perfidy

What books are you embarrassed to not have read? That meme has been circulating the blogosphere in recent weeks, and I've finally succumbed. I'm happy to say that I have, by dint of a intergalatically awesome high school English teacher and dogged personal application, managed to read a whole bunch of books that I can be proud of. But not all of them. That's going to take a lifetime. By the same token, I have spent long stretches of my life obsessively reading science fiction, fantasy, or history (which it amuses me to mention next to each other here, as though they were equivalent genres (which perhaps they are...)) and have accordingly had some potentially very bragworthy reading time crowded out by Piers Anthony.

Please note that I am counting as "read" books that I started, got plenty of the gist of, and read the importants sections and skimmed the rest. In this way I can say I have "read" The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America and The Bible. Sure, I haven't abosorbed every word, but I know that Joshua Judges Ruth and that industry is important to Amurricans. And stuff like that.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby. To be honest, this is one I'm not sure I'm ever going to get to. I didn't read The Catcher in the Rye until last year, either. Since both that and Gatsby are reputedly best consumed as a teen, my enthusiasm for them has ebbed. Nobody can seem to tell me what I would be getting out of this one anyway. Nevertheless, the uniform reaction elicited in people by my admission that I have not read this Great Classic is one of disbelieving wonder and pity, as if I told them I was a 30 year old virgin.

John Locke: Second Treatise. Apart from excerpts and explications, I have not read any Locke. Considering that my last act as an historian was to write an intellectual history of the debate over women, suffrage, and citizenship before 1850 which relied heavily on Locke (since my sources themselves did), this omission can be viewed as an act of breathtaking academic dishonesty. Someone call David Horowitz!! See remarks above in re: history, fantasy, and science fiction. I have also not read my Hume or Hobbes, but I have read Mill as well as Paine and various Revolutionary-era works on the social compact, so I guess I feel okay about this. No; thats' wrong. Guilt all over.

Dante: Inferno. I actually have read excerpts of this one, but I have to put it in this list because nothing stuck. Worse than that, Inferno is practically required reading if you wish to understand half the literary references in the great classics of the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, I'll make this entry a trifecta and toss in Plato and Socrates as well. Read a little; learned less. Just as I am reduced to cat-and-tennis-ball staring when Buckethead and GeekLethal trade barbs about whether Operation Barbarossa would have worked better had Company Ziggledezee employed a Gabba Gabba strategy and feinted toward St. Yabbahey (since my knowledge of military history is shallow in all respects), thus it goes when trying to keep up with Adams or Madison- or even Paine- in full smackdown mode. Ditto Pilgrim's Progress, which was seemingly handed out free in cereal boxes to early American thinkers. The difference being, of course, that I have not guilt whatsoever over not reading Bunyan.

James Joyce: Ulysses. I know, I know. Nobody reads this. But people do. And if I can get through Gravity's Rainbow and The Name of the Rose, why in hell does the first page of Ulysses fill me with dark foreboding of tedium to come?

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick. You have to understand where I live and the people I know. I live north of Boston and socialize with historians, librarians, and archivists most of whose work revolves in some way around New England's past. They tend to talk about Nathanael Hawthorne as though he was still alive (or recently deceased) and can tell you more about Herman Melville's tortured love life than about Desperate Housewives. So, though I have read enough Hawthorne to stay afloat in pleasant conversation, I have only read Melville in a terribly abridged children's edition that does't quite cut it. Sure, I can yammer on and on about the loving detail brought to the interclary chapters on whaling (and even spin theories on structural homages to Moby-Dick contained in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath), but at the end of the day I know that such pleasant party exaggeration is really empty posturing. I really should just bite the bullet and waste six weeks wading in ambergris and purple prose.

(Thanks to Hei Lun of Begging to Differ for finally putting me over the edge.)

Cause Lord knows, they need the help.

From Rocket Jones.

[wik] Note from the Ministry of Future Perfidy ca 2025: Rocket Jones' site is long dead, and for all we know so is Ted since we haven't heard from him in over a decade. So we've replaced the dead image link with this cute kitten.

Wandering through Ace's site, I ran across this little number. Ace links to an interesting theoretical exercise, to wit, how many five year olds could you take in a fight?

