Here's a Thought

So, one thing everybody's always on about when it comes to Muslim terrorism and terrorists is just how many of the guys that get radicalized are educated, middle-class people. The consensus seems to be, basically, wtf?

I think the underlying assumption is that educated folks should be harder to radicalize because they aren't dirt-poor and, as such, have so much more to lose. I mean, here are guys whose families have enough money to send them overseas to Europe or the United States to study useful professions (engineers seem to be especially well-represented among radicalized Muslims), who get to spend time in the West, in our generally freer, more tolerant atmosphere, while they're being educated, and who come out the other end with valuable job skills. All of which would seem to gravitate away from radicalization (after all, radicals are typically drawn from the ranks of those with little or nothing to lose).

But here's the kicker. These guys, many of them young, return home with their degrees to countries that just don't have any jobs for them. So here they are, young and ready to work, with an education they can't use because their economies are lacking in opportunity, and they get frustrated.

What's worse, and this is, I think, the crux of the matter, is that because they can't find work, they can't get married, since they can't support themselves, much less a family. Which means they can't have sex. And that's a problem.

As we all know, or should by now, Islam has some very strict rules about gender relations. I'm not going to go into a deconstruction of sharia law here, or even express my own feelings about that. I'm not a Muslim, and I do my best to respect the faiths of others, even when I do not share that faith, or necessarily understand it. But the fact remains that in conservative Islamic situations there is very little chance that a young man with no job is going to be able to woo a wife, which is pretty much the only acceptable path to the bedroom for him.

Sure, Muslims aren't the only religious conservatives that have a problem with premarital relations. I was once told by a Christian friend of mine, a woman, that she couldn't stand hanging out with the men in her church anymore because "all they want to do is get married, so they can have sex."

It was funny at the time, but it got me to thinking.

However you feel about it, whatever your Book says, the fact remains that the prime directive of being alive is to reproduce. Human beings are no exception. We're wired, especially when we're young, to desire sex, preferably right now. That our societies have evolved rules that countermand that primordial drive may or may not be a tremendous mistake, but the fact remains that there exists a powerful tension between what our bodies tell us and what our societies tell us we should and shouldn't do.

So here are these guys. They're raised in a strict Muslim culture that says the only way they're ever going to get some is by getting married. They've spent time in the West, where the rules are quite a bit more relaxed (after all, the most conservative parts of the US also have the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections, so we can safely say that there is sex being had, whatever the prevailing moral attitude toward it might be), where they might or might not have gotten a taste of that sweet, sweet fruit that is a woman's love. But whether or not they were successful at the dating game, the women are much freer and more open, and sexuality is much more prevalent, which when you're young and horny can be quite maddening.

They then return to a land where a woman may not so much as step outside her home without a male relation to escort her. And because the economy is poor, thanks either to a kleptocracy or foreign intervention, or both, they can't find work, even with their advanced degrees. So they're not only frustrated by having all this training and education and it not doing them a damn bit of good, but they know that until they get that job and get that money that they're never going to get some love, which'll drive any man crazy.

No wonder they're so often willing to sacrifice themselves to kill Westerners. When you've got no healthy outlet for the perfectly natural desire to get your rocks off and you can't see a way forward to ever getting to, you become imbalanced and angry. Easy to radicalize. I'm sure it doesn't help that the Islamic heaven seems to involve a large supply of willing virgins, but even if it didn't there would still be this pool of young men who feel they have a reasonable expectation of finding work, getting married, and having, if not a good life, then at least sex, and who are frustrated beyond all reason when they discover that even though they have jumped through all the appropriate hoops that they still don't get to get some.

Hell, it's a wonder there aren't more of them.

Also, Too

"Fine, let’s take a vote. Who wants fish for dinner?...Yeah, democracy ain’t so fun when it fucks you, huh?”
-Justin's Dad

More Health Care Bill Explanation! This time from Paul Krugman!

Take it away, Dr. Krugman.

Start with the proposition that we don’t want our fellow citizens denied coverage because of preexisting conditions — which is a very popular position, so much so that even conservatives generally share it, or at least pretend to.

So why not just impose community rating — no discrimination based on medical history?

Well, the answer, backed up by lots of real-world experience, is that this leads to an adverse-selection death spiral: healthy people choose to go uninsured until they get sick, leading to a poor risk pool, leading to high premiums, leading even more healthy people dropping out.

So you have to back community rating up with an individual mandate: people must be required to purchase insurance even if they don’t currently think they need it.

But what if they can’t afford insurance? Well, you have to have subsidies that cover part of premiums for lower-income Americans.

In short, you end up with the health care bill that’s about to get enacted. There’s hardly anything arbitrary about the structure: once the decision was made to rely on private insurers rather than a single-payer system — and look, single-payer wasn’t going to happen — it had to be more or less what we’re getting. It wasn’t about ideology, or greediness, it was about making the thing work.

What's the takeaway? Because we lack the political will for the better system (cuz, you know, socialism), what we got is about what we had to get.

Hopefully, what we're getting will be a step in the right direction. After all, the single most successful subsystem of American health care is Medicare, which has its faults but that everybody seems to agree works pretty good, which is a single payer system.

But thanks to politics, echo chambers, and the seeming disconnect between the stakes of the game and the game itself in some circles, we can't just move to the smarter, more efficient, more humane system right away.

Okay. Guess we'll just have to take a deep breath, steel ourselves for the long slog up the hill, keep up the pressure on our duly elected representatives, and keep winning the war of evidence and ideas.

I think these words of Churchill's, though used in a different context, might prove instructive:

The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.

I have the best girlfriend ever, I'm pretty sure.

Last night a funny thing happened while I was at work. First of all, an old friend I used to work with came in, someone I hadn't seen in a long time. That was cool, and I was happy to see her, and also surprised that she'd brought me a bottle of wine for my birthday, which is on Sunday.

Then another friend showed up, and he had a bottle of wine, too. Then, while I was talking with them, another friend came, and she had a bottle of wine for me too.

"Did you read the cards?" the first friend asked. And then I noticed that each of the bottles, in addition to a colorful ribbon around the neck, had an identical little envelope on it. I started opening them, and each one had a little note in it, in Kendal's handwriting, telling me something about me she loved.

