Tickle thyself

This New Scientist article in part addresses that age-old question: Why can't people tickle themselves? I guess it's not that hard to figure out -- it's what I've thought for years: You know what's about to happen. But this study helps formalize and pin down the effect.

Poetic justice?

I was just thinking about these here USofA and how we are getting bogged down in Iraq. I thought of Vietnam. I thought of the American War for Independence. A ragtag bunch of militiamen, outgunned, overmatched, using guerilla tactics to defend their home turf against a rich, imperialist power. What goes around comes around.

Color -- calm strength

I'm glad I came across a particular reason to link to this City Pages article from a [former?] friend of Christopher Hitchens' lamenting and wondering what has happened to him to make him such a bitter crank. Good story. I have no idea what happened to Hitch. This guy says it's just Washington. I guess. The Blumenthal affair certainly may have pushed him over the edge.

In any case, the excuse for posting this article -- not that I need one, it's my fucking blog -- is a quote from an old Harper's piece by Hitchens before he went cuckoo: 'An earlier regional player, Benjamin Disraeli, once sarcastically remarked that you could tell a weak government by its eagerness to resort to strong measures.' I've been sort of obsessed with this concept about individual people recently: I think true personal authority is frequently manifested by declining to use raw power.

International mudslinging

Heh. The Europeans are having a fight. The Italian tourism minister published an open letter bashing all Germans, 'these stereotyped blondes with ultra-nationalist pride, indoctrinated since way back when to feel top of the class at any price.'

About one German politician he says, 'But Martin Schulz, who probably grew up amid noisy belching contests after gargantuan beer drinking sessions and huge helpings of fried potatoes, is unaware of this.'

Essentially, the Italian guy is mad that some Germans think Italians are mafiosos, so he responds by saying their beer-drinking, fried potato-eating belchers. Perhaps they're all right?


Seems to me there's been a rise of tension in the West recently -- the Germans are belching boors, the Italians dumb mafiosos, the French cheese-eating surrender-monkeys, the Americans simple-minded cowboy yahoos...

The production of intended effects

Okay, I'm back now in the Bay [not the land part -- the actual Bay [blub, blub]], frittering my days away in front of a computer. So breathe easy, more posting to come.

I just encountered one interesting theme and noted it in my little head, and then ran into it again and figured it had to be really earth-shattering, so I'll recount it now. First, I saw this article in New Scientist about a new type of environmentalism: moderate and realistic. The deal is that lots of environmental groups have abandoned the no-harm-to-the-environment-ever strategy in favor of a more politically expedient and also humanistic strategy. The advantages are twofold: 1] you turn off fewer people when you say you want to save some of the whales rather than every single damn one; and 2] you alienate fewer people by sacrificing their jobs to the whales.

Snippet from the beginning of the story, entitled 'A greyer shade of green'. [Nevermind that the English can't spell their own fuckin' language.]

'Being green is no longer black and white. Major conservation groups are beginning to realise [spellcheck, you damn limeys!] that their old, hard-line protectionist approach simpy doesn't work, says Fred Pearce
...
'But [a proposed ban on catching live fish via a means that hurts coral reefs] is meeting opposition from an unexpected quarter: the Philippines branch of the WWF [no, not Hulk Hogan], the world's foremost conservation body, with backing from its internatinal headquarters in Geneva.

'Hard to credit? A betrayal? Well, hold your fire -- the WWF is just one among many science-based environment groups that are engaged in a savage reappraisal of their philosophy. In their self-imposed task of saving everythign from rainforests and medicinal plants to elephants and whales, they are coming to a heretical conclusion: conservatino -- at least in its hard-line forms -- is its own worst enemy. Far from saving endangered species and their habitats, it often accelerates their destruction, because it alientates local people and forces trade underground.'


And blah, blah, it goes on with some details and evidence and shit like that. I think this is a good change, myself. Environmentalism is about [ahem, should be about] producing good effects, not just striking the most uncompromising poses and kvetching with the shrillest voices. What is that saying about a teaspoon of honey and a teaspoon of vinegar? [Am I getting this right? Anyone who emails me a correction will be the subject of an upcoming adoring 'color' column in thinkness.]

