No No No

A spider was just crawling across my bed. It tried to hide in my computer, probably seeking superpowers. I kept that from happening, but I think the thing is still alive.

APPARENTLY BUGS ARE ON MY BED CONSTANTLY.

Information Battlespace IV: Department of This Thing Looks Like That Thing

Uh oh. Behold the Internet (or, more precisely, "the hierarchical structure of the Internet, based on the connections between individual nodes (such as service providers)"):

Cf. Hal (or, more precisely, "Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer") 9000:

Scared yet? You should be. "At the center of the Internet are about 80 core nodes through which most traffic flows. Remove the core, and 70 percent of the other nodes are still able to function through peer-to-peer connections."

See also terrorism, the brain, and biology in general. Remember that New Yorker article about how hemispherectomies aren't a big deal? Apparently nothing can be damaged ever.

Barely Legal; or, Not a Good Rule for the Club

If a bond does not specifically state that it is junior, you can assume that it is senior.

—Franklin Allen, Stewart C. Myers, and Richard A. Brealey, Principles of Corporate Finance, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006), 674, n. 16.

Information Battlespace III: Cheney vs. the Archives

Or, more precisely, Cheney vs. the Information Security Oversight Office ("Learn why Democracy Starts Here"), a 25-person subunit of the National Archives that handles the handling of classified documents. Cheney and his legal puppet-master, David Addington, don't think they have to submit to ISOO checkups because the executive order delineating the jurisdiction of the sad little mini-bureau applies only to executive-branch entities -- but ha!, they craftily contend, the veep's office is both executive and legislative (presidency of the senate, dig?). Cute, really.

But don't believe for a second that this dispute is playing out in the information quibble- or skirmishspace. Oh no: it's battlespace for sure. After "block[ing] [in 2004] an on-site inspection by [ISOO] that was routinely carried out across the government to check whether documents were being properly labeled and safely stored," Cheney & co. tried to get rid of the process of appealing interagency tussles to the attorney general (a process ISOO was attempting to use to break down the vice-president's informational battledoor) and tried to get rid of Information Security Oversight altogether. Didn't work out, though.

A lot of the time I think they engage in these shenanigans less to conceal anything in particular and more just for the hell of it. It doesn't seem like they had a lot to lose by submitting to the Archives; they just didn't feel like it. They weren't about to fall for the spell of false necessity; there was no non-human reality compelling them to do anything.

Maybe She Just Took the Word "Sitcom" Too Seriously?

Paul Tough's article "The Class-Consciousness Raiser" from last week's Times Magazine is a mildly interesting profile of a woman (kinda funnily) named Ruby Payne who teaches teachers how to get along with lower-class students. Their culture is different, dig? Apparently, "Foucauldian" types (this word is actually deployed) hate her. Quack quack. Now, I think her basic idea is perfectly meritorious, but the article does raise some doubts. First, she believes, as so many people now bewilderingly seem to do, in the Force:

Then in 1993, after moving to Texas, Payne read a book that had a profound effect on her: ''Creating Money,'' a New Age-infused guide to ''the spiritual laws of money.'' It's an odd book, ostensibly dictated to the authors by two ''spirit guides'' named Orin and DaBen. But Payne was inspired. ''The book said, Make a list of what you want in your life and ask the universe to bring it to you,'' she told me. ''So I did. I wrote: 'I want a life without financial constraints. I want a life without institutional constraints. And I want to make a difference with children.' And it happened!''

Payne's ideas about class differences in perceptions of "everything from time to love to money to language" also sound a bit wonky:

In a few words, Payne explains how each class sees each concept. Humor in poverty? About people and sex. In the middle class? About situations. In wealth? About social faux pas.

Maybe this is just my middle-class sensibility talking, but don't the "situations" that I admittedly find so hilarious subsume people, sex, and even -- I hope I'm not trespassing on anyone's castle here -- social faux pas?

And, despite the fact that my mind is too scattered now to really put this point convincingly, I think there's something very telling and tragic about the conjunction of, on the one hand, Payne's noble New Age (but also modernist) wish to live "a life without institutional constraints" and, on the other hand, her preaching of the importance of lower-class adoption of upper- and middle-class personal stylings (what she calls "the hidden rules"). She's too smart and too awake to the transcendent qualities of the human spirit (yes I went there) to think that situations are really more funny than people or sex, or that poor culture is really inferior to rich culture; but the facts of institutional constraint dictate, albeit unjustly and arbitrarily, that submission is the price to be paid for membership in the elite, with all the benefits that brings. I'm sure she's right about the situation (giggle -- sorry, can't help it, was raised that way) as it stands -- you can't get a job without possessing pointless, irrelevant social grace X or Z -- but what sticks in my craw about this kind of analysis (which, if I remember correctly, David Foster Wallace uses at some point to justify foisting his version of grammatical purism onto recalcitrant black college students) is how quickly the injustice and arbitrariness fall out of the picture. It's like: shrug. Wink!

