Another challenge: botanical edition

A while back I mentioned Andrew Carroll, an 18 year old kid who is really fucking brave.  He stood in the middle of his town holding some pieces of a plant, knowing what the result would be.  

Men with guns came, put chains on him, and forced him into a cage.  

Soon he'll face a "trial" in a "court" that is supposed to deliver "justice."  He'll make strong moral arguments, which will be ignored in favor of immoral laws that say he is guilty.  The state will punish him.  Because he possessed a plant.  

Challenge: justify this.

(Reminder:  your taxes pay for this kind of thing.)

If you aren't up to the challenge, Andrew has made his point.

on condescension

As a followup to the previous post, on a personal level, I want to say that I think Brice Lord is a good guy and I don't mean to pick on him specifically.  The views he has expressed are very common.  

Statism, especially in America, is basically a religion into which people are raised.  And just as I don't think people are stupid or evil just because they're religious, I don't think that about those who believe in the state or in the exceptionalism of America.  But I do think their beliefs are dangerous and can lead to actions that are stupid or evil, and as such I try to challenge bad arguments defending those beliefs.  

The most hopeful outcome of such a process is to convince people to give up their religions and evaluate the world around them without the blinders of faith.  Perhaps a more realistic hope is that by speaking up we make it easier for others to do the same and to unite, gradually adding cohesiveness and force to a previously-marginalized viewpoint.

Just like when I've spoken out against religion, I suspect a reaction to what I've said here will be that I'm terribly condescending.  But all I've done here is say that I disagree with someone (or lots of people).  Implicit in disagreement is the thought that the other person is wrong. Disagreements happen all the time without accusations of condescension, so clearly there's more to condescension that simply telling someone they're wrong.  

If it is the suggestion that a perspective is based on faith, not reason, that seems condescending, I would argue that if anything that is a nicer way of telling someone they're wrong.  Personally, I'd feel better if my failure to understand reality could be attributable to complex effects of the way loved ones have influenced my emotional development and trusted authorities have deceived me.  That seems like the nicest possible way to tell someone they're wrong.  

I think this feeling that someone is being condescending is an unconscious way of insulating ourselves from challenges to deeply held beliefs, a point I've made before when I talk about "poor form".  Rather than confront the ideas, it enables us to simply dismiss the challenger.  After all, even if I am being condescending, that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

reply to Brice Lord

I've been meaning to go back and address a point raised by Brice Lord in the comments to this post. I said that the government steals your money, calling it "taxation," to pay for its crimes, to which he replies:

First, who says it's my money anyway? Most of the money I make wouldn't be available to be made were it not for the facilitation of the government by redistribution of resources.

Perhaps this is a defensible reply to a narrow understanding of the specific comment that preceded his remark, but it doesn't meaningfully address the challenge I posed, though it may seem that way if you've deeply embraced the state structure, as most people have. To note that redistribution of resources is only necessary because of the state's essential role in maintaining massive inequality of resource distribution is to note that Brice Lord's answer begs the question: the state controls everyone's lives so of course the state should control our money!

To (hopefully) make this a little easier...

An easy way to dismiss Brice Lord's complaint is to imagine a farmer who earns a living by selling food that he grows to his neighbors, making little or no use of government infrastructure. He just works the land that his family has worked for generations, and sells his harvests to people nearby. He is taxed by the government, and if he refuses to pay, men with guns will throw him in a cage and/or take his property. I think this scenario goes most of the way to addressing Brice Lord's point.

As for the rest of us, how many people actually even have the option of making a living in a way that can't be seen as directly or indirectly reliant on government? Whether your career aspirations are about pure altruism, pure self-advancement, or anything in between, it is almost impossible to find a path that isn't state-managed. (If the privileged people that come from where Brice Lord and I come from have that option, they don't seem to exercise it very often. Our former classmates and mutual friends are lawyers, doctors, academics, federal law enforcement officers, Wall Street financiers, teachers, government policy advisors.) So pretty much the only way to make money, by which I mean the only way to gain access to general resources by the means of our personal specialized productivity, is by aligning yourself with the state. And it is this all-encompassing strangehold that the state has on our lives that Brice Lord offers as a defense of the state's all-encompassing stranglehold on the gains from our personal productivity. Obviously I find his argument unpersuasive.

As for Brice Lord's arguments in his other comments, I think he's committed several other errors. First he seems to think that because two-thirds of the annual federal budget (I'll just take his figure for granted here) goes to what are called "social programs," that means most of your tax money supports the "social safety net." He then acknowledges that such programs might be poorly managed, which immediately undermines his argument because poor management means that a significant percentage of that goes to waste. While some are content to politely call this inefficiency, there are thriving industries getting rich off this waste and investing a portion of their proceeds in lobbying to make sure the "poor management" continues. This is corporate welfare, redistributing resources in the opposite direction from what Brice Lord thinks the government is doing.

But you can even put that aside, because even if 100% of this money was devoted to the stated goals of these "social programs," many of them actually make things worse, not better. In order to adequately support this argument, I think we'd have to go through these programs on a case-by-case basis and examine their net effects, which is beyond the scope of this post. (As for the debate at hand, if Brice Lord can simply assert that these programs do good, I can refute him by simply asserting they don't, so at worst I've forced a draw on this specific point.)

Second, he seems to think that a meaningful version of democracy obtains in the US. It doesn't, and never has.

Third, he has only acknowledged negative actions funded by our tax dollars that take place in foreign countries. This might be because he thinks (perhaps fairly) that I've mostly focussed on those (though I did note a domestic issue in the original post). Following from the first point, I'd argue that the vast majority of all government action has negative consequences. An example that I must have mentioned before and that should be uncontroversial is the "war on drugs," which has devastating domestic effects and costs untold billions of tax dollars. Same with our agriculture policies and subsidies. Same with most federal "education" programs.

