I got 99 problems, but my bitch ain't one...

So, in thinking further about whether the b-word is sexist, I'm going to come up with the predictable response that its all about the context. If somebody is joking, it can be OK. If someone is using it to mean that this particular woman is so mean or nasty that she deserves to be called a female dog....well....its just not nice.

Because the history of the word is not nice, unless you're a full time comedian needing to make a few cutting edge jokes, I think that in most contexts you're just going to be dropping a little mean bomb into conversations when you use the word.

Also, there are far and away not enough demeaning words for white males because they are the top of the heap and always have been. The fact that there is an opportunity to use an especially loaded word for women, gay people, or non-white people, should give any one pause about using those words....

King George

I think I wouldn't object as much to domestic spying if I thought the government was going to do something sensible with it. If only rational reasonable people looked through my library records and listened to my phone calls and watched my every keystroke as I blogged, I would at least be able to say to myself "Its bad to have every move watched in Democratic society, but at least nobody is going to misinterpret things."

But these Republicans are not only paranoid and bad people, they are also completely nuts. So, it appears to me that it would be very easy for a hypothetical crazy person who hears voices from God and thinks they were sent to save the nation to misinterpret my reading selections or my phone calls with my friends.

But if you think about it, the natural consequence of a President who thinks God picked him out for the job (despite a notable lack of any qualifications) is overreaching and power grabbing. King George doesn't need those old fashioned checks and balances because God picked him. Somebody who talks to Jesus every day certainly doesn't need to consult with Congress.

Actually, King may not be a strong enough word. I think maybe Pharoh George fits better. Of course, ironically the Bible has a little something to say about selfish pharohs and kings....

A motif (See, I did pay attention in English class)

So, I'm reading the United States of Walmart which is unusual for its repeated use of the word "bitch" which is probably not likely to gain it any red state readers. The blurb on the jacket states "We are all Walmart's bitches."

The Dukes v. Walmart case also featured what the witnesses politely referred to as the B-word.

And then there are Sam Walton's hunting dogs. Many of the dogs were, in fact, bitches.

So, it is kind of like a motif.

People treating other people like dogs. Women being compared to dogs. White male liberal writers playing with the B-word to get some street cred.

On approval ratings

So Mssrs. Bush and Cheney's approval ratings have bounced back somewhat.... Still below 50% but the press has returned to lap dog mode (probably exhausted by the supreme effort of doing their jobs and ready to do some stories on Santa Claus).

I guess it was too much to hope that we were going to see an actual impeachment....

Reading, nanny fatigue, and is marching something you do by yourself?

I'm finally (and very reluctantly) reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran" because it was part of the 3 for 2 sale at Borders. So far, it is about being overly dramatic about dull things. Reading about reading is sort of too many layers of reference, but we'll see.

I was severely disappointed by "The Career Mystique" because it seemed to deal with upper middle class families exclusively. I suppose poor people don't have "careers"--they have "jobs." I'm just so bored by the eternal nanny problems of the upper classes that I'm ready to hurl. (Hint to Salon.com).

I also finished two Sarah Vowell books today. "Assassination Vacation" is pretty brilliant and a lot of fun. One of my favorite things about women authors is that there autobiographical bits usually reflect stuff about other people (in Sarah's case, her sister). Male authors occasionally give you all the uninteresting bits about themselves and NOTHING about their families and friends.

The same trend can be noticed in biographies of men and women. I think biographies of women tend to do more to place the women in context in their social and family circles. Biographies of men--especially the genre I call "great men in funny clothes marching through history"-- tend to emphasize the man as struggling in the world on his own. And just in terms of what makes biographical or autobiographical stuff interesting, it is way more cool to find out about how people affect each other than to make the (usually false) assumption that marching through history is a solo occupation.

Bush's Team 666

The whole Bush White House has been so thoroughly evil and so completely illogical that I've been unable to settle on an explanation for it. One theory is that Americans have done something really bad (slavery? Genocide of Native Americans?) and therefore Bush is the retribution we deserve. Another theory(more popular) is that the election was stolen, the people were hoodwinked and we innocent Americans were lied to.

However, I think there is actually a more logical explanation and one that fits nicely into the right wing Christian world view. Bush, Ashcroft, Condi, Cheney, Rove, and possibly that guy Scooter are members of a secret cult that worships Satan.

For all non-Christians in my audience (basically my whole audience), I'll point out a few of Satan's outstanding attributes.

1. He lies (nuff said)
2. He hates life (and probably loves unnecessary wars)
3. He doesn't like families or children (and tax cuts, spending cuts, deficits, and environmental damage can best be explained as the policies of people who hate children)
4. He does like rich people (especially when they oppress poor people)

So, my theory is that Bush Junior bats for team 666. Until a better theory comes along, I'm sticking to it.

Everything Right is Wrong

A congressman from San Diego pled out today on charges of accepting bribes from defense contractors. Defense contractors are making a ton of money off of Iraq--including at least one of the contractors who bribed the congressman.

And these were the people to restore honor and integrity to the government? Blow jobs in the oval office are starting to look pretty good.

The American Dream--Japanese Style

I just got back from a vacation in Tokyo--I'd never been before. I'm also in the middle of a polemical book by Paul Stiles called "Is the American Dream Killing You?" Mr. Stiles' premise is that we are living in a hyper-market and that the market seeks to kill all human traits that don't lead to consumption. Along the way he recommends Alan Bloom and trashes day care providers. Mr. Stiles is far from credible but he does make an interesting point about capitalism which contrary to popular belief is not pro-mother, pro-homemade apple pie, or pro-democracy.

Tokyo is a hard nut to crack--especially for a foreigner who spent all of 5 days there. Lost in Translation does provide a sense of the place but skipped the bland and endless malls, department stores, and other shopping opportunities. Tokyo seems to be a place of endless and exhausted consumption. According to economists, the problem with the Japanese economy is too little consumption and too much saving. And as a tourist, my role in the eco-system was consumption and not production. But still, it did seem that a lot of time must be spent in malls.

It was downright depressing imagining the typical Japanese day of working and consuming. Of course that isn't that far off from the typical American day and that's depressing too. Adults and especially adults who never were lucky enough to get a quality education are mostly workers rather than thinkers. And however loony-bin Mr Stiles may be, we do lose something incredibly precious when life becomes an endless cycle of working and buying.

I think I'll probably have to do a blog after this one explaining why I am not a communist. But markets do not have ethics. If we want more out of life than buying and selling, we need to value it enough to make it happen.

Save Christmas

Apparently, right wing Christian lawyers are ready at a moment's notice to save Christmas from the school boards and mayors of the world who think that church and state should be separate things.

Which is fine by me. Because this State and those Christians are one and the same. So, I think the only healthy thing is for them to admit it and plaster their tacky brand of Christianity all over City Hall and Washington DC and every other place they can find.

Because this scandal plagued President is their President and these crazy Supreme Court Justices are theirs. And some day real Christians are going to say to themselves... Is a plastic baby Jesus on the post office lawn a fair trade for leaders who trounce on every imaginable Christian value? And the real Christians at least will say "No."

Mean-spirited Musings

In the last 5 years I have gone from believing that religion is a matter of personal choice to believing that certain kinds of Christians are a cancer that could destroy our country. I have also started to believe that Republicans are dangerous and irresponsible people. I never wanted to be a closed minded liberal and I blame Bush and cronies for making me this way.

So, here's what I hope. I hope that when America wakes up from this awful nightmare, we will wake up a wiser and better country.

I also hope that the Bush administration is revealed for what it is. I hope that people are held responsible for the tragedy in Iraq. I hope that the Republican party dies forever. I hope that liberals learn how to stop being so damn fuzzy in their thinking.

Here's the mean spirited part. I hope that there is a hell and that it is chock full of hypocrites and liars and selfish people who caused innocent people to die. I hope that it is even something like the Christian version. I hope that there are a few places warming up for when the members of this administration go to meet their great reward.

Because sometimes there is not enough justice in this world.

Hipsters

1. I'm reading "Hip: The History" by John Leland. It is witty, funny and only occasionally wanders into super-heavy theory land.

I theoretically sympathize with a lot of what hipsters stand for. They're into mixing things up, rebellion, individuality, and they're usually basically liberals. The problem is that standing for something is very uncool. And verbalizing a logical belief system--that shows that you are not authentic, not hip.

I blame the Beats. They're pretty easy to blame if you live in San Francisco. They managed to create a dead end street right here that a whole generation of lemmings ran right down. But the created a set of problems for young liberals. Like, what about women? Should women be consigned to being grumpy house fraus? And what about politics? They never really left their Benzedrine haze long enough to figure that one out.

To be fair, it was never about the future. And the modern day hipsters are the same way. They carve out a small corner of the world, put their blinders on, and enjoy themselves.

Communism Doesn't Work because It Didn't Work

This is one of my favorite arguments ever. History is unlike Science in that you often only get one shot at a particular experiment. So, Communism doesn't work because post-world war II communism didn't work. What else do you need to know?

Right now, we are entering a grand new experiment of a really unequal society. Historically, we've done well with capitalism because we had a large and prosperous middle class. Can capitalism thrive without consumers? Will we end our regressive tax policies in time? Or will there be another truism about capitalism that everyone will be uttering 100 years from now?

