After the last federal budget the NDP's Thomas Mulcair announced a National Day of Action. This is the kind of thing that gets my lefty heart pounding. Finally, citizens getting a chance to talk about substantive changes not just to the budget but to the whole idea of what government means to Canadians - what we are willing to pay and what we expect for that money. I was imagining a Nation wide debate, held at the local level but simultaneously with engaged and interested citizens mooting their own ideas and discussing issues that matter most to us. Instead, Mulcair decided the issues under discussion - and I'm not making this up - would be 1) ATM fees, 2) Credit Card interest rates, 3) Payday lending schemes, 4) corporate collusion and gas price fixing, and 5) companies adding a surcharge for mailing out statements at the end of each month.
Holy shit. It's lucky no one was killed in the resulting complete lack of interest. Why did they bother to stage a media event when they could have just stopped in to any Tim Horton's in the country and heard the exact same bitching? And got the exact same result. Nothing.
My five topics for a genuine National Day of Action? 1) Reducing income inequality to pre-1970 levels, 2) implementing a meaningful carbon tax for polluters, 3) the text of the apology to be delivered to scientists and librarians employed by the federal government as well as a repeal of all the insulting legislation the Harper government passed to curb their freedom of speech, 4) the creation of a new top tax bracket for incomes over $300k per annum and the elimination of a two decades worth of corporate tax breaks, and 5) giving subpoena powers to the parliamentary budget office.
and 6) reopening the Experimental Lakes Area with full funding. And one more for good luck 7) a federal commission on climate change run by climate scientists and funded by the federal government to provide the most up to date info to any member of parliament (to remain in effect until the climate stops changing or the world ends, whichever happens first).
Seriously, if I was a member of the NDP I would be very pissed off about this. What Mulcair is doing is taking the nation's pulse on issues that, by selection, belong to the conservatives. People who really think those are issues of importance are always going to vote for the conservatives because they are small issues that amount to, at most, a couple hundred bucks per year. And the conservatives will save them more than that by cutting taxes and services. Sure, those costs disproportionally hurt poor people but they are hurt far more by a government that keeps reducing its influence and ambition for the sake of reduced taxes.
People who support the NDP support big government - or, at least they are willing to provided the government has big ideas. The genuinely weird thing about Canadian politics, seen through the lens of American politics, is we are willing to pay more to get more. Canadians don't share the American fanaticism about small government. Most Canadians want a bigger government if you ask them on an issue by issue basis. When the sum of these issues is a government that takes a large and active role in our national life, people are not just willing to accept it - they welcome it. In 2004, the CBC started a contest to choose the "most influential Canadian". Most people thought it would go to Wayne Gretzky or Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester Pearson but it went to the Prairie Giant, Tommy Douglas. The father of socialized medicine in Canada. If the NDP wants to gain seats, if it wants to hold on to the ones it has, Thomas Mulcair better start thinking bigger.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Nice work if you can get it.
This is a piece about how climate change denial is being funded by the same people who brought us the Harper Government. Every time I see something like this my first thought is, "That's disgusting" and my second is, "I could do that".
For the record, the IPCC (a tremendously conservative body) included in its conclusions that climate scientists are 95% certain climate change is both real and anthropogenic. Of the scientists who contributed to it, 97.1% agreed its anthropogenic. Here's a take on those numbers in the middle of a really good attack on the media for it's fair and equal presentation of ideas. Here is an interesting article on the lay deniers who argue winter is positive proof the anthropogenic argument is wrong and how that should replace, "Hot enough for you?" as the standard culture signifier for an annoying loudmouth.
Still, there seems to be a consensus there is very little we can do as individuals except try to find the best way to survive the coming changes. The people who we need to be at the head of the movement for change are the same people who are funding the attacks against the science demonstrating the need for change. The fight is fix, as Leonard Cohen told us a long time ago. Things are so bad here is Canada, the government sends chaperones to sit with Canadian scientists at press conferences to ensure they stay "on message".
Since you don't need an advanced degree in climate science to attack it and anyone who wants to take a crack at "debunking" climate science already has the winning combination of an audience who want to be convinced and backers with deep pockets I might be approaching this issue completely backwards. The way I see it, I have two separate but related problems. I need to make money. That's problem number one. It's not as important as problem number two but it is far more immediate. Problem two is, of course, the fact we might have already locked in a climate change that will make the Earth uninhabitable.
This piece was published almost two years ago and it's a really interesting take on the new world order and our reactions to it. After connecting the current crop of apocalypse fanboys (including me, I suppose) to the people who were reacting similarly to the Mayan prophecy of 2012 (which I didn't credit for a second) or Y2K (which I also completely ignored), the author throws the king-bastard of all bummers on the unsuspecting reader:
"Imagine a future in which all the trends I've just sketched out [increasingly frequent disasters and a less and less assistance from the government and the community] just keeps getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any light at the far end - not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point, imagine that this is your future; that you, personally, will have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an employee hoping that it won't be your job's turn to go away forever, until that finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care and dozens of other basic good and services stop being available at a price you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your life in the conditions I've just sketched out, and you know as you die that the challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the ones you faced."
I can't deny I have a strange fascination with this potential apocalypse I would have probably scorned two years ago. The extent I'm willing to believe the potential for global catastrophe seems directly correlated to the mess in my personal life. I don't know if that makes me as petty is it sounds. It probably does.
For the record, the IPCC (a tremendously conservative body) included in its conclusions that climate scientists are 95% certain climate change is both real and anthropogenic. Of the scientists who contributed to it, 97.1% agreed its anthropogenic. Here's a take on those numbers in the middle of a really good attack on the media for it's fair and equal presentation of ideas. Here is an interesting article on the lay deniers who argue winter is positive proof the anthropogenic argument is wrong and how that should replace, "Hot enough for you?" as the standard culture signifier for an annoying loudmouth.
Still, there seems to be a consensus there is very little we can do as individuals except try to find the best way to survive the coming changes. The people who we need to be at the head of the movement for change are the same people who are funding the attacks against the science demonstrating the need for change. The fight is fix, as Leonard Cohen told us a long time ago. Things are so bad here is Canada, the government sends chaperones to sit with Canadian scientists at press conferences to ensure they stay "on message".
Since you don't need an advanced degree in climate science to attack it and anyone who wants to take a crack at "debunking" climate science already has the winning combination of an audience who want to be convinced and backers with deep pockets I might be approaching this issue completely backwards. The way I see it, I have two separate but related problems. I need to make money. That's problem number one. It's not as important as problem number two but it is far more immediate. Problem two is, of course, the fact we might have already locked in a climate change that will make the Earth uninhabitable.
This piece was published almost two years ago and it's a really interesting take on the new world order and our reactions to it. After connecting the current crop of apocalypse fanboys (including me, I suppose) to the people who were reacting similarly to the Mayan prophecy of 2012 (which I didn't credit for a second) or Y2K (which I also completely ignored), the author throws the king-bastard of all bummers on the unsuspecting reader:
"Imagine a future in which all the trends I've just sketched out [increasingly frequent disasters and a less and less assistance from the government and the community] just keeps getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any light at the far end - not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point, imagine that this is your future; that you, personally, will have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an employee hoping that it won't be your job's turn to go away forever, until that finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care and dozens of other basic good and services stop being available at a price you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your life in the conditions I've just sketched out, and you know as you die that the challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the ones you faced."
I can't deny I have a strange fascination with this potential apocalypse I would have probably scorned two years ago. The extent I'm willing to believe the potential for global catastrophe seems directly correlated to the mess in my personal life. I don't know if that makes me as petty is it sounds. It probably does.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
On Certainty
If you're a scientist or know anything about science you will probably want to stop reading this right now. I'm about to try to explain alpha errors and will almost certainly make a has of it.
Anyone who has been reading my latest entries will know I'm going a little crazy trying to figure out how much attention I should be paying to the scientific doomsdayers who say a + 4º planet is not fit for human inhabitation and would therefore result in Near Term Human Extinction. I was trying to talk to someone about it and, my first advice, don't do that. No one wants to hear about it. Literally no one. People have regular lives with a million little things built into them specifically so people can worry about sensible things and not craziness like human extinction. People worry about their kids, the schools their kids go to, the economy, their pensions, their next week at work, the state of their mortgages and other debts, many many normal things. They really don't need a lunatic like me dumping human extinction onto the pile and upsetting everything. Second thing, the concept of certainty requires explanation.
This is my best guess because I am not a scientist. I took some science as an undergrad but not much. Just enough to understand alpha and beta errors. So when scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, it means they know something is happening and they are 95% certain it means what they say it means. Or, if they are predicting, it means they are 95% certain about their model. There is a huge difference between measuring and predicting (obviously) but the more important question is, "How certain is 95% certain?"
That 95% is a very important number because by itself it tells us a lot about the state of climate science. It is the statistical representation of the probability of a false positive. That's what alpha error is, a false positive. Reporting something is happening when it isn't really. The kind of opposite of alpha error is beta error and that's a false negative - reporting nothing is happening when something really is. No one needs to worry about beta error at all so long as we are talking about climate change because everyone agrees something is happening.
Alpha is typically expressed as a decimal but it gets converted into a percentage for public consumption. When I was an undergrad, we were taught that in most cases an alpha of .2 was acceptable. Meaning the results are accurate 4 times out of 5 and the corresponding certainty was therefore 80%. If you wanted a higher degree of certainty, you could make alpha .1 (or 9 times in ten, 90% certainty). So a 95% certainty is an accurate result 19 times in 20 or an alpha of .05
When you express it as a percentage it completely changes how people will perceive the number. 95% certain seems 5% more certain than 90%. And it is, kind of. But 1 error is 5 is twice as many errors (statistically) as 1 error in 10. And 1 in 10 is twice as many as 1 in 20. So 95% certain is not 15% more certain than 80% certain -it's four times as certain. An alpha of .2 is four times as high as an alpha of .05 - and that's the alpha they are using.
So when climate scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, they mean they absolutely and conclusively know something is happening but there is a 5% chance their results are occurring because of a selection bias.
I don't know how climate scientists deal with selection bias. When I was dealing with alpha and beta errors the biggest problems were geographical and historical - people in different parts of the world are different and that causes problems for generalizing results in the social sciences. But weather is always different in different places. It has to be. That's the definition of weather and it happens because we have an atmosphere (without which we would be even more completely fucked than I think we are).
I'm going to try to get an expert to explain this to me and I'll report back.
Anyone who has been reading my latest entries will know I'm going a little crazy trying to figure out how much attention I should be paying to the scientific doomsdayers who say a + 4º planet is not fit for human inhabitation and would therefore result in Near Term Human Extinction. I was trying to talk to someone about it and, my first advice, don't do that. No one wants to hear about it. Literally no one. People have regular lives with a million little things built into them specifically so people can worry about sensible things and not craziness like human extinction. People worry about their kids, the schools their kids go to, the economy, their pensions, their next week at work, the state of their mortgages and other debts, many many normal things. They really don't need a lunatic like me dumping human extinction onto the pile and upsetting everything. Second thing, the concept of certainty requires explanation.
This is my best guess because I am not a scientist. I took some science as an undergrad but not much. Just enough to understand alpha and beta errors. So when scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, it means they know something is happening and they are 95% certain it means what they say it means. Or, if they are predicting, it means they are 95% certain about their model. There is a huge difference between measuring and predicting (obviously) but the more important question is, "How certain is 95% certain?"
That 95% is a very important number because by itself it tells us a lot about the state of climate science. It is the statistical representation of the probability of a false positive. That's what alpha error is, a false positive. Reporting something is happening when it isn't really. The kind of opposite of alpha error is beta error and that's a false negative - reporting nothing is happening when something really is. No one needs to worry about beta error at all so long as we are talking about climate change because everyone agrees something is happening.
Alpha is typically expressed as a decimal but it gets converted into a percentage for public consumption. When I was an undergrad, we were taught that in most cases an alpha of .2 was acceptable. Meaning the results are accurate 4 times out of 5 and the corresponding certainty was therefore 80%. If you wanted a higher degree of certainty, you could make alpha .1 (or 9 times in ten, 90% certainty). So a 95% certainty is an accurate result 19 times in 20 or an alpha of .05
When you express it as a percentage it completely changes how people will perceive the number. 95% certain seems 5% more certain than 90%. And it is, kind of. But 1 error is 5 is twice as many errors (statistically) as 1 error in 10. And 1 in 10 is twice as many as 1 in 20. So 95% certain is not 15% more certain than 80% certain -it's four times as certain. An alpha of .2 is four times as high as an alpha of .05 - and that's the alpha they are using.
So when climate scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, they mean they absolutely and conclusively know something is happening but there is a 5% chance their results are occurring because of a selection bias.
I don't know how climate scientists deal with selection bias. When I was dealing with alpha and beta errors the biggest problems were geographical and historical - people in different parts of the world are different and that causes problems for generalizing results in the social sciences. But weather is always different in different places. It has to be. That's the definition of weather and it happens because we have an atmosphere (without which we would be even more completely fucked than I think we are).
I'm going to try to get an expert to explain this to me and I'll report back.
Friday, February 21, 2014
I guess I'm a descriptivist
In an essay about television David Foster Wallace (he of the long name and even longer books) described a professor, "He was the type of person who used which even when the correct pronoun was that because it sounds fancier." I'm paraphrasing. The essay is called E Unibas Pluram and it was published in A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again. You can look it up for yourself if you want.
So I googled "which that" (not really because of the Foster essay, which I do recommend, but because I had to look up mutatis mutandis) and found a dozen web pages dedicated to using grammar correctly. I think that might be redundant (grammar is by definition correct). It should probably go without saying but reading anything on not making a total clusterf*ck of the English language will convince you in about ten minutes that you can't use the language you have been speaking and writing your entire life and every time you open your mouth you make things worse.
Which vs that is kind of simple. I'm not going to explain it, you can google it yourself. But that got me looking at further vs farther and I felt like a champion. I was getting it right. Then I looked at the dreaded dangling participle. I didn't know English had participles. Who vs whom I mostly get right, dragged vs drug I didn't even know was a thing. Laid vs lie? No clue. There were about 200 "common grammatical mistakes" or "common grammar mistakes" I forget which (that?) one. And not only did I not know the answers, I didn't even know they were questions.
Correcting someone's grammar is about the most insulting thing you can do. It's a snide way of saying, "You're ignorant." But even worse, it's like telling someone, "You smile wrong." From that moment on they will be ashamed of smiling in case they forget the rules for how to do it.
There is, among people who work for dictionaries or have a startling amount of free time, a debate between the so-called Descriptivists and Prescriptivists. The D's think language should be studied as it is used and the rules continuously (continually?) changed to reflect usage. You can think of them as the people who want "ain't" to be in the dictionary. The P's want language to be used according to the rules. You can think of them as the people who know whether I meant continuously or continually two sentences ago. Or the people who complain it's "YLOO" not "YOLO". Prior to actually trying to figure out some of the rules that govern our language I would have said (written?) I was a P. I take language seriously even though I can't punctuate for shit. I read a lot of books and I know the difference between further and farther, lesser and fewer. But the more rules you learn, the more there are to learn. And, really, the more smug and irritating P's start to seem.
Even if I didn't care about associating myself with that annoying, know-it-all-ish, finger-wagging, prescriptivist bullshit, a big part of the greatness of the English language is its ability to consume and mangle. Some people think the reason has become the parole (langue?) of the world is because it is the language of business. I think that's only partly true. The official access to most languages is controlled by a bunch of tight-assed P's who say what is, and what isn't, a word. Which is why when you listen to people speaking other languages on the telephone, you hear, "[a bunch of Mandarin words] microwave [a bunch more Mandarin words]." The technical word for this is neologism and it just means you're allowed to make up words and pretend they're English any time you want. And anybody can do it. I think it's kind of funny because neologism is from the French neoligisme. They didn't have a word to describe new words so they took the Greek for "new" and the Greek for "word" and stuck them together. But in French it kind of means "a bullshit word" because you can't make neoligisme in French. You can in English, so neologism became a perfectly good English word to describe other new perfectly good English words.