Fourth, to put all of it together, he seems to be saying that if a government elected by a plurality of a population engages in aggressive foreign wars resulting in millions of ruined lives, that it is defensible for everyone living in the area controlled by that government to be coerced into supporting the atrocities, as long as that government confiscates additional and more numerous funds that are used for good causes. Aside from the already mentioned cheapening-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness of "democracy," this makes a mockery of any notion of government by consent of the governed.

And that the defense of this is that there is no "practical" alternative is shockingly cynical, which is ironic in that Brice Lord's view here is quite common, and my political thoughts are often dismissed as too cynical. But I've never argued that the only way that 300 million people in a given geographic region could possibly live together in relative safety and do a fairly decent job of taking care of each other is by surrendering control of their lives to an institution that sociopathically will do whatever it can get away with to gain the slightest advantage for those who control it, up to and including the mass slaughter of millions of human beings. I might be insane or naive, but I do still believe that there are practical alternatives to such an arrangement.

update: slight edit to the wording of the 2nd to last paragraph.

on the role of intellectuals

I don't know if I have special access to Science articles because I'm on campus, so I'll just copy the whole thing below. The basic story is that some academics have developed mathematical techniques to analyze the shape of Congressional districts and provide some measure of how goofy the shapes are, which you could infer is a measure of how gerrymandered they are.

The last paragraph amused me. The discussion is entirely about whether these sophisticated mathematical tools will lead to people feeling like the process is fair. Note that the discussion is not about whether these tools will lead to a process that is fair. Apparently the latter issue cannot be addressed because of "contradictions out the wazoo" since "one person's equality is another person's gerrymander." Clearly it is beyond the capacity of academia's preeminent publications to attempt to referee such muddled debates! I'm sure they couldn't possibly find any patterns as to which kinds of people think shapes like Maryland's 3rd district represent equality, or do any kind of analysis as to who benefits from those kinds of shapes. Far too many contradictions indeed. More than can be contained in a single wazoo.

Instead what is important is that the outcome be "respected." Smoke and mirrors. As Chomsky has said many times, the role of intellectuals is to support power systems and justify their atrocities. At least they sometimes acknowledge it.



JOINT MATHEMATICS MEETINGS:
Can Mathematics Map the Way Toward Less-Bizarre Elections?
Barry Cipra

JOINT MATHEMATICS MEETINGS, 5-8 JANUARY 2009, WASHINGTON, D.C.
With the 2010 census looming, U.S. politicians and their legal teams are gearing up for another round of wrangling over the spoils of redistricting: the process of deciding which voters get to reelect which members of the House of Representatives and other legislative bodies. Parties in power like to carve up voters to their own advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering. Some reformers, however, hope to limit the mischief--and are turning to mathematics for tools to do so. In a marathon 6-hour session at the Joint Meetings, speakers discussed ideas ranging from pie-in-the-sky theoretical to crust-on-the-ground practical.

The term "gerrymandering" dates back to 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a tortuous districting map that favored his Democratic- Republican Party over the rival Federalists. But given the fine-grain demographic detail of modern political databases, "the problem is much worse than it used to be," says Richard Pildes, an expert on election law at the New York University School of Law in New York City. Gerrymandering "gives people the sense that they're not really in control of their democracy," Pildes says. "It's part of what contributes to an alienation and cynicism about democracy."

The mathematics of redistricting starts with arithmetic and geometry. Ideally, every district in a state would have an equal population and would be, in some sense, both "contiguous" and "compact." Socioeconomic, political, and racial demographics also come into play. "You can have equipopulous districts and still have whoppingly biased gerrymanders," notes Sam Hirsch, a lawyer at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., who specializes in election law and voting rights.

To a mathematician, contiguous means connected--i.e., you can travel from any point in it to any other without leaving the region. Compactness is trickier. Various definitions have been proposed, including one presented at the session by Alan Miller, a graduate student in social science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California.

Miller's method, developed with Caltech economist Christopher Chambers, quantifies the "bizarreness" of geometric shapes. (The word "bizarre" traces to a 1993 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down several oddly shaped congressional districts. Politicians' attempts to handpick their constituents invariably create convolutions in district lines.) In essence, bizarreness is the probability that the most direct path between two randomly chosen voters within a district crosses district lines. The higher the probability, the more bizarre the district is. (The path is required to stay within the state, to avoid penalizing districts that sit on ragged state boundaries.)

Using block data from the 2000 census, Miller and Chambers have computed bizarreness for the congressional districts of Connecticut, Maryland, and New Hampshire. Most compact was Connecticut's 4th District, with bizarreness 0.023; most oddly shaped: Maryland's 3rd district, at 0.860 (see figure).

Bizarreness could be used as a threshold criterion in producing redistricting maps or comparing alternatives, Miller says. "You can use it to reject districts that are badly shaped."

In his own proposal, Hirsch took the idea of thresholds and added a dose of high-octane competition. Rival factions--or anyone else interested in entering the fray--would be able to counter one another's maps, as long as each new submission improved on at least one of three criteria and matched the other two. The goals of the three criteria are to minimize the number of counties cut up by district lines, equalize as much as possible the number of districts leaning toward each of the two major parties, and maximize the number of "competitive" districts, in which neither major-party candidate in a recent statewide contest would have won by more than 7% of the vote.

