I Affirm and Aver the Following is Poo

Research Into Your Brain on God

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:48:50 GMT

New Scientist posts this snippet:

"Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs," writes a team led by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To many, this seems a quite evident and non-controversial comment. After all, what are the chances that someone with, say, a hatred of any given act be drawn to any religion that fails to condemn or even embraces the act? Ah, but the article gets more interesting when we discover why the researchers were led to this conclusion:

The researchers started by asking volunteers who said they believe in God to give their own views on controversial topics, such as abortion and the death penalty. They also asked what the volunteers thought were the views of God, average Americans and public figures such as Bill Gates. Volunteers' own beliefs corresponded most strongly with those they attributed to God.

Next, the team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people. . . .

"The experiments in which we manipulate people's own beliefs are the most compelling evidence we have to show that people's own beliefs influence what they think God believes more substantially than it influences what they think other people believe," says Epley. (Emphasis mine.)

This smacks of perhaps something related to the Overton Window. By simply being exposed to opinions that vary from their own, this second group shifted not just their own opinion, but the opinion God is likely to take. Perhaps this is a variant on the old canard "Vox Deus, vox populi," or "The voice of the people is the voice of God." I say variant simply because the second group didn't sway from what they felt other people would say on the issue, a point illustrated by further brain scans:

Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or "average Americans". In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God. The majority were Christian.

In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans' beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people's mental states was active. This implies that people map God's beliefs onto their own.

So, we store and consider the opinion of others in different place in the brain than the place used to mull our and God's existences. Interesting.

Oh, and before you smug left-leaning folks out there take this as ammo for future dealings with the Faux News crowd, other researchers have been doing great work showing how one's political persuasion influences how credibly one accepts or rejects unsubstantiated claims. Here's one such graph. There are more. Each shows that all of us are susceptible to misinformation, to accepting the unproven. What bad knowledge that happens to be simply depends on the mis-info spreader tying the particular lie to the proper spin, one that resonates well with other preconceptions.

I realize that politics and religion are to many minds separate issues, but I feel both topics have share a "grounding" in the brain, are held by the adherents of those beliefs because they resonate well with preconceptions held by the adherents. Both political and religious beliefs are, after all, the mental models we humans use to frame the world around us. (For a really powerful if somewhat hackneyed take on this, has anyone read Philip K. Dick's The Eye In the Sky?) The old saying "Never discuss politics or religion" in polite company recognizes that both topics prove for most people difficult to discuss dispassionately since the topics carry deeply-held and therefore non-negotiable elements.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this research mentioned in New Scientist replicated in a political context with similar results.

When Red-Hot Economies Cool, Blame Entropy First

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:45:27 GMT

kmo delivered another great podcast the other day, interviewing economist Frank Rotering. Prof. Rotering has an interesting take on human progress and the limits the planet itself places on our expansion, part of which resonates well with what I accept.

For example, I whole heartedly agree that our biological imperative drives our expansion, the desire to eat the richest food (to give us strength and build our energy reserves as fat) and live in the best areas conducive to sating our desires to, well, eat and reproduce a lot. The number of simple behavioral studies that reveal this simple unconscious drive abound, each confirming that despite what we say, we are greedy little piggies that crave tasty (meaning energy-rich) foods and sex with the most reproductively viable candidates. Remember, folks, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" referred to reproductive winners, the organisms that most successfully got as many biological copies of themselves made before they croaked.

Where Frank went off the rails in the talk with kmo, though, was where he started talking about . . . capitalism. Wait, haven't I gone over this already?!?

But then the Professor did something very few who throw the C word about willy-nilly actually do: He explained what he meant. I'm not saying he got it right in my eyes, but I will say he at least had the courtesy to quote Marx's writings directly and explain the nitty-gritty details that might elude the less familiar. Someone who has obviously read Marx so carefully is rare to find even amongst Marxists. That was refreshing.

This explanation, though, confirmed something that has been nagging at me for quite some time: That Marx himself missed the most salient element of capitalism's expansionist tendencies, specifically by by conflating capitalism's necessity to expand with its ability to expand.

I'll open with fairness. It's hardly sporting of me to slam Prof. Rotering without giving him a chance to explain what he himself means. Poking around, I found he has posted some YouTube lectures expounding his ideas. The one below concerns what he finds the most damaging about capitalism, the need compelling capitalists to expand their economy as ongoing capital investments marginally displace profits.

I've been mulling a larger post about just this topic, but just haven't been able to fully form it enough for posting. The post in a nutshell: Think back on all the companies that proved the most profitable over the last century and consider what they did to earn those earnings. For example, consider that you are reading my words (most likely) on a computer screen. Think of all the computer companies of the past and present. The list is long and filled with both winners and losers. What did all these companies do? They improved on the status quo in some way. Perhaps they made some piece of software ubiquitous. Perhaps they pioneered the information delivery systems themselves. Whatever they did specifically, the players' cumulative efforts displaced the technology that had been previously dominant. Before the computers came along, we had to read words like these in other formats, formats involving the efforts of other companies.

It's unlikely I would ever be paid by a publisher to get these words out there. There's simply not that much commercial demand for musings like mine. Still, if I wanted others to read this post in the days before computers and the internets, I would probably have run off copies. Xerox made the big time with this technology, though there were many others. Before computers that was how very small-run printing was done, with hand-cranked mimeograph machines and later with motorized photostatic copiers.

A stenographic pool of document copiers from 1945.

And before Xerox made copying mostly automatic, companies like Smith Corona and Olympia introduced an improvement, seen above being banged on by secretaries in 1945 -- the typewriter. Before that, documents (again, like this post) would have been hand-copied by scriveners. (For an overview of how rewarding a process that must have been, do read Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," the tale of one lawyer's office full of copying help gone pretty much awry.) Of course, had I grander publication ambitions, I could have taken this hand-scrawled screed to a printer. He would have hand-arranged the movable type in his press and, depending on the model used, stamped or cranked out however many essays I desired to pay for. It would have been expensive, but would have still be preferable to endlessly exercising my chicken scratch that passes for handwriting. Before Gutenberg's moveable type, I would have had to pay a printer a princely sum to hand-carve individual plates filled with my words before any mass-production could ensue, raising the costs considerably.

So, to recap: My ability to share my printed words increased over the centuries as the technology for publication improved, sometimes in quantum leaps as new technologies were invented, sometimes incrementally as those technologies were gradually improved. In each step along the way from sharpened and ink-dipped feathers scratching away to today's intertubes, the cost for printing each page steadily declined -- for the consumer.

For the companies and individuals involved in the previous incarnations, each step toward increased mechanization must have been a disaster. Whole industries were wiped out as upstart concerns rendered their once-profitable efforts meaningless, even quaint. This is what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. In the wake of each innovation, the working lives of real people were creatively destroyed.

Why "destroyed?" At each improvement, a new technology, technique or approach needed to produce the words per page reduced the number of workers formerly necessary. Since people need work to keep them from banding together and plotting revolution, from attacking the establishment classes and demanding work (as Chris Martenson in The Crash Course points out), increasing the economy's size beyond what population increases dictate absorbs the workforce displaced by technology and guarantees the continuation of profits Rotering points out would otherwise be reduced.

Another of Rotering's videos pegs the start of capitalism at about AD 1500, very close in time to Gutenberg's 1439 first printing. Here human population starts to spike toward the limits of the planet's ability to keep us alive, what he calls "over-reach," driven (as Rotering explains) by our biological imperative to be fruitful and multiply (okay, that last phrasing was mine, not his). He calls this expansionist tendency "The Biological Economy," and gives capitalism sole credit for enabling it.

Here, though, I've got to ask: Is capitalism really to blame . . . or did something else happen at that time that both Marx and Rotering might have missed, or at least seriously undervalued? Put another way, what literally moved the economies those two describe?

Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is a sprawling nine-volume romp through speculative history, following the life of a rogue and a scientist over a century before the word "scientist" was invented. Though I've complained about mistakes I noticed in the series before, the books are well worth the time it takes to tackle them.

Stephenson uses the books to note technologies and practices introduced to the reader with an emphasis on the changes they wrought both to characters within the story and familiar to history. One is modern capitalism. Daniel Waterhouse asks his brother for some money from the family funds. Instead of coin, though, his brother (appropriately named Sterling) gives him a piece of paper, a note promising the holder to a quantity of gold from their nephew's gold shop. Here we see the beginnings of paper currency. We are also introduced to more conservative characters that deride the "money scriveners" as frauds.

One later traditionalist, Mr. Threader, engages Daniel in a discussion of the difference between the economies in the country estates and the city, a discussion that notes the shift from feudal land as the core of most all value -- the basis for feudalism -- to the more nebulous form of currency valuation we use today based upon the extraction of resources untapped until sail technology had enabled greater and greater exploitation of far-away sources of wealth. As Daniel sums the situation to Mr. Threader, "For the country draws its revenue from a fixed stock: sheep eating grass. Whereas, the City (London) draws its wealth from foreign trade, which is ever-increasing and, I say, inexhaustible." (Neil Stephenson, The System of the World, HarperCollins, 2004, p. 35.)

Ever since the Spanish Conquistadors started raiding the New World of the material wealth (often using the natives as slave labor to do so, or later bringing in more traditional slaves from Africa), the amount of wealth must indeed have seemed inexhaustible to the people of that day. They were living from the mid-1400s in a time of massive sea exploration and enjoying the massive finds from distant lands unprecedented even today. That found and moved wealth, powered by taming the seas, enabled early capitalism's first hyper-expansion.

That foreign trade is sometimes in the Baroque Cycle backed by traditional means, by the wealthy aristocrats funding expeditions. More and more, though, by this time the ships anchored in the Thames Pool are funded by companies which are in turn capitalized by company stock, by debt. Debt as a basis for an economy is pretty much all we have today, something I covered in an earlier post. Sometimes these ventures proved wildly successful. Other times, memories of the wild successes fueled a drive to fund less worthy ventures. Those investors usually lost their investments, sometimes far more if they went into debt to invest. (Sound familiar?)

Dr. Waterhouse's chief scientific explorations involve mechanical devices that process information, something he at one point in the stories emigrated to the colonies to pursue at his fledgling Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts. He finally managed to build mechanisms to punch cards that will be later used in his Logic Mill. These machines were powered by foot-powered bellows pumped by inmates at a women's prison in London. (Think of a Stairmaster.) Waterhouse is happy with the arrangement at first, but does some calculations and realizes a limiting factor. From the same book, he explains this limitation in a conversation with a potential investor:

"It will not work."

"The Logic Mill will not do logic?"

"Oh, yes, of course it will do that. Doing logic with a machine is not so very difficult. Leibniz took it up where Pascal dropped it, and I built upon Leibniz's work for fifteen years in Boston. . . .

(I love how Stephenson not only drops just about every historical name he can into the stories, but also weaves those historical characters into the fictional lives. Both Leibniz and Isaac Newton prove Waterhouse's close personal friends. But I digress. Back to the story.)

"Then what do you mean, when you say it will not work?"

"When I returned . . . two days ago I devoted some time to reviewing the (most recent designs). I am most pleased with the results. But then I discovered a grave difficulty: we want power. . . . (T)he Logic Mill shall require a source of Power, in the newfangled Mechanickal sense of that word, that is both mighty and steady. A very large water-wheel in a great river might serve; but much better would be -- "

"The Engine for Raising Water by Fire!"

(Neil Stephenson, ibid., p. 428, emphasis by the author.)

Dr. Waterhouse's investor here refers to a venture Waterhouse has undertaken with real history's Thomas Newcomen. Newcomen built probably the first practical steam engine, originally designed to pump mines clear of groundwater in places devoid of running water for mills. In the books Waterhouse helps fund Newcomen's fledgling steam-powered startup.

So here in the Baroque Cycle we find two technologies, wind travel and steam power, that dramatically increase economic production, allowing companies to expand their productivity without employing more people. The centuries following Rotering's AD 1500 mark starting the advent of capitalism also began with steadily improving ocean transport and trade and the later explosion of fossil fuel energy consumption that marked the Industrial Revolution. I don't think that's a coincidence, not at all.

In thinking that, I'm not alone.

Here I'd like to re-introduce another C-Realm guest, John Greer of The Archdruid Report. In his post "The Economics of Entropy", he notes terms for elements of the economy seldom acknowledged by economists:

. . . (T)here is no such thing as “the” economy in any human society; there are, rather, three economies, each of which follows distinctive rules.

The primary economy, in this way of looking at things, is the natural world itself, which produces something like three-quarters of the goods and services on which human beings rely for survival. The secondary economy, which depends on the primary one, is the collocation of labor, capital plant, and resources extracted from the primary economy that produces the other quarter or so of the goods and services human beings use. The tertiary economy, finally, is the system of social processes by which the products of the first two economies are allocated to people. This can take many different forms, of which the one most familiar to us is money.

