MIT - Martin C. Winer

Reconciling Biblical Numbers: Three Million at Sinai is making a Mountain out of a Molehill

June 12, 2010 mcwiner 5 comments

Imagine a historian 500 years from now constructs the following proof. “The culture of 1960′s widely accepted homosexual activities. Evidence can be found in the theme song of a popular cartoon of the era, ‘The Flintstones’. This is a cartoon involving the implied homosexual activities between the two male lead characters Barney and Fred with no visible objections of their wives which they mutually took for procreation. The theme song ends: ‘we’ll have a yabadoo time… we’ll have a gay old time.’[1] Clearly, this open admission was made in front of millions of watching viewers and there is no archeological record of a single objection to their categorization as being gay.” Do you accept this method of proof to be valid?The answer to the quandary is obvious to most in our generation: the dictionary changed. Beware of the word ‘obvious’ because it paints with a very broad stroke. Try asking some children what the word ‘gay’ means. However, provided a dictionary from the 60′s and a later (revised) dictionary survives to reach the time of future historian, someone will be able to correct his/her faulty logic. Think though, what if the dictionary did not survive?Take for example, this ‘simple’ statement from the Torah: “And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, beside children.” (Exodus 12:37)[2] This is an account of how many Israelites left Egypt and then went on to witness the revelation of God at Sinai. The Torah appears to go out of its way to repeat this figure again in Numbers 1:46 just for emphasis: “even all those that were numbered were six hundred thousand and three thousand and five hundred and fifty.”[3] So now we see two places where the Torah states that there were 600 thousand men of military age leaving Egypt.If you can now quickly accept the fact that the Torah says that there were 600 thousand military age men that left Egypt, I accuse you of swallowing your theology without chewing first. 600 thousand military aged men generally implies a total population of three million.
* For comparison: “In the 1967 war in which Israel defeated the combined forces of its Arab invaders, Israel’s population of 2 million provided only 264,000 soldiers.” [4] So a modern day army capable of defeating 3 nations simultaneously is of size 264,000.
* “Alexander, who controlled Greece, Macedonia, Thrace (Southern Yugoslavia), and a little bit of Western Anatolia, was able to raise between 90,000 and 100,000 troops total, with about half remaining in Macedonia when he invaded the Persian Empire.” [5]
* Hannibal of Carthage took 20,000 soldiers and besieged Rome for several years causing 50,000 Roman casualties before his defeat in 203 B.C. [6]
* “It is estimated that the whole population of Egypt at the time of the exodus was between 2 and 5 million. According to the above estimates of the population of Israel, the people of Israel would be the population of Egypt.” [7]
* “Archaeologists have shown that the land of Canaan was never invaded by 3 million Israelites after the exodus from Egypt. At this time in history, the land only had a population of between 50,000 to 100,000 (at most), and there never was a massive population increase in this time period.” [8]
* “There are thought to have been 20,000 in the entire Egyptian army at the height of Egypt’s empire.” [9]
* The ability to supply an army with food and provisions was a limiting factor to the size of ancient armies. “The figure of 80,000 seems to be a sort of natural limit to the size of these ancient armies.” [10] The credulous may be able to slip out of supply problems for the ancient Israelites by invoking ‘manna from heaven’. However, it’s for certain that God did not provide for their enemies. Thus, the limiting size of an opponent would appear to be around 80,000. The Torah claims that the Israelites had 600,000 military aged men. Thus, they could easily defeat any army they came across without the fear described in the Torah. Deuteronomy 7:17,18 “If thou shalt say in thy heart: ‘These nations are more than I how can I dispossess them?’ Thou shalt not be afraid of them thou shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt.” [11] There were no larger nations than 600,000 military men, and thus why would the Israelites be afraid of any of them?
* “The population of ancient Israel was probably about 300,000 at its maximum in the time of David.” [12]
* Assume for a moment that the population involved in the Exodus actually was 3 million. Then consider the verse Deuteronomy 7:1 where the Israelites “… cast out … seven nations greater and mightier than [themselves]“. [13] That would mean that there were 7 greater nations in ancient Israel before the conquest, making the population at least 21 million (7 x 3 million)! There is absolutely no archaeological proof for this. Further, archaeology bounds the population to 300,000 at the height of the Davidic rule. Moreover, the current population of modern Israel (in 2006) is 6 million.
* The ancient Israelites sojourned at Kadesh-Barnea for approximately 38 years. 3 million would have left some manner of record there. However, “Not even a shard from the Bronze Age has been found (Finkelstein and Silberman 2001, p. 63), despite thorough excavation of the site and surveys of the surrounding area.” [14] Some have argued that it wasn’t the business of the ancient Israelites to leave relics for archaeologists to discover. Archaeolgists retort that modern archaeology is “quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world” (Finkelstein and Silberman 2001, p. 63). [15]
* These points are a good starting point for problems with the 600 thousand figure. Consult the footnotes for more.
So we see that the number 600 thousand is a historically impossible number. With that many military age men, there is no need for any miracles in warfare: Israel would conquer the entire Middle East and likely the rest of the world shortly thereafter.How then do we reconcile the Torah’s twice repeated 600 thousand figure with the contradictions with history this causes? Recall our flawed Flintstone proof. The problem was with the dictionary we were consulting. In this case, the problem occurs with the translation of the Hebrew ‘eleph’. “The issue of Exodus 12:37 is an interpretive one. The Hebrew word ‘eleph’ can be translated ‘thousand,’ but it is also rendered in the Bible as ‘clans’ and ‘military units.’” [16] Consider the following Torah quotes. Where the Hebrew word ‘ELEPH’ is used, I will CAPITALIZE the translation.
* “And he said unto him: ‘Oh, my lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my FAMILY is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.’” Judges 6:15 [17]
* “and he shall be as a CHIEF in Judah, and Ekron as a Jebusite.” Zechariah 9:7 [18]
* “And the CHIEFS of Judah shall…” “In that day will I make the CHIEFS of Judah like a pan of fire among the wood…” Zecharaiah 12:5,6 [19]
* “Similarly, in the assault [by Joshua] on Ai (Joshua 7-8) the true proportions of the narrative become clear when we realize that the disastrous loss of 36 men is matched by the setting of an ambush, not of 30,000 [ELEPH] men of valour, but of 30.” [20] Other quotes where you get different meanings depending on which translation you use are:
* 1 Samuel 10:19, 23:23
* Micah 5:1 (It should be noted that even fluent Hebrew speakers can be victims of the translations they use: They can be using a modern interpretation of ‘eleph’ [thousand] erroneously.)Further, there is a possible confusion between the word ‘alluph’ (chief) and ‘eleph’ which look identical in Hebrew without vowels. [21] This is a little tricky to follow without an example. Take the words ‘ant’ and ‘not’. If you remove the vowels from both you get ‘nt’ and ‘nt’. In ancient Hebrew notation (as in other semitic languages) the vowels were omitted. I cn qckly prv tht th hmn mnd s cpbl f rdng ths. [22] Thus, “‘Alluph’ is used for the ‘chieftains’ of Edom (Genesis 36:15-43) probably for a commander of a military ‘thousand’ and almost certainly for the professional, fully-armed soldier.” [23] What should become apparent is that there are other interpretations and meanings for the Hebrew word ‘eleph’. See footnote [24] for a description of the etymology of ‘eleph’. So far we’ve seen ‘eleph’ mean ‘family’, ‘clan’, ‘chief’ and ‘armed man’.An academic caveat, we must beware of denying biblical numbers outright. While we are forced to question them in the case of the 600 thousand figure due to archaeological evidence, there is likewise archaeological evidence that certain numbers from the Bible do match with current records. “For bible numbers: The size of the Assyrian army approximates the number of troops stated in 2.Kings.” [25] It is important that we do not apply our logic in an all or nothing manner, denying the veracity of all bible numbers.How then do we reconcile the fact that the Torah twice repeats this 600 thousand figure? Recall that in Numbers 1:46 [26] we have a repetition of the 600 thousand figure, with a further refinement to 603,550 suggesting the Torah means thousands here, not anything else. John Wenham offers the following explanation of the census figures using the tribe of Simeon as an example:
“Simeon: 57 armed men [chiefs, eleph] 23 ‘hundreds’ (military units).
This came to be written: 57 ‘lp 2′lp 3 ‘hundreds’.
Not realising that ‘lp in one case meant ‘armed man’ and in the other ‘thousand’, this was tidied up to read 59,300. When these figures are carefully decoded, a remarkably clear picture of the whole military organization emerges. The total fighting force [of the Exodus Israelites] is some 18,000 which would probably mean a figure of about 72,000 for the whole migration”. [27]So what are the consequences of adopting a translation of ‘eleph’ that would lead the Exodus numbers to be in the 10′s of thousands? First we harmonize the Torah account with the account of archaeology. In so doing, we have a much more tenable historical account which reconciles with the world of science.

However, in so doing, we may unseat a famous theological proof known as the Kuzari proof which holds that 3 million witnesses witnessed the Sinai revelation and hence this public revelation could not have been faked. I imagine that Kuzari adherents will be equally impressed with 10′s of thousands of witnesses as they were with millions, so secular Jews needn’t be interested in this obstacle. The Kuzari proof was broken long before archaeology was invented and for many other reasons beyond the numbers. A further discussion of the flaws of the Kuzari proof can be found here: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=98052

In summation we must reconcile the Torah history with archaeology. “Later rabbis such as Maimonides taught that when scientific evidence contradicts a current understanding of the Bible, that means that we are obligated to reinterpret that verse in accord with science. For many traditional rabbis, such a position was not heresy.” [28] In a more global sense, we are obligated to teach our children theologies which reconcile with observable phenomenon.

“Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to…. But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent.” — W. K. Clifford [29]

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[1] http://www.cfhf.net/lyrics/flintstones.htm
[2] http://mechon-mamre.org/e/et/et0212.htm
[3] http://mechon-mamre.org/e/et/et0401.htm
[4] http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1995/1/1num95.html
[5] ibid
[6] http://www.harcourtschool.com/activity/biographies/hannibal/
[7] http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/17_theexodus.html
[8] http://www.encyclopedian.com/ex/Exodus.html
[9] ibid
[10] http://www.pothos.org/alexander.asp?paraID=78&keyword_id=8&title=Army
[11] http://www.mechon-mamre.org/e/et/et0507.htm
[12] http://philtar.ucsm.ac.uk/encyclopedia/judaism/ancisr.html
[13] http://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0507.htm
[14] http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/otarch2.html#sinai
[15] http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/otarch2.html#sinai
[16] Hebrew University professor Abraham Malamat as quoted in http://www.encyclopedian.com/ex/Exodus.html
[17] http://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0706.htm
[18] http://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2309.htm
[19] http://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2312.htm
[20] John Wenham quoted in http://www.specialtyinterests.net/hebrew_numbers.html
[21] http://www.specialtyinterests.net/hebrew_numbers.html
[22] http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/
[23] ibid
[24] http://www.specialtyinterests.net/im/hebrew_lexicon.html#aleph
[25] http://www.specialtyinterests.net/hebrew_numbers.html
[26] http://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0401.htm
[27] John Wenham quoted in http://www.specialtyinterests.net/hebrew_numbers.html
[28] http://www.encyclopedian.com/ex/Exodus.html
[29] http://www.religioustolerance.org/kaiser_01.htm

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Film Review of "Babel"

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Film Review of “Babel” — Spoiler Warning (however this movie was written spoiled)

– An alternative view

Biblically, Genesis Chap 11 tells of the story of humans who sought to build the tower of Babel such that they could reach God. God then responds by confounding their speech and understanding of one another and spreading them all over the world. This is the Genesis account for the origin of religions and races.

If the movie “Babel” has anything to do with its biblical namesake, in this case, God makes all the people of the earth extremely stupid. First we start with a couple in marital trouble as a result of the recent death of one of their newborn, likely from SIDS. This brainy couple decides to take a trip to Morroco (without the remaining kids) to solve their problems: stupid.

Compounding this stupidity, a Morrocan father procures a rifle to help rid his flocks of jackals. He gives the rifle to his stupid young children who decide to test the efficacy of the weapon on passing tourist busses. On this bus is? Yup you guessed it, the stupid couple with marital troubles. Who gets shot? You guessed it, the wife from this couple. Now some would look upon this as an artistic study of cause and effect. I look on it more simply: Stupid people shooting at stupid people is simply natural selection at its finest.

