halfway

2007-02-27T14:32:00.001-05:00

http://cta.ornl.gov/bedb/index.shtml

2006-01-22T08:16:00.000-05:00

on text messaging (and other new forms of communication)

Not that there is much call for Miltonic messaging these days. To use the
scholarly jargon again, text-messaging is "lateral" rather than
"penetrative," and the medium encourages blandness and even mindlessness.
On the Internet there are several Web sites that function as virtual
Hallmark stores and offer ready-made text messages of breathtaking
banality. There are even ready-made Dear John letters, enabling you to
dump someone without actually speaking to him or her. Far from being
considered rude, in Britain this has proved to be a particularly popular
way of ending a relationship - a little more thoughtful than leaving an
e-mail message but not nearly as messy as breaking up in person - and it's
also catching on over here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/magazine/22wwln_lead.html

why do people dump on email so much, huh?? 99% of my most substantive
correspondence happens via email. how can an email (a letter, after all!
in whatever physical form) even compare to a text message with a 200
character limit?

old hidebound fogeys suck. oh wait, no, that was probably a "mindless,
unpenetrative" comment worthy only of email.

2005-11-18T10:22:00.000-05:00

um, wow.

i can't help but think that this says something significant about the
state of the western world, or perhaps of academia or writers -- how
incredibly small we can make our intricate worlds! would even Proust have dithered so much on every sentence he wrote? (would he have lived long enough to finish anything if he had??)

then again, maybe they are just trying to get at the same thing as polanyi
(summed up in a slate article on books people found most influential in college)

"Polanyi's gist was that we know more than we know we know, and that
without this connoisseurial, "unsayable" knowledge, science and society
can't function."

2005-10-24T13:45:00.000-04:00

and then there were the fish ....

"For fishers of days past the closest thing to a management policy
consisted of finding a fish, learning how to catch it and then catching
all of it."

2005-10-04T20:34:00.000-04:00

yum yum ... in case you had forgotten in the 3 1/2 years since Michael Pollan's nytimes magazine article on the beef industry, this is why eating american cows is just a little scary.

2005-10-01T16:59:00.000-04:00

doesn't anyone want to play frisbee with me?

2005-09-03T12:58:00.000-04:00

so this is why i can't help liking allan bloom....

2005-06-30T12:53:00.000-04:00

noah feldman on a church-state solution ?

2005-06-28T19:32:00.000-04:00

pencil woes part 2:

my wonderful friend lindy lent me one of aforementioned super-pencils. i fancy it was thanks to that that my qualifying exams got taken at all. someone should remind me to give it back. lest my affections become fixed where they do not belong, and he never sees the pointy creature again.

meanwhile, i found some ordinary, non-mechanical good ol' wooden pencils to use. but it's been so hot and humid recently (ahhhhh, boston weather .... ) that:

the wood has expanded and pushed the lead out! and snapped the rest.

perhaps it's time to return to the erasable pens of yore. yore --> 6th grade, somerville public schools, erasermate writing implements.

2005-06-05T17:46:00.000-04:00

from a nytimes article on "neuroeconomics" .... monkey prostitution

---------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true.

What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)
-----------------------------------------------------------

..... i need a grape. :P

2005-06-04T21:53:00.000-04:00

um...wow. i can't believe the word "blowhard" made it into a nytimes review:

"Coldplay's countless fans seem to take comfort when Mr. Martin sings lines like, "Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too," while a strummed acoustic guitar telegraphs his aching sincerity. Me, I hear a passive-aggressive blowhard, immoderately proud as he flaunts humility."

2005-06-04T14:18:00.000-04:00

i bought a "value pack" (three for the price of two!) of my favorite pencils a few months ago, maybe to celebrate the new year. they're the kind with the rubbery grip and the clicker thing embedded in the side, and replaceable erasers at the top, and they cost way more than any pencil has any right to. i never know whether to feel guilty or ripped off for buying $2 pencils. but glee usually wins out.

so i managed to hang on to all three of them, including the extra special bright blue one for two whole months. but then all three disappeared in rapid succession sometime in april, and my life hasn't been the same since. my diagrams lack depth, countenance, finesse; where are my shades of gray? i can never feel quite as lighthearted with a pen, it's like playing without save-state, high up with no safety net. there's no reassuring frictive feedback from the page, no satisfying advance of the lead (that click!) to mark a page well scribed. worst of all, there's no reassuring little prickle when i reach into my bag without looking and the pointy point digs playfully into my hand.

oh my dears. how i wish you would come back to me. ::sniff::

2005-06-03T10:37:00.000-04:00

(nytimes again)
To the Editor:

Yes, writing clean English sentences is a learned craft. And like any other craft, it requires practice and guidance. But what student, confronted with contemporary popular artists of all stripes, wants to be a craftsperson?

As long as artistry is perceived as celebrity, and not the embodiment of art, the acquisition of skills is less necessary than an ability to generate clever ideas.

Yet artistry is more likely to arise from craft than craft is to arise from artistry. As I've told my students, "You can't deconstruct before you learn how to construct."

Mark Rosenblatt
Brooklyn, May 31, 2005

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ahhhh, artists : )

2005-05-31T17:39:00.000-04:00

is it possible to effectively address any real sized problems without getting involved in politics?

Atlantic Unbound | March 9, 2005

Interviews

Rebels Without a Cause

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, the authors of Nation of Rebels, on how the myth of a counterculture derailed the political left

.....


	Nation of Rebels [Click the title to buy this book] by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter HarperBusiness 368 pages

t's one of the hottest concepts of the last half century, the theme of countless Hollywood blockbusters, Top 40 songs, magazine covers, and bestselling books: industrial capitalism has turned the masses into mindless cogs in a great corporate machine. Brainwashed by ads to absorb the ever-swelling glut of useless products on the market, we consume ourselves into a state of numb complacency. The driving force behind this cycle? Conformism. The obvious solution? Rebel! Pierce your eyebrow; ride a motorcycle; eat organic; listen to hip-hop. To undermine corporate power, all we must do is refuse to conform.

Not so fast, say Canadian philosophers Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their new book, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (reviewed by Marc Cooper in the April Atlantic). Whoever came up with the critique of mass society should get a fat kickback from corporate America. The concept of countercultural rebellion and its elusive twin—cool—have resulted in a status competition that has driven consumption to unprecedented heights. It's not conformism that leads us to spend, spend, spend on the unnecessary and the ephemeral, but its opposite: the quest to distinguish ourselves from the masses through our enlightened, hip, or just plain rebellious consumer preferences. And marketers of products ranging from cars (the Volkswagen Bug) to computers (the Mac) to shoes (Doc Martens) have been reaping huge harvests from the countercultural seeds that were sown in the 1960s. The point was never underlined more heavily than when Kalle Lassen, editor of the ragingly anti-capitalist Adbusters magazine, came out with the Black Spot sneaker: a "subversive" running shoe that Lassen hoped would "uncool Nike" and "set a precedent that [would] revolutionize capitalism." As Heath and Potter point out, there is nothing "subversive" about trying to beat Nike. "That's called marketplace competition. It's the whole point of capitalism.

As far as Heath and Potter are concerned, driving consumerism is the counterculture's only real raison-d'être these days. The movement hasn't had a fresh thought in decades—ever since its heyday in the 1960s, it has merely been recycling and repackaging the same mythology. Forty-five years ago, French philosopher Guy Debord gave us the idea that, in modern capitalist society, reality has been replaced by "the spectacle," which he opaquely defined as "capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." And since 1999, Andy and Larry Wachowski have generated over a billion dollars in worldwide sales by spinning Debord's concept into a cult film series called The Matrix. For another prominent example, take Naomi Klein and Alissa Quart, two young journalists whose bestsellers, No Logo (Klein) and Branded (Quart), made the claim that "brand bullies" and the modern luxury economy have turned teenagers into overspending fashion victims. Nothing new there, Heath and Potter point out. The idea of the brainwashing powers of advertising is at least as old as Vance Packard's 1957 classic, The Hidden Persuaders, and the consumer-as-victim was a well-known paradigm in France by the 1960s. As for Klein's and Quart's prescriptions to these afflicted youths—respectively, to engage in protests against global capitalism and to dress differently from their peers—they would not have turned many heads in 1969.

The image of unthinking masses consuming in order to fill the vacuum of their otherwise empty lives comes, according to the authors, from the naive elitism of intellectuals. They offer some comical examples. When Jean Baudrillard wrote in his 1970 book, Consumer Society, about the useless goods that the system convinces the masses to perceive as "needs," he offered as an example the two-speed windshield wiper. As Heath and Potter point out, while multi-speed wipers might seem a silly gadget to a Parisian intellectual, a lot of people find them rather handy. They go on:

Whenever you look at the list of consumer goods that (according to the critic) people don't really need, what you invariably see is a list of consumer goods that middle aged intellectuals don't need. Budweiser bad, single-malt Scotch good; Hollywood movies bad, performance art good; Chryslers bad, Volvos good; hamburgers bad, risotto good and so on... Consumerism, in other words, always seems to be a critique of what other people buy. This makes it difficult to avoid the impression that the so-called critique of consumerism is just thinly veiled snobbery, or worse, Puritanism.

The authors take particularly gleeful aim at the puritans of the counterculture, who attempt to opt out of capitalist society by consuming only "good" products: organic, natural, second-hand, hand-made, "fair trade," and such. Like their Black Spot sneaker-wearing brethren, what these consumers are mainly doing is engaging in "status competition" and creating markets for expensive new goods.

But Heath and Potter are not just irritated by the vanity of the counterculture. They are angry at a deception that they feel has all but destroyed the Left. The critique of mass society and the myth of corporate world domination, they argue, have led to a loss of faith among progressives in the very idea of political reform. In No Logo, Naomi Klein grumbles that the replacement of free-market fundamentalists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s with social democrats like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in the 1990s made no real difference: "What good was an open and accountable Parliament or Congress if opaque corporations were setting so much of the global political agenda in the back rooms?" And in his Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine, after a poignant illustration of the horrors of gun violence, Michael Moore draws the conclusion that gun control is not the answer. The problem, in Moore's view, is a "culture of fear" in the U.S.—a problem so deeply rooted in American culture and history that, Moore implies, nothing short of wholesale revolution could solve it. This insistence on tossing out the baby with the bathwater has turned the American Left into an increasingly impotent political fringe, even as it seems to gain cultural status. Heath and Potter challenge the followers of Moore, Klein, et al. to abandon their militant fantasies and "make peace with the masses"—turning their energies to the often tedious but far more effective process of political reform in an imperfect world.

