Inert Material of the Historical Process

Pattern

2012-02-10T21:06:00.002-08:00

Acquisitions

2012-02-08T21:37:00.000-08:00

I just got a hold of two "escape maps," maps printed on silk and supposedly sewn into the jackets of pilots flying over enemy territory so that, in the event of capture, they could use them to find their way back to friendly territory. Silk was used to maximize conceilability, as it doesn't rustle under clothing and is lightweight and easily folded into just about anything. My maps are 50s, Cold War vintage, detailing the areas around Rome and Stalingrad. Just. Plain. Cool.

A bit like Balthus, but even colder.

2012-01-25T21:03:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered Italian artist Carla Bedini, painter of beautifully dark portraits that remind me very much of Balthus, but with what looks to be a much more conscientious Gothic theme to them. Though she has quite a web presence, surprisingly, I can't find much in-depth information on the artist at all, at least not that's written in English, and disappointingly, there doesn't seem to be anywhere to buy prints of her work.

Here are some of her amazing works, reposted from gGallery, where you can find a number of other examples of her pieces.

Here's to Your "Health"?

2012-01-22T14:05:00.000-08:00

A quick repost from an entry entitled "Evil cafe lurker" on Philosophy, lit, etc., a blog I just discovered:

Differences between Munich and Vienna are evident from the fact that Hitler disliked Vienna but loved Munich. He seems to have regarded Munich as his adopted home town (even though Vienna was the capital of his home country). Why did Vienna repel this monster while Munich attracted him? From what I can tell, Hitler hated Vienna's more cosmopolitan milieu. Also, Vienna showed more appreciation and support for its creative Bohemians (like Peter Altenberg) while Müncheners seem, for the most part, to have regarded their city's artistic, café culture with disdain and suspicion. This hostile stance reflects the incursion of rural and small-town Bavarian attitudes into the city, feeding a tendency in its inhabitants to be uncritical of tradition and to resent the apparently idle proto-hippies who challenged it. As Thomas Mann put it, Munich was 'the unliterary city par excellence. Banal women and healthy men – God knows what a lot of contempt I load into the word "healthy"!' (Quoted from p. 4 of Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich by David Clay Large)

Nobody says it quite like Thomas Mann.

Forgivable Error

2012-01-21T18:06:00.000-08:00

Factual inaccuracies in moralizing books are irritating and counterproductive for the books' causes. Today, I found myself reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions over breakfast. (No, I was not eating a "breakfast of champions," just some French toast.) This is my first time through the book, and I was rather surprised to hit two factual errors on the same page. The first: In some pithy commentary about the Germans after the Second World War, Vonnegut presents his depiction of the post-war German flag, shown below with the real German flag.

It's a pretty obvious error that even the most mediocre editing should have picked up. The second error is perhaps better described as merely an inaccuracy, as it isn't totally wrong. Vonnegut states: "After they [the Germans] got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people." Beetle production actually began before the outbreak of the war and was spearheaded by Hitler himself.

I realize this may come across as nitpicking; however, Vonnegut's work has been noted for its inaccuracy in other areas, such as the victim count he gives in Slaughterhouse Five from the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945.

Such errors, even when casually encountered in a light-reading book, are jarring. But if your work is going to rely upon smugness, snark, and satire to get your point across (which Vonnegut does brilliantly 99% of the time), then it's absolutely necessary to be as factually correct as possible. To be otherwise is to sacrifice all credibility.

That being said, Vonnegut must be forgiven. Why? Because he wrote this a few pages later:

Roses are red,
And ready for plucking.
You're sixteen,
And ready for high school.

It doesn't really matter if he came up with that himself or not. I tried to figure out, using my usual sources, i.e., Wikipedia articles. I didn't find an answer, but I did find this humorous handling of the above "poem" from the Wikipedia article on Mind rhyme:

Mind rhyme is a kind of substitution rhyme similar to rhyming slang, but it is less codified. In mind rhyme, an intended word remains unsaid, and is “heard” only in the listener’s mind. For instance, in this traditional example:

"Roses are red and ready for plucking / She’s sixteen and ready for high school."

The text initiates a possible rhyme which is completed by the reader or listener. Unlike rhyming slang, where the discipline of lexicography is possible (e.g., “dogs” or “dog’s meat” has traditionally signified “feet”, in a multitude of contexts^[1]), mind rhyme is a one-off. In no other linguistic situation than in this immediate example will “high school” mean “fucking.”

Glad to have that cleared up in such an academically objective manner...

2012-01-14T22:53:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning, I sat down to have my breakfast at the same local family restaurant where I've been regularly eating breakfast for about two years now. Generally, I go with a book and read for a few minutes before eating the same breakfast I've ordered each Saturday since I started going. This morning, my reading met with what I considered to be a pleasant interruption: an economic argument between two of the members of the family who own the restaurant; I believe they are brothers.

The argument was pretty typical. One brother was advocating for unions, fair pay, workers rights, etc., and the other kept asking, in counter, who was going to pay for all of that and how. The conversation was wonderfully peppered with Greek, and the two brothers, who were separated by an older gentleman who may have been a member of the family as well, carried on in a loud, animated manner while sitting at the front counter, seemingly oblivious of anyone else who may have been listening.

The conversation reminded me of some that have taken place in my family and many I remember from high school and my early college years. There was a time when I jumped at the chance of getting involved in such debates. That time has largely passed, a fact I was poignantly reminded of as I watched these two go at it.

One of the simplest reasons such debates are no longer appealing is that after graduate school in public policy and law school, the topics are simply played out. I've heard most of the arguments and been exposed to the vast majority of the facts upon which they rely. There's very little new that a layman can put on the table to make such a debate interesting enough to carry forward with. What continues to impress me is that average people can continue to get so worked up about such topics, not seeming to realize that everything either side says or could say has been said and said and said before.

More troubling, however, and I believe a great source of the vehemence with which such debates usually occur, is that the parties involved always act as though they are arguing from fact-based positions that necessitate a certain logical conclusion. While there are, of course, many economic and public policy arguments that can be made about the existence of certain sociopolitical and economic facts and the policy conclusions that those facts should imply, no one ever seems to come out and recognize that they are not actually debating these facts, but rather using them as as a smokescreen to advocate their own moral/political presuppositions. If that were not the case, then such arguments would be purely technocratic, and the only people who would get excited at all about them would be the bean-counters in the basement of every public policy school. The same holds true for the majority of apologetic arguments made on the behalf of religion(s), and it's painfully obvious in much of what comes out of judicial bodies such as the U.S. Supreme Court. This is why at the end of the day, there is no such argument that is actually winnable, no matter how impeccable the logic or well-stocked the factual arsenal of either side is. Political and religious arguments are, in the end, nothing more than a matter of choosing one set of values or principles over another. They have nothing to do with facts. Unfortunately, most people never even get to the point of choosing those values for themselves--they simply adopt the ones handed down to them by family or culture.

What I would love to hear for once, would be a conversation that starts out with the question, "What should we value?", and ends up with the question, "How do we best make the world reflect those values?" I won't be holding my breath.

Nudibranch!

2012-01-12T17:40:00.001-08:00

Stop the clock, forget that it exists, or at least get out of your rut

2012-01-10T19:12:00.000-08:00

In a recent New York Times Opinionator article, entitled "On Modern Time," philosophy professor Espen Hammer takes a look at the modern conception of time, how it differs from that of pre-modern cultures, and what, if anything, there is to do about some of the seeming disjointedness some people feel existing in a clock-driven world. This is a theme that's been visited often enough not to deserve any special mention here; however, the conclusion of his article veers a bit from the often sterile world of philosophy into something that seemed poignant enough to deserve a repost:

Most of our narratives are socially constituted. Becoming an investment banker is possible because such occupations exist in our society, and because there are socially constituted routes to obtaining that status. The investment banker is in possession of and identifies with the banker narrative: it largely determines this person’s identity.
Some narratives, however, are intimate and personal, based on experiences and commitments made by individuals independently of social expectation. These are the kinds of narratives that novelists often use. These are the ones that not only point beyond the deadening sequentiality of mere clock time but have the capacity to open new territories and vistas for human growth and authenticity. Discontinuity is the key here: the pregnant moment outside the regular flow of time when some unexpected yet promising or individually challenging event occurs.
We need these moments, and we need to be attentive to them. They are the moments when new possibilities emerge. The narratives that frame such forms of exposure to the sudden and unexpected will tend to deviate from the standard, causal “this because of that”-structure. They will have cracks and breaks, intimating how we genuinely come to experience something as opposed to merely “moving through” it. Falling in love is one such narrative context. While we can tell when it happens to us, the involvement it demands is open, promissory, risky, possibly life-changing, and sometimes deeply disappointing.
Experiences like this, which explode the empty repetition of standard clock time, offer glimpses of a different and deeply intriguing type of temporality that has the power to invest our lives with greater meaning, possibility and excitement than a life merely measured on a grid could ever provide.

I don't know that I entirely agree with equating "clock time" to standard cultural narratives, as Hammer describes. Temporality and cultural narratives may be interrelated constructs, but in the end they seem like very different animals. However, I couldn't agree more with Hammer that almost all of the meaningful experiences in life are those that are somehow unexpected and transcendent--those that are off the grid, at least breaking with the day-to-day narrative that most of us have constructed for ourselves in one way or another.

