From Streetcars To Spaceships

Harlan, you're fighting for us again.

The decades pass, the executives get richer, and those of us who put in our time and our creative output to keep them going generally get something between jack and shit. Even those who get paid above and beyond hourly rates get stiffed pretty reliably in direct proportion to how much they focus on creating good work instead of playing corporate politics.

If you're reading this blog, you probably already know this right down the the marrow of your bones.

But what justice there is can usually be traced back to somebody whose work was valuable, who somehow did build a certain reserve of their own wealth and power, and who is a sufficiently stubborn son of a bitch to refuse to accept "I'm sorry, we seem to have lost your letter on this matter; please send it again for our consideration" as a sufficient answer.

Right now Harlan Ellison is doing this. You can read about it here. Star Trek would never have done as well without his writing and he's demanding a fair accounting of all the products they've derived from his work, from a Christmas ornament that plays back lines he wrote to a series of books entirely built around characters he created. They've been giving him the runaround about this since Shatner had his own hair and will keep doing so forever unless this suit wins.

To which I say, GO HARLAN! All of us who have ever written for pay, all of us who have ever seen our creative output of any sort treated with off-handed contempt upon reception, recognized as lucrative internally, and then bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated for their maximum gain while the actual creators aren't even invited to the table to play a role, let alone get paid anything proportionate, should be willing to do whatever it takes to help. He is fighting for everybody who sells the products of their mind or even who has previously and now finds themselves getting nothing while gladhanding, seatwarming, frat boys congratulate each other on how much they've screwed us thinkin' folks yet again.

Once, years back, I took on a really nasty consulting job for an English magazine group that was launching a cooking magazine in the States.
The company IT manager has carried only two things away from his punk youth, expensive tattoos, and a very brownshirted insistence that everything be done his way, despite New York being just slightly different from London in, well, everything from supply relationships to voltages and software release dates. But being the young idiot and compulsive fixer I was I worked away at it anyway.

But somehow, as the weeks turned into months, once my first bill had been covered, I still wasn't being paid any of the rest. The New York office said I needed to talk (on the phone, mind you, in the early nineties) to the relevant people in the London accounting office. Those people, knowing perfectly well what each call was costing me, kept saying "the person you need just stepped out. How about you call again later?" When I finally got them on the phone they said that they needed more approvals from the folks in the New York office. And back and forth and back and forth. By this time the gig was over and, as far as I knew, my leverage was nil. And I was thousands of dollars behind, not even including expenses they were now disallowing entirely. Their lies and betrayal were leaving me unable to pay my rent.

For a while I stewed uselessly but then I talked to Martha Leinroth, a designer and photographer I knew from a consulting firm we both used to work for. She was older than me, more established, and generally more endowed with both perspective and experience about this kind of thing and she told me a story. Now, Martha was always a very elegant woman. She spoke and acted with grace and I had seen her stay composed and clear thinking through some pretty tumultuous times. So when she said that once, after a client had just absolutely refused to pay a bill, she had walked into their office, up to the relevant person's desk, kicked everything off the desk, and stood on it looking down at these weasels, saying that she would come down only when a signed check was in her hands, I believed her. And when she said that the check was soon in her hands, I understood her point.

Now, not being an elegant, black-clad, near six-foot tall, female college professor, I figured my approach should be a bit different. So I went to the magazine's offices and said that I wanted to talk to their bookkeeper about the delay in my check.

I was told that she had an appointment. I said that I would wait. I was told that it would be a long appointment. I said that was okay, and opened my bag, showing my notebook, some product literature I needed to review, and at least three books. That's fine, I said; I have plenty to keep me busy. The receptionist threatened to call security if I wouldn't leave and I said that was fine. I would then call the police and file charges of felony theft. She said that, well, then I could wait there after all. The entire exchange, mind you, spoken in plausibly polite tones.

I was still there at 6:00. I was back at 9:00. If I remember correctly, it took me about four days over the course of a little over a week. (Lost a few days to other gigs.) But eventually, a little after I had settled in for yet another day in their lobby with my copies of MacWeek, my books, my daytimer, their bookkeeper came out to the front and insisting that this had just been a trivial misunderstanding (though still trying to somehow pin all the delay on me), walked out and handed me a check. Not for the full originally promised amount, I'll grant. They got away with chiseling about a thousand of various expenses and such. But, nonetheless, most of my money and sure as hell money I wouldn't have seen at all if I had waited "politely" for them to be "reasonable".