Hirsch's proposal "is a great idea," says Charles Hampton, a mathematician at the College of Wooster in Ohio, who has been involved in redistricting since the early 1980s. (He drew maps in 1991 for the governor of California's Independent Redistricting Panel.) "We quibble on some of the details," Hampton says, but "I think [it] has some real prospect of producing a much better situation."

No one expects mathematics to solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction. "It's ultimately a political problem," Hirsch says. Kimball Brace, head of Election Data Services in Manassas, Virginia, and a member of the 2010 Census Advisory Committee, agrees. "Redistricting is contradictions out the wazoo," Brace says. "One person's equality is another person's gerrymander." Nonetheless, a growing group of practitioners believe mathematics can play a key role. Says Pildes, "Math can give you tools for creating processes that are likely to lead people to feel that the process is fair and that the outcome is therefore something to be respected."

my job this semester

The class I TAed last semester was amazing. I wish I had taken something like it as an undergrad.

This semester I'm TAing a behavioral ecology course:

Behavioural Ecology is a field devoted to understanding animal behaviour in terms of evolution and ecology. In this course, we will study the behaviour of animals, why such behaviour evolves and how behaviour may enable animals to adapt to their environments. As a field, behavioural ecology emerged from a synthesis of many scientific disciplines including ethology, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, zoology and population genetics. Note, this course is NOT centrally concerned with Homo sapiens, and will take a comparative approach to the study of
animal behaviour.

I would have loved this course as an undergrad too, but I stayed away from biology because I hated dissecting things. I haven't taken a biology course since my freshman year of high school, 1994-1995. I don't remember evolution being covered in that course, and there certainly wasn't any cool analysis of behavior. The stuff worth learning managed to elude me for a long time, but I found it eventually.

Repeat

Chris Floyd:

How many times do you have to see it? How many times must it be shoved in your face, crammed down your throat, brought down on your head like a ton of bricks, before you get the picture? When it comes to the lineaments and methods of empire -- war, murder, torture, extortion, and deceit -- there is no difference, none whatsoever, between the hip, cool "progressives" in Team Obama and the gaggle of militarist goons who preceded them.

Go read the rest!

dream a little dream

Sometimes you hear a philosophical examination of consciousness or something that argues that maybe you're just dreaming this right now and don't realize it. So how to do you know it is really real? That kind of thing.

Here's what I realized. I'm pretty sure that any time I've ever stopped and thought about whether something I'm experiencing is real, I've gotten the right answer. I've been in dreams and not thought about whether it was real, but whenever I actually stop and think about it, I realize I'm dreaming. (Then I get to start controlling the dream, which is awesome.) And any time in real life I wonder if I'm dreaming, I know I'm not. So I don't get what all the fuss is about.

Maybe I need to do more drugs though. I suppose that could trip me up.

this is refreshing

I'm not watching the Superbowl.  No desire, and I got other stuff to do.  I like it.

Obama is a war criminal

Just a reminder!

Spoiler alert: they're on the same team, and it isn't ours

This is what happens every single time: the Democrats do everything possible to "accommodate" the Republican position and then get attacked anyway (they voted in large numbers for the Iraq War in and then got attacked for being soft on Terror in 2002; they voted for virtually every Bush "Terrorism" policy and the same thing happened, etc.). Here, they did everything possible to change their bill to please Republicans and nothing is happening except full-scale GOP opposition accompanied by a constant barrage of GOP attacks against them as big-spending, reckless, wealth-transferring liberals.

Ultimately, the success of this program will be measured by whether it produces successful results, so why shouldn't Democrats use their majority to enact the policy they think is most likely to achieve that? That's true on this issue and in general.
- Greenwald

The answer to Glenn's question is that they have used their majority to enact the policy they think is most likely to achieve successful results. And that is true on this issue and in general.

The obvious next question is "what do Democrats think are successful results?" Some careful editing of the first part of the above quote might help answer that:

This is what happens every single time: the Democrats do everything possible to "accommodate" the Republican position ... (they voted in large numbers for the Iraq War... they voted for virtually every Bush "Terrorism" policy... etc.). Here, they did everything possible to change their bill to please Republicans ....

Get it?

Obama Bombs Pakistan, Kills Afghani Civilians, Defends Bush

Chris Floyd documents the reality of the BO Presidency, making it clear that my dreams won't be coming true.  I wonder whose dreams these are:

Why speak of Gaza -- where the relentless and ruthless Israeli assault on civilians ended almost precisely with the ascension of Barack Obama to high office -- when that newly-ascended embodiment of hope is already drawing first blood in his marshalship of the "War on Terror"? Already, Obama has ordered his first drone missile attacks on the sovereign territory of Pakistan, an American ally; already he has killed his first civilians with the faceless, soulless weapons of remote-control mass death. 

What's more, the Commander-in-Chief has already overseen his first mass slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan, the land he calls "the central front in the War on Terror," where he plans to commit tens of thousands of more troops in a massive escalation of a war that his new Terror War envoy, Richard Holbrooke, now says will last longer than the Vietnam War. As MSNBC reports, none other than the U.S.-installed Afghan president himself, Hamid Karzai, condemned the killing of 16 Afghan civilians, including three children and two women, in a ground-and-air attack by U.S forces on Saturday. Escalating the conflict will mean much more of this, of course. In any case, Karzai's protests will cut no ice with the new regime in Washington; he is yesterday's man, yesterday's puppet, and his increasingly frantic and forthright denunciations of the mass slaughter of his people by American and NATO forces will not be tolerated much longer. Obama and his team are already manipulating the politics of the occupied land to ensure that a "dream ticket" of politicians beholden to Obama, not Bush, will "wrest control away from Mr Karzai," as the Independent reports. 

