Robot Invasion Friday

Instead of actual blogging, here is an awesome “robots destroying the Earth” video made by a guy who I have never heard of but is sure to be famous soon. Enjoy! Hat tip: Will.

Who pays?

I’ve been carping about carbon offsets for what seems like years here at Toxic Culture, and was happy to see that “green tourism company” Responsible Travel has canceled its carbon offsets program for flights. Turns out that offsets don’t work to actually offset emissions (again we are told the awful story of Coldplay’s “carbon neutral tour” and its wake of thousands of dead mango trees) and may actually encourage people to travel more. We were particularly appalled to learn that one London-Los Angeles flight produces more CO2 per person than is produced by the average British commuter in a year.

But nevermind the commuters – turns out that if you added up all road and air travel emissions in the US for a year, that would still be exceeded by the carbon emissions from Indonesia’s peatlands. Those emissions, in turn, are the same as the combined emissions of Germany, Britain and Canada.  That’s right – Indonesian peatlands. Check out this article from the Washington Post on the subject. What struck me, along with the massiveness of their total emissions, was the way the story illustrated the sticky economics of trying to reduce global warming. There’s the Indonesian worker who can make twice in a day burning peat than he can make putting out fires; the villagers who oppose logging and palm oil plants but are afraid they will lose their jobs if they act up; the failure of Kyoto’s “global carbon market” to do anything about the problem – it’s a catastrophe, and all the yogurt cartons you piously recycle (if you live in a city where recycling is even available) will never even come close to offsetting even .00000000000001% of the emissions from the burning peatlands.

Not depressed enough yet? Comes now more terrible-but-unsurprising news from the United Nations Population Fund. Disproportionately, the impacts (4 to 6 degrees centigrade warmer by 2100) of global warming are and will fall on poor women in the majority world. They are more actively involved in food production than men and since they are usually tied to families, they are less likely to be able to migrate (as will become increasingly necessary in the New Climate).

The market’s at work in these circumstances for sure. Those who can afford it buy their way out of the psychological effects of guilt, displacing responsibility on those who can’t ante quite as much. Purchasing power is a beautiful thing. Pass the palm oil!

Shoes and Kicks: The Lacing of the Consumer

Shoes: They slide on, laces or velcro, hugging the parts of your body the very furthest away from your complex sensory organs. Your feet? If they work properly, you may not think about them at all, other than an occasional check to make sure that the nails are trimmed and that no odorous goo is accumulating in the weathered crevices.

Yet, there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about their feet. And I don’t mean marathon runners or those who fret about “toe cleavage.” And there are also a lot of people who think about your feet, even if you don’t have plantar fasciitis.

I have written before about Nike’s hilarious and absurd “Indian shoes” and how corporations can engage in eugenic-style biological determinism in order to create ethnic consumer identities. Fun stuff. But the corporate interest in creating customers is pretty obvious. What is also interesting is how people have taken shoes to become flourishes associated with their own identities. They don’t need a shoe-selling corporation to cause them to think about shoes. They just do it. Shoes. Uh Muh Gaw.

Now, I don’t know enough about Carrie Bradshaw and women’s fashion to talk about the python heeled Proenza Schouler. But I did read this super depressing piece in the Village Voice about the “Mayor of Sneakerdom.” It’s about a grown man who has 1,400 pairs of sneakers and the culture that surrounds the shoe collecting scene. People wait in lines for limited edition new shoes that are coming out. They trade them and sell them. They seal them in bags and don’t wear them. The “Mayor” estimates that his shoe collection is worth $300,000.

This article was not a shock to me. I have some familiarity with this scene by virtue of my time hanging out around Hip-Hop culture. The range of shoe fetishists there goes from actually impressive artistic creativity on the part of those who produce custom-made sneakers to mere industry whoring. And again, this is nothing new. There’s a famous story about the time that a shoe company exec saw Run DMC in concert and saw thousands of kids holding their shoes aloft during a performance of “My Adidas.” The link between Hip-Hop and commercialism was altered forever with Run DMC’s $1.5 million deal with Adidas in 1986, and the war between art and commerce has been welded to the soul of  Hip-Hop ever since.

But it’s still a little weird since the main things I want to know about shoes is, “Were they made in a sweatshop?” and “How much computing power do they have?“

I own a pair of the Adbuster Black Spots, but leafing through the pages of the numerous “shoe blogs” that are out there makes me want to take the advice of this gentleman (and this one) and just go barefoot.

