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Sunday, April 27, 2003
Batmobile Goes for $172,500 I missed the auto auction at the Klassix Auto Museum yesterday. Had to go to commencement ceremonies at ERAU, where I teach, and see some of my students graduate (which is always a thrill). While we were sitting in the sun, listening to a nice speech by Joe Martin of Fairchild Semiconductor (brief, throughtful, and to the point), Devoe Moore of the Tallahassee Antique Car Museum was busy picking up one of the Batmobiles from the 1960s Batman TV show for $172,500. Story here from the Daytona Beach News-Journal. Photo here. There's also a table of other television, film, and celebrity cars that sold currently on the front of the News-Journal's web site. The Stax Museum The Stax Museum of American Soul Music opened Friday in Memphis. Story here from the Commercial Appeal. Finally, Rufus Thomas, Sam and Dave, et al. get some due respect and appreciation. Let's all do the Funky Chicken! Saturday, April 26, 2003
Panda-Monium! Memphis gets more and more like the Simpson's mythological Springfield every day. First there was the Mud Island Monorail (did someone say "Monorail"?). Now, the Memphis Zoo has opened its Panda Exhibit. Let Them Be Squicked Revised, 7:00 p.m. EDT, 25 April 2003 to fix some pre-coffee weird constructs. One of the chapters in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is called "The Sanctimonious Animal." In it, he argues that the moral sense is just as much a part of our evolutionary design as are sight, vision, balance, etc. And just like each of our primary senses can be fooled by optical, auditory, vestibular illusions that yield the "wrong" output, so can the moral sense. Our moral sense licenses aggression against others as a way to prevent or punish immoral acts. That is fine when the act deemed immoral truly is immoral by any standard, such as rape and murder, and when the aggression is meted out fairly and serves as a deterent. The point of this chapter is that the human moral sense is not guaranteed to pick out those acts as the targets of its righteous indignation. The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of our imagination.... But it does mean that the moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic errors -- moral illusions, as it were -- just like our other faculties.He then goes on to present the following scenario, created by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and colleagues: Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide it would be very interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that; was it OK for them to make love?Most people, presented with the scene, immediately declare that what happened was wrong, then try to come up with justifications for their response. Since most of the usual objections -- inbreeding yielding damaged kids, emotional damage, community damage -- are already deflected by the premises of the scenario -- use of protection, closeness of the sibs, agreement to keep what happened secret -- people eventually just declare, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong." Pinker goes on: But for everyone else, such argumentation is beside the point. People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize the convictions after the fact. These convctions may have little to do with moral judgements that one could justify to others in terms of their effects on happiness and suffering. They arise instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions.Maybe this is where we are when it comes to homophobia and related irritations: There's a distribution of the degree to which people come into this world with a tendency or a capacity to be squicked by homosex, and some fraction -- maybe some substantial fraction -- of folks turn out to be the kinds of people who are immediately and seriously squicked by the idea of two men going at it sexually. Completely without any family or social or class or teevee input at all. Those people might, for all I know, have true and honest yucky feelings about gay sex, or about the men and women who have it (although my own gut feeling is that there's a gender difference regarding who the people having homo-sex are as well as who the people having the feelings about homo-sex are). Fine. Let them have their feelings of disgust and irritation. No one can stop them short of Saddam-style torture, which would be wrong. I'm surely not inside their skin to be able to say that their feelings are phoney, and I would rather believe an evolutionary-biological explanation for their feelings rather than "if only we organized society/families different" kinds of thought. But their feelings justify neither laws nor threats nor violence against lesbian or gay or bisexual or transexual people for being who they are or having consensual sex with other adults. Santorum may be right that respecting the right of gay adults to do what they want in their bedroom could, er, open the door (!) for all adults to do what they want in their bedroom. No big whoop. That doesn't mean that the state/community has to recognize bigamous or polyamorous arrangements if it recognizes same-sex coupling. That doesn't mean that the state/community has to respect forms of sexual behavior -- adult/child or interspecies -- that require mental gymnastics to manufacture a meaning of "consent". The bottom line to me is that Santorum's attitudes, like those of the Ocala, Florida, legislator