And why not? Shouldn't the new Caesar be allowed to appoint his own men to govern his dominions?

...

Of course, such things aren't serious. They don't really matter. Why should you waste your beautiful mind on something like that? 

Especially when you can be mesmerized by Obama's amazing "First 100 Hours," when he has already revolutionized American policy by, for example, restricting the overt use of torture to the torture techniques approved of by the Pentagon -- although his own intelligence supremo, Dennis Blair, refuses to say if "waterboarding" should be considered torture, and assures Congress that he will examine "whether certain coercive techniques have been effective"; i.e. which torture techniques should be continued. There is also Obama's bold ordering of the (eventual) closure of the Gitmo camp and the handful of CIA detention center,while leaving alone the Pentagon's numerous and far worse gulag centers -- where thousands of Terror War captives languish without charges, representation, or the slightest legal recourse. And of course, there is his heartening decision to go to court to defend Bush's multiple rape of American liberty: the years-long illegal surveillance scheme, which Obama had voted to support while still in the Senate.

good news

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Noam Chomsky's wife died in December and that I hoped he'd be ok and be able to get back to work. I noticed last night that indeed he has been working. As always, it is worth reading and listening to what he has to say, so check out his latest.

I have a dream

Some BO supporters like to defend his actions up to this point as unfortunate but necessary things he had to do to get the power, and they dream that once he's sworn in he'll abandon the principles he's clearly expressed and do what he truly believes is right, which of course is the same thing they believe is right. I share this dream.

I dream that starting today:

• The US will immediately begin a complete widthdrawl from Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The US will stop its unconditional support for Israeli state violence, will stop supplying the weapons used to terrorize Palestinians, and will support a 2-state solution with the 1967 borders.
• War criminals will be prosecuted: all of them, including former Presidents and executive branch leaders, Congressional leaders, and military leaders.
  
• The US will stop violating international law, will give up its UN Security Counsel Veto, and follow World Court rulings.
• The Federal Reserve will be abolished.
• The US Military empire of bases will begin to be liquidated, troops repatriated and reintegrated into civilian life, and reparations paid where owed.
• Corporate personhood will be revoked, and measures adopted to eliminate corporate influence on elections.
• The CIA will be dismantled, along with much of the "intelligence" structure.
• The war on (certain kinds of people who use certain kinds of) drugs will end. Non-violent offenders will be released with support. Prohibition on drugs will end.
• Universal health care will be adopted, fully funded by the government.
• A sensible national food plan will be adopted, eliminating subsidies for mass-produced industrial monoculture, and providing extensive support for local, sustainable farming.
• Public mass transit infrastructure and alternative energy, especially renewable sources like solar and wind, will be heavily supported by the federal government, as part of a plan to drastically reduce US carbon emissions.
  

I'd like to see lots of other things, but I'll just leave it there because I believe this list is extremely conservative. It simply says we should follow the law, enact policies supported by the population (sometimes called "democracy"), and act according to very simple moral truisms.

If Obama disavows everything he's said and done so far and gets started on that, I'll gladly join the crowd celebrating his work. I won't even mind if he waits a few years to turn himself in for his own war crimes.

But we all know this is just a dream, and is no closer to being acheived than Dr. King's dream.

molding young minds

BO saw this, and decided he needs to bring this to the national level. Read that if you're interested in education.

McCain advising Obama, ha!

Ha! For all of you lesser-evil supporters of BO evil, how do you feel about this? You voted for BO to keep McCain away from power, right? To make sure he has nothing to do with the important decisions, right? Well now Commander Hope-n-Change is calling McCain every night asking him what to do, almost as if he thinks McCain is likely to have something useful to say.

h/t Chris Floyd

don't fall for it

I managed not to notice that today was MLK day until a friend mentioned it on the phone last night. I'm assuming that Canada doesn't pay attention to this particular day, but I might just be oblivious. Anyway, I thought I'd write something about how feel-good connections between today's commemoration of a heroic human rights advocate and tomorrow's imperial management succession ceremony are full of shit, but, as usual, better bloggers have already done it. So go read them.

Perrin:

God, I hate inaugurations -- a massive commercial for the imperial state, with some "populist" tinsel tossed around to make consumers feel included.

...

No one seems to mind hearing pro-FISA Obama praise Martin Luther King, who was on the other end of government wiretaps.

Schwarz: Works the Same Everywhere


Silber:

But the absolutely overwhelming amount of colossal shit attendant upon this inauguration ("Look, Mom! Barack made me fly!" -- I do not exaggerate even slightly, scroll to about the midpoint of the story) is enough to make anyone who remains remotely sane loathe all mankind throughout all eternity.

update

James: Blast from the past: Commemorating MLK, Jr.

a space in the howling madness

In an essay that is worth reading for many reasons beyond what I'll mention, Chris Floyd says:

What commentary could adequately address such madness? Simply to see it is to know what it is. And if you cannot already see it for what it plainly is -- when the bare, unaccomodated facts shout this evil from the lower depths to the highest heavens -- what amount of commentary will sway you?

Then again, I don't write to sway anybody any more, if I ever did. I write to stay sane, to keep from exploding in rage or going dead with despair, to try to clear a space in the howling madness for myself, and for anyone else who might come this way. I write to bear witness -- mostly to myself, and to what's left of my conscience. I write because somewhere along the line, by drift of circumstance, my mind was shaped in such a way that it is only by writing that I can try to understand the world, and my own thoughts and beliefs. If I could do all that without writing -- or if I could stop looking at reality and caring about it -- then I probably would. But for whatever reason -- those same drifts of circumstance, no doubt -- I can't; so I go on.

