From Streetcars To Spaceships

Movies, TV shows, etc. to teach with

A lot of us have talked in recent years about movies and such that are good enough at presenting some historical period, techology or concept that they could be used as real teaching means. Something that a student could watch and come away with a pretty real hope that the viewer(s) would come away withsome basic competency in something that we've counted on schools.
Ideally, one would pair such viewings with instruction by a live human. But I'm only interested here int he wones that YOU htink could do well enough on their own.

We live in a time when many of us are losing our faith in schools. And where there is more respect both for learnign afterleaving school and for those who are not able to be in one regularly enough to learn int he ways that our society has taken for granted.

These are, educationally speaking desert island movies. And let me say again, these are not to be held to the high typical standard of our brilliant circle. The acid test is does this piece combine entertainment value (call it watchability) with content well enough that viewers come away better informed than they would have been otherwise in some way that noticeably brings them towards being capable and competent citizens?

Please list them here and hopefully as I go I'll incor[roate some or all suggestions in the body of the note. I'm HOPING that eventually your contributions will far outweigh my few feeble ones.

Obviously TED Talks have a special place here. In my opinion most documentaries don't. These days lall too many of them are so seduced by the drive for a tidy narrative that they actually HURT understanding by forcing a clean, simple narrative, with Good Guys and Bad Guys. And then people like us have to deal with people who think "I know all about that. I saw the Discovery Channel Special." And that usally means that they're utterly incompetent to judge anything related to it at all.

That having been said, let me start:

The Middle Ages 

The Lion In Winter

Not only for history of the period but on politics. Trust nobody. Even those you tryst with. Especially those you tryst with. Watch your ass. Plan. Prepare.

Robin and Marion
Companion piece to TLIW, if only for the additional exposure to a world where indoor heating is a joke, and other aspects of daily circumstances of ther period among the "nobles", to to mention how little that could mean. 

 

Elizabethan Era

Elizabeth I and II

Not perfect but it will sure as hell but names and faces and personalities toall those names and dates int he textbook. Five hours of this and, if done with any standard written teaching tools the whole period becomes and stays more real.

 

Shakespeare In Love

No, it's not perfectly accurate or trying to be. But it drops you into a world that is fundamentally different in more ways than a superficial gloss will notice. Rule of Law? Yeah, right. Torture as day to day thing? Of course. Being a spy for the crown? It's a contract job. Plenty of people have done it at some point or other.

 

Edwardian Era

Raise The Red Lantern
So historical. Such an ancient world of stone walls and inherited fiefdoms. All struggling to maintain control in a time of record players and modern eyeglasses and steam locomotives. Don't think that the existence of those things plays no role in the nature of rebellions this movie shows.

 

The Thirties and Forties

Mephisto with Cabaret
Pre-Nazi Germany. Both focus on the arts scene but both give plenty of elegant and earthy details of the rest. Seen together they add emotionally resonant context to all those seemingly impossible parts of that world.

 

The Fifties and Sixties

The Apartment

Mad Men is cute and all but this is a much less prettified view of those days of the man in the grey flannel suit.

 

Thirteen Days

Not perfect but it lays out the circumstances, the players, and many of the dynamics of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the surrounding Cold War.

 

The Space Race

Apollo 13
Well, duh. 

 

Modern City Life

(This is more useful than some of you might think. Remember how many kids *still* have never been to anyplce with more than a hundred thousand people. Or, even worse, have only gone for a weekend visit or passed through the bus station and have no fucking clue and think that they know all bout what cities mean.

 

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Mortgage scams, megacatering. Urban sprawl. Gender stereotyping. Yeah, this one's a dman good start. I suspect that it could also be a superb teachable moment for the weakenss of rule of law on many modern Asian cities.

 

Half Baked

Just about everybody disses this movie. But ya know what? It's a superb overview on living in the city on no fucking money. Screwing around and scraping by. The kinds of lives that hundreds of millions live every day and the media and schools pretty never portray sympathetically. Go ahead, laugh.But you just might learn something.

