Horizon

Winwood Reade

I'm actually reading The Martyrdom of Man, being alternately mystified, entertained, edified, and appalled. Anyone else here tried it?

Bad Apples

Am I dreaming or was the original expression "One bad apple can spoil the whole barrel"? If so, then how did we get to the linguistic point where defensive officials use "a few bad apples" to mean that an institution is fundamentally sound and that any cases of wrongdoing are ('nother cliche) "isolated incidents"? Does anyone else have the impression that this second meaning for the expression came into use during the post-Rodney King debate over reform of the LAPD?

Slate Roundup IV

My Secret Burden: The abortion-rights movement grapples with repression.

"Friday morning, leaders of pro-choice and feminist groups gathered at the Center for American Progress to debate the movement's future. One of the panelists reported that the latest annual tally of abortions in this country was 1.295 million. The most recent comparative numbers, detailed in an article I brought to the meeting, indicated that our abortion rate exceeds that of every Western European nation. "Raise your hand if you think that number is too high," the conference moderator told the 50 people in the room. I saw one hand go up. The woman next to me said she saw another. The two hand-raisers used to work for pro-choice groups but no longer do. This is the predicament facing the abortion-rights movement. It's led by three kinds of people: Those who see no problem, those who are afraid to speak up, and those who think it's futile. I'm betting that the denial, fear, and futility will give way. But it'll take time ..."

Slate Roundup III

Where the Buses Run on Time: The lure of incentive pay.

"Companies in Chile pay bus drivers one of two ways: either by the hour or by the passenger. Paying by the passenger leads to significantly shorter delays. Give them incentives, and drivers start acting like regular people do. They take shortcuts when the traffic is bad. They take shorter meal breaks and bathroom breaks. They want to get on the road and pick up more passengers as quickly as they can. In short, their productivity increases. They also create new markets. At the bus stops in Chile, people known as sapos (frogs) literally hop on and off the buses that arrive, gathering information on how many people are traveling and telling the driver how many people were on the previous bus and how many minutes ago it sat at the station. Drivers pay the sapos for the information because it helps them improve their performance ..."

Slate Roundup II

Bygone Age: Old age is changing. So should Social Security.

"If you thought this week's budget fights over Iraq and Katrina were bad, wait till you see the blood bath over retirement benefits. Hurricanes come and go. Iraq can be abandoned. But the debt to retirees increases every decade, and they're a lot harder to abandon. Their clout grows, perversely, in proportion to the burden they impose. In 1945, for every Social Security beneficiary, we had 42 workers paying in. By 2002, we had just 3.3 workers per beneficiary. By 2030, we'll have only 2.2 workers per beneficiary. To keep the system afloat for the next seven decades, its trustees say the Social Security tax rate will have to reach 19 percent. And if life expectancy keeps rising over that period, academics project a tax rate of 27 to 32 percent ..."

Slate Roundup I

Not much time for considered (hah!) posting right now, but here are a few interesting articles from Slate - let's send these down the collective esophagus and see if anyone chokes.

Rough Draft: The gross unfairness of an all-volunteer Army.

"The main reason that the war remains so remote from the lives of middle-class Americans is the absence of a military draft. This is a subject that no one seems to want to talk about. Supporters of the war definitely do not want to talk about it. President Bush and Vice President Cheney react angrily to any suggestion that a draft might be needed, because they know that the prospect of conscription would make their decision to invade Iraq even more unpopular. Having lived through Vietnam and shirked the draft themselves, they understand that if people anywhere near their own station in life were forced to fight, any remaining support for wars of arguable necessity would dry up and blow away ..."

"Values" language from Rockridge

Wondering if these Rockridge Institute comments ring true on diverging understandings of widely named but infrequently detailed values such as "fairness."

3.14

According to the Guardian, it's Pi Day today. A pretty idea but it reminds me of something sad: last Saturday, Mar. 10, was "Mario Day" by similar reasoning, and Mario McCarthy is dead.

You didn't know Mario. He was a volunteer receptionist for many years at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. A nice guy, a crank, a serious drunk, a wise manager of the frayed personalities who walked into that office and, as it turned out, a hopeless romantic. I don't know how long ago he declared Mar. 10 to be Mario Day, the day everyone was to bow down to him and (the important part) bring him beer. I nearly always forgot Mario Day, though a couple of years ago I did remember.

