Allow Me To Politicize Tragedy

In this piece I will make a point about healthcare, and I will exploit two recent episodes of American tragedy to do it.

To frame the issue that the point is about, I want to hearken back to a theme often heard from conservatives when discussing public healthcare policy. First and foremost they are interested in efficiency -- in cost containment. "Of course we want people to be cared for and lead healthy lives," they say, seemingly reasonably, before adopting a pinched visage of thoughtful concern: "But who's gonna pay for all that?"

When I read the news and see headlines like "Boston Marathon bombed, 3 dead, more than 100 injured" and "Texas fertilizer factory explosion kills 5, injures over 160," a thousand thoughts rush into my head. But here's one that doesn't: "Who's gonna pay for all that?"

If, on the other hand, your very first reaction to either of those headlines was "but who's gonna pay for all that?" then, by the power vested in me as a non-asshole, I decree that you lack all human compassion.

And if you pass that test, and thoughts of cost containment were at the end of the line, and you do have basic human compassion, then -- why would you wonder "but who's gonna pay for all that?" in any other, lesser, context? What extra moral imperative is imbued in the flashy, obvious, explosion-based disasters that is missing from more subdued disasters like, say, cancer, or clinical depression? Wherever it is that you're drawing that line is morally inferior to simply erasing it.

So in a few months, when things have calmed down, when we're back in the mode where misfortune is more a matter of comfortable, inside-out decay than anxiety-provoking, outside-in impingements, and we're bored enough to argue about healthcare again, I want you to remember this point. Remember, and refrain from changing the subject to economics, when it had properly been the alleviation of human suffering.

Human suffering is worth the cost required to alleviate it, period. It would be interesting to redesign economics around that axiom and see what kind of civilization we arrive at.

Epistle to The Ninety-Nine Percent

I am a member of the 99%. But in truth, I am much closer, in terms of raw dollars, to the One Percent than are 99% of those who eagerly refer to themselves as "the Ninety-Nine Percent." In real, big-picture statistical terms, I'm definitely not in the top 1%, but I'm probably in the top 15%, maybe 10%. This relative proximity to the One Percent has given me the opportunity to realize that, much as a diehard liberal like me might hate to admit it (and even after saying there was only "precisely one" respect in which I sympathize with the One Percent), it turns out there's another one.

I sympathize with the One Percent because, at bottom, they all value efficacy; and so do I. The One Percent and I like shit that works.

And unfortunately, this preference affords them a perspective from which they can look at you, the Ninety-Nine Percent, and point and laugh and joke about how effective the Occupy movement won't be. The fact that you have good, well-thought out points to make, and reasonable, demonstrable grievances to air, doesn't change the fact that, to the One Percent, your points and your grievances don't need to actually be heard in order to dismiss you. All they have to do is say "Occupy Wall Street is just a bunch of bored college kids who can't seem to score pot or level in World of Warcraft anymore. Get a job and a haircut, you hippie jackasses."

I find myself in a strange position because, while I cast my lot with the Ninety-Nine Percent in terms of philosophy (i.e. I agree with most if not all of the points you make, and most if not all of the grievances you air), I still have to side with the One Percent in terms of efficacy. The One Percent are absolutely right that you guys come across as a bunch of bumbling hippie jackasses who make up in earnestness and passion what you lack in pragmatism and efficacy.

But, while I reach the same conclusion about your efficacy that the One Percent do, I arrive at it through different reasoning. And that reasoning is this: Occupy is an urban movement, because the Ninety-Nine Percent are young, creative, idealistic, and educated people who live in cities. To your demographic, cities are awesome; cities are the place to be; why would anyone tolerate rural or suburban life? If it's a given there's gonna be some badass worldwide meritocratic revolution, of course all the action will be in cities!

The One Percent may work in cities, and a handful of them might reside in cities (between jaunts to Bermuda and Zurich), but the majority of them live in the suburbs and commute to the cities only for work. It is therefore easy for them to ignore you, because the only contact they have with you is through the window of their corporate limos and/or taxicabs and/or Escalades, tooling past whatever frozen park the NYPD hasn't managed to evict you from yet. And the only contact their loved ones have with your ideas is filtered through the breathless, schoolmarmish, seventh-grade-educated media. So nothing gets through.

The answer is simple: the Occupy movement needs to target the suburbs. This is where the One Percent actually live. Suburbia is where the policymakers actually live. Suburbia is where the bankers and insurance executives actually live. Suburbia is where, even as we speak, life burbles along tranquilly, blissfully oblivious to the possibility (and necessity) of change.

Disrupt that tranquility -- PEACEABLY -- and the One Percent will finally start to get it. Once the bylines stop reading NEW YORK NY and start reading YORKTOWN HEIGHTS NY, or DERBY CT, or CHERRY HILL NJ, or OSSINING NY, or KENT CT, or MT KISCO NY, or BROOKFIELD CT, or SOUTHBURY CT, only then will the seventh-grade-educated media finally start to get it. Metaphorically hit them where they literally live, and they will get it.

You will still get arrested, definitely. Asshole townie cops will still manhandle you and perhaps even continue to shoot rubber bullets at you. But only if those things occur in the suburbs will there be a chance that actual members of the One Percent will be forced to deal with you face-to-face, in the raw, not predigested by the seventh-grade-educated media. You will get to meet that rare species of primate who belongs to the One Percent without really knowing it or thinking of themselves in that way. And it will be a shocking experience for you both.

Epistle to the One Percent

I am a member of the 99%. But in truth, I am much closer, in terms of raw dollars, to the One Percent than are 99% of those who eagerly refer to themselves as "the Ninety-Nine Percent." In real, big-picture statistical terms, I'm definitely not in the top 1%, but I'm probably in the top 15%, maybe 10%. This relative proximity to the One Percent has given me the opportunity to realize that, much as a diehard liberal like me might hate to admit it, there is precisely one respect in which I sympathize with the One Percent.

I sympathize with the One Percent because, at bottom, they all value the idea of meritocracy; so do I. Where we part company is on whether free-market capitalism is truly the engine of meritocracy that they insistently and ceaselessly trumpet it to be.

I'd like to think that the One Percent would join me in wholeheartedly endorsing the truth of the following statement: "Money is useful and desirable. There are many desirable things money can be used to obtain, and there are many undesirable things money can be used to avoid." But I'm starting to get concerned that the One Percent would not join me in wholeheartedly endorsing the logical corollary of the foregoing: "It is possible for other things to be valued more than money."

