Things I Know I Know

Blinded by the Right by David Brock

There's a certain knowledge that you can't escape while reading this book--the fact that Brock has proven himself a big, fat, unscrupulous liar over and over. I mean, he confesses to it all through the book as you're reading, just in case you're inclined to forget. But the other thing is that he was in a position to know a great many things, much of what he talks about here makes himself look as bad as anyone, and what he says helps make sense of things that otherwise are too nonsensical to entertain.

David Brock, for those who don't know was a right-wing journalist who wrote The Real Anita Hill and breaking articles on 'Troopergate,' Paula Jones, and other 'scandals' of the Clinton presidency.

But he's a changed man, now. In a nutshell, according to Blinded by the Right, Hillary Clinton was right--there was a vast right-wing conspiracy to ruin the Clinton presidency. And though, at times, it looked more farcical than effective, its success is illustrated every time someone says, 'Al Gore, well, you know he's a liar,' or 'Hillary only married Bill because she wanted power,' or 'Bill Clinton had to have done something wrong or they wouldn't have spent so much time and money trying to 'get' him.' But, of course, in the latter case in particular, the point was to spend that much money whether there was anything or not, the idea was to invoke the 'where there's smoke there's fire' mindset. Most people can't even recognize how it colors their perceptions because it was been so thoroughly ingrained in every public discussion, the regular imperfections of humans blown up and exaggerated and downright lied about until we can't stand to look at them anymore. And there was so much discussion. Even Brock can't seem to come up with an explanation for why so much of the so-called 'liberal media' participated in the pecking party, too.

What annoys me the most about this is that a bunch of sulky eighth-grade boys could bring our government--you know, the one that's of, by, and for the people--to a virtual halt for years. Health care reform? We need it desperately. People are miserable, people are dying, people have lost their voice in their work place over health care. We pay more for less than Canada and France (though we think we pay less and get more). People against health care reform try to scare us by telling us that we won't get to choose our own doctors anymore. What planet are these people living on? Hardly anyone gets to choose their doctors freely anymore anyway. It's the rule of HMOs and PPOs and managed care. Health care reform was a real possibility at the beginning of Clinton's presidency, but it got buried under bad reporting and scare tactics and, quite frankly, stupid stuff that doesn't matter.

The right wing conspiracy is real, says David Brock, much of it made up of a bunch of unprincipled young (or, by now, formerly young) people making a lot of money and laughing at the rest of us, and it's pushing us in a direction most of us don't want to go. And yet, we watch it, our country, being slowly pulled away from us because for one thing we can't believe people would act as these people have acted. We think--no one would talk this much about Whitewater or Troopergate or chocolate chip cookies if there wasn't something there. What's there is this--virulent hatred and too much money and access.

Posted by debco at 08:31 PM | Permalink

Playing with Time is a web site and a traveling museum exhibition that looks at time and change. The web site has a lot of interesting examples of time lapse photography in the gallery, ways to collaborate and have some time lapse fun of your own, and lots of links to other time-savvy sites.

Posted by debco at 03:20 PM | Permalink

According to an AFP report (German derivative work thereof), the Finnish music industry is asking kindergardens to pay about 20 €uros per month in royalties for singing and performing copyright-protected songs.

...you know, sometimes you just have to wonder how people can manage not to be totally embarassed by the things they do.

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 09:16 AM | Permalink

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, reports from Davos on the yuck factor:

When it comes to thinking about how to regulate the science, the best test may be the "yuck factor." This is, as you might imagine, a pretty squishy concept, something along the lines of using gut reaction as a proxy for a long and unproductive philosophical debate. Perhaps if people are grossed out by, say, vat-grown artificial organs, they may not be ready to use them wisely. Indeed, their gag reflex may be telling us something about the essence of human nature and what might threaten it.

I would say the opposite can hold as well--if people find something too mundane, we're not always going to think through all the consequences of its use. 'Oh, there won't ever be a problem with that' can be famous last words.

Another problem says Nobel Laureate David Baltimore is that 'Yuck is culturally determined.'

Dr. Baltimore bravely soldiered on, noting that yuck changes with age and generations; teenagers aren't freaked out by the things their parents are. Indeed, yuck is as much learned as innate: An audience member cheerily volunteered that a 1-year-old will drink apple juice—"which is urine-colored"—out of a bedpan without complaint. Good point: Perhaps this is not the stuff laws should be made of.

All that money and all those brains--it's good to know they're concentrating on the estoteric and the strange....

via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 09:06 AM | Permalink

The Salt Lake Astronomical Society wants to drop bowling balls from airplanes in order to study how asteroids impacted the local salt flats. Officials are concerned that someone might be standing in the way.

