Random Hatred

So, we all know that random hatred of perfect strangers for irrational reasons is morally-upright and socially acceptable, right? Right. But what happens when the person you irrationally hate is also someone you admire? Such is my dilemma.

I give you A.C. "Carl" Newman, front-man of the New Pornographers, one of my current favorite bands. He writes brilliantly catchy, and yet off-beat, songs which combine disparate elements from across the rock spectrum into music that no one with good taste could dislike.

And yet ... I get the feeling that I hate him.

It all started when Annie and I went to see the New Pornographers at an in-store appearance at Amoeba in San Francisco. The set was short and messy, but fun. But Newman's stage banter was a bit much, y'know? He asked the crowd to recommend burrito places, and then proceeded to rattle off the names of several burrito places in the Mission. Who does he think he is?

Then there's this interview. Read it. Go ahead. It's riddled with smug I'm-the-front-man-of-a-critical-darling-band quips. Where? What are are you, lazy? Read it yourself. They're in there! I swear!

Oh, and also? He's Canadian! Yes, Canadian. He even admits it!

And finally, there's this picture. Look at it. Can you possibly come to any other conclusion than that he's an asshole? If you can, you're dead to me.

To recap:
1) Burritos
2) Interview
3) Canadian
R) Picture

What's that? My arguments don't make sense? That's why they're irrational! Haven't you been paying attention?

So, in conclusion, buy A.C. "Carl" Newman's music. It will make your life better. But while you do, curse his very existence. This I command!

Cheap Shot of the Week

It's a good thing that the French don't have the problems of racial animus, incompetent governance, and intractable social issues like us poor benighted Americans.

Perhaps the Awesome-est Thing Ever

Try this.

Overstatement of the Week

Oh, by the way, I'm elated that the A's didn't hire Orel Hershiser's '88 Dodger-ass to be their manager. I couldn't stand the thought of raising a child in a world as perverse as that.

A Brief Foray into Indie Music Criticism

Heart + Sleeve = Death Cab for Cutie

Heart + Sleeve + Drum Machine = The Postal Service

Pain and Baseball

Ah, so it finally happened again. The zombie corpse of Kirk Gibson has arisen from a traffic and smog filled L.A. cemetary to haunt baseball once more, this time coming in the form of Albert Pujols.

I watched the conclusion of Game 5 the other night, and it was the kind of drama that makes baseball (and sports in general) so exciting. You can't sit there and say "Eh, seen it before" or "Oh, this plot is soooooo predictable." There is no plot. Just the sight of David Ecksteins slapping a ball into leftfield with two strikes and two outs. In Houston, I'm sure it looked more like the wheels coming off a big-rig at 80 mph. Then the walk to Edmonds. The big-rig is now jack-knifing. And then Pujols hit the gigantic-est homerun I have seen since Jose Canseco's moon-shot in the Skydome during the '89 ALCS. The big-rig is now engulfed in flames, rolling end-over-end, crushing all in its path.

And the stadium went silent.

And somewhere in Houston, a 9-year-old's childhood ended. Replaced with the pain and suffering that come with your team's failure on an epic scale. It's one thing to be bad year-in and year-out. But to get so close and then to fail so spectacularly can mean only one thing: God hates you. Not dislikes. Hates.

And I know. I can still vividly remember the arc of that ball off of Kirk Gibson's bat. I can remember my little 9-year-old heart hoping and praying that it would land harmlessly in Canseco's glove. But instead, it landed 20 rows up in the rightfield bleachers. And the A's lost the Series right there and then. There was no coming back. And it continued to haunt them - even their win the next year was tainted by the earthquake and Gibson.

Gibson!!!

They haulted that motherfucker out the ICU and put him right onto the field, didn't they? He was on crutches, bandaged head-to-toe, barely able to lift his arms. His homerun can be explained only by steroids, bionics, and a corked bat. I can't be the only one who remembers his bat exploding in a shower of cork and superballs, can I? Others remember the spent syringes falling from his pockets as he rounded second base, right? I mean, I shit you not, the man had to be rebooted at home plate.

That's who we got beat by. So I totally understand, Astros fans, if you're sitting around thinking "Best hitter in the game, sure, but you mean we got beat by a guy named Poo Holes? What the fuck?"

ACLU and Communists

So a few weeks ago, Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy had a series of posts (one, two, three, and four) about the ACLU's famous decision to expel Communists from the organization. What struck me in particular about these posts is that they mirror an argument we once had in my family regarding that decision.