Andrew Potter lives in Montreal, where he is a fellow at the University of Montreal's Center for Research in Ethics. Joseph Heath is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. I spoke to them by phone on February 24.

—Elizabeth Wasserman

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter

One of the central ideas of your book stems from a remark by the renowned cultural critic Thomas Frank that countercultural rebellion is basically a modern quest for social prestige. Was the idea of counterculture as a liberating, democratizing force always mere vanity?

Heath: The unquestioned assumption that's at the core of the critique of mass society is that the capitalist system imposes conformity. Everybody's trying to fit in—it's somehow required by The System that people behave themselves, not ask too many questions, and do what they're told. That's what leads to this theory that rebellion—against clothing styles, for example, or any other elements of the culture—is going to throw a wrench into the works and generate systemic dysfunction. The central observation that Frank makes and that we pick up on is that, in fact, rebellion just exacerbates consumer capitalism. We simply invert the analysis. We say, Look, most consumers are not trying to conform. They're trying to establish some kind of distinction. And rebellion is a very good way of setting yourself apart from the masses, whether it's by being cooler or morally superior or just better informed than other people. It's a search for prestige in the most basic sense.

But doesn't that contradict the essence of leftism? Isn't that a kind of bourgeois striving?

Heath: I think that's absolutely right. That's one of the reasons why we say, If anything, counterculture articulates the true spirit of capitalism, because the older bourgeois establishment was basically imitating an aristocratic system of values, which emphasizes the orderliness of life and the inherited wealth and the sedentary lifestyle and so forth. But that's not really in tune with what Joseph Schumpeter famously called the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalism. So it's definitely the restless, bourgeois search for individuality and identity that greases the wheels of commerce.

You claim in the book that "bohemian" values "more accurately reflect" modern capitalism than do conservative ones. Do you mean that on a more than superficial level?

Potter: Oh, yeah. We mean that at the deepest level countercultural values reflect the true spirit of capitalism in a way that the old bourgeois values, which praised order and family and hierarchy, did not. Capitalism works best in a decentralized sense in which there is the possibility of overturning or subverting any form of production at any given time. And that's the essence of bohemianism.

Heath: For example, the older bourgeois system of values prizes the antique. Having antique furniture in the house is regarded as the pinnacle of style. And why is that? You're aping an aristocratic system of values whereby wealth is inherited. By having a bunch of antiques in your house, what you suggest is that you've got old money, not new money. The bohemian, on the other hand, is constantly in a restless search for the new. The bohemian wants the latest, sleekest modern furniture, all of which of course goes out of style within a couple of years, creating the need to buy more of it. That kind of value system is much more sympathetic to the needs of the capitalist system than people sitting around on a bunch of antiques that they inherited from their great-grandfather.

You're explaining how bohemian values boost consumption, but do they make for more effective capitalists?

Heath: Well, there's a difference between people who run businesses and people who start businesses. The true entrepreneurs are guys like Steve Fawcett and Richard Branson, who go around the world in airplanes and hot-air balloons. It's these radical figures who embody the essence of capitalism. They're always trying to stick it to their managers—the drones they've hired to run their companies. It's the bankers who are actually sort of slowing things down. And Thomas Frank pointed out in his last book, One Market Under God, that the dot-com revolution made this point really clear—you saw a fascination with countercultural values in the workplace.

There's an almost paradoxical alliance in the counterculture, between the ultra-permissiveness of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll way of life, and the ascetic, buy-nothing, grow-your-own-organic-sprouts and seek out the most difficult, uncomfortable place to vacation kind of puritanism. How do those two attitudes meet?

Potter: That's certainly true. The line we push, especially our chapter on exoticism, is that the counterculture sees technology as a homogenizing force, and is afraid of that. And once you see technology as building up bureaucracies and serving capitalism and the military-industrial complex, you end up being afraid of what Theodore Roszak calls the "technocracy." So the only real way of opting out of the "machine" is to opt out of society as a whole. And that's why you get that affinity between the hippies and the puritan back-to-the-land type stuff in general. Because they really are trying to opt out of the technocracy and regain more supposedly authentic values.

So while being in the counterculture was supposed to mean rejecting the work ethic and just doing your own thing, "dropping out" is actually hard work.

Potter: This is a point we make in the book. Genuinely opting out of society is extremely difficult to do. It imposes huge costs on you, which is why very few people do it properly. They end up engaging in really superficial forms of opting out, which actually have the effect of driving consumer culture.

It ends up being an expensive lifestyle choice.

Heath: Yeah, and I guess part of the problem we try to identify is that there's a difference between the countercultural version of opting out and the kind of opting out where you just quietly slink off and become a hermit in the woods. I mean, Christian hermits have opted out for centuries without promoting consumerism. There's a specific problem that arises with the counterculture when people opt out as a way of rejecting mass society. There's an implicit status move there. People who opt out because they don't want to be members of the brainwashed masses are passing judgment upon all the people who choose not to opt out. You can see the almost unassailable sense of superiority that's associated with the vegan, organic-vegetable-shopping, back-to-the-land, Guatemala-handcraft-wearing, anti-globalization activists. They clearly think that they're better than the people who do not share their system of values. So, because other people don't like being characterized as brainwashed cogs, they wind up promoting competitive consumption. There are markets for people who haven't got the time or the leisure or the wealth to completely opt out, but who want to adopt the opting-out lifestyle. Sure, it's great if you can bake your own bread, but if you're busy, at least you can buy home-made-style bread. And there's that Mountain Equipment Co-op sort of "get away from it all to the wilderness one week a year" lifestyle.

So the ones who are most concerned with authenticity or with being the most opted-out of the opted-outs end up in a losing battle. If everyone's eating organic then what are you going to do next? If everyone's doing eco-tourism, what are you going to do? Is this another form of the "race to the bottom" that you describe in the book?

Potter: Tourism is the best example. This became crystal clear to us when we were in Vancouver giving a talk this fall. We got into a discussion afterwards with some people about what's going on on Salt Spring Island. I don't know if you've been following this, but Salt Spring Island, which used to be a hippie getaway, is being colonized by Americans. I think Oprah bought a place there. And so the hippies are all bailing on Salt Spring and going to some of the other, more inaccessible gulf islands. And I said to them, "Well, what you're doing by creating that distinction is a form of status competition." They got really upset with us for saying so. But how else do you characterize that?

Heath: That's why we say all the countercultural backpackers poking around the remote beaches of Thailand are the shock troops of mass tourism; what you have to do to be an authentic countercultural traveler is find the place that is uncontaminated by Western influence. The place where they don't take Visa. And pretty soon, what do you know, they do take Visa, because a bunch of other Westerners have followed you there. It's the desire to always find the place where no Westerner has been before that drives people out into these places. In the same way that the missionaries aggressively expanded across the planet in order to bring the word of Christ, the countercultural faith drives people to bring every last little corner of the world into the orbit of consumer capitalism.

Except that, unlike the missionaries, the actual leaders of this movement really don't want to be followed.

Heath: It's intrinsically competitive. The only way to get away from it all is to not have other people follow you.

You write that the Beastie Boys called the counterculture's bluff with their song "You've Got to Fight for the Right (to Party)"—that it was all about having more fun. Has the counterculture rebellion been a success in that regard? Are we having a better time?

Heath: I would tend to say yes, but it's important to recognize that we're not cultural critics. And we're not developing a cultural criticism of the counterculture. We're developing a political criticism of the counterculture. What we're claiming is that it's not that the counterculture failed to enhance the culture; it's that the countercultural rebels made a whole series of promissory notes about how cultural rebellion was going to generate economic and political transformation of society. Social justice and so forth. And people like Charles Reich have claimed that change in the culture is actually the high road to economic and political change—that it's the more effective political strategy. Our complaint about the counterculture is that it has completely failed to deliver on these political promissory notes. Furthermore, it's exacerbated many of the economic problems that it was supposed to solve.

Such as overconsumption?

Heath: Yeah. But Andrew and I are both enthusiastic consumers of cultural products, many of them countercultural. I don't have any problem with the counterculture on a cultural level. What's not to like?

One thing not to like, maybe, is the self-loathing it inspires. You offer a pretty scathing critique of films like American Beauty and Fight Club that use 1960s philosophy to present a fundamentally depressing view of modern American life. And yet these films are hugely popular among the very people that they're criticizing. What does that say about how we feel about ourselves, that we're eating this stuff up?

Heath: Well, I think all it does is validate the quote we take from Thomas Frank: "Business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching." The theory of mass society is like Palmolive. We're soaking in it. And people love it. And so you can just play off dominant tropes like the overbearing mother and the fascist boss and the rebel who rejects it all. Of course this stuff sells. It's our new Hero with a Thousand Faces.

And you trace this mythology back to whom, to Freud?

Heath: Yeah, we pretty much blame Freud for everything.

Do you think our society needs to be de-Freudianized?

Heath: Our popular culture could use a bit less of him, yeah. Freud had a very bleak vision of what goes on within humans and what potential there is for freedom. But he was writing at a time when it was clear that you ultimately had to choose civilization over freedom and reason over your instincts. That seemed obvious to him. But what happens in the twentieth century is that people retain the same bleak view of human nature, but they start to think that, what with the atomic arms race and so forth, perhaps civilization isn't such a great deal after all. What you see in American Beauty is the bleakness of the Freudian vision. The central thesis of American Beauty is that you cannot be a well-adjusted adult. There is no such thing. Either you're a teenager acting completely irresponsibly, or you're a fascist who follows the rules and is slowly going nuts. Those are your options. We think that that's simply false. There are lots of well-adjusted adults. Some kinds of repression are very good and useful. We have to start drawing more careful distinctions when it comes to what we rebel against.

