Life Imitates Art

So, KFC now has a sandwich held together with two pieces of chicken, rather than bread:




Sorry, Colonel, but the Tracy Jordan got there first:

In Defense of (some) Television

FCC chairman Newton N. Minnow famously remarked in a 1961 speech that the television was a "vast wasteland," a remark that has only gotten more true in the nearly 50 years since then. However, people often forget a line which prefaced that remark: "when television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better." For good or for ill, television is one of the important ways that our society manifests its culture, so it would be a mistake to dismiss it all as lowbrow garbage. It has been remarked that if Beethoven or Mozart were alive today, they would probably be composing scores for movies, since that is where the top-flight jobs in orchestral composition are; similarly, if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be just as likely to write for television as for cinema.

So, where are the oases in the vast wasteland?

CURRENTLY RUNNING

• South Park - Finally getting its edge back after a couple of inconsistent seasons, and still one of the best sources for social and political satire available today. Usually thought provoking and occasionally brilliant, it has a lot in common with Greek Old Comedy. They're all available online, and legally, at South Park Studios.
  
• 30 Rock - Whenever South Park fails, 30 Rock picks up the slack. Jabs at deranged corporate culture, vapid entertainment, and career obsession abound. If you're a Netflix subscriber, all of the seasons released on DVD can be watched online.
  
• Castle - Unlike many other police procedural shows on the air today, there is very little reliance on magical forensic science. Basic forensics are there, but what's more important is old-fashioned reasoning and pounding the pavement, much like Sherlock Holmes. And, for once, we have a TV show in which we see a good father raising a happy and well-adjusted teenage daughter.
  
• Jeopardy! - This has been highly regarded and on the air for decades for one very simple reason: its a game show that spends less time on gimmicks and drama, and more time testing real knowledge.
  

NO LONGER RUNNING:

• Jericho - This show really thought long and hard about how modern people would adapt to life without electricity, and about what the fall of the United States would be like. Both seasons highly recommended.
• Firefly - Smart, fun, and politically thoughtful. Be sure to see the followup movie, Serenity. All episodes available cyclically on Hulu.
  
• Red Dwarf - A long-running and side-splittingly funny sci-fi parody from the BBC. Leaving no sci-fi trope unskewered, it really is oddly thought provoking. I normally hate laugh tracks in shows, but here it's appropriate: the over-arching plot is the life of the last human alive in a mostly empty universe, so the simulated laughter of an audience helps to balance out the loneliness. All eight series recommended, but the Back to Earth special was a bit of a disappointment. Also available on Netflix streaming.
  

STATUS UNCERTAIN:

• Torchwood - The first six episodes were terrible, like a 12-year-old with a really filthy mouth stole a few ideas from The X-Files and wrote some Doctor Who fanfiction. Once it found its feet, however, it became quite good. The strength of British science fiction has always been its willingness to ask weird existential questions, and that's what Torchwood is all about. It's off the air at the moment, though rumors are circulating of a forth series, and possibly an American version. Also available on Netflix streaming.

Ride on in majesty! In lowly pomp, ride on to die.

Today is Palm Sunday.

Until last year, I had always though of "All Glory, Laud, and Honor" and "Hosanna, Loud Hosanna" as the definitive Palm Sunday hymns (better recordings of the tunes here and here, respectively). I still like them quite a lot, and it is especially a privilege to be able to sing "All Glory, Laud, and Honor," since we rarely get to sing hymns so old and so closely translated from their original language.

However, last year I was introduced to "Ride on! Ride on in Majesty." It now reigns supreme in my mind:



(The tune, called "Winchester New," can be heard by itself here.)

Everything about it just comes together perfectly: a rousing and memorable tune, beautiful poetry, and so much theology crammed into every verse that it even gives Charles Wesley a run for his money! The triumphant and glorious themes are tempered by a trembling anticipation of the pain and suffering that must soon come. Then, at the very end, we get a tiny glimpse of the joy of Easter. This is a perfect microcosm of Palm Sunday.

Earth-friendly, locally-grown ... lightbulbs?