Both of my parents had worked at the ACLU, and one day on a long car ride we somehow came around to the topic of the expulsion of Communists from the organization. My mom maintained that it was hypocritical of a civil liberties organization to expel members based on political beliefs - the equivalence of McCarthyism. My dad and I both argued that it was perfectly proper to remove people who didn't, after all, believe in civil liberties.

Volokh's first post makes much the same point as my dad and I did (and it should be noted that Volokh was born in the Soviet Union, so he certainly has more first-hand experience with Communism in the actual, rather than theoretical, form).

However, reading further, I learned a number of things about the ACLU and it's Communist ties that I had not been aware of at the time of our initial argument (and perhaps not my parents, either).

First, the ACLU decision came in 1940, when the Soviet Union (and, by extension, all Communist Parties and their card-carrying members) was allied with Nazi Germany. This was also just a few years removed from the bloodiest purges in Soviet history. In other words, the danger of Communism, so often exaggerated, was very real at the time of this decision.

Second, the ACLU expulsion of Communists also extended to anyone who believed in a "totalitarian" ideology (i.e., Nazis and Klansmen, as well as Communists). So this was not just an internal purge aimed at left-wingers, it was an attempt to make clear that the organization was firmly opposed to totalitarian suppression of civil liberties, no matter what the rationale.

Third, Roger Baldwin, the founder of the ACLU, was himself an admirer of Communism and the Soviet Union, and even went as far as to defend the suppression of civil liberties in the Soviet Union in the name of expanding and nuturing Communism.

I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties.

In other words, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union did not (at least in 1934) believe in the good of civil liberties for their own sake, but only as a means to an end. And that end was the triumph of "workers rule." Only after the Nazi-Soviet alliance did Baldwin turn against the Communists.

Given this, I have to say that not only was the ACLU's decision to expel Communists correct, it probably saved the organization as we know it. Had the ACLU continued to be dominated by Communists, it likely would have been utterly discredited by switching to pro-fascism in 1939 and then anti-fascism in 1941 (as all loyal Communists did). The coming of the Cold War would likely have been the death knell of the organization.

But instead, it decided in 1940 to reaffirm civil liberties as its primary goal (and as an end unto themselves) and has thus been an important defender of the Bill of Rights for the last several decades (despite the slings and arrows of many conservatives, such as the first President Bush).

Soccer

So, I'm curious, why is it that Americans are often depicted as unsophisticated and provincial because they don't like soccer? Because, the way I see it, soccer is a remarkably unsophisticated and provincial sport.

The sport itself is probably the least complicated major team sport out there - essentially two teams kicking a ball back and forth, each trying to get the ball in the other's goal while defending their own. Now, I know there are a bunch of rules, but the fact is that an alien (of the little green variety) could probably sit down at a soccer match and figure out the basics of the game pretty swiftly. Compared to baseball or American football, which are ridiculously complicated, understanding soccer is child's play. Which, after all, is a big reason why the sport is so popular - anyone can play it, you can play it anywhere, and there's little learning curve. But that doesn't explain why Americans are unsophisticated for not liking it. If anything, it's the rest of the world that's unsophisticated for not loving baseball (or cricket).

But I think the real argument is just that Americans stubbornly refuse to embrace a sport that everyone else likes, and this is taken as further evidence of our arrogant nature (right up there with vetoing the Kyoto Accords). This, however, ignores that fact that soccer is hardly a sport that brings the world together. If anything, it tears people apart - soccer fans are notoriously nationalistic and provincial, not to mention thuggish. Are American sports fans terribly civilized? No, but at least we rarely see riots between fans from different places. "Hooligan" is thankfully not a word often associated with baseball fans.

I Rove You

So the President has appointed Karl Rove to head reconstruction of the the Gulf Coast?

Huh?

Has this President learned literally nothing from the past couple weeks? Karl Rove is a political operative, advisor, and fixer. He is not (repeat - not) an expert in reconstruction. And as we learned from the Michael Brown debacle, having your crony in charge of something reeeeeaaaaaly important is a terrible idea.

This administration never fails to impress me with the massive disconnect between its rhetoric and it's actions. High oratory mixed with stunning incompetence.

Definition of the Day

codify (cohd' i fie), -ied, -ing, -ies, tr.v. 1. to turn someone or something into a fish; Bob has lived in a fish tank since he was codified

Intelligently Designed Film

So now some conservatives are arguing that March of the Penguins is, at it's heart, a conservative film that demonstrates the validity of Intelligent Design.

