Tory/Liberal attack ads, crazy old ladies

A few days ago, the Tories showed off their newest attack ad.

Two nights ago, I almost ran over an elderly woman, probably homeless, definitely confused, who was walking in the middle of the road at rush hour, in the dark.

These things are, believe it or not, connected by our political system.

Let me explain.

In the beginning, was representative democracy. This was the idea that people would choose their own leaders, instead of having leaders chosen for them by violence, heredity or religious superstition. It was a major leap forward in human society. Because it is a human institution, it almost immediately began to reveal its own set of flaws.

One of the chief among these was the system of parties. The west's first modern representative government, the United States, actually tried to avoid the party system for some time. It was referred to as "faction" and was seen to be a bad thing, an undermining of the basic system of democracy. But, people being people, they clubbed together based on mutual beliefs and interests. Parties and factions are probably unavoidable in any political system, but their influence may be greater or lesser.

Here in Canada, it is definitely greater. Because of the first past the post electoral system, and for historical, cultural and financial reasons, it is a hell of a lot easier to get elected as a party member than in any other way. So anyone who wants to be a political ruler has to join a party. And the parties compete with one another for votes.

This is not, I should add here, because the party members are uniformly cynical, venal, bad people. Unlike some folks whose political orientation, like mine, is outside the norm, I've met a lot of politicians, at the local, provincial and federal level. Most of them are, or were, very idealistic. They have lofty goals, and they genuinely want to make the world a better place. Some of them are stupid, or venal, or nuts, but they're drawn from the sometimes stupid, venal or nutty mass of humanity.

For example, they want to do something about homelessness. They would all agree that it is bad that an increasing number of people live on the streets, and sometimes wander into traffic. They have solutions they would like to put into place. But first, they have to get elected.

Getting elected is hard. It takes money. You have to convince a justifiably cynical electorate, or around 50 to 70 per cent of it, anyway, that you are not a total asshat. You have to deal with grotty local reporters and the national media, and annoying, whiny bloggers. You have to shake so many hands that you will certainly get every cold and flu bug going around.

Then, once you are sure you are going to get elected, you have to make sure your party wins. It's no good to just be out in the wilderness, with 10 or 20 seats out of 308. You've got to sweep at least half the fucking game board! More money. Leadership conventions. Internal party politics. Many people have to compromise, and special interests have to be appeased. And that's all before you take power.

Once you go through this for months, maybe years or even decades, you might still remember that you got into politics because you wanted to end homelessness, but you've spent most of your resources, your time and your effort doing other things. Fighting partisan battles also tends to become all consuming. It even seduces other people who aren't even members of the parties with its spectacle. Reporters and bloggers and political junkies. We all get consumed with the game. And we forget about the real-world consequences of the game.

So this is the game: the Tories and the Liberals, the NDP and Greens and Bloc, they all want to help that old woman out of the street. So they raise money, and form national organizations, and hold meetings, and strategize and scheme, and hate one another, because they all know that their plan to help the old woman is much better than the other guys' plans. They run hugely expensive campaigns and viciously undermine one another. And the game is never over. You just keep going around the same board, over and over and over.

Fuck the game.

Humans need systems to get along with each other, sure. But we might want to consider that this system does not work, at least not any more, not for the 21st Century. It's like trying to thread a needle while wearing 20 pairs of gloves. To get at the problems we face, to bring the whole weight of our society behind some great endeavour, we have to go through this bizarre process, which has acreted over the years.

I say, tip over the game board, and start again. Let's make up some new, simpler rules. More direct. More open.

Because I'm tired of living in a world where an attack ad has anything to do with old women in traffic.

Arar's money

Maher Arar just got $10 million from the Canadian government in compensation for the horrible tortures he suffered in Syria for no apparent reason.

The irony? It comes in the same week that the US Ambassador David Wilkins again refuses to let Arar off the US no-fly list, and again says that the US has its own reasons for that. Said magical mystery information was apparently shown to Stockwell Day, and it didn't convince him. I'm pretty sure you could fool ol' Stock with a game of three-card-monte that was two cards shy, so the info must not be that persuasive.

Wilkins, a waste of carbon utter asshat seasoned diplomat, must have his reasons for this. It would be nice if someone would tell us proles what those reasons are...

Dead dinos and property rights

Sometimes, you just can't rely on the market to do the right thing.

A big fossil controversy, one that will rival the $8 million sale of Sue the Tyranosaurus rex, has sprung up again in Montana. This time, a private collector has found two fully articulated dinosaur skeletons preserved together. The carnivore appears to be a Gorgosaur, a smaller relative of Tyranosaurus. The herbivore is a certopsian, related to Triceratops, but it may be a previously unknown species. There is also a chance that the Gorgosaur was either preying on the ceratopsian or scavanging its remains when they were buried.

So what's the problem? From the AP story.