Notice how children are born valuing not money, but novelty. Children are born feeling an expectation of happiness, and if that's a thought whose naivete makes you guffaw, then consider the moral implications of such guffawing. There would be no valid moral argument against suicide, for instance. In order to be genuinely happy, people must have an emotionally sustainable way of obtaining the things they seek, and they must have an emotionally sustainable way of avoiding the things they seek to avoid. If this weren't declared true, we would be lending credence to the idea that it is morally acceptable for people to live out their entire lives without ever experiencing even a single instant of joy. What's the point of living, if you don't have some path to achievement of some semblance of some notion of the life you want to live? If we really all couldn't agree to that idea, then the notion of a social contract would never have caught on, even back in the day.

So, I agree with the One Percent about the sanctity of the idea that people need some sense of a meritocratic system in order to live a fulfilling life. They are absolutely right, for that and many other valid reasons (e.g. the free rider problem), that the overall system governing our lives must be a meritocracy. But they are wrong in their utter unquestioning acceptance of free-market capitalism as the only viable way to establish that meritocracy.

Whenever you notice the circulation of the "class warfare" meme through the media fishbowl, understand that this is the One Percent's way of trying to remind people, in the subtlest, least dickish way possible, of the moral imperative of perpetuating a stable class structure. I agree that capitalism is the best way thus far discovered to implement a functioning, scalable meritocracy, but I disagree that our civilization does not pay a large opportunity cost by investing such a concomitantly large amount of faith in it. Capitalism has proved to be only as scalable as the class structure of the culture into which it is installed (see China and India), so that creates a need to perpetuate ours. The metaphor that allows the One Percent to cloak this systemic/structural need in the moral language of human/personal admonition is "class warfare."

I admire that metaphor, but it has a bug in it. I'm a software engineer, which means I'm good at detecting design flaws in semantic spaces. And there is a big design flaw lurking at the heart of the "class warfare" metaphor, one whose existence fills me with hope for the possibility of real progress. The bug in "class warfare" is this: the term "class warfare" was coined during a period in history in which there was no concept of "war crimes" or "genocide" -- certainly many such acts occurred during those times, but those labels were applied to them only after the fact. Since then, we have learned the ugly truth that there are such things as "war crimes" and "genocide," and that they can and should be viewed from within the metaphor of global criminal justice. But we have not gone back and revisited the "class warfare" metaphor to see how its economic meaning might change when its geopolitical meaning is admixed with the newer "war crime" and "genocide" constructs.

The One Percent continue to invoke an older version of a meme that has since been upgraded, but upgraded with features they don't like. If the One Percent want to allow the phrase "class warfare" to continue to have any real meaning, any genuine cultural relevance, then they must, in order for their underlying metaphor to work correctly, acknowledge the possibility that phrases like "economic war crimes" and "class genocide" could also have real meaning, and genuine cultural relevance. I now invite you to join me in imagining what "class war crimes" could look like in the real world.

The international legal principles that emerged from the Nuremberg Trials divide the colloquial term "war crimes" into three categories: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. The first category encompasses things that pertain to the fates of specific individuals: "murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity." The latter two categories encompass things that pertain more to the fates of large, easily named groups, like "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds."

Bernie Madoff is a reasonable example of an economic war criminal, but only in the first sense outlined above: he violated large-scale fiduciary responsibilities -- moral obligations dictated by the underlying promise of meritocracy that theoretically underpins capitalism and made it attractive to everyone when Adam Smith first outlined it in the 1700s -- and in so doing financially devastated the lives of many. But those many had no prior factors in common except for the fact that they were all Bernie Madoff's clients; the victims who found themselves chained against a rock in Madoff's lair must have, at some point, chosen to walk into it. There is certainly no single religious, or ethnic, or racial, or even political, identity that would unify the demographic disparateness of his client list. This lack of any available group identity disqualifies Madoff, in my mind, from being charged with economic crimes against humanity.

Bernie Madoff's conviction represents America's first successful apprehension and punishment of an economic war criminal. From an ontological standpoint, this is good, because it legitimizes the term economic war criminal; and from an intentional standpoint, it is also good, because it represents the indictment of a large-scale economic actor whose intentions were clearly bad. But it seems to me that the real indictment we should be talking about is not of the man, but of the system within which he was allowed to operate for so long. The only reason Madoff was tried in a manner befitting an economic war criminal is that the victims of his economic war crimes were all members of the One Percent. So this proves two things: despite their obvious horror at the thought of openly discussing it, the One Percent do, on some level, acknowledge the validity of the concept of economic war crimes, of economic crimes against peace. And the only thing they find even more horrific is when it happens to them -- when "economic shock and awe" shatters their peace.

It turns out there is another precedent for economic war crimes: the book of Genesis, in which the moral depravities of Sodom and Gomorrah are harshly condemned by the God of Abraham. To most Christians, their intuitive sense of moral depravity is polarized in the sexual direction. But the Hebrew Bible makes clear that Yahweh was just as pissed off about economic moral depravity. Genesis describes wealthy Sodomites giving gold ingots to beggars, after inscribing their names on them, and then subsequently refusing to sell the beggars food. The unfortunate beggar would end up starving and after his death, the people who gave him the ingot would reclaim it. That sounds a lot like how credit card companies do business, doesn't it? The One Percent give ingots of plastic to the Ninety-Nine Percent, after inscribing their names on them, and then subsequently refuse to provide them economic sustenance (i.e. reasonable interest rates that promote actual saving behavior instead of speculative behavior). The unfortunate Ninety-Nine Percent end up economically starving (i.e. jobless with little or no unemployment available to draw, or bankrupt, or scraping by in the present with only a raided pension or cratering 401k waiting for them in the future), and after their economic (or, increasingly, literal) death, the people who gave them the money reclaim it through foreclosure auctions, liquidation sales, Chapter 11, debt collection agencies, repo men, insurance companies, and other unsavory economic constructs.

I just want churchgoing Jews and Christians who voluntarily participate in this system to understand something: the supreme being whose opinion you all claim to care about placed economic practices such as these on the same plane of moral repugnance as fucking children and homosexual gang rape.

I hereby declare the One Percent a global terrorist organization, waging a distributed, decentralized, but still coordinated, asymmetric campaign of economic terror against that ragtag band of economic rebels known as "the workforce." We, the Ninety-Nine Percent, have not forgotten what you, the One Percent, have: that free-market capitalism is only as valuable to a client civilization as the extent to which it makes good on its implicit promise to serve as an engine of genuine meritocracy.