The New V: Birther Sci-Fi

When I was growing up, I loved everything about the NBC mini-series V. I loved that Marc Singer was in it because The Beastmaster was awesome (to elementary school aged me). And the special effects seemed awesome at the time. The lasers were especially great. And the music ruled. The fact that it was in short supply as a TV product, first a mini series and then another mini-series and then a short-lived series, made it even more awesome. This was the age before every TV show was always already online and in DVD boxed set form. And it was about Nazis. And you didn’t have to be some kind of fancy English major to appreciate that fact. There was an actual Holocaust survivor in the series pointing out how the aliens were like the Nazis. I think it was my first experience understanding that you could refer to historical events with a cool fictional story about aliens.

Lots of people feel this way. Almost an entire generation of sci-fi nerds my age grew up lusting after that show. So of course, like everything else anyone even vaguely fondly remembers from earlier decades of TV and movies, it must be remade. And it has been. ABC has decided to take control of the “V franchise.” So? We watched.

What has been produced is the first work of science fiction to incorporate the worldview of Orly Taitz and the anti-Obama “birther” and teabag movement. Seriously. We were not the only people who had this reaction. From Slate:

More than a few journalists and bloggers have remarked that it’s possible to read V as an allegory hostile to President Obama and sympathetic with the birthers and other nutcases who believe him to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The charismatic Visitors load up their “bandwagon” by “spreading hope.” In using their sophisticated iguana technology to provide free medical services, they promise “universal health care.” Indeed, if the show is to have the symbolic import that we expect from a science-fiction story, this is the only possible way to read V as a coherent text. The only problem with this analysis lies in its generous presupposition that the text is, in fact, coherent.

The Washington Post tried to get V’s writers to cop to the political angle on the series, to little avail. Salon nodded to this angle but got more traction jabbing at the bad execution of the “resistance” subplot.

We were pretty shocked by what we saw when we finally sat down to see the first two episodes. Outsiders have taken over. They are not from Kenya. They are not Muslims. But you think of those things. They come with the promise of Hope and Unity. They make friends and influence people who are blind to their true motives. They get in through the youth. Those youth! Because there’s nothing more that rebellious motorcycle-riding adolescent boys like better than the promise of a spiffy uniform. Especially if the uniform is given to them by a hot emaciated alien chick.

There is actually a line in one of the first two episodes about how the Visitors have begun to heal humans, leading to a scene where a journalist confronts the leader of the aliens about their promise of “universal health care.” This is a key scene in a plot thread about how some journalist guy (Fox News) must decide whether access to power justifies refusing to “ask the hard questions.” He tells it like it is!

Another plotline follows an FBI agent as she makes connections between the aliens and terrorist sleeper cells. You see, the aliens have been here for years preparing. They are lying in wait. They are Al-Qaida. They are Obama. Obama is Al-Qaida. The resistance (themselves tagged as a “sleeper cell” by the FBI – ah, the ironing!) wants to fight and meets in a secret warehouse. Their leader gives a speech about resisting the control of the aliens that sounds straight out of a tea party. He gets killed. The priest and the FBI lady escape somehow. Evidently the priest is also a MMA expert. And the aliens have spy droids, but fight with knives (not cool lasers).

The resistance groups are the tea partiers. They protest those damn aliens. One episode ends with the FBI agent musing, “They are arming themselves with the most powerful weapon out there. Devotion.” Faith is the enemy on the new V. Even the renegade priest finds himself at odds with his faithful colleague, who is content to follow the Vatican’s lead rather than think for himself.

Meanwhile, the black lead is a traitor – an alien who hates the aliens. In other words, he is Michael Steele, bravely refusing to stay “loyal” like the others. He’s played by Morris Chestnut, who I loved as Ricky in Boyz N the Hood, but who evidently flushed his career down the toilet by making something called Two Can Play That Game and a sequel to the movie Anaconda.

The Vs will torture to find out about the resistance. We were disappointed not to see waterboarding. All we got was some kind of holographic snake table, which was frankly stupid-looking and seemed to double as the “resurrection table” when (spolier alert!!) the FBI agent’s secret alien partner isn’t dead and wakes up at the end of the second episode.

There are plenty of other reasons why the show is horrible: the list of “everyone who has ever contacted the FBI about aliens” that FBI lady somehow “swiped” from the top secret government task force; the awful Mulder-Scully ripoffs; the gaping vacuum of space where the chemistry between the FBI agent and the priest is supposed to be; etc. Then there’s the “I’m lying to my boss at the FBI about my missing partner” absurdity. It doesn’t even hew to minimal plot standards, and made us very thankful that we don’t watch its sister crime solving shows like CSI, etc.