Interestingly, corruption is one of those things that we haven't just gotten one chance to experience. It appears in virtually all time periods and virtually all forms of government. It also appears (gasp...no) in supposedly competitive markets. And cronyism and corruption are a big deal because, if unchecked, they will kill the host that feeds them. A decent society where everyone has a chance to succeed is by definition a society where goodies go to the qualified and not the connected.

Unlike capitalism and communism (both fairly theoretical economic systems that have never existed in a pure form), cronyism is something we have lots of historical experience with. And it has never been a viable long term option and it can tear apart a wide range of governments and societies.

I think once upon a time in America there was something called the goo-goos. It was some sort of good government coalition that came out of the progressive movement. I think that's what the democrats need to do. The problem of course is that the Dems are just as implicated as the Republicans in all this....

Having = Deserving or How to Sleep at Night if You're Really Rich

I'm reading "Flat Broke With Children" by Sharon Hays. It strikes me that when we say "everyone should work," we don't mean people with trust funds or stay at home Moms (with husbands to support them). If you're a woman without a man, you should work. If you're poor, you should work.

The ethics of drug use is more of the same. Drug offenders should rot in prison but frat boys shouldn't.

And of course there's stealing. Stealing from the government is apparently OK when a Bush crony does it, but it's completely immoral when a poor person does it.

It must be nice to be a rich person. Not only do you get to wallow around in piles of money, but you can wallow guilt free. By virtue of belonging to the golden class, your good morals are beyond question.

According to Hays, in 2002, the top 1 percent of American households earned on average over a million dollars. The bottom 10 percent earned less than 10,000 dollars. If everyone earning more than a million were taxed an additional 100,000, the average income of the desperately poor could be doubled. But that would be income redistribution which is deeply wrong because people who have money deserve to have their money. They are, in fact, the deserving rich. People who don't have money...well...the fact that they don't have any shows that they are not so deserving.

Women's Issues

I've been reading the latest issue of Oprah's magazine and a recent issue of Wired. It's a weird experience. We're a very gender segregated society when it comes to reading material. Somehow reading got to be an unmanly thing to do. Oprah apparently believes that her audience will read long articles. Wired doesn't think so. Oprah has stuff with heavy emotional content--domestic violence, breast cancer, etc. Wired is mostly about gadgets.

It would be super funny if these magazines had to take each other's topics for a month. I can just picture Wired trying to explain domestic violence with some sort of hip graphic. And Oprah would have to go into excruciating detail about tech companies and their drama.

Po-mo Koan of the Day: Does the form of these magazines dictate their substance? Or does the substance lend itself to a particular form?

Would I want to know?

I'm (after the Bush administration) probably a life long Democrat. Supposing the shoe were on the other foot and I'd helped elect an incompetent and corrupt bully. Would I want to know?

The answer is yes. I would not want the press to tell me only what I wanted to hear. I would not want the press to pretend like bullshit and the truth deserve equal time. Ultimately I would respect the press a lot more right now if I felt that they'd even attempted to tell the truth.

On Propaganda

The press is back to towing the line with "hopeful" stories about the relief efforts and New Orleans recovery and "not as many dead bodies as previously thought." For a few brief moments there it looked like we might actually have a free press and that the free press might actually provide a useful service for our democracy. But they're back to being Republican lapdogs a mere one week after Katrina.

I also thought for a brief moment that the press might start investigating things. Because FEMA is not the only can of worms in the Bush administration. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a major agency that hasn't suffered an outflow of professional talent and an influx of party hacks.

As our news looks increasingly like propaganda, it is worth asking what it means to have a society where journalists tow the party line and fear falling out of favor. Because it is emperors and dictators who refuse to allow criticism. It is emperors and dictators who don't discuss their decisions with those they rule. An interesting dynamic (repeated in places as diverse as imperial China, the Roman empire, North Korea, Ethiopia) is that the emperor who makes a poor decision can remain popular with ordinary people because the ordinary people believe that he has made the poor decision because of bad information from his advisors.

Bush is one of the least accessible presidents in American history by design. He can get away with (apparently) virtually anything because the press must choose between distributing propaganda or getting no information at all. In this, the Bush administration has behaved like they are dictators rather than elected officials and they have gotten away with it.

A Liberal Jeramiad

There is something in this country's innocence that leads inevitably to hypocrisy. In my darker moments I think that we somehow deserve this president with his pretend ranch, his pretend courage, and his pretend innocence. If there is a God, maybe this is how he chooses to punish us.

The Blame Game

The Blame Game-- What a wonderful phrase. It implies that the person playing it childish and frivolous. It implies that person being blamed is only being blamed because of this frivolous game and not because he deserves it.

Charity and Justice

It's interesting that President Bush has taken to emphasizing the outpouring of donations and support for the victims from religious organizations. That fits in neatly with what Greedy Corporate Republicans want (we'll donate, just don't tax us) and with what Evangelical Republicans want (church as the cornerstone of society, not government).

But these victims are not refugees or charity cases. They are citizens. Furthermore, they are citizens who paid into our society by laboring and building and paying their taxes. Admittedly, these from red state citizens that grumbled about their taxes and voted for GW. But that doesn't take away from their claims that they are citizens deserving of human dignity and new start. Their government owes them that. It's another Christian value called justice that we've not been hearing so much about in the rush to say that it isn't the government's fault and the government won't have to fix it.

And by the way what are former presidents Bush and Clinton doing raising money for state governments? Are governments charity cases too? Are we going to stop taxing and start donating to our government?

Funny Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spaghetti_monster

Sinclair Lewis Novels

Because I think I've finished most of them...
and because I know you all care...
Here is my ranking:

1.Elmer Gantry--womanizing preacher
2. Arrowsmith--idealistic doctor
3. Main Street-- boosters
4. Babbit--more boosters
5. Cass Timberlake--old judge marries young thing

OK, I just looked him up on wikipedia, and I guess I haven't read most of them.

Mike's blog

http://www.motelnoir.blogspot.com

I just really enjoyed these pictures.

On death

I know, kind of a heavy topic. And I'm not thirteen and I don't dress all in black. I left Emily Dickenson behind in college.

I got to thinking about the subject today in the context of my favorite authors. I seem to prefer them dead--probably because I don't have to worry about them saying something really dumb or publishing something really bad. Also, there's something spooky about reading words from a dead person. I'm a pretty firm believer that Art (the real thing with a capital "A") is about communication. So, the writings of dead people are the best shot at communicating with people across the generations.

Terrorists and Anarchists

The Economist ran an interesting piece last week comparing today's terrorists with the anarchists of the late 1800s. The similarities are striking.

Given its political bent, the Economist did not go into the striking similarities between the maladaptive government reactions to the anarchists and our current expensive and maladaptive anti-terror policies.

A quick run down:

We now have a very expensive government bureaucracy (with color coding).
We now have a very expensive war/occupation in Iraq (without enough body armor).
We now have fewer civil liberties (because its easier to catch people saying or reading something than bombing something).

With the anarchists, it was a case of a misperceived threat. They were not organized. They liked attention. But they were not going to take over the world any time soon. Freaking out about them probably prolonged their reign of terror.

Having just come off of a colossal misjudgment about the cold war, we should be more cautious in judging threats and less quick to decide that we need to freak out and change everything. Of course with a hotheaded cowboy in the white house, it was sort of inevitable.

Explosion in Downtown SF

So, this has to be an incredibly random thing. An underground transformer exploded today and blew off several manhole covers and started a store awning on fire. It sounds like the one person who was hurt was hurt pretty badly. She was just walking down the very same street that I walk down everyday and all of a sudden things are on fire and manhole covers are hurling through the air.

Sacrilegious thought for the day: Maybe some people believe in God in order to have someone to blame for this kind of thing.

Why can't anyone from the Clinton administration write?

I'm now 0 for 3 in the category of books written by Clinton administration officials.

Strobe Talbot's "The Russia Hand" was all about Strobe and he didn't even bother to develop his own character.

"I'll be short" by Robert Reich managed to wander in circles for 100 pages (or however long the thing was).

Finally "The Roaring Nineties" by Joseph Stiglitz was too nice by far. Clinton's policies failed but everyone in the administration was nice, earnest, smart, competent and hemmed in by evil Republicans.

It's all very muddleheaded without being remotely idealistic or bleeding heart. Actually a little bit of heart and soul would go a long way towards redeeming any of these books not to mention the Democratic Party.

The tone of these books taken together leads me to believe that the Clinton administration just didn't get it. They sacrificed their principles because the principles weren't based on a deeply felt emotional and intellectual base. They abstractly understood that things like unfair trade agreements and ending welfare would hurt people but they didn't understand it on a human level.

Their inability to understand what might interest an audience is symptomatic of their personal failings and the failure of Clinton and his administration to speak to Americans as individuals.

Pondering Puritans

After reading Hellfire Nation, I got to thinking about whether the puritan impulse is a healthy thing and where it should be directed.

By the puritan impulse I mean the impulse to make oneself or society better, purer, more just, closer to perfection. It is a religious impulse, but non-religious people have it too.

Currently, watching the religious right mess up the this country, its hard to see this impulse as a good thing. It seems so misguided for a bunch of people to decide that they have a god-given right to hunt small animals but that women's reproductive lives should be regulated by the state. Another theory might be that they've picked the wrong things to direct their puritan impulse at. Maybe they should be concerned with the personal rather than other people. If they concentrated on perfecting themselves as individuals (and there is plenty of room for that), they could go off into the woods with their pick up trucks and King James Bibles and could stop bothering the rest of us.

