Category: Thoughts

Here’s my current theory: gay marriage can save the economy.

The average wedding in the US is well into the $20k range, before you start counting the gifts. If spending is good for the economy, weddings are good for the economy, and we should have more of them. However, the wedding industry is in stasis: people are getting married later, and more reluctantly.

Some in the industry blame low-cost competition but that’s not the heart of the problem. The real blocker on demand for weddings is over-regulation.

Oh neoliberals, where are you now? There’s a whole class of citizenry with oceans of pent-up demand just waiting to spend spend spend, and here are unnecessary, intrusive laws blocking the unfettered commerce of the American wedding industry. The engine of economic growth is firmly in our grasp: we have only to open the throttle!

On the other hand, maybe we need to legalize gay sex before we get to recognizing unions.

Cemex has been advertising an awful lot in The Economist. It’s funny to me to see companies that advertise there. Their classified ads tend to be of two sorts: official announcements of things like job openings at the World Institue of Econometrics, or privatizations of Rwandan banks, and then ads for “wealth preservation” with “privacy” through “offshore investments.” And of course the other ads are for luxury items and for companies that want people to invest in them and boost their share prices.

Three totally random links:
Rumors in Fargo and a woman whose death was apparently, but not actually, related to the movie.

The bared navel, much analyzed. You know, dude, I was totally all about navels before they were cool.

101 stupid business moves of the past year. Including one item that just reads “Martha, Martha, Martha.”

Is there justice? Is there something which resembles pleasure?

I slept most of today and I feel dead and rotten inside.

Been thinking about the concepts of “loyal opposition” and “dissident patriots,” and having just seen his Columbine movie, I quite liked Dissent Magazine’s take on Michael Moore’s failures. He’s really emblematic of the left, to me, and the article has a much more nuanced feel for what I have been groping for when I said “most protestors are idiots” or whatever.

Getting arrested isn’t a powerful symbol anymore. Conflict and protest don’t win hearts and minds the way they did in 1960 when it suddenly became apparent that the police were turning dogs on unarmed protestors. It was certainly something when everyone knew that Nice Kids did not get arrested, that an arrest, even without conviction, barred you from Good employment, and so forth. But now, not so much. Now, it’s not really a big deal to rack up that symbolic arrest. The police have a whole procedure for putting you in jail for an afternoon and letting you out with a small fine that covers the cost of disposable plastic handcuffs and gas for the paddy-wagon.

I do feel the frustration of not being able to convince people of the obvious truths before them: Our Leader is turning this nation into a kleptocracy, and our rights are malleable and disappearing fast.

Them Democrats better get their asses in gear and start promoting fiscal responsibility and exposing Bush for the puppet he is. I just wish the citizenry were more economically and mathematically astute– they’d see through this a lot easier.

Well, at least there’s some positive news on the horizon: new research says video games are good for hand-eye coordination.

This weekend I saw Metropolis, the 1927 version. Naive and over-the-top, and of course the standard silent-film overacting. But nonetheless, pretty neat. Now I’ll have to watch the 2002 anime version. You could pair Metropolis with urban dystopia pics like Blade Runner, or industrial-wasteland movies like Eraserhead or Modern Times, or of course union movies like Matewan. But for some reason I ended up watching it right after I’d seen L.I.E., which still forms neat parallels: suburban rather than urban wasteland, and the corruption of privilege, semi-innocent kids discovering parental malfeasance, male bonding, etc. etc.

I like the New Yorker more and more these days, even as I have grown to notice how predictable portions of it are. For example, I laughed out loud several times reading Adam Gopnik’s review of The Matrix: Reloaded. As might be expected, he begins with a pretty comprehensive overview of the impact that the first Matrix movie had on contemporary academic philosophy, and notes that the line “welcome to the desert of the real” comes from Baudrillard. Later, he mentions both novelist Phillip K. Dick and postmodern philosopher Slavoj Zizek in the same sentence.

Once his highbrow credentials are established, he gets to the review:

It would have been nice if some of that complexity, or any complexity, had made its way into the sequel. But — to get to the bad news — “Matrix Reloaded” is, unlike the first film, a conventional comic-book movie, in places a campy conventional comic-book movie, and in places a ludicrously campy conventional comic-book movie. It feels not so much like “Matrix II” as like “Matrix XIV” — a franchise film made after a decade of increasing grosses and thinning material.

