Monday, December 28, 2015
Giant Squid
A Bit of Bipartisan Good Cheer
What do you know, sometimes Congress works:
A bill to protect the environment was introduced in the House in March. In early December, the House passed the bill. A week later, the Senate passed it as well, without changing a word and by unanimous consent, just before Congress left town on Friday.As the Times notes, one reason this bill sailed through is that several states have already passed bans on microbeads, and the industry decided to support the Federal ban rather than deal with 50 different state laws. Microbeads are not really such a huge threat, but they are hazardous to water-dwelling animals and they just seem like a frill, since they are used mainly in cosmetics and less dangerous alternatives are available.
That is the strangely charmed life of the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, which sailed through Congress in an age when most legislation plods. The new law bans tiny beads of plastic that have been commonly added as abrasives to beauty and health products like exfoliating facial scrubs and toothpaste.
Under the law, companies will have to stop using beads in their products by July 2017.
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Minster Court, London
The Independent described it as ‘one of the great walking nightmares of postmodern architecture, an aftershock that rose like Dracula’s castle from the ashes of the recession.’ According to the Guardian it looks ‘as close to Batman as the Middle Ages’ and Simon Bradley sees it as a ‘vast and bewildering American influenced flagrantly populist pile of peaks and gables’. The film 101 Dalmatians gave it the backhanded complement of use as the headquarters of Cruella De Ville. The City Guides architectural expert, Paul Taylor, feels that it is a rather dishonest building, as its fantastical complexity is achieved by appearing to stick on features that serve no practical and little symbolic purpose.And here is what I hate about contemporary architecture and its critics: what is wrong with making an office building "flagrantly populist"? Why shouldn't people like the buildings they work and live in? Why should people be forced to endure, day in and day out, various sculptural experiments with form because that is what architects admire? Architecture is not like painting or chamber music, something created and consumed by small groups of insiders. It is a mass art for the mass of the people. And, damn it, architects should strive to create buildings that the people who see them every day will enjoy.
Jens Jensen, The Boy on the Wall
Losing Faith in Democracy
For decades now Americans have had little faith in most of our institutions -- Congress, unions, big business, etc. -- and this has now begun to erode our faith in democracy itself. Vox summarizes the polling:
Rich Americans are especially down on democracy, more than 40% now saying that we would be better off having a "strong leader".
I don't view any of this as an immediate threat to democracy in America -- or in Europe, for that matter. What would we do instead?
But I do think that this shows our actions and our words matter. Over the past 15 years western democracies have failed in some major, significant ways -- in preserving peace, preventing terrorism, and organizing the economy to help ordinary people. If politicians want the respect of the people, they need to make government work better. In America we also have the problem of increasingly rigid partisanship, in which both parties exert themselves as much to keep the other side from achieving its goals as to accomplish their own, leading to grim gridlock. Right now the notion that everyone in the government should work together to help Americans seems ridiculously naive.
America's public discourse has also shifted away from the center. The sort of bland nationalism that we were fed by Time magazine back in the day has slipped into the background, replaced by Rush Limbaugh and the Daily Show. One of my favorite facts about contemporary America is that more Americans tell pollsters they would be unhappy about their children marrying someone from the opposite political party than someone of a different race.
On the right especially, but also to some extent on the left, the tone of politics has become less rational and more apocalyptic. Politicians talk more about losing the America they grew up, or even losing America altogether, than about the great things we will achieve in the future. I was struck to hear Sean Hannity, no great optimist himself, pausing during the last Republican debate to wonder what had happened to Reagan's "city on a hill." That sort of optimism is hard to find in contemporary America.
I think the rise of libertarianism is particularly destructive. The notion that we are lone wolves struggling for personal advantage in a dark forest is both wrong and damaging to democracy. Our future depends absolutely on our ability to work together and take care of each other, and the existence of millions of people who deny this has become corrosive. You can see this especially among the rich, who have started to believe in the lie that they achieved everything by their own efforts and owe nothing to the rest of us. They are wrong, and if we are going to preserve the liberal world we inherited, a world that takes democracy and human rights for granted, we need to answer them.
If we care about democracy, we need to argue back against the oracles of selfishness, the prophets of doom, and the sirens of resentment. We need to stand up for reason, for humanity, for our common weal. Because our free, democratic world, for all that ails it, is our greatest creation, and we absolutely should not let it slip away. Hold fast to the light.
For Americans born in the 1930s, living in a democracy holds virtually sacred importance. Asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how important it is to them to live in a democracy, more than 70 percent give the highest answer. But many of their children and grandchildren are lukewarm. Among millennials — those born since the 1980s — fewer than 30 percent say that living in a democracy is essential. . . .Among Americans born since 1970, more than 20% rate democracy as a "bad" or "very bad" way to run America. The number of Americans who think it would be better if the country were run by the military has climbed from 5% in 1995 to 15% today.
I don't view any of this as an immediate threat to democracy in America -- or in Europe, for that matter. What would we do instead?
