Gessel On…

Yesterday a “special edition” of the New York Times was handed out around New York. It is absolutely hilarious and I think one of the better pranks I’ve heard of.

Most of the satire is spot on. Of many examples that I found really amazing, the fake “Friedman” piece is one of my favorites. He was on The Daily show recently promoting his book and I couldn’t contain my disdain for his relentless errors and misinformation. Is there any penalty for being completely wrong? About everything? Yes! Perhaps only in satire, but yes.

The Satire is mostly about Friedman’s errors on Iraq, but he’s been wrong about just about everything: economics, social reality, the role of trade, and, of course, the war in Iraq.

I got a note about it from the Yes Men mailing list, the NYT article (real) about the Times (fake) has some details.

Carolyn and I were in Canada for the election. We saw it from the safety of a Russian themed bar called Pravda in Toronto, one of our favorites (the Chicken Kiev is amazing and Andrea the bartender is the best).

We watched on a projection screen as the results came in and the initial McCain victories were soon overwhelmed by a tide of… well… for once not being a land of morons.

We left once the electoral victory was inevitable and heard the results on the radio between Toronto and Guelph. We were happy but not surprised. We listened to people describing how happy they were, Canadian commentators speaking about how “The States” was now not a joke and might perhaps once again participate in the world’s stage as something other than belligerent idiots. It was good.

Now I have to admit a bit of wistfulness at the results. Not that I didn’t want Obama to win… but I’m sorry to see Palin go the way of Kathleen Harris. Palin is such a caricature of extreme white trash, of all that is idiotic and embarrassing in America: the Tonya Harding of Politics but with a body double for her sex tape. I’m sad that tonight Jon Stewart will be boring. That for the next eight (please) years the most ridiculous news will come from somewhere other than the white house. We could have had Palin there and every day would have been a delight of absurdity. I’d trade good leadership for comedy, but it is not an unmitigated win.

Today, on the way out of Canada, I saw something that demonstrated in a small way how monumental this moment of history really is. I followed a black American man through security screening. It was obvious he was used to being given a hard time for his color, for his culture. He expected it, reacted to the scan and the follow up as if it were part of the normal sweat inducing stress he had to live through every day. What broke his stride was when he collected his things after passing the secondary mass spectrograph screening and the Indian screener said to him as he turned away “Yay Obama!”
Across boarders, across centuries, across races this is a moment that renders irrelevant such trivialities as a global depression or wars.

It turned out the guy grew up about 20 blocks from me in Philadelphia. The world is interconnected and small and overnight the good people have a reason to be optimistic. Finally.

I was listening to Christian Radio in a red state recently and heard a news break between the adulational Christian soft rock/country exhort Christians to vote their conscious.  The commentator was, to my liberal ears, neutral in his repeated statements about voting one’s conscious until he said “I honestly believe that if the liberals win the presidency we will see Christians going to jail.”

Some of what followed I couldn’t hear behind my own laughter, but I think he said something about a liberal senate, house, and presidency having unchecked powers to criminalize evangelicals and jail them for their beliefs.

On the one hand this sort of fear mongering seems just bat excrement crazy, and a fringe not representative of the mainstream of conservative thought.  On the other hand…

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After almost eight long years of unrelentingly horrible news, of an enervating, depressing, distressing litany of stupidity and manifest religious extremism cloaked in political lies finally, finally there is one slim measure of clear thought, of defense of right of justice of decency.

It is narrowly targeted, it is in defense of the civil rights of a minority, but it is good and right and in the right direction and it deserves our full support.

The Travelers Privacy Protection Act (TPPA) is a bill that attempts to address what should be unconstitutional and illegal searches of electronic devices by DHS. Now most people might not know or even believe if they heard the rumors that DHS has claimed the right to confiscate any electronic device they want anyone carries into the US. They can keep your stuff forever. They don’t have to get permission from a judge, they don’t need probable cause or reasonable suspicion or any legally meaningful threshold to justify these seizures.

Not surprisingly, the DHS is reluctant to give up the convenience of a paperwork and accountability-free operation and there’s not too much evidence yet that they’ve been unreasonable in their use of this power, but absolute power corrupts absolutely and it is merely a matter of time before tales of intolerable abuses come to light unless the usual and assumed checks and balances are applied.

So contact your representative now and support the Travelers Privacy Protection Act, written by Feingold, Cantwell, and Smith. It sets a fairly low but legally significant standard of “reasonable suspicion” for search and limits the search to 24 hours. If DHS needs more time, they must find (either on the device or by other means) justification for “probable cause,” which may justify seizure.

Only the United States presumes such unchecked power to snoop through people’s private lives. No other country will seize devices without any judicial oversight. A very strong argument for applying minimal legal standards to DHS seizure is that failure to do so will ultimately justify other nations taking the same position. While the US has, for the bulk of those who pass under suspicion, protected nominal rights it is not necessarily true in other countries and the data on our laptops and phones might be used for political or industrial gain.

The US must strive to set the standard for protecting rights or we will continue to lose any premise of moral authority in world affairs.

Your support helps.

The state of mind in the US is very sad, more so than typical. While there seems to a continuous and ongoing degradation of discourse, I’ve never before seen politics and statesmanship so irredeemably reduced to the level of a religious war.

Sadly… embarrassingly, it is not a phenomenon consigned to the usual right wing fundamentalist morons that dominate the airwaves with their punditry and inanity; rather the left too seems to have taken up the banner of unthinking allegiance.

Having just seen Bill Mahr’s Religulous (”lig” rhymes with “midge”) in Toronto, the idiocy of “faith” is fresh in my mind. Not that I’ve ever doubted that “faith” is the sad abandonment of reason, but Bill’s entertaining movie makes amusing and thoughtful light of the many entertaining flavors of absurd that are the world’s religions.

