Author: Aaron Weber

Now you tell me

Now, we hear about the reasons for the implosion of LTCM, and about Saddam’s depravity. It would have been good to have that sort of information prior to taking action, prior to bailouts and bombing runs.

But most of life is composed of actions taken with insufficient information, actions taken on a hunch or a whim or an estimate. Risk and risk management rear their ugly heads again and again. Will I be pretty, will I be rich? Does she like me or is she merely tolerating my presence? Will I be loved again, like the Cowboy Junkies song says I will? Oh, we’d all like to know a lot of things. Maybe some of them will be revealed. Maybe not.

Ick. Ick. Ick.

Been reading a review of a new history of the gulag. The review quotes a prison memoir of torture by exposure to mosquitos:

The mosquitoes crawled up our sleeves, under our trousers. One’s face would blow up from the bites. At the work site, we were brought lunch, and it happened that as you were eating your soup, the mosquitoes would fill up the bowl like buckwheat porridge. They filled up your eyes, your nose and throat, and the taste of them was sweet, like blood.

I used to read the Hellblazer comic from DC/Vertigo, and there was this one part of it that I remember clearly: the hero is investigating some evil and finds a junkie cowering in a bathtub in some squalid dive, shivering and sick from withdrawl. He says he feels like insects are crawling all over him, it’s all he can do not to try and tear them away. Only, he’s actually covered in insects.

Some suggest that Our Leader is a genuine American psycho. Seems to be a common comparison, partly due to Bush’s total lack of empathy, and partly due to the fact that it’s quite easy to offer up one or another mental illness to describe any harmful behavior. It’s what makes the DSM-IV such a good parlor game.

I want to start a rock band and call it Token Sucker.

Porky

J. Bradford Delong’s Semi-Daily Journal (yes, quite the name) has a note about the Economist and its coverage of the Doha round of WTO talks: are they doing more of that British humor that sells so well among the elites here in the US.

Dozens of comments follow accusing the magazine of fawning over Bush’s current policies, which I found somewhat surprising. After all, every time I’ve seen the Economist mention recent US agricultural policy, it’s with adjectives like “scandalous,” “regressive” or “absurd.”

It seems to me that there are two points that the Economist has sought to make about agricultural policy in the US and Europe, and about the Doha round generally: First, despite the most recent farm bill, US subsidies are still lower than those in Europe. Second, the US (like other countries) has a hard time reconciling the populism of its representatives with the wonkery of its envoys.

Now, I’m not sure about the whole “free trade” thing. Globalization, as I must have said before, seems to be one of those words that means everything and nothing. But I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on ambivalence.

Many of our leaders are in favor of tarrif reductions, especially in the abstract. On the other hand, it’s not the most important issue for them, especially when it gets to specific industries in their specific districts. And that’s where the back-scratching, log-rolling, and pork-barrelling beings.

When your job is to represent your nation’s trade policy, you’re a free-trader. If your job is representing the textile workers of South Carolina, you’re a protectionist, or you’ll get laid off with the rest of your district. It’s the job of negotiators and legislators and envoys to resolve the conflicts between wonky abstractions and populist demands. The fact that they all have perfectly good arguments makes the process so complicated, so tedious, and so prone to polemic on all sides.

Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn

RCB points me to SexLingo, which I am sorry to say is the most overengineered piece of trash I have ever seen. Let me count the ways that this noble concept could have avoided annoyance:
There’s only one tiny link in the page that launches the dictionary, and it’s not easy to find. It’s done in Shockwave 8.5, which is completely unnecessary for a dictionary. It uses XML and a database which is overkill for a dictionary of under ten or twenty thousand entries. It forces you to use a single lookup heirarchy (category, then alpha) when XML and a database could be used for multiple drill-down patterns and also a search engine. It uses cascading menus when it should probably be a flat list. You have to look up each word individually and can’t click “Next” or “Previous.” The definitions are not displayed along with their corresponding words, so if the definition doesn’t make immediate sense you aren’t sure that you haven’t clicked the wrong menu item (is that what “turkey” means? Or did I just click on “terabyte?” ). There are no links between words, even when you are directed “see steerer” or “see felching.” Between lookups you have to move the mouse off the menu launching point, then go back and click; this makes browsing a pain in the ass.

In other words, I’m a crotchety old man who’s pedantic about technology. And who has just discovered that this site renders poorly on the Danger Sidekick (aka T*Mobile HipTop). I think the stylesheets are broken for Internet Explorer on Windows, as well, but I don’t think any of my friends use that.

Which is yet more evidence that I live in a parallel universe of my own creation. I mean, really. I know only two or three people who voted for Dubya. Everyone I know thinks abortion should be safe and legal, and that gay people should be allowed to marry and adopt, and that drug laws in this country don’t make any sense. I can just tell that some day I’m going to buy a tiny little house with a tiny little lawn, and every afternoon at three thirty I’ll come out the door in a cardigan waving my fist and shouting at the goddamn kids to stay away from my tiny little house and off my tiny little lawn.

Hematoma

Oh, sure, I rant and shout about all the ranting and shouting. But lemme tellya, some people are getting the shorter end of the stick for their ranting and shouting. Like the random protestor who caught a a rubber bullet in the face this past weekend. (Via Yahoo News.)

Rubber bullets sound harmless, and they’re certainly less damaging than steel. But they’re not what you’d call safe either. Other info: Doctors urge rubber bullet ban (BBC UK) Beyond the Rubber Bullet (Time on nonlethal weapons), Future Nonlethal Weapons Arsenal (apc.org)

Correction

Ettore has convinced me that I was incorrect of me to state that “the average anti-war protestor is retarded.” I was actually quoting someone else at the time, and have edited the entry to make that clearer. However, it’s still an insult to people such as Ettore, who are really very intelligent anti-war protestors. Heck, it’s an insult to the developmentally challenged. What I meant, and what I assume i5 meant, was:

A very loud, highly visible minority of protestors are wicked queer, By which I mean they dress like soccer players.