Super Doomed Planet

This ad appeared in the Help Wanted section of the local college newspaper.

I’m not sure I understand the logic here.

Anybody remember that President Bush guy? What’s he been up to?

Apparently not a lot.

You want to know the pathetic thing? The press hasn’t been up to much, either:

To react to the main news of the day — thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma — Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure “to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path” and “to meet its people’s basic needs.” Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna’s wedding, and the names of future grandchildren.

[...]

Four minutes after the scheduled start time for yesterday’s White House briefing, only 14 of the 49 seats were occupied… many of the nation’s leading news outlets left their chairs empty, among them National Public Radio, the Washington Times, the New York Daily News, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune and the Politico.

[...]

Reporters busied themselves with personal tasks: rubbing eyes, cleaning eyeglasses, reading the newspaper, fiddling with BlackBerrys or studying the blank pages of their notebooks. One of the deputy press secretaries, Gordon Johndroe, rested his chin in his hand. There was nothing left to be said — which was the cue for [radio host Lester] Kinsolving, who demanded to know Bush’s view on the disparity in pro-football eligibility for players from the military academies.

You’re doing a heck of a job, Washington Press Corps!

(Link via Hullabaloo.)

The New York Times has an article on habit. Specifically on developing new habits. I have habits I’d like to get rid of myself. Or not so much habits, exactly, as a deep, deep rut. I spend hours every day with my brain on automatic pilot and I’m trying to take the controls a little more often. So this looked interesting:

[B]rain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

[...]

But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

Unfortunately it’s a Business section article, stuffed with inane marketbabble from people like Dawna Markova, “an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners.” Wouldn’t it be great if American culture could break whatever dysfunctional habit leads us to think “executive change consultant” is in any way a sane job description?

The lede promises an exploration of the neuroscience of habit. The further you read the more obvious it gets that this is a shopworn veneer over an ad for Markova’s and business partner M. J. Ryan’s books and consultancy. Is that a press release I see, peering out from behind the faux woodgrain shelf liner?

Anyway. Back to the oversimplified neuroscience:

Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.

The capacity to approach challenges sounds kind of like the alignment system from the Dungeons and Dragons games. (My level 3 ranger is analytically relational!)

(Incidentally, did you know that if you do a Google search on the single word “alignment,” that Wikipedia article is the second link in the search results? Yes, it scares me, too.)

Here the article gets into standardized testing. Our cultural romance with standardized testing baffles me; we took the damn things all the time when I was a kid. I get the impression that No Child Left Behind encourages schools to arrange their curricula around maximizing their test scores. I sometimes suspect we’re raising a generation of dull, regimented multiple-choice drones who understand nothing more important than the best way to fill in bubbles with a number two pencil.

And so does the New York Times. The article hypothesizes that we spend so much time training students to take standardized tests that their brains order themselves around the kinds of thought useful for standardized testing–”analysis and procedure,” in consultant-speak. What’s interesting is that this article, in advising business types, automatically assumes the reader is “an analytical or procedural thinker”–the kind of thinking they associate with standardized bubble-fillers. Maybe if I were a more innovative thinker I wouldn’t have bothered reading this far down.

Dave Sim may or may not be a misogynist, but he sure is completely and utterly fruit-loop crazy!

History is fractal. At the top is the history of nations as singular entities. England declared war on France, Japan closed its borders… on the high-school-textbook-summary level we talk as though nations are monolithic blocks animated by ants marching in lockstep. But nations aren’t made of ants; they have factions and movements and territories, and this internal history is the next level. Then you have the history of individual factions, and particular territories, and cities and boroughs and streets, all the way down to the histories of individuals. There the fractal analogy breaks down. You can’t really write histories of an individual’s internal organs, with the possible exception of Winston Churchill’s liver which declared independence in 1951.

I always sort of thought about France as an ant monolith. Even reading Dumas didn’t change this much. My old United States-style high school education treated foreign countries as sort of hazy unimportant little islands off in the far distance. It still lurks in my subconscious. Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France was a great corrective. It turns out most of what we think of as “French culture” has, historically, been the culture of Paris. Away from the city, Parisians would find themselves in a wildly varied mosaic of provinces united only by the encircling national border. For a long time the north of France and the south didn’t even speak the same language. There were towns so isolated that everyone considered it their civic duty to hack a wandering cartographer to death in a fit of superstitious paranoia.

That’s the thing about fractal history: the farther down you go, the weirder it gets. Remember how bored you were in high school Western Civ? You were dealing with the lumbering impersonal history of monolithic nations. Sentences like “England declared war on France” are the stock in trade of textbooks. The declarations of war and treaty negotiations happening up at the nation level are important, but dry. When you drill down to the lower levels, that’s when things get interesting. That’s where you can see humanity in its particularity, and peculiarity. The best history is about people doing what they do best: behaving very, very strangely.