This gendanken experiment has some ground rules:

• You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
• You are not allowed to touch a wall.
• When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out."
• I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans.
• The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training.
• There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
• The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.

This is a tough one. While we can assume for the sake of argument that most adults could defeat any given five-year-old with little difficulty, facing hordes of the little booger eaters is a different ball of snot. According to this government chart, the average weight of a five-year-old boy is about 40lbs. You get ten of those, and you're talking 400 aggregate pounds of booger eater. If, as the scenario stipulates, these kids get training from a Navy Seal or Green Beret or DC meter maid, they are going to have at least some idea of how to use their numbers against you.

And that's the crux of the matter. If you could somehow trick or fool the kiddies into attacking one on one like the evil minions in a kung fu movie, you could probably win against even an arbitrarily large number of kindergartners. But if they can mob you and get you on the ground, it's all over. Instead of Bruce Lee, you'll be like the grasshopper in one of those old national geographic flicks, being devoured by hungry, hungry ants.

I think even against well trained and thoroughly briefed muchkins, I could take twenty. My reach and strength would allow me (I hope) to keep them from swarming effectively. I could maintain my footing and triumph. Much more than that, and the half-pints would always have a sufficient numbers to saturate my defenses, and take me down.

[wik]Johno, lest you think I am completely inconsistent, I am aware of the implied contradiction between this post and the email I sent you this am. I can only offer this: on Allah's post, Dr. Rusty Shackleford said in a comment, "I guess these things are funny up until the time you have a kid in kindergarten." My boy's only two. Allah also links this Decadent Westpost, which I didn't find as amusing, especially since it personalized the fight. Anonymous opponents somehow are fine, hey, they might be evil or something: Chinese Communists or mutants or Norwegians.

Perhaps oddly for a guy with a temporary disdain for political commentary, my first short note at the new home so graciously provided by my friends here at the Ministry has a political tinge. It's occasioned by Buckethead's posting about the proposed changes to Senate rules, now made moot by the agreement reported this evening.

As that matter's already well covered at the link and comments above, my take's a bit macro. Harry Reid, in the tradition of folks from both sides of the political aisle, has engaged in a long-running game of pissing on peoples' shoes while claiming it's raining. Similarly to the theatrics of Trent Lott, who originated the phrase "nuclear option", and Bill Frist, among others repeatedly use it, the game involves sleight of hand, repeated ad nauseam until the hoped-for moment when everyone forgets their legs are being pulled, with vigor.

As evidence for Sen. Reid's success, the Washington Post makes reference to the proposed rule changes as "an arcane constitutional question", when it's neither arcane nor even a constitutional question at all. Mr. Reid regularly refers to it as a (capital C) "Constitutional matter", intentionally confusing the actual requirement for "advice and consent" with his desire to let the minority outvote the majority. Frist, Lott, and the rest haven't helped by talking about the "nuclear option" as though a change to the Senate rules was utterly unprecedented and disgusting, sort of like wiping out a couple cities in Japan.

Yeesh. You can't get a straight story out of either, and it's become a battle of drooling retard sound bites, none of which accurately reflects the position of its dispenser. In my admittedly non-existent perfect world, Reid would make a case to the public at large that those "extreme" judges such as Owen and Brown are actually extreme, rather than, say, not holding the political views that he thinks they should hold as females, African Americans, or in one case, both. Claiming to disagree with their views isn't the same as convincing the rest of the Senate or the American public you're right. Just ask Tom Daschle, if you can find him. But it's easier to cast it as a constitutional infringement, or the trampling of the rights of a group who, ahem, didn't carry the majority in either house of Congress.

And the Republicans? Sure, it's easy to change the rules, far easier than making your case and doing what Senators do - trading horses. There's not much room for give and take on a yes/no vote for a judicial appointment, particularly in a case when so much testosterone's already been spilt. Gilding the proposed rule change under the previously chosen name, "nuclear option" (until Karl Rove dictated other nomenclature) was a great way to further inflame prostates all 'round, but not good for much else, like an actual resolution to the matter.

