Apostrophic

Quick and nearly meaningless observation that may be of some use to some of you.

Bars in small towns or super-suburban neighborhoods usually have an apostrophe in their name, a possessive to indicate that the owner has a cool, hip name and has seen a lot of the world and will sell you a kicky multi-colored cocktail and maybe you can dance.  So you get bars named "Hollywood's" or "O'Reilly's" or "Chance's."

Bars in actual cool hip places don't use the apostrophe.  The possessive isn't there.  The bar is named after a state of being and not a person.  The most famous of these is Cheers, which was actually a TV show: but note its not named Cheer's, as in There's a guy named Cheer and this is his bar, but Cheers, just the toast you give when you're drinking. 

A long time ago I used to frequent a bar in San Francisco in what's now probably called the "upper-to-mid-Market" neighborhood (or Umm) called The Lucky 13.  Great bar.  I practically lived in another bar called The Armadillo, which effectively killed my hopes of being a great graduate student.  No possessive on either, and that is, I'm now convinced, what made them great bars to drink in. 

Because here's an easy test to see whether you'll like a bar.  The test requires some time, so its not going to resolved right away.  But go into the bar's neighborhood, and listen to people talk about it.  If they use the possessive, as in "Are we going to Lucky 13's?" or "How about Armadillo's for a beer?" then they're the kind of people who drink their Bud lite with a lime and there will be a lot of popped collars in the clique. The blondes will not be dirty; the tattoos will be pretty butterflies.  Those people should go the nearest O'Reilly's or Bing's and commence to mixing.  That may be what you prefer. 

But if people put the definite article in front of the bars name - and no one ever said "The Lucky 13's", because that's just obviously dumb - then the bar shows promise.  If they shorten and use The, as in The Dillo, then they're talking about a place to go because its cool and not because the owner is some kind of goofy loser who accommodates the wealthy riff-raff.  Those are definitely stops.

One exception to this rule is the bar Rudy's, at the tale end of University Avenue in Palo Alto right next to the train station.  Rudy's is dark, malevolent and existential, a red-hued entrance to the Hell under those innocuous Venetian-style villas housing shadowy government-funded institutes on the Stanford campus, where they pass out heroin on the first day and lock you into the basement until they've sucked your soul into an intelligent dissident surveillance system.  Rudy's is just pretending to be the kind of place frat boys go to drink, in the way the funhouse entrance is often painted to look like a clown's mouth.

Otherwise, I think the theory holds. 

Deja Vu vs. Reality

In the morning I like to watch the local NBC affiliate while I read the NYTimes.  My daughter will often ask me questions about what's on the news, such as "why is everyone so happy this Bowe guy got out of prison?  His parents should be ashamed of him!"  It helps to be there to gently clear up her misconceptions.

But I've had this nagging thought for weeks now: How much of what I'm reading in the Times or seeing on TV is caused by conservatives flailing around demanding their irrational prejudices be enforced as the law of the land and universally respected as truth?  On any given day it seems like 80% or more.  Even the weather isn't immune.

Perhaps its time for a media diet.

Clipper Chip

The Donald Sterling affair is an excellent example of how race gets dealt with in the US.

Sterling is the owner of the LA Clippers, a basketball team in the NBA with a black coach and mostly black players, who was recently recorded saying he doesn't want his mistress - or someone he wanted to be his mistress - hanging out with black people.  He was fined and banned from the NBA in a rather surprising turn of events, and its likely he'll lose the team.  Prior to the recording being made public Sterling was famous for (a) maintaining a very public image as a sugar daddy and (b) making his money as a slum lord in downtown LA, who was convicted of discriminating against Hispanic and African-American renters after another, earlier recording detailed his antediluvian attitudes.

You may have heard about it; it was in all the papers.

Godwin's Law

"He was expressing the fact that he needed to send in troops to protect those in Crimea of Russian ancestry and Russian language and certain religious groups," he said. "And what the President made clear to Putin was, this was unacceptable."