Then, while reading Breaking Open the Head, a dope book about modern shamanism through psychedelic drugs, I come across a part about 'Ayahuasca tourism', in which well-off Westerners pay a bunch of money to South American shamans ['shamen'?] who lead them through the process of taking ayahuasca, a potent psychedelic also known as yage. Some people say that this ayahuasca tourism is bad for these old-school native tribes because it's commercializing their culture and bringing too many industrial-tainted people into the jungle and blah, blah. Daniel Pinchbeck, the author, disagrees:

'It seems to me that these perspectives are shortsighted, not only because the shamans [okay, fine: 'shamans'] themselves have the vision of sharing their knowledge with Westerners, but also because yage tourism, if it is done conscientiously, is a force that can help to preserve indigenous traditions at this point. This is what seems to be happening with the Secoya. There are not going to be any "pure" Indian cultures anymore, certainly no illiterate ones. After decades of seeing their cultures trashed by missionaries, assaulted by Western governments, overrun by corporate greed, the Indians need to know that certain groups of rich Westerners value their knowledge and history. The yage tours are, in fact, beneficial to both sides: The shamans desperately need the revenue, and we, equally desperately, need the revelations.'


If you read the book and the article [or simply take my word, credulous reader] you would see that comparing these two theses is particularly apt because Pinchbeck talks a lot about the Amazonian environment and the New Sci article talks about tours to go see gorillas and shit in Africa. I like this trend. I am aware that it's sort of weird to say that this other culture, or this other race, is something we'll pay money to go look at. Is that the gorilla's function, or even worse, is that the shaman's function? 'Hey, hop into the service economy, Don Caesario!'

But we need the better elements of the West to come forward and interact with the world. Currently, most of what developing countries see of America is oil companies. Globalization is going to happen, whether we like it or not. We might as well try to make it a mixed bag, rather than purely a flaming shitbag left on most of the world's doorstep. Didn't globalization used to be an ideal?

Wow. Blogger on a Mac really stinks. I'll write this quick so I don't have to deal with it for long.

Michael Savage, repressed gay dude and mean, mad person, was fired by MSNBC for making mean, mad comments. Only radio is able to contain such vitriol and hate:

"Oh, you're one of the sodomites... You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it."

Reminds me of an old Chili Peppers line: 'It's so lonely when you don't even know yourself.'

Revelations abound

Yes, it's revelation day here at thinkness.

Michael Savage, caustic conservative radio shithead, used to be gay. Or is gay. Or wants to be gay. Or has or had man-liking tendencies. In any case, he had a touching pen-pal relationship with Allen Ginsberg [gay!] and a hand-touching relationship with a 'black brother' in Fiji.

Not that there's anything wrong with that! [Kinda jealous about being buds with Ginsberg, actually.] But I just wish he didn't repress his homosexuality until it bubbled forth in such unseemly ways.


And in other news, Strom Thurmond, racist, segregationist senator/presidential candidate, had a daughter with a black woman! Sweet Jeezus! Were there a whole lot more freudian somethings-or-other going on in his head? Little shame, perhaps?

Redistricting, the hot topic = confuzhon

Redistricting is all over the place now. First there was the thing in Texas where the Republicans tried to redistrict again [only a couple years after the last redistricting in 2000, contrary to age-old tradition] and a bunch of Democrats flew the coop to Oklahoma so that the state wouldn't have a quorum and couldn't conduct business. Then Governor Perry called a special session to deal with redistricting and they're in that now. Democrats say their 12 out of 31 state senators will be able to prevent redistricting from coming to the floor. The NYTimes just covered this on page one, doing a good job of pointing out the clean break with tradition -- perhaps it's finally getting some well-earned attention.

Then there was the recent redistricting case in the Supreme Court. [This is a pretty technical issue that seemed to confuse the pants off Takeshi.] SCOTUS decided not to overturn a Georgia plan that would potentially water down districts that have really big black-people majorities in favor of making coalition-type districts where significant numbers of black folks would be put together with significant numbers of similar-voting white folks. Essentially, the court said -- contrary to previous interpretations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- that minorities needed to have some demonstrable pull in sympathetic districts, rather than having basically all of the power in certain districts with almost all minority populations.