There are way more than a million words in English. It's probably closer to two million by now. There are about 120 000 in German and only 90 000 in French. About 80 000 of those German words are used in English because the Germans have a real knack for coming up with words for saying crazy shit no one in English bothered trying to say until they found out the Germans already had a word for it. Like dopelgänger and schadenfreude. It's only fair to add that while you can't make new words in German you can stick two or more old words together to make a (kind of) new word. The English equivalent would be knowitallism (instead of the massively incorrect "know-it-all-ism"), which (that?) would then be mangled and changed to kiam or douchebaggery or something else no one could predict.
Even though I am willing to call myself a descriptivist, I'm still not going to admit a construction like, "Either you is or you is ain't..." There are degrees. I am a descriptivist to precisely the degree that my grammar is incorrect. Any mistakes I make should therefore not be construed as mistakes but, rather, as a fluid and lively use of a mutable and growing language. Other peoples mistakes are just wrong. Unless I make them too. What a wonderful fucking language.
So I googled "which that" (not really because of the Foster essay, which I do recommend, but because I had to look up mutatis mutandis) and found a dozen web pages dedicated to using grammar correctly. I think that might be redundant (grammar is by definition correct). It should probably go without saying but reading anything on not making a total clusterf*ck of the English language will convince you in about ten minutes that you can't use the language you have been speaking and writing your entire life and every time you open your mouth you make things worse.
Which vs that is kind of simple. I'm not going to explain it, you can google it yourself. But that got me looking at further vs farther and I felt like a champion. I was getting it right. Then I looked at the dreaded dangling participle. I didn't know English had participles. Who vs whom I mostly get right, dragged vs drug I didn't even know was a thing. Laid vs lie? No clue. There were about 200 "common grammatical mistakes" or "common grammar mistakes" I forget which (that?) one. And not only did I not know the answers, I didn't even know they were questions.
Correcting someone's grammar is about the most insulting thing you can do. It's a snide way of saying, "You're ignorant." But even worse, it's like telling someone, "You smile wrong." From that moment on they will be ashamed of smiling in case they forget the rules for how to do it.
There is, among people who work for dictionaries or have a startling amount of free time, a debate between the so-called Descriptivists and Prescriptivists. The D's think language should be studied as it is used and the rules continuously (continually?) changed to reflect usage. You can think of them as the people who want "ain't" to be in the dictionary. The P's want language to be used according to the rules. You can think of them as the people who know whether I meant continuously or continually two sentences ago. Or the people who complain it's "YLOO" not "YOLO". Prior to actually trying to figure out some of the rules that govern our language I would have said (written?) I was a P. I take language seriously even though I can't punctuate for shit. I read a lot of books and I know the difference between further and farther, lesser and fewer. But the more rules you learn, the more there are to learn. And, really, the more smug and irritating P's start to seem.
Even if I didn't care about associating myself with that annoying, know-it-all-ish, finger-wagging, prescriptivist bullshit, a big part of the greatness of the English language is its ability to consume and mangle. Some people think the reason has become the parole (langue?) of the world is because it is the language of business. I think that's only partly true. The official access to most languages is controlled by a bunch of tight-assed P's who say what is, and what isn't, a word. Which is why when you listen to people speaking other languages on the telephone, you hear, "[a bunch of Mandarin words] microwave [a bunch more Mandarin words]." The technical word for this is neologism and it just means you're allowed to make up words and pretend they're English any time you want. And anybody can do it. I think it's kind of funny because neologism is from the French neoligisme. They didn't have a word to describe new words so they took the Greek for "new" and the Greek for "word" and stuck them together. But in French it kind of means "a bullshit word" because you can't make neoligisme in French. You can in English, so neologism became a perfectly good English word to describe other new perfectly good English words.
There are way more than a million words in English. It's probably closer to two million by now. There are about 120 000 in German and only 90 000 in French. About 80 000 of those German words are used in English because the Germans have a real knack for coming up with words for saying crazy shit no one in English bothered trying to say until they found out the Germans already had a word for it. Like dopelgänger and schadenfreude. It's only fair to add that while you can't make new words in German you can stick two or more old words together to make a (kind of) new word. The English equivalent would be knowitallism (instead of the massively incorrect "know-it-all-ism"), which (that?) would then be mangled and changed to kiam or douchebaggery or something else no one could predict.
Even though I am willing to call myself a descriptivist, I'm still not going to admit a construction like, "Either you is or you is ain't..." There are degrees. I am a descriptivist to precisely the degree that my grammar is incorrect. Any mistakes I make should therefore not be construed as mistakes but, rather, as a fluid and lively use of a mutable and growing language. Other peoples mistakes are just wrong. Unless I make them too. What a wonderful fucking language.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Pretending to care about the Olympics (again)
Today, if Facebook posts are a reliable indicator, the Canadian women's hockey team won a gold medal. Like anyone gives a fuck about women's hockey. I don't mean to offend any women that read this but it's hockey - a sport so fucking dumb you really should know better. I know that women are smarter than men. I'm not trying to dig myself out of a hole here, they really are. Guys are so dumb they are even dumb about the things they are smart about. Like boats or guns. A guy who owns a boat will think he knows every fucking thing there is to know about boats and all of it will be wrong. And it isn't women who are threatening to kill Obama if he takes their guns away. Really, that is typical of male thinking - you took my toys away so I'm going to hit you. We are dumber than five year olds. My nephew knows how to share, how many adult men do?
So hockey. That's a guy thing. And that's not me being macho. It's the most damning condemnation I can pass on a thing. It's so fucking stupid only guys like it. Women, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Curling, on the other hand, is something women also do. And they do it because you can't just throw the fucking rock as hard as your steroidal muscles will manage. It's physics, timing, delicacy, and a strange kind of tactical thinking women are better at than men. The only reason men beat women at curling is because they sweep better. Put a female skip and lead with two male sweepers against a male skip and lead and two female sweepers and the female skip will win every time. Men are only good for sweeping. Wow, our culture really dropped the ball on that stereotype.
I'm not bitching about the Olympics just because I like to piss on other peoples' parades. Although that's definitely part of it. I also bitched about George Bush the Lesser invading Iraq. That was stupid, disingenuous, and genocidal. The Olympics are stupid, disingenuous, and boring. So Iraq wins on the losing scale.
Before this Olympics started everyone was talking about boycotting it because Putin is a homophobe. He's also a crazed monster whose politics are somewhere to the right of Attila. But the homophobic part really rubbed people the wrong way. But, homophobic or not, it's been a long time since Canada won double gold in Olympic hockey (since Salt Lake). I guess we better hope the next winter Olympics doesn't coincide with any major political upheaval that requires some canny intervention from the Great White North - or failing that, that the men's team gets eliminated early.
To be fair, I never gave much thought to how to respond to the official homophobia of the Russian state. In some way I always think it's nice when a nation does something as dumb as actually codifying the prejudices and idiocies everyone knows they. It makes them so much easier to mock. Look at the famous case of Dred Scott. America was racist as fuck before that and racist as fuck after it but people still gave their heads a shake when they heard the Supreme Court let that cat out of the bag. So when Russia passed its ridiculous anti-gay propaganda law, I thought we were in for some quality humour and, maybe, some very entertaining arrests during the ice dancing competitions. But the hotels were shit and people started posting funny pictures on Instagram and that was the end of the anti-gay bashing.
Maybe we'll get lucky and those mad bastard Brazilians will make some nutty laws before 2016. I think I wrote this before but if they make pro-gay propaganda mandatory, I will watch the entire Olympiad. From the opening to closing ceremonies, I will watch every mind numbing long jumping pole vaulting minute.
So hockey. That's a guy thing. And that's not me being macho. It's the most damning condemnation I can pass on a thing. It's so fucking stupid only guys like it. Women, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Curling, on the other hand, is something women also do. And they do it because you can't just throw the fucking rock as hard as your steroidal muscles will manage. It's physics, timing, delicacy, and a strange kind of tactical thinking women are better at than men. The only reason men beat women at curling is because they sweep better. Put a female skip and lead with two male sweepers against a male skip and lead and two female sweepers and the female skip will win every time. Men are only good for sweeping. Wow, our culture really dropped the ball on that stereotype.
I'm not bitching about the Olympics just because I like to piss on other peoples' parades. Although that's definitely part of it. I also bitched about George Bush the Lesser invading Iraq. That was stupid, disingenuous, and genocidal. The Olympics are stupid, disingenuous, and boring. So Iraq wins on the losing scale.
Before this Olympics started everyone was talking about boycotting it because Putin is a homophobe. He's also a crazed monster whose politics are somewhere to the right of Attila. But the homophobic part really rubbed people the wrong way. But, homophobic or not, it's been a long time since Canada won double gold in Olympic hockey (since Salt Lake). I guess we better hope the next winter Olympics doesn't coincide with any major political upheaval that requires some canny intervention from the Great White North - or failing that, that the men's team gets eliminated early.
To be fair, I never gave much thought to how to respond to the official homophobia of the Russian state. In some way I always think it's nice when a nation does something as dumb as actually codifying the prejudices and idiocies everyone knows they. It makes them so much easier to mock. Look at the famous case of Dred Scott. America was racist as fuck before that and racist as fuck after it but people still gave their heads a shake when they heard the Supreme Court let that cat out of the bag. So when Russia passed its ridiculous anti-gay propaganda law, I thought we were in for some quality humour and, maybe, some very entertaining arrests during the ice dancing competitions. But the hotels were shit and people started posting funny pictures on Instagram and that was the end of the anti-gay bashing.
Maybe we'll get lucky and those mad bastard Brazilians will make some nutty laws before 2016. I think I wrote this before but if they make pro-gay propaganda mandatory, I will watch the entire Olympiad. From the opening to closing ceremonies, I will watch every mind numbing long jumping pole vaulting minute.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Even more on public professors
I just wrote this in the previous entry but it was way at the bottom and I doubt anyone will bother struggling through my terrible prose to find it. So Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed piece on the need for more public intellectuals - something which I have previously agreed with. Kristof makes a glaring omission that I somehow didn't think of until my 15 minutes were almost up.
The most famous public intellectual (and the most trusted man in America according to some surveys) is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky. One of Chomsky's first big political splashes was his description of the limits of acceptable opinion. You can be a (very) little to the left on an issue or you can be (very) little to the right on it. But if you are outside the bounds of acceptable opinion, you might as well not say or write anything because no one will publish it. Of course, we have the interwebs now and you can publish it yourself on your blog or your Facebook page. And ten of your very best friends (who already agree with you) will read it. But if it gets too big and too many people read it, you will be excoriated in the journals that make public opinion as a radical. Maybe a radical liberal maybe a radical conservative but you will be described as a potentially dangerous lunatic either way.
So why do professors bury themselves in arcana? Partially because many fields of human knowledge are genuinely so fucking complex everything we don't already know seems like arcana to those of us who aren't specialists in the field. Anyone out there really understand anything beyond 12th grade particle physics? And partially because everything written above an 8th grade level seems like arcana to people who read newspapers. I happen to know a whole lot about the Roman concept of imperium, anyone interested? And partially because the spectrum of acceptable opinion is too fucking small for them to contribute anyway. I would really like to publish my opinions of American foreign policy since 1950, anyone want to print them for me?
The most famous public intellectual (and the most trusted man in America according to some surveys) is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky. One of Chomsky's first big political splashes was his description of the limits of acceptable opinion. You can be a (very) little to the left on an issue or you can be (very) little to the right on it. But if you are outside the bounds of acceptable opinion, you might as well not say or write anything because no one will publish it. Of course, we have the interwebs now and you can publish it yourself on your blog or your Facebook page. And ten of your very best friends (who already agree with you) will read it. But if it gets too big and too many people read it, you will be excoriated in the journals that make public opinion as a radical. Maybe a radical liberal maybe a radical conservative but you will be described as a potentially dangerous lunatic either way.
So why do professors bury themselves in arcana? Partially because many fields of human knowledge are genuinely so fucking complex everything we don't already know seems like arcana to those of us who aren't specialists in the field. Anyone out there really understand anything beyond 12th grade particle physics? And partially because everything written above an 8th grade level seems like arcana to people who read newspapers. I happen to know a whole lot about the Roman concept of imperium, anyone interested? And partially because the spectrum of acceptable opinion is too fucking small for them to contribute anyway. I would really like to publish my opinions of American foreign policy since 1950, anyone want to print them for me?
More on Professors
Here is Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about how we need more professors to become public intellectuals. The article is a funny kind of thing because when I read it I got mad about it. And that's funny because I've made some very similar complaints here.
When I see it under someone else's name I can be a lot more critical. That's a ridiculous statements but the leader at the top of the page says, "Don't expect too much... 15 minutes or less." This is as smart as I can be on any given day in 10 to 15 minutes. And that's not very smart. So, let's start with the problems in Kristof's piece.
On the issue of academic marginalization: Kristof thinks (and I agree) the world needs more inspired generalists. This would be particularly true of the United States where Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has become the advocate for realism in the American culture. There is a systemic flaw (there are many but I want to write about one) in the academy and it has to do with the process of becoming a professor.
When you apply for a graduate school you have to submit a document stating your research intentions. And you know when you write it that the final result has to be a new and original contribution to the area you are working in. So. What are you going to do? Are you going to bet 4 years and +$100k that you can succeed in coming up with something new in an area that is very general and already has about a thousand books written about it or are you going to pick something very particular that no one else has researched yet? Kristof thinks you should do the latter but it's the riskier bet. And if you spend four years and pile up another $100-200k debt and don't come up with something you can use to get a job in academia, you're properly fucked. You know how long it takes to pay off $200k in student loans on what an adjunct prof makes? Forever. You'll be paying off loans with your social security - if there is any left by the time you apply for it. So the smart bet is specialization. And then you get a job (if you are very lucky) because you specialized. The next step is tenure and to earn that you have to publish and publish. Anything new can get published. It doesn't matter how arcane it is. Kristof acknowledges this in his backhand way. Publications in a newspaper don't count. Speeches made to thousands of people don't count (unless they are part of a conference). Being a dutiful and conscientious public intellectual doesn't count. Moving the conscience of a nation doesn't count. TED Talks really don't count (unless we are keeping track of the warm strokes to your ego). You need to teach and publish. So, if you do all that and you are very very lucky you get a tenured position. It is worth pointing out that since 1970 the number of tenured professors in the United States has increased only 10% despite hundreds of new schools opening and a massive increase in the percent of the population that goes to university or college. Luck is a very important factor.
Now you have another difficult decision to make. You feel very strongly about a number of issues and you want to bring your own knowledge to the discussion. Some of the administrators above you in the hierarchy (administrative positions have increased 240%) will be with you, some will be against you. Do you risk pissing people off - not just in the community at large but in the community you work in every single day? How many people do this outside of academia? What percentage stand up for their beliefs when it has the potential to cause them grief they can easily avoid by keeping their mouths shut? Academics have, I believe, a higher standard they ought to live up to but in order for them to do so we (meaning you, me, and everybody) have to make things just a little easier for them. I was looking for a site I sometimes visit that keeps track of the insane hoops academics are made to jump through, so I googled "professor complaint" and the first 5 pages of results were either instructions on how to complain about a professor or complaints against professors as a species. It is important to remember here that tenure isn't the last promotion a professor can get. There is a lot of money after that. Not just in salary either, the big money is in equipment, assistants, space to work, and other support.
Moving on. Kristof quotes a fellow at the Brookings Institute, "Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research." The Brookings Institute isn't a university, it's a think tank funded by ExxonMobil, the Carnegie Corporation, the Republic of China and Qatar (among others). As a think tank public advocacy is it's reason d'être. So long as it keeps up its advocacy for causes its donors support, it has no need to worry about money. Researchers at universities need a constant influx of money from private and corporate donors. The trend is away from corporate donations and toward corporate partnerships that give the corporations control over everything from the patents generated to curriculum and hiring. And we all know how much corporations love public advocacy.
The liberal bias in the humanities and social science isn't a selection bias. There is no political agenda in the hiring committee. Same as there is no political agenda on the admission boards. The process of learning about any subject that falls into the humanities or social sciences has the effect of making a person more 'liberal'. That's using the American political spectrum. There are plenty of conservative professors in Canada in both faculties. In fact, I would argue historians are, by education, conservative. If history teaches you anything, it teaches you only very bad shit happens fast. Young people all want to change the world (or, if they are lazy, for the world to change itself). By the time they graduate they have learned every change in the world so far has produced an enormous body count and so they become conservative. Just not according to American nomenclature. So long as conservative means 'free market radical' they will be limited to economics. And maybe a few other disciplines that aren't particularly interested in how the world actually works.