Same thing: Mrs. Keyhole received a comment on her thesis, from a respected professor of English, saying something to the effect of "I see that you don't obey the no-split-infitive rule. While some people do reject its authority, some don't, so you may be distracting your readers." This really got me (though not Mrs. Keyhole, bless her heart) angry: here this professor was, signalling her awareness of the idiocy and baselessness of the "rule" only to reassert its power! And what -- for the sake of the fogies and their all-too-rockable boat? Doesn't this line of argument suggest that we should never change anything, since someone somewhere might not be ready for the shock? Isn't this exactly the kind of limp gradualist whining that Martin Luther King, Jr., attacked in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" ("the appalling silence of the good people" who think that time on its own will wash away everything bad)?

Payne, in her oscillation between the vain hope for a life without institutional constraints and the total resignation to those constraints (regarded as lacking justification yet weirdly, robustly resisting change), is a miniature portrait of life without Unger. Look, people: we can never be totally free of institutional constraints, but we can be more free than we are now. Can't we?

Actually, Marx Is Jealous

Stretched out and face down on my bed with my laptop before me, perusing a capsule description of the Santa Fe Institute's "zero-intelligence method" of analyzing financial markets (sounds kinda like pointless topology), I saw in the periphery of my perceptual world a nasty little spider. Without thinking much, I picked up a collection of Marx's later political writings and bashed the critter to death (I hope). I was reminded of a couplet from the Coup song "Not Yet Free," from the album Kill My Landlord: "Capitalism is like a spider / The web is getting tighter..."

This arthopod encounter came hot on the heels of another incident, in which I slew a moth that had settled upside-down on my ceiling with the mighty heft of the (two-volume, slipcase-enclosed) Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Interpretation is left as an exercise for the reader.

There should be a whole archive of such literary collisions. Consider: as Francis Wheen's delightful Karl Marx: A Life informs us (on p. 109), though "[Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon [the socialist/anarchist] made no public riposte to [Marx's] The Poverty of Philosophy [which was in part a polemical attack on Proudhon]...his own copy has furious marginal scribbles on almost every page -- 'Absurd', 'A lie', 'Prattle', 'Plagiarism', 'Brazen slander' and 'Actually, Marx is jealous'. An entry in one of his notebooks describes Marx as 'the tapeworm of socialism'." If we know that Proudhon called Marx a plagiarist and a tapeworm in his private writings, why can't we figure out what tomes the Frenchman used to kill real worms? Or other creeping things. I'm not picky. I'm sure the CSI creative team could crank out at least an episode or two riffing on this premise. "The copy of The Holy Family, or, Critique of Critical Criticism left at the crime scene doesn't have any fingerprints on it, but I did find this strange brown spot. It's probably nothing, but..." "Enhance! Enhance!" "Whoa! Looks like DNA from a false stag beetle, chief. But those are found only in California!" And the hunt is (would be) on.

(The worst thing about all this is that I now have to live the rest of my life with the absolute certainty that bugs do sometimes end up on my bed. I've long suffered from the (not uncommon, I don't think) fear that, when I sleep, bugs crawl all over my face; I've managed to carry on largely on the basis of the irrational but never (until now) disproven belief that my fear was totally unfounded.)

(In the past few minutes alone, I've been greatly startled by things that turned out to be 1) my comforter (ironically) and 2) my headphones. Help.)

Christopher Hitchens Never Doesn't Talk about Blowjobs

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Probably the Cause of a Lot of Embarrassing Typos

Wikipedia:

Herpetology...is the branch of zoology concerned with the study of reptiles and amphibians.

Foucault:

We might imagine a sort of systematic description -- I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -- that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and 'reading' (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology.

Say what you will about Foucault's "systematic description" of "different spaces," but at least it's not pointless:

In mathematics, pointless topology (also called point-free or pointfree topology) is an approach to topology which avoids the mentioning of points.

Cf. the tetragrammaton and the via negativa. Who knew math was so religious?