Mark Eatman, the Billings floor salesman who first spotted the new fossils last summer, says he and his team have deep respect for the science of paleontology.

They also have a bottom line.

"We all went broke digging them up," said Eatman, who hopes to sell the specimens to a major American museum.

The profits would be shared among Eatman, his two digging partners and the ranch couple that owns the fossil.

The problem there is that scienctific journals won't accept papers based on fossils held in private hands. There is no way to guarantee future access to privately held bones, and therefore no way to trust the data. If a future scientist can't re-examine the same bones and write his or her own paper, there's no scientific freedom.

This scientific current of absolutely open access to data and samples sends scientists paddling against the current of Western property law. Scientists, as everyone knows who has spent time with them, are pretty damn socialist and even communalist when it comes to their work. Sure, just like everyone else, they would like to get paid well and have nice things. But the system of scientific openness that is essential for progress is about as profit-driven as a monastery.

Paleontologists would be best served in their work by a property system that used either strict usufruct or some kind of community ownership - in other words, by a libertarian-socialist system. Under usufruct, samples could pass from hand to hand, as one research team was finished another could take possession. Most likely, samples would wind up in public institutions because it would be easier than moving the damn things around all the time. Under community ownership, they would be considered an asset to humanity in general, and the community would have a responsibility to either protect them for science or to give them to some organization that would undertake that job.

Many amateur fossil hunters, those who don't need the money, already abide by the philosophy inherent in the idea of community ownership. Anything that is scientifically important, they give away to museum or university researchers. They are giving it not to one institution, but to science itself.

Whether those property systems would support any other kind of enterprise so well - or whether we'd be able to support any science without a present-day or Lockean property system - is a debate for another time.

I'm a loser

For the second year in a row, I did not win the 3-Day Novel Contest. This year was worse, however, in that I wasn't even shortlisted like I was last year.

To a certain extent, this is easier than getting a rejection letter from a magazine publisher. You can look at the absolute number of people who submitted stories (more than 380) and the winner, and maybe get some kind of idea of what the judges were looking for.

Last year, the winner was a comedic series of vignettes about misplaced monsters called Day Shift Werewolf. So the editors of the year were surprisingly open to fantasy and science fiction, it would seem. My place on the shortlist isn't that surprising.

This year, the winner is The Convictions of Leonard McKinley, a coming of age story/comedy about a 13-year-old boy in a small prairie town. Now, I'm not going to run down that book, especially having just reviewed King Dork so favourably. There's a place for comic coming of age novels. But it's possible the judges who really like that kind of thing might not like a book in which, say, humans absorb the power of gods, there are swordfights, bank robberies, magic, frog-sex cults and fights to the death between giant ground sloths.

I'm just saying.

I'm a loser

For the second year in a row, I did not win the 3-Day Novel Contest. This year was worse, however, in that I wasn't even shortlisted like I was last year.

To a certain extent, this is easier than getting a rejection letter from a magazine publisher. You can look at the absolute number of people who submitted stories (more than 380) and the winner, and maybe get some kind of idea of what the judges were looking for.

Last year, the winner was a comedic series of vignettes about misplaced monsters called Day Shift Werewolf. So the editors of the year were surprisingly open to fantasy and science fiction, it would seem. My place on the shortlist isn't that surprising.

This year, the winner is The Convictions of Leonard McKinley, a coming of age story/comedy about a 13-year-old boy in a small prairie town. Now, I'm not going to run down that book, especially having just reviewed King Dork so favourably. There's a place for comic coming of age novels. But it's possible the judges who really like that kind of thing might not like a book in which, say, humans absorb the power of gods, there are swordfights, bank robberies, magic, frog-sex cults and fights to the death between giant ground sloths.

I'm just saying.

He stole my title!

Not the title of the book. I'm saying this could have easily been my high school nickname. Could still be, really.

I just finished Frank Portman's (aka Dr. Frank) very fine book, King Dork. If you haven't heard of it yet, you soon will. Runaway hit, movie rights, blah blah blah. Don't let that turn you off. It's actually very good.

King Dork is the first-person tale of Tom Henderson, who is 14 years old, a near-total social outcast, the subject of constant mid- to high-level bullying, a rock and roll nerd, and the most virulent critic ever of Catcher in the Rye.

The plot is almost inconsequential, even though it ostensibly deals with the mysterious death of Tom's cop father, a mystery girl he meets at a party, and the bizarre behaviour of everyone from Tom's mom to his high school principal to his best (and only) friend.

It is one of the funniest books I've read in years. If you've ever wanted to know whether milk can come out of your nose, get yourself a tall glass right before the scene where Tom's band plays at the school's talent show.

The only thing that confuses me about the book is the fact that it's being marketed as Young Adult, and shelved as such in our local library. Seriously, there is a difference between a book about a young adult and one that will only appeal to a young adult. Usually, young adult books are notable either because they are badly written, or because they are preachy, moralistic and badly written. There wasn't this much oral sex and casual drug use in YA books when I was Tom's age, that's for sure.

