Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in joe_haldeman's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Sunday, November 29th, 2009
2:53 pm	Ah believe in John Wayne Dave, I don't even believe in Newtonian physics or Einsteinian relativity, as I understand the verb "to believe." I think they provide good answers to the right questions. One counter-example and I'm reaching for my hat. I've been comfortable with this state of nonbelief since I was in my teens, though my atheism predates it. My juvenile atheism was a kind of belief; I wasn't old enough to be comfortable with absolute uncertainty. Now I take comfort in it. Belief of any kind makes me tired. (Sometimes scared.) I don't think it's cynical; I'm a skeptic but not a cynic (embracing the classical distinction of price versus value). If I were to hook up with any religion, it would have to allow so much latitude that its borders with nonbelief would disappear. Guess I'm a secular hedonist. I can claim to be a humanist, too, but that's harder to demonstrate. Interesting coincidence after watching the DVD Western -- "Tombstone" was on last night, and we endured the commercials to watch it. Interesting comparisons, though of course "Tombstone" did have to more-or-less conform to historical incident. (It wasn't accurate, even in broad strokes. There's an interesting take on that at http://www.clantongang.com/oldwest/movie1.htm.) Gay and Rusty and I saw the movie when it came out, in 1993, only about a dozen miles from the real Tombstone. We were camping just north of the town, and didn't know about the movie until we drove through. So we did the Cook's tour of the place and then saw the reconstructed (I assume) town in the movie that night. A pretty entertaining movie, though it was drastically cut for TV. Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday was a lot stronger in the actual movie, and was a high point. The other acting was good, too. I'm a sucker for the genre, though I've only written one novella that might roughly be categorized as a western. That's "Manifest Destiny," which was in the '83 F&SF and the Year's Best for that year, plus my collection _Dealing in Futures_. Maybe I should do another one. Slap leather, you sons o' bitches. Joe (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
3:08 pm	holidays and horse operas I like your take on Christmas, Dave. I try to get the best out of it, too. Won't be able to do much high-caliber gift-giving this year; too much time spent on my back. But we'll have the family and feast and the streak of goodness that runs through the commercialism like the delicious apple and cinnamon through a plain roll of a morning. Like morning coffee with a surprise shot of Grand Marnier (no longer for me, unfortunately). I'm sorry winter is such an unrelenting downer for you. We get to your Colorado every few years during the winter, and the brisk ice and snow are a bracing tonic for our subtropical sensibilities. But we always get back to the sunshine before the chill reaches bone. My really cold winters in Alaska are colored with the optimism and fun-seeking of childhood. Building igloos, sledding down long slopes, battling from behind snow forts with unlimited snowball ammunition. Playing with my black cocker spaniel, who would roll in the snow and wind up looking like some animated confection. Even the twenty-below cold of Iowa in graduate school was not without pleasure. I don't mind walking when it's too deep to drive, and still love the creak and whistle of snow, walking when it's too cold for mammals. Yesterday got up at 4:30 to be at the hospital by 6:00 for a routine procedure, removing a tube that drained the pancreas and replacing it with a smaller tube. The predictable happened -- I lay in a hospital bed for hours (having had nothing to eat or drink since midnight) and finally was wheeled into the operating room at 10:30. Wheeled out at 11:30, after a five-minute procedure. Lay in a room for another hour or so, but a kindly nurse brought me an 8-oz. Diet Pepsi and some graham crackers. Gay fixed me a huge leftover turkey sandwich when I got home, though, followed by a slice of Becca's good peach pie. So even though I had a new bag depending from my abdomen, to match the ileostomy on the other side, the world became all right. I mostly slept the day away, still fuzzy from the sedatives they gave me for the procedure. Roused myself around dinnertime for one of my favorite meals -- post-Thanksgiving casserole. Joel had bought the DVD of Sergio Leone's epic _Once Upon a Time in the West_, the director's cut, almost three hours long. I had a hankerin' for it, as we aficionados say, and because I'm sick the others went along with it. Well, it was sort of like a Sergio Leone western with a lot of air blown into it. The bad guys in long coats, the dusty pseudo-realistic western town, the beautiful woman and the complex not-so-good guy. A thousand pregnant pauses. Two minutes of Claudia Cardinale admiring herself in the mirror with a troubled look that slowly mutated into a troubled look. Several massacres and a shoot-out. A really mangy bad guy with a sawed-off lever-action rifle hanging from a string around his neck. A harmonica tying everything