Xeno's Paradox

New Information, Scumbags, And The Ongoing Coronavirus Situation

2020-03-20T21:29:00.001-05:00

If you have already read my previous post on this situation, the following will merely be updates; if you have not, please feel free to do so; the link is here, and please feel likewise welcome to share it as freely as you want. I prefer if you do so with attribution, but having the information - real, accurate, truthful information - get out to as wide a spread as possible is more important than having my name attached.

So, first, the numbers.

At this time, the U.S. has 19,469 cases, 258 deaths, and 147 people considered "recovered."

Worldwide, there are currently 275,531 cases, 11,385 deaths, and 91,533 patients recovered.

So, bad news, then scumbags, then good news, in that order.

Italy is really struggling; at this point their hospitals are triaging patients, and making some really tough decisions about whether or not to offer treatment to patients likely to die anyway. At this point it is unknown if their quarantine measures will prove to have been successful in slowing the spread of the virus.

Iran has moved from "struggling" to "totally overwhelmed" and is reporting a death every ten minutes.

Spain has passed 1000 deaths, and they are concerned that as much as 80% of the population of Madrid might already be exposed.

France at this point has 1/5th of its total available hospital beds already filled by patients with COVID-19.

The virus is spreading at an enormous rate, and the worry in the U.S. that the healthcare system might not be able to keep up is a significant one. While I don't consider NBC News a consistently reliable source, they polled 250 healthcare workers in hospitals already dealing with SARS-COV-2, and they're not painting a pretty picture. Supply shortages are already a problem. The lack of test kits is leaving healthcare workers dangerously exposed to the virus with patients they know are sick but can't test for it.

Now, this is strictly my opinion, but I'd suggest that getting the doctors and nurses who will be critical during this pandemic ill with the virus themselves will make things 1000% worse and should be, generally, avoided.

During the time I've been writing this, the United States has had 53 new cases reported and 4 more deaths.

Now, I don't want to be a panic-monger. At all. A rational, considered response is key in containing something like this.

But by the same token, the rate of spread of this disease is terrifying.

So let me go through some simple things for you, before we move on to scumbags and then good news, ok?

The true threat this disease poses is one of collapse of the healthcare system. This is true in every country that's faced large numbers so far. If you can get treated, you will likely be fine.

Let me say that again in huge letters for emphasis:

IF YOU CAN GET TREATED, YOU WILL LIKELY BE FINE.

But the reality is that if you get the severe form of this disease, and leave it untreated, your chances are far worse. In every country affected, what we're seeing is that initially patients are receiving treatment, they're recovering, no big deal.

Then they run out of ventilators.

Then the death toll starts to climb, and it stops being something that only kills 80 year old diabetics with renal failure, and starts being a thing that kills everybody.

Do not let people fake you out with this narrative that I'm seeing on social media, "this is so overblown, it's not nearly as severe as..."

Yes it is. This virus is highly mutagenic; at least two strains so far are known to exist in the wild, and it is not beyond the bounds of speculation to suggest that the differences between the strains might be a contributing factor to the severity of the disease in patients. As yet, although as I mentioned in the previous article there are several drugs offering possible therapy, at this time no effective treatment has been verified to exist.

This is a health crisis never before seen in the modern world.

As long as people follow the quarantine rules, and deal rationally with the situation, the numbers will remain manageable. If they remain manageable, we will be fine.

At this point, the U.S. has about 88,000 hospital beds available to treat patients with severe COVID-19.

But so far today, the death rate is steadily climbing, and right now deaths in the U.S. outnumber recoveries almost 2 to 1, because the federal government thus far has basically not responded except by making speeches.

Several states have taken severe measures to limit contagion, including New York, Illinois, and California, but the response from the federal government has been a number of laws introduced that haven't been voted on yet - hold on, we're getting to scumbags now - because everyone in Congress seems determined to capitalize on the crisis for political gain by inserting their pet legislative projects as line items in each of the pandemic response bills; this has thus far resulted in the actual legislative response from the U.S. government being, well.

Zero.

They have passed no laws, they have made no changes, they have done nothing.

President Trump - whose decisionmaking here seems spotty at best and who has made some serious mistakes - at least seems to be trying, in his very Trump way, to get something done; he's made several executive orders that don't require Congressional approval.

But Congress has done nothing.

Wait, wait, that's not accurate entirely.

U.S. Senators Bill Burr, Jim Inhofe, Kelly Loeffler, and Dianne Feinstein all miraculously managed to sell off huge chunks of their investment portfolios immediately after receiving their briefings on the SARS-COV-2 epidemic.

They are all playing the "those people just work for me" card, and saying that they don't personally go click buttons to make stock trades, because they have people for that, but the fact remains that all four of them have been enormously enriched by this crisis; they have literally profited from everyone else's economic misery.

Even if they didn't personally click the button to do it.

And despite the fact that they're the ones that got caught at it so far, they're almost certainly not the only ones who did it; they're just the worst at hiding it.

They're not the only scumbags, however.

Although price gouging in an emergency is illegal most places, some businesses found out that that isn't universal, notably in Minnesota, where the Attorney General's office has received a slew of reports about price gouging among local retailers. In response, the state governor, Tim Walz, has issued an executive order forbidding it, with a legislative solution to follow.

Seriously, guys, the dirtbags buying up hundreds of units of critical items and reselling them online at hugely inflated prices is bad enough, thanks; we don't need retailers doing the same thing.

And one last corporate scumbag to call out: GameStop has not only declared their business essential, despite that being utterly untrue, they have actually told their employees to resist law enforcement if law enforcement tries to enforce a store closure.

Newsflash, guys: Steam exists. People can totally buy games at home. And I'd bet against your CEO remaining out of jail for long if he stands by that idiotic idea.

On to good news, finally:

As we know, several vaccine candidates using different strategies to defeat the SARS-COV-2 virus are currently being researched; the first to enter clinical testing comes from Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle.

Now, clinical testing is definitely not a speedy process, but having a candidate in testing is a long step forward, especially considering most vaccines don't even enter clinical testing for over a year.

This is the point where antivaxxers all yell "insufficient testing" at you, so let me set your minds at ease.

The reason they're so far along so fast has nothing to do with cutting corners or any other silliness; it has to do with the fact that they started developing vaccines for SARS and MERS several years ago, and thanks to the scientists in Wuhan sequencing the genetic structure of the SARS-COV-2 virus almost immediately, several different companies were able to determine that this virus is similar enough to the originally noted SARS virus that the existing vaccine candidates could be rebuilt to work for it.

This means that a huge portion of the process that goes into making a vaccine effective was done in advance.

It absolutely does not mean that they're not testing adequately; the need for testing is precisely why the timeline for a vaccine is still a year or more away.

But what it does mean is that there are already several vaccine candidates entering testing.

No matter how bad this pandemic gets, there is light at the end of the tunnel; this bug can be, and will be, beaten.

So Let's Start Talking Facts About COVID-19 (Updated 3/18/20)

2020-03-16T00:32:00.001-05:00

(Updates here if you've already read the original post.)

So, over the last few days, I've been reading up on this disease, and along with that, checking out social media to see what fresh misinformation is making the rounds.

There's a lot.

So, in the interest of letting my friends and family, and anyone else who wants to see this, get some real, solid, verifiable information - and put some of the mythological garbage on FB to rest - I'm going to give you some reality.

I am aware I am not a doctor. Accordingly, to prevent the claim that I don't know what I'm talking about, I will source everything I can, and update this post as new information comes down. For those not familiar with my site and its layout, links are underlined. They will also change color if you mouse over them, and I generally will link supporting documentation in my discussion of each factual claim I make, so if I said it, there's a link somewhere. Some of those links will go to .pdf files - sorry, but that's how a lot of papers are published by the medical community.

Now, normally, I am fairly incendiary in my writing; I will try to minimize that, so that when you share this with your elderly relatives who insist that swearing invalidates all the information that follows, they don't clutch their pearls and gasp.

One of the first things I've noticed going around on social media are a trio of memes, two of which purport to be from doctors or nurses - different ones each time, but still - claiming a variety of things as effective against the novel coronavirus, AKA COVID-19, AKA SARS-COV-2, which I will refer to for the duration of this post as CV19.

First, there's one claiming you need to stay hydrated (true because you die of dehydration in 2 days,) but keeping your throat and "tissues" hydrated reduces the impact of CV19.

It does not.

The same meme also claims that warm water will help but cold water can make things worse.

Water temperature has nothing to do with the effect of CV19.

The second meme claims, among other equally silly things, that holding your breath for ten seconds will determine whether or not your lungs are in fibrosis.

It does not.

This one we'll revisit later, because while the test is completely false - holding your breath doesn't test anything and is certainly not an effective test for CV19 - the fibrosis is not false, but by itself doesn't tell you anything. I promise I'll come back to it.

The third thing I've seen going around is a story about a guy in Wuhan who recovered from CV19 by ignoring antibiotics and eating manuka honey.

This one is so stupid it makes me practically burst into flames.

First, correlation isn't causation.

There may be a guy who got better. Hurray! That doesn't impart mystical healing abilities to honey. As you will see, most people who get CV19 do get better.

Ignoring antibiotics double bonus extra doesn't matter. CV19 is a viral pathogen; antibiotics are for bacteria. There is no value to antibiotics in a CV19 case unless the patient is suffering from aggravated secondary infections.

So.

Here is the situation.

Currently, there is an outbreak of unknown scope of a virus from a common family of viruses; known as a betacoronavirus, the strain currently spreading is a new strain, very similar to the virus that causes SARS. (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.) Thus, the actual, official name of the virus at this time is SARS-COV-2.

This virus is dangerous for a number of reasons.

First, it has a lengthy period of asymptomatic incubation during which patients are contagious. By lengthy, I mean it lasts between 2 and 14 days. (Initial estimates were 2-7 days; subsequent information has expanded that estimate.)

This means, in non-medical jargon, that after you are exposed, you can spread the virus to other people for as long as two weeks before you, yourself, show any symptoms at all.

Which is why we're seeing these huge spikes in the numbers of cases reported; a single infected individual can spread the virus to a heck of a lot of people before they actually start to cough. Virus particles can be expelled primarily through coughing and sneezing, but once your upper respiratory system is infected, you can spread it by contact with surfaces that have been exposed, by shaking hands, by leaning in really close and breathing on someone. That's how aerosol viruses work, and it's not new; it's how influenza spreads.

Once symptomatic, the patients split into two main groups; mild and severe. For mild cases, time from onset of symptoms to recovery averages at two weeks.

For severe cases, that time extends to three to six weeks.

During that entire time, the patient is contagious. Even if displaying mild symptoms, and not reporting for medical care, they are still able to transmit the pathogen to others, and since at this time it is not known what causes individual cases to enter the severe phase, that's very dangerous.

It is important to note at this point that although the majority of the patients who have died in the initial outbreak were people with underlying health conditions, the numbers of healthy people who have died are steadily climbing. Having COPD sure doesn't help, but not having it doesn't mean you'll be fine.

So, let's talk about recovery. And then I'm going to scare the crap out of you.

At this time, approximately 80% of the patients who are infected with CV19 experience mild symptoms and then recover in a couple of weeks.

Approximately 20% enter the second, more severe, stage of the virus. Severe phase patients experience significant difficulty breathing; this stage is survivable in hospital, but attempting to ride it out is heavily contraindicated.

Approximately 6% of the total number of infected patients go into a critical phase.

Patients in this critical phase are unable to survive without oxygen therapy, artificial respirators, and significant medical intervention.

Without that medical intervention, they die.

Let me be perfectly clear about this: medical treatment has been effective enough that they have been able to save most of the critical patients at this point.

That absolutely should not reassure you, for reasons I will talk about in a minute.

But first, let's talk about the folks who have survived this disease.

The Hong Kong Hospital Authority is reporting that between 16% and 25% of the people who have recovered from CV19 are experiencing a loss of lung capacity of between 20 and 30%.

A permanent one.

This is where we talk about what CV19 actually does, and that fibrosis thing I promised to talk about earlier.

See, when CV19 enters your lungs, it begins to attack your lung tissue. That's bad. (And heart tissue, which is also bad.)

What's worse, is that it can allow secondary microbial attacks, including damage to the stem cells that allow your lungs to repair damage. Which means that the longer it progresses, the more of your body's ability to self-repair is destroyed.

This has a bonus side effect; it drives your immune system absolutely crazy, causing your immune cells to attack both damaged lung tissue and healthy lung tissue, causing further damage and scarring. The term fibrosis refers to damage and scarring in the lungs; this is absolutely a result, and aftereffect, of CV19; but by the time the patient has fibrosis, they are either too busy dying to hold their breath, or they are "recovered" with permanent lung damage.

But they live.

This is survivable.

However, as I said above, that should not reassure you.

Because resource scarcity is a real thing, regardless of people's opinions.

And keeping critical-phase patients alive long enough to recover is resource-intensive.

Very much so.

At a number of cases measured in thousands, the hospitals in China were overwhelmed. Patients were being treated in the halls.

So let's talk about contagion again.

Because recovered patients continue to be contagious, even after the end of symptoms, for as long as five weeks. (37 days being the longest duration currently recorded.)

This means that even after they're better, even after they're out of the hospital and at home, they can continue to infect people, generating new cases, for over twice as long as they could before they figured out they had it in the first place.

And CV19, while not particularly durable in its aerosol form, can survive on surfaces for a long time as well.

Up to 72 hours.

Which means that China is now reporting patients being re-infected after "recovery" - by going back to their insufficiently sanitized houses, touching their kitchen counter, and then their eyes or nose. (I note here that this has thus far not been lab-tested; so far it's just news reports, and since it's really, really bad news, scientists are denying until it's demonstrated in a lab. So, unproven, but reported. Can't say it's factual, but it's possible. There are at least two different strains of CV19 running around out there, and immunity to one doesn't make you immune to the other.)

Want to take that 80% bet twice?

There is currently no known antiviral agent effective against CV19.

Antibiotics have no effect on it.

There is currently no medication known to work on it.

The only current treatment for it is palliative - they try to ameliorate the symptoms long enough for you to recover on your own.

But guess what? After you "get better," you are *not* necessarily immune to it. It may be possible for you to catch it again, just like the common cold.

And the best estimates I've been able to find so far about the development of a vaccine say that it may take as long as April - of 2021.

Let's be clear; they've gene-sequenced this virus.

They understand its likely origin point (a bat.)

They understand its means of transmission.

They just can't kill it.

And they can't prevent you from getting it except in one way, which we'll talk about in a minute, after I get done showing you why that way is super important.

So, a week or so ago, I started seeing people talking about how H1N1 influenza spread to millions of people.

Yeah - about 80 million people worldwide.

So, at this time, I want you to remember that about 6% of the people infected with CV19 go into the critical phase.

6% of 80 million people is 4.8 million people.

Hospitals in China were overwhelmed with thousands of cases.

No matter how proud you are of the state of medical care in the USA, there is simply no mathematical way for hospitals to absorb, and treat, 4.8 million people who all require respirators, artificial blood filtration, and lung lavage to survive.

Because of resource scarcity.

Limited numbers of respirators.

Limited supplies of IV needles. (They're a large, but finite number.)

Limited numbers of caregivers.

Limited hospital beds.

And against 4.8 million people, those supplies will simply run out.

4.8 million people is more than the 2010 census reported as the total population of Houston and Chicago combined.

That is not a number the medical establishment can simply absorb.

That is not a number the country can simply write off.

That is not an acceptable number.

So. This disease has a contagious period ranging verifiably up to nine weeks. During the majority of that time, it shows no symptoms whatsoever.

The fact that the lethality numbers thus far are as low as they are is a testament to the dedication and skills of hospitals in the areas of initial infection.

The problem is that as the disease spreads to countries which aren't responding with the same quarantine fervor displayed by China and Korea - say, Italy, for example - that lethality number is steadily climbing. The hospitals in Italy are overwhelmed, and as they run out of supplies, they're starting to lose more and more patients.

The US is following the exact, identical epidemiological curve that Italy did.

Except so far, the quarantine measures we've taken are even less effective.

Italy is in lockdown; and although they're struggling to keep people cooperating with it, it's working to reduce the spread of the infection.

The US is not.

They're recommending "social distancing."

They're closing schools.

They aren't closing businesses, unless it's voluntarily.

And we're talking about a disease that - so far - kills roughly 5-6% of the people who get it according to The Lancet; a disease that is contagious for up to 9 weeks, can possibly re-infect, and causes permanent lung damage in up to 30% of the people who recover.

Now, this is not the end of the story.

Quarantine measures appear to greatly reduce the spread of infection.

A nine week quarantine would be a huge burden to everyone.

Major adjustments would need to be made. Business estimates would need to be revised; medical leave - with pay - made available; quarantine enforced. People are already seeing impact, from school closures and child care, to difficulty obtaining basic supplies.

The Senate will be considering the bill to take care of some of the leave, pay, and other issues, hopefully tomorrow.

I don't think it's good enough.

People need to go home and stay there.

Not go to the movies, or take their kids to the park.

Home. Stay there.

If they do, the infection will become a much less significant threat. Doctors and hospitals can handle this disease, provided that they are not inundated with millions of simultaneous cases. Slowing the spread will work; they can handle some cases.

Just not everybody at once.

This disease is scary.

It should be scary.

And we should be doing more about it.

Eating honey doesn't help.

Holding your breath doesn't work.

Drinking warm water exclusively doesn't work.

Gargling with vinegar doesn't work.

Saying "I'm young and healthy, I will be fine" doesn't work. (Lethality still at 0.9 even with no comorbidity factors.)

Quarantine does work.

And we should be doing far more of it, as soon as possible.

At a guess, if the US government manages to catch on to the idea that pretty much everyone currently in it has been exposed thanks to that one staffer, and pretty much everyone in it is in the highest risk category, we'll go into lockdown by the 20th of March.

If they decide to really let the cows out before closing the barn door, the 27th of March.

Honestly, considering how the numbers will jump tomorrow, I hope they freak out and lock everything down in the morning.

The CDC updates its estimates Monday through Friday; as of Friday, their estimate in the US was 1629 cases. That number has doubled over the weekend.

We'll see what that looks like tomorrow - and I will update.

(Updates as of 3/18/20)

So, first up on the list, bad news: the USA now has 9385 reported cases and 154 deaths. Up from 1689 cases on Friday. That is not a good trend. (This tracker seems to be updating far more frequently than CDC, and I'm going to leave this link here for later reference.)

Second, apparently ibuprofen, and other common-use NSAIDs (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) can make symptoms worse. So... Take Tylenol.

Third, Italy is swamped; 35,713 cases currently under treatment, 4025 recoveries... and 2978 deaths. Which is why early quarantine measures (like the ones the United States has already skipped) are so important. Running out of hospital beds and treatment options is a death sentence for a lot of people.

Right now, Italy has 591 cases per 1 million people in population.

The USA has 28 cases per 1 million people in population.

Now, we pinky swear that we have more hospital capacity per population, more medical caregivers, more everything.

So, numbers-wise we'll be in a comparable situation to Italy if we hit 200,000 cases. If we can manage 200,000 cases as well as Italy has, we'll end up with 16,755 deaths.

As of right now, we're several days in the contagion spread past the point where Italy began to seriously try to contain the disease. So it will likely be quite a bit worse than that.

Guys, I want you to know, I want nothing more than to be wrong about this. I want this disease to be a flash in the pan and then gone, something that inconveniences us for a few weeks and then disappears.

But right now, Congress is debating the response they'll make to this - because each and every Congresscritter and Senator seems hellbent on riding the necessity of the response into getting their particular legislative wishlist inserted into the bill - and that means that the bill will die. And nothing will get done.

Mayors countrywide are responding.

Governors, the same.

The federal government? Absolute paralysis.

And both teams are to blame. Let nobody be fooled here; it doesn't matter which side of the aisle you're on, both teams are complicit, both teams are playing disaster brinksmanship; and we won't see any serious, immediate action until one of them actually falls ill. (Further update: Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla) and Ben McAdams (D-Utah) are our big winners! Lo and behold, now it affects the political elite! We'll see how Congress reacts to the knowledge that literally every member of Congress has been exposed at this point - tomorrow, I'd guess.)

Third piece of bad news: as the Italian hospitals are failing, they're finding out that the "survivability" of this disease for younger people is a total illusion. Younger people are less likely to get the severe form, but less likely doesn't mean they don't get it, and without proper treatment, they're dying too. It hasn't happened in the USA yet because the hospital system isn't overwhelmed, but the operative word in that sentence is "yet."

However, there actually is some good news; there are several drugs showing signs of reducing the severity of the symptoms, and reducing the duration of the actual COVID-19 disease. Two different antiviral agents - remdesevir, and a cocktail of Tamiflu combined with several drugs used to treat HIV - have shown serious promise as palliative therapy. There's been some sign that chloroquinine - used to treat malaria - may also help. And there's a Japanese antiflu medication called Favipiravir because scientists aren't any better at names than the U.S. DOD is.

Kaletra, however, has failed its first major clinical trial and is likely to be discarded as a potential treatment.