But wait, one would think this expose of stupidity would suffice for a two hour and twenty minute film, but there are more stupid entaglements. The rifle was originally given to a local Morrocan by a Japanese hunter. This Japanese man recently had his wife commit suicide and he stupidly leaves his younger (deaf and mute) daughter alone for great spells of time such that she needs to compensate by seeking sex from any and every available male. In the films most unbelievable stroke, she fails on every attempt. I have the fortune of living in a male body and as such am qualified to inform you that this would never occur.

But wait again, there’s still another stupid entaglement. The housekeeper of the stupid maritally challenged couple has a wedding to attend in Mexico. She was originally promised the day off, but upon hearing of the tragic string of events which happened to her stupid employers, she’s informed that she won’t be able to get that day off. What follows is a screenplay that could be accomplished by going to Taco Bell and using 8.5″ x 11″ stock as toilet paper to clean up.

She takes the kids, American citizens, into Mexico with her. The kids experience the cultural diversity of a Mexican wedding, at first seeming to enjoy it. Things go awry when stupid people allow a drunk driver to drive the kids and Nanny back to San Diego. The rest is just too hard to believe; first that it could actually happen and next that the screen writer wrote it. The driver is hassled at the border. He panics and runs the border with the police hot on his tail. He abandons the children and the Nanny in the desert with promises to return. (He was likely fleeing the scene of a crime in screen writing.) The Nanny and children are left to fend for themselves in the desert when he never returns. Eventually they are picked up by the border patrol and the children are returned unharmed, and the Nanny is deported. I am a critic of US Immigration Policy, however, not in this case.

In the end Babel is an example of Oscar seeking formulaic writing. The formula is simple: create an appearance of meaning, when, in fact, there is none. In so doing, you automatically embarass any critics of the film by allowing the argument that they are simply dullards who can’t grasp the great meaning of the film. The truth is far more simple in this case: Stupid people understand stupid people very well and are able to write a painful two hour and twenty minute discertation on the interactions of stupidity.

Film Review of “Babel” — Spoiler Warning (however this movie was written spoiled)
– An alternative view

Biblically, Genesis Chap 11 tells of the story of humans who sought to build the tower of Babel such that they could reach God. God then responds by confounding their speech and understanding of one another and spreading them all over the world. This is the Genesis account for the origin of religions and races.


	//

If the movie “Babel” has anything to do with its biblical namesake, in this case, God makes all the people of the earth extremely stupid. First we start with a couple in marital trouble as a result of the recent death of one of their newborn, likely from SIDS. This brainy couple decides to take a trip to Morroco (without the remaining kids) to solve their problems: stupid.

Compounding this stupidity, a Morrocan father procures a rifle to help rid his flocks of jackals. He gives the rifle to his stupid young children who decide to test the efficacy of the weapon on passing tourist busses. On this bus is? Yup you guessed it, the stupid couple with marital troubles. Who gets shot? You guessed it, the wife from this couple. Now some would look upon this as an artistic study of cause and effect. I look on it more simply: Stupid people shooting at stupid people is simply natural selection at its finest.

But wait, one would think this expose of stupidity would suffice for a two hour and twenty minute film, but there are more stupid entaglements. The rifle was originally given to a local Morrocan by a Japanese hunter. This Japanese man recently had his wife commit suicide and he stupidly leaves his younger (deaf and mute) daughter alone for great spells of time such that she needs to compensate by seeking sex from any and every available male. In the films most unbelievable stroke, she fails on every attempt. I have the fortune of living in a male body and as such am qualified to inform you that this would never occur.

But wait again, there’s still another stupid entaglement. The housekeeper of the stupid maritally challenged couple has a wedding to attend in Mexico. She was originally promised the day off, but upon hearing of the tragic string of events which happened to her stupid employers, she’s informed that she won’t be able to get that day off. What follows is a screenplay that could be accomplished by going to Taco Bell and using 8.5″ x 11″ stock as toilet paper to clean up.

She takes the kids, American citizens, into Mexico with her. The kids experience the cultural diversity of a Mexican wedding, at first seeming to enjoy it. Things go awry when stupid people allow a drunk driver to drive the kids and Nanny back to San Diego. The rest is just too hard to believe; first that it could actually happen and next that the screen writer wrote it. The driver is hassled at the border. He panics and runs the border with the police hot on his tail. He abandons the children and the Nanny in the desert with promises to return. (He was likely fleeing the scene of a crime in screen writing.) The Nanny and children are left to fend for themselves in the desert when he never returns. Eventually they are picked up by the border patrol and the children are returned unharmed, and the Nanny is deported. I am a critic of US Immigration Policy, however, not in this case.

In the end Babel is an example of Oscar seeking formulaic writing. The formula is simple: create an appearance of meaning, when, in fact, there is none. In so doing, you automatically embarass any critics of the film by allowing the argument that they are simply dullards who can’t grasp the great meaning of the film. The truth is far more simple in this case: Stupid people understand stupid people very well and are able to write a painful two hour and twenty minute discertation on the interactions of stupidity.

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Glenn Beck – Inconvenient Debt

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Glenn Beck has a video railing against printing of money by the US in epidemic proportions. Beck shows a graph of total money in the system, but should also be showing a graph of CPI, or inflation as in this post:

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/whats-wrong-with-the-economy/

This graph shows that the problem started back in 1913, not in 1971 as Beck describes. Beck is however correct in asserting that it is a problem with the US withdrawing from the Gold Standard. The US withdrew from the Gold Standard in 1933 domestically, and 1971 internationally.

Even before that, the Federal Reserve was able to manipulate (inflate) the currency to a limited degree from its inception in 1913. It is the Fed which has and always will be the problem. The Fed has never and will never be able to offer a solution.

For more information, please see:

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/the-ancient-roots-of-injustice/

Perpetual Motion Claim — If It's a Hoax, It's a Good One

June 12, 2010 mcwiner 17 comments

For my grade 10 science project, my partner and I set out to hook a generator to an electric motor. The idea was that the motor would drive the generator which would drive the motor again in perpetuity. Now we weren’t so naive as to discount the idea of resistance. When you pass current over a wire, a certain amount of that power is lost to resistance (lost as heat). We were proposing using superconductors instead of the wires we used in our mock-up. We also proposed using magnetically suspended bearings and running our set up in a vacuum to eliminate all friction. Even if it was possible to eliminate all friction, there was still another problem for our design.

In grade 10, we had yet to be introduced to the laws of thermodynamics which strictly forbid such arrangements. A physics teacher came over to grade our project and after a quick glance he said: “background emf.” We stood there trying all permutations in our mind of what ‘emf’ could possibly stand for. He asked: “Background EMF? Have you taken grade 11 physics?” We dejectedly shook our heads to indicate that we hadn’t. He continued while leaving our booth “well you need it!”

Having recovered from our tragic defeat, and some 18 years later, I can explain the ‘travesty’ we had committed against physics. Background EMF stands for background Electromotive Force. What this means is that when you use a current (electrical power) to drive an electric motor, the electric motor as a result of its operation generates an opposing current to the one driving it. In a sense it is a sort of electromagnetic resistance. In short, what it says is that the system we built could never work, even if we used super conductors as wires and ran in a frictionless environment.

For the lay reader, a generator and an electric motor are virtually the same device. One generates electricity from motion and the other converts electricity into motion. In fact if you were to take an electric motor and hook up a volt meter to it and spin it, you’d discover that there voltage was generated just as if it were a generator. At the core of either device lies a loop (or loops) of wire and magnets. Recall that I said if you spin an electric motor, you generate a current. Well that’s exactly what background EMF is. As the motor spins, it also generates a current in the opposing direction to the current driving it.

Now along comes Thane Heins.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/300042
http://www.thestar.com/Article/300041
Through experimentation, he has come up with an arrangement which theoretically feeds background EMF back into the electric motor in a way which ADDS to the current driving the motor. In so doing he’s (theoretically) created a positive feedback loop which causes the motor, not only to maintain speed, but actually to accelerate.

This flies in the face of physics, specifically the laws of thermodynamics which say that you the amount of energy in the universe is constant and in a closed system, you can’t create energy. Heins’ system is what’s called a closed system, that is there is no external input of energy, hence it should not be able to create any more energy than was inputted: ie, the wheel should never gain speed, if anything it should always slow down.

Claims of perpetual motion on the Internet are about as common as claims of a new fad diet which will slim you with no effort. If you catch my drift, such claims are usually discarded as junk science. In this particular case though, it has appeared to have attracted the attention of several physicists, one of whom from MIT, who haven’t admitted that he’s achieved perpetual motion, but also haven’t been able to point out any obvious error in his experimental setup and claim.

Even if this fails to be perpetual motion, perhaps some of the concepts can be adapted to produce newer and more efficient electric motors. At the very least, the exploration of Heins’ design and concepts should help illuminate us all. To see video and for some further reading, please see:

http://www.g9toengineering.com/backemf/demonstration.htm

The Fedora and Sombrero may have more than a Passing Similarity

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

While it is true that the Hasidic fedora and the Mexican sombrero have only an incidental similarity, a recent discovery in the Mexican desert reveals that Jews and Latin Americans share a common history.

One might be only mildly surprised to find a kosher sushi restaurant in the heart of today’s Mexico City. But, what if one found evidence of a Jewish presence in Latin America in the 8th century? Dr. Donald Panther Yates believes that a stone found in Los Lunas Mexico is a remnant of the Calalus Roman/Jewish settlement. The stone, seen here, contains a mildly abridged version of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) which is written in Phoenician script.

Here is a transliteration of the inscription as provided by http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/15_williamson.html

1.) I YHWH your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt from the house of slavery. This is a letter for letter match with the Mastoretic Text.

2.) Not YHWH to you gods other ones before my face. Not will you make to you images or any likeness which in the heavens above or which in the earth under or which in the waters under the earth. Not will you bow down to them and not will you serve them for I YHWH your God a jealous (God) bring punishment upon fathers upon children on the third and fourth generations to those that hate me. And doing kindness to thousands to those that love me and keep my commandments. Highlighted portion is omitted.

3.) Not shall you take the name YHWH your God in vain for not will leave unpunished YHWH one who takes His Name in vain. Highlighted portion omitted

4.) Remember the day the Sabbath and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. And day the seventh is Sabbath to YHWH your God, not shall you do any work you and your son and your daughter your male slave and slave girl and your cattle and your stranger who in your gates for six days made YHWH the heavens and the earth the sea and all that is in them and rested he on the day seventh therefore God blessed the day Sabbath and sanctified it. Highlighted portion is omitted.

5.) Honor your father and your mother that may be long your days on the land which YHWH your God is giving to you. Here is a complete match with Masoretic Text, but not the LXX).

6.) Not shall you murder. Word for word match.

7.) Not shall you commit adultery. Perfect match

8.) Not shall you steal Perfect match

9.) Not shall you testify against your neighbor there false. ( Match)

10.) (Not shall you covet house our neighbor) Not shall you covet wife your neighbor or his male slave or slave girl or his ox or his ass or all which is to your neighbor. Highlighted portion is omitted.

Dr. Yates has written a book which I have yet to read on the subject. Clicking on the image will take you to the amazon.com site.

I’m adding it to my reading list, but in the meantime some appropriate music:

Mexican Classical Guitar – Hava Nagila.mp3 – Marichis

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Toronto Sun Runs TTC Suicide Statistics: Courageous and Necessary

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Some have accused the Toronto Sun of sensationalism regarding their request of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, Brian Beamish, to release Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) suicide statistics for coverage by the media. The very accusation of sensationalism reveals a double standard in the way that media outlets deal with issues of mental health. This past February of 2009 no one accused any media outlet of sensationalism when they carried the story of a TTC fare collector who nabbed a disturbed individual who had pushed several youths on to the tracks. (http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090216/090216_ttc_collector/20090216/?hub=CP24Home) There was no fear of copy cat pushing incidents in their coverage nor was their any need to appeal to the Freedom of Information act to secure information. If you have the misfortune of being pushed on to the tracks, you can at least derive some solace in the fact that your city and your local news outlets will deem the story newsworthy.

If on the other hand you have the misfortune of being thrown on to the tracks by your own hand, rest assured that when you rest in peace, the story will be buried with you. Officials of all stripes will claim that, for the good of the community, reports of suicides need to be silenced lest you invite copy cat attempts. The TTC in its press release cites a Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention Media Guide (http://casp-acps.ca/Publications/MEDIA%20GUIDELINES.doc) which suggests that in order to: "discourage imitative or copycat suicides, it is important to avoid or minimize: Reporting specific details of the method".