In architecture, where I have the most direct experience, I would say my (tenured) professors were all far more conservative than I am. There were one or two Red Tories (conservatives with socialist leanings) but no Reds per se.
Kristof ends with a plea that professors not cloister themselves like medieval monks. And I agree with that too. But there is a reason medieval monks cloistered themselves. It was because the world they lived in became extremely hostile to them. And I think the same thing is true about professors. The world doesn't want to hear what they have to say. When the presidents and prime ministers of advanced nations start hurling anti-intellectual screed, when the government cracks down on "political speech" by librarians (as happened here in Canada, the political speech being discussions with kids in the third grade and helping people compile their family tree), when the mayor of Canada's largest city calls professors "leeches on the system" in a city council meeting, I would be cloistering myself too.
The worst part about the Kristof article is that he is right (in a very general way). I have argued here before that Matt Taibbi is the closest thing America has to a public intellectual (since George Carlin died). Maybe I should have given Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson more credit. The reason I was trying to find the site I mentioned about the lives of professors was because I read a very moving article I wish I could link written by a professor who just found out she has breast cancer. She had originally scheduled her scan for more than a year before the cancer was found but had to keep putting the appointment off for the everyday inconveniences being a professor entails. They don't have it easy, living off a kind of luxury welfare. The best professors I know, and in fact most of the professors I know, live their jobs. They don't ever really stop working. They become what they do and it is who they are. They have no private lives in the sense most people do. It's an incredible dedication to a vocation.
This entry is already a little long but, fuck, like I care whether any of this scrawl ever gets read by anyone. The second best lecture I ever attended in my life was about professions of the gown. There are, my professor said, some professions that require their practitioners to wear gowns. Judges, priests, professors, and sometimes lawyers. The reason they wear gowns is as a symbol of their collective purpose. Each judge is supposed to rule as any other judge would. Priests all perform the same sacrament in the same way. Professors share a common purpose and a common charge. The gown marks them as instruments of society. As a professor, and as a judge or priest, their duty is to society as a whole and not to some portion of it or to their own advancement. The gown is also a kind of visible submission to a more permanent order, a more lasting truth, than the world outside can offer. Judges are the voice of law, that abstract compact between people. The priest is the voice of an eternal g*d. The professor speaks only the truth as it is then known and is dedicated to making the current state of truth more faithful to reality. Of course some judges are corrupt, some priests pedophiles, some professors lazy and self-aggrandizing. The symbol of the gown finds its ultimate affirmation in the expulsion of priests, who are symbolically and literally defrocked.
This is perhaps the best argument against both Kristof and me. Public advocacy has little place in this culture of the gown. The role of professors is to relate the truth all the time to the best of their abilities. Public advocacy always reduces the conflicting ideas and simplifies them to a position that is right and a position that is wrong. There is no room for subtlety and, therefore, less fealty to the true state of things.
It is also worth pointing out that if there were thousands of professors making vigorous political stances on the issues of the day, how would we know? There is a limit to what the New York Times or the New Yorker (the publications Kristof takes as the bench mark for public advocacy) will print. If you are outside of those limits, you are left with few means of making your positions known. You can have a blog, I guess. You can speak at rallies that don't get covered in the news. You can organize talks in your local community center or church. Chomsky's main point about the potential from public advocacy is the how small the spectrum of acceptable opinion is. In the years since he first described it, it has only gotten smaller.
When I see it under someone else's name I can be a lot more critical. That's a ridiculous statements but the leader at the top of the page says, "Don't expect too much... 15 minutes or less." This is as smart as I can be on any given day in 10 to 15 minutes. And that's not very smart. So, let's start with the problems in Kristof's piece.
On the issue of academic marginalization: Kristof thinks (and I agree) the world needs more inspired generalists. This would be particularly true of the United States where Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has become the advocate for realism in the American culture. There is a systemic flaw (there are many but I want to write about one) in the academy and it has to do with the process of becoming a professor.
When you apply for a graduate school you have to submit a document stating your research intentions. And you know when you write it that the final result has to be a new and original contribution to the area you are working in. So. What are you going to do? Are you going to bet 4 years and +$100k that you can succeed in coming up with something new in an area that is very general and already has about a thousand books written about it or are you going to pick something very particular that no one else has researched yet? Kristof thinks you should do the latter but it's the riskier bet. And if you spend four years and pile up another $100-200k debt and don't come up with something you can use to get a job in academia, you're properly fucked. You know how long it takes to pay off $200k in student loans on what an adjunct prof makes? Forever. You'll be paying off loans with your social security - if there is any left by the time you apply for it. So the smart bet is specialization. And then you get a job (if you are very lucky) because you specialized. The next step is tenure and to earn that you have to publish and publish. Anything new can get published. It doesn't matter how arcane it is. Kristof acknowledges this in his backhand way. Publications in a newspaper don't count. Speeches made to thousands of people don't count (unless they are part of a conference). Being a dutiful and conscientious public intellectual doesn't count. Moving the conscience of a nation doesn't count. TED Talks really don't count (unless we are keeping track of the warm strokes to your ego). You need to teach and publish. So, if you do all that and you are very very lucky you get a tenured position. It is worth pointing out that since 1970 the number of tenured professors in the United States has increased only 10% despite hundreds of new schools opening and a massive increase in the percent of the population that goes to university or college. Luck is a very important factor.
Now you have another difficult decision to make. You feel very strongly about a number of issues and you want to bring your own knowledge to the discussion. Some of the administrators above you in the hierarchy (administrative positions have increased 240%) will be with you, some will be against you. Do you risk pissing people off - not just in the community at large but in the community you work in every single day? How many people do this outside of academia? What percentage stand up for their beliefs when it has the potential to cause them grief they can easily avoid by keeping their mouths shut? Academics have, I believe, a higher standard they ought to live up to but in order for them to do so we (meaning you, me, and everybody) have to make things just a little easier for them. I was looking for a site I sometimes visit that keeps track of the insane hoops academics are made to jump through, so I googled "professor complaint" and the first 5 pages of results were either instructions on how to complain about a professor or complaints against professors as a species. It is important to remember here that tenure isn't the last promotion a professor can get. There is a lot of money after that. Not just in salary either, the big money is in equipment, assistants, space to work, and other support.
Moving on. Kristof quotes a fellow at the Brookings Institute, "Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research." The Brookings Institute isn't a university, it's a think tank funded by ExxonMobil, the Carnegie Corporation, the Republic of China and Qatar (among others). As a think tank public advocacy is it's reason d'être. So long as it keeps up its advocacy for causes its donors support, it has no need to worry about money. Researchers at universities need a constant influx of money from private and corporate donors. The trend is away from corporate donations and toward corporate partnerships that give the corporations control over everything from the patents generated to curriculum and hiring. And we all know how much corporations love public advocacy.
The liberal bias in the humanities and social science isn't a selection bias. There is no political agenda in the hiring committee. Same as there is no political agenda on the admission boards. The process of learning about any subject that falls into the humanities or social sciences has the effect of making a person more 'liberal'. That's using the American political spectrum. There are plenty of conservative professors in Canada in both faculties. In fact, I would argue historians are, by education, conservative. If history teaches you anything, it teaches you only very bad shit happens fast. Young people all want to change the world (or, if they are lazy, for the world to change itself). By the time they graduate they have learned every change in the world so far has produced an enormous body count and so they become conservative. Just not according to American nomenclature. So long as conservative means 'free market radical' they will be limited to economics. And maybe a few other disciplines that aren't particularly interested in how the world actually works.
In architecture, where I have the most direct experience, I would say my (tenured) professors were all far more conservative than I am. There were one or two Red Tories (conservatives with socialist leanings) but no Reds per se.
Kristof ends with a plea that professors not cloister themselves like medieval monks. And I agree with that too. But there is a reason medieval monks cloistered themselves. It was because the world they lived in became extremely hostile to them. And I think the same thing is true about professors. The world doesn't want to hear what they have to say. When the presidents and prime ministers of advanced nations start hurling anti-intellectual screed, when the government cracks down on "political speech" by librarians (as happened here in Canada, the political speech being discussions with kids in the third grade and helping people compile their family tree), when the mayor of Canada's largest city calls professors "leeches on the system" in a city council meeting, I would be cloistering myself too.
The worst part about the Kristof article is that he is right (in a very general way). I have argued here before that Matt Taibbi is the closest thing America has to a public intellectual (since George Carlin died). Maybe I should have given Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson more credit. The reason I was trying to find the site I mentioned about the lives of professors was because I read a very moving article I wish I could link written by a professor who just found out she has breast cancer. She had originally scheduled her scan for more than a year before the cancer was found but had to keep putting the appointment off for the everyday inconveniences being a professor entails. They don't have it easy, living off a kind of luxury welfare. The best professors I know, and in fact most of the professors I know, live their jobs. They don't ever really stop working. They become what they do and it is who they are. They have no private lives in the sense most people do. It's an incredible dedication to a vocation.
This entry is already a little long but, fuck, like I care whether any of this scrawl ever gets read by anyone. The second best lecture I ever attended in my life was about professions of the gown. There are, my professor said, some professions that require their practitioners to wear gowns. Judges, priests, professors, and sometimes lawyers. The reason they wear gowns is as a symbol of their collective purpose. Each judge is supposed to rule as any other judge would. Priests all perform the same sacrament in the same way. Professors share a common purpose and a common charge. The gown marks them as instruments of society. As a professor, and as a judge or priest, their duty is to society as a whole and not to some portion of it or to their own advancement. The gown is also a kind of visible submission to a more permanent order, a more lasting truth, than the world outside can offer. Judges are the voice of law, that abstract compact between people. The priest is the voice of an eternal g*d. The professor speaks only the truth as it is then known and is dedicated to making the current state of truth more faithful to reality. Of course some judges are corrupt, some priests pedophiles, some professors lazy and self-aggrandizing. The symbol of the gown finds its ultimate affirmation in the expulsion of priests, who are symbolically and literally defrocked.
This is perhaps the best argument against both Kristof and me. Public advocacy has little place in this culture of the gown. The role of professors is to relate the truth all the time to the best of their abilities. Public advocacy always reduces the conflicting ideas and simplifies them to a position that is right and a position that is wrong. There is no room for subtlety and, therefore, less fealty to the true state of things.
It is also worth pointing out that if there were thousands of professors making vigorous political stances on the issues of the day, how would we know? There is a limit to what the New York Times or the New Yorker (the publications Kristof takes as the bench mark for public advocacy) will print. If you are outside of those limits, you are left with few means of making your positions known. You can have a blog, I guess. You can speak at rallies that don't get covered in the news. You can organize talks in your local community center or church. Chomsky's main point about the potential from public advocacy is the how small the spectrum of acceptable opinion is. In the years since he first described it, it has only gotten smaller.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
My fascination with the two Americas
Normally when someone writes about the split personality in the American psyche they are referring to the phenomenon Gwynne Dyer described by saying, "Half of the United States is very much like Canada; the other half is very like Iran." The simpler version is the distinction between the so-called Red and Blue States. I am starting the think of the two versions of America, the halves of its split personality as the idealistic version put forward in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the cynical version evidenced by its amoral calculation and power politics.
The first version might seem nothing more than a fantasy. Placed up against the other, harder, more opportunistic reality we see everyday it doesn't seem like much. Anyone trying to understand American policy (foreign and domestic) will struggle with making sense of any of it until they completely reject the idea of the United States as the "Champion of Democracy", the "Free World", and the last, best hope for reason. The "better angels of [their] nature" don't hold sway in the government very often or for very long. The purpose of the American government is to ensure the maximum benefit for those who govern (and those who get them elected). When Germany bailed out Greece as part of the sovereign debt crisis, no one was naive enough to think they were doing it out of altruism. They did it because they were afraid of the effect the collapse of Greek debt would have on German institutions. Yet, when America invaded Iraq they did it under the pretense of "bringing freedom to Iraqis". A ridiculous lie that the media repeated as an article of faith.
America's foreign adventures have always been predicated on (wholly and demonstrably false) claims of defending democracy, bringing liberty, and/or fighting communism. The CIA has, in the last half of the previous century, deposed or assassinated democratically elected leaders around the globe under the pathetic excuse of defending liberty and democracy. Someone looking solely at the historical record might justifiably wonder whether there is any basis for believing the more noble aspect of the American soul is anything other than a convenient alibi for doing thoroughly evil shit. As an interesting side note, the original plans for the invasion of Iraq was called "Operation Iraqi Liberty" until someone pointed out the unfortunately accurate acronym. The only reason one can speak of America as a bastion of democracy or liberty or freedom or anything other than naked power and barely concealed corruption is so many of the common people of America actually believe their ideals should be reflected in the things the government does in their name.
This strand of idealism never dominates and only infrequently mitigates American foreign policy. It certainly never helped Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the other countries the United States has invaded, destabilized or forced into the Washington Consensus. But without it the power of the office of the President would be almost limitless. And Presidents are not famous for their discretion or charity in the use of that tremendous power.
I'm not a Constitutional scholar. I have to look up the Amendments if I want to remember what any of them after the 5th are about. I haven't studied the Constitutions of other countries. I know more about the governing of Republican Rome than I do about the European Union. But it seems kind of important to me the Constitution is largely dedicated to defining things the government can't do. The Amendments are almost exclusively dedicated to limiting governmental power. "Congress shall make no law..." Given the rate at which the Amendments are being decimated by the current (and some would argue permanent) state of emergency that gives the President extraordinary powers, some might argue the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are interesting documents with no relevance to anyone except historians. Certainly, the Supreme Court is making no effort to defend them. I wrote (but didn't publish) a list of recently enacted laws or revelations of law breaking in violation of the protections guaranteed to Americans but it got a little too long. People got exercised when the Patriot act allowed the CIA, NSA, and a host of new acronyms to violate 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 14th amendments rights but the "War of Terror" took priority - and the Patriot Act got renewed to the surprise of no one. The "War on Terror" followed the "War on Drugs" but preceded the "Mortgage Crisis" and the "Sovereign Debt Crisis". I think it's interesting the government's response to what it considers (or depicts as) wars is essentially the same as its response to economic crises.
Anyway, why do I think the "kinder gentler" America is anything other than a myth? Because everyone who serves in the military takes an oath to "defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic" and some of the people who take that oath take it fucking seriously. There is no organization with a greater moral authority to bring the American government to account than "Veterans for Peace". I'm not given to blind adulation of veterans. My grandfather and great-uncle were veterans of WWII and when my brother and I expressed an admiration for their heroism, they laughed in our faces. They said they weren't heroes, they were fools. And they resented the government for using their youthful ignorance against them. That pretty much shaped my opinion of every military everywhere. But I know of no more moving demonstration against the American invasion of Iraq than the veterans who lined up to throw the medals they had received in that war over the fence that surrounds the White House. They wanted to return them to the President directly. And one can imagine the change that would have created in American public opinion had it been allowed to happen. Unfortunately for the American people, and the American military most of all, the President's men were not foolish enough to let the veterans anywhere near the President.
There are millions of Americans who naively believe the lies their government tells them. There are millions more who don't but still believe America should be the nation its founders wanted it to be. They might be the best hope for those of us who are citizens of their Empire but without the rights and protections citizens receive. Of course, it's also possible my belief in the power of American idealism is a form of intellectual laziness. I think Edward Snowden might think that. For today I don't care. I need a little hope today.
The first version might seem nothing more than a fantasy. Placed up against the other, harder, more opportunistic reality we see everyday it doesn't seem like much. Anyone trying to understand American policy (foreign and domestic) will struggle with making sense of any of it until they completely reject the idea of the United States as the "Champion of Democracy", the "Free World", and the last, best hope for reason. The "better angels of [their] nature" don't hold sway in the government very often or for very long. The purpose of the American government is to ensure the maximum benefit for those who govern (and those who get them elected). When Germany bailed out Greece as part of the sovereign debt crisis, no one was naive enough to think they were doing it out of altruism. They did it because they were afraid of the effect the collapse of Greek debt would have on German institutions. Yet, when America invaded Iraq they did it under the pretense of "bringing freedom to Iraqis". A ridiculous lie that the media repeated as an article of faith.