And, man, French people are strange. Of course, so is everyone else–although most of us don’t notice the strangeness of our surroundings, having grown up in them–but anyone who’s just read The Discovery of France could be forgiven for feeling as though France was a weirder place than most–a surrealist country that might have arisin from a conclave of New Weird writers. There are whistling languages and spiderlike shepherds on ten-foot stilts who covered ground at eight miles an hour. Villagers live in caves carved into the sides of quarries. Marshes host a community of fishermen “whose long-legged beds were lapped by the water at high tide and who learned to sail almost before they could talk.” The author of a French-German phrasebook advises her postilion (coach driver) that “I believe that the wheels are on fire. Look and see”–amazing not only for the implication that this was a common enough occurrence to need a standard translation, but also for the idea that this was not something a postilion would notice without help. Survivors pour out basins of water from a house where someone has died, in case the victim’s soul washed itself on the way out–or “tried to extinguish itself,” if on its way to hell.

It’s like an encyclopedia of strange. And yet none of these people would have thought themselves unusual. Neither do we. But two hundred years from now a thousand readers of 21st century history will come up for air, closing their books or switching off their Kindles or whatever, with dazed expressions and universal cries of “Huh?”

Fox News on the Lincoln… ah, Douglass debates.

I’m not sure what’s worse: the intern who was looking for the video, or the senior reporters who didn’t know the difference between Stephen and Frederick.

Of all the things our representatives in Congress could be focusing on right now…

Concerned that the military is selling pornography in exchange stores in spite of a ban, one lawmaker has introduced a bill to clean up the matter.

“Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,” said Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., unveiling his House bill April 16.

His Military Honor and Decency Act would amend a provision of the 1997 Defense Authorization Act that banned sales of “sexually explicit material” on military bases.

(Via Hullabaloo.)

I would have assumed it was more dishonorable to send our troops to live in shoddy slum housing (also via Hullabaloo), or to oppose the expanded GI Bill.

Of course, as a member of Congress, Rep. Broun has a different perspective on things. Legislators enjoy any chance to introduce a bill that stimulates moral outrage yet accomplishes nothing significant. It gives them something to brag about, and stirs up the kind of fuzzy indignation that generates votes on the very far right, but doesn’t really rock the boat. Nothing unusual there. What’s appalling about this bill is the justification:

Exchange officials noted that tax dollars are not used to procure magazines in the system’s largely self-funded operations.

But Broun’s spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved — “used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials,” he said.

Translation: these guys think that, because military pay come from taxes, they have the right to tell the troops how to spend it.

Now I’m wondering how soon it will be before everyday employers try the same thing–whether the big box stores and meatpacking plants of the world will claim the right to stick a finger in their employee’s personal finances, since, after all, that money is coming from corporate profits…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted much on this blog. I should do something about that. To get things going, here’s a review of a Doctor Who novel which originally appeared in the second issue of Shooty Dog Thing, a fanzine edited by Paul Castle.

Of course, if you’re not a fan this won’t be of any interest. Feel free to skip it.

If you are a fan, let me recommend The Slow Empire by Dave Stone.

You may have come across The Slow Empire. If so, its profound ugliness probably discouraged you from picking it up. When I say The Slow Empire is ugly I don’t mean it’s unpleasant or somehow immoral. I’m saying it’s physically ugly, as an object. BBC Books’ chronically maladroit designers managed to top themselves with this one. On the cover, a dull arrangement of planets and electrical arcs in the colors of unpleasant bodily fluids haloes the head of a half-blurry, bile-filtered stock photo of Paul McGann. Inside, whole sections of text are laid out in Comic Sans MS, the font that turns everything it touches into an amateur garage-sale flyer. This thing looks like it was vanity-published by a high school dropout.

In short, The Slow Empire needs a little love… the more so because Dave Stone is an acquired taste. Honestly, he’s kind of weird. But it’s a grounded weirdness. Stone has a deep grasp of human nature; characters react to freakish and strange plot twists in ways that seem just somehow right. There’s an aura of conviction here that many Who writers can’t manage. He’s also digressive, tossing ideas around like cheap salad, following wherever they lead. His books are as much about his digressions as about plot, and The Slow Empire has less plot than most. It’s there, but it’s not the point so much as an excuse to have a novel.

I guess the guys sending out all those fake PayPal and eBay emails aren’t satisfied with the take they’re getting from the general public. According to the New York Times phishers are trolling for a bigger class of seafood. Some operation is specifically targeting the wealthy and powerful. What’s interesting is the tack they’re taking:

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

I guess these guys know their audience.

Yesterday Tim Goeglein, a special assistant to President Bush who has essentially functioned as a political operative keeping right-wing activists in touch with the president, was caught plagiarizing columns for his home-town newspaper.

This embarrassed everybody, and it wasn’t long before the President “accepted his resignation”.

Not long before his exposure Goeglein contributed a piece to the National Review Online’s tribute to William F. Buckley, Jr. What’s great about this is the byline:

— Tim Goeglein is deputy director of the White House office of public liaison. [This has been corrected since posting. —Ed.]

It sure has, National Review Online!