 

Modern Politics

They Live

It's just a joke, right? I don't bloody think so.

 

Training Day

Again, this movie shows the kinds of lives that are all too rarely shown well from, more or less, the inside. This movie exaggerates. But not all that much. And I suspect that ofr the right social studies teacher it provides easily a dozen superb teachable moments. And for once the cool bad guys come away looking like the shitty-ass scumbags that they are and DON'T get away with it. But nobody gets away clean. Good lesson, that.

 

The West Wing
Many of you will squee with glee at this. Some will rage with loathing. Whatever you think of its politics, it lays out congressional procedure and a hell of a lot more of the operational side of modern American politics. Most people find the pretty people and crisp writing makes it easy to watch so getting two or three hours in is pretty easy and that's enought oc over a hell of a lot of ground.

 

Conceptual Sophistication

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Absurdity is one of the defining tells of a nimble mind. Here's a dose.

 

Where Are We Going?
Silent Running

Not fun, not glamourous, all too possible. Important to discuss.

 

Countering more lies of the enemies of the Occupy movement

A web site recently reposted a video of an NYU professor dutifully and smugly rattling off the latest rationalization for modern wealth inequity, as he is likely paid to do by his corporate patrons. His line of patter? That we should be GRATEFUL for wealth inequities since "surely" those are a result of somebody who has done something that improved the world SO MUCH that people were glad to pay a premium to get this unique and wonderful thing. So "obviously", the money these people accumulated is only a fraction of the value they've created, as is testified by their being rich.

Uh, huh.

So here is my response, slightly edited for reposting here.

Professor Epstein’s statements are based on ideology, not facts. Here is the reality.

Most wealth is not primarily a result of innovation. America’s wealthiest businesspeople from Vanderbilt forward, are mostly successful makers and enforcers of monopolies. America not only doesn’t gain from monopolies (or even oligopolies) it is harmed by them as people are forced and scammed into paying excessive prices for things that they need. And honorable companies who try to succeed based on doing good work get destroyed by unscrupulous slime right alongside of us exploited consumers.

Another disproportionate source of business success is starting out rich. Bill Gates was richer at the age of five than most people will ever be, with a fat trust fund and daddy a hotshot corporate lawyer. Almost every part of Microsoft has always lost money. They still lose money on things like the X Box. Their wealth comes largely from the market power they got from the Windows license. An operating system that Bill Gates didn’t create. In fact, he stole it. But since his mother was friends with the IBM executive choosing their OS, he got the contract anyway.

More wealth comes from using other people’s money and insider connections to buy up companies (or government assets) break them up like a horse butchered and sold by the pound to make glue and dog food. Pay off enough legislators and you can get away with almost anything. America is further and further “stripped for parts” by looters like this every year. They get richer. We get poorer.

Then we get the media fortunes. Most media companies are doing very badly. But the executives are getting richer all the time. They falsify the recordkeeping. They put their friends in sweetheart jobs. Look it up. And ask yourself if America is really enriched by this.

Then we get executive salaries. Which get bigger all the time, even for people who are obviously incompetent or evil. Explain to me how Yahoo’s previous CEO “deserved” twenty million dollars. Or H.P.’s. And this is money that comes directly out of the pockets of the actual workers in the company who create that wealth.

Epstein is bought and paid for. Don’t believe the hype.

And please, do not succumb to the logical fallacy that anybody saying that we need change is just “against somebody being richer than others”. Nobody I know with more than three brain cells is that simplistic. This isn’t some rap song where the world is divided into “playas” and “playa haters”. We’re not opposed to have some be richer than others. We’re opposed to a society where too many people successfully steal, defraud, bully, and scam their way to wealth and then pay *less* in taxes while getting *more* government protection.