For their part, society members emphasise they are not eccentric. For a start, they will not just limit themselves to bowling balls: they will also drop putters' shots and rocks. As Wiggins said: 'Everyone likes to drop things from planes.' Indeed, the society even considered dropping a real meteorite to ensure realism, but realised it just might get lost.

'We're not stupid,' added Wiggins

...via Making Light

Posted by debco at 11:40 AM | Permalink

Talkleft reports on an ex-prosecutor who is trying to overturn the conviction of two men he put behind bars in the 1970s.

The prosecutor, Thomas Breen, says:

I would rather [this case] come back 25 years later and find out I'm dead wrong than those guys spend one more day in jail," he said in an interview. "I don't see anything wrong with correcting your errors when the errors are shown.

"If these guys didn't do it--and all the evidence seems to indicate we are dead wrong--then it's devastating."

Posted by debco at 07:36 PM | Permalink

I know that science is iterative so that even many 'breakthroughs' really are the result of collecting information doing research piece by piece by piece.

But some things still make you go--who the heck first thought of this?

Posted by debco at 07:13 PM | Permalink

A number of years ago, a farmer in Indiana told me that you can talk a farmer into doing pretty nearly anything once.

In Bad Land, Jonathon Raban tells how the promise of dryland farming lured countless hopeful people from the east, from the cities and, most of all, from foreign countries to the arid open plains of Montana and other Western states:

...Campbell's Soil Culture Manual [on dryland farming] was an inspirational work. Hardy Campbell was an evangelist in the cause of Science, Progress, and the American Way...

Anyone could be excited by Campbell's figures. On his own farm, he had reaped 54 bushels of wheat to the acre. Using the Campbell method, Mr. L. L. Mulligan had gotten 75 bushels of barley...with crops like these, grown on land once named a desert, Campbell's drumrolling on behalf of his own system did not seem immodest.

Of course, how it worked in the long term was not exactly inspiring:

Most people were baffled and frightened by the disastrous turn in the weather. They had been assured--by the government, by scientists, by the railroad literature--that this couldn't happen, that (in Campbell's words) "the semi-arid region is destined to be in a few years the richest portion of the United States." Now, as grasshoppers swarmed over the ruined crop, and farmland turned to desert, it seemed that there might be an ominous significance in the embossed gilt camel on the cover of the Soil Culture Manual.

In the 1970s, Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture, told farmers to 'get big or get out.' And, like dry land farming, that too, seemed, at the least, a possible idea, and at best, a path to greater success. Agricultural colleges in the 70s taught future farmers to be hard-headed and technology-minded. Bigger was better, bigger was, in fact the only choice for a 'good' farmer, who would then enjoy economies of scale and efficiencies that could only be achieved through automationand expansion. A farmer in New Hampshire in 1979 leveled his farm, spending thousands of dollars to turn it from rocky, rolling New England countryside into plowable land for big equipment, slicing off a hill here and filling in a valley there. In 1976, a Cornell University professor described a system where dairy cows would live their lives in transportable stalls, which could be hooked together like a cattle train and moved from milk house to feed center to overnight shelter without the inefficiencies of actually getting living creatures from place to place. It was all about production. We were the 'breadbasket to the world' and all things seemed possible to farmers who were sharp and forward-thinking and innovative.

The 1970s were a heady time of rapidly rising farm income and skyrocketing land values, and few questioned the notion that the good times would roll on forever. Banks urged farmers to take out larger and larger loans to modernize and to expand operations. One Iowa farm family applied for $12,000 in 1979 only to find their check made out for $25,000. When they called their loan officer about the mistake, he just laughed. "Don't be foolish," he chided them. "Go ahead and use the extra money for whatever you want. You’re good for it."

But they weren't really....

In Broken Heartland: The rise of America's Rural Ghetto, Osha Gray Davidson describes the farm crisis of the 1980s and its long--and still ongoing--aftermath.

In 1971, farm debt stood at $54 billion. By 1985, that amount had swelled to $212 billion--a figure greater than the combined debt of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. American agriculture had become the most capital-intensive system of food production in the world.

Farming is all about hope in the face of disaster. Despite science and technology, farmers can't control the weather and in farming it's important when it rains and when it freezes and where the twisters touch down. And it is a far more precarious living than most people ever imagine:

From 1981 to 1987, 26,000 Iowa farmers--about 20% of the total went out of business. But the family farm--never the robust institution of popular mythology--has been in serious, and many say fatal, trouble for decades. Our farm population has plummeted from 30 million down to 5 million since the 1940s, while the average farm size has more than doubled during the same period.