involved in the end run at the state level attempting to overturn local anti-discrimination ordinances, are likely just based on being squicked, with the Bible, threat to families, threat to the traditional order, etc., brought in after the fact, as suggested in the research referenced above, for justification. End Run While everyone and his/her brother/sister is up in arms about Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum's remarks about how the government/community's ability to restrict any forms of adult chosen sex -- from incest to bestiality -- will crumble if the Supremes don't rule in favor of Texas when it comes to privacy in the bedroom, a certain Florida legislator, under the influence of lobbying from so-called conservative groups, tried to tack on an amendment that would have overturned local anti-discrimination legislation regarding gay people. Story here from 365gay.com (whatever that is). (Link from Lane.) Meanwhile back in the midwest.... Friday, April 25, 2003
"Ground Troops" Yesterday, I watched with a good deal of pride as one of my students get commissioned into the USMC. Today's LA Times (insert smarmy "registration required" comment here) has this story on what he might've faced if he'd've been commissioned last year. It's a story of life of five very different men in a humvee on the job in Iraq. Thursday, April 24, 2003
No Blogs in This House The Hartford Courant has told one of its writers to stop blogging. Mark Lane has the details here. Blech. Some obscure former reporter or publisher passes away, and it's all over the front of the paper as if everyone in the world is interested. But tell a reporter to shut up, and there's nothing there from the paper itself. Lane has this link to Editor and Publisher which has the gorey details. Addendum: Ken Layne is all over this, too, here. Incredible, isn't it? The guy writes with some confidence about blogs having the power to overturn dictators. He lives in a country with the most fantastic free-speech protections in the world. And a chickenshit tyrant from a small-town newspaper tells him to shut up or lose his job.Yow! Addendum II: The individual being silenced is Denis (one n) Horgan, and his blog is here. Al Qaeda Damaged ABC News ('A' for America, not for Australia) is reporting here that Al Qaeda may have been seriously damaged by recent anti-terrorism efforts. Seriously damaged to the extent of not being able to mount the kinds of attacks that result in massive death and destruction like those of 11 SEP 01. If true, that's a major accomplishment for the US government and its allies, and it should provoke reconsideration of what's necessary in the new current context (Iraq whipped, Al Qaeda broken) for maintaining or increasing security for US nationals at home or abroad. Sure there are and always will be new and remaining challenges, but does the Patriot Act II address any of them? Klassix to Auction Autos For Sale: One Batmobile. Grandpa Munster's Dragula. The General Lee. Ghostbusters' Ecto 1. All at auction this Saturday. Story here from the Daytona Beach News-Journal, with more info here. A Buttload of Prime Numbers As you likely remember, a prime number is a whole number that's divisible only by one and by itself. 3 = 3 x 1 is prime; 4 = 4 x 1 = 2 x 2 isn't. To see more prime numbers presented in a rather unique fashion, click here. (Link from Dave Barry's blog.) Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Ooops I was confused. Yes, I was forced to sing "Mockingbird Hill" when in grade school. (Fifth grade with Mrs. Tidwell, to be exact.) But that wasn't the Tennessee state song we had to learn. That was "My Tennessee": Oh, Tennessee, My Tennessee, Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Mockingbird Hill Tra-la-la, twiddle-dee-dee-dee It gives me a thrill To wake up in the morning Up on Mockingbird Hill. Those are the words to the Tennessee state song that I was taught in school, not that ridiculous Rocky Top nonsense introduced for reasons that escape sensible people. Cremation, Schemation You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals, so let's get thermally depolymerized like those Butterball turkeys in this article at the Discover Magazine website. What? You don't think it's better than Living Burial Reefs? Love, Sex, Murder, Defrocked Priests, a Police State, the Death Penalty, and Chihuahuas named 'Taco' and 'Tico' This article from Miami New Times has all of the above. And more. (Link from Hit and Run.) Thursday, April 17, 2003
More GITM You've likely already read a previously referenced article from the Philadelphia Inquirer about LBG service folk and how their non-military partners back home cope. Today's LA Times (registration still required -- imagine that) has another: This article by Patricia Ward Biederman is fairly comprehensive. It describes in some detail how the folks back home manage when their lover is stationed overseas. Monday, April 14, 2003
"I Do This for You and Mom" Today's LA Times (reg. req.) features this story on novelist Frank Schaeffer and his family. The last thing the Schaeffers expected was that their son would join the Marines. Since that happened, they've had to deal with anti-military snobbery from their peers and the educated elites, but they've also made human contact with a variety of working folk who have kids in the USMC. Wednesday, April 09, 2003
