Month: November 2010

Edie And Thea's story:

(Hat tip: Dan Savage)

Joshua Tucker basically agrees with Jonathan Bernstein about the GOP's healthcare pledges:

My assessment is that repealing health care reform is going to turn out to be a lot like cutting spending: everyone is in favor of cutting spending generally, but no one wants to cut spending for particular programs. Thus the Republicans face a dilemma. Politically, they are probably best served by continuing to rail against health care, but not actually trying to make unpopular changes to the program. However, that will open them up to charges of not actually fulfilling campaign promises. So the best strategy may be to overreach, propose plans that could never work (e.g., repealing mandates without doing anything else), count on the Senate to block or Obama to veto, and therefore keep the issue alive in its general form for the 2012 elections. Gridlock anyone?

Same, one suspects, on the debt. Pure politics; no policy. Is power all they care about?

Waitati, New Zealand, 12 pm

It's the kind of scholarship Alan Jacobs wants to do:

We need some faculty who are irresponsible to their disciplines and responsible first to integrating and connecting knowledge. This is a precise and concise summation of what I’ve tried to do for many years now. There’s a price to be paid for this kind of thing, of course: expanded interests do not yield expanded time. The day’s number of hours remain constant, and then there's the matter of sleep. So the more I explore topics, themes, books, films — whatever — outside the usual boundaries of my official specialization, the less likely it is that I will read every new article, or even every new book, in “my field.”

…Is the unswerving focus on a specifically bounded area of specialization the sine qua non of scholarship? Is it even intrinsic to scholarship? Is there not another model of scholarship whose primary activity is “integrating and connecting knowledge”? I think there is such a model, and I think it deserves to be called scholarship, but I’m not going to fight about the point. Call it what you want, it’s what I love to do, and God willing, I’ll be looking for new and interesting connections for the rest of my life.

This is why, when I entertain my habitual urge to drop this blog and retreat into a private space and read books for a few years, I hesitate. How could I find a way to learn from books what Dish readers inform me about on an hourly basis? How would I sustain the constant energy that interaction and debate provoke as opposed to solitude and walking around in one's own thoughts?

Yes, they are different; and vive la difference. But I remain unsure of where this collective mind model will take us, and whether one day it will utterly supplant the old model of thinking. So I hang in, pursuing the intimations, wondering what they will bring.

A reader writes:

While you're considering the validity of Uve Boll's Auschwitz film, consider that there is every indication that he filmed it simultaneously to and sharing assets (costumes, sets, &c) with these two films.

Ugh. Another writes:

You should just know that Uwe Boll is a purveyor of the worst, exploitative dreck who has managed to obtain licensing rights to a number of videogame intellectual properties and then go on to kill those properties with ungodly bad films.

Because he unfortunately works in two genres close to my heart — videogames and horror films — I've seen his work, I've read his interviews and I have no doubt that having this man turn the horrors of Auschwitz into just another torture-porn horror film like Hostel or Saw is just a stain on the collective soul of humanity.

Really, dude, he's that fucking bad.

A reader writes:

Just wanted to share a story about Spice and the other versions of "legal marijuana" from the perspective of a regular cannabis user. 

First of all, from what I can tell, pretty much every brand of "legal marijuana" consists of some sort of herbal substrate coated with JWH-018, a super-potent synthetic cannabinoid developed by John Huffman at Clemson.  Several of Huffman's chemicals, including JWH-018, can be purchased in 100% pure powder form through any number of online suppliers.

After reading the increasingly frequent stories about these substances over the past year or so, my curiosity got the better of me.  I strolled down to a head shop right on Franklin Street here in Chapel Hill, and asked the proprietor if he had any Spice or K2.  He enthusiastically showed me all of the different available brands, and I asked him which one was the "best" (wink, wink).  He gave me his recommendation based on customer feedback, and I gave him 15 bucks for a gram of absolutely awful-smelling shake.

The first time I tried it, I smoked a small amount and sort of just waited to see what happened.  The stuff definitely had a noticeable and immediate effect, and on its surface it was indeed similar to the cannabis high.  However, it was a very flat, one-dimensional experience.  Unlike with cannabis, there was no actual mood elevation or "body high".  It also lacked the subtle changes in ego and perception, which is my favorite thing about cannabis.  It was simply a brain buzz – undeniable, but without any truly enjoyable texture or nuance.  Oh, and the stuff tasted as terrible as it smelled, and felt incredibly harsh on the lungs.

The next time I tried it, things were much worse.  I'd had 2 or 3 beers over the course of an hour or so, and decided to break it out and try it again.  The alcohol emboldened me, so I packed quite a large bowl and took a few healthy rips of the stuff.  I immediately regretted it.  So, so very sick.  The room was spinning, I was in a cold sweat, and I promptly emptied my entire stomach contents.  The rest of the night was spent on the couch, shivering and sweating at the same time, moaning to myself and just hoping it would be over.  I actually missed work the next day because I was so drained and nauseated.

I absolutely adore cannabis, and have since my first awkward toke at fifteen.  I will never, ever touch any so-called "legal marijuana" again in my life.  This stuff is vastly more dangerous than even the strongest cannabis or plant-derived concentrate, and it owes its very existence to our insane war on what should rightly be considered a miracle plant.  It absolutely does follow in the proud steps of bathtub gin, crack cocaine, and shake-and-bake meth.  That our legal structure pushes people toward the use of this shit is the true crime.

Andrew Sprung compares voting to prayer:

I think that there's some similarity in this to the way some people who pray think about prayer — if their thinking about a personal God is at all complicated. The act is intrinsically beneficial to the doer and therefore must have some nebulous impact on the universe.  It's a participation in God's will — not instead of trying to influence God, but in hopes that thinking correctly about what you want will somehow make it more likely to be what God wants too, and therefore more likely to happen. Somewhat sublimated superstition.

Maybe a vote is a prayer. It's certainly a gesture of faith. If I don't do it, who will? There's a mystery in participation.

Uwe Boll, violent video-game producer a movie director inspired by gory video games, has filmed a new movie about Auschwitz. It's controversial – but from the trailer, I have to say it strikes me as valid. The violence of genocide, its unspeakable human cruelty, cannot really be under-stated. The trailer, which is gruesome yet no more gruesome than the reality one glimpses in places like the Holocaust Museum, is below the fold:

A reader writes:

Your reader’s observation about shrinking grocery sizes is spot-on.  In fact, there’s a whole meme over at Consumerist that identifies products that have been zapped with the incredible shrinking laser.  They’ve a whole wealth of items that have succumbed in recent years.

Go here to track the reader-generated "grocery shrink ray" series.  Diaper details here. Another example:

Details here (the small print shows a drop from 9 ounces to 8.5). Another:

According to this post, "Both cans contain 100 tabs but the total weight has dropped from 72 ounces to 70.9 ounces." Head to Consumerist for dozens more examples.