The weird thing about this decision is that the five more conservative justices made this decision that everybody seems to think will help Democrats, both in Congress and state redistricting. Instead of one 80%-black district that always votes Democrat, you might have two 40%-black districts with lots of white liberals that also vote Democrat. The four more liberal members of the court agreed with the heart of the decision [that minority districts could be watered down without denying those minorities fair representation] but claimed that no one had proven that would happen in the Georgia case. They wanted to throw the plan away, while the conservativos told the trial court to get more information on how the change would affect minority representation, considering a lot of different factors, including what black politicians in the state think. Well, they're stoked. There you go, Tak.

[That's funny, this is sounding like a conversation I heard last night between a friend of mine and her neighbor -- they were talking about how new housing projects and neighborhoods near them were more race- and class-mixed and how it made better communities. Also true of political districts? Makes sense to me. Wouldn't it be less polarizing for people to have their lot cast in with people from other races who are inclined to agree on many issues?]


Incidentally, there's a good sum-up of this action-packed SCOTUS session in the NYTimes. Interesting distinction drawn between the more pro-business, socially-moderate conservatives -- Kennedy and O'Connor -- and the moral-majority-type conservatives -- Thomas and Scalia. Linda Greenhouse puts Rehnquist in the middle. Social moderateness [?] is somewhat akin to libertarianism, while moral-majoritism is like conservative communitarianism. As I mentioned before, wrt John Asscock, it's terrible to have conservative communitarians deciding matters of law and justice. [I would rather him switch with the uberlibertarian Michael Powell.]

Second-best grass ever

New Scientist published a little piece on a grass genetically engineered to be hypo-allergenic. It's still years from marketability, but interesting. Consumer-oriented GMOs? Is it possible? Much more on this later...

Who wants some Vietnam?

Lots of people have been saying that maybe Iraq is a quagmire, a new Vietnam. Well, the US military's been spreading a little of that itself. Like when it uses Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries as its theme music in a raid, a la Apocalypse Now. Reminiscent of the Reagan campaign misinterpreting the doleful, bitter Born in the USA and using it as a theme song.

[Just found out that MotherJones.com and The Nation both covered this. Moving right along...]

I guess I'll catch up on something that I was obsessing over that day Blogger died. [Is there a song about that? And we were singing, bye bye...]

I usually find Maureen Dowd's columns in the NYTimes to be insipid, cutesy, and vapid. No, it's not really that funny that you keep calling him Rummy. But her most recent column is extremely good. Really good. I hesitate to admit it but I got chills from reading it. Maybe I need to get out more. In any case, I don't want to quote it because the whole thing's really good and it derives a lot of its power from the sequence of one pointed observation after another.

I wonder if I should just reprint the whole thing here, seeing as it will go away from the NYTimes' site soon. And it's not as though they'd catch me or anything. Hmmm...

Sometimes you get more than you pay for

I was just starting to really give up on Blogger. I figured hey, it's free, made for dumb people who know no html, what do you expect? But then they just went and changed it and it's waaay better. Impressive. Forget Moveable Type and learning stuff, I'm staying here.

Like father, like son

Unbelievable. Speaking of getting in with Beltway Democrats, Dean said, "It is a bit of a club down there... The Democratic Party, all the candidates from Washington, they all know each other, they all move in the same circles, and what I'm doing is breaking into the country club."

Last week, Dean's son drove the getaway car for a group of kids that broke into... a country club.

Unbelievable.

Will an honest man...

George Will -- whom I once liked because he wrote well about baseball and then came to dislike because he's a conservative tightass -- is the first conservative pundit I've seen to raise serious questions about the WMD bullshit [while managing to get in a dig at new-age bullshit]:

"But unless America's foreign policy is New Age therapy to make the public feel mellow, feeling good about the consequences of an action does not obviate the need to assess the original rationale for the action.

"Until WMD are found, or their absence accounted for, there is urgent explaining to be done."