We’re opposed to a 1.3 TRILLION dollar savings and loan bailout after which not a single person served a jail term as long or as hard as that of a bank robber who steals a thousand dollars. We’re opposed to companies like Enron having killed people (yes, those rolling blackouts resulted in deaths) by intentionally shutting off power supplies to Americans, all to up their quarterly profits. And then, while we know that dozens of them actively designed and executed these schemes and hundreds or even thousands were knowing participants, three people in the entire multi-billion dollar corporation ever saw any noticeable jail time at all and most of them got to keep most or all of the money they “made”.

I run a small business. I work hard to create excellent products and I expect to be paid for what I create and sell. I hope to some day make a lot of money doing that. I have known millionaires who I'm delighted got millions of dollars for their work. They deserved it. Bully for them. The problem is that in reality most of the people getting rich and staying rich are NOT “creating value.” They are getting rich by hurting people. And the trail of bodies and misery they're responsible for is more than most people can even imagine.

Most of our farmers have been reduced in recent decades to sharecroppers on their own land, with almost no control over what they grow, how they grow it, or how they sell it. As the grandson of a Kansas farmer, I find that monstrous.

Congress required our worker pensions to fork over a percentage of their money to be “invested” by venture capitalists. Venture capitalists who then ignored most of the real entrepreneurs and instead blew it on funding “dot-coms” run by the kind of people they liked drinking with. Almost all these dot-coms went bankrupt, the real businesspeople having to compete for resources made more expensive by these spendthrifts, and money that was supposed to fund the retirement of schoolteachers and factory workers was instead spent on fancy dinners and condos for rich bankers.

Our engineers and scientists have created waves of good products, from old-school Rubbermaid appliances to “clamshell” computers. And then some new executive fad comes along and they’re ordered to cheapen the quality or move the factory overseas or simply replace it with some shoddy garbage. All while customers are BEGGING to be allowed to buy the high-quality goods that our engineers created in the first place. In those cases even the companies lose money. Again, look at H.P. And the executives who do this get millions in pay and bonuses and even if the company fails, and then get even more money to serve on boards of other companies.

And THAT is what we are opposed to. This is a wave of crime against the vast majority of the American people and we have no intention of passively waiting to be told what to think or what to do. We are informed, we are outraged, and we are fighting back. And I can guarantee you that the “Occupy” movement isn’t even close to all that we are doing.

And, ya know, here I am writing these marathon responses to Professor Epstein’s trash and maybe I just need to keep it simple. If somebody being rich is “obviously” because they found ways to sell things that made the world even better than what would have existed otherwise, what has he got to say about drug dealers and pimps? After all, they get rich. And they certainly do so by selling products that are in demand.

Check what people like the FBI and business insurance firms say. As far as they can tell, most embezzlers get away with it. And they get away with billions. And frequently they do it by being freelance bookkeepers to many families or small businesses, who they defraud over years, thereby, yes, concentrating wealth. Just as you crowed about.

So tell me, Professor Epstein, if YOUR bookkeeper got rich by stealing YOUR money and that of ten of your friends, would you call that a “gain” to society?

Wisdom is where you find it.

Sara and I spent some time today talking about how Scooby Doo was, if you think about it, kind of an activist model of how to live. Find a crew of friends you can utterly trust. Be there for each other, even when they f*ck up. ESPECIALLY when they f*ck up. Don't trust the people you meet along the way but DO listen to them. Stay curious. Fix what you can. Be "those meddling kids" and maybe the schemers and bullies and peddlers of fear won't "get away with it". And be sure to have fun along the way.

Huh. Maybe I should make this into a t-shirt.

Reason depends on acceptance of complexity.

A determination to reduce all things to a few conflict-free sentences is one of the biggest forces behind fascist movements from the Armenian Genocide to the Tea Party. Complexity and nuance are at the very heart of responsible adulthood. Fight that as such and you are an enemy of democracy and reason. When a situation is reduced to one factor, to "the thing that really matters is…", it cannot be understood in any useful way.

Watch this talk. She gets it just right.

Then read this and think about the dangers that we face.