Yet, I don't think that about liberals when they exhibit the Puritan impulse. If you spend your whole life perfecting yoga poses and developing vegetarian cooking skills, you haven't made much of an impact on society. Having the noble ideas with no action seems selfish.

So, my thinking on this is massively inconsistent. I don't want everyone to direct their puritan impulses in the same way. The main reason I want conservatives to direct it inwards is because I think they have dangerous ideas.

Best depressive coffee guys

Tullys at Market and Sansome.

The whole atmosphere is about getting you in and out without jarring you into awakeness quite yet. Not as friendly as Starbucks. Coffee is not as good as Pete's. But the two coffee guys at Tullys have that elusive quality in coffee guys--I'll call it the friendly but not freaky quality. They neither love nor hate their jobs. They just serve coffee.

Things I saw at 24 hour fitness Part III

A girl on a treadmill who would get off every 5 minutes or so and hit the control panel...with her fist...hard....

Cheesy Books

So this weekend I managed to go through more than a book a day starting with a Pearl S. Buck novel about a quarter Chinese kid growing up in Vermont, The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett (good, but Bel Canto was better) and The Secret Life of Bees which everyone went on and on about but it seems like just a cheap and unbelievable version of To Kill a Mockingbird.

These books will all be easily and gratefully forgotten in a few years because the characters are fundamentally unbelievable and shallow. I don't even know why I read this stuff other than I have to read something and I get weirdly sucked in to finishing these books to see if they are going to get any better (See review of Ha Jin's War Trash--It didn't get any better for the record.)

So here's the thing. Nobody was ever motivated by just one thing unless they are crazy. If your character is going to be motivated by just one thing it should probably be something like revenge and not something like an inexplicable desire to lie (The Patron Saint of Liars) or an equally inexplicable desire to take your black nanny to a town your mother (who you accidentally shot and killed) may have visited in order to escape white racists who your nanny (again without reason) threw a spitoon at (which she wasn't even carrying until the moment she threw it). This is (and I'm not even kidding) the premise of the Secret Life of Bees.

And yet I'm sucked in. I think its the desire to see if anyone can redeem these godawful plots and these unbelievable characters. It never happens. If an author thinks that telling a really great whopper is enough to motivate someone for 20+ years that author is not going to be able to get her character out of the mess she created.

And here's another rant--If you, as an author, have chosen an interesting subject, you should try to live up to it. For example, Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite and yet I was bored. Same problem with the Virgin Suicides--teenage girls offing themselves right and left and yet I'm not entertained. Oh and the Confession of Max Tivoli. The man lives backwards and manages to seduce a woman three times while going from an old man to a young man and yet I came away with the impression that his real misfortune was to be born such a godawful whiner.

Geek Love is the one book I can think of that had a gimmick and is truly great. Can anyone think of another one?

Hellfire Nation by James Morone

This is the most fun I've had with a history book in ages. Mr. Morone traces the oscillation between religion as a democratizing tendency and religion as a method of social control for the elites.

The Democrats anti-populist rhetoric about the people in pickup trucks in red states is actually part of a long standing elite/enlightenment critique of the more untempered varieties of evangelical religious expression.

Republicans have so effectively captured populist rhetoric to accomplish elitist goals in large part because they speak the language of religion and Democrats don't. Morone makes the point that as far back as the Puritans, religion was about who belonged and who didn't. A counter current (evident in the Great Awakenings) was religion as a leveling and democratizing force. The Republicans have put together a winning formula of talking like they are from the democratizing version of Christianity and also playing on fears of the "other" whether it be Willie Horton, Mexican immigrants or gay people.

In my angrier moments I think that the solution might be for Democrats to take back the moral high ground--to point out that the Republicans are hypocrites who win elections by encouraging Americans to hate their fellow citizens. They've turned good Christian people into warmongers and hateful people. I'm pretty sure that if there is a hell, a special level has been reserved for GW and his cronies. But that may be a trap...Somehow when I think thoughts like that I really feel that I'm living George W. Bush's America.

Harry Potter & the War on Terrorism

The new Harry Potter book attempts to capture a wizarding world under seige. Vague fears, random acts of violence, and the search for understanding of the evil that is Voldemort create a world that is uncomfortably close to our current reality.

The only nit I have to pick is that the world seems disconnected with the world of book 5. We've gone from pre World War II appeasement of an evil Hitler figure to post World War II terrorist cells. The shift is too radical to be believable.

In real life, people have a hard time holding more than a few ideas in their head. Once a group of people has an idea of what "enemy" and "evil" means, they can't wheel around and radically change it in a year or so.

Another thought: evil in a state is much scarier than terrorist evil. Most terrorists who have any kind of long term success are connected to states or quasi-states and most terrorists have strong nationalistic tendencies. This is something that has been completely ignored in our current war on terror because GW does not want to name names.

What People are Wearing

I went shopping today....at a mall. I guess like most people, I tend to focus on what I'm wearing instead of what other people are wearing. Crowds at a mall are just so much background to my mental world.

But today I couldn't find anything to buy and everything I tried on didn't fit. I also realized that stores have wildly varying sizes and a lot of it depends on your income level. At the Gap I'm a medium. At Banana Republic I'm a Large. At WalMart, I'm probably a small.

I also realized that most people at the mall were walking around in clothes that were way too tight. I also stumbled into a shoe sale and Nordstrom and realized that most women wear uncomfortable shoes--all day--every day. I bought a pair of shoes that was super comfortable and saw a 70 year old woman wearing the same shoes as I walked out of the store.

A recent book I read by Thomas Frank pointed out that fashion and capitalism are made for each other. The art of being cool requires constant investment in things that become obsolete very quickly. It's a sucker's game played in lycra and four inch heels.

Things I saw at 24 Hour Fitness: Part II

* a woman with a tube of lysol handiwipes (with bleach). She wiped down an entire treadmill, created a horrible smell and then exercised for all of one minute before moving on to the bike which she did the same thing to. I'm a big fan of bleach, but my god.....

Dukes v. Walmart

I don't know if these folks are going to update their blog, but I'm planning to follow this case pretty closely.

http://employmentblawg.blogspot.com

The fun part is that the hearings will be in San Francisco. The other fun part is that it is the largest class action in history and the reason that it was able to be certified is that Walmart runs its operations in such a way that everything (including it culture of discrimination) is standardized.

Is blogging bullshit?

I was reading a review of a book about bullshit in the new Harper's and apparently the author of the bullshit book believes that blogging is in part responsible for the rise b.s. in modern society.

I do think that blogging gives you some mental habits--run on sentences (and thoughts), ignorance of research, authority without knowledge-- that aren't entirely healthy. I'm sure blogging will (like e-mail) do some dreadful things to grammar over time.

But blogging is just a tool. And by genuinely diffusing the opportunity to say something among many people, (including those who are not professional GW Bush ass kissers--aka the press corps) blogging has potential to be a really democratic art form.

Actually, I think that Journalists (like lawyers) need to realize that they are playing a new game. Since most reasonably intelligent people can now look things up for themselves, journalists need to learn how to dig deeper and add something to the discussion beyond a nifty intro paragraph or a pretty face on the television. If you have a full time job as a journalist, you have a chance to develop breadth and perspective.

Since journalists are now less respected than lawyers, it may be a tough sell.

War Trash by Ha Jin

I'm into this book, but the narrator is weirdly not very compelling. He misses his girlfriend. He feels torn about following the communists. I can never quite predict what he's going to do next. I guess that's why I keep reading it--I'm trying to find out if he's going to hang together as a character or not...

The Spiral Staircase--Nice, Very Nice

I never expected to like Karen Armstrong. I think it was for entirely stupid and snobbish reasons. She doesn't have a degree in it, but she writes books on the history of religion for a popular audience. Her autobiography "The Spiral Staircase" is compelling, sweet, and consistently interesting. She resolutely refuses to sensationalize or glamourize any of it--being a nun, a school teacher, a TV personality, a woman traveling in the middle east. There's something nice about the English can pull that understated thing off. . . . .

Freaknomics--Fun but Overwrought

I liked this book. The questions it asked were interesting and the answers were much more believable than the general run of answers provided by economists--in part because the economist author portrays himself as an iconoclast and I'm all for smashing the economic idols.

On the other hand, why do economists feel the need to tell you 10 times a second how brilliant they are? It makes me want to say--no you're not. (I had the same problem with the Harvard President--If he hadn't claimed that he was so wonderful, I could have had more sympathy with his stupidity)

If nobody has ever looked into the economics of cheating before or whether Roe v. Wade caused the drop in crime rates, I have to say that says more about the profession of economics than the brilliance of the author. I think it will probably take a non-economist to truly challenge the empty pretentiousness of most of what passes for economic analysis these days.

If Consciousness is a burden, some people are traveling light...

What is the correct attitude towards the not so bright? The conventional wisdom is that we should feel sorry for them, pity them, and promptly forget them. When large numbers of them turn out to vote for a stupid and evil administration, we briefly became more concerned. It is a problem for the rest of us that large portions of the American population are unable to connect the dots between things like SUVs and global warming or rising debt and the essential slavery of the American worker.

I think jealousy is the appropriate response towards people who live this way. They are happy at the expense of others and cannot even be held morally responsible because they are too dumb.