Then another friend walked by the outside of the bar, someone on my soccer team that I haven't seen in months (I tweaked my knee a bit before I had to go to Florida and haven't had a chance to play since, much to my dismay). I ran out to say hi, still not quite getting it, thinking how random it was that a friend who lives on the Eastside would walk by my bar in Fremont with her two kids on a Wednesday night. Until it was revealed that she too had a bottle of wine for me, and had made me a cd, too.

I went back inside and texted Kendal 'Did you do this?' She totally left me hanging.

By 6:30 more than a dozen of my friends had shown up, each bearing a bottle of wine with a note from Kendal on it. Many had added their own. By the end of the night I was up to around 29 or 30 bottles, maybe more, from people in all of my circles of friends, who'd all dropped by to wish me a surprise happy birthday. There were people from my soccer team, people I've worked with at a few different places, people I went to school with; the list goes on.

And Kendal did it all. Without my knowing. She tracked them all down, individually, and got a note to each of them for them to attach to their bottle. I'm amazed. Absolutely floored. Noone has ever done anything this awesome for me for my birthday before. Ever. I had one of the best nights I can remember, even having to work. All night people kept showing up. Some could only stay for a minute, some stayed an hour or more. Every one, and every moment, was almost unbearably precious to me, and will stay with me forever. I can't express how blessed I feel to have such people in my life.

Especially Kendal. The best girlfriend ever. Whatever I did to win or deserve her, I'm glad that I did it, and I hope I keep doing it.

Posted Without Comment

To live is to accept some modicum of risk. To live in an advaned, industrailized, technological, hegemonic, militaristic, imperial society in the twenty-first century is to accept with fair certainty that someone, somewhere, wants to blow you up, like, right now. This is, as they say, the cost of doing business, an inevitable outcome of the system in which we live, work, and pretend to thrive.
-IOZ

Hm

I just watched the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say on the Daily Show that the military was 40% smaller than it was in the Vietnam era. But our military budget has increased every year that I can remember. What gives?

Posted Without Comment

For me the basic dynamic of the mortgage bubble is some Ivy League dickwad hawking a billion dollars of securitized subprime mortgages to a pension fund, and then Hobie-sailing off into the sunset with a bonus after they all blow up.
-Matt Taibbi

Posted Without Comment

On the one hand, libertarianism advocates a free society in which there is necessarily economic inequality but considers it an unforgiveable sin to use tax revenue to give the inevitable lower orders some semblance of human comfort and safety; on the other hand, it advocates a society where the slightest risk of physical harm to air travelers is cause for the suspension of the Constitutional Order and the declaration of martial law. Yuh. Okay. That's really a robust and well-conceived philosophy of liberty you've got there.
-IOZ

What I'm Reading

I've got a couple of books going right now, both of which are making me very happy.

The first is City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer. It's compilation of novellas and short stories of or otherwise having to do with the fictional city of Ambergris. Vandermeer was recommended to me by my good friend Nathan, and I have to say that it's totally rocking my world. Technically, it's New Weird Fantasy, which is a somewhat obscure sub-genre in whose most famous practitioner, as far as I know, anyway, is China Mieville (whose New Crobuzon novels are just absolutely amazing). New Weird Fantasy subverts the traditional mode of the fantasy novel by contextualizing it more deeply, building large, culturally and politically complex worlds to serve as settings for the narrative action and producing a more engaging reading experience through the unexpected and bizarre nature of the imagined worlds in which the stories occur.

It's the subversion of the reader's settled and comfortable expectations that produces the effect. The typical fantasy novel, at least the kind I cut my teeth on as a reader, has a pretty common set of tropes and storylines that, entertaining though they are, can grow a bit stale as time goes on. It's one of the reasons my pleasure reading made the turn to science and speculative fiction, because the worlds in which the stories occurred were more challenging and alien, and learning their internal logics was more fun for me as a reader.

But the New Weird Fantasy has brought be back to fantasy novels and provided some highly satisfying reading these last few years. Jeff Vandermeer looks to be a new favorite. He's got a lot of books set in Ambergris, his fictional city, that I'm greatly looking forward to reading. After seeing what he's done with City of Saints and Madmen, I'm especially keen to read some longer-form fiction set there, just to see what he does with it.

The book itself is comprised of four novellas, which take up about half the book, followed by an appendix of shorter pieces referenced in the last of them, The Strange Case of X. The stories are not your typical fantasy fare, being more deliberately literary in character, and somewhat postmodern in their execution, in the absolute best sense of the term (those who know me know that I have a somewhat... complicated relationship to said term, and mostly consider it a pejorative, but I can't think of any other way to characterize this guy's work). Narrative voices, even the most seemingly straightforward ones, become problematic, as authorial characters reveal themselves over the course of the work causing some interesting retrospective questions to come up and not a few 'a-ha' moments. There's less in the way of action, as typically understood in fiction, and more in the way of history and the sort of cultural background that makes a place and a time make sense. But it's not history as told from an objective, omniscient third-person voice, but from a more human-scale voice, set within a larger, albeit fabricated, historical narrative, which enriches not only the reading experience but also the world in which the stories take place.

And it's weird, so delightfully, unexpectedly, refreshingly weird. Like the best narrative fiction, it makes its own kind of sense, a sense you just have to sort of surrender to in order to understand what's going on. He intersperses a lot of official-esque narrative as well, as with the second story, The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, and the third, The Transformation of Martin Lake, which is about a painter and alternates between a more traditional narrative and a scholarly treatment of Lake's work after he has become famous.

What I like most about City of Saints and Madmen is that it is mostly context. World-building. It's about the art and culture and history of this strange place, not its politics and heroes. Fully half the book is a semi-random accumulation of works in Ambergris' varied and occasionally problematic intellectual history, that are mentioned only in passing in The Strange Case of X and would seem to be provided in order to give that particular story more heft and context. It's fascinating stuff, and extremely well-written. In his own voice, Vandermeer writes with an eye for small, telling details and an almost gothic, elegaic tone. In other places, he creates authorial voices that are every bit as believable and well-developed as anything Kierkegaard ever put to paper, and far more entertaining to boot.