Wind and fossil carbons are both products in a primary economy, just like timber, quarry extracts, crops and livestock. They also, as I suggest with my citations from Stephenson, drove our population expansion and continue to support it even centuries later. Without the products of the primary economies, there are no secondaries, let alone tertiaries. Sadly, this is a lost lesson.

In another post, Greer further notes that the tertiary economy has (in his words) ". . . metastasized so deeply into our economic life that it’s nearly impossible to do much of anything without it." He continues:

For most people in the modern industrial world, the only way to get access to any kind of wealth – that is, any good or service – is to get access to money first, and exchange the money for the wealth. This makes it all too easy to confuse money with wealth, and it also fosters the habit of thought that treats money as the driving force in economic life, and thinks of wealth as a product of money, rather than seeing money as an arbitrary measure of wealth.

The thought experiment of placing a hundred economists on a desert island with $1 million each but no food or water is a good corrective to this delusion. Unfortunately this same experiment is being tried on a much vaster scale by the world’s industrial economies right now. We have seven billion people on a planet with a finite and dwindling supply of the concentrated energy resources that are keeping most of them alive, and governments and businesses alike are acting as though the only possible difficulty in this situation is coming up with enough money to pay for investments in the energy industry.

Sadly, the age of hyper-expansion fueled by fossil liquids may have come to an end just a few years ago. Newcomen's fuel may have done exactly the same thing even earlier. Chris Martenson concurs on coal, noting in his Crash Course that the energy extracted from coal peaked in the '90s. We continue to burn coal of lesser and lesser energy content, meaning that we need to dig up and burn more and more black rocks to get the same amount of energy we made from rocks in the '90s.

And so we arrive at today's situation. With this post, I hope to maintain that the expansion Rotering accused capitalism of fueling, his Biological Economy, was only mostly guided by capitalism. It was literally fueled by wind and fossil carbons. Now that those fuels are in decline, its time to look beyond the economics presented in textbooks and consider rules from other disciplines, like physics:

The comment of Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, is typical: “If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics, there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. . . .”

Buffett's Vision?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:37:17 GMT

Remember just a few weeks ago Warren Buffett bought BNSF outright? The press blather was predictable: "Our country's future prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system."

Last night, though, while discussing an oil-poor future, my economist friend mentioned an alternative situation for buying the rail: electrification.

From The Journal of Commerce:

Earlier this year, BNSF Railway’s chairman, president and CEO, Matthew K. Rose, said he was in talks with transmission line companies that want to install new power lines in the railroad’s right of way. And he said BNSF was exploring whether that could help the railroad convert large parts of its sprawling western network to electricity.

Industry sources indicated other large carriers were looking at the same options, as Congress and the Obama administration push to upgrade the capacity of the U.S. electricity grid and tie in more alternative power sources including wind energy farms.

My friend also sent me a post from a rail site (sadly, one locked down to members only) which said:

If the wind- and solar-power crowd are really able to create some critical mass in their plans for mass conversion to such energy generation, transmission corridors for new high voltage lines are going to become necessary in the West. The battles for these rights-of-way are already starting to brew in several places in the West. . . .

Single steel pole towers, which are more easily situated on a railroad right-of-way than the old wider-footprint lattice-work towers, are now capable of handling up to the 765,000 volt lines being discussed for transmission from potential wind and solar fields in the West. . . .

Combine this observation with Buffett's planned wind farm facilities and one sees a definite business plan shaping up.

Buffett started as an oil man. He knows what's coming: Fuel shortages leading to ever higher fuel prices. Electric rail lines -- fed by the power lines sharing the corridor -- give him an incredible advantage, if he can get the major routes powered in time. And because he bought the rail outright, he won't have to dither about with quarterly stockholder reports. This means he can take his sweet time electrifying without worrying about "enhancing shareholder value" every few months.

Computers and the Last Days of Disco

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:31:20 GMT

I've got to say, I'm pretty surprised by the reaction I've gotten for my simple assertion that flaws in computer architecture have led to innocent lives being destroyed. Everyone knows there are gaps in security. When it comes to the consequences of those gaps, though, it seems no one realizes that, in a law-abiding society, for one person to be wrongly accused of a crime is itself a crime. The police don't get extra points for convicting the innocent. If our society does not work to close all of the circumstances that lead to wrongful conviction, we cannot declare ourselves a just people.

I'll leave the topic of who is to "blame" for getting a virus on a computer aside for a moment. Let's consider other ways that one's security can be compromised.

Decades ago, a friend got her first credit card. Well, not really; at first all she got was the bill for her first card. The card itself never arrived. Did she have to pay the over (IIRC) US$850? Not at all. She was able to prove that she never got the card. Visa had to eat that one.

Credit cards are not the only problem. Long-time readers will remember that years ago someone tried to inflate the amount on one of my checks.

"That'll be a hundred extra bucks, please!"

Did I have to pay? No again. A quick-witted bank teller caught the suspicious check, asked the forger for all the ID she could before she ran away, and notified me. The cops now have an arrest warrant out, and for all I know may have served it years ago.

A similar thing happened to The Wife, though the jerks got away with it. She mailed her US$8 gas bill through a US Postal Service sidewalk collection box. A month later, the bill comes with a past due amount. Less than three hours after she dropped the check in the mail -- in a box located outside the USPS main Seattle headquarters -- the box was robbed, her "tamperproof" check was "washed" of all her ink, new ink was added and the modified check -- complete with a signature that didn't resemble hers at all -- and was cashed 4 miles away. She didn't pay that one only because she was able to show the signature wasn't even close.

My point here is that every time a financial transaction takes place, we -- and I mean all of us, each time -- place ourselves at risk of fraud, of some intermediary or participant intervening in the normal course of events and trying to skew the process in their favor. Yes, you may never use your credit or debit card to make online purchases; but that doesn't stop the cashier at the bookstore or the restaurant from simply copying your card number and making later purchases, or just selling the number on the internets to those that specialize in such fraud. We are all at risk, every time.

I think back to the '70s, to the more sexually exploratory adults that surrounded me, of the exploits they regarded as common and were told I would have to look forward to. I didn't. That heated rutting and frolic faded just about the time I and my body grew ready. Why? It started with herpes, Time Magazine's "Scarlet H." Unlike most of the VD of the time, this was a virus that couldn't be wiped out with a simple shot or series of antibiotics. Close on herpes' heels came AIDS, raising the stakes for physical contact through the frickin' roof. It went from game on to game over almost overnight. I came of age during the rise of the Moral Majority, not the Summer of Love. (And yes, I am still pissed.)

I'm also not one to defend the Draconian pornography laws this country has chosen to enact. We have more child-targeted sex crime in the US of A than Holland, a country with very lax porno standards and porn freely available in Amsterdam. Possession of child pornography does not lead to child abuse. That has never been demonstrated scientifically; in fact, the opposite is likely true.

I, however, do not live in Holland.

So let's look at those examples I gave. When I get a new card, I must activate it with personal information. This is necessary simply because of the millions probably lost from stolen or otherwise intercepted and abused cards, like my friend's from decades ago. When my altered check was seen, the tale of altered checks like The Wife's gas bill -- and the money the bank had to lose -- taught tellers a lesson to be more vigilant. Likewise, now, when you pay for dinner, note that only the last four digits of your card are visible on the receipt. This prevents dumpster divers from scoring on discarded bills.

It won't, though, prevent cashiers from actually copying the info. That's still a problem.

Likewise, try as they may, software makers have yet to make a bullet-proof operating system, one immune to the kind of fraud that I outlined in the kiddie porn post. As it has been mentioned, it seems, I am alone in sympathizing with those whose lives are ruined. Most every reply seemed to suggest that the Fiora's should still be rotting in prison for opening themselves to abuse from a hacker. That surprised me.

This is a problem that won't go away. Consider also that the hackers that compromised that state-owned laptop sitting on the Fiora's table are doing what I hear time and time again should happen: They were turning computing into a "cloud" application. Why store information on a single hard drive when distributing it on many will keep it safer . . . especially when the digital info can translate into hard time in the penitentiary?

However, note that the examples I've just given of situations one hardly ever sees -- credit card activation, extra check cashing scrutiny -- were forced on institutions by the monetary losses fraud exacted. When they're not likely to pay, companies will likely not pay attention.

And now that fraud has escalated from a dose of the clap to a social death sentence, isn't it time all computer makers started to pay . . . attention?

No matter how old their products?

Confused on the Left, Blinded by the Right (Part II, Blinded)

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:35:00 GMT

I'd like to introduce everyone to David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right and The Republican Noise Machine. In Blinded, he introduces himself as a progressive and idealistic young lad who had a rude awakening during his college days in Berkeley. He went to cover Jeane Kirkpatrick's speech to the college, and was deeply disturbed when protesters interrupted her until she was forced to leave the stage:

The scene shook me deeply: Was the harassment of an unpopular speaker the legacy of the Berkeley-campus Free Speech Movement, when students demanded the right to canvass for any and all political causes on the campus's Sproul Plaza? Wasn't free speech a liberal value? How, I wondered, could this thought police call itself liberal?. . . . The few outspoken conservatives on the faculty, and the Reagan regents, raised their voices in support of Kirkpatrick's free speech rights. The liberals seemed to me to be defending censorship.

(David Brock, Blinded by the Right, Three Rivers Press, 2002, p. 4.)

This and other incidents burned in his mind, Brock turned from liberal and progressive issues and became a cheerleader for the Other Side. He rose in prominence, publishing his first piece in Policy Review, "a theoretical organ of the Heritage Foundation in Washington." He eventually landed a job writing for the conservative Washington Times in 1986, went on from there to a fellowship with the John M. Olin Foundation and wound up later writing pieces for The American Spectator. (One piece almost assuredly helped Clarence Thomas get his seat on the Supreme Court. In it, Brock attacked Anita Hill, coining the phrase "a bit nutty and a bit slutty" and thus impugning her testimony.)

During this whirlwind of a political activist career, Brock met the movers and shakers of the conservative movement . . . and learned their techniques first-hand. He was paid handsomely to spread conservative causes through written pieces by people that literally invested millions -- some hundreds of millions -- for just that purpose.

I've written before about one of these institutions, The Cato Institute. For the purpose of this post, I'll focus mostly on those institutions David Brock came to know well. Let's start with the Heritage Foundation.

In 1969, Paul Weyrich "attended a political strategy session run by liberal operatives." He learned from that encounter:

Weyrich acknowledged that from that moment on, his life was "changed": He spent the early part of the 1970s working "to get these people who really have the same morals, who have the same ideals, but who came to it from different traditions to work together."

To pursue that goal, Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation (with start-up money from Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife) in 1973.

Next, the John M. Olin Foundation, given its present mandate in 1969. That mandate:

". . . to provide support for projects that reflect or are intended to strengthen the economic, political and cultural institutions upon which the American heritage of constitutional government and private enterprise is based. The Foundation also seeks to promote a general understanding of these institutions by encouraging the thoughtful study of the connections between economic and political freedoms, and the cultural heritage that sustains them."

Of Brock's observations, those he makes of Richard Mellon Scaiffe are especially interesting and entertaining. Brock describes him as the most prolific "sugar daddy" of conservative politics:

According to calculations made by the Washington Post, Scaife gave more than $200 million to conservative institutions between 1974 and 1992 in an attempt to influence governmet policy and train personnel. Though he operated in the shadows, Scaife was the most important single figure in building the modern conservative movement and spreading its ideas into the political realm.

(Brock, Blinded by the Right, Three Rivers Press, 2002, p. 87, emphasis mine.)

Oh, and what a colorful person this Scaife is! He is linked with more than one murder, noted as a "gutter drunk" (by his sister!), and when approached "by a reporter for the Columbian Journalism Review who tried to question him, Scaife railed, 'You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here.'"

I'm going to add one more bit of history to this list, a memorandum cited as influential in the conservative politics we see today. Lewis F. Powell, Jr. was a prominent Richmond, Virginia attorney. At the request of his neighbor and long-time friend Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Powell composed a letter to the National Chamber of Commerce referred to today simply as The Powell Memorandum. The date: August 23, 1971, two months before Mr. Powell was nominated to become a member justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by Pres. Nixon. Powell begins:

No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack. . . .

There always have been some who opposed the American system, and preferred socialism or some form of statism (communism or fascism). Also, there always have been critics of the system, whose criticism has been wholesome and constructive so long as the objective was to improve rather than to subvert or destroy.

But what now concerns us is quite new in the history of America. We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.

Powell continues by outlining the source and flavor of these attacks: "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic." Though the more extreme elements of this attack remain in the minority, they are receiving support from an unexpected source:

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. . . .

Moreover, much of the media -- for varying motives and in varying degrees -- either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these "attackers," or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people.

One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction. . . .

Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the enterprise system to survive.

