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Saturday, February 19, 2005from Il PenserosoJohn Milton Sweet bird that shunn'st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy! Thee chantress oft the woods among, I woo to hear thy even-song; And missing thee, I walk unseen On the dry smooth-shaven green, To behold the wandering moon, Riding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray Through the heav'n's wide pathless way. 
posted by gbarto at 10:08 PM Minimum wage, minimum income, progressivity and more! Cicero has an interesting post spurred by proposed minimum wage increases. I usually oppose increases in the minimum wage. I don't oppose the idea of a wage floor, however. And I think Cicero has some very useful thoughts on what our current economic policies are getting us: [A guaranteed national income] undercuts business demands for special tax breaks and low wages in state A backed by a threat to move to low-tax and low-wage state B.One of the uglier moments of the early '90s was Clinton running for Prez as a job creator while the unions ignored that he did so by running a "right to work" state. It's also ugly that sometimes the major thrust of a state's modified poverty program is not finding a better way to give help to those in need but driving them into a state more sincere in its committment to the least among us. It's one thing to boast that you figured out how to feed a homeless person for $2.00 less a day, saving a million bucks a year for the state. But making your state unliveable so that somebody else gets stuck with the tab is like a company stiffing laid off workers and counting on the unemployment/welfare system to take care of them - it's just state, rather than corporate, welfare. Cicero's (and Richard Nixon's) ideas have their problems, but they should be considered as we head toward the next stages in remaking tax and welfare policy.
posted by gbarto at 8:50 PM Friday, February 18, 2005from El golem (excerpt 2 of 2)Jorge Luis Borges El rabí lo miraba con ternura Y con algún horror. ¿Cómo (se dijo) Pude engendrar este penoso hijo Y la inacción dejé, que es la cordura? ¿Por qué di en agregar a la infinita Serie un símbolo más? ¿Por qué a la vana Madeja que en lo eterno se devana, Di otra causa, otro efecto y otra cuita? En la hora de angustia y de luz vaga, En su Golem los ojos detenía. ¿Quién nos dirá las cosas que sentia Dios, al mirar a su rabino en Praga?
posted by gbarto at 9:45 PM Thursday, February 17, 2005How are things going in the Middle East?Life can be so often plagued with uncertainties. And yet, if you know where to look, there are ways to find something true and sure. For example: We're making progress in Saudi Arabia. While it is unclear just how far the recent municipal elections will bring about change, we are going in the right direction. There are two logical outcomes to the elections: the unelected council members monopolize power, prompting more grumbling and low-level unrest or they play along, bringing about gradual reform. Either way, the genie's out of the bottle and change is on the way. Of this I am sure. How? All you've got to do is read the Thursday NY Times editorial pooh-poohing the elections. By the way, Friedman's column on Lebanon is a solid read, well worth the time.
posted by gbarto at 10:35 PM from El golem (excerpt 1 of 2) Jorge Luis Borges Sediento de saber lo que Dios sabe, Judá León se dio a permutaciones De letras y a complejas variaciones Y al fin pronuncío el Nombre que es la Clave, La Puerta, el Eco, el Huésped y el Palacio, Sobre un muñeco que con torpes manos Labró, para enseñarle los arcanos De las Letras, del Tiempo y del Espacio. El simulacro alzó los soñolientos Párpados y vio formas y colores Que no entendió, perdidos en rumores Y ensayó temerosos movimientos.
posted by gbarto at 10:32 PM Marcus pointed out this "Moral Politics" quiz. My results - dead center between liberalism and conservatism, bias toward capitalism rather than state-run societies: 1. System: Conservatism, Liberalism 2. Variation: Moderate Conservatism, Moderate Liberalism 3. Ideologies: Capital Republicanism, Capital Democratism 4. US Parties: Republican Party, Democratic Party 5. Presidents: Gerald Ford (95.58%) 6. 2004 Election Candidates: John Kerry (86.74%), George W. Bush (74.23%), Ralph Nader (70.35%)
posted by gbarto at 1:18 AM Wednesday, February 16, 2005Happiness is...Shawn Christopher Shea Shea posits that while our physical bodies are machines according to the old models - levers, pulleys, etc operate in the physical universe to produce movement, at the level of spirit, we are quantum machines, operating with rules that allow for things like souls that can't be seen but keep popping up anyway. Shea contends, specifically, that we are "happiness machines." If that sounds like the kind of psychological mumbo-jumbo you've heard somewhere before, you've probably read one of our book reviews before. And like all our other recommendations, this one is worth a look. Shea starts with a pretty good place for figuring out how to be happy - the lives of happy people. But the folks he's selected are a bit unusual. For one thing, most of them don't seem like the sort who would have been happy. His major example is John Merrick, a.k.a. the Elephant Man. Says Shea, happiness is easy when things are going well. But when they're not... By looking at people who have found happiness where most would find despair, loneliness and alienation, Shea isolates the keys to happiness as an attitude, as opposed to as a logical response to good circumstances. He suggests that by getting in touch with the way that Merrick and others faced the world, we, too, can be happy, even when life isn't perfect. How well does the system work? Shea says he's getting better about remembering to use it, but that, yup, it's a struggle sometimes. And if you've picked up a book called "Happiness is," you've probably got some struggles of your own. Still, interesting stuff for facing those struggles, adding a little joy and understanding to the mix.