Which makes me think that this was not written with a YA readership in mind. Rats Saw God, an excellent novel by Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, is another mature (ie, sex that isn't presented as a Lesson) book that was marketed as YA. Thomas has commented in the past that he didn't actually intend the book to be YA, it was just the story he wanted to write.

That's not to say that young people (especially young, bullied, nerdy people) should not read King Dork. I would have loved this book when I was 14. So if you know a geeky, outcast kid, buy him or her a copy today. It'll hit a nerve.

Cory Doctorow: King of Interviews

In my Real Life, I interview a lot of people. Why can't I have an excuse to interview this guy?

Selected snippets from Doctorow's interview with SFRevu:

On peer to peer sharing of info.

But even if it turns out that P2P is the death knell for $300 million movies and artists who earn a living from recording, so what? Radio was bad news for Vaudeville, too. Today's recording artists can earn a living because radio and records killed the careers of many live performers. If bands have to be more like Phish to survive, that's how it goes. Particular copyright business models aren't written into the Constitution; technology giveth and technology taketh away.

P2P is enabling more filmmakers, more musicians, and more writers and other creators to produce a wider variety of works that please a wider audience than ever before. That's the purpose of copyright -- to enable maximal expression and cultural participation, even if it costs us Police Academy *n-1* and payola-driven boy-bands.

On copyright and SF:

The pulps today pay $0.02-6/word; it's pretty much the word-rate Hugo Gernsback was paying in 1928. Yet people continue to write and submit, even though tuppence doesn't go nearly as far in 2007 as it did during the New Deal. Note that the compensation here has NOTHING to do with copyright. You could give writers a million years of copyright and the right to behead people who infringe their rights and it wouldn't change the word-rate at Asimov's.

On the American lifestyle (see below, re Vegas):

SFRevu: I've heard varying numbers on how many planet Earth's it would take to provide everyone with an "American" standard of living, ranging from 10 to 20 or so. That's always seemed bogus to me since a) Americans suffer from over-abundance and b) information doesn't consume resources to be replicated. Mostly. What's your take?

Cory: Well, America has lots of weird consumption inefficiencies, especially away from the coastal cities where we're encouraged to own a lot more house, car and material goods than we need. I'd be more interested in how much it would take to provide every person in the world the kind of life they enjoy in one of the moderate-priced European "B" cities like Florence. Walkable places with incredible food, design, manufacturing, schools, racial diversity, etc. Places with great public transit AND a high level of private vehicle ownership, as well as universal health-care, cheap or free universities, and refreshing absence of paranoid security theater aimed at eliminating abstract nouns like "terror."

The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (just listened to a Stanford lecture about the American Couple that cited a study that determined that the single biggest predictor of long-term marital happiness is whether both partners have health care), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that's straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don't think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.

America has lots going for it -- innovation, the Bill of Rights, a willingness to let its language mutate in exciting and interesting ways, but the standard of living is not America's signal virtue.

Read the whole thing.

Back from the Weirdest Place on Earth

No blogging recently as I spent much of the holiday season in Las Vegas/dealing with family medical emergencies/being lazy.

I've been to Vegas twice now, both times solely to visit family. I seem to have absorbed that tight-fisted Scots virus that infects so many Canadians, and the idea of gambling more than $1 at a time makes my teeth itch. I eventually managed to go up to a grand total of US $3, which I played on penny slot machines at five cents a spin. I won a net total of $4.40 playing the awesomely bizarre Alien Vs. Predator slot machine. I was the only person playing this game, even though there was a whole bank of about half a dozen of them. I don't think the oxygen-tank-sucking retirees who were the bulk of that casino's patrons really got it.

Other Vegas notes:

- The first thing you see when you walk out of your plane into McCarran Airport is a row of slot machines.

- The ad board over our baggage check advertised The Gun Store. "Shoot a real machine gun." The accompanying image was of a busty blonde woman holding an assault rifle. This is a good intro to the level of subtlety Vegas upholds.

- There are wild quail living in the suburbs. Presumably they inhabit the same ecological niche as crows, but they're much cuter.

- The plants around Vegas are the product of millions of years of evolution to deal with a dry, high desert climate. They have waxy needles or leaves, twisty trunks and a shrunken look. They are obviously ready to survive privation and extremes. This makes them an odd contrast to the massive 24-hour excess binge around them.

- In suburban Vegas, there is so much gambling money sloshing into the municipal tax coffers that they just pave everything. You will never see such nice roads again in your life. A medium-density suburb will typically be serviced by four-lane roads, with left turn bays at the corners and double-left turn suicide lanes down the middle. Of course, they still have four way stops because there isn't enough traffic to justify signal lights yet...

- You almost never see anyone walking anywhere.