Someone pointed out in a NYTimes story today, a Ukrainian citizen in fact, that the claim that you need to invade a country to protect ethnic Russians and Russian speakers from their government has just got Nazism written all over it.  Not just fascism; we're talking about a very specific set of ethnocentric claims about the identification of a group of people with a state, and that the state itself is an expression of the ethnic composition and identity of that group.

There are people who, by virtue of colonial histories, happen to find themselves "left behind" when the colonizers depart.  For those people to demand the colonizing country come in and protect them, indeed invade and run the damn thing, is the height of entitlement.  The UK left people all over the globe and spent many years using slights to Englishness as a pretext for invasion; thankfully that's a policy Her Majesty's government no longer pursues.  During the 60s various former European colonial powers would send in rapid-reaction forces to get their citizens to safety; that's one of the benefits of a passport, that there's a Marine regiment waiting somewhere to keep you safe.  (This is true of Belgium, France, Holland, the US and the UK, for instance.  Canada has no such policy and, in fact, much of the populace and the better editorial pages will happily blame you for any trouble you might find yourself in - for Canadians, once you leave you're on your own.)  Algeria comes to mind, as does northern Ireland, of instances where it gets more complex: a whole group of people and a significant portion of the population born in the colonized territory who identify as colonizers and aren't willing to give up the colonial project.  Israel, through certain lenses, looks similar.

Toys

I bought myself a rifle recently so I could go hunting for larger mammals, a spiffy little Marlin in the Winchester .270 caliber.  I was inspired by Hank Shaw's blog and a couple of others; I'm at an age where I'm looking back on the things I really liked to do when I was younger, the things that didn't involve sitting in a bar arguing Foucault, and wondering why it is that I stopped doing them.  In an earlier age that might have driven men like me to buy a Porsche and a pretty young girlfriend.  But practically, as Plato once noted, you don't really become a man until your forties.  The "mid-life crisis" was always more about marketing lifestyle shifts, sub-dividing consumer categories to make it easier to slot people in and sell them stuff, and it was a co-optation of an actual, honest-to-god milestone in one's life.  So now, having spent far more of my time arguing Foucault in bars than I'd really have liked to, I'm beginning to do the things I like.  Like go trail-running, and hunt, and play music.  This is good for my mental health - building new skills keeps the brain humming along - and my physical health, and my family, and if we ignore all the mass-market bourgeoisie bubble culture built up since the 30s, a necessary part of what it is to be a round, solid, useful human being.

The Value of Comfort Food

Pacific Standard just published a piece on the Toast craze.

I didn't know there was a magazine called Pacific Standard until today, when Chris Hayes tweeted a link to the story.  It looks like an excellent magazine and as I read through the titles of the online pieces I thought "I should subscribe to this": It looks like exactly the sort of magazine smart, thoughtful, with-it people such as myself read, a west-coast version of The New Yorker.  I have a subscription to The New Yorker and have for years.  Also, I haven't opened a copy in probably three months.  I read half a piece then and left it folded on the coffee table so I could pick it up again, but I believe its been recycled, as we have a rule in my house, more or less by default, that any magazine older than three months gets recycled, even if Dad has left it folded open, but especially if its then covered with subsequent issues of various other magazines.

The recent history of the 2nd Amendment in a nutshell

1 in 5 Americans suffers from some form of mental illness, some 60 million-plus people.  Tens of millions of those people suffer from paranoid delusions, which often take the form of a specific fear that marauding gangs of dusky-hued drug dealers and rapists and disrespectful teenagers will break into their suburban houses or local Starbucks or simply park next to them, and then outright kill them or rob them of property and perhaps just self-respect. 

Duck Dynasty: Making Fun of Racists is Racist!

I was thinking this morning of writing a post about the whole Duck Dynasty controversy, for a couple of reasons.  And then I went through Facebook this morning, because its a slow day at work - next week is some kind of religious holiday, and so they give us a bunch of time off, because the dominant religion here in the US forces everyone to obey its wishes - and saw a ton of posts, some of them making genuinely stupid comments about how this poor Phil guy who was interviewed in GQ is being discriminated against for his Christian beliefs.  And that's from the the people who also believe the entire thing was cooked up by A&E to resuscitate declining ratings.