And so now we've got a compromise. Since I believe 80% of Americans are clustered within a standard deviation of dead center, I'm drawn to the conclusion that roughly 80% of the populace is, like me, happy that some form of resolution's been reached. (Yes, I just made that 80% up. Twice. Out of whole cloth)

Complete happiness, however, remains elusive. I'd enjoy the ability, for once, to deactivate the bullshit filter when listening to my elected representatives as they troll for dupes.

I haven't read Lileks for a while. Months really. Not because of anything he wrote, or didn't write, but simply because I was locked in the solipsistic confines of unemployment and seasonal affective disorder. And going to the park with my son. I tune in for the first time (in months) and what do I find? Exactly what I expected.

I’m still impressed by the movie’s look, the sound, the costumes, the level of ingenuity demonstrated by every frame of the movie in which the insipid words or insubstantial characters do not ruin. If it came from Lucas, it’s krep. It’s like the reverse of Orson Welles – the intellect at the center of the enterprise is bereft of novel ideas, but is kept afloat by indulgent studio support and willing talent. The dialogue in AOTC isn’t completely unlistenable – better Lucas should write exposition dialogue than anything emotional, or you get love scenes in which characters say “I hate sand. It’s dry and gritty. I much prefer your vagina.” Or whatever “Anny” said. But even in the exposition scenes Lucas has an ear made not of tin but some metal alloy created specifically for its inability to channel sound; hence he has his big bad guy announcing not just the creation of an Army, not just an Army of the Republic, but a Grand Army of the Republic. So the Empire is the North, marching to put down the rebellious breakaway South. I’m supposed to root for the slavery side. Noted.

Is there any living screenwriter who’s worse at naming people and places? Naboo, for God’s sake.

From an ABC news piece on an audit of Medicaid in New York State:

[New York State Comptroller Alan] Hevesi asked Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in a letter Sunday to "take immediate action to ensure that sex offenders do not receive erectile dysfunction medication paid for by taxpayers."

What? Yes, that's right...

Scores of convicted rapists and other high-risk sex offenders in New York have been getting Viagra paid by Medicaid for the last five years, the state's comptroller said Sunday. Audits by Comptroller Alan Hevesi's office showed that between January 2000 and March 2005, 198 sex offenders in New York received Medicaid-reimbursed Viagra after their convictions. Those included crimes against children as young as 2 years old, he said.

Gaaaaaaah. One thing you can count on... whenever a story like this breaks, the politicians will descend like ants to lap up the publicity. Senator Chuck Schumer: come on down!

"While I believe that HHS did not do this intentionally, when the government pays for Viagra for sex offenders, it could well hurt many innocent people..."

Thanks, Chuck. That really clarifies the issue for me. I though it was about cutting government waste: I'm relieved that you've twigged to the notion that giving boners to babytouchers is not in anyone's best interest. Although I do have to wonder: why is the government subsidizing Viagra for anyone? What sense does that make. (Well... as much sense as requiring soldiers to surrender their nail clippers to TSS, but letting them hold on to their M-16s and bayonets, but I digress.)

Hat tip to Reason's Julian Sanchez, who goes where I dare not in his choice of headline.

Virginia Postrel, writing in the New York Times, makes an interesting argument:

Some people say they want "just the facts," and fault reporters for introducing too much analysis. Others complain that stories do just the opposite, treating all sides in a conflict as equally valid. The news-buying public seems to want contradictory things.

But one person's contradiction is another's market niche. Those differences help answer an economic puzzle: if bias is a product flaw, why does it not behave like auto repair rates, declining under competitive pressure?

In a recent paper, "The Market for News," two Harvard economists look at that question. "There's plenty of competition" among news sources, Sendhil Mullainathan, one of the authors, said in an interview. But "the more competition there has been in the last 20 years, the more discussion there has been of bias."

The reason, he and his colleague, Andrei Shleifer, argue, is that consumers care about more than accuracy. "We assume that readers prefer to hear or read news that are more consistent with their beliefs," they write. Bias is not a bug but a feature.

In a competitive news market, they argue, producers can use bias to differentiate their products and stave off price competition. Bias increases consumer loyalty.