The Generation Gap

2011-12-30T22:47:00.000-08:00

I'm 31. I spent roughly my entire time between 1999 and 2008 at one college or another, surrounded by people who were mostly my age or younger. I'm not married. I don't have any kids, and I don't own a house. For all intents and purposes, I consider myself young, and until recently it would have seemed absurd to talk about a generation gap between myself and other young adults (that is, young and more or less independent adults of college age or older). But over the last couple of weeks what I can only describe as a generation gap has started staring me right in the face--it's there; it's surprising; and there's nothing to be done about it!

The event that precipitated this observation was a concert I attended today at the Blue Room Cafe, in Hammond, which attracted a fair bit of local musical talent. Like most events at the Blue Room, the crowd is young--the Blue Room, after all, is a coffee shop, not a bar, and there's no alcohol to be found on site.

But looking around the crowd at the cafe, which spilled out into the hall, what I saw was something fairly remarkable: for the first time ever, looking at this group, I realized that there was no way I could ever blend with most of this crowd, not because of how old I looked (I can pass as quite young--for better or worse), but because it would have felt absurd.
Almost everyone there looked alike, a look best described simply as "scruffy." There were more stocking-caps than you could shake a stick at. Scraggly beards were the norm. Hair was mostly longish, but not really long. Flannels and working-class, rough cotton jackets. Skinny jeans. The look is certainly very "hipster," but different from what I previously identified as a look belonging to the hipster subculture. The dripping-with-irony hipster culture that started more or less ten years ago was very much a product of "my generation." The decision to start wearing trucker caps and aviator sunglasses to clubs was quite conscious. I don't detect the same sense of self-consciousness in these kids. This is simply the fashion of their time, no more, no less.

Moreover, while I'm not averse to going out in ripped jeans and old army jackets, to clad myself in the same manner as this crowd would simply feel like costuming. The skinny, skinny, "skinny jeans"? Plus a stocking cap? I simply can't relate--and that's coming from someone who's had about every hair color and style in the book, as well as who's gone through goth/punk, grunge, preppy, euro-pop, and just plain bland phases of dressing.

While I've primarily used clothing as an example of the generation gap, it goes for other fields of cultural production, as well, of course. The difference is, perhaps, that while musical and artistic trends come and go with time, quality in these areas speaks for itself, and while different generations might grow up with different musical or artistic contexts, for the open-minded person, new works can always be appreciated.

So the question I have to ask is this: Is such a generation gap the product of some sort of genuine cultural change that occurred in the last couple of years and had its impact more strongly on younger people (contradicting one of the positions expressed in my previous post that American culture had come to a point of only rehashing itself and not doing anything original), or...is noticing this just a symptom of getting older?

I admit it...

2011-12-17T22:23:00.000-08:00

In the wake of Christopher Hitchens' death, I've been perusing the net for material related to him, and a statement he made in an interview with C-SPAN in 1999 caught my attention:

I like to think that I have a life, rather than a job or than a career. And it's all to do with reading and writing, the only two things that I was ever any good at, and public speaking, which I could also do. And that's something like living, but it's also what I am, who I am, what I what I love, and I'm fortunate at that, because there's nothing else I can do. It's not as if I could have been a lawyer or a doctor and I chose this. It chose me.

It's nice that worked out for him. Such statements are often heard by prominent artists, musicians, writers, etc. The question is, how much weight should anyone give to statements like this? Hitchens was the lucky one with the talent to make his passions into a viable career. For every one of him, how many others are there out there who are also believe, for better or worse, "It's not as if I could have been..." this or that. But we only ever hear from the successful ones. All the rest generally find that they have to be something else, because life demands it. I get a little irritated when those at the top of their field seem to portray themselves as the product of fate. Statements like this are utterly meaningless and completely misleading to most people. As much as I like Hitchens' work, if he had to be something else, he would have been--of necessity. I believe some, if not all, people do have a "calling." But it's rather shallow for those who happened to be fortunate enough to make a living through their calling to flaunt it as if it was the only thing they were capable of.

The Old Is New, and That's Not Bad

2011-12-08T17:17:00.000-08:00

Today while eating my lunch in the Blue Room Cafe, as I do every day, I came across an article in Newcity, a local Chicago cultural magazine. The article was a review of Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past, a book by Simon Reynolds that came out earlier this year.
Retromania analyzes, in excruciating detail, pop culture's current tendency to reuse and recycle the pop of the not-so-distant past. I haven't read the book, nor am I likely to do so, but I find it notable that I came across this article hours after reading another article in an entirely different publication on the very same theme. In the January 2012 edition of Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen discusses the fact that American culture has not significantly changed its face in the last 20 years or so, unlike in almost all previous periods throughout the 20th Century, when one could observe tide shifts in art, literature, fashion, and other cultural fields that left the styles of the previous generation, or even decade, seeming like relics, strange and inconceivable objects from another world. Obviously, he points out, some things have changed drastically, like technology (Walkman vs. iPod anyone?), but when clothing, music, and fashion are compared between, say, 1995 and 2005, the differences, relatively speaking, are minute. Sure, almost anyone can come up with an abundance of examples of trends in an area like music that have come and gone over the last 20 years, but, honestly, do the musical productions of the early 90s seem truly dated today the way the music of the 40s would have in the 60s or the the 70s in the 90s? Generally, the answer is no. Nirvana seems just as fresh and relevant today as the band did in 1993. Many cars produced in the 90s could easily pass for those produced last year if you didn't already know they were 20 years old. The styles simply haven't changed substantially. Why?

Andersen expresses various theories, such as a "loss of appetite" for newness, with Americans today experiencing such a deluge of information from every which direction, facilitated by technology, but also contributed to by the tremendous real-world political and economic changes of the last 10-20 years, that they are simply maxed-out on change. He laments this loss of appetite, theorizing that it perhaps points to a sort of American civilizational middle-age, a loss of vibrancy pointing toward a gradual decline of our cultural supremacy.

I'm very skeptical and quite unconvinced that the current cultural fixation on the old, even the recently old, in any way indicates a lack of creativity or cultural decline. My suspicion is more that consumers and producers of pop culture, for the first time ever, now have access to the complete cultural repertoire of the past, which has provided a fertile field for rediscovering and reprocessing the things that have come before us. What other generation has had the opportunity to become so effortlessly steeped in prior pop-cultural productions, independent of the whims of the current publishing, recording, or broadcast industries? None. High culture has always been almost universally available due to its embrace by academia and the intelligentsia, who ensure its continued propagation through the education system and other cultural institutions. On the other hand, pop culture has never received this kind of embrace from the cultural elite, meaning that until recently pop-cultural trends and products whose time had past, no matter how popular they were at their height, had most often remained the province of a few devotees who amass knowledge and material products from their preferred era in relative (and perhaps mocked) obscurity.

With the advent of the internet and the full development and population of easy-to-use data sources like YouTube, the cultural floodgates have opened, and now one and all have the opportunity to appreciate the things that our parents and grandparents went wild for. And many of us find that we really like the stuff! If anything, I see the recent glut of recycled culture as an encouraging sign that we are finally fully processing material that may not have been available to previous generations that rode the tide of the moment, with little consideration given in the development of their own pop culture to anything but the most recent cultural movements they were likely reacting against. Maybe we have simply moved beyond this sort of reactionary pop culture. Couldn't this signal that now an even more fertile field exists for the development of some truly revolutionary cultural innovations?

Five Years of Scribble

2011-11-30T21:15:00.000-08:00

I don't know when I first developed a liking to Moleskine journals. I do know that I began writing in one on January 1, 2007 at 3:20 a.m.. The topic was law school.

Law school has come and gone, but the journal is still around almost five years later, though it's a little worse for wear. And it's almost complete. With any luck, and just a few pages to go, I'm hoping for a perfect five year record.

The Cool...and the Not So...

2011-11-29T18:34:00.000-08:00

As Dr. Who might point out, some things are cool, like my new shoes--Adidas Samba's. They're more comfortable than my last two pairs of casual shoes put together (those being some Pumas and Converse All Stars), and they still have that classic-sneaker vibe. Yay.

Other cool things? My OLD watch, the envy of every 10 year old in 1989-90: a Nintendo Mario Brothers watch (which, unfortunately burns through batteries like crazy due to the continuously moving LCD game display, but that's totally not the point).

Stuff that's not so cool? Gulden Draak...a great Belgian beer, BUT, what's with the new, plastic bottle condom in lieu of the good ol' fashioned white paint? And what's with the continuously increasing price? Sometimes I find myself hankering for the Euro's slide...

