The Next Hurrah

Order and confusion

by emptypockets

I've been thinking a bit about order. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation was taken over a couple weeks ago by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who almost immediately had to surrender one of his ideas because it was so unpopular with, well, everyone. That idea was about randomness over order.

...Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg backed away yesterday from his insistence that the names of the dead be displayed in random order, a position that had pitted him against many relatives of the victims and representatives of those who died in the 9/11 rescue effort... Other officials have suggested displaying the victims’ names around the footprint of the tower in which they died and grouping them by affiliation, like the company or emergency service unit where they worked.

Why is having the names in random order so unappealing? What is the power of a memorial like the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, with every name listed in chronological order of death? Would it be as powerful if the names were listed at random?

I began to think that a memorial is not only a way to remember lives, but an attempt to restore order to the chaos and uncertainty that accompanies death. Think of the Oklahoma City Memorial, that took the site of a murderous explosion and restored it to rows of orthogonal metal and stone chairs, one for each victim, arranged to represent the floors of the building and with each victim's name on the floor where that person was. Everything neat and in its place. Think of the order of a graveyard. And then think about what we all have been doing, as a culture, since September 11.

Wikipedia began at the start of 2001. By the end of that year it had 20,000 articles but in the years since it has grown to 5 million, worked on by tens of thousands of users each month. Elsewhere in pop culture, YouTube has given us home videos subject to organization and tag-based indexing while blogs have become an exercise in cross-referencing and categorizing thought. On television, CSI and its spin-offs take up 3 of the top 10 rated shows and it seems like there are at least two flavors of Law & Order running somewhere on cable at any hour of the day -- detective shows, of course, offering the old fantasy in which a universe that is disrupted by a crime at the top of the hour gets restored to order by its end. The other American order-over-disorder fantasy, the comic book superhero, has been in resurgence at the movies. In short, it seems to me that after the World Trade Center attacks, more than ever, we are hungering for ways to put our world back in order.

Over 7,500 New Yorkers repeat a grade this year

by emptypockets

Actually, the number is 7,813 -- that's how many New York City kids will be repeating a grade this year because they failed to pass a standardized test. These kids were given standardized tests in the spring, failed them, and were asked to report for summer school. Now, after spending their summers in an intensive five-week "success academy" on which the city spent $33 million, or $2800 per student, more than half of the kids have failed again anyway.

Is it worth it -- both in dollars, and in how much it must make these kids really hate school -- to make nearly 4,500 3rd graders spend their summers in class when only about 1 in 3 of them will raise their scores enough to pass the test in August?

In 5th grade, over 8,000 kids had to go to summer school and only 3,300 of those were able to raise their test scores. In 7th grade, it was a little under 3,500 kids who failed the test in the spring -- of those, less than 1,000 passed the test in August.

But what strikes me most are the numbers for 3rd grade -- those nearly 2,500 kids who are about 8 years old being administered standardized test after standardized test, losing their summer for more classes, and then failing again, and being held back to repeat 3rd grade as a 9-year-old, all for bubbling in the wrong multiple-choice answers.

The Heliocentric Hoax

by emptypockets

So-called "scientists" who propound the hoax of heliocentrism have been at each other's throats this week as their so-called "theory" falls apart. Heliocentrism is the idea that Earth and all other planets were formed at some point in history and circle around the Sun. How shaky is this "solar system" theory? Well, the experts don't even know how many planets there are:

Seize My Gatorade. Ignore My Semtex.

By Meteor Blades

I didn't think about gel-filled shoe heels when the government tightened the latest air travel rules after the Brits made everybody's eyes go round with their raids and arrests on Thursday. Lousy consumer that I am, I didn't even know there was such a thing as gel-filled heels. Little cushions. Will wonders never cease?

No matter, while hair gel is now banned from carry-on luggage, you're still allowed to wear your gel-heels. They'll get the same treatment as all shoes from now on - off your feet and onto the conveyor belt for an X-ray screening. Apparently, the amount of explosive gel that can be contained in a couple of shoe heels isn't enough to bring down a passenger jet.

These new rules don't upset me. I'm all for "better safe than sorry." On the other hand, while I'm being deprived of carrying my preferred swill and my eye drops into the passenger compartment, a clever terrorist can still ship a crate full of explosives in the cargo hold beneath me because the Republican-controlled Congress won't pass the Safe Skies Cargo Inspection Act.

