The novel seems to have eclipsed other fiction forms in recent times, but there is a still a roll for the short story. I certainly enjoy many short stories, they can distil a story to its central elements more effectively than longer forms. A certain form of short story is the ‘weird’ story, such as those of Franz Kafka or J G Ballard. One I found recently is the ‘imaginary tribe story; try it on:

http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2008/08/imaginary-tribe.html

Author’s note: Given my reasonably diverse music tastes I thought it might be interesting to spread the word about interesting music I stumble across. My original thought was to try and embed short clips in the blog page, but in practice clips can often be found on YouTube.

I have used YouTube clips before, for this post on The Gotan Project. Unfortunately one of the links has died but the two video’s there are quite good and representative of the Gotan sound. They have subsequently released a new album; a clip of a song from that album (’Diferente’) can be found here. (The lesson here is to make sure you give the name of the song in the text in the blog, that way if you do suffer from link rot you can a least go and look for the song again - I will never remember what that last Gotan song was).

Anyway on with this review, which is of Sufjan Stevens.

Sufjan Stevens is modern indie pop musician with a strong folk music influence. You can see it with the focus on acoustic guitar and the extensive use of banjos and other folk instruments.

My first experience of Sufjan Stevens was the album ‘A sun Comes Up’ which can is in iTunes (itunes link to ‘A Sun Comes Up’).

His most famous album is the Illinoise (he has proposed an album for every State of America. So far he has made two). Here is a song off that album. While you listen to the song try to figure out what the subject is about.

It turns out that John Wayne Gacy Jr is quite famous.

The following songs are some of my favourite that I have come across so far, I tend to enjoy his quite songs.

This Dress Looks Nice on You

To Be Alone With You

Concerning the UFO sighting Near Highland

Seven Swans

With the global financial crisis the left blogosphere has been chattering about how this event is a defeat for neoliberalism, and a opportunity for the rise of left policies.

The problem I see is the framing of these new policies of the left.

In a discussion on bloggingheads.tv, the US reporter Christopher Hayes was discussing what he thought were the policies that were opening up for the left, and Eli Lake pointed out that what he was describing was traditional Keynesian and social democratic policies.

It just seems to me to be that an appeal to old 1930’s style policies is not the best way to progress the left agenda. Obviously there are no new policies under the sun, but if the left is to sell its policies isn’t it going to have to repackage and resell them in a modern and relevant form?

It has been pointed out to me that is some way this is what Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ was, and I think that this gives us a good pointer to how the left needs to package and market a market policies.

Robert Farley a while back wrote an interesting article titled “Abolish the Air Force“, making the case that the Air Force as a distinct military structure should be abolished. This is an intriguing idea.

But it raises in my mind a more basic question - why is their an airforce in the first place?

If you think of the history of warfare, there have been two major warfighting services - the Navy and the Army. These have been enduring institutions for centuries.

When new mechanisms for fighting wars were introduced they were integrated into these structures. So for example, when fighting soldiers became an important part of naval strategy, a new force - the marines - was integrated into the navy, and when aircraft carriers became a potent weapon - the fleet air arm - was created, again as part of the navy.

Similarly new land warfighting technology created new forces in the army, Artillery and Armour being prime examples.

When air fighting came of age during World War 1 the air arm were part of the other services, such as the Army Royal Flying Corp, but after the war the UK created a new service the Royal Air Force:

The decision to merge the two units and create an independent air force was a response to the events of World War I, the first war in which air power proved to be decisive. (ref: wikipedia)

One of the things that has always struck me about religion is the apparent conflict between the enormous powers of the creator and the feeble manifestations of those powers in the real world of people.

This particularly struck me while listening to the Religion Report on ABC, the episode was about Pope Pius XII, the pope during Hitler’s reign. The discussion centred around the relationship of the church and the Pope with the Nazi regime. The conclusion of Dr Paul O’Shea seemed to be that the pope was all too human and that while he generally had good intent, the way that this played out in his public statements and actions lead many to condemn him unjustly for his acquiescence on nazism.