In addition to the farms themselves and the people who live and work on them, farming knits together the fabric of rural communities in ways that aren't always visible or easy for people not living in those communities to understand:

As farms began to fold [in the 1980s], so did the many businesses that had grown up to service them. Between 1976 and 1986, Iowa's small towns suffered the following losses: the number of gas stations fell almost 41%, grocery stores 27%, building material stores 21%, variety stores 37%, men's clothing stores 38%. Bankrupticies among Iowa businesses rose 46% in 1985, the largest one-year jump since records were first kept 25 years earlier.

Farmers who lose their farm don't just lose a paycheck and it is not, for most of them, a simple matter of shrugging their shoulders and moving on. Sometimes the land has been in the family for generations; it is where they make their home. When farmers lose their farms, they lose their land, their history, their families, their place in the world, and their lives, sometimes even literally.

In 1987, the number of suicides in Iowa climbed to 398, the highest number since the Depression. (One hundred and ninety-five Iowans shot themselves; 74 used poisonous gas or vapors; 66 hanged or suffocated themselves; 35 took poison; and 28 died of a variety of other methods.) The suicide rate among farmers in Iowa was 46 per 100,000 in 1983. The national rate for all adult men is about 29 per 100,000.

...

For all the outer changes that have taken place in rural America over the past decade, it is the change occurring inside the hearts and minds of rural people that is the least recognized and perhaps most important. The constant downward ratcheting of expectations, the grinding, dailly battle against largely unknown but seemingly invincible enemies, the dissolution of families, communities, and dreams are taking a toll on rural people that will last for decades.

Why should we care about any of this? Because small and medium-sized farmers on their own land are free economic citizens who can be good for the environment and are key players in building healthy communities nearby. Independent farmers, independent small business owners, and other individuals who are free citizens both socially and economically are absolutely critical to a functioning democracy.

It is fashionable to dismiss Thomas Jefferson's agrarian society as an outdated utopia which was, in any case, restricted to white men. But while there is much to criticize in Jefferson's original vision and in how sparingly it was actually implemented, the democratic principle central to Jefferson's ideal--the commitment to community assured by the yeoman farmer--remains our passport to the future. The challenge is to adapt that eighteenth-century conception of society to fit the realities of the twenty-first century. If we can meet that challenge, then the golden age of rural America will lie not in our past--as our myths have it--but in our future.

Broken Heartland was written over a decade ago (though there is a small updated section from the 1996 edition). Since that time, farming has continued to change in Iowa and other midwestern states. It isn't quite as bleak as it was in 1990, though one thing definitely remains constant--the total number of farmers keeps right on shrinking.

Posted by debco at 11:13 AM | Permalink

According to this article in Scientific American there is now evidence that stones can self-organize into circles:

The team found, using computer simulations, that the two main mechanisms are lateral sorting, which moves stones and soils to regions that have high concentrations of similar particles, and squeezing, which stretches stones into longer lines by causing movements within a pile of rocks.Freezing and thawing of the ground influence both of those processes, and their relative strengths determine what the final pattern looks like. For instance, polygons arise when squeezing is strong enough to counteract the effects of lateral sorting.

You turn your back on them for just a minute....

Posted by debco at 09:51 AM | Permalink

I recently finished reading--Thurgood Marshall, American Revolutionary by Juan Williams.

Thurgood Marshall was the first black Supreme Court justice. He was the lead lawyer for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education. He had a voice in many of the important segregation cases in this country in the 40s and 50s. He was a federal circuit court judge and Solicitor General under President Lyndon Johnson.

Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1908. He had a brother, Aubrey, who became a doctor, a mother who was a school teacher and a father worked on the railroad as a waiter. When he was in college he worked summers as a waiter at an all-white club on Chesapeake Bay. He attended Howard Law school in Washington DC (the University of Maryland law school was not an option--it hadn't admitted a black man since 1890). He worked many years for the NAACP before accepting a judgeship.

Thurgood Marshall was not a perfect man, either personally or professionally. But he was tremendously energetic, successful in the things he set out to do, and dedicated to the cause of improving the lot of individuals in this country according to the promises set out in the Constitution. His accomplishments were myriad and significant, though he, unfortunately, also lived long enough to see the gains he fought for chipped away in ways that still threaten to undermine the principles on which his successes were founded.

When Marshall was about to move to New York to take a position with the NAACP, his brother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and his father was out of work. The best TB hospitals in Maryland, admitted only whites:

...Norma Marshall with tears in her eyes, told Thurgood and Buster that her troubles should not be their troubles. With a plainspoken approach, she said Thurgood's future was in New York and the family owed him as much support as they were giving Aubrey...staying in a failing law practice wasn't going to help Aubrey or anyone else.

