The future of jobs

This weekend, about every third editorial I read was about what can and should be done by government to promote the creation of more jobs. One common theme among the articles was the seeming paradox that corporate profits are improving, but this isn't resulting in a new wave of hiring.

At the risk of sounding like a cranky radical (you may judge left wing or right wing), corporate profits are improving because corporations have figured out how to make and sell as many things as they used to using fewer people. Corporations don't have a mandate to create jobs; they have a mandate to create profits for stockholders. Employees are just a cost of doing business, and smart businesses cut costs wherever they can.

Some people are attracted to large corporations because they provide the illusion of job security. Microsoft or Fedex or even McDonald's look to be companies that will be around for the long haul, and it might seem like, once you get a job with a corporation that has been around decades and will last for decades, you can be assured your job will last.

But, it's big corporations who can be the most agressive when it comes to making the cuts needed to stay profitable. So you've got twenty years experience? Do you really turn out more work than the five part timers you could be replaced by for the cost of your salary and benefits? Or, having gotten secure in your job, are you actively making yourself replacable by taking for granted that you've found your niche in life?

I'm not writing this to condemn corporations as cruel or heartless, however. I'm writing more as a wake-up to the American worker. We can bemoan the fact that corporate CEO's take home multi-million dollar bonuses that could have been used to hire more workers, or we can accept that these are the facts of life in the new American century, and, really have been the facts for a good twenty or thirty years now.

The only way to ensure that you will never be fired is become your own employer. Develop your most profitable skills to the point that other people willingly pay you money to excersize those skills.

Self employment isn't easy. I'm writing this as someone who still has a job with a corporation, because, while I can concievably replace my salary with my own efforts, it's a much higher hurdle to replace my salary and my benefits. Health insurance is a huge expense. But, I know my goals, and the longer I strive, and the harder I work, the closer I get to reaching them.

One giant hassle of self-employment has been handling my taxes. I think I've done a fairly good job. As a writer, my revenues in a year come from fewer than a dozen sources, and my expenses aren't excessively difficult to keep track of. Still, the stress I feel every April when I mail off the taxes I owe always cause me to wonder if it's worth it. It's not like I've sat down and read our entire zillion page tax code. What if there's some odd sub-clause I'm missing and the next thing I know I'm in court defending myself because I didn't pay the 9x12 manilla envelope tax when I mailed off my last book contract?

So, returning to the question that started this column: What should government do to create more jobs for you? Nothing. It's up to us. This is still America. If we've reached the point where we can't pull themselves up by our own boot straps, we're done for. But, the government could do more to put us bootstrappers on equal footing. Corporations can deduct health insurance. Why can't I? Give the American people fairness, and we can't provide our own opportunities.

A few thoughts on politics and guns

The shooting of Gabriel Giffords has caused me to think about some of my basic assumptions. As a libertarian, I'm relatively pro-gun. I think the Supreme Court has things about right. The second ammendment does plainly guarantee that any citizen should have the right to own a gun, but doesn't prohibit reasonable laws regulating these arms. I firmly believe that 99% of gun owners are honest folks who would never dream of using a gun for aggressive violence.

But, having the right to own a gun for hunting, target practice, or self-defense is one thing. Owning a gun that will let you fire off thirty rounds into a crowd in a minute or so is a completely different matter.

Life isn't a Hollywood action movie. I can't think of many plausible situations where a person is likely to need a gun that fires off more than 5 or 6 rounds in order to defend themselves. I know it will never happen since the NRA opposes any restrictions on guns, but couldn't we slow the pace of these spree shootings that seem to happen almost yearly in the US simply by limiting the magazine sizes of guns? Six-shooters were good enough for cowboys. Let's make that the limit. Then, a spree killer has to stop and reload (or carry multiple guns, but if you're carrying five guns into a supermarket, maybe someone will notice before you get four feet away from the congresswoman).

Can anyone give me a sane argument why this would be an intolerable limit on our civil liberties?