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A relative of mine was once worked in government. For years we’d argue about whether government was really for the people or simply an instrument of corporate interests. He always took the side that government was for the people and that while special interests had excessive clout, government was made by people who genuinely wanted to make the world a better place and fulfill the mandate of our constitution.

Then came the Sonny Bono copyright act, an act that made no concession what so ever to either the Constitution (Copyright is a limited monopoly offered for the sole purpose of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts and is not, and never was a “property right”) nor to the public good (entirely selling out the public interest for private gain). He lost confidence in government and now works as a lobbyist.

As disheartening as the fundamentally unconstitutional direction copyright law has taken in recent years in order to prop up a largely unnecessary publishing and distribution business, a model that has been obviated by the technology of the internet, it takes a far more sinister turn with the Pro-IP act.

This act does more than merely turn the government into a strong-arm profit enforcement agency for the entertainment industry as recent bills such as Sonny Bono, NET, and the DMCA have done by criminalizing what is fundamentally a civil complaint, it creates a Stazi-like federal enforcement agency with the power to seize property in a way that seems on it’s face to violate the 5th amendment.

The irony of violating the spirit and letter of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 by creating a false property right that retards the progress of science and the useful arts and enforcing that false property right by violating everyone’s Fifth Amendment right to real property is extraordinary.

I cannot help but imagine entertainment industry lobbyists falling out of their chairs laughing and snorking their champagne.

Slashdot reported (others too, I’m sure) that the Pro-IP act has passed the Judiciary Committee. This is yet another evil copyright expansion that blatantly contradicts the plain English meaning of the 8th clause of Section 8 of the First Article:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”

This particular bill authorizes seizure of property in copyright cases - a mechanism that has resulted in gross abuse in drug cases and is repugnant to the rule of law.

The /. article linked to William Patry’s blog, who is now one of my heroes. His blog discusses an article by Neil Natenel: “Why Has Copyright Expanded? Analysis and Critique.” It is an excellent discourse on the prevailing contortions exploited to provide legal cover for industry-drafted legislation that has so distorted the concepts of copyright and hobbled the advancement of technology and science.

Natenel’s counterarguments against ideas as property and neoclassical market optimization were convincing but I think missed something, though there is a full-length book on the same subject I have yet to read.

(My thoughts below but they reference the article.)

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The Toronto Globe and Mail published an editorial by Tom Flanagan titled “The biological and philosophical reasons why we should prosecute polygamy” in which Mr. Flanagan laid out arguments in defense of the prosecution of the Eldorado Mormons and in defense of laws against polygamy, though his arguments are only valid against polygyny.

Mr. Flanagan’s arguments against the Eldorado sect follow a very uncontroversial line: that the wives are held either in fact or in effect against their will by strong social pressure, managed education, and arranged marriage which is also implied to be against their will. They are “treated as breeding machines,” he says.

These arguments apply equally to any coerced relationship, whether monogamous, polygynous, or polyandrous. Coercive monogamous relationships vastly outnumber coercive relationships of any other form; the few coercive polygamous relationships that come to light merit comment only out of prurience.

Mr. Flanagan goes on to posit an argument against polygamy on the basis of biology and philosophy that is so hypocritical that it seems more plausibly a straw man defense of polygamy.

Humans, he says, are biologically predisposed to polygyny on the basis of sexual dimorphism and as evidenced by the bulk of history; conversely, he fails to note adaptations for polyandry such as the coronal ridge, sperm viscosity, and noradrenaline.

The argument is that this predisposition to polygamy would, left unchecked by social edict, tend to accrete breeding females around a small number of alpha males, leaving the majority of beta males mateless, thus shiftless, and therefore more inclined toward crime and violence. And so, to protect society, we must assign women to a single male, even a beta male, lest she by following her animal urges plunge society into chaos.

It is not clear why this model does not, in fact, treat women as chattel and “breeding machines” whose distribution to desperate men is mandated by social pressure and force of law.

This argument is false. There is no evidence that women’s rights are protected by enforced monogamy, nor that civilization is threatened by polygamy: monogamy arose as a property right and polygyny was the norm at the founding of civilization.

While society has an obligation to intercede on behalf of the coerced, government has no place interfering in the private behavior of consenting adults.

One of the great irritations of many “healthy” hippie communities is an obsession with “hydration.” People who wander around with bottles of water “hydrating” for one psudoscientific neo-mystical reason or another with absolutely no evidentiary basis for doing so are emblematic of the sort of self-righteous received knowledge that characterizes fundamentalism and cults.

It is a practice that has always bugged me. I am a runner and I’ve run for hours on hot days without drinking anything to no ill effect. When I was young, waaay back in the prehistoric days before Polyethylene Terephthalate and running high school cross country, we’d take a sip or too from the fountain on a hot day and nobody died. It always struck me as incongruous with my experience that all of a sudden people needed so much more water than they used to just to make it through the day, even in an air conditioned office.

I soon learned that the water craze was not only a bunch of crap, but dangerous, even to runners. I ran the Boston Marathon a few times way back then and one tended to drink a bit here and there along the course, and more and more as the years went by. As people started to obsess about “staying hydrated” (as opposed to not being thirsty) they started suffering from Hyponatremia; so much so that a couple of people have died of it. Apparently nobody has ever died from dehydration along the marathon. Yes, not drinking enough just slows you down; drinking too much will kill you.

“But,” the water fanatics say, “water detoxifies, beautifies, mysticifies, and is an all over tonic for everything that ails you!” As it turns out, not so much. A recent study published in the American Journal of Nephrology found no such benefits. Yes, if you’re wandering around with water bottles you’re merely paying a lot of money for water that’s worse than from the tap and contributing to a problematic waste stream. If you’re thirsty have a sip from the tap.