I charge the One Percent with economic crimes against peace. I charge the One Percent with class genocide against the "ethnicity" of the Ninety-Nine Percent. And I call upon the International Court of Justice at The Hague to convene a panel to explore the precise legal meaning of terms like "economic war crime," "class genocide," and "economic crimes against peace," and how they might be applied to hypothetical international independent investigations of such large-scale economic actors as, say, Discover Financial Services, or Goldman Sachs, or the SEC, or General Motors, or Union Pacific, or Alcoa, or Boeing, or the Pentagon, or United Healthcare, or the New York Jets, or the House Appropriations Committee, or Iron Mountain, or the Federal Reserve. Or the Vatican.

Only 1% of the One Percent actually deserve, in terms of personal honor and merit, to be in the One Percent. There do exist people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, smart, dogged, energetic people who made themselves rich by thinking of nonobvious, valuable things to build. But they're the minority. The vast majority of the One Percent fall far short of this description. And they've crept into the hospital bedroom where American meritocracy lies feebly in ICU, and they're looking around for a suitable pillow with which to begin the smothering.

Consider this your upgrade notice, One Percent: you no longer get to keep running an old version of the "class warfare" metaphor. Either upgrade to the new version boasting support for war crimes, or uninstall it from your discourse completely.

Worthless Cunts

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because they trumpet their own alleged patriotism, pounding their heaving, idiotic chests with their flailing, ignorant fists about the supremacy of self-sacrifice, common sense, and decisive action, while never once coming within 1000 miles of ever conducting their own lives in a way that can render such cuntitude anything other than rank hypocrisy.

As an example of a white, native English-speaking, female, true American patriot, read no further than the case of Heather "Lucky" Penney (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/11/heather-lucky-penney-flight-93_n_957326.html). Read her story and then tell me to my face that she isn't, in actuality, what those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann ceaselessly proclaim themselves to be. Read her story and then tell me to my face that the ideals she can readily prove to have actually structured her existence around aren't the same ideals that those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann ceaselessly proclaim themselves to honor.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because they use exclusive language to talk about how best to solve complex large-scale problems. They invoke the tacit glorification of martyrdom that lies at the core of the entire Abrahamic tradition (smooth move, Yahweh/Allah) to position themselves as "the only ones tough/assertive/bold/brave/etc. enough" to step forward to take the decisive action needed to save this country. And they invoke it loudly over their shoulders while sprinting the fuck away from any political situation that could force them to actually exhibit any of these characteristics.

Contrast this with how Lucky Penney describes her conduct: "I was prepared to die for my country. It's something everyone else would have done if they were in my shoes. I didn't have time to feel fear. We had a mission, and there was a sense of urgency."

The active ingredient in this quote is "It's something everyone else would have done if they were in my shoes." And when she says it, every real patriot within earshot runs the little lightning-fast simulation in their minds and reaches the same conclusion. Like those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, she too uses plain English to talk about how to solve complex large-scale problems, but unlike those worthless cunts, she does so inclusively. Any other rational adult with equivalent skills would have acted the same as Lucky Penney, she says, and we all know it. But those worthless cunts Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann caw and squawk the exact logical inverse, the contrapositive, of Lucky Penney's statement: there in fact exists a majority of rational adults with equivalent skills that would never once act the way they do, and they are the only ones who don't know it.

In fairness, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because their lives have presumably taught them that the only way to get and retain the political attentions of the average white male conservative voter in this formerly great country of ours is to become the physical instantiation of the two emotional concepts that mark the ends of the continuum of femininity that dwell within the minds of those average white male conservative voters. Those Nascar-fellating simpletons view all women they've ever known as occupying a point somewhere on a line that ends with Worthless at one end, and Cunt at the other. They're very shrewd, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. They know there's a vast market of voters who can't conceive of a real live woman as being something other than some alchemical fusion of the base elements Worthlessness and Cuntitude, so they have used Fox News -- the Philanderer's Stone, as it were -- to transmute themselves into flashy, smarmy nuggets of Worthless Cunt gold.

In other words, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are worthless cunts because it takes one to know one. And there are an awful lot of worthless cunts among the white men who are either part of, or enjoy the benefits of a financially parasitic relationship with, the Republican party.

This might seem like an undue psychoanalytic generalization, but the social experiment required to back it up has already been conducted. Its results were published recently at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/01/adult-industry-2012-gop-convention_n_943906.html. (Go read it; I'll wait.) This article actually contains my favorite political parable of the modern age: a small business owner whose #1 customer base is the GOP brass condemning the economic policies of the GOP brass. This has to support the idea that the GOP aren't pro-business, they're pro-Worthless Cunt. The GOP brass exists to amass money mainly so they can ensure themselves a reliable supply of attractive female human beings that have no economic freedom to do anything other than accept the mantel of Worthless Cunt being handed to them.

Fuck you, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, you worthless cunts. And thank you, Heather "Lucky" Penney, for giving all of the average white male GOP hoarders of Worthless Cunt gold an irrefutable example of what real, genuine white female native-English-speaking American patriotism looks like. Thanks to your having been you, maybe enough of the male worthless cunts running the GOP will come around to a sensible world view, freeing the two female worthless cunts under discussion to finally gather up their balls and go home.

An Open Letter To Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia

Dear Justice Scalia,

It is with great pleasure that I imagine you deigning to read this letter. It is not lost on me what a legitimate honor that would be, seeing as how you are the longest-serving justice on the Court. After earning a Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard, you built a successful private practice, but then heard the call of public service and failed to miss the opportunity to ride Ronald Reagan's disgraceful coattails to your current august position.

Before delving into the substance of our discussion, I want to acknowledge the caliber of your legal acumen. I want to recognize your mind as a direct lineal descendant of the Magna Carta. And then, I want to crumple that recognition into a ball, and wipe my ass with it, you warthog-faced buffoon.

It may have penetrated the dimly-lit sphere of your Cialis-fueled consciousness that there is a Constitutional battle brewing in the state of Mississippi, where the unfortunately named "Personhood Amendment" is being debated by a representative subset of that spineless species of asshole we continue beyond all reason to call "legislators." (If any so-called legislators happen to be listening in -- fuck you, assholes.) The citizens of the Mississippi Delta Nuclear Family Waste Containment Area, exhibiting a degree of thoughtful civic deliberation remeniscent of ancient Athens, have proposed that legal personhood be granted to human fetuses.