Guns don't kill people. People kill people. And some people are bat-shit crazy and there's really no good way of filtering them out. When they do finally get their hands on a gun, let's make them reload.

Thought two: Hateful rhetoric and a culture of violence.

Blaming Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh for this shooting or for the rise of "hate speech" is more about hating Palin and Limbaugh than it is based on any sort of evidence or reason. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that this violence was inevitable due to the harsh rhetoric of modern politics, but it makes me wonder if he's actually paying attention to history and the news.

The reality is, if you're under 25, you haven't seen a serious assassination attempt on a president, congressman, senator, or supreme court justice. You could argue that the president has better security these days, but congressmen aren't surrounded by squadrons of guards. US senators freely go jogging on the streets of DC without armed escorts. Supreme Court Justices don't wear bulletproof vests when they go grocery shopping. For all the talk of political violence, anyone half way paying attention has to see that we live in very peaceful times. As a people, we don't solve our political disagreements by gunning each other down in the streets.

Is political violence today worse than it was in the 60's and 70's? For all the talk that the Tea Party members are racist bastards driven to insanity by a black president, does no one remember that it was little more than 50 years ago when KKK members routinely lynched blacks and murdered civil rights advocates?

Even back in the 90s, it seemed like there was a spate of homegrown terrorists bombing abortion clinics and targeting federal buildings and mailing bombs to college campuses.

Maybe the increased security after 9-11 is the reason, or maybe we just started getting our violent rages out by playing video games, but it seems to me that we've had a remarkably civil and non-violent political discourse in our country for the last thirty years or so. I don't even think the shooting last weekend counts as political violence because the guy was obviously wacko. He didn't need Glenn Beck telling him to shoot people; he had that creepy little skull on that shrine in his back yard whispering what to do.

So, I'd like to say to the right wingers and the left wingers out there reading this: Thanks. Thanks for being decent folks and limiting your political action to name calling and shouting. I'm grateful that you haven't turned us into a place where we settle our differences with rifles instead of ballots. You're alright, my fellow Americans.

Unless you think that you need more than six bullets in your gun to defend yourself from a burgler. In which case you're just a jerk.

Five writing mantras that bear repeating

These are the most important truths of writing I've learned to date. At various points in the past, I've posted all these rules in various configurations, but, these are my writing mantras, and the whole point of a mantra is that it's something you repeat:

1. The worst novel you put on paper is better than the best novel you have in your head.

Suppose you sit down and bang out a manuscript that is, in your judgement, utter crap. Guess what? Other people can read crap. They can go through your manuscript and tell you what they like and didn't like. On the other hand, that golden, gleaming, perfect novel that exists only inside your skull is completely unreadable by anyone other than yourself.

2. Here. Now.

These words have saved me time and time again. When I get the most lost in a story it's often because I can't see the trees because of the forest. I'm getting distracted by the big picture, worried about whether I'm sharing enough information about what happened twenty years before the story began, or properly laying the groundwork for what will happen ten chapters from now. Screw the past and the future. When you sit down to write, focus on the immediate spot in time and space that your character occupies in the scene at hand. Make the moment concrete, and when it's done, move on to the next one. Do this a couple of hundred times, and whoah, you've written a book!

3: To write a good novel, you must first write a bad novel.

First drafts aren't supposed to be great all the way through. You've got to just slog ahead and write some stuff wrong so that you can later go back and write it right. Or, maybe you'll never get it right; a bad novel is still priceless. I've written nine novels to date. I've sold and published four, two more will either be sold or published this year, and three of these will never be published because they aren't at the level of craftmanship I now demand of myself. But, I couldn't have written the six good novels if I hadn't written the three bad ones. I had to write the bad novels A: so that I could prove to myself I had the discipline to finish the tasks I started B: so that I could inflict them upon critique groups that went on to give me useful advice on plotting, character development, style, pacing, dialogue, etc., and C: so that I could learn more about the types of stuff I was lousy at writing so that I could better understand the sort of stuff I was good at.

4: Never look back.