A Technique

It's not always easy being a white rap fan who wants -- yes -- to sing along. There is the issue of "the N word." Self-censorship can seem prissy and ostentatious -- look at me not being offensive -- but the obvious alternative is scarcely any better -- look at me defying the dictates of political correctness!

The solution? Whenever you encounter "the N word," substitute "blogger." Con: the rhyme scheme will often suffer. Pro: it will never not be hilarious. You can probably make a lot of friends!

Things That Are Better than Other Things

1. "Seven" > CAPM, says Tyler Cowen:

   For risky equity assets in the United States, my preferred economic model is simple. Expected return equals seven. That is my model, "Seven."

   Plus of course an random or error term. How's that for Occam's Razor?

2. Robotic cats > plush cats, say researchers:

   "We used the plush cat and a robotic cat and found that a robotic cat was more self-engaging and triggered positive emotions and interest more than the plush cat," Alexander Libin told ABC News. ... Renata Bushko, chair of the Future of Technology Institute where the researchers presented their work, said that the concept could be extended. "Robocats will be very useful in disease management..."

3. "[T]he more homely, but more intelligible, maxims of distributive justice among the Saxons" > "the narrow rules and fanciful niceties of metaphysical and Norman jurisprudence," says William Blackstone (not exactly topical but (to quote Lil Wayne) "I just thought that I should mention it").

4. Putin > all Russian leaders in recent memory, says Perry Anderson (kinda):

   Part of his chilly magnetism is cultural. He is widely admired for his command of the language. Here, too, contrast is everything. Lenin was the last ruler of the country who could speak an educated Russian. Stalin’s Georgian accent was so thick he rarely risked speaking in public. Khrushchev’s vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin’s slurred diction the better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of expressing himself with clarity, accuracy and fluency, in a more or less correct idiom, comes as music to many Russians.

5. Minds > governments, says Lil Wayne:

   Lil Wayne has been attending the University of Houston in Houston, Texas since early 2005, where he began studying political science. According to the Cash Money Records website, Wayne has since switched his major to psychology.

The Force

Oliver Sacks, writing about an artist who lost the ability to see in color after a car accident, says that

At first he was intensely, furiously conscious of what he had lost ... He would glare at an orange in a state of rage, trying to force it to resume its true color.

Scientology turns this kind of wishful thinking into a religious experience. Some of the Church's low-level Training Routines, or TRs, involve the use of "Tone 40 Intention (intention without reservation or limit)," which is both a state of the will and a mode of speaking. The guidelines for "TR 8: Tone 40 on Objects" are as follows:

Trying to make the ashtray STAND UP. Student gives Tone 40 command "STAND UP!". Tone 40 acknowledges with "THANK YOU!". "SIT DOWN!". "THANK YOU!."

Repeat until cognition (about an hour).

As a disillusioned ex-Scientologist put it,

By this point, I was so deluded by the concept of Tone 40 that the fact that I was LIFTING IT WITH MY HANDS was irrelevant. I gave the command, the ashtray stood up. After doing this for half an hour, I felt like God, lifting the ashtray by sheer intention. My Thetan's (Scieno-babble for "spirit") Intention was using my arms and hands, though that was only for convenience, since with sufficient intent they were not necessary.

This is probably what happens when you start to worry about Free Will too much. Even rappers fall into this trap:

• Jay-Z: "...he who does not feel me / Is not real to me. Therefore, he doesn't exist. / So poof: vamoose, son of a bitch" ("Izzo (H.O.V.A.)," The Blueprint (2001)).
• Tony Yayo, in an interview somewhere: "I don't believe in Cam'ron. I don't believe in Jim Jones. I don't believe in Baby. I don't believe in Lil Wayne. I don't believe in Game. I don't believe in Fat Joe."

On the other hand, the loss of free will is pretty rough too. It only just occurred to me that Jack Kirby's Fourth World stories are pretty clearly one big allegory for the Cold War: Apokolips is the evil empire, clanging with machinery, filthy with smoke, sadists and spies around every corner, Darkseid the dictator presiding over it all. And do remember what Darkseid is always looking for: the Anti-Life Equation, which has long been one of my favorite comic-book concepts (alongside the Ultimate Nullifier, if only for the sake of the name). As Wikipedia explains, "Various comics have defined the equation in different ways, but a common interpretation seems to be that the equation is a mathematical proof of the futility of living." Armed with the Equation -- portions of which, in an odd bit of cryptic symbolism, are scattered throughout diverse individual minds -- one can "dominate the will of all sentient and sapient races." And because it eliminates free will in the target, the Anti-Life Equation also renders wanton violence permissible, since, according to some perverse moral calculus, beings without freedom can be freely abused. Thus the nefarious Glorious Godfrey (don't ask) dubs the ALE "the cosmic hunting license." Of course, you'd have to have a pretty strange configuration of qualms and non-qualms to think it was okay to eliminate freedom from the universe but not okay to kick a puppy, but why quibble ?