I have a hunch this case will make it to you at some point, and since you sat on the Court during the recent Citizens United case, you presumably have built up some experience navigating the tricky ontological waters of legal personhood. So, as repugnant as I find you personally, I must overcome this defect in my compassion and actively seek out your expertise.

If the Supreme Court holds that the status of legal personhood can be granted to both corporations and fetuses, then the Supreme Court will create an ontological crisis that will be as devastating to the practice of American law as the Greek debt crisis is turning out to be to the commerce of Europe.

By "ontological crisis" I mean, two things that are both (stipulated to be) real, but are in fact completely fucking different from each other, will be indistinguishable from the perspective of Constitutional protections. Corporations, as you may have heard between pig roasts and rounds of golf, are vast agglomerations of physical objects and human beings, distributed in potentially many geographic places at once, using technology to exchange information amongst each other. Fetuses, on the other hand, are lumps of tissue that are basically indistinguishable from your appendix except for the magical property that they will, left to their own devices, turn into human beings. These two objects, corporations and fetuses, are arranged in an ontological opposition best described as diametric.

Not only are the ontological essences of corporations and fetuses diametrically opposed to each other, but they are both diametrically opposed to the folk notions of personhood prevalent in the American electorate -- y'know, the John Q. Public commonsense notions of what the word "person" means. These notions are hosted in, and originate from, the minds of sentient beings (presumably somewhat like yourself) that our friends and our families have seen fit to call "persons" without a second thought, for generations and generations, long before anyone felt a burning need to give that term legal primacy.

By "ontological crisis" I mean, it will be impossible to contrive a reliable test for determining whether a given ontological entity that might be referenced in a legal proceeding does or does not constitute a person. Such basic ontological tests as "Is it alive?" will fail: this answer is "yes" for fetuses and for the folk notion of person, but is "no" for corporations. "Can I converse with it?" yields "yes" for the folk notion of person and for corporations, but will yield "no" for fetuses. "Is it capable of love?" yields yes for the folk notion of person and for fetuses, but will yield "no" for corporations. "Is it capable of being sued?" will yield "yes" for corporations and for the folk notion of person, but will yield "no" for fetuses. "Can I readily determine how much money it's worth?" yields "yes" for corporations and for the folk notion of person, but "no" for fetuses. "Can it be owned?" yields "yes" for corporations (and maybe fetuses, depending on how our hillbilly fucktard brethren in Mississippi want to play it) but "no" for fetuses and the folk notion of person.

The only ontological tests that can reliably succeed for all three flavors of legal person are so general as to be useless: "Can it die?" Yes in all cases. (Note how "Can its death be mourned?" yields "yes" only for fetuses and the folk notion of person.) "Is it made of matter?" Yes in all cases. "Can it experience the passage of time?" Yes in all cases. Surely a mind as keen as yours sees this Boschlike landscape of hellish ontological chaos. Words (which I understand are used heavily in law) would literally cease to convey meaning reliably, regardless of whose mouths they emerge from.

The way I see it, a strict constructionist like yourself has only one honest option: you get to pick one. Either corporations enjoy legal personhood, but not fetuses; or fetuses enjoy legal personhood, but not corporations. But hear me loud and clear, you bitch motherfucker: YOU DON'T GET BOTH. If you were to get both, that would mark the moment when the entire population of this country realizes that the law has become completely self-referential and untethered to the ontological realities that constrain us all. This isn't a political ax I'm trying to grind, either: I don't give a fuck which one you pick. Leave Citizens United intact, at the price of smacking down this dreadful "Personhood Amendment"; or give the Personhood Amendment the thumbs-up, at the price of overturning Citizens United. BUT YOU DON'T GET BOTH.

So my question is this: what ontological test, or set of tests, do you plan to rely on in this eventuality? What "strict constructions" will you use to express your strict proclivities while orienteering through these thorny wildernesses? What set of guiding principles will you use to map the abstractions of law back to the ontological catalog from which this world is populated with objects? Articulate for me, if you will, your underlying legal philosophy for approaching these questions in the future. Give me a glimpse of the heated conversations you have with yourself when these matters intrude on your CPAP-enabled sleep. Thrill me with your acumen.

Why I Got Euler's Identity Tattooed On My Back

The majority of people in my life are uninterested in math, to put it mildly, but that has not prevented them from expressing curiosity about my Euler's Identity tattoo. "What's it mean?" they ask. "Why is it so important to you?" These questions are difficult to answer without invoking so much math as to make the questioners' eyes glaze over (at best; at worst they run screaming from the room). This post attempts to provide a non-mathematical metaphor that, I hope, will convey even to math-phobic readers the same kind of awe and beauty that I experience when contemplating Euler's Identity. I'm going to start with a totally un-mathy topic: literary characterization.

Readers of novels have slightly different ideas about what makes for good characterization than, say, readers of comic books. (I'm deliberately defying the growing pressure to call this benighted artform "graphic novels" by focusing specifically on comic books about superheroes, which is how it all got started, no matter how much the breathless fanboys may inform me that it's grown up since.) Readers of novels define their characters in terms of interiority: they talk about childhood memory, emotional nuance, mannerisms, depth. Readers of superhero comic books define their characters in terms of exteriority: they talk about costumes, superpowers, Achilles' heels, weapons, amulets, etc. It's the difference between viewing a character as a human being versus as a mere bundle of attributes.

Although I have little patience in general with the superhero comic book way of approaching character, it is useful in this context because it provides an interesting approach to numbers. Numbers, too, can be described merely as bundles of attributes. Of any number, there's a list of well-defined characteristics that it may or may not have: odd or even? Real or imaginary? Positive or negative? Whole or fractional? As long as we're willing to view the world through these glasses, then it's not such a stretch to reimagine the set of all numbers as literature's only infinite cast of characters.

Granted, some of these "characters" are a lot more interesting, compelling even, than others. Zero is a good example. We have yet to discover any other number that is as devoted a pacifist and yet simultaneously as rapacious a conqueror as zero. When it comes to addition, zero is a cuddly, harmless teddy bear: you can add anything to zero and that number will just emerge as itself, untouched. But when it comes to multiplication, zero is Genghis Khan, slaughtering all hapless comers, leaving only itself standing. (Don't even get zero started on division.)

In 2005, Roger Ebert popularized the term "hyperlink movie" (coined by Alissa Quart in that same year) in his review of Syriana, where he says it "describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another." Part of the power of this narrative structure, he explains, is that "the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one." The TV show Lost, for instance, also has a "hyperlink narrative."