The fear being amplified by the pundithuggery this weekend about the liquid-bombs-in-the-sky plot has forced me several times these past few days to put the wet-vac to work sucking up the deluge of sludge pouring from our television onto the living room carpet. That and the fecal scribblings of the New McCarthyists about "Defeatocrats" and the Dems' "Taliban wing" and how we're all terror-symps has spurred me to stop paying attention to the megamedia for the rest of the weekend. If I wanted this kind of ferocious spew, I could just stick V for Vendetta in the DVD player and watch John Hurt do his number.

Speaking from experience, Billy boy?

By Meteor Blades

Selecting the contemptible, feeble, outrageous, inaccurate, intellectually destitute, villainous, morally upsidedown, false, stupid or depraved comments that emerge from the mouth of Bill O'Reilly on the Foxaganda label is a turkey shoot. Pick a date. Any date. Bullseye. Olbermann does it and Mike Stark does it and so do the folks at this site and this one.

For August 2, Billy boy managed to combine all those categories into one typical scurrilous comment, condescendingly delivered in his faux homespun imitation of Lonesome Rhodes. I had missed the broadcast, but it was captured by those fine deconstructors over at Media Matters:

On the Lighter Side

by emptypockets

Something fun for your day off. I scribbled it several years ago in Golden Gate Park.
Let's call it the second entry in The emptypockets Anthology of Short Fiction.

"Any excuse for a barbecue! That's what my grandfather would say, ash on his apron and sparks in his hair. He was good, too, a real hamburger Hephaestus. But he never moved out of the classical. He'd learned it old-school, black coals and red dogs, with grey smoke over everything.

Now my father was weaned on those weenies but he moved on as a young man. It caused great tension between him and my grandfather, and when my dad grilled his first portobello they didn't speak for six years. My pop was the Picasso of the Weber, he reinvented the grill. Mushroom and salmon shishkebab with garlic butter and dill. Upside-down buffalo burgers with avocado chili. Even desserts -- grilled dandelions over vanilla ice cream would have crowned the collection of any gustatory Louvre.

So when he presented me my first set of tongs in a small ceremony, close family only, on my thirteenth birthday, I was intimidated by them to say the least. In my dreams I was turned over a low fire all night, waking covered in sweat and charred on one side.

A Weekend Train Ride with Kurt Vonnegut

by emptypockets

Sunday afternoon. You've taken the weekend out of the city. You're returning by train. You struggle down the aisle. You find an empty seat. You shove your bag onto the overhead rack. You sit down, rummage for your ticket, stick it in the seat strap for the conductor. You look at the man next to you. He is frizzled, wrinkled, frazzled, twinkled. He is Kurt Vonnegut. You begin to talk.

Wouldn't that be nice? Taking the train back to New York with Kurt Vonnegut? Wouldn't that be fun?

Well, perhaps "nice" isn't the right word, exactly. "Fun," may be not quite it either. I mean, even in his youth, Kurt Vonnegut was not exactly a ray of sunshine. Reading him was not like staring into a rainbow. And, like most humans, Vonnegut has not found fewer things to complain about as he's gotten older. Like most humans, he does not see the world of today as a bouncing bundle of joy and hope compared with the world of his youth. The writer whose work has been described as a sugar pill with a bitter coating seems, in his older years, not to have bothered with the part about the sugar pill.

So his most recent book, "Man Without a Country," is not one to read when you are depressed. It is not one to read when you are ready to give up hope in America, or when you are already thinking about how humans have ruined the planet, how we are all doomed. It is, however, an excellent book to read when you are on a train, returning home, relaxed, sun-baked, afraid for the future but content in the present, and wishing for a little company from an old friend -- a very old friend -- a very old, cranky friend, who will crab all the way back until the train pulls into Penn Station.

I'm excerpting a few passages here to give you a taste. These were not my favorite parts (though they're good) but they are directly political and seemed best suited for discussion here. I've excerpted long chunks not out of disrespect for copyright but because it was not fair to the prose to slice and dice and ellipse it up until all the flavor was lost. Readers, lawyers, Kurt, forgive me.