Taken together with the recent WMD piece from those war-is-awesome kids at The New Republic, I hope this is some kind of sign that the scandal has scandalously nice legs.

Let's get 'em, Larry

Some corporate asshole recently tried to tell Lawrence Lessig that every good idea coming from the 'open' and 'free' movement will be co-opted by corporate assholes and exploited. This is an affront to my faith in and hope for cooperative human organizations, and to show the true cooperative spirit we must smash everything in our communal way.

Lessig links to some kind of debate about how to standardize blogs or something. I can't even get my fargin archive to function right. Sounds like something that Zephoria would know about...

Yes, I'm slobbering on Dean again

Slate says something I've tried to say for a long time now: Dean isn't really all that liberal. I think that image people got into had to do with the fact that he's from a liberal state and signed the civil unions law. I also think that because he comes out very hard on the issues where he takes a liberal standpoint people think he must be really liberal. [The fact that he's determined on his liberal issues is good -- people, including me, like determination and decisiveness.]

It's good that he's not hardcore liberal, because it means he might actually get elected. One thing that is great about him is that he's pro-gun rights. 'A' rating from the NRA. I not only like this position philosophically but think it is a huge winner politically for somebody who might be tarred as an uberliberal.

A recent column by a guy who's apparently pretty influential in Iowa also discussed how Dean is selling himself well there -- being decisive, 'presidential', forthright, and friendly to rural voters. I personally think the Dems should basically just give up all the hardcore red states. Let these people be crazy. To win, the Democratic candidate must carry the West Coast [including Hawaii], the Northeast, and the Great Lakes part of the Midwest [and New Mexico, I guess]. Florida would, of course, be a big help, which instantly makes Bob Graham an attractive veepee candidate. A smart campaign could pick up New Hampshire, Ohio, West Virginia, and Florida -- all states lost by Gore in 2000, any of which would've made him win. [Not to mention Tennessee. Gahhh.]

I think Bush's poll numbers are being boosted by the fact that he has atmospheric ratings all over the South; the Dems' chances will look better when they pick a nominee, we get further from the war, and people start focusing on the electoral vote rather than the popular vote.

TNR says Dean sucked on Meet the Press. My mom says he was good. What's a teevee?

My brother says The Economist used the 'total recall' joke before Safire did. Who knew.

Better living through genetic modification

Japanese researchers have concocted a GM coffee bean that has significantly reduced levels of caffeine. More on this to follow.

Deep regret -- real entertainment

This is an old story that I meant to post long ago. The NYTimes ran a good expose on how CBS tried to secure exclusive rights to interview Jessica Lynch by using owning-company Viacom's ability to make her a star using its other media holdings.

Yes, the world is screwed up.

Color -- abounds

There's so much color in this Safire column about the Davis recall effort I don't know where to start.

Yes I do: Yesterday my brother said that people would start saying that if the cali gubernatorial recall effort succeeds and Ahnold runs to replace Davis, people would start calling it the 'total recall'. Well, Bill Safire was listening. 'Thus, if Davis is afflicted with total recall...' Apparently, perceptiveness runs in the family. Humility -- not so much.

And beyond that, Safire wraps up with a particularly nice Emerson quote: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . . . With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.' Dylan quotes the first part of this line frequently. Props all around.

I like Safire's take on this issue, actually. This means I'm agreeing with him at least twice in one year; recently, he highlighted the liberal-conservative convergence in communitarianism when he opposed the FCC's action to scrap lots of ownership regulations, and then encouraged Congress to pass a law overriding the commission's decision.

Truth be told, I think a congressional action is plainly the best way to go about this. A huge number of voters voiced overwhelming opposition to the new rules. This is exactly the type of occasion when Congress should jump in to support the popular desire and hand down a very democratic outcome.

What would Orwell say?

Kinsley says there existence of WMD in Iraq has already been proven. Sorta. "Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Sure there are—in every sense that matters, reality not being one of them." Gaahhhh. You may have to read the rest of the story to really get the idea. I am afeared he's correct. Damn jaded bastard.

Yesterday I made a Watergate reference. Today it's Orwell. Tomorrow I'll make a Nazi reference and then, per Godwin's law, sweet reader, it is time to quit thinkness forever. I believe this is reverse psychology.