Euler's Identity is the best evidence thus far discovered that all of mathematics is one giant hyperlink narrative. Before Leonhard Euler discovered it in the sixteenth century, mathematics better resembled, say, the work of Stephen King -- a collection of largely unrelated narratives that occasionally overlap in character or location. There was the "number theory" narrative, whose heroes are 0 and 1; the "calculus" narrative, whose hero is e; the "complex analysis" narrative, whose hero is i; and the "trigonometry" narrative, whose hero is pi. Nobody had any idea that the arcs of these characters, which had been entirely separate up to that point, would directly intersect each other.

If math is a hyperlink movie with numbers as its heroes, then Euler's Identity can be thought of as that mindfuck scene at the end that makes the viewer go "No way!" It is the first, and so far only, scene in Math: The Movie in which all five of these compelling number-characters, 0, 1, i, pi, and e, interact directly. (When Heat came out, much was made of the fact that Pacino and DeNiro, two Italian giants of crime noir, had a single six-minute scene together; imagine how much more of a publicity coup it would have been if they were joined by, say, Humphrey Bogart, Denzel Washington, and Laurence Olivier.)

But what are these mathemacting luminaries saying to each other? No one knows. After proving the Identity in a lecture, Benjamin Peirce said, "It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth." Euler's Scene is the mathematical equivalent of something out of a David Lynch film -- arresting, bizarre, inscrutable -- only, this David Lynch film is actually a documentary.

I Miss C-Style Switch Statements

It took me about a year to fully warm up to C# after years of unmanaged C++ in the COM/Win32 world. Now I'm at a point where I love it. But there is one thing about it that drives me nuts: Microsoft no longer lets you have "fall-through" control transfer between case clauses inside a switch statement. You have to have every case paired with an explicit break, even if it doesn't make logical sense. This means that now I have to do a lot of if...else if...else if...else-type constructions to get the desired control flow, when a C-style switch statement would've been the most elegant thing. *sigh*

Blessings In Disguise?

I suppose, in the long run, a net reduction in the population of Tennessee is probably a good thing.

Ruthless Reviews Gets It Right!

This site used to be awesome. I discovered it in 2002, and it just blew my socks off with its combination of extreme left-wing political opinion (although paradoxically mixed with some unaccountable misogyny), high IQ, creativity, and lazy editing.

Starting around 2006 they experienced a slump, but it seems like they've been getting better over the last 6 months or so. But this bit, about the recent Tiller assassination, is the best bit of commentary they've done in years. Bravo.

David Frum Just Keeps Getting Better

I became a David Frum fan last year, after not liking him very much initially. This recent article proves that, in the Civil Cold War (aka the post-election Republican Party infighting between the Southern wingnuts and everyone else), he's fighting for the North. Kudos.

Interesting View of Obama's Pragmatism

The fact that I can't quite figure out what the editors of the Christian Science Monitor want, believe, or think is part of why I tend to like their pieces. This is a good guest editorial that, while structured as a criticism of Obama's M.O., illuminates for me exactly what I like about him. It's written well in any case.

My favorite line: [Obama] presumes that policies forged by reason, evidence, and "unbiased" expertise (Pragmatism 1) – those policies that "work" – will garner the support of all reasonable members of Congress and thus bridge partisan divides (Pragmatism 2).

What an unreasonable way to operate! Obama is a "evidence fundamentalist"!

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Reagan must be rolling over in his grave.

Obama-Era Pelosi = Pre-Obama-Era Clinton

Apparently American reactionaries require there to be one highly visible white female in Washington on whom they can focus their irrational loathing. Before Obama got elected, that woman was Hillary Clinton. I was always amazed at how much the wingnuts despised Hillary, but more to the point, how transparently their hatred was simply an inversion of their sexist fear.

But things have changed -- Clinton is now part of Obama's cabinet, and by siding with Obama, she finally finds herself in America's good graces. All the non-Democrats who voted for Obama --moderates who have fled the Republican party since Limbaugh took over as RNC chairman, and independents* -- who, to their credit, just can't reconcile the cognitive dissonance resulting from the simultaneous claims that "Obama is doing a good job" and "Hillary is a shrill power-hungry feminazi crypto-lesbian bitch" -- feel an aching void where their cowering hatred of Hillary used to be.

But now there's Nancy Pelosi!

Granted, Pelosi was a Republican whipping-boy ("whipping-girl" just sounds too overtly S&M for its intended meaning to come through) ever since she assumed the Speakership, but this recent CIA torture bullshit has proved to be the spark igniting the powderkeg. All those disenfranchised Hillary haters finally have a new, competent, politician with a powerful office and a vagina, all at the same time, on whom they can unload their loathing.

I'm not a fan of Pelosi -- to be honest, I am utterly neutral toward Pelosi. There are plenty of folks on the left end of the political spectrum who would dispute my having called her "competent," and I can see why. But I can recognize when ostensibly neutral political maneuvering is being used to disguise misogynistic fear. Hang in there, Nance.

* There are two kinds of people who claim to be "independent" -- (a) informed people who have their own idiosyncratic set of principles that doesn't completely align with either party, and (b) clueless people who feel guilty about never having paid enough attention to politics to figure out what their principles are, but don't want to risk painting themselves into a conversational corner by arbitrarily claiming to agree with one party over the other.

How Will They Spin This One?

More amazingly bad behavior on the part of the world's oldest multinational corporation. Even more amazing to think that they think they have the monopoly on human goodness. I've said it before and I'll say it again: fuck Catholicism and fuck the Pope. I concede that the Vatican served some valid purposes in the course of human development, but it has long since outlived that usefulness. I eagerly look forward to its eminently timely death.

Sheep In Wolves' Clothing

I'd like to make a special shout-out to those of you who drive black or navy Crown Victorias or Dodge Chargers, yet aren't police officers:

FUCK YOU.

Get a civilian car, you Macdonald Triad bitches.

Kary Mullis, Global Warming, Deicide Bombing: A Parable of Inducing Opinion Reconsideration

This post likened atheism to a product for sale in the marketplace of belief systems, and the analogy was helpful to a certain extent. But lately I've been thinking that "marketing" is the wrong approach. Marketing is the kind of thing that induces people to raise their guard. In the end, most people's purchasing decisions are guided by factors other than the products' marketing.

What I've really been searching for is a way to make people change their minds; I've been trying to understand the process by which people adopt beliefs. And I think I've figured out a way to reverse, or at least combat, the indoctrination tactics used by organized religion, thanks to a recent experience in which I was prompted to doubt one of my own beliefs.