In all, a big thumbs up. Highly recommended. The payoffs may not be the stuff of traditional fantasy or literature, but they're worth it and then some, because while the work is challenging, it's also enjoyable.

And go read some China Mieville while you're at it.

The other thing I'm reading, or, in this case re-reading, is The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I never realized until this go-round that it's as old as I am, having been published in 1973, and it surely does stand the test of time.

Obviously, it was the movie that brought me to this story in the first place. I was in high school when it came out, and loved it. To this day it's still one of my all-time favorites, being one of the first movies I was aware of to engage in the sort of ironic self-awareness and subversion of traditional storytelling tropes that've become almost de rigeur these days.

It's a truism that the book is always better than the movie, and The Princess Bride is no exception. While the dialogue does lose just a bit of its snap on the page, the story is richer and more fully elaborated, especially the backstories of some of the most beloved characters (Inigo and Fezzik spring most readily to mind). And it doesn't lack for a certain degree of postmodernity, either, which is pretty impressive for something written in the early '70s. The author continually inserts himself, both in his own voice as well as in the voice of S. Morgenstern, the fictional author of the ur-text of which The Princess Bride is the abridged version, creating a dialogue between the various levels of the story and its fictional historical context. Also, it's laugh-out-loud funny.

What's best for me about this particular reading experience is that I'm reading it out loud to Kendal and her son August (it was one of his Christmas presents from me). Kendal told me early on in our relationship that she really likes being read to, and she reads to August as well. Previously, I read her The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was enjoyable for both of us and a fun read either out loud or just to oneself. But I'm finding The Princess Bride to be especially enjoyable to read aloud, both for myself and for my audience. It gives me a better feel for the language, and it makes me pay more and better attention, since the window of comprehension for the sense and rhythm of the language is so short between entry through the eye and exit through the mouth. Given that I plan eventually to release my own novel, these many years in the making (and many more to come, if my present pace and constant need to revise continues), in podcast form as well as written, it's good practice for me. And it's just a really fun story, with pirates and giants and swordfights and escapes and true love's triumph in the face of overwhelming odds. What more could you ask for, really?

So yeah, the written word continues to provide me with much joy and stimulation, and if you're looking for something to read, oh reader mine, I heartily recommend either of the above selections. You won't be disappointed.

Avatar vs. District 9

So, I went and saw Avatar last night in 3D. Normally I'm largely indifferent to seeing movies on the big screen. There's almost nothing that I just have to see, and I generally prefer to watch them in the comfort of my own home, where I can pause the movie to go to the bathroom. Also, the snacks are way better.

But there are some films that are such pure spectacle that it makes sense to see them on the biggest screen you can, and Avatar is definitely one of them.

[If you haven't seen it, and care, there will be spoilers in what follows, so caveat lector.]

As a technical acheivement, Avatar is nearly unparalleled. The vision is extraordinary, and the execution is just absolutely spot-on. Pandora feels real, and not only real, but credible. You can see how the ecosystem fits together, and though there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief (floating mountains, anyone?), the parts add up to a credible whole. It may not necessarily make perfect sense, given what we know about things like physics and biology, but it's internally consistent enough that it's easy to allow yourself to be drawn into it anyway and let its internal logics and sensibilities wash over you and do their thing without engaging your critical faculties and ruining the spell.

And it is a spell, a glamer that draws you in, as fantasy worlds are meant to do, disconnecting you temporarily from your usual lived reality and casting you forth into a magical realm where not only is everything much prettier and more vivid, but all the intangibles that so inconveniently fail to manifest in said usual lived reality, the spiritual things that we poor humans must take on faith and believe in because we lack or have lost some fundamental connection to our world (that we may or may not ever have had), are always already there, easy to see thanks to the magic of the script and the cinematography.

And that is the real source of the film's power, the power of the vision behind it, the depth of the fictional world. The richness and splendor that draw you in, uncritically, and cast their spell upon you, the viewer. It's downright magical.

The story, well, not so much. Noble savages and white-explorer-goes-native aside, the sheer unoriginality of the plot is something you can ignore, or at least that I could, right up until the end. That such hoary tropes have been dusted off and pressed once more into service (is there any character, at all, that has more than a single dimension?) could be forgiven if the story did not engage in such obvious liberal-guilt wish fulfillment. The devastated Earth lurks offstage. We know she's been worked over but good. It barely rates more than a line or two of dialogue, because it can be safely taken as read. But here is a paradise that's never had its cherry popped, and She ain't gonna take it.

It's the deus-ex-machina that ruined it for me. Perhaps it is a personal failing, that I require some facsimile of realism even in my magical fantasy. I mean, you know that the humans are the bad guys, at least the military types leading the assault on the Tree of Souls. So you know they're going to lose, because that's what happens to the bad guys in Hollywood movies: they lose. Any other outcome would be unacceptable to a mainstream American audience, and we all knew going in that the Noble Savages of Pandora would triumph, even though the history of our actual world gravitates severely against such an outcome.

I'd hoped that said triumph would come about thanks to the smarts and savvy of, if not the Na'vi, then at least Jake Sully, the aforementioned white-explorer-gone-native. He's a marine, so you figure he's got some at least tactical understanding of warfighting, and certainly that he understands the armaments and capabilities of his foe.

But no, he doesn't. His plan is laughable. Bows and arrows against machine guns. A cavalry charge that makes the Charge of the Light Brigade seem like sound military strategy. The shuttle/bomber that's set to deliver the payload and destroy the Tree of Souls has an open door with no more than ten guys protecting it, but even though he has grenades (Where did he get them? It's never explained) he doesn't toss any in there, nor does he order a concentrated assault on the enemy's weak point. The whole plan is to say "Chaaaaaarge!" and hope that valor and ferocity will triumph over vast technical superiority. It makes you wish James Cameron had maybe talked with a couple of Native Americans before he wrote the script and asked them how that worked out for them, or maybe just watched The Last Samurai.