Not much left to say, I suppose, after that.

And then I saw this piece by Ben Collins, a new writer at Esquire who I'm quite impressed with, that walks a reasonably fine line for a blog post, and is my wont, because I'm a sucker, I read the comments.

Are you with Israel or Turkiyeh?

Will Israel Go Fascist?

Fascism is notoriously difficult to describe.  As a reviewer of the book of Robert Paxton's McConnell cites in this piece points out, when JFK said "ask not..." he said something that sounded fascist, but wasn't really fascist.

But McConnell quotes Blumenthal quoting a woman on a bus asking "Are you with Israel or Turkiyeh?" when discussing the Israeli commando raid on the Gaza flotilla.  I think this is one of the hallmarks of fascism: The treatment of one's political unit as a football team, which one supports no matter their behavior.  It drives me nuts, frankly, that questions of policy that must be hashed out and debated from multiple perspectives get reduced to "If the other side suggested it then its wrong."  That happens, to some degree, with people on the left, but so rarely its counts as a unicorn sighting.  Its common on the right, however.

The new hosers

Rob Ford and the triumph of the new hosers

Canadians spent much of the 70s and 80s trying to identify themselves.  What did it mean to be a Canadian?  What was Canadian behavior?  Why were Canadians in Canada as opposed to some other country, more specifically the US?  How could you create a country out of two groups of people who didn't really like each other, but were otherwise forced to live in the same space because it was so cold all the time?  And if Canada is a mosaic in contrast to the US melting pot, what kind of glue holds the pieces in place and does the mosaic actually make some kind of coherent sense?

Ender's Blues

The song above is from Miles Davis's performance at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, Friday and Saturday night at the end of April, 1961.  There's some performances on this album that stand with some of his best.  This particular version of "If I Were A Bell" hits all the highlights for Miles Davis: Its modal, a form he invented, which frankly turns jazz from a collection of major-scale solos - certainly beautiful, but limited nonetheless - into a new form of music; its indescribably cool; its a sentimental favorite that he does something new with; its both technically proficient and accessible; and its catchy.

Bag men

Sharp drop in infrastructure spending...

Two things of note happened in the Y axis of the above graph.

1. Earmarks disappeared from the Congressional toolbox.  The sole job of a congressman is to get good stuff for their district; its this correlation of self-interests among potential competitors that makes the American system work.  I know we all looked down on earmarks as a hallmark of the unacceptable corruption of a previously high-minded institution, but the institution was never that high-minded and it was never designed to be. 

2. Americans elected a black guy President, and he was promptly tagged as corrupt and likely to hand out money to poor people who were undeserving because they are poor.

So what you see in that graph is a successful takeover of infrastructure spending by people who have power not by virtue of their elections - the President, the House - but by virtue of their institutional longevity and ability to work the system from the inside, i.e. the Speaker of the House.  And of course the thorazine wing of the Republican party is what enabled Newt to gain and hold the power, and for some reason - not his race and your racist for suggesting it! - they hate Obama, and like Frankenstein's monster or Godzilla they've now decided to wreck everything in their path because that's all they were really designed to do.

(I think that might be the best way to understand the thorazine wing.  They're not there because they have ideas about government or the inclination to govern.  They're there because they smash things, or at least up until recently threaten to.  With strong leaders they feel warm and cozy because that is, after all, what they really want - a strong leader who is of the people but also above them, irreproachable in morals but not afraid to wield his disapproval like a sword, a kind of Jesus Christ via 1928 Munich.  With weak leaders like Boehner they run amok wrecking things, asking stupid and irrelevant questions, and generally doing the things the strong leader threatens they will do.  But its always a mystery when they do, because we're supposed to believe these people have rich inner lives and read Locke and Burke in their spare time when really they're not much more than Christian Dominionist robots.)

