My View on the Ross Thing

You may have heard of the latest controversy to engulf the science fiction community--after all, not only is it less than a week old, this one has been picking up some mainstream media coverage, to the extent that six of the first ten hits for his name deal with it. That's because it pivots around how, for eight hours or so last Saturday, former British TV presenter Jonathan Ross was tapped to host the Hugo Awards at this year's Worldcon, Loncon 3. It was only eight hours because that's how long it took for him to back out of it after the news of his being tapped set off a Twitter storm.

If you've never heard of Jonathan Ross, you may be wondering why he was reacted to in such a manner. He has, in fact, run into no shortage of controversies himself, one of them getting him suspended from the BBC for six months. But that is, in itself, a huge factor in what went down. I get the distinct impression that the Loncon 3 chairs didn't fully appreciate that this isn't just another British con, but a Worldcon drawing thousands of people from all over the world--though mostly North America and Western Europe--many of whom would have never heard of this guy who used to be on the telly. Many of whom had only the stories of his controversies to inform them, and given what the sf community has been through in the last few months, a lot of people out there are understandably on hair triggers.

As an experienced presenter, and knowing that he would be representing Loncon 3 in his interactions with the sf community, Ross should have known how to approach the situation professionally and how to introduce himself to people with no prior experience of him. Instead, this is what we got:

@WendyMetcalfe1 that's slander and untrue. Feel free to voice any opinion but please do not create false 'facts'
— Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014

@wasteofpaint absurd. I'll happily buy the ticket off you and give it someone less stupid.
— Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014

My first introduction to and impression of Jonathan Ross, ladeez and germs.

When you're caught in an incipient controversy, there's one simple rule--don't feed it. Resnick and Malzberg turned the SFWA controversy from eye-rolling and grumbles to flame wars by saying that people rolling their eyes and grumbling at them were liberal fascists trying to censor them. Rob Ford made a mockery out of his status as a crack aficionado by constantly denying that he smoked crack until finally telling reporters that they hadn't "asked the right question." Ross didn't appreciate this, and so he got burned.

But it's more than that, I think. In this, it seems like there's also a measure of fame's blinders. I see plenty of people like Neil Gaiman bemoaning the reaction that Ross received, but how much of this came from an unexamined opinion that everyone would know Ross for Ross? I didn't. I only know Ross from his tweets, and I don't care if Neil Gaiman calls him a friend--I think he's a jerk.

When people voice their concerns about you, the proper response is not to insult them or accuse them of slander. It only makes you look out-of-touch and, frankly, a bit sad.

Photo: Watching the Leafs Turn

That was a hell of a thing Toronto had going for a few days there, wasn't it? Back in that heady age when the Maple Leafs had qualified for the Stanley Cup playoffs, but before they did what the Maple Leafs do and screwed up in the last minutes, there was an energy in the city, an electricity. Working next door to the Air Canada Centre, I couldn't help but get caught up in it somewhat. In this photo, the crowd has gathered in Maple Leaf Square to watch Game 3 unfold. Let them have their celebration; it took another week after this shot was taken for the Leafs to blow their chance for the forty-fifth year running.

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What Happens At Track Level...

One of the things that was new to me when I returned to Toronto was the way announcements are now done in the subway. When I left, it would always be someone from Transit Control coming over the microphone, more often than not sounding like one of Charlie Brown's teachers--and that was on the rare occasion when I was in the position to hear one of their announcements, as it's only since I came back that I've been relying on the subway for day-to-day travel.

If you use the subway even occasionally, though, you'll run into one eventually. In a city where the passenger assistance alarm is pressed at least three times a day, given enough days the odds are unity.

"ATTENTION SUBWAY CUSTOMERS ON THE YONGE-UNIVERSITY-SPADINA LINE... WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING A DELAY BOTH WAYS AT UNION STATION DUE TO A PERSONAL INJURY AT TRACK LEVEL..."

It's not something that anyone likes to hear, is it? Plenty of us leave their schedules down to the wire as it is, and a few minutes here or there can break them. That emotionless, monotone synthetic voice comes over the speakers and your heart sinks--what's it going to be this time? Waiting in the tunnel for five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour? At least they even deigned to announce the delay at all; who hasn't been stuck on a train that's come to a stop in the tunnel, or just been loitering at the platform for five minutes with its doors open, with nary a word of explanation?

The problem is when people feed that sense of being inconvenienced too much. When it makes people lose perspective.

A few months ago, I was riding in to work as normal, aboard one of the sleek new Toronto Rocket trains. When it pulled into the Union platform, there was another train already there on the other side. Hardly unusual--what was unusual was that when my train stopped, it was more like it had been put on pause. None of the doors opened, and for a minute or so us passengers could only goggle out at the platform, wondering what the hold-up was this time. Eventually, a door opened: the one at the very front of the train, up where the operator sits. We started filing toward it, pushed on by a request to leave the train, as it had been taken out of service.

It was the same Union platform that I stepped onto then that it's been before and since, but the atmosphere was vastly different from anything I'd experienced. People were streaming up the stairways and escalators, but no one was coming down. Uniformed police officers were there, urging people to clear the area. There, crouched against one of the walls, was a woman in tears: a woman wearing the sort of frozen grimace that tells you everything you need to know.

Suicide is more common on the Toronto subway than we'd like to think. You won't see them reported on in the news, if only to keep from encouraging any potentials who might be wavering... but it happens, nonetheless. Those announcements of "a personal injury at track level" don't mean that someone slipped on the yellow dots. It means someone made a 218-ton subway the instrument by which they would catch a ride away from the world.

When I next checked up Twitter, what did I see in #TTC? Message after message of complaints. Of grousing. Of bitching. People moaning that they would be delayed in getting where they were going. People fulminating against the TTC for lousing things up again. People gnawing and whining that the wire had snapped.

Lost in it all, of course, was this simple fact: a person had died. Presumably, at least; I can only draw inferences about what I saw. But who cares about that? No, the truly important factor is how the fact that a person is dead impacts one's timetable. Don't consider, say, the operator of the subway--the person in control of those two hundred tons of steel, who got to watch while a person who'd reached the end dropped in front of the train, too close and too quick to do anything but let physics solve that harsh equation. Don't consider the people around--say, the commuter who watched someone step off the platform right next to them. Don't consider the people that the person left behind.

Because it's only your schedule that's really important. What's one life, more or less, if it means you're late to work today? Empathy is totally for suckers.

For Neil

When my right index finger starts going numb, something that I've only experienced in the context of funerals, I know it's a serious thing. So it was when I heard the news that Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, died yesterday. While it's the sort of news I knew that I'd hear one day, for it to be extracted from that comfortably distant future and dropped into the present was a shock. You don't ever wake up and expect that particular day to be the Day.