Beamish, after having reviewed reams of clinical research, concluded that

"The evidence provided … establishes that news coverage which provides details of methods used, uses the word “suicide” in headlines, romanticizes suicide, or provides prominence to a particular death or attempt could reasonably be expected to result in harm. This is in contrast to the simple publication of suicide statistics which do not focus on the details of a particular death."

(http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Findings/MO-2466.pdf)

He went on to cite a Center For Disease Control report which found, conversely, that the

"reporting of suicide can have several direct benefits. Specifically, community efforts to address this problem can be strengthened by news coverage that describes the help and support available in a community, explains how to identify persons at high risk for suicide, or presents information about risk factors for suicide."

(http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Findings/MO-2466.pdf)

-*-*-*-*-

On August 26th, while driving on the DVP, listening to the traffic news, trying to navigate the infernal Toronto traffic, I heard of an attempted suicide off the Millwood Ave overpass. Later reporting of that same event would only discuss a ‘police investigation’. (http://cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090826/090826_don_mills/20090826/?hub=CP24Home) When the reporting changed to a ‘police investigation’ I knew that the attempted suicide was successful and that the media had changed its tune for our protection. However, it didn’t take a PhD in psychology to know that ‘police investigation’ meant suicide so I wondered who the media were protecting? The vulnerable? If so, they only succeeded in protecting the most naive of them.

Still, you won’t hear of any ‘police investigations’ regarding the Bloor St. Viaduct because a suicide barrier was put in place there in 2003. As the result of some official sounding reports and official sounding thinking, some City Hall bigwigs decided that suicide was a ‘spur of the moment’ type of thing and their spurious research suggested that barriers would be an effective countermeasure. Suicide is in its final moment, perhaps, a rash moment, but that ignores the often months and years of prodrome before a person takes their life.

In the wake of this recent TTC report, there is again discussion of the erection of barriers. Barriers take a Not In My Backyard-Bridge approach to suicide; simply shunting the problem elsewhere. The Toronto Sun has acted courageously in their coverage of this taboo topic. I hope that other media outlets to follow suit with panel discussions of social measures that can help troubled individuals deal with their issues in a respectful and dignified manner.

Arctic Melt – This Summer's Blockbuster – Category: Reality

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Star Wars Theme Song plays.
Text “Earth Wars :: Arctic Melt – A Lost Hope” grows larger and larger until out of view.

Announcer
Coming soon to an Arctic theatre near you… Earth Wars :: Arctic Melt – A Lost Hope.

Obi-Wan, Al Skywalker and Yoda observe a glacier where water is seen to be streaming on the surface and forming cracks can be seen and heard.

Obi-Wan
I sense a great disturbance in the force… as if thousands seeking the truth were suddenly silenced

Yoda
mmm yes… clouded the force is.

Al Skywalker
I can’t convince the people that they are the cause.

Yoda
Always with you it can not be done.

Frustrated Yoda waves his hands and two bottles appear float out of his smock. One is marked CO2 and the other marked AIR. There are thermometers inside. The thermometer of the CO2 bottle reads significantly higher than the AIR bottle.

Yoda
See you the difference young Skywalker?

Al Skywalker
I see it, but I can’t make them believe it.

Yoda
frowns
That is why you fail…

Cut to the white house. Count Condeleeza, Darth Cheney, and Darth Bush are present. Behind them environmentalist David Suzuki can be seen frozen in carbonite. Count Condeleeza has in her hand a hologram of a planet deluged in water with a mysterious floating sattelite marked USA orbitting it. She is kneeling before Darth Bush and recieving parting orders.

Count Condeleeza
Very well my master. I will take our secret plans and store them safely.

Darth Bush
They must not know what we are planning.

Count Condeleeza turns off the handheld hologram, rises and walks out.

Darth Cheney
I sense Luke Al Skywalker will come to me.

Darth Bush
When he comes to you, bring him before me. Only together can we turn him to the Republican side.

Cut to Air Force One where Al Skywalker is on board in front of Darth Bush and Darth Cheney.
The windows behind reveal an active battle field in Iraq. Al Skywalker is wielding a solar panel as a weapon.

Al Skywalker
I will not turn to the Republican side.

Darth Bush
Witness behind us, all is going to plan. Your puny environmental slideshow and oscar is no match for the United States Empire! Unlimited power!! Once again the Republicans will rule the world and there will be peace!

Darth Cheney
Come my fellow politician, it’s time to join us.

Al Skywalker
Never.

Al Skywalker throws down his solar panel defiantly.

Darth Bush
… then you shall certainly die.

Darth Bush grows enraged as the scene cuts to the Iraq battle and the Star Wars them plays.
Text “Summer 2008″.
Fade to black.

Further Reading:
http://www.rsc.org/education/teachers/learnnet/jesei/co2green/home.htm

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gA1taPWzhCJnHQ79DowKK3VwfqQwD90DNCBO1

The War of the Words: Are Heterosexual Monogamists the Patent Holders on `Marriage'?

June 12, 2010 mcwiner 1 comment

There is much debate of late as to who is the patent holder on the term ‘Marriage’. Conservative heterosexual monogamists have put their moral stake in the ground claiming that ‘Marriage’ is their intellectual property. The proponents of a traditional definition can be subdivided into the religious, who claim divine rights to the word, and traditionalists that appeal to the naturalistic fallacy that the definition is as it ought to be, proven and tested by time.

First, let us set things straight. What is the traditional definition of marriage? The short answer is: one woman, one man, for life. Yet, is this the definition that both proponents of the traditional definition truly espouse?

Those religiously minded who claim a divine definition for marriage point you conveniently to the Bible. Yet, weren’t many of the biblical greats polygamists?! Clearly some historical modification of this divine lexicon has occurred.

The traditionalists have also modified matrimonial definitions over time. As recently as 1997, Ireland legalized divorce, reducing the certainty of the ‘for life’ part of the definition. Throughout most of recorded history, divorce was simply, ‘not an option’ yet it seems that societal needs have forced us to alter that definition.

So what the proponents of a traditional definition of marriage present as an immutable and timeless definition, turns out, upon closer inspection to be a shifting definition which is a product of the defining times.

Having knocked the moral ascendancy of the conservatives down a peg, we move on to possible solutions to this problem. Most people believe in homosexual marriage-style rights, leaving the word used to describe this solution as the only sticking point to be debated. They turn to homosexuals and say: what’s in a name? Wouldn’t ‘a marriage by any other name be as sweet?’ They give them the rights but just wish that they’d stay out of their lexical backyard.

Same sex marriage proponents contend this would be tantamount to the tenets ‘different but equal’ and point back to the inequalities such thinking created in civil rights history. While they have a point on this issue, I believe that the semantic battle for the word ‘marriage’ is a bid to gain popular acceptance and I believe that their opponents see it as such. I would like to see advocates for the broadened definitions of marriage speak to why homosexuality should be accepted in general. In dealing with the issues at the core of the debate they have the best chances of evoking understanding, hence change.

The main points at the core of the debate as to whether to accept homosexuality are: 1) is it natural 2) is it evil and 3) is it a choice or endemic? We’ll examine each point in turn.

First what is natural? There are two aspects to natural, first the examples taken from nature around us and next the notion that the way things are, even in the human (not natural) world are the ‘natural’ way they should be. Looking to nature we see some examples of heterosexual monogamy in say, the Bald Eagle. However, more often we see examples of harems (polygamy) and loose monogamy (infidelity, or pair bonding for only a few mating seasons). While the traditional definition of marriage does exist in the animal kingdom, it is a minority player amongst many other definitions of bonding. Further, in nature we see examples of homosexuality amongst, say, male mice who often make female sexual displays in high population densities. Thus to say that heterosexual monogamy is nature’s way is tunnel sighted and uninformed.

Next we look to the idea that homosexual marriage is not natural since the heterosexual definition has been the prevailing one across the centuries. This is a classic example of the naturalistic fallacy which says that the way things are, is the way things ought to be. If we subscribe to the belief that the way things are is the way things they ought to be then we are forced to conclude that the world we currently live in cannot, and/or should not, be improved upon or changed in any way. Imagine if we all had subscribed to this belief, as many did, when it came time to review our ways in the face of slavery. Imagine again telling many suffering couples that they were stuck together for life because the definition of marriage was the way it was meant to be. Yet today we tell homosexuals that marriage is as it ought to be and if you want your rights, well then fine, but go do it on another page of the dictionary please. If we want the rights of deep, fulfilling, long term relationships to be extended to all humanity, heterosexuals must not drink the stupefying elixir of a ‘natural’ definition of marriage, because no such definition exists.

Is homosexuality evil? Well first, what is evil. To the religiously minded, they say evil is what God says is evil as given in the book of absolute truth. I’ve found that people who believe in absolute truths usually do so only because they are absolutely wrong. I admit that I have little respect or patience for those who derive their definitions of evil from a book and thus outsource their thinking. I dismiss them quickly for the same reason I scrape cold peas of my dinner plate, because they are cold and uninteresting. For those who are prepared to think about what good and evil really are, we come to the notion of utility. Good things serve a purpose and bad things do harm. This categorization is relative to a certain frame of consideration.

The ‘packages’ your dog delivers on the neighbourhood park are not good for you to eat, yet are gourmet meals to the community of flies. Thus the truth to the statement: “doggy packages make good eating” is relative to whom is speaking. In a thinking world, to show that homosexuality is evil, we must demonstrate that it is evil in one of two frames. We must prove harm to either homosexual individuals or to society as a whole.

To homosexual individuals, the main harm done to them by being homosexual is the lack of acceptance they receive. Many heterosexuals quickly point to the often ‘sad’ lives some homosexuals end up living. However, to borrow from the poet Andrew Lang, they do this “… like a drunk leans on a lightpost, for support instead of illumination”. The truth is that heterosexual intolerance of homosexuality is the cause of the ‘sadness’ they observe. Still, as acceptance slowly increases, we see many more homosexuals today live productive and successful lives. They do not necessarily live reproductive lives, but either do all heterosexuals.

To our society at large, homosexuality may have a reproductive impact, but on a planet of 6 billion, is this really an issue? If we really would like to have a discussion about harm, let’s talk about the harm of subverting this ‘evil’ impulse to be homosexual, only to have men live in a traditional marriage unhappily, hurting both himself, and his wife and perhaps children. Thus aside from the heterosexual discomfort it causes, there is no harm caused by homosexuality and hence it is not evil.

Finally, is homosexuality a choice? Why ask the question? We ask because if it is a choice, we can ask them to make a different choice. Well, homosexuality is a choice but only in the same way heterosexuality is a choice. Heterosexuals could choose to be homosexual if they really wanted to. What we refer to in common speak as a choice actually has two components, first a pressure and second a pure choice. When faced with an oncoming freight train, we have a tremendous survival pressure to move. Still we have a pure choice as to whether to move or not. Most of us would move. In the case of our sexuality there are pressures given to us by our environment, genetics and evolution and in the case of heterosexuals there are no other pressures which would cause us to use our pure choice to override this strong evolutionary pressure. In the case of homosexuals, societal pressures can cause individuals to use their pure choice to over-rule their evolutionary pressures. The fact that the natural pressure can be overruled does not suggest or imply that it should because most such individuals live lives with the constant stress of juggling conflicting priorities and are never truly at peace.

In order to determine the existence and severity of this pressure to be homosexual, being unable to jump into the minds of others, we need to empirically observe the effects. The empirical proof comes from asking: Why would any person willingly join a historically persecuted group if the pressure wasn’t strong to do so? Throughout history homosexuals have been shunned and forced to lead marginalized lives. This fact is common knowledge, thus it is impossible to state that homosexuals became or become homosexual on a flight of fancy.

So are heterosexual monogamists the patent holders on marriage after all? Why do homosexuals want the word so badly, even if they’ve already got the equivalent rights? Homosexuals want the word for the same reason that heterosexuals want the word, because of its meaning. It represents a deep, long-term, and socially recognized relationship between two people. Heterosexual monogamists claim to be the patent holders on marriage because tradition, the bible and nature have provided immutable and clear definitions of marriage that conveniently agree with them. None of that is true.

