Sunday Morning Reading Material Second Sunday in July 2011- The dream is alive but sleeping Edition
It’s Sunday morning. Sundays are for departing for points East– Texas, and West– Big Bear. Alternately Sundays are for mourning the sad fact that Space Shuttle will no longer depart for points unknown. Also: Sundays are for enjoying the last day of your vacation before returning home on Monday. Also? Sundays doing the things you have to, instead of the things you’d really like to.
This week Japan was rocked by another major earthquake- that fortunately produced only a minor tsunami. Also this week: South Sudan officially became the Earth’s newest sovereign State. In a display of mind-boggling stupidity, half of America’s major political parties pushed America one step closer to ending itself as a great power by deciding to default on America’s debt.
This week, let’s try and start off light. If you’re a man– or anyone who wants to dress in traditionally male-coded ways– you might want to know how to dress. A person might never develop an intrinsic sense of what the next step ought to be, but like all arts, dressing well merely takes practice.
Imagine my surprise the first time I saw a Herd of Bison roaming around the middle of Golden Gate Park. I had previously believed that it was only movies in which double takes occurred. I do hope the herd recovers.
Empathy is the human ability to say “yeah, that could be me in that situation”. In some ways it’s a cheep way of finding justice. In other ways, it’s the only way that many of we humans seem to stumble into justice. I can’t help but wonder if last week’s decision about games being art was influenced by the fact that many of the current justices know a game designer.
Empathy may be cheap, but without out it, we end up with some rather strange mental disorders.
One of the more bizarre spectacles of the healthcare debate is that we had to sacrifice cost-controls for universality. Getting an edifice of universal healthcare up and running was incredibly important to America’s continued commitment to social justice. Healthcare costs are still going up, though. And America needs to fix this problem quickly.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
San Francisco is a young city, but with a weird and wonderful history. Ours was the city in which the United Nations was born. Ours was the city in which China reopened relations with non-Soviet world. And ours was the city in which Mexican food was invented.
I’ve been following this story all week. Dude walks into a gallery, sees a Picasso, takes it off the wall, sticks it under his arm, and walks out. I’d like to believe that this was a spur of the moment decision, but it doesn’t seem to have been. The art thief/waiter’s bail has been set at $5 million. To raise the money, he’s planning on stealing 19 more Picasso sketches.
This is what the phrase Epic Win was coined for.
Google launched Google+ last week. It’s a great service, but an incredibly awkward name. When Google had to create a style guide to help people figure out how to grammatically incorporate their strange creation into our language, it should have been a sign to try something else.
One of the more frustrating aspects of the prescriptivist/descriptivist fights is that the prescriptivists are correct– right up until the moment they are wrong. Language is a shared attempt at communication that only works when participants agree on meaning. An English person who calls an American “love” is going to create a whole lot of confusion. Different cultures attach very different values to identical sets of inputs.
A cereal coma is when a person eats so much breakfast that they pass out. A serial comma is a useful tool for marking certain kinds of distinctions in lists. Me? I’d love some computer programmers to weigh in…
There are days when I really need this button.
Back in 2008, I was in Ohio working on a campaign. You may have heard about it– we did alright. While I was there, I kept hearing horror stories about the 2004 and 2006 elections. In African American districts, for instance, 4 precincts might be put into the same polling station. Each voter would have to stand in the correct (hour long) line in order to cast a valid vote. The lines were differentiated by a (small) hand written note at the front of the (again, hour long) line. Voters who failed to see the note would be told to stand in the correct line, or forfeit their right to vote. In 2008, there was a new Secretary of State, and new rules– voters were given better voting layouts, and more specific instructions about how to ensure their vote would count. Republicans have begun rolling back these protections.
Every time i seat an African American guest in the back of my restaurant, I mentally cringe. I know that I’m good at what I do, and the decisions I make are the correct ones. But still, the optics are bad. How much worse, thento use gangs of black convicts to work the fields of former plantations in a former slave state? Didn’t anyone think this through? Did one person not step up and say that it looked too bad to be right? This is a stench in the nostrils of the gods.
If a human being made this sort of mistake, they would do everything in their power to fix it. Guy would have medical care for a year. Guy would get his car back– or get a new and better car. Guy’s employer would hire him back, or a new job would be found for him. A human did not make this mistake. A corporation did. Corporations literally lack the capacity for shame. And this guy is screwed.
Giant battle blimps are a wacky idea that just might work! Except they’re fucking stupid. Blimps literally went out with the biplane for the very good reason that a wooden biplane was the only aircraft a blimp could outfight. By using blimps as battlefield surveillance, we’re assuming utter control of the skies. We’re also assuming that our opponents won’t have ground-air missiles capable of hitting a gigantic stationary target. Maybe I’m utterly wrong about this. Maybe the pentagon has thought through my objections and has good answers. Maybe.
It probably says something about how immersed I am in the language of video games that I’m not sure how much of this article is technical jargon. I’m say that because it’s a fascinating study about how a very tricky problem got solved. It’s a small example of the genius of our species: a once seemingly insurmountable problem has become routine and easy to solve.
About to start talking about the failures of American government. Before I begin, let’s have an amusing list of possible alternatives.
Here in San Francisco, pot is considered fairly normal. While technically illegal, the police are officially instructed by the City that they have far better things to do with their time. I had to have this story of Reefer Madness explained to me. It seems that the Federal government has literally declared pot to be a more dangerous drug than Cocaine. I can think of only one reason for this: the government has secret knowledge that pot is an alien plot to control our minds and steal our precious bodily fluids.
It’s one thing for the courts to dismantle every protection that Americans have come to rely on. It’s another thing entirely to teach corporations how to get away with violating worker’s rights. Corporate America is slowly building up an entire extra-legal system where citizenship counts for nothing. Money don’t vote- it swears.
Admiral Zhou was the last of the great Chinese explorers. He traveled from China to the West Coast of India, and possibly all the way to Africa. On his last trip, he came home to discover a cabal of eunuchs had taken over his country. These gonadless men cut the budget for his explorations. A few years later, a European discovered America, and Europeans would go on to dominate China for centuries. America no longer has a human-crewed space program. Humanity will go into space. America will not. Good luck Europe and China. The future belongs to you.
“That’s the way Democracy dies- to thunderous applause”. Those were my thoughts 18 months ago when President Obama announced that he was creating a deficit commission. The commission wasn’t the problem. The problem- the scary part- was the way he specifically linked an Executive Order as the way around a failed Senate vote. There is a real problem with the American political system. We’re solving it the easy way, the cheap way, the way Rome solved it: Empire. Constitutional reform is needed. Stealth reform that situates a supreme executive at the head of a vast bureaucracy will be a disaster for our descendants.
If you read just one link:
This is a good one. Back in February of 1996, the Atlantic published an article about Why Americans Hate the Media. America has some deep problems that are being left undressed. The media has become the worst possible thing it can be. It’s not that the media is biased. Yellow journalism would be preferable to what they are: lazy.
I’ve been reading Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order. It’s almost custom build to be superfluous for me, and it’s dedicated to an International Relations laughingstock. Having said that, there are some insights in the book that need to be more widely shared.
This week’s theme was humans doing human things and letting our government fail. So in the comments section, let me know your favorite word starting with the letter S.
Doggies!