A lot of the time that has been the reason why I've kept writing in this stupid blog of mine. Maintaining what's left of my sanity and conscience, maybe helping anyone else do the same, trying to understand the world and myself. That's what it has been about, albeit on a much different level than Chris. (That guy is amazing.)

Increasingly I think I'm finding myself doing this in other ways. I'm too lazy to check the stats but I think I'm posting less frequently and with less volume. At least it feels that way. Of course I've been pretty busy with school, and my computer at home is falling apart so I guess I have a lot less opportunity to write. But I still feel like a lot of the time I consider writing something and just decide it isn't worth it. So, yeah, I think I'm getting whatever it is I used to get out of this some other way now.

What does it say?

Think about this.

The President and Vice-President of the US openly admit to having committed crimes under domestic and international law. They are criminals under US law and they are war criminals. They ordered wireless surveillance in violation of FISA law, openly admit to having done so, and thus are criminals. They ordered or approved of water-boarding, which is a violation of international law an which the US has previously prosecuted people for doing under torture laws, and thus are war criminals. This can't be controversial because they openly admit it. There's simply no disputing that these are the facts of the situation.

And in response to this, the political elite in the US are unified in their response: Bush and Cheney should not be held responsible for this in any way. They should not be impeached, and they should not be prosecuted. We're talking about the entire US political machinery, not just close party allies of these guys. From the idiot talking heads on TV to the idiots writing op-eds for the major papers, to Nancy "impeachment is off the table" Pelosi, to Barrack "look forward, not backward" Obama, absolutely everyone is lined up on the side of the openly criminal regime. They shall not be punished.

What does that say about the United States?

Strains on this simple observation have been circulating through the blogs I tend to read these days - Silber, Floyd, Greenwald - and if you want me to point you towards particularly well written pieces I'll be happy to do so, but what I've written here is the gist of it. Our highest elected officials are openly criminal, and nobody within the official leadership structures gives a flying fuck.

BO recently commented on Israel's war against humanity in Gaza something to the effect that if someone lobbed rockets at his family, he'd do everything in his power to respond, too. And when asked if Bush should be prosecuted for his crimes, he said we should look forward, not backwards. Can anyone spot the hypocrisy? This is supposed to be the great new progressive hope for America?

What does that say about America?

Bush and Cheney are widely despised. Their approval ratings have been abysmal, and at times polls have shown a majority of Americans in favor of impeachment. And that is without any major leadership on the impeachment issue. Can you imagine how popular a high-profile politician would become by fighting for impeachment? Anyone who did that would instantly gain hero status for huge numbers of people throughout the world. And yet nobody is willing to do this.

What does that say about America?

how we roll, continued

Mustached Chicks Smoking Carrots




Dotted-Line 'Stache




Free Mustache Rides

end beard. begin mustache.

As promised:

before





after



(Yes, in the first picture there is a woman with a mustache grading papers behind me. That's just how we roll up here.)

yes, Obama is the same as Bush

A recent commenter here objected to my likening of BO to Bush, citing BO's "superior moral grounding" as a reason for optimism. Chris Floyd makes a mockery of this argument:

It's true that the United States government is facing a severe and prolonged budget crisis. But what does it say about the underlying moral philosophy of an administration when its first target for budget cuts are programs designed to help ordinary people – including the weakest among us? When it will not cut a penny from a war machine that has only made the nation more and more insecure over the long decades of its ascendancy, involving the American people in an endless series of conflicts in which they have no business, and no genuine national interests at stake? If urgent cuts in government spending are needed, why would you not look first to this gargantuan swamp of waste and corruption and dangerous meddling? Instead, Obama proposes to pour even more money into it, and to increase the dangerous meddling.

The president-elect has made his fundamental priorities clear – for anyone who wants to see them. The war machine and the financial markets will continue to be gorged and comforted in their wonted manner. Programs to help ordinary citizens, programs to enhance the quality of life for individuals and the well-being of society, will be the first – perhaps the only – areas to feel the budget axe. Whatever you may think of the efficacy of such programs, this ordering of priorities -- war and profits over people -- bespeaks the same depraved sensibility that has prevailed for generations in Washington. It is the same old rancid swill in a stylish new container.

BO = bo = plagiary!

crispin sartwell is stealing my highly original nomenclature. i'll retaliate by stealing his no caps style!

to advance his convictions

I don't have any plans to note the official transition from one evil emperor to the next with any special fanfare, on this blog or otherwise, but TomDispatch has a good piece on Bush's legacy. Spoiler alert: he destroyed everything he touched and piled up gruesome numbers of dead bodies:

Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated, abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless drains; eight years of massive destruction to places from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of significance was ever rebuilt: all this was brought to us by a President, now leaving office without apology, who said the following in his first inaugural address: "I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility… to call for responsibility and try to live it as well."

2008 year in review pictures.

fun with facial hair

Because of an agreement with some of my male classmates, I haven't shaved in a long time.  I have a bushy red-blonde thing all over my face.  MAN BEARD BLOG would be proud.  (I think.)  But that agreement also stipulates that the new year brings Mustache January, which is going to be pretty scary.  Will I last a full month?  Hard to say.  Maybe I'll post some pictures.  Maybe.

tags

ima trim some of my tags.  i don't imagine anyone cares.

For now I just want to say that this Israel-Gaza shit pisses me the fuck off.  And makes me sad.

A Christmas Tale

There are lots of people who have no interest in religion but who will be going to church this week just to please family members. Others will decide not to attend church services but will feel guilty about causing tension by breaking with tradition. Both of these situations are unfortunate.