Watching the show will make you confront your demons. You get to this point in watching it where its badness begins to wash over you as a matter of course, as a “what-did-you-expect” dumbening. And then you are really in for it; your intellectual immune system is compromised, and you are ripe for an alien takeover far worse than anything portrayed in this treacly pseudo-nostalgic mess of a program.

The whistle blows

It is a Friday. That means many of us are fixing to have our Designated Days Off From Regular “Gainful” Employment. Here is some reading for that occasion. But remember: To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. Don’t be a “tiresome debater” always pushing your problem of freedom vs. necessity.

Maybe you’re an avatar of necessity; you are a concupiscent cornicopian. In this case, perhaps you will say that you must work to purchase the objects appropriate to your gender. Or perhaps you shrug all that off; you are a DIY diva – a pioneer of pointless punctuation and absurd alliteration. In this case, you may say that you simply have to put off happy hour so that you can be penuried enough to acquire some of the goods on this site. Only then will people fully appreciate your quirk.

So get back to work already.

Obama Tyranny Continues: Bivalve Mollusca Version

Comes now the news that the federal nanny state wants to stick its probing tentacles into Alabama yet again. First it was the stimulus money, what with trying to help solve our crippling financial problems. And now they want to mess with our food products.

I’m talking oysters here people. I’m talking regional traditions of wholesome goodness being thwarted by fat cats in D.C. who know nothing of the slimy delight of a raw oyster. From the New York Times:

Two-thirds of the nation’s oysters are harvested from the Gulf Coast and about 40 percent of them are harvested during warm months. Half of Gulf Coast oysters are eaten raw, but they are largely eaten in the South. Many upscale seafood restaurants north of the Mason-Dixon line refuse to carry Gulf Coast oysters.

What’s the problem?

Eating shellfish raw is risky since they can be infected with both viral and bacterial contaminants. The bacteria Vibrio vulnificus is commonly present in oysters, but warm water can lead the bacteria to grow rapidly, so the riskiest oysters come from the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months.

Well la-de-freaking-da. How many people die of this? Answer? 15 people a year. Are the deaths horrible? Yes. The description of the guy in the NYT article with his blackened and blistered skin made me want to puke. But there’s a reason why we don’t make social policy with our queasy stomachs. We prefer to use rational risk assessments. And we don’t kill an entire industry and hundreds of years of “how to eat tasty food” just because a tiny handful of people out there have some kind of wacked out body chemistry.

5,700 Americans died last year from food-related illnesses. Do you see us banning peanuts or meat? Compared to 15 people dying from oysters, that’s practically a food Holocaust.

There are already warnings about oysters. If you have AIDS or your immune system doesn’t work, maybe you shouldn’t eat them. Also, if you are blind, you shouldn’t drive a motorcycle. Those things don’t mean that the government should come in and regulate with a sledgehammer, putting people out of business and confining the rest of us to eat rubbery pieces of shit while wearing our federally-mandated safety helmets and rubber teeth protectors (for those out there who might have a hidden dental stress fracture but don’t know it).

More articles about the freakout in Alabama’s seafood industry can be found here and here (Landrieu and Sessions together at last!). But my concern isn’t even the economic one, or the fact that you can take any side of any debate and still call yourself a “scientist.” It’s merely that a simple (marginally risky) pleasure is soon to be forbidden to all of us simply because a few people died. I’m not taking a stand against any and all food regulations, nor is this a Libertarian rant about why the guv’mint ought not to be paying for roads and nuclear weapons. But when 15 corpses a year merit gutting an entire culinary tradition (and fundamentally unique experience) for the rest of us, it makes you want to wade into the debate about skateboarding and seat belts and gun control. We deserve beauty queens slurping oysters, damn it.

Just chalk it up as a continuation of our nation’s slide towards weakness and nanny state governance, where it’s fine to dump toxic chemicals in the water and invade multiple overseas nations, but God forbid a fraction of the few of us out there who still care about living might want to taste a raw oyster or go hang gliding or any number of other “dangerous recreations.” Thank goodness the government is here to keep us safe from ourselves.

Let’s Make An Abortion Deal!