But it was, and the man who took one small step forty-three years ago is gone. There are other moonwalkers, of course; Buzz Aldrin is still alive, still healthy, and still punching out moon landing deniers. Neil Armstrong was different, though--he was the first. First in a way that it's difficult to conceive of without some thought, first in a way that's utterly foreign to Earth.

Barring an ancient extraterrestrial scout mission or some previous technological species that's been obliterated from the fossil record, he was the first thinking being to step out among those rocks in the history of time. Not just the first man, not just the first human, but the first sapient being in all the universe.

The first, and he returned to Earth to live a modest life. He didn't allow his experience to go to his head. He didn't take advantage of his fame for political ends. He did things no one had ever done before, and as long as there are those who look up in wonder at that silver world in the sky, he will never be forgotten.

see you space cowboy...

White People Don't Understand

If there's one key truth about the modern world that many Westerners don't understand, it's this: white people do not understand racism. I know I don't! I know as much about racism as I do about what it's like to walk on the moon; I can read the accounts of people who know what it's like, but I have no personal experience with it. The problems come when white people, as white people are wont to do, assume that they are in tune with the world and its complexities.

First off: the $100 issue. There's been a flap across Canadian news outlets lately regarding the redesign of Canada's new $100 polymer bill. With its reverse bearing an image of a woman peering into a microscope, it's supposed to emphasize Canada's role in the sciences--after all, these designs were originally made back in 2009 or so, before certain recent events. However, the bill we're getting isn't the bill that was first designed. Originally the woman was depicted as Asian, but it seems that some focus groups thought an Asian scientist was "stereotypical" or that such an ethnicity "doesn't represent Canada."

So the Bank's designers redrew her, with the intention that it would not depict "a specific individual," and we end up with the bill we have today. A bill which, as the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney acknowledges, "appears to represent only one ethnic group."

I would theorize that it's because the woman does represent only one ethnic group. Specifically, the white ethnic group. I don't know who aside from the ultimate higher-ups at the Bank of Canada were responsible for approving it, but considering Canada's ethnic makeup I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I hypothesize that most of them were probably white. They may have been trying to go for something "non-ethnic," but that's a ridiculous mirage--there's no such thing as ethnic neutrality. What's more likely is that you perceive your own ethnicity as somehow "neutral," the same way a lot of North Americans insist that they don't have an accent or how people tend to perceive a stick figure as being of their own ethnicity in the absence of contradictory information.

Bears do not approve of people who think "non-ethnic" is a thing.

The other factor to this I just discovered today, but apparently it's been a thing for some time already. While Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt dovetails with the whole "crapsack dystopia" thing that appears to be common in Young Adult novels lately, it takes a sharp turn away from the pack with the way it treats racism. See, Save the Pearls is set in a world where whites are the weak, oppressed lower class, known as "pearls," and society is dominated by black people, called "coals."

Are you beginning to see the issue already?

That doesn't even cover the use of blackface, references to black characters as "beastly," and so on. The book's reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative, and as of this writing it has a two-star review due mainly to a handful of higher reviews... including that of Marvin Kaye, editor of Weird Tales magazine, who calls it "a thoroughly non-racist book." I, for one, am relieved by the assurances of this aging white man that it's non-racist. I mean, if you can't trust a white man who grew up in the mid-20th century as the final arbiter of whether or not something is racist, who can you trust?

For the record, I don't think that Save the Pearls was written to be racist, or that the $100 bill was redesigned for that reason. Instead, it's more of a problem that's endemic to white authors tackling racism--they don't understand it, but they think they do anyway, and they are incapable of recognizing how the unspoken assumptions of their upbringing affect their work. They are taking something they don't understand and filtering it through their own lens, a lens that does not see things in quite the same way as other people do.

I, for one, understand that I don't understand it at all. Still, that puts me ahead of folks who not only don't recognize their lack of understanding, but charge ahead nevertheless.

From the Gardiner to Kelowna, A Flagging Link

What do Rob Ford and Kelowna, British Columbia have in common? Considering that one is a man and the other is a city in the BC Interior, probably not all that much. Nevertheless, some isolated bits of recent news have drawn a connection between them that's all the more important for being not immediately obvious.

The first news: earlier this week, Rob Ford was photographed reading papers while driving on the Gardiner Expressway, and after the photo appeared on Twitter it quickly spread through the Greater Toronto mediascape. It's easy to understand how this came about if you know anything about the man--not only does he have mayoral responsibilities, but he's practically allergic to delegation. He made his name in city politics by eschewing perks like "office budgets." He's not going to let 80 km/h traffic keep him from absorbing the information he needs to absorb.

Fortunately for Ford, reading while driving isn't illegal in Ontario, but soon enough he's going to be given a driver--causing an accident while distracted by mayoral papers would not be good for his reelection prospects. The media is on him, the police are on him, even his brother and other mayor Doug Ford is on him to accept a driver. Sure, some people are capable of coping with that sort of split attention in ideal situations, but situations aren't always ideal and lives are more important than documentation that can be dealt with just as easily inside City Hall.

Now, the second news: Kelowna is currently considering whether or not it will fly a pro-life flag over City Hall during its Protect Human Life Week, and when I Google that phrase the first hit is of Pro Life Kelowna, a site of the sort that comes as no surprise at all, featuring stories of "abortion caravans" and a ticker of "Babies Killed Since 1969." According to Kelowna Community Resources this is the website of the Kelowna Right to Life Society, the same agency whose executive director is quoted by CBC News as saying that "there's nothing controversial there's nothing particularly political or religious" about a pro-life statement.

I'm not questioning the city of Kelowna's right to fly a flag in honor of whatever time it chooses to recognize. After all, it's flying a rainbow flag right now. In this case, I'd say the important issue is the source of the flag. It's not something that already existed that Kelowna is just going to run up the pole--it's something that's being created for this specific function, the first version of which has already been rejected by the city.

If you're looking for a flag that's "for human life," why not just fly the World Health Organization flag? Oh, wait, it's part of the UN, and they've distributed contraception...

I said there was a commonality here, and there is--it's the necessity of using good judgement in politics. Rob Ford may have been a busy man, and he may have thought there was no problem reading and driving, but he demonstrated poor judgement by actually doing it. Likewise, when it comes to the flag situation, the Kelowna city government's judgement is of paramount importance. The politics of pro-life and pro-choice are lightning rods here as they are in the United States. So is the whole issue of gay rights, but they're fundamentally different issues--the rainbow flag represents an entire group of people that were systematically discriminated against for generations. The pro-life flag, in contrast, represents an organization with an axe to grind about that specific issue.

If the situations were reversed, and Kelowna was considering flying a pro-choice flag over City Hall, I don't think it would be appropriate. The whole issue is a fundamentally personal one that should be dealt with at the personal level, not at the level of the state. It all comes down to exercising proper judgement, and demonstrating that the people holding positions of power are worthy of having been placed there.