Politics, Religion, Uncategorized advocate, aig, ale, Andrew Lang, bible, Case, cent, cold, Coming, Environment, evolution, gay rights, God, homosexuality, http, Ireland, king, life, marriage, minority player, MIT, monogamy, nature, player, poet, RAM, Red, sex, slavery, utility

Review: Star Trek XI: Star Trek (J. J. Abrams)

June 12, 2010 mcwiner 1 comment

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This preview rated ‘A’ for anyone not familiar with Star Trek:
A teaser from a good Star Trek movie: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Khan (Ricardo Montalban)

Khan (Ricardo Montalban) blames Kirk for the death of his wife and the hardships suffered by his crew. The planet that Kirk had long ago planted the Khan colony on had suffered a major catastrophe, yet no one from came to check up on them. A Starfleet expedition chances upon Khan who commandeers their ship bent on revenge.

Khan tries repeatedly to kill Kirk but only manages to maroon him. Khan suddenly realizes that marooning Admiral Kirk serves his purpose better:

Khan: I’ve done far worse than kill you, Admiral. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her; marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet… buried alive! Buried alive…!
(Kirk shakes violently)
Kirk: KHAAANNNN!
[echo]
Kirk: KHAAANNNN!

Khan!

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… and now for our feature … a review of J. J. Abrams’ “Star Trek”.

"Felicity": Keri Russell

Prior to the release of Star Trek XI, my only exposure to J. J. Abrams was when I flipped past his series “Felicity” in search of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” reruns. Now I admit that there were moments when I tuned in to Felicity, specifically when it looked like Keri Russell was about to get naked. But every time it looked like things were about to get interesting, Felicity went into a long soliloquy ruminating about the morality of it all leaving me with a case of ‘Clothes-off-is Interruptus’. The rest of the show consisted of contrived plot twists all designed to elicit pouty and extended reaction shots. In fact the one hour Felicity, stripped of the reaction shots would run around a minute and a half. Is it any wonder that I desperately flipped channels seeking the scientifically shielded warp speed plot progressions of Star Trek?

When I heard that J. J. Abrams was set to produce and direct the latest installation in my beloved show, all I could think was “uh oh”. I approached the movie with great trepidation and it only took a few moments into the film to realize that my fears were justified. The antagonist of the film Nero is a Romulan who watched his entire race destroyed by a supernova. The Romulans shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘stock bad guys’ because they bear almost no resemblance to the Romulans of Star Trek lore. If anything Nero looks more like Vin Diesel than any other character. Nero decides to take revenge on Spock and the Federation who failed to save his race from extinction. By analogy, this would be like assaulting a competent doctor whose best efforts had failed to save a loved one suffering from heart failure. It just doesn’t make sense; there is no motive for Nero to go after Spock and the Federation other than J. J. Abrams’ motive to write a movie.

Vin Diesel XXX

Nero Diesel Star Trex XI

The movie was wrecked for me right there. The rest of the movie was filled to the brim with other such contrivances. There was a giant drill which drilled into the planet before planting a device which created a black hole. Why couldn’t they just create a black hole on the surface of the planet? Because Abrams needed it to take longer so he could write in more reaction shots. The black hole was created with mysterious (and convenient) ‘red matter’. The red matter interacted with the green matter of the given planet producing brown matter which then collapsed into a black hole. So we have black holes and brown matter. This single sentence is perhaps the best summary of the entire plot.

Take for example the sword fight with Kirk and Sulu versus the stock bad guys on the deck of this great planetary drill. This single sequence drearily occupied at least ten minutes of the running time. What happened to their phasers? They fell out of reach. How did they fall out of reach? Abrams had them written out of reach to foster the sword fight. What happened to the explosive charges they had brought with them to destroy the drilling platform? Abrams killed the chief engineer who carried them to make things more interesting. Why didn’t they all have an explosive charge each? Abrams wanted a sword fight. Starting to get the picture?

The Drill that launched a 1000 reaction shots

So Abrams got his sword fight and Kirk and Sulu won. They then destroyed the drilling platform which existed only for the purpose of the sword fight. They were too late though and the planet Vulcan was destroyed anyways. Why didn’t the few surviving Vulcans seek revenge against Kirk and Sulu for failing to save them? Because that would have ruined Abrams’ movie. Why did a surviving group of Romulans blame Spock for failing to save their planet despite his best efforts? Because Abrams needed them to.

The movie was so chock full of similar cheesy contrivances and plot holes that I could swear Abrams was Swiss. Take this slice of the Swiss cheese plot for example: Abrams again has Kirk brandish his sword this time wielding it on a scantily clad Starfleet cadet. Abrams fails in trying to play up on the Kirk-lothario theme of Star Trek. Kirk of classic Trek was a man of many women because his heart only had room for his first love, his ship. While it’s true that the Kirk’s bed welcomed the United Colours of the constellation Benetton, classic Trek did it all with style. Abrams’ Kirk was nothing more than a man-whore frat boy on a teen series (say Felicity) as follows:

Like, okay. So there they were in the dorm room with nudity on the horizon and in walks Uhura, her roommate. Like, oh my God! So like Kirk totally jumps under the bed while Uhura starts to like undress. Like thank God the dorm monitor had been binge drinking Romulan ale or it would have been all their asses! Uhura is down to her undies and bra before she catches wind of Kirk in the room. She is like sooo embarrassed but she plays it cool and pouts proudly as Kirk like hops out of the room. Is it like any wonder Uhura went on to be Communications Officer. That girl is like built. She could raise any admiral in Starfleet, totally!

I was furious: Abrams had turned Star Trek into Felicity Trek, The Next Reaction Shot. Sure this ‘new’ star trek (sic) was set in an alternate timeline leaving the original timeline intact, but I was offended by its very existence. I couldn’t figure out why I was so angry, given that Abram’s hadn’t killed Star Trek. But it occurred to me that Abrams had done far worse than killing Star Trek: He’d hurt it. I feared that in spin offs he’d go on hurting it. Abrams was set to leave Star Trek as he’d left so many other shows, marooned for all eternity in the center of dead plot lines, buried alive. Buried alive. My fists shook and I stared at the ceiling of the movie theater and screamed: “Abrams!”.

Why Men Don’t Like Chick Flicks

June 12, 2010 mcwiner 2 comments

(Honest Title) Why Men Don’t Like Chick Flicks

(For those politically minded) Why Men Don’t Like Female Centric Films

(For those with a penchant for subtlety) Why Men Don’t like Baby Bird Films A Case Study : ‘Notting Hill’

1) Plot inconsistencies. The plot in all female centric movies seems to center around prolonging a certain romantic uncertainty. This is usually done at the expense of logic. There are two good examples of this in Notting Hill:

i) William (Hugh Grant) goes out in the morning to find a frenzy of Paparazzi outside his door. He knows this will upset his actress girlfriend Anna (Julia Roberts) but only mentions ‘don’t ask’ when she asks him what’s going on outside. He lets her walk outside and be confronted by the same Paparazzi. This, of course, upsets Anna who wrongly accuses him of summoning the Paparazzi and causes a ‘break up’. This, in turn, provides Hugh Grant a grand opportunity to apologize (despite his innocence), setting the female audience swooning and the male audience hurling.

ii) William goes on a movie set where Anna is being filmed where she greets him warmly and intimates that she’d consider getting back together. Unfortunately, she’s just in the middle of a shoot so she walks off to film a scene and William is provided with a headset to hear what is going on unbeknownst to Anna. While casually preparing for the scene, a fellow actor asks Anna: ‘Who was that rather difficult chap (referring to Grant) you were talking to on the way up?’ Anna replies: ‘Oh… no one… no one. Just some… guy from the past. I don’t know what he’s doing here. Bit of an awkward situation.’ Grant reacts negatively and leaves. When Grant asks her later as to why she would say such a thing, she dismisses it as: ‘You expect me to tell the truth about my life to the most indiscreet man in England?’ This is an example of terrible writing where the writers dig themselves out of a whole by floating to the top in syrup. Why didn’t she just answer the fellow actor with ‘He’s a friend’ and leave it at that? Why does Grant have to put up with such behaviour and accept such lame excuses? Of course, in tradition with all Grant films, he accepts the explanation and leads up to:

2) The grand apology. It seems a new trend in the effeminized America to have the leading male prancing around apologizing. In every Grant movie there is a huge apology where he apologizes to some horribly behaved woman to get her love. Watching Grant wince his eyes and beg forgiveness having committed no wrong, aside from his selection in screenplays, is like fingernails on the chalkboard for the male audience. Ross (from Friends) and Grant (in every movie) always apologize for no apparent reason, and in fact, often apologize for not apologizing. Perhaps the only real apology in such films should be an on screen cameo by the screenplay writers apologizing for overly syrupy content. Looking at the movie script: http://www.juliaroberts.de/script2.htm, Men apologize some 23 times compared to 8 times for their female counterparts. The male lead Grant apologizes some 12 times, compared to Julia Roberts apologizing a mere 3 times. Somewhere around the 10th apology, women in the audience are becoming enraptured while their male counterparts are wondering when the next episode in the Star Wars saga will premier so they can watch a movie where men can proudly wield their light sabers and offer no apology in so doing.

Uncategorized actress, ale, America, Anna, blog, Case, cent, Coming, fellow actor, head, http, Hugh Grant, ILS, Julia Roberts, king, life, Like Female Centric Films, logic, MIT, Notting Hill, Paparazzi, Red, star wars, the Star, United Kingdom, writing

Notes: Lost in the Meritocracy – Walter Kirn

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link): http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Notes and Excerpts:

“Marine’s [Marine, Minnesota] elementary school was on a hill. It was the largest man-made structure in town, one of the newest, and by far the ugliest. Shape: rectangular. Material: beige brick. Constructed with tax money, it looked like tax money, a fiscal line item come to joyless life. Even the playground equipment seemed bureaucratic: a stainless-steel slide and a set of iron monkey bars on which one could picture army recruits glumly sweating their way through basic training. From the moment I entered the building’s long tiled hallway, its colorless walls inadequately brightened with red-and-yellow construction-paper maple leaves, I wanted out. But out, I know, meant through. ” p.25

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“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable. For example: what is Death? To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff. What is Beauty? The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. ” p.30

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On losing a debate…
“I’d harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread lossed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room. I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy. Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.” p.62

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In an early computer class, no one seemed able to use the computer yet it was promised to revolutionize the future:

“That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem. Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English. To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in. This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors. ” p.66

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Upon watching a younger talented computer whiz work the computer…

“The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news. A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits. The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option too, I saw. Once could let others cope with the novelty and concentrate on the familiar.” p.68

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On a graduation night romp with two exchange students:

Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs and primordially bridged all language gaps. Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. p. 73

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Kirn feeling he was a fraud while mourning the passing of John Lennon:

“”All the lonely people,” he began [singing].

The choice was a magical piece of luck for me. Afterwards, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real — from gratitude. Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I’d managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades. My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred. I wasn’t ashamed of this. My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me. It represented ambition, longing, need. It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.” p.77

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Drug use was rampant, even for the lighting guy during the performance of one of Kirn’s plays:

“The lighting guy, who’d eaten a hash brownie which he’d sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clashing colors, turning the stage into a cruise-ship disco…” p.91

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Discussing a conversation Kirn had about ‘the divided brain’. Kirn may be a victim of this divided brain, leading to the impostor syndrome which he suffers from greatly:

“The best conversation of my life ensued — one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn’t, at least when I’d been listening. Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he’d written as an amateur. It had ground out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, “the history of consciousness.” I asked him to explain but keep it simple. He told me that he’d try. The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long, ago, when man’s double brain had operated differently. It’s parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided. In fact, they’d been virtual strangers to each other. When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice. This voice seemed to come from another being, really. But who was this being? Who were these secret speakers? Man had answered these questions in many ways. He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies. Muses.

“Back when, before the Breakdown,” said Julian, “before the gods and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration. They experienced inspiration. It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I feel that way a lot. Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly. And sometimes it shakes me up a little. Should it?”

Julian shook his head, but not as vigorously as I would have liked.

“What was the ‘Breakdown’?” I asked him. I had to know. I had to know everything he did, suddenly. Julian was a genius, I’d decided, even if everything he’d said was crazy. And it probably was. Because I understood it.” pps 93-94

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_Syndrome

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Kirn is brought before the Honor Committee accused of cheating on his Spanish mid-term:

“Guilty or innocent? Yes or no,” Rob said.

I ate a pretzel and let Rob’s anger hang there. I thought he should have to feel it in the air. I thought it might force him to face his ugliness. Then I said, “I heard this from a senior. In France, there’s a critic, I forget his name, who teaches that antonyms, words that mean the opposite, don’t really mean the opposite at all. They aren’t the only alternatives, that is. There are other words between them. And all around them.”

“Fascinating except this isn’t France.”