It seems like the catchiest concept the counterculture has come up with has been the dehumanization of humankind and the personification of systems and machines. Technology is not our tool so much as it controls us; advertising, rather than catering to us, is brainwashing us. Why do you think this idea is so seductive, that things are controlling us rather than the other way around?

Heath: Well, I would say that our society does seem like a system that's out of control. It does generate the impression of being machine-like. Capitalism does that. But the counterculture draws the wrong conclusions from that. In the extreme, conspiracy theorists argue that there's somebody behind it all, pulling all the strings. Our analysis is just the opposite. The reason that capitalism has this machine-like quality is that capitalism is the most decentralized system of social integration in human history. That is, a market economy generates order out of highly decentralized individual decisions made by people in the market. We can sit around talking until we're blue in the face about what we don't like about it, but that will have absolutely no impact. As a result, the system appears to be controlling us. It's an illusion that comes from not really understanding how a market economy functions. But it's a natural illusion that arises almost automatically.

How do you think the countercultural Left compares intellectually to previous generations of leftists?

Potter: Certainly, when you hear about leftists of the forties, fifties, and earlier, it seems they were reading and thinking in a more intellectually serious way than what you see now.

Heath: I don't know. I don't think it's a case of higher or lower qualities of debate. I mean, the Left has spent a lot of the twentieth century worshipping false gods. Consider the amount of time that was wasted trying to find ways of making communism work: it was a massive diversion of energies away from reformist projects into revolutionary projects that ultimately were fruitless. The contemporary counterculture is similarly, in our view, a massive diversion of political and intellectual energy into pointless cultural issues. It is a false god on par with communism. Just look at the culture wars in the universities and the amount of political capital that the Left has burned debating what kind of literature undergraduates should be reading. The kind of post-modern, deconstructive stuff that is consistently made fun of—there's a reason that stuff gets made fun of, because it is actually quite goofy. Has Western civilization fundamentally been shaken by the fact that the canon of Western literature has been modified in some courses at some of the colleges?

You also make the point in your book that by bringing these cultural issues to the fore, the Left has provided a platform for the likes of Ann Coulter. Do you think the Left has succeeded in dragging the Right down with them into what you consider foolish cultural debate?

Potter: Yeah, except that the Right is winning. In the United States, academics spouting postmodern theories translates into votes in Kansas for the Republican Party. The Republicans have won the culture war by making it into a fight for the soul of America. They can now brand their countercultural opposition as anti-American. I mean, Ann Coulter wrote a book called Treason. That's been incredibly damaging to the Democrats, that they've allowed themselves to be branded as traitors.

Heath: That's why the Republicans have no intention of doing anything to impose their view on these various cultural fronts; they're getting such great mileage out of the culture wars themselves. So while the Left may be dragging the Right down to its level, overall it's not helping the cause of social justice and progressive politics.

The fact is, the critique of mass society is inherently anti-democratic. Not only does it exhibit contempt for the masses by suggesting that they're brainwashed conformists, it's also motivated by the implicit view that the masses are dangerous. It suggests that these are the people who supplied the concentration-camp guards—the conformists just following orders. And so it's in conflict with trying to build a mass political party, because underlying it all is a belief system that's deeply insulting to the majority of the population.

So the critique of mass society has caused the countercultural Left to basically give up on the idea of political persuasion?

Potter: There's a myth of powerlessness on the Left. Last fall, Lewis Lapham wrote a piece in Harper's about the forty-year process the Republicans had gone through to take over the American political system. It was about how thirty or forty years ago they set out a plan to invest all kinds of money in think tanks and endow university chairs and so on, to produce generations of cohorts imbued with this rightist view of things. Lapham made it sound like a state propaganda project, which it was. But at no point did he ask the question, where's the Left been in all this? The implicit idea on the Left is always, "Oh, the Right's got the money; they're the ones who can afford to do this." That's a load of crap. Look at the amount of money that's been spent on marijuana alone by the Left over the past forty years. If we'd just put a tax of one percent on that and put it into endowments, you'd have something bigger than Harvard.

Do you think progressive political candidates do enough to try to persuade the countercultural Left to participate in politics? Do they pander too much to countercultural ideas?

Potter: I think leftist politicians are having trouble getting people to pay attention to them because of the counterculture. Four years ago in Canada there was a New Left conference, with Naomi Klein involved, to attempt to reshape the New Democratic Party. What they concluded was that the NDP was no good, which meant they'd have to start a New Left party. It was ridiculous—here was this left-wing party that had been around for ages and the new, new left decided that it was no good. The biggest disaster was what happened to Howard Dean. Here's a guy who sweeps to prominence almost entirely on the basis of having the countercultural vote, and they abandon him.

Was it a mistake on his part even to try to reach that demographic?

Potter: It was a mistake to see it as anything more than an Internet phenomenon. It was a mistake to think that things happening on e-mail lists were going to translate into votes. I hate to say it, but the countercultural Left can't be trusted. They can't be trusted to turn out to vote, and they can't be trusted to continue to support their candidates.

Do you think that perhaps Thorstein Veblen's theory of wealth—that there are diminishing returns in satisfaction with each rung one climbs on the economic ladder—applies to politics? That the better society gets, the less satisfaction we get out of political reform? Might the Left's embrace of the counterculture be a symptom of that?

Potter: It's certainly true that state action is subject to diminishing returns and therefore political action gets more difficult and less rewarding. There are very clear examples of this with environmental legislation. When governments first started regulating things like air quality in the late sixties, you could pass regulations that would generate massive improvements in urban air quality. Banning leaded gasoline, for example, was a very, very simple piece of legislation to pass, and it resulted in dramatic improvement in urban air quality. In the early seventies, there were enormous benefits to be gained at relatively low cost and problems were relatively simple to resolve. There's a simple reason for that: people tackle the easiest problems first. The problems we're left with are ones that are increasingly difficult to legislate against and ones where the costs are more evenly balanced with the benefits. And then you have to start crunching numbers and doing some economics and it gets very complicated. Of course it gets more difficult to mobilize people politically when you're trying to argue for complex things like tradable pollution permits. So I think it's true that the kind of state action that we call for as the core agenda of the Progressive Left has diminishing returns. Which is why we need to galvanize ourselves to get more engaged politically, precisely because the problems are more difficult.

Can you imagine what America would be like had the Left not become dominated by the counterculture?

Heath: America is diverging from the mainstream trajectory of development of other Western industrial democracies. You can see it, both institutionally in terms of the dismantling of the welfare state and culturally in the individualistic concept of personal fulfillment in the United States. The United States is in that respect very, very much out of sync with the development of values in both Europe and Canada. I think that without the enormous influence of the counterculture, the United States would be much more in tune with the rest of the world.

So you blame the counterculture for rampant individualism and for the turn toward free-market policy?

Heath: Not exclusively, of course. But the dominance of countercultural thinking and the massive trauma of the Vietnam era to the American psyche have caused American politics to be reconfigured along culture-war lines instead of along traditional Left-Right lines. That's had a massively distorting impact on the development of the state, the economy, and the culture of the United States.

Potter: There's a common theory that if Kennedy had not been assassinated, the entire history of the U.S. since the sixties would have turned out a lot differently. I don't know how true that is, but I do believe that the sixties was a major trauma that has launched America on a forty-year trajectory out of the orbit of the rest of Western civilization.

Heath: You only have to look at the last election campaign. It was all about Vietnam. If you look at what fundamentally divides a Republican from a Democrat, it's how they feel about the 1960s and the counterculture and the anti-war movement.

Do you think that over the last sixty years, progressives have been slower than conservatives to realize when strategies are failing? First communism, then sixties radicalism—is it a failing particular to the Left to cling to false gods?

Heath: Well, I think free-market ideology and laissez-faire have taken just as long to fade away. Dogmatism is fundamental to the human condition, it's not just political. But it is true that people on the Left tend to feel morally obliged not to change their minds. They feel obliged to be in support of rent control, for example, because it helps the poor and the disadvantaged. And they won't change their minds even when economic reasoning shows that rent control hurts the poor more than it helps them. So I do sometimes think you get a characteristic type of ideological rigidity on the Left, where people are unwilling to even explore certain arguments because it might lead them to a conclusion that they find morally unattractive.

Were you both raised in countercultural families?

Heath: Very much so. My parents were back-to-the-landers, hard-core. My mom was American. She left the United States in the sixties. They were a bit old to be hippies, but they were heavily, heavily influenced by countercultural ideas.

Potter: My mom was countercultural. My dad was in the military, so it was kind of hard for him to grow his hair long. But he later grew an afro and got a beard and the whole deal. We have a lot of macramé at my house and my mom made granola for years.

How have they reacted to the book?

Potter: I don't know if they get it.

Heath: My step-mom, who was a hard-core sixties radical, actually read it before it went to print and basically thought we got it right. And from the reaction that I've gotten from most older people who were heavily invested in sixties ideas, I've come to recognize that to a large extent, it was the god that failed for them.

On the whole, have you had a better response to the book from older generations than from the young?

Potter: For the most part, the reactions have been quite positive across the board. What seems to be emerging is that the older generation recognizes, as Joe said, that the counterculture is the god that failed, while the younger generation understands implicitly that alternative culture is, more than anything, an information asymmetry. Whereas you once had enclaves of cool that very gradually percolated out, now, because of TV and particularly the Internet, the latest cool thing can become a mass phenomenon within twenty minutes. They see the bogusness of the whole notion of alternative culture as something subversive. The exception, of course, is the people who are vested in that idea. Kalle Lassen, the editor of Adbusters magazine, called us "fuckheads."

That's pretty unequivocal.

Potter: He red-baited us, too. He said our call for state-imposed regulation as opposed to individual consumer activism sounds like something that made sense back in the days of the Soviet Union.

Heath: This is the point that we make, about the extent to which the countercultural Left shares ideas with the Right. He literally said, "Oh, these guys are calling for state regulation of environmental externalities. That's communist."

Potter: It sounds like something Mao would have said.

Is this an example of the extremes meeting? Do you find that a lot of countercultural ideas are shared by the Right, and particularly the religious Right in North America?

Heath: Christians in the States have actually quite aggressively appropriated the countercultural vocabulary. The critique of mass society is not intrinsically anti-right-wing. What we see now in the United States is a lot of evangelical Christians embracing the critique of mass society, because they think we live in a world of sin and that they're the oppressed minority—the enlightened rebels—and until the rapture comes, they're basically going to be the counterculture.