I also forget how long ago it was that Mario said his goodbyes to us all. He had met the love of his life, he said, and they were moving to the country, someplace up north, it sounded nice. Then one day when he was supposed to be long gone, I ran into him in front of Harrington's Bar on Turk Street, drunk, swaying, and miserable. The love of his life had borrowed $500 from him to fix her car for the trip and with that she had disappeared.

Mario died last year, of a sudden fast-moving pancreatic cancer. His neighbors and his Coalition friends had a barbecue/wake in his memory at a picnic site he used to enjoy on the VA grounds near the ocean. Ribs and chicken galore. He would've loved it. R.I.P.

Girls in Science: The Local Front

An article in this week's Austin Chronicle informs us that Austin ISD is starting a girls' school specializing in science education. This is exactly the sort of thing that knowledgable analysts have been pushing for, and it will be interesting to see how it works out. Embedded in the hopeful report is this bit of delightful alterna-weekly prose:

[P]lans for a Young Women's Leadership Academy are now officially under way, with the district betting its Bunsen burners that if you throw a single-sex environment and high expectations at a bevy of brainy beauties, they'll lift their aspirations and reveal their inner Edisons.

The YWLA, which will open in the fall of 2007 with 115 students each in seventh and eighth grades, will eventually grow to 800 students in grades 6-12. The program will emphasize science, which is of course gender-neutral, but the schools will girl-ify in other ways, such as tailoring PE to the gentler sex (yoga … salsarobics … mud wrestling …). We hear the ladies may also dissect unicorns and butterflies in lieu of frog bellies and cow eyes.

2006 Horizon Awards I: Best Use of Frames

I'm inaugurating the Horizon Awards. If I were really serious, I'd come up with a list of categories, solicit nominations, and our band of bloggers would vote on them. That sounds like a lot of work, however, and runs the risk that my favorites might not win. So instead, I'm just going to announce the winners without informing anyone that there was a contest.

This award goes for the best use of frames on a website of substance. We're all familiar with frames, and probably place them second to popups as a hazard to site navigation and an all-around nuisance. So it's unusual to see a website in which frames are not only unobjectionable, but actually make the reader's job easier in a way that would be impossible without them.

The TEAMS Middle English Texts Online project has applied HTML frames to the end-of-book glossary and the footnote/endnote sections of traditional texts in a way that is an immense relief to anyone familiar with chrestomathies. They use the ability to redirect a frame to a different anchor from a hotlink on a different frame to allow the reader to look up annotations and vocabulary without ever leaving his position in the text. The result is an e-text that's actually more readable than the dead-tree version.

Don't just take my word for it, though — check out The Birth of Merlin, or — for the spiritually-minded — read The Cloud of Unknowing . Remember how many fingers you'd have to hold in different pages if you had a copy in your hands, and give thanks to the folks at TEAMS.

When the Revolution Comes...

Title: "The C********** Nation Manifesto"
Author: James Howard Kunstler
Year Published: 2001 - Present
Rating: 3 Locally-Produced Artisanal Cheeses (out of 5)

Summary: Several months ago, Martha wrote about the "Mary Sue" — a wish-fulfillment fantasy disguised as fiction. These are endimic to post-apocalyptic sci-fi: the world is changed in such a way that suddenly [ survivalists | SF Bay concept artists | unemployed veteran gunnery sergeants | live-action role-playing Wiccan RenFaire-ists ] either run the world or at least become the valued and important members of society that they currently are not. Kunstler's manifesto is not, technically, science fiction — rather it's an essay predicting a future which cannot be escaped, but could perhaps be ameliorated by adopting New Urbanist planning immediately.

Setting: After a catastrophic supply crunch of petroleum, America is reduced to a society of pedestrians and cyclists. Suburban yards are cultivated for food by the few poverty-stricken residents foolish enough to remain in the sprawl zones. The majority of the population, however, is split between smallish New Urbanist cities and multipurpose farms which produce the same kinds of high-profit artisanal foods that are currently only sold as luxury goods. Nobody will drink Budweiser — everyone will drink a local microbrew.

When America last experienced the conditions Kunstler describes was a bit before the 1980s. This was not, frankly, an era noted for its connoiseurship. Why the New Urban Men in Kunstler's society wouldn't drink a local equivalent of Hamm's, Lone Star, or Schaefer from their local microbreweries is never explained.

Catastrophe: Peak Oil — which for some reason the market never adjusts for, despite the profits of the futures market, popularity of hybrid vehicles, and 55-gallon barrels of ink spilled on doom-and-gloom predictions.