But instead the tide is turned by Eywha, the Planetary Overmind whose nervous system is made up of the trees in the forest. Flocks of flying dinosaurs conspire to take down helicopters. Forest rhinoceri plow through mechanized combat suits. Wolf-analogue packs rout the ground troops, who are surprisingly ill-equipped for their mission. And a tiger, or something very like one, consents to be ridden by the Hero's girlfriend.

Perhaps this is all part of the director's vision, the moral lesson we are meant to learn from the story. That not every Planetary Overmind will be as passive as Earth's, and just lay back and let the rape proceed. But for a movie that promised a new era of cinematic awesomeness, I have to say that though the cinematrography and technical acheivement are indeed stunning, the hackneyed storytelling and feel-good ending are Hollywood schmaltz at its purest. And for me, at least, that was needle enough to pop the bubble.

Standing in almost perfect contrast is District 9, a film gritty in its realism and unblinkered in its view of humanity. The aliens are just as believable as the Na'vi, though considerably less graceful or anthropomorphic. And though the vision of humanity, painted in broad strokes, is similar, it's more believable here, because it's rendered on a far more human scale. The documentary footage is what makes it work, especially the footage of Wikers van der Merwe, the quintessential company man whose luck in falling in love with the boss' daughter offers him the opportunity for advancement. That he has his unfortunate accident in the course of some bureaucratic kabuki makes it all the more poignant.

The story arc is nearly the opposite to Avatar in District 9. While both involve becoming alien, the one is willful wish-fulfillment, the chance to escape the fallenness of humanity and reconnect with something pristine and unadulterated by the moral hazards of civilization. The transformation of van der Merwe, on the other hand, is an accident, and represents a further fall from grace, the sundering of a man, not a perfect or even exemplary man, from all that he loves and holds dear. All he wants is to return to what he's lost, and you can see his character growing as the film proceeds. At the beginning, you'd hardly believe that the smarmy, nervous guy with the pre-emptive combover had it in him to do the things he later does, but we none of us know what we are really capable of until events require more of us than we are accustomed to, and we rise to the occasion or don't. Jake Sully, on the other hand, is a Marine, so we just assume he's up for whatever, and there doesn't seem to be a single moment where he has even the slightest question or hesitation. That may just be the character, but it's not half so interesting from a storytelling standpoint.

Contrast the endings. One the one hand, there's Avatar, that ends with the Na'vi running the human interlopers off-planet and Jake getting his wish to fully inhabit his awesome new body, a triumphal note that rings false pretty much as soon as the credits start rolling, because the disconnect between the story's logic and the logic of the lived world has become just too much. On the other, there's District 9, with van der Merwe's wife crying over her handmade garbage-sculpture flower (Wikers' preference for handmade gifts is mentioned in passing earlier, a small detail that becomes all the more moving in retrospect at the end) and the cutaway to what we assume is Wikers, now fully transformed into a prawn, gently smoothing out the rough edges of another, and seeming, somehow, to emanate a deep and abiding sadness, although the Prawn physiognomy is ill-equipped to demonstrate such quintessentially human emotions.

And here we have the crux of the thing. For all its visual richness and bombast, Avatar is essentially one-dimensional, a children's story with just enough sex and violence to keep the grownups titillated. The good guys win, though a few secondary characters must be sacrificed for the sake of some emotional string-pulling, and the bad guys are either killed violently or banished in ignominy, and that's supposed to be that. Everything's wrapped up in a neat little package with no loose ends, and we leave the theatre with the feeling that everything's going to be alright, although such a conclusion is patently ridiculous on its face if you stop to think about it for even two minutes. District 9, on the other hand, though equally science-fictional, resonates all the more powerfully at the end because so little is resolved. We assume Wikers is transformed, and awaiting his only hope, the return of the Prawns' ship, which may or may not enslave or destroy humanity in reprisal for its genuinely horrible treatment of its alien visitors, what with the experiments and the concentration camps and the casual executions that nobody seems to think is anything but wholly reasonable and right. There's a lesson to be learned, of course, but it's not clear that anyone has learned it, with the possible exception of the protagonist, who's not in a position to tell anybody.

In the end, if I may analogize, Avatar is candy, a delicious sugary mess whose gratifications are simple, straightforward, and essentially substance-free. District 9 is a meal, nourishment for the mind and spirit as well as a visually interesting phenomenon. And while both take as their subject the rapacious side of human nature, the one offers only pabulum and a happy ending, while the other leaves you with more questions than answers, and a lot more to think about after the spectacle is over.

For what it's worth, I liked them both. But as someone who enjoys some substance in my entertainment, there's really no comparison.

I'm so disgusted with the Seattle Police Department right now that I'm at something of a loss for words.

As a bartender in a nightclub, I've had more than a couple of opportunities to call 911, including during assaults on my person. It's a difficult situation to be in, since because I'm on the clock, I'm legally representing the business, and so my hands are tied in the application of physical force save in the service of self-defense. There's probably a bit more wiggle room than I'm allowed at the particular establishment at which I work, as my employer is adamant about this sort of thing, being rightfully worried about lawsuits, but there are real constraints on what we can do to/about people who become problems in and around the bar.

So when someone gets out of line, or becomes physically violent, we call 911.

I've called 911 at least a dozen times in the last five years. Not once has an officer arrived in less than 45 minutes. Not once.

Even worse, when calling 911, the operator, instead of acting with any expeditiousness at all, wants me to fill out a fucking questionnaire about the incident before calling dispatch. Now, I understand that having some detail would be helpful to the officers if/when they finally show up, but I've had a 911 operator keep me on the line with inane questions for minutes on end while a guy is standing in front of me, being held back by his friends and my employer, literally yelling "I'll kill you!" at the top of his lungs over and over. On at least one occasion, I lost my phone because the guy sucker-punched me while the operator, who I was calling for the fourth time, asked me the same goddamned questions as the last three times.

But last night just absolutely took the cake.