Potter: Or take someone like Naomi Klein. Set aside her economic beliefs and look at her political program: it's deep, decentralized democracy—faith in the grass roots and individual action. It's straight-ahead Republicanism.

You seem to be leftists in the tradition of George Orwell. Leftists who are deeply put-off by the reality of the Left. Do you identify yourselves with that end of the spectrum?

Heath: The reason we're leftists is that we actually share the core left-wing critique of capitalism. In other words, we think that all of the major problems that the Left has identified as unattractive byproducts of the market economy are in fact genuine and serious problems. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Left has been right on all the big issues. I mean, when it comes to the environment, the stability of the banking system and the importance of macro-economic stabilization, labor-market policies, welfare, unemployment, health insurance—the Left has been absolutely right on every single issue. But they've systematically given wrong explanations for why capitalism produces these problems. And as a result, they've often proposed mistaken solutions.

But who is this "Left" that you're talking about? All of the good ideas that you've mentioned have been adopted, in varying degrees, by nearly all Western governments. Do you think that maybe the good Left has been co-opted by the state?

Potter: I don't know if it's a matter of co-opting so much as reform. Valuable reforms are often seen by both sides as valuable. Even those on the Right recognize the value in having a welfare state, unemployment insurance, various forms of regulation. And as we point out in the book, there are a lot of forms of regulation that capitalists have no reason to oppose, as long as they allow a fair competitive playing field.

Heath: Clearly, we don't view the Left-Right polarity as being exclusive, or as inherently antagonistic. There's more common ground than a lot of people think. Part of the reason the Left thinks that it has no common ground at all with the Right is a consequence of the mistaken explanations they provide for these negative byproducts of capitalism.

Your book is not just a critique of countercultural protest; it seems to be an appeal to people engaged in that kind of protest to work toward political reform instead. But what makes you see the followers of Naomi Klein and Kalle Lassen as potential allies? What makes you think that if they weren't culture jamming or marching against globalization, they would be doing something politically useful?

Potter: We've been accused by a few people of concocting this thing called "the counterculture" and lumping everybody into it. That's a misunderstanding of the message of the book. We're not claiming that everyone who calls himself a leftist wants to destroy the system or overthrow capitalism. What we're trying to show is the way countercultural thinking permeates and insinuates itself into all kinds of leftist views of the world.

Heath: Also, there's a lot of do-goodism that informs countercultural activities. People will eat organic vegetables, partly because they think they're helping the world. They think they're doing something good for nature and for other people. And we're trying to point out that that's a misguided way of doing things for nature and for other people. You should be targeting bad practices in agriculture on a political level. The desire to do good is an important motivating factor in a lot of what goes on in counterculture. But it's being misdirected. I think what we need to do is to harness some of that do-goodism and divert it into useful political activities.

2005-05-30T22:02:00.000-04:00

gotta love the basal ganglia

or is to basal ganglia the love?

May 31, 2005

Watching New Love as It Sears the Brain

By BENEDICT CAREY

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.

"When you're in the throes of this romantic love it's overwhelming, you're out of control, you're irrational, you're going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day - why? Because she's there," said Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the co-author of the analysis. "And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live."

Brain imaging technology cannot read people's minds, experts caution, and a phenomenon as many sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics, like those produced by the technique used in the study, called functional M.R.I.

Still, said Dr. Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital, "I distrust about 95 percent of the M.R.I. literature and I would give this study an 'A'; it really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love."

He added: "The findings fit nicely with a large, growing body of literature describing a generalized reward and aversion system in the brain, and put this intellectual construct of love directly onto the same axis as homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, craving for drugs."

In the study, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led a team that analyzed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who were in the first weeks or months of new love. The students looked at a picture of their beloved while an M.R.I. machine scanned their brains. The researchers then compared the images with others taken while the students looked at picture of an acquaintance.

Functional M.R.I. technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity.

In the study, a computer-generated map of particularly active areas showed hot spots deep in the brain, below conscious awareness, in areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit.

These areas are dense with cells that produce or receive a brain chemical called dopamine, which circulates actively when people desire or anticipate a reward. In studies of gamblers, cocaine users and even people playing computer games for small amounts of money, these dopamine sites become extremely active as people score or win, neuroscientists say.

Yet falling in love is among the most irrational of human behaviors, not merely a matter of satisfying a simple pleasure, or winning a reward. And the researchers found that one particular spot in the M.R.I. images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.

This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.

This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, "is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don't think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized," Dr. Brown said.

The intoxication of new love mellows with time, of course, and the brain scan findings reflect some evidence of this change, Dr. Fisher said.

In an earlier functional M.R.I. study of romance, published in 2000, researchers at University College London monitored brain activity in young men and women who had been in relationships for about two years. The brain images, also taken while participants looked at photos of their beloved, showed activation in many of the same areas found in the new study - but significantly less so, in the region correlated with passionate love, she said.

In the new study, the researchers also saw individual differences in their group of smitten lovers, based on how long the participants had been in the relationships. Compared with the students who were in the first weeks of a new love, those who had been paired off for a year or more showed significantly more activity in an area of the brain linked to long-term commitment.

Last summer, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta reported that injecting a ratlike animal called a vole with a single gene turned promiscuous males into stay-at-home dads - by activating precisely the same area of the brain where researchers in the new study found increased activity over time.

"This is very suggestive of attachment processes taking place," Dr. Brown said. "You can almost imagine a time where instead of going to Match.com you could have a test to find out whether you're an attachment type or not."

One reason new love is so heart-stopping is the possibility, the ever-present fear, that the feeling may not be entirely requited, that the dream could suddenly end.

In a follow-up experiment, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Aron and Dr. Brown have carried out brain scans on 17 other young men and women who recently were dumped by their lovers. As in the new love study, the researchers compared two sets of images, one taken when the participants were looking at a photo of a friend, the other when looking at a picture of their ex.

Although they are still sorting through the images, the investigators have noticed one preliminary finding: increased activation in an area of the brain related to the region associated with passionate love. "It seems to suggest what the psychological literature, poetry and people have long noticed: that being dumped actually does heighten romantic love, a phenomenon I call frustration-attraction," Dr. Fisher said in an e-mail message.

One volunteer in the study was Suzanna Katz, 22, of New York, who suffered through a breakup with her boyfriend three years ago. Ms. Katz said she became hyperactive to distract herself after the split, but said she also had moments of almost physical withdrawal, as if weaning herself from a drug.

"It had little to do with him, but more with the fact that there was something there, inside myself, a hope, a knowledge that there's someone out there for you, and that you're capable of feeling this way, and suddenly I felt like that was being lost," she said in an interview.

And no wonder. In a series of studies, researchers have found that, among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person's opinions, hobbies, expressions, character, as well as sharing one's own. "The expansion of the self happens very rapidly, it's one of the most exhilarating experiences there is, and short of threatening our survival it is one thing that most motivates us," said Dr. Aron, of SUNY, a co-author of the study.

To lose all that, all at once, while still in love, plays havoc with the emotional, cognitive and deeper reward-driven areas of the brain. But the heightened activity in these areas inevitably settles down. And the circuits in the brain related to passion remain intact, the researchers say - intact and capable in time of flaring to life with someone new.

2005-05-17T12:39:00.000-04:00

magic squares :)

try one here

2005-05-17T00:43:00.000-04:00

oh no....they're really going to start charging us for the nytimes?!

::tear hair out::

whatever will i do to fill all the empty hours???

2005-05-16T16:19:00.000-04:00

democracy in a world of inequality
(referencing Setting the People Free by John Dunn)

Dunn's difficulty remains rooted in equality. How do you run a world where every nation, great and small, conforms to the latest definition of democracy, when equality between nations and between their citizens is simply not a realistic part of the equation? Where there are winners and losers by design, one world of permanent inequality? That's a pretty feeble beacon - and some nasty supplementary questions spin out from behind it.

One is the way that the economic order that goes with democracy renders freedom to choose, to change course profoundly, an illusion. Success (or failure) is handing political power to a central bank. Make Alan Greenspan or Mervyn King monarchs of the market and your vote inevitably loses force, the parts it can influence shrunk to opaque pledges about tax and pleas to nurses to wash their hands.

There is, in short, less to vote about, egoism abetted by forces and capital flows that are bigger than any of us. Why opt for abortion or classroom discipline instead? Because these are little things, cheap things. Globalisation, even in a single democratic world, strips power away. "Parliament is degenerating into a subsidiary of the stock market," says Günter Grass. The German debate, like the French debate, is about despair and incomprehension, not lighting bonfires on Beacon Hill.

and a review by roy hattersley

2005-05-15T10:14:00.000-04:00

about time....

2005-05-14T22:37:00.000-04:00

hours of fun

the profession and prestige calculator from the nytimes. (part of the broader class calculator).
who knew that physicists were so much cooler than rest of us? .... oh wait. :P

and the accompanying article: Class in America

2005-05-12T10:21:00.000-04:00

it almost sounds hopeful

2005-05-12T09:31:00.000-04:00

and ... poor blair .... (not to be confused with pooh bear :P)

2005-05-12T09:27:00.000-04:00

nytimes editorial: the roads are paved with pork
more reasons to hate alaska... :P

2005-05-04T20:36:00.000-04:00

some words from Konrad Lorenz

I realised that an overpowering increase in the drives of feeding as well as of copulation and a waning of more differentiated social instincts is characteristic of very many domestic animals. I was frightened - as I still am - by the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity.

.... The elemental neural organisation underlying behaviour does not consist
of a receptor, an afferent neuron stimulating a motor cell and of an
effector activated by the latter. Holst's hypothesis which we confidently
can make our own, says that the basic central nervous organisation
consists of a cell permanently producing endogenous stimulation, but
prevented from activating its effector by another cell which, also
producing endogenous stimulation, exerts an inhibiting effect. It is this
inhibiting cell which is influenced by the receptor and ceases its
inhibitory activity at the biologically "right" moment.