Besides, when you get down to it, the flag design itself is horrible. Writing "PRO-LIFE" on the flag defeats the whole purpose of having a flag--it's supposed to be a simple but standing-out design easily recognizable from a distance. Don't these people know the first thing about vexillology?

Photo: Demonstration and Authority

What I know of protests in the United States comes from books and the media; I sure as hell don't involve myself in them when I'm down there, being a foreigner and all. I stumbled upon one while I was in Portland, though - a small one, assembled on the occasion of Mitt Romney being in town for some reason or another. What struck me were the number of police officers on the scene, practically one cop per demonstrator. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a normal sort of turnout.


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The Audacity of Evidence

There's an index card on my desk with a few sentences written on it, sentences I need to take heed of and remember for when I encounter them around the internet. Sentences like "the moon landing was a hoax" and "all taxation is theft" and "the birth certificate is a fraud." Sentences that, in other words, serve as a gigantic, waving flag that any other arguments offered by the person flying them can be safely discounted - because if someone believes one thing so divorced from all real-world evidence, what assurances do I have that anything else they've chosen to believe has any real grounding? The problem is that while moon-hoaxers are fundamentally harmless, committed anti-taxer lolbertarians or those who double down on the idea that President Obama isn't a natural-born American can make seriously negative waves in the society around them.

People like Donald Trump, who has stuck around to remind us that the 1980s weren't necessarily all that they're cracked up to have been these days. Earlier this week, while sharing a Las Vegas stage with Mitt Romney, Trump again reminded us all that he very strongly believes that Obama has no right to be President, that he is some kind of Kenyan-born Kenyan, based on the strength of evidence such as... well, such as the fact that he very, very strongly believes it, I suppose. Not that any sort of evidence would do much good. This is reality, such as it is, and Phoenix Wright can't dramatically point and shout "take that" and watch as the vain attempts at bluffing and misdirection crumble to dust.

In a word, it's ridiculous - the same word, incidentally, that Wolf Blitzer chose in a recent interview he conducted with Trump, only for Trump to attempt to turn it around - because, apparently, Donald Trump lives in a world where pointing out that Honolulu newspapers from 1961 that carry announcements of the future president's birth is "defending Obama," and "I know you are, but what am I" is a valid tactic in debates between adults. Here, have a partial transcript of the YouTube video available here:

WOLF BLITZER: Did the conspiracy start in 1961 when the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser contemporaneously published announcements that he was born in Hawaii?

DONALD TRUMP: That's right, and many people put these announcements in because they wanted to get the benefits of being so-called "born in this country."

I can't help but be reminded of Mike Reed's catalog of online flame warriors - specifically Ferrous Cranus, a warrior "utterly impervious to reason, persuasion and new ideas... ever unfathomable, Ferrous Cranus cannot be moved." Today, this sort of warrior is on the march in politics, in business, in culture all across Earth. People like this, people like Trump, know what they know and refuse to be moved, in spite of evidence or the lack thereof. The Hawaiian government presents the actual long-form certificate? It's obviously a fraud. Newspapers carry birth announcements? Obviously it was an immigration scam.

I almost want to ask Trump if he can conceive of any mundane evidence that would convince him that Barack Obama is a natural-born American. "Almost," because I'm pretty sure the answer would be is that there isn't any. This kind of belligerent bullishness isn't indicative of someone who's weighing arguments. It's the hallmark of someone whose mind is made up, and damn the torpedoes.

I don't think there's a long form of this one.

Why? It's the question that echoes endlessly in my skull, the most important question we can ask, the question that we must always work to answer if we ever want to be something more than what we are. Why? Donald Trump and others seem to be going the extra mile to make the nature of Obama's birth a non-falsifiable hypothesis; for every piece of evidence presented, there's some special pleading as to why it's a fake or why it doesn't say what you think it says. Are these the actions of people who are honestly seeking after truth? No! These are the actions of people with an agenda.

Donald Trump's own agenda is easy enough to guess at: he wants his team to win the 2012 election, and his attempts to cast doubt on Obama's heritage are just one of the many avenues that are being tested to diminish Obama's shot. Evidence is poison to people like this; bare evidence, after all, doesn't have an agenda - that's what interpretations are for. So every piece of evidence offered up in support of the certificate being genuine is ruthlessly re-interpreted, at which point the interpreters act like that evidence has gone away.

Maybe, to them and a lot of their supporters, it has. But even if a million people believe "rabbit" is spelled with a "k," we won't be seeing "kabbit" in dictionaries any time soon. This sort of interpretation does not change reality.

What I'd actually like to see is Trump's evidence - the evidence that originally gave him reason to suspect that Obama wasn't a natural-born citizen, the evidence suggesting that the long-form certificate held by the Hawaiian government is a forgery, the evidence that it was some kind of immigration scam. I mean, there's got to be evidence, right? Is twenty-year-old book promotional material really the best he's got? Doesn't he have some sort of evidence that makes his opinions more believable than David Icke's "world leaders are really twelve-foot-tall alien lizards in disguise" hypothesis? If that's the case, why is he hiding from us?

Because Trump is a rational, reasonable man, right? That's got to be what happened, isn't it? If McCain had been elected in 2008, Trump would have been the voice of reason investigating whether or not his birth certificate was a fraud, and he was actually born in Panama, wouldn't he? It couldn't possibly be because Obama is - gasp - black, right? Trump doesn't have something to hide... like, say, the notion that he's the time-displaced clone of a warlord from the future, right? He wouldn't have a problem with demonstrating that his DNA is a match to that of his parents, right?

Where's the evidence, Donald? Point us to the evidence!

Photo: Hey Hey, Ho Ho

Yesterday, while hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Montreal in protest against Quebec's draconian Bill 78 - which I wrote about the other day, if you're unfamiliar - smaller sympathy demonstrations rose up across Canada. A relatively small group, perhaps a hundred people or so, made its way through downtown Vancouver yesterday afternoon, though it wasn't long before the demonstrators were herded away by the police. First time I've ever seen a police cruiser driving on the sidewalk.

The events in Montreal, and the inability of the police to control something so massive, is just one more reminder that ultimately, all governments require the consent of the governed to function - and that any government's first priority is to keep as many of the governed as possible from realizing that.


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All the President's Genes

Ten years ago, the only reason anyone really talked about the need for the President of the United States to be a natural-born citizen was in connection with whether Arnold Schwarzenegger's mail would ever come to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Today, it's a bit more heated than that; despite the presentation of fifty-year-old certificates and newspaper announcements, there are still quite a few people who believe that the evidence is a hoax and that Barack Obama (aka B-Rock "The Islamic Shock" Hussein Superallah Obama) was born outside the USA. Presumably, they also believe that a nice man in New York has a bridge to sell them and that once they hear back from that exiled Nigerian prince they'll be millionaires.