Audi has been on my Ideological Bad List since Super Bowl XLIV, thanks to their Green Police commercial. If you haven't seen it, or are disinclined to watch it, it shows various people getting busted by a special police force for not performing fashionable environmental gestures. For example, a homeowner is ordered by a team in a helicopter to compost a fruit rind rather than throw it away, but we never see them ordering anyone to compost their own feces, which would be quite unfashionable but would probably accomplish far more. The crux of the commercial is that, at a Green Police traffic checkpoint, a man driving a 2010 Audi A3 TDI Clean Diesel (30 mpg city/42 mpg highway) is allowed to pass, while all of the other drivers are harassed, fined, or worse. Thus, the bad list: if Audi honestly cared that much about the environment, they'd stop building over-engineered luxury cars that feed conspicuous consumption, and resurrect the Geo Metro XFi (53 mpg city/58 mpg highway, or more). Of course it would never sell, since which of these do you think is more appealing to the yuppie-hipster trying to save the planet while still keeping up with appearances?





This is especially not funny because in some parts of the world, and for one unfashionable "offense," the Green Police really will be coming after you in the near future. The U.S., the E.U. and Canada have all passed legislation aimed a forcing their subjects, either de facto or de jure, to adopt compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). Yes, they do require less power than incandescent bulbs, which translates into less carbon pumped into the atmosphere by the end-user's power plant, assuming that the power source behind them is something that produces carbon dioxide and not solar, wind, hydroelectric, or the dreaded fast-breeder nuclear reactor.

The well-documented problem with CFLs, however, is that like all fluorescent lights, they contain mercury, which can be quite hazardous if allowed to leech into groundwater from people breaking bulbs or not disposing of them correctly. In response to this, the EPA has quite correctly pointed out that the amount of mercury released from a coal-fired power plant powering a CFL for a given length of time, added to that CFL's own mercury content, is about a 1/3 the mercury output of a coal-fired power plant powering an incandescent bulb for that same length of time. This logic holds up for the half of the U.S. which gets its electricity from coal, but for the other half, not so much (source: U.S. Department of Energy):



The other trouble with CFLs, of which I have seen very little coverage, is that all of them are made in China. This poses three problems.

First, China has significantly lower standards for worker safety than the U.S. and Europe.

Second, China also has much looser standards for environmental protection, which makes one wonder if the products of a CFL plant in China would really be better for the Earth than the products of an incandescent plant in Virginia. However, it is indisputable that manufacturing in China makes it cheaper for GE to meet the efficiency standards it basically wrote for the U.S. government, i.e., the de facto mandate for CFLs that I mentioned above.

Third, is it really better for the environment to buy one item (with a much more complex control mechanism) built in China and then shipped overseas, in plastic packaging, by a diesel-powered cargo ship, than to buy 8 simpler items built a few hours' drive away and trucked that relatively short distance in recycled cardboard packaging? End-to-end resource analyses such as this are notoriously difficult, but when you consider the other problems with CFLs, my instinct tells me "no." This is quite similar to a point that Michael Pollan makes in either In Defense of Food or The Omnivore's Dilemma (I can't remember which, since they kind of run together). He argues that if you're trying to make your food choices less environmentally harmful, you should consider the possibility that locally grown food that lacks the USDA's organic stamp may be better than officially "organic" food grown far away, due to the higher overhead of shipping and packaging that big organic entails.

I remain a true CFL skeptic; I don't buy it, but I could be convinced otherwise given a good argument. However, I'm never buying a factory-new Audi.

Addendum: Other alumni of Tony's Ideological Bad List include:

• Border's Books and Music, for deciding not to sell the issue of Free Inquiry that ran the Jyllards-Postden Muhammad cartoons
• my senator, George Voinovich, for voting against the bill that would have recognized full faith and credit for concealed carry permits

Quis Googliet ipsos Googles?

Good to keep in mind, but it's important to also remember serveral things.

First and foremost, concentrations of power like this always happen for a very simple reason: only perhaps 1 in 10,000 people have the ambition, talent, and luck necessary to create a massively successful company in a given field (yes, I'm paraphrasing Pentti Linkola here). With so few at the top, it will always happen that a few will control almost everything; nature abhors a vacuum. You can cry "antitrust" all you want, but all that does is transfer power to the state (not desirable, since the state is the only "company" that can force you to buy its products) or delay the inevitable. The clearest example of this is the oil companies of the world: of the top 20, more than half are state-owned, and #2 is ExxonMobil, which is basically Standard Oil reconstituted 90 years after being broken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Second, if you're concerned about the need for net neutrality ("it also wants to own the cables that deliver the Internet itself"), the truth is that restricted service doesn't sell. This is why CompuServe and Prodigy went the way of the dodo. I'm not terribly worried about Google squashing speech online at the moment, since this video has been up for 16 days with a quarter million hits on YouTube, which is owned by Google, and if you Google the phrase "Google is...," phrases in the top ten suggested searches include "SkyNet," "scared of Islam," "making us stupid," and "the devil." Similarly, if you're worried about privacy, you can always take the appropriate security measures. The beauty of ubiquitous free email accounts and ubiquitous free Wi-Fi, combined with encryption, is that we're effectively back to the days of being able to make anonymous calls from back-alley payphones, plus we can now publish dissident literature this way. For the truly paranoid, you'd have to buy a "clean" laptop to do this, but basic laptops with Wi-Fi capability are relatively cheap nowadays, especially on the secondhand market; my own 6-year-old laptop is more than capable (excepting the nigh-useless battery), and the same model costs secondhand about 1/7th of what mine did.

