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Joelene Life Personal Uncategorized Writing

If Trees Could Scream

May 5, 2011 – 8:16 am

So far parenthood isn’t all that different from non-parenthood. I still eat at the same five restaurants and drink myself to sleep at night and occasionally get peed on. I just now have a car seat wedged into an upside-down highchair, am less discriminating about my liquor choices, and try not to let “careless urination” incidents turn into fistfights.

Jack Handey once Deep Thought,

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

I suspect that Handey had an infant in or near his life when he came up with the preceding. Baby Madeline doesn’t necessarily scream all the time, but quite often she has no good reason.

Or possibly it’s just that her reasons are so opaque. The scream for “I’m starving” sounds a lot like the scream for “I couldn’t eat another drop.” The scream for “I have soiled myself. How embarrassing.” is pretty indistinguishable from the scream for “if you remove my diaper, I’ll pee all over you.” And the scream for “please bring me my Sophie the giraffe” is quite similar to the scream for “I hate Sophie the giraffe, and if you squeak her one more time I’m going scream (which you might not be able to distinguish from this scream, but so be it).”

When she’s not screaming, she’s pretty delightful, although so far she’s shown no interest in Hilbert spaces, Objectivism, the Priory of Sion, or any of the other myriad topics I’ve tried to teach her about.

For entertainment she mostly enjoys being sung the “Where’s the Tiger?” song, which seems to be the Indian version of “Frère Jacques,” which (I figure) gives me license to sometimes sing it as “Where’s the Cobra?” or “Where is Gandhi?” or “What is Dharma?”

I also downloaded a bunch of rock-songs-as-lullabyes compilations, but once she realized the Dark Side of the Moon ones didn’t sync with The Wizard of Oz, we both lost interest and abandoned the project.

Anyway, she is a funny kid, and grooming her to take over the world someday really cuts into my writing and blogging time. (Also, not sleeping on account of her screaming really cuts into my writing and blogging energy.) But I now have a good idea for a parenting book, and an auto-repair manual, and a short story about a kid who likes baseball but is no good at it, so I’ll try to ease myself back into writing. Also, I’ve been criminally neglecting promotion for the spreadsheet book, so if you want to push a few copies of that on your friends, that would be kind.

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We Learn to Give Each Other What We Need to Survive

March 13, 2010 – 8:25 am

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the song “Ebony and Ivory,” it’s that people are the same wherever we go. Alas, the educational establishment has been reluctant to embrace this truism, insisting on people-are-the-same-wherever-we-go-denying practices like tracking and electives, and (grudgingly) allowing charter schools a limited degree of “autonomy,” which is just a fancy word for “not following all the rules that our wiser-than-everyone-else education officials, in their near-infinite wisdom, insist that we follow.”

Signs are showing, however, that this is changing. First, brave pioneers like Texas are demonstrating the wisdom of a centrally-planned curriculum:

Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic,” and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.

[...]

Republican Terri Leo, a member of the powerful Christian conservative voting bloc, called the standards “world class” and “exceptional.”

Indeed, it’s probably dangerous and/or irrelevant to teach kids about antiquated topics like “separation of church and state.” And how can you be a good citizen if you don’t learn the story of how George Washington was driving on the freeway one day and then broke down in tears and pulled over to the side of the road and accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior? It sounds like they also have pretty good plan to make sure that “world history” actually covers the entire several-thousand-year history of the world. (Unfortunately, it sounds like they still don’t have a plan to avoid spending way more time than scheduled on the Civil War and then end up having to cram all of post-World-War-II history into the last week of the school year.)

Nonetheless, this plan isn’t perfect. For instance, it only applies to children in Texas. Why should the kids in Washington and Alabama and North Dakota and Iowa be denied the benefits of a Terri-Leo-approved, one-size-fits-all education?

Luckily, governors and “education leaders” are on the same page:

Governors and education leaders on Wednesday proposed sweeping new school standards that could lead to students across the country using the same math and English textbooks and taking the same tests, replacing a patchwork of state and local systems in an attempt to raise student achievement nationwide.

One small sticking point seems to be that the good people of Texas, enamored of their seemingly-already-perfect system, are reluctant to throw their lot in with the other 49 states.

Nonetheless, the logic is inescapable. If one unified curriculum for all students in Texas is good, one unified curriculum for all students in the country is even better. Sure, some naysayers might claim that “different students learn differently” or “trying a variety of things could help us figure out what works best” or “there’s a chance that wingnuts could capture a centralized process and force a completely wingnut curriculum on everyone,” but (as was made clear in the song “Ebony and Ivory”) those are pretty weak objections.