together, sort of. Cool horses, kind of scruffy. Good railroad stuff. Symbols galore. Water. Money. Bullets. Hats. Lanterns. Facial hair. Water was especially interesting. The bad guys wanted the beautiful woman's land because the railroad's a-comin' and her land has the only water in fifty miles. (You might wonder why they didn't put the town there, instead of several miles away.) At the end, after a bad guy dies just inches from water, she takes water to the assorted minorities who are working on the railroad in her front yard. She evidently performs a Jesus-class miracle, because she takes care of a hundred semi-legal immigrants with less than two gallons of water. Henry Fonda enjoys playing a really really bad guy, a smooth-cheeked child-murderin' rapist who cheats at cards and throws away parking tickets. I did like it, though. Made in 1968, it pointed toward a genre that may not have a specific name -- dramas set in a late-19th century West that attempts to be historically accurate in terms of background and quotidian details, and that are more or less realistic in terms of blood and gore, but retain the dime-novel fantasy tropes that have characterized the movie genre from the beginning. Of course the take-home exam is to think of a sciencefictional analogue to that mixture. For me it was a large part of the attraction of the original _Star Wars_ movie -- rusty robots and homesteaders scratching out an existence on an alien planet, looking kind of ragged and dirty. Then it got all flashy, unfortunately. I guess some cineastes might have a similar problem with the Leone movie; oil and water. Joe (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
12:33 pm	take a turkey to dinner (In response to sffnet -- ) Actually, I like putting on a big feast myself, when I have normal energy. I like to do a couple of ducks (used to be a goose before they went sky-high) and have plenty of meat and fat for cassoulet the next week. The family picks over one of the ducks the day before Christmas. For some reason I've been especially feeble the past couple of days. Maybe the approaching (two and a half hours now) holiday. Did I mention that I don't much like holidays on principle? I guess I do like the part with family and food and giving presents. But all the public greed and sanctimoniousness and sheer ubiquity of it makes me vaguely ill from late November till early January. Of course we should all emulate Baby Jesus and treat one another with love and respect during these special days. And, to quote Tom Lehrer, be grateful that it doesn't last all year! Even as I write, that turkey is waiting for us across the parking lot in the Kroger's. And mashed potatoes and gravy and all those things to feel thankful for. Hope you all have a good feast and a sound nap watching the Lions lose. (In ancient Rome, they never did . . . ) Joe (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
2:04 pm	philosophers and root vegetables Nothing of great import to report. Went to the hospital and had a CAT scan, which will guide the doctor[s] in moving the tube that I think runs over the top of the pancreas (and then out through a hole in the upper abdomen to a vacuum receptacle). That will be day after tomorrow. Another schedule shake-up, keeping us in Cincinnati some days more. (Not a big problem, since I'm not yet physically up to a thousand + mile car trip.) Going to have the little "procedure" Friday on the abdominal tube, requiring sedation but no serious surgery. Then a week from Friday I'll finally see the original doctor, out of town for a week, and perhaps get a travel verdict. Maybe have the tube removed. Made a pretty good dinner, all vegetarian, almost all from Becca's garden. She and Gay dug up all kinds of root vegetables. Then Gay cleaned them and I prepared sweet potatoes and carrots as "oven fries," cutting them like oversized French fries and tossing them with olive oil and cinnamon, then baking; on top of the stove I did a big bunch of fresh Swiss chard, just wilted in olive oil with a squeeze of lemon. Avocado and tomato from somewhere south of Ohio. My customers thought it was all great. Read a fascinating graphic novel, _Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth_, a 300+ page biography of Bertrand Russell and his friends and enemies, wives and lovers. With a bit of propositional calculus thrown in for spice. Well drawn and written. (Authors Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou; art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.) Wishing everybody a happy T-day. (Tryptophan?) I may be offline for a couple of days, though so far they don't plan to keep me in the hospital. Joe (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