My friend Sara Stewart and I wonder sometimes, when did it become assumed that being a progressive meant being everybody's doormat? What ever happened to all that the unions worked for to create a just fury among those who get screwed by the kind of people who take dinner dates with judges and host benefits for legislators? What softened away the righteous willingness to stand up and say that we've had enough to the faces of the scam artists who seem to be behind so much these days?

We know many of the answers to that. Corporate structures that hide every decision behind layer upon layer of "customer service" desks and 800 numbers where we're supposed to accept them as the authoritative and sufficient voice of the corporation when they're saying offensive things to us but be polite to them no matter what because, after all, "it's not their fault, they're just doing their jobs".

In person, for what it's worth, I'm not terribly big on literally raising my voice as a way to get things changed. I've generally found it more effective to calmly, implacably, refuse to go away."I'm sorry, but I can't accept that. May I speak to your manager, please?" "your manager is away? I see. Who is the store supervisor at this time. I see. Then I'll speak to them. They're busy? That's okay. I'll wait. No, I don't need a seat. I'll stand right here" (in the middle of their busiest aisle). Or sometimes, as I'm told I need to sign something or check something, to simply walk away and force them to either yield the point or need to physically attack me.

But we all need to to do this. We all need, sometimes, to refuse to "sit back down and not disturb the other customers". We all need to, as I did yesterday, walk up to the sales desk at Comcast and tie up half an hour of their time going over how it's illegal to sabotage downloads (it's called "throttling") as they have been found to do and that I will be changing my service soon. Feels good. I've had a good rant to clear my head and they'll be a little more reluctant to hang onto those jobs as corporate stooges.

Y'all mostly know about my DIY Manifesto. You know that I fight for the big battles, too. To change zoning codes and how kids are raised and how people are taxed and regulated and punished. But this stuff is crucial, too. Once you yield to a bully, you betray not only yourself, but everybody who will deal with that bully after you. And which is more polite, being calm and "understanding" while somebody fucks you over, or defending not only yourself, but those who will come after?

The SciFi Channel is being renamed WHAT?

So I see that The SciFi Channel is being renamed SyFy with the tagline "Imagine Greater".

Seriously. I'm not kidding. Here's the new site, complete with press release: http://www.syfy.com

From what I can see, this is mostly about their wanting a unique brand identity instead of a name built around a descriptor that they can't control. But since they didn't want to do anything daring like actually come up with a new name, they just changed the spelling. Brilliant, huh? Then they added a tagline which sounds like it was created by some guys who want to sound like the Think Different campaign but have no real understanding of why it works.

“We couldn’t own Sci Fi; it’s a genre,” said Bonnie Hammer, the former president of Sci Fi who became the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions. “But we can own Syfy.”

This article covers the issues pretty well: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/business/media/16adcol.html

Here are some other responses:
http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/64356/sci-fi-channel-becoming-syfy-huh
http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/sci_fi_channel_aims_to_shed_ge.php

Evidently they're anxious to dissociate themselves from those of us who actually care about fiction that takes seriously things like, ya know, actual science.

So, if they're going to call it "SyFy" I say let's pronounce it "siffy". They want to change their perception in the marketplace away from icky things like actual science. I say that we should help them with that distancing process.

I intend to go around making excuses to say the phrase "siffy - the syphilis channel" in a fake, perky, marketer-speak voice. My friend Kate Gowers has already picked up the ball and has added her own nefarious touch - spelling it "syffy". It's amazing how adding one more F makes the appropriate pronunciation clear. I intend to start doing the same.

Of course, to an old comics geek like me, that pronunciation also evokes the "hsiffys" of early Cerebus, adding all the "now I need to wash" associations of Dave Sim plus bonus ones of anti-intellectualism, racism, jingoism, and media manipulation.

Sounds about right to me.

Not to mention that syphilis is all about decreased brain function, loss of reasoning skills and judgement, becoming more prone to fits of violence and leering, crude sexuality. All of which just happen to describe pretty accurately recent trends of the channel in question.