That would certainly explain many things, including Fox News' success. By appealing to a previously untapped market segment, they rapidly gained viewers and brand loyalty.

An interesting historical note to the debate over the judicial filibuster comes from Anne Althouse, who notes that the Constitutional Convention considered requiring a supermajority to reject nominees:

Mr. Madison, suggested that the Judges might be appointed by the Executives with the concurrence of 1/3 at least of the 2d. branch. This would unite the advantage of responsibility in the Executive with the security afforded in the 2d. branch agst. any incautious or corrupt nomination by the Executive.

[wik] On the other side of things, here's some interesting information on other means by which nominations could be blocked from hilzoy of Obsidian Wings.

[alsø wik] My earlier discussion of this is here.

By way of our gracious bloghostess, Kathy Kinsley, I learn that the ever-modest and self effacing Donald Trump has a few issues with the proposed Freedom Tower project that he'd like to raise, if it's not too much trouble for everyone:

Denouncing the existing plans for rebuilding Ground Zero as the "worst pile of crap architecture I've ever seen", Mr Trump argued that erecting two new, even taller twin towers was the only valid response to the terrorists. ...Describing the Freedom Tower as an "empty skeleton", Mr Trump said its construction would be a capitulation. "If we rebuild the World Trade Centre in the form of a skeleton ... the terrorists win. It's that bad,"

Myself, I was never too happy with the plans for the Freedom Tower. The fact that it was to be 1776 feet tall was kind of cool, but I never thought the plan was all that attractive. Not bad, but not great:

And at 1776 feet, its only a bit taller than the current tallest building, and smaller than some proposed skyscrapers:

And compared to tallest structures, including free-standing, non-skyscraper thingies, well, it's not terribly impressive:

The CN Tower is already taller than the planned height of the Freedom Tower. But you may argue, "Hey, that's a tower, not a skyscraper." Well, you'd be right, but only trivially right. Further, as you can see from the diagrams, there are at least two planned skyscrapers that will be taller than the Freedom Tower. That, to me, is unacceptable. To build a tower to be the tallest in the world - for a couple years - that's a waste of time. I argued during the first go around that we need to build something stupendously, in-your-face-huge. It doesn't have the visual impact of Kathy's favorite design, but I'd argue that psychological impact would be even greater. If we built something in the 650 meter range, we'd probably be safe for a while. But I'm thinking that we should just go balls to the wall and build a skyscraper an even 1000 meters tall. Don't just break the record, break the record when the building's only a little more than half done. 

One of the most attractive designs I've ever seen for a skyscraper was from Frank Lloyd Wright. Ol' Frank thaought that his mile high "Illinois" from 1956 could have been constructed with the technology of the day. The big problem was insufficient elevator technology, and cost. Reduced in scale to a kilometer, something like this could certainly be built today. It might cost a bit, but imagine this on the New York skyline:

Accept for that whole thirty years' war thing, and Luther's anti-semitism and potty mouth.

I can't sleep, and evyone and their brother have linked this, so why the hell not. Here's a link to Iowahak's wonderful lutefisk post. This post made us ponder why we didn't have him on our blogroll. Since we couldn't come up with a definitive answer, we blogrolled him. This post also serves a useful purpose from Newsweak's point of view: it puts the blame on where it belongs, on the rioting fundamentalist loony tunes rather than on the slipshop reporting which has made them famous.

“It is important that we remember that Lutheranism is a religion of peace,” said Army spokesman Maj. Richard Lehrman. “And we need to remember to avoid insensitive behavior and remarks that will cause these peaceful Lutherans to go on another bloody killing rampage.”

I know how true that is. I was raised Lutheran, and not just milquetoast ELCA Lutheran, but Missouri Synod. That's just one step shy of the wahabi fundamentalist equivalent for Lutherans, the Wisconsin Synod.

The last sentence sums up the situation as well as anything I've seen:

“Oh yahh, I tell ya what, dere’s a lotta bad stuff goin’ on in dat outfit over dere,” said a young Decorah cleric who identified himself only as ‘Pastor Doug.’ “I heard dem infidels are switchin’ da prisoner’s Leinies with Schlitz.”

Ja, you betcha.