Later, as a representative of the NAACP working to promote equal rights for all:

When Marshall spoke to NAACP youth groups and asked the youngsters what they were going to do when they grew up, the kids answered: "I'm going to be a good butler" or "I hope I might be able to get in the post officce." he thought to himself, That was it for them. He understood he was watching their lives get shut down before they were even grown up. He wanted to unravel this rope that was choking so many.

Trent Lott talks about being lynched as he sits in his office in his comfortable chair surrounded by supporters and synchophants. In the south in the 1940s, the issue was a bit more immediate:

...This time the policemen ordered Marshall out and pushed him into their car. They told him he was under arrest for drunken driving. The lawyer protested that he hadn't had a drink in several days. The police told him to shut up, then ordered Looby and the others to drive away.

....

[Looby] watched with growing horror as the car turned off the highway and headed down a dirt road toward the river....Pulling over, one policeman got out shouting, his face red in anger, and ordered Looby to get back on the highway and drive to Nashville. Speaking slowly out of fear, Looby said he wasn't leaving until he saw Marshall.

...

With Looby still driving his car behind them, the police drove back to town. When they got to the square, they ordered Marshall out of the car and told him to go to the judge's chamber on the second floor of the courthouse by himself. Marshall told them he would walk over, but only with them. "You ain't gonna shoot me in the back. We'll go together," he said.

It's important to note in reading the above passages that Thurgood Marshall at that time (1946) had considerable power for a black man. He was recognized by blacks as "their top criminal defense lawyer and a civil rights leader." He had a network of friends that included Eleanor Roosevelt and other prominent figures. And yet, he was still someone who couldn't spend the night in many towns and who could be taken away and shot if the right people decided it needed doing.

And here, among other things, is why all of this matters:

In the thirty-nine years between his triumph in the Brown case and his death, Marshall saw the nation go from complete segregation through halting attempts at integration to occasional resegregation. When he first joined the high court in the late 1960s, almost two thirds of black students were in integrated schools. When he died, however, two thirds of black students were in mostly segregated schools.

Posted by debco at 11:57 AM | Permalink

MaxSpeak reports on the anti-war rally in Washington yesterday:

First, self-identified vets were much in evidence. The organized contingent had posters showing individual mug shots of the War Party luminaries (Cheney, Bush, Lott, Wolfowitz, etc.) with the legend underneath: "Never Served!" They worked the chicken-hawk thing hard. An unaffiliated vet had a sign that said "Remember Pearl Harbor: the U.S. doesn't start wars." Not literally correct, but you get the idea.

Second, lots of church ladies and church guys. I realize this is not new to a peace movement, but there seemed to be more than usual.

Third, what I call the lone wonks. Guys who looked like they were on lunch break from a job at State, bookish types with succinct signs like "Deterrence works" and the like.

Four, high school kids. Lots of them.

Five, a combined, organized (with sound effects) Korean/Filipino contingent. Maybe 75 people.

Six, anti-communists for peace. A couple of signs here and there against war and in support of Cuban political prisoners. In the same vein, 'Libertarians for Peace.' I met up with a small contingent of Stand Down participants, including the Niels[e]n[ ]Haydens, Matt Hogan, and my neighbor, the dean of real libertarian bloggers, Jim Henley. He had a sign that said "Peace Now, Socialism Never." If he was trying to provoke people, the results were negligible.

Seven, and my favorite: "Fighting Scots for Peace." This was not, as I thought, some Euro-Social-Dem type. This was some people from a midwest college whose mascot was the "Fighting Scots." I'd say when such people are turning out at anti-war rallies, the War Party has a problem.

A comment to this entry notes that in Bozeman, Montana 750 protesters turned out. In a conservative state, in a city of 30,000, that's noteworthy.

Posted by debco at 05:45 PM | Permalink

The Broken Poem Generator

formant transitions.
each seat has its own sound.
there wasn't much more to the story.
drank coffee

Posted by debco at 05:16 PM | Permalink

Jesse over at Pandagon has had enough of the lamentations of poor little rich folk:

I've just about reached my breaking point with the sad song of rich white people. Get over yourselves. You are not oppressed. You have to pay taxes on the money you earn. The rivers you cry will be mopped up by black and hispanic women guaranteed a whole two bucks over minimum wage, lucky duckies. Affirmative action does not discriminate against white people - there is an inherent value to the life experiences of those in racial, economic, and ethnic minorities. White people are denied virtually nothing in American society if they want it and will work for it.

You go, Jesse.

...via Calpundit

Posted by debco at 04:23 PM | Permalink

I actually already blogged this elsewhere so it seems a bit redundant to me, but in the interests of completeness (I've talked about the issue here before) it ought to go here too:

The Supreme Court decided 7-2 to uphold the Copyright Extension Act passed in 1998. This act extended copyright 20 additional years and was applied retroactively, removing some works from the public domain on which copyright had already expired.