2005-05-03T16:58:00.000-04:00

here are some things that struck me from an interview with Bernard-Henri Levy:

BHL: A thing which impressed me there, at the beginning, was the flood of American flags. Everywhere American flags. On the windows, on the shops, on the jackets, on the bicycles, on the cars. I am coming from a country where you never see a flag. I come from a country where to love the flag, or to feel an emotion in front of the flag, is considered as proof that you are a cuckoo and an idiot. And I arrived in a country where there are flags everywhere. My hypothesis is that it has something to do with the fragility of being a nation in this huge space of fifty states. People come from everywhere. The greatness of America is that being a nation has nothing to do with the evidence of the body. It has nothing to do even with the fact of having common roots in common ground. It has to do with an idea. It has to do with contracts. It is to want to be an American. We are not born American, we become American, and this creates a sort of uncertainness, a sort of fragility. Compensation for that is this extreme exhibition of the flag.

Another difference. I come from a country where religion, the faith, the creed in God, is a declining attitude. Old churches are in a deep crisis. But I landed in a country last year where you cannot find one American —lady or gentleman—saying that he doesn't believe in God. Tocqueville had seen that already. This is a big part of his observation. He stressed the paradox of this being the only nation in the world where freedom and faith did not go in two separate roads. In France, liberty has had to be gained over religion. The less religion we have in France, the more liberty we have. In America, Tocqueville said, it is contrary—the two nourish and feed each other.

Sometimes one feels that in America banks look like churches; "In God We Trust." But you also have the feeling that some churches look like banks. At the Willow Creek mega-church, for example, you feel as if you have walked into a big bank. And a new fact for me in this theatre of the religions is the proximity, the banality, the prosaicism of God.

David Brooks: A Harvard historian, Sacvan Bercovitch, said to me one of the smartest things that has been said about the Unites States, which is that a crucial distinction was not recognized here between the sacred and the profane. He said that when people came here in the seventeenth century, they noticed two things. First they noticed the incredible abundance that was in front of them. And then they came to realize that God's plan could be realized here on this continent. So religious fulfillment, and getting rich while doing it, went together. I think that's why churches begin to look like banks and we have companies like Ben and Jerry's ice cream which look like churches.

BHL:

So, of what am I afraid? Of what should you be afraid? I would not dare to say. You know yourself. But myself there are a few things which I love and a few which frighten me. For instance, coming back to the topic of religion. One day I was in a helicopter going above the Grand Canyon. The pilot was a young boy, quite up-to-date, modern, liking new music, dating with a beautiful girl, and—I'm completely sure—secular in his mind. A modern, young, American boy. And I asked him "What about this huge, magnificent landscape that we see under our feet?" The canyon. And he said to me, "There are two theories." I felt aie, aie, aie, as we say in French, Problems begin! "First theory," he said, "during millions of years, the erosion of the water," and so on and so on. "Second theory," he said, "six thousand years ago there was a big flood which took place exactly here. And this is the place of the creation of the world." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Yes, there was a second theory which said the world was created six thousand years ago, in six days, and in this very place." We spoke when we landed, and he told me that he frankly did not know if Darwin was a scientist or a crook. That he frankly did not know if the birth of the universe was an immemorial event or a historic event like in the Bible. And I felt that is the thing of which, if I was American, I would be afraid.

Today, they say, there is a Darwinist science and there is a creationist science. What the young pilot of my helicopter meant, by saying there are two theories, was exactly that. This is very serious, because if both of them are scientific then you give to creationism the title of legitimacy. This is a phenomenon which we don't have in France. It might be a little example, but it tells a lot of the dark side of the future of America.

Tocqueville said that there was an instinctive mistrust of the American people toward great ideas. He called them "les grandes systèmes"—grand, great systems. And this nourished the idea of a pragmatic, un-ideological nation. I found exactly the contrary.

There was a book published one year ago, by a good author—and a very good book which I recommend to you—called What's the Matter With Kansas? The author of this book wondered whether it was a surprise that so many Americans were ready to vote against their economic interests. To vote against one's economic interests means ideology—means politics. It is the very definition of politics. If people voted only for their economic interests there would not be politics.

It is no longer true that America is a neutral, pragmatic, unpolitical country. One of the most stupid things I heard during the two last years about America is that the conservative coalition and President Bush went to Iraq because of interests—because of oil. No! For the best or for the worst, America went to Iraq for ideological purposes, for ideas.

2005-04-28T10:19:00.000-04:00

Another useless letter to David Brooks....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear David,

Sometimes it seems like you make an art out of ignoring the obvious. What a
a shame, considering you received what was no doubt a fine Chicago education.
::suppress guffaw here:: (ahem.)

In reference to your column "Mourning Mother Russia":

"When those totalitarian regimes fall, different parts of society recover
at different rates. Some enterprising people take advantage of economic
recovery, and the result of their efforts is economic growth.

But private morality, the habits of self-control [actually, it would seem
that good self-control would have been a trait critical to survival in a
police state, and would therefore be quite well trained in the older
population...it is the cult of the individual and the misperception of
whatever-the-hell-i-want as freedom that lead to lack of self control] and
the social fabric take a lot longer to recover. So you wind up with
nations in which high growth rates and lingering military power mask
profound social chaos."

And yet,

"The more shocking reason Russia's population is declining is that people
are dying younger. Russians are now much less healthy than their
grandparents were in 1960. In the past three decades, Russian mortality
rates have risen by 40 percent."

As you are aware, those "lucky" grandparents in 1960 had already been
living under decades of totalitarian control. An inescapable conclusion of
your own words taken at face value is that this particular communist
regime, even as it "destroy[ed] the bonds of civic trust and the normal
patterns of social cohesion ... rule[d] by fear, [etc.]" nonetheless
managed to maintain a functional if limited health care and social
security system, and was socially conservative enough to preserve the
family (even if only as a defense against the ravages of the government).

It is more likely the conversion to a particularly rapacious form of
capitalism, the elevation of profit and every man for himself above
social responsibility, the abdication of the government from concerning
itself, in however small proportion, with the welfare of the people, that
has contributed to the (yes, terrifying) declines in the Russian condition
of which you so compellingly write.

However corrupt and ideological the old government may have been, it
nonetheless existed in the name of the people; even as it warped that people's
interests to pursue geopolitical military might, it still provided for their most
basic needs. Corporate power, by contrast, is answerable to no one but the limits
of human greed. As you point out, we all have a stake in the well-being of
the Russian people. It seems that the investors (often living abroad) in Russia's
economic development, arguably at the cost of her social stability, may not know
or care. (Do they read the New York Times editorials?)

Replace fear with profound poverty and lack of security for most, replace
the abuse of political power with the abuse of economic power, and public
life still becomes brutish. Replace traditional values with the exaltation
of wealth above all else, replace governmental power with corporate power
and private and public morality nonetheless become perverted.

Sincerely,

Rosa Cao

2005-04-18T15:40:00.000-04:00

well, back from chile....phew. i posted some pics here

disclaimers:

1.) i just got a new camera, so some of the movies are a little giddy :) don't hold any seasickness/blairwitch flashbacks against me, please.

2.) it's mostly scenery, so if you find trees, mountains, lakes, etc. boring, don't bother looking -- the people have been edited out for the most part.

3.) if you turn the sound off during the movies, you won't hear any obscenities.

4.) have fun with your keyboard shortcuts :P

2005-04-08T01:13:00.000-04:00

not in my name: the irresponsibility of reverencing a dead pope

The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy.

The Vatican's deeper power is in its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees. With its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across the world. In countries where 50% are infected, millions of very young Aids orphans are today's immediate victims of the curia. Refusing support to all who offer condoms, spreading the lie that the Aids virus passes easily through microscopic holes in condoms - this irresponsibility is beyond all comprehension.

In 1971 I interviewed Mother Teresa and asked how she justified letting starving babies be born to die on Calcutta streets for lack of contraception. She said sublimely that every baby entering the world was another soul created in praise of God, even if it lived only a few hours. She was never keen on cures: suffering was a gift of God that enabled those who cared for the afflicted to demonstrate their love. She was beatified by John Paul II for their shared religious mania. Those who met them talk of an aura of love, power, listening and intensity. But goodness is in doing good; good intent is no excuse for murderous error.

Today's saccharine sanctimony will try to whiten the sepulchre of yet another Pope whose obscurantist faith has caused pointless suffering; it is no defence that he was only obeying higher orders.

2005-04-06T01:52:00.000-04:00

wow, the sort of supercool corporate work that almost makes you want to sell out!

Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Campbell Soup are all working with a biotechnology company called Senomyx, which has developed several chemicals, most of which do not have any flavor of their own but instead work by activating or blocking receptors in the mouth that are responsible for taste. They can enhance or replicate the taste of sugar, salt and monosodium glutamate, or MSG, in foods.
--------------------

and as for msg, my personal favorite flavoring.....how come no one told me about the brain lesions???

"There's a negative consumer perception held by some people regarding MSG," said Mr. Snyder, who came out of retirement in 2003 to become Senomyx's chief executive. "Some school districts, for instance, won't sell MSG-containing snacks."

In the 1970's, after it was shown to induce brain lesions and nervous system disorders in laboratory animals, baby food manufacturers removed it from their products.

2005-03-27T10:29:00.000-05:00

i can't believe this b%$@s#*! gets published:

"At the same time, the scientific legacy of the Enlightenment, which argued that human life resided not in the body but the mind, is now being undermined, as modern neuroscience demystifies elements of thought and personality as heartless biochemical or genetic processes. The mind is simply prisoner to the body's DNA."

wtf, the mind is not "simply" anything. humans might be prisoners to our embodied natures (needing air, for example), but we are not "simply" that and nothing more. ::growl::

2005-03-26T11:01:00.000-05:00

wow, stillsuits. just like in Dune! :P

2005-03-22T17:09:00.000-05:00

appalling.

from the nytimes op-ed page: A Blow to the Rule of Law

They did so yesterday with the new law, which gives "any parent of Theresa Marie Schiavo" standing to sue in federal court to keep her alive.

This narrow focus is offensive. The founders believed in a nation in which, as Justice Robert Jackson once wrote, we would "submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules." There is no place in such a system for a special law creating rights for only one family. . . . the right to bring such claims in federal court is reserved for people with enough political pull to get a law passed that names them in the text.