Once identified, Powell outlines a broad and ambitious strategy for countering these anti-American forces. Since business as usual is under attack, he reasons that businessmen should recognize that they have traditionally " . . . shown little stomach for hard-nose contest with their critics, and little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate." It was time to reverse that tradition.

What specifically should be done? The first essential -- a prerequisite to any effective action -- is for businessmen to confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management.

The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival -- survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people. . . .

Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.

Moreover, there is the quite understandable reluctance on the part of any one corporation to get too far out in front and to make itself too visible a target.

That last consideration requires that separate and new agencies take up the fight to defend businessmen everywhere. He suggests the National Chamber of Commerce form a more active arm of its organization, one that can implement a multi-part strategy designed to ultimately defend and promote the American Way of Doing Business from the left-leaning forces attacking it.

This promotion starts on The Campus, where "the Chamber should consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system." Supplementing these scholars, the Chamber should establish "a staff of speakers of the highest competency" to spread the work of the scholars and "a Speaker's Bureau which should include the ablest and most effective advocates from the top echelons of American business." These people should "evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology" as part of a "continuing program." They should "insist upon equal time on the college speaking circuit" with emphasis on "(i) (having) attractive, articulate and well-informed speakers; and (ii) (exerting) whatever degree of pressure -- publicly and privately -- may be necessary to assure opportunities to speak." I emphasized that last one simply because it speaks to their real aim -- success at any cost.

Powell continues:

It is especially important for the Chamber's "faculty of scholars" to publish. One of the keys to the success of the liberal and leftist faculty members has been their passion for "publication" and "lecturing." A similar passion must exist among the Chamber's scholars.

Incentives might be devised to induce more "publishing" by independent scholars who do believe in the system.

To clarify that last sentence, those "independent" scholars should be well paid.

Powell outlines many areas of political interest that should be attended to by the enhanced Chamber he envisions -- legislation, the courts, advertising, shareholder influence on companies -- but I intend to focus here on media. With this in mind, I find his passively reactive position on television and radio curious, especially since he says early on how important those media are becoming. Look at his proposal for television:

The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs . . . , but to the daily "news analysis" which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system. Whether this criticism results from hostility or economic ignorance, the result is the gradual erosion of confidence in "business" and free enterprise.

This monitoring, to be effective, would require constant examination of the texts of adequate samples of programs. Complaints -- to the media and to the Federal Communications Commission -- should be made promptly and strongly when programs are unfair or inaccurate.

As a future Supreme Court Justice, Powell undoubtedly felt more comfortable with the printed word and academia than he was with the Boob Tube. He may not have realized that television programs, like newspapers and magazines, are written and produced by people who get paid. Why demand "equal time . . . when appropriate?" Why would the Chamber insist "that the forum-type programs (the Today Show, Meet the Press, etc.) afford at least as much opportunity for supporters of the American system to participate as these programs do for those who attack it" . . . when they can just buy television stations and air whatever they feel like?

What Powell may have missed was not missed by everyone. The early 1970s were a time of enormous broadcast and later cable consolidation in the United States, a power grab that resulted in probably the most homogeneous programing ever seen within as vast a number of possible outlets. Some of the moguls control their holdings quietly, exerting a light touch on the editorial direction of the stations they oversee. Others have no problem whatsoever with exerting a very heavy hand indeed.

Rupert Murdoch:
"I like to win."

Powell, Weyrich, Olin, Scaife and others reacted against the excesses of the late 1960s and early 1970s exactly as Karl Marx reacted against the social and technological upheaval of Victorian Europe. These major institutions and foundations, these star Chambers and the funders thereof, have a very real impact on the political climate in the United States, an impact that can be measured by the Overton Window. It's something I cover in the tag Bend Overton, something that should be understood by every single gosh-darned person in the world. Let's review how it works and compare how this relates to the strategies outlined by Powell and implemented by his many institutional adherents. (Most of the following analysis I took from my most in-depth post on Overton, The Whispers and the Early Screams.)

When it comes to public opinion, what other people think is more important than people are willing to admit. It doesn't matter what the topic is, people tend to align themselves -- and their opinions -- with those that they know and respect . . . and against those they hold in less esteem. The spectrum of ideas can usually therefore be catalogued and ordered thusly:

* Unthinkable
* Radical
* Acceptable
* Sensible
* Popular
* Policy
* Popular
* Sensible
* Acceptable
* Radical
* Unthinkable

Consider the ranges above and below "Policy" to be the range of ideas on any given topic more to either the political left or the right of the population at large, meaning more to the left and the right of the centrist individuals within that population. Where ideas are ordered should be considered a constantly-occuring process. Every time these ideas are discussed, people consider who takes what position -- with emphasis on what level of esteem those people are currently held -- as well as the relative merits of the ideas themselves. That's why Powell insisted that "attractive, articulate and well-informed speakers" represent the Chambers' views in his memorandum. That's also why you will find damned few pictures of Yours Truly in these LJ entries. ;-)

Let's emphasize that all the discussion on any issue counts. Therefore, the publications from the Chamber -- publications written by men and women like Brock, and bought and paid for by the "incentives" Scaife and others contributed -- start to artificially weigh the argument on policy, giving more voice and impact to the conservative position. I outlined how this is currently happening with the health care debate in "Whispers." Let's see how it might have played for other issues, like taxation.

As I mentioned in Part I, Confused, the top income tax bracket in the US used to be 90%. Let's role play for just a moment. Let's say you earn the princely sum of $10 million a year! At a 90% bracket, you would take home well over $1 million. (Exactly how much over would depend upon the exact tax tables and percentages of the time, something that would take quite a while to research, let alone calculate.) A good sum, but considerably less than your gross salary.

Now let's say you were approached by someone like Weyrich, someone who funded a Foundation dedicated to tasks like the Heritage Foundation and its like entities. Let's say you gave them, oh, I don't know, a hundred grand. They take that hundred grand and publish, promote, pressure -- all the tactics that Powell suggested and more he didn't foresee. With all this sustained pressure, the top tax rates fall from 90% to 80%! A few years after your generous gift, you will take home well over a million dollars extra a year! Furthermore, you can expect to take home more and more in the years that follow!

Why wouldn't you give to foundations like these?

Let's consider one example, that curmudgeon Richard Mellon Scaife. In 1974, the first year Brock notes Scaife giving money to institutes like Heritage, the top income tax bracket was 70%. By 1992, the last year Brock notes, it was down to 31%.

In this light, that $200 million Richard Scaife has given to various organizations over the decades seems less like the impulsive, wasteful spending of an unstable individual, and more like one of the best investments he may have ever made in his very, very rich life.

Though I personally feel everyone should be made aware of the Overton Window, the Heritage Foundation, and all the other influences directing our society as invisibly as they can, I started this post to note shifts in the very definition of specific words. That's why Part I talks about the definition of "capitalism" and to a lesser extent "communism." In this part, I'd like to raise how a historically significant word seems to be losing its original meaning almost entirely -- fascism.

I've noted this before. In that linked post I noted how a religion with very few historical links to actual fascism was conflated with it for political gain (and to avoid political loss). Ever since I saw it in the bookstore, though, I've suspected that this book might be the product of Brock's former employers:

Why is this so disturbing to me? Very simply, look at the definitions for both words in the title. In a dictionary. A "liberal," according to my desktop dictionary, is "open to new behavior or opinion and willing to discard traditional values." Every single person, foundation and institute I've cited above is dedicated to preserving, not "discarding," traditional values! Powell didn't get appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court because he was "liberal" in any way! Weyrich dedicated his life to fighting for right-wing causes. Hell, he was one of the people who prompted Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority, hardly a pantheon of "liberal" thought!

In fact, if anything, the conservative right is closer to the fascist ideal than the left. I say that in all seriousness and without hyperbole. After all, Powell railed against "the broad, shotgun attack on the system itself" from those on the left, not the right. Read his memorandum in its entirety if this is still unclear. Read my description of original fascism as well. The Fascists in Europe originally formed to fight the growing influence of Marxist revolutionaries. Anyone who fights commies are, I venture to guess, guys Richard Mellon Scaife would find a-okay.

Be that as it may, "fascism" tests very well in just about every demographic focus group as a vilification. The left hate its association with actual fascists. The right hate its association with the fascists the Allies fought in WWII. Nope, nobody loves fascists today . . . or at least admits to loving fascists. For that reason, it was appropriated as a modifier in Rumsfeld's war against Al Qaida ala "Islamofascism."

And, I suspect, it was the reason Jonah Goldberg wrote his book, the one pictured above.

Let's remember what Powell wrote about "Books, Paperbacks and Pamphlets" in his memorandum:

The news stands -- at airports, drugstores, and elsewhere -- are filled with paperbacks and pamphlets advocating everything from revolution to erotic free love. One finds almost no attractive, well-written paperbacks or pamphlets on "our side." It will be difficult to compete . . . for reader attention, but unless the effort is made -- on a large enough scale and with appropriate imagination to assure some success -- this opportunity for educating the public will be irretrievably lost. (Emphasis mine.)

I emboldened that section because it so beautifully explains not just Goldberg's book, but about half the bound pages I see in the Political Science section of the bookstore. Really, how else can we explain why Ann Coulter's books are so damned common? Same goes for Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly. These books are, I think, deliberate noise published to skew public opinion, not original and thought-provoking pieces by dedicated intellectuals.

There's some real precedent available to support that last sentence. David Brock wrote The Real Anita Hill, an admitted hit-piece targeting the woman for slander, something he admitted himself in Blinded and his article "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man" (published in Esquire). He tried to pen a similar assault on Hillary Clinton, The Seduction of Hillary Clinton; but by then he, well, had grown a pair and failed to write the kind of sensational, fact-free assault -- like the Hill book -- that made him a rising star in conservative politics. In Blinded, he very specifically noted that his more popular and successful books were not meant as "scholarly pieces," but as hit pieces, designed to question the integrity of the targets in the titles. Like the books by Coulter, by Beck, by O'Reilly. These were written to shift the Overton Window and nothing else.

Goldberg's book smacks of just such associations. How, for example, can anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the English language accuse Pres. Obama of being a "fascist?" For the right-wing hit machine, the solution is simple: change the current definition of "fascist" to specify something created by the left . . . without robbing the word of its power to vilify.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Jonah Goldberg

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

"Can we air any of this?" -- Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart had Goldberg dead to rights. Every single talking point Goldberg spews in this interview smacks of market research done by Luntz, from the slams on progressives to the laughably spurious association with Mussolini as a progressive. He is single-handedly trying to rewrite the history of fascism itself to fit the ideals of American conservatives, or at least to foist the word "fascist" on the enemies of fascism, lest people start to notice the fascist tendencies -- and history -- of the conservative right. I only wish Comedy Central had the entire interview available. I would be very interested to note which meanings of other words Goldberg was ~~paid~~ "induced" with "incentives" to change.

Which, under the Overton model, works. The more that people assert fascism is liberal, the more other people will think fascism is liberal. This part is important -- It doesn't matter that actual fascism proves about as un-liberal as any philosophy can be.

Sadly, if enough people say it is with enough conviction and with enough gravitas, some people will accept it.

Brock later recanted and apologized for his shenanigans. Only time will tell if Goldberg will adequately apologize for raping the English language . . . simply because he needed the money and craved the fame. After all, not everybody gets on The Daily Show . . . and even those who look like total asses get remembered.

Mircrosoft -- Enabling Child Sexual Predators!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:33:00 GMT

By now I hope everyone out there has seen this story about computer viruses that store kiddie porn on computers. From the article:

Pedophiles can exploit virus-infected PCs to remotely store and view their stash without fear they'll get caught. Pranksters or someone trying to frame you can tap viruses to make it appear that you surf illegal websites.

Whatever the motivation, you get child porn on your computer — and might not realize it until police knock at your door.

Let me briefly emphasize one salient element of that story, one probably glossed over by most, but which I feel cannot and should not be emphasized enough: the virus exploits PCs -- shorthand, as most know, for "personal computers," but almost universally acknowledged as "personal computers running a Microsoft operating system."

Don't get me wrong: I don't harbor a conspiracy-theory twitchy loathing for All Things Bill. I do, however, recognize that Microsoft's historical disregard for the security and integrity of its operating systems has finally produced consequences far too devastating to be ignored. For decades, it has built back-door access into all of its products, including the operating systems, specifically to enable features in its software that gave a Redmond a competitive edge. Of course, these back doors did not remain a secret. Once revealed, they became the means that enabled just about every virus writer to become a star in Black Hat shenanigans.

When the viruses were disseminating up to a third of all spam mailings, it was a problem. When the viruses made Command and Control slaves of PCs by the tens or hundreds of thousands, enabling one person to engage in Denial of Service attacks on anyone they felt deserved an attack -- including Live Journal -- it was a serious problem. But now that these back doors can ruin lives it is an unforgivable problem. We must all realize that Microsoft is culpable for enabling these malicious acts and should be held legally accountable.