And in the end, it’s hard to imagine that the Texas School Board won’t give in to logic. Which leaves us only with the issue of getting Your Religion Is False enthroned as part of the national-standard eighth-grade required reading. Can somebody introduce me to Arne Duncan?

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Coffeefiltering the Coffee Party

March 1, 2010 – 10:12 pm

Yesterday the Facebook News Feed was moderately functional for a change, which is how I discovered the existence of the Coffee Party, which had been Facebook-fanned by several of my Facebook friends and/or stalkers and/or stalkees.

Given that I drink approximately 10 cups of coffee a day, you’d expect that I’d be favorably inclined toward a Coffee Party. And indeed I was, until I read their Mission Statement:

MISSION: The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.

1. Americans who want to see cooperation in government.

Indeed we see little cooperation in government these days. Perhaps the Coffeefilters are nostalgic for bipartisan collaborations like the Wall Street Bailouts and the Iraq Resolution, and the Compromise of 1850.

But if you think about it, “cooperation” is not exactly an obvious desideratum. After all, for every Warren G & Nate Dogg there’s a Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis. For every David Bowie and Bing Crosby there’s a David Bowie and Mick Jagger. For every “The Girl is Mine” there’s a “Say Say Say.” For every “We Are the World” there’s a “We Are the World 25.”

I know they probably taught you otherwise in kindergarten, but there’s nothing intrinsically good about cooperation. Sometimes people *cough* Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney *cough* are cooperating to screw you.

2. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will

Now, as anyone who’s done graduate work in political science knows, it’s surprisingly tricky to define “collective will” in a coherent way. Nonetheless, the point here seems to be that most things the government does are things that we all agree upon, like overfunding remote airports named after politicians and holding secret negotiations to strengthen copyright laws and reauthorizing the Patriot Act and keeping marijuana illegal.

See, when the government locked up Japanese citizens during World War II, it wasn’t their enemy. When the government let people die of syphilis as part of an experiment, it wasn’t their enemy. When the government poisoned alcohol to scare people out of drinking, it wasn’t their enemy. It was expressing their collective will. Duh!

3. and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans.

Really? I’m only one American, but here’s a partial list of the challenges I face:

  • not enough people are buying my book
  • not enough people are writing 5-star reviews of my book
  • love iPhone; hate forced use of iTunes and AT&T
  • cannot fit CrossFit into my current schedule
  • think eggs seem like the ultimate food but hate the taste of them

Now, I’ve done as much graduate work in political science as the next guy, and I’m pretty unclear as to how participating in the Democratic process is going to help any of these things. (In fact, it’s gotten to the point where the people answering the phones at both my Senators’ offices recognize me as the “make eggs taste better guy” and refuse to pass on my messages.)

In fact, I’m more inclined toward Reihan Salam’s position:

I take solace in the possibility that despite–or perhaps because of–our inability to pass sweeping reform legislation without crafting ugly compromises that buy off those ever-present large and powerful private interests, we’re getting better, and faster, at solving the countless small problems that add up to big problems.

Or I guess we could count on our “collective will” and “cooperation” fixing everything, because there ain’t no nothing we can’t love each other through… Sha la la la.

4. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.

And here, at last, is where the Coffeefilters demonstrate that they stand for nothing. Every idea is a “positive solution” to those who support it. Some people think the DMCA was a positive solution. Some people think the Patriot Act was a positive solution.

Politics is full of tradeoffs, and except in the rarest cases every “solution” is a negative for somebody. This is why whenever you look up a law in Wikipedia, you’ll usually find a section called “Criticisms,” and if you read that section you’ll often find descriptions of people who somehow managed to find faults in the “positive” solution.

You may not like the status quo, but you’d have to be pretty naive to think that every departure from it is an improvement and that those who obstruct such departures are necessarily the bad guys.

This is a kindergarten view of the world. This is a kindergarten view of politics. Don’t we get enough of that from the parties we have already?

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Movie Review: Avatar 3-D

January 3, 2010 – 3:55 pm

I very rarely go to the movies. Sure, I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince out of a misguided hope that they’d depart from the source material and have Harry snog Luna, but for the most part I’d rather stay home and watch Conan the Barbarian over and over again on Netflix-on-Demand.

However, I’d heard good things about Avatar. For instance, it was made by James Cameron, creator of Jessica Alba. Also, it was made in 3-D, which everyone knows is 50% better than 2-D. In addition, I heard there was some sort of controversy involving the use of white actors to play “Asian-inspired” characters. (For my money, the characters were more “Amerindian-inspired” from their face paint down to their sacred trees.) Finally, the movie was supposed to be about 8 hours long, which meant that I’d get the most value for my movie-ticket-buying dollar.