It is easy to lose sight of an important point: the tension isn't caused by you skipping a ceremony. It is caused by people who expect that you should feel obligated to do something you don't want to do. So you have nothing to feel guilty about.

But still, if you skip church, that might make someone feel bad, and you probably don't want that, even if the blame isn't on you.

It strikes me that two reasonable people who care about each other's feelings might come to an agreement. Tell Mom or whoever that you don't want to go to church, but you know that she wants you to go. Say that you thought that rather than go through the motions of showing up and daydreaming through the service just to please her and quietly wishing that you didn't have to spend your time this way, you were hoping that you could make a deal. If what is important to her is that you go, then you'll go and pay very close attention to everything. You'll even bring a pen and paper to take notes. And since you'd be giving up your time for her, in exchange you'd like her to spend an equal amount of time to a conversation about the service, where you can express things that bother you about it. That way you spend time doing something important to her, and she'll spend time doing something important to you.

It is pretty hard to imagine this actually going over well, probably because it is hard to imagine two reasonable people being in this situation in the first place.

JJ Wayne

It has been a while since J.J.'s fine work was featured here. Wait no longer!

J.J. loves Batman

Magic SG J.J. Redick may be in a no-man's land of sorts in the Magic rotation, but he is finding a way to kill the downtime.

Redick said recently that he has seen the newest Batman movie, The Dark Knight, about 10 times. Asked to expound on his obsession with the flick, Redick defended his viewing habits.

"It's deep," he said. "You have to pay attention to the dialogue."

hiber nation

Last few days have been high temperatures in the 20s or lower (F, although most people use C up here), and lots of snow. Forecasts call for more of the same. I've been drinking beer and sleeping a lot. Such is Canada, eh?

Here's the view out our back window:

the US role in the UN

America, FUCK YEAH:

On the right to food posted by lenin

In favour: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia (Federated States of), Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Against: United States.

sad news

Carol Chomsky dead at 78. Hope the family does ok, and that her husband (of 59 years!) Noam keeps working for a long time.

Heros and Criminals, Shoe-Throwers and Presidents

In terms of the moral significance of the action, throwing a shoe at somebody is somewhere between calling him a motherfucker and punching him (the merciless beatings al-Zaidi has endured are far greater crimes than throwing shoes). It is basically like a hard slap in the face. The primary purpose is to humiliate the victim, but there is also the known risk, if not outright intention, of inflicting minor physical harm. Because of the slightly violent nature of the act, I wouldn't throw a shoe at Bush to make a political point. And I wouldn't call someone who did a hero.

If I accepted the criminal justice system as an appropriate avenue for dealing with these kinds of situations, I'd probably say throwing a shoe at a politician deserves a very minor sentence - a few nights in jail, a small fine, some community service, probation, or whatever. I'd definitely say that anyone who condemns Muntathar al-Zaidi even the slightest bit without noting that his minor transgression was an emotional reaction to a series of unspeakably horrific organized crimes committed by George Bush is so morally depraved as to be unworthy of commenting on such matters.

So I understand why many people consider al-Zaidi a hero. He bravely stood up to a powerful evil, knowing he would face severe consequences for doing so. There is something heroic about that, but I'd prefer to see heroic acts that don't involve even minor levels of violence.

That said, I'll add my powerless voice to those calling for al-Zaidi's immediate release. And I'll continue to call for real criminals like George Bush to face justice.

when science is really worth it

If you manage to make it to the 22nd page of this paper*, you'll read one of the most entertaining paragraphs in the history of science. (By the way MS is "mortality salience," which basically means being confronted with the inevitability of your own death.)

More recently, Solomon, Pyszczynski, Cohen and Ogilvie (in press) demonstrated that a reminder of death increased peoples’ reports of flying fantasies and desire to fly; a behavior that, for humans without mechanical assistance, clearly violates the laws of nature. As importantly, asking people to imagine themselves flying eliminated a widely replicated MS-induced worldview defense. Specifically, whereas MS increased affection for President Bush among American participants relative to controls (replicating Landau et al., 2004b), imagining oneself flying completely eliminated this effect. These results are shown in Figure 2.

Here is the amazing Figure 2:


Please share with me your favorite part about the paragraph or the figure. I think my favorite part is the implication that if you ever find yourself in the upsetting condition of feeling affectionate towards George Bush, just imagine yourself flying and you'll be cured.


* Landau, M. J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Greenberg, J. (2007). On the compatibility of terror management theory and perspectives on human evolution. Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 476-519.

man to possess a plant. men with guns will punish him.

Man renounces US Citizenship, becomes stateless

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Bratislava resident renounces American citizenship, becomes stateless person

BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA, 10 December 2008 – Citing US war, human rights abuses, rapacious state capitalism and hypocrisy, Bratislava resident Michael Gogulski announced today that he has renounced his United States citizenship and become a stateless person as a means of “political divorce”.

Gogulski, 36, renounced his citizenship on 8 December 2008 at the American embassy in Bratislava, surrendering his US passport and culminating a two-week process and months of personal preparations. He currently awaits a Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States confirming his loss of American citizenship. As Gogulski has no other citizenship, he is now a stateless person.

“I was disgusted to be associated through citizenship with the most dangerous gang of criminals in the world, the United States government. Renouncing my citizenship is a means of achieving a political divorce with that vile institution,” Gogulski said. “American politicians extol their state in terms of liberty, human rights, free markets and the rule of law. Examination of the country’s history and present actions reveals nothing but lies and hypocrisy. The genocide of Native Americans, slavery, nuclear slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, support for brutal dictators, the torture of innocents at places like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the massive robberies for the benefit of big business in the name of ‘rescuing’ the economy, the world’s biggest prison population, the growth of a domestic police state and the brutal wars of oppression underway in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia paint a rather different picture. America, via its government agents, is truly exceptional – exceptionally evil,” he stated.