On Saturday morning we woke up and bounced into the living room excited to watch, of all things, the House health care debate on CSPAN. It was a good spectacle at first, as women lined up on the Democratic side for unanimous consent to revise & extend their remarks, or some such parliamentary procedure thing.

It was hard to miss the messaging on the Democratic side – the idea seemed to be to get a bunch of women up to talk about how the bill would support the health of women in a variety of ways. It’s no single-payer by a long shot, but the bill will increase access to health care for a lot of people (men and women), and go a long way to helping people with treatable and preventable conditions as well as reducing medical cost-related bankruptcies.

Of course, there are plenty of people who are now saying that the bill passed the House only by selling out the health of women, or at least their reproductive freedom. And probably they’re right – that is what the bill did. The Stupak-Pitts amendment means that insurance plans receiving new federal subsidies to keep costs down (for families making less that $88,000 per year) will also not be able to cover abortions. So those plans can continue at a higher cost to their customers, or they can drop abortion coverage to be eligible to participate in the health case exchange.

The result will likely be (if the plan passes with the Stupak amendment, something that’s now questionable in the Senate) a decrease in access to abortions among middle class women. William Saletan has a good explanation over at Slate, and he asks the provocative question: If this is the cost of health care reform, are we willing to pay it?

Abortion’s been a hollow right for many, many women for a long time – at least since the passage of the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for abortions and ensured that poor women would have a good chance of staying that way as long as they kept getting pregnant. Abortions are expensive, after all. Combine the financial barriers and geographic and social barriers (if you live in some states, odds are you won’t be able to get an abortion simply because the clinic will be too far away from you, and if you’re poor you might not be able to reach it anyway because of the lack of public transportation), and we’re left with a right without access for millions of American women.

This is not a reason to decrease access even further – just an observation about the long decline in reproductive freedom that we’ve been experiencing in this country ever since Roe tried to carve abortion rights, MacGyver-like, out of a handful of Amendments and some rubber cement.

There are a lot of people that want to see an end to the current bill on the grounds that it restricts access to abortion. I think there’s a lot to hate about this bill, including reduced access to abortion. But at the same time it’s worth considering whether it will do more harm than good if the bill passes. Lack of health insurance kills people. Lots of them. Others lives are ruined, sometimes forever, because of medical bankruptcies or preventable illnesses – all things that will be reduced after passage of the bill. Lack of access to abortion also ruins lives, but there are a lot more people whose lives will be improved with access to health care here than whose lives will be hurt by lack of access to abortion. And again, this bill only bans health plans for paying for abortions if they want to compete in the exchanges. Rich women who can pay for their own abortions will still be able to do so.

It would be great if the Stupak Amendment galvanized people interested in maintaining reproductive freedoms. If these rights were so easy to sell out, that’s a failure of the movement and a failure of advocates who haven’t been able to sell reproductive freedom as essential. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many pro-life Democrats acting as swing votes on critical health care legislation. We’ve been willing to roll far too long on rights without access, which are of course not rights at all, but privileges for the few. Just like health care. It should also be considered a matter of right in this country rather than a privilege that comes, for example, with working a certain kind of job or having a certain amount of money.

The danger is that reproductive rights will trump expanded health care access because health care is not seen as a right. This is a classic divide and conquer type strategy that the left should avoid at all costs.

The deal is objectionable, but so is the failure to expand health care.

Friday Randoms

Because work has been work lately, I feel like I have been a bit slack on the blogging front. As such, you, the reader, now get a reward that involves minimal effort on my part. A burst of random!

1. Fort Hood killings:

Fort Hood is in Killen, which is represented in the Texas House by the delightfully-Texan-named Jimmie Don Aycock, who replaced Suzanna Hupp, who, as a result of surviving the infamous Luby’s massacre, became one of nation’s leading gun enthusiasts and defender of concealed weapons law. Guns!

Also, how insane is it that the dude who did the shooting was the dude who talked to other troubled service members about their problems? Wow. Would have liked to have heard some of those sessions.

2. On the military theme, get your military debate on! Might just save some lives.

3. And as far as that goes, you know I can’t help but link to any article with the headline, “Armageddon in Alabama.” Good national piece on the crisis in Birmingham (written before the mayor was convicted on 60 felony counts).

4. If that’s all too heavy and bumming you out, might I suggest that you begin watching (or re-watching for some of you nerds out there), the Disney Medfield College movies. Yes, that’s right. I’m talking about starting here and working your way through the variety of movies that feature this fictional school.