One of my first posts on this blog was about global warming, and the philosophical meat of it was essentially that scientists as a whole have too much at stake to ever engage in a wilful conspiracy, which is what global warming skeptics accuse them of. But my faith in this belief was weakened recently by a TED video, Nobel Prize-winner Kary Mullis talking about the nature of science. Mullis was speaking extemporaneously, so be prepared for some false starts and improvisatory sentence structures; I've transcribed a large section of the talk here, but emphasized the important parts via italics and larger font size:

Naturally honest, and naturally inquisitive, and that sort of leads to that kind of science. All scientists aren't like that, you know? A lot's been going on since Isaac Newton and all that stuff happened. One of the things that happened right around World War II, government realized, look scientists aren't strange dudes that hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with test tubes, scientists made WWII as we know it quite possible. They made faster things, they made bigger guns to shoot 'em down with, they made drugs to give the pilots if they were broken up in the process, they made all kinds of ... one giant bomb to end the whole thing. And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to invest in this shit. Because whoever has got the most of these people working in the best places is going to have a dominant position at least in the military and probably in all kind of economic ways and they got involved in it, and the scientific-industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, because it was suddenly available. And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air, they were the same people that later went into medical school, yknow, because there was money in it, and then they all got into business. I mean, there're waves of going in to your high school [guidance] person [who] says "Wanna be rich? Be a scientist." Not anymore; you wanna be rich [now], you be a businessman. But a lot of people got in it for the money, and the power, and the travel. . . . Those people don't always tell you the truth. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always to tell you the truth. The people I'm talking about are . . . . the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And they have these big meetings where they try to figure out, how are we gonna continually prove that the planet is getting warmer? When that's actually contrary to most people's sensations. If you actually measure the temperature over a period, i mean the temperature's been measured pretty carefully for about fifty sixty years longer than that but in really nice precise ways and records have been kept for fifty or sixty years and in fact the temperature hasn't really gone up. The average temperature has gone up a tiny little bit because the nighttime temperatures at weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there's a good explanation for that. The weather stations are all built outside of town where the airport was, and now the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around, and they call it the "skyline effect," and most responsible people who measure temperatures realize you have to shield your measuring device from that and even then -- you know, because the buildings get warm in the daytime and they keep it a little warmer at night. So the temperature has been sort of inching up, it should have been, but not a lot. Not like -- you know, the first guy who got the idea that we were gonna fry ourselves, he didn't think of it that way, his name was Svarnte Arhenius, he was Swedish, and he said, if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere -- this was in 1900 -- the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees. He was thinking the earth is kinda like a completely insulated thing with no stuff in it, just energy comin' down, energy leaving. He came up with this theory, and he said, this'll be cool, because it'll mean a longer growing season in Sweden. And the surfers thought it was a cool idea. But a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad. But nobody actually demonstrated it. The temperature as measured -- and you can find this on our wonderful internet, just look for all NASA's records and all the weather bureau's records, and to look at it yourself and see -- the temperature has just -- the nighttime temperature measured on the surface of the planet has gone up a tiny little bit, so if you just average that with the daytime temperature it looks like it went up about 0.7 degrees in this century, but in fact. . . the daytime temperatures DIDN'T go up. And Arhenius's theory, along with all the global warmers, they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime too, if it's a greenhouse effect. Now, people like things that have names that they can envision, but people don't... get all excited about things like the actual evidence: "Evidence for Strengthening of the Tropical Circulation in the 1990s" [or] a paper that came out in February, "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability In the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget." Those papers were published by NASA and some scientists at Columbia . . . and those two papers were published in Science magazine, February the 1st, and the conclusion in both of these papers. . . is that our theories about global warming are completely wrong. What these guys were doing, and NASA people have been saying this for a long time, that if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up. It's not going up at all. We've been doing it very carefully for the last twenty years, from satellites, and it isn't going up. And, in this paper, they showed something much more striking. They did what they call a radiation -- I'm not gonna go into details of it, actually it's quite complicated, but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say, the sun puts out a certain amount of energy, we know how much that is, it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount, when it gets warm, it generates redder energy, like infrared. The whole business of the global warming trash, really, is that if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that's trying to escape wont be able to get out, but the heat that's coming from the sun, which is mostly down in the 350nm [range] is where it's centered, that goes right through CO2, so you still get heated but you don't dissipate any. Well these guys measured all those things. I mean, you can talk about that stuff and you can write these large reports and you can get government money to do it, but these guys actually measured it and it turns out that in the last ten years -- that's why [the paper] say[s] "decadal" there -- the level of what they call "imbalance" has been way the hell over what was expected. The amount of imabalance -- meaning heat's coming in and not going out -- that you would get from having double the CO2, which -- we're not anywhere near that, by the way, but if we did, in 2025 or something have double the CO2 we had in 1900 -- they say it would increase the energy budget by about -- in other words, one watt per square centimeter more would be coming in than going out, so the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study -- these two studies, by two different teams -- that five and a half watts per square [centi]meter have been coming in, 1998, 1999, and the place didn't get warmer, so the theory's kaput. These papers should've been called "The End to the Global Warming Fiasco." But they're concerned, you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers because they're talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. If they said, you know what, there isn't a problem with global warming any longer, so we can -- y'know, if you start a grant request with something like "global warming hadn't actually happened." They have to be very cautious, but what I'm saying is, YOU can be delighted, because the editor of "Science" who is no dummy, and both of these really professional teams, have come to the same conclusion and the bottom lines in their papers they have to say, what this means is, what we've been thinking, the global circulation model that would predict that the earth is going get overheated is all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor, not by a small one. There's obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about, because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer. . . . Some science is done for other reasons than just curiosity, and there's a lot of things like global warming and ozone hole and a whole bunch of scientific public issues that if you're interested in them, you have to get down into the details and read the papers called "Large Decadal Variability in the Tropic--" you have to figure out what all those words mean, and if you just listen to the guys who are hyping those issues and making a lot of money at it, you'll be misinformed.

When I listen to conservative pundits question the reality of anthropogenic global warming, it's easy for me to dismiss. But when I heard Kary Mullis do it, it was not possible for me to dismiss. Kary Mullis is at least something of an authority -- dude won the Nobel Prize for foundational biochemistry work -- who I also perceive as being in my "group" (TED). Conservative pundits lack authority on the subject and even if they didn't, I don't perceive them as being in my "group." That's just human nature; part of how we adopt ideas is by seeing whether people we look up to endorse them. Even though I know that scientific knowledge can be independently validated by anyone in principle, in practice it is much easier to simply take the word of an agreed-upon expert.