3:16 pm	stars and tears Elizabeth, our experience was just like yours. When I first got the Questar, I could use it in the back yard and see lots of galaxies and nebulae. Now, with the football stadium and shopping mall, forget it. At least with a small scope. With my 12" and a Skyglow filter, I can glimpse deep-sky objects. I hope that will also be true with my next scope, a 9.25" Mak. We do have dark sky about eighteen miles away, in Paynes Prairie State Park. Have to rent a campsite to get in at night, though. A few days ago Stephen Leigh brought by a guitar for me to play if I was in the mood. I tried it once and found it too difficult -- my main guitar at home is a nylon-string classical; the only steel-string I play regularly has ultra-light-gauge strings. These were regular gauge, and they hurt my fingers too much; I couldn't bear down enough to make a decent tone. Today I thought I'd try it again, and when it hurt I bore down harder -- don't be such a wuss -- and after a few minutes I was able to play right through the pain. My fingers remembered "this is the way it always is, coming back from a long absence." I haven't played since August. I strummed around and subvocalized until I found a song I thought I could sing with my hoarsened voice, a high one with not too many notes. When I sang it, Gay burst into tears. Another part of her husband was back. Joe (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
4:22 pm	war and peace and moon and stars Mitch, I have to admit that I didn't take note of the viciousness in the attitudes of the crew in the new Trek movie. I'm too inured to it, I guess. You make a good point, though, or a good set of points. The generation that created the pacifistic Star Trek knew what real world war was. The generation working on it now sees the good guys doing their thing in the desert on TV. That's war, and the grainy black-and-white cataclysm of world war isn't even memory anymore, just history. Not that I don't think they are good guys, or at least gooder than the ones they're fighting. But moral murk is the province of war, as well. Like W characterizing as "cowards" people who trained for years to drive a jetliner into a building. There are better words for them. And most of the men and women protecting our interests in Afghanistan know that they aren't GI Joes and Janes; defeating Hitler was a different and less subtle game. Your points are good, too, Elizabeth. We live in a charmed and relatively peaceful time and place. People like me see it as unstable equilibrium, though. Spend an afternoon listening to hate radio and see the dark side. We lefties tend to dismiss them as nutcases. As German lefties did in the thirties. I just got a joyous phone call from London. When Judith Clute was here I gave her a small telescope -- a 3" Dobsonian reflector that Celestron brought out to celebrate the Year of the Telescope. The skies cleared over London and Judith took the little scope out onto her garden terrace and looked at the moon, which is the best target for the little scope. Does make me wish I was back home with my little Questar. Maybe in a couple of weeks. Having a CAT scan on Tuesday and a meeting with the surgeon on Friday. Hope my stars are lucky. Joe (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
3:04 pm	war and peace It's interesting to consider the sentiment "There was never a good war or a bad peace." A lot of people (especially those with no direct experience with war; especially males under 25) would go to war to protect vague abstractions. People without personal freedom will nevertheless go to war to protect the freedoms their government claims they have. Is a peace without liberty preferable to fighting to regain liberty? I have some sympathy for the man who reaches for a gun when the government wants to do something for his own good. But I'm not that man. I have patience and a long view. And an ability to get along with people no matter what. You can quibble over "bad peace," but I wonder if anybody who was ever in one could come up with an example of a "good" war. Not if it was actually a war, the use of deadly force to bring about political ends. No matter what good resulted from it. It's still the murder of innocents. A tattoo-covered multi-decorated killer Marine started out innocent, and the core of goodness is still within him. And speaking of astrophysics . . . An interesting note in New Scientist for 7 Nov 09. Radio astronomers reaped a short-lived bonanza after the June switch from analogue to digital TV, which freed up the radio spectrum from 700 to 800 megahertz. The window is important for pulsars ("pulsar exotica," like a pulsar orbiting a black hole) and for galaxies that hit their stride when the universe was half as old as it is now. But they have to hurry. The frequency band is being auctioned off for cell phone use, and will be opaque to astronomers in a year or so. Seems like they could have waited a bit longer. Well, there's always the other side of the Moon. Real radio quiet back there. Joe (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 20th, 2009