Let me pause for a second while I cry "Bullshit!"

Yes, the film does demonstrate the wonders of penguin monogomy, which allows for the division-of-labor necessary to allow their young to survive. But to claim that this is relevant to human relationships is ridiculous, unless you also believe that we have something to learn from elephant seals, who manage to reproduce through violent polygamy - they engage in brutal combat to win the right to copulate with the entire harem of females in the group.

These conservatives also claim that the fact they these penguins manage to survive in the one of the harshest environments on Earth is proof that they must have been designed by a creator. But as the (conservative) columnist George Will points out:

If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?

Their success at breeding in such a seeming impossible environment is much better explained by evolution. The Antarctic was an open niche which these penguins evolved to exploit.

Finally, shouldn't it bother these conservatives that they are noticing such similarities between people and penguins? Doesn't a large portion of the resistance to evolutionary theory come from the fact that people are disgusted by the implication that people evolved from "lower" animals, thus violating the idea of man being created in God's image? If people and penguins are so similar as to invite comparisons, doesn't that show a good likelihood that we share a common descent or at least a common mechanism for the creation of our species?

Bring Me the Head of Michael Brown!

Andrew Sullivan has called on bloggers to try to bring about the resignation or firing of Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, and so I am here to do my part. In my previous post, I said that we should wait until the crisis passed to start pointing fingers, but the more I read, and the more I think about it, people need to be fired now, if only to reassure the public that the administration is aware of just how colossal of a failure this is. I say "people need to be fired," because I'm seeing Sullivan and raising him one - Michael Chertoff ought to go to. True, the mess at DHS isn't entirely his fault, but he's the leader and so he has to go. And, after further investigation, I'm sure there are a number of mid-level people at FEMA and DHS who ought to be removed as well.

In addition, I think that George Bush owes the people of Louisiana and Mississippi (and indeed all of the American people) an apology for the poor showing of the government. Why? Because he's the President, and so the buck stops with him. He's the one who appointed Brown and Chertoff. He's the one who presided over the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. So it's his job to find out what went wrong, to fix it, and to hold those responsible accountable for their failures.

Now, some people might object that this is all just partisan politics at it's worst, capitalizing on a national tragedy. No, defending the administration at this point is the partisan thing to do. Calling for the resignation of incompentent bureaucrats is simply demanding accountability from government - the only way we can possibility expect things to be better next time. We have to change the institutional culture at FEMA, and we need to do it immediately.

Finally, please check out Andrew Sullivan, John Marshall, Slate, Constructive Interference, CNN, and any number of other websites that are doing an excellent job covering this crisis.

Katrina

Sorry I haven't posted in a couple weeks. Last week we were on vacation, and this week I've been consumed by trying to keep up with the coverage of the unfolding disaster in New Orleans.

A lot has been said already by people a lot smarter and more knowledgeable than me, so I'd suggest reading your favorite news sites and political blogs if you're looking for in-depth analysis.

Meanwhile, a few thoughts:

1) The most important lesson from this catastrophe is that, in the four years since 9/11, we have not learned anything about dealing with urban disasters. We are unable to completely evacuate a city and maintain order, despite the fact that we had several days warning of this hurricane, and despite the fact that scenarios of this sort had been predicted for years. If, god forbid, an earthquake or nuclear/chemical/biological attack were to strike a major U.S. city without warning, we would likely see the New Orleans disaster unfold again, except on larger scale.

2) A lot of attention has been paid to the looting and disorder, but I think far more serious is simply the lack of basic necessities of life - water, food, ice, basic medical supplies, etc. It is unconscionable that the children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the infirm should have to go without water or necessary medication for days at a time. People should not die of thirst in this country, ever.

3) A few people have implied or stated that if the people of New Orleans had been more prepared - with emergency supplies - or had just followed orders and evacuated when the call went out, this could have all been avoided. This completely misses the point that the people still in the city are those in poverty, who did not have the means to escape or prepare in advance. An emergency kit full of water, food, batteries, etc. which have to be kept fresh is a luxury poor people cannot afford. It's also of little practical use when your entire house is underwater. As for evacuation, these are people without cars or without money for gas. Believe it or not, some people actually rely on public transportation to get around.