Dan Gillmor has an excellent journal article on the decision:

Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one -- a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries.

The Constitution talks about granting rights to creators of ''science and useful arts'' but only for limited periods. After that, the works can be used freely by anyone.

At the end of the article he also has links to Lawrence Lessig's blog (the lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme court) and the court documents, including dissenting opinions from Justices Stevens and Breyer.

Posted by debco at 01:41 PM | Permalink

Inflata-church....for those last minute religious emergencies

...via BoingBoing's guest blog

Posted by debco at 11:05 AM | Permalink

That's what we believe that it takes to succeed in this country. Sometimes this makes us willfully blind to unfairness (that person must be smarter, harder working, better in some way than we are because he has a better job and a lot more money). But while we expect things to be fair and we expect hard work to pay off and we are willing to go to great lengths to rationalize the world as it is, it's still becoming increasingly clear that what we see right now in this country is that neither of those things hold.

Jeanne D'Arc has an excellent post on this topic:

Most Americans are genuinely patriotic. They want what's best for their neighborhoods, their cities, their states, and their country. And taxes are our contribution toward making it work. At one time we believed that the more you received from the country (and rich people obviously get enormous benefits from living in this country; if they didn't they wouldn't be here), the more you owed it -- and as a result we had a genuinely progressive income tax.

Whittling away at the middle class as we've been doing for a while now and as Bush, et al, do continuously and agressively hurts our stability, our generosity, our clear-sightedness and ultimately our sustainability. The rich do not make this country great. It takes all of us to do that.

She cites an article by John Balzar which is also worth tracking down.

Posted by debco at 10:47 AM | Permalink

A recent article in The Nation by Bill Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins talks about the estate tax:

There is a stunning disconnect between the terrible budget shortfalls facing states and localities and the priorities of federal tax-cutters. States face budget deficits of more than $60 billion for the coming year--and the ax is falling on mental health, education and children's healthcare. Libraries are being shuttered, tuitions increased and parks closed. Governors of all political persuasions talk about the need for massive federal relief to the states in the form of block grants and Medicaid subsidies.

and

Today, the estate tax affects less than 2 percent of the richest households, those with wealth exceeding $1 million. A reformed estate tax, with wealth exemptions boosted to $3.5 million, would still generate tens of billions of dollars of revenue a year. Under such a reform, an estimated 6,000 estates a year, averaging $17 million each, would pay the tax. In Maine, Montana, Alaska and Mississippi--states where both senators have voted to completely eliminate the tax--the estimated number of estates paying the tax every year would be fewer than twenty-five.

Proposals to reform the tax have been blocked since 2000 by the "all or nothing" repeal lobby, which understands the peril of not having smaller estates as camouflage. Once exemptions rise above $3 million, it becomes impossible to find a credible and photogenic farmer or restaurant owner who will complain about what opponents call the "death tax." It's hard enough to find them now. The pro-repeal American Farm Bureau was asked to produce an example of a farmer who had lost a farm because of the estate tax. It could not identify a single one.

There is no reason to repeal the estate tax, no benefit to anyone but the very richest among us, and, as this article points out, much to be lost. There are people who allow themselves to get tied up in knots about the fact that rich people pay more in taxes than you or me or the 'lucky duckies.' But remember, they have most of the money.

...via The Rittenhouse Review

Posted by debco at 09:06 AM | Permalink

Dog: A kind of additional or subsidiary Diety designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship. Ambrose Bierce

...from my new 2003 calendar (and you thought I got this stuff from reading great literature)

Posted by debco at 09:05 AM | Permalink

According to BBC news, researchers have found the formula for happiness:

Happiness = P + (5xE) + (3xH)

Where
P = Personal Characteristics
E = Existence
H = Higher Order needs

So, now you know.

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 09:02 AM | Permalink

William Gibson has a blog

For some reason, I find this is worth knowing.

Posted by debco at 03:33 PM | Permalink

Them:Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson.
I sort of didn't get this book. Was it trying to educate me about what's going on in the world? Did it have some sort of over all messsage for me about extremists and the world we live in? Was it trying to be funny? And who were we supposed to be worried about at the end of the book? The extremists? Or 'Them'? (Them being the 'international bankers' who rule the world from a small room in some unnamed city).