America's foreign adventures have always been predicated on (wholly and demonstrably false) claims of defending democracy, bringing liberty, and/or fighting communism. The CIA has, in the last half of the previous century, deposed or assassinated democratically elected leaders around the globe under the pathetic excuse of defending liberty and democracy. Someone looking solely at the historical record might justifiably wonder whether there is any basis for believing the more noble aspect of the American soul is anything other than a convenient alibi for doing thoroughly evil shit. As an interesting side note, the original plans for the invasion of Iraq was called "Operation Iraqi Liberty" until someone pointed out the unfortunately accurate acronym. The only reason one can speak of America as a bastion of democracy or liberty or freedom or anything other than naked power and barely concealed corruption is so many of the common people of America actually believe their ideals should be reflected in the things the government does in their name.
This strand of idealism never dominates and only infrequently mitigates American foreign policy. It certainly never helped Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the other countries the United States has invaded, destabilized or forced into the Washington Consensus. But without it the power of the office of the President would be almost limitless. And Presidents are not famous for their discretion or charity in the use of that tremendous power.
I'm not a Constitutional scholar. I have to look up the Amendments if I want to remember what any of them after the 5th are about. I haven't studied the Constitutions of other countries. I know more about the governing of Republican Rome than I do about the European Union. But it seems kind of important to me the Constitution is largely dedicated to defining things the government can't do. The Amendments are almost exclusively dedicated to limiting governmental power. "Congress shall make no law..." Given the rate at which the Amendments are being decimated by the current (and some would argue permanent) state of emergency that gives the President extraordinary powers, some might argue the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are interesting documents with no relevance to anyone except historians. Certainly, the Supreme Court is making no effort to defend them. I wrote (but didn't publish) a list of recently enacted laws or revelations of law breaking in violation of the protections guaranteed to Americans but it got a little too long. People got exercised when the Patriot act allowed the CIA, NSA, and a host of new acronyms to violate 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 14th amendments rights but the "War of Terror" took priority - and the Patriot Act got renewed to the surprise of no one. The "War on Terror" followed the "War on Drugs" but preceded the "Mortgage Crisis" and the "Sovereign Debt Crisis". I think it's interesting the government's response to what it considers (or depicts as) wars is essentially the same as its response to economic crises.
Anyway, why do I think the "kinder gentler" America is anything other than a myth? Because everyone who serves in the military takes an oath to "defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic" and some of the people who take that oath take it fucking seriously. There is no organization with a greater moral authority to bring the American government to account than "Veterans for Peace". I'm not given to blind adulation of veterans. My grandfather and great-uncle were veterans of WWII and when my brother and I expressed an admiration for their heroism, they laughed in our faces. They said they weren't heroes, they were fools. And they resented the government for using their youthful ignorance against them. That pretty much shaped my opinion of every military everywhere. But I know of no more moving demonstration against the American invasion of Iraq than the veterans who lined up to throw the medals they had received in that war over the fence that surrounds the White House. They wanted to return them to the President directly. And one can imagine the change that would have created in American public opinion had it been allowed to happen. Unfortunately for the American people, and the American military most of all, the President's men were not foolish enough to let the veterans anywhere near the President.
There are millions of Americans who naively believe the lies their government tells them. There are millions more who don't but still believe America should be the nation its founders wanted it to be. They might be the best hope for those of us who are citizens of their Empire but without the rights and protections citizens receive. Of course, it's also possible my belief in the power of American idealism is a form of intellectual laziness. I think Edward Snowden might think that. For today I don't care. I need a little hope today.
Monday, February 17, 2014
On James Lovelock
The climate scientist who was interviewed for the Guardian piece that was the subject of the previous post has apparently walked back his stated opinion that the human population will decrease by 80% by 2100. You can read about it here. Lovelock characterizes his earlier comments (in the Guardian) as 'alarmist'. I think 'absolutely fucking terrifying' would be more accurate. He then adds, "Nothing much is really happening."
How is one supposed to react to such a dramatic change of positions? He's gone from "only a few breeding pairs [of humans] will remain in the Arctic" to "the world has not really warmed up since the millennium." Is he talking about 2000 or 1000 CE? Let's say 2000 CE. So in the previous 14 years. Here's my favourite interpretation. And here's the gist: the observed rise in global temperature is too great to have been caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The IPCC's models of the climate are too CO2 sensitive and the real cause is something called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (or PDO). What's the PDO? Real the article. In case you're wondering, the author isn't some crank who works for FOX NEWS, he's a PhD in climate science, formerly with NASA, now with a University somewhere.
His best conclusion tho is on this page. He states, "The confusion between forcing and feedback (loosely speaking cause and effect) when observing cloud behaviour has led to the illusion of a sensitive climate system, when in fact our best satellite observations...suggest an IN-sensitive climate system."
A 'forcing' is an energy imbalance that produces climate change; in the short term this manifests as weather patterns and in the long term as the kind of big changes that scare the shit out of people. A 'feedback' is a result of long term change that itself causes change both in the short and long terms. A good example of a forcing is the temperature differential between the heat stored by land mass and the heat stored by the oceans. This is the most basic cause of weather. An example of a feedback is the melting of the permafrost in Siberia. As it melts, it releases methane (which is between 25 and 100 times more efficient as a greenhouse gas). The methane increases the atmospheric temperature, which melts more permafrost which releases more methane. So when he describes feedback as effect rather than cause, he is being a little disingenuous. But no more than I was when I described Lovelock's changed forecast as a 'walk back'.
I called it that because that's what it sounds like to me. The term was originally used to describe lowering something with a hoist while controlling the speed of descent by maintaining control of the ropes used to lift it. It is much more commonly used to describe the political act of distancing oneself from an earlier comment. Typically this happens when a politician or a spokesperson A) says something really stupid and has to make it seem less stupid, B) accidentally tells the truth and has to spin it, or C) both. "Yes, I did say that but what I meant was..."
Perhaps it's pure coincidence that Lovelock walked his earlier statements back during a book tour. Somehow I doubt it. But what I can't evaluate is the truth (or, more properly, the factuality) of his statements. Truth is, in this case, much less important. I don't give a shit if James Lovelock believes we are in for catastrophic climate changes in the next decade; I care if we are in for catastrophic climate changes in the next decade.
Fortunately, I didn't blow my entire life savings (pitiful as it is) on wine, women, and song based on his earlier prediction. But this is the big problem with climate change as opposed to any other issue we've encountered as a species. When a philosopher tells me there is an abyss between language and dialogue and the "I" that I use to refer to myself doesn't actually refer to myself but to something else (see Saussure on linguistics or Agamben on Saussure) I don't start losing my shit wondering who I really is and whether or not I can properly speak. I ignore them. Saying things that are completely incomprehensible to anyone who isn't a philosopher is a philosopher's job. And when some preacher in Arizona says the world is going to end and gives a precise date for the Rapture I ignore him too. Or maybe link it on Facebook so my friends can have a laugh. You aren't suppose to be able to ignore scientists (with the exception of physicists who are as incomprehensible and every bit as insane as philosophers). I heard on the radio the other day that physicists have demonstrated that a quantum flip in a single Higgs-Boson particle would instantly end the entire universe. You know how much sleep I lost over that? The same as you will.
The current state of climate science is so fucked it is impossible to make sense of without an advanced degree in climate science. And even then only a fraction of the climate science community will agree with you. I've been trying to take a measured approach to this for years - I haven't always been so completely out of my mind with panic. Ten years ago I thought as a percentage proposition and I think a lot of people still think this way. Either climate change is real, is happening, and needs to be avoided or it isn't. If we don't do anything we are placing all of our futures on a bet that it isn't happening and if it is, we're fucked. If we do something, we are costing ourselves a lot of money, some changes in our behaviour and probably a big change in our economic systems but we don't go extinct whether or not it actually is happening. If the weather forecast says there is a 60% probability of rain, you take an umbrella with you. If the weather scientists say there's a 60% probability of an apocalyptic change in our climate, we need a BIG fucking umbrella.
Now what we have is 80% of the climate scientists saying there is a 60% PoA (probability of apocalypse), 10% are saying there is a 0% PoA, and 10% say there's a 100% PoA. And you can't just go with the averages. Some of them are right, some are wrong. Even more significantly, whether it happens is much less important than when it happens. If it's coming in 10 years, we're fucked. If it's 100 years, we can stop it. Maybe. Lovelock's most dire predictions of doom still said, "If we started in 1967..." Which is only 45 years ago so that extra 90 years would make all the difference in the world (maybe). Since we have effectively done nothing in those 45 years, I really wonder whether the added time will make any difference except that there will be a judgement against us (people my age and younger) if we continue to fuck things up (and it turns out to be an issue rather than a weird climatic blip caused by the PDO).
How do people in apocalyptic religions stand this shit? How do they prepare themselves for the rapture over and over? Don't they get tired? I've only been doing this for a couple of months and I'm fucking exhausted. I almost don't care anymore. My ability to be freaked out and appalled is just about finished. And my determination to continue reading and writing about this shit is absolutely gone. I going back to long digressions about The Walking Dead.
How is one supposed to react to such a dramatic change of positions? He's gone from "only a few breeding pairs [of humans] will remain in the Arctic" to "the world has not really warmed up since the millennium." Is he talking about 2000 or 1000 CE? Let's say 2000 CE. So in the previous 14 years. Here's my favourite interpretation. And here's the gist: the observed rise in global temperature is too great to have been caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The IPCC's models of the climate are too CO2 sensitive and the real cause is something called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (or PDO). What's the PDO? Real the article. In case you're wondering, the author isn't some crank who works for FOX NEWS, he's a PhD in climate science, formerly with NASA, now with a University somewhere.
His best conclusion tho is on this page. He states, "The confusion between forcing and feedback (loosely speaking cause and effect) when observing cloud behaviour has led to the illusion of a sensitive climate system, when in fact our best satellite observations...suggest an IN-sensitive climate system."
A 'forcing' is an energy imbalance that produces climate change; in the short term this manifests as weather patterns and in the long term as the kind of big changes that scare the shit out of people. A 'feedback' is a result of long term change that itself causes change both in the short and long terms. A good example of a forcing is the temperature differential between the heat stored by land mass and the heat stored by the oceans. This is the most basic cause of weather. An example of a feedback is the melting of the permafrost in Siberia. As it melts, it releases methane (which is between 25 and 100 times more efficient as a greenhouse gas). The methane increases the atmospheric temperature, which melts more permafrost which releases more methane. So when he describes feedback as effect rather than cause, he is being a little disingenuous. But no more than I was when I described Lovelock's changed forecast as a 'walk back'.
I called it that because that's what it sounds like to me. The term was originally used to describe lowering something with a hoist while controlling the speed of descent by maintaining control of the ropes used to lift it. It is much more commonly used to describe the political act of distancing oneself from an earlier comment. Typically this happens when a politician or a spokesperson A) says something really stupid and has to make it seem less stupid, B) accidentally tells the truth and has to spin it, or C) both. "Yes, I did say that but what I meant was..."
Perhaps it's pure coincidence that Lovelock walked his earlier statements back during a book tour. Somehow I doubt it. But what I can't evaluate is the truth (or, more properly, the factuality) of his statements. Truth is, in this case, much less important. I don't give a shit if James Lovelock believes we are in for catastrophic climate changes in the next decade; I care if we are in for catastrophic climate changes in the next decade.
Fortunately, I didn't blow my entire life savings (pitiful as it is) on wine, women, and song based on his earlier prediction. But this is the big problem with climate change as opposed to any other issue we've encountered as a species. When a philosopher tells me there is an abyss between language and dialogue and the "I" that I use to refer to myself doesn't actually refer to myself but to something else (see Saussure on linguistics or Agamben on Saussure) I don't start losing my shit wondering who I really is and whether or not I can properly speak. I ignore them. Saying things that are completely incomprehensible to anyone who isn't a philosopher is a philosopher's job. And when some preacher in Arizona says the world is going to end and gives a precise date for the Rapture I ignore him too. Or maybe link it on Facebook so my friends can have a laugh. You aren't suppose to be able to ignore scientists (with the exception of physicists who are as incomprehensible and every bit as insane as philosophers). I heard on the radio the other day that physicists have demonstrated that a quantum flip in a single Higgs-Boson particle would instantly end the entire universe. You know how much sleep I lost over that? The same as you will.
The current state of climate science is so fucked it is impossible to make sense of without an advanced degree in climate science. And even then only a fraction of the climate science community will agree with you. I've been trying to take a measured approach to this for years - I haven't always been so completely out of my mind with panic. Ten years ago I thought as a percentage proposition and I think a lot of people still think this way. Either climate change is real, is happening, and needs to be avoided or it isn't. If we don't do anything we are placing all of our futures on a bet that it isn't happening and if it is, we're fucked. If we do something, we are costing ourselves a lot of money, some changes in our behaviour and probably a big change in our economic systems but we don't go extinct whether or not it actually is happening. If the weather forecast says there is a 60% probability of rain, you take an umbrella with you. If the weather scientists say there's a 60% probability of an apocalyptic change in our climate, we need a BIG fucking umbrella.
Now what we have is 80% of the climate scientists saying there is a 60% PoA (probability of apocalypse), 10% are saying there is a 0% PoA, and 10% say there's a 100% PoA. And you can't just go with the averages. Some of them are right, some are wrong. Even more significantly, whether it happens is much less important than when it happens. If it's coming in 10 years, we're fucked. If it's 100 years, we can stop it. Maybe. Lovelock's most dire predictions of doom still said, "If we started in 1967..." Which is only 45 years ago so that extra 90 years would make all the difference in the world (maybe). Since we have effectively done nothing in those 45 years, I really wonder whether the added time will make any difference except that there will be a judgement against us (people my age and younger) if we continue to fuck things up (and it turns out to be an issue rather than a weird climatic blip caused by the PDO).
How do people in apocalyptic religions stand this shit? How do they prepare themselves for the rapture over and over? Don't they get tired? I've only been doing this for a couple of months and I'm fucking exhausted. I almost don't care anymore. My ability to be freaked out and appalled is just about finished. And my determination to continue reading and writing about this shit is absolutely gone. I going back to long digressions about The Walking Dead.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
20 years until it hits the fan
Here is a report from the Guardian. The essence? We're all completely fucked. 80% of the human race gone in the next 90 years. The more I look for evidence this isn't happening, the more I find people saying it is happening.
I took a little break from being incredibly freaked out about the coming environmental devastation to get freaked out about how indifferent we can be to the suffering of others. It was kind of like a vacation from panic - during which I was angry and hopeless instead of being frightened and hopeless. So, really, not a great vacation.
I've written many paragraphs in the last few weeks about NTE and my reaction to it. I never really get to the part where I come up with a positive plan to do something about it. And that's an important bit. My difficulty formulating any kind of plan is that to do so I need more information; the more information I collect the more convinced I become there is nothing to do. It's too late. The idea of participating in some kind of effort to force our leaders to change the way things get done seems to me like nothing other than a concession to form. It would be nice, after the icecaps melt and all the coastal cities are underwater, after the rise in mean temperatures turn Europe and most of North America into dustbowls, to be able to stand up to history's scrutiny and not look like a complete dick - complacently consuming and ignoring the increasingly strident warnings while the planet goes over a cliff. The problem with that (not particularly noble) idea is it mistakenly presumes there will be someone to scrutinize, to write a history. And there won't be. That's kind of the problem. I won't be judged by the next generation; they will be too busy pillaging in savage hordes. They are more likely to eat me than judge me, and that takes some of the pressure off.
On the plus side it makes politics more bearable generally. Watching people demonize each other because of governmental spending or "the War on Christmas" or whatever the bullshit is this week is much easier when you know, rather than merely suspecting, that it makes absolutely no difference even in the short term. How do I feel about legalizing pot? Sure, if you want to. I don't care. Should we change our tax code? Will it make a difference in the next 10 years? If not, don't bother.