2005-03-17T14:48:00.000-05:00

europe bright

2005-03-16T10:56:00.000-05:00

i liked this juxtaposition:

fake news under bush (yesterday's nytimes)

chinese propaganda office (today's nytimes)

one of them involves a balance of powers

2005-03-13T14:30:00.000-05:00

The Claim:
Cutler says, medical spending isn't increasing because of inflation so much as because of people consuming more ''good stuff.''

from the Sunday Times Magazine: The Quality Cure?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
it seems like a big part of the reason people need more of the "good stuff" (health care) is because the focus in both industry and research is on cures rather than prevention. possibly because the profit in privately sponsored medical research (by, say, pharmaceutical companies) comes from people being sick and needing to spend money to treat it, rather than in making people stay healthy without drugs.

one way to keep costs down would be to focus on education and maintenance of health, rather than "miracles" and heroic attempts to put the pieces back together once they have already broken. such an approach offers incentives not just to patients, employers (those who pay for health plans) but also insurance providers. nor are providers unaware of these possibilities: many Blue Cross plans, for example, offer to subsidize gym memberships, and send out newsletters encouraging people to take better care of their health, whether by eating better or exercising more. also, the efficacy of treatments, no matter how advanced, is improved when the patient is generally healthy to begin with.

combining a strategy of prevention with the doctor incentives focusing on results rather than treatments (as discussed in the article) could do more to increase both the quality and efficiency of care while controlling costs.

2005-03-13T12:03:00.000-05:00

niall ferguson on the new imperial tribute

2005-03-12T14:15:00.000-05:00

francis fukuyama on the protestant ethic ... sounding authoritative as usual.

the only part i object to is here:

"What held traditional China and Japan back, we now understand, was not culture, but stifling institutions, bad politics and misguided policies. Once these were fixed, both societies took off."

we now understand??? you condescending jackass. what about actual, material conditions? like the size of the population? or the climate and natural environment? or the distribution of natural resources?

and in what sense exactly are you defining "back"??? took off where? straight toward the consumer culture and deepseated spiritual ennui that define the western world today?

2005-03-07T17:06:00.000-05:00

goodbye bethe

and sean's comment:

[but]
sluox777: just being a scientist is NOT ENOUGH to get you a long ob in the Times. which, is really the dream of my life.

sluox777: Sean Luo, public intellectual, dies at 92
sluox777: smirk.

2005-02-17T12:14:00.000-05:00

iraqi elections and the purple finger

2005-02-01T13:05:00.000-05:00

the spin on iraqi elections

2005-01-30T17:08:00.000-05:00

who took over my brain?

2005-01-27T14:58:00.000-05:00

Ukraine vs. Iran; or, Timothy Garton Ash on why paymon is wrong.

2005-01-26T21:40:00.000-05:00

transatlantic relations again

2005-01-25T13:13:00.000-05:00

why i love bill gates (and MS): the new robin hood

2005-01-19T01:25:00.000-05:00

apparently i only post the night before exams. but i still think this review of Blink is cool, even if it is written by david i-have-a-heart,-really-i-do brooks.

...and along those lines, it's too bad we can't harness all those great visual computation skills we've got to do other similarly complicated analyses (say, my homework) similarly instantaneously.

and wow. i wonder how my roomies fared.

2004-12-15T03:33:00.000-05:00

funyuns, baloney, and CAMKII. yippee. i didn't like aplysia the first 3 times either.
"when the revolution comes, we will abolish all exams" -- Mao, via my mother. :)

2004-12-10T19:37:00.000-05:00

Maybe we could harness WordOfMouth for spreading useful things, like liberalism ;) instead of more mundane products:

WordOfMouth Manifesto
Buzz in nytimes

2004-12-05T22:25:00.000-05:00

god save us all

"social anglican" .... is that like a "social drinker"?

2004-12-04T23:29:00.000-05:00

so yesterday i was warmly welcomed to my "mid-twenties" .... and it all seemed bright and shining and wonderful (yes i do have the best friends in the world, thank you very much) until this afternoon, when i came across this in the ever-depressing nytimes -- confirmation that we peak in cognitive powers, including processing speed and memory in our early to mid twenties. yes, peak. implying, the followup of 50ish years of long, steady, irreversible decline. oh. no.

why am i in school??? why am i doing mindless busywork? my brain is decaying before (behind!) my very eyes ... MUST DO SOMETHING IMPORTANT SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGING NOW!!!!!

::shudder::

::trundle off::

2004-11-18T02:37:00.000-05:00

national scrabble week : ) and ... spelling.

2004-11-11T14:01:00.000-05:00

finally, some good news! spinach power : )

2004-11-11T14:00:00.000-05:00

also, sid blumenthal on the rise of the new theocracy.

2004-11-11T13:54:00.000-05:00

two sides of Timothy Garton Ash: a review of the conciliatory-sounding what is to be done, and the more combative guardian article what to do about Bush.

2004-11-06T19:10:00.000-05:00

I've decide to voice some opinions of mine. Recently I have been uncharacteristically interested in politics and I have decided to stop that once again. (There is an art historical analysis of some of the particular contemporary political process underway/such as blog color schemes and so forth, but in any case...)

Many people I know are such staunch liberals who just absolutely hate Bush. But the reasons that they have given me seem to be a bit odd, or, at least, not relevant. There has been very little cogent analysis of the war in Iraq: the hawks' argument for attack (i.e., the propagation of democracy at large and America's responsibility to the world at large, that is, aside from terrorism) is difficult to refute. The only thing that is certain about the war is that it is poorly executed. It is unclear to me what explicit backstage agenda the hawks would have had (i.e., is it really conceivable that they started a whole war because of oil? Now, if you are sentimental and view all republicans as devils, then, perhaps.) But rational thinking tells us that the reason the current strategy was pursued was because the DC think tank conservatives had all along this idea of the "new world order", which, if not directly linked to Christianity per se, at least is linked to American hegemony in morality.

The question then becomes, is it all right to push American values as far as we can? That is, is it reasonable to claim that because we believe that freedom and equality are universal things, we therefore are in every way justified to protect this way of thinking with force? It's very hard for even a liberal who is against the war to say NO to that. And I dare you to produce a consistent argument against the war if you hold on to this undying doctrine of the forefathers.

For a postmodernist, however, the question becomes almost trivial. American moralism (or any moral philosophy) per se cannot possibly be justified universally: it is subject to deconstuction and deconstituiton which would tease out the elements of commercialism, Orientalistic sensationalism and other various (most likely, artificially constructed) prejudices. To advocate American "freedom and equality" (which is nothing but a amorphous construct) without a profound skepticism of its universal applicability is the reason why liberals cannot possibly sell the anti-war sentiments to the public. (Well, they probably cannot even sell it to themselves, because most likely they (as in, the emotional preppie activist liberals) are more in tune with these constructs than conservatives.)

Along the same lines, most people who voted Bush are not "stupid". (The Mirror's headline is a bit ill defined and ill supported.) They just don't have as much conscience as the Kerry voters. It is an irony that the Christians don't have as much conscience as the non-Christians, but it is reasonable, in the sense that religions in the end have to do with one's OWN sprirtuality. Futhermore, Bush is not that bad for the rich and/or bright (Gary Becker:education=human capital=money). He works for you. So, instead of bitching constantly about Bush, even a liberal ought to consider ways he can take advantage of the situation. Who cares about abortion (if you are careful), who cares about gays (as long as you aren't one), who cares about civil liberties (as long as you live on the coast). If you have capital, you have everything.

2004-11-04T13:30:00.000-05:00

Gary Wills: The Day the Enlightenment Went Out

2004-11-01T14:55:00.000-05:00

One of the best articles that I have read for a long time

For some reason, articles like that really...I don't even know what. It's enormously powerful, touching, yet I don't know if I should feel sympathetic or envious, or satisfied or what...I have a thousand words for it and yet I feel like my mouth suddenly got erased from the Matrix. It's the greatest irony that my pursuit of truth and freedom probably made me feel more trapped inside this spider web than people who never grappled with illusions and relativisms--they are entirely freer in many senses. On the other hand, it's never really up to me to decide my fate in the first place. So I don't even know if I should feel happy or sad.

most entertainingly, as a follow up:
"Gene Weingarten:
Good afternoon.

I was going to begin by just taking questions, but Ted Prus called me this morning, and there is Entertaining News.

You will remember that Ted doesn’t vote because he feels the political process is cynical. He mistrusts all politicians, including Bush and Kerry. He feels they are liars and opportunists. But he did say that if he were frog-marched into a voting booth with a gun to his head, and he absolutely had to vote one way or another, he’d probably opt for Kerry.

That was enough for the opportunists! On Saturday evening, Ted got a phone call. It was from a Democratic Party fundraiser, wanting to know if Ted would agree to travel the Midwest in the next three days, jetted from place to place on behalf of the campaign, urging the similarly disaffected to get out there and vote for Kerry. He’d get to meet Kerry, he was told, and hobnob with important people!

Ted declined.

He is my hero. "

2004-10-27T23:46:00.000-04:00

well, they did it. there are firecrackers going off and people shrieking with glee. i would celebrate, but there are these tests tomorrow. and some people just want to sleep...as usual.

2004-10-25T01:18:00.000-04:00

A nice article that I shall cite from a George Mason professor. This is essentially common sense, but rarely so well simplified and articulated. This really underlies the problems of the American general public. Most people who are not in the academia (excluding some policy circle specialists), frankly, don't know what they are talking about when they talk about politics. Most Americans constantly make statements that have "great emotional worth but little analytical value".

-----

Non-Politically Correct Thinking

Walter E. Williams

There're lots of terms used in ways that have great emotional worth but little analytical value. Take the term discrimination. When selecting a wife, some 43 years ago, not every woman was given an equal opportunity. I discriminated against white, Chinese, Japanese women, not to mention criminal women. You say, "Williams, that kind of discrimination is okay because it's harmless!" That's untrue. When I married, other women were harmed. The only way that I couldn't have harmed other women was to be a man that only one woman would want. Sometimes I'm tempted by the ideals of equal opportunity and non-discrimination, but Mrs. Williams insists otherwise. Discrimination simply means the act of choice.