Chesterton Antiquing

2011-09-05T14:52:00.000-07:00

Glitter and Doom

2011-09-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

As something of a continuation of my previous post on some art I encountered while in Berlin this summer, I thought it might be interesting to link to an exhibition that was held a few years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I, unfortunately, missed. Having been a fan of German Expressionism for some time now, I occasionally encounter links to the exhibit catalog on Amazon when looking for literature on the subject. And, though the catalog looks fantastic, it also has a fantastic price. Here are some excerpts from the special exhibitions page at the Met, which is still maintained:

Sonia, by Christian Schad (1928)


The Salon I, by Otto Dix (1921)


Anita Berber, Otto Dix (1925)

Not Lost, But Burried in Traslation

2011-09-01T20:46:00.000-07:00

I recently bought the DVD of The American, the 2010 crime-drama starring George Clooney set mostly in the Italian countryside and a few small towns. The film moves slowly, in my opinion, and lacks many of the jolts normally found in crime films. The Italian countryside, and Clooney's character's inner conflicts the are at the forefront during the entire movie, and indeed, the film's atmosphere could very well overpower its plot. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons I like the movie so much, as I find myself often much less interested in a particular story and its development than in the story's setting and the way the character's personality types exist in it. Films that do a good job with such portrayals I can watch time and time again. After renting this one about three times, I finally bought the DVD.

After seeing a single movie for about the tenth time, however, there is an inclination to add a little bit to it. At this point, I often switch over to French with English subtitles, or French subtitles. My French isn't that good, so when watching it with English subtitles, I didn't notice anything remarkable. However, when I switched over to French/French today, something very interesting did occur. Not only does the French translation often not match the English (very predictable), the French dubbing doesn't even match the French subtitles. Sometimes the differences are remarkable. The subtitles have removed much of the more casual turns of phrase and substituted more formal language. Is this something particularly French, having to do with their fixation with the preservation of the language, i.e., "they can say what they want, but if you're going to put it in print, it had better be proper!"? I certainly don't think we do this with English subtitles, or am I wrong?

A Little Bit of Art

2011-08-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

This summer, I went to Berlin on vacation. While the first few days of the trip were spent with my friend Jana's friends and family before, during, and immediately after her wedding, the last half of my stay I kicked around Berlin for hours and hours on my own, just exploring. A good deal of that time was spent looking at art. One artist with whom I was not familiar was Franz von Stuck, a painter whose life and work straddled the turn of the last century. Many of von Stuck's works have a very dark, decadent edge to them, while keeping with religious and mythical themes. His portrayal of Circe, below, caught my eye and dragged me across the room shortly after entering the Alte Nationalgalarie.

Here's another of von Stuck's works, portraying Salome, the biblical figure who supposedly demanded from her father, King Herod, the head of John the Baptist.

Appropriately coupled with the work of von Stuck, the Alte Nationalgalerie displays this great vanitas by Arnold Boecklin.

I don't have anything profound to say about these works. They're just damned good art that I can find myself staring at for hours on end.

Interests of the Moment

2011-08-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

In an effort to keep this blog from withering away entirely, I present a sampling of some of the things that have caught my attention in the past few months, in no particular order.

Das Keyboard

This thing is cool not just because of the name. When I was learning to type in the mid-90s, it was still relatively common to run into schools with old enough computers to be using keyboards with mechanical switches in them. In a computer lab of 20-30 machines, I always prized these. Not only is the tactile sensation of typing on such a keyboard simply wonderful, the resistance on the keys, which leads to a loud "click" as the typed letter appears on the screen, the noise these things made was especially pleasurable to someone who then prided himself on his blazing 40 wpm typing speed--it attracted stares! Anyway, these keyboards are high quality devices made for those of us who don't like the squishyness of most modern keyboards.

Pippin, the musical

At the prompting of my friend Liz, who was in the show but spoke about it rather more often and highly than many of the other numerous productions she's been involved in, I went to see Pippin this weekend at the Dunes Summer Theatre. It was an unusually good production, I thought, but what struck me most was that I had never heard of the play itself, which has been around since the 1970s. Perhaps this isn't completely surprising, as I'm not exactly a musical theatre aficionado, but the show deals with themes that any self-respecting philosophy or literature is well familiar with. Essentially, it is the story of a young man who goes out to find himself in the world, expecting and demanding some kind of grandiose fate, only to find that the goals touted most by society end up being rather meaningless once achieved. The story reminds me very much of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, but with a somewhat different mood, darker perhaps as Pippin's eventual acceptance of the meaningfulness of everyday living comes begrudgingly. He almost accepts the offer to meet his fantastical demise when prompted seductively by the magical theatre troop that has already chosen his destiny. (Suicide! But, oh so grand!) See the show the next time it's playing near you--it's well worth it. It does a good job transcending the sappy emotional excess of many 70s and 80s pieces of the same style by embracing universal themes.

Walter Potter's Museum

I don't know if it's a fad or a genuine resurgence in certain themes that has somehow been prompted by the zeitgeist, but old and odd is in right now--that is, at least if you're a regular reader of the New York Times, have certain hipster/alterna tendencies, and perhaps a slight web addiction. When I was in college, people of a certain inclination gravitated toward the gothic subculture, which puts emphasis on the weird, smart, dark, romantic, and somewhat historical. Today, these same people, I believe, are trending toward Steampunk, which, although it is historically more limited to the Victorian and Edwardian eras, still has a certain freshness that goth was already losing by the time I got interested. Steampunk may be getting played out by now in cultural centers, but for me, a 30-something suburbanite, it's still fresh.

My particular interest in things old and odd in this vein, started, as I'm sure it has for many in the last year or so, with the show Oddities, then on the Discovery Channel (now migrated to Science--which is a questionable choice in my opinion, but hey...). I won't go out of my way to describe the show. Watch it yourself. It's a shop where they sell things that are strange and old. Really strange and old. But the show is part of something broader that's going on right now. The NY Times captured the phenomenon well in their 2009 article, "The New Antiquarians." There's an aesthetic not seen for quite some time that's grown into fashion, emphasizing not just antiques, but the quirky, cabinet of curiosities mentality that led many in other eras to embrace things that have for a long time been considered grotesque or at least too dark for daily consumption. Taxidermy is big on this list. Which brings me to Walter Potter.

Walter Potter's Museum was a collection of carefully, humorously arranged taxidermied animals, set in vignettes typical of everyday human life (think dogs playing poker--but with Potter, it might actually be real dogs playing poker). Morbid Anatomy, one of my favorite blogs and a frontrunner in the aforementioned cultural movement, recently posted a couple of videos of the museum, fascinating all:

POTTER'S MUSEUM

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That's all for now...

Criminals are not to be trusted...

2011-08-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

evidently, even with their own typewriters. A company known as Swintec produces clear typewriters like the one below for prisons. Like so many of the restrictive elements of jailhouse living that leave those of us on the outside puzzled, this raises the question, just what did someone stick in a typewriter to lead prisons to believe that such a thing was necessary???

Yum

2010-05-26T19:43:00.000-07:00

I am not a foodie. There is very little talk of food that really gets me going. However, this recent article in the NYTimes about real German pretzels practically has me slobbering all over my desk.

Must See

2010-05-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

I ran across this exhibit from MoMA through some links at the NYTimes. Clicking through the flickr pages is absolutely fascinating. The sequence of face after face, mostly unadorned, but all presented in the harshest, least forgiving lighting possible provides a wonderful display of facial expressions, structures, hairstyles, eyeglasses, you name it. Granted, the crowd is hardly a random sampling of humanity, but if you're looking for a cross-section of the type of people who find themselves in MoMA (mostly educated, middle-class, young, and white--and many foreign), this is a winner.

Recurring Febrile Nightmares, Anyone?

2010-05-23T18:59:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, and occasionally still today, each time I would become extremely feverish, I would always end up with the same, recurring delusions/nightmares: that I was traveling unbelievably quickly through a tunnel in the center of the earth that was so tight it allowed no movement of my limbs, and though I couldn't see what was above or below me, I always knew of its oppressive weight and sheer mass. The recent news coverage of the BP oil spill off our southern coast brings to mind a good comparison: it's not often that people are forced to consider places miles down in the ocean or in the earth, but when an event in such an extraordinary place is threatening to significantly impact our daily existence topside, we take notice. So, imagine the reality of such a place, the reality that miles and miles under lifeless rock, there is a real place that contains something that we want. A place that is dark, cold, and soundless. Now try to put yourself there. It's not pretty. Being trapped in such a place, being propelled through it, was my febrile nightmare. And almost as soon as I would realize the existence of this place, it would be contrasted with pleasant images of people lounging at a sidewalk cafe in the sun, with a slight breeze blowing. I suppose the mind has to compensate for the horrors it has created (or highlight them with starkness of the contrast? I could never decide which.)

A passage from Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana brought this childhood fright to mind, when he describes the recurring figures that haunted his protagonist's dreams:
Several silhouettes approach. They seem at first like many-armed giants. They give off a weak heat and the fog melts around them, as if they were being lit by a feeble streetlamp, and I shrink away for fear that they will hurl themselves upon me, dominate me, I go through them the way you can with ghosts, and they disperse. It is like being in a train and watching the signal lights approach in the darkness and then seeing them swallowed by darkness, vanishing.

Now the mocking figure from the Thermogene ad comes forward, a satanic clown sheathed in a green and blue unitard, squeezing something to his chest, a flabby mass, like human lungs, and spewing flames from his unseemly mouth. He crashes into me, licking me like a flamethrower, then goes away, leaving a thin wake of heat that for a few moments lightens that fumifugium. A globe rolls up to me with a huge eagle atop it, and after the bird comes the ashen face of the Presbitero pencil man, with a hundred pencils bristling from his head like hair standing on end from fear...I know them, they were my companions when as a child I lay in bed with fever, feeling immersed in royal soup, in a purulence of yellow wellsprings that boiled around me as I cooked in their broth....