This should be as much a turning point, as much a wake-up call, as much a call to legal action as Preston Tucker's indictment of the major automakers was when he installed seat belts and safety glass into his 1948 Tucker . . . "accessories" not found universally in other cars at the time.

If they have any energy to fight left in them, the Fiolas and others ruined by the legal entanglements they have faced should file suits against Microsoft until their settlement allows them to enjoy certain waterfront properties in Medina, Washington.

Houses Are Heavy

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:15:14 GMT

Really, really heavy.

Enlarge the Crushing Power!

More Bigger

That Awkward 'Oh, Shit' Moment Enlarged

Rural bridges: They ain't like the Romans used to make.

Via Lenny!

Shared Without Comment

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:07:48 GMT

I Choose To See This As A Good Thing

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:48:26 GMT

fabunobo posted with a pic of his Halloween costume the other day:

If you Love It!,
share props and adulation at his LJ.

Here's the thing: I didn't get it. At all.

Really.

And I see that as a good thing.

I'm bragging here. I have so distanced myself from commercial "news" media that not one pip of this silly story made it on my radar. Commercial "news" exists only to keep people in their seats staring at the blinky box through the commercials. ("That beverage in your hand can kill you! Stay tuned to find out how.") The thought of a 6-year-old maybe dangling from a gas bag hurtling across the sky is OJ-in-a-Bronco news. Yes, people find themselves riveted to the tube. But do they learn anything, anything at all?

I kept tripping on mention of Balloon Boy in the internets afterwards, but didn't pay much attention, apparently. Thought it was an ad campaign (which it kinda was). Not until I saw fabunudo's get-up did I finally ask The Wife and a friend what was up. Last night. I got the eye-roll on that one.

But here's the thing: All that time I wasn't following the exploits of a media-manipulative UFO crackpot family in Colorado, I was learning things that were far more likely true. Strangely -- and I say this with a tinge of pride in our American PBS system -- NPR didn't even mention this well enough for me to find it on Morning Edition. The podcasts to which I subscribe gave me my first hint before I broke down and asked The Wife: Clark Boyd at The World's Technology Podcast played the 5th Dimension's "Beautiful Balloon" as a hint of what he wouldn't be covering. And just today, the crew of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe gave me a 5-minute recap of all the details I need to know about the woo-woo father's stunt.

What's weirder still, some of my friends constantly come to me for quirky tidbits of info. Usually I can help them. They have no idea why I prove this repository of general knowledge . . . yet they think I care one whit when they try to update me about the latest from Dancing with the Stars or America's Got Talent. I know obscure but somewhat trivial detail because I don't follow that crap. For me, it's that simple.

I remember being glued to the White Bronco as it happened. Did my paying attention get OJ apprehended any faster? Nope. Not by one second. Lesson learned.

Raw news footage is just that, raw. Like raw food, it isn't ready for consumption. Basically, news should be finished before it is plated and served.

So, that's my story. I ask you: Is your life better because mention of this (*ahem*) inflated hype took up you time? How much time would you say was lost to this and similar stories, if any? Importantly, what do you think you weren't learning about in the time it took to relate this developing breaking story as it unfolded?

And think further: How many stories of this caliber but lacking the quirkiness of the Balloon Kid did you follow to no avail? How many spoonfuls of crap got shoved down your throat before you realized you were being duped by the "news?"

A Happy Halloween Reminder -- Don't Be Afraid!

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:11:59 GMT

From this rant:

It's not that I'm cavalier about safety. I'm just a sucker -- so to speak -- for the facts. And the fact is: No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And...he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more.

Well, they did and dad was executed. That's Texas for you. Another boy died after he got into his uncle's heroin stash and relatives tried to make it look like he'd been killed by candy. And that's it.

Now look at how the fear that our nice, normal-seeming neighbors might actually be moppet-murdering psychopaths has turned the one kiddie independence day of the year into yet another excuse to micromanage childhood. (Emphasis mine.)

The Wife and I theorize the fear of tainted home-made treats was started by Big Chocolate. Hershey's, M&M Mars, those guys gained millions in the sealed candy market, probably by simply starting whisper campaigns in the 1970s that snowballed into mass paranoia.

So, hey, let the kids off the leash. Let them wander and grow. Sure, they might skin their knees on occasion. Everyone does. That's how we learn about hard surfaces and the importance of traction.

That parental micromanagement leash: it's embarrassing to all involved.

If you want to enlarge the fear!

As if you want it bigger. . . .

A couple hundred feet of cheap clothesline, electrical tape and Whip Dip, a pack or three of zip ties (various sizes and colors), two monster conduit pipes I snagged from the neighbor's free pile, 30 feet of 1/2 inch nylon 3 strand twisted line, two dog lawn anchors, 3 mongo eyed lag screws and a mega-huge spider for the center (from the best retail store on earth) . . . and voila! I'm ready to snag the little rugrats before they take my precious, precious candy! Bring 'em on!

I also need to take a night shot if it doesn't rain. The eerie blue flood light really brings out the white of the web!

Confused on the Left, Blinded by the Right (Part I, Confused)

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:58:38 GMT

First things first: I'm not someone who appreciates absolute descriptions. I see the planet and its people interacting in a myriad of ways best described with a myriad shades of grays, not blacks and whites. Is an act of offering someone a job, for example, capitalist exploitation or one of beneficent opportunity? For me, it depends on the job and the wage.

How about the decision one must make if one is "communist" or "capitalist?" In Orson Welles: A Biography, Welles tells his biographer of an encounter he had with an FBI agent during the Cold War. Agents were common in theater, since Hoover thought all entertainers were Commies until proven otherwise. Welles finally cornered the G-Man tailing him and asked him why he was being followed. The Fed said to prove he wasn't a communist. Welles asked him what a communist was. The Fed said, "Someone who gives his money to the government."

Welles pointed out that since he was at the top of the income bracket, he therefore paid 90% of everything he made in income taxes. "I guess that makes me 90% Communist," he concluded.

His answer always resonated with my belief in a spectrum of conditions providing one the boundaries of any given definition, as opposed to a binary "either/or" declaration of definition. More and more, though, I realize how unique I must be in this regard. I see in so many people the need to absolutely declare beyond any and all argument that X situation must be called X-ism, and that this definition must be maintained in perpetuity for all to see and learn from. These people can be found on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum. The need to define and categorize knows no philosophical boundary. However, I have noticed one disturbing trend that does follow party lines, though not a way most could reasonably expect.

Let's dive into some historical definitions, just for fun. Everyone seems to describe the monetary/economic/legal system in which we Americans live today as "capitalist." Capitalism: that's the general moniker given to our mostly unencumbered economic transaction tradition. Here's a question, though: Where did those words come from? Consulting Wikipedia, we learn that the terms date back to 1633 (for "capitalist") and 1850 (for "capitalism"). There seems to be little disagreement that the terms refer to those that own capital and the system that supports their continued ownership and activity.

Here's where a little digging gets some interesting results. Early in the article, we read: "There is no consensus on capitalism nor how it should be used as an analytical category." Say, what?

It turns out the myriad of transactions, traditions both legal and cultural, behaviors et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseum have existed longer than most can trace under a great number of descriptors. Merchant capitalism, feudalism, mercantilism -- all sort of blend together in a melange of action translated today as capitalism. How pervasive is this blending? In the section entitled Mercantilism, one citation notes mercantilism and feudalism "disagreed only on the methods of regulation." Both seemed to cede from importance in favor of capitalism as technology improved transportation and nation-states consolidated from feudal holdings, thus reducing the importance of inherited lands as a measure of wealth. Neil Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle tackles this fascinating transition mostly in the birth of fossil fuel as a means of production and the rise of banking, trade and money as an early indicator of dying traditional seats of power.

The key difference between capitalism and its antecedents seems to be the notion that wealth is stagnant under mercantilism and feudalism, while it can grow under capitalism. This concept of growth proves important when one considers the change industrialism and the rise of banking inflicted especially on the cities of Europe. Take this passage from Emergence concerning growth of the English city of Manchester:

It was impossible to see it at the time, but Manchester. . . had planted itself at the very center of a technological and commercial revolution that would irrevocably alter the future of the planet. Manchester lay at the confluence of several world-historical rivers: the nascent industrial technologies of steam-powered looms; the banking system of commercial London; the global markets and labor pools of the British Empire. . . . (This) created a new kind of city, one that literally exploded into existence.

The statistics on population growth alone capture the force of that explosion: a 1773 estimate had 24,000 people living in Manchester; the first official census in 1801 found 70,000. By the midpoint of the century, there were more than 250,000 people in the city proper -- a tenfold increase in only seventy-five years.

(Steven Johnson, Emergence, Scribner, 2001, p. 34.)

Keep in mind that ten-fold increase occurred before modern construction methods made it possible to increase the housing of a city at a commensurate rate. The result of this growth was felt disproportionately by the poor, who were at the mercies of the tight housing market and the landowners who found themselves in a very good bargaining position as a result. This is the England of Charles Dickens, experienced also by a resident of London described in another of Johnson's books, The Ghost Map:

Living in (a) two-room attic were seven individuals: a Prussian immigrant couple, their four children, and a maid. . . . Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husband's productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx.

(Johnson, The Ghost Map, Riverhead Books, 2006, p. 19.)

The same squalid conditions that drove Dickens to pen his descriptions of life in industrial England also drove Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto and other books that pin down and further define "capitalism," giving it the accepted modern meaning, a definition that has been, it seems, embraced by capitalists themselves. And Marx continued a rejection of capitalism by trying to formulate an alternative philosophy regarding the traditional nature of possessions, transactions and people.

But here's the rub: He was trying to simultaneously describe and condemn something that was morphing and forming faster than it could be defined, let alone condemned. Marx identified quite a bit of value in his work, giving definition to what for centuries had been simply assumed. But he did it during one of the most chaotic economic times in all of human history.

And therefore, sometimes his work misses the mark entirely.

One of the more basic elements of Marx's definitions is the distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the owner class and the worker: From The Communist Manifesto itself:

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

Really?

See, this is the problem I've always had with Marx, this increasingly binary division of humanity. It gets worse when one considers that, though he spent his life supposedly supporting the Proletariat he defines, he wasn't one of them. He didn't understand the working class -- or, for that matter, work itself -- at all.

Marx also understood first-hand -- and formed his seminal opinions based upon -- the most egregiously skewed labor market probably ever to have existed in all of history up until then, the England of Dickens. Remember how fast the cities were growing, how rapidly the population turned up at the factory gates looking for work. The gentry had the means to build these new factories, and were in an enviable position when it came to negotiating a wage for the work those factories provided.

(By the way, "gentry" here refers to the traditional division between the landed class and the commoner, a social system that dated back to the feudal system of lords managing the inherited lands worked by the peasants. Essentially, if one took a wage from another, one proved oneself needful, basically lowering one's social status. Jane Austen has some passages in her novels where poor gentlemen engage in highway robbery rather than admit the poverty that besets them and taint themselves with the harness and stigma of a salaried profession.)

Those factories increasingly became complicated bastions of new, emerging technologies. They exemplified for Marx the capital the bourgeois used to wage enslave and exploit the worker. However, is that how things were always done? Hardly.

Let's say you were a craftsman. What do you need to build a house? A factory? No, merely material and tools. They need not be fancy, either. My grandfather built the house in which my mother spent most of her childhood with simple hand tools. It can and has been done many, many times. With skills and a few simple tools one can go out in the world and seek employment. The better your tools, the better your product, the greater your profit. I inherited Grandpa's tools after he died. She said the greatest regret he had when he built that house was that he didn't buy the Craftsman rotary saw (sadly, stolen when I was in college) until after he finished it. Why? According to Witold Rybczynski in One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, the total cuts needed to build a modest house would, if organized perfectly, would take about a week of 8-hour days to complete with a hand saw. The same cuts organized similarly would take someone wielding a powered rotary saw about a 1/2 hour.

So you have a hammer or two, you have a saw. You own both. You are a capitalist, your tools worn on your belt and stowed in your toolbox. You literally own means of production. Let's say you hire a young apprentice to help. He can use some of your old tools as he helps, training him in the art of craftsmanship. Are you exploiting his labor? Absolutely. You are able to build more houses, execute more repairs with him than without. But he is also learning the trade. He is using your old hammer and saw, thus able to learn without having to buy costly tools himself.

That was the way things worked for many, many years, the way things still work in many places today. But it was not something Marx understood well. Here's an example from Henry Petroski:

In spite of Marx's astonishment that five hundred different kinds of hammers were made in Birmingham in the 1860s, this was no capitalist plot. Indeed, if there were a plot, it was not to make more. The proliferation of hammer types occurred because there were then, as now, many specialized uses of hammers, and each user wished to possess a tool that was suited as ideally as possible to the tasks he performed perhaps thousands of times each day.

(Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things, Vintage, 1994, p. 156. Emphasis mine.)

The worker's ultimate champion could not imagine a world with so many hammers simply because he had never swung a hammer. This was a man who saw himself as a temporarily poor gentleman, not a commoner. Remember, even though he could only afford two squalid rooms, he hired a live-in maid.

With this admittedly cherry-picked view of the man best known for defining capitalism and inventing communism, let's go to how "capitalism" is used by his acolytes. In my opinion, it's pretty shoddy work. Nuance be damned; anyone who hires is bourgeois, anyone who accepts a wage is proletariat. Never mind the very real distinctions that in every real workplace refine the roles each of us play. Never mind the primal social drives that shape our behavior into its hierarchy, analogs of which that can be seen in just about every social animal from monkeys to magpies. To the literal Marxist mind there can be no progress in history until no one exists who offers or accepts, until no one dominates and no one submits.

The trouble comes in earnest when these people identify a very real problem. Let's take the current financial situation. To me, this is a result of years of de-regulation brought primarily by Alan Greenspan, a fierce champion of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, a philosophy that allows for no government oversight. At all. Though people other than Greenspan actually pulled the stunts that led to the economy's hyperbolic expansion and eventual collapse, Greenspan actively blocked key regulators that wanted to oversee the mechanisms causing the increase (For a fascinating overview of how this came to be, watch Frontline's "The Warning", something you can do online). Furthermore, Greenspan held the Federal Reserve rate so absurdly low that investors sought -- and thus created the market for -- alternative (and questionable) investment opportunities. (This American Life has several episodes dissecting the explosion of wealth, including "The Giant Pool of Money," "Scenes from a Recession" and "Return to the Giant Pool of Money," episodes they produced in association with NPR's Planet Money Podcast. Many of the Planet Money episodes should be required listening in high school and college economic classes.)

How would I describe our current troubles? Think about the old geometry lesson: A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. Both are four-sided shapes with each side joined at a right angle; only the square, though, has four sides of equal length. Furthermore, both a rectangle and a square are parallelograms, but a parallelogram is neither a rectangle nor a square, since a parallelogram need not have right angles. It's a matter of defining each situation encountered with greater and greater precision.

So, though avowed capitalists are indeed involved in just about every aspect of this financial clusterfuck, I would further refine the situation as primarily corporate in nature (with the short-term needs of publicly-held corporations driving the urgency and need for quick returns) and definitely objectivist in origin. Those were the two defining philosophical excesses that primarily colluded to create the excess, spuriously-created money that has yet to fully be revealed as non-existent.

No one in the popular press has, though, identified those two elements, not to my knowledge. Nope. Absent this needed clarification, all the criticism from the left has been leveled directly at "Capitalism!" Michael Moore especially disappointed me with his new movie. I found the title alone too obscure, too binary, painted with too broad a brush, too general a description of the situation to allow me to even see the flick. I would just find myself chafing at the scattershot "capitalism bad!" accusations which would, I'm sure, be woefully nebulous and thus largely undefined.

That, in my opinion, has become the real problem; hardcore and occasional Marxists everywhere have so overused the C word that every laissez-faire excess is painted as a primarily Capitalist! problem without considering the nuances that actually led to the problem. This blinds these experts -- and everyone listening to them -- forcing the problem-causing complexities to forever dwell in a poorly-understood fog.

When people have problems understanding problems, they cannot be expected to effectively prevent them.

And all this happens to people who kinda understand Marx's ideas. What happens when the language drifts, as it inevitably does? Now all types of strange definitional things start to happen.

For instance, consider Welles again. In his early career, he staged Marc Blitzstein's "highly political Operetta The Cradle Will Rock". He related to his biographer that Blitzstein was an ardent revolutionary Marxist. Ah, but what would the future look like after the revolution? Welles asked Blitzstein if everyone would drive a Cadillac. Blitzstein said that everyone would have two. In his revolutionary utopia, everyone would enjoy the excesses enjoyed in 1937 by only a few.

Consider also a newspaper quote I committed to memory in the early 1980s. It concerned the changes in China after Mao's death, especially those loosening the Communist Party's prohibition on, well, capitalism. Factories were springing up. Small businesses supplemented incomes. And though these changes flew in the face of life under Mao, the culture of traditional China, one that embraced the rewards of hard work, trumped dogma. One man dismissed the concerns of his more hard-line Marxist countrymen with a simple, pithy bit of irony: "This is communism. If you want more, work harder."

So much for all that From each according to his ability, to each according to his need crap.

So where are we? By abandoning nuance in favor of the bourgeois/proletariat divide, many on the left have created a blind spot in their thinking that fails to observe, collate and consider subtle distinctions in individual capitalist situations. The broad brush cannot fill in the tiny but important details. That's a problem, to be sure; but I hesitate to suggest it is a deliberate problem. No, economic theory can be complex and therefore might cause confusion. Cultural differences, historical context, personal myopia, all conspire to distort a more accurate portrayal of circumstances and the language that should be used to describe said circumstances. It's not deliberate; it's just complex.

I cannot, however, say the same is true of the right. I'm sorry, folks, but the language is in much graver danger of abuse from the more conservative elements of our society, a claim I intend to support with argument backed by evidence in Part II.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:51:03 GMT

Yes, Leviticus 18:22 does indeed forbid the "abomination" of men lying with men thusly. However, just a chapter away in Leviticus 19:28 it also says:

Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. (Verily, I hath emphasized.)

Perhaps the picture depicts some one with a strong sense of irony (though the interviewee hides it very, very well).

Just Three Houses Away . . . .

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:35:08 GMT

Remember my neighbor's dilapidated abode? Well, another neighbor just emailed these updated shots. The failing wall has failed, spectacularly.

Zoom in on catastrophe

For a gooder look

I feel sorry for the small gang of raccoons that lives there, not to mention the abundant rats. When it becomes no home for rodents, it's a bad house.

In happier news, it's sold! Hopefully the bulldozers will be rollin' in with destruction on their blades. We neighbors shall greet them with roses, wine and song.

Pledge Drive Comment: A Perhaps Revealing Update!

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:02:57 GMT

Just a few days ago I mentioned a comment I made to my local NPR station. A few days after, I actually received a reply!

Your email conveying some concerns about business support of public broadcasting in general and (our station) specifically was forwarded to me. I would be very glad to speak with you and answer any questions that you may have.

Cool!

I've been putting in extra hours at work lately, so I didn't get a chance to sit down and compose a reply to J. until just now. I outlined my concerns about how corporate and business sponsorships cause what I call the Sugar Daddy Effect; even without direct threats of withdrawing support, sponsorships lie in the back of a reporter's mind, perhaps subtly steering the inquiry of any ongoing investigation away from a sponsor's interests. No reporter wants to wear the label of That Guy Who Costs Us Millions With His Big Mouth, do they?

Here's one paragraph, for a taste:

For example, consider the local television news and the overwhelming ad saturation provided by automobile dealerships. I've notice very few minutes from those outlets devoted to, say, tackling fuel efficiency requirements, something (your station) does very well by comparison. Considering the poor efficiency of most new vehicles, and the tendency for auto shoppers to notice this right away should they be made aware of it, this SDE makes perfect sense.

Here's the funny part, though: I had about five paragraphs lined up outlining what I see are the dangers of news organizations receiving corporate support . . . when I realized the guy receiving this email would be the station's Director of Corporate Support.

The farmer got letter of concern noting that hens might be disappearing, and they sent the fox to investigate.

I realized my gaffe, that I have probably been punked, and asked in a final paragraph for this guy to forward my notes to someone without so glaring a conflict of interest. I'll keep you posted if I receive anything else.

Three News Agencies Describe a Glass of Water

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:02:26 GMT

NPR

Resting upon the tablecloth one sees a clear, round receptacle, perhaps made of glass. Within it appears to be half-filled with a clear liquid shot through with translucent, rounded and clear blocks, perhaps ice.

How the receptacle got to be in this half-filled condition is hard to say; though, if one assumes the blocks are of ice, one might be able to rule out evaporation. The globules clinging to the receptacle's side appear to be condensation, a phenomenon most often associated with colder objects, not warmer.

That the globules form a line just at the level of the receptacle's internal fluid suggests that the glass has sat for some time at this level and has gathered atmospheric water to the colder portions of the exterior, so much so that the globules have started to run down the side of the receptacle, dampening the tablecloth with a ringed mark.

CNBC

Not only is the glass half full, there's every reason to suspect it might fill up fast. Liquidity literally gathers to this glass, clinging to the opportunities afforded just outside the main action and pooling at the base. Naysayers may cry foul, wondering what forces apparently drained half the glass's resources; but we here maintain this bearish attitude serves only to besmirch an otherwise apparently robust vessel with plenty of room for refreshing and profitable containment.

FAUX NEWS

Are restaurants poisoning their patrons? Though unconfirmed, the very real possibility of a clear and deadly fluid in a clear and seemingly innocent "glass" -- or is it just cheap plastic? -- must be investigated.

Suggestions of poison arose when obvious and deplorable leakage was spotted by our intrepid reporter, evidence that the seemingly refreshing fluid within had dissolved the glass, shooting it through with undetectable pinholes and allowing the liquid death to spread. What was once a strong and reliable vessel seems to have been compromised from within, allowing half of its resources to empty through these holes and stain the very fabric of the table.

If so, this glass may shatter, spreading the poison it contains. We should not, we cannot rest until this growing threat is further investigated.

. . . .

We've just learned that the glass holds water. This information does not change things, though. Why in a busy restaurant is a half-empty glass allowed? There must be a waitress nearby doing something other than her job. I'm thirsty just thinking about this deplorable situation.

Waterboarding Bankers Next?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:05:59 GMT

solarbird has once again passed along a couple of wonderful posts from Karl Denninger. In the first, he suggests it's time to waterboard those responsible for covering up the vast extent of our current unreported financial crisis:

All these new "proposals" are doing is attempting to once again screw the American public, turning them (once again!) into debtors and renters while lying to them about being a "homeowner." In addition if the original mortgage was a purchase money first an effective refinance into an interest-only product will destroy the non-recourse nature of the note in those states where it applies, leading those who are trapped in these loans a couple of years from now to lose not only their house but everything else they possess. (Emphasis by the author)

In the second, he seems to echo Chris Martenson (whom I've mentioned before) when he says how very badly our debt will eat our future:

Everyone in America wants "a pony" - the magical alchemy that will turn lead into gold, or return their stock market portfolio to its previous purchasing power.

It won't happen so long as our government and citizens spend more than they make.

There is one and only one way to make that happen: You must grow output faster than debt. When there is a credit overhang this means you must get rid of the debt at a faster rate than GDP declines.

Don't listen to talk of "the recovery." Until these un-discussed debt problems are dealt with head-on, there won't be one. Instead, there will only be more kicking the can further down the road, where it will grow and wait to impoverish the next generation.

It's Pledge Drive Time Again!

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:09:32 GMT

Ah, that grand time of the year when the local public stations staff the phones and wait for you to call in your donation, all the while interrupting the otherwise fine programming they constantly tout with outright begging more befitting of the Calcutta poor. I did my duty. I sent in my pledge. Later, I will actually fill out and mail the check.

This year, though, something new! A comment box, one that appeared just after I gave my info in the Required Fields.

Why not? Here's what I wrote:

I am very concerned that the PBS system -- your station included -- has eroded its integrity as an entity free from commercial influence by agreeing to air "enhanced sponsorhips," what should be called openly "commercials."

At what level would we have to donate to rid the local air of this corruption? To whom would I speak to even broach the topic?

And yes, I am serious.

You see, public radio and television used to be, well, public. That's what set it apart from commercial content. No advertisers. And when one is free of advertisers, one is free from a major source of influence that checks every commercial outlet -- the fear of Pissing Off the Advertisers. It's why the best (IMNSHO) news over the air now comes almost exclusively from PBS radio and telly stations.

Ah, but it couldn't last.

After Nixon's besmirchment and exit, many ardent conservatives recognized that the media was indeed very liberal, very active and very aiming for their asses. What to do? Simple! They went on a spending spree, buying up as many stations and newspapers as they could. Once Saint Ronnie's administration got into office (largely by committing treason), he relaxed the restrictions on how many news outlets one can own. The race was on. Those with money bought up newspapers, radio stations and television outlets.

Then they simply required their holdings to "improve efficiency." That's biz-speak for consolidation, trimming and other neat gimmicks that make it more difficult for any reporter they hire to actually do a decent job reporting. Really, why have many eyes on congress? One should be sufficient. And if they have to package their reports for a variety of different outlets, they won't have time to get too nosy, poking around in dealings that are really "none of their business" like those bastards Woodward and Bernstein. No, best if the news covers Michael Jackson and OJ, rather than bother the viewers'/listeners' pretty heads about skullduggery or anything remotely topical.