4:26 pm	war, peace Dave, when I was in the hospital in Vietnam I volunteered to work for the Red Cross. I was sitting in my office typing up a ditto master for the football pool when an old guy knocked on the door and stepped in -- I saw the general's stars on his Air Force fatigues and snapped to. Then a lifelong familiar voice said, "Aw, siddown, soldier," and I saw "Stewart" sewn over his blouse pocket. I shook Jimmy Stewart's hand and stammered something inane. We exchanged pleasantries and he went on to talk to the guys who were bedridden. Later that month his son was killed in a different part of Vietnam, I think his plane or helicopter shot down. I didn't learn that until years later. He'd come over to visit the boy. War is the province of irony; von Clausewitz might have said; war is the province of tragedy. Not much new going on here. Added a "long" walk, ten minutes, to my exercise regimen. Walk ten minutes, rest thirty. But everything is progress. Signed contracts for three more titles to AudioBooks -- Camouflage, Starbound, and Untitled (next sf book, presumably Earthbound). I should get a few of those and listen to them. A disconcerting number of fans have _only_ heard my books, checking the disks out of the library. Give me a break, guys! Feed my greed and buy a book. (Actually, I'd rather be read for free than ignored. And I do make a little bit from library sales.) Joe (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
4:04 pm	getting better (n sff.net, Geoff Landis referred to an article in American Scholar that analyzes F. Scott Fitzgerald's financial records.) The Fitzgerald article was fascinating, Geoff. No actual surprises, but it was valuable (and astonishing) to see the actual numbers. He and Zelda did party their way through an immense pile of cash. It's open season on Fitz. The 16 Nov New Yorker has Arthur Krystal's "Slow Fade," an elegaic retelling of the Fitzgerald/Hollywood tragedy. Or can you make tragedy out of bathos? When I was around eighteen I read "The Crack-up," Fitzgerald's elegy for his own creative life, and it scared the shit out of me. I resolved never to read it again, out of fear that it might be contagious, and so far I've kept that resolution. He was still an elegant writer, but he'd lost the creative spark and didn't know how to rekindle it. We've lost WiFi, because the folks we were slaving off had the gall to move. Got up one morning and there was a moving van down the street and no "linksys" on the computer. So this will go out whenever Gay finds a node. I've been doing comfort food. Chicken and dumplings, meatloaf. A culinary nesting instinct, perhaps. But yesterday Gay got me a tin of garam masala (from an Indian salesman at the huge grocery store Jungle Jim's); I'll do up some tangy Indian fish or chicken. Still improving physically. I can walk without the walker for several minutes. Various pains are decreasing; I can stand upright without discomfort, which I couldn't have done a week ago. Going to see the surgeon this morning for a checkup. Spent six hours over three evenings trying to make sense of _The Prisoner_. Very diverting if confusing. Otherwise we've been mostly watching old movies on Turner, without commercials. Writing on the novel almost every morning and some afternoons. Still low on energy, but I don't think it shows in the writing. I haven't put any characters in the hospital or had a pancreas give out. Joe (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
9:53 am	a day like all days, filled with those events which alter and illuminate our times Yesterday was pleasantly uneventful. Weather almost springlike, so I got out a bit on my walker. Went to a nice Indian restaurant for lunch, the New Krishna. I read a couple more chapters to Gay and Judith, and then they went off in search of a ready-broiled chicken for dinner. None to be had, so they got a raw one and handed it to me. Not much work at all. I did it country French style, slathering it in butter and then squeezing lemon juice all over it. Put it in the oven and then Judith did the rest of the work while I rested. My energy level seems to hit a maximum around midday, and then I wear out slowly until after dinner about all I can do is sit in the recliner and enjoy painkillers and television -- a nice anachronism last night, a Jack Benny TV show. I lie awake until one or two in the morning, and then sleep till about seven. (I tried sleeping pills in the hospital, and they just make me groggy.) I'll probably straighten out once I can get more exercise. Right now I do a set of simple PT moves, about 10-15 minutes, that hits me like running a mile used to. Give it time, I know. But time is all we have. Joe (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, November 13th, 2009
3:58 pm	eating, reading Lunchtime, we screwed our culinary courage to the sticking place and struck out for the nearest Skyline Chili. (They're as ubiquitous as Burger Kings in another city.) I got a bowlful of everything but the spaghetti, watching carbs, and have to say it wasn't bad, even if (as has been reiterated here a few times) it wasn't chili, either. Greek hamburger stew, a good lunch. Judith Clute protected the reputation of British trenchermen by getting a jumbo five-way, and almost finishing it. I read a bunch of books while I was languishing in the hospital, mostly unmemorable light stuff. An Elmore Leonard I didn't like, surprisingly (The Hunted) and a Western I thought was super, Elmer Kelton's Joe Pepper. Enjoyed two of the Alexander McCall Smith "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series. Yeah, I should have been reading cutting-edge science fiction. Rather write it. This afternoon I started easing into writing again, reading the first chapter of the current book aloud to Gay and Judith. Holds up pretty well. Joe (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