Representative Sample:

Agriculture faces a similar predicament. Today, we grow a few monocultures of grain or milk or beef or pork in vast quantities on gigantic factory farms, process most of the outputs at a similar enormous scale, and truck it great distances to gigantic super-stores. The end of cheap oil means this will no longer be possible. We are going to have to grow at least some of our food closer to home. We will have to do it with fewer petroleum inputs, the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides. Our methods will have to be along lines that are today labeled as "organic." Farming will have to be done at a smaller scale, and it will probably entail more intensive human labor. A class of people will re-emerge on the scene: American agricultural laborers. Their lives will probably be far from idyllic. Don't count on this kind of work being done by foreign migrants when we are engaged in border disputes and demographic / territorial contests with Mexico. When the US economy shudders and stumbles, life will become worse by orders of magnitude in Mexico, which is already struggling.

The re-localization of farming in America is going to be very difficult. Our relationship with land the past half century has been one almost exclusively of brutal commodity exploitation. A lot of farmland in California is close to being ruined from over-irrigation; you can see the salt precipitates in the fields off Interstate Five in the Central Valley today. Some of the best eastern farmland has been paved over. The years ahead will require us to rediscover a relationship of caring for land and doing so by hand, tenderly. In an age when the farmland around our towns and cities seemed to have value only as potential development - for monocultures of suburban houses and discount shopping - stewardship was regarded as merely prissy. In the future, our lives will depend on how we take care of the land.

The re-localization of agriculture presumes that many so-called value-added activities will take place on a more local and regional basis, too: the conversion of milk into dairy products, the production of meats, hams, sausages, wine, preserved foods, and so on. Europeans never stopped doing this. Their models and methods exist to be emulated, and we will have to do it as the end of globalism becomes a more emphatic condition of life. Today, there are probably fewer than fifty immense factories producing most of the cheese in America, all absolutely dependent on long-haul trucking based on cheap diesel fuel. Twenty years in the future, there may be thousands of smaller dairies operating across the US. They will probably put out better products. They will employ people in complex vocations. They will have regional differences.

Dispatches from the Academic Front

The University of Wisconsin is very likely to revoke its foolish ban on graduate student RAs organizing bible study classes in the privacy of their own dorm rooms. (WARNING: Link comes courtesy of "religious lobbying group" FIRE.)

The same religious lobbying group also reports (with outrage) on the suspension of a popular Lancaster, PA-area community college history professor because he used occasional profanities in class.

Pwwwong!

This week's NYRB is more fun than usual. There's a long article, vaguely promotional but still pretty cool, about poker as the U.S. national sport and a Dallas banker who nearly held his own with the big boys.... and then a romp through the world of Weird Bugs including this:

If you imagine that worms are any less intriguing than scorpions, [David] Attenborough has surprises for you. The largest worms on earth inhabit an area of about eleven square miles in Gippsland in southern Australia. It's difficult to establish just how long these creatures are, for they keep changing shape from (relatively) short and squat to long spaghetti-like strands. Attenborough settles on a meter; but their changing shapes are hardly their most surprising attribute, for the giant Gippsland earthworm is more often heard than seen. As these subterranean creatures move about in their tunnels they produce sounds like water going down a plughole, or more occasionally like a toilet being flushed. The town of Poowong in West Gippsland supposedly derives its name from an aboriginal word describing the sound of the worms as they shift about: Pwwwong!

"The Ethos of Cheer" and its discontents

In today's SF Chron, several researchers, including one from unsmiling Bulgaria, consider whether American pressures to appear happy are really quite healthy for all.

Adjacent in the print edition of the paper: the starving children in India. Out of fashion as a reminder to American kids to eat their vegetables with gratitude -- but apparently still starving nevertheless.

Conscience vs. Guilt

At the end of last week's marathon thread, I think Alan H. and I ended up talking at cross purposes. I thought I was making the unremarkable statement that it's healthy to notice inequality, to find it unfair, and to do one's bit to try and make things fairer, and that deep down I supposed he did do that, being after all a decent human being. I think he was saying that I and various campus activists were commending self-hatred to him as a virtue. I can't speak for these campus activists -- he knows who he's talking about, I don't -- but I think anyway he and I were saying different things. Were we?

[MORE: Seen the research suggesting helpfulness is an innate trait of human beings?]