The lesson is that government, whether local, state, or federal, has to step in and help those who cannot help themselves. This is not simply a matter of individual sacrifice and bravery by police, firefighters, doctors, nurses, and soldiers. Someone at the top has to plan this in advance. The free market can't evacuate a city - the government has to do that. Disaster planning and preparation is right up there with maintaining law & order as one of the very most basic functions of government. And this week in New Orleans, government on all levels has failed at both of those basic tasks.

4) Finally, I'm not looking to blame anyone in particular. This is a profound problem that cuts across both parties and all levels of government. But right now, the Republicans control the Federal Government, so they have to accept that they will get a lot of heat, and that the proper response is to fix the problem rather than making excuses or deflecting blame. None of the Federal officials involved have come across looking good. Once this passes, heads should roll.

Anyway, at this point I'm just not hopeful that anyone really has a handle on this situation and knows how to move ahead. For the residents of New Orleans, your nation has failed you in your time of need, and I only hope that things can somehow be made right.

Intelligent Design, Equal Time

I just got a call from the FCC indicating that my blog is showing a pervasive bias against Intelligent Design, and so in deference to the "equal time" rule, I must write a post in favor of Intelligent Design.
Here it is:

According to evolutionists, plants, animals, and humans are well-adapted to their environments and ecological niches by the process of slight mutations over time which favor certain individuals and thus increase their odds of producing offspring who also possess the favorable mutation.

However, there is a fundamental flaw in this theory, which is that all living creatures have full and functional organs. If change comes gradually, we would expect to see Nowhere in nature do you find an creature with a partial heart or half an eye. SUch a structure would be a hindrance to the animal, not an aid, and so certainly wouldn't lead to that individual having more children, as evolutionists predict.

So, where do these organs come from, if not gradual change? Perhaps sudden change? But this seems highly unlikely. The odds that evolution could produce by change a fully developed and functional organ is infinitesimal. We need only look at nature to see this. In thousands of years of human history, there is no record of, say, a dog being born able to walk upright, or a horse born able to grow antlers.

Since evolution cannot explain these changes as either sudden or gradual, we must return to our original assumption, that animals are particularly well-suited to their environments. Sharks have perfect gills and fins. Cheetahs have legs suited to incredible speed. Humans have highly sophisticated brains capable of thought and speech. Since these organs did not arise by chance, they must have arisen by design. Each species was granted by the designer with attributes suiting its environment.

Who, then, is this designer? Given the immense complexities of life, which even humans, the smartest moral creatures on our planet, cannot understand, this designer must be God, the only omnipotent and omniscient being known to exist. The fact that evolutionists deny this conclusion is a testament only to the blind spots that are inherent in secular science.

Intelligent Design Update

In case you missed them, people have posted some very interesting comments to my remarks about Intelligent Design. I have responded at some length.

Coca-Cola Fortune

So, as you may or may not know, an ancestor of mine, John Stith Pemberton (not quite sure how he's related, but that's not important), invented the recipe for Coca-Cola. This is a neat little anecdote, interesting to tell at parties and such. Inevitably, however, someone asks "If your ancestor invented Coke, how come you're not rich?" Well, turns out that he sold it for a only a few hundred bucks. Being not-rich because of this, I've always resented his lack of business acumen a bit.

However, the other night we were watching Antiques Roadshow and this guy brought on a picture of his great-grandfather (or was it great-great?), Asa Candler, and explained that this ancestor of his was the founder of the Coca-Cola Company. The picture turned out to be worth only a couple hundred bucks. But he got the same question I always do "If your ancestor founded Coke, how come you're not rich?" Well, turns out that great-grandpa Coke was a philanthropist, and gave away the fortune.

So, turns out that I don't have to be as bitter about my ancestor's lack of business acumen. No one ended up rich from Coke, after all (except, probably, the other shareholders in the corporation, but nevermind that). Huzzah!

Cindy Sheehan

So I had been feeling pretty sympathetic towards Cindy Sheehan, the mother who lost her son in Iraq and is now camped out near President Bush's ranch, especially given the abuse heaped on her by right-wingers (most egregious was Michelle Malkin, who presumed to know better than Sheehan how her dead son would feel about the protest).

However, it turns out that Ms. Sheehan has a subscription to Blame the Jews Quarterly. Her objection to the war is that it was planned by neo-cons (Jews!) for the benefit of Israel (Jews, Jews, Jews!). It's entirely possible that Ms. Sheehan is not anti-Semitic, nor is she opposed to the state of Israel, nor does she even realize that her statements could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. But her theory is complete garbage. It's just a retread of the classic "enemy-within" view of the Jews - you can't trust them because their loyalty isn't to the country, but only to other Jews.