I will note here that although Cuba has been making loud claims about their plethora of drugs available for treating CV19, so far they have produced zero clinical evidence that those drugs actually help. (If anyone comes up with an actual clinical study showing some effect from any of their suite of medications, I'd love to see it. Please forward it to me so I can read up on it and add it here!)

As far as an actual vaccine, there are several vaccine candidates progressing through different phases of testing. They're all still months away, but they're all solid candidates - which means that this virus may be preventable, even if we're not there yet. Vox - not generally a bastion of fine journalism - actually did a great writeup on the various vaccine trials and the story behind them, so instead of reinventing the wheel I'm just linking it here.

Keeping Promises

2019-06-16T17:41:00.000-05:00

One thing politicians rarely do is to keep campaign promises.

Everyone knows it.

But the thing is, those promises serve an important purpose, which is to make the voters in those areas feel emotionally like their candidate really cares about their issues, and allow them to vote from their emotions rather than their logic.

So, it's become tradition in every American election for the candidates to descend upon their voter base and promise the sun, moon, and stars - or even better, as witness recently, to promise to Make America Great Again, which appeals to emotion, offers nothing substantive at all, and is easy to argue later.

That is not to say that the candidates have any intent whatsoever of keeping those promises; again, it's become tradition for campaign promises to be ignored after the election, to the point that it's become a cliche; "as solid as a campaign promise" being a good description of, say, quicksand.

So, I have to call out victories in that regard where I can. Hold onto that thought; the road to get there is going to be twisty.

California is currently in the throes of a number of various crises.

Homelessness has become a plague - indeed, it's such a massive problem that the CDC is worried that a literal plague might result.

Los Angeles has an immense trash disposal problem. In fact, California as a whole has a huge trash problem thanks to China changing the rules for recycling, which has resulted in huge amounts of formerly recyclable garbage being stranded in increasing strained facilities statewide.

Rats, and rat fleas, are becoming an issue.

The California pension system is collapsing.

The California budget is unsustainable.

The California deficit is almost half a trillion dollars.

So, California is a huge base of support for Democratic presidential hopefuls. Those electoral votes are required for any Democrat to win the Oval Office; without California, Democrats will simply outright lose every election.

Which means it is - or should be - obvious that Democrat presidential candidates should be devoting a huge proportion of their time to California, and ignoring states that they won't win in a hundred years.

It came as a bit of a shock, then, to the Democrat voters in California that the entire field of candidates for the 2020 election have been effectively totally silent on California's issues.

California voters are pissed off, and so are their newspapers.

They're important, dammit! Why aren't their candidates paying attention to them?!

The answer is a little involved, and I don't want to get ahead of myself, so let's take a detour into California history for a sec.

See, with only a couple of exceptions, the California governor has been a Democrat since 1978.

The California legislature has been majority Democrat since 1959 except for 4 years.

California has been almost exclusively under Democrat control for decades. This is why it's seen as such a bastion of electoral votes for the presidential election; California has voted for the Democrat candidate in every election since 1988.

This, in fact, for a substantial part of the last several decades has been a trifecta control, in which one political party controls the state house and senate and the governorship at the same time; allowing that party to pass its chosen bills and legislation effectively without interference or meaningful opposition by the other party.

All to the good, you may be thinking; all the more reason for Democrats to be loyal to their constituents.

Wellllllllll, about that...

See, the policies and legislation that have brought California to its current state have, almost without exception, been Democratic policies.

You can't argue that; the Republicans haven't had a sufficient majority to pass legislation without the Democrats signing off on it since the 1950s.

So the problems California is facing aren't a product of a vast right-wing conspiracy, and that's a huge problem for the presidential candidates.

Those problems are a kiss of death for them, and they know it.

See, this is where I have to give credit where credit is due. The Democrats in California kept their promises, and that's why they're being ignored.

They kept their promises, and put in place the exact programs and ideas they promised to, and the results stand before us: their ideas don't work.

They result in homelessness.

Disease.

Vermin.

Trash.

Appalling debt.

Poverty.

Economic ruin.

In fact, the only reason the poverty numbers in California look as good as they do is that California has been steadily losing poor people, and gaining rich people, for years. Often by farming their poor out to Texas. This does make the poverty numbers - and the numbers on education - look better, but it doesn't do anything to address the problems, for example the fact that even wealthier people are now starting to feel the bite of California's outlandish housing costs.

California is in a massive crisis.

And the Democrats running for president can't touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Because they don't have any solutions for those problems.

Their campaigns - all of them - are predicated on exporting those same policies and ideas to the rest of the country.

As long as they can pretend those problems don't exist, they don't have to open themselves to a question they can't answer, which is "if it didn't work in California, why would it work for the whole country?"

And they know perfectly well that Californians will, again, wind themselves up in another election cycle, charge off to the ballot boxes, and vote for whichever Democrat ultimately gets the party nomination, regardless of whether that person has even touched base with them or not; regardless of whether that person has ever tried to help, or not; because anything is better than electing a Republican.

So, they don't care; they don't, because there's no compelling reason they should, and their political survival depends on them pretending California doesn't exist until Election Day.

If you're bankrupt, what you need more than anything else is a higher credit limit.

Maybe this is just me, but I'd be looking at California as a test case for anything the Democrat presidential candidates say on the campaign trail, because...

...This is what happens when they keep their promises.

Are those the promises you want kept?

Well, If You Don't Know...

2019-06-16T15:54:00.002-05:00

So, for this post the usual warnings about the offensive nature of everything I write apply, but double or so.

And an additional disclaimer applies because I'm going to say some things that are going to offend a very broad selection of members of the audience.

So... Cope. This is a No Snowflake zone.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way...

So, I was inspired by multiple discussions I've had - and some I've seen but not participated in - surrounding culture issues.

In the last few years, a term has come into vogue that I absolutely hate, which is "cultural appropriation."

Now, if you look it up, there's a whole lot of verbiage surrounding what it actually means; there's a reason for this.

It's a smokescreen.

Back up a bit.

See, every culture borrows good ideas from its cultural neighbors. This is one of the main ways cultures grow and improve over time; the more insular a culture is, the more it stagnates, and ultimately while a small group of people might still adhere to it, that culture gets left behind. (Examples abound, and I'm not going to call any of them out because then I'd have to list all of them.)

So, it originally started as a way to distinguish respectful borrowing, and appreciation, of another culture, from disrespectful douchebaggery.

Visiting Japan, for example, and coming back with a new tea set and a bunch of how-tos on tea ceremonies, versus showing up to the costume party in blackface or being Rachel Dolezal.

You may not ever develop the skill and knowledge to truly perform a tea ceremony the "right" way, but you're showing appreciation by studying the process and trying to understand its meaning and why it's done a certain way. That's fine.

The thing is, as the term gained traction, it stopped being a distinguishing term, and started being a segregating one.

Suddenly, both the examples I described above became "appropriation," and began to be treated with the same contempt.

They're not the same.

They're not even close.

But they served an important purpose; they transformed the term itself. It originated as a means of distinguishing respectful cultural contact from disrespectful cultural contact; but now, it's been transformed into its own form of hidden bigotry.

See, a vibrant, living culture is strong. It can take disrespect; it can take mockery. And while those things are offensive, they don't threaten the existence of the culture itself.

But the cult of segregation doesn't think that way.

In the cult of segregation, the term itself applies to any use of a cultural element by the dominant culture.

And in every case, this translates to, "it's wrong when white people do it."

Well, that's douchey, but *shrug* resident in my palace of privilege, I don't actually care if you call me names, because I'm not personally so weak that your lack of approval threatens me.

But here's the thing - the anti-appropriators have a bit more on their plate than that. They vehemently oppose any cultural transfers by white people, because those transfers pose a threat to the integrity of the other cultures themselves.

So, what the term has transformed into, instead of being a tool for rational people to distinguish between respect and disrespect, is a blanket statement that other cultures are so weak, so fragile, by comparison to "white" culture - with fingerquotes because white people aren't exactly a monolithic culture block - that any use of cultural elements from those cultures by white people poses an existential threat to those cultures.

China, in other words, must be protected from white people, because Chinese culture might suffer irreversible damage if a white girl wears a Chinese qipao for a prom dress.

The inherent racism of that idea - the utterly incredible disregard for the value of those other cultures - should shock and offend you.

You ought to be offended by that idea.

Because what the cultural segregators are really saying is that it should be obvious that "white culture" is better than those other cultures - so much so that they need to be preserved, like zoo animals, because otherwise they will go extinct, like those zoo animals' wild equivalents.

I reject that idea in its totality.

Now, this doesn't - yet - relate much to the title, but I promise I'll get there.

Multiculturalism and appropriation cannot coexist, guys. You don't get both. You can't require appreciation for other cultures, and openness to their lessons and wisdom, and simultaneously declaim that any use of the lessons learned from those cultures is dangerous and disrespectful.

So, if an African designer and a Japanese designer get together and make a kimono line with African cultural flourishes, it's not appropriation; neither of them is a member of the "dominant" culture, so it literally can't be.

A white toddler wanting to wear a Moana costume, however, is an existential threat to the culture of Pacific Islanders.

Read that again, let it sink in. These are the literal responses from the Snowflake Brigade to these two events.

And they are leading up to the title, I promise.

See, the difference - the mission critical, worldshaking distinction between those two things, is ignorance.

The African designer was knowledgeable about Japanese culture and expressing appreciation.

The toddler was a toddler, didn't know the cultural meanings, and just said "that's awesome and I want that."

Let that soak in, too.

The Snowflake Brigade was angry at a literal child for this because the child didn't know enough about Pacific Island culture for it to be "legitimate."

First, if that's your standard for legitimacy, then no culture transfers should take place ever. Ever.

Anyone not Scottish, knock off with wearing kilts. You're not entitled to tartan.

Now, that's never been an issue; Scots don't chase people down in howling mobs, screaming about appropriation, because their culture isn't threatened by imitation.

Nor is yours, or anyone else's.

But this whole thing begs a question, which is, if you can't be exposed to other cultures because any use of any element of those cultures is "appropriation," how can you become educated enough about those cultures to be respectful in the first place?

Well, you can't.

Because that's the whole agenda of "appropriation" in the first place - isolation.

And here we come on the title.

Whose job is it to educate people about your culture?

See, if you're going to be offended at ignorance of your culture, then it is up to you to cure it. You don't get both; you don't get to say "you can't use my culture in any way because you're too ignorant about it" and when they say "well teach me about it" respond with "It's not my job to teach you," because you literally are your culture's ambassador.

You can be offended at ignorance; that's perfectly fine. I would be, too.

You can also choose to refuse the obligation to educate. You're super right; it's not your job to train a bunch of people in the ways of your people.

But you have to choose between them.

Otherwise, it's like if a Japanese girl married a man from Mexico, and at every meal his mom came over and griped about not having tamales, but then refused to teach the girl how to make tamales.

So, while thinking about that, I was trying to catch a thread; I remembered vaguely a conversation on that exact topic - the obligation, or lack thereof, of people in a marginalized group to educate others about their struggle.

Where have I heard that before?

Most recently, I read a lengthy, and not particularly well thought out screed from a transgendered person claiming that people needed to know, off the top of their head, the correct pronoun for them, avoid assuming gender, know that they're on a journey, and if they don't know any of those things because their contact with transgendered people has been very limited by virtue of the fact that transgendered people are a tiny, tiny minority of the population, then...

"Well, if you don't know, it's not my job to tell you."

Huh. (Note: link doesn't go to that post on Facebook because I couldn't find it again. Goes to a different example of the same thing - this time claiming that asking for education *is* oppression. Well played.)

So, you're the person who is on the spot, you're the person with the best chance to permanently cure some of that ignorance and marginalization, to remove some minor aspect of that discrimination for good, to create another ally, to advance your culture - and it is one - and your response is to shrug, because you have no obligation to teach people, and say "well if you don't know..."

Right.

So, here's the thing.

The concept of cultural appropriation is poisonous. It is simultaneously bigoted, condescending to the cultures it claims to represent, and really dangerous in terms of creating cultural isolation; terrible thinking.

And the cure for it is education.

You're not obligated to teach people.

But you're an asshole if you don't.

Not to the folks being ignorant; they're already ignorant of your struggle, and don't know they should care.

You're being an asshole to every member of your group that interacts with those people later on and experiences disrespect that you could have cured and didn't.

"Well, if you don't know..." is toxic.

Don't say it.

Don't use it.

If you're not willing to educate, keep your offense to yourself. The legitimacy of your platform to complain about any issue depends on the solutions to the problem.

Perfectly legitimate if you try to educate someone and they refuse to hear you; they're an asshole. It's a species all its own. You're 100% right to treat them, and their behavior, with disdain.

Not so much if you're yelling at someone for being wrong, and they ask you how to do it right and you refuse to tell them.

Not so much, again, if you think the solution to ignorance is to ban toddlers from buying Moana costumes.

If that's your thought process, you're the asshole.

A Point I Feel Needs To Be Made (Abortion. You Have Been Warned. )

2017-01-29T11:43:00.001-06:00

So, I was having a civil discussion with someone on Facebook this morning on a controversial topic, namely abortion.

I know!

Who even does that?

Civil discussion, pffffft.

Predictably, a name-calling troll showed up; unsurprisingly, to "support" my argument by calling the other person an idiot, thus reducing my argument to "the thing that guy who was on the same side as that other asshole said," which I didn't appreciate at all.

So, since I think the point I was making is important and valid, I'm going to make it here, instead, where I literally cannot be interrupted.

So.

Abortion.

Abortion is, and should be, a huge decision.

I'm going to talk a bit about the nature of that decision, and of the rhetoric surrounding it.

I am only peripherally going to discuss my stance and feelings about that decision, promise.

Abortion is, literally, a life or death decision.

The person making that decision is choosing literally between life and death for a human being.

And that right there is what brought this about.

Because a bunch of you, reading that, knee-jerked "in the first trimester it's not a human being yet, " and I want to make you revisit that.

Let's examine it.

There are only a few possible outcomes to a pregnancy.

It can result in a healthy baby.

It can result in an unhealthy baby.

It can result in a dead baby.

It cannot, however, result in anything that isn't a baby.

No office chairs can pop out of your womb.

You cannot give birth to a car, or an avocado.

It is impossible for a human pregnancy to result in anything other than a human.

So saying it is a "clump of undifferentiated cells," or a "non-viable tissue mass," or any other term besides "baby," is a dodge.

The problem with that dodge is that it robs a literally life-or-death, irreversible decision of much of its weight and importance.

It's way easier to end the existence of a clump of non-differentiated cells than it is to kill a baby.

Now, having used that phrase, I'm sure quite a few of you are thinking, "oh, ok, I know where this guy stands now."

I assure you that you do not, so I will briefly digress to explain my actual stance on abortion.

Myself, personally, I would not make that decision, or support it, in any case other than medical necessity or loss of agency.

Remember that last phrase, because it will become important.

The thing is, despite the fact that *I personally* wouldn't make that decision unless I felt it was unavoidable, I also don't believe the federal government has the right, reason, or justifiable power to pass laws about it. It is a reproductive choice, involving at most - at absolute most - two people, in each case: except in cases of loss of agency, in which case there's only one person involved, the only people responsible for that decision are the parents.

This is not something rightly solved by federal law. Maybe not even state law.

I will explain that specific point in another article, because it by itself needs significant expansion.

But in brief, for those among you who don't read this site normally, and only found this on Facebook, the same principle of agency applies to lawmaking.

The larger the scale of the political unit involved, the more difficult it is to opt out of unfair or unethical laws. When your town passes a local ordinance that you can't live under, just opting out of that by moving is outside the capacity of a lot of people.

Much more so, for states.

Far, far more so for an entire country.

It is therefore the responsibility of government, at each level of scope and power, to consider the difficulty of that option when making laws, because passing huge laws your citizens cannot escape and cannot prevent is loss of agency - there's that phrase again - and that's morally wrong.

So, back to abortion.

We have a nominally democratic, representative form of government, which universally is the cover used by our legislators when they pretend the ability to opt out actually still exists on the level of federal laws.

"If you don't like it, vote for someone who..."

What?

How do you conclude that sentence in an honest way?

"Better represents your interests" ?

Because none of them do, regardless of the campaign speeches.

"Will work to help you" ?

Because that exact "help me, fuck them" mentality is what got us where we are today.

There's no real, honest answer to that, because both the speaker and listener know that that phrase is code for "now that I'm in office, I don't have to listen to you, so fuck off. "

So when you're talking about federal laws around abortion, you're really talking about a small group of very rich people making huge, life-altering decisions for millions upon millions of people; and those decision-makers are, almost universally, held to be exempt from the laws they pass.

So.

I don't personally think abortion is the right choice in the overwhelming majority of cases.

But I also don't believe I have the right to make that decision for you, or you for me.

What I do think is that it should be a bitterly hard decision to make.

Not needlessly cruel - that whole business of forcing pregnant women to look at their ultrasounds before making that decision is so ham-handedly awful it makes me want to hit somebody - but hard.

Because a pregnancy cannot result in anything other than a baby.

If the situation leading you to make the decision of whether or not to abort is sufficiently important to you that it outweighs the life of your child, and you make the decision honestly and on that basis, then you made the right choice for you.

It would never be the right choice for me, but it doesn't have to, because I'm not you.

Lying to yourself about what that decision really is, is always the wrong way.

Always.

Because killing your child is a choice that can come back to haunt you.

If you accept that that's what it is, at the time, you may cry, you may be hurt, but you will heal and move on.

If you lie to yourself, one day those lies will fall apart, and then there's a pretty good chance you will, too.

Goddammit, Nintendo, Why?!

2017-01-17T16:26:00.001-06:00

So, before I really get going with this, you should know that the "NES Classic" is limited to only 30 specific, built-in games.

The new Switch system, with its tiny on board storage and absurd over-reliance on peripherals, has numerous developers that have promised games and support, but very few titles are confirmed, and the official production numbers look like Nintendo is poised to have yet another launch where they can't even come close to meeting demand, thus crippling their own sales and Market penetration, again.

Again.

Why, Nintendo?

You're just going to end up with another console generation where your only contribution is another round of Mario and Zelda games, and we get it, guys, but Mario just isn't compelling enough to drive an entire console alone.

So, thankfully, I'm here to save the day.

I'm going to give you an idea that will make you literal billions of dollars, and I'm not even going to charge you a consultancy fee, because I know you will never, ever actually do it.

Ready, guys?

Think handheld.

Start with the same emulator and engine for the NES Classic. Add a more significant storage; for example, a 120gb solid state drive. Add an LED screen capable of handling 16 bit graphics. No touch screen, no crazy extra stuff. Build enough buttons and controls to act as a Super Nintendo controller (d-pad, four face buttons, two shoulder buttons,) right onto the device.

NES and Super NES games are fricking tiny. 120gb gives you enough space for literally every Nintendo-owned title from both consoles, and enough space left for every third party game you can figure out licensing for.

Literally hundreds of games.

No need for Internet connectivity, no need for peripherals, just usb fast charge and a 6 hour battery.

Low battery use due to the low processing, memory, and screen power means a 6 hour battery would be smaller and cheaper than the one in my phone.

If you want to get really crazy, put in a micro SD slot so people can swap saves.

I'm talking about a retro handheld, able to play hundreds of games, with absolutely no need for internet, no need for peripherals, and did I mention hundreds of games?

Not thirty, hundreds.

MSRP $99.99, you'd sell so many of those it's not even funny.

Which is step 2.

Advertise the shit out of it.

Open a long preorder. Like 9 months long. Get your production lines going, estimate that brick-and-mortar demand will be twice the preorders.

Watch the preorder numbers.

Build enough to meet a total of three times the preorders on launch day.

Sit back and make money, because this should be pretty much pure cheddar for you after the design is finalized.

Guesstimate that interest + price will sell about 15 million of these things. If you guys cheap out on materials and workmanship and still can only scratch out $15 in profit per sale, that would be $225 million.

Add a case with some Mario and Zelda logos that costs you 6 bucks and you sell for $25, that's another $300 million.

You're now at half a billion dollars.

Offer some games as for-pay downloads using the usb; another $200 million.

Track achievements, and let gamers upload their stats to a (free!) account to show their friends.

Authorize YouTube videos of games / achievements. (And knock off copyright takedowns. Do you seriously not understand free advertising? Just require that Nintendo ads play with any video that shows Nintendo games or characters.)

Hell, use the SD slot to save videos with a "shareshot" button.

Charge $20 for each of four or five collectible, differently colored and logoed SD cards.

You're already well over a billion dollars.

Thank me with a free one.

Because This Gets Overlooked (ITP: My Fandom Will Salt And Burn Your Fandom. )

2016-08-12T14:23:00.001-05:00

So, I'm a fan.

For eleven years, I've followed a TV show called Supernatural.

And we just had the pleasure of watching the actresses Briana Buckmaster and Kim Rhodes do a panel at the Minneapolis convention center.

So, Briana responded to a fan question by saying that her character, Sheriff Donna Hanscum, is a comic relief character.

Yeah, that's true.

But that's not the whole story.

One of the conventional narratives in media and fiction, a trope that gets overused in the wrong ways, is the damsel in distress.