Actually, it makes a lot of things more bearable. And that's kind of a stinging indictment. The climate scientist / horseman of the apocalypse featured in the Guardian's piece thinks it might have been possible to take effecting action around 1967. I wasn't even born til 1972. So my successes and failures, my achievements and regrets are all placed within the larger context of the End of the Fucking World. Am I going to recycle? Fuck no. Am I going to ride a bike instead of driving? Good one. Hey! That goes in the compost bags! Eat shit. The world is ending and my whole life fits into the period alien students of human history will call the "End of the Beginning of the End Era".
I am no longer under any obligation to have an opinion about anything. I'm kind of happy I no longer have to save for my retirement. My lack of professional success doesn't goad the way it used to. Really, all that's left is a kind of reticent hedonism. I'm not going to start acting like it's last call at Studio 54 but saving for a rainy day is not something I'm going to do either.
If you have money and you want to survive a little longer than most people I recommend you invest in gold and firearms. Watching a lot of zombie movies seems like a good idea too. There is still enough time to get pretty handy with a sword or a long bow. If you have a lot of money, I would advise you to buy a big fucking sail boat. Equip it with some machine guns and some solar panels. Learn how to fish. Stock up on vitamins so you don't get scurvy. Maybe buy an island somewhere in the North. If you owned a big part of an island that happened to have a lot of people who already knew how to fish on it and maybe a few farms, some grocery stores you can plunder for canned goods, maybe some fruit trees too then you could become a feudal lord for a few years. Not a bad way to go. As for me? I'm taking the easy way out as soon as the power goes off.
I took a little break from being incredibly freaked out about the coming environmental devastation to get freaked out about how indifferent we can be to the suffering of others. It was kind of like a vacation from panic - during which I was angry and hopeless instead of being frightened and hopeless. So, really, not a great vacation.
I've written many paragraphs in the last few weeks about NTE and my reaction to it. I never really get to the part where I come up with a positive plan to do something about it. And that's an important bit. My difficulty formulating any kind of plan is that to do so I need more information; the more information I collect the more convinced I become there is nothing to do. It's too late. The idea of participating in some kind of effort to force our leaders to change the way things get done seems to me like nothing other than a concession to form. It would be nice, after the icecaps melt and all the coastal cities are underwater, after the rise in mean temperatures turn Europe and most of North America into dustbowls, to be able to stand up to history's scrutiny and not look like a complete dick - complacently consuming and ignoring the increasingly strident warnings while the planet goes over a cliff. The problem with that (not particularly noble) idea is it mistakenly presumes there will be someone to scrutinize, to write a history. And there won't be. That's kind of the problem. I won't be judged by the next generation; they will be too busy pillaging in savage hordes. They are more likely to eat me than judge me, and that takes some of the pressure off.
On the plus side it makes politics more bearable generally. Watching people demonize each other because of governmental spending or "the War on Christmas" or whatever the bullshit is this week is much easier when you know, rather than merely suspecting, that it makes absolutely no difference even in the short term. How do I feel about legalizing pot? Sure, if you want to. I don't care. Should we change our tax code? Will it make a difference in the next 10 years? If not, don't bother.
Actually, it makes a lot of things more bearable. And that's kind of a stinging indictment. The climate scientist / horseman of the apocalypse featured in the Guardian's piece thinks it might have been possible to take effecting action around 1967. I wasn't even born til 1972. So my successes and failures, my achievements and regrets are all placed within the larger context of the End of the Fucking World. Am I going to recycle? Fuck no. Am I going to ride a bike instead of driving? Good one. Hey! That goes in the compost bags! Eat shit. The world is ending and my whole life fits into the period alien students of human history will call the "End of the Beginning of the End Era".
I am no longer under any obligation to have an opinion about anything. I'm kind of happy I no longer have to save for my retirement. My lack of professional success doesn't goad the way it used to. Really, all that's left is a kind of reticent hedonism. I'm not going to start acting like it's last call at Studio 54 but saving for a rainy day is not something I'm going to do either.
If you have money and you want to survive a little longer than most people I recommend you invest in gold and firearms. Watching a lot of zombie movies seems like a good idea too. There is still enough time to get pretty handy with a sword or a long bow. If you have a lot of money, I would advise you to buy a big fucking sail boat. Equip it with some machine guns and some solar panels. Learn how to fish. Stock up on vitamins so you don't get scurvy. Maybe buy an island somewhere in the North. If you owned a big part of an island that happened to have a lot of people who already knew how to fish on it and maybe a few farms, some grocery stores you can plunder for canned goods, maybe some fruit trees too then you could become a feudal lord for a few years. Not a bad way to go. As for me? I'm taking the easy way out as soon as the power goes off.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
On Michael Ruppert, 2
So after watching Mike Ruppert's analysis of American geo-politics from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the invasion of Afghanistan I watched a documentary about him called "Collapse" and, fuck, the title really isn't hyperbole. A few years ago a physicist (whose name I forget) published a paper measuring energy use as a function of the size of the global economy. His conclusion was a bigger economy is directly correlated with increased energy use. Seems like a no brainer. We use energy to make things, ship them, build stores to sell them; we use energy getting to work, at work, in whatever industry or profession we are part of and that's all necessary to make money to buy shit. So more things getting made and sold equals more energy use. But it was the corollary that made people freak out; if energy use has to decrease in the future (either by choice to avoid catastrophic climate change or as a result of decreased oil supply) then the economy has to shrink too. Economists said he didn't know shit about the economy. He said he didn't need to since the correlation was so accurate and so universal. Any time we have either a measurement or an estimate of the energy use for a particular period and a measurement or estimate of the size of the economy for the same period (from different sources and compiled independently of each other) the same relationship applies. Ruppert has taken this (and other sources) as a way of predicting our future with oil demand significantly exceeding supply and his conclusion is don't even bother running for the hills, if you aren't there already you're too fucking late.
Again, the problem with evaluating this kind of information (or doom-speak) is evaluating both the information and the conclusions drawn from it. Ruppert doesn't make it easy for people to dismiss him. Collapse is a presentation of his conclusions without much supporting evidence. But where he has time to provide his evidence he is slow, careful, and meticulous. The one very obvious flaw in his reasoning is he starts with a conclusion in mind. In the case of American foreign and domestic policy, he started with his experience of being on the receiving end of an attempted recruitment by the CIA for the purpose of bringing cocaine into the US. He took that and started trying to figure out how wide-spread the problem was and what the motivations could be. In that particular case his end point (that the US government is dependent of laundering drug money for liquidity) is only mildly controversial since everyone knows the CIA is the biggest drug cartel in the world. But getting from "drug smugglers" to "completely dependent on drug profits to prevent economic collapse" is a big leap. He does have evidence (as he sees it) and isn't obviously a maniac. I think I posted a link to a Taibbi article about banks laundering $9B in drug money. That's the tip of a very large iceberg. The estimates for total drug money laundered through the US are between $500B and $1T a year.
I think an honest person has to wrestle with a whole bunch of conflicting motives in evaluating any evidence like Ruppert's. First there is the desire to believe things are generally alright. This not only helps one sleep at night but also excuses a general political apathy. Then there is the desire to dismiss truly alarming information as false simply because it is alarming. One must also acknowledge the fear of accepting really radical ideas because you don't want to seem "bug-fuck" or bat-shit or crazy as a sack of assholes. I think most people would have completely rejected the statement, "The most powerful bankers in the world are completely incompetent, viciously avaricious criminals who knowingly break laws every day and the rest of us are absolutely at their mercy" at any time before 2008. Being in the minority, being very fucking scary, and sounding like a crazy person does not necessarily make one wrong.
My handy rule for figuring out who is a crazy fuck and who is genuinely frightening is the coincidence rule. To borrow yet again from William Gibson, there has to be room for coincidence. If everything you see becomes part of the conspiracy then you've gone off the deep end. Anyone who manages to make something at the scale of the whole world seem either simple or all-encompassing is just crazy. One of Ruppert's strengths is he shows how ever stage of the arguments he makes has a motive people can understand (and one that is documented). He was a cop and still needs motive, means, and opportunity to make his case.
Ruppert sometimes seems like a crazy person. It's not that he doesn't allow for coincidence, it's that he just has that jangling, sketchy quality really bug-fuck people have. I suppose if you have been carefully compiling evidence that your government is a giant criminal clusterfuck for 20+ years and still people won't listen to you - despite the mounting evidence of collusion, criminal behaviour, the revolving door between government and corporations, private prisons being stocked with millions of "drug offenders" while the CIA and the White House use the marines to guarantee the flow of heroin into the country - I guess that would frustrate the fuck out of a person and make them seem a little nutty.
Still, the basis for my conviction Ruppert both believes what he is saying and likely isn't crazy at all is the comparison between him and Alex Jones. At no point does Ruppert obviously distort facts, invoke a great conspiracy, mention the Rothschild family, talk about a New World Order, tie in gun control or death panels. He steers a wide berth around the topics that always pop up in Bat-Shit Crazy Whack-A-Mole. I think of him, at the moment, as a guy I would prefer not to believe.
Again, the problem with evaluating this kind of information (or doom-speak) is evaluating both the information and the conclusions drawn from it. Ruppert doesn't make it easy for people to dismiss him. Collapse is a presentation of his conclusions without much supporting evidence. But where he has time to provide his evidence he is slow, careful, and meticulous. The one very obvious flaw in his reasoning is he starts with a conclusion in mind. In the case of American foreign and domestic policy, he started with his experience of being on the receiving end of an attempted recruitment by the CIA for the purpose of bringing cocaine into the US. He took that and started trying to figure out how wide-spread the problem was and what the motivations could be. In that particular case his end point (that the US government is dependent of laundering drug money for liquidity) is only mildly controversial since everyone knows the CIA is the biggest drug cartel in the world. But getting from "drug smugglers" to "completely dependent on drug profits to prevent economic collapse" is a big leap. He does have evidence (as he sees it) and isn't obviously a maniac. I think I posted a link to a Taibbi article about banks laundering $9B in drug money. That's the tip of a very large iceberg. The estimates for total drug money laundered through the US are between $500B and $1T a year.
I think an honest person has to wrestle with a whole bunch of conflicting motives in evaluating any evidence like Ruppert's. First there is the desire to believe things are generally alright. This not only helps one sleep at night but also excuses a general political apathy. Then there is the desire to dismiss truly alarming information as false simply because it is alarming. One must also acknowledge the fear of accepting really radical ideas because you don't want to seem "bug-fuck" or bat-shit or crazy as a sack of assholes. I think most people would have completely rejected the statement, "The most powerful bankers in the world are completely incompetent, viciously avaricious criminals who knowingly break laws every day and the rest of us are absolutely at their mercy" at any time before 2008. Being in the minority, being very fucking scary, and sounding like a crazy person does not necessarily make one wrong.
My handy rule for figuring out who is a crazy fuck and who is genuinely frightening is the coincidence rule. To borrow yet again from William Gibson, there has to be room for coincidence. If everything you see becomes part of the conspiracy then you've gone off the deep end. Anyone who manages to make something at the scale of the whole world seem either simple or all-encompassing is just crazy. One of Ruppert's strengths is he shows how ever stage of the arguments he makes has a motive people can understand (and one that is documented). He was a cop and still needs motive, means, and opportunity to make his case.
Ruppert sometimes seems like a crazy person. It's not that he doesn't allow for coincidence, it's that he just has that jangling, sketchy quality really bug-fuck people have. I suppose if you have been carefully compiling evidence that your government is a giant criminal clusterfuck for 20+ years and still people won't listen to you - despite the mounting evidence of collusion, criminal behaviour, the revolving door between government and corporations, private prisons being stocked with millions of "drug offenders" while the CIA and the White House use the marines to guarantee the flow of heroin into the country - I guess that would frustrate the fuck out of a person and make them seem a little nutty.
Still, the basis for my conviction Ruppert both believes what he is saying and likely isn't crazy at all is the comparison between him and Alex Jones. At no point does Ruppert obviously distort facts, invoke a great conspiracy, mention the Rothschild family, talk about a New World Order, tie in gun control or death panels. He steers a wide berth around the topics that always pop up in Bat-Shit Crazy Whack-A-Mole. I think of him, at the moment, as a guy I would prefer not to believe.
Friday, February 14, 2014
On Michael Ruppert
I have a dirty little secret. I don't believe the official line about the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center or the other targets. I don't even believe the Pentagon was attacked, unless you count a missile strike launched by American military aircraft as an "attack". There are thousands of people (possibly millions) who believe, like I do, that the official line is a con but I still don't talk about it much. When I was teaching at Waterloo one of my fears was a student would ask about Sept 11 and I would be forced to either lie or out myself as a conspiracy theorist. My strategy at the time was to deliberately misconstrue the question and start talking about the American backed coup in Chilé that ousted Salvador Allende (which also occurred on Sept 11). Fortunately, it never came up.
I don't know why being associated with the Truthers, as some of those who are trying to figure out what actually happened call themselves, is such a bad rap but it is. I was in a meeting where decisions about sessional faculty were being made and the suggestion was made one candidate should be dropped because he talked too much about Sept. 11. "Too much" in this case being "at all". I'm not trying to portray myself as a persecuted minority; I just have enough strikes against me already and don't need to add others if I can avoid it.
But, like the hundreds of other trained building designers in the "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth", I don't believe jet fuel could cause the collapse of a steel frame tower. It has never happened before or since. If you knew nothing about the statics or stresses involved, if all you knew was Building 7 collapsed despite not getting hit or having any debris land on it, you would have to wonder about the official story. Anyway, that's my confession.
So from time to time, I look for the latest info and arguments by the truthers online. Today I found a lecture by former LAPD narcotics and homocide investigator Michael Ruppert. He talked for almost 2 hours about the US government's 30 year involvement in the international drug trade, showed the documented evidence of forewarning, the political policies of the US re drugs and oil, and gave a very convincing argument the plundering of the Russian economy (which must otherwise be attributed to Free Market insanity) was a deliberate destruction of a nation of almost 200 million people in order to secure dominance in the oil, natural gas, gold, and poppy rich former Soviet republics that border China, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. My conclusion after watching it is the world is even more completely fucked up than I thought and our ability to countenance human suffering for the sake of material wealth is almost limitless.
If you aren't already completely bummed out by the rapid destruction of the natural world (and our own particular niche in the ecosystem), or by the shitty entertainment value of the Olympics, or by The Walking Dead ill-advisedly going into Michonne's backstory, I recommend you search "Mike Ruppert 911" and watch the 2 hour video. You know you are feeling pessimistic about the human race when Ron Paul starts to seem like a statesman (rather than a slightly less crazy version of Ross Perot).
I don't know why being associated with the Truthers, as some of those who are trying to figure out what actually happened call themselves, is such a bad rap but it is. I was in a meeting where decisions about sessional faculty were being made and the suggestion was made one candidate should be dropped because he talked too much about Sept. 11. "Too much" in this case being "at all". I'm not trying to portray myself as a persecuted minority; I just have enough strikes against me already and don't need to add others if I can avoid it.
But, like the hundreds of other trained building designers in the "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth", I don't believe jet fuel could cause the collapse of a steel frame tower. It has never happened before or since. If you knew nothing about the statics or stresses involved, if all you knew was Building 7 collapsed despite not getting hit or having any debris land on it, you would have to wonder about the official story. Anyway, that's my confession.
So from time to time, I look for the latest info and arguments by the truthers online. Today I found a lecture by former LAPD narcotics and homocide investigator Michael Ruppert. He talked for almost 2 hours about the US government's 30 year involvement in the international drug trade, showed the documented evidence of forewarning, the political policies of the US re drugs and oil, and gave a very convincing argument the plundering of the Russian economy (which must otherwise be attributed to Free Market insanity) was a deliberate destruction of a nation of almost 200 million people in order to secure dominance in the oil, natural gas, gold, and poppy rich former Soviet republics that border China, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. My conclusion after watching it is the world is even more completely fucked up than I thought and our ability to countenance human suffering for the sake of material wealth is almost limitless.
If you aren't already completely bummed out by the rapid destruction of the natural world (and our own particular niche in the ecosystem), or by the shitty entertainment value of the Olympics, or by The Walking Dead ill-advisedly going into Michonne's backstory, I recommend you search "Mike Ruppert 911" and watch the 2 hour video. You know you are feeling pessimistic about the human race when Ron Paul starts to seem like a statesman (rather than a slightly less crazy version of Ross Perot).