“You tell me to choose, but the words I’m meant to choose from — ‘innocent and ‘guilty’ — aren’t my only choices. I chose another one. ‘Uncovictable’. p.109

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Kirn discusses the ‘critical assumptions’ he’d made in reading. Unfortunately, Kirn had done very little reading at all.

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway. What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” pg119

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On the unreadability of some of the supposed ‘Greats’:

“This suffocating sensation often came over me ‘whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a. collection of essays by leading theory people that l spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force. Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking ”heteronomous’ and ”invagination.” When I turned the page I came across- tucked in a footnote –”unreadability.”
That word I understood of course.” p.120

See: http://books.google.ca/books?id=igP67FXXQCEC

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

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Kirn discusses the literary catchphrases for ‘hard’: ‘ semiotically unstable’ (referring to TS Elliot’s The Waste Land), hermeneutical, gestural, recursive, incommensurable. pps 120-122

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Kirn discusses his use of literary catchphrases to mask his ignorance of literature.

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted. Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds. We recognized one another instantly. … We spoke of “playfullness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” p.121

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Kirn discusses how he used his confusion to his advantage:

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion. The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique. The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example. My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then. We could say “incommensurable”. p.122

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On feeling a fraud for learning to regurgitate professors opinions rather than truly appreciating the classics:

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes. In classrooms discussions and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic post-modernisn – that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed. Long live the king. p.122

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On page 122, Kirn holds a play of planters on a stage. He watches in amazement as the audience waits for something to happen, which never does. The play is titled: Planters and Waiters. Double-entendre on “waiters”.

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On drug use at Ivy League schools:

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene. Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies. They have to ground their mischief in manifestos. The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs — especially plant based psychedelic drugs — helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” p.124

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Kirn expresses a unique view on the relationship between literature and war:

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.” p.145

This may not be as outlandish a suggestion as it may first seem. If literature is based on pretence instead of substance, as it was in the case of Kirn’s education, then pretence needs to be defended by violence of all forms, military and otherwise. Further if the great written works upon which the great religions of the world are based turn out to be not the writ word of God, they are then by exclusion, works of literature. The swords that have been raised in the name of these literary works are well documented.

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More evidence of the theme of detachment. Kirn seems detached from his inspiration.

“Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions grief, self-loathing, panic while mine were concerned with grander matters Such as the creeping loss of ”personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it. I invented an alter ego, ”Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of mechanization and macroeconomics In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque” but I could tell she didn’t like them.” p.140

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Toronto Plastic Bag Research Full of Holes

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Toronto Plastic Bag Research Full of Holes

Martin C. Winer

The City of Toronto has undertaken a goal of 70% waste diversion from landfill. In order to achieve this goal, City Council asked staff to prepare a report [1] which considers plastic bags along with several other ‘target materials’. Insofar as plastic bags are concerned, both the preliminary research and the resulting plastic bag tax by-law are full of holes. One hopes that they are printed on recycled paper because that is likely the only good either will do for the environment.

Legal Foundation:

City staff typically requests legal counsel in preparing their reports. The October 2008 report concluded that the City of Toronto did not have the authority to impose a plastic bag tax based on the powers afforded it under the City of Toronto Act. The City of Toronto Act (Section 8(2)) gives the city the right to issue by laws pertaining to the “Economic, social and environmental well-being of the City.” [2] The city staff believed that a plastic bag tax which would appeal to this provision “is not possible under the current City of Toronto Act, which only permits a sales tax to be applied to alcohol, tobacco and admission on places of amusement.” [3] The word ‘plastic’ is not only a noun but also an adjective meaning capable of being molded. Evidently the legal eagles in City Council were able to use the latter meaning of ‘plastic’ to mold the blunt instrument of “environmental well-being” into a targeted attack on plastic bags.

Staff recommended a discount to incentivize reduction, not a punitive surtax

“A tax or fee on plastic retail shopping bags is not feasible under the City of Toronto Act, but the waste reduction benefit of a financial incentive is apparent.” [4] The city staff thus recommended that the City incentivize reduction via mandating a discount for using reusable bags. “Staff recommends a per-bag discount of $0.10 to effectively drive source reduction behaviour by providing a reasonable financial incentive to reduce plastic retail shopping bag use.” [5] If City staff recommended a per bag discount, why does the resulting by-law impose a per bag tax? Galen Weston, CEO of the Loblaws chain, caught wind of the impending legislation and paid Mayor Miller a visit. He suggested that offering a 10 cent discount would be “prohibitive” and negotiated a 5 cent surtax instead. [6] Bearing in mind the ‘hard bargain’ Mayor Miller drove in resolving the garbage strike, it’s likely that Mayor Miller let Weston finish his plea and then in a ‘Jerry Maguire moment’ told him: “You had me at ‘hello’.”

Plastic Bags Levy has the luck of the Irish

In March 2002 the Irish government introduced a levy on plastic bags (colloquially referred to as the “PlasTax”). The report to council claims that the Irish program was a huge success with: “a 94% reduction in the use of plastic bags (from 328 bags per capita to 21 bags per capita) in three years.” [7] As is often the case with political speak, the devil is in the details. ‘A 94% reduction’ where? Perhaps the supermarkets realized a 94% reduction in demand, but are we to believe that the Irish suddenly stopped lining their kitchen bins with plastic? Charlie Mayfield chairman of UK retailer John Lewis remarked that the Irish tax “had reduced [retail] plastic bag usage, but sales of bin liners had increased 400 per cent.” [8] With regards to a meaningful reduction in plastic bags making it to the landfill, diminishing the supply at the supermarket ‘borrows from Peter to pay Paul’.

Why 5 cents?

Staff’s report also suggests that the Irish PlasTax “charged 15 Euro cents ($0.24 CAN) starting in 2002 and was raised to 22 Euro cents ($0.35 CAN) in 2007.” [9] The fee needed to be raised because “The use of bags increased to 33 bags per capita in early 2007, prompting officials to raise the levy.” [10] Staff’s further research revealed that: “a per-bag fee of $0.10 to $0.35 [(CAN)] would significantly reduce the consumer use of retail plastic shopping bags.” [11] Thus it’s a mystery how City Council arrived at a 5 cent levy in the face of their own research which suggests the amount is too low to be effective.

What about Paper Bags?

There is a conspicuous absence of paper bags in the staff report. Recall that, historically, plastic bags were brought in to replace paper bags which were considered deleterious to the environment. Conversely the final by-law states: “Persons carrying on a retail business in a retail business establishment who do not offer or provide plastic retail shopping bags to customers shall offer or provide alternatives, such as cardboard boxes or paper bags, at no charge to the customer.” [12] In fact, in Taiwan where a plastic bag levy was imposed, it was subsequently lifted in the case of fast food venues because too many were offering free paper bags, thus increasing overall pollution.

In Manhattan Beach, California the ‘Save the Plastic Bag Coalition’ launched a successful action against the municipality which had banned the sale of plastic bags. In his ruling, The Honorable David P. Yaffe wrote: “The basis for challenge is that the adoption of the ordinance violates the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because the City did not adopt an Environmental Impact Report that compares plastic bags and paper bags and determines which of the two has a greater negative impact on the environment.” [13] Ruling in favour of the challenge he continues: “The Administrative Record in this case contains substantial evidence to support a fair argument that the prohibition of the distribution of plastic bags to customers will result in a net increase, rather than a net decrease, in damage to the environment.” [14]

Misleading Statistics

A philosopher, a mathematician and a statistician are all asked “what is 2 + 2”. The philosopher ruminates for several days and eventually asks “what do you mean by 2 + 2?” The mathematician quickly says “4” and then proceeds to issue a 400 page proof thereof. The statistician draws the blinds and closes the door and asks “what do you want the answer to be?” There are evidently many statisticians at work in the city staff:

“Conclusions from Stewardship Ontario audit data (2005), presented to the In-Store Packaging Waste Diversion Working group, estimate an average of 8.8 plastic retail shopping bags generated, per household, per week in Toronto. This represents a total generation in Toronto of 457.6 million plastic retail shopping bags per year and, with each bag weighing 6 grams, 2745.6 tonnes per year, which is approximately 6,900 cubic meters of landfill capacity per year. Plastic bags do not degrade significantly over time and therefore this volume of plastic bags will persist if landfilled.” [15]

These statistics are meaningless in that they neglect to mention how many of the plastic bags are recycled or reused. The plastic bags of concern are the ones which are the surplus bags which are thrown out empty. These statistics make no attempt to distinguish between the source and use of the plastic bags.

The City of Toronto currently accepts plastic bags for recycling in their Blue Box Program. How many of the 8.8 plastic bags per week are thus recycled? Plastic bags are frequently reused as trash bin liners, indeed green box liners. How many of the 8.8 plastic bags were used as garbage bags? Succinctly, don’t judge a pile of trash simply by its cover.

While the City of Toronto decries plastic’s inability to degrade, they are talking out of both sides of their legislative mouths when they then forbid retailers from offering compostable plastic bags: “Retail business[es] … are prohibited from offering or providing … non-compatible plastic bags,” (City of Toronto By-law No. 356-2009, 604-4) Non-compatible bags in turn are those “that are not compatible with the City’s blue bin recycling program and includ[ing] … biodegradable plastic bags or compostable plastic bags…” (City of Toronto By-law No. 356-2009, 604-1) [16] The use of compostable bags is prohibited because they interfere with the recycling of regular plastic bags!

Further, the staff report fails to mention how much 6,900 cubic meters of landfill capacity is as a proportion of the total. The 2005 Solid Waste Multiyear Business Plan mentions that in “2003, about 1 million tones of material were collected from 1,000,000 units.” [17] So if we take 2745.6 tonnes per year and divide through by 1,000,000 tonnes per year, we get 0.2%. So after all the fuss and commotion, City Council has managed to achieve 0.2% of its 70% goal. There is an old Greek idiom which runs “the mills of the Gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. If this be virtue, then Mayor Miller’s environmental stewardship is saintly in that his millstones have ground both very slowly and with exceedingly small results.

[1] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf

[2] http://www.canlii.ca/en/on/laws/stat/so-2006-c-11-sch-a/latest/so-2006-c-11-sch-a.html Section 8(2)

[3] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[4] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[5] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[6] http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2009/06/01/5-cent-bag-tax-now-in-effect.aspx

[7] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 11)

[8] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3508263.ece

[9] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (pps. 11-12)

[10] ibid

[11] ibid

[12] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/By-laws/2009/law0356.pdf (604, 3C)

[13] http://www.savetheplasticbag.com/UploadedFiles/Manhattan Beach ruling.pdf

[14] ibid

[15] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p.
[16] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/By-laws/2009/law0356.pdf

[17] http://www.toronto.ca/garbage/pdf/2005_plan.pdf (p.28)

Uncategorized AID, ale, author, blog, california, Case, cent, chair, chairman, eagles, Environment, food, God, html, http, ILS, king, Martin C. Winer, mathematician, MIT, Ontario, pdf, plastic bag, plastic bags, RAM, Red, toronto

The State of the Union: As Seen on TV

June 12, 2010 mcwiner 2 comments

The State of The Union – As Seen on TV
Martin C. Winer

But first a word about how this article was written: This article was the result of a ‘cluster’ or a free-word association. This is an exercise which is meant to use the ‘right brain’ to spur creativity and generate writing topics. You can create your own clusters or bubbles here: http://www.bubbl.us/ but it’s best to do them with pen and paper since one tends to self edit when typing. Each word you see italicized below is from the cluster. Usually, the idea is to take one theme from the cluster and write about it. I thought it would be a challenge to include ALL the words and still have the article tell a cohesive story. Read the article, taking note of the italicized words. Then see the cluster below.

I have been worried about the state of the world as of late. Being recently unemployed with no meaningful job on the horizon, I was wondering when I’d be returning to the 9-5 lifestyle. It’s not that I ravish 9-5, as Dolly Parton’s famous song correctly puts it, 9-5 is all “takin and no giving” but it beats aimlessly strolling on sidewalks waiting for a direction to unfold. Up until recently I was a member of the over 30 and unmarried class. Fortune changes quickly and I now find myself suddenly being married with children. The responsibilities are understandably far different. Curious as to what direction my life would take over the next months and years, I turned on the familiar glowing oracle fitted in every living room, the television.