Speaking of Mrs. Williams, early in our marriage she used to angrily charge: "You're using me Walter!" I'd tell her that of course I was using her. After all who in their right mind would marry a person for whom they had no use. In fact, another way of looking at the problem of people who can't find marriage partners is that they can't find somebody to use them. One never wants to be useless.

How about the expression: "It's not right to profit from the misfortune of others." That's utter nonsense that's easily revealed if we ask: Should there be a law against profiting from the misfortune of others? I'm guessing that auto collision shop owners are not saddened by predictions of ice storms. Neither are orthopedic physicians when people break a limb in a skiing accident. I profit from the fact that students are ignorant of economics. So should we have a law banning profiting from the misfortune of others?

What about prejudice and stereotyping? Going to the word's Latin root, to pre-judge simply means: making decisions on the basis of incomplete information. Here's an example. Suppose leaving your workplace you see a full-grown tiger standing outside the door. Most people would endeavor to leave the area in great dispatch. That prediction isn't all that interesting but the question why is. Is your decision to run based on any detailed information about that particular tiger or is it be based on tiger folklore and how you've seen other tigers behaving? It's probably the latter. You simply pre-judge that tiger; you stereotype him. If you didn't pre-judge and stereotype that tiger, you'd endeavor to obtain more information, like petting him on the head and doing other friendly things to determine whether he's dangerous. Most people quickly calculate that the likely cost of an additional unit of information about the tiger exceeded any benefit and wouldn't bother to seek additional information. In other words, all they need to know is he's a tiger.

Similarly, sometimes it makes sense to use sex and race stereotypes. If I'm face with choosing among people who could become soldiers and succeed in a 20-mile forced march carrying 60 pounds of equipment, I'd assign a higher likelihood that men would succeed more so than women. Or, choosing among the general population who is more likely to be able to slam-dunk a basketball, I'd choose a black over a white and surely men over women. If I were guessing the race of an American most likely to win a Nobel Prize in science, I'd select a Jew over any other ethnic group. In none of these cases, is there necessarily a causal relationship but there's surely an associative one. Moreover, pre-judging and stereotyping doesn't necessarily make one a sexist or racist.

You say, "Williams, how can you get away with such political incorrectness?" It's easy. I'm a tenured professor; I have diversified sources of income; plus I don't have much longer in this world.

2004-10-19T14:02:00.000-04:00

bush v. nytimes

2004-10-16T11:18:00.000-04:00

The National Eating Disorder

The magazine always has some cool articles. But I don't know how true this article is. Ti sounds good on the surfarce. It seems to me that those who are the most concerned with nutrition, and actually execute specific guidelines in US are in fact the more affluent and healthier people. Sure the attititude is there, but any regular old middle class American is going to eat whatever he had wanted to eat. To truly enjoy food anywhere, like to be able to truly enjoy anything else in life, is more a matter of social status. If you have more money (and free time, which has its monetary equivalents), you will have a more acute sense of pleasure from food. So, on to my Marxist critique of the food cultrue in America: perhaps it's the fact that there is a higher degree of social inequality that is at the root of the "American" deliemma.

The article also shows you what's wrong with humanities--you can make various statements via aecdotic evidence (my mother did so and so, therefore it must have been what EVERY mothre had done.) In fact the study WAS done, and the result is very surprising. The overall structrue of American diet, despite all the fads interjected, has not changed ALL THAT MUCH since the end of the WWII. The obesity phenomenon is a distinctly recent (~20 yrs) thing. It's really a hard, baffling question that shouldn't be attributed too easily (and pretentiously) to the fact that, Americans lack "culture" compared to the French--appeciating food is not like apprciating Bizet.

2004-10-12T22:33:00.000-04:00

i can't vote but ....

2004-10-12T10:19:00.000-04:00

has anyone else ever hit the snooze button repeatedly for 6+ hours in a graphic demonstration of the failure of will?

2004-09-26T03:08:00.000-04:00

is voting worth the trouble?

I particularly liked the following...it made me laugh

"Others have wondered whether voters aren't motivated primarily by a desire for self-expression, or by the ''entertainment value'' of going to the polls, or even by a fascination with voting machines. (Perhaps this is why so many people bestir themselves to vote without bothering to learn anything about the issues.) "

2004-09-22T01:44:00.000-04:00

why we should all get to vote

2004-09-16T20:08:00.000-04:00

on indecision

2004-09-12T13:44:00.008-04:00

Top Ten Things for being a "Good Kid in eyes of the Asian parents" (literal translation of an internet post that my mother pointed me to)

America is the world's most powerful economy and has the world's best educational institutions. In regard to children's education, American parents cannot compare to Chinese parents, but the Chinese methodology is nowhere near as scientific. Almost every Chinese parents eager to have his kid to be successful. Unforunately, how to make their children successful, not every parent has a clear notion of. Here are the "Good Kid in the eyes of Asian parents" standard list composed by Asian children.

1.get full credit on exams
2.plays violin or piano, in fact good enough to play in concerts
3.apply to 20 schools and get into all of them
4.get into a famous university, and get enough scholarship money to pay for tuition
5.has four hobbies, the first is to study, the second is to study, the third is to study, the forth is like to play piano or violin
6.like classical music, dislike "talking incessantly over the telephone"
7.get into a doctoral program with lots of scholarship money
8.has a goal to become a neurosurgeon
9.get married with another Asian doctor, with very sucessful children
10.like to listen to parents talking about their past stories, especially their toil of walking barefoot for 10 miles to go to school

2004-09-10T13:26:00.000-04:00

why there is no god, and the sad fate of genesis

2004-09-09T22:39:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/national/07doctor.html

there wasn't a single "large" settlement. I'll take this to mean that there are multiple small settlements. :-p

He looks like a nice guy. And, great thing he dropped out of a PhD program in biophysics.

2004-09-08T20:05:00.000-04:00

DUDE!!!!! my very own eggs and tomatoes made it into the nytimes!!!! :)
fancied up a bit, here's the recipe

2004-09-08T17:52:00.000-04:00

can we declare democracy dead yet?

it seems like the more we understand how elections really work, the more we can analyze what are "swing states" and "swing voters", the more obvious it becomes how little say all but a vanishingly small proportion of the electorate really have in how the country runs. the only thing keeping the government responsive to the will of the people may soon be the perception of a democracy that has no basis in the actual distribution of political power. the current administration seems to have realized this...not perceiving a democracy, they see no need to act as the leaders of one.

2004-09-08T13:59:00.000-04:00

i've finished with the ccc, time to move on to the d's. (brand new school year, brand new reading)
dreams of my russian summers -andrei makine
democracy and its critics - robert a dahl
next up,
on the pleasure of hating - william hazlitt, yet another underappreciated miserable genius who died in poverty in a lonely boarding house (and yes, i am judging this essay by its title)

... oh, and *cloud atlas* (david mitchell, aka rp jr.) but i ent got it yet.

2004-09-04T02:24:00.000-04:00

i'm so lost

2004-09-02T21:40:00.000-04:00

Inspired by Thomas Frank's new book What's the Matter With Kansas, I took a trip there to go find out. I stuck primarily sites listed in the book. The main destinations were:

The opulent Kansas City suburbs of Mission Hills and Overland Park

The turn of the century boomtown Emporia

Wichita and its Boeing complex

The Totem Poles of Mullinville. A sculpture set up by a contemporary rabid conservative, M.T. Ligget

The slaughterhouses and feedlots in the west Kansas towns: Liberal, Garden City, and Dodge City.

The Garden of Eden. A scuplture garden by turn of the last century populist J.P Dinsmoor.

The Cathedral of the Plains, built 100 years ago by Volga German immigrants.

The Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, founded by Abolitionist settlers funded and armed by the Yale faculty.

The Saint Mary's Academy and College, supported by a traditional Latin mass sect.

Downtown Kansas City, KS.

Random highways and general scenery.

2004-08-30T20:50:00.000-04:00

population explosion not so bad after all ?

Dr. Ehrlich still argues that the earth's "optimal population size" is two billion. That's different from the maximum supportable size, which depends on the consumption of resources.

"I have severe doubts that we can support even two billion if they all live like citizens of the U.S.," he said. "The world can support a lot more vegetarian saints than Hummer-driving idiots."

2004-08-28T22:46:00.000-04:00

log from mex

http://www.columbia.edu/~xsl2101/mex1.htm

2004-08-21T17:14:00.000-04:00

santa barbara....and it's grey and overcast. is this normal? the institute for theoretical physics is exactly the same shade of unforgivable pink as the financial times, and the beach smells like tar.
the ethernet connection, however, is as glorious as one could hope for. :)

if you want a more exciting story, hound sean for a travelogue from mexico.

2004-08-20T17:48:00.000-04:00

you shouldn't get that close to me

2004-08-16T03:49:00.000-04:00

i made some new pictures

2004-08-15T13:34:00.000-04:00

anyone remember our plutonium source howitzer? :P
Uranium Reactors on Campus Raise Security Concerns

2004-08-12T17:51:00.000-04:00

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Monkeys test 'hardworking gene'

2004-08-12T17:43:00.000-04:00

OH MY GOD. the answer to everyone's problems! Gene Tweak Ends Procrastination

2004-08-12T17:06:00.000-04:00

dream become reality? entelechy is the word of the day

2004-08-11T18:47:00.000-04:00

mendelsohn on the truth about the Olympics

2004-08-08T07:41:00.000-04:00

Stay calm everyone, there's Prozac in the drinking water

happy fishes :)

2004-08-05T13:19:00.000-04:00

i have been waiting

2004-08-05T12:12:00.000-04:00

school spirit? guess we missed out :P

2004-08-02T13:21:00.000-04:00

College is but a tribe

So, I think University of Chicago is like one of those tribes that people are so desperate to get out of once they got in, like, "divorced middle aged men" or "The American Talibans". But nontheless...I remember my old high school teacher attributed the entire Middle East misery to "tribal mentality". We definitely need more drifters and less "crimson" pride, even if it only implies a high GPA and not daddy's bank account.