And yet, it was an interesting book. I was reminded as I was reading it of a conversation I'd had recently with a friend of mine about people who throw themselves enthusiastically into turtle worship or animal magic or the seven secret senses (I'm making these things up, but it wouldn't actually surprise me to find you could google for them and find something). These people are looking for something and they often find it in enthusiastic words or promises that almost speak to that empty thing inside them or explanations that make a certain kind of sense out of inexplicable events. And they grab onto these things because they want something so badly that means something. That was the sense I got from many of the extremists Ronson talks to in his books. Their searching, though, has turned to hatred and anger and a need to strike at something, which makes them dangerous, in my book, and not particularly amusing.

And one of Ronson's points (at least I think this was a point) is a good one, that there is much to be worried about in the world and even if it's not 'international bankers,' there is consolidation and globalization and corporatization and those are problems that we shouldn't ignore simply because terrorism and extremism is also a problem.

Posted by debco at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Edge.org asks:

What if President Bush wrote to you and asked--"What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?"

85 reponses to that question include:

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
We should be preparing for the future, Mr. President, not continuing to invest in a mythical past. Currently science is at the service of speculators and mindless traffickers in destruction. It is time the rest of society reclaimed its right to have a voice in determining what their lives shall be like.

Roger Schrank
One thing a science advisor should do is attempt to define science. The last definition we had was in 1892 when Charles Eliot, the President of Harvard, led a committee that decided upon the high school curriculum that is still in place today. They defined science as biology, chemistry, and physics (in that order.) These just happened to be the science departments at Harvard in 1892. They defined mathematics as algebra, geometry and trigonometry (— same reason.) But a few things have happened since 1892.

Alan Alda
The world is going to come to an end in about 5 billion years no matter what we do. So, in the long run, you're off the hook. It's true that things like Global Warming, plus the increasing loss of clean water and bio diversity, can hasten The End Of Everything As We Know It, but even so, it will all end eventually. Nobody gets blamed for continuing a disastrous policy, so there will be no harm to your reputation if you do nothing. People simply do not say, "Caesar did nothing to halt the Roman practice of putting lead in the air and water, probably resulting in the eventual weakening and fall of the empire." But they're absolutely fascinated with the way he could divide Gaul into thirds.

Rupert Sheldrake
Diverting 1 percent of the present science budget to the National Discovery Center, open to democratic input and public participation, would involve no additional expenditure, but would have a big effect on people's involvement in science and on innovation. It would appeal to many voters, make science more attractive to young people, stimulate interest in scientific thinking and hypothesis-testing, and help break down the increasing alienation many people feel from science. It would also enable many working scientists to think more freely, and unleash some of the creative potential that is currently being stifled.

That last one, BTW, falls into the category of 'ideas I like and think we should do right away.'

Posted by debco at 02:00 PM | Permalink

1776 to 1799
1776
Continental Congress offered land grants for service in the Continental Army

1790
Total population: 3,929,214
Farmers made up about 90% of labor force

1796
Public Land Act of 1796 authorized Federal land sales to the public in minimum 640-acre plots at $2 per acre of credit

1980, 1990
Total population: 227,020,000 and 246,081,000
Farm population: 6,051,00 and 4,591,000
Farmers made up 3.4% and 2.6% of labor force
Number of farms: 2,439,510 and 2,143,150
Average acres: 426 and 461
Irrigated acres: 50,350,000 (1978) and 46,386,000 (1987)

1980's
For the first time since the 19th century, foreigners (Europeans and Japanese primarily) began to purchase significant acreages of farmland and ranchland

1987
Farmland values bottomed out after a 6-year decline, signalling both a turnaround in the farm economy and increased competition with other countries' exports

1988
One of the worst droughts in the Nation's history hit midwestern

...from A History of American Agriculture, 1976-1990

Posted by debco at 08:16 PM | Permalink

Brad deLong blogs the American Economics Association conference:

"Do you know all these people you are waving at across the hotel lobby? Or are you just waving at random? Who are those two--they look really confused." "I wasn't waving at them, I was waving at Aaron Edlin behind them."

"You must have done a bunch of research to learn that much about the connections between Lord Dalhousie's 'Doctrine of Lapse' and the Anti-British Revolt of 1857." "Well... Sort of... It was in the distant past, and only if reading pulp historical fiction novels by George McDonald Fraser counts as 'research'."

"If he'd had that diagram, it would have made things much clearer." "If he'd had that diagram, the seminar would have been over in five minutes, and then what would he have done with the rest of his time?" "But it would have been a really impressive five minutes."

Patrick Nielsen Hayden says that this is yet further evidence that the world is being slowly conquered by science fiction fandom.

Posted by debco at 08:05 PM | Permalink

The Guardian gives us its Survival guide 2003:

the 25 technologies and notions we think hold most promise over the next year. From the evolutionary to the revolutionary, the trivial to the very serious, these are 25 of the trends we'll be watching closely over the next 12 months.