Afterwards, you can order yourself a custom-made bobblehead of you or a favorite stalking victim loved one.

Jordan, Inc.

I grew up in a house where Chicago sports were on the television often. Baseball was the first religion, north side only. But second to the Cubs were probably the Bulls. Sure, the Bears were good. We certainly owned a copy of the original Super Bowl Shuffle on VHS. But the Bulls were on the TV pretty often. Dynasty and all. My brother and I grew up liking Jordan and Pippen, just as so many did.

But as I got older, I started to look back on the career of Jordan: “The Greatest to Have Ever Played.”

I learned about his famous comment about why he doesn’t get involved in politics, when his endorsement could have cost Jesse Helms an election: “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

I learned about how Nike shoes are made. I learned about Jordan’s image construction, the giant machine of global mega-capitalism, branding. I learned back stories about Jordan on the Dream Team and his affinity for gambling — essentially, all of the things that kids didn’t learn about their sports idols back in previous generations before there were billions of dollars at stake and round-the-clock news cycles.

We learned about his divorce from Juanita and how he was terrible as a front office GM. And most recently, there was the uproar over his cringe-worthy Hall of Fame induction speech, which was not gracious and was, in fact, was described by Bill Simmons as “an off-the-cuff, uncomfortable, petty, biting, rambling, vindictive, score-settling speech during what’s meant to be nothing more than a celebration.”

But what prompted me to post about Jordan was not any of this. It was news about one of his children, to whom he pointed during the aforementioned atrocity of a speech and said, “I wouldn’t want to be you.”

No, not Jeffrey Jordan, who quit hoops at U of Illinois and now is coming back to the team (just like Dad did in the pros!).

Jordan’s other son, Marcus, is a freshman in college at the University of Central Florida. And he also plays hoops. And since his dad sells Nike shoes, Marcus has refused to abide by the school’s contract with Adidas. He wore his dad’s brand onto the court, causing Adidas to cancel a lucrative contract with the school. So much for what the rest of the team was wearing. So much for the best interests of the program or the school. It’s all about the brand. It’s all about corporate loyalty.

True Jordan.

What’s in a name

I’m sure only the most naive among us believe that there’s such a thing as “truth in advertising.” There are, of course, many truths in advertising, including all the ones we construct to explain our relationships to products and the reasons we buy them or not. But advertising is about persuasion, and persuasion has a complicated relationship to truth, at least as conventionally understood. Who among us really believes that tiny animated bubbles with personalities (and, one assumes, hopes and dreams) are among the “Scrubbing Bubbles”? And if we did, why would we feel comfortable putting them into a can or down the drain rather than, say, releasing them into the wild or studying them for Science?

There’s a whole strand of advertising that purports to get asymptotically closer to the truth – Burger King is a good example, with their Whopper Virgins campaign and that silly lie detector ad they did recently. What makes those ads work is an open admission that most ads lie – they try to get beyond that by saying to the consumer: “Yes, yes, but this is really real.”

Product naming skates around this strand. You want to convey the idea of the thing and its aspirational brand-type qualities, but don’t want to get into a situation where you can be sued for making claims you can’t deliver on. But if the FTC doesn’t push back, the sky is the limit. I’ve always thought that the people behind the highly misleading Freecreditreport dot com campaign should have gotten some heat from the FTC. The name (and the evilly invasive commercials with the slacker band guys) makes it seem that you’re getting a free credit report. Which credit report you are, in fact, legally entitled to receive once a year from the big three credit vampires monitoring agencies. The site actually tries to sell you a “credit reporting” package that is expensive and unnecessary. Only now is the FTC moving to try and force some more regulations on that site. We’ll see how that goes.

Sometimes names are designed to produce trust by trading on another established brand. This is how we got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Most people think that Good Housekeeping has an evaluation process to get the seal. But actually any product that advertises in the magazine gets the seal (as long as it passes tests in this lab,  the magazine will give you a refund within two years if a product proves defective – many exceptions, typically, apply). It’s nothing like the vetting process over at Consumer Reports. In September, Paul Smalera wrote a great article about a new Good Housekeeping venture called the “Green Seal” that is even more troubling. The new seal will still be pay to play, like the old one. And there is no word on the standards of sustainability that will be used. Will it be enough to be “natural?” How about “nontoxic” or “organic”? None of these words has anything necessarily to do with the relative environmental goodness of a product. Bottled water can be all three of these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s better for the environment than tap water.

T. S. Eliot was right – the naming of things is a difficult matter.