Whirled Peas New York Times website headline right now: "Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital". It's not over, but whatever it was, I think it had value, even with its very real costs of human life. I find that one step on my own way to visualizing world peace is to visualize a world without any Stalinist or quasi-Stalinist governments. That's followed by one without one-party Leninist governments, religious theocracies, family kleptocracies, or authoritarian dictatorships. What's the balance between someone's life today and the future lives of others tomorrow? I don't know, nor do I know the balance between someone's life today and someone else's freedom today. But I believe there is a balance, and it's not "never ever". Monday, April 07, 2003
American Life Heather Havrilesky -- aka Rabbit Blog, nee Filler -- takes on Madonna's supposedly controversial "American Life" video in this article on Salon (click through of irritating advertising required for "Day Pass" -- ugh). Her take: It's no more controversial than what you come with channel surfing, so why pull the plug on the US release? Sunday, April 06, 2003
Mark Lane, Baseball Fan The season just started, and Flablog's Mark Lane has already been to one Daytona Cubs game and is planning on going to another (blog entry here). I missed the opener, but maybe we'll make it Tuesday night, too. Aside: I'm not sure if it's fair to criticize Single-A play. You gets what you pays for. Jackie Robinson Stadium, where the Cubs play, is, along with Bethune-Cookman College, part of Daytona Beach's special history in black/white race relations in the USA. It's a neat little ballpark -- and it's a ballpark, not a stadium, no matter what they call it -- and the fact that it has some legitimate history makes it even more fun. Warning: Aluminum bleachers; bring cushion. David Bloom Jeff Soyer at Alphecca has these comments about the loss of NBC reporter David Bloom to an embolism while with the 3rd Infantry in Iraq. I've been disappointed with some of the war coverage, but I have to admit that Bloom's on the spot while on the move reporting was captivating. I had never found anything particularly special about his coverage of the White House, especially when compared to some who had previously filled that role. But his reporting from Iraq was genuine and important, if for nothing more than the sense it gave of life in an armored column. His network's web presence, MSNBC has the following about how they did it in their story about Bloom's death. Technology journals immediately picked up on the significance of Bloom's live, on-the-move reports, made possible in large part because of the foresight and ingenuity of Bloom himself. Military Divisions Explained Today's LA Times (registration required) has a good explainer piece on the historical, cultural, and equipment differences among the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, the USMC's 1st Marine Division, and the Army's 101st Airborne Division. It's a good start to understanding who's doing our fighting in Iraq. Now, has somebody explained similarly for the Brits? Saturday, April 05, 2003
On Excellence "I think that when excellence enters the world -- when an individual brings his excellence into the world -- it is like a deep love being born between two people for the first time. It goes into the world and adds to the sum total of good in it. It inspires, and is moving in a way that cannot always be explained or understood. It adds to." -- Peggy Noonan (here -- probably a perishable link) from her appreciation of the life and work of Michael Kelly. Friday, April 04, 2003
The Drinking Age In this post and motivated by considerations of the way the media referenced recently-rescued P.O.W. PFC Jessica Lynch, Virginia Postrel asks a sixty-four-dollar question: "... [I]f you're old enough to be a POW, shouldn't you be old enough to drink without a fake I.D.?" I'd add, if there is going to be a national age of majority, shouldn't it be the same for everything from drinking and smoking and buying porn to serving in the miltary to voting, and (2) shouldn't it be implemented without the tired old way of having the federal government hold state governments hostage by promise of witholding funds? Thursday, April 03, 2003
Quality What kind of guys are some of our current Marines? For one datum, read this. (Link via InstaPundit.) Wednesday, April 02, 2003
Climax, Then Denouement The current lead article at the New York Times concerns the start of the Baghdad phase of the war. It concludes with this paragraph: But, early this morning, the focus was on Baghdad and Iraq's response. The Americans are gradually moving closer to the capital. The dangers are increasing, and the denouement of the war also appears closer at hand.Excuse me, but isn't the climax supposed to precede the denouement? I mean, I guess it makes sense in some kind of literal interpretation of "moving closer", but in that sense the very passage of time means that the denouement has moved closer? Tuesday, April 01, 2003
Don't Say Hello, Don't Say Goodbye In the remote event that you read this excuse for a blog but don't read Shattered Buddha, in this entry, Mr. Dragonleg points all to this piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer (which looks suspiciously in layout like the Miami Herald) about the same-sex partners of gay and lesbian service personnel gone off to war. While we're on the subject of gay people in the military services, Andrew Sullivan recently featured this e-mail from a retired US Army officer on that same topic. |