I had proposed this theory like 10 years ago and a friend of mine brought up the counter argument that people who are not very bright have a lot of experiences that they can't explain-- Things happen and they don't know why and that must be a scary and frustrating way to live. However, in my extensive observations of not-so-bright people, I've discovered that they are generally untroubled by things that they can't explain. They find the simplest possible explanation and move on. They also feel very little need to reconcile contradictory explanations. So, they can simultaneously believe irreconcilable things. (i.e. George W. Bush didn't tell the truth about Iraq/ GW is an ethical person unlike that lying Bill Clinton)

Among the many things that we don't discuss meaningfully in this country, I think some attention needs to be paid to the problem of the not-so-bright among us. As a democracy, we will not be able to survive too many of them. I think many of the not-so-bright could be turned into reasonably-bright people if they are caught early enough and educated. Today's packs of feral teenagers are tommorow's feral suburban parents. Scary thought.

Free Market Fantasy---brought to you by the Cato Institute

I got a snazzy little pamphlet in the mail from the Cato Institute today. It "goes beyond the 'green eyeshades' debate" to help me understand what's really at stake.

Apparently I too can live the life of the blonde haired blue eyed family of wealthy people on the cover. I'm comforted to discover that "there has never been a 20-year period in U.S. history during which you would have lost money in the stock market."

I also got a soft-sell pitch from my 401K plan advisor today at our company meeting. He stated that "If you get personal accounts as part of social security, you'll be able to invest money in Target retirement funds like Fidelity's."

It's a comfortable sort of vision. Wall Street doesn't want to take money from suckers, it wants to help us afford velvet sofas in our golden years. Wall Street will just skim a little money off the top--it won't hurt one bit. Stocks are safe. Totally safe. The SEC is just a little fussy about companies saying that there is no risk. Bunch of bullshit legislation passed after the Great Depression. But they're safe. Totally safe. Don't you want some?

One interesting phrase is the ownership society. If stocks turn into worthless pieces of paper, we're still owners. And if your home is in hock for more than it's worth, you're still an owner.

On Friendship

I wrote my senior thesis on this topic, so I have a lot to say on the subject. I've recently joined an existentialist reading group and I found it interesting that Sartre thought that friendships were important too. Somehow it doesn't seem to fit with the radical choosing things. Because friends influence choices in a big way.

But I think Sartre is hearkening back to Montaigne who saw friendship as a rare and essentially philosophical relationship. He thought you were lucky if you had one true friend in your life and that friendship was the most important relationship that anyone could aspire to. Montaigne also saw a friendship as defining and an essentially non-manipulative relationship (in contrast to romantic relationships). We've inherited that idea, but I don't think it's accurate. Friendships can be very manipulative and romantic relationships can be a defining relationship (in the sense of the central relationship in a person's life that allows them to define who they are as an individual).

So, if you want to do radical choosing you need to do it by yourself or with the help of a thoughtful non-manipulative philosophical friend. Ironically, Sartre was apparently personal very manipulative. Poor Simone.

I think my existentialist reading group will involve a lot of me trying to determine why I don't stay on the boat with the existentialists and where I get off. We'll see.

Workers Compensation was a really broken form of income redistribution....

And now, after Arnold blew up the box, the face of our economy may change. I forgot the exact figures, but in California the workers' compensation industry was a measurable portion of the economy. Billions of dollars transferred every year from companies to insurance companies to injured (and not so injured) workers. Workers' Compensation was generally very good at paying the doctors and the lawyers and not so good at paying the injured workers. And it encouraged people to become professional victims.

We don't have a truly progressive tax structure. We don't have a true social safety net. The court system in this country replaces more rational structures that other countries enjoy. Unless you're a lawyer, the court system is not a reliable way to redistribute income because people will pay or get paid according to luck or fault rather than need. But, it does redistribute and it is one of the few institutions in our society that effectuates that.

Connections

So, just like I was on economics jag a few months ago, now I'm on an architecture/suburbia jag. Books in this series include: The Geography of Nowhere--my current read and very excellent Consumer's Republic--repetitive and probably only of interest to someone on a jag of reading about cities and the consumerism. The City in Mind--Another Kunstler book, but not as good as the Geography of Nowhere Home- Wytold Rybczynski City Life--Also by Wytold Rybczynski, my second favorite to Geography of Nowhere in this genre
The Devil in the White City--Sensationalistic and lame--I was skipping by the end
The Power Broker--Caro biography of Robert Moses. I really liked this one too. It was incredibly rich in detail and Moses was a compelling character.

I'm going to try to quit while I'm ahead with Geography of Nowhere.

Since I've been an adult and freely able to choose where I live, I've chosen to live near where I work--within walking distance preferably. I probably wouldn't be so fascinated by the suburbs if I had to live in them. Just like I probably wouldn't be so fascinated by economic distress if I were struggling to make ends meet.

Geography of Nowhere

What an awesome book. I haven't had this much fun reading something in ages. I'll give a full book report when I'm finished.

The Downing Street Memo

I'm not sure if this is the smoking gun that people think it is, but it brings up the absolutely cynical nature of the Democrats votes on the Iraq War.

It seems to me that anyone with half a brain could see that we were going to war with Iraq for reasons unrelated to terrorism or weapons of mass destruction or any of the other nonsense that the Bush administration was pushing at the time. The reasons offered were simply not good reasons. Had the Democrats had anything remotely resembling a backbone, they would have voted against the war.

As far as Bush is concerned, either he is so stupid as to believe his own lies and therefore shouldn't be President on intelligence grounds or he knowingly lied to the American people and shouldn't be President on moral, ethical, and legal grounds.

But this has all been obvious for a long time. So, what will a smoking gun do for us anyways?

My current thought on this whole situation is that it is a little bit like Enron. The Bush administration got away with it because of greed--not just their own, but the others who were supposed to act as checks on their power. If the Democrats hadn't been so craven, they would have risked their political careers to voice true opposition to the war in Iraq. If the media hadn't been so afraid of losing access, they would have reported more honestly. If the Supreme Court hadn't acted as the judicial arm of the Republican party, the man wouldn't be President in the first place.

It'll be interesting to watch when it all turns (if it turns). We'll be treated to the spectacle of all of the people who should have stopped this mad ride condemning the Bush administration as if Bush and his cronies were the only ones who did anything wrong. "We didn't know! We had no smoking gun! We could only speculate...."

And so it goes....

Things I Saw at 24 Hour Fitness Last Night

1. A man working out for like 45 minutes with a towel in his mouth the whole time.

2. The world's loudest French girls--I could hear them over the punk rock on my ipod.

3. A man who picked up a piece of dirty paper off the floor, spit on it, and then wiped down a machine with it.

4. A girl with "Bling Bling" written on the rear end of her sweat pants

Japan and Nukes

So, my excerpting of Robert's blog wasn't entirely fair in the context of us dropping the bomb on Japan. I actually took that quote out from some parentheses.

The real issue is how do we as a culture think about our past actions and how do we attempt to make it so that we have better sets of choices in the future. And the bomb is not something we've come to terms with. We don't like other people having it but we like having it. We like to act all ethical about nuclear weapons but we aren't about to apply the ethical standards to ourselves (It just wouldn't be realistic).

On the question of whether or not we should have dropped the bomb. I don't know. If we and the rest of the world learned from it and if some lives were saved, maybe it was the right decision. It's hard to imagine a non-nuclear world anymore, so it's not a question that can really be answered.

Robert's blog

http://blogs.salon.com/0001517/


I think Robert's blog is probably the funniest blog I've ever read and although sometimes it's over the top, some times it is right on..... I love that he's an angry smart funny lefty instead of a wimpy dumb toe-the-party line lefty.

The other thing is that I get actually upset when I read his blog. Maybe it's the pictures? I think it has something to do with the combination of humor and truly shocking and appalling things that he is being humorous about. I dunno. But the way things are presented sometimes in the mainstream media (beheadings, gitmo, soldiers dying in Iraq) it's so sanitized that you don't realize that you're supposed to feel something about these things.

Robert's blog is not for the faint at heart and his humor is definately gallows humor but that's the kind of humor that makes some sense right now. And if humor about these things is what it takes to shock people, then so be it.

I haven't asked Robert's permission for this (cause I'm attributing properly and he's a nice guy) but here are some funnies from recent entries:

Get a life, get a blog, get something...

So is this what the civil rights movement has come to? Al Sharpton is like a superhero -- maybe we can call him Blackman -- who, when he sees in the night sky the signal of possible racism in progress -- maybe the signal can be the pointy-headed silouette of a KKK member -- he rushes to the scene to set everything right again?

*****

And if you aren't a conservative white male, you'd better fucking think and act like one if you want to play in any Republican reindeer games.

*****

And the irony of us Americans saying how important it is that other nations don't get nukes and "throw [their] weight around" when we remain the only nation in the history of the planet to have thrown its weight around by nuking another nation keeps me in fucking stitches. When we Americans do something, God is on our side and it's for freedom and democracy and love and butterflies, blah, blah, blah; when someone else does the same exact thing, they're evil.

http://blogs.salon.com/0001517/

Imagination

It's funny how parents are big into developing imagination in their children. A powerful imagination is actually about half way to delusional and not a very good thing. So, why do so many parents think its cute and essential to growing up?

On pictures

I was watching the girl next to me on the bus flip through a photo album and I got to thinking about why people take pictures. Interestingly, there's a girl at work has decorated her cubicle entirely with glamour shots of herself. She's an underwriter, but clearly there's something in her that wants to be model.