If another agreed-upon expert comes along and contradicts the first, that creates doubt. For beliefs in which the doubter has little invested (like whether one still needs to change a vehicle's oil every 3000 miles), the doubt alone can be enough to dislodge the belief from the doubter's mind. For beliefs in which the doubter has much invested, on the other hand, the doubt has a much longer climb ahead of it. The engines of denial will be working overtime to cope with it through various false strategies -- anger or righteous indignation or passive/aggressive philosophical rationalizing -- so the doubt must be the residue of some especially emotionally impressive event. In my experience there is no more emotionally impressive event than a trusted, even loved, benevolent authority figure flatly declaring, in public, "I was wrong."

At 6:36 in this video the following exchange takes place between Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris:

DAWKINS: Dan Barker's making a collection of clergymen who've lost their faith but don't dare say so because it's their only living -- it's the only thing they know how, what to do.

HARRIS: Yeah. I've heard from one of them, at least.

DAWKINS: Have you?

HARRIS: Yes.

According to a 2002 article in the UK's Telegraph, as many as one third of British clergy fall into this category. As far as I can tell, such figures are unavailable for American clergy. My guess is that the percentage is lower, but the raw number is higher.

I wonder what would happen if one of these clergymen "came out"? He would lose his job, certainly -- but what would the effects be on individual members of his flock? He is ideally positioned to influence their opinions on this subject: a designated authority on God and spirituality who they perceive as being "on their side" or "in their group." This is the kind of person who marries people, confirms their children, speaks at their parents' funerals, helps them get through dark times, or otherwise forms meaningful bonds with people. Imagine if such a figure were to lay it all on the line in front of 300 followers and say "Look, this is bullshit, wake up." Imagine if his sermon told the story of his own journey from religious believer to atheist, letting them know it's OK to leave it all behind.

That would be quite something. You could almost call it a "conceptual suicide bombing." But it would be even cooler to call it a "deicide bombing."

Al Qaeda and other organizations that rely on real suicide bombing set aside a sizeable portion of their budget to compensate the families of suicide bombers after their martyrdom.

Wouldn't it be great if atheists formed a non-profit that provided economic relief to deicide bombers in the same way Al Qaeda takes care of its suicide bombers' kin?

I'm looking to talk to people in three industries: (a) professional religious orators who have secretly lost their faith and are intimidated by the prospect of switching careers in midlife, (b) people with experience in educational finance, i.e. setting up and/or running scholarship/grant programs, and (c) people with experience in setting up and/or running nonprofits or charities. Eventually, after enough conversations, I'll have a clear idea of what it would take to create a nonprofit organization called Deicide Bombers, Inc. I already have the domain name reserved.

Here's how it would work, at a very high level: a closeted atheist clergyman publicly comes out as an atheist, before his flock, as his final sermon. Volunteers videotape this and upload it to YouTube. The clergyman gets fired, presumably without any kind of severance package. Deicide Bombers, Inc. works with various universities, scholarships, educational grant programs, and other collegiate funding sources to procure a free Ivy League education for this clergyman. Everything would be covered -- tuition, housing, books.

There would be a few details to work out. The clergyman would have to consent to having his tax records during the time he was employed by the church audited by an accountant retained by Deicide Bombers, Inc. This would be to ensure that total compensation is commensurate with the clergyman's original church salary: if there isn't parity here, it will lend the religious opposition credence when they argue that the only reason people are willingly engaging in deicide bombing is for the money.

The Deicide Bombers, Inc. organization would need to come up with some broad guidelines for the clergyman in preparing his coming-out sermon. The sermon must be authentically from the heart -- it must be written in the clergyman's own voice, sharing his or her own journey from "person of faith," through the beginnings of doubt, all the way to atheism. Once both parties sign off on the text of the sermon, a date is set.

The date would be disseminated to a sort of closed-circuit social network of volunteers who would have to be willing to, with at least one week's notice, drive to any random church or other religious building in their area at which one of these deicide bombings was scheduled to occur. These volunteers would converge on the site prior to the worship service and set up video or audio recording devices to make sure there is at least one video documenting the delivery of the coming-out sermon.

Once the "martyrdom" has taken place, the coming-out sermon, all recordings, and all supporting financial and contractual documentation are all uploaded to the web for the public to see -- and the martyr gets set up with a free shot at starting over. An intellectual get-out-of-jail-free card.

Total openness (after the fact) is the key to making this work. Religious authorities will immediately claim that the only reason anyone is agreeing to deicide bombing is for the money. Deicide Bombers, Inc. would need to be able to refute such a claim instantly. It would calibrate its stipend and scholarship packages so that it constitutes a purely lateral move, salary-wise, and publish all the documentation required to prove that. Essentially they would provide the severance package that the clergyman's own church will not, and maybe some scholarship money to help switch careers, but that's it.

So, is there anybody out there who has a clue how to actually get this going? I'd love to pick your brain.

Lost

I am a huge fan of ABC's Lost. In certain respects, it is utterly conventional television: nearly every character is white (the only black or Latino cast members have been either killed or exiled from the island), every single female character is played by a stunning perfect-10 type, and the only female character without ludicrous pulchritude, Rose, is also the only non-white character who's still alive, although this is mostly a by-product of her being saddled with another American pop-culture trope, the Magical Negro. So it goes.

On one level, I think the writers are simply playing a game amongst themselves to see how much complexity can be revealed gradually over time. The X-Files broke new ground because it made clear from the outset that it was going to have a broad scope -- a story that affects the fate of the entire world. Lost is breaking new ground because, although it, too, tells a story that affects the fate of the entire world, that fact was not at all made clear from the outset. At the outset it looked like it was going to be a tropical version of Alive.

Around the end of the second season and the beginning of the third season (we are now about 7 or 8 episodes into the fifth season) I began to think about a possible explanation for what was going on in Lost. There are entire web sites devoted to fans presenting such theories and interactively critiquing them. I never published mine on one of these boards, but I did mention it to a few people.