I hate those who need to reduce everything to comfortably tidy simple stories. Hate them. They are enemies of all that lives. We are facing problems defined by their complexity. Global climate change.

My father was born in Missouri. My mother was born in New York City. They met and married in California, where they both lived for years and where I have spent quite a bit of time myself, from San Diego in the early 70's to the Bay Area in 2009. My stepfather was born in Tennessee. I was born in Panama City, Panama. I have lived in Panama City, New York City, Pittsburgh, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee. Which am I? Am I a New Yorker? A Panamanian? An Oregonian? Which is the "correct" answer? That's a stupid question.

Toes? You're afraid of toes? Really?

The current kerfuffle about a picture in a J.Crew advertisement has caught my attention. Many years back I spent a rewarding and involving year working in the "creative" department (the folks who did the catalog and most of the ads) and I am proud to remember it now. I am proud of them for having run the image. And I am even prouder of them for having stood by it.

My only question is why hasn't anybody interviewed Rena Delevie about this yet? She used to be the operations manager of J.Crew's creative department, she stayed there for years, worked in other parts of fashion and publishing for more years, and knows plenty about the decisions made about what does and does not run in a catalog or an ad. And she's now doing a documentary about motherhood for which she's been interviewing moms for ages now. Not to mention that she's funny, very smart, clear thinking, and vivacious as all get out. And of course has spent tons of time on the other side of the mic and so knows what an interviewer needs. I'll bet that she gives killer sound bite.

Okay, and yeah, she's really cute.

Anyway, as for this whole gender thing, I dunno. In my experience all those years back J.Crew was amazingly rational and full of smart, capable people who had plenty of funny things to say (Jeff Grewe, I'm thinking of you) about narrow-mindedness but they were actually less indicative of norms in the New York media world than you might think. Or at least among many of the people outside editorial.

Later I had a long-standing gig at ad agency DDB Needham. I'd been working there on and off for around two years. One Monday morning we started talking about men wearing nail polish and I pulled off one of my loafers and showed that my own toenails were painted. (A wonderful turquoise from Bendel's, if I remember correctly). The barrage of homophobic comments and actions that day left me entirely gobsmacked. (For example, "I'm afraid to be alone in a room with you; how do I know that you won't rape me?") Later that week my gig got unexpectedly canceled and I never got work there again. To this day I wonder if part of it was simple shock on their part. After all, I was this perennially sweaty, aggressive, bearded guy who was constantly trying to pick up various cute women and now and again dating them. (Ahh! Stacy Turner!) I guess that when they saw my tiny little bits of color I was messing with their handy-dandy stereotype. Strange. And kind of sad, actually.

A few years after that when my similarly bedecked toes were noticed poolside after an Americares day with the staff of This Old House Magazine I found myself the subject of snotty and nasty remarks ("should we start calling you Rustina?") and general static, including some from my boss. Interestingly, the people who responded negatively then and in the days after were all women. Women who always wore makeup every day and were very gender conventional in their presentation. And again I suspect that part of it was that I was the same guy I had been at DDB, though now with a shaved head and a manic gamer friend in a beat up leather jacket who would drop by and hang. Though sadly, since I was by then the IT Director, I had reluctantly stopped asking the cute women out. ;->

This stuff has always seemed chowderhead to me, at best. What's your deal, folks? Why are you so threatened by this? What makes you so timid that you need to have everybody fit into little labeled boxes? We can do better. In fact, given the force that gender roles exert on things like norms for executive behavior ("the department needs to come across as strong so we're going to refuse to give in on that budget proposal") we need to remember that these forced dichotomies actually impede things like our ability to pass treaties or address international debt. Let alone to accept things like greenroof as serious. Even now I still see residual bits of contempt for those in architecture and engineering who work in "less manly" specialties like landscape design. And a tendency to muddy up otherwise clear proposals for things like swales with ungainly chunks of superfluous jargon and obstructively precise specifications that only serve to increase costs and pressure the implementors into trying to force living things into a degree of linearity that just can't ever work.