So, the movie is set about 150 years in the future. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering how things have progressed between now and then. Here’s what I know:

  • hibernation invented (or maybe stolen from bears)
  • space travel to distant planets possible
  • genetic engineering able to produce hybrids between civilized white people (notable for having five fingers and being civilized and white) and savage blue people (notable for having four fingers and being savage and blue)
  • mind melds invented (or maybe stolen from Star Trek)
  • new popular mineral: unobtanium
  • mild advances in helicopter technology
  • either inflation remains in check (“20 million dollars” is portrayed as a lot of money) or else US Dollar has been redenominated
  • “cheddar” still used as slang for riches
  • invention of oversized robotic military exoskeletons, and correspondingly oversized military knives
  • no healthcare reform (see below)

Now then, the Blue Man lives in nets suspended from “sacred trees,” where he carries bows and poison arrows while simultaneously respecting all life as sacred. The sacred tree has pollen that move like jellyfish and glow in the dark and have an affinity for the main character Sully Sullenberger, one of the aforementioned white-blue hybrids powered by the mind-melded brain of a paraplegic marine whose scientist twin provided the DNA before inopportunely dying and being placed in a cardboard box and incinerated.

Meanwhile, Sigourney Weaver is the scientist in charge of the blue-white hybrid project, and the guy who was Phoebe’s dumb half-brother on “Friends” is the MBA-driven leader (I forget his name, but it was something like “Piggy McGreedum” or “Spoily von Selfish”) of Unobtainium Amalgamated, and Michelle Rodriguez is a bad-ass who thinks for herself while getting an occasional DWI, and some guy with white hair (“Killy McKillington”) is an evil military commander (but I repeat myself).

Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that the biggest supply of unobtanium within 200 klicks is located right underneath that pesky sacred tree where the Blue Man lives. And (apparently) transportation technology has advanced so little that killing the Blue Man and blowing up his tree is seen as a preferable solution to just looking somewhere else.

After a comical series of misadventures involving not-dogs and flaming goo and rhinoceri-that-are-also-sledgehammers, Sully Sullenberger is accepted by the Blue Man, who teach him about sharing and caring and the wisdom of the sacred forest and how every creature has a biological FireWire port at the end of its ponytail or one of its tendrils, which can be linked together to share Pure Moods MP3s for noncommercial purposes. I’m just kidding, there are no commercial purposes among the Blue Man.

Sully’s real role, of course, is to convince the Blue Man to leave his ancestral sacred tree, so that von Selfish can get the unobtanium without having to send in McKillington to do some McKilling. If he succeeds, then they’ll pay for doctors to fix his paraplegia, which Obamacare apparently would not do.

It should come as no surprise to you that Sully discovers that (despite their not having bathrooms or electricity or even YouTube, or maybe because of all these things) life with the noble savage Blue Man is better than life among the so-called “civilized” White Man.

Now, life on the Blue Man Planet is ruled by an inter-species Antiochan Contract, where before jacking into and riding (e.g.) a not-horse or a not-pterodactyl, you have to get permission from the Womyn’s center. (For no real reason, not-pterodactyls FireWire with only one Blue Man for life; not-horses are comparatively promiscuous.) After carefully negotiating these treacherous waters, Sully dips his quill into the blue ink.

Where he discovers that (as they say) “Once You Go Blue, Nothing Else Will Do,” and then it’s all-out warfare, with important diversions to criticize greed, belittle terrorism, clamor for health care reform, bemoan the fact that there was “no green” back home on earth, make Desert Storm references, and a bunch of other things, all of which were very loud.

The 3-D was very impressive. Not only did it not give me the headache I was expecting (which I got from the 100dB explosions instead), but its use was fairly restrained. (Compare with the trailer for Tim Burton Presents Alice in Wonderland 3D which consisted primarily of 60 seconds of anthropomorphic playing cards trying to stab me.)

In the end, the Tree of Souls saves the day, as do other tribes of Blue Men (“Comanche” and “Cherokee”) who ride in on not-horses and help out. At the risk of providing spoilers, let’s just say that McGreedum and McKillington both get what they deserve for trying to rape a planet.

For some reason the movie didn’t contain any references to the McDonalds Avatar Meal, but that’s probably because I didn’t see the IMAX version (which was sold out until approximately March).

In conclusion, did you know that they’re remaking Clash of the Titans? Bastards.

