Category: Thoughts

Changes in tax code should be revenue-neutral. Just like with the Massachusetts income-tax repeal, which has been described as “public policy arson”, we’ve got a similar situation at the national level. Congress, under pressure from the prez, is shooting itself in the foot. Yes, the AMT needs to be fixed. But it needs to be fixed in a revenue neutral manner, and instead Congress has just said it’s going to pile up some more damn debt.

The Gentleman’s Emporium, despite its name, sells reproduction Victorian clothing for men and women. Oddly, it sells Victorian lingerie but no reproduction men’s underwear. I’m not sure why.

I found a real-estate blog focused on Charlottesville for a friend of mine who lives there, and sent it off to him without thinking. And then I looked at it again and it’s one of those ones done by a Realtor who thinks they’re smart because they understand that the National Association Of Realtors is sleazy. It’s not a terrible blog, but nothing special, really. (Update: The blogger saw this post and sent back a really polite comment and now I feel guilty for insulting him. I’m not going to deny doing it, but… two blogging-without-thinking moments today. Ouch.)

My friend wrote back: “Cville/Albemarle is owned lock/stock/barrel by the realtors. How come? Why is it that the stockbroker’s back was broken by the on-line brokers — saving consumers 90% or so on commissions — but Cville/Albemarle is still owned by the commission-heavy Realtors? … It’s a cartel. Some smart people have got to figure a way to break this system….”

I replied that, sadly, there are quite a few smart people dedicated to perpetuating it as well. But I suppose that could be said about more than just real estate markets. Sure, there’s potential for reform and transparency, but I’m not optimistic.

I’m not optimistic about the prospects for a lot of things. Mechanics and politicians and veterinarians are going to keep being sleazy bastards. Massport and the MBTA will never be reformed. It’s not so much The System as the fact that any system is only as good as human nature, and human nature just isn’t that good.

Maybe I’m particularly gloomy today because I’ve watched too much of A+E’s “Intervention,” a show I’d call the sleaziest reality show ever if I hadn’t already used that phrase to describe “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila.” Every episode is the story of two different addicts and how their parents got them to go to rehab. It’s mostly white women, possibly to make the suburban audiences more comfortable, possibly because that’s who gets intervened on the most. I don’t know. It’s riveting, and although I know it’s shameful emotional pornography I can’t stop watching.

Then again, I could be permanently damaged by the video I saw today over at Ectomo. I won’t even describe it, but you should definitely watch it. With headphones. The screaming is the best part. Well, that and the fact that someone kept filming the whole thing. Can you say “older brother?”

Boston’s been the center of an awful lot of technology booms in its day, you know, starting with the textile mills in Lowell. We love tech bubbles. We’re all about the bubble bath.

It is snowing. But do not despair. There is a blog about bunnies in art.

It features great drawings and paintings and photographs but most particularly the following YouTube video about melting a chocolate bunny in three ways. My favorite is the third.

Only the French would have a hip-hop track that’s about how cliche and irony are deadening to the soul. Well, I think that’s what it’s about. There’s also one featuring contrasts between the pastoral ideals of the French past and today’s urban wastelands, but it might be about vegetarianism, or just about how sausage is kind of icky. It definitely features rappers with wearing masks made out of pig’s faces holding up a butcher shop using antique hunting rifles.

Action figures in drag advertising, what else, a drag night at a gay bar in Manila. They’ve got Harry Potter in Hermione’s skirt, Darth Vader in Leia’s brass bikini, and Superman in Wonder Woman’s bulletproof bustier.

It’s a wonderful world when we can see gay Phillipine club flyers all over the world.

John Scalzi went to the Creation Museum awhile ago and wrote a report that helps make it understandable to those of us who live in the real world. It begins “Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit.” He also took a whole bunch of photos and posted them over at Flickr. At first it made me laugh, but right now I’m getting increasingly irritated.

You see, the horseshit seems to be leaching into the groundwater and getting into mainstream life. It’s not just Chuck Norris endorsing bible study in schools, it’s The New York Times op-ed contributor Paul Davies totally failing to understand what science is.

He writes “All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.” Horseshit.

I suppose he’s right that science begins with the assumption that nature is intelligible. But rational? There’s no particular reason for gravity. It’s a force. Science looks at gravity, describes how it affects apples as they fall out of trees, and makes predictions about how it will affect pears when they start dropping later in the fall. A scientist looks at the universe and sees a jumble of odds and ends interacting with each other, and tries to find the ways in which those interactions are consistent and predictable. Does a scientist ask why gravity exists? No. A scientist tries to figure out how gravity works. Why is for philosophers and priests.

When a scientist begins to say that there has to be a rationale (not merely an explanation, but a reason) behind the existence of the universe is, if you’ll pardon the repetition, horseshit. That’s not something science explains. That seems to be the problem with a lot of theoretical physicists: They bump up against the edges of the universe, poke their noses into wormholes in their areas of expertise, and end up stumbling around the philosophy department with their heads up their asses.

In Davies’ case, he’s written a column that manages to confuse scientific laws with human laws. It’s as though he thought that someone out there decided we needed gravity, got the bill through the galactic senate, and required objects with mass to be attracted to each other. Uh, no. Human laws require; scientific laws describe. You learn the difference in junior high school. The similarity is a giggle when you’re an MIT freshman with a t-shirt about how the real speed limit is a constant known as c. But to most educated adults, it’s just a quirk of language we don’t fret much over.

But Paul Davies, for some reason, either doesn’t understand or has forgotten the difference. This is a man whose facility with logic suggests that he shouldn’t have passed high-school geometry, and yet he has a Ph.D. in physics, a tenured position at the decent (if non-prestigious) Arizona State University, and a featured op-ed in the newspaper of record. I can think of very few explanations for this situation. He might, as I suggested first, have gotten lost in a wormhole and come out in the philosophy department. He might be part of a wingnut affirmative action plan that aims to make the New York times more like the Washington Times. He could also be losing his mind after years of exposure to high-energy physics experiments. Perhaps too much time staring at a particle accelerator has caused a brain tumor of some kind. Finally, someone might have stolen his identity and written the column posing as him.

In a rational world, he’d have to issue a retraction of this horseshit. But I do not expect the world to behave rationally. I’m accustomed to thinking scientifically, and I know that human behavior, while rarely predictable, is predictably irrational.

Vieve once told me (OK, wrote yesterday in an email) that there’s a special place in hell for people who cheat at Scrabble. In this case, they’re not cheating against someone. It seems like they’re collaborating with someone to get improbably high single-word scores. Clever, really, but also kind of bizarre.

Similar in spelling but not at all related to my friend Vieve is Vive Cool City, an Australian video series you might call soft news if it weren’t so damn cool. Your local Fox affiliate will tell you about a new trend in health food or the latest kitten-related human-interest story, but these guys will fill you in on where to buy marijuana in Melbourne and how to have sex on one of those giant yoga balls. Here’s one bit on how to do some quick and easy home surgery:
http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/5YfXvJBcN1L5tmSqR