Let's just all keep saying the phrase at every opportunity. See if we can get it to propagate. I'm talking to all of you science fiction fans, comics geeks, and other current or likely future members of their demographic. Let's see what we can do to make the association reflexive so seeing the logo causes the phrase to instantly, automatically pop up in everybody's mind.

"siffy - the syphilis channel".

Happy propagating,

Rustin

Science Needs Your BRAIN! (Seriously.)

I've been reading upsetting stuff for a while now on the increasing crisis in medical science that is coming about from the decreasing scarcity of human bodies made available for scientific research. Well, according to the Beeb, there is a desperate shortage of folks who donate their brains to science when they die. Evidently a donor card doesn't do the trick in most cases. That's just for transplants. So for all of you who haven't got some other serious objection, please do make sure that your friends and relative know that you want your body made available, especially since many doctors are evidently such fragile flowers that they now don't even ask.

Oh, and just for the record,

WHEN I DIE, PLEASE MAKE MY BODY AVAILABLE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.

signed me, Rustin H. Wright - geek of all work.

Have I made myself clear?

If nothing else, the idea of researchers trying to make sense of my body and brain, which have already left quite a few doctors shaking their heads and leaving me to figure it out for myself, tickles me no end.

p.s. - I've never liked the whole drop the body into a sealed box thing. As my essays on sending bodies to the Moon and Mars should make plain, I'm far happier with the idea of all those complex, useful chemicals going back into the ecosystem. As far as I'm concerned, it's even more, dare I say, spiritually satisfying. Part of me (which parts, you ask) has always felt that if I were to die with some scratch in the bank and some friends willing to take on the job, that the ideal would be to have my unembalmed body put in a wicker coffin and buried in an unmarked hole in an unrecorded location deep in the Cascades or the Rockies.

"Where is Rustin buried?"

"The mountains back around there."

"Where exactly?"

"Just back there. We didn't keep a record of where."

Sadly, this would not only be complex, it would also be illegal.

Our society has some serious problems.

They say that I'm a criminal.

I'm going to tell you a story. Quite a long one. But I promise that none of the details (well, almost none) are pointless and that I will get to that point. I will most bloody well assuredly get to my point.

It's been a great holiday season. Time with the family. Gave a huge mound of gifts to some my friends' kids. (Some of them even educational!) Plenty of parties. Lots of fun. But the real event that makes this holiday season one to remember has been getting written up on a morals charge.

Yup. That's right. One of our fine men in uniform has determined that I am a corrupter of youth and is determined to see me pay.

While I wait for the papers to arrive in the mail, let me tell you all about it.

My birthday is Christmas Eve. As I'm sure you can guess, this sucks. Luckily Christine, one of the people I know from the IPRC, had the same dilemma. So she arranged a party. At first is was to be on the 24th but with everybody planning to go away and the snow getting deeper all the time, she relented and off we all went for goofy times and bad Chinese food.

And that is why, at 1:00 in the morning, with the 23rd fading into memory and the 24th just begun, I was just then leaving Chopsticks, having left the crowd recovering from my unique rendition of There Is Nothin' Like A Dame (it's not my fault that the karaoke machine mixed up the music and lyrics) and the staff (I hope) pleased with the generous tip I had just put on my debit card. It had been a fun night and, if nothing else, it had been cool to finally get a chance to sit and chat with several people like Indigo Kelleigh and Carolyn Main who I had pretty much just seen around the Portland scene and rarely exchanged more than a sentence or two with. In fact, there had been at least ten at our table from the time I arrived until right before I left.

So, in short, I was in a jovial mood. And I had been there so long that I was even (sadly) stone cold sober. (My booze budget had been hit too hard over the previous weeks.) The view down Burnside was breathtaking, the snow was just a picturesque sprinkling, and the wind was gone. So I decided to walk home. And it was so very pretty. Of course a little part of me winced when a bus actually drove right past but overall I was mellow and delighted. And it being not only after one in the morning but also right in the middle of one of the biggest snowstorms in Portland history, the streets were empty. Everything was closed. I walked right down the middle of Burnside much of the way and the view right down the drive and across to the downtown skyline was enough to warm the heart.

So this was the state I was in as I reached 12th Avenue and Stark.