Although the meaning of "natural-born citizen" isn't defined within the Constitution, it has gained the established legal meaning of someone who was born an American as opposed to someone who acquired their American citizenship at a later date - this was an important consideration back in the eighteenth century, as it slammed the door on the possibility of European aristocrats coming over, starting a political storm, and ending up in the White House. Since then, the electorate has often had its hands full dealing with American aristocrats. Sure, it's practically unique when it comes to developed countries - not even as homogeneous a state as Japan has that kind of limitation written into its constitution (a constitution which, incidentally, was written by the United States).

For now, this is a sufficient definition... but I don't believe it'll stay that way forever. Why not? It's as simple as this - "natural-born citizen" doesn't necessarily have just the one meaning. Who defines what a "natural-born citizen" is in an age of genetic engineering?

Lookit that! It's DNA. Hey, give me a break. It's hard to illustrate abstract concepts.

Plenty of people have, shall we say, a thing against genetic engineering, most notably reflected in what seems to be a common reaction to genetically modified plants that end up in the human diet. The prevalence of the term "frankenfood" in the media tells you all you need to know about how a lot of people view it - that we're playing God, that we're going too far, nonwithstanding that humans have been genetically engineering plants for thousands of years by uprooting ones with attributes we don't like and planting ones with attributes we do like. The difference today is that genetic engineering is down to a science, and science is bad, mm'kay.

This opposition to genetically modified organisms manifests in a number of ways; recently, a group of anti-GM protestors in the United Kingdom threatened to destroy a test crop of wheat genetically tweaked for greater resistance against aphids, and over the weekend an organic farmer broke into the research centre and vandalized crops. Personally, outside the prospect of "terminator" genes - that is, food crops genetically modified for sterility, so that farmers have to continually purchase seeds from the manufacturer - I have difficulty understanding just what it is about genetically modified food that gets people so worked up.

Bear in mind that these are just genetically modified plants, and they're already getting this reaction. What the hell's going to happen when we have genetically modified *people*? Would a genetically engineered Presidential candidate face opposition because he or she wasn't "natural-born," but cooked up in some laboratory? The obvious answer, unless people really change their ways over the coming decades, is yes. When it comes to Obama and the birth certificate "controversy," what it comes down to is the claim that he's not American. When it comes to President Future, it would be as simple as suggesting that he or she isn't human.

Harsh? Yes... but wholly in line with what I've come to expect from people.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Supermoon

The moon: something that's been there for as long as we can remember, our planetary friend, our first clue that the universe beyond Earth wasn't just heavenly perfection - now available with footprints and spent Apollo Program descent stages. Last night, its full phase matched up with an uncharacteristically clear Lower Mainland sky, so I took another look at it from my window. I found that, as usual, it is a spherical world that can appear grey or golden depending on the time of day, appearing approximately the same size as a dime held six feet away from your eye.

It was only very recently that I learned people were, for one reason or another, really talking about last night's moon - that it was in fact some kind of supermoon; the real unusual thing, to me, was that the media was actually acknowledging it. Ordinary people who don't live in the future tend not to pay all that much attention to happenings on the other side of the sky. The last time I can remember an astronomical event actually getting newspaper space involved the close approach of Mars about ten years ago, which resulted in... an imperceptibly larger point of light in the sky. Much like last night, when the moon's "supermoon" phase coinciding with its periapsis resulted in an imperceptibly larger moon.

Most of the news articles in the immediate runup to the night were fairly straightforward "go and see the supermoon" pieces. (Step 1: look at the moon.) Amidst those, however, a couple caught my eye. The Toronto Star asked whether it would "make us crazy," and the Tampa Bay Times recognized that some people were exaggerating the effects, and that earthquakes were "unlikely."

Really. The media had to step up and specifically tell people that Earth's internal geological processes weren't going to be affected by a full moon at periapsis. What that tells me is simple - we may be living in the twenty-first century, but there are plenty of people still hewing to magical thinking that would have been common in the eleventh.

Moon. Moon! Mooooooooon. In case you didn't already know what it looks like.

I can understand why some people can believe that the moon can have such wide-ranging effects on Earth. For one, it does; the influence of the moon's gravity, a piddling 0.16 g as it is, affects the tides. For an ordinary person, it's not necessarily a huge leap of logic to conclude that if the moon can affect one part of Earth, it can affect another. It's completely wrong logic, mind you, but it is not crazy moon-man logic. The only problem is that earthquakes are the result of internal geological processes; for the moon to have an influence on them it would have to be a far more coarse manner, such as the moon actually impacting Earth. As for the Star's commentary, while the supermoon didn't make people crazy, some people probably believed crazy things would happen as a result of the supermoon... so maybe it kind of did.

The way I figure it, it's this - the moon is big, the moon is visible, and the moon is recognizable. It's easy for humans to read danger into something familiar, something that can be seen by anyone. For the reptile brain, there's no "subtle threat" about the moon. It's something huge that stays up in the sky as if by magic, but who's to say that, if the people upset the gods, it won't descend to Earth and crush them like a hammer of divine fury? It's big. Even though we have a steadily increasing knowledge of it, have even visited it, for a lot of people it's still just a great big unknown - and the unknown can be dangerous.

Personally, I marked the supermoon by crashing landers into the Mun in Kerbal Space Program. The sacrifices of those brave kerbals will not have been in vain...

Magical Thinking, Magical Healing

If there's an ultimate truth of the human condition, I would not be surprised if it was something along the lines of "a fool and his money are soon parted." A willingness to believe in foolish things is one of the things that makes us human, and that willingness is expressed in a million different ways in modern society, from Ponzi schemes to poorly-written emails from Nigeria. Most of us, after all, want to become wealthy and powerful, and when what seems to be an opportunity presents itself a lot of people are unable or unwilling to appraise it critically. After all, opportunity knocks and so on.

Then there are the ones that prey on our health, one concern that everyone shares. You see it in homeopaths, who dilute remedies in ordinary water by thousands and thousands of times and claim that the resulting snake oil is just as efficacious as ordinary medicine because the water "remembers" what was diluted in it. You see it in antivaxxers, whose wild obsession with the idea that vaccines cause autism has resulted in a disappearance of herd immunity to diseases in some areas, as in the case of Dana McCaffery. You see it faith healers, who take advantage of people desperate or eager to believe that they can be cured by something as simple as a laying on of hands.

Then you have the ones that, while apparently harmless, are just out there. A few days ago I found an account in the Vancouver Sun about Braco the Gazer, a "healer" who has reputedly healed people of "cancer, cardiovascular illness, financial wows, addictions, depression, allergies," and a host of other things. How does Braco do this?

By looking at you.

Seriously.

The Braco website, which is chock-full of New Age mystical shit, goes into detail about the "gazing sessions" he offers. Apparently he's "like a conduit for a remarkable gift that has been proven through the testimonials of those who have been helped," because who needs the scientific method when you've got hearsay and conjecture on your side? He can help you find "a new life outlook, a physical healing or transformations in [your] relationships" - not only that, but he can help your loved ones, and they don't even have to be there! Seriously, all you need to do is let him stare at a photograph of a person, and "transformation, and even miracles" will ensue!