I began to wonder if the point of the show was to put us, the American audience, in the role of reviled foreign terrorists. In this arrangement, "The Others" -- who live on "their island" with an orderly, courteous, regimented, productive social structure, yet at the same time seem perfectly content to be left alone on "their island" and exhibit no curiosity about anything off the island -- represent us, the American audience. And the substance of the plot consists of these "Others" systematically imprisoning, torturing, murdering, abducting, seducing, manipulating, and deceiving this ragtag band of protagonists. There were even shades of 9/11 in the fact that the way the Others are first made aware of the protagonists is by their arrival on a crashing plane. Over time we learn that the most frightening thing about the Others is their righteousness; their certainty that their cause is of such transcendentally greater purpose than you mere non-Others could ever imagine.

My confidence in this theory began to wane when the show introduced "the flash-forward of doom" at the end of Season 3, which established that some of the characters would in fact be able to leave the island. It seemed to me like the entirety of the action would have to play out on the island if my conjecture were to be strengthened.

Then the most recent episode aired, and my faith in the "we're the terrorists" hypothesis was renewed:

At this point in the story, a subset of the original plane crash's survivors -- the "Oceanic Six" -- have managed to get off the island, leaving some of their compatriots behind. They have been persuaded by "the Others" to return to the island. A mysterious woman somehow affiliated with "the Others" tells them that the only way to get back to the island is to get on another plane, this one going from L.A. to Guam, and for reasons having to do with "strong electromagnetic currents flowing throughout the earth" or something, this plane will also crash on the island. So they have to do the whole plane-crash thing over again, except this time they'll know what's going to happen.

This leads us to an extraordinary sequence in which, one by one, the "Oceanic Six" board this commercial airliner, and each gets this look on his or her face of rapturous anticipation, complete with lingering camera pans underscored with lush strings. These people are finally doing something they've thought about for a long time. They are united in purpose and conviction. They know they are going to crash, but are unafraid because they view the crash simply as a gateway to something wonderful beyond. A brief exchange of dialogue even makes it clear that they are aware, and simply don't care, that non-good things are going to happen to the other passengers on the plane.

These are the people that we have come to identify with over the last four seasons, yet they are shown boarding a commercial jet in the exact same emotional frame of mind that the nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers presumably were in on the morning of 9/11. The whole show has been leading up to a moment in which we are given a glimpse into what it must have felt like to be one of those suicide operatives. It's a profoundly creepy experience.

It's worth noting that, even if my conjecture is totally wrong, Lost could probably never have been made without 9/11 having happened first. Before 9/11, plane crashes were among the worst things people could think of. After 9/11, having a jet crash merely by accident into something that wasn't a crowded urban building seemed positively quaint. Before 9/11, pitching the Lost story would have been like pitching a prime-time sitcom about child molestation.

The other thing I'm loving about Lost is that the writers seem to have been profoundly influenced by one of my favorite books, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. The idea that the island can continuously move from one "pocket of strong electromagnetic energy" to another seems very similar to Eco's notion of "telluric currents" that, when properly harnessed and controlled, can remake the geography of the earth, and do in a few seconds what would take natural forces millions of years to do.

An Unusually Perceptive DailyKos Post

This is the kind of political writing I like. Let's talk about the systemic flaws that prevent us from making good policy, as opposed to hurling canned arguments about specific issues at each other.

Movie Roundup

In the last few months I've been very impressed by two psychological thrillers, each very different from the other but both quite excellent in their attention to character. Psychological thrillers used to rely on psychology to thrill us, but the James Wan generation of directors abuse the word "psychological" just as a way to put cardboard-cutout characters into bizarre and improbable situations. I love a good cinematic mindfuck as much as the next person, but if you don't have any insight into the minds on screen getting fucked, it all seems kind of pointless and contorted in the end. (This is the way a vocal minority felt about The Usual Suspects, although I loved it.)

2008's Transsiberian, written and directed by Brad Anderson and starring Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer among others, is set on the cross-continental railroad of the same name, and involves heroin traffickers, marital secrets, guilt, and Ben Kingsley with a kick-ass Russian accent. 3.5 out of 4 stars from Ebert, for those who care what he thinks.

2006's Bug, adapted from some play but directed on the screen by William Friedkin, starring Ashley Judd (!) and some dude I'd never heard of named Michael Shannon, was absolutely amazing. Just a vicious, devilish, perverse, but always believable ride. I haven't often been truly frightened or horrified by a movie, but this one did it. And there's very little violence (although what little there is disturbs). Also 3.5 out of 4 stars from Ebert.

Also, I had the opportunity to see The Golden Compass on pay-per-view. This was the so-called "atheist movie" that had the characteristically open-minded and well-informed Catholics up in arms. Not surprisingly, the fans of the British series of books on which the film was based were upset that not enough of author Philip Pullman's atheist message survived the translation from page to screen.

From my point of view, I thought the film was ideologically heavy-handed, but along much more environmental lines than atheistic ones. No explicit mention is ever made of God or belief or anything else, and the metaphorical attempt to depict mankind's better nature as a physical substance -- the mysterious Dust -- seemed less like a shot at God than a shot at people who don't believe global warming is real.

The large, oppressive bureaucratic villain -- the Magisterium -- presumably was a stand-in for the Catholic Church in the books, but in the film seems like a reasonable representative of multinational oil companies. When Daniel Craig ruffles the Magisterium's feathers early in the film by presenting concrete proof of Dust's existence, I took that as a metaphor for the eventual day of reckoning in which even the staunchest climate-change denier is confronted with irrefutable proof of anthropocentric global warming.

That, plus the fact that half the film takes place in the Arctic, with Scottish-brogued CGI polar bears in armor (don't ask) playing out the intrigues of their own moribund ursine kingdom, just left me with a very "environmentaly" vibe.

I'm tempted to read the books, but it takes a lot to get me to read fiction lately. We'll see. Ebert gave the movie 4 out of 4 stars, which seems a tad generous to me; 3 seems more reasonable. I also found it interesting that, while some saw The Golden Compass as the ideological antidote to the first installment of the Narnia Chronicles (with its thinly veiled retelling of the Christ story), both films essentially fetishize youthful innocence at the expense of adulthood, knowledge, and experience, which apparently Philip Pullman found very irritating and was one of the precise things his books were trying to stamp out.

Those damn atheists are never happy.

Vagus Vagaries

I must refer you to a recent post on Roger Ebert's blog. I absolutely love it because I'm a huge fan of Ebert, and in this piece he writes (in part) about Jonathan Haidt, another person I'm a huge fan of. (Just ignore the horrific photo of Oprah Winfrey that, for some unfathomable reason, he chose to include.)

It's debatable whether film criticism is a form of journalism, but if it is, then Roger Ebert has succeeded Edward R. Murrow as the most eloquent journalist in America.