It is evident where Eco's nightmare imagery is drawn from, as the entire book is a reconstruction of memories absorbed from years of media encountered by its protagonist, much from pop-culture ads and comics of the 40s. Who knows where my imagery came from...some bad movie I watched when I was two or three?

Philosophy Kills?

2010-05-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

Having been a philosophy major, I of course felt obligated to read the most recent NYTimes "Opinionator" article entitled "What is a Philosopher?" After all, it's not often you find such an article in some form of non-specialized media. Little did I know, there would be commentary about the profession I chose after finishing with all that philosophy stuff:

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things. The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

Outstanding speech...

2010-05-08T21:54:00.000-07:00

that no one will be able to understand. Here it is anyway:

Many Americans would likely agree with the sentiments expressed here, especially those active in the Tea-Party movement. Dr. Wagenknecht is essentially railing against bail-out packages for big banks...and small countries (i.e., Greece). The irony is, she doesn't represent some right-leaning grass-roots movement. She's one of the most vocal far-left members of Germany's already far-left party, Die Linke (aptly named, "The Left").

Who needs the Yorba when you've got the Chelsea?

2010-04-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

Some inspired lyrics from a stay at the Chelsea a while back. They were meant as one rap, but more rightfully should be two:

Bile colored techno-vomit svet socks,
listening to my techno on my beat box.
Pink and grey like some stinkey salmon locks,
Sweating like a stinky salmon grittle hox,
Bursting like a pious rapist with the pox.

Rubrics run counter to the ways of our man,
Cause I got a hard crush on a goat named Stan.
I'm sittin' in the Chelsea and I aint got a plan.
Smokin' out the window, wish it was a cubAN,
Pick a fight with Satan just because I'm a man.

Prizes to anyone who can come up with a continuance of either of these! (No...not really.)

In an age of IPods, IPads, and IPhones...

2010-03-26T23:03:00.000-07:00

I've decided to buck the trend and become less connected. Well, not really. If I had the money for an IPhone, I'd probably have one right now. Then again, if I hadn't taken up a new, anachronistic interest, I might have the money for an IPhone. That interest? Typewriters. Old ones--the type that have no correction key, no power plug, and require tremendous feats of strength to type a capital letter, because your pinky has to bear the entire weight of the typewriter's carriage as it is lifted up into a position where the capital letter will hit the page instead of the small one. These are my two latest acquisitions.

As similar as they may seem, with their cute, round buttons and arced arrays of hammer-like letters, there are great differences between them--something that I was surprised to find when the one of the left arrived today.

The machine on the left is a Kleinschreibmaschine, a portable typewriter that hails from Germany. It was built around 1940-41 by Wanderer-Werke, a company in eastern Germany that still exists and now builds a variety of products, such as high-end bicycles. The quality is impeccable. Any place that a corner could have been cut, it wasn't. There are spring-loaded bars in the back that click pleasingly into place when you set the tabs. There is a paper-guide to keep your paper from flapping in the wind and getting crinkled--a sure hazard for the types adventurous enough to need a typewriter small enough to be carried with them to wonderful and exotic places. There's even a postcard clip so you can type your cards in a neat fashion when you get there! The machine has a light touch, much lighter than you would expect, considering that it's only the power of your fingers that must snap those little levers into place against the page.

The German machine does have a distinct disadvantage, however. Much like a finely made BMW with all the bells and whistles, all that fanciness increases the opportunities for something to go wrong. And sure enough, when I got this typewriter, there were a few kinks to work out--which had me spending the better part of the evening finding out just how much I could pull apart on the thing before I got to the point of no return.

The American typewriter, on the other hand, worked perfectly straight from the box. It's of about the same era as the German machine, with Royal producing a number of models closely resembling this one from around the beginning of WWII up to the early 50s. The action is heavy, very heavy. It's necessary to practice a while to train your fingers to successfully dive-bomb onto the keys from a sufficient height to render a good, dark impression on the page. (This might also have something to do with the fact that the ribbon is probably 50 years old.) Overall, I'd say the Royal has maybe 1/3 of the individual parts as its German counterpart. What parts it does have are thick, sturdy, and unadorned. There's even no "1" key--you have to type "l".

Of course, both typewriters look cool, with the German machine having perhaps a slight edge in the style department. And as much as I like the feeling of pounding away on the keys of such machines, I think ultimately it's the looks that are going to make these things worth the investment. Face it, there's just little occasion for typewritten letters anymore...but my office still has a few empty spaces to fill with conversation pieces.

Exploring, exploring...

2010-02-21T19:12:00.000-08:00

This weekend, after visiting the weekly Chicago Stammtisch, I made it to Wrigleyville, the neighborhood that surrounds Wrigley Field. It's a very hip part of the city, and I anticipate many more visits in the future. My destination this time around was Bookworks, one of the many bookshops in the area that I've been trying to tick off of my very long list in an attempt to learn the ins-and-outs of the Chicago's book scene. As with a few other places I've visited so far, it was smaller than I anticipated. I suppose Chicago's high rents make the sprawling bookshops I'm familiar with from downstate Indiana unfeasible.

The selection was good, however, and I ended up walking home with at least one real treasure, called The Museum of Lost Wonder. It's not often you encounter a book that's erudite, creative, interactive, and just plain fun. The Museum of Lost Wonder ties together a variety of themes with an esoteric world view, using the processes of alchemy as way to remystify and enliven minds dulled by everyday humdrum. It mixes religion, science, and philosophy in a way that's amusing for those with extensive academic backgrounds and not intimidating for those without (paper cut-out models are a big plus). There is a website, as well, which generally patterns itself after the book. Both are well worth checking out.

Keeping Safe From Myself, or An Unsustainable Model of E-Security

2010-02-17T18:17:00.000-08:00

The last week has been an e-safety hell for me. It all started with a good-ol' car break-in, a real-world event that, while unfortunate and irritating, was not overly difficult to deal with. A few phone calls to the police and my car insurance, and I was driving home in a car with a replaced window and expecting a check in the mail for my stolen GPS.

No, the real problems started when I went to check up on my claim on my insurance company's website. I hadn't visited the website in over a year, and not only the layout, but the security features had changed. I couldn't remember my username, so it had to be e-mailed to me. Then, I couldn't remember my password; after all, it had been over a year! So that soon followed by e-mail. The next step, after I thought I had safely logged in, was to input a 4-digit PIN code that I had created years ago. Luckily, I got that on the second try. This little hiccup with my insurance was only the prequel to the problems to come, however.

A few days ago, I wanted to buy something on e-bay, but realized that my PayPal account information was old. The account information was old, because, as with my insurance, I hadn't used the system for quite some time. And, as with my insurance, I no longer remembered my exact username or password. So, I ended up facing a row of security questions that I should know the answer to--that I did know the answer to, but because my answers were not typed exactly as I had originally typed them (god knows when), they were, alas, unacceptable. Who is PayPal to tell me that I don't know the name of my childhood best friend? Eventually, I made it through.

A little later, I got a letter from my credit card company, telling me about suspicious activity on one of my accounts. In order to even talk to the operator about my account, I was subjected to interrogation: What is your e-mail? What is your phone company? Do you have any automatic debits taken monthly on your account? I must have got a few of these wrong--damn! I guess that video store membership is automatically debited from my credit!--because I was soon put on hold and subjected to interrogation anew. At the end of this nightmare, the operator revealed that a review of my account patterns showed suspicious activity. This suspicious activity? My e-bay purchase and some credits I bought with Skype. Funny, I never got an alert when I used my ATM card IN AFRICA.

The point of this rant is that our present method for dealing with e-security--adding layer after layer of passwords of required, increasing complexity, backed by a series of arcane personal questions for the forgetful among us--is simply unsustainable. If you've got bank accounts, credit cards, insurance, online utility bills, student loans, and other sundry accounts with e-services and vendors like Skype, PayPal, et. al., it is simply impractical, if not impossible to keep track of all the passwords and usernames in your head. This is especially the case when many online accounts require various types of numbers and characters and symbols and cases and other voodoo to be included in usernames and passwords. Writing them down in a secret little book is exactly what you're not supposed to do.

There's got to be a better way. Biometrics may be an answer. Some computers already have fingerprint pads or more advanced forms of security. But it wouldn't surprise me at all to see a return to face-to-face transactions, perhaps in a modified form to take advantage of the possibilities technology has opened for us. The trust that's built in such face-to-face dealings simply can't be replaced by a series of passwords, and strains the memory a hell of a lot less.

Everybody's a Lawyer...

2010-02-01T17:12:00.000-08:00

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in the mind of many people as to what it means to practice law and what lawyers can and cannot achieve. In medicine, people seem to understand that permanent illness, disability or even death is sometimes unavoidable. The message is: the doctors will fight until the last minute, but, heh, sometimes shit happens and the battle gets lost. People more or less understand that when natural forces are at play, nature is going to win eventually, regardless of the human effort put in to prevent it.

This understanding does not extend to the law. Since law is man-made, and the practice of law is primarily one of human interaction, many people seem to have the idea that anything is possible--as long as the lawyer fights hard enough for the client. TV has done nothing but propagate this myth. And when people see laws getting changed or overturned in the higher courts, it further reinforces this attitude.