I used to have a friend, Janet Pascal, who was prone to saying that in 1600's Europe a gentleman's perfect day was putting on makeup, lace, high heels, and brocade, wading into bloody sword fights on a smoky, chaotic, mud-covered battlefield littered with the bodies of his enemies and loud with the screams of the dying and the horns and drums of the victorious. And then back home, where he would bathe, put on a nice lacy robe and perfume, and write flowery poetry about it all. Of course, it's crucial that one's lace, pen, and robe all have just the right sweet, diaphanous fragility. Shows one's quality, you see.

Yes, let's not forget that all this mahooah from "conservatives" about "how things have always been" is just yet more proof that they are, let's come out and say it, ignorant and foolish. Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, the military genius who whipped the colonial army into shape (sometimes literally) and wrote the field manual that our military used throughout the Revolutionary War and for decades after was, by any rational definition, a man's man. A combat-hardened, tough, strong survivor and commander in a time when even just normal life for a person who traveled the world required considerable hardness. And the men who were his lovers would all have agreed.

Can we please just grow up already, admit that people vary greatly, that gender is a multi-variable and complex thing, and move past the second grader's need to divide the world up into primitive, simplistic, crayon-bordered categories of This or That?

 We can, we must, do better.

 

Re Greg Mortenson, how deep does the rot go?

I see that people are finally reading my post from six months ago about Greg Mortenson and the CAI (Central Asia Institute). The 60 minutes piece and the CNN article and all the rest have changed things, haven't they? I never went into details last year about what might be in it for the people who I have long suspected are behind him. So I guess that's kind of overdue.

First of all, I'm going to say it yet again. If you want to get a handle on what's going on in that part of the world, personally, I say drop "Mortenson's" books. Instead, read Charlie Wilson's War (The movie's not bad in its own way), Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, and The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet, by Brian Murphy.

Just for starters, this would also be the time to say that I was born in Panama. To parents who had spent quite a bit of time in Mexico. And each of whom has since spent ample time in the developing world, from Sri Lanka to Kenya to Nicaragua. And very little of that in hotels or other "Americanized"and protected zones. My best friends when I was a little kid were the missionary family down the hall. Their mom was from a Wyoming family of evangelists (she eventually spent years in China) and their dad grew up in a mission in Burma and did his thesis on U Thant, who was then just a local notable. I'll get back to him later.

I could go on with the long list of missionaries and NGO folks and ethnobotanists and mountain climbers in my life or the time I've spent in my own kinds of places that aren't exactly "U.S. mainstream" but let's just say that when I wrote six months ago about having a visceral sense of Mortenson's books being wrong, it wasn't in comparison to Discovery Channel specials. It was in comparison to things like, oh, god, my father is caught in a "civil revolt" again and I'm really impatient to hear from him. Or once, oh crud, here I am arguing with my mother about is it worth keeping our appointments while the smoke from the protests and Guardia Civil's tanks wafts into our room?

Okay, that having been said, it's time for me to speculate.

My guess is that there were people in, well, let's just say the Mary Bono/Mellon-Scaife world, who were uncomfortable with the various movements by people like BRAC to route around the horrific but very controllable "education" infrastructure in south Asia.

In other words, there were, by the late nineties, any number of groups, most native to south Asia, that were working to build schools, many also for especially for girls, tying this into microcredit (note how CAI has now positioned themselves as a gatekeeper for microcredit as well) and enable things like access to birth control and health care for women. In other words, groups that were and still are generally taking a decentralized, locally controlled, collaborative approach to the systemic problems that have kept women (and actually, to some extent, everybody not from the ruling families) relatively powerless in that part of the world for, at the least, centuries.

Now, I don't know about how much y'all followed the Reagan period approach to policy there but a key part of it was a systemic approach to do just the opposite. To keep things such that oil companies and our local totalitarians could "smoothly" keep doing their thing. I've long since lost track of the number of schools U.S.-backed people like the Contras burned down or how many teachers they tortured and killed. And it's not like U.S. foreign policy has exactly become simon-pure since then or avoided such techniques before.