On top of all that, the commercials that the individual stations ran -- the money from which had always been the life-blood of the system -- never gave their ~~whores~~ stations cash without strings. Prove it to yourself. Watch the local news. Really. Count the ads for car dealerships. What percentage of the total ads do they represent? Take that number and consider why news teams don't do more stories about the crappy fuel mileage cars sold in the States get compared to other countries, especially Europe. It starts to make sense, doesn't it?

Still, there was NPR, PRI and PBS. They had no such worries about sponsors, did they? Sure, sure, they had the odd Foundation endowment mentioned ad nauseum, but no real bizness folks to complain about the content they continued to provide.

Until W. came along.

Lest anyone pretend to forget, our last president did his job so very badly that our new president has been given the Nobel Prize for Peace simply because, I think, he breathes through his nose. Not only that, it's probably the second time someone has gotten a Nobel because He Wasn't George W. Bush.

One of the things W. tried to screw up was PBS. He appointed Kenneth Tomlinson to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Ken went right to work by questioning the work PBS did. He further encouraged them to shun money from the government by supplementing their revenue streams with "enhanced sponsorships," which as I mentioned in my comment, anywhere outside of PBS, would be called commercials.

And since then, folks, NPR has stood for Nice Polite Republicans.

Granted, it's still heads and tails better coverage and reportage than anyone in the commercial sphere. Why? Consider that NPR spends less on the entire combined salaries for both its morning and afternoon reporting combined than CBS spends per year on Catie Couric's salary alone. You get more bang for the buck. (Well, more bang, less honey shot.)

But the scare Tomlinson shot through the ranks at NPR can be heard still, years after his departure. They know they're in the crosshairs, and are bending over (not backwards, just over) to appear non-threatening. They do things I like, like back up every story with as much verifiability as possible, at least far more than the commercial mouthpieces. But they back off the more controversial topics, "balancing" reporting by giving outright loons as much air time as professionals in the field, and occasionally verging into spontaneous editorialism without warning.

Commercialism makes that easier. When a sponsor can pull cash, news agencies take notice. Furthermore, once the cancer is introduced it metastasizes easily. For example, let's say someone actually has balls and answers my simple inquiry. More than likely, they'll dance around the issue of influence and say crap like "balancing revenue streams," blah blah blah. Money is a hard, hard thing to pass up. Until people make a stink about the spots, a stink that doesn't go away, those spots will besmirch NPR's programming, perhaps so subtly that no one will notice.

And the program started after Nixon will continue unabated. In an era becoming increasingly less conservative, everything becomes more obviously liberal . . . except the media.

Take away the sponsorships, and will anything change? Probably not right away, but it will take one angle of attack off of NPR's open and creamy jugular-thumping necks.

Addendum, October 14, 2009: There are many reasons to separate commercial interests from our source of news, chief among them Faux "News":

It's clear that in 2009, Fox News is no longer in the business of journalism. Fox News isn't trying to inform people, it's trying to misinform them. That's not journalism. It's propaganda. But as long as the press continues to hold up the façade of journalism, Fox News will try to hide behind it.

Fascinating.

"How about a little realism?"

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:02:49 GMT

To the rabid optimists: Put down the pom-poms. Step away from the pink megaphone. You aren't helping.

Please read this. Without knowing it, without being able to articulated it as well, this has been my philosophy for decades.

Shots V. Worms

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:11:36 GMT

I'll first make an up-front declaration of bias: I hate the anti-vaccination crowd.

For those of you unfamiliar with actress, comedianne and centerfold model Jenny McCarthy's hobbies, she has been probably the most visible and outspoken celebrity to endorse the vile lies that childhood vaccines, especially those containing mercury-based preservatives like Thimerisol, cause autism.

I call her positions on vaccine "vile lies" for good reason: At least four peer-reviewed studies have failed to show a connection. That doesn't stop folks -- including celebs like McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Bill Mahr and a raft of others -- from flogging the Thimerisol horse corpse.

Ms. McCarthy, of course, has reason to be angry at autism; her son suffers from the condition. In this case, though, she has gone completely off the deep end attacking vaccines, even going so far as to suggest that the inevitable preventable deaths that follow people refusing to immunize their own children are a price worth paying to avoid an autism connection that (once again) has been debunked.

Let's really add to evidence of her dissonance. Though she has on more than one occasion likened vaccines to "poison," take a gander at what she had to say about one of the most deadly poisons known to man:

“I love Botox, I absolutely love it. I get it minimally so I can still move my face. But I really do think it’s a savior.”

Anyhoo, I'm not posting this just to rant. I was responding to alobar the other day. I think the Hygienic Hypothesis might be a more likely culprit, and said so. He asked a good question: Why now? Why are we facing an explosion of autism?

I had to mull that one. I'm not sure anyone has looked into this, but I'm here suggesting it might have something to do with epigenetics, the study of how genetic code is activated and de-activated based upon environmental factors, not heredity. If you want to blow you mind and perhaps invalidate much of the stuff that got stuffed into your head about our DNA, do go immediately and view Nova's "Ghost in Your Genes". You'll see how rats that get cuddled and well-tended as pups respond more resiliently to stress later in life, that the cuddling and early nurture might actually physically activate their "resilience" DNA.

You'll also see that childhood events can have generational effects:

At the far speculative edge of this new science, some are seeing evidence of an astonishing possibility, that genes may not be all that passes from generation to generation.

The evidence comes from this Swedish village huddled on the Arctic Circle. Overkalix stands out for one reason, its archives.

Olov Bygren, a Swedish public health expert, has been studying them from more than 20 years. What makes these records unique is their detail. They track births and deaths over centuries—and harvests. This is significant because, in years past, Overkalix's location left it particularly vulnerable to crop failures and famines. . . .

Bygren was studying the connection between poor nutrition and health when he stumbled on something curious.

It appeared that a famine might affect people almost a century later, even if they had never experienced a famine themselves. . . . (Emphasis mine.)

After crunching the detailed records, Marcus Pembrey, Bygren's research partner, discovered that:

. . . a grandson was four times more likely to die from an illness related to diabetes if his grandfather had plenty of food to eat in late childhood. . . . They discovered that when a famine was able to trigger an effect was different for the grandmother than the grandfather. The grandmother appeared susceptible while she, herself, was still in the womb, while the grandfather was affected in late childhood.

MARCUS PEMBREY: And the timing of these sensitive periods was telling us that it was tied in with the formation of the eggs and the sperm.

"Tied in with the formation of the eggs and the sperm" -- of grandparents. What happened to your grandparents could one day make it more or less likely that you yourself would live or die.

Okay, now let's get back to autism. What if autism is an auto-immune disease like diabetes?

There is some evidence that suggests such a link. For example, symptoms of autism seem to diminish when the children experience high fevers. Perhaps the immune system is too busy during these fevers.

Let's assume this is the case and extrapolate. As I recently noted, RadioLab's latest covered parasites. They there mentioned that outhouses were not common in the rural South of the United States until after 1908. (I'll let you listen to learn the full icky icky story.) This improvement in hygiene took some time to popularize, but once outhouses caught on a host of until then common diseases, including salmonella, typhus and cholera, also declined in frequency and severity. So, let's start the speculative clock after 1908 in the rural South, and a few decades earlier at least in the major cities of the colder North, especially New York (which has an exceptional and unprecedented clean water system; as I mentioned earlier, some auto-immune diseases were first noted there). For the sake of an average, though, let's peg the date at or around 1900.

The average generations separate by 30 years. My own grandparents were born just after the turn of the last century. For the sake of this exercise, lets assume they led relatively infestation-free lives, unlike those of their own predecessors. Had I had children at the average age of 30, they would have been born 15 years ago or so in the early 1990s. With me so far? Okay.

Now check out the chart below (from this site):

Some disclaimers are in order. I am not a medical researcher. While I am suggesting autism may be the direct result of an auto-immune disorder, I have no personal research to back that claim, no body of empirical evidence upon which my case can stand . . . but others do:

Studies using TSO (Trichuris Suis Ova) to treat certain autoimmune disorders have yielded remarkable results with no side effects. I brought these two together and treated my autistic son with TSO with dramatic results. . . .

After 10 weeks he completely lost all symptoms of agitation, aggression, self abusive behavior (including head smashing and hand biting), perseveration(?), behavioral inflexibility, compulsivity, impulsivity, repeated questioning, “stimming” and hypersensitivity to external stimuli. He continues to take TSO every two weeks and the symptoms have been gone now for 15 months. (Emphasis mine.)

And to that, I can only strongly urge everyone to question that assumed trope that vaccines are poison, to kill that vicious rumor and get kids those shots . . . before more children die.

Edit: Link and floppy verbiage corrected October 8, 2009.

Remodeling the Economic Future

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:48:36 GMT

Decades ago I dated a chess player, a very good chess player, one who trained with chess masters and knew first hand many of the names in competition at that time. One day in the smokey basement pub where chess players meet to play, she came back from a game downright pissed off.

She had lost. Now, she was very good, but people win and lose all the time. I asked her why she was so upset. Her explanation stumped me: "He played like a fish," she said.

Huh?

I had her describe what it meant to play "like a fish." She explained that fish make wild, unpredictable moves, that their play doesn't fit any recognizable pattern.

"But he won," I said. I suppose comments like this are one of the big reasons we haven't seen each other in almost 20 years; but I was honestly then trying to understand the difference between a truly great player who wins and a "fish" who wins. To me, they both win, so what's the difference? After all, if a master sat me down and schooled me in the ways of the board, I wouldn't know if I was undone by a lost Fibunacci Bishop or a Pawn's Gambit or the Flirty Queen. I would only know that I lost. Checkmate.

Out on a walk last night, I finally reasoned why the term "fish" might be used. Hook a fish and drag it out of the water, and it flops about madly on the deck or the dock without getting anywhere. A chess "fish," therefore, might be someone whose play seems erratic and pointless. They don't seem to be getting anywhere, or going anywhere. Ah, but the schooled opponent of the fish is judging the fish's moves on a learned pattern, the movement of one who walks on dry land.

Let's take this fish analogy a bit further and suppose that the fish player is actually playing by rules applicable in the water. Those spastic arches and flops across the board make no sense to us dry-landers; but put us in the drink and we shall see the fish's twitches move it across great distances with an admirable economy of effort. We walkers, on the other hand, slap and kick and flap about and barely get anywhere in the water. (I have a video of myself scuba diving in Hawaii, if anyone needs images of an amateur diver for comic relief.)

All this led me to reconsider a word upon which I've been stumbling quite a bit lately: Heuristics. According to the Wiki, "(H)euristics stand for strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines." That is (if I understand this concept) we humans model complex phenomena by reducing key elements we see into more easily understood patterns and, by extrapolation, attempt to use this model to make predictions about what should happen if certain modifications to the phenomena are changed or, if left alone, what should develop in the future.

We've been talking chess up until now, so let's continue. I went with her on some of those lessons. One was revealing simply because I tried paying attention and trying to learn something. She brought a play-by-play of a recent match, and she and her instructor reviewed her choices and options that she may have missed. After she revealed each move, he would comment, sometimes at length, at similar games between masters. I have to admit that his knowledge of chess lore was fascinating. He could dredge from his brain piece positions from matches in the 1950s, and relate those ancient games to the one she had brought for review, following options and asking whether she had considered this or that strategy, this or that defense.

I've thought about this lesson for decades now. I'm not one of those people who believe we humans use only a small percentage of our gray matter. That's utter bullshit. I do believe people benefit from using that squishy lump just as we benefit from flexing out motion making muscles, but to assign a mere 10% as the benchmark of the average brain's use is simply laughable. More likely, we brain folks are just not accustomed to using our brains. We're using our memories to do silly things instead of wowing the crowds with feats of memory or invention.

What this master and my ex were doing, though, were analyzing their realities, those chess games, based upon a memory of past games and the evaluated strategies used by those past players. They were taking the history of the game and distilling it into meta-strategies, patterns of pieces moving in sequence that strike a mental chord and that can be used to predict, based upon those histories, what outcomes might develop.

And here we find the weakness to which our minds are enslaved: What if these models of games past, these heuristic memory aids, don't apply to the game at hand? If the player she faced that day hadn't studied Karkarov or Fischer or Deep Blue, that player might very well be moving about the board in "unrecognized" patterns. Yes, the moves might very well be indicative of a novice, the spastic horsie jumps and silly castlings of someone who isn't bothering to analyze things, to project the possible outcomes, someone who is instead just playing for a lark. These moves could, though, be coldly calculated using difference heuristic experiences, different modeling, perhaps done on the player's own. This guy might have been an autistic Rainman character who played in his own head without considering the depth and breadth of the game's official history. This fish might have been swimming in his best element and watching her, my ex, kicking wildly just to keep her head above water.