(As it turns out, the Equation has been used to prove empirically that, at least within the moral superstructure of the DC Universe, Benthamite utilitarianism and "libertarian paternalism" are both unambiguously wrong. It's never okay to override individual choice in the name of the greater good: when Darkseid's rebellious superhero son Orion "learned the Equation, and tried to use it to make people happy and good, ... [he] realised that the suppression of free will is always a bad thing." The end.)

Scrawl This All Over Me

It's Still a Little Early to Call This One

4 June 2007, BBC News:

...[T]op Iranian security official Ali Larijani described the [U.S.'s] planned deployment [of an anti-ballistic missile system in eastern Europe, purportedly aimed at "rogue states"] as the "joke of the year", adding that Iranian missiles were not capable of reaching Europe.

27 May 2007, The Financial Express (Bangladesh):

Awami League (AL) presidium member Suranjit Sengupta Saturday laughed off Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) Chairperson Khaleda Zia's dismissal of dynasty in her party as the 'joke of the year', reports bdnews24.com.

The former prime minister Friday said she had joined politics on merit and ruled out a dynastic bulwark in her BNP.

I Don't Know. I Just Don't Know.

No, My Lip Gloss Is Poppin'

1. Today, under the influence of the incomparable ideelz, I came across Lil Mama's song "Lip Gloss" for the first time. I'm afraid I can't even pretend to think this is okay. Especially:

   Cherry, vanilla: flavors is a virtue
   They loving lip gloss universal'!

   No, no, no. It's not just brainless; it's sloppy and poorly delivered. I usually celebrate songs that cover territory outside the predictable, circumscribed realm of lovin' and bein' very sad or very happy, but you don't get credit for doing a song about lip gloss if all you can say about it is that some varieties of it are good. I was going to say that this song represents a weird return to the "Parents Just Don't Understand" paradigm -- rap is about fun/funny things we kids can all relate to, not shooting some people and selling drugs to some people (usually (?) different people) -- but at least "Parents Just Don't Understand" didn't restate the same thesis for like infinity minutes. WHO COULD WANT TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD

2. On the other hand, I have learned that "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield is neither a new nor a bad song. It is, in fact, both a couple of years old and good (? (I have a lot of questions lately)). I've probably caught bits of it before, but I was thunderstruck when I heard it yesterday at the local pizza shack -- so thunderstruck that I found myself scribbling down a snatch of the lyrics and a brief annotation in the top margin of a page of the New York Times Magazine containing the middle of an article about economic inequality.

   'feel the rain on yr skin / no one else can feel it for you'
   little girls singing along

   I was pretty irked by these tartlets at the time, but a quick download proved how wrong I was. It reads like a goddamn Cliffs Notes version of Unger:

   I am unwritten, can't read my mind; I'm undefined...

   I break tradition
   Sometimes my tries
   Are outside the lines
   We've been conditioned
   To not make mistakes
   But I can't live that way!...

   Release your inhibitions
   Feel the rain on your skin
   No one else can feel it for you
   Only you can let it in
   No one else, no one else
   Can speak the words on your lips
   Drench yourself in words unspoken [okay, this line is dodgy]
   Live your life with arms wide open
   Today is when your book begins

   Would it be TMI to say that I feel weirdly, genuinely inspired by these schmaltzy pop lyrics, no matter how obscenely Bedingfield oversells them with her I Can't Believe It's Not Butter voice and, god help us, some kind of choir at the end? Tough cookies: this is Keyhole's blog, li'l mama. Did you know that Bedingfield was in a family Christian rock group when she was a kid, and that it was called "the DNA Algorithm"?!

3. Via Defamer, an only somewhat decontexualized quote from Michael Bay, giving the straight dope to the Republic of Korea:

   There definitely will be a massive alien robot war in the future.

   Unfortunately, I haven't found any commentary from the Democratic People's Republic up north, where one instead sees all the traditional, run-of-the-mill headlines: "Bush Team's Sophism Blasted" (they are very concerned with sophism), "Construction of Mushroom Production Centers Brisk under Way" ("The newly-built mushroom farm in Sinuiju City is equipped with all necessary facilities including ozonizer and autoclave"), and "S. Korean Military Warmongers Warned Not to Run Riot" (hey, military warmongers: you better not run riot!).