Not to mention that birth control, especially in the developing world, is a big no-no to such people. They feel that it's VERY important to keep groups backing that on the margins. Our Congress has given us demonstrations of just how hard and viciously the right will fight for that quite recently, haven't they?

So they found an American, a charismatic guy raised in a missionary outpost, a very controllable, very ambitious, very Christian guy who was already doing something in the field and happily admitted that he wanted to hand off things like publicity and managing money, and they turned him into a front man they could position publicly as THE voice of education reform in that part of the world. It's a game as old as Alfred Sloane. If you can't kill a threatening movement you build your own organization under your control (G.M. backing Greyhound Lines, anybody?) and position it as the "more legitimate" and emotionally compelling substitute for the people who are threatening your power.

And Greg Mortenson would have been, I suspect, a very controllable front indeed for the person who knew what buttons to push. I don't think that my friends' dad ever quite got the hang of American culture and his permanent confusion about what "America" meant is pretty common among people who grow up overseas in missions. I strongly suspect this applies to Greg Mortenson. They grow up on idealized and very fraught stories of the U.S. and visits from friends of their parents and workers for the mission and some of these former mission kids seem to have trouble all their lives with a certain kind of "in-betweenness" and need to get back to what feels "real" conflicting with a guilt that they should want to be "back" in the U.S. where they've been told they "belong" but never entirely feel comfortable. Except when spending time with others from the same backgrounds which just leaves them driven to go back "overseas" again. Sound familiar?

So if Mortenson's would-be backers/handlers can drape their "suggestions" and "advice" in the language he was brought up in, then he'd be eager to agree and go along. And as, over time, that advice grew to include money and organizational help and maybe now and again "one of our people who'll drop by and fix that little problem you're having with your accounting" he would be quite possibly relieved to be able to turn his back and not look too closely at the details. And as the "help" shifted over to them buying him expensive suits and flying him around on private jets, there would always be somebody there to tell him that this wasn't a bribe or a luxury. Just a selfless part of doing the job. And as the Pakistani and then U.S. military stepped in, he could just keep saying that it was all for the purest of reasons. And as for his millions in "personal expenses", he wasn't stealing CAI's money. It was all for the greater good, really, and surely not at all, well, sinful. I don't think that any of us will ever know how deep the lies went in his head and among the staffers at CAI. But we know that one way or another the answer was "pretty deep."

At the moment the world out there is enjoying their high dudgeon about "this is an OUTRAGE!" but they aren't, from what I've seen, asking the question, "so, if this has been going on for over ten years, why weren't you covering this in, say, 2007, when he was already a celebrity but hadn't gotten the massive support from everybody from the New York Times to Oprah Winfrey that he has now had?"

This is about centralization of power, and the coordination and propaganda machines that play such a key role in making that centralization possible. It's also about the media's collective habits of what to cover and how.

 

And that makes it everybody's business.

 

-Rustin

 

The Teabaggers PURPOSE Is To Be Vandals, Bullies, and Thieves.

I disagree with those of you who have been saying, today and in general, that bad spelling, combovers, etc. aren't issues for the new right. Quite the contrary.

The Tea Party and the movements it's interwoven with, whatever their funding and whomever writes their talking points for them, is fundamentally, as far as I can tell, all about being a truculent wave of spite. A collective mass of vindictive assault upon the things that they claim to revere. A blue in the face resentful toddler yelling IT'S NOT FAIR! about having been caught and forced to stop stealing candy or beating up the smaller child who lives next door.

It is a vast pouting child of a movement of people who have been passed by as their various unearned advantages have stopped letting them wallow in unjustified privileges. Privileges of race and sex and position that used to be supported by the very measures that folks like us have spent the past hundred and fifty years fighting.

It is INTENDED to be the voice of losers, liars, and lechers. Of those whose failures in the world, whose diminishing power, are manifestations of ways that the system works. These are, disproportionately, the ones who lost their jobs to somebody else because they never deserved them in the first place.