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Less than a week after the publication of Crunchy Cons, Johah Goldberg reads Rod Dreher out of the conservative movement:

Rod's problem is that he has essentially bought into a Christian Marxist worldview. Now, I don't like using the word Marxist much because too many conservatives throw it around promiscuously (Social Security isn't Marxist, for example). But all of his talk about alienation and worker exploitation, his contempt for bourgeois careerism, and his relentless abuse of the word "materialistic" all point in that direction. The fact that he also favorably invokes Marxist activists, scholars, arguments, and movements, while ignoring, say, Robert Nisbet's work on community, is also a bad sign. And then there's this whopper of a statement: "Adam Smith and Karl Marx are two sides of the same coin: they define man as primarily economic man."

Putting aside the grotesque slander to Smith, who was one of the great moral philosophers of the last three centuries, it's simply untrue that the free-market is rooted in materialism or that Smith's intellectual descendants define man in economic terms. Classical liberals root their case for laissez-faire in the autonomy of the individual, the primacy of freedom, the faith that virtue not freely chosen isn't virtuous, and in a deeply religious conception of the individual conscience (another sorely missing voice in Rod's book is Michael Novak, the world's leading authority on the intersection of market economics and Catholicism). Save for a few Randians (heh), the only people who really think the free market is based on a materialist vision in an intellectually serious way are themselves Marxist materialists, in much the same way that the only people who see white racism behind every black problem are people convinced of the primacy of race.

[...]

Rod frets over mass man like a Fabian socialist, tut-tutting their wants and poo-pooing their desires. He buys into the Malthusian fetish of scarcity. He embraces the environmentalism of the left and — at least by implication — the condescending aesthetics of the anti-globalization movement. . . . He sounds like Al Gore in Earth in the Balance when he talks about modernity, and he lavishes praise on Hillary Clinton's view that it takes a village to raise a child (a somewhat odd view for someone so passionate about the glories of homeschooling). He claims Russell Kirk as his hero, but he often sounds like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a Russell Kirk mask. Again and again and again, Rod buys into leftist categories of thinking and thinks that by merely calling them "crunchy" they will suddenly become conservative.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Pack-Mules?

BigDog, meet Her Majesty's Servants.

Street Fight

Anyone seen this Oscar-nominated documentary yet? It sounds fascinating, and a useful reminder that the racial politics of the urban northeast are never straightforward.

Kadykchan

For some reason I only encounter the relics of the USSR through motorists. 2004 saw the motorcyclist's essay of Chernobyl, and now the Vladivostok Offroad Club shares a gallery of their trip through Kadykchan.

According to this Washington Post article, Kadykchan was a coal mining town built by prisoners of Kolyma . The reason it looks like a ghost town is that the government has been trying to shut it down, and apparently the threat to turn off heat finally succeeded. It looks like someone took a sledgehammer to old Vladimir Illyich on their way out, though.

Perhaps someone with more Russian that I have could translate what Yuri Opolonsky has to say in his interview?

Prerelic

I've been reading Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo lately. It's less reminiscent of Democracy in America than it is of the more freeform notes de Tocqueville took during his travels. (Regarding which, could anyone point me to the passage where Tocqueville meets Sam Houston as he's leaving Tennessee?) One of Lévy's fascinations is with how Americans interact with history, and I thought I'd share this passage:

The give me, at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, the room that's reserved, eight days from now, for John Kerry.

I write down this detail because it's the first thing the receptionist tells me as I'm registering.

Better than that, they've taken care to display on my night table, next to a framed photo of the candidate playing the guitar, a plate of cheese wrapped in cellophane identical to the one that will be served to him on the evening of his arrival and, in another frame, a copy of the fax sent by his press secretary detailing his minibar preference: "Mixed nuts; chocolate chip cookies; diet soda (preferably Diet Coke in the can); bottled water; plain M&M's (no peanuts); regular Doritos."

The craze for the relic, this time. A taste for preservation and for the museum, taken to the n^th degree. No longer, as in Cooperstown, the artificial as opposed to the authentic. Nor is it as in Dearborn, where, the other day, I visited Henry Ford's Americana museum: everything that has existed will, one day or another, end up in a museum; even if it's under the heading "fake," we might as well make a museum of everything right away. But, even more striking, more extravagant: yes, everything is becoming a relic; a mere plate of cheese is becoming a museum piece, but the museum piece is a plate of cheese that has not been eaten yet, or even served — it's a kind of antemuseum, a prerelic, an extension into the realm of memory of what has not yet taken place.