These include:

At home

• Mobile games
  
• Mobile photos

Work

• Bluetooth
  
• Interaction anxiety
  a worry about managing interactions with people, content and devices, a fear of being cut off from the Network

Ideas

• Social Software
  
• Wi-Fi
  
• The return of William Gibson

Websites

• Googlewords
  
• Clay Shirky
  
• Gossip sites
  
• Moblogging
  
• Whuffie
  Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie - that's what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it

And now you know as much cool stuff as I do.

Or possibly more.

Posted by debco at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Per our discussion of why I don't read fiction anymore, Dawn sends me this

In a New York Times article (yes, you have to register, but registration is free) from around this time last year, Chitra Divakaruni writes about serving as a judge for the National Book Awards and reading 300 novels all at once. It gave her new insight, she says, into what distinguishes a great novel from a merely mediocre one.

It is this resonance, finally, that separates the successful novel from the others. The cast of major characters may be small or large, clowns or kings. The backdrop may be modest (a room) or ambitious (a continent). The vocabulary may be simple or flamboyant, literary or colloquial. The melody may be created by a single flute, or performed by an entire orchestra. But through it all, there's a sense that what we're seeing is not all that this is about.

The novel continuously opens into something larger than the specifics that form the boundaries of the story, though paradoxically these specifics must be concrete and convincing if we are to intimate a larger truth through them. Reading it becomes a three-dimensional experience, beginning in the book and ending in ourselves. Such a novel, while it is a mirror of, and a commentary on, a particular event, people, country or time, is on some level about each one of us, our central truth. Each successful novel gives a special flavor and shape -- and tone -- to this truth, but does not limit it to these. In this it is similar to the bell, which shapes sound without enclosing it.

Resonance and truth. Definitely things worth aspiring to.

Posted by debco at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

PhysicsWeb presents its Highlights of the Year

2002 has been an exciting year for physicists. From the production of large numbers of anti-atoms at CERN to the first measurement of the polarization of the cosmic background radiation, there has been no shortage of important developments.

Posted by debco at 07:08 PM | Permalink

I'm not, particularly a Penn and Teller fan (nor anti-Penn and Teller either--I'm refreshingly neutral on the whole Penn and Teller issue), but I am a big fan of this story:

Seems Penn was pulled aside for a search before a flight. He told the security guard that grabbing his crotch without permission was assault. The guard told him, "Once you cross that line, I can do whatever I want." Penn called the local police, who said, when they arrived, "What's wrong with you people? You can't just grab a guy's crank without his permission." Penn tells him that his genitals weren't grabbed and the cop says, "I don't care, you can't do that to people. That's assault and battery in my book."

Eventually, he ends up talking to a PR person for the airport:

I said that I had talked to two lawyers and they said it was really a weird case because no one knows if he can be charged with assault and battery while working in that job. But I told her, that some of my lawyer friends really wanted to find out. She said, "Well, we're very new to this job . . ." and I said, "Yeah, so we need these test cases to find out where you stand."She said, "Well, you know a LOT about this." I said, "Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it."

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...or why I don't subscribe to a daily newspaper anymore.

The Daily Howler in its review of 2002 says:

As we reach the end of the year, we'll repeat our great mantra one last time: Democrats need to understand the way their party lost the White House. And Democrats need to understand the way their party's most recent leader has been hounded from public life. In the past few months, some pundits have finally begun to describe the press corps' odd conduct toward Candidate Gore. We continue to ask the obvious question. Why are we being told this now, instead of in real time, when it mattered?

This is the quote that really gets to me:

JOSH MARSHALL, Reliable Sources, 8/10/02: I think deep down most reporters just have contempt for Al Gore. I don't even think it's dislike. It's more like a disdain and contempt. . .And this was, you know, a year-and-a-half before the election, I think you could say this. This wasn't something that happened because he ran a bad campaign. If he did, it was something that predated it.

They had a 'contempt' for Gore? Geez! It isn't their business to have a contempt for Gore! It's their business to report the news. Not to tell me what I think. Not to manufacture news that doesn't exist. To report it.

I have contempt for them.

...via ConfluenceTheoryofTruth

Posted by debco at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I wish someone would tell me the answer to this question.

Because right now most everything I do read strikes me as:

Stories about people I don't like doing stuff I don't care about

And don't tell me I should read genre fiction because that's what I'm talking about.

Literary and/or mainstream fiction strikes me as:

Pointless stories about people I don't like doing stuff I don't care about

And don't suggest specific books to me because I consider a lot of books and what I'd really like to know is why I pick up so many and put them down, why I stop reading halfway through, why I get to the end and feel completely unsatisfied. Is it me or the books?