While I waited for my big screen TV, a vestige of my former employed self, to come to life, I recalled that a comic had mentioned that Dolly Parton had insured her breasts. I wondered if the comic was putting us on, as he was apt to do. Would an insurance company take premiums for such a ridiculous item? What was the counterparty risk? Were her breasts in good hands with Allstate (TM)? The TV came to life with the evening news reporting of another hemorrhage on Wall Street of 213 ethereal points, with AIG requesting more bailout money. Evidently, indeed, insurance companies would take premiums on just about anything and the only boobs in the interaction were the policy holders who actually thought the policy was worth something. Bored with the evening news I changed the channel.

Dick Cheney was on “State of the Union” with John King on CNN. Cheney, a bastion of the old guard was set to be ‘grilled’ by King as to the sins of his administration. I flipped right past the interview because I knew it could not yield the satisfaction I was seeking. Waterboarding and assassination squads would be second nature to a man like Cheney who shot his hunting partner in the face. Waterboarding I imagined was just his technique for cleaning his felled game, human or otherwise. I wasn’t interested in the past, I was curious to know what my future held.

There was an infomercial on with 90 year old Jack Lalanne sporting his leisure suit and his juicer. I am a late night TV watcher and infomercials plague the airwaves from dusk ‘til dawn. Jack Lalanne was born in 1914 and looked to be in better health than myself all thanks to his 1/2 horsepower juicer. In went an orange, apple, and every other healthy fruit your mother tried to get you to eat as a child. Out poured a fountain of youth which had purportedly kept Lalanne in such great shape over these many years, yet somehow, it hadn’t managed to save his fashion sense. The leisure suit was last popular when the juice on everyone’s lips was Juice Newton, “Grease” was the new movie and disco was still in style. I was intrigued with the notion of extended life and wondered if indeed Lalanne’s juicer could provide it. Even if it could, what would my life be like, aged 90+ years drinking fruit and vegetables all day? Would my life be fulfilling? I changed the channel seeking an answer from the glowing oracle of TV.

The next infomercial was for Extenz tablets; an all natural ‘Male Enhancement’. Well this held some promise now didn’t it? At least my latter years could be herbally augmented with extra length and girth. But just what were these pills I thought to myself? “An all natural male enhancement?” I wondered to myself. Didn’t we already have such a thing in Dolly Parton? What were these herbs and how were they discovered? Did someone eat a salad with wild herbs one night with shocking results in the bedroom? How did they then suspect the salad and not anything else? My mind was awash with questions and I wasn’t much in the thinking mood. I wanted answers, not questions. Come on oracle of television, what would my life be like? The only effort I was willing to exert was in flipping channels.

Yet as I flipped there were a plethora of Viagra and its new copy Cialis ads. Was the television intimating that my future would need these? A Viagra ad promised that at age 50 I could trade in my sedan for a Harley Davidson and with one pill have the vigor of a 20 year old. A Cialis ad promised 36 hour or daily dosing options to make sure I would be able to respond when the mood was right. If I was as old as Jack Lalanne, would my wife still be ready for me? I’d be worried about breaking bones at that age. Another flip would quell that fear.

Once a month Boniva would rebuild my wife’s bones without the need to remember a weekly pill. There would be no need to take those chalky calcium pills once a day. Of course memory at that age will be compromised so the once a month dosing is ideal. Side effects could include liver and kidney disease but at least you would only have to endure them once a month. God bless Big Pharma. I could have a once a day boner and my wife could have healthy bones all month. I was comforted that the future would be bright. My comfort was not long lasting, at least not as long lasting as 36 hour Cialis promised to be, when it occurred to me that Big Pharma was suffering from a horrible case of misplaced priorities. With all of their attention focused on bones and boners, they had dropped the two big balls of cancer and heart disease. I curiously imagined a big Pharma strategizing kick off meeting with people brainstorming on new drug targets and somehow bones and boners getting to the top of the list over cancer and heart disease. I only hoped that Jack Lalanne’s fountain of youth Juice could get my wife and I past those two roadblocks.

I calmed myself thinking that my 90th year was well off, I being only 35 now. Big Pharma had time to readjust their priorities. I continued my flipping to discover yet another Big Pharma commercial for Requip, a medication for Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS). My legs were perfectly atrophied into their TV watching position. I didn’t believe that such a condition could occur. “My doctor said ‘Requip’” said the announcer as a television doctor mouthed “Requip”. I imagined that the doctor mouthed “bullsh*t” in response to the patients complaint. [0u92R90U R ‘ jixz-]0039;ffaS980059-09ATRE MT3. Oops, I’m ever so sorry about that previous mess, you see my arms tend to spontaneously move uncontrollably every so often… Oh my, could it be I have Restless Arms Syndrome (RAS)? Well at least I know that Big Pharma is on the case. Perhaps if I ingest Requip while standing on my head, the medication will settle in the appropriate appendages? Parenthetically I wonder if all Requip contains is a bottle of gel caps filled with Brandy? All it seemed Big Pharma could do for me in my latter years was give calm legs and arms and a rock hard erection. The Viagra commercial warned that any erection lasting over 4 hours constituted a medical risk and thus I knew my fulfillment from Big Pharma would leave me with 20 remaining hours in the day to fill with what? What would I do? I looked to the financial stations to see if I had any prospect of finding a job.

CNBC was heralding the success of the latest Apple Computer quarterly results. The IPhone and the IPod were unrelenting successes. The host discussed the failing health of Steve Jobs as a concern for the future of the company and since we now know all that Big Pharma is good for, the concern is justified. I myself am not a gadget freak. I often mockingly eye people walking down the street sweaty palmed typing at lunatic speeds on their Palm, Blackberry or blueberry or whatever the latest berry is. I have no need to be so totally connected, but evidently there is a huge market for these devices. Just the same I was delighted to see the success of Apple whose Macintosh computer was, in my mind, the superior computer in 1985. Bill Gates was the smarter CEO, not the better innovator. Steve Jobs didn’t allow clones of Macintosh’s while Gates allowed clones of the PC. As a result Apple’s market share fell like Newton’s apple under newly discovered gravity. With all the discussion of executive compensation these days, I think Steve Jobs deserves the lion’s share of the reward when it comes to innovation. The IPod is simple to use media device which takes advantage of the recent wave of music piracy and MP3’s that puts the tale of the Maersk Alabama to shame. Now don’t get me wrong, copyright infringement was not created by Jobs, he only capitalized on it. The IPhone is the next logical extension of a handheld computing device incorporating maps, navigation and a whole host of other useful features we come to expect from Apple. The Macintosh, the IMac as it’s now called, is gaining market share in leaps and bounds. I guessed that I had attained some inspiration from the glowing oracle; perseverance, like that of Steve Jobs in the face of constant opposition and I too could one day go on to innovate a pile of handheld devices – or something like that. Of course this special was being aired on CNBC the so called financial news network that managed to complete miss any predictions of the financial collapse which had claimed my job. I wasn’t about to take any advice from them. No, the Corruption National Broadcasting System as I had renamed them would have to find another mark. I dismissed them with a flip of the channel.

The Cheney Interview was over on CNN and now Anderson Cooper on A.C. 360 was sporting a pie chart showing the distributions of the American reinvestment Plan. There were huge allotments for infrastructure building projects. A clip revealed workers building bridges all over the country. Wasn’t it another Democratic president who wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century? Now are we building bridges out of Chapter 11? There was discussion of incentives to homeowners to renovate and rejuvenate their properties. I thought of stopping in at Home Depot but immediately balked because the 27 minute hand waving discussion with 17 year old ‘Skippy’ who works there never seems to get me the results I want. For all the talk of hope and economic plans CNN was pushing out, I knew that the recession was receding faster than Dick Cheney’s hairline.

Rembrant - Raising of Lazarus

Then they aired a clip of the master of hope: President Obama. “America has been great and shall rise to be great again” he prophesized. I thought this had a familiar tone. I quickly switched to the Catholic Television Service and the pastor proudly boomed “and the phoenix shall rise out of the ashes just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.” The pastor went on to solicit donations for a new building project. This also had familiar overtones and I flipped back quickly to CNN. “It will take considerable investment from us all but we shall rebuild and come back stronger” proudly acclaimed Obama. It then occurred to me that Obama was more than just a President, he was our primary minister. He then intimated at his plan to remove toxic assets from the books of the banks without providing the necessary details I was looking for; undoubtedly he would turn water into wine. The rhetoric of hope was overflowing my ears and I needed a counter position to ground myself again. Luckily there was the FOX network who was lambasting Obama as the bane of humanity whose short stint in office had already thrown the economy into apocalypse from which only a miracle could now save us.

Putin and other former Soviet interviewees were quoted as saying that the end of capitalism has finally come. A commentator remarked: “the American dream of picket fences has been replaced by picket lines” as the video showed protesting auto workers. Am auto worker protested: “The companies are trying to divide and conquer us, taking advantage of this downturn to cut our benefits and pay. I say enough taxing the middle class!” Cheers and hurrahs followed. My brain was like a pair of Levi’s jeans iconically being pulled by these two polarized stations in opposite directions, at the risk of ripping. There had to be some truth on the glowing oracle of television. PBS I thought to myself quickly. That will save me.

Jim Lehrer

(Ed. Note: Actually it’s IOWA that is ok with Gay Rights, not Oklahoma. In my cluster, I confused the two, but I went with it because the challenge was to write an article using all the clustered words. I was only off by a 10 hour drive anyways. )

Public Broadcasting, publicly funded and publicly ignored in favour of watching MTV to hear if Britney Spears of Lindsay Lohan were wearing underwear today. Today Jim Lehrer was discussing the state of Gay Rights. Evidently in Ahnold’s (sic) California the rights of gays have been ‘terminated’. Ironically, Oklahoma seems “Ok” with gay marriage. Is that what the song “Oklahoma, OK” is about from the musical Oklahoma? The world seemed upside down. Had I inverted myself such that Requip went to my arms and forgot about it? Oklahoma was a place where I expected politicians to spout the bible about ‘being Fruitful and multiplying’ and how homosexuality was unnatural. In liberal California, I expect them to say anything goes, from Gay Rights to cloning dolly the sheep. After all doesn’t Hotel California by the Eagles promise “Plenty of room at the Hotel California / Any time of year, you can find it here”? I couldn’t make sense of my world. I was about as comfortable as a man swimming in itchy wool trunks. I needed to flip the channel quickly.

Kim Kardashian

Chicks Who Love Guns

Up next was a documentary “American Justice” revisiting the O.J. Simpson trial. It brought back names like Mezza Luna, Nicole Brown, Robert Kardashian, Kim Kardashian… whoops my mind wandered. Robert Kardashian had helped set a murderer free but brought us Kim Kardashian. Now they say justice should be blind, but have you seen Kim Kardashian? He was off the hook in my books but the rest of the characters who let O.J. go were open to attack in my imagination. I recast the events of that fateful night as a Quentin Tarantino movie. I’d have my justice, if only in my imagination. Nicole Brown would now be Jackie Brown. She would seductively seduce O.J. by dancing for him like Salma Hayek in Tarantino’s “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”. She’d then immediately turn into a vampire and eat him alive. Next, Travolta and Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction would show up and after quoting Ezekiel 25:17 would lace into the O.J. lawyers. Finally the women from “Chicks who love Guns” as seen in Jackie Brown, armed with the AK-47 and they would deal with every “mother [t]ucker” in the jury room. Returning from my daydream I realized that 10 years had passed and there was no justice to be spoken of. The only thing I had learned from the episode was that justice is a function of wealth and that O.J. stood for Orenthall James, not Orange Juice. I’m not admitting I was that stupid however, I’m about to write another article: “If I was that stupid, here’s how I’d admit it.”

I knew how the O.J. saga ended so I flipped again to see what else was on the glowing oracle. John Sebastian crooned “Welcome Back, to the same old place where you started from…” It was a rerun of Welcome Back Kotter. Truly, I was basically back where I had started from, only an hour of flipping elapsed. I knew nothing more of the future than when I started. Sure I knew that my bones and boners would be safe, boobs could be insured, and that if I worked very hard, I might find a job. But I was looking for important answers to important questions like, what would justice be like in the future? What would the economy be like? I was sure that Kotter’s Vinni Barbarino wasn’t going to be able to answer my questions. With that, I turned off the glowing oracle for the night.

‘Apple’ cluster which generated the article.

This is the free word association (or cluster, or bubble) which generated the article. Again, each italicized above came from the cluster below.