Around 1:30 am, there's an altercation outside the bar. This drunk asshole is trying to start a fight with just about anyone he can make eye contact with. He's on to the fifth or sixth one by the time we go out to intervene. I look over, and there's a cop car at the light. I wave and wave, to no avail. It's like the officer doesn't see me. We've already called 911 at this point, for what that's worth (see above). The street's mostly empty, so I walk over to the police car, where I'm told to get out of the street. At this point, the guy's running rampant right there on the corner, in full view of the officer, who has yet to even turn on his lights. Seriously, the guy's taking swings at people and the officer not only won't intervene, he won't even get out of his car or turn on his flashers until more cops show up. They finally do, and soon enough there are five police cars outside the bar. They put the guy in handcuffs, put him in the back of the car, and we all breathe a sigh of relief and go back in to clear out the bar and start cleaning up.

Now here's where it gets really fucked up.

Half an hour later, the police roll out. But they've left the guy. Apparently they decided that as long as he and his brother are willing to take a cab to a hotel that they're going to let him go. The guy's been running up and down the block in front of the bar for most of an hour, swinging on any- and everybody that he even thinks is looking at him cross-eyed, whether they are or not. I mean, if there is any point whatsoever to having police, any justification at all for the monopolization of legitimate force that government has arrogated to itself, surely it is to get this guy off the street and under control. Seriously, he's like a mad dog. And, despite the hour, it's not like they have something else they're supposed to be doing. I mean, there were five of them. Surely one could be spared to take the guy downtown and book his ass. But I guess DUIs are more profitable or something, and the city couldn't spare the revenue. So they let the guy go and drive away.

He then proceeds to hang around for another half hour, starting more fights, even going so far as to assault a girl. He even tries to sneak up the back stairs, back into the bar. Finally, after who knows how many assault and battery incidents, he and his brother finally get into a cab and go away.

I really have no idea what to say. I'm so outraged that I'm flabbergasted. As I mentioned earlier, I was already pretty unimpressed with SPD's responsiveness to 911 calls, having been in personal physical danger as a result on more than one occasion. But this takes the cake. The guy is literally assaulting people, in full view of the the police. They put him in handcuffs in the back of the police car, and then, for reasons that defy explanation, decide to let him go and leave, so that he can continue his rampage.

What the fuck? Seriously. So much is wrong with this situation that it literally boggles the mind. I mean, SPD is famously unhelpful when it comes to bars and bar staff. I've heard of at least one incident where an officer was at a bar, dressing the owner down for being at or over capacity, while a fight broke out in front of the club, which the officer ignored in order to concentrate on the club's supposed fire code violation. And don't let me even get started on the Mardi Gras riots, when the SPD famously stood by while Pioneer Square was overrun with drunks and hooligans and a guy got beaten to death right there on the street in front of them.

It shakes my faith in civil society. I mean, what's the point of having police if they're not going to keep people from randomly assaulting other people on the street?

New Year's Eve

No matter how much I like you in real life, chances are I'm going to hate you tonight, at least a little bit.

It's not your fault. It's just how it is on Amateur Night.

New Year's Eve, St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo, and a handful of other nationally recognized American Drinking Holidays are a part of our yearly celebratory landscape, nights that we, as a society, grant ourselves as individuals permission to go forth and party like it's 1999. To really cut loose, get wasted, and dance with the proverbial lampshade on our heads, until the party's over and it's time to pass out, get laid, have breakfast, or, if you're very lucky, some combination thereof. For those of us behind the bar, well, it's the job in a nutshell; the night you dread having to work, right up until it's over, when the door is locked and the sidework's done and you're counting the money and, because it's over, it suddenly really wasn't so bad after all.

But it was. And it's going to be.

For those of you with square jobs, or who are, at least, not scheduled tonight, my advice to you is to stay in. Or, better yet, find a house party. Surround yourself with friends and loved ones in a safe and happy environment, and ring in the new year from there. Leave the bars and the clubs to the amateurs, because they'll be out in force tonight and they'll feel even less responsible for their words and actions than they usually do. Which is no good for anybody.

For those who are going out tonight, please try and observe those few simple rules that help make everything go smoothly. Know what you want. Have your money ready. Pay cash, or open a tab. Make eye contact. Have a little patience. Tip. If you want good service, go somewhere where the bartender knows you. If you don't know the bartender, tip well early. We'll remember.

Don't wave money at me. Everybody else has money, too. Don't try and order if it's not your turn. If you're ordering for a group, know what everybody wants before your turn comes up. If you must pay with a card, open a tab and settle at the end of the night. There's nothing more frustrating than having to spend time running someone's card a second or third time when there're fifty people clamoring for drinks. Don't order complicated drinks when the bar is backed up. It's rude to everybody. Don't drive home drunk. Don't be a dick.

And if you, like me, are going to be in the trenches tonight, then I salute you. Rock that shit hard. Because tonight is the crucible, that separates the pros from the wannabes. Be a pro. Keep your cool. Prove your mettle. Show that sea of thirsty mouths how this shit gets done. And don't take any shit, from anybody. Remember, this is your house. Own it.

Like I always say: have fun, get rich, and don't let the fuckers get you down.

This is just all kinds of awesome. And I don't even really drink beer.

A Good Point from an Old Friend

As a physician....I appreciate the post on your blog. One huge issue that is missing; is the amount of waste that occurs with defensive medicine and end of life care. I know you have heard this before from physicians. I assure you that from the trenches......10 to 20 times is wasted with defensive medicine compared to ...medical errors etc. In fact many preventable events in health care could be avoided if defensive testing and unwarranted procedures were not performed. The system is broken! Unfortunately many feel that medicare is like a blank check and families request unneccesarry procedures and treatments that do not provide better health and only serve to prolong an inevitable death! When this type of coverage is expanded, without rationing, we are all screwed I assure you!
-George E.

George makes a good point, and one I haven't yet touched on in my ongoing bloviations here at the anticontrarian blog.

It's something of a truism that most of the money spent on any given individual's health care is spent at the end. Grief-stricken families with loved ones on their death beds will often, quite naturally, do just about anything to prolong their lives, even if what they're prolonging is the persistence of a vegetative state or simply unalloyed pain and suffering. The case of Terri Schiavo is a perfect example, where the body was kept alive long after the person inside had gone.