But I do think that this shows our actions and our words matter. Over the past 15 years western democracies have failed in some major, significant ways -- in preserving peace, preventing terrorism, and organizing the economy to help ordinary people. If politicians want the respect of the people, they need to make government work better. In America we also have the problem of increasingly rigid partisanship, in which both parties exert themselves as much to keep the other side from achieving its goals as to accomplish their own, leading to grim gridlock. Right now the notion that everyone in the government should work together to help Americans seems ridiculously naive.
America's public discourse has also shifted away from the center. The sort of bland nationalism that we were fed by Time magazine back in the day has slipped into the background, replaced by Rush Limbaugh and the Daily Show. One of my favorite facts about contemporary America is that more Americans tell pollsters they would be unhappy about their children marrying someone from the opposite political party than someone of a different race.
On the right especially, but also to some extent on the left, the tone of politics has become less rational and more apocalyptic. Politicians talk more about losing the America they grew up, or even losing America altogether, than about the great things we will achieve in the future. I was struck to hear Sean Hannity, no great optimist himself, pausing during the last Republican debate to wonder what had happened to Reagan's "city on a hill." That sort of optimism is hard to find in contemporary America.
I think the rise of libertarianism is particularly destructive. The notion that we are lone wolves struggling for personal advantage in a dark forest is both wrong and damaging to democracy. Our future depends absolutely on our ability to work together and take care of each other, and the existence of millions of people who deny this has become corrosive. You can see this especially among the rich, who have started to believe in the lie that they achieved everything by their own efforts and owe nothing to the rest of us. They are wrong, and if we are going to preserve the liberal world we inherited, a world that takes democracy and human rights for granted, we need to answer them.
If we care about democracy, we need to argue back against the oracles of selfishness, the prophets of doom, and the sirens of resentment. We need to stand up for reason, for humanity, for our common weal. Because our free, democratic world, for all that ails it, is our greatest creation, and we absolutely should not let it slip away. Hold fast to the light.
Saturday, December 26, 2015
What do Student Protesters Want?
Increasing the diversity of professors is hard because professors tend to stay in their jobs for decades, so even the biggest universities hire only a few every year, and in some fields the applicant pool is overwhelmingly white. Diversity training is a waste of time. I don't have any problem with cultural centers, if that is what students really want. Increasing the diversity of students is hard in the current legal climate, since quotas are pretty much illegal, although the "top 10% of every high school class" rule that the University of Texas came up with is a clever approach. And anyway there are only so many minority students to go around, and some of them go to historically black colleges or other places where they are the majority.
Tracking race-related offenses is a devil-in-the-details problem; track what offenses, as reported by whom? I imagine most colleges already track offenses that result in a formal charge against someone. What others should be considered?
Expanding mental health resources is something every college that can afford it has already been doing, yet another reason why tuition keeps going up and every college has more administrators.
Every college would also love to retain more minority students -- in fact to retain more white students, too -- but this is another hard problem.
I expect that some colleges will be renaming buildings and changing mascots over the next few years, but this is only going to happen slowly, after administrators have had time to feel out alumni and so on.
I find public apologies for long-past actions to be rituals as bizarre as anything done in New Guinea, but if that's what people want, whatever.
Maybe some college officials need to be removed, but I suspect most of this is scapegoating.
None of this is going to eliminate racism or sexism in America or make college a happier place.
Michael Davies, Frozen Tea
Ontario-based photographer Michael Davies timed this impressive shot of his friend Markus hurling a thermos of hot tea through the air yesterday in -40°C weather. At such frigid temperatures water freezes instantly to form a dramatic plume of ice.
Algorithmic Campaigning
New Hampshire reporter Scott Conway on his meeting with Marco Rubio:
We had roughly 20 minutes with him [Rubio] on Monday, and in that time, he talked about ISIS, the economy, his political record and his background. But it was like watching a computer algorithm designed to cover talking points. He said a lot but at the same time said nothing. It was like someone wound him up, pointed him toward the doors and pushed "play." If there was a human side to the senator, a soul, it didn't come across.I have always had exactly this feeling about Rubio.
Friday, December 25, 2015
Michael Sowa
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
I found her account of the post apocalypse world more believable than most I have read. Why do so many people assume that the collapse of civilization would make most people into raging evil monsters? I had to stop watching The Walking Dead because I got tired of everyone being so pointlessly, purposelessly evil. In Station Eleven there is much turmoil and there are some bad people, but most folks are just trying to survive and welcome help wherever they find it. The main focus in that era is on the Traveling Symphony, a few dozen folks who wander the world playing music and putting on Shakespeare, the motto "Survival is Not Sufficient" painted on their caravans. Loved them.
Thursday, December 24, 2015
The Nativity
Nerds Gotta Be Nerds
Hans Burgkmair
Der Weisskunig (the white king) is a loosely biographical account of the life of Emperor Maximilian I. The text, composed by Maximilian's secretary Marx Treitz-Sauerwein, is accompanied by illustrations by Burgkmair, Leonhard Beck, Hans Schäufelein, and Hans Springinklee, with the proofs completed between 1514 and 1516. However, they remained unpublished until the blocks were rediscovered in 1775, at which point they were published as a book by Hoffstätter in Vienna. It includes 236 woodcut illustrations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