Its going to be an interesting 20 years, as bridges start to collapse, interstate highways crumble, and airports fall apart, all because Newt Gingrich wanted to rule the world and the Washington establishment felt uncomfortable calling out the racists in their midst.  These idiots have no problem using my tax dollars to air condition tents in the desert, but making sure my kids' schoolmates aren't hungry during the day and that their schools aren't falling apart is bleeding-heart liberalism.

Things that are true, part I

A list of things that I believe we can all accept as true.  The implications of these truths often leads me to my political positions, but apparently that's just me.  I'm not sure why that is.

1. Pipelines leak.  Really, what more is there here to say?  There's a lot of reasons why pipelines leak: from the general decline in quality control in the Chinese-produced steel used for most pipelines, through the hubris of pipeline designers and the greed of pipeline company management more concerned about bottom lines than wildlife habitat and drinkable water, all the way to the Godel Incompleteness Theorem.  We could come up with many many reasons why pipelines leak, but I think we're all in agreement that they do.
2. The same people who think the US government can default on its debt without consequences are the same people who think the Confederate army included willing black soldiers fighting for slavery and that the Civil War was more about states rights than slavery; that the world would be a safer place if everyone had a concealed carry permit; that a large portion of the budget of the US government is spent on foreign aid; that the theory of evolution is a lie spread by Satan; global warming is a conspiracy by leftist climate scientists to raise taxes.  This set of shared beliefs is an anthropological fact.  We can do sociology all we want and survey people and try to understand the fact that the various Venn circles describing this belief are so tightly correlated, but that misses the point.  There is a tribe of people that believes all of these propositions.  Some tribes worship Sirius as their original home; some tribes believe God is an old man who slept with his daughter and her children were bison and human beings; and some tribes believe the Confederate flag is a symbol of freedom.
3. One of the most dangerous places to be in North America is in a school zone outside an elementary school five minutes before the morning bell rings.  Pretty much everyone not in a minivan or an SUV can be crushed to death in minutes by someone who won't even realize they're there, and who is likely responding to work email anyway.  Its not as dangerous as East Oakland or certain neighborhoods in Chicago, but people are still killed in school zones daily.

More as they occur to me.

Mary Shelley's Prophecy

We're all just characters in Frankenstein.  And Frankenstein isn't really fiction.  Its a treatise on how modern Capitalism works.

Friends and family plan

In surveying the newspaper this morning - my local paper stopped coming, apparently of its own accord, so I was stuck with the paper of record - I was struck by a recurring theme, and one that's recurred to me often over the last few months.  The continent's elites - economic, political, social and technological - are in the grip of a Dunning-Kruger effect so powerful they're willing to cut off everyone's noses to prove they're right.  Its not just that the general analytical skill of these elites is best represented in the XKCD cartoon about girls and math; its not just that the question "stupid or evil?" has no apparent answer when it comes to the continuous desire of the elites to push economic policy, birth control, energy policy, military solutions, and countless other arenas that have not just failed in the past but are failing with rank and odious consequences for everyone.  The stunning displays of obstinate ideologically-motivated incompetence we see in the news every morning are being modeled by everyday people, at work and at school.  People feel willing and justified in saying or doing stupid things every day to the people around them because in society as a whole there are no consequences at the top of the heap.  So its okay for people to say the President is a Nazi Stalinist who wants to force socialist medicine on all of us and enslave us to a life of indentured zombitude, and as a result people come into their places of work and make my life, and yours, a constant exercise in "what are they trying to do here?"

Historical parallels

Sometime after 9/11 I stopped being paranoid about what I thought was the ever-present possibility of a coup-d'etat in the United States.  There was no need, really, for something like that; the majority of Americans were only too happy to dive into an orgy of militarism and the various abdications of moral responsibility that followed the invasion of Afghanistan - from the PATRIOT Act, through torture and the invasion of Iraq and all the nonsense that followed - had agreement across a broad range of the political and social culture.  People who's political sensibilities I admire (even if I'm far more left wing) like Nancy Pelosi and Tom Dachle and Pat Leahy and Hillary Clinton couldn't see a problem with the direction things were going.  Once the narcissists and egomaniacal ideological fanatics had chased the sensible people out of the GOP after Bush pere lost, it was the D side of the aisle in the House of Representatives that had to be counted on for at least a modicum of caution, to try to avoid too much social experimentation and the wild-eyed douchebaggery that makes it hard to raise children, pay off your debts and rebuild your infrastructure.  If the Democrats and the Republicans thought you needed to do a bunch of stuff that was unlikely to have any positive impacts or sustainable outcomes, then reason dictates you have to argue to change things and hope for the best.  That is, after all, what its about in a democracy.  Especially a democracy that ends up trying all the wrong doors before it picks the right one, to paraphrase Churchill.

