A friend of mine was contracted by an anarchist bookstore to make some posters (yes, I have interesting friends and I’m proud of it). He came up with lots of great stuff but my favourite mostly just said “somewhere along the line we forgot that we made all of this stuff up.”

I think he’s right, and that’s why horse-race political coverage is depressing to me:

Painting the Suburbs Blue, Ed Dionne Jr., Washington Post

If you buy into the pan-universal cue break theory, then fine, all of existence is an ordered series of inevitable predeterminate cause-and-effect events, and all we have is the utterly convincing illusion that we have meaningful choice over ourselves and influence on the world around us. I don’t know many folk who take that perspective, but I sure seem to know some who think that politics and business are inevitable end-of-history monoliths that just are that way, and having opinions about how they should or could be is tragic naivety. But here’s the thing: we make all this stuff up. Not individually, and not always intentionally, so we can’t just decide how the world should be and it will become that. But we do have influence, we can participate in the ebb-and-flow that collectively emerges our social scenarios. Democrats aren’t winning in the former red states because of a wobbly orbit in the universe which can be observed and extrapolated out to predict the rest of the future, they are winning there because they are somehow convincing people to vote for them in elections. If the republicans change their behaviour they can swing that around. Income disparity isn’t growing because free markets are the nature of the world and that’s what happens in free markets, it’s growing because our choices have created a particular form of free-market-based society where disparity can grow. It’s also our choices which have prevented it from growing more. Collectively at least, this stuff is on us. Some people take that as precocious self-importance, but it doesn’t make it less true.

I love the cross-genreness of James Randi, veteran debunker of paranormal claims, taking on overpriced speaker cable audiophile bullshit.

My audio cables cost more than either my stereo receiver or my speakers but that’s because 1) my receiver and speakers are ebay-scavenged cheapos and 2) that was the cheapest the audio store would sell me speaker cables for. Jaysus.

Sorry about the title. Kieran Healy links and juxtaposes some Marxist and Smithist economic theory regarding specialization in the context of a set of photographs of Chinese toy factory workers. Its a good trick and one that I, not being an economist, don’t see don’t very often.

The hand-lettered sign on the Dairy Queen says it’s the last week of the season.

How come Dairy Queen is a mega-ubiquitous corporate franchise but so many of the one-by-one stores still feel like hometown family operations? It’s a good trick. I like it. I don’t like the ice cream, but I like buying it there.

I’m a grown adult and know how to button my shirt and hold two different and legitimate meanings for the same word in my head at the same time. Sometimes it’s productive for words to have different meanings (“progress” comes to mind, in my peer group), sometimes it doesn’t hurt. Sometimes it’s just dumb. For instance, Boston seems to be determined to redefine the word “hoax”.

My understanding of hoax: somebody tries to convince others that a thing is happening that isn’t really happening.

In Boston however, official reality has it that a “hoax” is when authority thinks a thing is happening when it isn’t really happening. Doesn’t matter whether anyone was trying to make them think that it is happening, it just matters that they think it is. Thus if something you do is misinterpreted by them, you are responsible for perpetrating a hoax. Perhaps criminally responsible. More specifically (if this is Boston) you are responsible for a bomb hoax.

Exhibit A: The aqua teen hunger force “bomb hoax”. In which people put up LED-glowy signs which looked nothing like bombs, but were interpreted as bombs by the apparently un-bomb-savvy people in charge of dealing with bombs, and blown up. After they realized they weren’t bombs, and one hopes had the mental flexibility to realize they were never remotely meant to look like bombs, the authorities continued to mouth the words “bomb hoax” for weeks on end, and the term was carried in headlines from most of the major media sources. The “perpetrators” of the “hoax” were treated as actual bomb hoax perpetrators and criminally charged. Luckily for our collective sanity, said perps had the un-Bostonian mental flexibility to be resistant to the insidious pull of official-reality broadcasting, and took the charges with exactly the seriousness they deserved. I loved those guys, I still do.

Exhibit B: some comp-art dork shows up for her flight at the Boston Logan airport with an art-installation stylized electronic device harnessed to her chest. The authorities respond swiftly and with prejudice and for once I think they were in the right to do so. I haven’t seen the device, but if it looked even kinda like a bomb then they really should have worried about it being strapped to somebody in an airport. So they got out the guns and took her into custody and hopefully she retroactively realized that there are some reasonable limits to personal expression and they tousled her hair and told her “get out of here kid and don’t come back with fake bombs” and she said “gee officer, and I hope my friends learned a lesson too!” and we can all expect there to be fewer impromptu bomb-art-installations in airports from here on out.

Except, guess what! The authorities decided she meant to make people think it was a bomb, and what the authorities decide is what’s real even if it isn’t, so they retroactively inserted the intent in her mind of making a “hoax” and told everybody and now that is what the media are calling it. Too bad english language, it’s more important that our homeland security heroes feel self-important and justified in over-responding to future incidents, so you’re just going to have to take the hit, again, in Boston. Better stay out of Boston next time english language. It isn’t safe for you in there.

I’ve been watching the director’s cut of Das Boot, in shifts over the last four days. Next time I might leave the subtitles off so there will be no distractions from the visuals. Who knew one cramped, sweaty little iron tube could generate so many kick ass camera angles?

Don’t know if I’ll watch the end again though. That hurt.