I still watch movies, not a lot of movies, but there are plenty that I like.

I read a lot of non-fiction which I do find engaging, often for its storytelling.

I don't watch much series television anymore because I don't care to get involved with shows (Firefly) that the network moves around (Firefly) and then yanks from the schedule (Firefly) before it can develop its rhythm and its following.

So why?

Mystery novels, it seems to me, are usually more full of gimmicks and annoying personality traits than mystery. For one thing, there are often all these other people--friends, family, spouses, children--who spend a great part of the novel arguing with the protagonist and interfering with their concentration and their confidence and their intelligence to no apparent purpose except to make the mystery last longer. No wonder so many mystery characters didn't have family in the 'old days.' Science fiction novels have characters who aren't engaging or complex in interesting ways and the novels are busy being plausible in ways I don't care about and implausible in ways I do. Fantasy is, well, people I don't like doing things I don't care about and, again, too much attention spent on why things are and how things came and what went on before. I care that things are and I care that how they are is plausible, but unless it's critical to the resolution, I don't care why. I don't. There's also a fair portion of fantasy that's about wish-fulfillment in areas I don't seem to have wishes anymore. This wouldn't necessarily be a show stopper, but these stories very often involve people I don't like getting things I don't see that they deserve (possibly because I don't like them).

The writing in these books is all serviceable, some is good, some is very good. I presume they're well constructed though I don't always make it far enough through to know for sure. In addition to not finding much fiction I like, I don't find much I dislike (although there's some out there). It's all just...there.

I'm not a big Harry Potter fan, don't rush out and buy the new book in hardcover as soon as it's out. But I read the books and enjoy them when I read them. Harry Potter is engaging, engaging enough to overcome the annoying bits. And I haven't figured out the difference. I have no desire to read a bunch of books like Harry Potter. But I'd like very much to read a bunch of books as engaging as Harry Potter.

I think about this for three reasons:

• I miss reading good, engaging fiction.

• I wonder how much my tastes have in common with other people's tastes and if more people than just me are looking for something they're not finding

• I'm a writer. I want to know why the good stuff works and why the not-so-good stuff doesn't.

I do think a large part of it is me--I'm looking for something that fiction can't give me anymore, maybe something that it never had to give. But I think it's partly the fiction too, that something is missing. What is it that makes me go 'ho-hum, yeah, yeah, don't care'? And how many other people are doing it too? If I tried to name it, the missing thing, I'd suggest that it might be wildness and joy and optimism and adventure, but I'm sure as soon as I apply those names someone will jump in and give me a whole list of books that, at least for them, contains those things.

Here's the bottom line to all that ramble, in case anyone wants to speculate:

I don';t read fiction anymore, I don't find anything I like or care about, I'd sure like to figure out why.

Posted by debco at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Working for Change has a year-end article listing the most overhyped and the most underreported stories of the year.

Overhyped stories include:

Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: Nobody -- except the Bush Administration and Tony Blair -- believes they exist. Seldom have so many words been wasted on weapons that, if they did exist, would be few in number, poorly made, and impossible to deliver more than a couple hundred miles. Instead, Bush's obsession becomes our obsession. Worse, constant repetition of "Iraq = Saddam = Terrorist" has successfully shifted post-9/11 focus -- and blame -- away from the very real threat posed by Islamic terrorists, most of whom seem to come from countries we consider allies.

The Economic Recovery: It's coming, remember? And coming, and coming. It's just around the corner. Who'd have guessed this funhouse had so damned many corners?

Under-reported stories include:

White House Power Grab: Occasional flurries, like Dick Cheney's noisy refusal to release information on who wrote his energy policy, made the news. But on endless fronts, this White House and its Congressional allies have reserved for themselves an unthinkable array of powers -- everything from keeping details of legislation secret until the last moment to imprisoning Americans without charges or counsel on nothing more than the President's say. A full list of the ways in which our unelected president is becoming emperor would be useful. We're still waiting.

Shredded Safety Nets: Beyond all the false cheerleading and Greenspan-worship, the one piece of the rotten economy that did, in fact, make news -- beyond tanking 401(k)s -- was budget crises. But these were inevitably painted as local stories. As their legislatures convene in January, forty-six states -- almost all of them -- face severe budget shortfalls. The feds send less money to the states, the states send less to the counties and cities, and at every level revenues suffer as politicians (or Eyman figures) rail against taxes. The first thing to get cut, at every level, is the safety net. The much-vaunted welfare-to-work programs mean there's even less help for people who work full time (sometimes two or even three jobs) but still can't make ends meet. And thanks to the aforementioned global warming, the winters will get colder on the street, too.

Posted by debco at 11:05 AM | Permalink