Third, while it might be a bit frightening to contemplate one company in charge of your online life like this, your online life need not be identical to the whole of your life. Google can't "follow your friendships," it can only follow what you and your friends do online, with Google products. Useful as Facebook, Google chat, and their ilk are, they are not friendships in and of themselves. Plus, you are astronomically more likely to get spotted, and identified, coming out of a sex shop by someone face-to-face than by someone using Google Earth.

The final point of the video, that Google makes the vast portion of its income from advertising, does raise an interesting question that we need to ask ourselves as individuals and as a society: why is advertising so powerful? Like Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, "advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need." This is not a problem that any government can solve, it has to be a conscious choice on an individual's part to be less neurotic and oversocialized. I applaud you if you're working past this.

For the moment, I'm still willing to trust Google. But that's a conscious decision, and I'm fully aware of the need to keep my powder dry.

(explanation of post title)

Is there a mandatory minimum for manufacturing drug abuse, with the intent to distribute?

I'm not normally one to go down the rabbit hole of reducing things I don't like to social constructs. It often misses the point. For example, people who argue that gender is a social construct are willfully blind to the fact that there really are massive, inborn differences between the sexes, many of which have been specially selected by evolution as beneficial survival tools.

Sometimes, however, it is true. I have seen it argued that the modern teenager is a social construct; it seems plainly obvious to me that our modern concept of the teenager could not exist without mandatory schooling, the automobile, and a youth-obsessed popular culture which says that teens are better off creating their own society than becoming junior members of adult society.

Another legitimate example of a social construct is the definition of drug abuse that Dr. Nancy Caroline gives in her magnum opus, Emergency Care in the Streets, which is one of several textbooks for the Paramedic class that I will be starting shortly. The definition is given as "any use of drugs that causes physical, psychological, economic, legal, or social harm to the user or others affected by the user's behavior" (6th ed., p. G.12). My problem is not with the "social" clause, as you might have thought from the introduction, but with the "legal" clause.

The way that definition is structured, we can call any person who runs afoul of the law by use of drugs an abuser, regardless of the circumstances. The 20-year-old National Merit Scholar and ROTC cadet who safely enjoys a rousing game of beer pong with his fraternity brothers, the chemotherapy patient who needs to smoke marijuana to have some semblance of an appetite, and the grandmother who bought a little too much cold medicine are all made drug abusers out of thin air if they're busted. Justitia is supposed to be blind, not deaf and stupid.

When we use the law to construct character flaws for upstanding citizens like this, the law starts to mirror Penn Jillette's portrait of pointless Victorian-type manners: "random rules to sniff by ... don't really have any purpose at all, other than to control you and make [manners consultants] richer." Substitute "random rules to sniff by" with "random rules on what you can't sniff (or drink, smoke, etc.)," and "make manners consultants richer" with "keep politicians and bureaucrats employed," consider how miserably we've failed at winning the "War on Drugs," and you begin to see what I mean.

This leads to several different problems on top of making life unnecessarily difficult for the accused. First, it burdens the legal system at the expense of taxpayers. Second, it breeds habituation to not thinking critically among people when they buy into the propaganda that necessarily comes with laws that make no sense; we don't need "just say no" campaigns for murder, arson, rape, theft, or (generally) fraud because is plainly obvious why these are undesirable, and the vast majority of people understand that. Third, it creates a general distrust for rule of law, cracking one of the foundation-stones of Western civilization.

So, I propose a mandatory minimum for lawmakers who create these asinine laws: the loudest and most virulent disrespect we can muster. And we can always look to our masters for comic relief.

Another loss in the War on (imaginary) Drugs. YAY!

(originally posted 25 June 2009)

Supreme Court Says Child’s Rights Violated by Strip Search

Good news for the most part. I suppose hoping that the principal, nurse, and administrative assistant would be clamped in a pillory in the center of town and pelted with rotten eggs under a sign reading "we violated a 13-year-old girl" would have been too much to ask.