   The previous day's news was similarly ho-hum: in the article "Poem Recital on Pochonbo Battle Anniversary," the writers couldn't help but yawn their way through a typical work of North Korean piety:

   Recited then was the lyric "Lineage" to the effect that the revolutionary tradition established in the flames of the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle is the historic root of the Korean revolution and it gives steadfast continuity to it. [Yadda yadda yadda.]

   A human-interest piece on the Pyongyang Circus was fun (did you know that the Pyongyang Circus "won a gold prize in the 9th International Modern Jugglery Festival held in Karlovy Vary of then Czechoslovakia in April 1972"? and that its "hundreds of fine acrobatics" include "animal, magic, synchronized and ice feats," including both "Aerial Iron Bar Flight" and "Flying Girls"?), but by the millionth time that the Korean Central News Agency insists of referring to its creative class as "artistes" instead of artists (e.g. "dignified People's Artistes, Merited Artistes, highest skill possessors and talented acrobats"), it stops being enjoyable. (j/k) But you have to appreciate the clarity and sentiment of this headline:

   KCNA Urges U.S. to Stop Acting Fool

   The article describes the U.S. as "a centre of plot-breeding, fraud and swindle" whose claims would normally be of no interest, were it not for the possibility that the allegations of "Lefkowitz [no first name given], special envoy of the U.S. State Department for human rights issue of north Korea" might be taken seriously; alas, "there is the need to let the world community know clearly about the U.S. sinister aim lurking behind the nonsensical malarkey let loose by this guy in view of its crafty and serious nature. ... [W]hat he uttered is no more than a foolish ploy to convince others that he is not useless. ... The U.S. is the country of beasts which regards man-hunting as pleasure."

4. I recently read an old (1974) article from the Journal of Law and Economics by Ronald Coase: "The Lighthouse in Economics." It's apparently somewhat famous, but it's pretty goofy and trivial all the same: Coase debunks the lighthouse as an example of a public good, showing how, as a matter of historical fact, many of the lighthouses built in England were indeed the products of private enterprises operating under the aegis of the profit motive. Causing a sea change in the conceptualization of lighthouses by means of a carefully researched but fundamentally boring essay: I can't tell if it's during my more or my less ambitious moments that I dream of accomplishing something similar.

5. O'Reilly Media, which publishes all the nerds' favorite computer books, has a beautiful mission statement of sorts:

   O'Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

   They'll probably also sponsor the first and only time traveler's convention.

6. Via Language Log, it turns out that condescending multiculturalism may get accused terrorist Jose Padilla killed:

   Defense lawyers also repeatedly jousted with FBI translators over how they converted the intercepted calls into English, suggesting that they used the most sinister language possible. They also noticed that sometimes they translated the Arabic "Allah" as "God" in English and other times left it in the Arabic form.

   "You have to understand, it's my personal choice. I chose to use Allah. I think it's a beautiful word," said FBI linguist Joyce Kandalaft. "Allah does not have a negative connotation in this sense."

   I kanda laft when I first read that.

   But seriously, folks: how many times have we heard some grinning old coot ask a non-white somebody, often a child, what their name is -- and respond, upon receiving some crazy gallimaufry of foreign phonemes as an answer, "Why, that's a beautiful name!"? "Beautiful" here almost always means "vowel-containing." Why do people say this? It is worse (more annoying) than the worst (most annoying) racism. Didn't Edward Said die for these sins?

7. While we're on the topic, I have a difficult time believing this, from Cory Doctorow:

   I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank--to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing.

   I'll leave the musings on prosopagnosia and Levinas (check out his little Western Philosophy wiki-trading card on the right: "Notable ideas: 'the Other', 'the Face'") to the experts. But I will note in passing that Doctorow should not have been allowed this riff:

   Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you."

   Um. "The camera recorded you" is most definitely not in the passive voice. Also, the passive voice isn't a "voice" in the way he's implying; you can't "do" it during an open-mic comedy event. Well, maybe...

8. Did you know that "the bear cub is born as a shapeless and eyeless lump of flesh, which the mother bear shapes into its proper form by licking it"? Well, according to various medieval bestiaries, it's true:

   

   For bonus points, consider the financial implications of the following: "Bears fight bulls by holding their horns and attacking their sensitive noses."

9. There will be more.

Symbolism?

I just bled all over a pad of paper that I got from the Ritz-Carlton in New York.