It's not that they don't care about the evidences of ignorance, slovenly thinking, and cowardice among their mouthpieces. It's that they CELEBRATE how "authentic" those evidences make their chosen representatives. And are determined to believe that those of us who don't litter our houses and speech and thought with anti-intellectual trash are secretly just like them. We just, they tell each other, do a better job of hiding it.

George W. Bush was elected by people who openly admitted that they cared more about having a president who they could pretend would enjoy having a beer with them than about having a president who could do the jobs the Constitution and our society actually expect that person to do.

Don't make the mistake of taking these shambling, evasive, willfully vague People Of Walmart at their word. Never let yourself mistake these people for clueless bumblers who haven't noticed or don't understand that their every project weakens our country. Weakening the things that make our country worthwhile is, in truth, exactly what they want to do.

 

Greg Mortenson should be no model to anybody.

Greg Mortenson and his group have built some very admirable things in the mountains of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the rest of that part of the world, material and organizational. But I am convinced that he, deep down, is a dangerous and willing tool of the authoritarian right wing and that we should all be damned careful before giving him or his group a penny of our money or a second of our support. You want to help children in that part of the world? Wonderful. Find other ways to do it.

Not only that, but any techniques his group, the Central Asia Institute, put forward as models for wider use should be strictly cost-accounted, broken down to their constituent tasks, and then reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and run past others for confirmation who have done similar work in similar parts of the world before being adopted or publicized.

I'm taking this opportunity, with the New York Times having just name-checked him yet again, to say again that I find many things about "Three Cups of Tea" and Greg Mortenson morally repellant and that I look forward with fervor to the day that people realize that it's no coincidence that Mortenson's strongest Congressional supporter featured in his books, Mary Bono, is a mainstay of the authoritarian Christian right.

I found it interesting and non-coincidental that his writing partner for his first book, David Oliver Relin, is never even mentioned in Mortenson's second book. I suspect that they are no longer even on speaking terms. I'm betting Relin's patience ran out. That the mixed feelings he alluded to in the introduction to Three Cups of Tea shifted further over to the negative as time passed and that Mortenson and his people have erected as tall a barrier as they can manage to block off any role Relin might have in speaking about what's really going on. In fact, I'd give it about one in three odds that Mr. Relin is under continuing pressure to keep his mouth shut or be faced with attack by Mortenson's allies. Allies who I would equally bet have long since threatened Mr. Relin in no uncertain terms with retaliation if he should say "the wrong things" in too loud a voice.

As I read Three Cups of Tea and then Stones Into Schools, a lot of subtle things kept sounding somehow off to me. Credit seemed oddly disproportionate to contribution and was weighted far further to authoritarian, conservative sources than their role would seem to merit. Groups I had heard about doing related work seemed oddly absent. Major help from people here in the Pacific Northwest was glossed over, while much smaller efforts by midwesterners got paragraph after paragraph if not page after page. An especially odd thing given that his coauthor was a Portlander. Gender issues in the areas he was working in were addressed, but in an odd tone. One that would fit well in a 1980's Mormon document trying to show that, no, we're not racist at all. Never were. And some of his actions in the mountains just somehow didn't sit right with me. Didn't quite match what I had heard from mountaineers and other people who had been there about what was possible, viable, advisable.

But, well, I've never really even been out of America's big cities. Certainly never really spent time overseas. Maybe I was wrong. I'm just a techie and publishing guy. What would I know?

So I asked around a bit. And I've got to admit the details escape me at the moment. Well, other than my sources being able to rattle off half a dozen agencies getting more schools built with far less fanfare. Or the mahooah I already knew he was spouting about the availability of earthquake-resistant building techniques. Or the presumption that nobody could have been expected to notice the massive fraud his later "partner" was pulling off as his first big third round funding came in. Or the details of his "lucky" chat with Congresswoman Bono and the military connections thereof.