Supernatural is one of the shows that doesn't do that much, and they usually overturn it when they do.

But it's s huge thing, that trope.

So Kim Rhodes and Briana Buckmaster play two of the characters Supernatural has used to smash that trope. And even though Briana's character is usually played for laughs, she has subtext.

Both Jodi Mills and Donna Hanscum have one major factor in common: when confronted with the existence of supernatural creatures, unlike most other non-hunter characters on the show, they reacted with acceptance of the situation and assisted in containment.

Most people who found out monsters exist would not be that calm. Or functional.

So here's the thing. Donna's funny.

But the character is awesome.

She's girly. She's Midwestern. She's a bit flaky.

And she stepped up to the plate when confronted with evil.

I don't think "comic relief" does her justice.

Weapons-Grade Feels (Theory of Persistence Hunting)

2016-06-26T16:14:00.005-05:00

I want first to begin with a disclaimer for those among us who are incapable of entertaining any discussion without believing that the act of discussing a behavior entails support for that behavior: it does not. While I am attempting to explain, and shed light on, some human behavior patterns here, that doesn't constitute support for those behaviors. I believe that in order to control an instinctive behavior, one must first accept that the behavior exists; without that, one is left woefully ill equipped to make meaningful change.

I'm going to engage here in somewhat lengthy speculation.

I know, I never do that.

But what I'm going to do is take an established theory - persistence predation - and expand on it, in an attempt to explain some current human social constructs of whose existence we may not even be aware.

So, in order to do that, I must begin by explaining the theory of persistence predation.

First, let's abolish for good the idea that humans aren't a predatory species. It has nothing to do with your teeth; the definitive sign that you are a predator is literally looking you right in the face every time you look into a mirror: only predators, in our biosphere, have binocular forward-oriented vision.

This is to provide depth perception, something not nearly as useful for prey animals; prey animals need peripheral vision far more than they need accurate depth perception, so virtually all terrestrial prey species have eyes facing out to the sides, so as to provide the greatest possible sweep for danger. (The depth perception is so that when we leap at our prey, you see, we tend not to miss.)

The reason we got to the top of the food chain - and since we're NOT on the endangered species list, but most of this planet's large predators other than humans ARE, that's clearly the case - is because we developed evolutionary advantages allowing us to use a specific method of hunting no other species can use as effectively.

I say "as effectively," because there are a few other species that use a lesser version of one form of our primary hunting strategy; some wolves, hyenas, there's this one spider, but none of them are as good at it as we are, and for specific evolutionary reasons.

First, humans perspire. This gives us more efficient thermoregulation than most other species, allowing us to cool off, and survive heat, more easily than many animal species, which have to pant in order to cool off.

Second, we have little body hair; this gives us a more effective surface for sweat to evaporate from, thus increasing its cooling effects.

Third, we walk - and run - upright, in a particular way. Specifically, we run in such a way that our breathing isn't regulated, or tied to, our stride.

What that means is that while we may not be as fast over short distances as any given animal - hell, an alligator can move 40 miles an hour when it's pissed off - we can keep up our pace longer than virtually any other terrestrial animal.

Which leads me to persistence predation, and how humans learned to weaponize emotion.

See, we don't have big fangs, or claws, or poison, or built-in projectile weapons; we can't change our skin color at will for camouflage, we can't generate electricity from our skin - all things other species can do - but we're scary nonetheless. Not because of size, or strength, or speed, but because we're creepy.

Imagine yourself as a woolly mammoth. You're huge, you're on top of the world, you're the rock star of rock stars; you've fought off tigers that have attacked you, and while you have some scars, you are still standing.

One day, you notice that near your herd - not too close, just not far enough away for comfort - there's this little biped.

It's staring at you.

It's not making threatening moves, it's not loud, it's just watching you.

The kind of gaze you can feel. It's like a weight between your shoulders, that gaze, and no matter how you try to ignore it, that weight just grows the longer that little biped stares at you.

So, you trumpet to your herd; you take the lead, and you move away. Moving around at midday is hot work; soon enough, you've gone about as far as you want to go; you're panting, your feet hurt, and it's time for a drink and a rest in the shade.

And as you look around, you see that little biped again.

It's staring at you.

You try to ignore it, drink some water, eat some grass; there's some really nice clover over there, but it doesn't taste right, because the whole time you're trying to relax, there's that little monkey, staring at you.

Edging a little closer every time you turn your back on it.

So you trumpet again, and your herd moves with you; now complaining a little, because they, too, are tired and hot and hungry.

Finally, there's another good spot; you settle down, and look around.

There's the little monkey again.

Staring.

This time, you're not going to settle for it, and you charge, trumpeting furiously.

It scampers away, and you settle back down, satisfied that you've scared it away.

Then you look up from your meal, and it's there again.

By now; you're tired, angry, confused, and afraid. This is not what predators do; they jump right on you, and bite and claw; this thing is tiny, it's no threat to you, but it's also not scared of you.

Which means it knows something you don't.

Which means maybe you should be afraid of it.

So you move away.

And it follows you.

Over.

And over.

Each time you try to stop, there it is.

Each time you try to rest, there it is.

Each time you try to cool off, there it is, and each time you get a little more afraid.

Soon enough, you panic, and try to run.

Maybe you overheat and collapse; you can't pant and run at the same time.

Maybe you sprain an ankle.

Maybe you just trip and fall down.

But soon enough, you're immobilized.

And that's when the spears come out.

We have this romanticized vision of cavemen hunting mammoths with thrown spears that's ultimately completely silly. Mammoths have thick skin, and a fat layer, and are generally huge. How is a human arm going to impart enough force to a spear to throw it through elephant hide?

It's not, that's how. But it can sure impart enough force to drive it in when your feet are braced and you're shoving it into a downed elephant.

Or a predator.

Like, say, a lion.

Or a cheetah.

You may at this point be thinking I'm nuts; after all, a cheetah is way, way faster than you or I.

I'd like to introduce you to a small group of Kenyans, whose domesticated goats were being menaced by a pair of cheetahs; they chased the cheetahs down on foot, captured them alive, using just some rope, and turned them in to the government.

In 2013.

Humans can run down antelopes; cheetahs; mammoths; it doesn't matter.

Because we're creepy.

Now, this behavior in humans took two forms; pursuit persistence predation, which is what I just described, and manipulative persistence predation, in which we lull animals into a false sense of security using bait, stillness, and kindness, to induce trust in the animal, at which point we either kill the animal, or domesticate it. There are animals who use one or the other of these tactics to some degree. There are literally none which use both, aside from humans.

Here's where I'm going to depart from the established theory and strike out on my own.

The evidence is in; humans are the primary evolutionary example of pursuit persistence predation.

But there's more to it than simply running.

Humans are the only species that ever evolved to intentionally manipulate the emotions of others as a hunting strategy.

Fear.

Kindness.

Trust.

Anger.

Humans provoke animals intentionally into displays of violence that leave the animals too exhausted to defend themselves.

Humans use trust as a weapon.

We use anger as a weapon.

We use fear as a weapon.

We use love as a weapon.

Only humans directly weaponize emotion.

And here is where we come to human social structures: even though we no longer, by and large, have to chase down antelopes to have dinner, we still have the instincts that lead to that behavior.

So we've turned it on each other, instead.

As an example, look at the phenomenon of catcalling.

A woman walks down a sidewalk. A man calls out to her. Maybe it's lewd, maybe simply unwanted, but for whatever reason, he persists.

What is he shooting for? There's no context in which this is a valid mating strategy.

Literally zero times in ever, has a woman turned around, tackled him to the ground, mated with him, and proceeded to get married.

But it is a valid strategy for predation.

It's scary. It unsettles her emotions - he's looking for her to react, watching to see how much it disturbs her.

If it's a strong enough reaction - regardless of what that reaction is - it's a sign that she perceives herself to be in danger, and thus her emotions are upset; she is, for the purposes of this strategy, a valid target.

His level of aggression goes up.

He tries to disturb her more, maybe resorting to outright threats.

As she becomes more afraid, his level of aggression goes up.

Because this isn't a behavior based in mating. Guys, reading this, you may think it is, but it's not. If you do this, you are engaging in a predatory behavior; one prompted by instincts that end with the death of your target, it is effective, it is menacing - it is an attack.

Let me be clear about that.

This is a use of emotion as a direct attack on another human being.

That's not the only one.

Humans use emotional manipulation on each other all the time; catcalling, gaslighting, guilt-tripping, threats, intimidation, emotional blackmail; they're all behaviors intended to manipulate and control the emotions of others, for predatory reasons.

Those instinct packages are a tricky bunch, particularly since, as a human, you aren't necessarily aware that these behaviors come from the same source.

I'll throw out another one; "the friend zone."

The friend zone isn't a thing, guys.

If you're proclaiming to the world that some woman "friendzoned" you, you're really saying that you tried to use the appearance of friendship to get in her pants, and it didn't work.

So, emotional manipulation.

"What do you mean 'good night,' I bought you dinner, now you owe me....."

Nope. Emotional manipulation as a form of predation.

Women do it just as often, although their predation is a bit more subtle; women tend to manipulate with the goal of securing sustenance for their offspring, instead of as a means of creating offspring, although that does happen as well.

"If you break up with me, I'll kill myself!"

Emotional manipulation.

"That's not really what happened, you're just trying to rewrite history to sound like you're right!"

Emotional manipulation.

We're - in most cases - not out to actually eat each other.

But we practice emotional manipulation as a predatory behavior daily, on everyone around us, mostly because we're not aware that that's what we're doing.

So if you didn't know, now you know.

As a species, we're only able to deal honestly with each other - something other animal species do automatically - by stepping outside our instincts. We're designed for emotional dishonesty; we're designed to use emotions as our weapon, instead of teeth, claws, speed, or poison, and we use it on each other - and it is just as deadly to us as to that fictitious mammoth.

Or the utterly real antelope.

We talk a lot about how the human race can improve itself.

One thing we could do as a first step is to recognize our primary hunting strategy for what it is; accept our nature as predators, accept that that is, and always will be, part of our genetic legacy, because without that recognition, we can't address the issue directly or effectively, and never will.

We can never stop hunting each other while we continue to believe we're supposed to be herbivores.

ITP: I Discuss Male Territorial Instinct.

2015-07-11T20:38:00.001-05:00

Those who have known me for a long enough time know that I am, at heart, a creature of instinct. I am deeply in touch with my animal side, and that manifests, at times, in verbalizing and analyzing animal behaviors, sometimes in ways that you might not expect.

Hopefully, when I do this strange thing, it takes the form to my readers of something which they have always known, but never spelled out; an unwritten rule, written and (hopefully accurately) explained.

So tonight, I was talking to Lovely Wife about territoriality.

I am very aware of my territorial instincts, and those of other men; and to some degree, the ways in which those same instincts both exist, and differ, in women.

Accordingly, I behave in ways that agree with my understanding - my conscious understanding - of what the "rules" generated by those instincts are.

What we were discussing specifically, was a time when a dear friend and much-loved frequent guest to our house made a particular misstep that roused her territorial instincts, and by extension, mine; it resulted in an argument that went a lot farther than it should.

I will note that the breach was repaired almost immediately.

But that discussion led us to territoriality in general, and in specific, the frequently unwritten customs between men that have evolved as a result.

So, one rule: when you are contacting a female who is mated (boyfriend, husband, such distinctions do not matter to the lizard brain, you see, once it is mate it is she who must be protected and other, lesser things are of no consequence,) you contact the man first.

It does not matter if you have an independent friendship with the female; outside her domicile, contacting her is fine, but when she is at home, you contact the male first.

This establishes (to him) that you respect his relationship with her, and also that you intend neither intrusion nor harm; it permits him a veto, with the implication that such a veto will be respected, on your contact with her at home, because there may be factors in his thinking, or their plans or environment, of which you are unaware, and it demonstrates that you respect the boundaries of their house. (Which is both her safe space, and his.)

...At which point Lovely Wife says, "But that means you're just seeing the woman as property!"

And thus, this post.

You see, the female interpretation of that paragraph is exactly as she said it, and yet that interpretation is utterly, completely wrong.

But clearing up what, precisely, is wrong with it, and why, is more than a simple sentence or two.

I will try, here.

First, you must understand that with the exception of men who have been in some way traumatized, or obviously those who do not sexually orient on females, the male mind treats women as a special case.

There are not one, but many, associations tied to the concept of "mate."

Safety.

Comfort - a place of rest; sanctuary, however temporary, from the efforts and trials of the day.

Sex, obviously.

Offspring. The very nature of our species is that - without significant interference from science - females determine the future of our existence. They determine whose genetic legacy carries onward; how far it spreads; how much support those offspring receive; they determine literally the care and feeding of offspring; they are our only immortality.

They are partner, confidant, the one person who can be trusted when all males are competition; the only person for whom all the masks can be let down, the only person who can know your feelings, the only person who can be let behind the defenses.

They are not an object; and at the same time, I used the phrase before, they are she who must be protected.

There is literally nothing more important. Offspring - no offense, kids - can be replaced. The mate cannot. Even if you find a new mate, it will not be the same. It can never, will never, be the same.

I know that women don't, and can't, understand this on the kind of visceral level on which men understand it.

Women, as a gender, tend to form groups of people who fulfill most of those functions I listed above; the mate, to them, is protector - provider - source of offspring, but most of the other associations men have in that relationship are either not there, or not nearly as high priority. Friends, instead, act as confidantes, and while women have the same protective instincts men do, they are primarily focused on their children, not their men. Men are expected to be able to handle themselves, dammit. Why do you big babies need us to take care of you, anyway?

It never seems to occur to the women that it's because literally no-one else does. Males tend to view requests for help as weakness; they are, I assure you, conscious of this. Making a request for help lowers your status in the silent pecking order; fulfilling it implies not only higher status, but obligation for a return of favors, regardless of difficulty. Men simply do not, and cannot, turn to their peers as a source of support for the kind of day-to-day needs that women can, because they would be inviting in the jackals.

When women suffer an emotional upset, they turn to their friends, often before their mate has any idea anything's wrong, and they particularly double down on this behavior when their mate is the source of the upset.

Men have only one person to whom they turn, and that's their mate.

She who must be protected.

Literally nothing will cause a fight faster than interference with one's mate. Nothing. Yo' momma jokes might get there if you really, really push it, but cause the mate distress? Even the world's biggest Caspar Milquetoast will try - maybe ineffectually, but try - to get violent in her defense.

Because she who must be protected is in danger. Distress.

Literally nothing could be more important than that.

The worst guy out there - lazy, drunk, jobless, doped-up, wasted bum - will leap to his woman's defense if he recognizes that she is in danger.

Girls, here's a tip: if you're upset, and he's not behaving like a highly aggressive guard dog, he doesn't see you as his mate. He may see you as a sex object, but there's no goddamn way he sees you as his mate, because - I keep using this phrasing because I want you to really internalize it - his mate is she who must be protected and nothing in the male brain outranks that in order of priority.

It's one of the big arguments against women in infantry combat; the Army can't come right out and say what I'm saying, here, but if a male soldier, who has formed an attachment to a female soldier, sees her in danger or injured, his instincts will be triggered in an actual sense; he will react according to his protective instincts, regardless of reason, intelligence, planning or forethought, and most likely cause a whole lot of deaths that could otherwise have been avoided.

Having this conversation - among many - with Lovely Wife indicates to me that women, whose instincts react very differently, don't really understand how this feels.

Imagine, ladies, if you saw your child about to be attacked by a bear.

Women have literally fought bears, to save children.

Now imagine if every single person who comes by is a bear.

A potentially hungry bear.

A potentially angry and dangerous bear.

Men have come a long way.

We're far from perfect, and we have a long way yet to go.

But at least we no longer leap at each other on sight with pointy sticks.

We need you to bear in mind that that - evolutionarily speaking - wasn't that long ago. Sometimes keeping calm is a challenge.

Perhaps with greater understanding of our respective burdens of instinct, we can get better communication between the genders.

But that will never happen as long as you make the assumption, about us, that the concept of she who must be protected equates to seeing you as property.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

When you see some guy saying "she's mine!" or "that's my girl / wife / woman / whatever" that's not ownership.

That's a statement, to the world, that this is the person in whom all your dreams, your hopes for the future, your legacy, your immortality, your love, your very best that you have to give the world resides...

And that you are her protector.

If you want her, you're going to have to go through me.

You best bring a lunch.

The First Step On A Long Road

2015-06-26T18:48:00.001-05:00

I'm going to begin in a way that makes a part - a very large part, if you have any familiarity with my writing on the subject - of my feelings about today's events perfectly clear.

CONGRATULATIONS, MY FRIENDS!!!

For those of you who aren't following the news, or are living with your head under a rock, today was a landmark day.

It was the first step on a long road.

Today, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed that denying recognition of a legally recognized marriage from another state, on the basis of the genders of the participants, is unconstitutional.

They then went farther than that, and flatly affirmed that denying people the right to marry based on their choice of partner directly contravenes the Due Process clause, inherently constitutes unequal treatment under the law, and as such is also unconstitutional.

"This analysis compels the conclusion that same-sex couples may exercise the right to marry. The four principles and traditions to be discussed demonstrate that the reasons marriage is fundamental under the Constitution apply with equal force to same-sex couples.

A first premise of the Court’s relevant precedents is that the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy. This abiding connection between marriage and liberty is why Loving invalidated interracial marriage bans under the Due Process Clause. See 388 U. S., at 12; see also Zablocki, supra, at 384 (observing Loving held “the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals”). Like choices concerning contraception, family relationships, procreation, and childrearing, all of which are protected by the Constitution, decisions concerning marriage are among the most intimate that an individual can make."

In other words, the Supreme Court just legalized gay marriage.

Celebrate!

And then, with sober deliberation, once the party hats are off and the beer has gone flat, remember that the job isn't finished.

The job has only just begun.

Because the same legal structure - the same Constitutional protections that led to this decision - also demands further action.

Note the first line of that second paragraph.

The right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy.

And the last line, as well.

Like choices concerning contraception, family relationships, procreation, and childrearing, all of which are protected by the Constitution...

Those two lines mean there's more work to do.

Because the fundamental premise is that your relationships are yours.

They do not belong to your peers.

They do not belong to your government.

They belong, rightly, exclusively, and inherently, to you.

Now, I know as I get rolling here, there will be, with the inevitability of the tides, questions.

"B-b-b-but adoption law!"

"B-b-b-but child custody!"

"B-b-b-but medical decisions!"

I am hereby assuring you that there is, in fact, a simple way to address those concerns, so I will get to them when I get there, ok?

So.

First and foremost, among human rights, are two bedrock principles inherent in the very concept of sentient life.

First, you have the right to your life.

From this right descend the right to property, the right to self-defense, and the right to pursue (though not to succeed; nothing guarantees that) self-advancement, provided only that your quest to do so does not infringe on anyone else.

And second, you have the right to freedom.

From freedom descend all other rights, and those rights, as with freedom, contain only one solitary caveat: "so long as it does not infringe on anyone else."

An it harm none, do as thou wilt.

Freedom is inherent in the human condition in the same way that breathing is; the two cannot be separated if the organism is to survive.

The court case today was a huge step in the right direction.

It was worthy of the celebration that will inevitably be carried out.

It wasn't the whole journey.

In this country, for many years, we've mistaken custom, tradition, and comfort for the "right."

We've accorded many things over this country's history the weight of moral approval, only to have later generations realize the many ways in which those beliefs were mistaken.

Because, ultimately, there are only two fundamental rights: the right to your life, and the right to do anything you want to do that doesn't harm anyone else.

And that second one applies.

Even if you belong to a religion that says you should marry more than one partner.

Even if you are sexually oriented towards the same biological gender and want to marry accordingly.

Even if you wish to have a child without a partner.

Even if you wish to have multiple partners of multiple genders.

The government does not, and cannot - and by the last line of that opinion I quoted above, the Supremes agree with me - have the right to tell you that those choices are rightly the place of "society" to make for you.

Because they are not.

Those choices are, and must be, yours.

ONLY yours.

The government got into the business of marriage for one reason: tradition. It literally never occurred to the Founders that they didn't have to do that.

Woops.

But here's the thing: reading their letters, reading the things they had to say about liberty, freedom, and what it meant to them, it is - or should be - obvious that they would totally agree with the reasoning; it is not society's place to make those decisions on behalf of a citizen.

Society CAN say, for example - since I know this will get brought up - that it would be "harm" to marry below a certain age, because people under that age are not yet ready for that kind of responsibility.

Society CAN say that you cannot marry an animal.

Society CAN say that you cannot marry a tree.

Do you know why those three things are within the purview of society?

Consent.

Agency.

The free exercise of free will.

Children, animals, and plants, cannot give informed consent, because they lack the ability to do so.

Any such relationship is therefore inherently harmful; it requires an absence of consent. This is what statutory rape means, guys; one person involved is unable to provide consent and therefore the relationship is inherently harmful.

But guess what?

If everyone involved in the relationship is a consenting adult, the government has no right to be involved outside of the function of recording its existence.

Which leads me to the "b-b-b-but inheritance law!" questions.