Photos of people seem to be a young person's game. Most semi-intellectual guys go through a phase where they take pictures of everything. Most semi-pretty girls want to be photographed. Old people take a lot of scenery shots unless grandchildren are involved. A lot of family photo albums seem to be mercifully blank when it comes to photographs of 13-15 year olds.

I guess it's something I want to think about some more.

The First Amendment-- Not About Politeness

When I was attending my right wing college, I heard a lot about relativism and creeping relativism. Lefties were accused of having no standards and of not believing in anything and therefore having no moral compass. This was apparently because lefties had applied the first amendment to their own lives in some illogical fashion--moving from all speech should be tolerated to I shouldn't firmly hold to any one idea.

As a lefty and a lawyer, I'm a firm believer in the first amendment. That means you should be able to pick your religion and your ideas--no matter how loony--until you actually become imminently dangerous to other human beings. That does not mean you have to politely sit there when somebody is deciding to go off in some repulsive direction. And that doesn't mean you have to withhold comment on other people's religion, pornography, morally relativistic play or whatever.

So, although I am not religious, I comment in this blog about religion. The marketplace of ideas means that everybody gets to say something. While I think it is important to be polite and tolerant, if you have something to say and there's just no polite way to say it, I think it's important to go for it.

Ethical Christianity

I'm reading Dorothy Day's autobiography which is a good reminder that religion and Christianity can line up on the side of the less powerful. In thinking some more about the subject of my last blog, I'd like to refine my thesis a bit.

Our democracy allows for personal choice in religion. The evangelical forms of Christianity seem to do better as a result. But the evangelical branches of Christianity believe in the literal truth of the Bible. So, once you make the choice to become an adherent, your choices are necessarily limited. For example, if you understand a choice facing you as one between a sin and a righteous action, there is very little wiggle room for compromise. Of course people do sin anyways as witnessed by the higher divorce rate among those who consider themselves born-again.

The interesting thing about the modern evangelical movement (which I learned from watching a documentary on Tammy Faye Baker) is that sin is essentially to be expected. The thesis is that while we certainly need to try not to sin, Jesus will forgive. Actually, Jesus will forgive if you believe in Jesus.

So, when George W. Bush speaks of Good and Evil, he knows his audience. And when he walks around with that smirk on his face that says he's confident he's going to Heaven--that's his religion. Which makes me wish for the good old days when Christians had a few doubts and a little bit of modesty.

If you think back to Max Weber's book, capitalism may owe a lot to the doubting modest kind of Christian. What will capitalism get from these smug Christians? I would suggest Enron, George W. Bush, and the teleevangelists for starters.

This terrible mix of right wing politics with Christianity is going to have lasting consequences for our Republic. They seem to have no ethical compass on matters not directly related to themselves or their families and they have put what can only be described as a bad man in the White House.

This mix of politics and Christianity will also have a lasting impact on Christianity. Hypocrisy and human suffering aren't exactly recruiting tools. And if Christians would like to claim that they're ethical people, they need to start thinking about what's going on as a result of their actions.

On the left wing side of things, Christian lefties need to get their act together and start challenging some of these right wing orthodoxies.

Religion and Democracy

So, I saw Thomas Frank who wrote "What's the Matter with Kansas" last week and he said at one point that someone should investigate what is going on with religion and the Republican party, but he just didn't feel qualified to write on it.

De Tocqueville had the great insight that religion flourishes in the United States because it is not state sponsored religion. But, I think the necessary next question is, what kind of religion flourishes here?

Historically, Christianity and specifically evangelical Christianity has done quite well. A lot of our mainline religions that aren't strictly speaking evangelical anymore (i.e. Methodists) were once upon a time in the not so distant past participants in religious revivals on a massive scale. After a couple great awakenings, certain areas of what was then the Midwest were referred to as the "burnt over counties." And of course there are the completely home grown versions of Christianity like the Mormons.

Some of these denominations have a church hierarchy and some don't, but they all feature an idea of individual salvation as the paramount thing. In a democracy, this makes sense. Because religion is not controlled by the state, people are free to find the version of Christianity that is most appealing to them. Most people think about themselves and their families far more than they think about world peace or humpback whales.

If the version of Christianity that people are following emphasizes the sinful nature of the world and the fallenness of humanity, then that kind of Christianity may to some extent act to de-democratize its believers. If a person believes that the most important choice he can make is a religious choice and that, in fact, all other choices should be in service of that religious choice, then there is a danger that he will lose interest in any choices that are purely secular and view many choices that are not religious in nature as religious tests. The logic is as follows. The world is sinful. Nothing I do in the world other than my religion matters. I guess I'll vote for George W. Bush. (Admittedly, the last one is a bit of logical leap)

The irony is that we have this kind of Christianity because we are a democracy and yet it may be one of the greatest threats facing our democracy. By that I mean that for many people, their social and democratic impulses are channeled into their religious lives--leaving little left over for improving the here and now. If they adhere to a particularly fundamentalist (usually individualistic) brand of Christianity, they may be trained to take the Bible literally and that training may carry over into the rest of their lives. They may have the twin handicaps of being unable to think socially and being unable to read beyond a literal interpretation.

The problem of Christianity and the state is not actually a new problem. A grandly oversimplified walk through history: Early Christians were perceived as a threat to the state. Early Christians were persecuted even though they just wanted to spread their religion and didn't have any designs on the government. Then, they were co-opted by the state. Then they broke free from the state. This resulted in a radical decline in religious observance in Europe and an uptick in religiosity in the United States. The Catch-22 for Christianity is that if it is involved in the world, it will be tainted by it. But if it fails to become involved in the world, then its adherents will suffer.

Interestingly, it is extremely impolite to say that particular sects of Christianity are dangerous. Because we are a democracy. Also, because although the right wing rails against relativism, they love it when it comes to religion. Why? Because if they were forced into theological discussions, the whole coalition would fracture. Which is my prediction for what will happen anyways. My other prediction is that one day, not too long from now, young Christians everywhere will wake up and realize that they have been duped by people who claimed to be god-fearing into killing and maiming and destroying life. And they will be angry about what this un-Christian president has done.

How weird are the Germans?

Apparently pretty weird

Link

On Alumni Magazines

My undergraduate alumni magazine arrived in the mail today. My classmates appear to all be brain surgeons who hold down public office and manage hedge funds in their spare time. I'm pretty sure even Harvard doesn't have as many genius people walking the earth.

On the other hand, in the category of small victories, I am no longer working for a man who thinks that Jesus wants him to spend his days shoe shopping while everyone else does his work. He got the axe on Friday. I'm in the process of readjusting my worldview to include ideas such as accountability and responsibility. These things sort of flew out the window (at work at least) for the last few months.

On Hedonism and the Weather

My professor who taught Milton claimed that it was impossible to understand any of the deeper authors (i.e. Milton) in a place like California. He also got really upset if any of us accidentally left out the t. You could watch veins pop on his forehead by saying "Mil'en."

Of course people in places with nice weather still have tragedies and still manage to have dark nights of the soul. That said, the natural state of being on a perfect 70 degree day in San Francisco is not sadness.

The Smartest Guys in the Room?

I've now both seen the Enron movie and read the book on which the movie is based. I suppose the one part I would take issue with is the idea that these guys are smart. And clearly, there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. Yes, they were arrogant. Yes, many of them went to Harvard. But, smart?

Maybe the problem is that smart is thought of as some innate unchangeable quality. It seems to me that if your brain gets stuck in a rut, then you are no longer as smart. And if your brain is enslaved to some dumb idea, no matter how fast your brain moves, it's like a hamster on a wheel. It's not going anywhere.

Enron was only possible because the executives were smart enough to spend their money paying people off rather than building things. While that shows a certain short sighted kind of smartness, it's more evil than brilliant.

The Enron executives were not people that it would be particularly entertaining to have dinner with. They are not nice people or broad people or interesting people. They made money by cheating and it shows in their dodgy eyes. George W. has the same eyes by the way and while he is many things, no one has accused him of being smart.

Hair Products

I never fully appreciated why people's hair stays put. When I lived in Korea, I experimented with a product called hair glue which could probably hold a mohawk with 4 inch spikes no problem. But, apparently, ordinary hair cuts also require hair products just to make hair look normal. When I had my hair cut friday, the hairdresser straightened it with a flat iron and added 3 different hair products. There was even a pop quiz at the end. When I woke up the next morning, my hair looked exactly the same. It was incredibly freaky.

So, for the last couple of days, I've been sort of obsessed with the hair product thing. It's like I have a secret password and now that I know about these things I can tell who uses and who doesn't. Walking around San Francisco, I think that most people are users. Actually the weirdest thing is working out at the gym because although until yesterday I didn't realize that most people's hair doesn't move even though they are moving. Which makes me wonder what else I don't notice about the world. And it also makes me think that we really are living in some redux of the 1950s. It's just that we don't call it hair spray in more. It's hair products.

Liberals with Money

I just got done reading the letters to Salon.com about their most recent article on the problems of having a nanny. Which reminded me again of the weird thing about the Bay Area. This is where the liberals with money live. Liberals with money beget some strange things like Clinton and computer companies and more than likely affirmative action. They say they are feminist and not racist and down with the working people. But they encourage their daughters to marry well and have decorative careers. "I think art school is a swell idea Buffy." They hire nannies from third world countries. "I just think it's so great that little Blythe and Mortimar are going to learn Spanish." And of course they see no problem with earning outrageous salaries themselves while other people and families struggle.