3:22 pm	twenty thousand bottles of wine on the wall, twenty thousand bottles of wine . . . I'm sort of copping out on Turkey Day this year. Don't have the stamina to do the usual one-armed-paperhanger cooking. So we've decided to buy a ready-cooked turkey with all the trimmings. Have a few fans over to help us with it. Having a pretty good time being inactive. Watched the zany Liz Taylor version of "Taming of the Shrew" on teevee, and last night there was a charming corny 1938 movie with Hedda Hopper as herself, "Hotel Hollywood." Mainly sleeping and eating a lot. Doc said several small meals would work better than three regular ones, and heavy on protein, which I take as a License to Kill Cheese. I can stand at the stove now for more than five minutes at a time, and have a chair right behind me for periodic rest. So tonight I'm cooking up pork chops with sliced apple and onion, and Gay's gotten me some salmon and beef to play with. Gay was on the phone all morning, arranging my medical appointments, trying to shorten our stay here. Once this tube is out, I'm sure I'll be able to ride to Florida, though I don't think it would be smart for me to drive. Too many meds. I haven't missed alcohol and doubt that I will in a serious way. Between the ages of 17 and 67 I drank about twenty thousand bottles of wine, and that's probably enough. Joe (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
4:03 pm	back from the dead Hello, there. Joe calling back from the dead. About two hours after my last LJ entry, in Cincinnati on 19 September, I went back to the hotel from fixing a kettle of vegan chili for the next day's party. I developed stomach pains that became all-thorax pain and then began an impressive bout of projectile vomiting. The last time I vomited was 1954, so I was pretty sure there was something wrong. I collapsed and Gay called 9-1-1. The last thing I remember was the ambulance crew coming through the door. I woke up more than three weeks later. They thought it was a twisted bowel, but once they opened me up they found acute pancreatitis, and it was touch and go for weeks, me in a coma on a refrigerated mattress (to keep fever under control). To make a long story short, I spent the next 52 days in two hospitals. Crept out yesterday. (Anyone curious about the details can check Gay's daily log of the disaster – http://webnews.sff.net/read?cmd=xover&group=sff.people.joe-haldeman&from=-10) It's beyond wonderful to be rid of the hospital room, the IV drips, the wretched immobility. Not to mention the scorns that a meritorious patient from th'unworthy take. The condo that Joel Zakam has graciously loaned us is comfortable as can be, and has a nice woodsy view out back. Speaking of woods, I'm not out of them, quite. I get tired walking across a room (but I can do it, without the walker). I have the clumsy ileostomy bag for another six months or so, and some pretty serious surgery in store then, when they reattach my large intestine. (They removed about 18" of it, including the appendix as a little bonus.) And of course there's pain. I have a tube stuck in my upper abdomen, about the place where guys used to get shot on TV. A nice .32 caliber hole – feh! Ladies' gun – with an alarming plastic tube slithering into my innards, sucking out pancreatic fluid and dead tissue into a vacuum bulb. They're pulling the tube out a couple of inches at a time, which sort of establishes a lower limit for returning to Florida. I have to go back to the hospital two weeks hence – outpatient! – to get a CAT scan before they pull the tube out another inch. Then more scanning as they slowly work it out. So it will be closer to Christmas than Thanksgiving when we get back to Florida. I couldn't have picked a better place than Cincinnati, to fall over almost dead. We have an army of friends here from science fiction fandom, who have been as dedicated as an army. The city itself is rated #2 in the country for pancreatic medicine. And when I'm in a little better shape, I'll hadj over to Skyline Chili and get a bowl of the weird cinnamon spaghetti sauce that they call chili here. My heartfelt thanks for everyone's good thoughts and prayers. Even a lifelong atheist can recognize the healing power of love, in whatever form it's sent. Joe (55 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 18th, 2009
9:13 pm	chili and galaxies I took a long weekend off from MIT (actually, carrying work with me, of course) to go to ChiliCon, an annual event put on by two Cincinnati fans, Guy Allen and Becca Levin. Just put in about an hour and a half chopping vegetables for tomorrow's vegan pot. There will also be two pots of beef, hot and not-too-hot, and one of elk. I predict the elk will go first. One of the most stunning astro-pictures I've seen in a while is the NASA UV picture of the Andromeda Galaxy, http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/386913main_Swift_M31_large_UV.jpg, done by the Swift satellite. 24 hours of exposures and ten weeks of processing (by undergraduate Erin Grand at the University of Maryland, where I incidentally got my astronomy degree, back when we still used daguerrotypes). Both of my classes at MIT are oversubscribed, but in Longer Fiction it's "listeners" who put them over the limit. In Science Fiction I'll have to do some juggling. (MIT says I have to accept up to eighteen. I would prefer no more than twelve. But the courses are popular.) Joe (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 14th, 2009