The first time I saw Das Boot was also the director’s cut, but actually in a theatre, back in undergrad at Waterloo. That was the first and last time I’ve watched a movie with a honest to god intermission. There are references to a 5 or maybe 6 hour “TV version” of the movie. Maybe in another 10 years I’ll have a go at that. It would probably be worth it, it’s quite a film.

And here’s a link to a beta version of an .ogg format media player loaded with a chunk of a 1991 rave remix of the main theme from the movie.

For some reason I was walking around for years with this assumption that Jimmy Wales was yer typical silver bullet technical utopian who figured humanity was just a few routed packets away from transcending it’s traditional bonds and attaining universal middleclassdom and good TV reception, if only it would standardize on technology X. I reluctantly listened to his longnow talk and was convinced otherwise, then forgot and assumed he was a techno-utopian again for a while, but now that I’ve skimmed this great interview with RU Sirius I’ve remembered.

Jimmy Wales Will Destroy Google

Maybe he’s just pretending to be a thoughtful case-by-case-etarian who can’t get comfortable with any particular dogma because he knows what a liability he could be for the open culture movement if he came off as mouth-frother, but if so he does a damn fine job of it.

According to Ursula Le Guin’s website:

“October 12 and 13, 2007, in New York, American Opera Projects will be doing a staged version with piano of the Prologue and Act I Scene 3 of Stephen Andrew Taylor’s opera Paradises Lost. The entire opera will be performed at the University of Illinois in Spring 2009.

The libretto is by Stephen Andrew Taylor and Kate Gale, with input from me. It is based on my generation-ship novella “Paradises Lost,” in The Birthday of the World Excerpts were performed at the New York City Opera’s festival VOX this spring.”

I read Birthday of the World not that long ago, and remember Paradises Lost as a good short science fiction story, with unlikely and unassuming characters and Le Guin’s usual capacity to make the standard assumptions seem odd by presenting some more honest ones as normal. An opera? Weird.

In response to the various militant atheists who have been insufferably gloating it up over the rather obvious lack of an active god in the world, Michael Shermer posts this open letter in Scientific American:

Rational Atheism

He pretty much gets it right, I figure. If you stand back and tap your foot and think about it on starkly physical-reality criteria, it’s not much of an intellectual feat to recognize the powerful unlikeliness of a supernatural ordering personality. Crowing around the town about how you’ve got that one figured out and therefore everybody who isn’t you must be mentally stunted doesn’t actually reflect that highly on your brain capacity. Try taking the next step and asking “why is it that so many people don’t see it my way? is the world other than me just demographically biased towards stupid or could there be other things at play?”. If you don’t see that or some other shades of gray complexity lurking at the edges then you may just be the stupid-biased one.

I’m surprised to find Michael Shermer as the temperer of pugnacious atheism. He’s closely associated with Skeptic Magazine, which has always struck me as the rallying redoubt for self-important puncturers of the more obvious myths of the world. Maybe I had him wrong. And check out this quote from his wikipedia entry:

‘In May 2004 Shermer debated young Earth creationist Kent Hovind at UC Irvine, and spoke to defend evolution before a predominantly creationist audience. However, in his online reflection of the debate while explaining he won the debate with intellectual and scientific evidence he felt it was “not an intellectual exercise,” but rather it was “an emotional drama.”[8] While receiving positive responses from creationist observers Shermer concluded “Unless there is a subject that is truly debatable (evolution v. creation is not), with a format that is fair, in a forum that is balanced, it only serves to belittle both the magisterium of science and the magisterium of religion.”‘

Seems like the sort of thing that someone who was in it find out and not just to win would say. I think however that I disagree with part of this point from his open letter:

“5. Promote freedom of belief and disbelief. A higher moral principle that encompasses both science and religion is the freedom to think, believe and act as we choose, so long as our thoughts, beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. As long as religion does not threaten science and freedom, we should be respectful and tolerant because our freedom to disbelieve is inextricably bound to the freedom of others to believe.”

But religion does threaten science, quite routinely, and presumably the other way round too. Not necessarily in catastrophic ways, but the daily, homely tension between religious and scientific approaches to understanding the world are one of the reasons that this topic is interesting at all. Sure and absolutely, people have a right to believe what they want, but claiming those beliefs don’t sometimes conflict and frustrate each other is like claiming that any of the other fundamental human rights are divinely designed to never conflict with each other. It’s a cheery notion that just don’t play. Our ability to navigate the compromises those conflicting rights necessitate is what makes us good at living collectively, or not.

So here’s my leader board for the superstars of the current atheism vs. religion semi-furor:

1. Michael Shermer (who knew?)
2. Sam Harris
3. Dawkins Dawkins Dawkins
4. Hitchens (what a dick!)

with Dennet as an unranked dark horse, who I’ve only ever heard introducing talks by Dawkins. Maybe I should read him. Or maybe there’s no point, I know what I think, there’s probably more to learn from why my smart religious friends persist in such a seemingly strange position. Maybe I’ll go listen to some flobots instead.

Father of dead Jehovah’s Witness girl can sue church: court

“’It is not at all clear to what extent a religious adherent can convince another person to take actions for religious reasons that will cause him or her bodily harm or even death, even if the religious belief is sincerely held,’ the justices wrote.

The appeal judges said those issues could only be resolved in a full trial.

Mr. Hughes was shunned from the church after he rejected its teachings about blood transfusions and agreed to allow Bethany to undergo transfusions during her chemotherapy treatments.

Her illness and death tore the family apart and renewed public debate over how to determine when a child should be able to choose medical care.”