There is no good reason why the government cannot simply permit you to record a legal next of kin, who is then responsible for making those decisions of inheritance, medical care, and child custody when you are incapacitated. In strict point of fact, the government already does this; the typical document used to register as next of kin is a marriage certificate recorded by the clerk of court, but a legal declaration of kinship is just as binding and could be whipped up in OpenOffice in minutes.

Marriage law, as it exists, is contract law. A contract having more than two signatories is no less valid, and no less enforceable. There is no valid reason that contract law cannot continue to cover the situations human relationships produce.

Just because you, and I, and everyone else, are used to it being one way, is no reason for it to stay that way.

The government has no rightful place in human relationships. Human relationships belong only to those participating in them, and nothing more.

But tradition, right?

Custom, right?

How do you think those things feel when an immigrant comes from a polygamous society to America?

It feels like we don't have a great regard for their traditions, I'm sure.

"You have one wife now."

"What? But I have three."

"No. You're in America. You have one. The other two are social outcasts who we look down on."

"I'msorrywhat?"

This is no way to run a country.

The thing is, everyone is really caught up in their own personal facet of a much larger issue.

I have a friend, for whom I have tremendous personal respect, who is no doubt celebrating with her wife quite thoroughly tonight.

I'm hoping I can convince her to side with me after their party is done.

Because the same moral principles that apply to gay marriage apply to all other human relationships, as well.

This is a wonderful day.

It should be celebrated.

It should be recorded in history.

But the fact that it is a first step should not be forgotten.

A long, beautiful, long-overdue first step, yes.

A righteous, empowering, rejoicing first step, yes.

But the first of a long journey.

Keep fighting. Reclaim our freedom from the government, just this way, one step at a time, always moving forward.

The government rightly exists to protect you, not to control you.

Do not mistake one for the other, and never quit until the government doesn't either.

[As a footnote, if you want to read the actual text of the Court's opinions, the majority opinion, by Justice Kennedy, can be found on page 6, while the dissent, by Justice Roberts can be found on page 40, and by Justice Scalia on page 69. The link opens in a new window.]

Seething, Boiling, Burning, Hysterical! (Mad Max: Fury Road, With Spoilers Galore)

2015-05-20T21:56:00.001-05:00

So, yesterday, I had the chance to see Mad Max: Fury Road.

Prior to that, I had heard that there was a bit of uproar surrounding the movie.

So, for background, I own the original three Mad Max movies, and have watched them many times. These are films I grew up with, a franchise for which I hold a deep, abiding affection.

Accordingly, I was going to see this movie whether or not there was controversy.

Now, I said in my spoiler-free review of the movie that it was perhaps the best action movie I've ever seen, and I will stand by that.

I talked about pacing, cinematography, scripting, and all of those things are true and relevant.

But I didn't talk about anything that would give away the storyline. I'm going to do that, extensively, not only for Fury Road but for the entire series here, so if you haven't seen it, stop now and go somewhere else.

So.

After watching Fury Road, I was even more mystified by the reports of people being upset about the movie.

Upon finding out it was a small but apparently vocal men's rights group, I was even more mystified. Then I actually read what they were complaining about, and then I was actually angry.

You douchebags, you haven't even seen the other movies! Or you didn't bother paying attention, either way.

So let me clear things up in context of reviewing the movie.

This group's complaints, as a whole, revolve around the fact that Max Rockatansky is not the main character of the movie. He is the viewpoint character, true, and his is the narrative voice relating the story, but he is not the prime driver of the action; that honor belongs to Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron.

How dare George Miller write a sequel in which there is a strong female lead! This is MAD MAX, his name's right on it!

How dare they make a movie where Max shares the title card with a person with a vagina!

Let me first begin by saying that "cars exploding are only cool when there are only dudes in them" is a ridiculous, stupid statement.

Cars exploding are always cool unless YOU'RE in them.

It has nothing to do with plumbing and everything to do with explosions.

Especially since George Miller has always focused on practical effects wherever possible, using legions of stuntmen (and women) and spending the massive majority of the film's budget on 150 post-apocalyptic dieselpunk nightmare cars that all actually work.

This group of idiots was especially incensed by the fact that at one point, Furiosa yells at Max, something that is apparently on a par with anal rape of a chicken in Times Square for offense value; you just don't yell at MAD GODDAMN MAX.

So, returning to my original point: you just haven't actually watched the rest of the series, have you?

Mad Max is an everyman. In the first movie, he is explicitly offered the hero role by his boss, MFP captain "Fifi" Macaffee, and explicitly turns it down. He's not an anti-hero; he simply rejects the role of hero entirely.

In the eponymous movie, Max is brought into opposition to a sadistic, drug-crazed biker gang run by a lunatic known as the Toecutter (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also plays Immortan Joe, the main antagonist in Fury Road.) The true driver of the action in the movie is clearly Toecutter; Max's actions are entirely reactive.

And this brings me to my several points about Max.

Max is a cipher. As the viewpoint character and narrative voice of all four movies (with the exception of a small voiceover at the tail end of each movie,) he is essentially a passive character. He acts, but he either acts in response to someone else, or in furtherance of someone else's plans; his own agency in the movies is very subdued. Max exists in a kind of twilight world of survival, and Fury Road spells this out in a way the earlier movies didn't.

Now, those of you who have watched these movies may be scratching your heads a bit, at this point, but think.

The only reason Max took direct action against Toecutter's gang is that they killed his family. If they had simply ridden on, he wouldn't have pursued them; despite his friends' anger at seeing Johnny the Boy released from jail, Max was the voice of calm, the voice of reason and restraint, right up until Toecutter killed Jessie and Sprog.

At that point, Max kills Bubba Zanetti, Toecutter, and Johnny the Boy, and runs several other members of the gang off a bridge, and then disappears into the wasteland.

But Max doesn't actively pursue the gang, doesn't act in any way heroic; he simply responds with violence to the deaths of his family.

Move forward to The Road Warrior, and Max is existing as a scavenger in the desert; he's not a hero, or a wandering vigilante, he's a guilt-wracked, hollow shell of a man who simply exists.

He's scavenging, and staying clear of the skirmish, as he watches an attempt at escape by the crew of a besieged oil refinery by the forces of The Humungus; he only steps in to rescue one of the survivors as a means of trading for a tank of gas.

Once inside the compound, the survivor dies, and the leader of the compound's forces, Pappagallo, reneges on the deal; Max offers to retrieve a big rig he saw abandoned on the road at the beginning of the movie in exchange for fuel.

He retrieves the rig, then attempts to escape, and is caught and nearly killed; he is rescued on the way back to the refinery by the Gyro Pilot, and once in the compound agrees to drive the rig as it is the only way for him to escape the forces of The Humungus.

The Humungus and his forces pursue the rig, allowing the rest of the refinery personnel to escape in a caravan. After the rig's defenders are killed, Max is able to destroy the Humungus's vehicle, but this overturns the rig, at which point it becomes clear that the entire run was a sham; the rig is filled with sand, not oil, and Max was strictly an unknowing decoy. Max wanders off into the desert.

In Beyond Thunderdome, the entire first half of the movie is orchestrated by Tina Turner's Aunty Entity character; once again promising Max fuel and resupply in exchange for a task, this time killing off a political rival in single combat. Max agrees, but once he actually confronts Master and Blaster, he realizes that Blaster is developmentally retarded and not responsible, and refuses to kill him, resulting in banishment from Bartertown by Aunty Entity.

Max then encounters a group of lost children, stranded by a plane crash, and attempts to lead them to safety, but is forced to steal vehicles from Bartertown to do so; he runs interference to allow the children to escape, and at the end of the story wanders again into the desert, once again alone, after Aunty Entity - victorious - allows him to live.

Which is the whole point. At what point, in any of that, is Max the primary driver of the story? He is the window through which the audience experiences the story, clearly, but at no point is he the primary actor; his exercise of agency, throughout the series, is only to ensure his own survival.

As Fury Road begins, Max is wandering the desert as a scavenger, haunted by his past - stop me if you've heard this - and is captured by the forces of Immortan Joe, a despot who rules The Citadel, the only source of water for miles around. Immortan Joe has created a pseudoreligious cult called the Warboys, all of whom have been taught that Immortan Joe is the arbiter of the afterlife, and the guardian of the gates of Valhalla.

Joe happens to have a harem - the Wives - who are unwilling to continue to exist as objects.

Which brings us to Furiosa.

Imperator Furiosa is Joe's most trusted lieutenant, and she is entrusted with the task of taking a tanker truck to a nearby refinery for refueling and supplies. In fact, this is a ruse on her part; her intent is to smuggle the Wives out using the rig, and once Joe figures out the trick, he rouses the entire army of the Citadel in pursuit. Max is carried along, literally chained to a car, as he is being used as a blood donor for a Warboy named Nux.

As Furiosa's run continues, the escort forces become suspicious, and then attack her, and the pursuit forces catch up enough to engage in combat; Max is freed when Nux's vehicle is destroyed in an attempt to stop the rig. Max then hijacks the rig, but as the pursuit forces catch up, he joins forces with Furiosa, supporting her in the escape attempt.

Nux also eventually joins with Max and Furiosa, after seeing how cavalierly his efforts are dismissed by Immortan Joe, and how the Wives react to him and to Max.

The story turns when Furiosa finally makes contact with the forces guarding the place she had planned to use as a safe haven, only to find that the haven itself has been destroyed, and only a few warriors remain; at that point, Max makes his first actual plan of the entire series, convincing Furiosa that it's possible to block off the Warboys from returning to The Citadel long enough for Furiosa to actually take it over; they return to The Citadel by reversing the chase right back through Joe's forces, ultimately succeeding in returning to The Citadel; Max then disappears into the desert again.

In Mad Max, the primary narrative driver is Toecutter.

In The Road Warrior, the primary narrative driver is Pappagallo.

In Beyond Thunderdome, the primary narrative driver is Aunty Entity.

In Fury Road, the primary narrative driver is Furiosa.

Notice something in common?

Max isn't the primary actor in any of them.

Sure, his name's on the door, but that's because he's telling the story; these are things that happened to him, but he's not the motivating force behind any of those stories. In that way, Miller is able to draw in the audience, letting them identify with this ragged, desperate survivor, who is unable to control the events around him, and merely clings to survival when nothing else matters.

So, in fifty percent of the Mad Max films, the primary narrative driver is a villain.

In fifty percent of the Mad Max films, the primary narrative driver is a woman.

Why are we suddenly pissed about this?

I can tell you why.

It's because Fury Road is a much, much better movie than the ones that went before.

It's better scripted, tighter, better paced; it's Mad Max stripped to its bare essentials and painted chrome.

The script draws you in; the characters each experience noticeable growth, in particular Max, Furiosa, and Nux; you invest in these characters, in their situation, in their hopes; the moment when Furiosa discovers her long-lost haven is gone forever is a crushing blow, especially since Miller drove the narrative right past the location of the fallen haven without taking particular note of it.

That past is gone so thoroughly that you drove right through the middle of it without ever noticing, Furiosa.

Do you feel that?

That's pain.

That's loss.

That's despair.

And that's the moment - the first time in the series, really - when Max himself steps forward as a driver of the narrative, when he becomes more than a passenger, more than a bystander, more than only a survivor.

That's redemption.

That's hope.

What about that do you find to be negative?

You're mad because a girl yells at Max?

You didn't get mad when a girl yelled at Max in The Road Warrior, did you.

You didn't get mad when a girl yelled at Max in Beyond Thunderdome, did you.

So what's different now?

Furiosa is the difference.

From start to finish, it's really her movie, and she sells it completely, believably, and you invest in her, in her hopes and her success, because of it.

You care about her.

Max is the shell you use to ride along with her.

And for the first time in the series, Max lets you be more than a passenger.

There is nothing wrong with this movie, and everything right with it. I'm not going to try to deconstruct tropes, or break down gender roles, or talk about how the movie itself uses the story as a vehicle for reversing everyone's expectations...

...Wait, at least for a bit, I will.

You invest in this movie.

It's that moment when Splendid goes under the wheels of Immortan Joe's car, and you see the fury and heartbreak as he carries her body out of the wreckage. It's so, so much worse, knowing that he cares as much as he knows how to.

It's that moment when Rictus stands up, with tears in his eyes, and announces to the waiting Warboys that he had a baby brother. One perfect in every respect.

It's the moment when Nux realizes his only way to redemption is death. "Witness."

It's the moment when Furiosa knows her past is lost.

It's the moment when...

...you know that even if they're wrong, even if they're crazy, there's no-one in this movie who doesn't care.

And that makes you buy into it.

That makes YOU care.

That's a level of heart rarely seen in any movie, much less in an action movie; much less in a two-hour car chase.

I know why those peabrains are protesting the movie, and it has nothing to do with it being bad.

It has to do with it being fucking artwork. And making you care.

I can't wait to see what George Miller does next.

Fury Road, Spoiler-Free!

2015-05-20T10:48:00.001-05:00

I will be writing a much more in-depth article about this movie later today, which I will link when I'm done. That article will be spoiler-tastic, so be aware of that before clicking. (The spoilerriffic version is available here.)

Having said that, I felt like I should say something about it for the no-spoilers people who haven't seen it.

So here it is..

GO.

FUCKING.

SEE.

IT.

Ahhhhh, that feels better.

So, Fury Road is the best action movie I've seen, maybe ever.

The cinematography is astonishing - it conveys vast expanses of post-apocalyptic landscape with wide, sweeping shots, while keeping the action sequences tight, focused, and personal.

It's utterly relentless in pacing; literally thirty seconds into the movie, a chase starts, and after that point, there is never more than five minutes of the two hour runtime at once where there's no action.

Brace yourself.

The screenwriters did a stellar job in developing character with minimal dialogue, and Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron absolutely knocked it out of the park; both their characters are fully realized, fully voiced, and neither of them has over a hundred lines of dialogue in the entire movie. The smaller characters have in some cases as few as six lines, and yet carry distinct personalities; this is professional-grade screenwriting.

The story is cohesive, intelligent, and compelling - and there is one, which may surprise people not familiar with this franchise.

But nothing matters more, in this movie, than the stunts, and I want to say something here.

CGI is great for fire.

CGI is great for backgrounds or artwork.

CGI is not great for stunts.

The Kennedy / Miller production team just proved that in a defining way.

If your eye looks at a fire effect and sees CGI, it doesn't take you out of the story; you look, realize it's augmented, and go "ok, but there's fire there."

If your eye sees someone catapulted out of the back of a moving vehicle and you detect CGI, your brain rejects the impact of the whole scene.

Doing the stunts for real makes the whole movie have far more dramatic impact, and draws much more visceral response from the audience. When someone falls under the wheels, your whole body clenches in sympathy.

Prepare yourself.

Because nobody, nobody, ever, has done a car chase the way George Miller does car chases.

This movie is twenty minutes of story, character growth, and high-concept discussion of how to regain a foothold for civilization in a world gone insane, and an hour and forty minutes of the most screamingly testicle-or-ovary-as-applicable-shivering car chase ever filmed.

I expect that nobody will ever do it better.

Go see this movie, even if you're not into action movies.

It's worth your $8.

"What Just Happened?!" (The UK Election)

2015-05-12T17:41:00.002-05:00

So, as many of these articles do, this begins with Lovely Wife asking me a question. In this case, "why is everyone so upset after the election in the UK?"

Now that's a complicated one, but to give off a good TL: DR; for everybody, it comes down to surprise, and sore losers.

The British government works differently than does the government of the United States. Superficially, they're similar, in that Parliament has two houses, like Congress, and an executive, but the similarities stop there.

Parliament has two houses, the house of Lords, and the house of Commons.

Those names are mightily descriptive.

The Commons are the "Members of Parliament" that make up the bulk of the government. They are elected.

The House of Lords has two types of members: the senior bishops of the Church of England, known as the Lords Spiritual, and members of the peerage appointed by the ruling monarch, known as the Lords Temporal.

All government ministers must come from Parliament; they can't simply be brought in from the outside.

Like the United States, ministerial positions are generally taken by the members of the coalition currently in power in the UK.

Now, in the U.S., that doesn't mean a whole lot, as there are only two significant political parties, which means that whoever won the last election controls all the cabinet positions. But in the UK, where there are four parties big enough that their results mattered in this election, ministerial positions are typically put together from a coalition between two or more of the existing parties.

But this election was a weird one.

See, the UK has weathered some financial crises, as well as diplomatic ones, over the last few years. (Their biggest ally, the U.S., spying on them being high among that number.) Accordingly, the coalition government made up of Conservative and Liberal Democrat members that has been serving, has become steadily more unpopular, and the left wing of British politics has been getting louder and louder in their determination to take over.

Don't get bent out of shape. The British "conservatives" are center-rightish in American terms, while the Liberal Democrats are centrists. They're not nearly as far apart in the UK as the groups living under the same labels do here.

At any rate, the Labour party, specifically, has been agitating heavily, and was openly predicting a huge victory in the elections.

Since the BBC and most of the British media outlets available to the U.S. are also pretty solidly left-wing, they were too.

And that's not what happened.

To understand the true depth of the upset, there are a couple of other factors that need to be brought in.

Scotland is one.

Labour has traditionally counted on Scotland as a bastion of votes. Scotland, however, has experienced a strong upswing in nationalism just recently, going so far as to have a losing, but hotly contested, plebiscite in September; a vote that would have split Scotland off into an independent nation.

The Scotland National Party or SNP, which had previously held 6 seats in Parliament, took the Scots' Parliamentary seats by storm, leaving Scotland represented by one Conservative, one Liberal Democrat, one Labour, and 56 SNP members. Scotland sent a powerful message that while they may not be ready to exit the UK yet, they're very unhappy with Labour and its representation of their constituencies.

That right there was a disaster for Labour; previously, they would have been able to count on another 46 members in Parliament, seated and voting for their agenda, but the loss of Scotland's seats was crushing.

The end results of the election were that the Conservatives won, not only over Labour, but enough of a majority to form a government all by themselves, which is very rare.

To put in perspective how rare, only one other Prime Minister in history has been re-elected after a full term with even more seats under their control than in the previous term; that was Margaret Thatcher, who was also a Conservative.

The problem for the media in the UK, and the Labour Party, is that the majority held by the Conservative Party is a definite mandate from the people. They put their hopes and dreams behind the idea of removing Prime Minister Cameron, and failed miserably, as well as potentially losing Scotland for Labour permanently.

But in fact it is worse than it at first appears, because it wasn't so much the fact that the UK government is now 330 Conservatives, 232 Labour, 59 SNP, 8 Democratic Unionists, and 8 Liberal Democrats; it was the fact that of the 46 seats Labour lost, and the 48 seats the Liberal Democrats lost, they lost several of their parties' major leaders.

Labour lost the party leader from Scotland, Jim Murphy; the party campaign manager (who seems to have been the wrong man for that specific job,) Douglas Alexander, and Ed Balls, former Chancellor for the Exchequer. (Treasury, in the U.S.)

The Liberal Democrats lost Danny Alexander, their Treasury Secretary; Vince Cable, the Business Secretary; Charles Kennedy, a former party leader; and Simon Hughes, their deputy party leader.

Apparently - and who knew this from their tv shows, media, fiction, and every other cultural touchpoint - British citizens prefer to keep their views private except at the actual election booth; the polls showed a much more even split between Labour and Conservative right up until Election Day.

And this whole thing has made many, many people who are really invested in the success of the political left very upset.

Predictably, they're screaming that there must have been some kind of fraud.

Not so much, guys. You had 66% voter turnout, and of the voters, the Conservatives got slightly over 11 million votes, versus the Labour Party's 9 million.

So...

I understand that it stings.

I know losing a cherished belief hurts.

But unfortunately, a wiser course, instead of bewailing your fate, is to adjust to the new circumstances and move forward.

The new circumstances are that the Conservatives have an all-Conservative government for the first time in 18 years.

They will be responsible for the formation and operation of policy for the UK until the next election at least.

They will, however, be responsible; if you want success going forward, hold them to it.

Biting Down Viciously With Teeth Like A Lion...

2015-05-05T09:45:00.006-05:00

So, I'm gonna get all kinds of spoilery talking about something old enough that spoilers shouldn't matter.

Have any of you ever read the book "IT" by Stephen King?

If you have not, you're going to get a bit of an education about it today.

See, the powers that be in Hollyweird have decided to "remake" IT into a pair of theatrical, hard-R-rated movies.

And suddenly there was an outcry, because "No Tim Curry? Booooooo!"

Wait, wait, back up.

OK.

So, the book came out in 1986.

In 1990, there was a TV miniseries, adapted from the book, that starred Tim Curry in the role of...

Wait, wait, back up.

OK, so the book, at its base, is about a small town built on top of an extraterrestrial crash site. The creature - otherwise known as "IT" - which came to earth in prehistoric times, is a psychic predator, which is able to shapeshift, control minds, and project hallucinations, among other things.

It likes children, as they are easy prey.

Kids are scared of clowns.

So, one of ITs favorite forms is "Pennywise," the most terrifying clown in, well, ever.

No, really.

In the TV miniseries, Tim Curry plays Pennywise, and does so quite well.

But it's important to distinguish that from playing "IT," as in the book, IT takes on many, many forms.