And there, in the vast lot that has been abandoned for so many years, I saw a wondrous sight. A positive league of holiday enthusiasts, something like ten of them, were building an igloo. And by igloo I mean the real thing. Blocks of packed snow built up like rows of bricks. About eight feet across, two windows, little half cylinder tunnel out of one side, big enough to let you crawl in and out, fit a few adults inside at a time. And even though they were just then starting to taper it in seriously, this wondrous bit of transitory architecture was already up to their shoulders.

And what were they using to build this? A couple of those yellow recycling bins we've all got were being used to gather snow. A beat up little corrugated plastic mail basket was being used to mold the blocks. And an assortment of mugs and cups and a stew pot or two held water to pour over joints and strengthen the whole assemblage. This was American gumption, straight out of Norman Rockwell. And just as pretty.

So, of course, I walked around the lot, up the slippery stairs, down the slope, and over to tell them how cool this was. And, by the way, could they use any help? They said, sure, another person to help fill in cracks and bring snow would be welcome. So I joined in. I told them that chances were good that pictures of this would be in tomorrow's paper, at which point one of them pulled out a camera and started snapping shots of others in the igloo looking out. After a couple of shots they remembered to move the six-pack of Hamms out of the way and to stand so the flash didn't reflect too much.

Well, sadly, this was about it for most of them, so most of the bunch headed in. It turns out that some of them had been there since five or six that afternoon. They were cold and tired and it was time for bed. So this left me and two of the guys. I was sad to see so many of them go since they took a bit of the party atmosphere with them but it let me focus more on things like getting a big chunk of ice to finish off the tunnel entrance and then start packing in snow and ice to smooth out the insides and outsides. Just my kind of thing.

We would have probably been at it for quite a while longer when we saw this guy in black headed our way, dropping his bicycle (!) about thirty feet off. He gets close and his first words are, "I'll need to see some ID; I'm gonna have to be the party pooper here." I would soon learn that "party pooper" was one of his favorite phrases. You see, he was a security guard for the property. And we were trespassing.

Now those of you who don't know southeast Portland won't know the spot I'm talking about. You can see it here. It's a big ol' lot that has people on it all day long. It's used as a dog run. I've seen people wander through it after parties. The only place you won't see anybody is the building, which is so boarded up, chained in, and obviously abandoned that any day now it may be used as the set for Friday the 13th, Part Umpty-zillion.

But as this earnest individual was very adamant we understand, it is, in point of fact, owned by the Portland public schools (from what I understand it actually was used as a school right up until a mere twenty years ago) and so we were on school grounds after school hours and so not only were we trespassing this was about corrupting youth. (Should I ask which youth we were corrupting at an abandoned building at two in the morning? No, I didn't think so either.)

And yes, he did have an additional complaint. You see, once he was there he could see that we had those terrifying cans of Hamms beer nearby. And a couple of them were (as far as I could see) empty. So we had open containers of alcohol in, as he reminded us again, a schoolyard.