Dang, maybe I should give this a go. Meet my photographic gaze. Meet it, be healed, and send me your MONEY. Non-sequential large bills, please.

This isn't the first time I've encountered this idea, but it is the first time I've seen it in the wild. Again, I'm thankful that my mom got me a copy of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World when I was young and impressionable, so that I could immunize myself against things like this. When I hear of "healers" like this I immediately think of the 1988 Carlos hoax, and I reflect on how some people are so desperate for relief that they'll latch onto anything that even pretends to offer it to them.

But, you might be asking yourself, what's the problem? So he helps other people, so he brings them feelings of wellness and contentment. What could be the problem with that? If he was actually advertising himself as that, there wouldn't be. But he isn't. He is presenting himself as some kind of conduit for some kind of energy or positivity that helps people while he gazes at them, and in the limited information I've found doesn't shy away from going into detail about what ills he can help cure just by looking at you.

Do me a favor - go back toward the top of the post again, and read that litany of things that his press release claims he can cure. What was the first thing on the list? Yeah, that's right, cancer. A very destructive, very dangerous condition. There are people close to me who have reckoned with cancer, and even with the full array of modern medicine at hand, cancer can sometimes be a close-run thing. Now, what if they had gone not to a hospital, but to someone like Braco? Perhaps the placebo affect would take hold - they'd feel better because they expected they were supposed to feel better, but only for a time. A man's gaze cannot destroy tumors. "Healers" like this not only give false hope, but redirect people from actual, efficacious treatments to mystical performances based on magical thinking.

Some people just want to believe, and sometimes it is at their peril. Magical thinking like this is a remnant of our ignorant, superstitious past, and it will kill if we let it back in the door.

To See the World Through Google-Colored Glasses

If you've never heard of Google's Project Glass before, well... now you've heard of Google's Project Glass! It's something that's been in the science fiction pipeline for more than a decade, and its imminent emergence is just another data point confirming that we now live in the future. Project Glass is a wearable augmented reality interface; present prototypes look like ordinary glasses frames with the lenses removed and replaced by a small screen; once this technology matures, it will probably be integrated into more ordinary-looking designs. This idea is nothing new to me - I've been using it in the stories I've been writing for a few years now, but it's something else entirely to see it leaking out into reality.

If you're not up on augmented reality, it's a process that adds computer-generated input to your view of the world. Right now, it's only available via smartphone - if you have the right app, you can hold your iPhone up to the street and it can splash information from, say, Google Maps on top of the "real" layer. It echoes some of the things that were being predicted about VR back in the mid-90s, but is distinct in that while virtual reality systems are difficult to find outside of amusement park arcades, augmented reality has been hitting the streets for a while now.

Google is aiming to take Project Glass as far beyond the modern state of the AR art as the SkyTrain is beyond Catch Me Who Can, likely attempting to beat Apple at its own game. At this point, I don't think that simple descriptions really work best - check out the promotional video Google made for Project Glass, aking us through a day in the life of a New York City hipster dude whose life has been immeasurably improved by augmented reality and demonstrating a product that will blur the lines between the artificial and the real to a degree that I don't think anyone is really prepared for.


On the face of it, it's all techno-wonder. Look how easy it makes things! They prompt you when you've got appointments to go to, give your friends a seamless way to get in touch with you no matter what you're doing, lets you adjust your plans on the fly without you having to lift a finger, simplifies meetups and removes that "just hanging around" time by allowing you to broadcast your location, and even lets someone else see through your own eyes, practically. It's vastly beyond what smartphones are capable of, at least in terms of the relative cumbersome nature of smartphones; I mean, you have to hold them up, you have to press buttons, you have to get your digits involved. With augmented reality glasses, it seems, all you really need to do is talk, blink, and move your head.

Part of me can't help but feel that it makes things too easy - that the sort of AR implicit in Project Glass will undercut the formation or practice of certain skills because it's easier to have the glasses handle them. Take, for example, the map issue; wayfinding is not going to become any less important in the future. I was raised in a way that made me want to pay attention, to understand where I was going even though it was my mom behind the wheel and to know the many ways I could get from point A to point B. Today, when I find myself in a strange city, my first order of business is to wander around downtown until I've seen enough that I can make connections and carry a map around in my head.

Some people didn't have those advantages growing up - some people were just driven around by their parents and didn't have any say in what route they took to get where they were going, some people weren't able to wander around and explore, and as a result some people end up with poor wayfinding ability, unable to conceptualize the street grid and easily able to lose their way. The active maps that Project Glass makes available would be a boon to people like this, sure - but I can't help but think that those maps would also guarantee more generations of people who are severely lacking in the internal wayfinding department. I can imagine kids only being let out of the house with their augmented reality glasses on, ordered by their parents not to deviate from the route they suggest or else. Not every kid would be capable of cracking the parental controls, either.

Likewise, it suggests possibilities for abuse, if people come to rely on those active maps. Imagine a situation like Toronto's G20 - remember the kettling at Queen and Spadina, and how plenty of the people caught up in it were just folks going about their business until police are everywhere and they're not letting them go? In an AR future, the police wouldn't need to kettle; they'd just need to pull a "public safety necessity" thing and see to it that the active maps, when prompted for some kind of escape route, lead straight to a police checkpoint and processing zone.

What these glasses really connote to me is the further commodification of our time, of our existence. Watch the video carefully - except for a brief moment looking out the window, from the instant the glasses boot up at the beginning, Hipster Dude is always doing something. Realistically, it's because we're watching a video and we want to see the interesting bits, but art - if this can be called "art" - does influence life. I know that waiting around for something to happen can be boring, but that sort of boredom has been with humans since we've been human. Sure, it was probably exciting for our ancient hunter forebears to chase down a deer with lots of meat, but waiting for that deer to show up? Less so, I would imagine. Useful things can be extracted from quiet times; by putting your circle of friends perpetually in your face, innovations like these threaten to drown out that quiet.

I can't imagine that that would be good for everyone.

The Trouble with Twitter

It's a bit surprising, thinking about it, the presence that Twitter has taken in the professional and personal lives of so many people only six years after being launched; I suppose it's because I'm perpetually stuck in 2000, when dialup was how you got online and ICQ was how you talked to people once you got there. Imagine coordinating something like the Iranian election protests a couple of years back, or even something as minor as the #TellVicEverything thing from a little while ago, over point-to-point instant messaging. Twitter gives a level of basic engagement that, in some respects, is vastly elevated over what came before.

In some cases, perhaps too basic. On Friday the Toronto Star reported on the decision of NDP MP Charlie Angus - who I first heard of in his capacity as the NDP's digital affairs critic - to quit Twitter, which he described as "like being badgered by a drunk on a 24-hour bus ride." It's true that Twitter gives people a line to prominent figures - be they government, corporate, or celebrity - but what's also true as a result is that it gives people a line to each other, giving mute testimony that the world is not as we believe it to be.