10:06 pm	bipolar blues (In sffnet, we're talking about Jonah Lehrer's book _How We Decide_ . . .) It does look like a fascinating book. But should I buy it? I can't decide . . . Currently preparing a talk about THE GREAT GATSBY, so all this meditation about decision-making process leads me to Fitzgerald's famous aphorism: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Give that guy a shot of dopamine. This afternoon we took a break to go see the director's cut of Jean-Jacques Beneix's 1986 film _Betty Blue_, only in town for a couple of days. It has an hour of footage never before seen in the United States. A fascinating slow film, three hours of watching a sexy impulsive woman's psyche disintegrate into bipolarism -- what was no doubt called manic-depressive psychosis at the time. I found her growing madness both convincing and deeply disturbing. There's a lot of attractive domestic nudity -- she and her boyfriend are both built like brick pissoirs -- and a few explicit sex scenes, all very natural-seeming, which probably means she and her partner were acting their brains out. A sad film with some mad happiness and bittersweet moments. Of course the guy is a novelist, which I guess seems pretty romantic to people who don't have to live with one. Joe (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
7:20 am	The Three, or Many, Laws of Bureaucracy (Responding to Dave Nicholas on sff.net, about using AI in a bureacracy . . . ) Maybe, Dave, it's worth deconstructing Asimov's Three Laws in this regard. 1. A bureaucrat may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A bureaucrat must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A bureaucrat must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. You'd have to modify #2, because the proper bureaucratic AI would be independently analyzing situations and arriving at conclusions. The first one has to be modified, the way the Hippocratic Oath has to be modified when applied to public health rather than single patients. "First of all, do no harm" becomes "First of all, act toward the greatest benefit for the greatest number." (This one caused my father genuine grief when he authorized the Salk vaccine trials, which did cause 260 cases of poliomyelitis, including ten deaths. But polio is gone now, because of the testing.) Speaking as someone with no expertise in AI, it still seems obvious that a primary step in empowering expert systems to step in for bureaucracy is to agree on some kernel of principle defining a core of ethics that everyone can agree on; something that every [sane] culture can accept. ("You can't kill or torture anyone except the enemy" would be okay in much of the world, including the Benighted States of America, for various values of "enemy.") Joe (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 11th, 2009
10:22 am	bureaucracy and the Beast (from sffnet) Blipvert, I don't know whether this is accurate -- I think I got it from a Heinlein novel -- but the story is that bureaucracy started out in ancient China, both as a way of keeping an increasingly complex society together and a provision for continuity between dynasties. Hmm . . . I googled, and Wiki confirms this: "The most modernesque of all ancient bureaucracies . . .was the Chinese bureaucracy. During the chaos of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Confucius recognized the need for a stable system of administrators to lend good governance even when the leaders were inept." I guess abuse of authority and lack of direct accountability -- insulation from the governed -- give bureaucracy a bad name. It doesn't have to be that way in a modern wired world, I say typing through rose-colored glasses. Started re-reading _The Great Gatsby_ (which I'll be teaching next week) on the train home yesterday. Delightful, the lapidary precision of the writing. "In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." A nice entry point into a story. You don't need flash if you've got polish. Junot Diaz picked us up for dinner and a movie. We went to Toraya, a nice little Japanese restaurant in Arlington, a place a Japanese friend thinks is the best in the whole Boston area. I felt like something warm (it was getting a little chill) and seafood, so got a crunchy softshell crab appetizer and fish and vegetable tempura, just right. The movie we saw was "9," a non-stop action animated film. It's visually effective, sometimes beautiful, but basically is an unrelenting chase scene. The characters are all robotic dolls, numbers one through nine, their personalities mostly sketched by the choice of actors that dub their voices, and their multiple antagonists are evil machines that seem to exist only to hunt them down and crush them, in a setting that looks like an alternative-history London destroyed by a WWII-type war. Yellowing newspapers that blow around, and a rickety newsreel, reveal that a Hitleresque suicidal dictator was responsible. The main baddie is a huge arachniform robot called the Beast, which would be absolutely unbeatable if not for #9's luck and pluck. The art has a high degree of sophistication and polish. The use of forced perspective in unusual points of view gives it a three-dimensional depth. I think it's worth seeing for that, and for the exquisite timing and physical suspense of the chase. But ultimately my reaction was sort of "Eh? So what?" I never really connected with the creatures or their situation. Joe (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