posted by gbarto at 11:56 PM Lamb - Between Darkness and Wonder I was sitting in a local Borders the other day when Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue came on. And then went off. And then back on. Surprisingly, though the song on the store's sound system kept echoing a few bars of Gershwin interspersed with the stuff of dance/electronica, the effect was pleasing rather than horrifying (there's a piece based on Albinoni's Adagio that should earn its composer a bullet). Better, the album has stranger stuff in store. "Wonder" sounds like Delerium's Rhys Fulber got together with Peter, Paul and Mary, laid down a few tracks and had the Portishead crew do the final mix. The best piece on the album, however, is "Learn," a plaintive meditation of the modern sort (i.e., not as deep as it sounds) over a string arrangement of the sort Kronos Quartet favors (I'm not sure I haven't heard the string piece alone, but haven't been able to place it). Parts of the album may tend to grate, particularly on some listeners, but for those who have accepted (or, God forbid, liked!) the new direction Delerium has been taking, this release from Lamb should please.
posted by gbarto at 11:36 PM For those wondering about the Wolcott poem... Wolcott won the Nobel Prize for lit back in the early '90s for his Omeros, a recasting of the Homeric epics for Caribbean fishing villages. Helluva book. As for today's poem, I first encountered it in France in '93. In a supplementary lecture for an English-French translation class I was taking, the instructor brought in a Time magazine article about Wolcott including the poem. Most of the article was standard fare and easily translated. But the poem... that presented challenges, starting with the instructor's inability to understand that "nigger" had a lot more implications than her dictionary indicated. I don't remember much about how our group effort came out except that I don't think any of us were really satisfied with the result. At any rate, here you have a short but interesting snippet from an unusual poet.
posted by gbarto at 10:39 PM "I'm a red nigger who loves the sea..." Derek Wolcott I’m a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, And either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.
posted by gbarto at 1:02 PM Ankle-biting pundit (linked at Instapundit) is right to question the idea of going further with the Indecency Act. This is, in fact, a case for "a pox on both their houses," with conservatives acting like a bare nipple will bring an end to Western Civilization and Hollywood liberals acting like limitations on a bared nipple will bring an end to art. More likely, it will bring an end to network television. Face it folks. What the nets need is not less "indecency" on television, but better indecency. Consider HBO's Sex in the City, now running in edited form on TBS. TBS isn't network television, but it's basic cable so they watch content carefully. The result is that an artful but sometimes raunchy show is running at inappropriate times for inappropriate audiences with, worst of all, inappropriate levels of indecency for the ebb and flow of the show. At an appropriate hour, I'd see no problem with running Sex in the City as is. Say, for example, 10 o'clock. And if your kids are watching television at ten and you're not their monitoring the content, please don't complain. You've already abdicated your parental authority. Right now, the nets have an awful problem. The decency freaks are hunting them with ever-increasing vigor while the rest of the population watches whatever it damn well pleases on cable. The result is that the nets are attempting to equally "compelling" programming but within the confines of the censors. The result is schlock. Better to loosen things up at nine and let the nets run free after ten. We'll see if the result is television as awful as we have today, only with more dirty words and naked people (which would still be an improvement), or if a little art slips in. I imagine the reality shows would be worse than ever (impossible). But maybe the numerous Law and Order type dramas could do even better if freed to think about what they're trying to convey instead of what the censors will let them convey. In any case, the last thing we need is to expand the Indecency Law and raise the fines. In an age of internet, blockbuster, tivo and video-on-demand, we don't need Congress protecting the children from the four lone signals they can fully control, we need parents getting off their butts to find out what their kids are up to and broadcasters left to compete on a fairer footing with cable so they can either prove their worth or give us conclusive evidence of why cable, not air, is the place to watch. (BTW: I know that Ms. Jackson's nipple made its awful appearance during the Superball, a most inappropriate place. But it's not as though the television stations fined knew it was going to happen or caused it to happen. The appropriate curative came into play without the least bit of government intervention when the vast viewership asked itself, collectively, "What the hell were they thinking?" and consigned Jackson and Timberlake to the freak category.)