I can understand why Angus left Twitter. As a politician, and especially an NDP politician at that, I can imagine that his timeline and Direct Message box must have always contained at least a significant minority of heinous shit in the form of received messages. It's life, without filters - and it's not the sort of thing that's restricted to political figures alone.

In the Star article, Susan Delacourt takes a rather optimistic view of Twitter, asking if people "are any nicer" in any given Tim Horton's than online, and that it "holds the potential to be a window into vast new worlds of politics." For the latter, I think it does, but not in the way a lot of us would hope; I would describe it more as a magnifying glass, throwing the quiet beliefs of a lot of people into unflattering sharpness. It's yet another demonstration of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or for you science majors, the online disinhibition effect - people who feel anonymous, who are at a remove from what they're saying and who they're speaking to, and who have an audience through use of a carefully-placed hashtag, will say things on Twitter that they would never say to a stranger in the real world.

Are people at Tim Horton's any nicer? Perhaps not, but the difference is that they'd at least act nicer. Someone in Tim Horton's who is, say, opposed to Earth Hour would probably be more circumspect about accusing its supporters as being "lunatics" who want to return civilization to the thirteenth century - which, I stress, is something that I honestly encountered - because if you pull out those kind of insane accusations in someone's face, you're running the risk of getting someone's fist in yours. As of yet, no one has invented a device that will allow you to stab people in the face over the Internet.

This is a problem that, honestly, I don't see being resolved any time soon. It's basic human nature, and from what I've seen too many humans are unwilling to climb above their basic natures. Nevertheless, in the end I think it's for the best that the internet has enabled conversations like this, and that politicians and so on should stick with it. If nothing else, it provides them with a far more honest appraisal of some of the people they are representing.

Earth Hour Needs a New Approach

No matter how well thought out something may be when it's first introduced to the world at large, and no matter how popular something might be at the moment of its rollout, the simple fact is that if something sticks around for long enough a majority of people are eventually going to sour on it. It happened to disco, it happened to the Liberal Party of Canada, and I feel like it's in the process of happening now with Earth Hour.

That's not to say it's falling apart already. The City of New Westminster announced yesterday that power consumption dropped by 2.19%, above the provincial average of 1.67% - and though Toronto experienced a 6.8% drop, it was significantly less than the reductions in 2009 and 2010. People worldwide continue to mark the hour, don't get me wrong - still, it feels like the opposition - represented mostly by the Human Achievement Hour "turn everything ON" crowd - may be starting to get more traction.

Sure, at its core Earth Hour is just a gesture, and depending on where you live it might not even make a difference whether you turn your stuff on; most of BC's electricity is generated by renewable sources already. I'll admit that there are problems with it - in addition to "turn off your lights for an hour" literally being the least we can do, it also provides an angle of attack for people who are predisposed to oppose these sort of initiatives anyway. I'd rather have an environmental initiative that didn't lend itself to claims that its backers want to return the world to a medieval lifestyle.

So in that respect, isn't it time to reinvent Earth Hour? People who haven't been reached by it yet probably won't be - I think it's time to take a different tack, to use it to pursue environmental awareness and conservation from another direction.

One that recognizes that the Lower Mainland actually does experience subzero conditions and snowfall.

I've asked around since arriving in British Columbia, and the consensus is clear - at least in the Lower Mainland, when it comes to residential buildings the insulation is shit. I can tell when it's a windy day outside by the way my blinds move in the breeze, even with the window shut. Sure, it's not the first time I've dealt with a poorly-insulated apartment; during my student days in Peterborough, I bedded down in one that was effectively uninhabitable in the winter without space heaters. It may have only got down to 4 or 5 degrees last week while I was keeping my heat off, and even though water doesn't freeze it's still damn cold.

“I’m very proud of our results this year... I look forward to us doing even better in the years to come," New Westminster mayor Wayne Wright said in regard to the city's Earth Hour performance. What I'd rather see is New Westminster becoming an example for lowered energy consumption throughout the year, without the need to turn off lights for an hour. If there's really such interest in environmental initiatives, why not establish a program where the city will provide financial support for residential insulation projects? If it's energy we're concerned about saving, let's fix up our apartments and our houses so that the heat we're pumping out of the radiators doesn't just slip right out the window.

Something like that might well give us more than a 2.19% drop, all on its own.

An Hour for Understanding

On Saturday I was watching the #EarthHour hashtag on Twitter as 8:30 ticked through Mountain Time, and I'll be blunt--I was demoralized by a lot of what I saw. Sure, there were people tweeting about how they were going to participate... but there were also people shooting from the hip about "hippies," about how if you want to find anyone marking Earth Hour, you just need to look for a pulled-over Prius with its passengers shivering in the dark, and plenty of people bragging about how they were turning everything on.

I can understand someone who thinks it's a meaningless gesture on their part and just doesn't participate; my own participation, while I was off for a walk around New Westminster, means that the demand on British Columbia's grid dropped by maybe 0.1 kilowatt-hours. What I have more difficulty understanding is the the thought process of someone who luxuriates in their non-participation, or goes the whole Ezra Levant route and turns on everything in their house just because they can. Is it just spite? It's not the sort of action that makes sense to me, in that case; when I set out to spite Ezra Levant in response to his Human Achievement Hour bull, I turned my heat off - which not only made me less comfortable, but saved energy and, thus, money. When people turn on all their stuff during Earth Hour, what is it? "I'll show you to turn off all your lights! I'll turn on all the things that make me more comfortable, and in so doing jack up my hydro bill!"

A lack of understanding is something that irritates me, so I tried to engage. I asked questions. I didn't swear, I didn't insult... but that didn't stop some dude, when asked why we shouldn't give a shit if George Carlin was right and it was just us that needed to be saved and not the planet, from answering that I'm "nuts" and "want us living in the 13th century."

I don't know how to respond to something that's as far out there as that statement. How do you have a meaningful conversation with someone who's so rooted in their position that their answer to a question (in the interests of transparency, my question was "Oh, so if it's only us that are going to go somewhere, it... isn't our problem? Seriously?") is a personal attack? How do you engage with someone who refuses to even entertain the basic premises of your argument?

A streetlight in downtown New Westminster.

I can remember a time when I hadn't yet come to a conclusion about the issues of climate change - back around 2002 and 2003, almost a sort of never-never-land now, when there were reports of "global warming" on Mars and before summer Arctic ice losses really started getting in gear, and before the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt machine really started to spew in earnest. What didn't happen was this - I didn't find a position and then weld my boots to it. As evidence continued to pile up, and I learned about things like ocean acidification that I'd never heard of before, things shifted.