11:42 pm	triage (In sffnet, we're talking about smoking and motorcycle helmets and such -- personal lifestyle decisions that have public health consequences that translate into tax dollars from others who haven't made such decisions . . . ) I didn't know that about California, Karen. When Florida repealed their motorcycle helmet law some ten years ago, there was some graveyard humor about it -- "what do you call a biker without a helmet?" "A transplant donor." In fact, an often-repeated rationale against helmets, from macho bikers, was that when a motorcycle goes up against a car or a truck, the motorcycle's going to lose even if the rider's wearing a helmet. Might as well die "clean," from a brain injury. Of course a lot of them survive, as Dave says, to become wards of the state, i.e., grateful recipients of our tax dollars for decades. As to the triage argument implicit in [Roby and Karen's] thoughts about turning away ER patients on a basis of ability to pay . . . I put myself in a fictional situation. What if I, an old guy, showed up at an ER unconscious, without any proof of coverage -- for instance, after an accident where I was separated from my wallet? In fact, I have triple coverage: I have my MIT policy, and since I'm a combat-disabled veteran, the VA system is there for me . . . and I have money, too. Not even thinking about Obama's pie in the sky. But if there were dozens of other injuries, or hundreds -- an earthquake or something -- the doctors and nurses would look at my white hair (what's left of it) and stack me with the rest of the expendables. I wouldn't criticize the decision. Just a data point to put into the mill. Joe (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
8:54 pm	(from a sff.net conversation ... ) Just to reinforce the obvious . . . I was a heavy smoker in college and a triply heavy smoker in Vietnam, where cigs were free and you were going to die anyhow. In my thirties I was able to quit inhaling ("") and get by with a pipe and cigars, and finally gave that up at 40. Twenty-six years later, I'm still smoke-free. But not completely free. The addiction is gone, but the longing will always be there. Not for cigarettes, but the pipe and good cigars. Nothing tastes like them, and there's nothing like a pipe on board a boat in a freshening breeze, or a cigar in a low-down dive with whiskey and jazz. The only reason I don't seek out those situations is that I'm honestly terrified that I couldn't do it just once. I remember addiction and don't want to go back there. So I have a lot of sympathy for smokers, and a tad more for non-smokers. When I go to a music gig where the performers are smoking, I don't mind it so much once I get used to it. But in the morning I want to burn all the clothes I was wearing and take a bath in lye. Joe (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 7th, 2009
11:56 am	not a soapbox I should have come up with a word that has fewer associations than "administration." You just want to start with the problem, which is that we have various functions that have to be performed "by society" so that people can live in reasonable comfort and security. Of course the details of these functions vary from culture to culture, neighborhood to neighborhood, and so on down to the individual. When I'm home alone, the television can stop functioning for weeks and I won't even know. If the WiFi goes down, I start to have palpitations. My need for roads, for another instance, is not aligned with my neighbors' needs, since I have no car up here. I need bike trails and public transportation. I suppose we need trucking roads since Big Auto trashed train travel. But that could be rethought and rebuilt. The result of proper leadership in dealing with these collective concerns is never going to be perfect for everyone. But if the compromises made are sensible and fair, and if the people understand compromise is necessary, the ordinary business of life could be a lot easier. My argument is less with government as an abstraction than with politics as a reality. The complex algorithms by which political leaders are selected -- and I mean "selection" in the broadest sense, like Darwinian selection -- give us leaders who are on top for all the worst reasons. I want people who are good at leading but don't desire to lead because of some psychological defect. I've met leaders like this all through my life, in business, education, religion -- and even in the military, which can attract leaders for lots of wrong reasons. But you often feel that good people got there in spite of their virtues rather than because of them. It's a pretty low soapbox for an anarchist. But I'm not the bomb-throwing kind. Joe (10 Comments |Comment on this)