Chernobyl, beyond the numbers

by Plutonium Page

"It was like airplane pilots experimenting with the engines in flight..."
             -- Valeri Legaslov, Soviet Chernobyl accident investigator

"Without Father"
              -- a 1986 painting about the Chernobyl disaster, by Lyudmila Koulichenko, age 12

"We did not yet possess a system of imagination, analogies, words or experiences for the catastrophe of Chernobyl."
                --  Svetlana Alexiyevich, writer from Belarus

On 26 April, 1986, the worst commercial nuclear accident in history occurred during a test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which lies near the Belarus-Ukraine border, 100 km north of Kiev, Ukraine.  At 1:23:58 am local time, the plant's Unit 4 reactor was rocked by a steam explosion, followed by a hydrogen explosion and a fire resulting in temperatures over 2,000°C.  The 1,000 ton reactor lid was blown off the core, the nuclear fuel rods melted, and more than 100 times the radiation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined was released into the atmosphere over the 10 days that the fire burned.

Many of the small towns and villages close to Chernobyl were rendered uninhabitable, and radioactive fallout from the accident was detected all over Europe.  On that day, the lives of over 130,000 people evacuees from the 30 km radius "exclusion zone" (left, click to enlarge) were changed in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, for most of us to imagine.

Most of the recent media discussion of the Chernobyl catastrophe has focused on the controversy about the number of people who have died - and will die - as a result of the accident.  In other words, the media has largely failed to see the people behind the statistics.  The purpose of this post is not to discuss the numbers, but to put a human face on the legacy of that day in April 1986.

This post is dedicated to those who died, and those who are still with us today. 

(A note to the nerds out there:  for brevity, I am not going into extreme technical detail about the disaster.  However, if you're interested, this article [pdf] is excellent.)

Republicans Are Naughty Patriots

By Meteor Blades

I spent my first nine years in southern Georgia. And if there's any label that can universally be applied to the South of my youth, it's "polite."

Oh, I know, some of you think the South of the 1950s was the home of lynchings, chain gangs and forcing people of certain pigmentation, like my grandparents, to step off the sidewalk when a real human needed to pass. The home of old times being misremembered but not forgotten, of nigger this and nigger that, of fire-hoses and share-croppin'. True enough, but underneath it all was politeness. Practically the first words out of my mouth were "ma'am" and "suh." I can still feel the sting from the backhand to the mouth I caught on the two occasions when I forgot to employ those honorifics. Today, half a century later, whether to clerks, cops, CEOS, neighbors, whoever, I call them what I was taught. Proving, I guess, that violent child abuse can modify behavior.

Today, too, I confess that I am disconcerted by the incivility of modern political discourse. The incendiary name-calling, the profanity, the obscenity, the hyperbole just makes that Southern piece of me scream: how very, very rude.

So tone it down, people.

Lying liars: ExxonMobil tries to polish its image

by Plutonium Page

There are some people you just can't believe, no matter what, because they can't stop lying:

The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

-- George W. Bush, June 17, 2004

Liars like to hang out with other liars, which is why Bush and  ExxonMobil are such good pals.  And, just like Bush, since ExxonMobil can't stop lying, and lying, and lying, you can't believe anything they say.

ExxonMobil's latest farce is to try to polish their image and shore up credibility with environmentalists.  Unbelievably, they think that changing their leadership from an unpleasant jackass to a slick, smiling, oily jackass will somehow convince people they've turned over a new leaf.

The New York Times reports:

If Rex W. Tillerson has his way, ExxonMobil will no longer be the oil company that environmentalists love to hate.

Since taking over as Exxon's chairman three months ago from Lee R. Raymond, his abrasive predecessor who dismissed fears of global warming and branded environmental activists "extremists," Mr. Tillerson has gone out of his way to soften Exxon's public stance on climate change.

"We recognize that climate change is a serious issue," Mr. Tillerson said during a 50-minute interview last week, pointing to a recent company report that acknowledged the link between the consumption of fossil fuels and rising global temperatures. "We recognize that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors affecting climate change."

[Emphasis mine.]

Wha...?  Does this mean that Exxon astroturf groups will have to re-write all their anti-climate change position papers?

No, wait!  Relax, folks!  Nothing has changed (except the climate).