Which gets back to the idea that all evil springs from willful innocence. George W. Bush is a bad man because he refuses to take responsibility for his actions and refuses to see the reality of his choices. Liberals can be just as guilty of that kind of innocence.

Am I a dictator?

A few years ago, my fondest dream was to run a book club where I would select all the books and run the discussion. Maybe I could pay people to be book club members, I hadn't exactly figured out how it would work. I'm picturing sitting around with a bunch of homeless people talking about Jane Austen.

The responses to the last post were like a Rorshach test. And I'm not a remotely elliptical writer.

So, as a dictator in blogosphere, I'd like to lay down some rules for comments.

(1) related to the post
(2) not personal
(3) pet theories kept on a leash

And yes, I know it's not nice to be a dictator and I'm supposed to listen to everyone and value your opinions and all that. But I would like comments that I can engage with and that will spark new blog entries.

The Roofs of San Francisco

Interestingly, at least in my neighborhood, no one hangs out on the roofs. I'm not complaining. I had a gorgeous half hour up on my roof today sipping tea and looking at the view. It wouldn't have been nearly as cool if I had to share the roof with someone. I guess San Francisco is a little too expensive to have people keeping pigeons on the roof like in On The Waterfront. Plus I imagine there's some zoning ordinance. And sun is pretty common here, so people don't go up and sunbathe like in Dublin. It's not nearly as crowded as Seoul, so there's no need to get away from people.

Maybe it's because you can't jump from roof to roof because there are too many steep ones...

On Being Precious

It's probably some part of human nature that nobody likes the kid who raises his hand all the time. Although, I think that's also an American thing. We're a competitive culture in a good old boy-slap you on the back-take your money-praise Jesus kind of way. And we're a pretty individualistic culture too. So, the raised hand is a big old "look at me, I'm smart" kind of gesture and people get mad when someone else is the center of attention.

So, that leads to the problem of having some sort of an intellectual discussion or conversation without being precious. Because one theory holds that people only bother being intellectual at all as some sort of maladaptive mating strategy. Picture tweady looking guy at a cocktail party talking about his research into the meta structure of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And I think it is really a legitimate question to wonder why anyone should bother being an intellectual at all. It certainly isn't the hedonistic choice. And no matter how smart you're born, it does take some effort to read a few books, talk to a few people, and spin a few theories. So why do all this just to make people angry at you for having something to say?

Of course you could argue that it does not necessarily follow that if you know something you have to raise your hand and tell people about it. That's more than likely a question of personality and many intellectuals are quite shy people. But people who don't share their thoughts start thinking ever weirder things. So, it may be necessary for the mental health of these (often) shy people to talk about things and therefore to do the adult equivalent of hand raising.

My current theory on this is that if you're going to say anything at all you have to constantly court preciousness and that's just inevitable. There are ways to balance this out. So here are my top five suggestions for unprecious intellectualizing.

(1) invent new words
(2) swear liberally i.e. that fucking Pynchon
(3) take up a physically dangerous hobby i.e. bullriding
(4) drink democratic drinks i.e. beer
(5) spell things wrong (I'm actually a natural at this)

But sometimes you just have to be precious and that's life. We can't all be cool all the time.

Art

When I was in college, we had a group of skinny white boy literature majors. They looked like they might do heroin and they certainly never went out during sunlight hours. One professor nicknamed them the po-mo boys. Sort of like the Peep o' Day Boys I suppose...I think that would have been a cleverer name for them.

Anyways, the one question we all obsessed about in an earnest sort of way was the nature of Art. Except the po-mo boys. They just lounged about looking ethereal and jaded all at the same time. I suppose they were being Art. We were a pretty conservative college and our professors encouraged us to engage with "age-old questions" and encouraged us to believe that long and deep thought on things like the nature of Art would make us wise.

So my thinking on Art evolved to point where I decided that Art required an audience. By that I mean that Art is a form of communication and an artist creates in the hope that someday somewhere someone will get what the artist has said or meant. But then there are a whole bunch of pathways you can take from that idea that I don't have time for today. Isak Dineson and Billy Collins both play with that idea in different ways. Of course Shakespeare's the Tempest is about that. In the visual arts, the Dutch artists seem to enjoy joking on the subject. Music is a bit trickier considering that most people experience it as a soundtrack to other events rather than something you sit and listen too. I suppose Rock is a democratic art form and musicians don't mind that they create art for people to hum along to rather than contemplate.

And then there are blogs. I'm not sure if a blog can be a work of art. The nice and yet terrifying thing about comments is that you can get feedback that lets you know whether people are getting it or not. And maybe Art is not a personal thing. Maybe it's more about yelling out into the cosmos than the audience. Or maybe the audience needs to be an abstract thing in the artist's mind.

Thinking and creating art are two different things. So maybe blogs (at any rate this blog) are too analytical. Maybe art needs a little mystery. Maybe the reason I think that po-mo boys were creating art with their lives is that they were silent.

Working out while sick

Did you know that if you work out when you have a cold you don't really sweat? Freaky..

Some thoughts on Jesus

Anne Lamot had a really good column on salon.com about the problem of reconciling faith with Republicans. Her position was that you shouldn't even try. Jesus was just so clearly not on the side of the rich and powerful and bigoted that you have to believe that anyone who worships that kind of God has it wrong.

Baconian Induction

When I was writing my thesis, my reader pointed out that I never seemed to want to come to a conclusion. He also pointed out that I was working from evidence to theory rather than from theory to evidence. Interestingly, my introduction proposes one theory and my conclusion addresses an entirely different theory. Horribly inconsistent, but great fun.

It struck me recently that a blog may be a good way to do that. It's particularly interesting in the context of those group blogs where people can feed off of each other.

I've been reading a lot of books about economics lately. The Coming Generational Storm, "Manias, Panics and Crashes," One Market Under God, The Fragile Middle Class, The Consumer's Republic...

It's hard to tell what people do with their time actually aside from work and shop. I suppose what I like about these books is that they explain so much of what we do with our time. It's only when you're a student that you won't be caught up in the endless cycle of getting and giving up money.

One of my pet peeves with contemporary fiction is that the characters don't think about ordinary things. They have no credit card bills. They don't worry about how to feed their families. They don't stick with boring jobs because they have kids. They get divorced only for meaningful reasons rather than because they're fighting over the bills.

Which is maybe part of the American unwillingness to deal with class. Fictional characters live in a classless workless world.

Anyways, I think I'm about done with this economics jag for now. I've read everything good I can find, unless anybody has any suggestions?

LA in 5 hours

I flew back and forth to LA today which is a shocking cultural thing, because LA is bleak.
San Francisco has the tenderloin, but the whole of downtown LA appears to involved armed camps of cops. Oh, and the sky is actually brown.

The weirdest thing to me is that people who live there don't even think about it. Theoretically a child could live and die in LA and never know that the sky isn't meant to be that color and that there are places in the world where buildings aren't armed bunkers.

The funny part was I tried to catch a cab from downtown to the airport. People were looking at me like I was crazy. I finally had to call on my cell phone.

너무 이상해요.

Where have all the editors gone?

I suppose it's kind of ironic coming from a blogger, but I've been interested in the concept of authors and their readers for a while.

It seems that for a lot of very bad writers, writing is a self-involved activity. I've edited my fair share of essays (and one pornographic science fiction novel). With a bad writer, you have to spend a lot of time saying things like, "I totally see where you're coming from, but you might want to try a transition..." or "I'm not sure if your readers are going to get where this tribe of big breasted amazonian women came from..." With a very bad writer, you have to actually beat the concept of a reader into the writers head. It's not that very bad writers don't have a concept of a reader--its an unrealistic concept. They picture their readers as people who get them in every way and who won't demand petty things like editing, character development, and transitions. It's the reader as alter-ego for the author.

One of my favorite contemporary authors is Billy Collins who is fairly obsessed with the reader in his poetry. An interesting interview from Powell's is available here. He gets dinged by the critics for being accessible. (and probably for accepting a poet laureate appointment from GW) I'm not sure how I feel about the poet laureate thing, but I do think that if something is fun to read it is more likely to be great literature and not less likely. If your contemporaries can't understand you, I don't think there's much hope of standing the test of time.

To me, if you are an author, the central question is who are you an author for? If it's not about talking to yourself, then you have to think about, struggle with, and take into account your readers in some fashion. I suppose that's pretty old fashioned and not all that radical but it's amazing how many books get published that are just a slog to get through. It makes me wonder if authors have editors any more. Or maybe the authors just have too much power and the editors aren't allowed to really edit. It's a puzzle.

The South Sea Bubble

The south sea company sold the government's debt. It didn't sell the debt at a discount. It sold the debt for more money than was owed and used various schemes to support its stock price.

It reminds me a bit of Enron which booked profits that it made trading with itself.

Now if I could just figure out a way to sell stock in my student loans....

On Originality

I had a professor in Dublin who cribbed an entire lecture from a New Yorker article.
The law of course is entirely about borrowing from some other source. Original does not describe most winning legal arguments.
I went to my high school reunion recently and was not surprised by one single person.

