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Springheel
Jack's Log
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9:56 pm
Friends of Radiation |
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I'm reading this book about Area 51, entitled "Area 51". It's a very strange book. 90% of it is solid, convincing journalism and good history. The other ten percent is so crazy it glows with an eerie phosphorescence. The histories of the U-2, Project Oxcart, the MiG testing, the environmental lawsuits? All great, and leavened with fresh detail. That chapter about how the Roswell crash wasn't aliens, but was really a Nazi flying saucer captured and reverse-engineered by the KGB and piloted over the USA by mutated Jewish slave children genetically altered by Dr. Mengele? Less convincing. It's as if the author talked to nine knowledgeable sources and one fulminant schizophrenic, and couldn't tell them apart. I blame the public schools.
I'm trying to think what else I've read lately; I've been forgetting to post about books. Mostly that's because I hit that inevitable thing in the summer in which I can't read anything in a sustained way. I think it's either the weather or the light. So I read some more Anita Blake s/m vampirism porn books, and I re-read the first five Harry Potter books, and um.
Oh, I read an excellent book on cancer, called "The Emperor of All Maladies." It's full of information about cancer. The upshot was that cancer is very interesting if you don't have it. It did resolve one thing I'd forgotten I was wondering about, which is why cancer the disease and cancer the crab have the same name. The disease and the constellation are both named after the animal.
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9:56 pm
Friends of Coal |
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Today at the Zoo saw a car with the FRIENDS OF COAL license plate (it's black). The family was all wearing FRIENDS OF COAL t-shirts. Coming on the heels of seeing the actual Quiverfulls at the zoo, I have to say it's something of a delight. There's often a group of fascinating people at the Zoo; it makes being Zoo members totally worthwhile, quite apart from seeing the animals.
So, anyway, coal. "Save coal", says the web site. Also, "legalize coal." I guess that makes United Mountain Defense a bunch of anti-freedom coal-killers. Also, "Know Thy Enemy: The Sierra Club." Do these people even know how they sound?
Before you go to bed tonight don't forget to spare a thought for coal.
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8:13 pm
Sharps Ridge Memorial Park |
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Here's the local story that's galvanizing us, if that's the right word.
Backgrounder:
1) Knoxville escaped the city-county government unification trend of the mid-20th century; as a result we have Government Duplication Like Woah, with both a city government (and council, and mayor) and a county government (and commission, and mayor). The county commission votes on the schools budget. The City is more liberal; the County is more conservative. This results in a lot of city services, like schools and libraries, being choked off by people who don't even pay all the same taxes. Representation without taxation.
2) The County Commission is locked in a struggle over next year's schools budget - a battle bitter even by local standards. The current County Mayor is a tea party fanatic and has a thin majority on the county commission, and Commissioner Jeff Ownby is one of his minions. The Mayor been robo-calling the city to get people to oppose raising the local property tax levy so the schools don't have to be absolutely the worst in the state. The opposition responded with a rather ill-judged and expensive splashy tv ad in favor. The vote is in a few days.
3) Sharps Ridge Memorial Park occupies the crest of one of the many ridges that cut the town up - it's within easy sight of our house. This part of the state is in the Ridge and Valley Appalachian geological province; you can see all these huge ridges and outcrops of folded Cambrian dolomite everywhere. Sharps Ridge is one of these. It's had many functions - at one time it was prime cross-burning territory for Klan who wanted to put a scare into the African-Americans in the lower-lying Mechanicsville neighborhood. Now it's full of cell phone towers and is a gay cruising ground after twilight.
4) All these Baptist homophobes - absolutely all of them - are closeted gays. I don't know how that is possible, or how it works, but it seems to be true.
5) These "indecency" stings against local gays are absolute bullshit. Let's be clear about that. This guy is a jerk, but it's creepy and terribly wrong that homosexuality is criminalized at certain times and places, and that the state is seeking to entrap people this way. You know how these things are - there were no kids, or anyone else, around; they were in a car under a tree in the dark. No harm was done. Straights would not have been troubled by the police - and nobody would ever run a sting operation like this against them. As far as I can tell the only really problematic thing this guy did was not availing himself of one of the many convenient internet services for gays seeking hookups on the QT.
6) They took his foster kids out of the house already.
7) It's quite possible he didn't do anything at all. Do you trust the cops to be honest?
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8:11 pm
apparent undefinabilities |
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I don't know if this counts as an ideological contradiction in the full sense, but if you live out here, you will go to crunchy vegan-y co-ops and see cars with like two dozen anti-Obama stickers - and they're not critiquing him from the left, just so you know. This is full-on tea-party madness. But teabaggers apparently also need bulk legumes.