Big bang theory

There's a lot of discussion in various locations where hunters and shooters collect about the cause of the ammunition shortages that have plagued these very same hunters and shooters.  Some people have claimed Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States, the proverbial worst nightmare for many of those hunters and shooters, is buying up all that ammunition at the direction of his boss (this man) because they couldn't ram gun control down the, err, throats of all those people who don't like having stuff down their throats.  Others have speculated about the UN, or Nancy Pelosi, or the usual half-baked arguments about inconsistent state regulations.

We could have nice things

Casual Cruelties

There was a time when the United States dreamed and did big things, as a nation.  Americans went to the moon.  They spent tens of billions of dollars to keep north Vietnam from overrunning south Vietnam, according to the wishes (at the time) of the south Vietnamese.  Lyndon Johnson announced a war on poverty that initiated a whole series of experiments designed to help the poor and disadvantaged succeed, and he signed civil rights legislation that aggressively rolled back an apartheid state.  His successor, a died-in-the-wool conservative as crooked as Lombard Street on a foggy Friday night, launched the EPA and the Clean Water Act and acknowledged that society can't live in a synthetic environment, that the natural world is a reality and we're part of it.  "American made" was a term of pride and American bridges, highways and railways were engineering marvels, safe both because of the quality of the work and because we, the people, who'd formed our more perfect union, tasked some of us with ensuring that standards were upheld.  Living standards and social engagement grew to the point where everyone wanted to be American, and Americans lived longer than anyone.

Sending a message

Making war in Syria

Gohmert's anti-American conspiracy theory

One fascinating aspect about American culture is how insular it is.  It'd be an adorable trait were it not held by a superpower.

Despite the fact that Americans generate enormous amounts of content - on average probably at least double what your average French citizen does, and more than 10X what they do per capita in China - and basically own the web - who's got the .gov domain?  Governments in general, or just the American government? - there's this apparent belief that they can have loud arguments amongst themselves that no one can hear, and when they finally do reach a conclusion, their representatives will be able to say things clearly to foreigners and have those foreigners understand unequivocally what that message consists of.  That position appears to be completely oblivious to the fact that people can, you know, read.  They can read comments.  The regime in Syria knows that Obama has to act; if they did commit war crimes, then they know they've got some retaliation coming, and if they didn't, they know they'll never break the blockade, or pierce the carefully cultivated story about capitalism and American power and the will of the people and so forth.  So all this back-and-forth about why he's acting and what he should try to convey and so on is just hilarious.  They're listening, people.

And so you see a guy like Louie Gohmert, a genuine idiot, operating under the misapprehension that the stupid things he says to rile up his local wingnuts will go no further than his local newspaper's website.  Which anyone can read - you can get news tailored for Louie Gohmert on your Android phone in the darkest slums of Manilla, or the plains of Africa, right this very moment.

There's probably a parable here, about a group of people that think they live in a bubble, but really don't.

Some of the poultry have figured out how to use GPS

Some recent discoveries.  But first, I'm morally obligated to link to this public service announcement:

1.  Charlie Stross points out that when, as a culture, you systematically destroy the notion of reciprocal loyalty in labor contracts you cannot expect much except that rest of us will use tit-for-tat.  My parents worked for the same organizations for multiple decades, whereas my record, which is perhaps a bit more extreme than my Generation X peers but not by much, is five employers per decade.  People born after 1980 and the glorious Reagan revolution will have similar or worse experiences.