Gogulski says that when he receives the Certificate of Loss of Nationality he will apply to the Slovak Interior Ministry for a Travel Document – similar to a passport – under the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons, which Slovakia signed in 2000. He says that he has no plans to leave Bratislava until then, and that he recognizes that his life without citizenship will be more difficult, especially with respect to travel. But, “if the Schengen Zone is to be my cage,” Gogulski states, “I think it’s large enough for me. There’s enough to explore within Europe to last a lifetime.”

On his personal blog, Gogulski indicates that he works as a freelance translator and editor. He also writes about anarchism and supports the revolutionary theory called agorism, which posits that free-market service providers will compete with and eventually supplant states, giving rise to a voluntary society. “Governments pride themselves on notions of ‘equality’ and ‘rule of law’, but fail to apply the same standards to themselves that their subjects must endure,” he says, explaining his political philosophy. “The foundation of state power, taxation, is robbery. That the robbers have fancy uniforms, impressive titles and the sanction of law does not in the slightest way change the basic formula for extortion: pay us, or we will kill you.”

Michael Gogulski’s blog can be found at www.nostate.com.

###

Congratulations, Michael.

Pictures I like.

This picture was taken at The Phoenix, the graduate student pub on campus at McMaster.



It includes the following noteworthy storylines:

• David (2nd from left), a friend from Ohio, and Bailey (middle), my sister, came up to visit for...
  
• It was taken November 27, 2008, which was American Thanksgiving, and 2 days before my 28th birthday.
• It includes Dan's asymmetrical beard (far left), one of the more amusing results of a decision among the men in my class not to shave for a few months.
• It includes Kira's recent short haircut (2nd from right).
• It was taken by Leo, a visiting grad student from Brazil, who I really ought to have some pictures with.
• It is the only picture I've seen from a very fun night that featured a much larger crowd, including my supervisors, who I really ought to have some pictures with.

Here are other pictures I like.


Hanging with the bride (Kate... on the left), the night before her wedding. Canton, Ohio. October, 2007.


Last day over there: (left to right) Paolo, Ate Lady, Jakob, Ram, JJ, and Jam. Calamba, Laguna, Philippines. November, 2006.


Kira and I, in top shape clearly. Annapolis, MD. Christmas, 2006.


Left to right: Sarah, Dave, Phil's ass, Phil, Phil's hair, Zsaz, Kira. Ada, Ohio. May, 2008.



Left to right: Katsu, Hattori, Horus. Ada, Ohio. March, 2008.

slather yourself in change

Pres-elect BO and all of his awesome changes. Do you realize what a joke he's making of "progressives" who voted for him? Just look at that headline.

h/t: Strike the Root Blog

and 64% of prisoners break prison rules!

I gotta agree with the professor:

so 64% of american students cheat. let me say this: that would be bad if education were not compulsory. if i enter into a contest - a sporting event, a game of chess or poker - because i want to play, then to cheat is disgusting. but if you put a gun to my head and make me play, then i have no obligation to abide by the rules; no one should blame me if i do whatever i can get away with. indeed, under such circumstances, cheating would be a nice little act of resistance. i think it's deeply reprehensible when an author plagiarizes, but if writing books were compulsory, plagiarism would be understandable and at worst morally neutral. in other words, compulsory education abrogates anything we might think of as educational ethics: destroys it, vitiates it, suspends it. that's one reason (of many) why compulsory education is an absurd concept, or merely a contradiction in terms. our educational institutions teach that capitulation is the essence of honor, which of course is exactly the center of our moral training of young people. if they come out of that cheaters, you're getting what you deserve, what you're begging for.

structural violence.

Bernard makes an extremely important point. While everyone is freaking out about terrorism, the structure of society guarantees terrible results for far more people than are hurt by what is officially called terrorism. But it wouldn't do to mention that, would it?

an open challenge

FACT: If you pay taxes in the United States, you've made financial contributions to the following:

• Illegal wars of aggression that kill, maim, and displace millions of civilians.
• Illegal abduction and torture of people who have not been charged with any crime.
• Illegal surveillance of domestic communications.

FACT: If you refuse to pay taxes, men with guns will likely force you into a cage for an extended period of time.

THE CHALLENGE: Defend this system.

HINT: Offering "you're free to vote for people who will change these policies, or to run for office yourself" as a defense is the equivalent of saying "these policies are fine with me as long as a slim majority of the voting population supports candidates who say it is ok for the state to lock you in a cage for refusing to fund its illegal and immoral activities."

Truth is not important

I came across the video below, a compilation of a guy named Peter Schiff on various news talk shows in 2006 and 2007. It is 10 minutes of him being right forecasting the current economic collapse, while all the other talking heads literally laugh at him. It is kind of fun to watch. My first thought was that those idiots who mocked him while they predicted endless booming growth should never get a job again.

But that was very silly of me, a vestige of my naive former worldview. I was imagining a world in which news programs are in the business of getting things right, of telling the truth.

News television, like all television (and other media for that matter), is in the business of selling audiences to advertisers. As such, we expect the programming to reflect these interests. Also, the major television networks are owned by a small handful of wealthy conglomerate corporations. As such, we expect the programming to reflect the interests of those corporations and their owners. These two interests largely overlap, though there can be a few conflicts, as in all cases where the same parties have multiple interests. In those cases strategic decisions have to be made. But in the case at hand, it is pretty easy to see that an audience of people who believe that endless economic prosperity is always just around the corner is easier to sell to advertisers, and is better for the corporations who own the media.