2004-07-22T09:27:00.000-04:00

ehrenreich

2004-07-19T16:16:00.000-04:00

and even finer

2004-07-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

what a fine idea :)

2004-07-13T02:58:00.000-04:00

SEX LIFE

Hans and Margarita are two squirrels in the forest (one male and one female). They were still kids when they got married. It’s unclear if it was because squirrels have short lifespans, such that they never had the time to fully grow up, or perhaps they never really wanted to grow up in the first place. The two kids obvioulsly never had premarital sex, and even after the wedding, it was still infrequent. They were happy when they were together. Hans always laid his head on Margarita’s big tail, uttered “I love you” and fell asleep. Margarita, meanwhile, used the agile and hairy tail to brush his chubby face, and even swept him up and down once a while. She could feel Hans’ nose blowing into her hair. They were too happy to need sex.

“But when people get married they always have a sex life,” said Margarita to Hans. “Fine, we can try that too.” Hans was even willing to hold Margarita forever in his arms, but he never had strong urges to have sex with her. He always gave the impression of having never gone through puberty completely. Although, Hans had a another idea—-wouldn’t it be great to have a kid with Margrita? They are kids themselves, and kids often want to have a few more playmates.

Hans made money and took care of the housework. He never got exhausted, and easily kept everything in order. Every time he cooked he always showed his infinite inventiveness. He tried to mix up different sauces, but most of the times it was a disaster. Luckily Margarita’s main interest was junk food, therefore she didn't mind as much.

What else could she do besides eating junk food? Didn't make any money or do any housework? She’s an artist! She used up all her youthful passion on the canvas. Her favorite subject was herself, because she felt that she’s the most beautiful thing in the world. Hans wanted to be her model, but she wanted to wait until he’d grown up. Hans was always upset when she said that. He knew he’d probably never grow up.

Plus, he knew maturity and materialism had a subtle relationship. If he grew up, Margarita might like him more, but he might’ve not liked himself as much. It’s important to note that Margarita didn't like materialism either. She liked mature, cool beauty. Artists only cared about beauty.

Though Margarita didn’t make a salary, whenever she sold a painting, she’d become ecstatic for a long while. She’s a great painter, and Hans usually appreciated it. But once his hands was under his chin and said sternly, “your painting lacks something...suffering.” “But baby, my dear Hans, how can I suffer when I’m with you.” Hans contemplated briefly and said, “You could...poverty, lack of sexual satisfaction..” “Yes, you are a bit on the small side, you should exercise more.”

In actuality, Hans exercised a lot. When he went to work, he never walked on the ground. He always jumped from one tree to another.

Sometimes he got a ride from a big bird, but that’s more for the purposes of finding other beautiful squirrels in the forest. He used to be shy, but for some reason, he had more guts to smile to unknown females after getting married. Hans knew he couldn’t tell that to Margarita. She could understand everything, except the rosy mind of her lover. She herself often command cuties to do things for her, and even fooled around with them (the kind with physical contacts). But she couldn't tolerate her lover thinking about anybody else. After all, she’s still just a kid.

Hans and Margarita didn’t really fall in love at the first sight. Initially he sent her lots of gifts and brought her to the forest amusement park every week. In the evenings he bought her bear mother’s honey. Back then Margarita always played hard to get, teasing him forever before finally letting him kiss her. Now it’s more convenient. If he wished, he could be with her at any time. No more excuses necessary.

Hans brought home a box of almond chocolate one day. “Happy birthday Margarita!” Margarita held the chocolate close to her heart, smiling, as if she was afraid of losing it. Her tail swayed happily behind her body. Hans was waiting for her to kiss him, but she didn’t move until he asked, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” She finally dropped the chocolate and kissed him with all her might, even putting his entire black nose into her mouth. Hans could only use his mouth to breath. They suddenly had the desire, embraced each other and made love.

Afterwards they walked shoulder to shoulder out on the branches to get some fresh air. When their neighbors stole a glance at them, they got embarrassed, because when they were doing it they made the whole tree truck shake. Everybody knew what they were doing inside. Margarita started weeping, “They are so annoying! How boring! Why do we have to have a sex life?”

Hans’s heart started beating fast. “Margarita didn’t really believed it. She’s a woman...no she’s just a kid, how could she have the guts to believe it? Maybe she’s serious, I should’ve...no, god damn, she is just a kid.”

But he finally forgave himself, because he was also just a kid. Or, at least he had a kid’s heart. Kids could not live like that. The next day he grudgingly dropped an envelop on Margarita’s easel. Confused by his guilt, yet excited by his soon to be had freedom, it was like the first time he made love to her:

Margarita, my darling, my favorite, my prettiest one:
I will be back soon, real soon. Don’t cry, baby. If you cry, I’ll suffer to death. But I must go.

Loving, Hans.

Hans hesitated before he opened up the covered canvas. Covered canvases usually shouldn’t be opened, out of respect for the painter.

But He’s going to leave soon, so he wanted a last look. It was still a self-portrait, as beautiful as always. But Hans was shocked: passion like fire burning through the surface, golden background, high flung tail, eyes bigger than normal, sexiness and explosive desire all over the body...where is that arrogant but caring Margarita? Hans was shocked.

Made sure his letter had no spelling errors, Hans started packing.

Except there was also a letter on his desk:

My love for you could not be the reason for me to live with you. The day I decided to leave you I was overcome by a sudden inspiration. My last painting was a reflection of myself then. Now I give it to you as a remembrance of me.

Kiss your chubby face!
Margarita

Seeing the letter, Hans dropped his suitcase and rubbed his round nose. “Hmm, I’d have to cook a little less today.”

2004-07-08T15:05:00.000-04:00

"thus illustrating how British irony has a habit of disappearing up its own rear end"

from this cute article on intellectuals in britain.

my favorite quote, however, is: "Like most British intellectuals of his generation, Karl Popper was born in Vienna."

and if george monbiot is supposed to be a top public intellectual , then no wonder they have such a terrible reputation.

2004-07-07T08:53:00.001-04:00

from the ever more sucking boston globe:

"As the life sciences industry grows in Massachusetts, it needs to do a better job of explaining to the public what it does. Part of the reason that many people (and many elected officials) believe prescription drugs
should cost about as much as Skittles is that they don't understand the regulatory constraints the industry works within, the obsessive focus on quality, and the innumerable failures that companies must endure to get a new drug to market."

ah yes, the mystical mythical allexplaining alljustifying "pipeline".

"Anyone can go on a tour of the Sam Adams Brewery in Jamaica Plain. Why can't you get a tour of Genzyme's factory on Storrow Drive in Allston? If the industry wants to be better understood, it needs to open its doors to the public.

Novartis is taking one nice baby step in this direction: It recently held a competition among school kids and adults for ideas about how it should decorate the old rainbow-striped Necco water tower on its new research headquarters in Cambridge."

jesus fucking christ, and this is a GOOD thing??????? the Novartis logo display is pasted on the main window of the MIT museum facing mass ave: it looks more like propaganda a la "kim il sung invented the hamburger and everything else worth having and all our schoolchildren have been made to sing his praises in crayon" than anything else i've ever seen in this country.

"Another free idea, in that vein: What if a biotech or pharma company plastered a sign on the outside of its building, listing the number of tests it has performed on new drug prospects this week, or the number of
patients currently using its products?"

and that poster would have a nice symmetric zero on it for a good proportion of the biotech startups in the area.
such openness might also expose the extent to which the drug industry has betrayed its supposed goals of developing new drugs, and opting instead to meet short-term wall street / irresponsible investor driven profit motives (which have nothing to do with any of the altruism so conveniently used to prop up pharma's image) in favor of marketing or reformulating old ones. or maybe that, for the larger successful companies, the number of patients using its product is incredibly high because of marketing, and large numbers of people are taking drugs that maybe aren't necessary, maybe aren't right, probably don't work better than placebo (and oh, what an expensive placebo it is) and crooked doctors taking pharma bribes? it probably doens't want to post the number of pipeline drugs because those numbers are dwindling, and are often focused on making the most money (making expensive drugs to serve small numbers of patients who can afford the treatment, rather than working on badly needed remedies for the hordes who cannot) instead of being the most effective effort to improve and save lives.

"This is an industry that relentlessly looks for opportunities to improve and save lives. Too often, that's forgotten."

HAH!

see rebuttal in new york review of books

this boston globe guy sure fell for the marketing hook line and sinker.
::hatred:: that or he's a plant. ::more hatred::

of course, some of us are planning to work in pharm ... :P
and others of us are contributing to their profits...

::hatred + shame:: ::jumping up and down:: ::killing small animals::

....

yours truly

2004-06-28T11:56:00.000-04:00

well, time to find out who actually ever reads this thing.
i'm afraid i can't match the bathetic profundity of sean, but:

WHAT'S EVERYONE DOING JULY 4TH WEEKEND??

1.) going to new york for liz's bbq

2.) staying in boston and camping out by the river for fireworks
(lots of people, overpriced food from carts, music, frisbee, general frolicking)

3.) figuring out a cheap way to see same fireworks from the river
(swimming is not recommended. all the bilge from all the boats that day...ick. building a raft?)

4.) being in chicago ... far, far, away from all the action ... :P

5.) staying at home to "do work" or "organize wedding"

"love" is responding to this post!

2004-06-25T23:28:00.000-04:00

What is it like to be in love? What is like to be a raindrop, falling on the shoulders of Corinthian columns, damping the straw man, clearing the throat of a blue starling with misty self-conciousness? What is it like to remember an eclipse, with a thick glass, a smooth rim, emerging from pure black ink? What is it like to count hairs falling off a pineapple, despite its most earnest attempt of self-preservation?

What is it like to be in love? Is it a floating hand on the Danube pierced by the strings of Wilco, typified by the teenage tweeds, glorified by the gloating guffaws? Is it a dangerously thin gush of blood, following the impossible passage from bullets to digits? Is it a microphone crying pity me, pity me?

Is it you? Is it me? Is it this senseless exchange?

Willow is almost a palindrome and halfway is a place where we find the half-insane.

P.S. http://get.to/seanluo

2004-06-24T21:34:00.000-04:00

haven't felt apopletic in a while? try this on for size. i'm thinking of changing my name to "furiousa".

2004-06-23T11:15:00.000-04:00