Of course, most misunderstandings grow from a kernel of truth, and it is very true that the laws of man, at least at their higher levels, can sometimes be much more manipulable than the laws of nature. But from a practical perspective, law is a game of rules that must be adhered to. Having a lawyer adept at manipulating those rules is not the same as having a miracle worker who can simply rewrite them at will in the interests of the client.

To make things worse, many people who come to lawyers go with the unreasonable expectation that they can set all the terms of the representation, make every decision every step of the way, and still be assured of a favorable outcome to their case. After all, the lawyer is just there to carry out the will of the client, right? To cut a path through the legal jungle so the client's interests can roll right through?

Absolutely wrong.

To think in such a way is to think that you could hire a chess master to play a game for you and still expect him to win, even though you demand to tell him all the right moves.

Sometimes there is no happy end to a case. Sometimes rules are rules, limits are limits, and the options to play within them are quickly exhausted. And there's no overturning the chess board--that generally means disbarment. Such cases are made even worse for lawyers when they are forced to not only deal with their own disappointment at not bringing matters to a favorable conclusion, but angry clients who refuse to accept reality, and instead choose to become irate, placing blame wherever they can.

Needless to say, I had a difficult day.

Some more dark humor

2010-01-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

My friend Jana recently told be about this band. English cabaret that draws on some dark German motifs. This particular song is an English adaptation from one of many rather gruesome tales in the series of instructional German children's stories known as Struwwelpeter.

Musical geek humor from the 60s

2010-01-12T19:45:00.000-08:00

Though I first heard a version of his work in German, the original really does it best. Tom Lehrer is a master in dark, erudite humor of the sort not often encountered today:

There's plenty more on YouTube, which I would highly recommend.

Turning to the dark side of geek...

2010-01-08T22:14:00.000-08:00

but only because somebody pissed me off.

Heretofore, I've had no desire to start a Wikipedia account. I certainly appreciate the site and those who write for it, but never before have I encountered material on Wikipedia that's just one-sided and hateful. Maybe that's because I don't read the sites on currently controversial figures a lot.

Today, however, I felt absolutely compelled to change an article about one of my former law professors whom I rather respect. It seems if a person is outspoken and holds controversial political opinions, some people will use any forum they can find to denigrate them and express their own opposing views.

This is, quite simply, utterly offensive and totally wrong.

Wasting more time on Wikipedia...

2010-01-02T21:40:00.000-08:00

After an unexpected trip to the antique shops in Crown Point today, I came home with a paperback copy of Carl Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. Though I can't really comment yet on its contents, as I've only put a slight dent in the first chapter, I have high expectations: It's one of the few academic books I've ever encountered that lives up to the literary expectations of my inner child. Pictures, pictures, and more pictures (and interesting ones at that).

In the introductory chapter, Jung seems to be setting up a paradigm for understanding religion's role in the psyche that is very close to what (little) I remember from William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. That is, saying religion is "all in your head" is not necessarily disparaging; rather, it may be the necessary mode of divine operation, even if there were an objectively existing deity outside the human mind.

Anyway, the connection with James led me to digging around on Wikipedia for a refresher on Pragmatism, the philosophy he's most known for. Some more link jumping found me at the page on Richard Rorty, which yielded this interesting quote on liberal college professors:

It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.

– ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.

And to continue with the tangential connection of themes in this post, I might mention that I recently went to Borders and observed someone else playing with Nazi references: Glenn Beck. His new book, Arguing with Idiots, shows him in a Nazi-like uniform with a smug and somewhat twisted look on his face that I suppose he thinks is funny. Honestly, I couldn't help but see some irony in the fact that he was dressed as a Nazi, considering the similarity between his extremely low-brow, populist sort of propaganda and that used by the Nazis. It's a proven and effective formula, unfortunately. I truly wish at some point in Beck's life he'd found himself under the sort of benevolent Herrschaft mentioned above. As Charlie Brown would say, (sigh).

"The Intellectual Revolt" ... We need one of those!

2009-12-26T23:55:00.000-08:00

I recently bought ten of the eleven books in Will Durant's The Story of Civilization, and I've been picking through them, a chapter here, one there, based on my historical-interest-of-the-moment. One of the things about the series I find truly great is the way Durant intersperses his historical narrative with fitting personal observations that not only ring true, but are also simply beautifully written. Here's an example from the beginning of his chapter, "The Intellectual Revolt" in the volume on the Renaissance:

In every age and nation civilization is the product, priviledge, and responsibility of a minority. The historian acquainted with the pervasive pertinacity of nonsense reconciles himself to a glorious future for superstition; he does not expect perfect states to arise out of imperfect men; he perceives that only a small proportion of any generation can be so freed from economic harassments as to have leisure and energy to think their own thoughts instead of those of their forebears or their environment; and he learns to rejoice if he can find in each period a few men and women who have lifted themselves, by the bootstraps of their brains, or by some boon of birth or circumstance, out of superstition, occultism, and credulity to an informed and friendly intelligence conscious of its infinite ignorance.

Well said, no?

Tis the season...

2009-12-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

to go on frantic, last-minute searches for Christmas cards and affordable gifts. Today, this necessitated a trip to Hallmark, one of my least favorite stores. Why, you might ask?

Somewhat because of the quality of most of the brand's cards--the paper's not all that nice. But mostly because of the cards' content. Hallmark has pre-printed cards for almost every occasion, further classified by the possible senders and recipients. Thus, finding an appropriate Christmas card means wading through category after category of pre-printed, supposedly heart-felt thoughts, trying to find the one that might be applicable to your situation.

I wanted to spend less than 5 minutes in that shop today, and I ended up there for almost thirty. I still didn't find what I was looking for. Upon asking if they carried any cards that were just blank, I was shocked to hear they did not. So, it's not like Hallmark is simply providing a service for the inarticulate card-writers among us. No, the store is absolutely certain it can provide the right words for all occasions, for all customers.

Simply unbelievable.

For a more tasteful alternative, try Crane's. They respect their customers enough to give them the option of making their heart-felt holiday greetings their own.

The old is the new...and vice versa

2009-12-18T20:43:00.000-08:00

Since I'm spending most of my time now learning to be a crack lawyer, I haven't posted in a while. But this juxtaposition was too good to pass up:

Then check out:

This video from Lady Gaga.

(which seems, unfortunately, unembeddable--probably due to some ridiculous copyright nonsense...)

One of the coolest parts of my new job

2009-09-18T19:20:00.000-07:00

is the elevator. It's manual! You can find an article about it, here, in the Northwest Indiana Times, where I pilfered the pics, as well.

More Indie Music Blogging

2009-08-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

The Kills are now my new favorite band. Plenty of vids on YouTube, here's one of the best, in my humble opinion:

If you don't love them...I'm sorry. Something might be wrong with you.

Why we need health care reform...

2009-08-19T20:44:00.001-07:00

The Perry Bible Fellowship shows why health care reform is so necessary:

Go to Church!

2009-08-18T19:33:00.001-07:00

Well, if you live there, that is.

As an undergraduate, I had some pretty eccentric friends. Their friends were often even more eccentric. Some of these happened to live in an abandoned church for a while, an area that they were preparing to use as a creative space--mostly to host local rock concerts. I'm not sure it ever made it to that point. When I saw it, parts of the reception hall had been segmented into living space using cellophane walls, and the basement had been turned into a sort of makeshift boxing ring. The people I knew, who were legitimately renting the church from its owners, moved in to find this basement full of drug paraphernalia and traces of some very weird and sinister-looking pseudo-satanic cult idols and sacraments. (Jesus had LEFT the building...!)

The wonderful thing about this church they lived was the abundance of space and unique spaces. All of those nooks and crannies that serve some sort of boring, practical role in any institutional building suddenly become mysterious and somehow delightful once the imagination is given free reign to use these spaces as it will. How do you come to terms with the fact that your house includes a passage to a bell tower, for example?

For a long time, I've been chewing on the idea of having a space like that for myself one day. Here are some great examples of people who already do:

A propos High-Mach personalities

2009-08-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

The following quote, relayed from an interview on the Jim Lehrer NewsHour via the NYTimes Opinionator, seemed strikingly appropriate, given my last post:

You really do think about it institutionally; this is your job, and to some extent you benefit from having a job to do at a moment like this. You have things that you have to make happen. And you don’t have time for the emotional reaction that might otherwise occur if somebody was just sitting there watching these events unfold and had no responsibilities.

This is, of course, from former Vice-President Dick Cheney. To be fair, I'm not sure if he exactly falls within the Machiavellian prototype, considering that Machiavellians, at least the type discussed in Oakley's book, are generally characterized by behavior that is self-serving over ideologically consistent. Still...