posted by gbarto at 12:29 PM Penitent Nigerians... Haven't seen any quite like this before: From Brother Steven MaduSpelling needs work, but interesting concept. Incidentally, the headers are a mess and the supposed message recipient is him. Fairly sophisticated spamming technology for a humble servant of the Lord who wants only to send a single, dedicated person a message.
posted by gbarto at 9:07 AM Tuesday, February 15, 2005Gays deserve better than some gay activists are offeringThe New York Times today offers this headline: Gays Debate Radical Steps to Curb Unsafe Sex Pretty disturbing stuff. What's most disturbing, though, is that as with the war on terror, there are a lot of people who don't even want to see a problem. 40,000 gays a year are getting infected with HIV, and yet some pretty unsafe behavior is becoming more popular, not less, as crystal meth becomes the next cool thing on the gay scene. The problem, in part, is the existence of the "gay scene" in its present form. Not homosexuality, per se, but colossal irresponsibility within an isolate population. There are sociological arguments to be made for why this came about, starting with the marriage question: Efforts to destroy the Black family in order to keep slaves under control probably played an even larger role than poverty in creating the problems Black families have had since the end of slavery. Likewise, a social system which condemns homosexual behavior as bizarrely animal may produce homosexuals who defiantly respond by acting like animals. But, the homosexual population ought to know better. Right now, ironically, some homosexuals are living out Jesse Helms' finest fantasies, wallowing in rut and so marching to their own extinction. If you're 40, homosexual and have made those life choices, there's not much we can do. But if society wants to come out better in the last 20 years than it did in the previous 20, when an 18 or 19 year-old starts discovering he likes other men, we need someplace better for him to turn for affirmation than the bathhouses. For the bathhouses are to gays what gangs are to innner-city Blacks and Hispanics - sites that feel welcoming but offer only the cruelest of validation: acceptance for those who are willing to die. Gay marriage may or may not be in the cards, but if we want the HIV infections to go down (and the resultant health costs, as well), we need to create a social space for gays more committed to each other than to lust and disaffection. What goes on in the bathhouses is cruel and awful, with narcissists literally killing the ignorant for their own pleasure. The ignorant need both protection from their would-be-killers and a better place to go. Our culture, glad to say, has been working on the second point off and on. Hollywood falls all over itself to feature "normal" homosexuals. And our society at large has been becoming more open (though living in the Bay Area, I know I'm seeing the outer limits of today's version of tolerance). But we need to make some of that acceptance more concrete with actual protections for what gay couples build together - they need to be freed from rootlessness; as important, they need to be tied down by the same things that tie down heterosexuals. While I hedge on gay marriage, I do wonder about other approaches. Business partners often find they have as many committments to each other as to their spouses. And explorers used to sign gentlemen's agreements about what would happen if they didn't make it home. If two gay men signed a gentlemen's agreement and filled out as much paperwork about it as you need for a will, would the courts have the decency to accept it? Even if the long-lost nephew who wanted nothing to do with his "fag uncle" suddenly turned up to cash in? If not, laws ought be written not merely for gays but because consenting adults in general should be able to make binding contracts without the courts second-guessing them anyway. Even with social changes taking place today, there's a long ways to go before we're likely to have gays attaining the humdrum normalcy some claim to desire and others defiantly eschew. But creating an open social space in which the latter group can live will help. That's part two - someplace better to go than the bathhouses. But what about protection for the ignorant from what the bathhouses threaten? I really hate to say it, but if the homosexual community doesn't start policing its own, the "Buckley plan" may be all that's left. For those who have forgotten (or are too young to remember), Bill Buckley suggested a simple, diabolically useful answer to much of this decades ago: the tattoo. Gays at the time protested that Buckley's suggestion was like the Scarlet Letter. But, that was hyperbole. What Buckley suggested was a tatoo or two in places that you would only see in intimate circumstances. One on the buttock, one just above the genitals, would warn partners both heterosexual and homosexual of what they were dealing with. If that didn't stop them, well, there's not much we could do. But it would be a way of letting those looking for love, acceptance and understanding of where their feelings led them know that the person before them wasn't just offering love, that death was quite possibly part of the bargain. The tattoo, of course, sounds scary. Shades of Hitler and all that good stuff. But what's truly scary is seeing the phrase "gay activist" next to quotations whose practical import is that value of unrestricted sexual freedom for the HIV-positive outweighs the lives of HIV-negative young men who don't know what they're getting into. The bottom line is that if every life is precious, then we need to be taking some pretty drastic steps to make sure that the next generation of homosexuals doesn't go down the same path as this one. As much as the NYT article was supposed to be about hard facts, it had a fantasy-land feel to it. Only in a fantasy-land could one seriously argue for a viewpoint whose practical result is killing people and then label that viewpoint as belonging to advocates for those people. In the real world, impact, not intention, is the deciding factor. I've spoken of the need for broader social change. But there needs to be change within the gay community, big time. For right now, the extreme "gay rights advocates" have more in common with Pat Robertson than they do with the health advocates: They're both more concerned with the advancement of political goals than they are about the confused young man who, craving love and acceptance, wanders into a gay bathhouse and meets someone with HIV. Let's hope society at large can do better.