But today as I was walking down the street I saw a blue man. He was wearing a blue out fit and had blue make-up on. As I was dodging him in an effort to avoid getting blue make-up on me, I thought "that's original." And then I started to wonder if maybe he escaped from the troop of blue people in the TV commercial.

When I was growing up, there was a naked student at Berkeley. He went to classes naked and strolled around naked and all that. Then, apparently he made some naked friends and they formed a sort of naked posse. Then they started to feel brave and they would apparently heckle the clothed people.

And so it goes.....

Arguing From History

One of the worst reasons to study history is because you don't want to repeat it. You can't step in the same river twice and history doesn't actually repeat itself. There are themes. In general, religious extremism leads to barbarism, death and destruction. But then there are exceptions. The Quakers are plenty extreme and they've gone the opposite route. In general, hedonists don't accomplish much. But, there are whole lot of authors, artists and poets who accomplished things precisely by being hedonists.

The best thing you can get from history is a sense of human possibility and the wonderful way that life will confound any theory. History teaches subtlety. But history makes a poor basis for any argument--maybe because it is subtle. And interestingly, arguments from history seem to be used to justify holding women back more than any other group.

Picture a florid sort of guy clearing his throat. ahem ahem. Since time immemorial, women have taken care of children, men have had affairs, and women have never been any good at science. Just look at history.

And then how do you argue against that? The only real argument is that history is not determinative and history is not that simple. But that's not an argument that's easy to explain--especially to people who apparently haven't gotten much from their reading of history.

Truth and Freedom

The thing that rankles so much about being lied to is that for a moment (or for eternity) you are trapped in someone else's reality.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Social Security Crisis, and the No Child Left Behind Act are how we know that we're living in George W. Bush's reality. Apparently, a majority of the country is also living in a world full of lies and apparently a majority of the country believes those lies. And this makes us a nation of slaves. Because you are not free to act and make choices and be a true citizen if you have no real information and no real choices.

Because waking up one day and realizing that you've been lied to is about one of the worst feelings around, many victims of lies will invest in the lies themselves and continue believing as long as possible.

My theory is that many people are afraid of freedom and this sometimes transfers to a fear of the truth. When confronted with opposing versions of reality, why not pick the most comfortable? Why not pick the one that'll make it easy to sleep at night? Who really wants to be responsible anyways?

It is a tragic irony that the grand old party, the party of Lincoln, the party of personal responsibility is selling a pack of lies to the American people and enslaving them for generations.
To paraphrase the sex pistols-- There's no future in America's dreaming.

On rebels

There was a point in my life when I thought all novels were about the individual oppressed society. I think that it had something to do with being a teenager and incapable of seeing the world other than through my own lens. But there's something in that.

Actually, some books--not the most interesting books--deal exclusively with that question. I'm thinking of the teenage boy authors--Conrad, Keruac.

But the more interesting question concerning rebellion against societal norms is "is it a good thing?"

Although I've been kicking against the way things are for a good 20 years now, I'm not sure it changes things or makes me a better person. There is something intellectually dishonest about revolution and rebellion. I think most people who make a pattern out of it fail to admit that they are, in fact, a part of society and that they do, in fact, need other people.

Crazies

One of my favorite things about being a lawyer is the occasional crazy litigant representing himself. Today I got a pleading from the "Republic of California" against various Moes, Does, and Roes and their vessels. Apparently, although from a landlocked county, it was an admiralty cause of action.

But it got me thinking that I'm maybe not using this blog thing to its full potential. What I really need is a conspiracy theory, a beef against the government, and to found my own religion. I also clearly need to read more Ayn Rand.

A Social Security Theodicy

I picked up a Money magazine today because I forgot a book for the bus. It featured some scary black and white pictures of baby boomers and another scare story on social security.

There are a certain number of things in life that exist only because we believe in them. God and the Tooth Fairy don't work that way. No matter how hard I believe, I'm not going to be able to wish them into existence. But other things exist and have meaning because we believe. For example, love. Another example would be a promise. Still another example is social security. Yes, the dollars we all put in matter. But what really matters is that we believe that this is a promise and that our society's (social) promise means something (security for older and disabled Americans).

And lest I open myself up to charges of bleeding heart liberalism [I suppose mentioning love and social security in the same blog is hopelessly muddle-headed], I'll point out that every economy is founded on shared beliefs. We all believe that little green pieces of paper mean something. Many of us have an irrational belief that stocks will go up by 10% in perpetuity. If we stopped assigning meaning to the green pieces of paper, the economy wouldn't work.

So, the real question confronting us on social security is who are we? Do we make and keep promises? Do we work to create a society? Do we care about people beyond our kin group and beyond the people who look and act just like us?

Alternatively, maybe we want a society where if you're born poor and work hard all your life, we say too bad--keep working until you drop for your sins of being poor or ignorant or not saving. What privatizing social security really says it that we are not responsible for each other.

If we come to believe that we will have neither a society nor security.

My Management Philosophy

I currently have a boss who enjoys 2-3 hour meetings on the subject of his management philosophy. So, apparently this is a fascinating subject.

My management philosophy is that management is a bull shit profession designed to give white men something to do that they can get paid a lot of money for. Too bad I can't make a book out it. I could have chapters like: How to be white. How to be a man. How to act entitled. How to act busy. How to call a meeting to discuss your management philosophy. How to get paid 3 times as much as your subordinates who are doing all the work.

Dedication to the Cause

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32921-2005Mar14.html

It's hard to comment on this one, but wow. I'm trying to think of what I would slice off my finger for, and I can't think of one thing.

A Poverty Creating Bill

CNN Story

The new bankruptcy bill that is poised to become law is a terrible idea for everybody except the credit card companies and the lawyers.

The most interesting thing about the debate on the bill has been how completely unsuccessful the Democrats were in connecting macroeconomics issues to everyday life.

As a practical matter this bill means that:

1. Bankruptcy lawyers will be more costly.
2. Your bankruptcy case will be judged on the basis of IRS formulas.
3. You will have a hard time wiping out all of your debts.
4. The credit card companies can come in and contest your repayment plan in a chapter 13 case.

As a result, more people will be unable to support, feed, and shelter their families.

Since we no longer have a decent social safety net in this country, people made poor by the bankruptcy law will not have the kind of government assistance that they could count on in the past.

Apparently, our country has become a cold hearted place and the specter of families out on the street is not enough to move our elected leaders. So, maybe a little Keynesian macroeconomics will help. By creating an impoverished and enslaved class of people, this bill will create an perpetual underclass of people who cannot pay for their basic needs. If consumers are the engine of the economy, shifting money away from consumers and creating a class of people who effectively can't consume will slow the economy.

We may be forced to wake up from our credit card dreaming, and it's not going to be a beautiful world we wake up into.

Crackpot Idea in Honor of Woman's Day

I can't find the article anymore, but there was an interesting recent study on the subject of the wage gap between men and women. The study found that there was no wage gap if regression analysis was applied to wages to sort out things such as willingness to do dirty work and work overtime hours. Of course regression analysis can be used to show some pretty absurd things, so I'm not entirely convinced.

But it does seem to be true that women are more willing to accept low pay in exchange for fulfilling jobs than men are. Female coal minors are rare. Female kindergarten teachers are pretty common.

Women are also less willing to work crazy hours and kiss ass with bosses. Which is interesting, because supposedly women are the manipulative sex. But I think it has to do with women not investing as much identity in work as men do.

So, here is my crackpot proposal to achieve pay equity.

First, put everyone (including managers) on a 37 hour week. Pay everyone (including managers) overtime. Triple the overtime rate after 40 hours.

If everybody were forced to work reasonable hours, men and women could compete on an even playing field, we'd be more likely to achieve full employment, and everybody could stop wasting so much time at work.

Second, for particularly disagreeable jobs, mandate that people only work 20 hours a week and get paid for 37. That would make things like being a coal minor or garbage truck driver more bearable. It would also make it a family friendly choice and attract women to those professions.

In my experience, people who work 60 or 80 weeks are inefficient and/or attempting to escape some kind of hellish homelife. It is not good for the economy or for the people that have to live that kind of life.

The Housing Bubble

As a San Francisco resident, I've always intuitively known that buying a house would be a stupid thing to do, but I didn't have proof. This week's Economist has an article doing the math. Given a choice between renting a $2,000 a month apartment and buying an $800,000 house and assuming the buyer sells the house after 7 years, the buyer will be worse off by $120,000 than the renter.

Yes, rent is money down the drain. But property taxes, interest payments, and the potential for your house to lose value are also ways to lose money.

Sacramento Musings

I spent today reading through a bill file that I ordered from the state archives. A number of interesting things emerged from this bill file. The first was that the process appears rigged. There were hundreds of letters from constituents begging that the bill be amended to reflect the needs of small business. (My favorite--Please don't drive a steak through the heart of my company)

The letters also asked for public hearings--there were none on the final version of the bill. The letters from the real players were far less pleading. "We note that you have amended the bill to do x, we think it would be better amended to do y."

I happen to have seen assembly member Peace (the bill's author) in action when I worked in Sacramento. He was a complete blowhard and responsible for energy deregulation and other assorted back room deals. I have no inside knowledge about that man. I don't want to slime him. I just think he's one of the creepiest human beings I've ever met and my gut instinct is that he's corrupt.

And I was thinking that the usual solution to having legislators like him would be voter education, cutting out special interests, electing Ralph Nadar. The other solution would be for the press to do what we pay them to do.