So, I'm going to delve into the book a bit, and in the process, explain a bit about why the miniseries, while enjoyable in its own right, was a fucking terrible adaptation of the book, and why A remake is a great idea. (Emphasis because I have no idea how THIS remake will turn out.)

I will note that at this point, there isn't enough information available to know whether this remake will be what's needed, or any good at all, although the hard-R and runtime makes me think it at least has a shot.

So.

In the book, the eponymous creature wakes every 27 years, feeds, and returns to slumber. During its waking periods, the town of Derry, Maine, undergoes a series of disasters, disappearances, bizarre murders, and general mayhem...

...And then IT goes back to sleep, and the town forgets.

The novel heavily implies, but doesn't state outright, that the alien projects forgetfulness of its attacks onto the townspeople as part of protecting itself while it sleeps.

The novel is quite rightly considered a classic of horror, but for those of you who have never read the book, you may not understand quite why it was, and is, such a big deal.

So here goes.

The book is constructed as a paired narrative; following a group of kids who call themselves "The Losers' Club," during one of IT's waking periods, in 1957, and then following those same people as adults, during IT's next waking phase, as they try to finish what they tried and failed to do as kids - killing the creature and ending its cycle forever.

As such, it acts as both a coming-of-age novel, and as a parable about returning home; finding both in a single narrative is already a step above most novels full stop, much less above most horror novels.

But beyond that, the shifting, fear-based nature of the creature gives King an opportunity that maybe no other single narrative could have, which is that it let him create vignette after vignette of wildly different horror, and present them all in the context of a single story.

Human fears are often irrational; often unconnected; often simply nonsensical.

And IT appears as whatever you fear.

For a small child, it may be a clown hiding in a storm drain, with teeth like a lion.

For a teenage pyromaniac who kills animals by suffocating them inside an abandoned refrigerator, it may be a cloud of flying leech-wasps that drain you of blood.

For a young man unsure of his sexuality it might appear as a leper, propositioning him in a way he doesn't even understand yet.

For another kid, the Mummy.

For another person, the werewolf.

For another, a giant, hungry bird.

For another, an abusive husband who is utterly unstoppable.

And IT gives King the opportunity to tell all those stories at once.

As an anecdotal aside, I used to have a good friend whose daughter Katie, at age 12, was quite intelligent and precocious. Said kiddo decided to tackle this book, and I advised against it, and told her and her mom that I thought it was a bit above her readiness. She insisted, and I volunteered to act as a sounding board if she needed to talk about anything she read in the book.

She got her copy from the school library, and dived in, and a few days later, told me "I don't see what all the fuss was about."

Upon my inquiries ("Seriously? You weren't bothered by the flying leechwasps?" "What flying leechwasps?") I got to witness a truly epic tantrum, as it turned out that the school library had a heavily sanitized, heavily abridged edition that was deemed "safe" for the kids.

After a fairly extended bout of screaming at the school librarian, Katie procured an unabridged, complete edition of the book.

Three days later, she gave up and told us she thought she would never sleep again.

Never even made it to the leechwasps.

So.

As kids, the Losers' Club face the indifference - and baffling lack of involvement - of adults; powerlessness; other kids, who can be manipulated not only by their environment but by the creature as well, and the built-in trials of growing up.

As adults, returning to Derry years later, they face middle age; the knowledge that they tried and failed to kill this thing once before; the fear of the consequences of returning, which as kids they never had to face; they face greater doubt, no less fear, and a firm awareness that this is their last chance, because in 27 more years they will simply be victims.

It is a magnificently, brilliantly constructed, hallucinatory meditation on the nature of fear itself, on friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, and the meaning of courage, and it's one of the greatest novels ever written.

When the miniseries was made, it was constrained tremendously by network TV. If it had been released as a movie, it would mayyyyybe have managed a PG rating.

"They left out a lot," to put it mildly. Being on TV meant that virtually all of the really scary bits, and a huge majority of the story, were simply abandoned as unsuitable for family audiences.

The novel's enormously controversial sex scene - in which the Losers' Club's one girl, Beverly Marsh, "bonds" the club together by having sex with each male member, in sequence, in a sewer tunnel, just before they confront the creature in its lair, at age 12 - was removed entirely for obvious reasons. (And likely will be in the remake, as well.)

The majority of the monster's appearances were also removed.

As a result, the miniseries is left with one face, for the "ultimate faceless monster that can be anything" - Pennywise.

It's no wonder the fans of the miniseries think Pennywise is super-de-duper important.

But in the book, Pennywise is a minor part; primarily, the creature uses Pennywise as a way of appearing to the kids when it isn't going to directly attack them.

I understand that you can't really represent IT - a being composed of several glowing orbs of sickly orange light that drive people instantly insane to see them - in its "natural" form, and that Pennywise is a recognizable face to put on the villain.

But this is a creature of immense power; a villain of subtlety, terror, and mystery; a creature that is thousands if not millions of years old and comes from a place outside our universe.

The most important thing about IT is not the actor playing the fucking clown.

A proper treatment, with more of the story intact, more of the monster itself intact, more of the scares intact, and a generally improved sense of fidelity to the original, could be amazing.

No offense, guys, but as much as I also think Tim Curry is awesome, I'm totally not going to miss him for this one.

Perspectives And Viewpoint (Possibly Part One, If I Can Organize This Mess Better Later)

2015-05-02T20:33:00.002-05:00

This is ~~likely to be a bit unorganized~~ utterly chaotic and without any internal logic that will make sense to anyone, and will almost certainly make people angry.

So, having said that, fair warning: if you are incensed with anger upon reading this article, congratulations; you're perfectly normal. I expect no other response, because I know that viewpoint bias is a stone-cold sonofabitch to overcome. And this will likely be quite long.

That said, here goes.

It's really hard to walk in someone else's shoes, either literally or figuratively.

I mean, I have damn big feet. Trying on other people's shoes hurts.

I know, obvious, groan-worthy bad joke, but it will become relevant later, I promise.

See, something I think about a lot - a lot more than you might expect - is how to do that in a figurative sense.

For example, I have a fairly gruff set of features, and a similarly gruff voice. Despite that, I am basically a pretty laid-back guy, most of the time. This blog may not give that impression - in fact I am certain it gives the impression of endless, fulminating fury - but that's because I use this forum to vent, when something really bothers me; it's not what I'm like all the time. Shut up, Thomas, I am not.

Because of my face, and voice, most people, meeting me the first time, have a really difficult time parsing my sense of humor. They tend to react to me as though I am verbally assaulting them, especially when I open with stuff like "good morning," or "how are you today," or even a fist bump.

So, I have developed habits to compensate for that. Pretty routinely, when I meet someone new, I will tell a joke that relies on comical, stupendous exaggeration of some obviously minor thing, and then conspiratorially tell my hopefully new friend, "You can laugh. That's a joke. I know I look scary, but I came from the factory like this. They didn't give me an option package."

I'm pretty sure most of the people I meet have no idea how honest I'm being right there.

So, in the past I have written articles about a host of sensitive topics, and some with a fairly rough tone.

Rape.

Racism.

Gay marriage.

Abortion.

I'm not exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to tough conversations to have, ok?

But here's the thing. Regardless of my opinion, regardless of your opinion, one thing needs to be perfectly clear, in everything I write, everything I say:

I am not you.

Watching the way the discourse on practically everything has changed over the last ten years, as I have been blogging that long and goddamn does that make me feel old, I am keenly aware that we've forgotten that critical point.

I am not you.

You are not me.

We share commonalities; we're both people, fifty percent or so of us are the same gender, most of those people have the same orientation and gender identity I do within that subset, many of them are the same race I am, a lot of those people are from similar economic circumstances, some of those people are even from the same town, and share similar early family life.

You know what?

With all that in common, they're still not me, and I'm not them.

Some of those people from my same town, who grew up in a split, sometimes abusive home in greater poverty than they knew, who are the same race, gender, and orientation I am, also like the same music I do, eat the same kinds of food I enjoy, and like the same movies I do.

You know what?

They're still not me, and I'm not them.

And generalizing experience is a fool's game.

It seems these days, every issue has to come with an endless, heckling circlejerk about the "correct" viewpoint.

So, I'm here to break that myth.

There isn't one.

The "correct" viewpoint, does not exist. If you think it does, you are simply wrong.

There are, for example, perfectly valid arguments on either side of virtually any point of politics, social life, religious belief, or literally any other human experience you can have.

What viewpoint any individual expresses, and supports, depends almost entirely on that person's individual human experience.

I tend to disagree with some kinds of ideas fairly violently. I do so because my experiences, and my understanding of those experiences, leads me to seeing those things in a negative way.

I'm not you; you may not see those things in that way.

Ronald Reagan once said, in a speech, "facts are stupid things."

He was right, because facts don't contain a moral component. They don't make decisions; they simply exist. Something either is a fact, or it is not. No amount of argument turns an opinion into a fact, and no amount of argument turns a fact into an opinion.

You can, for example, say that something is categorically wrong when it comes to the legitimacy of the facts.

Anthropogenic Global Warming is a case of this; and frankly as long as the world takes its climate data from the NOAA, there's going to be significant argument about whether or not the facts support the idea, or don't.

You can argue facts.

What you cannot do is argue viewpoint.

I see a lot of that, and it's stupid, and needs to stop.

For example, you have white people, who have not grown up black (obviously,) saying "all lives matter!" in support of protests against police brutality.

And black people, who have not grown up white, telling those white people to shut up because they don't understand the struggle.

Fair enough. I'm not black, and I'm 100% sure that I never will be, either. It's not like I was suddenly dipped in bleach on my 18th birthday and magically thereby made immune to jackbooted thugs.

But you know what? I'm also 100% sure those black people telling white people to shut up are also not white. They have totally different life experiences, and you don't get to, in the same conversation, say "you don't know my life experiences so shut the fuck up," while blithely ignoring the fact that you also don't know theirs.

That particular example is funny to me, because the anger over "#alllivesmatter" is so badly misplaced.

Do you seriously not get the irony of your own anger, here?

Let me break it down, black people.

You go on about how white people are immune to police brutality, and unaware of your life experiences, all the time. It's literally impossible to be on Facebook or Reddit these days without seeing something about how white folks just don't get it.

So, these people, who have lived in this magical immunity bubble their entire lives, not sharing your experiences and not suffering the same circumstances, are aware there's a problem, and have stepped outside of their life experiences enough to agree with you that something is deeply wrong and needs to be fixed, and your response is to tell them to shut up because they're not angry enough?

Not focused enough on you?

Guess what? They're not. Because - just like you said - they don't have your life experiences. They have different ones, instead, but they've managed to step outside that just enough, and just long enough, to at least try to identify with you.

Don't tell them to shut up. If you want to educate, educate. But don't tell them to shut up. When you do that, you confirm the exact type of negative stereotypes you're telling them they have in the first place.

When you've fallen, and you're lying in the mud, and someone offers you a hand up, you don't bat their hand aside indignantly because they don't also want to hear your entire life story after you're on your feet.

You gratefully accept the help, and maybe you can engage them in dialogue.

Maybe get a new friend. That'd be awesome.

This happens a lot with gender identity, too.

"Shut up, cis-people! You're just a shitlord!"

Way to educate a huge swath of society that doesn't really understand your experiences because they fucking can't.

Transgendered people have an opportunity to take life experience from the other side that is literally unparalleled in human terms.

It's not TRUE transformation - until genetic engineering and genetic surgery gets a bit better, anyway - but at least you can try out the other team's hormone loads.

Try this out, womenfolks.

Think of how many times you have said, of a male you know, that he cannot understand you because he doesn't have your plumbing.

Do you honestly think that doesn't apply in the other direction?

I assure you it does.

I see, a lot, women complaining about being "overly sexualized" by men while wearing perfectly innocent clothing that reveals most of their bodies.

I hate to break it to you, but to most men, the act of looking past your sexuality when you are dressed in revealing clothes is either a constant effort, or flatly impossible. It has nothing to do with your clothing, and everything to do with our hormones; but that doesn't actually change the fact that no matter how offended you are that someone stares you in the cleavage, your cleavage is a fucking eye magnet that is practically impossible to resist - and the act of resisting that magnetism is such an effort for most guys that if they put in the effort to manage it, it actively detracts from their enjoyment of their time with you.

You are thinking that I am just a complete idiot, right now.

Surely it's not like that!

We're not just great swarthy beasts, unable to control ourselves!

This is true, we're not. But this is why rape is a crime that draws some very different responses from people. Rapists make men furious in very different ways, and for very different reasons, than they do women.

See, for a woman, or at least most women, this is a tremendous trauma. Your autonomy has been violated; your sense of safety in your person has been violated; your body has been possibly injured, and in a lot more cases than people admit to has betrayed you by responding sexually to the act of rape, which can double down on the emotional trauma and damage; you could be facing an std, or an unwanted pregnancy; you could - most likely will - suffer tremendous difficulty with intimacy with your partner going forward, not to mention nightmares, panic attacks, and years of therapy.

Compounded by which, you have - and I am using this term advisedly, as you will soon see - people who are not you - offering advice, unwanted "comfort," and intentional or unintentional offense in a myriad of ways as they try to comfort you.

Not fun.

Of course, to be fair to them, a lot of those people are trying to reach across that divide in experience, trying to offer you support in any way they can find that they think you will take positively.

They may be absolutely wrong in their assessment of your needs. But they're trying to support you.

"Fuck off!"

For most men, there are three primary traumas associated with rape.

You have the obvious health risks; you have the obvious potential monetary risks - because courts will quite happily award child support to a woman who got pregnant by raping a man - your autonomy has been violated, as a result of the actions of someone you and other men perceive as weaker than you. This does catastrophic, horrifying damage to your internal concept of autonomy and self, and literally every interaction you have from then on with other males who have not had a similar experience is tainted; on their end if they know about the event, or on yours, if they don't, by shame.

How could you have been raped?

What, did that 100-pound girl overwhelm you?

How did you get it up, if you didn't want it?

See, if these things happen to a woman, the assumption is that she was unable to protect herself.

You're welcome to think that every person on earth who thinks that is a condescending douchenozzle.

But that's the assumption, nevertheless.

And you know what? Guys, who have an organ that quite visibly responds to such stimuli as a passing pretty girl, a vague daydream while distracted, a stiff breeze, being in a pool, being out of a pool, standing up, sitting down, or seeing new eye shadow on your wife, will assume that you couldn't have had a physiological response that you could not control.

So, when these things happen to a guy, other guys, who have that same organ, will sympathize with that aspect alone, and totally bowl you over with how utter their contempt is for the idea of you having been overpowered by a mere girl.

And girls, who have an organ that responds with much less visibility but no less demand to such stimuli as "two hot guys in a movie kissing," that cologne some rando on the sidewalk is wearing, or someone firmly gripping your upper arms (or, as Lovely Wife just said a second ago while looking at houses, "that kitchen almost gave me an orgasm,") will assume that you have perfect control over that organ of yours at all times and therefore you must have wanted it.

Because none of us, not one, can step outside our experiences to see what, in that, we share with others.

And we mostly don't try.

And we mostly don't think about it.

How fucked is that?

Stepping outside your experiences is hard.

Think about what people call "the cycle of abuse," because the label makes it easy to reduce. Someone gets beaten as a kid. They grow up, they have kids...

...And most of the time, they beat their kids.

Does anyone here honestly believe that those people, when they found out they were going to have a child, said to themselves "I can't wait to whip my kid's ass until they go to the hospital!"?

Of course they didn't. But that's the example of parental discipline they had, and it takes years of therapy to overcome it.

Years of effort, to change that response.

Viewpoint is a hard goddamn thing to break.

I have big feet. If you have more normal feet, you don't know my struggle. I have to go to a very limited number of stores, and buy custom-fitted shoes, for my giant-assed feet. Normal shoe stores always, always, always try to suggest smaller sizes, because after 40 fucking years I have no idea what size my feet are, and must be making it up. It's so outside their experience, as people who don't have similarly-sized pontoons on the ends of their legs, that they not only don't understand but can't believe it's real.

I have a hard time imagining what life would be like without feet this big.

And that's something minor.

Something simple.

Something, relatively speaking, that's easy to look past.

None of us is exactly alike.

We're not supposed to be.

We're not capable of being exactly alike.

We shouldn't want to be.

What we should do, and mostly don't, is two things.

We should, always, try to step outside the cage of our experience and see things as much as we can from the viewpoints of others.

And we should, always, try to accept people's efforts in that regard no matter how successful they are.

Or aren't.

Thank You, Anonymous Tumblrina! (College Tuition)

2015-04-25T21:12:00.005-05:00

So, as is usual for the cause-heads of Tumblr, there's a post going around cheering for some Tweet from some jackoff who thinks Republicans oppose Obama's "free community college" ~~giant cartload of horseshit~~ empty symbolic gesture because, you know, they hate the poor.

After all, those rich folks, they're not paying their fair share.

I mean, they're paying 92.5% of all the taxes paid in this country, but fuck, why settle for 92.5% when they could just pay for everything and you can just have a free ride everywhere, right?

But at any rate, Free community college!

Yaaaaay!

After all, poor people should get to go to poor people college, right? But why should they get to go to real schools?

I'm pretty sure, at some point here, people will begin to take offense and defend the honor of their awesome community college.

And that's fine and good, but if you have any shreds of honesty you know good and goddamn well that if your community college is so awesome, it's a huge, glaring exception.

So, here's the thing that makes me burst into flames when I read something as goddamn ignorant as that Tumblr post, which Lovely Wife conveniently saved for me. (Fair warning: Lovely Wife is a fanfic writer. Learn to cope.)

That is, we already pay for college. You, me, the pimply teenager at Burger King, all of us, pay taxes, and a goodly portion of that to the states we live in, whether as income tax or sales taxes. And guess what's publicly funded? State colleges.

So, University of Minnesota? University of Pennsylvania? Texas A&M, University of Texas, FSU... All of those are great schools, and they're also ALREADY TAX FUNDED.

It's not like there's a giant rich people conspiracy. There's a giant government which wants you firmly under their thumb. That's not - quite - the same thing, although boy are the government wonks trying to turn it into the same thing.

As a side note, that thing would be called a "hereditary aristocracy," and was a big part of what the Revolutionary War was all about, but who studies history? History is for squares, and, like, conservatives.

So.

The current apparatus is miserable. The public universities take taxpayer funds, and then charge astronomical tuitions, which the government will happily give the student funds for, provided the student is willing to enter perpetual debt peonage; the student then finds out that they also have to pay astronomical prices for textbooks "because publishing textbooks is really expensive" as opposed to, you know, how-to books on computer programming which are a dime a dozen in any bookstore and teach at least as much as a college course on computer programming.

At least that trend is starting to reverse itself with regard to the books; more and more schools are putting the textbooks up as a free download for the students, which is a step in the right direction.

But the question needs to be asked:

What,

Directly,

The FUCK,

Are Student Loans,

Even About?

I mean, I'd love to know.

Remember that these are schools funded by tax dollars. I'm not talking about private schools; private schools can charge astronomical tuitions if they really want to, and if your family can afford it, or you are willing to take on that kind of debt, awesome for you.

But public universities have no such justification.

There is no good reason - none whatsoever - that public, and publicly funded, universities should not be free to attend for residents, full stop.

Obama is making an empty symbolic gesture, by saying that he wants the worst schools in the country to be available for free. Yes! Give me the worst education I could have, for free, instead of the education I have been paying for all of my adult life through tax dollars and therefore should already receive for free, and I will cheer for you, because...

...Well...

"OMG FREE SHIT YAY!"

And then when someone points out that maybe instead of lustily tackling the shitty free thing, you should be going after the much better thing that you already also deserve for free...

...Well...

"WHY DON'T YOU LIKE FREE SHIT, YOU MUST HATE THE POOR!

...

SHITLORD!"

...Only because I find "shitlord" to be a hilarious insult and one so devoid of meaning or importance that the only reason I don't shoehorn it into conversation at work is because I'd get fired.

I guess what I'm getting at, O nameless Tumblrina, is that you're misdirecting your angst and concern for the poor against Republicans, when you should be aiming it at Obama, for trying to sell you a deliberately chosen shitty thing, instead of what you actually already earned.

But thanks for spurring me to write this.

Lovely Wife interjected, to warn me to add that we're not rich, because "they will accuse you of being rich."

"I don't give a fuck what some random Tumblrina thinks. If they don't read this blog, or yours, enough to know we're not rich, then they have no right to expect us to care about their opinions."

But since she mentioned that...

Hey, Nameless Tumblrina, you're gonna get another whole post tomorrow, just for you. I doubt Lovely Wife will link it, but just in case, I'll make sure I title it appropriately.

Using Game Of Thrones To Make A Point (SPOILER WARNING / S05E02) (Societal Trust)

2015-04-21T20:17:00.001-05:00

First, I will begin here by briefly discussing the recent episode of Game of Thrones without spoilers, so that the preview on Facebook doesn't spoil anything. Further, I am going to discuss the events of the episode (I hope,) without spoiling anything later on. I will try to remain within the context of the episode as much as I can.