The two guys and I had all immediately handed him ID as soon as he asked for it and as he lectured us we all tried to get him to see just what the situation was a little more clearly. As soon as he has finished writing our information in what I assume was his ticket book and given back our ID I asked, "Well, look at this. Can you at least admit that it's pretty?"
His response, in a mumbling into his chest kinda way was, "I built one of those. . . In eighth grade." The pause had been long enough to fit a short opera in, the tone by the end an impressive combination of quietly dismissive and truculent.
"You built one of these. Like this. In eighth grade?" I asked.
"Well, um. . .  mine was a bit smaller."
"A bit?"
"It was smaller. But in my day we didn't have all sorts of special tools and stuff like you guys had. I had to build it with just my hands, just push it together."
Immediately dozens of ads from fifties issues of Popular Mechanics and seventies supermarket circulars started whizzing around in my head. Ads for cheap, easy to use plastic kits for building snow forts and igloos. Not, remember, that we were using any such things. Or, for that matter, that I had needed any in my long ago childhood days of snow fort building.
"but I thought that stuff for making these have been around for ages." Say I. In, of course, the most positively glowingly friendly but sadly perplexed tones. I just need him to explain it to me, you see.
"Well, this was a small town and we didn't have all that specialized stuff."
By this point the ghosts of a hundred thousand onetime children from broke country families, my father, late of the elegant metropolis of Poverty Knob, among them, were surely whizzing all around his benighted head trying to explain to him all that had been done by them with scraps of wood, chucks of discarded cardboard. Even, say, a couple of recycling bins and a box from the curb. But clearly we weren't getting anywhere with this.
I try another tack. I take off my glove again and offer him my hand. "Well, you've seen already from my ID, but even so, hi, my name is Rustin. What's your name?"
"I'm Corporal Saunders."
Corporal. Oh my. Dealing with the upper crust, I see. Actually, he may have said his first name too. He was kinda mumbling that part. But the Corporal came out loud and clear. And I could see Saunders on his little brass nametag so I know that I got that right.
And yeah, by now it was obvious that this was the kind of guy who must have loooved being hall monitor as a kid. Because, you see, it was so unfair that the other kids got to have all the fun. All the kids like me.
The guys and I all try one last time. We're building an igloo for crying out loud. On Christmas Eve. Surely he can cut us some slack. He talks about being "a party pooper" again. He comes back to the open containers of alcohol. I say that I don't know about anybody else but that I haven't had any of the beer and I don't see anybody bring them.
"So they were just sitting here when you got here." he says with a generous helping of sarcasm.
"That's exactly right" I say with complete honesty.
For what it's worth, you'll want to keep three things in mind.
First of all, as you know if you've read from the beginning, I had headed there at one in the morning through a snowstorm and, in fact, hadn't had so much as a sip of beer in the time I had been there. I mean, if nothing else, it's Hamms. I've got plenty of real beer in my place five blocks away. Why would I drink something generously described as PBR's inferior cousin when I had everything from Fat Tire to Bushmills a few blocks away?
Secondly, in the last half hour or so, the other guys hadn't been drinking either. Or at least not as far as I could see. We had actually all been working quite industriously.
Thirdly, it may not have been snowing much but it was snowing. So there is no way that a security guard riding a bike in a snowfall several blocks away could have even seen those few cans sitting amidst tall piles of broken snow blocks and various implements, from, if I understand his original path right, over a small rise.
But our Man In Uniform, from the esteemed ranks of Reliant Security, knows a liar when he hears one and he made a few choice comments more on the credibility of my statement. I would guess that he was about in his late twenties, early thirties but he was determined to come across as a solid authority on this. Which, I will admit, must be hard when talking to a blase guy at least ten years older than you who obviously is nothing like impressed. Though still smiling. Mostly.

Anyway, that was basically it. He made a few more comments, we asked him to let us at least finish the job. He said that we would have to come back and finish it in the daytime. And we all walked off. The next night, round about eleven p.m. I came back with some friends, took some pictures of the now rain-shrunk igloo. Passed a taller guy in a Reliant uniform walking right past. He waved, we waved, we all wished each other happy holidays. We talked to the lady with the dog who was standing right by the igloo and she said that she had been there for a while. I guess that the guy on shift that night was being a bit more reasonable about who was allowed on the fields when.

And now I'm waiting for my charge. Hasn't turned up yet. I'm guessing that whichever cop was supposed to sign off on it has had a good laugh. Of course posting this (with names and all that) has probably increased my odds of being charged tenfold. Which would be cool. I would love to contest it and get a chance to stand in front of a judge (complete, mind you, with a copy of my timestamped receipt from Chopsticks) and tell him the story of my evil deeds building an igloo on my birthday, Christmas Eve.

I could go into more detail. At some point I will.

I could reference the recommended procedure for such encounters from the 2008 training manual issued by the Portland city government that I just happen to have sitting next to me at my desk as I type this. ("Verbal Judo", huh? Interesting run of phrase, that.)

I could talk about more serious examples of what happens when "law enforcement" is about "do what makes me feel good" instead of protecting citizens. About Duane Kercic, who was harassed and detained for taking pictures in a public part of an Amtrak station. To get, mind you, shots for an Amtrak-backed contest for best shots of their trains and stations.

Or really serious stuff like Hope Steffey, who was beaten, stripped, and left naked in a jail cell without explanation for six hours for not showing a policeman sufficient "respect" when he arrived to investigate an earlier incident in which she had been attacked.