The file I'm reading is a public file available from the public archives. Another back room deal was just completed on this very subject with some of the same terrible ideas that were in the last bill.

I'll give my imaginary journalist readers another big hint from my time in Sacramento. If nobody knows the contents of a piece of legislation until the moment before the vote, something corrupt and fishy just happened. Those giant controversial bills that get passed at the end of session are the ones you need to dig around on. Usually there was a buy off and a compromise and sometimes there will be a quid pro quo for another bill. And yes, they don't generally let journalists into the smoke filled rooms. But with a little hard work, it just might be possible to connect the dots as to how it was done....

The Morality of Work is the Morality of Slaves

--Bertrand Russell

What a great quote. A little Greek, a little bohemian, and a little bit of upper class contempt all in one pithy comment.

In my experience, overworked people are not thoughtful people. They are not good husbands and wives or good citizens or satisfied human beings. Perhaps one explanation for the recent election's outcome is that Americans work too hard. With so little time left over, we are slaves to our consumer wants and our instincts. We were unable to vote wisely because we had insufficient time to develop wisdom.

Just a thought for the day.

Deconstructing Larry Summers

The Economist mounted a predictable defense of the Harvard president it its latest issue. To paraphrase--He's economist, of course he's a scientist, and of course he knows what he's talking about. The faculty of Harvard should stop their PC whining.--

The problem with this position is that economists aren't scientists. Yes, they do have lots of graphs and numbers. But they don't have the luxury of conducting studies according to the scientific method. And they constantly have to make judgment calls about their numbers. Economics is at best a social science and economists in particular seem to love fudging the issue by claiming to be scientists.

The other piece of earth shattering news is that academics don't tend to admit what they don't know. Actually, I'll qualify that statement. Academics who are not scientists don't tend to admit what they don't know. I've seen a physics professor admit that he hadn't read anything by Shakespeare with a look along the lines of "and why would you think I waste my time on that?" But Academics in general are not prone to admitting that they aren't qualified to evaluate something.

The final piece of the puzzle is that Americans and the American press have lately had a weird and regressive respect for authority. It probably comes from having a total boob in the white house. The press seems to have been forced into operating on the assumption that GW is competent. And since questioning this premise would be unpatriotic, we are left with day after day of news reports that imply that the president is a rational, thinking, and empathetic person. Apparently because any other kind of reporting would implicate the journalists in a massive fraud on the American people. Since Larry Summers is the president of Harvard, he also has a position of authority and therefore in our current hyper-respectful phase, the press will act from the assumption that he knows what he's talking about.

I've been weirdly fascinated with this story and I think it's because it points to larger issues in our culture. We've become a culture obsessed with things that are unquestionable and a culture uncomfortable with ambiguity. Because most people aren't educated in the sciences, things that are "scientific" are largely unquestionable for most people. For religious people, their faith is unquestionable. For liberals, racial and sexual equality is unquestionable.

If you are debating about two unquestionables, there is no room for judgment. For example, evolution vs. creationism. Either you believe in science or you believe in the Bible. The red state/blue state thing is another example. We've all picked our unquestionable standards and we follow our standard bearers.

When your ability to judge and sift through grey areas becomes rusty, any attempts at judgment are likely to be crude at best. Larry Summers' speech was objectionable on a number of levels but it is particularly notable for anecdotal evidence, a lack of consideration of alternatives, and an attempt to cloak his prejudices as scientific fact through use of scientific language without accompanying scientific rigor. Interestingly, all faults of economics as a profession with the possible exception of anecdotal evidence.

What I'm worried about is that Larry Summers is our future. If the president of Harvard is unable to coherently analyze and choose between alternatives, what does that say about our educational system? I don't think this is an idle question. Apparently, he is considered to be a brilliant man and a brilliant economist. If this is the intellectual peak, what is going on in the valleys?

What's in a blog?

I've been thinking about blogs lately. There was one of the crabby old journalists on TV on Sunday morning saying that he hopes bloggers develop the same ethical standards as journalists. He thought that bloggers unfairly brought down CNN's chief.

It is true that bloggers seem to be more inflammatory in their language than regular journalists. If you want readers to pay attention, one way is to say radical and daring things. It seems like part of what is going on is the inevitable tension between democratic forms of expression and the elites who think the mob can't be trusted.

On the other hand, the elites have long been somewhat hypocritical. They say one thing to those who are among their kind and then have another thing to say when the matter is for public consumption. The Harvard president was a perfect example of that. He thought that among other elites, he was safe in making completely stupid and damaging remarks. The kind of journalistic ethics that allows for on the record/ off the record remarks from public officials is really just a way for journalists to themselves be part of the elite.

Interestingly, journalists are currently more despised than lawyers as a profession. Possibly because they're a bunch of sanctimonious sell-outs, but I'm just a blogger with no ethical responsibilities....

Arcade Fire

I'm not much of a music person. However, one of the things I'm doing with my copious spare time is trying to find new music and this Canadian band Arcade Fire has just the right mix of what makes good music.

It's sweet and has a beat and has intelligent lyrics. I've had the CD for a month and haven't gotten sick of it.

Bands I rapidly got sick of include: Postal Service, the Shins, and Snow Patrol. On the other hand, I'm not really a music critic. I just thought I'd add this thought to my blog to say something on something besides politics.

The Bush Tapes

I caught a bit of the tapes recorded by Bush's friend and released to ABC news this morning. On the tape, Bush makes fun of Gore for admitting he used marijuana. Bush states that he would never publicly admit to his past drug use because he doesn't want to set a bad example.

This bit of hypocrisy might be more forgivable if people weren't serving prison time for supplying party boys like GW.

Bush comes off as an innocent and a bully in the tapes. As ABC News noted, his private personality doesn't appear to be different from his public personality.

Crack Attics

According to a website reviewing apartments, my former apartment complex is full of "crack attics." I've never seen one, but I suppose I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for. Or it could be that crack addicts are revolving in out of the prison system rather than hanging out at my old apartment complex.

By 2010, over 3% of our population will either be in prison or have been in prison. A good chunk of those people will have been incarcerated for drug crimes. While lowering the crime rate is a goal everyone agrees with, options other than incarceration are seen as bleeding heart and muddle-headed.

According to the sentencing project, 60% of federal prisoners are in for drug crimes. It is worth asking how we can remain a democratic and free country if the prison experience becomes our national experience for those who are poor, black, and young.

Of course if you're rich, privileged, and white maybe you don't have to worry. President Bush apparently doesn't have a twinge of conscience that he is running the country after some wild partying days when, if he had been a different person, his partying might have led straight to jail.

Here are some interesting websites:

http://www.sentencingproject.org/losing_05.cfm

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.html

Here is the apartment review website:

http://www.apartmentratings.com/rate/CA-San-Jose-101-San-Fernando.html

The Tollbooth Kirk

I'm reading a book about Scotland and I just like the idea of a tollbooth kirk. Since this a blog and I'm not Montaigne, I figure it is permissible to have a title that doesn't make any sense but sounds interesting.

Actually, the book is a bit cheesy, so I'm not going to mention the title, but it is about religious history--one of my favorite subjects.

It's gotten me thinking about the current witches brew that is the American Right. I think I would be more sympathetic if they weren't so certain that Jesus loves them. Because if I were Jesus, I would certainly have a very hard time loving them. In fact, the religious right is the kind of movement that only a Jesus could love.

In order to get televangelists and all the rest, you have to decide several theological questions in ways that make Christianity and easy religion.

Does God want us to be happy or suffer?

Happy, definitely--We're Americans after all.

Is salvation a result of our actions here on earth or are we predestined?

Too hard. Next question.

What kind of life does God want us to lead?

Lot's of money and a family and taking care of what's yours.

I could go on and on. But it's amazing how in 200 years we've almost completely lost any trace of puritanism. It'll be interesting to see how well Christianity survives as it competes as a hedonistic alternative to other hedonistic alternatives...

On bureaucracy

I got to spend some time today listening to an incredibly overpaid manager fulminate against bureaucracy in the schools. Apparently, despite making his living off of bureaucracy, he hates the idea of anyonelse making their living off the bureaucracy.

I've worked in both the private and public sectors and I don't see one whit of difference on how people spend their time. My current theory is that the actual amount of work that needs to be done in this country (aside from manual labor) is not much. But without work, we have no reason for being. So, several hundred million people will spend their adult life pushing paper and grumbling about how people somewherelse never do anything.

Hoping to be lied to some more

My current theory is that the best we can hope for from the Bush presidency is that George W. is lying about more things than we already know him to be lying about.

Apparently, George W. is tacking back on social security. He will consider getting rid of the cap on social security taxes--currently income over 90,000/ year is not subject to the payroll tax. So, again that's not what he said he was going to do but it's a lot closer to a solution than the private acounts thing. Explaining how taxing more income is not the same thing as raising taxes is going to take a bigger intellect than GW has displayed thus far.

I don't think I have any conservative readers, but any conservatives out there who would like to explain how lying is better than flip-flopping...please, let me know.

It's frustrating that the best the Democrats can do is sit on the sidelines and sputter "But he lied!" We have the same problem in California with Arnold. He can do and say whatever he wants because the media is not calling him on it.

And while the utopian idea of bloggers ruling the world is appealing, bloggers have day jobs. The media is paid to give us news. What do they do all day anyways? Foozeball? X-box?