When it comes to a person who shoots first and answers questions later, then... where are they? What led them to the spot where they're standing, and why do they keep standing there? I know for a fact that some people believe, just as I theorized, that it's "arrogant" to suggest that humans can influence the climate, but that comes down to the nature of how well one understands the effect that human civilization has on Earth. But that can't be all of it. So what is it, then? Is it fear? Are some people really so terrified of shadows that something like this is enough to set them off, that something as innocuous as Earth Hour means that the black helicopters will soon be landing?

It's difficult, it really is. Sometimes I feel like it's 1983 and I'm arguing with people who think that TTAPS is full of shit and the idea of nuclear winter is a Communist hoax meant to make the West eliminate its nuclear stockpile so that the Reds can roll over us. I mean, it's no less ridiculous than the idea that that climate change is a hoax set up by scientists to get grant money, or that it's not anthropogenic so we don't need to give a shit about what happens. These are fundamentally stupid ideas that have as much backing as the notion that our prominent political and cultural leaders are actually twelve-foot-tall blood-drinking reptilian aliens in disguise.

Maybe it would be better if they were aliens, after all--that, at least, would mean that they've probably dealt with this sort of situation before, and have some idea of how to address it.

An Unnecessarily Sexy Description

If you had to describe, say... Indiana Jones, what kind of adjectives would you use? Daring, perhaps; capable, adventurous, and lucky would also work, considering how many of his plans were improvised on the spot. The same is true of most of the heroes of paper, stage and screen - these are competent people, able to face challenges that would slam most of us back on the mat without even blinking, standing in the face of danger and death and making it through because that's what heroes do. Words like bold, uncompromising, tough, and fearless tend to make the rounds fairly often, as well.

For dudes, that is. When it comes to female characters, the score is strikingly different. For a heroine, someone has decided that one of the most important factors is whether or not she's attractive - that the things a woman can do, what qualities she brings to the situation, are of less importance than what she looks like. This idea has been hideously persistent down through the years, but now that people are finally starting to realize that we should know better than that, this double standard just becomes more galling and grating - like a train screeching across old, rusty rails.

The DVD case for Tomorrow Never Dies, for example, describes James Bond as being "devastatingly cool," because in Hollywood that's something only a man can be. Imagine that they made a movie about Jane Bond - what description would be more likely? Something like "devastatingly cool" or, more likely, "stunning and sexy?"

It happens since I see evidence of it every day, even if it's not always thrown into my face. That's just the chance I take now whenever I board a SkyTrain, since they started placing ads for the new Ava Lee novel, The Wild Beasts of Wuhan. I growled at it inwardly the first time I saw it, then again, until I took a photo of one of the ads so I could properly tear it down without doing something that would get me a talking-to from one of those nice SkyTrain Attendants.

If Indiana Jones was likewise described as being fearless, sexy, and lethal - all qualities which are, admittedly, beyond argument - we might be better off, I think.

This frustrates me, this irritates me, because decisions to present people like this give a fresh jolt of electricity to the shambling beast that is the traditional view of women in Western culture. Especially in a non-visual medium such as a novel, but equally true for the world in general, whether or not a woman is "sexy" shouldn't warrant such prominent consideration unless it's directly relevant to the situation at hand.

Here's the problem: it's all marketing. This ad was most likely dreamed up in some office after being bounced from person to person in some committee, trying to maximize its impact. I can tell that's what happened because when I go to the website of the author, Ian Hamilton - an author whose name, incidentally, is practically absent from the ad itself - take a look at the words he chooses to describe Ava Lee. Words like "methodical." "Determined." "Confident." Certainly stands in stark contrast to the presentation in the ad, don't it?

Except, like I said, the ad reinforces that shambling beast. The continued presentation of women through this kind of prism encourages the belief that this sort of thing is okay, that there's nothing wrong with the implication that one's attractiveness is a question of fundamental importance for half of humanity. It helps give life to antediluvian attitudes that have no place in a civilized society - a society that, in many respects, still treats a woman's body as public property.

It's a relic of times far more barbarous than ours. We need to do what we must to relegate those relics to history, where they most assuredly belong.

Taking Chances, Making Mistakes, Getting Messy

A lot of people, it seems, have come to believe that the world is a fundamentally just place where good things happen to good people and if something bad happens to you, you must have done something to deserve it. It's called the Just World Fallacy and it's been with us for as long as can be remembered, because the alternative is living in a world where bad things can just happen to us no matter how much we've tried not to be an asshole. A great deal of people have would have difficulty living in this kind of world; nevertheless, one of the earliest lessons children learn is that life isn't fair.

So there are some mixed messages, of course. Not enough to keep plenty of people convinced of the notion that life is fundamentally fair, that if someone has an advantage it's because they earned it honestly, and if someone charges into a run of bad luck they obviously did something to justify it coming down on them.

This sort of thinking is particularly widespread in the United States, and at no time is it as visible as in the Presidential campaign season. I came to consider this earlier this weekend, when I encountered an article about the modern American political divide in the Toronto Star - specifically, the part hearkening back to a September debate, where Republican candidate Ron Paul was asked about the hypothetical situation of a healthy 30-year-old dude who elected not to hold medical insurance, only to suffer a serious accident that left him needing intensive care for six months.

"But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" Wolf Blitzer asks. The transcripts and videos I've found don't cover Ron Paul's response; for the purposes of this I'm not particularly interested in what he had to say. What I'm more focused on is the audience's response, members of the peanut gallery hooting and shouting yeah, that society should let that person die.

Because it was his own fault, you see. So the fallacy goes.

Do justice, and so on.

What concerns me is that it's a distinction that would be lost on a lot of people, or could be made to be lost by those in positions of authority who have an interest in making it lost. Right now in the United States, I imagine there are some people who could get health insurance but don't feel the need; I imagine there is a far, far greater number who could get health insurance, but feel that buying food and paying rent is more important. But because of the idea of the Just World, there are those in society that agree that those people should die because obviously they made the wrong choices, made too many mistakes, or otherwise they wouldn't be there.

Yet the world isn't just. Bad things happen to good people, and society is not on an even keel. There must be as many reasons why people believe otherwise as there are people who believe otherwise. Just a recognition of that, a rejection of the fallacy, by more people could do a lot to correct the sort of inequities the world faces today. Even if you think that society should allow a person to die for one simple mistake, that doesn't take into consideration the messes that come whether or not you want them to.

The Why of Climate

I've never quite been able to wrap my head around what the deal is with particularly vociferous climate change skeptics, and why they think the way they do. Note that I'm not talking about the average person here, who most likely has only encountered very limited information and has drawn their conclusions based on their own observations and what they get from the media. The folks I'm thinking of here are more those who are, to put it bluntly, wild-eyed about it, ranging from furious notes in newspaper comment threads to sending death threats to climate scientists.

