The Valley Advocate: The 10 Gallon Liberal

NRA: Violent Movies Bad, Except When They're Cool

Tue, 21 May 2013 8:41:00 AM MST

Goldurn violent movies keep turning people crazy. Only now, says the NRA, those violent movies are pretty cool. From their Top 10 list of "Coolest Gun Movies," there's this about The Godfather:

"While not rip-roaring with action, this film affected millions in many different ways with its cinematography, plot and underlying themes, such as how with determination anyone can become powerful, even if that power is of the criminal nature. Who has not dreamed of having the power and respect of Michael Corleone? That he built his empire through violence is only that much more alluring."

So there you have it: "alluring violence" and dreams of power. So there's that.

There's also weirdly wistful language about preparation for apocalypse throughout.

And here's some of the introductory copy:

"Some of these movies, though, have affected our next gun purchase or made us think about situations for which we should be prepared. Many of these movies also take us back to simpler times, when dreaming of saving the day got us through that oh-so boring class."

Exhibit A on the list? Red Dawn.

What I find disconcerting is the strength of paranoia about end times, gun grabs and invasions when such horrific and very real disasters as yesterday's Oklahoma tornado happen with relative frequency compared to the disasters that preppers are readying themselves for.

Maybe that's a key element: I can remember many an occasion in my Tornado Alley childhood that called for huddling in rows along interior hallways because of nearby tornados. It became old hat, but was sometimes terrifying, especially if you could hear a twister. We were all basically helpless, adults and children. Maybe that kind of helplessness contributes--in some cases--to the drive to possess the trappings of power, including guns?

Life imitates Science Fiction again

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:48:00 AM MST

Something to think about next time you weed the garden:

Plants use underground fungal networks to warn their neighbours of aphid attack, UK scientists have discovered. The study, published this week in Ecology Letters, is the first to reveal plants' ability to communicate underground in this way.

Makes things like Stanislaw Lem's sentient ocean seem more like science, less like fiction.

Where the Christmas decorations went

Wed, 08 May 2013 1:28:00 PM MST

Some weird stuff:

1) Google Earth offers some unwitting insight into William Gibson. Namely, the idea of experiencing/manipulating computer code as if it were an object. It never makes a whole lot of sense to read, in science fiction, of people manipulating code visually and virtually as if it were a stack of bricks. Granted, that kind of meta-programming trend is more common now, but still not akin to hammering together a tooldshed, as it sometimes appears in SF.

But Clement Valla has discovered, at the edges of what Google Earth can adequately/accurately render, sort of the reverse number. It seems that the "mistakes" he and others have found are reflections of how the database works and how it renders a virtual world. Though it's not, perhaps, a subject that will hold most folks' attention nearly so long as Valla's (he's got an entire essay exploring this in rather heady terms here), it's certainly intriguing to see the convergence of "real world" and computing he loves.

2) Under a temple complex in Mexico, robot explorers have uncovered a trove of faux-gold balls of various diameters, placed there and sealed off.

Say the archaeologists, "We literally have like no idea." (Paraphrasing, but barely.)

3) David Lynch really ought to clean up his movie sets before he departs.

Austen will Destroy You

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 1:15:00 PM MST

When I first was required to read Jane Austen, I thought, "Uh-oh. Chick lit." I was surprised and pleased to find that my preconceptions were not only ill-founded, but absurdly off-base. I have nothing but admiration for her deadly wit and humor, and now count her among my favorite 19th-century writers.

This awesome piece at the New York Times may seem like a discovery of the obvious to fans of Miss Austen. (with hat-tip to Leisure Guy for the catch.) It is, nonetheless, fascinating:

Modern game theory is generally dated to 1944, with the publication of von Neumann’s“Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” which imagined human interactions as a series of moves and countermoves aimed at maximizing “payoff.” Since then the discipline has thrived, often dominating political science, economics and biology departments with densely mathematical analyses of phenomena as diverse as nuclear brinkmanship, the fate of protest movements, stock trading and predator behavior.

But a century and a half earlier, Mr. Chwe argues, Austen was very deliberately trying to lay philosophical groundwork for a new theory of strategic action, sometimes charting territory that today’s theoreticians have themselves failed to reach.

Triumph of the Swill: Why Amanda Palmer's poem about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev needs a replacement

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 7:54:00 AM MST

I often try to temper talk about musicians or artists I don't personally care for with a healthy dose of understanding that making good art is quite hard to do. I often look back at my own earlier works of poetry and wonder how I thought they were worthy. It's part of the deal. And accurate description of a work of art is more useful than mere opinion anyhow.

But there's a problem at the core of Amanda Palmer's work, most especially her writing, that provides a bright dividing line, a love-or-hate point of departure. She, like too many folks, seems to believe that the heat of the moment of creation is itself the thing that matters; the resulting words are, apparently, to be honored for simply having made it to the page. Which means she writes dreadful poetry.