You'll also see the hippie disabled vegan lady who hates abortion. It could be from a disability-rights point of view that criticizes Peter Singer, but somehow I doubt it.
East Tennessee has been defined by such apparent undefinabilities. This has always been, even by Southern standards, a burned-over district; trade unions are practically illegal, and the last person not a Republican to represent this district in Congress was a Whig. Nationally famous legislative embarrassment Stacey "don't say gay" Campfield is from right down the road. Yet it's been a crucible of Quaker abolitionism, socialist utopianism, and the United Mine Workers. It had to be occupied by the Confederates to prevent it re-seceding to the Union and was a vital center on the underground railroad. One of the most important economic forces in the region is arguably America's last bastion of old-style New Deal socialist welfare-statism outside the NFL - the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has rewritten the land as with a vast crayon. Grotesque bituminous-fired power plants are nearby some of the newest nukes in the hemisphere. Half of this metropolis was an atomic closed city until the 1950s, an American version of Chelyabinsk-40, and remains a billion-dollar Big Science lab. The most intense experiments in contemporary right-wing Protestant religiosity sit right alongside neo-utopian pastoralist gay covens. The city mayor is a liberal Democrat and the county Mayor - unified governance passed us by, unsurprisingly - is a tea-party Republican. A few miles from the most-visited national park are surface-of-the-moon examples of nearly unregulated mountaintop removal coal mining. And so on.
It's not dull. It's not one thing. It's not stultifying. Nobody should think of it that way.
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9:52 pm
hamburger hill |
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So we're in a war on marriage. The wounds had not yet healed from the war on christmas. Where's their parade, huh? But no, you spit on those jolly men in red suits, called them reindeer killers. And now the air is rent with screams anew, filled with a horrible confetti of shredded doilies and bits of taffeta. Dulce et decorum est, pro nuptia mori.
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7:48 am
the mentalists of wall street |
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If you're following the story of the sudden, ruinous de-pantsing of JPMorgan (ok, you probably aren't), one of the better parts is watching the financial press try to figure out who "The London Whale", the metonymous trader who lost them all that money, is. Initially he was identified as Bruno Iksil, who is also called "Lord Voldemort" by his compatriots in the blow-up-the-world-with-shitty-investments biz. Now they're saying it may be Achilles Macris, who doesn't appear to have a second nickname, but is described by pals as "an idea-generating machine...who doesn't suffer fools."
Which leads to a second observation. I'd say putting two billion dollars in a pile, soaking it with kerosene, and setting fire to it, in the course of your duties as an investment banker, is pretty much the definition of foolish. (All the other high-flying banksters were betting against his bets as a hedge.) Yet people love these dickbags; they're always "the smartest guys in the room." There must be a way they have of seeming uber-competent when they are, in fact, pathologically useless; I mean, most people don't get world famous for being incredible, historic fuckups at their jobs, but this guy will be recalled along with Nick Leeson and the the guys on the April 26, 1986 night shift at Chernobyl.
It's the form of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome that's transmissible, an intersubjective Downing effect. You have to realize it's so strong that he'll get jobs after this, people will still treat him as though he's smart. Even though they know on some level that he's shit; even though the first, if unwritten, requirement for his position is "won't lose billions and billions of dollars in a couple of days." This goes way beyond class loyalty. It smacks of necromancy. Vampire telepathy? The Imperius curse?
As a confirmed depressive realist, I wish I could do it.
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12:17 am
something has gone wrong |
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Nerd defensiveness is one thing, but the idea that claims of taste are nondisputable is something that anyone who has ever talked to me knows sends me into a rage. We do practically nothing else in our conversation about culture; this claim of de gustibus non est disputandum only ever arises when someone says something that the other really doesn't like. Then it's "but it's just my own taste, and that's just your opinion, and never the twain shall meet." Yes, but while claims of taste are subjective in one sense, they are objective in another - they are about recognizable features of the work itself, not merely about the emotive state occasioned by its reception. When we converse about them we are attempting to convince each other of our points of view and we use recognizably rational ways of doing so.
There is really no excuse for thinking that subjectivity is actually a defense against critque other than not having thought about the issue for more than two consecutive seconds. Yes, I engage in some hyperbole when I say my judgements of taste are bedrock-true, but I make a claim in what Kant called a "universal voice"; the claims are not indexical "to me". At the very least I am acting as though they were true; I can't not. We'd be awfully quiet, and awfully dull, if it were so.
I mean, what, exactly, is it that is supposed to exempt or insulate a claim of taste from external evaluation and criticism? What aspect of human subjectivity or the concept of the subjective is it that has this power? Why would this be true?