But at the same time the Pope is God’s envoy on earth, a role set down in the bible. He is the Vicar of Christ and his pronouncements on faith and morals are infallible. As wikipedia reports the second Vatican said:

And this is the infallibility which the Roman Pontiff, the head of the college of bishops, enjoys in virtue of his office, when, as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful, who confirms his brethren in their faith, by a definitive act he proclaims a doctrine of faith or morals. And therefore his definitions, of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, are justly styled irreformable, since they are pronounced with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, promised to him in blessed Peter, and therefore they need no approval of others, nor do they allow an appeal to any other judgment. For then the Roman Pontiff is not pronouncing judgment as a private person, but as the supreme teacher of the universal Church, in whom the charism of infallibility of the Church itself is individually present, he is expounding or defending a doctrine of Catholic faith.

Am I the only one who finds these two descriptions of the pope to be in conflict?

I was listening to the In Our Times episode on vitalism, and suddenly the story of Frankenstein’s monster make more sense.

If you remember Dr Frankenstein creates a creature by animated a body through the use of electricity.

As outlined in the radio program, vitalism dealt with the ’spark of life’ the thing that gave a living human life, the thing absent from the dead. As knowledge and science advanced in the 19th century electricity came to be seen as a candidate for this ’spark of life’. For example one scientist was able to make a dead frog legs twitch by running electricity through them.

Growing up I always saw all these images of “cigar-shaped” rocket ships which I thought kind of quaint because I was used to the “straight as an arrow” Apollo mission rocket ships.

An example is the ship in the Tintin story: “Destination moon”.

Source Wikipedia

But I saw a video of the original Nazi V2 rocket that made me realise where the image came from:

For some reason I was reading about Bruce Lee, the revered Kung Fu master of my childhood. I never realised how athletic he was until I saw this photo:

For some reason I think that people with those giant back muscles (like swimmers) look like bats.

Matthew Yglesias posted on the lack of ‘fighters’ in Star Trek:

The Imperial Star Destroyer of the Star Wars universe is a hybrid battleship/aircraft carrier, capable (according to Wikipedia) of carrying 72 TIE fighters plus auxiliaries, but also capable of fighting it out ship-to-ship.

All of this makes me wonder why the ships in Star Trek are so clearly cruisers and battleships, rather than aircraft carriers. As far as I can tell, no race in the series employs vessels that act as motherships to large numbers of fighters.

Clearly this is a question that calls for a made-up answer. So what I would say is that most likely in the Star Trek universe it’s not technologically feasible to equip a craft smaller than a Defiant-class starship with deflector shields. You could attribute that to the physics of the deflector fields themselves, or the need for a large power supply, or what have you. Either way, the upshot is that piloting a small craft in battle would be tantamount to suicide.

In sympathy with Matt’s call for imaginary answers, I think this issue requires serious consideration. However, i think the real question is why the Imperial Star Destroyers in Stars Wars had fighters at all.

The use of a large mother-ship with smaller fighters attached is an obvious homage to the aircraft carriers of World War Two, particularly the Pacific Theatre of the war where they were a decisive component of the American forces.

These aircraft carriers were a combination of a mother-ship with associated fighters. But it was the nature of the medium that made this work, that is the fighting was occurring a the interface of water and air. It allows the combination of water-based large, heavy, slow ships with air-based light, fast fighters.

You don’t see this occurring in other aspects of earth-side modern (or world war two) warfare. You don’t see tanks mother-ships with little fighter tanks, or long range bombers with little fighters tucked inside them.

This is also relevant the the space medium of the Imperial Star Destroyers. Both the ISD and the fighters travel through the same medium and would seem to be little reason to create separate types of space craft (that is, it is going to be more effective to make big ships - or small - but once you know that your best strategy is to make as many of those as possible).

So the question for Star wars, and Battlestar Galactica, is why have fighters at all?

I was listening to Car Talk and a caller had a problem with a weird noise emanating from the car. The proposed solution was that a door in the air conditioning system was getting stuck and the specific door could be isolated by removing the glove box and listening.

It was the first time I heard that term “glove box” and thought - why is it called that? Is it really because the early drivers of motor vehicles tended to wear gloves when the got out of the car? Maybe early car drivers were predominately opera buffs and attendees of white tie evenings.