Put me in coach -- I'm ready to kick ass

On day 91 for the search for WMDs, I just figured out how the stupidass Democrats can really push the WMD scandal further. A lot of people have been saying Yeah, they pumped up and twisted the reports on WMDs, but the US won the war and now no one will care even if they flat-out lied about why we were in the war.

Well, you remember this little thing called Watergate? [I hate bad Watergate analogies as much as the next guy, but this is good.] People got pret-ty mad that the president had been involved with a second-rate burglary of the hotel, trying to spy on Democrats and their strategy sessions before the 1972 presidential election. McGovern lost that 1972 election by a huge landslide -- Nixon got 60% of the popular vote and 96% of the electoral vote [he lost only Massachusetts and DC]. Nobody was really concerned that the Watergate break-in and cover-up changed the election, because there's no way it made all the difference.

To sum up, it doesn't matter that Watergate had no tangible, discernible effects other than that the president's administration spread lies to the American people. Similarly, it doesn't matter if the WMD scandal didn't cost anything because the US won a just war -- it is wrong and impeachable because this administration passed out flagrantly untruthful material to the people, and in a matter of extreme national security.

This is how the Democrats should push this issue. Push it hard and consistently. Why can't they get this shit? Do I need to step in there, damnit!? Or maybe Howard Dean can do this right...

Novelty items

This is a good new feature from Scientific American called Staking Claims that examines some recent quirky US patents and writes little blurbs on them. Critical that it includes the patent number -- very good for a practical, inquisitive readership.

This week: Viagra gum; using a jet engine to deprive cave-hiders of oxygen [and shake them around, for good measure]; stuffed animals that come with pedigrees -- registered genotypes and phenotypes that are then passed on to 'offspring'; using teevees and computer monitors to mess with your nervous system [perhaps causing 'sudden loose stool']; and a dietary supplement that improves the taste of semen -- the spunk of the anyone who takes the supplement acquires 'a pleasant flavor that is considered by 98.5% of all customers as very enjoyable.' Such exactitude.

Btw, I think I'm going to move to Moveable Type. Blogger SUCKS, if you are at all concerned. Everyone else's blog that's on MT is better. I wonder if they'll let me migrate my posts and post-date them. I know Blogger won't let me do that, the bastards.

Goooooooo community!

A little while ago I highlighted the communitarian/libertarian axis that can be used as a lens to view political views, and how hard-core conservatives and liberals often end up nearby in the communitarian camp.

In that vein, damn-conservative Senator Sam Brownback is going to introduce a bill that takes a couple jabs at the recording industry and, essentially falls in with what would seem to be the liberal-ish position on the matter. Liberal enough that the Electronic Frontier Foundation likes the bill. [A version of the story from a non-subscription site.]

Look in the dictionary under 'clusterfuck'

Add this to the enormous list of stuff that's gone wrong in the aftermath of the US' recent wars: Iran is now gaining sway over western Afghanistan by providing electricity. Yes, the same Iran that has started beating reformist student protestors.

But the #1 sad irony of this whole mishpucha is 'yellowcake'. Yellowcake, what the hell is that? A good illustration of much of went wrong in Iraq. In this year's State of the Union address, Emperor Bush said that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuke-making in Niger in West Africa. It turned out that this was complete bullshit [alert!] and many folks CIA knew it was and reported it to someone but somewhere in between their mouths and Bush's mouth that discrediting was totally lost. The radioactive material in question was 'yellowcake' uranium.

Flash forward four months. The US has won the war over that nuke-making bastardo, potentially saving the lives of tens of millions innocent American children, by the grace of God. But Iraq is al Amok [that almost rhymes]. And in one town, thirsty villagers raid a nuclear research center and grab some old containers for storing water. Thing is that they have some radioactive material and the folks don't know what it is and they're drinking it and hey, you know what? they're starting to get sick because of it. And you know what kind of radioactive material it is? Yes. Yellowcake uranium. Maybe they got it from Niger. Jason got really mad about these people being exposed to radiation, and he's not an angry guy.