Dystopian America

I recently read Dan Simmons's 2011 dystopian novel, Flashback.

From the back cover:

Some twenty years from now, the United States is near total collapse. But 85 percent of the population doesn't care: They're addicted to flashback, a drug that allows its users to re-experience the best moments of their lives. After former detective Nick Bottom's wife died in a car accident, he started going under the flash to be with her; now an addict, he's lost his job and is estranged from his teenage son.

Nick may be a tortured soul but he's still a good cop, so he's hired by a top government advisor to investigate the murder of the advisor's son. Soon Nick becomes the one man who can change the course of an entire nation turning away from tomorrow to live in the past.

Simmons draws on the events of the last few decades, ending historically with the first years of the Obama administration, and offers a very dark, possible future. There are ongoing race wars, a new Mexico has reclaimed large swathes of the southwest, Texas is again an independent republic, and most Americans, including the hero, care far more about reliving their glory days than solving the problems.

Although it's science fiction, this is at heart a pulp detective novel with dark twists and turns along the way to solving a murder. Despite its 550 pages, it moves quickly and is a pretty good read. Simmons occasionally takes a break from the action to preach to the reader about obscure things like the disastrous effects of national debt and enabling Iran, but it didn't really diminish how much I enjoyed the book. (Maybe because I agree with much of what he says?) I don't want to spoil the ending, but I will say that it is unusual. If you enjoy these kinds of stories, I highly recommend it.

As a last note, parts of the book feature trucker convoys through the anarchic wastelands of the American West which reminded me a lot of the song Grim posted back at the end of June:

Uh-oh

They say this didn't work out well for the Neaderthals when we started trying it.

That explains it

From a three-part New Yorker article about sleep disorders:

If you sleep six hours a night for twelve days, Adusumilli says—and that’s about how much many Americans sleep all year round—your cognitive and physical performance becomes virtually indistinguishable from that of someone who has been awake for twenty-four hours straight. (The same effect is produced by six days of four-hour nights.) And the performance of someone who has been awake for twenty-four hours straight is similar to that of someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.1 per cent. In other words, “normal” amounts of sleep deprivation have us acting like we’re drunk. (Charles Czeisler recalls presenting these facts to a Times journalist; when the journalist handed in the story, the editor said it couldn’t possibly be true. Most people in the newsroom were sleep-deprived, and they still managed to produce the Times every day. Surely an intoxicated newsroom would be incapable of such a feat.)

In my whole life, I've almost never used an alarm clock to wake up in the morning unless I had a plane to catch. It's one reason I don't like traveling.

Mismatched sets

Laura, a young woman in Bogota notices a man in a butcher shop, William, who looks so like Jorge, one of her co-workers, that she assumes she's caught him moonlighting. She takes a picture of him back to Jorge, who is struck by the resemblance. Jorge shows the picture to another friend:

"Tell me what you think of this photo," he told his friend, handing him the phone.

You look fine, the friend said.

"Except it’s not me," Jorge said. He could not stop staring at Laura’s phone.

. . . Jorge moved to his desktop computer so he could see the images more closely. He clicked once more on the photo of William and the friend holding shot glasses. Now that the image was large, he could examine what he had failed, incredibly, to notice when he looked at the photo on his phone. He leaned in close, his nose practically touching the screen. The man’s hair was slicked up like a rooster’s crown, and the shirt was all wrong. But there was the full lower lip and thick brown hair that Jorge knew well. The buttons on the man’s shirt were straining slightly at the hint of a potbelly, in a way that was intimately familiar. Jorge felt a rush of confusion, and then his stomach dropped. The friend sitting next to his double had a face that Jorge knew better than his own: It was the face of his fraternal twin brother, Carlos.

Going to the Wild

Going to go ride for a while. I think the Grandfather Games are going on right now. Might be worth stopping in.

Back Tuesday or so. Here's some relevant music to these hills, and to things Celtic.

Gentlemen Can Be Ungentlemanly If Necessary

I've long advocated being a gentleman.

To do so, though, requires that you constitute yourself a defender of your country and its civilization. It is not enough to say, as did Dutch humanist Oscar van den Boogaard:

"I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."

No, that is not a gentleman, though he wears the finest clothes and writes the finest novels, keeps the best society, and has the finest manners. He has only the accidents of a gentleman. He has nothing of its essence.

The essence is to bear arms, in defense of country and civilization. That is the real thing, the root of the tradition. The arms may be symbolic, or they may be actual. The defense must be devout.

Today I read about men who were no gentlemen.