On Alex Jones
Youtube (bane of my existence) thinks I like Alex Jones and always has something new of his for me to watch. It all started because I wanted to watch someone say insane shit for a few minutes. Alex Jones is a huge celebrity. He's almost an industry. He has a radio program, a regular internet "broadcast", he sponsors dozens of products, he is a very big deal. He is also bat-shit crazy. You might remember him for his appearance on Piers Morgan's show - the one that degenerated into him screaming at Piers about "another 1776!!!!!!!!!!!!" I left a few exclamation points off the transcript.
The completely bizarre thing about Jones is that not everything he says is crazy. Every point he makes is crazy but most of the things he says are just true. He takes three or four accurate stats (or facts or opinions of others) and puts them together to make something fucking completely out there, too weird to be real, crazy crazy crazy. Personally, I find the detail with which he embroiders his ravings fascinating. Almost every show he talks about "Agenda 21" like he read the title in a secret book he wasn't supposed to see. What are Agendas 1 through 20? Who knows? It's Agenda 21 that's the killer.
There are thousands, possibly millions of people who believe every word this lunatic says. And, sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, he is a fairly reliable source for info other news outlets won't run with. This is not, as Jones would have it, the "Liberal Media Elite". It's another kind of media self-censorship. The one Chomsky identified but bigger, more ramified. The relationship between the media and the populace isn't as simple as it was in the Cold War (when Chomsky first published his theories of media's self-censoring propensity). No one really knows who the "enemy" is anymore. So painting the enemy as self-destructive, always wrong, fundamentally evil, and against "us" isn't as simple as it was when the Soviet Union still existed.
If you have some time on your hands, watch Jones' explanation for what he admits was a slightly crazed performance on Piers Morgan. I'm not going to link it because then Youtube will become convinced I believe in Agenda 21. Watch any episode of Infowars. As soon as you know what Jones believes - that a conspiracy of rich liberals, crooked monopolists, and dictator wannabes are in control of absolutely everything - it is simple enough to spot the distortions. Why, you might ask, should I waste my time doing such a thing? It's kind of fascinating to watch a guy weave facts into paranoid delusions.
For example, David Suzuki said a few months ago that moving the reactor rods at the Fukushima plant in Japan could release so much radiation the West coast of Canada and the US would have to be evacuated. Immediately before that he said the radiation released into the ocean would spread via ocean currents and, over the course of years or decades, reach the West coast and it would eventually contaminate the groundwater, the fish, the atmosphere, etc. Jones played the clip and started screaming about evacuating the US because of Fukushima. Not a part of the US, not as a result of radiation in the ocean, not over years or decades. The whole US as a result of moving the reactor rods. Suzuki has recently said he regrets the comments he made (possibly as a result of people like Jones deliberately misinterpreting them). Still, Jones performance was something the see. Three or four facts, plus someone else's opinion, equals insane non-sense.
Jones would be a sad character if he wasn't doing so well for himself. There is a lot of shit happening one might consider a genuine reason to freak the fuck out - witness my previous entries on climate change. But Jones is a fake out freak out. He is obsessed with his freedom (from taxes) and his constitutional rights (to own as many guns as he wants). That's a little unfair. Jones knows a surprising amount about the content, interpretation, and history of the US constitution. But his claims about how it is being attacked (as part of Agenda 21) are ludicrous.
The oligarchs with their anti-matter reactors have done a deal with Communist China and we'll have more about that later in the show.
The completely bizarre thing about Jones is that not everything he says is crazy. Every point he makes is crazy but most of the things he says are just true. He takes three or four accurate stats (or facts or opinions of others) and puts them together to make something fucking completely out there, too weird to be real, crazy crazy crazy. Personally, I find the detail with which he embroiders his ravings fascinating. Almost every show he talks about "Agenda 21" like he read the title in a secret book he wasn't supposed to see. What are Agendas 1 through 20? Who knows? It's Agenda 21 that's the killer.
There are thousands, possibly millions of people who believe every word this lunatic says. And, sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, he is a fairly reliable source for info other news outlets won't run with. This is not, as Jones would have it, the "Liberal Media Elite". It's another kind of media self-censorship. The one Chomsky identified but bigger, more ramified. The relationship between the media and the populace isn't as simple as it was in the Cold War (when Chomsky first published his theories of media's self-censoring propensity). No one really knows who the "enemy" is anymore. So painting the enemy as self-destructive, always wrong, fundamentally evil, and against "us" isn't as simple as it was when the Soviet Union still existed.
If you have some time on your hands, watch Jones' explanation for what he admits was a slightly crazed performance on Piers Morgan. I'm not going to link it because then Youtube will become convinced I believe in Agenda 21. Watch any episode of Infowars. As soon as you know what Jones believes - that a conspiracy of rich liberals, crooked monopolists, and dictator wannabes are in control of absolutely everything - it is simple enough to spot the distortions. Why, you might ask, should I waste my time doing such a thing? It's kind of fascinating to watch a guy weave facts into paranoid delusions.
For example, David Suzuki said a few months ago that moving the reactor rods at the Fukushima plant in Japan could release so much radiation the West coast of Canada and the US would have to be evacuated. Immediately before that he said the radiation released into the ocean would spread via ocean currents and, over the course of years or decades, reach the West coast and it would eventually contaminate the groundwater, the fish, the atmosphere, etc. Jones played the clip and started screaming about evacuating the US because of Fukushima. Not a part of the US, not as a result of radiation in the ocean, not over years or decades. The whole US as a result of moving the reactor rods. Suzuki has recently said he regrets the comments he made (possibly as a result of people like Jones deliberately misinterpreting them). Still, Jones performance was something the see. Three or four facts, plus someone else's opinion, equals insane non-sense.
Jones would be a sad character if he wasn't doing so well for himself. There is a lot of shit happening one might consider a genuine reason to freak the fuck out - witness my previous entries on climate change. But Jones is a fake out freak out. He is obsessed with his freedom (from taxes) and his constitutional rights (to own as many guns as he wants). That's a little unfair. Jones knows a surprising amount about the content, interpretation, and history of the US constitution. But his claims about how it is being attacked (as part of Agenda 21) are ludicrous.
The oligarchs with their anti-matter reactors have done a deal with Communist China and we'll have more about that later in the show.
Damn the Olympics!
There are so many things to dislike about the Olympics and so few to like - skeleton racing (completely insane), women's curling (the only watchable winter Olympic sport), that's about it. Some people like figure skating I guess. I've never understood the attraction. It's like stock car racing but instead of crashes, you get slips and the very occasional fall. And when it happens it's just sad. Those idiots spend their entire lives to get to that point and then lose because of a tiny slip. Watching it reminds me of watching Degrassi Junior High - the agonizing wait for someone to do something painfully embarrassing.
Plus there's a weird kind of pressure not to watch these games (which are on at 4 am anyway) because Putin is a homophobe. He's also a brutal dictator and a gangster so maybe people should be less concerned about the whole homophobe thing. It's like finding out a convicted murderer also beat his dog. Yes, it's reprehensible. Anyway, the homophobic laws have given me political cover to do something I was going to do anyway -pretend these Olympic games aren't happening.
I have to wonder how much the Olympics messes with the ratings numbers. Does men's sport style really cut into the audience for Grey's Anatomy? How many people are forced to decide between this week's episode of Elementary and the qualifying rounds for short-track speed skating? Thankfully, AMC and HBO don't give a fuck about the Olympics either so True Detective and The Walking Dead are both on this Sunday.
I had a friend whose sister got into the national ballet company. It was a huge achievement. My response was, "Good for her. She's the best at something no one gives a fuck about." There's a reason hockey is the only sport at the winter Olympics that is also a sport outside the Olympics. It's because pro hockey is an excuse for guys to get drunk with other guys. Have you ever heard about skeleton outside of the Olympics? And that's the craziest sport ever. I saw a video on Youtube of a guy climbing a 1500 ft wall in Mexico with no safety ropes. That's insane. Even he doesn't have balls big enough to slide down an ice track at 120 km/h face first. Still, it's a very weird thing to get excited about. "Canada wins the gold medal is skeleton!" Who cares? No one will remember that person's name in a week. And why would that be a (compulsory) source of national pride?
So I guess I should be thankful the Russians are a bunch of homophobes. All the noise about the anti-gay propaganda laws allows me to escape giving a shit about something I really don't give a shit about.
Plus there's a weird kind of pressure not to watch these games (which are on at 4 am anyway) because Putin is a homophobe. He's also a brutal dictator and a gangster so maybe people should be less concerned about the whole homophobe thing. It's like finding out a convicted murderer also beat his dog. Yes, it's reprehensible. Anyway, the homophobic laws have given me political cover to do something I was going to do anyway -pretend these Olympic games aren't happening.
I have to wonder how much the Olympics messes with the ratings numbers. Does men's sport style really cut into the audience for Grey's Anatomy? How many people are forced to decide between this week's episode of Elementary and the qualifying rounds for short-track speed skating? Thankfully, AMC and HBO don't give a fuck about the Olympics either so True Detective and The Walking Dead are both on this Sunday.
I had a friend whose sister got into the national ballet company. It was a huge achievement. My response was, "Good for her. She's the best at something no one gives a fuck about." There's a reason hockey is the only sport at the winter Olympics that is also a sport outside the Olympics. It's because pro hockey is an excuse for guys to get drunk with other guys. Have you ever heard about skeleton outside of the Olympics? And that's the craziest sport ever. I saw a video on Youtube of a guy climbing a 1500 ft wall in Mexico with no safety ropes. That's insane. Even he doesn't have balls big enough to slide down an ice track at 120 km/h face first. Still, it's a very weird thing to get excited about. "Canada wins the gold medal is skeleton!" Who cares? No one will remember that person's name in a week. And why would that be a (compulsory) source of national pride?
So I guess I should be thankful the Russians are a bunch of homophobes. All the noise about the anti-gay propaganda laws allows me to escape giving a shit about something I really don't give a shit about.
G*d, I'm turning into a bore
All this freaking out about the extinction of Homo sapiens is turning me into a bore. Granted, I think it's freak out worthy but there are limits. So here is Giorgio Agamben discussing the end of modernity, Capitalism as a savage religion, and the death of art.
And here is a not-very-good article about the Canadian government's $1.2 B spy headquarters. I didn't think we had spies. Somewhat predictably, the feel-good Canadian style is to call them "watchdogs".
The second article is only really interesting when read immediately after the first. The Agamben interview is all over the place, which is to be expected in an interview with a philosopher that's going to be published on the internet. Agamben makes the point, "A city whose streets and squares are controlled by way of surveillance cameras cannot be a public place: it is a prison." This control by surveillance is precisely why Canada's new spy palace costs so much. Canada doesn't have much in the way of spies; not in the way most people think of them. No CIA, no MI6, certainly no James Bond types. We have nerds with weapons training hoovering up information and compiling it. Agamben's assertion Western governments view all their citizens as virtual terrorists here takes on its double meaning. We have the capacity to be terrorists (as defined by the government) and our crimes will be digital.
And here is a not-very-good article about the Canadian government's $1.2 B spy headquarters. I didn't think we had spies. Somewhat predictably, the feel-good Canadian style is to call them "watchdogs".
The second article is only really interesting when read immediately after the first. The Agamben interview is all over the place, which is to be expected in an interview with a philosopher that's going to be published on the internet. Agamben makes the point, "A city whose streets and squares are controlled by way of surveillance cameras cannot be a public place: it is a prison." This control by surveillance is precisely why Canada's new spy palace costs so much. Canada doesn't have much in the way of spies; not in the way most people think of them. No CIA, no MI6, certainly no James Bond types. We have nerds with weapons training hoovering up information and compiling it. Agamben's assertion Western governments view all their citizens as virtual terrorists here takes on its double meaning. We have the capacity to be terrorists (as defined by the government) and our crimes will be digital.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Trying to live with NTE
So, I spent all day yesterday on Guy McPherson's Nature Bats Last, your one-stop shop for all things apocalyptic. It took about five hours but I read through all the links on his regularly updated "Climate Chaos" page - a more or less complete listing of all the ways our species is desperately fucked. I had a hard time digesting most of the material. Not because it is overly scientific (I didn't need to use a calculator at any point, there is no math on the exam) but because it is scientists who are screaming "The sky is falling!!!"
I've written about that before. The incredible weirdness of people dedicated to the continuous but incremental increase in human knowledge, the practical definition of "slow and steady", the most rational and level-headed among us being the one's who are crying doom instead of patiently destroying every claim of the Doomsday freaks. It's a very odd thing. Scientists are careerists, of course they are. But they are also just one part of a larger project that has been underway for the past 300 odd years - the patient displacement of human ignorance with human knowledge. It is a deeply optimistic world view to take. You have to believe you are engaged in a process that began long before you were born and will continue long after you are dead. It doesn't make any sense otherwise. This process might be slowed in certain places and certain times but, as a whole and on the level of our entire species, it will continue. Now large groups of them are saying it might not. We just might be fucked.
The crux of the whole thing boils down to two points: self-reinforcing feedback loops and locked-in change. Here is a good video about feedback loops. There are two essential things to know. First, each loop feeds back into all climate changing factors and second, the changes are exponential and not linear. The "albedo" effect is a really simple example. White reflects more heat energy than black. Anyone who has worn dark clothes on a sunny summer day knows this. The biggest reflectors on the planet are the polar ice caps. They reflect sunlight (heat) back out of the atmosphere. As the ice melts, less energy is reflected causing the temperature to increase causing more ice to melt and so on. Since melting ice caps also expose the enormous peat bogs that store billions of tonnes of methane, as they melt more methane is released, increasing the temperature, which causes more ice to melt exposing more peat bog, etc etc. People say methane is 25 times more potent as a green house gas than carbon but that's measured over a century and the whole argument about feedback loops is they occur in a much shorter time span so 100 times would be more accurate. There are a whole bunch of these systems and they're all connected.
Then there are locked in changes. The planetary record shows historically temperature changes have preceded changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (rather than the other way around). Some people use this as an argument against climate change theory but it makes sense and the scientists' models are include it. Essentially, when the climate change is not anthropogenic, higher temperatures have started all the feedback loops. Now, dumping millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere started them. But the net result is the same. Once the temperature change occurs, billions of tonnes more carbon will be released into the atmosphere by melting ice caps, increased ocean temperatures (warm water throws carbon stored by cooler water back into the atmosphere), etc etc. That means the effect of the carbon already released into the atmosphere won't be entirely measurable for another 50 years. Basically everyone agrees that a 4º increase in temperature would fuck our shit up. We are currently at around .8º higher and the estimate is the locked in change is 1.4º - but that doesn't include what the planet will do in response to those extra 2.2º. It might mean we are already locked into a 4º change. If that isn't scary enough, the difference between the survival of our species (with billions of death) and the complete extinction of our species is the difference between a 4º and a 6º increase. 6º over 1850 and bye bye.
What I didn't realize until late last night, after several hours of trying to write something intelligent about the possibility humans might do sufficient damage to our environment in the next ten years to ensure our own extinction sometime in this century, was some part of me hopes it is true. This is partly because the people doing the most significant damage are kind of hideous people -the coal lobby, the natural gas frackers, etc. Then there are the people like the Tea Party Republican Paul Broun, who also happens to be the Chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee for the House Committee on Science and Technology, who thinks evolution and the Big Bang are a "lies straight from the pit of Hell" intended to convince people they don't need a saviour, that there is "convincing scientific evidence" the Earth is 6000 years old, and who stated on the floor of the House "Scientists all over this world say the idea of human induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax." You can find all those quotes, and many others, in his Wikipedia entry. The irony of this guy being in charge of oversight for the US Government's science and technology initiatives is lost on no one (except possibly him). And to correct his bullshit, no climate scientists think global warming is a hoax. The massive money of the combined energy lobbies has convinced some people with PhD's to argue against anthropogenic climate change. The 9000 studies combined in the IPCC's 2013 Report on Climate Change contain precisely zero studies claiming it is either a hoax or a natural occurrence. This isn't a selection bias. The IPCC is famously conservative, including only the most conclusive and widely accepted results. Anything with even a little bit of doubt (and some things that are certain but frighten politicians) is cut.