Or I could talk about my years working right by the New York City Police Academy and seeing them break laws like it was a daily requirement, all while the academy looked on, disciplined none of them, and graduated just about every one for service as a cop.

But I won't because this is just a silly blog post. No real point at all. Just about a guy in a uniform enforcing some laws against some other guys who were all, without doubt, breaking at least one of those laws. After all, the details don't really matter.

Do they?

Happy New Year. Let's make the best of it.

Make districts simple.

I write a lot, and think even more, about issues of organizational, and specifically government malfunction. There are many things one can say about this, and rest assured, I intend to keep going on at enervating length about dozens of aspects of this for as long as I have the time and access.

But there is one measure that applies to governments at all levels from town to sovereign, that is simple, very difficult to subvert, and should be capable of short and long term fundamental improvement in how governments work and how well.

Set geometric limits on the circumference to area ratios of voting districts.

It's as simple as simple gets. Simply provide a maximum numerical ratio, where the length of the line one would draw to go all the way around a voting district can only be but so complex. This simple thing would, right there, cut way down on gerrymandering, one of the most pernicious kinds of political gamesmanship. Ideally, such a law would also limit the degree of change a district could be subjected to in a given period of time. There are dozens of possible nuances that I leave as an exercise for the reader. You're smart folks, afaict; you'll see them just fine. And, as always, you're welcome to comment below.

Think about it.

I don't want to live in a society run by a bunch of Generals

Anybody who's paying attention is bound to see that every year our world is controlled by a smaller group of companies and their friends. The current crisis is just accelerating that. Twenty banks become five. Ten insurance companies become three. And it's nothing new. Since Enron we supposedly understand the importance of objective and external accounting measures. So it confuses me that nobody much seems to be upset that the once Big Eight accounting firms are now the Big Three. Big Two? Big ONE?

Well, let's step back a bit and remember that in much of America, not only is this round two or three of this kind of corporate domination (anybody remember Standard Oil? U.S. Steel?) but that many of our largest corporations were founded, not by inventors or marketers or people who cared about some particular kind of product at all. They were founded by financiers who set out from the get go to win not, fundamentally, by making better products but by owning as much of the market as they could and through techniques that are mostly illegal or should be. By beating up and marginalizing those who tried to succeed through the "naive" approach of making things that people wanted and selling them under good terms at a good price. They intended to win through sheer power and monopoly and to large extent they've succeeded.

I sound kinda vague, don't I?

Well, many of these companies have a tell. You see, they were quite open about their intent at the time, so you will find that these companies aren't named after founders or their products, or the places where they were. Nor after mythical figures or their products or any of the other types of names that show some kind of love  by those in charge for what they have wrought. Instead the names are as arrogant and dismissive of particulars as their strategies.

They're all Generals.

General Motors.

Founded in 1908 by as a holding company by William Durant, who owned two car companies by the time he had been in business a year and owned two more by a year after that.

General Dynamics.

Rebuilt by financier Isaac Rice, who, starting as the Electric Boat Company, making submarines for the Japanese, Russian, British, and Dutch militaries in the early 1900s, and then renamed and reorganized the company under the current name in 1952 when their takeovers of Canadair and Convair, paid for with the company's large post-war cash reserves, caused then to reorg and become a "modern" conglomerate.

General Foods.

Renamed General Foods in 1929 when Postum, personally being run E.F. Hutton (the guy, not the company), used money from stock sales to buy up, in quick succession, the makers of Jello, Minute Tapioca (owners of the process later used to make Minute Rice), Log Cabin Syrup, Maxwell House Company, and others.

General Electric.

Created in a merger by J.P. Morgan of the pre-existing Edison Electric Company and Thomson-Houston Electric Company (itself a result of several mergers), in effect creating a monopoly on many patents and processes for all electric devices.

If a company has a name that starts with General, they are bad people. And do I even need to get into Union? Union Carbide, perhaps?

One day soon I'll get back to this in more detail but for now remember two things:

1.) Any company named General anything can be assumed to be scum.

2.) They were founded to be scum and those scum behaviors were woven into the DNA of the firm by the day the name was first announced.

Happy Holidays.

