Color -- words from the good doctor

How could I blog for this long without having any Freud here? In a quite interesting LA Mag story on Mickey Kaus, RJ Smith cites a quote from psychoanalysis' dad: "the narcissism of small differences", which, he says, Democrats and lefties are all to prone to.

But I've been saying 'snarky' for years. YEARS.

Stranger than 'truth is stranger than fiction'

From a June, 2002 Discover magazine article about uninformed science popping up in media:

'Plait isn't out to lecture. His goal is to demonstrate that reality is actually more interesting than make-believe.'

And you know what else? The Easter Bunny is a fucking LIE! And not only that, but Newton's Third Law of Thermodynamics is more interesting than the Easter Bunny! Hahaha! Stupid kid!

It's funny when science magazines get this triumphalist, untouchable tone. They're so sure science is really the way. They have faith in it. They're true believers. They drank the Kool-Aid.

Dean -- still my man

Haven't slobbered on Dean for a while. [Since June 24, if you're curious.] He's still the guy. Case in point:

'The early line isn't good. Word from the field is that the impetuous Dean makes Bob Dole look soft and cuddly, that he's little more than a fad, and, worst of all, that he's a one-trick pony who doesn't have the legs for a long presidential run.

So I arrived up here half expecting the candidate to be disemboweling bunnies in his spare time, screaming at staff about the dripping entrails, and railing nonstop about Iraq. I expected, in short, to find someone to be dismissed.

What I found was the candidate standing amid a couple of hundred fascinated people inside Elliot Hospital, taking questions that centered not on Iraq, but on health care. With national reporters ringing the room, Dean spoke off-the-cuff in a way that few politicians do anymore...

''Everyone else is so afraid to lose that they tailor their message so tightly and don't say anything,'' he says. ''If we turn into a fad, it's the American people that will decide.''

Asked how he'll avoid that, he makes the point that has other candidates worried most. ''This is the first time I remember the national press identifying the insurgent before picking the front-runner,'' he says. ''This is uncharted territory."


It goes on like this. What makes him good, in some combination of what I like and what's electable [which sort of is what I like, anyway]:

- Personality: ballsy, straight-talker, decisive
- Slams Bush hard
- Fiscally conservative & generally good on economy
- Pro-gun rights

I think his personality may make it very hard for the GOP to peg him as a wishy-washy pansy, which is basically what they always try to do with Democrats. Dean's got an element of domineering asshole in him. Hey, worked for Bush. [Along with that SCOTUS decision, their worst decision since Dred Fucking Scot, those Supreme Assholes. Sorry, had to vent.]

We'll get you yet, Nature

UCBerkelely Professor Alex Zettl created the first nanoscale motor. Quite small, really. Could ride on the back of a virus, which is something I've longed to do for years.

Still, I get a funny feeling when they say, "Nature is still a little bit ahead of us... but we are catching up."

Does nature already ride on the back of a virus? She's always one move ahead.

Pay no attention to the slick man behind the curtain

Last month I wondered why SF Mayor Willie Brown hadn't waded into the California recall game -- powerful former state speaker, forced out of SF by term limits, big ambition... Turns out he is involved with the gubernatorial game -- as a mastermind. The Chron's good columnists, Matier and Ross, have the straight dope:

'Big confab this week in San Francisco -- with the state's top Democratic and union consultants coming to town for a sit-down with Mayor Willie Brown. The mission: To come up with a plan to ensure that a Democrat is in control of the governor's office. Read that any way you want. The urgency is obvious -- anyone who wants to get on the recall ballot has to file by Aug. 9. Democrats have pledged to stand solidly behind Gov. Gray Davis -- but maybe that will change, if the consensus is he's a sure loser. Why meet with Willie? "He's the one guy in this state who can bring people -- who normally can't stand each other -- in the same room and get something done," said one Sacramento consultant on the invite list.'

'Read that any way you want'? What if I want to interpret it to mean he's going to run for governor if Riordan also does? How sweet would that be? LA vs SF, in a battle royale to decide control of the universe. [The answer to this answerhetorical question: It would only be cool if Brown won.]

[PS - goddamn, I'm going to trademark 'answerhetorical'. In this era of irony, there should be a whole category of questions that are rhetorical, but not. Works on many levels.]