As must happen at least once in every issue, there is the mockery of right-wing populism intruding into popular entertainment:

Lambert Wilson appears as a sort of digital Dominique de Villepin — even virtual Frenchmen are now amoral, the mark of Cain imprinted on their foreheads, so to speak, like a spot of chocolate mousse.

And sure enough, he does the gay-icon check:

Then, there are his twin dreadlocked henchmen, dressed entirely in white, who have all the smirking conviction of Siegfried and Roy.

Last, right before he says the redeeming values of the first movie are not besmirched by the banality of the second, he adds the requisite jab at Dubya and Fox News:

… one can even start to wonder whether the language we hear constantly on television and talk radio (“the war on terror,” “homeland security,” etc.) is a sort of vat-English — a language from which all earthly reference has been bled away.This isn’t to say that any of us yet exist within an entirely fictive universe created by the forces of evil for the purpose of deluding a benumbed population — not unless you work for Fox News, anyway.

I agree with everything he has to say, but then again, he doesn’t say much: The Matrix was all about smoking dope and going to Philosophy 101, our president is a moron, and sequels are never as good as the originals. I already knew that, though. As more succinct viewers put it, “Matrix: Reloaded blows donkeys.”

I’m once again wondering: at what point would you say “My country has changed beyond recognition, it is no longer the nation I love, I must leave.” At what point in the degeneration from democracy to fascism do you get out while you still can? Obviously I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet, not by a long shot, and I hope that we never do.

But it’s a bad sign when the Germans say you’re starting to look like a police state. I’m not the only person feeling like an alien here. The foreign press is increasingly mystified by US behavior, and the lies in our policies are obvious.

But where are you going to go? England, where you may be devoured by badgers?

Schlitz will surpass Pabst Blue Ribbon as the cheap beer of choice among hipsters. PBR is getting to be too popular and Schlitz has a similar appeal with the advantage of a name that sounds like it should be a word for drunkenness.

Malbec will follow Shiraz as the new trendy wine. Shiraz is losing its exclusivity just as Merlot did, and in addition its rising popularity means that producers are lowering quality controls to boost output. Malbec also for some reason appears to be a significant portion of Argentinian wine export, and the state of Argentina’s currency means that good-quality Argentine malbecs are available at very reasonable prices.

I should so be a professional trendspotter.

Money: Continuing my recent fascination with money and the things it does in the world, Prof. DeLong links to an IT/money blog called The Bottom Line..

Words: I am debating the purchase of the new Schiller book on risk and risk management, given that I bought “Irrational Exuberance” and never read it. I bought a book on irrationality today, about UFOs and so forth, which might be more interesting. Also got a couple novels (Joseph Conrad and Tim O’Brien). I should link to Invisible Shoebox, which is all about literary writing.

Bodies: Today my leg was sore so I went to the gym figuring, hey, I’ll just do upper body. So I did all the upper-body stuff, and focused on shoulders and back mostly, and while I was waiting for the rear-delt flye machine I figured, hey, I’ll do calves too. And then the next thing you know I’m pressing like 240lb. with the leg extension. The flye machine was still occupied so I did standing row and went home. Now I’m scarfing pizza and soy nuts and wondering if I have enough protein within reach. I’m kinda worried that it’s this close to becoming seriously unhealthy. But on the other hand, even the unhealthy obsession aspects become so appealing.

One of the truisms about heroin addiction, which seems to be the same about exercise, is that it gives you a schedule you have to live by, a master you can follow, and you know exactly where you’ll be all the time. It’s all-encompassing and when you roll up a sleeve you’ve said everything you need to say.

A complete victory, you have to acknowledge, is impossible. You’ve got two options: compromise, or keep fighting. Keep fighting until … until everyone loses. Nobody is going to win. Winning would mean flattening every building and killing or displacing every single person, and you know as well as I do that’s not victory.

There’s going to be an irredentist movement no matter what, on both sides. But irredentism is suicide, it’s a desire for the impossible victory that will turn to blood-stained dust in your hands. Reasonable, calm voices need to find a way to convince and cajole and co-opt the extremists, siphon them off and take their leadership into positions of power in moderate structures. If you do not, we will all suffer.

Subject: Palestine
Example: Northern Ireland