Rustin

Consequences in Fiction, Part Two

So I see that yesterday's post has already drawn traffic searching on the phrase "burn notice". Good. Especially since the last straw for me had been having Sam, one of the lead characters, getting beaten and interrogated for three days (unless I'm misunderstanding the timeline in the episode) and, as soon as he's untied, standing up (after three days tied to a chair?!), running into combat, and, as soon as it's over, being casually dropped off at his place looking no more than a bit tired, with just a manly "thank you, brother".

Okay, now I've never been tortured, but I've gotta say that I think that almost three weeks tied to a bed in a burn ward gives me a little to say about this, especially since I kept flashing back to those weeks while I watched the torture scenes. And I can tell you now that after three days tied to a chair, frequently with his mouth duct-taped shut (which, by the way, in a hot, enclosed space like that would have almost certainly killed him right there), being beaten, interrogated, screamed at, and spending most of the rest of the time alone in that dark metal room, he wouldn't even be able to lift his arms or walk, let alone jump into manly action. And when they go out? I'm sorry, but just about anybody would have fucking well fallen over sobbing. Would he, maybe, in theory, wait for his buddy to drive away? Possibly. But one way or another he would be very, very fucked up indeed and a couple of smart guys like those, old pros as they're supposed to be, would have acknowledged that in no uncertain way.

So, just to let y'all know, that was the thing that inspired my previous post.

And, as it happens, my timing was good. Looks like Slashdot has a thread going right now about torture in fiction based on an expansion pack for WoW, and the article they link to turns out to be about just the same point as my previous post, about the stories that fiction tells about actions having consequences. Or not.

And you know what? I think that the article says these things damned well. So I'm done. Go read it. You'll be glad that you did.

Episodic TV Is Fundamentally Evil. Really.

At the recommendations of first my friend Matt and then my mother, I just watched the first season of Burn Notice on Hulu. In the past few years I've been trying to experience more in the way of mainstream American culture since I feel that anybody who wants to have useful conclusions about social policy better have some idea of how the people in that society actually live.

So in some ways I've found it fun, charming, certainly pretty. But by the end of the first season my disgust with it had finally reached the boiling point.

Now I could tell you what plot points and what production issues and what tricks of lighting and casting and editing nailed it down for me but let me jump to the chase.

Conventional episodic television is built around "normal" people (ones carefully engineered to fundamentally feel sympathetic to the audience) constantly doing extraordinary things. Over and over. And simultaneously doing them in an amped up way that is ten or twenty or a hundred times more eventful than real life.

And then being there for the next episode to do it all again.

What does this mean?

That conventional episodic television is, by definition, built around a world of actions without consequences. People get shot at and two days later are shaking it off in ways that make PTSD seem like some silly myth. They get married and divorced and married again but are still making the same jokes. They are pernicious fantasies and they have real impacts on people's personal behaviors, on how they teach their children, how they deal with each other, and vote.

Enormous numbers of events happen on any episodic television show of the sort that would utterly reshape people's lives but they can't change much or too fast because if they did the show wouldn't ever be able to sell in syndication.

One of the basic guiding realities of television is that a hell of a lot of the possible profits on a show come not from when it first airs but from when it airs again and again and again. And when the DVDs sell. And from sales of just the sort of licenced merchandise that depends on characters staying very much the same. So it is a rock solid rule of television production that you're always going for a bare minimum of three seasons worth of episodes. Episodes that need to have pretty much the same people doing pretty the same thing in pretty much the same kind of place. All while living through at least fifty to one hundred events of the sort that would, in the real world, guarantee that such consistency would never, ever happen.

Now you can spout all you want about Battlestar Galactica and The Sopranos and House all that mahooah. But let's get real here, the Galactica's pilots would never, ever be able to have the kind of mortality counts they supposedly have and still have Starbuck and Apollo and all the "important" pilots both predictably take on insane risks and reliably get away with it. "Oh, you say, but Apollo had a really scary time that once and had to wait for rescue for hours!" Yeah, whatever. If you believe that this refutes my statement, then somewhere deep in your mind you know that you're rationalizing.