Color -- life during peacetime

A Slate article discussing the movie Buffalo Soldiers, which is getting jerked around because it's anti-military or whatever, cites a Nietzche quote: "Where there is peace the warlike man attacks himself."

Color - someone's baking bodies
or Another take on the dope on humans

Good quote in David Rakoff's interview of Matt Ridley, author of Nature Via Nurture, in the May/June issue of Seed:

Q: What do you mean when you write that the genome is 'a recipe for baking a body, not making a body'?

There's still a view out there that a genome is a blueprint, a map of the body that tells you where to put each molecule. The engineering analogy simply doesn't work because biological systems are grown -- a process rather more like cooking than it is construction. The key difference, in my view, is the presence of a fourth dimension. A recipe has a time element that a blueprint never does.


That's right! I try to tell people that whenever I'm in this type of discussion. Also interesting to consider the development of a body in utero -- it's well known that in animals that are born in litters, each individual's location within within the womb has a very large effect on its development and health after it's born. No to reason to believe that other gestational factors wouldn't affect those animals or other ones that are generally born one-by-one, like humans. So there is a fair amount of 'nurture' that is commonly overlooked going on in the womb.

Ridley also says something I say all the time, so he must be right about it:

Q: [The chicken-and-egg debate is one] that no one over the age of eight really thinks of engagin in anymore.

A: Well, for good reason, because it's absolutely clear: The egg came first in evolutionary terms. Reptiles were laying eggs long before there were any chickens.


I've been saying this for years, except I get it more right than he does: Fish were the first egg-layers. He's off by a few hundred million years, but I'll let it slip. This time.

The dope on humans

The question of what makes humanity is one that I'm thinking about frequently. All the friggin' time. And this letter to New Scientist is good input. So good that I'll retype the whole fargin' thing:

Technohominids
From Dennis White

Now that it is no longer possible to cite language as the defining difference between Homo sapiens and H. neanderthalensis, the enquiry becomes more esoteric, as exemlplified in Steven Mithen's fascinating article (17 May, p 40).

It was, of course, antural for linguistic thinkers to assume that their particular mode of reasoning was crucial, but our technological history indicates otherwise. For themI propose a simple experiment: describe in words an abstract three-dimensional form that you have never seen before without forming an image of it in the mind's eye first. We are distinguished from other creatures not by what we have said but by what we have made. The Neanderthals' ability to reason visually was clearly inferior to ours. So it was us who developed superior technologies and took over the world.

I knew a cabinet maker who could neither speak nor hear, but had complete command of 3D form: working drawings showed all he needed to know. Some 70 per cent of the content of the human mind is visual, leaving 30 per cent to be shared between aural, verbal, tactile, motor, taste and smell.

It has bee recorded that listening to Mozart raises the IQ and that the effect persists for half an hour after th music stops. There must be similar effects from the other arts, helping to explain why they are felt to be of value. Composers think aurally, writers verbally, artists and desingners visually. With pure visual reasoning, any verbal thought is an interruption, an intrusion, a nuisance.

You cannot talk an axe, a bow, a shelter into existence, you can only talk about it after it already exists as a vision in the mind. Likewise with every development and modification.

It is no coincidence that our ancestors were master draughtsmen on cave walls and made sculptures and ornaments. Real visual art expresses the essense of being human, the unique designing animal with the faculty of visual reasoning -- and hands, of course.

Hey, I've been busy. Without further adoodoo:

Corporate globalization is fun!

I know, I should read a little further than the NYTimes. But I was struck today by what's going on:

The Great Catfish War -- a great op-ed about how the US is shafting Vietnamese fishermen. Textbook case of how international capitalism serves the rich&powerful first, and serves ideals about free markets somewhere around 92nd. [I guess this is some kind of list of priorities, but, not being all that rich&powerful, I'm not even privy to the list title. Feh.] I'm not saying that I don't think an American is at least 3x as valuable as any Asian besides the Dalai Lama or Lucy Liu, but maybe we should be a little nicer to them, no? Also, there's a really terrible irony that an American Congressman is falsely claiming that there is too much Agent Orange in Vietnamese rivers for the fish to be safe. Turns out there's plenty of Agent Orange there but it sticks mostly in the ground, or the groundwater or something. And no, the Vietnamese didn't put it there.