Since I watch GoT two days after everybody else, but I've read the books, I have a strange dichotomy when it comes to new episodes. My friends will all come talk to me about it, wanting to know if I've seen it yet, and of course the answer's no, but at the same time I know most of the events that will have happened.

Fun.

So, this most recent episode, "The House Of Black And White," featured pivotal moments in the lives of five characters, although their effects in a couple of cases are a long way off.

Have we gone far enough beyond the preview now?

I wonder.

Without anything that isn't given away in last week's preview, Arya Stark's pivotal event is the most obvious; she finally arrives in Braavos, and thus at the eponymous House, which you may have guessed to be an assassin school. It's more than that, but we'll leave that for later.

The characters whose pivotal moments were the most immediately apparent were Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen; he becoming Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and she making a political mistake so vast that it warrants this entire post.

So.

The build-up for the mistake is that one of her loyalists, Mossador, murders a prisoner awaiting trial; the prisoner was a Son of the Harpy, and a pawn of the former slavemasters of Mereen. Having chosen to give the prisoner a trial, however, Daenerys knows that the rule of law cannot be subverted by simple emotion if true justice and freedom is to prevail in her domain, and accordingly, she brings Mossador before the people, denounces him, and has him executed in accordance with the law.

The mistake she makes in doing this, of course, is that she doesn't make the case for law to her audience; the former slavemasters don't care, and the former slaves see only that she has killed one of their own. In an instant, she goes from beloved leader, to threatening despot.

It's an awful moment, and one I'd been waiting for, because I wanted to see how it would play out on TV.

But watching it, I felt that not everyone would take the message that I took from it. Accordingly, I felt the need to explain.

A while back, I wrote an article entitled Tribalism, in which I discussed the idea of trust in a society, and the ways tyrants control their populations by splintering them into smaller, more easily controlled groups.

What I didn't do, there, was include the value of the rule of law itself in that discussion.

So.

As I said, the true error Daenerys Targaryen made was that she didn't make her case to the public.

Her audience consisted of her loyalists, most of whom remain so dependent on her continued success, as with any ruler; the freed slaves, who see her as a symbol of their freedom, but also as a symbol of their fight against the oppressors who had ruled them before; and the former rulers, who see her not as a new ruler, but as an obstruction.

She has a strong, fine sense of justice. But very little in the way of political instinct.

What really happened there was an opportunity to demonstrate herself as a just ruler for all; not merely a figurehead, not merely a liberator, not merely a usurper, but a valid, worthy leader in her own right. And she failed because she didn't want to make a speech, or didn't think she had to.

In any society, the rule of law must be universal or it has no value.

In other words, for the law to have meaning to anyone, it must apply to everyone.

In the United States, we're seeing a gradual dissolution of that idea, as the very rich, the famous, and the politically connected move farther and farther away from law, and accountability, while the law is most stringently enforced against those who have no means of recourse.

Nobody is liking the consequences of that, regardless of whether or not they connect the dots between that dissolution and the results.

Riots against the police. Police shooting innocent people. Police killing suspects regardless; their job is to detain and arrest, so that the courts can do their job. It is not assassination.

And whether you believe the cops are 100% innocent and pure as the driven snow, or 100% literal Satan and Hitler love babies, or like me, think they're likely humans and therefore subject to having both good and bad amongst their number, you have to acknowledge that the popular opinion of the police in this country is rapidly turning more and more negative.

What do you imagine happens to the rule of law when the trust of the average citizen in the apparatus built to sustain that rule fails?

First, the citizens stop believing.

Then they stop participating.

Then, the rule of law itself fails.

Then the society fails.

No force can bring down a society more quickly or thoroughly than a lapse in the trust of its citizens for the legitimacy of its government and laws.

It does not, and cannot, matter to the law who broke it; only the transgression, and mitigating factors.

It does not, and cannot, matter to the law how connected or wealthy the transgressor is; only that the crime was committed.

And it cannot matter to a ruler, either.

In the case of Daenerys Targaryen, Mossador's actions had to bring death.

But they should not have occasioned the collapse of societal trust we witnessed in that episode.

She should have given Mossador a trial.

She should have said something.

I'll say it for her, since she didn't.

"I am your queen. You call me Mhysa, your mother. But even mothers have the duty of justice.

For Mereen to stand, to be a place for freedom, justice must prevail. The law must prevail.

A prisoner was taken; a murderer.

But a citizen of Mereen.

If I am your Mhysa, he was my child as you are.

All my children deserve no less than a fair trial, no matter what they have done; this law applies to all, and it must apply to all, or none are safe.

Mossador took it upon himself to steal that right from my prisoner. He killed him, and in so doing, denied that prisoner my protection under the law.

But the law applies to him no less than to my prisoner, or any of you, or me.

Murder brings death.

That is the law.

Mossador is my friend. He is one of you. He has been a trusted ally and an advisor.

But for all of that, and no matter how it wounds my heart to do this, none of those things can be permitted to place him above the law.

The law must have meaning for all of us, must protect all of us, or it protects none of us.

Mossador committed murder of a prisoner in captivity.

For that, his sentence is death.

Forgive my tears, my children. I am strong enough to keep the law, but I bleed today with all of you."

I suspect that if Daenerys had said that, or something similar, things would not have gone the way they did.

Because she would have been showing the public - her enemies, her allies, and the unconvinced - that she stood for the law even when it hurt her to do so.

In doing so, she would be showing them a leader, a ruler, to follow.

Our government, in the real world, is failing on that charge.

It is failing faster than most of us suspect.

I hope that trend reverses itself, as past a certain point, the fall becomes inevitable.

I don't want to walk past and see your faces on the other side of the wire.

So, Lovely Wife Asked A Question... (Taxation)

2015-04-14T14:50:00.003-05:00

From time to time, since we share most but not all of our views, Lovely Wife will ask me to explain why I see things the way I do.

She asked me last night why I despise so many forms of taxation, and what I support instead.

So, here goes. Please note that this is about taxation, and not intended to be an exploration of overreach of government.

First, there are currently three primary forms of taxation, and three secondary forms of taxation, used by the government of the United States to fund its operations.

Those are, individual and corporate income taxes, property taxes, fees for specific functions, fees for regulatory compliance certifications, and sales taxes, respectively.

While I primarily want to talk about the federal level, since the differences at a state level are notable, I will annotate those as I go.

First, there is a base premise that gets misunderstood a lot, or is something of which most citizens are simply ignorant, which is that in order for a tax to be justifiable, regardless of any other factor, all entities paying the tax must derive benefit from its use. This is important when it comes to state and local taxes specifically, because the argument can be made that all federal taxes benefit all citizens, thanks to the use of a general fund for all expenditures.

I personally find that argument a bit disingenuous, since the federal government routinely gives out money from that general fund in favor of things that don't benefit anywhere near everyone, but the argument itself isn't totally unsound, if the government actually operated as it was intended to.

With states and localities, however, this premise becomes more crucially important. An example of a justifiable secondary tax would be charging a fee for a dog license, which is then used to provide veterinary care for local dogs. Everyone who pays it benefits from it; nobody is required to participate. Note here that I am not suggesting such a program; merely using it as a hypothetical example.

But forging ahead, there are some major problems with each of the primary methods of taxation used in the United States. And the arguments used to justify those taxes are annoyingly, frustratingly persistent, despite being entirely specious and without merit.

Primary among those being the so-called "social contract" theory, which states that since all the things you have are things that exist in part due to the society, the fact that you live in the society means you enter your life in debt to that society for permitting you to exist.

This argument falls apart on the grounds of volition; in order for a debt to be valid, there must be a means of avoiding incurring that debt, and there must be a way to pay it off. Neither of those exists in our current system. You cannot leave the country and simply emigrate elsewhere without great difficulty and expense, which is simply beyond the means of most citizens; without means of escape, or the ability to reject the contract, the contract itself is inherently null and void. Coercion cannot carry moral authority.

As it stands, as well, there is no means by which a citizen may give such great service to the country that they are deemed to have paid their debt to society; nobody is entirely exempt from taxation, and there is no means in place to permit citizens to become so. A sane means of doing this would be to trade a period of service - military or civil, but with a risk-based premium for hazardous duty - for tax-exempt status; no such system exists in our society.

The social contract theory is invalid in its entirety, simply because it is the age-old argument of original sin revamped; because you are born, it says, you owe a debt from the moment you draw breath, through no fault of you own; that debt can never be retired, can never be relieved, except for the benevolent if condescending gesture of a higher power, and for most citizens, there is no means of escape from it.

...In other words, involuntary, uncompensated labor...

So.

Property taxes and income taxes suffer from the same flaw, and corporate income taxes do as well, but at one level removed. That being, all three primary methods of taxation assume total ownership by the government of all assets, real or intellectual, in the United States.

This directly contradicts the base premise upon which our government is founded; your right to your life. Without the right to own property - and by "own," I mean "can dispose of or use in any way which doesn't directly harm others or infringe on their rights without interference," - you cannot sustain your life. Without the right to own property, the right to life is meaningless.

So. Income taxes, whether individual or corporate, and property taxes, all assume that property, and money, belong to the government first; you have "earned," on payday, only the right to keep what the government permits you to keep.

...Otherwise known as involuntary, uncompensated labor...

Corporate taxes are a bit trickier to explain for most people, but I will cut through the morass.

Corporations do not pay taxes. Their customers and shareholders do. All of those people - those individuals - are the ones paying any tax levied on corporations; those taxes are only "corporate" in name. In actual effect they come directly out of your wallet, as a consumer, in the form of increased prices - effectively a second, sneakier income tax on you.

This, incidentally, is also the reason I hate it so much when people crow about one candidate running a budget surplus, and lambast another for running a deficit. In a free society, where you have the right to own property, a budget surplus cannot be morally justified; if the government has more money than they need, it is their bound duty to return it to the citizens from whom they took it. You will note that this, in fact, does not happen; instead, each year the budget grows, until it consumes any surplus. I'd far rather have a government run at a slight deficit (although the current deficit unquestionably does not qualify under any definition of the word "slight,") than one in which the government steals too much of my money and then finds things to spend it on.

Now, regulatory fees are a whole different ballgame. It is actually fair for the government to require a fee for an inspector to verify that regulations have been followed; however, most of those regulations are absurdly specific for the simple reason that it allows for higher fees, and for no other meaningful reason. This is actually a means for a smaller body of government to fund itself, provided that the fees are not unreasonable and the regulations not unnecessary. (Delving further into this, however, calls for an entirely separate blog post.)

Fees for specific functions are risky. A good example is driver licensing; at heart, it is a simple regulatory compliance inspection. Can you drive well enough to be permitted to join other drivers, or are you a huge danger to all and sundry? However, the immense machinery that has grown up around it has turned renewing your license into a much more expensive proposition than it should be, which makes it unduly expensive for many citizens.

As well, the ever-growing insistence on using it as a means of primary identification makes the growing price of that identification a risk of disfranchisement; a voter cannot be prevented from coming to the polls by means of a mandatory fee, or the entire idea of representative democracy is false. (This is the flaw in most voter ID plans; they propose a series of good ideas, and then want to charge a prohibitively high fee. The only way it's justifiable is if it's available to everyone eligible to vote.)

And then we get to sales taxes.

Sales taxes are entirely justifiable, and come in two forms: the classic "sales" tax, or the European-style "Value-added Tax," or VAT.

You may be a bit on your heels after seeing my flat statement that these taxes are justifiable. So I will add one more comment, and then explain both.

Sales taxes are justifiable but stupid.

One of the primary functions of any duly constituted and morally legitimate government is that it protects its citizens against - what's that phrase - "all enemies, both foreign and domestic."

That seems oddly familiar, somehow.

*Ahem*

So, the government, by performing its primary task, has provided a venue for commerce that could otherwise not exist. As a free citizen, you are protected both from foreign invaders, and from robbers, con artists, fraudsters, and other such predators. (Granted, the government's performance in that regard has not been all that stellar. But it hasn't crossed the line into illegitimacy on that front yet.)

Accordingly, you are able to engage in trade. Sales and VAT taxes are, effectively, paying the government directly for having provided that protection; as such they are justifiable.

Sales taxes and VAT taxes, however, differ widely in the burden they place on the economy.

A sales tax, applied fairly, adds a certain percentage to the price of every transaction full stop.

As a product moves through its development stages to the market, this application happens repeatedly, and causes the total cost of that product to balloon beyond measure, until it simply becomes unaffordable.

This is one of the primary drawbacks of the so-called "FairTax Initiative," which purports to be a flat, fair, across the board tax, until the authors of the plan figure out that the way they designed it absolutely destroys any hope the poor have of ever escaping poverty, and probably of staying alive; at that point they devolve into ever-stranger methods to contort their tax plan around so that it doesn't do exactly what it's designed to do, ultimately finishing in a form that is ruthlessly unfair, lays a gargantuan burden on the rich while allowing the poor to evade it entirely, and demolishes the economy through massive cost inflation (or, in an alternate version, doesn't, but also doesn't provide enough revenue for the government to stay even marginally solvent.)

VAT taxes, however, add a fixed percentage to the full cost on the first transaction, but on subsequent transactions only tax the difference in value. In other words, selling copper ore to the smelter gets taxed; selling the ingots of copper to the wire factory taxes only the increase in value; selling wire to the ISP taxes only the increase in value. Accordingly, its impact on price inflation is much less dramatic than a sales tax, and it can be applied easily across the board without being unfair to anyone.

In fact, a VAT tax is inherently, voluntarily progressive. Luxury goods go through far more stages of improvement than do common ones; accordingly, they are far more heavily taxed, and yet...

...

...And yet, nobody is required to buy a sports car.

Fresh produce, for example, goes through hardly any taxable stages between the farmer and the supermarket; food ingredients in general are much less developed and refined than more recreational property. A VAT tax would greatly impact the poor, by making fresh produce and less-refined, more healthy foods actually less expensive, just through the process of development and refinement, than today's endlessly processed junk foods.

And on any product, the more steps taken to improve it, the higher the tax burden becomes, while remaining entirely voluntary. Nobody is required to spend the extra money; nobody is statutorily required to undertake a higher share of the tax burden, and yet...

...

...And yet, because rich people have the ability to do so, they will tend to buy luxury goods anyway; thus voluntarily assuming a higher share of the tax burden of the nation, which both satisfies the angry poor (or it would if they thought their way through it, anyway,) and lends the tax the force of moral authority.

Another plan that has been offered, and is quite popular, is a flat tax. This type of thing is typically accompanied with a great outcry about fairness; "everybody pays the same!"

Riiiiight. Except for the fact that poor people use a far higher percentage of their income on subsistence than rich people do, which means that a flat tax has a needlessly, disproportionately high effect on poor people. Rich people love the idea of flat taxes, by the way; it means they can shrug and say "I paid the same as you, what's the problem?" and then fly away in their private jet, secure in their moral justification, while their poorer neighbors still struggle to put food on the table.

I do not support income, property, flat, or sales taxes as a means of financially supporting a government.

I do, however, support a system of primary VAT taxation supplemented with regulatory compliance certification fees limited by some sort of separate blog post about how to set that up, and direct fees for optional services.

I do not believe in involuntary, uncompensated labor, guys.

And you may have noted my use of that specific phrase.

That's because it is the definition of slavery. And that's what most taxes are: a means of reducing your population into slavery.

Calling someone "slave" in the bedroom is hot.

Calling someone slave when you mean it is as far from hot as you can get and still be in our galaxy.

Instead of trying to justify systems of taxation that have been used for hundreds if not thousands of years as a means of controlling the population, let's think about the concept of a tax permitting voluntary association and commerce to fund the government.

Imagine a social contract in which the government provides you a safe place to exist, and in exchange, you are asked to participate only so far as you want to.

I would sign that.

An Ongoing Comment Overrun (The College System)

2015-03-05T16:28:00.001-06:00

So, a topic that gets brought up again and again in a lot of contexts is the college system and how to fix it.

I approve of fixing it, since it is obviously broken.

However, I am not under the impression that doing this by itself is enough to repair our economy and get the nation back on track. There are many facets to the problem, and it's not simple enough to handle in one sitting.

So, I'm just going to tackle schooling.

First, all federally held student loan debt should be abolished, full stop. Although private loans are a private contract between the loan company and the borrower, the federal government should not be in the business of holding its citizens in economic duress.

Second and corollary to this is that any college, university, or vocational school that accepts tax funding should be tuition-free for resident students. Too many schools take tax dollars to help them support, run, and maintain the school, but then turn around and charge students - whose tax payments are already feeding the school - obscene tuitions, which lead to federally controlled loans, which leads to endless debt servitude to the government.

Third, we need to choose: either tax-supported schooling, "public," if you will, is the wrong way to pay for it, in which case it should be scrapped and replaced top to bottom by private, competitive schooling, or we need to make the universities and trade schools part of that same system, so that tuition isn't an issue anyway.

Fourth, the concept of "general education" needs to be flipped on its head.

See, right now, when you attend university, they require you to take classes based not on what your future job will require you to know, or what your course of study requires, or what your interests are, or even what you will need to become a productive citizen; no, they pursue the "Renaissance" model, in which everyone is expected to know everything, and if not demonstrate competence in it, at least be able to blather on about it long enough in a paper that they get a passing grade.

This takes place in the form of four years of required classes, most of which are functionally disposable for the students. A math major most likely doesn't need a literature class.

So, instead of the conventional consideration of what constitutes "general" education, we should instead be requiring certain classes as "basic citizen requirements." All of general education should be completed by the end of the second year of school, so that the remaining time the student spends in school is spent in their actual field of study. The school should require a certain amount of classwork in the major every semester, with elective classes counting as elective: they are optional and do not count towards the requirements for a major; they are taken entirely at the student's discretion, can be dropped at any time without penalty, and do not affect the student's grades.

An elective class should be elective; the point of it is to let the student study something outside their primary field of study without risking their livelihood. Maybe they'll develop an interest. I would have enjoyed my Art History class a hell of a lot more if I hadn't been forced to take it.

So, general education: basic science. A solid grounding in physics, chemistry, biology, and "body science," that same being medicine, health, and nutrition. The anti-vax movement exists because people are so bone ignorant that they are unable to distinguish truth from fiction; that shouldn't be a thing.

English grammar and technical writing. Respecting the culture of others is all nifty as hell, but doing so to the extent that it leaves us functionally unable to communicate with 50% of the nation's resident is dumb. Requiring kids in college to not only understand how the common language works, as well as how to structure and communicate thoughts on paper, more than adequately satisfies that need, and will have tremendous positive impact on their ability to communicate in the business world as well. Additionally, as part of "citizen required education" - which I'll get to later - a class on writing resumes and passing job interviews. It's pointless to educate someone for 8 additional years and then have them unable to find a job because they don't understand the importance of coherent sentences.

Math, to an understanding of basic geometry and algebra. More than that is elective or a major course of study. Calculus is awesome, but most jobs simply don't require it. The average citizen never uses more than basic arithmetical skills anyway; there's no reason to force it on someone who has chosen a field of endeavor that steers clear of math on purpose.

History; to include three units: Ancient history, Western Civ, and American history. Once again, I find other cultures fascinating, but they're simply not relevant for most people in more than the faintest way. Studying the historical path our civilization has followed, and our specific nation's past, is relevant. More than that should be elective or a major field of study.

Logic. A logic class should be required; preferably both classical and symbolic, but a class on "how to think rationally" is something most students are sorely missing, even if they don't know it.

A class on study skills. This seems counterintuitive, but most students don't have any. Required material, first semester of school freshman year, mandatory.

Government, in the form of a class on our government, how and why it does things, and how the structure itself works; a general grounding in macroeconomics, and then a "citizen required education" class, covering things like how to balance a checkbook, how to rent an apartment or a car, how to plan for emergencies, how credit and loans work, and...

Ahem. We can't actually call it a "how to be a grown-up" class, but I literally know no-one who has graduated college and not wished they had taken one. "Lesson one: When you move into a new place, take a toilet plunger with you the first night you stay there no matter what. If you plug the toilet and can't get a plumber because your phone's not hooked up yet / you don't know the area / nothing's open this late, your experience will be very negative."

The purpose of school is intended to be making our children into productive adults. Parenting is responsible for making them decent people; school is responsible for making them ready to venture out into the job market on their own.

Right now, it does a piss-poor job of that.

We could do it better, and we owe it to them to do so. Dragooning kids into taking heaps of classes in subjects they will never use and don't care about because that's how they did it in the 1400s has demonstrably failed, and we should let that model die.

Because Clearly Geopolitical Analysis Is Not Our Strong Suit... (OPEC)

2014-12-14T20:40:00.000-06:00

So, just recently, I've seen people doing something that's making me grit my teeth.

I'm here to make you knock it off.

If you hear me out, you may find yourself agreeing with me.

So, thus far, my personal opinion of the Obama Administration has been much like my opinion on the Bush Administration: the people who hate him, hate him for the wrong reasons, and the people who love him have the same problem.

There were a lot of reasons to hate Bush 2; there are a lot of equally valid reasons to hate Obama, and some of them are, frustratingly, the same ones.

But this is a new thing, and nobody in the media seems to be calling it right.

Whoa, whoa, back up.

History Lesson Time.