Economy, Entertainment, Humor, Politics, Uncategorized, news 9 to 5, 9/11, AID, aig, AK-47, ale, allstate, America, american justic, Announcer, apple, arnold schwarzenegger, auto workers, bailout, bank, bankruptcy, bible, bill gates, blog, boniva, bubble, california, cancer, capitalism, Case, cent, chapter 11, chicks who love guns, cialis, cluster, dca, dick cheney, dolly parton, eagles, Economy, Executive, extenze, Ezekiel 25:17, free word association, gay rights, God, grease, head, Health, heart disease, home depot, homosexuality, hotel california, http, ibm, ILS, insurance, Internet, iphone, ipod, jack lalanne, Jackie Brown, jim lehrer, John Sebastian, John Travolta, juice newton, kim kardashian, king, lawyer, lazarus, levis, life, logic, maersk, maersk alabama, marriage, Martin C. Winer, MIT, mp3, Music, nature, O. J. Simpson, obama, OJ, oklahoma, palm blackberry, piracy, pirates, President, Pulp Fiction, quentin tarantino, quote, Red, requip, rls, Robert Kardashian, Rome, Salma Hayek, sex, steve jobs, Tarantino, viagra, video, Vinni Barbarino, waterboarding, wealth, Welcome Back Kotter, writing

Voce ‘e Notte (Voice in the Night) (Russo, De-Curtis, 1903)

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

This is one of my favourite Neapolitan love songs. It is mournful during descriptions of the present and joyous and hopeful in recollections of the past. I’ve been trying for some time to find a translation. I’ve found a partial translation from the version performed by Mario Lanza (which was abridged). I prefer the rendition of Claudio Villa presented here:

Here is the partial translation. If anyone has a more complete translation, please provide a link in the comments.

Si ‘sta voce te sceta ‘int’a nuttata,
If this voice wakes you in the night
Mentre t’astringe ‘o sposo tuio vicino,
While the man at your side is holding you
Statte scetata, si vuo sta scetata,
Stay awake if you want to stay awake
Ma fa vede ca duorme a suonno chino.
But pretend that you’re fast asleep.

Nun gghi vicino’e llastre pe’ ffa’ spia,
Don’t go to the window to see who’s there
Pecche nun puo sbaglia: ‘sta voce e’e mia…
Because you can’t mistake it – that voice is mine…
E’a stessa voce ‘e quanno tutt’e dduie
The same voice as when we both
Scurnuse, nce parlavamo c’o "vvuie".
Were strangers, both so formal.

Si ‘sta voce, che chiagn’int’ `a nuttata
If this voice crying into the night
Te sceta’o sposo, nun ave paura,
Wakes your man, don’t be afraid
Vide ch’e senza nomme’a sserenata…
Because there are no names in my serenade…
Dille ca dorme e ca se rassicura…
Tell him to sleep, that everything’s all right.

Dille accussi: "Chi canta ‘inta ‘sta via
Tell him: "Whoever is singing down in the street
O sarra pazzo o more’e ggelusia
Is either crazy or dying of jealousy
Starra chiagneno quacce `nfamita
He’s probably crying over some betrayal,
Canta isso sulo. Ma che canta a ffa?"
He sings alone. But what’s he singing for?”

Uncategorized AID, Claudio Villa, http, Mario Lanza, MIT, RAM, Red

Conspicuous Absences from Religious Texts — Wouldn't God Know That?

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Many discuss, argue and berate the contents of the big three religious texts: the Quran, The Old Testament and The New Testament. Discussions have been going on for millenia about what is contained therein. I’ve been more interested, indeed dismayed, by what is missing. These books are held to be the writ word of God by the adherents of their respective faiths. Now, if God be the author of these texts, I wonder how it was possible to omit some critical information.

Slavery: All the aforementioned texts allow slavery. Sure, they may put limits on it. They may even dictate humane ways to treat your slaves, but slaves be they just the same. It was humans, noble humans at least, that put a stop to the practice only not so long ago. All of humanity has been enriched by the emancipation. Wouldn’t God know that?

Environment: “Be fruitful and multiply” the Lord of the Old and New Testament declares boldly. But what of population control? What of greenhouse gasses? The Old Testament contains passages urging the ancient Israelites to bury their excrement outside of the camp to keep the place clean. But what of the future generations? Religious texts are supposed to be written for all generations. Otherwise why should we at a later generation be compelled to abide by them? So true, at the time of their writing, there was no concern for population control or emission of greenhouse gasses, but there would be for future generations. Wouldn’t God know that?

Democracy: Democracy isn’t the perfect solution; far from it. Just the same it’s far better than any other system that’s come along so far. Moreover democracies are largely peaceful compared to their predecessors. So why then is there no mention of it in any of the religious texts? Why is it a Hellenic invention? Centuries of warfare might have been averted had democracy taken an earlier hold which it certainly would have if it were sanctioned by the big three religious texts. Wouldn’t God know that?

Health: The big three religious texts go to excruciating details into what can and cannot be eaten. Restrictions of shellfish, rules for butchering methods and the like go on and on for pages and pages. Yet on those pages we find narry a mention of things which are currently obvious. How about a few words about high fat, high cholesterol diets? How about a few words about not smoking? Now this knowledge may not have been accessible to the people of the day but wouldn’t God know that?

Finance: All religions have prohibitions against usury. However, readers must be careful in that when they read these prohibitions they must realize that these prohibitions apply to lending with interest to someone of the same faith. Lending to others, outside the faith is allowed. So then what about financial disasters we’ve faced? They were caused by manipulation of currency and powerful bankers taking control of our financial system. How about some laws defining a fair monetary system? How about laws preventing partial reserve banking ( a current system where banks lend money they don’t actually have on reserve )? How about laws prohibiting the artificial contraction and expansion of the money supply which caused the Great Depression, the Great Inflation of the 70′s and now plays a major part in the current recession of 2008? Now the people of the day may not have understood these concepts but wouldn’t God know that?

Interview: Reza Aslan on Iran — The Daily Show

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Ahmadinejad wearing his trademark white jacket and pointing to the Farsi phrase Ma Mitavanim (We Can) on a blackboard.

Canadian Link: http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart/full-episodes/#clip185688

US Link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=231561&title=reza-aslan

Reza Aslan was interviewed on the Daily Show on June 24, 2009 lauding the response of Barack Obama during the recent and ongoing revolution in Iran. Aslan notes strong parallels to ’79 noting that this revolution is likewise a battle for the future of Iran. Starting at time index 4:48, Aslan applauds Obama’s response: “Thank you God for President Barack Obama” says Aslan.

“Obama played this perfectly. During his campaign Iran never left his mouth. This worked to the disadvantage of Ahmadinejad’s because he couldn’t use his ‘America is going to attack any minute now’ rhetoric.”

Aslan notes that Ahmadinejad’s campaign slogan was “Ma Mitavanim” which is Persian for “Yes we can”.

Responding to opposition calls to make stronger statements or take stronger actions in regards to Iran Aslan warns:

“The US has a long sordid history of meddling in Iranian affairs. … If you want to pu and end to this movement, this revolution tomorrow, let’s listen to Bill Bennett, let’s listen to John McCain.”

Aslan recommends that the US continue its current approach. “The best thing that we can do is shut up.” He goes on to say that “Obama has changed the equation in that region. He is taking the long view on issues, looking ahead 10 years from now.”

Aslan is certain that Iran will emerge a different country from what it is now, but he is concerned as to what form of change will come. “Iran is on a precipice between North Korea and China; with isolation and militarization on one hand and a preservation of the oligarchies while opening to commerce and contact on the other.”

When asked what US citizens can do to help the revolution, he suggests encouraging and pressuring the EU and UN to act who do have influence in the region. As for the US, he contends “you have to have a relationship with someone in order to punish them more. … We have no influence there. … We can’t punish them any more. What are we going to do sanction them more?”

—

Reza Aslan’s most recent book is “How to Win a Cosmic War”:
http://www.rezaaslan.com/cosmicwar.html

We Don't Live in a Free Market Economy

June 12, 2010 mcwiner 1 comment

Growing up I often heard people remark that the “poor get poorer as the rich get richer.” I was led to believe that this was an unfortunate side effect of a free market economy. This flaw aside, the free market economy was said to be a much better approach than anything else that had come along. I spent my time focused on ways of making laissez faire capitalism more compassionate. We exist in a welfare state and I, living in Canada, live in a society which offers socialized medicine. Both of these measures are great first steps in assuring the compassion of capitalism however, I was always frustrated knowing that the only true compassion of capitalism would come in allowing everyone to earn wealth.

As I continued to study the problem, imagine my shock and dismay when I learned that we do not live in a free market system. We live in a central bank monetary system (ie, the Federal Reserve) which has an invisible, moreover, malevolent hand in conducting the nation’s monetary policy. This may sound like a conspiracy theory however if it was, it’s an awfully dull one given that the chairman of the Federal Reserve openly admits this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x56MpWZh88s
http://broadband.thecomedynetwork.ca/comedy/?vid=19058

Through the Federal Reserve’s mucking with the money supply and the resulting inflation, those with savings saw their savings erode silently falling into the hands of the nations richest few. In order to escape inflation, you must own debt free assets which index to inflation. Only the richest few of us can accomplish this and thus evade the silent erosion of our savings into the hands of bankers and the financial elite. Here are a few graphs showing the effects:

source : http://lanekenworthy.net/2008/03/09/the-best-inequality-graph/

source : http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Central banking (The Fed) is an age old scheme of mob rule over the money supply.

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.”
– Mayer Amschel Rothschild

It has origins dating back to the temple days when Jesus drove out the money changers. (The word ‘bank’ comes from the Latin ‘bench’ from which the temple money changers made their predatory exchanges.) The only way to restore justice and equity is to restore the issuing power over money back to the people. For more info, please see:

http://inflationtax.blogspot.com/

Review: "Lost in the Meritocracy" — Walter Kirn (Doubleday)

June 12, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link): http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Review of:
“Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever”
By: Walter Kirn (Doubleday)
Reviewed By: Martin C. Winer
June 28, 2009

When I picked up “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday), I expected a semi-dry expose on the problems facing the American Education system with an emphasis on the Ivy League schools. The only semi-dry thing in the book was the champagne Kirn poured over two fawning exchange students during a graduation night orgy on his way to Princeton. Told with prose and wit more common to novels, Kirn details his experiences as he rises out of the rural Minnesota winning one of 20 transfer student spots at Ivy League Princeton.

By Kirn’s account it is a wonder that there is any ivy left due to the propensity of the students to smoke any mildly herbaceous looking thing.

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene. Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies. They have to ground their mischief in manifestos. The most popular one around … held that drugs, … especially plant based psychedelic drugs helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” (p. 124)

Recreational drug use was pervasive at Princeton as were many other illicit activities, with education taking a back seat. I was so engaged with the stories that I was half way through when I reexamined the title and asked “what is a meritocracy anyways?”

Meritocracy was introduced as a more equitable replacement for aristocracy. Insofar as education, Harvard’s James Conant championed the cause of educational reform towards meritocracy as a realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy among men, founded on virtue and talents.” (Jefferson used the term ‘natural aristocracy’ instead of ‘meritocracy’ because it wasn’t coined a term until the 1958 book “Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Young. Incidentally it was intended pejoratively.) As with many high minded theories, the implementation often renders an imperfect reflection of the ideal.

Conant set the controversial School Aptitude Test (SAT) as gatekeeper for the bastions of higher learning guarding all the rewards of power that lay beyond. When Walter Kirn took the SAT, he discovered he “had a natural talent for multiple-choice tests [which] landed [him] without the vaguest survival instructions [at Princeton]”. (p. 6) Throughout the course of the book which details his experiences at Princeton Kirn suggests that his education consisted of learning how to succeed in the education system; this is a far cry from becoming educated.

The distinction is eloquently revealed when Kirn is asked to discuss the ‘critical assumptions’ he’s made in reading the Norton anthologies; unfortunately, Kirn had done little reading at all:

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the [Princeton Student] Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway. What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” (p.119)

Throughout the course of the book Kirn refers to himself as a fraud – sometimes proudly but more often with remorse. But is Kirn a fraud or instead a sufferer of “Fraud Syndrome”? Fraud Syndrome (also Impostor Syndrome) is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a topic well known and documented by psychiatrists and psychologists. It is an intellectual condition where the intellect feels disconnected from any accomplishments or abilities. If the intellect were a tree, then the tree would lack any knowledge of its roots and thus mistakenly think that its ability to grow upright was the result of undeserved serendipity.