posted by gbarto at 10:45 PM Thought for this day To become better, we must have been worse. To become stronger, we must have been weaker. To become smarter, we must have been more stupid. To become wiser, we must have been more ignorant. Before we can walk, we must first crawl. Before we can learn life's lessons, we must first live. So do not regret what might have been if only you had known or done or been different: You could not become who you are before being who you were and could not know what you now know before learning. Therefore, if you feel the urge to regret, celebrate: In the process of becoming who you are, you have learned from life's stumbles and have grown.
posted by gbarto at 10:34 PM from Wee Willie Winkie William Miller Wee Willie Winkie rins through the town, Up stars and doon stairs in his nicht-gown, Tirling at the window, crying at the lock, Are the weans in their bed, for now it's ten o'clock?
posted by gbarto at 10:30 PM Monday, February 14, 2005VodkaPundit took Firefox out for a spin and was impressed by some bits, unimpressed by others. His biggest hangup was "tabbed browsing" - windows are tabbed within Firebox instead of being differentiated on the task bar.Hmm. You don't have to open new windows into tabs; you can open them into new windows with their own taskbar icons. I know, because that's the course I usually take. The nice thing about tabs? If you're reading a post with several interesting links, you can open the links in tabs, keeping related pages together, then open other stuff in different windows. The biggest problem I see with Firefox is that it does goofy things with iframes and sized graphics sometimes. Seems to go with its clunky functionality. Internet Explorer is certainly more sophisticated and does a sharper job with the coolest web pages. That said, I do 90% of my browsing with Firefox these days. If you're looking for a different browser, click the Firefox link. You might like it too.
posted by gbarto at 2:46 AM I see the Shiites came out on top in the Iraqi elections, but that they'll probably need Allawi's help to form a government. Good enough. It's not surprising that the Shiites did well; they're a clear majority of the population. But it's reassuring to see that vote totals didn't have a one-to-one correspondence with ethnicity. Because the Shiites did well, there is minimal danger that they will feel like Iraqi democracy is just a new version of Saddamism. Because they didn't do too well, they will, however, have to compromise, assuring that the rest of the country doesn't feel like all that changed was the names of the thugs in charge. All in all, a positive thing, I'd say.
posted by gbarto at 2:30 AM Meeting at Night Robert Browning The grey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!
posted by gbarto at 2:27 AM The TurkeyBlog notes in its defense that we published a very upbeat poem for Jan. 30, the Iraqi elections. And today's (Valentine's Day) selection is appropriately sweet. Tomorrow's is a fairly light-hearted children's rhyme. But yes, the 12th and 13th's selections were cause, as Cicero notes, to say "enough already" with the death thing. For the record, the Turkster is too young to be tired of living. And as spring nears, the poems should become more cheerful. Which doesn't mean we won't be tossing in "Because I could not stop for death..." just to make sure Marcus is still paying attention. In the meantime, look to the poem for the 14th for thoughts of love and joy and passion - and completely death-free!
posted by gbarto at 2:18 AM Sunday, February 13, 2005from Complaint of a Forsaken Indian WomanWilliam Wordsworth My fire is dead - it knew no pain; Yet it is dead, and I remain. All stiff with ice the ashes lie; And they are dead, and I will die. When I was well I wished to live, For clothes, for warmth, for food, and fire; But they to me no joy can give, No pleasure now, and no desire. Then here contented will I lie - Alone I cannot fear to die.
posted by gbarto at 10:58 PM |
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