"High-Mach" is not a description from Top Gun

2009-08-14T07:50:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading Barbara Oakley's book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, in which she takes up the task of examining the genetic basis for certain types of nasty behavior. The book primarily focuses on behavior that could be considered Machiavellian, that is, manipulative and self-serving with a seeming disregard for any harm caused to others. Dr. Oakley examines in particular the behavior of individuals like Slobodon Milosovic and Adolf Hitler, making the case that modern neuroscience can go a long way toward explaining the seeming paradox of intelligent, high-functioning people whose behavior in many ways is comparable to psychopaths and others with mental problems that have long-since sent them to an institute. In a way, it's the old nature/nurture theme taken up anew, with a heavy emphasis on the fact that personalities, even in their seemingly infinite complexity, can largely be traced to the physical mechanics of the brain, i.e., the genes that led to the brain being the way it is. Nurture, or environment, then plays its role by affecting how many of our genetic predispositions end up being expressed. I'm not finished yet, so I won't offer any grand critique of her work, but so far, I think it merits a read.

Anyway, last night, I found a passage in her book particularly striking, given a conversation that took place during a class in my first or second year of law school. A lively argument erupted when the professor began talking about a well-used hypothetical situation: A train is rumbling down the tracks. It cannot stop. There is a fork in the track. On one side is a group of, say, four people, who will be smashed if nothing is done. You are watching from somewhere above all of this, maybe on an overpass. There is a switch that would safely put the train on another course, but you can't reach it. The only way to reach it and save the people would be to toss one of your fellow observers on the overpass down onto the switch. What do you do?

The obvious moral difficulty here is the question of sacrificing one life to save four. There were plenty of law students willing to take up either side of the argument, but throughout the debate, I felt something was deeply wrong with both sides. Here is Dr. Oakley on a similar hypothetical:

Subtle brain damage has also been affiliated with odd "end justifies the means" behavior. Logically, it might seems rational, for example, to push a hefty man into the train's path to slow a train and save the lives of people farther down the tracks--but normal individuals just can't bring themselves to even think about doing it. Those with damage to their frontal lobes, on the other hand, can easily imagine pushing the man in front of a train to impede its motion and thus save other people's lives.... Brain-damaged individuals, it seems, focus primarily on the consequences, ignoring whatever nasty means might be involved. it may well be that subtly miswired or damaged neural circuits lie behind some of the can't-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-eggs type of behavior seen in dictators and their supporters as they justify the killing of thousands, or even millions, to further their goals.

My fellow law students were quite willing to think about throwing someone into the tracks. Indeed, they were willing to positively advocate it. Throughout the argument, I was stunned that no one even mentioned what I considered to be the only truly moral option, if not a moral imperative: throw yourself onto the tracks (or the switch, whatever). I'm pleased to find someone else who indicates that the calloused nature of such discussions is rather unnatural and perhaps more than a bit twisted.

"The Two Faces of Ghana"

2009-08-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

After reading Laban Hill's recent article in the NY Times, "The Two Faces of Ghana," I should be pining for the opportunity to book my flight. Hill describes the vibrancy of Ghanaian markets, in which you can buy oh-so-fresh fruits and an assortment of other tasty treats from street vendors. He talks of the friendliness and openness of the Ghanaians, always shouting a welcome in their native tongue or giving a friendly hail to obviously foreign visitors (read, white people). He tells about his moving trip to the Cape Coast Castle, the last stop for many slaves before being shipped to the new world. And he praises the wildlife of Ghana's parks and the country's affordable and idyllic resorts. The place sounds like paradise!

So why haven't I bought my ticket? Mostly because I know that Hill's "Two Faces of Ghana" forgot to talk about the second face. What he says about Ghana is mostly true--for a Westerner who can afford to seclude himself in air-conditioned resort hotels by the beach and drive rental cars all over the country. Ghana is fabulous for anyone who can float above the reality of daily life in Africa. But people who have experienced Ghana on the cheap know that the second face of Ghana is very real and sometimes quite ugly.

Ghanaian markets are filled with dirty tin shacks whose merchants peddle products rejected 15 years ago from Western markets. The are often clustered tightly in large dirt pits with filth-strewn paths that dead end into spaces filled with rotted smoked fish and swarms of flies. One has to be careful to avoid falling, or being pushed, into the open sewers that run along the surrounding streets. The street food is sometimes good, but just as often it will necessitate an emergency trip to the outhouse, which, if you're lucky will be lighted--but that doesn't keep the two inch cockroaches from congregating just below the seat.

Some of the restaurants are great. Most, however, are not. It's fairly typical to wait between one and two hours to get an order, and then it might not be exactly what you expected. I remember one time in particular arriving at a Lonely Planet-listed restaurant in a famished state only to wait over an hour for a plate full of meat that was literally nothing but charred fat and bones.

The Ghanaians are mostly friendly, and many of them genuinely like Americans. But there's also a sizable number of them who view any white person with a good deal of contempt (for obvious reasons), which is testified to by the fact that the word obruni, taken by Hill as a friendly greeting, can also be spoken through clenched teeth in a quite aggressive manner. (The term itself is somewhat ambiguous, sometimes being translated as "foreigner" and sometimes specifically as "white man.") Further, it's not hard to sour on the supposed friendliness of the Ghanaians after you've been charged three times the normal taxi fare for the tenth time or been shoved off a packed bus after waiting twenty minutes in 100 degree heat by a guy who just got there. Needless to say, the occasional machete-mugging does nothing to establish good rapport.

I was not moved nearly as much as Mr. Hill upon visiting the Cape Coast Castle. Despite the legitimate tragedy surrounding the place, I couldn't get out of my head the thought, "If the Ghanaians could do it again, they would." That's right--the Ghanaians. As much as many today would like to paint the slave trade as a one-sided horror, the fact is that Ghanaians themselves were complicit in the capture and sale of their own countrymen. And my observation of numerous acts of sheer cruelty and opportunistic behavior directed at one-another by Ghanaians left me with serious doubts about the degree of moral understanding that has penetrated the culture to this day. (Mind you, this is not a critique of Ghanaians as people, but more an observation of the deleterious cultural effects of underdevelopment.) The colorful fishing boats that Mr. Hill spies from the beach have been featured in Western publications, due to the brutality of boatmasters and the de facto indentured servitude of children as young as five who work long hours under dangerous conditions in the boats.

Ghana presents, as well, the obvious disadvantages of living in the tropics, like the tremendous heat, abundant insects, and the very real risk of disease.

So should you buy the plain ticket? Yes and no. I would recommend travel to Ghana for the truly adventurous and those who are looking to learn some hard lessons about life in less-advantaged countries. I would not recommend it for the casual tourist. I am glad I went there. I believe I benefited immensely from the experience. However, Mr. Hill's portrayal of the country borders on the absurd. His obvious affinity for black/African culture has led him to write an article that portrays only half of the truth, and that's a real shame.

Just the facts, please.

2009-08-07T22:11:00.000-07:00

Although I haven't had a great deal of time to peruse the site, politifact.com looks like a winner. It appeals to my increasing frustration with partisan nonsense from both sides of the political spectrum. And how can you not love a site that brands the most egregious instances of political story-telling with the label "pants on fire"?

Indie Rock and Machine Guns

2009-07-29T22:37:00.000-07:00

Does it get much better than this?
(Ok, it probably does, but this is cool, nonetheless...)

Gruesome antiquated felony of the day!

2009-07-24T19:48:00.000-07:00

MAYHEM

Barbri (the bar prep course for all you non-lawyers out there) provides:

At common law, the felony of mayhem required either dismemberment or disablement of a bodily part.

One of many definitions from dictionary.com:

mayhem
1472, from Anglo-Fr. maihem (13c.), from O.Fr. mahaigne "injury," related to mahaignier "to maim" (see maim). Originally, in law, the crime of maiming a person to make him less able to defend himself or annoy his adversary.

Originality at your own peril!

2009-07-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's tried writing an article for a law journal knows that they like it when you cite as many other sources as possible. In fact, there tend to be so many citations/footnotes in law review articles, I'm often shocked when I read something by a normal academic (non-law, that is) and only find one or two citations per page. The standard in legal research seems to be one or more citations for every sentence you write, with the caveat that the acceptable number of citations is inversely proportional to the eminence of the author.

With that in mind, I was very amused upon finding this bit from a page on Wikipedia's standards for writing articles called "No original research":

Citing sources and avoiding original research are inextricably linked. To demonstrate that you are not presenting original research, you must cite reliable sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and that directly support the information as it is presented.

Damn. And I thought the thousands of law journal articles written each year were breaking new ground...

You be the judge

2009-07-16T17:23:00.000-07:00

So, I was doing some Wikipedia-hopping today with a judicial flavor, influenced in part by the Sotomayor hearings. What I found is pretty striking. (No, it's got nothing to do with the hearings, sorry. You can hear plenty about those elsewhere.)

This is the German Federal Constitutional Court:

Pretty good looking bunch, no? Actually, I find the outfits pretty absurd. Here's ours:

Except for Ginsburg's doily, I don't think they look all that silly. Accordingly, here's our Supreme Court building:

I rather like the building. It's imposing, respectable, classic. Now here's Germany's:

Would somebody mind telling me what happened there?

(Okay, I admit, it's no surprise. Germany is filled with this kind of crappy post-war architecture. Have a look at Regensburg University, for example. But the Constitutional Court?!? It's a bit much.)

One of the best speeches I've heard in a while

2009-07-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

I suppose it should come as no surprise in watching the Sotomayor hearings that Republicans persist in pushing the artificial dichotomy between "judicial activism" and sticking to the law as written. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave a great response to this ridiculousness yesterday in his opening statements at the confirmation. They are not only forceful, but eloquent, a welcome relief from today's political shouting-matches. Check it out.