Now, this is some dangerous territory we're entering, as I'm quite well aware. After all, people are rarely rational in the face of death, whether theirs or that of a loved one, and George's point that having a blank check to extend that life, no matter what the quality of it is or will be, will inevitably lead to waste and abuse is a good one. The term 'rationing' is a loaded one, freighted with all manner of unhappy connotations, but it's also something that we, as grown-ups, quite frankly need to face up to.

There is, after all, only so much care to go around. Period. And only so much good that can be done for someone who is going to die. Period. That there will be rationing is inevitable, and even just. It sucks, but there really isn't any way around it, at least until there is more supply than demand when it comes to health care. I don't see that happening. Do you?

This is why end-of-life counseling and directives are so important. 'Death panels' nonsense aside (and it is nonsense, another example of willful misinterpretation in the service of scoring cheap political points, which I will not deign to rebut here), it really is important for everybody, and most especially those who're either sick or getting on in years, to sit down and figure out how they want things to go down when the end is nigh. Nobody wants to think about things like that, of course, but it's one of those things grown-ups have to and ought to do, if for no other reason than to see that their wishes are carried out. After all, when the time comes, you might not be conscious or capable enough to make your own decisions, and I can tell you from personal experience that it's a hell of a thing to put on someone else to decide it for you. The Schiavo family can tell you that, too.

Lucky for me, when my mother began her terminal decline, all of the decisions had been made, and the appropriate legal documents drawn up and notarized. She made her wishes crystal clear, which spared me from having to make that decision. She had long ago made her wishes clear to me verbally, and so I knew what she would've wanted, but it was a great comfort to have it in writing, to know that she'd thought it out and made her decision. Things were difficult enough at the time, and even having had the burden of decision taken off my shoulders it was hard enough to make the decision to move her to hospice and to sign the do-not-resuscitate order.

But it was what she would've wanted. What she always said she wanted. She would've been horrified to spend her last days in an ICU, shot through with tubes and surrounded by beeping machinery that could only stave off the inevitable for so long and at great cost, without changing the inescapable outcome.

Personal stories aside, what pisses me off most about the 'Death Panels' meme is the childishness of it. The unwillingness to face the fact that life ends, and that each of us should be able to decide how we want ours to end, if that choice is given us, and to have those choices respected. Why it should be problematic for any- and everyone to sit down with a medical professional and decide just how far they want things to go to draw just a few more breaths when the end is in sight and inescapable is beyond mysterious to me. That the government would be willing to compensate doctors for their time in doing so seems perfectly reasonable.

That there comes a time when it isn't worth it to do anything else but try and ameliorate the pain and ease a dying person's passage into whatever's on the other side is something we all have to face up to. Better to do it proactively, for ourselves and for the sake of our loved ones.

That it makes sense from a policy perspective, too, well, I suppose that just goes to show that life gets better for everybody when the grown-ups live up to their responsibilities. I, for one, would rather not waste finite medical resources to keep me alive in pain or a vegetative state for a few more hours or days when it's my time, not when they could be better used on someone whose life is still ahead of them. I suspect that most of the grown-ups out there would agree.

It's the Unions' Fault

One of the things I've learned in the wake of the failed Christmas airline attack:

An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there were one.

Why, you might ask, does the TSA have no head? Seems like a pretty important job, in our post-9/11 world. The kind of post that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle would move expeditiously to fill, given the dangerous world we live in, now that Terror has declared War on us. Right?

Apparently, not so much.

The post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama's nominee in opposition to the prospect of TSA workers joining a labor union.

Yup. A Republican Senator has such a problem with organized labor that he's willing to filibuster the confirmation hearings for one of the most important positions in the Dept. of Homeland Security.

Without collective bargaining, DeMint said, the TSA has "flexibility to make real-time decisions that allowed it to quickly improve security measures in response to this attempted attack."

If organized labor got involved, DeMint said, union bosses would have the power "to veto or delay future security improvements at our airports."

This is not the only important post in the Administration that hasn't been filled, almost a full year into Obama's Presidency. There are numerous positions over at Treasury, where they're also doing some important work, you know, trying to save the economy and stuff, that are also vacant, thanks to the systematic obstructionism of Senate Republicans.

There's a pattern here, one that goes unremarked in these days of three news-cycles a day. Dots to be connected. Put simply, Senate Republicans are using any and every procedural and parliamentary trick they can get ahold of to keep the federal government from doing its job. Why are they doing this? I'm sure it's partly because they want their distrust of government and its efficacy to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but mostly, they just really hate that Obama guy, who's so darned popular, and they want him to fail, no matter how catastrophic that failure might be for, say, the American people.

It's fucking shameful, is what it is. Erroll Southers, the Administration's nominee, is, by all appearances, eminently qualified for the job. But, because any Senator can put a hold on any political appointee, for any or no reason, we, almost a year into a new Administration, don't have a head of the Transportation Safety Administration, because Jim DeMint would like him to clarify his views on whether or not the people who're paid to keep us safe when we fly should be able to engage in collective bargaining in order to improve their economic lot.

You know, cuz the last thing we would want would be for the people who keep us safe to be happier at their jobs. I'm sure it's much better for them to be able to get screwed over just like Wal-Mart employees. After all, I know I do a way better job when I'm employed by jerks who won't pay me a living wage and don't give a shit what I have to say about improving the workplace. Don't you?

The Ought-Nots

I've noticed, here and there in electronic perambulations, that now that we're to the end of the decade we need a moniker to hang on it for purposes of general referral. So here's my two cents. Given how badly so many things went, and how crazy so many folks went, and how inadvisable it'd be to repeat much of what we did these last ten years, I think the official name of the first decade of the twenty-first century should be the Ought-Nots.

Plus it rhymes.

The Good Things the Senate Health Care Bill Does

It's easy to get confused about the health care debate, what with both extremes going to extremes to take it down, and the folks in the middle who are actually trying to solve problems not really articulating the depth and breadth of what they're doing. Even your faithful correspondent here at the anticontrarian blog gets a bit confused here and there.

So mad props to Jonathan Chait at The New Republic for laying it out, debunking some myths, and putting the whole thing in the context of the present fiasco we call Health Care in America.

A few choice quotes:

The salient fact, though, is that the United States currently has, among advanced countries, a uniquely horrible system—twice as costly as the OECD average while producing mediocre results and denying care to millions.