"But that's just television" you say. What does that mean, exactly? Explain to me how being able to describe why this is done (a thing that I understand full well) makes it somehow exempt from being destructive. A destructive thing is destructive UNLESS IT DOESN"T DAMAGE THINGS. "But they have a reason" is fundamentally a non-sequitur if what we're discussing is whether or not it causes a given result. Charles Manson had reasons. Executives at General Motor and McDonalds and Enron have had plenty of reasons. Having reasons does not change the basic fact that those actions have had consequences. "But that's just the way things are" has been the best protection of segregationists, slave traders, war profiteers, and oppressors and underminers of decent lives of a thousand different stripes for all the history of the known world. When something makes an impact on our world we need to look past "but that's just how things are". And whether people want to face it or not, these shows are created to make an impression.

And they do. Every time you watch an episode of a television show you are being exposed to a brilliantly seductive world, one that tries harder and with greater skill every year to give the superficial appearance of credibility, in which people are constantly rewarded for and and evade the changes that would come from their actions and circumstances. Actions and circumstances that relate to ones we engage in or at the least are expected to make decisions about all through our lives. Every hour you watch this stuff you're being seduced. You're being brainwashed. And the "realistic" shows like the Sopranos, with their high production values and skillful writing, are the one that will brainwash you the most and the fastest.

Count on it.

Commercial to residential. Or mixed. It's the smart move.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. America is flooded with surplus commercial real estate. Rental demand is climbing and the available rental unit supply is not up to the job. Thus rental prices stay high (relative to the economy) while hundreds of millions of square feet of real estate sits vacant, not generating income and in some cases, so empty of people as to be at increasing risk of vandalism and theft. And real estate companies are in serious financial trouble. We also need to face that as people get poorer, they'll become more prone to exactly the kind of destructive behavior that any owner of an empty building should fear.

The obvious consequence will be more people living illegally in commercial spaces. Done illegally, landlords will look the other way because they're hungry for the revenue, but the conversions, such as will be done, will be rushed and unsafe and will cause problems ranging from fires to floods caused by amateur plumbing.

This being the case, smart municipalities should be exploring passing temporary variances to allow, and perhaps even assist the use of some commercial spaces as residential. Maybe even allow or even encourage the conversion of zoning with an option for those conversions to be permanent. Or, even better, allow more spaces to be zoned more flexibly, allowing mixed use to be not just within complexes but in side by side units.

Commercial space, in normal times, rents for more per square foot than residential. Many landlords also consider it far less of a headache. 

But these are not normal times.

It's time that we started doing a better job of thinking through how or society can best adapt to that.

Iodize salt. It's the cheapest way to help the truly poor.

When an area is low in iodine, people grow up shorter, deformed, and, most reliably, stupid. Read more about it here. Most of these techniques average about five cents per person addressed per year. And beyond the usual adding iodine to salt technique and such methods, there are others that depend less on an industrialized salt supply or a reliably conscientious local government.  Or, to put it another way, the U.S. government could pay to deal with this for the entire at risk population in the entire world for the cost of a few hours of our insanity in Iraq.

Living in Portland I get to deal with plenty of non-profits, who trumpet their supposed amazingness for doing things like putting hundreds of conventional refrigerators in towns without electricity as ways to "bring them into the modern world". When I challenge them about this kind of bullshit ("if you have hundreds of millions of dollars a year to dispense, why not spend most of it putting in superinsulated iceboxes built by local residents of cob?") they get snitty and say that it's a waste of their time (!) to get bogged down in such things or are otherwise dismissive and go right back on script.

Well, the next time you get approached by one of these do-gooder groups, so many of which define effective aid as that which turns the areas addressed into third rate imitations of fifties American suburbia, just ask them about iodine. It's cheap, simple, and needed by hundreds of millions of people.

I would have put in a link to a group that does address this but to my disgust, I don't know of any (other than UNESCO) and a web search didn't turn any up.

But all the moreso,as the holidays come, a lot of people will be asking for your money. When they do, ask them about iodine. And when you find somebody who says yes, help them. And be sure to tell the rest of us about it.

-Rustin

Note: This post originally cited Mercy Corps as a group distributing fridges. Since I based this conclusion on repeated conversations with staffers at Mercy Corps who were presented at Mercy Corps events as former managers of overseas work, I stand by my statement. But since Mercy Corps, to be fair, mostly does things that I *do* support and given that the only online references I could find were either for small donations or for Banda Aceh, I've pulled that reference from the piece.