The poem that's currently giving Palmer far too much press is her recent piece of poorly realized (she claims to have written it in 9 minutes, thereby proving it's not had time to bake) verse that purports to be about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but is instead, according to her rundown of her life in the days and minutes leading to her act of writing, about the details of her life. The marathon bombing suspect is sort of in there, too, in monumentally sophomoric lines about things like an iPhone battery running out inside a boat. Here are a few lines:

you don’t know how to separate from this partnership to escape and finally breathe.

you don’t know how come people run their goddamn knees into the ground anyway.

you don’t know how to measure the value of the twenty dollar bill clutched in your hurting hand.

you don’t know how you walked into this trap so obliviously.

The trap in question, is apparently, the trap of having to talk about lines spawned in 9 minutes by a mediocre poet.

We have "controversy" and widespread nattering (and of course, that's where she wins--you can't talk about this without spreading her name around) about her daring to write something that maybe kind of sympathizes with Tsarnaev, itself no crime, if not a particularly well-advised choice at the moment. But what I find fascinating is that, as a performer, Palmer has reasonable talents in the musical department, but has seldom written a lyric or verse that's more advanced than what you'd find in a sophomore English class. Yet she plays the media/publicity machine like a mad organ grinder. Her brand of half-baked, feckless writing becomes part of the conversation, and that in a culture that boasts, quite literally, thousands of poets and musicians who could take on the same subject and make something remarkable of it.

I'm hoping one of them will do so, and move the diva of mediocrity aside for a while.

A Matter of Important Semantics

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 8:38:00 AM MST

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said yesterday regarding the Boston Marathon bombings:

1) "...we need to know everything we can about why this happened, what the motivation was, how it happened, and all of those issues are under investigation."

2) "And so the President commended the work that was done and underscored the need to continue gathering intelligence to answer the remaining questions about this terrorist attack going forward."

3) "[Dzhokhar Tsarnaev] will not be treated as an enemy combatant. We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice. Under U.S. law, United States citizens cannot be tried in military commissions."

Point 3 above is a bit of a relief; instead of going extra-judicial and foregoing the rule of law, the Obama administration is choosing to deal with this suspect as if he were any common criminal suspect. Doing so minimizes the perceived importance of such a person, and minimizes the outsized fear that such people seem to want to create. It is, in short, how states like Great Britain have taken the long view regarding IRA and Islamist terrorists.

That last word is an important one. "Terrorism" is a very specific thing, and our definition of it has slipped, as Carney proves. This matters tremendously, especially in an era when there are immediate calls that someone be denied their legal rights as a U.S. citizen because what they allegedly did was considered terrorism. It's neither appropriate nor necessary to label the Boston marathon bombings terrorism yet. They were a heinous and barbaric crime. They might have been terrorism. We'll find out.

Carney's use of the word is premature and legally inappropriate, though it will no doubt be adopted far and wide. We can't know if it's terrorism yet, because of statement number one above--the motivation is still "under investigation," and motivation is key to whether something is truly terrorism.

Here are Merriam-Webster's two (separate) entries on the word:

1)the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.

2) Systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

Both of these require the same thing: trying to coerce someone into something, usually something political. Even the less exact first entry requires "use of" terror, not merely the creation of it. Until and unless we know that this was the goal of these acts, we are calling these suspects terrorists based on imagination and supposition.

In watching Friday's coverage (on ABC, I believe), I heard "terrorism" defined as "an act that creates terror." That is simply not what the word means, and adopting that looser definition can only invite further abuses of our previously inalienable rights. A lot of things create terror--mass shootings for one--and they don't get called terrorism. Yet by this addled definition, they necessarily are.

Tsarnaev may well have committed an act of terrorism. He will almost certainly be convicted of multiple crimes. The system will work just fine, even if we avoid the collective hyperventilation of prematurely inflating his acts to the level of terrorism.

UPDATE: Prelilminary word on motivation:

Two U.S. officials say preliminary evidence from an interrogation suggests the suspects in the Boston Marathon attack were motivated by their religious views but were apparently not tied to any Islamic terrorist groups.

So we're closer to meeting the actual definition; perhaps we'll soon hear what they hoped to accomplish.

A Tough Week Gets Worse

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 9:29:00 AM MST

Meanwhile, in Congress, expanded background checks for gun ownership, supported by an overwhelming majority of even NRA members, are voted down. Gabby Giffords says this:

They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.

They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.

This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.

But it gets worse! After that, another bill came up:

The National Rifle Association-backed measure, brought by Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) as an amendment to gun legislation, would have made a concealed carry permit in one state valid in other states. In other words, if it passed, California would be forced to let someone carry a concealed weapon in public if they were permitted to do so, say, by the state of Kansas.