Also, you know, I really think I am a geek. What, is it that I don't code? That my obsessive and fiddly interests are in the humanities and not in comic books or tech? I don't get it. Do I really present the image of someone who wasn't harrassed as a kid? Haha. Whatever.
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3:59 pm
bleah |
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I know, blah blah, superhero movies are just another hegemonic American genre, like the Western used to be, but I don't like them at all and I don't want to hear about them or ever want to see another one under any circumstances. And that's cool, whatever, I don't have to, except I keep getting this weird vibe from people, from the culture at large, that's almost cultic. Little-red-bookish. You /don't/? What's wrong with you? You know, they might send you to the comic-con gulag and re-educate you if you say that out loud!
I just don't get why "fuck superhero movies, they're stupid" isn't at least a substantial minority position, even within geek culture.
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4:31 pm
overtoning the overton window |
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I've noticed - you probably have, too - that the main Republican rhetorical strategies are not so much about "moving the overton window" as creating a complete intellectual cleavage between Us and Them. You take the most obvious, clear, strong fact about the opposition and instead of chipping away or misdirecting or refuting you simply deny it absolutely and assert the contrary. So Kerry was, in fact, a cowardly war-dodger. Global warming is a fringe, lunatic, ideological position that scientists don't believe (this from a quote I just saw posted by Jason Goodman by the Heartland Inst.). And Obama is a radical, alien, idiot (telepropmpter-gate, and the accusation he cheated his way through school, and so on.)
Liberals don't do this because they can't seem to simply deny the obvious truth, but it's clearly the way to go, as long as we're being all Plato's Republic about this. So, what do we say about Romney? That he's secretly poor? That he's a Satanist? That he's a Marxist? I'm convinced that saying what he actually patently /is/ - rich, out of touch, a centrist flip-flopper hard to distinguish from Obama - is not the way to campaign, even though the Democrats think it is. Deny the obvious, do it clearly and loudly, over and over and over, and people will believe you.
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4:29 pm
many disappointed |
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This is a great article about our local "anti-sitting" law, and by "great" I mean retch-inducing. I mean, the people they're describing are /hanging out near the mission that they sleep in/. They don't have anywhere to go, or, you know, they wouldn't be there in the first place.
So apparently what the homeless should do is just walk until they die. It's like one of those dystopian movies.
And apparently actually speaking to one of the people affected by these laws is completely beneath the dignity of the reporter. In fact, the business owners they talked to aren't even on that block - they're in a much tonier part of town. It's like they were out on lunch and said, hey, Frank, you don't like those homeless, do you? Want to be a pull-quote? It's miserable.
These are the same dumbasses who voted to kill the city's long term plan to deal with homelessness, because it wasn't free and magical.
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4:28 pm
tat |
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Maybe for my tattoo I should opt for a formalization of the modal adage that counterfactual conditionals are not truth-functional, which I tend to believe, if only for psychological reasons. See also the relative unprofitability of tormenting regret and that famous Frost poem everyone thinks they understand.
Actually right now I'm thinking of that distinctive colophon from the title page of the original german edition of the critique of pure reason.
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4:27 pm
nuclear factory |
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I grew up in a somewhat unworldly nuclear family. I was always encouraged to read and learn, and I have always continued to do so. But at the same time that seems so normal to me - indeed imperative - that doing it hardly feels like a stretch, and I don't get a big boost in (horrible word but apropos) self-esteem. Unless the problem I've unraveled is a really large and complex one.
Whereas doing things with my hands...I didn't do that a lot growing up and was always intimidated and a little awed by people who did, who had role models close to them who, well, made things and fixed things. So successfully executing even small and simple home projects like replacing a window screen, replacing brake shoes, or fixing a ceiling fan, are a giant hoot. Especially if I don't cut or burn myself, or break something.
I do have to go back to the store, though. Turns out 0.125" window screen spline was the right size, but I didn't buy enough screen. Multiplication is still tricky.
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Saturday, April 28th, 2012 |
3:06 pm
how not ever to do it |
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I'm not sure this scrapbook changeover even portends any problems. I can't, for example, confirm from any source other than the shared post that they're really stripping our capacity. And it looks like everything should re-map (maybe?). The thing that's a hassle is that I guess they couldn't figure out how to change all the custom security filters over, so everything is defaulting to private if it wasn't public and will have to be changed.
But WHY wouldn't you make an obvious, public, clear announcement? WHY would you make just one, half-assed, half-clear, threatening announcement in one squirreled-away community in one language? WHY then just sit and wait while rumors proliferated? It's just crazy!
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