So, a long time ago - literally, 55 years - an organization some of you may have heard of was formed, called OPEC.

OPEC stands for Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and its entire purpose is economic warfare.

No, seriously. It's an organization which exists to fix oil prices and use oil prices to shape public policy in their larger, otherwise stronger trade partners.

The members as of 2014 are Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.

If you read that list and thought to yourself, "Gee, most of those nations have been historically overtly hostile to the U.S.," give yourself a gold star for passing high school history.

At the time when OPEC was formed, the main leaders - Venezuela, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, and Saudi Arabia - were upset with what they saw as absentee landlordism by the multinational oil companies, who affected their economies by changing the price of oil without warning, or increasing or decreasing production.

There is some legitimacy to that view.

However, those nations pulled together a large roster of other small countries whose main export was oil, not to protect themselves as their rhetoric would present, but rather to co-opt the tool of oil production as a means of forcing national policy shifts on their economic enemies.

This was first demonstrated on a massive international scale during the Yom Kippur war in 1973, when they reacted to U.S. support of Israel by steeply raising oil prices. The result of the oil embargo was gas rationing in the United States, a global economic recession, and the first moves in the United States towards fuel efficient vehicles. (Also the establishment of the Strategic Petroluem Reserve, which is one of our primary tools against this kind of attack.)

In the 1980s, the United States and other industrialized nations were taking steps to reduce their dependence on foreign oil, having begun the climb out of the recession, and were beginning to explore alternatives to oil, as well as renewable resources.

OPEC's response to this was to flood the market with oil, increasing production until the price dropped so far that efforts to find alternatives were abandoned, because they were unable to compete economically with petroleum usage.

Bear that part in mind, as you wonder why U.S. energy policy has flailed around so dramatically for decades, and why renewables haven't been an option a long time ago. We're going to come back to that.

Oil prices have been OPEC's tool of choice for five decades.

So, just recently, oil prices have started to drop. This is quickly becoming evident at the pump; gas prices are down to their lowest point in years.

And now we come to it: I've been hearing people cheer on the Obama Administration for this.

"Yay, Obama! I can afford gas now!"

But the problem with that is that it displays a near-cataclysmic ignorance of the world situation.

Amusingly, the folks who have been saying that, are typically the ones who are heavily invested (at least emotionally,) into environmentalism, and renewable resources.

So.

The Obama Administration's efforts at an energy policy have been a mixed bag. He's supported renewables, which everyone pretty much agrees is a good thing, but they've mostly supported the wrong ones.

Not ethanol, dummy, which is a net pollution producer, but biodiesel, which is a net pollution reducer. But good try, at least.

Not "clean coal," whatever that even means, wind, or solar, but nuclear, because despite all the flim-flam, nuclear technology has continued to advance, and modern nuclear plants bear about as much resemblance to the ones from the 50's as a Prius does to a Ford Edsel. But at least it's something.

It's SOMETHING.

And very quietly, Obama has done one thing behind the scenes that may be the one thing he's gotten really right in his Administration: he's pushed for greater domestic oil production, through shale and hydraulic fracturing. ("Fracking," if you can only handle the sound bites.)

Now, especially since his public rhetoric has been slanted quite heavily against domestic oil production, why would he do that?

Why put pressure on Congress to allow continued growth of domestic oil, despite your professed agenda?

...Remember, I'm giving him points for this one, because it's a nifty sort of jiujitsu; he's doing it because of his professed agenda.

See, as long as domestic oil production remains high enough to keep prices low enough that the citizenry doesn't revolt against gas taxes, the folks working on renewable resources for power generation and fuels have the most important thing they can have: time.

Does your TV today look like the ones on store shelves ten or fifteen years ago?

I'd bet the answer was a laugh, and "nope."

Because the technology improved.

Now, you can get a ginormous tv set for a pittance, compared with how big a chunk of your pay it would have taken to get a much less impressive device ten years ago.

A fifty inch TV ten years ago would have cost you $3000, weighed about 400 pounds, and required a team to get it into your house.

By comparison, a fifty inch TV today weighs about 25 pounds, costs between $300 and $500, and is, well, frankly a lot more affordable - and in high def, too!

What this has to do with oil prices is that technology advances. A typical symptom of that advance is falling costs; the better we get at making something, the more efficiently we learn to do it, so it gets cheaper over time.

Obama knows, or someone on his team knows, that if the renewable energy people are left to work on their tech for long enough, the winners and losers will be screechingly evident, because the winners will be much, much cheaper than they are today, and the losers...

...won't.

So, how do you buy them time? By increasing domestic oil production, thus reducing our economic reliance on nations who have directly attacked us using this very tool in the past.

Well played, sir.

Except...

...

...We're not yet at the point when those technological advances have happened. Renewables are still economically nonviable for the most part, and OPEC is watching.

They aren't happy.

So, they're driving production as high as they can, because they know this tool works; drop the price of oil far enough long enough, and even the shale producers and frackers will go out of business. At this point, we're not there yet, but it's an arms race; we're trying to improve our fracking and shale extraction processes faster than OPEC can bankrupt the companies doing it.

They're not even hiding it well, because they know Americans have only the vaguest knowledge of events beyond their own immediate body bubble. They actually did the math to determine how long they could hold out - knowing their budgets require oil prices to be at a certain level to balance - without having to cut production or increase prices. They began this attack in full and certain knowledge that without U.S. governmental intervention, the shale oil producers will cave first, full stop.

It's like the cold equations, except with more economic warfare and less pathos.

The current oil price war is just that; it is a sustained, direct attack on U.S. economic interests, by an external entity whose goal is to keep us forever addicted to foreign oil, and by extension to block those technological advances so key for realistic, viable renewable energy sources from ever happening...

...At least, within the United States.

Nobody should be saying "go Obama!" because of low gas prices.

They should be saying "how will the U.S. respond to end this direct attack on our interests?"

It's quite possible this attack will work.

We should not be cheering for the success of our enemies. However polite and diplomatic they may be. Our best hope, at this point, is that we prove more economically resilient than OPEC is.

...You know how people have been blasting questions about why the Obama Administration isn't acting more directly against ISIS, no matter how depraved and horrible they are?

It's because Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait are all endangered by ISIS's antics, under siege, and unlikely to remain able to support this price war when they need funds desperately to remain viable as governments.

When their tools of waging this war are directly occupied.

Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are right next door; their pipelines are all interconnected, and thus ISIS is a huge problem for all of them, which leaves half of OPEC's member nations endangered in large or small measure by this group's efforts.

Obama likes to play indirect games of brinksmanship; he is betting that the pressure those OPEC nations are under from ISIS will cause them to cave before he is forced to act - on their behalf, no less - due to pressure at home.

For once, I think we should support Obama entirely in his endeavor.

It doesn't matter if he's on a different political spectrum than half of America. He's still sort of an American, however you feel about his politics or decision-making.

And on this one, he's doing exactly the right thing.

Who Is This Midget And Why Is She Still Following Me Around?!

2014-10-10T20:49:00.001-05:00

So, a couple of years ago, I had the biggest change I've ever had not change much.

By which I mean to say, I got married. (Which is different from what we were before where we lived together and shared everything because it just is, ok, shut up.)

My lovely wife, who I typically refer to as Lovely Wife - which in my way of thinking distinguishes her from all the random and semi-random females I know and is admirably descriptive - commemorated the occasion of our having gotten married by posting some rambling blather about it on Tumblr.

Which implies two things:

First, that Tumblr is a thing.

More on this in a minute.

Second, it means that I must, by way of keeping up, also issue forth some sort of rambling blather.

So, Tumblr is a thing, and by "a thing," I mean to say that it apparently is a place where you can indulge your inner fan so long as you do so in an acceptable way - following one of the accepted fandoms, and doing so without accidentally violating one of the many, many "unwritten" rules of the community which will result in a deluge of threats, hatred, and namecalling from social justice warriors, most of whom are too young to know what half those words mean anyway.

I admit I am not sure why Lovely Wife likes this thing.

However, Lovely Wife finds a lot of things I'm not really into, and goes all googly-eyed over them, while I look on in bafflement.

I am given to understand that this is normal.

I have a far smaller slate of things which are baffling to her, which I am given to understand is also normal.

But here's the thing.

I have discovered over the course of a few years with Lovely Wife that watching her flip out over stuff is one of the most fun experiences I've ever had.

I am disappointed to report that Lovely Wife banned me from putting the picture I really wanted, here. I took a shot of her laughing so hard she was literally crying. I smile every time I see that picture. It's one of my favorite photos I've ever taken of her.

...She hates it, for reasons.

I'm not sure what they are, but they're there. (So, here's Lovely Wife with a tree, instead.)

See? Tree.

Among the other things I have learned about Lovely Wife, I have learned that my ability to predict the outcome of her decision-making process is roughly as successful as my ability to predict political shenanigans, which is to say about 83%.

It should be noted that this does not imply, and should not be construed as, any particularly deep understanding of the decision-making process itself. For my money, Lovely Wife arrives at her decisions through a combination of sorcery, anxiety, and chocolate in proportions dependent on the length of time since she last watched Supernatural.

Lovely Wife indulging in an alternate but still Tumblr-approved fandom.

But I can usually guess where she's going pretty well.

I'm glad that I can honestly say that most of the time, that's with me.

Lovely Wife was there the time I won a staring contest with a horse. Which, by coincidence, was the same day I went on a mystic vision quest for bacon, but that's another story.

It's like you thought I was kidding. that's cute.

She laughed at me.

This is ok, because I laugh at myself a lot. I am a ridiculous caricature of a human being most days, but the real joke - the one she gets, better than anyone else - is that I think other people's reactions to me are fucking hysterical. And I don't mind people laughing at me, because I am laughing at them right back.

Even when she doesn't necessarily do it for the same reasons, we typically end up laughing at the same things and the same people.

Even when that's us.

Lovely Wife matches me. We both get weirdly intense when competing against...

Errrrrr...

Galactic goddamn hero, right there. That's right.

...Imaginary aliens?

We both agreed that the selection of convenient, life-changing breath sprays available at the biggest candy store in Minnesota was worthwhile.

My favorite was the "Communicate With Your Father!" spray.

Because wuuuuuuuuut?

See, Lovely Wife and I have gone places.

Like bowling.

We've done stuff.

What, you think I only "Grrrr!" at you? Pfffft.

We saw Harry and the Potters. (They're a real band! Look them up!)

Who, I admit, sound much better when you're VERY drunk.

And the important part of all those places and all those things - just as it's the important part of all our time, whether we're in a fancy hotel or broke and eating noodles again - is that we're together for it. (Even when she's being terrorized by the Blue Screen Of Death.)

It doesn't matter if it's meeting William Shatner.

Who I suspect felt about ComicCon the way I felt about Harry and the Potters.

It doesn't matter if it's someone else's wedding.

It doesn't matter if it's the State Fair.

It does matter that we're together.

This year, my grandmother died, and I was extremely surprised by the depth of my sense of loss when that happened.

Lovely Wife produced, through some sorcery that I can only imagine, enough money to pay for airfare so that I could go to the funeral.

Not because she was all that invested in my grandmother, but because she knew how important it was to me, and cared.

Both she and I are odd people, prone to inappropriate emotional attachment to things, places and people. Neither one of us really does things the way everyone else seems to.

I have no idea how much of that appearance on the part of others is illusionary.

But what I do know is that knowing that she has that depth of care for me, and for my feelings, says pretty much all that's necessary for me.

I love you, noisy midget. (No, seriously, her hiccups are the loudest thing ever invented. The first time Van Halen went on tour, they tracked down her parents and asked to record the sound of her hiccuping, so they could analyze it and find new ways to make their amplifiers better.)

Seriously. She's so, so loud.

And as I typed that, I got "Really?!" followed by a unsubtly-muttered "oh, my god."

Yep, really.

Some days I have no idea why she still follows me around.

Every day, I'm grateful she continues to do so.

You make me happy, Lovely Wife.

Happy Anniversary.

So, Upgrading From "That's Interesting" To "Holy Shit, CDC's Making Excuses Already?"

2014-10-02T22:06:00.004-05:00

So, every few years, there's some kind of epidemic, and people panic.

"OMG it aer teh new black death!!1!"

Riiiiiiiight.

One disease tends to get the lion's share of the serious scares, because it's rare, extremely deadly, and frankly really scary, mostly because we know very very little about it.

Thaaaat would be Ebola.

The Ebola virus is unique in a lot of ways. The virus particle itself is odd; it has a distinct shape that makes it recognizable on sight, which is, well, highly unusual, because most viruses look pretty similar in physical structure.

It's unique because we have, frankly, no frigging idea where it comes from. We know monkeys and fruit bats can act as carriers, and we know it's transmissible to humans, but if we knew what monkeys had it, we'd kill them all and then boom! No more Ebola. We can't actually do that, because *incomprehensible noises of ignorance, wide-spread hands, and an innocent face.*

It's also unique because it's one of the three or four most deadly and incurable diseases (mad cow and other prions, hemorrhagic smallpox, inhalational anthrax, and Ebola) known to have occurred in nature. There are deadlier viruses in existence, but those by and large have been engineered and exist only in laboratories. Ebola, on the other hand, kills on average - and I want to emphasize that word "average" for reasons that will become evident - 50% of the people that contract it.

Why is that relevant? Untreated, it goes to around 85-90%.

For relevance, if you discount the diseases (of which there are several) which are equivalently deadly but curable, or at least with more effective treatments than "here's some water, don't die, ok?" then you're left with mad cow and its relatives at 100% case fatality rate (CFR,) hemorrhagic smallpox at 95%, inhalational anthrax at 93%, Ebola at 83-90%, and well... Compare that to, say, pneumonic plague at 50%, malaria at 20%, the Spanish flu at 2.5%...

Yeah, Ebola is a relative badass.

Well, no worries for us, right? The good ol' USA has all the medical care required by law and even more.

...Um, about that...

See, the trick is that there is no effective "treatment" for Ebola. The only thing doctors can do is keep you hydrated and isolated from everyone else. And doing so is ridiculously resource-intensive, requiring a hospital bed (from which we are enthusiastically kicking patients the day after major surgery. Good thing there's no shortage,) medical staff to watch and monitor you, a staggering quantity of intravenous fluids, and safe, hygienic disposal of the inevitable tidal flood of medical waste coming from you, impregnated with simply trillions of infectious viruses.

So, Ebola kills you because your body goes into catastrophic organ failure. It's a hemorrhagic fever, which means (effectively) that it makes your circulatory system break down and leak from simply everywhere, while raising your body temperature until your systems simply stop working. The blood that leaks out is hugely contagious, as this is the virus' primary means of transmission.

Ebola - at this time, and thankfully - isn't airborne, by which I mean to say you can't get infected just by standing ten feet from someone who has it.

It is possible, however, to spread by aerosol, which is slightly different and relevant for reasons I will make clear shortly.

Incubation can take as long as three weeks, which means you can be infected and totally oblivious until holy shit, Ebola, almost a month later. For bonus fun points, men who survive the illness can carry the virus in their semen for as long as an additional seven weeks. (So, ladies, steer clear of those pesky hot-looking Ebola survivors, because even if they have dayum they also have OMG I'M MELTING... MELTINNNNGGGGGGG.)

So, the WHO happily informs you that people exposed to Ebola aren't contagious until they display symptoms.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy waaaait, which symptoms?

I mean, if they weren't contagious until they were staggering drunkenly and leaking blood from the surface of their skin, NOBODY would go near them and it wouldn't even be a thing. "Holy shit, dude, what's wrong with you? No, get the hell away from me."

So which symptoms mark the onset of the contagious stage?

Wellll...

Look at that list again.

Fever.

Muscle pain.

Headache.

Sore throat.

Errrr... So, the common cold?

It's just that a cold lingers and annoys you, and then goes away. Ebola makes you start vomiting blood, and then you die.

So, you're perfectly safe, as long as you stay away from everyone who shows symptoms of Ebola, which you can't actually tell apart from any other minor ailment until it's way, way too fucking late.

A relevant fact in the veracity of which we're getting an object lesson right now.

Meet Thomas Eric Duncan. Mr. Duncan is from Liberia, where you may have noticed in the news they are having an outbreak of - and I know this comes as a surprise given the article so far - Ebola.

Mr. Duncan holds the distinction of being the United States' "patient zero."

Now, we've had people in the States with Ebola before, specifically several of the doctors and nurses who have been helping out in Liberia.

Those people are a little different from Mr. Duncan, for reasons I will explain directly, before embarking on the previously-offset explanations which are, frankly, becoming increasingly overdue.

See, they knew they were infected before coming back to the States.

So, we were ready. They were transported in quarantine, to quarantine, in a secure facility prepared for their specific arrival and set up for treatment.

Awesome!

Mr. Duncan, however, helped a sick pregnant woman in the weeks before traveling; a woman who later died. He was symptomatic before he got on the plane to the States, but he filled out a form when exiting Liberia in which he promised he really, really wasn't sick, hadn't had any contact with sick people, didn't know what all the fuss was about, and no, this sore throat is because the dry air in the airport made me cough.

Or something.

Liberia - and you may find this satisfying rather than ridiculous, based on what happened next - is considering suing him for falsifying his exit documents, in large part because...

Well, at best he's killed a bunch of people. "At worst" is something I don't really want to talk about.

So, Mr. Duncan flew. In a plane. A plane in which he was symptomatic, and therefore contagious; and this is the first of the delayed explanations, that being the relevance of the distinction between "airborne" and "aerosol."

See, a plane is an enclosed environment. Particularly so, since the lack of exterior air pressure means that the cabin air is recycled.

An "airborne" virus can survive on its own in the air; people contract it after being within yards of infected people, like some kind of sinister sorcery. Ebola can't do that.

An "aerosol," however, is when, for example, you clear your throat, and the microscopic water droplets you expel in doing so contain, surprise, Ebola! And then you die.

Ebola can totally do that.

Which is super awesome when the contagious person with a sore throat is enclosed in a tiny space for 12 hours with hundreds of other people all breathing in his air.

You might think the airlines would be outright panicking right now...

...But I'm getting ahead of myself. (Spoiler; they totally are.)

So, Mr. Duncan decided to travel. And did. Now in context, after the doctors had been brought to the States, the CDC rushed to assure everyone that this wasn't a huge, stupid risk, because now that there was "an awareness" of Ebola and its risks, hospitals around the country were set up to recognize, isolate, and treat it, to reduce if not outright eliminate the danger.

So, no worries, it was totally ok for the first - note that word - hospital Mr. Duncan visited in Dallas to tell him it was a cold, pat him on the head, and send him on his merry way with some antibiotics. Even after he told them he had specifically been in the country that specifically has an Ebola outbreak they're supposed to be specifically looking for. Because we're prepared to identify the disease.

We're ready.

We're also caught flat-footed when he vomits blood and collapses a couple of days later, and then goes back to the hospital, where it's "Surprise, Ebola!"

So, let me digress a bit before I scare the shit out of you.

See, earlier, I was talking about how medical treatment reduces mortality significantly, and how it's a good thing there's no shortage of medical care in the USA.

For some values of the phrase, "no shortage."

There are two factors that are relevant to that phrase.

See, each individual under treatment represents a staggering drain on the resources of an individual hospital. Ebola isn't cheap, or easy, to treat, and each person suffering from it is a massive use of hospital staff, supplies, and care. This is why the African outbreaks typically are so deadly; the healthcare system in Africa by and large deserves the finger quotes you saw in your head when I said that, and is almost immediately overwhelmed.

Well, good thing this is the USA.

We can handle dozens of patients with Ebola, all at once!

So it's a good thing Mr. Duncan may have infected as many as 400 people.

Secondly, we have healthcare insurance in this country, but most people are like me - there's a deductible. Go to the doctor, it can cost you. A minor cold, to most lower-income people, is not doctor-worthy simply because they can't pay for it; they have to prioritize their trips to see the doctor according to the severity of their illness, which means that when your common cold turns into "Surprise, Ebola!" it's too late and you're fucked, and so is everyone you've coughed on in the days prior to your very own vomit collapse.

Awesome! Glad, again, that's only maybe 400 people.

Because - and here's the fun part - even if the government and the airline can notify all of those people, and they all come in, and only a few of them actually have it, by the time it's detectable, they will have been symptomatic, and thus contagious, for a while.

During which time they could potentially have infected everyone they came in contact with.

Which means - assuming that the average incubation period is roughly 10 days, 50% of the people he infected will be contagious hmmmmmm, let's see, he became infectious the 24th, today's the 2nd, so... Saturday?

Want to place bets the airline can't catch them all?

I really, really hope they can.

The Dallas County HHS Department pulled three schoolkids out of Richardson Elementary today because they are thought to have been in contact with Mr. Duncan while he was symptomatic.

Want to place bets he talked to, and coughed on, someone else?

Some rando is in the hospital being tested for it in Hawaii right now, because planes. And readiness.

An NBC correspondent in Liberia is infected, as well. Because despite precautions... "Surprise, Ebola!"

So, here's the CDC.

We're ready.

Then, Mr. Duncan shows; he was maybe in contact with five schoolkids.

Errr... Maybe 12 to 18 people.