Thanks to the wonders of wikipedia we can learn that the origin of the Glove Compartment is in fact a box used to hold gloves, although the answer is more prosaic. The early cars without a hardtop were windy and gloves were necessary to keep out the cold.

I was listening to the podcast of Thinking Allowed from the BBC, where they were discussing the coming financial crisis and the the fact that it appeared as if no economists had predicted it was coming.

One listener wrote an email into the show which was read aloud: “none of the financial types or economists seemed to predict this crisis but sociologists have very good models of how this type of behaviour comes about”. Maybe we should put the sociologists in charge of banking regulation?

The worst thing has happened, David Foster Wallace killed himself today, aged 46.

Report from the New York Times.

Foster Wallace was a unique and amazing storyteller. His novel, Infinite Jest, is quite rightly regarded as a masterpiece and his short stories often beautiful.

His writing style was unlike anything else, a combination of incredible storytelling with endless but powerful detail and widely meandering asides. But getting to the heart of the matter nonetheless.

For an example, I give you this quote from a commencement speech he wrote in 2005.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

An imaginary conversations between a US citizen and a Cuban citizen:

American citizen (AC): Cuba is an despotic country that locks up dissidents.

Cuban citizen (CC): Yes but it does not lock up very many.

AC: it still has over 200 dissidents imprisoned in Cuba.

CC: Well yes, but America has over 270 detainees locked up in Guantanamo Bay.

AC: Yes but they are unlawful combatants, maybe even terrorists.

CC: What about the rest of the prison system, America has 2.5m people incarcerated, one per hundred adults.

AC: Yes but they are criminals.

CC: So we have 270 dissidents locked up, but you have one in every hundred adults locked up, either you unfairly lock them up, or your capitalist system has generated a massive underclass of criminals. It is bad either way.

From this I am not attempting to draw a complete moral equivalence between the US and Cuba. However I am trying to demonstrate that the moral stance of an individual can be, and usually is, influenced by the culture in which it occurs.

If you remember the statue “Crouching Boy” that was the Australia entry in the 2001 Venice Biennale, you might like this look at this site covering other works of his.

I do like Germany, although I often find it hard to figure out exactly what it is I like. But when I see a factory like this one I understand.

Some elements of the Right in the US have been distressed by the neutral point of view of Wikipedia that they have created a new wiki: Conservapedia.

in the description of Conservapedia it is described as

Conservapedia is a clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth. We do not allow liberal bias to deceive and distort here. Founded initially in November 2006 as a way to educate advanced, college-bound homeschoolers…The starting point for increasing your knowledge, your faith and the well-being of you and those around you is to understand concepts better…No other encyclopedic resource on the internet is free of corruption by liberal untruths.

In How Conservapedia Differs from Wikipedia, they identify some of the key differences:

We do not attempt to be neutral to all points of view. We are neutral to the facts. If a group is a terrorist group, then we use the label “terrorist” but Wikipedia will use the “neutral” term “militant”.
We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts. Wikipedia editors who are far more liberal than the American public frequently censor factual information. Conservapedia does not censor any facts that comport with the basic rules.

This makes for a sometime bizarre website that can at times be hilarious as their entire view of the world is shifted rightward. There are lots of pages to see this, for example the page on Evolution, which manages to have pictures of not only Charles Darwin, but also Lysenko, Stalin and Hitler.

To give an example of Conservapedia I thought it might be worth having a look at the Barack Obama page to see what they say.

The first problem is in the first paragraph:

In 2007, Obama was the most liberal Senator.

This was certainly the conclusion of one magazine, there of course have been counter arguments to this claim, but to Conservapedia, because it fits their ideological view it is now a fact. In contrast Wikipedia reports this “fact” thus:

the National Journal ranked him as the “most liberal” senator based on an assessment of selected votes during 2007.

IT goes downhill from there:

Obama has declared himself to be a Christian, yet he never replaced his Arabic name with a non-Arabic one as many do casting doubt on his politically self-serving claim.

The implication here is that anyone who does not Anglicise their name is suspect in conservapedia’s view.

Obama downplays his Islamic background by claiming that his Kenyan Muslim father was a “confirmed atheist” before Obama was born, but in fact less than 1% of Kenyans are atheists, agnostics or non-religious.