It's unfair to pick on Broun. Not because he doesn't richly deserve it but because he is only one of many prominent people who are doing their best to preserve the myth there is some kind of debate about climate change. Or, more accurately, that the terms of the debate are "does it exist or not?" rather than "is it already too late or not?" Donald Trump thinks winter is conclusive proof "global warming is bullshit", Rush Limbaugh thinks climate change is a Trojan Horse for liberals to further their goals of higher taxes, bigger government, and less freedom. The (cartoonishly evil) Koch brothers have put up almost $70 million of their own money to fund climate change denial. It's hard not to want these people to lose and lose badly.
One of the places I spent a lot of time is Youtube. I generally avoid Youtube for anything other than incomprehensible Japanese gameshows because videos get ranked according to popularity. And a climate scientist telling us the world as we know it is fucking over is bound not to be popular. But I was (and am) stunned by the comments that climate change videos attract. There is a large group of extremely dedicated commentators who want everyone who thinks climate change is anthropogenic thrown in prison, executed, or subjected to some form of humiliation. The crux of these comments is the same as that of Rep. Broun - climate change is a conspiracy of devils and liberals (interchangeable in his mind). Fuck the IPCC - the most rigorously vetted scientific findings in the history of our species. Fuck the liberal ideologues (like the World Bank, NASA, and the NSA) who think climate change is man-made and dangerous as fuck. It's a big-government conspiracy. If you believe their lies everything is evidence of climate change.
I remain undecided re who is more absurd: me hoping for the worst so the deniers will get their comeuppance or the deniers who think it is a hoax perpetrated by malefactors and brainwashed liberals. I have at least the good grace to be ashamed of my own irrational and stupid bias. And, if I gauge the worth of my position by the quality of my opposition, I am more correct than the deniers. I would rather oppose the Koch brothers than David Suzuki any day of the week.
I've written about that before. The incredible weirdness of people dedicated to the continuous but incremental increase in human knowledge, the practical definition of "slow and steady", the most rational and level-headed among us being the one's who are crying doom instead of patiently destroying every claim of the Doomsday freaks. It's a very odd thing. Scientists are careerists, of course they are. But they are also just one part of a larger project that has been underway for the past 300 odd years - the patient displacement of human ignorance with human knowledge. It is a deeply optimistic world view to take. You have to believe you are engaged in a process that began long before you were born and will continue long after you are dead. It doesn't make any sense otherwise. This process might be slowed in certain places and certain times but, as a whole and on the level of our entire species, it will continue. Now large groups of them are saying it might not. We just might be fucked.
The crux of the whole thing boils down to two points: self-reinforcing feedback loops and locked-in change. Here is a good video about feedback loops. There are two essential things to know. First, each loop feeds back into all climate changing factors and second, the changes are exponential and not linear. The "albedo" effect is a really simple example. White reflects more heat energy than black. Anyone who has worn dark clothes on a sunny summer day knows this. The biggest reflectors on the planet are the polar ice caps. They reflect sunlight (heat) back out of the atmosphere. As the ice melts, less energy is reflected causing the temperature to increase causing more ice to melt and so on. Since melting ice caps also expose the enormous peat bogs that store billions of tonnes of methane, as they melt more methane is released, increasing the temperature, which causes more ice to melt exposing more peat bog, etc etc. People say methane is 25 times more potent as a green house gas than carbon but that's measured over a century and the whole argument about feedback loops is they occur in a much shorter time span so 100 times would be more accurate. There are a whole bunch of these systems and they're all connected.
Then there are locked in changes. The planetary record shows historically temperature changes have preceded changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (rather than the other way around). Some people use this as an argument against climate change theory but it makes sense and the scientists' models are include it. Essentially, when the climate change is not anthropogenic, higher temperatures have started all the feedback loops. Now, dumping millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere started them. But the net result is the same. Once the temperature change occurs, billions of tonnes more carbon will be released into the atmosphere by melting ice caps, increased ocean temperatures (warm water throws carbon stored by cooler water back into the atmosphere), etc etc. That means the effect of the carbon already released into the atmosphere won't be entirely measurable for another 50 years. Basically everyone agrees that a 4º increase in temperature would fuck our shit up. We are currently at around .8º higher and the estimate is the locked in change is 1.4º - but that doesn't include what the planet will do in response to those extra 2.2º. It might mean we are already locked into a 4º change. If that isn't scary enough, the difference between the survival of our species (with billions of death) and the complete extinction of our species is the difference between a 4º and a 6º increase. 6º over 1850 and bye bye.
What I didn't realize until late last night, after several hours of trying to write something intelligent about the possibility humans might do sufficient damage to our environment in the next ten years to ensure our own extinction sometime in this century, was some part of me hopes it is true. This is partly because the people doing the most significant damage are kind of hideous people -the coal lobby, the natural gas frackers, etc. Then there are the people like the Tea Party Republican Paul Broun, who also happens to be the Chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee for the House Committee on Science and Technology, who thinks evolution and the Big Bang are a "lies straight from the pit of Hell" intended to convince people they don't need a saviour, that there is "convincing scientific evidence" the Earth is 6000 years old, and who stated on the floor of the House "Scientists all over this world say the idea of human induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax." You can find all those quotes, and many others, in his Wikipedia entry. The irony of this guy being in charge of oversight for the US Government's science and technology initiatives is lost on no one (except possibly him). And to correct his bullshit, no climate scientists think global warming is a hoax. The massive money of the combined energy lobbies has convinced some people with PhD's to argue against anthropogenic climate change. The 9000 studies combined in the IPCC's 2013 Report on Climate Change contain precisely zero studies claiming it is either a hoax or a natural occurrence. This isn't a selection bias. The IPCC is famously conservative, including only the most conclusive and widely accepted results. Anything with even a little bit of doubt (and some things that are certain but frighten politicians) is cut.
It's unfair to pick on Broun. Not because he doesn't richly deserve it but because he is only one of many prominent people who are doing their best to preserve the myth there is some kind of debate about climate change. Or, more accurately, that the terms of the debate are "does it exist or not?" rather than "is it already too late or not?" Donald Trump thinks winter is conclusive proof "global warming is bullshit", Rush Limbaugh thinks climate change is a Trojan Horse for liberals to further their goals of higher taxes, bigger government, and less freedom. The (cartoonishly evil) Koch brothers have put up almost $70 million of their own money to fund climate change denial. It's hard not to want these people to lose and lose badly.
One of the places I spent a lot of time is Youtube. I generally avoid Youtube for anything other than incomprehensible Japanese gameshows because videos get ranked according to popularity. And a climate scientist telling us the world as we know it is fucking over is bound not to be popular. But I was (and am) stunned by the comments that climate change videos attract. There is a large group of extremely dedicated commentators who want everyone who thinks climate change is anthropogenic thrown in prison, executed, or subjected to some form of humiliation. The crux of these comments is the same as that of Rep. Broun - climate change is a conspiracy of devils and liberals (interchangeable in his mind). Fuck the IPCC - the most rigorously vetted scientific findings in the history of our species. Fuck the liberal ideologues (like the World Bank, NASA, and the NSA) who think climate change is man-made and dangerous as fuck. It's a big-government conspiracy. If you believe their lies everything is evidence of climate change.
I remain undecided re who is more absurd: me hoping for the worst so the deniers will get their comeuppance or the deniers who think it is a hoax perpetrated by malefactors and brainwashed liberals. I have at least the good grace to be ashamed of my own irrational and stupid bias. And, if I gauge the worth of my position by the quality of my opposition, I am more correct than the deniers. I would rather oppose the Koch brothers than David Suzuki any day of the week.
Monday, February 10, 2014
+4º
Read this: Guy McPherson
Don't just read the post, follow every link and read those too. It only takes about three hours.
Spoiler alert: We are all going to die.
Don't just read the post, follow every link and read those too. It only takes about three hours.
Spoiler alert: We are all going to die.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
A (Very) Bad Idea
Here is a contest advertized on Archdaily. For those who don't want to check out the link, here it is in a nutshell - teams of students are given 5 days to solve a complex architectural problem, they make their submission, the best 3 get money, the winner gets money and a job (or jobs) after graduating. The problem statement is "redefine the meaning of sustainability in architecture". Or that might be last years problem. Presumably the winner's already solved it. Here's why that is a really bad idea (and potentially very cruel).
The average frosh in architecture school is either 17 or 18. By the time they're advanced enough to have a chance in a competition like this they will be 21 or 22. Older students will enter but I would guess the average age of the competitors will be around 23. Architecture students are famous for working all night. The longest I ever went without sleep (in architecture school) was about 70 hours. Other people have gone much, much longer. Lou Reed once said he stayed awake for 5 straight days when he was hanging around Andy Warhol's factory because he didn't want to miss anything interesting. But for that kind of stamina you need drugs.
The chair of the panel of judges is a partner in OMA. You've heard of them because they're Rem Koolhaas's firm and you've heard of him. So getting a gig with them is a huge career move. When I was in school, I knew people who were using their Epi pens as study aids, snorting coke in the washrooms, taking Ritalin by the handful, grinding up commercially available "Wakeness" aids and snorting that, all manner of very unhealthy behaviour. And there was no prize involved other than bragging rights. First prize for this is roughly $5K CAD plus a job plus international exposure. I don't even want to know what kids (if you consider people younger than 25 kids and I do) are willing to do for the kind of career boost this can give.
So, in terms of public safety it's not a great idea. It's a bad idea. What takes it from "bad" to "very bad" is the idea you can do something interesting in 5 days about a pervasive, multifaceted, multidisciplinary, and global problem like "sustainability in architecture". For those of you who don't speak architect, sustainability is how we describe our ongoing efforts to make buildings that aren't so blatantly and sometimes mind-bogglingly wasteful. It's a huge problem. I would argue it's the biggest problem in architecture, since it requires a rethinking of massing and form, structure, materials, building orientation, urban planning, life cycle costing, how to measure and reward efficiency, how we travel (and how much), etc etc. Everything about building (except design) requires enormous amounts of energy - in the sense of oil, gas, hydro, or nuclear.
The logic behind the 5 day limit is "in the real world" architects don't have months to contemplate various alternative solutions. Everything has to be fast and good. I don't have much sympathy for ITRW arguments. It allows too much bullshit through the filters. In the REAL WORLD... is what someone says when they are tired of thinking. And, since Universities were invented and have been preserved so that people will have places to do things that take time (like reading, thinking, teaching, etc) bringing this ITRW bullshit into the University is a very bad idea.
In the REAL WORLD you won't have 5 days to solve complicated problems, you will have a career that spans many years to slowly work towards complex positions to complex issues. You will have both your own experience and that of the professional community to draw on as you move at what must seem like an achingly slow pace towards an understanding that is continually eluding you (until you are at least 50 and, more probably, 70 years old). In the interim, you work and think and maybe even teach.
This is a competition that will be won by a mediocre idea that won't really be worth the trouble of tearing apart. But it will be accompanied by some beautiful images. So really, it's a five-day endurance version of a beauty pageant. My congratulations to the winners in the event they survive.
The average frosh in architecture school is either 17 or 18. By the time they're advanced enough to have a chance in a competition like this they will be 21 or 22. Older students will enter but I would guess the average age of the competitors will be around 23. Architecture students are famous for working all night. The longest I ever went without sleep (in architecture school) was about 70 hours. Other people have gone much, much longer. Lou Reed once said he stayed awake for 5 straight days when he was hanging around Andy Warhol's factory because he didn't want to miss anything interesting. But for that kind of stamina you need drugs.
The chair of the panel of judges is a partner in OMA. You've heard of them because they're Rem Koolhaas's firm and you've heard of him. So getting a gig with them is a huge career move. When I was in school, I knew people who were using their Epi pens as study aids, snorting coke in the washrooms, taking Ritalin by the handful, grinding up commercially available "Wakeness" aids and snorting that, all manner of very unhealthy behaviour. And there was no prize involved other than bragging rights. First prize for this is roughly $5K CAD plus a job plus international exposure. I don't even want to know what kids (if you consider people younger than 25 kids and I do) are willing to do for the kind of career boost this can give.
So, in terms of public safety it's not a great idea. It's a bad idea. What takes it from "bad" to "very bad" is the idea you can do something interesting in 5 days about a pervasive, multifaceted, multidisciplinary, and global problem like "sustainability in architecture". For those of you who don't speak architect, sustainability is how we describe our ongoing efforts to make buildings that aren't so blatantly and sometimes mind-bogglingly wasteful. It's a huge problem. I would argue it's the biggest problem in architecture, since it requires a rethinking of massing and form, structure, materials, building orientation, urban planning, life cycle costing, how to measure and reward efficiency, how we travel (and how much), etc etc. Everything about building (except design) requires enormous amounts of energy - in the sense of oil, gas, hydro, or nuclear.
The logic behind the 5 day limit is "in the real world" architects don't have months to contemplate various alternative solutions. Everything has to be fast and good. I don't have much sympathy for ITRW arguments. It allows too much bullshit through the filters. In the REAL WORLD... is what someone says when they are tired of thinking. And, since Universities were invented and have been preserved so that people will have places to do things that take time (like reading, thinking, teaching, etc) bringing this ITRW bullshit into the University is a very bad idea.
In the REAL WORLD you won't have 5 days to solve complicated problems, you will have a career that spans many years to slowly work towards complex positions to complex issues. You will have both your own experience and that of the professional community to draw on as you move at what must seem like an achingly slow pace towards an understanding that is continually eluding you (until you are at least 50 and, more probably, 70 years old). In the interim, you work and think and maybe even teach.
This is a competition that will be won by a mediocre idea that won't really be worth the trouble of tearing apart. But it will be accompanied by some beautiful images. So really, it's a five-day endurance version of a beauty pageant. My congratulations to the winners in the event they survive.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
On (Good) Editors
That thing I wrote for OnSite came back with the editors comments. The email said, "My questions, comments, corrections are in red." I opened the attached file expecting to see a blood-bath and found two questions, one sentence each. As a result I have to re-write almost the whole thing. Not because the questions were general and / or mean. They were very specific and seemed very easy to answer. I sat down at 9 this morning thinking, "I can polish this off in about ten minutes." It's now 2:30 - five and a half hours of constant writing, looking things up, reading stuff, more writing, cutting things, re-writing, editing, changes, looking more stuff up...
I have a huge admiration for people who can do that - ask the perfect question. It is the one talent that separates great critics from mediocre ones. There are only a few people I know who can do it. And whenever I get a chance to work with them, I take it. It's something I have tried to cultivate in myself, with very little in the way of results. I'm still the person who thinks of the perfect thing to say three days later and is then tortured by the knowledge it was too fucking late.
By the way, when I say (write) I have been writing for five and a half hours, I don't mean in the super-fast, prayerful, non-productive way I described a few entries ago. I have been wringing individual words from my brain and weighing them carefully for since 9 this morning. It's fucking exhausting. Is 'notes' better or worse than 'identifies'? Did he 'collect' them or 'curate' them? Which is more correct - 'interpolate', 'calculate', or 'insert'?
The really great question makes you feel like a dunce two hours later. It humiliates you but it waits until you are alone to do it. Perhaps humiliate isn't the right word. It reveals to you the extent of your ignorance and, if the question is really really great, points you in the direction of the answer.
For some reason, possibly to do with spending a substantial amount of time at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory website recently and associating all things space with Neil deGrasse Tyson, I was thinking about Isaac Newton. Why was I on the jet propulsion lab's website? Because the latest terrain model used by Google Maps and Google Earth was produced by the space shuttle shooting microwaves at the surface of the Earth from two sources (60m apart) and is accurate to 0m (90% certainty) in altitude and generated a point on a 15m grid covering the entire planet from 60º N to 60º S. Everyone knows Sir Isaac was a intellectual badass. Optics, the orbits of the planets, gravity, calculus, the theory of money (he was in charge of the English mint), and a whole lot of stuff that was probably very intelligent about alchemy. But he was also a kick-ass question asker. When everyone else was wondering why snowflakes are all different, he was wondering why, given the all snowflakes are different, all the arms of any given snowflake are all the same. Which, when you think about it, is a much better question. Not only is it weirder, it also leads in the direction of the answer. Although, in fairness, that part about the answer might be either an accident or an illusion caused by my almost complete ignorance of how snowflakes work. I think it's similar to crystals and I know a bit about those from reading Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.