With this possibility in mind, I've been mulling over the recent financial crisis, looking for clues that might point to what went wrong and how to avoid personal disaster. I won't claim I know enough to solve the world's problems, but I might just take actions that make me and The Wife more comfortable in our collective dotage.

Over the last year, many in the press have been blaming the financial institutions that brought everyone into this morass for placing too much emphasis on a mathematical formula. Okay. Let's follow that bit just for a moment. While we do so, though, let's also dismiss the outright malfeasance and crimes that happened, focusing on a simple formula that computers can use. I don't care what formula it is, formulae are used to model realities too complex for most understand without that aid. Ah, but in that case we have ourselves a bit of a problem, because we evaluate the strength or weakness of a formula based upon the previous laws of mathematics. Mathematical formulae of all stripes are therefore a bit of heuristic history used by computers, either those in beige cases or those with sharp pencils and some time on their hands.

In Emergence, Steven Johnson recounts an experiment by Danny Hillis. He tried to break a record by coming up with a new number sorting program:

For years, number sorting has served as one of the benchmark tests for ingenious programmers, like chess-playing applications. Throw a hundred random numbers at a program and see how many steps it takes to sort the digits in the correct order. Using traditional programming techniques, the record for number sorting stood at sixty steps when Hillis decided to try his hand. But Hillis didn't just sit down to write a number-sorting application. What Hillis created was a recipe for learning, a program for creating another program. . . . He taught the computer to figure out how to sort numbers on its own.

. . . Hillis instructed the computer to generate thousands of miniprograms, each composed of random combinations of instructions, creating a kind of digital gene pool. Each program was confronted with a disorderly sequence of numbers, and each tried its hand at putting them in the correct order. The first batch of programs were, as you might imagine, utterly inept at number sorting. . . . But some programs were better than others. . . . Those programs became the basis for the next iteration, only Hillis would mutate their code slightly and crossbreed them with the other promising programs. And the whole process would repeat itself; the most successful programs of the new generation would be chosen, then subjected to the same transformation. Mix, mutate, evaluate, repeat. (Johnson, Emergence, 2001, Scribner, p. 170-171, emphasis by the author.)

I'm a big fan of using computers to solve complex problems, be those problems of understanding Darwin's process or Hillis's quest to order numbers quickly. After a few thousand iterations, Hillis found he had a mutated and bred some pretty decent programs, just not record breakers. So he introduced "predators" to the mix, evaluators that would judge each competitor . . . and delete the ones that took the most steps.

After only thirty minutes of this new system, the computer had evolved a batch of programs that could sort numbers in sixty-two steps, just two shy of the all-time record. Hillis's system functioned, in biological terms, more like an environment than an organism: it created a space where intelligent programs could grow and adapt. . . . (Johnson, ibid, pp. 172-173.)

Ah, but it's Hillis's observation that should give us pause: "One of the interesting things about the sorting programs that evolved in my experiment is that I do not understand how they work. . . . I have carefully examined their instruction sequences themselves. It may be that the programs are not understandable." (Johnson, ibid, p. 173, emphasis, this time, mine.)

They work, but they cannot be understood. Therefore, they cannot be evaluated, at least not by most human minds. How they work might just exceed our heuristic abilities. They just don't make sense to us.

Many other things don't make sense, even to those tasked with making sense of the chaos. Take economists. First of all, as John Michael Greer points out in his Archdruid Report, economists are in a particularly tough bind:

First of all, for professional economists, being wrong is much more lucrative than being right. During the runup to a speculative binge, and even more so during the binge itself, a great many people are willing to pay handsomely to be told that throwing their money into the speculation du jour is the right thing to do. Very few people are willing to pay to be told that they might as well flush it down the toilet, even – indeed, especially – when this is the case. During and after the crash, by contrast, most people have enough calls on their remaining money that paying economists to say anything at all is low on the priority list. (Emphasis by the author)

This might have something to do with positive-outcome bias. People tend to want to hear good, positive outcomes, despite the fact that neutral or negative results can be of enormous value to future investigators. A recent experiment furthermore implies this bias is far more prevalent than even the Skeptic's Dictionary suggests. "Media bias may be due to scientific journal bias, but the latter seems to be due mainly to researchers not submitting negative outcome studies for publication (the file-drawer effect), rather than to bias on the part of publication or peer review editors" might have just been further refined to include bias on the part of the publishers of peer-reviewed material discounted at the end of the Skeptic's definition. There appears to be equal bias in both the presenters and the reviewers.

Ah, but the economists face positive-outcome bias on steroids. Say good things and get paid, verses warn of doom and starve. Hmmmm. That doesn't sound like a hard professional choice to make.

Furthermore, Greer notes that economics has hardly passed scientific muster yet:

The fact that you can get some fraction of nature to behave in a certain way under arbitrary conditions in the artificial setting of a laboratory does not mean that nature behaves that way left to herself. If all you want to know is what you can force a given fraction of nature to do, this is well and good, but if you want to understand how the world works, the fact that you can often force nature to conform to your theory is not exactly helpful.

Economics is particularly vulnerable to this sort of malign feedback because its raw material – human beings making economic decisions – is so complex that the only way to control all the variables is to impose conditions so arbitrary and rigid that the results have only the most distant relation to the real world. The logical way out of this trap is to concentrate on the equivalent of natural history, which is economic history: the record of what has actually happened in human communities under different economic conditions. This is exactly what those who predicted the housing crash did: they noted that a set of conditions in the past (a bubble) consistently led to a common result (a crash) and used that knowledge to make accurate predictions about the future.

Yet this is not, on the whole, what successful economists do nowadays. Instead, a great many of them spend their careers generating elaborate theories and quantitative models that are rarely tested against the evidence of economic history. The result is that when those theories are tested against the evidence of today’s economic realities, they often fail.

Examined, economic histories can predict future collapses just as studying past chess games can help players familiarize themselves with and play toward future probable outcomes. But only, as Greer notes, when economists actually look at history. And, I'll note, when the past is similar enough to the future to allow such heuristic predictions.

But what if the future has a completely new set of circumstances to offer? What if the future flops around in new and unpredictably interesting ways . . . like, say, a fish? This is the topic covered by Greer's latest entry where he likens the economist's conundrum to Descarte's Fallacy:

Rene Descartes is famous nowadays for saying “I think, therefore I am.” Few people these days take the time to find out what he meant by that statement, and fewer still catch onto the radical project that underlay it. . . .

Descartes was arguing, in effect, that “to be” means the same thing as “to be known,” and “to be known” in turn equals “to be precisely defined.” It’s clear that he recognized, and intended, the sweeping implications of this metaphysical stance. It’s equally clear that a great many of the people who unknowingly follow his lead nowadays either accept those implications uncritically or have never noticed their existence. In the hands of much of modern science, in particular, Descartes’ equation has been blended with a passion for quantitative measurement to produce an even more extreme form of the same logic. To a great many scientists today, what exists is limited to what can be known; what can be known is limited to what can be measured; and what can be measured is treated as though it was identical to its measurements. (Emphasis mine.)

Greer continues to point out that wealth, the sum total of labor and resources at hand, is not the same as money. Money is merely the yardstick by which we -- at any given time -- measure wealth. That italicized portion proves most important, especially when one considers that times change. Greer continues:

Money is so convenient as a way of measuring wealth that very often it ends up eclipsing wealth, and this is why most economists nowadays, even when they think they’re talking about wealth, are actually talking about money. This becomes especially problematic when, as so often happens, they start attributing to wealth characteristics that are only true of money.

This habit of thought pervades contemporary economics. For a relevant example, watch the way most economists these days brush aside the immense challenges of peak oil with the assurance that if oil ever does get scarce, the market will come up with alternatives. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that any energy source is as good as any other, and that the total amount in the system is effectively unlimited. This is true of money – one dollar bill is worth exactly the same amount as any other, and the total number of dollars in circulation is as close to limitless, these days, as the printing presses of the US Treasury can make it – but it is emphatically not true of energy resources, or of any other form of wealth.

He continues by noting with precision how oil and other fossil fuels cannot be easily replaced, and that most of our economy depends upon these fuels to function. Even if they were to be replaced, retooling our economy would prove a monumental, unprecedented task, the costs of which most economists have yet to consider:

Presumably an economist would notice something odd if he sat down at a lunch counter, ordered the daily special, and was handed instead a box of socket wrenches, even if the price of the wrenches was exactly the same as the daily special. If the economist was starving on a desert island and a crate that washed ashore proved to contain socket wrenches rather than food, the difference would be a matter of life or death. This latter is uncomfortably close to our position just now, as the world’s energy companies race each other and the clock to extract fossil fuels in nearly unimaginable volumes from the Earth’s dwindling supplies. If we allow ourselves to wait until those supplies start to run short, it will be much too late to start retooling our civilization for some other energy resource, even if one happens to turn up.

Hence, Descarte's Fallacy as applied to economics: "Cogito ergo sums of money" is simply a mangled pun when there's nothing of sufficient value to buy.

I have no plan to escape from any heuristic trap I might have built for myself. Why should I? I didn't build it; it's how our brains function. When one rides the roller coaster, one expects some ups and downs. It's enough that I can recognize that these traps exist, that our human brains have limited abilities to escape the mental shorthand that passes for our understanding. It's been recognized for thousands of years. Zen masters have long noted the koan, a logical impossibility or dissonant narrative designed to help acolytes snap out of familiar heuristic thought patterns and achieve bits of sharp enlightenment.

Is it too late to do the same for economics? I hope not. I have, though, been noting an almost disgusting lack of awareness in economist interviews, a prevalence to repeat the free-market über alles party line without considering all the variables that made this petroleum-fueled expansion possible and that has no experience calculating how much it might cost in human labor to grow, for example, a day's worth of bread: "The 7,500 calories in today's ($.69) bag of flour would equal the diet of a four-person peasant family for a whole day; the difference is that it would take three days of medieval work to afford."

Such stark changes are already, I think, happening. One just needs to know what one should look for, and how to cut through the Green Shoots recovery-is-on-its-way blather that distracts most who talk about the economy, even when that's their job. . . perhaps especially when that's their job.

They're acting just like they're losing to a fish. An enormous whale of a fish.

"Bluntly, we have institutionalized accounting fraud. . . ."

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:41:16 GMT

solarbird gives what appears to be an excellent (but way over my head) analysis of the current market rally in her journal today. One of the many links had the quote in my subject line, Mark To Myth Losers: Americans posted by Karl Denninger.

He gives a frightening run-down on how many losses from foreclosures and defaults the banks are failing to report, often against the regulations requiring such reporting:

The bottom line here folks is as I have been hollering about for over two years: Banks and other institutions are carrying paper at FAR beyond its reasonable fair-market value - or that which it will EVER realize under any reasonable set of assumptions going forward.

Bluntly, we have institutionalized accounting fraud and the so-called "regulators" that are supposed to put a stop to and even prosecute these acts are willfully and intentionally ignoring them. The cities and towns across America are the big losers where these practices cause blight through intentional neglect while these "banks" claim to be in far better financial condition than is in fact the case.

In addition, this willful disregard for the truth means that these bankrupt institutions remain in the system as "zombies", unable to perform their critical role in credit intermediation. (Emphasis, this time, by the author)

This can't end well. My question is simple: Why is this info hidden only in the bowels of the intertubes? This indicates our current economic troubles are going to be far worse than the cheerleaders on the telly are suggesting.

When What You're Doing Ain't Enough

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:06:23 GMT

I commented in cargoweasel's LJ today. Looking back, I typed hastily and in anger, something that led me to make a comment that frightens me some hours later. For that, I apologize.

I'm reminded of Sam Kinneson (sp?) and his very early stand up. On spousal abuse, he said (in so many words) I don't condone wife beating . . . but I UNDERSTAND IT!!!

Well, when violence strikes from a perceived area of interest, people take notice. By now, all have heard of the census worker hanged in Kentucky with the word "fed" written on his body. Many have pointed out that the rage leading to this attack can be rightly attributed to the right-wing noise machine attempting to mobilize their base, all part of their effort to undermine in any desperate way any momentum the perceived left has made in the last few months.

What happens when that violence becomes more commonplace? What is the most appropriate response?

You see, I feel that is, as Zappa used to say, the crux of the biscuit. The right feel they are, well, right. They feel their positions on issues have been ordained by The Creator of All. They feel the violence they undertake -- be it the hanging of a substitute teacher or the gunning down of a doctor or the shooting of a black guard in a museum -- is justified as punishment for the fact that someone dared defied their god.

The left . . . what response have they? And herein lies the rub.