This is an attempt to make Obama’s claim suspect, but of course there are 32.5m Kenyans, so there are 325,000 atheists in Kenya, it is not so unlikely his father was one of those.

Obama wore an American flag lapel pin after 9/11, but later stopped wearing it without adequate explanation.

We are now descending into quite clear distortions of the truth, for Obama did provide an explanation for not wearing a lapel pin:

You know, the truth is that right after 9/11 I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest, instead I’m gonna’ try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.

It is only Conservapedia which has somehow classified this an not “adequate”. Certainly, this type of editorialising is not within the rules of Wikipedia, which is why it is biased against conservative “facts”.

And of course the article goes on in a similar vein. In many ways it is funny, but also quite disturbing.

This ad was shown on the Gruen Transfer last week, as an ad that won the 2007 best ad competition.

It is a good ad, well, maybe not a good ad (given that is about selling product and I have no idea how successful it was at that), but it is a good short film, and I was trying to think why that is.

There is the obvious connect between the ape and it animal spirit and the drum (the drummer in The Muppets wasn’t called Animal for nothing), but I think it is more than that. It is the sense of purposeful and meditative concentration on the ape’s face, the singular focus on the task and the obvious, primal, satisfaction that the ape achieve. I think we would all pay a lot of money for that sense of satisfaction.

The ABC’s new political television show The Hollowmen is not a bad show, but there are some unrealistic parts to it. For example this scene from last weeks episode, do you see the problem?

The public servants are using a Mac.

there is no way stingy government departments would fork out the money for a Mac. They would give you some dodgy Windows computer, because “that’s the policy”.

On a related issue, this was in the credits, it was the “thanks to section”:

Angkor Wat?

This is the ad being run by the current government on climate change, on televisions across Australia.

Political campaigning was something that the ALP complained about quite a bit before the election (see here and here).

Apparently ALP policy on the use of advertising in elections was to have independent scrutiny of advertising campaigns:

In 2007, Kevin Rudd made an election promise that campaigns over $250,000 would be scrutinised by the Auditor-General.

So now we have the policy in place. And what is the policy? From the department of Finance and Deregulation the policy [link to pdf] is:

A. all members of the public have equal rights to access comprehensive information about government policies, programs and services which affect their entitlements, rights and obligations;
B. governments may legitimately use public funds for information programs or education campaigns to explain government policies, programs or services and to inform members of the public of their obligations, rights and entitlements; and
C. government campaigns shall not be conducted for party political purposes.

To some extent these are just platitudes, but they to provide a guidance for what should and should not be in a public advertising campaign, and for that they should be praised. The only problem is that under these guidelines all the Howard governments would also get through. In that sense the Climate Change ads by the current government are no different to the Howard government ads.

The thing that distinguished the Howard government ads was not so much the content, but rather the amount of them and the proximity to the election, and these guidelines do nothing to address that.

You don’t pay attention too much over the weekend, and a country gets invaded by Russia.

Over the last few days the simmering tensions in the break away Georgian region of South Ossetia broke into outright hot war.

The region has declared itself independent since 1993, although on the map it has been part of Georgia, although after the fall of the Soviet Union the newly created country of Georgia has never had the capability to do much about it.

Russia has claimed to support the people of South Ossetia, and has had peacekeeping troops in the province.

This changed when the Georgian military launched an offensive last Thursday. I suspect that they thought that they could pull it off without Russian intervention. This was certainly the opinion of Douglas Muir over at ‘A Fistful of Euros’ who argued:

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.
So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains. This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.

They seem to have underestimated the size and power of the Russian response, as Robert Farley reported over at ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ the Russians managed to move 650 armoured vehicles into South Ossetia, more than that possessed by the entire Georgian military. In addition CNN have been reporting Russian plans bombing the capital of Georgia.

Obviously things have not turned out well for Georgia, which was a one stage angling for membership of NATO. But the bigger message here is the willingness of Russia to go to war with its neighbours. This was not a police action, but a full scale invasion of another country. Russia is regaining its mojo after the fall of the Soviet Union, and I don’t think anything good can come of it.