Well... 80. 80 people, that's it, that's all.

Good to know it was only 400.

Good to know we're ready.

Good to know we have a plan for disposing of that pesky medical waste, like Mr. Duncan's bloody vomit.

Your government is in charge and prepared, citizen.

I wonder what will happen when they have this much trouble dealing with each of several hundred people at once?

Because as I recall saying, once the hospitals get swamped, things go south pretty fast.

This might be a better time to wear the plague masks than during the swine flu scare, guys.

That Moment When...

2014-09-20T20:35:00.000-05:00

So, for me, I like music.

I've always liked symphonic music, but I prefer for it to connect to something a little more directly in my head; as much as I like the style, I am rarely able to attribute to it emotional content without a memory to pair with it.

I also like video games.

Some of you may have figured that out before now.

So, of course, it's a natural thing for me to delve into the weird world of video game soundtracks.

Some of which are obvious in their source, of course; but now that technology has caught up, games have been coming out that have more directly orchestral soundtracks.

No more of the old Squaresoft days, when a game soundtrack would be composed for the symphony, rendered down into 8- and 16-bit bleeps and bloops, and then resold in its original symphonic form later; no, games started coming out that had the full-fledged symphonic treatment right from the get-go.

Some of which were, of course, more distinguished than others.

A few standouts for me were Max Payne 1 & 2; Ico, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and then...

Well, something happened.

See, I hit a phase recently where I've been listening to primarily instrumental music for quite a while, in large part thanks to Lindsey Stirling's awesome second album. (It's called "Shatter Me." If you don't listen to it, you're really missing out.)

As part of that, I started thinking; which games really stood out for me? (Don't worry, I will provide examples.)

Which games - regardless of any other factors - just blew me away with the soundtrack?

The Elder Scrolls games, obviously. Ever since Morrowind and Oblivion, the soundtracks have been goddamn amazing, and seriously, who bought Skyrim and hasn't listened to the Dovahkiin song all the way through at least once, just letting it sit on the menu and play away?

Knights of the Old Republic.

Guild Wars. (And GW2, because daaaaaaaaamn.)

Dawn of War.

Actually, several Warhammer games... Dawn of War 2, Chaos Rising, Retribution, Mark of Chaos...

Neverwinter Nights.

Icewind Dale.

Dungeon Siege 2.

And then I noticed something.

...All of those soundtracks have one thing in common.

A gentleman named Jeremy Soule.

I'm serious, I had no idea. Apparently, about 60% of the games whose soundtracks I've really enjoyed over the last 15 years or so have been composed in whole or in part by Mr. Soule.

That's... badass, actually.

I mean, even in a world that has the absolutely sublime soundtracks to Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, the games I listed above have fucking spectacular soundtracks.

So, there you go. Hopefully you find something you enjoy in all those links!

A Ridiculous Concept

2014-07-24T20:48:00.000-05:00

So, this morning, I get up, and because I am a good internet zombie, I unlock my phone and see alerts.

Notifications all over Facebook.

The damn icon is covered with flags.

Festooned, as it were, with bunting and banners, begging me to pay attention to it. So, because it was 5:30 in the morning and I wasn't in a rush, I did.

The first thing I see is this article on Reason.com about that amazing girl competing in American Ninja Warrior, Kacy Catanzaro.

Now, that woman is very, very impressive. She's 5 feet tall - that's five feet, no inches - and weighs 100 pounds.

She's also farther along in the competition than any female has ever gone, and farther than most men ever get also.

If you're not familiar, ANW is, basically, a really huge, angry, and extremely disinterested obstacle course designed by sadists. There's no teams; no coaches, or help; no competitors trying to bring you down. It's just you versus the course; either you complete the obstacle in front of you, or you don't.

Kacy is 24. She's the first woman to reach the finals; only one obstacle course stands between her and a win.

Let me show you just how amazing an athletic achievement this really has been, from her, for those of you who don't watch the show.

So, yeah. At this point, even if she doesn't win, even if she doesn't complete the final obstacle course, she's made history. And she's fucking awesome.

Unfortunately, the article author at Reason.com doesn't understand some fundamental things about ANW, and it's led him to make some really, really wrong conclusions. Mainly, he tries to use Kacy as an example to prove that women can - and therefore should - compete directly against men in sports.

Let's examine that concept, because even if you looked at that and said "Um, what? That's crazy," you may not realize how crazy - and wrong - it really is, and why.

In American Ninja Warrior, the only factor in which Kacy is "competing" against men is time.

The whole way, she's not trying to carry as much weight as a man, she's not trying to run as fast as a man, she's not trying to throw or kick something as far, none of that. Her main obstacle, boiled down, is her own body weight, and it's competing against her agility, strength, speed, and spatial sense.

Just the same as each man, going through the same obstacles, is facing the exact same calculation.

ANW is, in that sense, a unique way for a woman to "compete against" a man athletically, because it doesn't require a direct physical comparison.

Why is that relevant?

Sports are gender-segregated for a very good reason. Let me break down some facts for you.

For example, powerlifting. The Olympics keeps records for two weightlifting events - the snatch, and the clean and jerk.

For men and women both, the events are segregated by weight class; although this comparison won't be perfect, because the weight classes don't align perfectly, I will give the edge on weight to the women, and let's see what happens.

Let me remind you that these are Olympians; these are the most finely trained men and women in the world, not your average Joes and Janes. These people are competing at the very tip-top of their craft, in the peak of their physical condition.

Women's second highest weight class is 75 Kg / 165#. The comparable men's class is 69 Kg / 152#. (There's a men's 77 Kg / 169# class, but I want the girls to have the advantage.)

Snatch: Men, 165 Kg / 363#; Women, 131 Kg / 288#.
Clean and Jerk: Men, 196 Kg / 432#; Women, 161 Kg / 354#.

Now, there's a weight advantage to the women, and they got schooled. Now you may be asking why I chose the second-highest women's weight class; it's because the highest is "over 75 Kg / 165#."

There are several more men's weight classes; 77 Kg / 169#, 85Kg / 187#, 94Kg / 207#, 105Kg / 231#, and "over 105 Kg / 231#."

So, what's the current women's world record?

The current world record holder for women's powerlifting is a Chinese lifter named Zhou Lulu. She weighs 133Kg / 293#, and her record currently stands at 187Kg / 412# for the Clean and Jerk. That's a tremendous lift, and well to be admired.

The reason she shouldn't be competing directly against the men is that the men's world record holder is a beast named Hossein Rezazadeh, from Iran, who weighs 335#, almost 50 pounds more than Zhou Lulu, and Clean and Jerked 263Kg / 580# for the record.

To put that in perspective, Zhou Lulu may bear the distinction of being the strongest woman on planet earth, and she was outlifted by Galabin Boevski from Bulgaria, who weighs 152#.

That's a lot of numbers.

Galabin Boevski weighs a little more than half as much as the strongest woman in the world, and he's stronger than she is, in a provable, demonstrable sense.

The fastest female runner on earth is Florence Griffith-Joyner, who ran the 200m in 21.34 seconds. The men's record holder is Usain Bolt, who ran it in 19.19.

That doesn't seem like that big a difference to non-track and field people, but to put it in perspective, Ms. Griffith-Joyner's performance wouldn't have put her in the running (ha!) at the 2012 Olympics; the slowest of the competitors who placed - Anaso Jobodwana, eighth in the field - beat her by almost a full second.

The teenager who won this year's 200m high school men's race in Minnesota, Tyler Beehler, ran the race only 1/10th of a second slower than the fastest woman in recorded history. (21.45.)

To put this in further perspective...

This is me.

I am awesome, but clearly not a powerlifter or professional athlete.

My lovely wife has a good friend, who is about 5'10" and weighs about 159#. She does yoga, and is in pretty good shape.

A few weeks back, we went bowling.

After some back and forth smack-talking between myself, and my wife's friend, a bet was formed: I bet I could bowl while carrying her. Obviously she bet I couldn't.

So after some discussion, I wrapped my arm around her waist, picked her up, and got a spare.

Aaaaaand, there you go.

With one hand, I was able to lift and carry about 37% of the weight the strongest woman in the world was able to lift overhead and hold for a second and a half, or so. I am out of shape if you're being extremely charitable, but I'm able to lift roughly 80% of the weight the most over-developed, heavily trained, professional female powerlifter in the world can manage.

It's not fair to suggest that women can, or should, compete against men in "sports."

A fit, tough, highly trained and athletic 165-pound woman, playing Wide Receiver in the NFL, would suffer a career-ending injury the first time a 350-pound-plus defender tackled her.

That's not judgment. It's inertia.

The salient and relevant point, however, is that that fact, on its own, doesn't mean she isn't a good football player.

The devastating beatdown that would be inflicted on the WNBA if they integrated their players with the NBA would be inevitable and embarrassing.

And you know what? It would be completely, devastatingly unfair, because it gives the totally inaccurate impression that those women, and their athletic achievements, are somehow less than the men.

And yet, those women are solid, professional b-ball players. They're professional athletes. They're in far better condition than I am.

Saying women should compete against men directly is foolish, and it's terrible, because the inevitable crushing defeat devalues women's real, solid, demonstrable achievements.

It's the same reason they don't put 145-pound boxers in the ring with superheavyweights.

And it's why if they integrated MMA fighting, there would be exactly one fight in the Octagon that men would "win," and thereafter the women would win every single fight.

Why? Because the first fight, the male would hit the female once, and she would have to be hospitalized.

And after that, the men would refuse to hit back. (Well, most of them. I can think of a couple of those dudes who look like they would love to bruise up the ladies just because.)

Despite the stylings of the gentleman writing for Reason.com, there's nothing reasonable about making the claim that - because Kacy Catanzaro is awesome at ANW - she should be placed in a direct physical match against male competition. Doing so makes it seem that Kacy's accomplishments aren't as important.

And she's a fucking rock star.

Why You Want Net Neutrality, Even If You Don't Know It

2014-07-21T18:06:00.000-05:00

So, you may have heard lots of (very boring) blather in the news about net neutrality recently.

You may not know what it really means, or who has what vested interest in a particular outcome.

Thankfully, I am here to save the day!

Hopefully, I can do so without being boring.

But let me start with a simple, direct statement, and then lengthy and hopefully interesting explanation will follow.

Net neutrality is a concept without which, network providers (the major players are Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T) could bone you six ways from Sunday without lube or the courtesy of a reach-around.

So let's begin by talking about what the internet actually is, how it works, and what you're paying for, versus what you think you're paying for.

Remember a few years ago, Senator Ted Stevens famously said "the internet is a series of tubes," and everyone mocked him publicly for his obvious ignorance?

Everyone but Senator Stevens was wrong.

See, "the internet," as you most likely understand it, is a fiction. There is no vast, swirling cloud of the sum total of all human knowledge in a secret containment vessel, hidden away in a long-buried subterranean laboratory run by the DoD.

Pictured: not a data containment vessel.

What actually exists are individual computers, and groups (sometimes called "server farms") of computers. Each of those places - call them a "node" for simplicity of jargon - contains something. Like a tank filled with some finite, limited, but interesting knowledge.

Or cat pictures.

Or Tumblr.

Whatever.

Those nodes are connected to one another by...

...

...A series of "tubes." Most often, these "tubes" are in fact fiber-optic cables, connecting two separate networks together; they're often less than a foot long.

Back up. What the hell is a network, then?

Well, it's several nodes, all linked together.

For example: if you're at a college, all the computers at that college, or a large portion of them, are linked together. That's a network.

In order for that network to be connected to "the internet," somewhere on that college campus is a box - or a rack of little boxes - called "routers." Their entire job is to figure out where incoming and outgoing data traffic is supposed to go; kind of like a super-fast system of...

...well...

...tubes...

Look, you've been to a bank drive-up window, right?

You know how you have the little container, and you stuff your check, ID, whatever, into it, shove it into the tube, and hit a button, and it goes away? This is what happens when you computer asks for information. That can be a song on iTunes, an ebook, a website, whatever, but your computer puts the request in a container - called a "packet" - and fires it off to the other end of the tube.

The router is a midpoint; it sorts all the containers to make sure they're in the right tubes.

Pictured: what a router does.

Now, at each network border, there's a router, or a series of them (depending on the amount of traffic,) which creates a route - thus the name - for your information, both outbound and inbound.

This happens really, really, really fast.

As in, your at-home little wimpy "router" from Comcast does this as many times a minute as the entire U.S. Postal Service manages in a whole year and then some.

Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with neutrality. We'll get there, I promise.

But back to the college campus...

The college - University of Downloadistan, whatever - pays someone, some company, to connect their campus network to the rest of the world.

To the student, this is transparent; they don't see any of the infrastructure, just the effects.

They click a link, a page loads.

But what really happened, was they clicked a link, their computer closed up the container with the info request, sent it to the college router. That router sent it on to the internet provider's router, which sent it on to another network router, which passed it along to another...

...ad nauseam, until the packet finally arrives at a computer that actually contains the web page the student wants; that computer opens the packet, takes the ID and check, stuffs the website data in, and sends it right back to the student.

Now, as the packet passes through each router, the router adds or updates the routing information on it; kind of like a dynamic mailing address, so that the data knows how to go back home after its hot date.

So, the student clicks, and within instants, the website is loaded and the student is none the wiser, not realizing that the data involved traveled in some cases literally thousands of miles to get there and back in the few seconds you were busy twiddling your thumbs waiting.

In doing so, it went through not one, but possibly hundreds, of individual networks - all connected by a series of tubes - to its destination.

Wait for it; we're getting the basics out of the way so the neutrality will make some sense, ok?

Now, if you're a private citizen, you most likely have an account with an ISP, or internet service provider. That would be Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Dish Network, Hughes, Verizon, AT&T, and some others.

What you most likely think you're paying for is an unlimited access pass to the collected sum of all human knowledge.

And cat pictures.

And porn.

And 4chan.

Pictured: 4chan.

Moving right along, what you're actually paying for is for the company in question to connect your computer to the series of tubes that connects all the other networks. The way that service is sold in the USA is by speed; the more you pay for, the fatter a tube you get. The fatter a tube you have, the more requests for information and gifs of dancing monkeys and Vine videos you can cram down it at one time, right?

Whoa there.

That's how it SHOULD work.

But only in a net-neutral world.

See, each of these networks has borders.

Pictured: not what those borders look like.

Information has a home; anything you're looking for is available for you to view, but it's stored in a physical place, even if you don't realize it.

Most of those physical places exist as individual networks.

Internet service providers, however, don't mostly have huge server farms like a university or corporation would; they have - drumroll please - you.

See, Verizon's "network," which has borders with the rest of the world's networks, consists of millions of individual people, each owning a computer.

In a net-neutral world, you ask for data; Verizon carries your request to the nearest border, passes it along to another network. Eventually, data comes back, and Verizon carries it to your house.

You pay Verizon to provide that service.

On the other end - somewhere - is a different network, run by a different company. Let's call them Level 3.

Now, Level 3 does the exact same thing Verizon does, except that their clients - instead of being single individual homeowners - are mostly corporations.

Netflix is one of those corporations.

So, in a net-neutral world, you open your browser, type in Netflix.com, and away goes your packet - through Verizon - to the border with Level 3. Verizon hands the packet to Level 3, Level 3 carries it to Netflix, Netflix refills the container with the webpage and sends it back; Level 3 carries it back to Verizon, Verizon carries it to you, you watch movies. Everyone is happy.

But... Wait.

Verizon ISN'T happy. Neither are Comcast or AT&T.

Pictured: a sad rich guy in a corporate boardroom.

They feel that their networks are being unfairly used - for the purpose that you specifically pay them to perform - because lots of data comes and goes from Netflix.

But that doesn't actually matter.

It's a cash grab.

Verizon and Comcast know that you don't know how this works. They're counting on it. They talk endlessly about it, because the more boring they can make it sound, the less attention you'll pay to it.

So they say that Level 3 is overloading their network by pouring so much data into it that it's slowing down connections for everyone else, because that border is getting congested.

You probably have a mental picture of the border between Verizon and Level 3 right now as some kind of Grand Canyonesque continental divide, a huge crevasse only bridged by a tiny rope bridge...

Pictured: What you probably think this looks like.

That's not an accurate picture at all.

Instead, the interconnection points between Verizon's network and Level 3's network are far more simple.

Pictured: network diagram of the Network Service Provider Internet Exchange Point in the Carrier Hotel in L.A.

Imagine a room roughly the size of a broom closet. Along one wall are two nearly identical metal frames, each holding several little flat metal boxes. Between those boxes are a series of cables, each about a foot long, connecting the sets of boxes together.

Not actually Level 3 and Verizon but you get the idea.

That's a network interconnection point. Level 3's border routers, connected to Verizon's, by about a foot of cable.

Now, they're congested; they're congested because they need more cables.

Verizon wants to charge Level 3, and Netflix, more money for the data that goes across those wires, because they're using an "unfair" amount of data.

But that data is there because you - paying Verizon customer - paid them to go get it for you.

And they know they can't simply demand more money from you for that service, so they're trying to make it look like Netflix is owned by unreasonable dicks, so you'll think of them as the bad guy.

Charge Netflix more, Netflix has to raise prices, which YOU have to pay.

Hmmmmmmm...

So, Verizon is trying to charge a company you already pay for the data, to carry the data you pay Verizon to carry.

Hmmmmmm.

Well, it's because there's some huge expense involved in upgrading, right? After all, it's not really fair to expect Verizon to assume all the expense of upgrading their service to actually support the demands they charge their customers to satisfy, right?

Sorry, that was overly sarcastic.

I meant to say that since Verizon already charges you to carry data at a specific speed, it's unfair to demand that they carry data at the speed they charge you for, because that data has to come from someone else like all the other data on the internet, but because it comes from Netflix it's made of sucks and bags of coal and ass cancer, and therefore hurts Verizon more to carry it, or something...

I wish I was kidding, but that's actually what Verizon is claiming...

...But wait, that's obviously bullshit, because...

...Level 3 offered to pay for the upgrades to the Verizon routers. Openly said "we will buy you the equipment, just plug in more goddamn cables," and you know what Verizon said?

"No."

Because their goal is NOT to provide you the service you pay them for, you see? Their goal is to profit off you on as many levels as possible. If Verizon launches a streaming video service - kinda like Comcast's "Xfinity" service - and they're competing against Netflix, they're going to lose.

But if they launch, and THEIR service is super, super fast, and Netflix is slow as hell - because Verizon is intentionally slowing down the traffic from Netflix so that their service looks better, despite the fact that you pay them to bring it to you - they win, and get your monthly service fee AND a subscription fee!

Yay, double-dipping!

If you feel like this is pretty epic douchebaggery, you're entirely right.

If you've read my articles before, you know what I'm gonna say:

But Wait, There's More!

See, it's not just that the villainous douchenazis at Level 3 have offered to pay Verizon's way through the congested links, no; as it turns out, Netflix actually provides - free - a service called the Open Connect Content Delivery Network.

What's that, you ask?

Well, it's the reason that Netflix doesn't experience slowdowns and congestion anywhere on planet Earth except the United States.

Because Netflix provides ISPs servers, containing Netflix data - big containers full of movies, you see - which can be plugged directly into the ISPs own networks, thus avoiding border disputes entirely.

And most of the major ISPs on Earth outside the United States have made deals with Netflix to do this.

Only in the United States do the ISPs have such sway over our governance that they can convince the government to let them even pretend their refusal to provide the service you pay them for is legitimate.

Net neutrality is the rule that says all ISPs have to treat data the same regardless of source.

If you don't have it, the ISPs get to not only refuse to provide you the service you pay them for, but they get to screw you out of extra money besides.

Now if you've read my articles before, you know what I'm gonna say:

But Wait, There's More!

Ever seen a Verizon ad? Or a Comcast ad?

In recent years, the primary thrust of their advertising has been to highlight their ability to provide the fastest, best streaming video service. Both companies loudly tout the ability of their networks to stream video onto any device you own, all over your house, or your neighbor's, or at McDonald's, wherever, because they're awesome.

Both companies also cap data. Both companies have made public statements to the fact that they want to change from a speed-based sales model, to a quantity-based model.

You want to know why?

Because they can charge you way, way, way more if they can charge you for the data, after you're hooked on streaming video services. Video streaming, especially at HD resolution, takes an enormous amount of data, thus the relevance of the speed of your connection; if you're trying to consume huge quantities of data, in the form of movies online, you need fatter tubes.

So they advertise fat tubes. (Look here to see how often Verizon and Comcast talk about their speed.)

Which they intentionally are trying to avoid giving you, specifically so they can gouge you for even more money.

Comcast earned roughly 1.8 billion dollars in net profit - that is, what they have left to throw in the Scrooge McDuck vault after they pay all their bills - in the first quarter of 2014. That adds out to not quite 8 billion dollars in profits expected this year.

Verizon made $11 billion in 2013.

AT&T made $18 Billion in 2013.

Do NOT let these companies snow you into thinking they're as broke as you are.

They're not.

And they're trying to avoid providing the service you specifically pay them for, despite other companies offering to help them overcome the technological hurdles they face utterly free of charge.

Understand that they're trying to steal from you, without your realizing it.

And don't let them succeed.