So, what's the result re my (what I hoped ought be brief but turned out to be dramatic) rethink of my short essay? An actual idea that goes from beginning to end and makes sense. Which is good. Except that it was supposed to already have that when I submitted it at the end of last month and it didn't really (although I thought it did). Which is bad. I suspect that, as a result, I have about four or five more hours of re-writing to do. I am starting to feel very thankful I didn't choose a career in journalism. And even starting to feel a little bad about all the vicious insults I have tossed at the Star's architecture columnists over the last couple years. I don't think they are any more right than I did before. They aren't. They remain wrong in general and in detail. But I acknowledge the difficulty in finding someone who can meet deadlines, write intelligently, and produce architecture criticism worth reading.
As for editing, I wouldn't be very good at it. I have difficulty restraining myself from rewriting the thing myself. Poor diction drives me nuts. And I am too impatient to think of really good questions (even if I had the ability, which I probably don't). My questions are typically limited to: "Really?", "Are you sure you mean this?", and "What the fuck is this supposed to mean?"
I have a huge admiration for people who can do that - ask the perfect question. It is the one talent that separates great critics from mediocre ones. There are only a few people I know who can do it. And whenever I get a chance to work with them, I take it. It's something I have tried to cultivate in myself, with very little in the way of results. I'm still the person who thinks of the perfect thing to say three days later and is then tortured by the knowledge it was too fucking late.
By the way, when I say (write) I have been writing for five and a half hours, I don't mean in the super-fast, prayerful, non-productive way I described a few entries ago. I have been wringing individual words from my brain and weighing them carefully for since 9 this morning. It's fucking exhausting. Is 'notes' better or worse than 'identifies'? Did he 'collect' them or 'curate' them? Which is more correct - 'interpolate', 'calculate', or 'insert'?
The really great question makes you feel like a dunce two hours later. It humiliates you but it waits until you are alone to do it. Perhaps humiliate isn't the right word. It reveals to you the extent of your ignorance and, if the question is really really great, points you in the direction of the answer.
For some reason, possibly to do with spending a substantial amount of time at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory website recently and associating all things space with Neil deGrasse Tyson, I was thinking about Isaac Newton. Why was I on the jet propulsion lab's website? Because the latest terrain model used by Google Maps and Google Earth was produced by the space shuttle shooting microwaves at the surface of the Earth from two sources (60m apart) and is accurate to 0m (90% certainty) in altitude and generated a point on a 15m grid covering the entire planet from 60º N to 60º S. Everyone knows Sir Isaac was a intellectual badass. Optics, the orbits of the planets, gravity, calculus, the theory of money (he was in charge of the English mint), and a whole lot of stuff that was probably very intelligent about alchemy. But he was also a kick-ass question asker. When everyone else was wondering why snowflakes are all different, he was wondering why, given the all snowflakes are different, all the arms of any given snowflake are all the same. Which, when you think about it, is a much better question. Not only is it weirder, it also leads in the direction of the answer. Although, in fairness, that part about the answer might be either an accident or an illusion caused by my almost complete ignorance of how snowflakes work. I think it's similar to crystals and I know a bit about those from reading Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.
So, what's the result re my (what I hoped ought be brief but turned out to be dramatic) rethink of my short essay? An actual idea that goes from beginning to end and makes sense. Which is good. Except that it was supposed to already have that when I submitted it at the end of last month and it didn't really (although I thought it did). Which is bad. I suspect that, as a result, I have about four or five more hours of re-writing to do. I am starting to feel very thankful I didn't choose a career in journalism. And even starting to feel a little bad about all the vicious insults I have tossed at the Star's architecture columnists over the last couple years. I don't think they are any more right than I did before. They aren't. They remain wrong in general and in detail. But I acknowledge the difficulty in finding someone who can meet deadlines, write intelligently, and produce architecture criticism worth reading.
As for editing, I wouldn't be very good at it. I have difficulty restraining myself from rewriting the thing myself. Poor diction drives me nuts. And I am too impatient to think of really good questions (even if I had the ability, which I probably don't). My questions are typically limited to: "Really?", "Are you sure you mean this?", and "What the fuck is this supposed to mean?"
Sunday, February 2, 2014
On Hamlet and Lear
This morning I heard a host on the CBC call Lear "Shakespeare's greatest tragedy" and I thought, that guy has kids. It seems simple. Young people (those who read Shakespeare anyway) think Hamlet is Shakespeare's best tragedy because youth is betrayed by age. Adults, and particularly parents, think the same about Lear because age is betrayed by youth.
Personally, I prefer Hamlet. And no, I'm not a parent. I've never understood Lear. I mean, I know what it's about and I get the point of it but I've never felt the same admiration for it as I do for Hamlet. I have a certain admiration for the resourcefulness required to fix the tragedy (in the sense of making it dramatically and logically necessary) in the very first act. But I always thought if you want your children to treat you well in your old age, don't give them names that sound like venereal diseases. Lear didn't fuck himself when he decided to make his children compete for his kingdom with protestations of love; he fucked himself when he decided Goneril was a good name for a girl. Regan is okay as a name but not as a character (she's a fucking bitch). Maybe her middle name was Syphilis. But obviously Cordelia is going to be the one who doesn't harbour intense revenge fantasies. Lear could have died happily in his bed surrounded by loving children and grandkids if he thought, "Should I call her Goneril or Lily? Hmmm, I think Lily."
Since my brother had kids I started paying more attention to parenting advice columns and I noticed a couple things. First, very few people tell you not to give your kid some strange fucking name you thought of when you were high (like Goneril or Titus or Gustave). I suppose Gustave is okay if you speak French. Second, parents all seem to believe their kids are little human time-bombs. Everyone is terrified of messing their kids up.
I sometimes wonder how difficult it is to really fuck a kid up? It must be hard. The only way I can think of would be if you either viciously mistreat them or completely ignore them. I guess cruelly and publicly criticizing everything they do would probably work too. And if you do that, you are so seriously fucked yourself it's more like the kid's grandparents are fucking them up - grandparent fucks up parent fucks up kid, therefore grandparent fucks up kid. If you aren't seriously emotionally damaged, a irredeemably vile person, or labouring under a crippling addiction your kids should be fine.
I think about it this way. Two or three generations ago it was not only okay to beat the fuck out of your kids, it was kind of expected. I'm sure my grandparents were (by many reckonings) good people but they didn't raise their kids in a way anyone would consider acceptable today. And my parents are good people and good parents. My brother is an excellent parent and his wife is even better. That's not me being blind about the failings of my own family either. They have an adult kid who is one of the nicest, level headed, and well-adjusted people I know. On the whole, it seems to me like it's harder to completely fuck kids up than most parents fear.
Of course, if I'm being fair, I have to add I have no inclination to listen to people talk about the shit their parents did to them. Unless your parents either completely neglected you, savagely beat you, or left you to be raised by a wolf pack I think you have an obligation to settle your own shit by the age of 25. If you don't. That's fine but it's your problem - don't blame your parents and don't tell me about it.
Personally, I prefer Hamlet. And no, I'm not a parent. I've never understood Lear. I mean, I know what it's about and I get the point of it but I've never felt the same admiration for it as I do for Hamlet. I have a certain admiration for the resourcefulness required to fix the tragedy (in the sense of making it dramatically and logically necessary) in the very first act. But I always thought if you want your children to treat you well in your old age, don't give them names that sound like venereal diseases. Lear didn't fuck himself when he decided to make his children compete for his kingdom with protestations of love; he fucked himself when he decided Goneril was a good name for a girl. Regan is okay as a name but not as a character (she's a fucking bitch). Maybe her middle name was Syphilis. But obviously Cordelia is going to be the one who doesn't harbour intense revenge fantasies. Lear could have died happily in his bed surrounded by loving children and grandkids if he thought, "Should I call her Goneril or Lily? Hmmm, I think Lily."
Since my brother had kids I started paying more attention to parenting advice columns and I noticed a couple things. First, very few people tell you not to give your kid some strange fucking name you thought of when you were high (like Goneril or Titus or Gustave). I suppose Gustave is okay if you speak French. Second, parents all seem to believe their kids are little human time-bombs. Everyone is terrified of messing their kids up.
I sometimes wonder how difficult it is to really fuck a kid up? It must be hard. The only way I can think of would be if you either viciously mistreat them or completely ignore them. I guess cruelly and publicly criticizing everything they do would probably work too. And if you do that, you are so seriously fucked yourself it's more like the kid's grandparents are fucking them up - grandparent fucks up parent fucks up kid, therefore grandparent fucks up kid. If you aren't seriously emotionally damaged, a irredeemably vile person, or labouring under a crippling addiction your kids should be fine.
I think about it this way. Two or three generations ago it was not only okay to beat the fuck out of your kids, it was kind of expected. I'm sure my grandparents were (by many reckonings) good people but they didn't raise their kids in a way anyone would consider acceptable today. And my parents are good people and good parents. My brother is an excellent parent and his wife is even better. That's not me being blind about the failings of my own family either. They have an adult kid who is one of the nicest, level headed, and well-adjusted people I know. On the whole, it seems to me like it's harder to completely fuck kids up than most parents fear.
Of course, if I'm being fair, I have to add I have no inclination to listen to people talk about the shit their parents did to them. Unless your parents either completely neglected you, savagely beat you, or left you to be raised by a wolf pack I think you have an obligation to settle your own shit by the age of 25. If you don't. That's fine but it's your problem - don't blame your parents and don't tell me about it.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
On Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry (and Frank Gehry)
I started reading the Harry Potter books in my mid-thirties. Most people who did that were reading them to their kids. I did it for my own enjoyment. I'm a big fan of dumb books. I don't think I could stand to read any of them again but I do like to watch the movies occasionally. Mostly to hear Alan Rickman draw his sentences...
...out.
Part of the fun of the Harry Potter films is trying to figure out how the fuck Hogwarts itself is put together. The people who designed it for the films did a really great job. My favourite parts are the bathrooms - which have a pretty big role in the films. Bigger than I remembered until I looked at them again. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is through a bathroom; Hermione turns herself into a cat in one trying to use the Polyjuice Potion; Mertle tells Harry the secret of the egg in the big tub in the prefect's bathroom; Harry fights Draco in the bathroom, using the Sectumsepra spell; that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
The bathrooms in the early movies are more Hogwarts-ish than in the later ones. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is a nice piece of set design but it doesn't look like it belongs in any bathroom outside a school for witchcraft and wizardry. The one where the fight occurs between Draco and Harry is fantastically strange. It looks like the designers decided to stick all the fixtures one might have found in a boarding school circa 1950 into a gothic cathedral. Really odd and great. I think they might have changed set designers around the fourth movie. The interiors for the first three are mostly borrowed from actual buildings. I guess once the producers realized every movie was going to make about a billion dollars they started spending more on them. The twin spiral staircase (which, if you think about it rationally makes no sense at all) that gets you to the prophecy class in the 5th movie or to the offices of Horace Slughorn in the 6th is a bizarre and wonderful treat. NOTE: I tried to find a picture of this one on the internet but all I got was a bunch of images of the hall with the moving staircases.
I'm sure someone has published a complete book of Hogwarts with technical drawings of all the sets. They have one for the Millenium Falcon so there must be one for Hogwarts. Let me search Google...
Unbelievably, there is no book for Hogwarts itself. You can get a complete Lego set and a bunch of other shit but no book of technical drawings. The free market fails again. Fuck you Milton Friedman! I guess the invisible hand of the market has some drawing to do!?!
This is way off topic but thinking about the spiral staircase made me think of Frank Gehry's addition and renovation of the AGO in Toronto. And that illustrates the essential lameness of Gehry's post-Bilbao work. Instead of sitting down and coming up with some real architecture he just said, "Find me some places I can do something sculptural and not have to think about proportions or the hierarchy of elements or any off that bullshit". That's probably not a direct quote. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is a masterpiece. In 80 years or so, when architectural historians start writing "Architecture in the 21st Century" Bilbao will be the second chapter. The first will be important shit that happened in the 20th - like Corb and so on. But since Bilbao, which has all the same characteristics, defects, and essential fucked-upness of all Gehry's projects but was the first time we'd seen anything like that so it gets a pass, Gehry has traded on his reputation and made it work because sycophants (and sycophantic critics) don't bother to wonder whether all architecture ought not be judged by the same criteria. I think it should. So architecture today (whether or not you are Frank Gehry) remains subject to, and the product of, the same considerations as the Doric temple and the Gothic Cathedral. Shape, proportion, hierarchy. Those of you who disagree with the inclusion of hierarchy in that list might remember Vitruvius (who is dubious in other ways but dead on in this) made it one of his main elements of architecture - only he called it by a different name. And by these criteria, the correct criteria, Gehry is an ambitious, self-centered, egotistical failure.
Even more unfortunate than the fact Gehry's name has enough magic in it to get shit projects realized around the world is that his is the kind of failure many young architects aspire to.
That turned into a downer. I should have stopped at making fun of Milton Friedman.
...out.
Part of the fun of the Harry Potter films is trying to figure out how the fuck Hogwarts itself is put together. The people who designed it for the films did a really great job. My favourite parts are the bathrooms - which have a pretty big role in the films. Bigger than I remembered until I looked at them again. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is through a bathroom; Hermione turns herself into a cat in one trying to use the Polyjuice Potion; Mertle tells Harry the secret of the egg in the big tub in the prefect's bathroom; Harry fights Draco in the bathroom, using the Sectumsepra spell; that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
The bathrooms in the early movies are more Hogwarts-ish than in the later ones. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is a nice piece of set design but it doesn't look like it belongs in any bathroom outside a school for witchcraft and wizardry. The one where the fight occurs between Draco and Harry is fantastically strange. It looks like the designers decided to stick all the fixtures one might have found in a boarding school circa 1950 into a gothic cathedral. Really odd and great. I think they might have changed set designers around the fourth movie. The interiors for the first three are mostly borrowed from actual buildings. I guess once the producers realized every movie was going to make about a billion dollars they started spending more on them. The twin spiral staircase (which, if you think about it rationally makes no sense at all) that gets you to the prophecy class in the 5th movie or to the offices of Horace Slughorn in the 6th is a bizarre and wonderful treat. NOTE: I tried to find a picture of this one on the internet but all I got was a bunch of images of the hall with the moving staircases.
I'm sure someone has published a complete book of Hogwarts with technical drawings of all the sets. They have one for the Millenium Falcon so there must be one for Hogwarts. Let me search Google...
Unbelievably, there is no book for Hogwarts itself. You can get a complete Lego set and a bunch of other shit but no book of technical drawings. The free market fails again. Fuck you Milton Friedman! I guess the invisible hand of the market has some drawing to do!?!
This is way off topic but thinking about the spiral staircase made me think of Frank Gehry's addition and renovation of the AGO in Toronto. And that illustrates the essential lameness of Gehry's post-Bilbao work. Instead of sitting down and coming up with some real architecture he just said, "Find me some places I can do something sculptural and not have to think about proportions or the hierarchy of elements or any off that bullshit". That's probably not a direct quote. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is a masterpiece. In 80 years or so, when architectural historians start writing "Architecture in the 21st Century" Bilbao will be the second chapter. The first will be important shit that happened in the 20th - like Corb and so on. But since Bilbao, which has all the same characteristics, defects, and essential fucked-upness of all Gehry's projects but was the first time we'd seen anything like that so it gets a pass, Gehry has traded on his reputation and made it work because sycophants (and sycophantic critics) don't bother to wonder whether all architecture ought not be judged by the same criteria. I think it should. So architecture today (whether or not you are Frank Gehry) remains subject to, and the product of, the same considerations as the Doric temple and the Gothic Cathedral. Shape, proportion, hierarchy. Those of you who disagree with the inclusion of hierarchy in that list might remember Vitruvius (who is dubious in other ways but dead on in this) made it one of his main elements of architecture - only he called it by a different name. And by these criteria, the correct criteria, Gehry is an ambitious, self-centered, egotistical failure.
Even more unfortunate than the fact Gehry's name has enough magic in it to get shit projects realized around the world is that his is the kind of failure many young architects aspire to.
That turned into a downer. I should have stopped at making fun of Milton Friedman.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)