On the afternoon of July 4 in Washington DC, a teenager with a knife boarded a crowded metro train and attacked a 24-year-old man, Kevin Joseph Sutherland, stabbing him 30 or 40 times and kicking his head repeatedly until he was dead. No one tried to stop him....

That no one did displays not just cowardice but also a callous and unthinking selfishness. The Reddit eyewitness had no idea at the time how many more people Spires would kill, no idea if he would attack the 52-year-old woman or an elderly passenger. He just let him walk off the train into the subway, covered in Sutherland’s blood.

This is essentially the opposite of the spirit of United Flight 93—the heroic selflessness that prompted a group of courageous passengers on 9/11 to attack their hijackers, forcing them to crash the plane in a Pennsylvania field.

The basic theory I advanced more than ten years ago in "Social Harmony" was that we need old men to be dangerous. This 18 year old was totally un-moored from our civilization. He was a murderer, an armed robber, and his society was so soft that no one in a train car full of people tried to stop him.  Older, larger men did nothing.  Even if they were too late to stop the killing, as knives work fast, they needed to stop him from leaving until police could arrive. A virtuous citizenry would have that courage. They would pull together to enforce the common peace.

Maybe we've become too nice, and not rough enough. Present company excepted, of course. A dangerous world can only be tamed by what Louis L'amour used to call "men with the bark on." This guy isn't nice, he dresses and grooms himself in a terrifying manner, and he uses obscene gestures and language. Yet he has the spirit of the thing. He's a guy who dares to be an apostate from Islam, a convert to Christianity, and a proud American. He has understood what is valuable about our civilization, and he has constituted himself a defender of it.

We must do better.

Havok Journal: ISIS Must Die

How much brutality can you stand before we decide that something must be done? There is a point when we become numb to such behavior, when after that we become used to such behavior. I don’t want to be used to something like that and yet with innumerable occurrences, I can no longer feel the way I did before.

We lose a bit of our humanity when we learn to harden ourselves to something like this. I had calluses on my soul before. I don’t want them back.

Understand clearly, this is the pattern of the Islamic State; this is how they will rule and there is no turning back. No nation, which started out with brutality and bestiality has ever stepped back from that level of force. They started their campaign this way and nothing has changed in the few years since it began.

UPDATE: Jim Hanson has an op-ed on ISIS today as well.

Old guys rule

The pleasure of seeing expectations confounded: young athletes get made up convincingly as geezers, then show up on the basketball court or skateboard park. It's a good joke on everyone, and no hard feelings.

Bad Habits

Same band as last night, this time singing about cocaine.



I don't care at all about cocaine -- I'm one of the last Americans to have never done any illegal drug -- but I was wondering about this song for a while. I heard it in this documentary about the Angels, and for a long time I thought it was an ode to BDSM: "everybody take a whip on me!" That turns out not to be the relevant lyric at all. It's an old tune, done by Woodie Guthrie.

By the way, forward that video to 8:24 to hear Jerry Garcia give an ode to bikers. "Is that out front, or what?"

"Are you afraid of them?"

"Sure."

"Why?"

"Because they're scary, man."

Root for the Socialists. It's Important.

There was a famous election in which David Duke ran against a legendarily corrupt politician that produced the slogan, "Vote for the crook. It's important." (The same politician produced the aphorism about political death meaning being caught in bed with "a dead girl or a live boy," the truth of which might now be questionable). At The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that conservatives should root for the socialists in Greece.

Conservatives may say that people get the governments they deserve. But the Greeks actually did something that was unthinkable in this country, kicking out both of the major parties that led them into debt-peonage. Syriza was their Tea Party, and like the Tea Party it boasts some grandiose and irresponsible rhetoric, flagrantly breaks Godwin's law, and is generally unruly.

This is what I mean when I say that I expect us to have a conversation like this down the road. The ones who've been striving hardest against reckless spending are the ones being told they have to accept the consequences, including the disarmament of the Greek military at a time of national crisis. Doubtless we will hear the same things in our hour. We should look differently upon them, as we would want others to look differently upon us.

Too far?

Oh, my. I assumed the village flag in this HotAir newsclip was for funnsies, but apparently not.

Beating China on price?