Kirn’s notion that he somehow managed to beguile and finesse the system into accepting him to its highest ranks is significantly, and ironically, weakened by the quality of the writing he uses in making said point. What follows is an example of Kirn’s average writing:

“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable. For example: what is Death? To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.” (p. 30)

Witty and clever turns of phrases such as these are found on every other page. While this made for a delightful read, it served to undermine one of his main tenets. It seems far more likely that Kirn didn’t finesse the system, but that the system managed recognized his talent despite his own inability to do so – marshalling him exactly where he ought to be: in the commensurate Princeton English Program.

If Fraud Syndrome ever does make it one day to be an official diagnosis, then Kirn should appear on the Public Service Announcement poster. The text is rife with examples of Kirn’s detachment from his talent and feelings of being a fraud:

“My genuine tears [over the news of John Lennon’s death] flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred. I wasn’t ashamed of this. My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.” (p. 77)

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery [(using catchphrases)] — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted. Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.” (p. 121)

“I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes.” (p. 122)

“[My poems] were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.” (p.140)

“I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that [my] Bittman [character] was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” (p.144)

“I felt in [my friend’s] company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.” (p. 168)

One of Kirn’s Princeton encounters offers a possible cause for Fraud Syndrome. Kirn has a conversation with Julian — undoubtedly Dr. Julian Jaynes best known for his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” – in a bar following the production of one of Kirn’s plays. Julian explained that the human mind was actually two distinct entities, that in ancient times were:

“… virtual strangers to each other. When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice. … But who was this being? … Man had answered these questions in many ways. He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies. Muses.” (pps. 93-94)

When Julian asked Kirn: “did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?” Kirn replied: “Honestly, I feel that way a lot. Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly. And sometimes it shakes me up a little.” (p. 94) Perhaps this is why Kirn was unable to identify with his obvious talent; it felt external to him. While Kirn makes this point incidentally in his book, it is nonetheless a very important one. While Kirn fails to connect with his talent due to this separation of the mind, many more do something far worse: Many fail to express their talents at all – failing to listen to that other ‘voice’.

While Kirn fails to impress upon me that his placement at Princeton was either coincidental or accidental, he does make some well taken points about the education he received once there. It seems that when reading in the English program, pretension superseded comprehension.

“We … concluded, before we’d read even a hundredth of it, that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert. In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” (p.121)

“To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed. Long live the king.” (p.122)

Kirn found that many of the supposed ‘greats’ they were asked to read were completely incomprehensible by students and professors alike:

“Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking “heteronomous’ and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across – tucked in a footnote –“unreadability.”

That word I understood of course.” (p.120)

For Kirn, university was a process in learning to jockey jargon words and phrases effectively. Phrases like ‘semiotically unstable’ (referring to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) and words such as ‘hermeneutical’, ‘gestural’, ‘recursive’, ‘incommensurable’ were all synonyms for ‘hard’. Kirn was extremely confused by the works he read but he realized that confusion was not something to be escaped by understanding, but instead something which could be exploited by mirroring it back at its source.

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion. The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique. The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example. My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then. We could say “incommensurable”.” (p.122)

Kirn was adrift in a sea of confusion but it seemed that he was managing to navigate it by drinking the sea water and rolling with the currents. It wasn’t long before Kirn’s thirst for meaning caught up with him, just as he had become completely intellectually dehydrated, basking in the scorching sun of the top percentile. Kirn suffered a collapse, unable to continue the charade:

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always . . .” “The book is thought to . . .” “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest. I’d done it. An hour’s work.” (p.178)

Eventually Kirn recovered after undertaking a course of self guided education which he found more fulfilling. He continued his academic career at Oxford as a recipient of the “Keasbey Prize”. Kirn draws two broader conclusions from his experience.

The first is a ‘roll with the punches and everything will turn out alright’ sort of message. “… I discovered the truth — if words like “truth” mean anything. And even if they don’t perhaps. Pause in your knowing to be known. Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled. Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.” (p. 205) This advice may bear meaning for someone like Kirn with an innate and wonderful talent. Its relevance to the rest of us who must work at it is somewhat questionable.

The second conclusion comes out more strongly in the interviews surrounding the book, but it is mentioned briefly. In an interview (The Colbert Report: May 19, 2009.) Kirn claims that the current meritocracy does not reward depth, but instead rewards the “ability to define ‘incipient’. “Basically people who are very good at cross word puzzles end up running the country.” “They are able to shine in every cocktail party they attend, but when it comes to running the economy, fighting the war on terror, … not very good.” Kirn is referring to Donald Rumsfeld and to certain Lehman Brothers board members, who are Princeton Alumni. Given Kirn’s experiences, it is easy to imagine jargon slinging economists brandishing terms like “Collaterized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps” using them as talking points, rather than understanding their deeper implications. Terms like these undoubtedly are mentioned in numerous A+ Ivy League Economics theses, confounding both the authors and the readers while leading to economic ruin.

This second summation is made in the book when Kirn discusses a run in, after graduating Princeton yet before going to Oxford, with an old friend who was self taught and well read.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,” for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” (p. 210)

Enough with the Crazy Kuzari Proof

May 25, 2010 mcwiner No comments

Intro:

You go to a ‘learning about the faith weekend’ or some such event expecting to be enlightened. Up to the podium steps a bearded Rabbi whose face speaks of wisdom and learning. Eagerly you wait for the inspiration you’ve been waiting for to believe. Out of those lips flow an argument which is akin to a method of argument you’ve learned about in calculus class: induction. Starting from a base generation which witnessed an event at Mount Sinai, this story has been passed down through the generations unchanged until it reached your ears. A miracle!

The Argument:

Numbers 1:24-26 tells of 600,000 adult males that witnessed the giving of the laws to all at Mt. Sinai. Since it is impossible to fake the simultaneous testimony of 600,000 adult males (approx 2-3 million all together) the story must be true. Since your (Jewish) ancestors witnessed and passed on the story of God publicly giving us his laws, we must obey his laws and worship him.

Another plausible solution:

20,000 people witnessed a volcano and worshipped it.

20,000?

There is a confusion in hebrew between alluph (chief, master, family clan) and eleph (thousand). They are spelled the same way since the torah (and most semitic languages) omit vowels. As a result a redaction or copy error has led to the interpretation of alluph as eleph. 600,000 adult males in ancient egypt is just a historically ridiculous number. For more info, visit:
reconciling-biblical-numbers-three-million-at-sinai-is-making-a-mountain-out-of-a-molehill

Volcano?

Many descriptions of Mount Sinai sound more to me like a volcano than anything else. The fact that the Israelites heard God’s voice in this may simply mean that they were frightened by the volcano and thought it was God’s voice? Recall this is the time of sun worship. It was common then to worship natural phenomenon and deify them.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Mount_Sinai#Biblical_description

Do I really believe Israelites worshipped a volcano?

I believe that the Israelites may have heard loud scary sounds at a volcano or some other natural phenomenon.
See, second part of:
http://extremegh.blogspot.com/2008/07/apology-to-rjm-chazal-destroy-kuzari.html

My point is that my alternative explanation is as plausible, if not more plausible than the Kuzari explanation. Hence the Kuzari proves nothing.

Why should we care about debunking the Kuzari Proof?

“Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to…. But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent.” — W. K. Clifford

That’s why!

History, Religion ale, bearded Rabbi, blog, CHIEF, egypt, God, html, http, Israel, israelites, judaism, king, kuzari, kuzari proof, mass revelation, MIT, Mount Sinai, Mt. Sinai, plausible solution, Rabbi, Red, sinai, Torah

The Subprime Mortgage Fiasco Explained

May 25, 2010 mcwiner 1 comment

In 2001 Alan Greenspan at the Fed (Federal Reserve) lowered the interest rate to try to rejuvenate the economy after the fallout of the .com bubble burst. History will record that Greenspan went from the sublime to the ridiculous when he cut the interest rate to 1%. This set off a spate of irresponsible borrowing and lending the effects of which are still being dealt with today.The banks took advantage of this by starting to offer mortgages to subprime borrowers. Subprime borrowers are borrowers with a poor credit rating (specifically a FICO (credit) score of < 620). Typically these are individuals who habitually are unable to make credit card payments, or those who have suffered a foreclosure or bankruptcy. In the past they wouldn’t be able to get a loan, but thanks to the low interest rate, some could now afford the payments. With great fanfare out went the ads: “Send us your poor, your homeless, your great creditless masses!” Lured by the prospect of home ownership and lulled by the chimera of ‘buy now, pay later’, loans were issued as fast as the printers could print them.

Banks noticed that the default rates were lower than they expected. This led them to think that there was an untapped market in subprime lending. They developed many products, of which 3 were common 1) Variable rate mortgage with a higher rate due to the risk, 2) An interest only loan where they would start paying off the capital after an initial period and 3) low fixed rate initially, resetting to market rate after a few years.

The people who took these loans did so for two principal reasons 1) they hoped their income/credit would improve during the initial period of the loans and 2) the housing market was so hot, they hoped to use the newly gained equity in their homes to refinance the loans with more agreeable terms. Regrettably, Alan Greenspan, noting the now uncontrolled inflation, agressively started to increase the interest rates in 2004 right back up to around 5% and beyond.

For people with loans of type 1) and 3) above, the loans were typically huge so these interest rate increases made the payments impossible to cover, leading to defaulting. Those with loans of type 2) were pushed over the edge when the capital component of their loan kicked in.

Now, were it not for the avarice of the bankers, this crisis would have ended there; that is, a large number of repossessions but no further economic upheavel. However, bankers are weasels and behind the scenes they were pulling more ridiculous stunts.

Behind the scenes, bankers were looking to mitigate the risk of this subprime debt and also to make more profit on profit by creating and selling subprime mortgage bonds. To accomplish this they pooled together all subprime debt. Next they broke the subprime debt into levels. Suppose there were 3 banks involved in a given mortgage. The banks that would get hit by a default first were put into the lower levels and the banks that would be hit last were put into higher levels. By doing so, each level bore a reduced amount of the total risk. Now, many financial institutions that cannot purchase subprime debt were able to get around this limitation by purchasing bonds in the higher levels (less risk) of these mortgage bonds. Now, subprime debt was distributed all around the world to various institutions in this masked mortgage debt trading instrument.

So when the debt hit the fan, the big institutions which normally make loans to one another on a regular basis to keep the economy rolling, suddenly mistrusted one another. No one knew who held what amount of subprime debt. As a result the overnight lending rate went sky high and the Fed had to step in to push cash into the economy to help stave off a liquidity crisis — a crisis where cash flow starts to freeze.

At the time of this writing (Dec 2007) we are beginning to see the end result of this crisis. The large financial houses are beginning to crumble under the weight of their own stupidity. Just yesterday financial giant Morgan Stanley reported its first quarter loss in its 73 year history. Even more alarming, in seeking to assuage their woes, not only are they turning to the US government for help, but have successfully enlisted the help of the Chinese Government.

What may not be obvious, but should have the reader seeing red is that as the result of the irresponsibility of US financial institutions, we’re witnessing a wide scale buy out of US assets and institutions. What’s more, who speaks for the countless duped masses who have lost homes, equity and security as the result of this mass irresponsibility? There can be only a partial answer in paraphrasing Herbert Hoover who said: “Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.” In this situation it is the financiers who tinker with the economy. But it is the working class that must work and suffer.

Martin C. Winer

Browsing Posts tagged MIT

Reconciling Biblical Numbers: Three Million at Sinai is making a Mountain out of a Molehill

Film Review of "Babel"

Glenn Beck – Inconvenient Debt

Perpetual Motion Claim — If It's a Hoax, It's a Good One

The Fedora and Sombrero may have more than a Passing Similarity

Toronto Sun Runs TTC Suicide Statistics: Courageous and Necessary

Arctic Melt – This Summer's Blockbuster – Category: Reality

The War of the Words: Are Heterosexual Monogamists the Patent Holders on `Marriage'?

Review: Star Trek XI: Star Trek (J. J. Abrams)

Why Men Don’t Like Chick Flicks

Notes: Lost in the Meritocracy – Walter Kirn

Toronto Plastic Bag Research Full of Holes

The State of the Union: As Seen on TV

Voce ‘e Notte (Voice in the Night) (Russo, De-Curtis, 1903)

Conspicuous Absences from Religious Texts — Wouldn't God Know That?

Interview: Reza Aslan on Iran — The Daily Show

We Don't Live in a Free Market Economy

Review: "Lost in the Meritocracy" — Walter Kirn (Doubleday)

Enough with the Crazy Kuzari Proof

The Subprime Mortgage Fiasco Explained

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