Bar study diversions: Quote of the Day

2009-07-03T19:23:00.000-07:00

I'm currently trying to find the time to read a book-club edition of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958). I picked it up at a new book store in town (Marion, that is), called "Unorganized Books." It's an interesting concept, really. All the books are, well, unorganized. Aside from vague categories like fiction/non-fiction, you're on your own. One bookshelf contains nothing but yellow books. The best part, though, is that all paperbacks are $1 and hardbacks $2. So I stocked up.

Anyway, Galbraith quotes another professor, Frank W. Taussig, who was evidently a man of some prominence at Harvard in the early 20th century, from his book Principles of Economics. It's quite elegant, I think:

No stretch of psychological analysis concerning the spur of ambition, the spice of constant emulation, the staleness and flatness of uniformity, can prevail against the universal conviction that the maximum of human happiness is not promoted by great, glaring, permanent inequality.

The Blind Leading the Blind

2009-06-25T16:44:00.000-07:00

This is about the most wrong-headed thing I can image: Pastor Urges Flock to Bring Their Guns to Church. I have to calm down a bit before I can even write. I've already deleted about two paragraphs of incensed ranting, because my better judgment tells me that's not the kind of stuff I want to publish to the world (or all two people who actually read this).

Judgment is the key ingredient that's lacking in our little pistol-packing parish. It's one thing to be pro-gun as a policy issue. But what's going on here clearly has nothing to do with the kind of rational thinking that goes into (or should go into) making policy decisions. No one ever stopped to consider whether this was a good idea or not--that is, what the consequences might be if there were a precedent of toting your gun to church. That's pretty clear when you consider that the church got dropped from their insurance policy. Insurance men are no fools. They're all about numbers, probabilities, and avoiding bad outcomes.

No, what we have here is a congregation riding on a swell of emotions. And they are the exact same emotions behind any number of socially destructive movements. Foremost among these is a sense of selfish entitlement. It's OUR right to have guns wherever WE please. No one can take OUR guns from US. Unfortunately, these people have a rather ambiguous amendment to the U.S. Constitution that they can hang their hats on. A badly interpreted Constitution, like a badly interpreted Bible, can provide a transcendent foundation to arguments that can't hold up to logic or rational scrutiny. So we'll never be able to trace this sort of rabid gun advocacy to its pathetic psychological roots. How convenient.

At the end of the day, however, the blunt contradiction of carrying an instrument with the sole purpose of killing into the house of a god who admonished his followers to turn the other cheek should confirm the utter foolishness of these people.

New Favorite Animal

2009-06-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

I officially have a new favorite animal. Heretofore, it was the lovable sloth.

Now, don't get me wrong. I've never run afoul of a sloth. It's just that something better has come along. That something is the long-beaked enchidna.

The NY Times has a good article about them here. One of the more fascinating quotes:

Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.

WTF?

Just Sad

2009-06-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

My family has had scooters for far longer than I've been around. The newest is a bright red Vespa. It's small, zippy, and fun to ride. It's also got a few improvements over the older models, like an automatic transmission, no foot pedal, and a built-in helmet compartment under the seat. About that compartment... Here's what it looks like with the seat up.

Now, take a closer look. I wish I could say that this warning was put on in anticipation of a problem instead of as a result of one. But I doubt it.

The Sean Hannity Book of Tricks

2009-06-06T14:18:00.000-07:00

You too can be a famous Fox commentator. Just follow these easy steps. And if you need to supplement them, throw in some of these beauties.

The website these come from, Butterflies and Wheels, is critical, smart, and altogether excellent. I'd highly recommend it.

Miscellanea

2009-05-19T22:10:00.000-07:00

Aside from the learned trades that have always required a certain level of university education (doctor, lawyer, priest, academic), most trades in the past educated their practitioners in-house. Numerous jobs had no degree denoting specialization in their specific areas, because the only way to gain the needed skills was to work on the job itself. Nowadays, the tables have turned, and there is a degree for almost every job specialization out there, without which, it is extremely difficult to get one's foot in the door.

I'm sure this proliferation of degrees was driven mainly by market forces, that is, every job seeker trying to differentiate himself from others with added qualifications. The problem is, it's had a perhaps unforeseen effect on the job-training market. That is, the financial burden of training employees has shifted from the employer to the employee. Once the burden was solidly established, it was only a matter of time before universities began reaping the financial benefits of a system in which job-seeking students would go to any means to secure themselves a position. Whereas employee training was once directly linked to the economic realities of the firm, it now became only indirectly connected to economic realities, with student loan providers acting as mediators in the process, passing the risk of education costs seamlessly to students while allowing employers to cherry pick the best trained performers in each field. This has led to a surplus of educated workers in some fields, while other, less-desirable or glamorous fields face shortages.

I think this redistribution of educational burdens is unjust. There are a number of ways it could be corrected, but, so far, I haven’t heard of any being seriously considered. One, for example, could be an educational tax on certain businesses. If a business wants skilled workers, it should be willing to pay for them. The levied tax could then be given to specific university programs in the field from which the particular business hires. Another, perhaps simpler way of shifting back the burden might be mandatory student loan repayment programs for employers.

I am less in favor of the student loan repayment option, because it allows university spending to continue running rampant, and it would surely be unfair to the business community to force repayment of loans accrued in large part because of excessive university spending. Why not cap university spending at a level that could be sustained by business contributions? This would return semi-direct market controls to the education arena, and hopefully mitigate today’s education bubble.

And now for something completely different…

At what level should a degree be borne as a title? Looking through numerous policy documents earlier today, I noticed a lot of authors of papers who were listing their names as “John Doe, MA” or whatever. Traditionally, MDs and PhDs have always listed their degrees after their names. Similarly, lawyers have used the title “esquire.” But is a masters degree really worthy of such recognition? Especially in today’s world, in which so many people hold graduate degrees?

Further…

Today on ZDF, a public German television station, one daily news anchor referred to the United States’ proposed new auto fuel economy and emissions standards as “eher bescheiden,” or roughly “rather modest.” I think this is about right. They may be groundbreaking for the US, but this only shows how far we’ve lagged behind other highly developed nations in such standards. The commentator ended his report, saying, “America is giving up its gas guzzlers. What’s next, America giving up its guns?” (my translation).

And finally…

My quote for the day, from a New Yorker article entitled “Jesus Laughed,” discussing the nature of unorthodox Gospels found in recent years: "Any orthodoxy is the snapshot of the moment."

I wish I understood this as a kid

2009-05-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

It's nice when you get something right.

2009-05-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, the results of one longitudinal study cannot prove my infinite wisdom. But I was rather happy to find one researcher who found that basically what I said in one of my older posts was true: personality types largely correspond to political preferences. The Atlantic reports on the results of a study of a number of Harvard grads who were meticulously tracked over the years in an effort to determine what sort of people end up happy and successful. One finding:

He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).

Nobody says it quite like Herr Mann

2009-05-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

Though I've studied German for god knows how long, I still can't read Thomas Mann in his native language. But that's Okay; there are some damned good English translations out there. And I'm quite glad of that. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to appreciate truly, uh, unique pieces of writing like the excerpt below, from Mann's Doctor Faustus, in which he describes the narrator's marriage (in first person):

Quite early, soon after my appointment at Kaisersaschern, I married: need for regularity and desire for a proper establishment in life led me to the step. Helene, born Oelhafen, my excellent wife, who still accompanies my declining years, was the daughter of an older colleauge at Zwickau in Saxony. At the risk of making the reader smile I will confess that the Christian name of the budding girl, Helene, those beloved syllables, played not the least considerable role in my choice. Such a name means a consecration, to its pure enchantment one cannot fail to respond, even though the outward appearance of the bearer correspond to its lofty claims only to a modest middle-class extent and even that but for a time, since the charms of youth are fleeting.

Ah, truer words of star-struck love and lasting dedication were never spoken.

People are just more interesting...

2009-05-03T21:51:00.000-07:00

than, well, the substance of the numerous things that might cause any of them to become well known in the first place.

The recent news of Justice Souter's resignation is a great example. I'm betting that, aside from lawyers and a few people who wanted to eminent domain his house a couple years back, hardly anybody in the country knew or cared a bit about Justice Souter before he decided to retire. He was one of many influential people who do complex, important things that all of us know we should care deeply about, but only very few of us can muster the intellectual stamina to actually deal with. Even after law school, I can't claim that tracking individual justices' legal philosophies and voting records is something I enjoy doing. But that's the substance of law; deep in those numerous opinions is where you'll find the stuff that really counts.

I have become much more interested in Souter, however, since The New York Times and other media outlets started publishing so much about him personally--how he lives in an old, ramshackle house filled with books, eats apples whole for lunch, tends to drive old cars, and disdains Washington. That's an interesting character for you, legal opinions be damned.

While looking for information on Souter today, I came across a nice excerpt about him from a book about the Supreme Court Justices, called Secret Lives of the Supreme Court. The same web page on which I found this information linked to another book on Amazon, called Secret Lives of Great Authors. Even though I've only read one book and a short story by Hemingway (yes, this is somewhat of an embarrassment for a former English major), I found myself craving the juicy tidbits about his life that were doubtless contained in this book. I don't even remember what I've read by Lord Byron, but how can one not wish to read about him after he's called a "man-slut" on the cover of a book?

