Rhinocrisy

Apparently leftist pundit Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and “One Market Under God”, is going to have a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal (read his debut here). I found this completely astonishing, but there is apparently astonishing precedent. A commenter on Ezra Klein’s blog informs us of a piece of ancient history: in the past the Journal featured Alexander Cockburn (of CounterPunch fame) as a regular columnist. Who knew?

Ezra takes the perspective that Frank’s presence will change nothing, since only a lefty economist would get through to Journal readers (whereas Frank is more of a sociologist). Maybe so; still, I find it surprisingly balanced for a Murdoch-owned publication.

Incidentally, I found this comment on the TNR blog thread about Frank intriguing:

Actually, having read the Frank piece, I find it suffers from the same tonedeafness people on the left generally show about “elitism.” Frank thinks “elite” means “rich”–which of course it does in part–and concludes from that that it’s ridiculous to call the relatively modestly endowed Obama an elite. But to ordinary working Americans “elite” also means “exemption from doing ‘real’ work.” In this regard they’re heirs to the Populists, whose basic distinction was not between rich and poor, but between “producers” and “nonproducing” parasites, who could be anyone from a hobo to J. P. Morgan–in the words of the Omaha Platform, a “tramp” or a “millionaire.” By this criterion, any member of the chattering classes–you guys, professors like myself–are part of the elite. Moreover, one doesn’t have to spend much time among one’s fellow elites to conclude that they’re also elitists–that they really do consider themselves superior to those who lack whatever gives them elite status: money if they’re rich, education if they’re chattering. TBS, the brouhaha over “Bittergate” was a case of right-wing pots calling the left-wing kettles black. But the fact remains that both the pots and the kettles are, in fact, black. All the self-righteous denials they can muster doesn’t change the fact that the left–and certainly Obama–has a problem with working-class white [and brown, BTW] America, and they need to do something about it.

This prompted me to consider the following notion: it would be fairly straightforward to find a handful of volunteers in America’s top ten liberal cities. These folks would each stake out a couple of Starbucks Coffee shops, and do a poll of their customers as they entered and exited the store. The questionnaire would (amongst other things) determine three important items:

• The customer’s political affiliation

• The customer’s educational attainment
• The customer’s favorite kind of coffee.

With this data, we might settle the debate about the latte-drinking liberal elite once and for all!

Some of you may already be familiar with Earth Hour, an effort pioneered by the Australians to increase awareness about global warming by symbolically turning off all lights in participating major cities around the world for one hour. It occurs on April 1 (already a great day, now even better) of each year, going since 2007.

When I heard about this my first thought was - “Holy shit! Dark sky!” After all, who gives a toss about stopping catastrophic climate change when there’s the possibility of seeing a really spectacular starry sky? As I’ve hinted here before, I’m more or less committed to sidereal worship, and it’s long been a fantasy of mine to become Lord Commander of Earth so that I can impose just such a venture (viz., forced blackouts) on major cities. I mean, check out the pathetic Bortle Scale map of North America. A guy like me hasn’t a chance in this country.

Or so I thought! But, cloaked in the guise of “environmentalism”, I can advance my umbratory agenda. It seems that Chicago is already on board, and certain other cities seem like ripe targets to follow. If things continue in this vein, I may even abandon my plans to sabotage certain transformers on Walpurgis Night.

Lately I’ve been interested in the Fusor, a device which achieves fusion by accelerating individual ions to high energies using electric fields (rather than creating a high-temperature plasma, the strategy employed by expensive and to date unsuccessful “tokomak”-based methods). It seems some guys at UC Irvine have done something similar. Check it out.

Note that this is NOT “cold fusion”, it is “hot fusion”, and the physics is relatively uncontroversial. Fusion power in a matter of years?

UPDATE: Apparently not.

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How do we know, exactly, that ours is the first civilized species on this planet? In 500 million years of life, it seems at least plausible that intelligence could have developed at other points. After all, there’s a number of existing tool-using, improvising species besides ourselves. It doesn’t seem implausible that, in our absence, some evolutionary contusion would produce in them the necessary burst of intelligence that would allow them to develop reason and the ability to build on acquired knowledge.

Human beings have been around for a scant few hundred thousand years. Of all that history, we find precious little in the form of remnants - maybe a few tools here and there, some bits of clothing or weapons, if we’re lucky. But the record is sparse. Meanwhile, the history of life is vast. There are 1100 extant mammalian genera. The total number of known dinosaur genera is 572, spanning a period of almost 200 million years. Recent estimates say that there are probably around 1844 total discoverable genera of dinosaurs. It seems unlikely to me that this represents more than a tiny fraction of the true diversity. Whole swaths of the fossil record might be missing. So if some small saurischian species at some point diverged and produced a brief flutter of intelligence, which might have only survived for a scant few hundred thousand years, would we know about it? Would any of their tools or clothes, their habitations, have survived? Perhaps not.

If this seems implausible to you, let’s consider the ocean. There’s a number of intelligent sea-faring creatures, not all of them mammalian. And the ocean is far more vast and impenetrable to us than the continents are. Much of what lives there even today is unknown. So how likely is it that some kind of civilization might have formed in the ocean at any moment in the long history of life and have escaped our notice?

The U.S. treasury lost a court case to a group of blind petitioners who want bills to look more different from one another. While the mint protested that redesigning money would cost too much, it has had great fun redesigning the U.S. 25-cent piece every 10 weeks since 1999. What’s your favorite? While I love all the horses and buffalo, this one takes the cake. Not because of the cheesy “courage” slogan, nor because the mint pressed this coin even as it defended itself against the court case decided yesterday. Rather, I like that it’s the first time I’m aware of that a Socialist has shown up on U.S. currency.

More proof that the Internet is awesome can be found on this site. Also I didn’t realize that Jesus looks like the lead singer for Celtic Frost.

I’m pretty excited about the Halo movie, which is being produced by Peter Jackson. In an interview with “Aint It Cool News” he insists that the movie is not getting made until he’s satisfied it has a really good script. Right on.

Anyway, the director he chose for the film is a dude named Neill Blomkamp, who has never directed a feature-length film before. The only thing he has directed is a 6-minute short called Alive in Joburg, which “depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa.”