I've spent plenty of time in my life around the charismatic leaders of do-gooder organizations, from senior officials in the Salvation Army to managers of anarchist community centers, and they all have a certain vibe to them, to some degree or other. A certain sense they give off of how much they're sanding off the serial numbers of other people's work to build their own legend or clouding up the record to cover up the shortcuts they've taken or making their agendas seem more in line with what the general public will find palatable. And I'm telling you that based on those two books and a bit of looking around I've done, Mortenson is over on the greasy-haired preacher end of the equation.

I'm telling you, eventually the honeymoon will end and left and right people will be distancing themselves from Greg Mortenson. And, crucially, making heavy pronouncements that "there was no way we could have known".

Yeah, well. I knew. And I'm just a crippled guy with no special access reading a couple of library books and making a few phone calls in a barely heated studio in a cheap part of town in a city far away indeed from the halls of power.

But even so, I'm telling you, don't believe the hype.

Apple: Think Diffident. Their corporate censorship, yet another reason a diverse marketplace is important.

This article goes in detail through the ways that Apple's obsessive, narrow-minded, self-justifying censorship of what can be done on or even sold for the iTouch/iPhone/iPad platform has hurt us all. Including, I think, Apple. And, even more importantly, how this dynamic hobbles many other parts of our oligopoly-dominated society.

There is a dangerous tendency on the left, not to mention among Tea Partiers, to try to explain everything corporations cause in terms of what enriches the people at the top. In other words, to presume that when some corporate-caused action hurts our society, the suits somehow gain equivalently to how we lose. If ten of us are in a boat and I pour salt on all the food, nobody gains. On the macro scale, the world is very rarely a place where each gain and loss is tidily evened out. And until people let go of that childish zero-sum game way of looking at the world, they'll never have any hope of accurately seeing what happens or why.

The truth is even worse. Much of what they do hurts even them. Sometimes choices are made out of fear or confusion or simple transitory power games that will be forgotten next week but whose consequences will live on for years or even decades.

And while we can happily natter on about how corporations "should" be virtuous or how we "should" be able to regulate them into pursuing the public interest, as far as I'm concerned, that's a side discussion. The most important response to the anxious, power-grasping, meddling of corporations in how a given market works is to fight that control. The control ANY small number of buyers or sellers or distributors have over that market. To create a market with many buyers and sellers and distributors.

If one company controls a market, that market will become inefficient, even for the profit maximization of that corporation. Same thing if two or three corporations share that control between them. Any detailed review of the finances of American car companies illustrates this very, very well.

My conclusion? When I see one company dominating a market, I am opposed to it. Same thing for two orthree or four companies. I don't care if it's Google or Ben&Jerry's or Apple. Oligopoly hurts the public interest. Every time. EVERY time.

It's the engineering, stupid.

I was just pointed to this article by my friend Erik Smykal. If it doesn't scare the ever-living piss out of you, you're not paying attention. Unless, that is, you're Iranian or Chinese or Indonesian or whatever and you're sitting there right now feeling smug.

A nation without productive capacity is a hot-house orchid and will not endure. A nation whose citizens don't understand the workings of its machines and homes and organizations is, well, 1990 Kuwait just waiting to get used, abused, and broken by the first people capable enough and self-justifying enough to do it.

And, oh by the way, programming and engineering and factories that make real salable goods are the keys to great buckets of money and them what don't know it or do it don't get that money.

If you have children, raise them to be competent. Raise them to be able to understand how wood shrinks when it gets dry and what makes a plant grow tall. Raise them to understand Boolean algebra and why languages are built the way they are. Raise them to understand their world.

Because our nation is wealthy and indolent and rude and has pissed a hell of a lot of people off on a regular basis for a couple of centuries now. Unless you want our future to look like that of French aristocrats circa right about 1760, then do your part.

And even if you don't have kids, you're not off the hook. Ask yourself, what have you done to make the next generation competent, honorable, and strong? If you don't a solid answer right on the tip of your tongue then it's time that you started doing your share.