...

Health reform solves the affordability problem by subsidizing insurance coverage, or expanding Medicaid, for low- and moderate-income families. And it solves the pre-existing condition problem by setting up a marketplace, called an exchange, where insurers must sell policies to anybody, at one price, and cover all basic services. In order to prevent people from going uninsured until they get sick, it also requires everybody to purchase insurance, except in limited hardship cases.

...

Employer-sponsored health insurance is tax-deductible, while wages are, of course, taxed. This means an additional dollar of health care benefits costs less than an additional dollar in wages—an anomaly that has contributed to runaway health care costs. Taxing high cost plans, which do not produce better health outcomes, will give employers a strong incentive to shop for cheaper plans. Either way, the government would collect revenue—either directly through the excise tax, or (better still) indirectly when employees start getting less compensation in the form of tax-free health care, and more in the form of taxable wages.

...

Small pockets of high-quality, low-cost care, like the Mayo Clinic, exist throughout the country, but most doctors and hospitals have not embraced the methods that produce this efficiency. Health reform contains a number of pilot programs to encourage more efficient care—such as penalizing hospitals with high infection rates, an easily-preventable failure that causes 20,000 deaths a year, or various provisions to reimburse Medicare providers based on results rather than the number of procedures used. Numerous other experiments abound in the bill.

...

The sum total effect of this legislation is fairly simple. It would redirect a large chunk of the money sloshing around the health care system away from ineffective treatments and toward providing care for the uninsured. On top of that, it would prod the system, in dozens of ways large and small, to adopt cutting edge methods.

I'll spare you all the laundry list of things I'd've liked to see in the bill that aren't there. But anyone who tells you that this bill doesn't do any good is lying, misinformed, or both. To those on the right, this ain't socialism, and even if it was, our most successful health care system here in America, Medicare, is a single-payer system. Just about everybody who's got it thinks it's just great, and you maybe ought to take that into consideration before you keep spouting off about government encroachment on health care. To those on the left, you maybe didn't get everything you wanted this Christmas, but love it or hate it, politics is the art of the possible, and the one thing that was not acceptable was a continuation of the status quo. I'm not fully satisfied either, but the solution is not to take your bat and your ball and go home, thinking that somehow it'll work out better next go 'round. The solution is to keep up the pressure on lawmakers and to keep making the argument that the more Progressive our health care system is, the better the outcomes will be for everybody. That you're probably right should make it easier on you.

I know it was rough in the Bush years, but just cuz Obama got elected doesn't mean the whole game magically changed.

Your iPod is Terrifying

Richard Reid tried to light a bomb in his shoe with a match, and was quickly subdued by other passengers. There was no real indication that the bomb would've even worked had he succeeded, which he didn't. Ever since, we've all taken our shoes off to go through airport security, even if we're wearing flip flops.

Eight British men planned to fill sports drink bottles with concentrated hydrogen peroxide and detonate them in airplanes, hoping to kill some 1500 people. They were caught before they even got to the airport. Ever since, we've all had to limit the liquids we carry onto airplanes to about the size of an airplane liquor bottle, and to present them all in a quart-sized plastic bag.

Now some joker from Nigeria sets his crotch on fire in an almost hilarious attempt to take down a Nothwest Airlines flight over Michigan, a man so inept that he failed to harm anyone at all besides himself, and rumor has it that the TSA's response will include such measures as no getting up or having anything on your lap in the last hour of an international flight into the US, even if you are incontinent or your four-year-old has to go to the bathroom; being limited to one carry-on bag for some reason; and, get this, no electronics of any sort allowed to be used or even powered up during the flight, no matter how long it is or how much work you have to do (hat tip to John Cole at Balloon Juice for the link).

Ladies and gentlemen, we've officially gone off the deep end at this point. The first two measures were ridiculous enough (and they are, truly, ridiculous), but at least they bore some connection to the supposed 'threat.' Shoe bomb? Check everybody's shoes. Liquid explosives? Limit the liquids allowed. Despite the fact that both plots were highly unlikely to succeed, and indeed were not successful, nor even came close, there is always, in times like these, of fear and fearmongering, the need to appear to be doing/have done something. But I defy anyone to explain how some jackass with a condom full of gasoline strapped to his inner thigh setting his junk on fire means that I shouldn't be able to listen to my iPod on a ten-hour flight. Seriously.

I've always had a big problem with the whole 'Terrorists hate our freedom' meme. Sure, there are some radical conservative Muslims that do genuinely hate the freedoms our civilization affords us, much as there are some radical conservative Christians who genuinely hate those freedoms, too. But the September 11 attacks were not motivated by ideology, they were motivated by geopolitics, by the fact that we as a nation feel it is not only our God-given right, but our sacred duty, to project our military might throughout the world and to meddle in the affairs and bomb the shit out of people in faraway lands who would mostly like, just like most of us, to be left alone to live their lives as best they can.

Terrorists do not hate our freedoms, terrorists hate our actions.

But the real problem with the whole 'Terrorists hate our freedom' meme is that we keep thinking that if only we curtail those freedoms, the terrorists will stop hating us. Not only are we wrong about that, but with every incremental step away from those freedoms, we lose the thing that makes our civilization worth fighting for.

It's easy to go to extremes when you're afraid, and there are certainly those who want you to be afraid, who derive advantage from the climate of fear we've been mired in these last eight years. Al Qaeda for one. The Republican party for another (had this attack happened under Bush's watch, we'd have Senior Administration officials on every cable channel telling us to tape up our windows and go shopping). People who, at the end of the day, lack sufficient faith in the strength of America, both as a nation and as an idea. People who forget that the fourth plane that fateful morning was brought down by ordinary Americans who figured out what was happening and decided 'Not if I have anything to do with it.'

So to the folks at Al Qaeda, I say: Fuck you, you fucking jokers. Your attempts to scare us are more pitiful with each try. Go back to your caves and cower, cuz we're gonna find you, and if you're very lucky, we'll just kill you when we do.