While looking into the matter, I've learned that the left tends to view more than just two sides of any given issue, tending instead to immerse themselves in the complexity and nuance, details that defy simple vilification. The left tends also to eschew violence, be it torture, assassination, what have you. There are many reasons for this. Despite the lessons Jack Baur may teach, torture, for example, doesn't get good information from the tortured. It almost never does. Think about it: If someone is willing to die for his cause, what is a little pain (in the short term) going to prove? In the long term, his information is probably of no value. Really, this should be obvious, given the lessons other countries have to offer. If Israel has abandoned torture as a means of interrogation, it's a good bet they tried it and failed to see the value. Lesson learned.

So when the right targets the left, what defense does the left have, well, left?

I was debating a good friend on such an issue years ago. He felt my position on (IIRC) global climate change was pussy-esque. He didn't agree on the very premise, and tried the ol' "Why don't you kill yourself?" ploy. It's a classic. If people are the biggest cause of global warming, one argues, why don't those that care about the issue off themselves?

Ah, I pointed out, not so fast. If a person cares enough about the issue, he or she should take down the biggest polluters, the biggest carbon output sources, as quickly as possible, all while living as carbon-free a lifestyle as they can manage. Down go the Hummer drivers, for starters. The coal plant operators get it next, followed by anyone who lobbies for Big Oil, Big Auto, what have you. This will reduce the pollution much more quickly than simply reducing the number of people who are striving to make a difference. As solutions go, it's an effective and compelling argument.

And that's the problem.

Any issue can be reduced to Us v. Them. It could be Kanye jumping onstage being a dick or the neighbors massing troops on the border. It doesn't matter what it is, really. What happens when Them just get too visible, too successful? What happens when Them starts a'winnin'? The knee-jerks in all of us reach for a handy blunt instrument and a nearby melon to crack. And if we swing and connect, score! Our side wins a round.

But we don't. Our side ultimately can lose in so many ways.

I will say if I as a lefty get targeted by melon-seeking object-swinging righties, I'll use whatever means at my disposal to defend me and mine. That's not even an issue. Go, Second Amendment!

But when it comes to avenging a teacher in Kentucky, I really have to calm the fuck down and remember that, given time for the issue to ferment, that stupid, stupid, stupid act is likely to do more damage to Beck and Bachmann and the rest of the paid rabble rousers . . . as long as we never let them forget it.

The Trash Surrounding Us

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:20:59 GMT

My brother metalmensch was sent to work in India a few years ago. Being my brother, he had his eye trained for things I, too, would find interesting, things beyond the travel brochure, things alien enough to folks like he and I that they verge on the outright fascinating.

He found such fascination in . . . trash cans. They weren't ordinary trash cans, no sirree. Check out one such can:

Litter can in Ramoji Studios

A few details simply must be noted. First, his Indian friends consider these cans "fiercely" embarrassing. That he was constantly shooting pictures of them in scenic areas like Ramoji Studios and the Taj Mahal was even worse. Shouldn't he be taking pictures of things worth viewing? Details of Indian life that might put the sub-continent in a pleasing light?

I'll get to why his friends thought his actions embarrassing in a bit. Right now, though, I'd like to share some podcast material that illustrates why I think we in the United States might have even more reason to feel fierce embarrassment: Simply, many of our buildings and neighborhoods are just as freakish and ugly as these cans are to the Indian locals.

One of the "less disturbing" dustbins at Ramoji.

Let's start our aesthetic tour of American embarrassments with my favorite architectural curmudgeon, James Howard Kunstler. In his KunstlerCast #78 -- Litter and Pollution, he shares an experience from Germany:

I had a very vivid experience in Berlin about ten years ago. Somebody had directed me to go to take a look at a particular building on what had been the East Side of the Berlin Wall, the communist side. It was (an) apartment building designed by Peter Eiseman. . . . Berlin's a fairly tidy city. It's German, right? (In a German accent) ". . . . You vill follow zee orders! You vill be neat! You vill not drop zee litter!"

So I went over to the Friedrichstrase to see this building, and I noticed there was trash in all the light wells and around the various parts of the building, where there was no trash anywhere else on the sidewalk in front of any of the other buildings in Berlin. One of the things I concluded from that was that people will literally trash a place that they don't respect, or they don't like, or they object to. And people objected to this apartment building. It was not a handsome building. Y'know, it was a Peter Eiseman post-modernist special.

I was later told that this building -- in a city where apartments were really scarce and (commanded) a real premium -- I was told that this was the only apartment building that had a waiting list to get out of. So you could tell that people had a low regard for it.

So if people have a low regard for a public place, they'll treat it badly. A lot of American urban space is very difficult to have a high regard for. To some extent, a lot of it -- especially now after it's incurred all the damage of the post-war period -- these are places that you can almost categorically state that they're not worthy of our affection. They're unlovable. And people treat them like unlovable places. (Transcript and emphasis mine.)

That sentence of Jim's I emphasized is not the reason Ramoji Studios has turned the elven-capped M&M Mars Peanut M&M character into a filthy trash receptacle. (Actually, remember the old M&Ms ad campaign, "Melts in your mouth, not in your hands?" That dustbin almost looks like he's been eating un-candy-coated chocolate like a three-year-old, smearing it all over his pie -- er, trash-hole. This leads me to believe M&M Mars did not authorize this reproduction, and would not be pleased to learn of its existence.

(But I digress.)

Ramoji Studios sounds like Universal Studios as far as attractions are concerned, probably not a repository of ugly architecture. Mr. Kunstler is instead emphasizing that the eastern portion of Berlin has an embarrassing building, a building most occupants want to leave if at all possible.

I did a little quick research on this Eiseman fellow. I love this quote from the Wiki entry on him: "Eisenman's focus on 'liberating' architectural form was notable from an academic and theoretical standpoint but resulted in structures that were both badly built and hostile to users." Yes, sounds just like that apartment Kunstler described. Ah, but the entry gets even more bizarre:

It was frequently repeated that (one of his building's) colliding planes tended to make its users disoriented to the point of physical nausea; in 1997 researcher Michael Pollan tracked the source of this rumor back to Eisenman himself. In the words of Andrew Ballantyne, "By some scale of values he was actually enhancing the reputation of his building by letting it be known that it was hostile to humanity." (Emphasis mine.)

This man Eiseman took pride in his building's hostility to humanity. Sound familiar? Regular Peristalt-ic readers should remember my and Kunstler's opinion on starchitecture, the aggrandizement of certain building designers based not on the way their designs interact well with the surroundings, but the way they deliberately confront and confound our innate human need for buildings to follow an aesthetic language of design.

How incredibly perverse of them.

Ramoji Studio penguin bin.

While Kunster notes people's trashy protest of ugly architecture, Oscar Wilde took the overall effects quite a bit further. Another good (but infrequent) podcaster is Stephen Fry. If you don't know who he is, remedy that immediately. In his third podcast in his first Series of podcasts (transcript here), he tells of Oscar Wilde's 1881 lecture tour of the United States. While speaking in Leadville, Colorado, someone asked him:

“Why, Mr. Wilde, do you think America is such a violent country?”

“I can tell you why,” he said. “It’s susceptible readily of an explanation. America is such a violent country because your wallpaper is so ugly.”

Now that seems, you might snort with laughter at first and say, “Well, how amusing.” Part you you may say, “Well this is just a typical peacocking primped camp remark from a shallow and trivial man who thinks it’s amusing to say things like that.”

But actually, to understand what the Aesthetic Movement is all about, one has to take that quite seriously. Instead of judging things as being good or bad, things are judged by whether they are beautiful or ugly. And we may say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but actually it’s a lot easier to judge when things are beautiful than it is when things are bad or good. We spend our time puzzling dreadfully over whether we can interpret something as being wicked or whether it’s virtuous. However, beauty, beauty, beauty acts on us in a very real way, and what Wilde was partly saying was, if we look out of the window into our world, we see things that are universally and entirely beautiful from nature. Whether they be palm trees swaying in an island, whether they be the arctic wastes, whether they be deserts, tundra steps. It doesn’t matter where you look in the world, we see nothing but beauty. Unconditional, remarkable beauty.

Except where man has intervened.

And what Wilde is saying is, imagine belonging to a species where all you believe that all you can do to the world is to uglify it. To make it worse. To despoil it. Which is what we do. We know that now in real and profound and terrible ways that Wilde couldn’t have known about because the science hadn’t yet discovered quite how harmful we are as a species to our planet. But he could see that we were harmful to our planet in terms of its aesthetics. That we were making the earth uglier. Uglier with bad architecture, uglier with badly designed factories, uglier with badly stamped out tin trays and cheap ornaments, ugly with appalling wallpaper. And if you’re someone who grows up in such an environment, who is surrounded by badly made ugly things, then you think ugly thoughts of yourself and world. You think ugly thoughts of your whole species. There is nothing for you to do but to, to, to crap in your own nest. It’s what we do when we don’t believe in ourselves. (Emphasis boldly mine.)

America in Wilde's time -- indeed, a large part of America today -- is covered with such ugliness. In Berlin, they litter-ally trash bad buildings; in America, we have so many bad, ugly buildings we trash entire neighborhoods . . . and then we violently trash ourselves.

A bin so well camoflauged it was almost missed.

Now, finally, let's get to these damned dustbins. I'll let brother metalmensch testify:

Garbage cans are not something that are commonplace in India. What do you do with your trash? You drop any trash on the ground. Untouchables pick such things up and generally keep the place clean. Anything that can be picked up and burned will be by people who live on less a day than that latte you just bought and tried to find a trash can for.

To Indians, those bins are an embarrassing accusation. They exist exclusively for tourists who know nothing about how trash should be dealt with -- as a gift to people too unclean to gainfully employ, let alone touch. And since the cans exist for the tourists, the ubiquitous "Use Me" must be placed upon them to remind the locals that here the untouchables won't be doing their normal jobs (lest uncomfortable questions pop out of the tourist mouths).

Here in the US, we have trash cans a 'plenty. We also have bad, bad architecture in abundance, some buildings built to confound and confuse, some built to inspire nausea. Tourists point their cameras at these structures all the time, but often not to honor them. The strip malls of the country are undoubtedly snapped by folks as perverse as my brother and I, people who notice something very unusual, very disturbing. "Why does this string of four or five small businesses surround itself with parking tarmac like some kind of moat? Why not just put the buildings along the sidewalk like they do in Europe? By the way, where is the sidewalk? Does this mean you have to drive to get here? Damn. When the lot fills, where can one park? Nowhere?!? Really? Are Americans that bad at parallel parking? Wow. And why are the apartments so separate from the businesses? That makes no sense at all. I've got to get a picture."

The Evil Cheshire Trash Cat

All cultures have elements other cultures simply can't understand. Without untouchables, we Westerners (well, most of us) simply cannot grasp an economic situation that turns a liability for society (accumulating garbage) into a resource donated to a subculture too vilified to even notice scrounging about.

By the same token, we Americans have become so enamored of personal vehicular transportation that we have destroyed the built environment for use by anything but, in some parts of the country so severely that we have relegated pedestrians and users of public transit to the same level as India's untouchables.

Built for the view from the street instead of the sidewalk, our buildings and their surroundings intimidate those forced to walk instead of drive. Those stuck without a car feel themselves stuck as in a tar pit, with all the opportunities reserved for the whimsically mobile. They live in apartment complexes surrounded by parking stalls and lawns on which no children play, far away from any social places like pubs, cafés and restaurants . . . and connected to these only by sidewalk-free county highways far too overbuilt to accommodate walkers safely, let alone peacefully.

And let's not forget that the cheap fuel that drives these neighborhoods is quickly but surely getting less and less abundant, a situation that will turn these areas into ugly and unusable. They will become tomorrow's Untouchable Places, hideous havens for those without the resources to remove themselves therefrom.

It's enough to inspire nightmares.

Help Solve This "Mystery"

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 04:59:22 GMT

Who could this boy be?

Evidence suggests this tyke is a year old, maybe a few days older. This was probably taken, judging by the faded nature of the print and the garment worn, in 1970.

The stare, though -- that's timeless. Whoever bears this stare might be a clue, even decades later.

Hookworms! A Podcastic Convergence!

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:37:56 GMT

I'm stoked. Radiolab has covered the parasite thing! They did a darn fine job, too, interviewing (among others) Carl Zimmer from The Loom, one of my fave blogs and author of the definitive introduction to parasitism, Parasite Rex. I've convinced two doctors and my own mother to read that book.

They also interviewed David Pritchard, someone I mentioned here, who cured own his allergies with a dose of worms.

There was also a guy who infected himself and thus shed his allergies, but who is going one step further; he's selling his worms to anyone who wants them. I'm sick of sneezing, sick of drugs which, if strong enough to dampen the sneezes, make it illegal for me to drive and thus work.

I'm on board with the Hygenic Hypothesis. I might wait until spring when the fun usually begins, but I'm ready. I am so ready.

Worm me.

Addendum, some minutes later: Here's Jasper Lawrence's website. He's the one who's selling the fruits of his butt. He also demonstrates the value of associating any business with a hot chick in pearls and furs.