The only thing truth has to do with it is if the audience figures out how unreliable the programs are and stops watching. The immense popularity of Fox "News" is a prominent, but certainly not isolated, demonstration of the appropriate level of concern TV networks need have for such a scenario. If their dishonesty becomes impossible for the audience to ignore, they have ways of handling that too. After US forces failed to find any WMDs in Iraq, what did the TV networks that credulously amplified the false WMD justification for war tell you? That everyone believed there were WMDs, and nobody could have predicted otherwise. There is ample documentation to prove otherwise, but that doesn't matter. They just lie after the fact to cover up their previous lies.

So the idea that the laughing fools in the video will never work again is foolish. They've shown that they're willing to say whatever needs to be said to advance their careers. Networks make good use of such people.



(By the way I know nothing about this Schiff guy. He may or may not be advancing his own interests here, which may or may not have anything to do with the truth. Maybe he just got lucky. I don't know and don't really care.)

you will respect my authoriteh

Man sentenced to 93 days in jail for sitting down too slowly while on trial for having a couch in his yard. Justice.

Fuck you, Keene, New Hampshire and "Judge" Burke.


other links about this:
http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2008/11/16/thank-you-mr-burke/
http://freekeene.com/
http://noiri.blogspot.com/2008/11/taste-of-ussa-united-socialist-states.html

nothin but love

I don't know, maybe this came off a bit harsh. Curiously, I don't even know if the directed sentiment expressed there applies to much of my audience. But I know there must be a few of you out there. The one or two I can think of, I love you guys and hopefully you know it ain't personal.

I suspect that was unnecessary for their sake. But I do a lot of anger here so I oughta balance it with some love sometimes, right?

Horus these days

Horus is doing pretty well these days, at least compared to where he started.

He spends a lot of time sleeping up on the perch near the windows.

From Cats Nov 2008

From Cats Nov 2008

When he's not as sleepy he'll dart over to hide under the kitchen table.

From Cats Nov 2008

And when he's feeling frisky and adventurous he might even play with me a little bit.

From Cats Nov 2008

But that gets tiring...

From Cats Nov 2008

He still freaks out if he sees me try to touch him, but if he's distracted I can scratch his back and he likes it until he realizes what is happening. As soon as he sees me touching him he recoils or swipes at me, but I'm convinced that some of the time he deliberately looks away so that he doesn't have to freak out. He'll still act like he's trying to investigate the source of this strange pleasurable sensation, but he'll look in a ridiculous direction, like straight up and from side to side, but not backwards.

Here are the other boys.

Hattori.

From Cats Nov 2008

Katsu.

From Cats Nov 2008

once again Obama is the same as Bush. but you don't care.

Jesus fucking Christ people, if this article doesn't show you what Barrack Obama is, nothing will. As Who Is IOZ? and Stop Me Before I Vote Again have pointed out:

Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by his advisers. They include where Guantánamo’s detainees could be held in this country, how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the Obama transition team say is worrying them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?

The biggest worry among people BO has chosen to surround himself with is that they won't be able to continue to jail people who they can't prove have done anything wrong.

THIS IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS BUSH YOU FUCKING OBAMA SUPPORTING MORONS. THIS IS NOT CHANGE. THIS IS THE SAME FUCKING THING, MAYBE MOVED TO A NEW BUILDING.

But liberals don't care about the principles involved. They don't care about justice, human rights, any of that pussy shit. They never did. They just care that someone on their team is the one doing the jailing:

“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration.

We're a democratic society? Oh, he must have meant "Democratic President."

But particularly inasmuch as the Bush administration invoked that authority as a basis for its much-criticized detention policies, a move by Mr. Obama to seek explicit authorization for indefinite detention without trial would be seen by some of his supporters as a betrayal.

Impossible! They're too covered in gooey change juice to perceive anything BO does as betrayal.

But human rights groups have been mounting arguments to counter pressure that they say is building on Mr. Obama to show toughness, perhaps by echoing the Bush administration’s insistence that some detainees may need to be held indefinitely.

How the flying fuck is this tough?

“I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things,” Mr. Wittes said in an interview.

I'm so tough that I'm going to lock up little boys who might have thrown rocks! And torture them! This shows my toughness! I won't be a pussy and release people who I can't prove have done anything wrong, because I'm scared that they might come back and hurt me. But I'm tough!



I fucking hate everyone.

can i get a piece of that action?

Why its almost as if they don't even give a fuck about the spirit of the terms they undemocratically rammed through the undemocratic system that controls our lives with money and guns. Bail outs for everyone! Funny money all around!

America: "Fuck you, Whales!"

The Supreme Court says it is very important that the US Navy be allowed to kill whales because maybe the imaginary submarine enemies might maybe theoretically possibly be coming for us. So for all you whales who don't want to suffer from "hemorrhaging around the brain and ears, acute spongiotic changes in the central nervous system, and lesions in vital organs" I guess you better move to someplace safer where American military delusion won't find you. Unfortunately there are no such places.

Egregious

Barack Obama will move swiftly to unpick many of what he sees as the most egregious acts of the Bush administration when he enters the White House in January, including restrictions on stem cell research and moves to allow oil drilling in wilderness areas, a leading member of his transition team said yesterday.

Three key words: "what he sees."

Notice how the list of "the most egregious violations" doesn't include domestic warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, torture, extraordinary rendition, launching illegal wars of aggression and other war crimes, election fraud, politicizing the justice department, immunity for corporate crimes, bail-outs for banks, etc.

a silly challenge

I defy anyone to listen to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones play Big Country and not want to cry out of joy.