As long as she stands by the theory, my sympathy for her will extend only to her personal lost, not to her political agenda.

UPDATE: There is significant debate (scroll down to read the comments) as to whether or not Sheehan actually wrote the letter about neo-cons and Israel that Christopher Hitchens has attributed to her. If she did not write it, I retract my judgment about her theory of the war.

+6

In an update to yesterday's post, my net total of boxes indexed for the week was 6. At this rate, I'll be caught up by Christmas.

Intelligent Design, Part Two

If Intelligent Design is so obviously wrong, then what is there to debate? Why did I say that this is not a cut-and-dried issue?

Well, the fact is that just because one side is right doesn't end a debate much of the time. People cling to their faith, beliefs, ideologies, superstitions, etc. against all reason. What we have here is two sides talking right past each other. One embraces reason and one embraces faith, and never the twain shall meet. And evidence increasingly shows that there is little overlap between the two camps. That is, there is almost no room for a middle ground.

So what? Well, here's the bad news - the correct side, the side with all of the evidence, the ones on the correct side of history, my side! - are losing. At least in this country. We're a minority. And unlike other issues (relatively uncontroversial things like gay marriage and stem-cell research), we're not making headway. Why? That pesky talking-past-each-other problem.

Now, I know what many (most?) educated liberals will say - the American people are just too stupid to believe anything other than religion, and to understand something like evolution. This is just further proof that liberals are smarter. A couple problems with that, though. First, support for evolution is far higher in Britain, for instance, but I have never seen any evidence that the British people are any smarter than Americans. Second, support for evolution may have much to do with level of education, but unless liberals want to play the part of the elitists that conservatives already think we are, we'd really better not argue that only educated people are smart. Third, religiosity and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. Many of the greatest minds of history have been very religious.

Finally, and most importantly, no matter what, we still have to share a country with the religious right. That is why I try (though I don't always succeed) to maintain a civil and respective dialogue with conservatives.

Evolution, however, challenges religion in a way that, say, gravity and progressive taxation do not. And I don't know how, in the long term, we can win this fight without escalating the culture wars and further playing into the victimology of the religious right. In the short term, however, we have to fight to keep evolution in the classrooms.

Intelligent Design, Part One

I wrote out a long post on Intelligent Design, which I have decided to split into two parts. Here's the first part:

What is to be done about Intelligent Design, the newest flat-earthism masquerading as science? To liberals and conservatives alike, the answers might seem obvious, but I don't think it's as cut-and-dried as each would like.

First, let me dispense with the obvious: Intelligent Design has absolutely no place in science classrooms, in public or private school. Period. It is not a scientific theory. It is not a theory at all. It is simply the latest faith-based appeal to Biblical literalism.

The arguments of conservatives that it is a legitimate theory that should be taught alongside evolution (in order to expose children to competing viewpoints) are both laughable and sad. These are the same arguments that conservatives deride when it comes to things like history, sociology, and politics. Furthermore, we already had this debate! When evolution was first introduced in the late 1700s, it was wildly unpopular and criticized by most educated people, until 1859, when Darwin came along with a theory so elegant and airtight that it became accepted as fact. Since then, further work has only strengthened the theory, not weakened it. So there is literally nothing to debate anymore (except for the details of the theory). Intelligent Design is not falsifiable, so there is no need to debunk it. For true-believers, it cannot be debunk. For the rest of us, it's just plain bunk.

Second, thought this may seem to be merely another salvo in the culture wars, this is more than an academic debate. The triumph of ID in schools would inevitably lead to a decline in the quality of American science teaching, specifically in biology, a field that underpins modern medicine, including stem-cell research, cloning, and gene therapies. If Americans do not lead these fields, someone else will (already the Koreans, Italians, and others are taking the lead in cloning).

History shows that voluntarily declining to pursue valuable technologies can have devastating effects for nations. In the 15th Century, the Chinese led the world in naval technology, but gave it up right as the European nations (with far inferior ships) ventured out in the Age of Exploration. Similarly, in the 17th Century, the Japanese led the world in the production of firearms. BUt they gave it up in deference to the Samurai class. Ships and firearms, of course, were the two of the prime technologies that led to the nations of Europe controlling the entire world. China and Japan were reduced to a shadow of their former selves, under European domination (from which Japan emerged only once it embraced Western knowledge and technology). This sort of fate is clearly a worst-case scenario, but we truly can't afford to be complacent about science education.