And to the folks in-country trying to scare up some panic so they can try and talk us into giving up our freedom for a little bit of illusory security: Unbunch your panties and man the fuck up. Seriously, you're starting to embarass the rest of us.

On Purity and Purges and the War of Ideas

Not very long after the 2004 elections, a friend of mine, a Progressive to his very core, convinced me to attend a Drinking Liberally event at a pub in town. He knew I kept up on politics and the news, and that I've been known to enjoy the occasional free exchange of ideas among friends and strangers alike. He'd been to a couple such events, and said he'd be interested to see what I'd make of the whole thing. Being a one to enjoy both lively discussion and the tipping back of a pint or two, I was happy to oblige.

Now remember, this happened at a time when George W. Bush had just won reelection and been sworn in for another four years, which led, as you might expect, to a great deal more swearing on the part of nearly everyone to the Left of Center in these United States. The folks at Drinking Liberally, doctrinaire liberals to a one (with the exception of myself) were not happy, and, having done a little liberal drinking, were more than happy to vent.

I won't go too deeply into the discussion, as the details didn't really stick even at the time, but the thing that struck me then, and sticks with me now, was the fervor of the crowd, most especially of the two guys who spoke loudest and most (again, with the exception of myself; I am a well-known loudmouth when it comes to a good argument). To be honest, the whole thing was probably more therapeutic than substantial, and while I understand the value of catharsis, I lose patience when it bleeds over into substantive policy discussion.

What really got to me, in the end, was that the proposal on the table, which almost everybody there seemed to accept as just the most natural and obvious thing, was that what really needed to happen in the wake of such a painful electoral defeat was a purge of the unbelievers, the DINOs of the world, who, though they may have registered or run as Democrats, were not sufficiently fervent in their left-wingitude (anybody who thinks the crazy is confined solely to the right extreme of the spectrum is sadly mistaken, alas) to pass muster, and had muddied up the message. These were the folks who'd come out early and hard for Howard Dean, who'd descended on Iowa in their hundreds and thousands, canvassing door to door, phone-banking, handing out literature, sure in their convictions and their campaign's deep, deep pockets, and delivered their man a singularly unimpressive third place finish in the caucuses, but who still became wild enough at the 'victory' celebration to call forth the famous 'Dean Scream' that doomed Dean to sideshow status.

The logic, and I'm not making this up, was that if only the Democratic party could undertake a massive purge of everyone to the right of, say, Ralph Nader, that the Progressive message, muddied as it had been by the fact that the Democratic party is not made up entirely of Progressives, would be allowed finally to shine through, its self-evident awesomeness immediately and uncritically convincing everyone in the country and possibly even the world of its Truth, Beauty, and total Righteousness, therefore causing a massive swing to the Left of the entire country and possibly even the world.

It's one of those things that might make perfect sense in your head, but when you say it out loud, you (or at least the people around you) realize that, actually, it's not really very smart at all.

For a while, after Barack Obama won the election, you could see the same thing happening on the Right. The Tea Party movement, such as it is, represents exactly the same process as the folks at that Drinking Liberally get-together were espousing. In the case of the Tea Party folks, they've even gone so far as to lose their chosen party a seat that it'd held for more than a century, by endorsing Doug Hoffman over Dede Scozzafava, who was too moderate for their tastes, thus handing the seat to Kirsten Gillibrand [see below]. The folks behind the move, like RedState's Erick Erickson, are so loony as to consider it a victory, since the squishy 'moderate' Republican lost the seat, thus sending a message to the rest of the caucus to pander to the crazies or else beware.

[CORRECTION: As JC pointed out in comments, it was actually Bill Owens who won the NY-23 seat, not Kirsten Gillibrand. That's what I get for not double-checking my all-too-fallible memory. D'oh!]

Now we're seeing it on the Left again. It's gotten so out of hand that there have been calls to oust Bernie Sanders, who is a SOCIALIST, from his Senate seat, because he's endorsed the Senate's Health Care bill. I'm sure from the angry place that such calls originate from, it makes perfect sense, but take a step or two away from the crazy and you have to wonder just what these people are thinking. I realize they're upset because electing Barack Obama did not immediately and magically change the nature and rules of politics in America, which most every sensible and right-thinking person does want, but when a Socialist isn't Progressive enough for you, you have gone off the deep end. For realz.

But what I really want to talk about is this: to issue demands, and to call for purges of the insufficiently ideologically pure misses the point of both Democracy and the Free Marketplace of Ideas. To demand that everybody think like you because of the self-evident awesomeness of your ideas and beliefs is childish. To take your bat and ball and go home because everybody else doesn't want to play the game just like you do is even more so. If you believe your ideas and ideology really are the best of all possible ideas and ideology, then you should have faith of their power to convince others, and you should be willing to engage in the competitive marketplace of ideas on a fair and square, level playing field.

Look, part of the basic respect that you're supposed to have for your fellow travelers through this life and this universe includes allowing them to decide for themselves what they think is right and why they might think that. If what you think is right differs from that, well, then by all means engage them in a free exchange of ideas. Open their minds, if you can, to the virtues of your own beliefs, and, even more importantly, open your own mind to what they have to say. There's not a soul in the world that's got this whole thing figured out, and it is not only possible but almost certainly the case that there's something you haven't thought of that'd be worth your time to figure out and maybe even integrate into your own worldview, something that might expand your horizons and make your own living-world richer and more rewarding.

That said, I am still a firm believer in not arguing with fools, not only because passersby might not be able to tell the difference, but because I think it makes you dumber, and, at least in my case, it sure as hell makes me angrier (I find it difficult to suffer fools gladly, especially when they are so fully convinced of their rightness that they're unwilling to even hear out the other side in a discussion). Opinions are indeed like assholes. Everybody's got one, and they all stink. But if you do really have the courage of your convictions, you owe it to your beliefs to engage with those who don't share them. But the object is to convince, not to demand conformity. If your ideas are robust enough to survive the crucible of the War of Ideas, then you shouldn't have to demand they be uncritically accepted. And if you have to demand that acceptance, well, your ideas are probably not strong enough to survive and triumph on their own merits, and you maybe ought to think about reconsidering them.

Take Your Pick

This is just hilarious.

This is just awful.