The bill failed as it was subject to a filibuster-proof 60 vote threshold, like all amendments. But thirteen Democrats joined all but one Republican (Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk) in voting for it. It received more votes than background check legislation, which would have modestly tightened the nation’s gun laws and managed to find 55 supporters.

Bad all over

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 1:25:00 PM MST

Quite the bodycount of innocents killed in the past few days around the world, including in our own horrible events. Here's the beginning of the list:

SYRIA

Syrian warplanes swooped over the quiet town of Saraqeb in the country’s north Saturday, dropping bombs on a residential district. The blasts shattered storefronts, set cars ablaze and sent huge plumes of smoke into the sky. Rubble and twisted metal littered the street after the airstrikes, which left 20 dead. Harrowing images like those have become routine for those watching the Syrian civil war unfold. Activists say an average of 120 people get killed daily in violence and clashes across the country.

‘‘In Syria, it’s not Boston every day, but many times per day,’’ posted Jean Pierre Duthion, a French expatriate in Damascus who has Tweeted the war.

IRAQ

A bloody assault across Iraq began around an hour after sunrise Monday in the western city of Fallujah when a suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed car into a police checkpoint. Over the next several hours, attackers would detonate more than 20 sets of explosives, most of them car bombs. By the time it was all over — shortly before the Boston bombs struck — 55 people were dead and well over 200 were wounded. No one has claimed responsibility, but the highly coordinated attack bore the hallmarks of a resurgent al-Qaida in Iraq and appeared aimed at sowing fear days before the first elections since U.S. troops withdrew.

Ali al-Moussawi, a spokesman for Iraq’s prime minister, condemned the Boston attacks and said Iraq ‘‘calls on the world to unite and fight terrorism that targets innocents everywhere.’’

NOTE: Overzealous spam removal by web admin wiped out legit commentary by "Ben" previously below. So "Ben," apologies--please feel free to repost.

Is authorship about to pay even less?

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 1:26:00 PM MST

Last November, I wrote about a thorny Supreme Court case, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons. In short, it revolves around the right to import copyrighted works intended for overseas use and resell them. Kirtsaeng, a Thai student who made a load of cash reselling textbooks produced for the Thai market, won the day.

In some respects, this is a good thing. You no longer need worry about reselling a CD you buy while on vacation outside our borders, something which would have been prohibited had Wiley & Sons won. This is a victory for used record shops, used book stores and eBay.

But in a very interesting piece, president of the Authors' Guild Scott Turow argues that this is another major blow in the slow pummeling of American authors--it basically means that cheaper imports could not only undercut authors' royalties in regular sales, but take authors entirely out of the equation. The sales would be considered secondhand, and the authors need not receive a penny.

This is sticky stuff, and pretty sobering for anyone who's trying to get a book published. Existing laws that stretch to address the emerging models of book sales really need to evolve or get replaced, and fast.

Some excerpts from Turow:

The value of copyrights is being quickly depreciated, a crisis that hits hardest not best-selling authors like me, who have benefited from most of the recent changes in bookselling, but new and so-called midlist writers.

Take e-books. They are much less expensive for publishers to produce: there are no printing, warehousing or transportation costs, and unlike physical books, there is no risk that the retailer will return the book for full credit.

But instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. That is roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty.
...
An even more nightmarish version of the same problem emerged last month with the news that Amazon had a patent to resell e-books. Such a scheme will likely be ruled illegal. But if it is not, sales of new e-books will nose-dive, because an e-book, unlike a paper book, suffers no wear with each reading. Why would anyone ever buy a new book again?

Hyperbole, or rapidly approaching nightmare?

Thatcher Oof

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:48:00 AM MST

When I heard that the Iron Lady had left us, I wondered, "What do the Oak Ridge Boys think about this?"

They quickly obliged:

From: Webster PR

To: jheflin@valleyadvocate.com

Subject: The Oak Ridge Boys comment on the passing of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

Closure, at last. (Their statement was so wispy, so utterly devoid of interesting content, that I won't bother. They apparently attended the same dinner once.)

Others had something of substance to say. This resulted in someone largely known as a relatively unfunny clown proving that he is a wickedly talented wordsmith.

Witness the unexpectedly remarkable power of Russell Brand:

"The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour.

And:

...if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

Last comes a musician whose political opinion ought to carry more weight than that of the Oak Ridge Boys, Billy, Bragg, for the win:

From Billy Bragg, Calgary, AB, Canada, on the death of Margaret Thatcher:

This is not a time for celebration. The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today. Of why ordinary working people are no longer able to earn enough from one job to support a family; of why there is a shortage of decent affordable housing; of why domestic growth is driven by credit, not by real incomes; of why tax-payers are forced to top up wages; of why a spiteful government seeks to penalise the poor for having an extra bedroom; of why Rupert Murdoch became so powerful; of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society.

Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don't celebrate - organise!