Will the Chinese equivalent of WalMart soon have to start importing cheaper U.S.-made consumer goods? I wouldn't bet on it quite yet, but a Boston Consulting Group study claims that we're closing the gap in manufacturing costs and might actually get cheaper than China within three years, mostly as a result of drastically reduced fuel costs, which is turn will be mostly because of drastically reduced fracking costs. As the article notes, all other things being equal, American companies would prefer to eliminate the risk and delay inherent in shipping "cheap" goods here from halfway around the world. We have to get pretty uncompetitive before that starts making sense, but maybe we can innovate our way out of the jam. Or maybe the EPA will find a way to outlaw fracking, to keep us from doing anything competitive or unfair or harmful to Gaia.

Tonight's Music

A little piece about the Cumberland river.

The Greek Perspective

We've been talking about the crisis in terms of the English-language commentary on it, and in terms of the clash between German and contemporary Anglo-Saxon economic philosophy. What we haven't really heard about is what the Greeks think, except insofar as it has been represented by Germans or Frenchmen or English or American thinkers. A Greek whose acquaintance I made in the last few days sent me this graphic to explain how the crisis looks to him.

From his perspective, the Greeks are proposing to pay 3.5B of the 4B Euros being asked. The creditors group is demanding the 4B (officially), but the way it has come up with for Greece to afford it is to violate its basic national security requirements. The Greeks were already proposing defense cuts at half the level the creditors would prefer, but -- at a time when Greece is facing a heavy influx of refugees, and possibly infiltrators, from the crises caused by ISIS and in Africa -- the creditors are demanding cuts to the bone.

Now national security in the face of an immediate threat is one of the few cases in which we often think it is reasonable for a sovereign power to run a deficit. After all, what are your alternatives?

Under this reading, the Greek position suddenly looks a lot more reasonable. They're willing to meet their creditors most of the way, but they aren't willing to commit suicide to close the remaining gap. And, by the way, isn't it really to all of Europe's advantage if Greece is able to maintain sufficient defense forces to deal with the influx of refugees? That seems like a problem it is carrying for the rest of Europe, to a certain degree. Might not the rest of Europe help to carry that burden a bit, or at least not kneecap the Greeks while the Greeks are carrying that burden for them?

Just so you know how it looks from the other side.

Oh, Really? Were There Snipers?

This story sounds familiar.

She told a story about the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Clinton and President Obama were trying to negotiate terms with India and China—two of the fastest-developing countries in the world—for a climate change agreement.

The problem: China and India's leaders were nowhere to be found. Clinton said she and Obama "sent out scouts," who found that the leaders were meeting in a clandestine conference room. Clinton and Obama marched to the room, she said, and pushed past Chinese security guards to confront the heads of state. As a result, the assembled countries signed an accord... though much of the text was nonbinding.

Hm.

Iron Lady II

For those of you who (like me) have never closely followed European politics, this WSJ article, which is linked via a Google search and won't trigger a paywall, is a fascinating summary. I didn't know that Angela Merkel was raised under communism or that she was a research physicist before going into politics. As she was the daughter of a West German Lutheran pastor who was assigned a parish in East Germany, her relationship with communism seems to have been ambivalent. She is a Christian Democrat who is openly skeptical of multi-culti assumptions, whose economic views pass for right-wing free-market enthusiasm in Europe, and who doesn't altogether despise Israel. She's also the Mean Mommy who tells countries with failing economies that they have to do their "Hausaufgabe"--their homework. Update: This is not a bad thumbnail sketch of the bid-and-asked in the negotiations between Greece and its creditors.

Freedom Machine

Let's stick with Junior Brown for another day. I liked the last one because of some of the clever word-play. This song doesn't really have any of that, but it does have some solid looking hotrods and ratrods.



We're still close enough to the 4th for an anthem to freedom. America has 365 freedom days.

The Robot Wars

The Japanese accepted.

Freedom

From Political Humor:

Eric Hines

If You Put Your Thumb on the Scales Hard Enough, It All Makes Sense

The governor of Pennsylvania demonstrates a Euro-like understanding of the workings of the market. There hard liquor sales are run through state alcoholic beverage control centers, which set prices and determine how much you are allowed to buy. The legislature moved to privatize hard alcohol sales, but no. The governor vetoed the bill with this statement:

This legislation falls short of a responsible means to reform our state liquor system and to maximize revenues to benefit our citizen,” Governor Wolf said. “It makes bad business sense for the Commonwealth and consumers to sell off an asset, especially before maximizing its value. During consideration of this legislation, it became abundantly clear that this plan would result in higher prices for consumers. In the most recent case of another state that pursued the outright privatization of liquor sales, consumers saw higher prices and less selection.

Turns out he's right about the last case, which was Washington state. Prices did go up after privatizing the market -- because the government slapped a huge tax increase on the stuff at the same time.