This desire to read about the trysts of a long-dead author whose work holds no particular appeal to me is, alas, a shining example of personality overshadowing substance. And though I rail against such personality fixations when they cause the easily distracted to miss the issue entirely in the argument-of-the-day, I have to admit, people are just more interesting than all that other stuff.

Nice lines

2009-04-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

I've always like Peugeots. I think they've got a good set of designers for both their full size sedans and compacts. Very sleek. They might now take the prize for best-designed fan-wear.

The neglected art of diplomacy

2009-04-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading the book Diplomat by Charles Thayer. It's a 50 year-old account of how U.S. diplomacy is done, and although a lot has changed since it was published, a lot hasn't. The book starts with the story of the events surrounding the 1958 rebellion in Lebanon, told from the perspective of an embassy insider.

Things were getting bad in Lebanon, and the country's president wanted U.S. troop support to help quell the uprising. At some point this was deemed prudent, and the 6th Fleet was called in. At the last minute, however, after consulting with the head Lebanese general, who thought a U.S. troop presence might cause his own army to defect, the U.S. ambassador decided it might be best to wait a bit before sending in the cavalry. Unfortunatley for him, by this point, the Navy has decided it no longer needed to stay in touch. While discussing the seemingly intentional lack of communication between the U.S. Navy and embassy personnel, the author notes:

In other nations which have been warring with each other for centuries longer than the United States, the military has long since learned that war is an extension of diplomacy by other means. Its object is political, from which it follows that military operations are guided primarily by political considerations.

As World War II demonstrated, however, the fallacious doctrine has grown up among American military leaders that the primary objective of war is military victory, preferably total military victory. After that has been accomplished the diplomats can pick up the pieces and do whatever they please with them. But while military operations are taking place diplomats should get out of the way lest they get run over by a soldier in a tank or a general in a staff car.

The events of July 15 [1958] demonstrated that, despite the lessons of the National War College, the fallacy had not yet been entirely eradicated from the American military mind.

Unfortunatley, fifty years later, this kind of thinking is still going strong, especially amongst the large body of those who can't seem to understand that there might be some strategic thinking going on behind Barack Obama's recent conciliatory behavior toward other countries.

Keeping us all safe.

2009-04-25T19:29:00.000-07:00

First, a disclaimer. I'm interning at Indiana Homeland Security right now. I enjoy it. There are a lot of people there with a genuine concern for keeping us all safe. I'm sure it's the same at the federal level.

BUT, you have to admit, the homeland security concept can go a bit far. In Britain, for example, they've installed closed-circuit television cameras all over. They've also started a billboard campaign. One enterprising blogger has created a way to create your own terror billboards, which has spawned a photo group on Flickr with some rather amusing (and some somewhat sobering) results. (The first one is real.)

It's a cruel world we live in

2009-04-24T21:28:00.001-07:00

We Just Don't Care Anymore!

2009-04-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

I was going through a stack of my parents old records today, and I inadvertently put a pretty nice gouge in my mom's Johnny Cash with one of the metal edges of my watch. That side of the record probably won't play right ever again. It was pretty damned easy to do. All I had to do was hold the record in the wrong way, and...oops...ruined.

This got me thinking; in the past, people had to be a hell of a lot more careful, skillful even, just to carry out basic, everyday activities. Record players are a good example. Drop the record on a hard floor, and it's ruined. Bump the player while it's going, and the needle skips. It's ruined. Try to start the thing the wrong way, and the needle forges a brave new trail across the record. It's ruined. Today: don't drop the IPod on cement or run over it with the car, and you'll probably be OK. Even just a few years back I remember getting excited about shock resistance in CD players...

Or how about shaving? I bought a straight razor once, a good one. But I couldn't figure out how to sharpen the thing correctly. You see, you need a strop, preferably one with two sides, one canvas and one leather. You have to use various types of sharpening paste on the strop. You have to know how to hold the razor as you strop it. Then you have to figure out how to use the thing without cutting your throat. All of this used to be common knowledge. No more. I now use an electric razor that probably couldn't harm a three year old yielding it with malicious intent.

Clocks and watches? You used to have to wind them. First with a key or by pulling the weights back up. Then by twisting the crown on your watch. Not today. Wait and watch blissfully for five years as the things run flawlessly until their batteries die. A 100-year-old pocket watch I bought a few months ago showed intricate scratchings on the inner case to mark repairs that had been made. But who repairs small consumer goods like that anymore when you can get a new one at Walmart for $20?

There are numerous other examples: the ease of driving a car vs. the difficulty of learning horse riding; writing with a ball point pen (or even a keyboard) vs. learning to write with a fountain pen or dip pen, etc. In every case, skill and care is replaced by ease and convenience.

I'm not saying this is all bad. It saves time and allows us to do more, much, much more in a day. But it also encourages an attitude that everything's disposable, easy, trivial. Nothing is worth caring for or maybe even about. That's just too bad.

Great man, not so great Handschrift

2009-04-19T22:22:00.000-07:00

The Kafka Project offers an opportunity to see some original pages from Kafka's manuscript for The Trial. Pretty cool, but not exactly legible.

Do the Mario!

2009-03-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about the degree to which modern technology and media have left us with so many niche products that there's little common culture remaining. In television, this is particularly true. With hundreds of channels to satisfy just as many tastes, what's the chance that you'll be able to get together with three coworkers and all discuss the same popular television show that you saw last night? It's much more probable that one of your coworkers spent the night watching USA, another FOX, another Showtime, and still others AMC or something quite weird like Chiller (a new horror channel that shows a lot of ghost shows that I find particularly addictive). But I think the abundance of diverse media carries over into other areas, as well. Like video games. I was reminded of a particularly strong strain of common culture amongst those whose formative years were in the late 80s and early 90s when I saw this pic on FFFound!:
I mean, for god's sake, someone embroidered this! And I can't help but remember how excited my roommates and I got a few years back when one of us picked up an original NES.

Maybe a school teacher could point out a few bits of strongly shared culture that kids are growing up with today, but when I look around, I can't find anything as culturally pervasive as Mario Brothers...

Adam Smith was an OK guy

2009-03-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

I can't claim to have spent much (if any) time perusing the works of Adam Smith. Sorry, it's just not where I look for enlightenment. But Amartya Sen has. In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, he has this to say about many of the folks who claim to be Smith's ardent disciples:

Smith called the promoters of excessive risk in search of profits "prodigals and projectors"—which is quite a good description of issuers of subprime mortgages over the past few years. Discussing laws against usury, for example, Smith wanted state regulation to protect citizens from the "prodigals and projectors" who promoted unsound loans:

A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it.^[4]

The implicit faith in the ability of the market economy to correct itself, which is largely responsible for the removal of established regulations in the United States, tended to ignore the activities of prodigals and projectors in a way that would have shocked Adam Smith.

Vox Populi

2009-03-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

"The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power."

Something that Rush Limbaugh said yesterday? No, just a quote from Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which he describes the beliefs of right-wing populists of the day.

Not much changes.

Hofstadter's essay is a good commentary on populist tendencies in American politics, well worth reading.

Quote of the...uh...Indeterminate Time Period

2009-03-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

The immense majority either never examine the opinions they have inherited, or examine them so completely under the dominating influence of the principle of education that whatever may have been the doctrines they have been taught, they conclude that they are so unquestionably true, that nothing but a judicial blindness can cause their rejection. Of the few who have obtained a glimpse of higher things, a large proportion cannot endure a conflict to which old associations and, above all, the old doctrine of the guilt of error, lend such a peculiar bitterness; they stifle the voice of reason, they turn away from the path of knowledge, they purchase peace at the expense of truth. This is, indeed, in our day the most fatal of obstacles to enquiry.

From William Lecky's History of Rationalism, 1865.

Smart Music

2009-03-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker has a blurb up on its website about some research by a CalTech student linking musical taste to smarts. Specifically, he looked at self-reported musical preferences on Facebook and SAT scores. Dubious science and all, I can't say I'm unhappy with the results: It turns out that alternative rock and classical music fans tend to be smarter than R&B fans. Who'da thunk it?

You can see the results of his study here, complete with fun, color-coded charts. Perhaps even more interesting is his other site, "Booksthatmakeyoudumb," which indicates that maybe not all bibliophiles are created equal.

If I had a dime...

2009-03-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

...for all of the articles that have come out since the economy went sour on the theme of changing America's culture from one of debt-laden, frenzied, material excess to one of sober and responsible prosperity, well, I would have achieved my own version of the "American Dream" by now.

Nonetheless, Vanity Fair has a good article this month on the changing meaning of the American Dream, with a very nice ending:

[...] The American Dream should require hard work, but it should not require 80-hour workweeks and parents who never see their kids from across the dinner table. The American Dream should entail a first-rate education for every child, but not an education that leaves no extra time for the actual enjoyment of childhood. The American Dream should accommodate the goal of home ownership, but without imposing a lifelong burden of unmeetable debt. Above all, the American Dream should be embraced as the unique sense of possibility that this country gives its citizens—the decent chance, as Moss Hart would say, to scale the walls and achieve what you wish.