The idea that it's just about the money doesn't ring true to me. Sure, some opposition I've encountered is predicated on the notion that climate change was made up by scientists so that they could get more grant money - yes, I actually did encounter someone claiming that - or that it's just another tax grab. Personally, I'm curious as to how or whether these arguments will change once we start getting ice-free summers in the Arctic, but I don't think it's really explanatory of what's going on here. A lot of the talk seems to be particularly emotionally charged.

Whatever's going on, it's something I'd like to be able to understand, so that I can take it into account in my own thinking. Besides, if you have any hope at all of getting an argument of yours through to someone else, you need to know where they're coming from. What may be a slam-dunk argument for you could just be a rubber ball bouncing off a concrete wall when used on someone else. So it's something that I do think about, off and on - the question of the manner in which some people reach the conclusion that climate change is bunk.

My latest theory - for some people, at least, it may be based on a mix of weather and humility.

A snow-covered tree in downtown New Westminster - January 15, 2012.

I'd intended to be in Seattle right now, attending a convention and exploring the Emerald City during the rainiest time of the year. Instead, earlier this week four inches of snow fell on the city, and while that's essentially nothing for eastern cities that know well the cold touch of winter, here in the Pacific Northwest winter means rain and lots of it. Those four inches of snow represented a substantial chunk of Seattle's total yearly snowfall average, and it played merry hell with transportation around the city. In particular, Wednesday's afternoon Vancouver-Seattle run of the Amtrak Cascades was cancelled because of weather issues, leaving me high and dry in the Lower Mainland, and it wasn't until today that normal Cascades service started to resume along the length of the route.

It's not a shock that this happened, though, when you know why - the jet stream, a powerful air current that's one of the prime governors of Canadian weather, bent to the south and allowed a sustained blast of cold Arctic air to rush in over the Pacific Northwest, transforming the usual rain into freezing rain and snow. The jet stream was likewise the proximate cause of the unseasonably mild and dry December experienced across North America, because it stayed far to the north and kept the arctic air bottled up tight - this is why cities in Alaska have seen more than four meters of snow pile up so far this winter.

Seeing things such as this, then - weather patterns at the mercy of air currents, cities paralyzed by forces of nature - is it any wonder that some people have trouble accepting the notion that humanity is a prime influencer of the climate? Look at the English language, for example - "force of nature" is just another way of saying "something that cannot be stopped." We're accustomed to thinking of nature as something above us, beyond us, that we're powerless to control.

That may be so, but the failing here is just because we can't control something, that doesn't mean we're unable to influence it. One of the prime notions of climate change is that by adding heat, and thus energy, to the system of nature, we are potentially influencing it in a negative manner. Nature will still barrel on, wholly heedless of us, but the danger is that it will barrel on in a new direction, one in which we're not used to dealing with. That's what the big uncertainty is here - we have no idea precisely what dumping all this energy into the system will do. We've unintentionally begun a grand climate experiment with Earth as the laboratory... but it's not a scientifically rigorous experiment, unfortunately.

There's no control group, you see.

It's "Due to the Dead," Not "Do to the Dead"

It's a simple truth of life that no matter how pure and good something is, you can easily find someone standing against it - a task that has become far, far simpler with the ubiquity of the net. The natural corollary is that there is nothing so coarse and vile that you won't be able to find someone cheerleading it. Case in point - the recent storm surrounding the video that made its way into the world, depicting United States Marines in Afghanistan pissing on the corpses of dead Taliban fighters. This is undoubtedly something that has happened times uncountable in the long and bloody history of humanity, but it's not often that the world gets a direct window on it - and just because it's been happened time and again, it doesn't make it any more excusable.

There's a little thing, after all, called having respect for the dead. After all, when the crew of RML 497 recovered the body of Obermachinist Pigorsch in the North Sea during the height of the Second World War, they didn't urinate on it - they buried it at sea in sight of Europe. War is a notoriously dehumanizing thing, and it's through even small courtesies like paying proper respect to the dead that people involved in it can keep from having the abyss swallow them.

History, however, has amply demonstrated that the abyss is plenty hungry in Afghanistan; take the First Anglo-Afghan War, for one example among many. What it hasn't had so much opportunity to show is people back home standing up and applauding barbaric actions - and yes, that's exactly what I think this is, a barbaric action. Pissing on the corpse of a dead fighter is something I'd expect from some grunting Visigoth tearing down the walls of Rome. I goddamn well expect better than that from a member of the United States Marine Corps. People today are supposed to stand above that sort of base revenge - sure, everyone stumbles from time to time, but this is more like throwing oneself off the edge.

Like I said, though, you can always find someone cheerleading for something, no matter how heinous. So it goes with this. Recently Dana Loesch, editor-in-chief of the CNN-contributing news blog Big Journalism, used her talk radio pulpit to argue in support of pissing on the dead. I found coverage of this on Little Green Footballs, a blog that incidentally has changed a vast, staggering amount since I was in university, along with the audio itself on YouTube. Listen to it. Since I don't listen to talk radio myself, particularly conservative American talk radio, I have no idea how "fringe" this is, or even if it is. Certainly the idea that "progressive" is a pejorative term has been spreading slowly but steadily through the American right wing since 2008.

"Can someone explain to me if there's supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who's part of an organization that murdered over three thousand Americans?" she asks, rather rhetorically. "I'd drop trou and do it too. That's me, though."

In situations like this I find it somewhat difficult to fully come to grips with the other person's thought process, mainly because we're hammering at the same situation from two vastly different perspectives. In her subsequent defense against "the usual mob of progressive haters," which I suppose applies to me now as well, she chooses to defend herself by saying, "In my Twitter timeline yesterday progressives called our military 'killers, kids, barbaric trash, murderers...'" and that because the same people didn't raise a stink over the Air Force dumping some cremated partial remains of dead soldiers into a landfill, their arguments are automatically invalid.

That last one is a horrid thing, disrespect for the dead - but disrespect of a different sort, one that should be dealt with a different way. Yet it's not material to the subject at hand. Loesch's defense is a scattershot attempt to discredit the people who disagree with her - which isn't really surprising; she evidently believes from what she's said and written that there was nothing wrong with Marines pissing on dead Taliban fighters, and so she doesn't see any reason to justify it. At least, that's what it seems like to me.

Still, it remains a bad thing, an intensely negative thing, something that's worth being called a scandal no matter how much people like Dana Loesch argue. To see why, simply turn it around - consider a situation where a bunch of Taliban fighters killed some US, or Canadian, or any ISAF troops, pissed on their corpses, and the video got out on YouTube. Would people like Loesch still be saying that this wasn't a scandal? Not likely. If the reverse happened the right-wing blogosphere would be on fire.

"I’ve seen more outrage towards our troops over this incident than I have ever seen towards the Taliban themselves who’ve beheaded soldiers (American and Afghan), raped and tortured women, sent out suicide bombers, and carried out horrific attacks," Leisch wrote. Allow me to be blunt in response.

We expect that sort of thing from the Taliban.

We expect our people to FUCKING BE BETTER THAN THAT.