I.B.M. Explores Shift of White-Collar Jobs Overseas -- sorta spooky story about how American tech jobs are getting moved off-shore to India and other places with some skilled but relatively cheap workers. There's been some noise about unionizing tech workers -- it's mentioned in this artikill -- but I suspect a lot of jobs will have flown the coop before they organize much clout. Not like unions have any power anyways, fuck. ['Fuck' is not bound by ordinary rules of grammar dontyouknow.]


At some point the country will realize that hypercapitalism is really bad. We may all be operating big clock-like machines for 20 hours a day [a la Lang's Metropolis] before that happens. My advice: Stock up on Scotch.

Come-unity

The Nation came out with an interesting story on Amitai Etzioni, an influential promoter of communitarianism. [I've been talking about communitarianism a fair amount, most recently wrt Asscock being a moral-majority-type, conservative communitarian.]

Black Thursday for that asshole acting like the president

For the past couple weeks, I've been talking about how this WMD thing might actually be serious. Over a month ago I posted that John Dean article about how this could be the biggest presidential scandal since [you guessed it] Watergate. [Bigger than Jizz-on-the-dress-gate? Well, certainly not as funny.]

And for a while everybody was saying that it was no big deal. Kinsley said the mess would blow over, that there were WMDs in Iraq "in every sense that matters, reality not being one of them." My fellow mailing-list kooks said the Dems were wusses and Bush was a god to this country and Hey let's all move to Kuala Lumpur.

New shit has come to light. I think this thing has really changed now. First, George Will started sounding a bit uneasy. And now Kinsley's changed his tune and put together a good, signature-Kinsley-stylerip of The Shrubby One. But that's not the big story.

David Broder, the embodiment of old-school, unimaginative, by-the-book, sucker-for-power, Washington establishment journalism, says we may have seen the "black Thursday for Bush." '"The CBS Evening News" that night was like Karl Rove's worst nightmare, and the other network newscasts -- still the main source of information for a large number of Americans -- were not much better.'

A front-page story in the Washington Post [remember Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein, right?] shows that usually sleepy White House press corps is shaking off the fairy dust and drawing a bead on an administration that is making more and more contradictory misstatements. I think they're getting ready to tear a new presidential pooper. You can see that they're fed up with the untruths:

'President Bush yesterday defended the "darn good" intelligence he receives, continuing to stand behind a disputed allegation...
Bush's position was at odds with those of his own aides...
The president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring...
In the face of persistent questioning about the use of intelligence before the Iraq war, administration officials have responded with evolving and sometimes contradictory statements...
Since last Monday, the administration has offered changing explanations for that statement...
On Friday, Bush and top aides said the CIA approved the inclusion of those words, and CIA Director George J. Tenet took responsibility. Yet Bush aides have argued in recent days that the statement may, in fact, prove to be correct...
Bush's remarks added to contradictions that have been presented by administration officials...
Bush himself has voiced no regret or irritation in public. But at his briefing yesterday, Fleischer described a displeased Bush...
Also, Bartlett, discussing the State of the Union address, said last week that "there was no debate or questions with regard to that line when it was signed off on." But on Friday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said there was "discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought"...
But Fleischer's words yesterday contradicted his assertion a week earlier that the State of the Union charge was "based and predicated on the yellowcake from Niger"...
Rice was asked a month ago about Bush's State of the Union uranium claim on ABC's "This Week" and replied: "The intelligence community did not know at the time or at levels that got to us that there was serious questions about this report." But senior administration officials acknowledged over the weekend that Tenet argued personally to White House officials...
CIA officials raised doubts about the Niger claims, as Tenet outlined Friday. The last time was when "CIA officials reviewing the draft remarks" of the State of the Union "raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues," Tenet's statement said. "Some of the language was changed." The change included using British intelligence as the source of the information. The CIA, however, continued to doubt the reliability of the British claim.'

Conan the governor

I have this creepy feeling that Ahnold is going to be the next governor of California. The NY Daily News seems to think so. This recall process is dumb, but fun. Sometimes I wish that the whole magic holding together the country just barfed and the thing came apart. Get some anarchy, a few new ideas...

Wouldn't it be smart for the Republicans to somehow get a bunch of nominal, but hopeless Democrats to run in the recall election? If there are 10 randomass Democrats, even if they are just some kooks or pawns, wouldn't that help split the vote?

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.]