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Movie Review: Change Congress Chronicles, Volume 1

November 8, 2009 – 10:14 am

Inspired, perhaps, by Quentin Tarantino’s multi-part epic Kill Bill, auteur Larry Lessig has begun work on the not-dissimilar Change Congress Chronicles.

Volume 1, “Congressman Campbell is a Friend of the Auto Industry,” chronicles Congressman John Campbell, who is a friend of the auto industry.

The film quickly establishes the character of Campbell, who spent 25 of his pre-politics years working in the automotive industry. In the next scene, Campbell landlords for a bunch of used-car lots, earning somewhere between $600k and $6m a year. And a flashback reveals that Campbell has pocketed $170k in campaign contributions from the auto industry over the years.

At which point the film shifts gears to focus on the “Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2008,” which (according to Lessig’s voice-over) is designed to protect consumers from the “shenanigans” of the “money-lending industry” (which everyone knows is a thinly-veiled euphemism for “Jews”).

The film does not delve into the bill’s merits or specifics, relying on astute viewers to infer that it represents an unalloyed good, based on both its opposition to “shenanigans” and its titular references to “consumers” and “protection.”

In an easy-to-guess plot twist, Campbell guts the bill by introducing an amendment that would exempt used-car dealers from its provisions, allowing them to continue their “shenanigans.” The film does not delve into the amendment’s merits either, relying on astute viewers to infer that it represents an unalloyed bad, based on both its opposition to opposition to “shenanigans” and its benefits to the used-car industry, which everyone knows consists primarily of dishonest, wicked people.

The movie ends with a three-fold call to action.

First, viewers are encouraged to “tweet” the Congressman, flooding his twitbox and letting him know that we’re onto him and his anti-anti-shenanigan agenda.

Second, viewers are encouraged to contact Congress, telling them to reject “this special interest legislation.” Presumably this refers to the Campbell amendment, which counts as “special interest legislation” on account of pertaining only to the interests of the “special” used-car industry, and not the original CFPAA, which pertains to the interests of the “unspecial” money-lending industry.

Finally, viewers are encouraged to demand public funding of elections. You see, if there were public funding of elections, then Campbell likely never would have spent 25 years working in the auto industry. And he certainly never would have gotten into the landlord-for-used-car-lots business. So he’d totally have no reason to take a particular interest in how proposed legislation affected the auto industry.

The film ends on a cliffhanger, as it deliberately avoids answering the obvious-to-the-viewer question “as long as Congress has the power to write laws favoring one special interest group at the expense of another, won’t these interest groups use any means they can (which obviously includes a lot more than campaign contributions) to get the laws to favor them and disfavor others?”

I’m excited to see how Lessig resolves this in his next film.

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Obama: Let’s Borrow Money and Give it to Old People

October 14, 2009 – 6:41 pm

Great news, Senior Citizens! President Obama wants to give you $250!

Why? Probably so you’ll vote for him again come 2012.

There’s some sort of nominally non-tawdry reason, too.

You see, by law, Social Security payments increase each year in a manner pegged to inflation. When Rascal Scooters and Life Alerts and diabeetus testing supplies and Centrum Silver get more expensive, Social Security checks get bigger to compensate.

This year, however, prices haven’t gone up! (According to government bean-counters, anyway.) How will seniors get by if we don’t cut them extra checks?

Listen to the heartless fat-cats in Congress:

“I think it would be inappropriate,” said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. “The reason we set up this process was to have the Social Security reimbursement reflect the cost of living.”

Now, at least a few of our elected betters understand that not granting a cost of living increase just because the cost of living didn’t increase amounts to “turning our backs” on Senior Citizens:

“I think that the Obama administration and many members of Congress understand that we simply can’t turn our backs on senior citizens,” Sanders said.

I’m convinced!

My only concern is where the President will get the $13 billion to dole out. Last I checked government revenues were falling short of government expenditures by a trillion dollars, give or take.

But according to a “senior administration official,” Obama’s got this figured out too. We’ll simply borrow the money!

Who wouldn’t want to risk their capital for a sure investment like “give free money to old people”? Obviously it can’t compare with “pay people to destroy functional cars” or “give free money to everybody” or “give more free money to old people,” but in today’s investment climate, I dare you to find something better!

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Got My Domain Back

October 7, 2009 – 9:02 pm

Due to a combination of carelessness, disorganization, and ineptitude, I let my domain expire a couple of years ago.  For many dark months, it pointed at a page of useless ads that I can’t imagine anyone being willing to click on.

Recently I checked and discovered that it was about to expire, and so I entered into an “auction” to get it back.  Armed with my economics degree and my copy of Auction Theory, I proceeded to grossly overbid, at which point I got my domain back.

Now, what should I do with it?

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