When writing my first novel, I kept getting caught in the trap of changing my mind about stuff I'd already written and going back and revising and reworking before I got to the end. Then, when I did get some forward momentum going, I'd change my mind on something and have to go back and revise again. It took me two damn years to finish that first book. I got better on my second and third books, gaining the willpower not to go back and revise while I was still writing, but lacking the willpower or wisdom to not go back and read what I'd already written, or to show what I'd already written to other people. By book four, I hit the formula that has worked for me on all subsequent books: I don't show any of the novel to anyone until I've completed the first draft. I don't even show it to myself; I forbid myself to go back and read the previously written chapters, since I can't read without editing them. I've never reached the end of a book without gaining a dozen insights in the last three chapters about the kinds of stuff I should have put in my first three chapters to make the book feel like a closing circle. You aren't going to know every thing that you have to include in your first chapter until you've written your last chapter. The surest, fastest way to get to that last chapter is just to keep pushing forward, keep working in your newer, better ideas as if you've been writing with them in mind all along, and keep that hunger to show the book to someone building until you write "the end."

5. Little by little, the work gets done.

For the most part, when I set a word count goal for a week, I meet that goal. But, it's also definitely not unheard of for me to blow a word count goal, sometimes severely. Inky black pools of despair open before me during these times as I wonder just what ever made me think I was any good at this game.

Almost always, I'm not missing my goal due to some internal barrier to creativity. I'm missing it because there are 1,000 things in this world that are more fun and/or vital to do in my "free" time. I'll skip a night of writing because a friend wants to go out to dinner, or skip a Saturday because one of my neices is having a birthday party cookout and the whole family is invited. I'll miss a Sunday afternoon in the spring because the sky is flawless blue and the air is a perfect 72 degrees and it's been months since my girlfriend and I have gone bike riding.

So then I start feeling guilt. I'm skipping writing to go to dinner? I'm skipping writing to enjoy sunshine? Are these such rare events that I should toss aside my pursuit of art? Is the sun slated to stop shining tomorrow and this is my last chance ever to enjoy it? Well, maybe it is. Who knows? So when all my big blocks of the time disappear, for happy reasons or sad, I start making bargains. I take my laptop and type 500 words while my girlfriend drives us to Asheboro. I get up 10 minutes earlier than normal and type two foggy paragraphs. I sneak back to my room between panels at a science fiction con and type like a demon for 45 minutes. The more moments I steal, the easier it is to transition back into stealing hours.

Steal the moments.

Little by little the work gets done.

Word after word after word

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about an even more fundamental building block of writing, the words themselves. My musings were kicked off by an episode of Radio Lab that basically put forth the premise that what we humans think of as "thinking" is impossible without words. At the risk of oversimplifying a very complicated subject, the argument is that if we don't have words like democracy, God, genetics, and karma, we can't think about these things. Without language, our thoughts are more animalistic; we can still love and fear, still grasp that water is wet and sandpaper is rough, but conceptual, abstract thinking is no longer possible.

For evidence, they present case studies like a man who was born deaf in the third world who'd grown to adulthood without any concept of words whatsoever. He'd made it to the US as part of a migrant family and was generally regarded as retarded until a therapist managed to make that first connection between a word in sign language and a concrete object (much like Helen Keller learning the word water). Once he had the concept of words, he went on to learn sign language and hungrily devoured the words for everything under the sun. He became able to discuss his previous, wordless life, giving insight into what life is like in the absense of abstact thought. Another case involved a woman who had a stroke that knocked out the language centers of her brain. She couldn't not just speak or read; she lost all concept at all that words even existed. Slowly, her brain healed itself and she was able to report on life without words and, again, if you don't have vocabulary, you aren't able to do the kind of thinking that I'm engaging in right now.

Or rather, that we are engaging in right now. Because listening to the show it struck me that words are kind of a mental virus, a carrier by which thought is transmitted from person to person. As writers, we aren't simply telling stories; we are altering the thought processes of our readers via the transmission of words.

While the story level aspect of writing is of extreme importance, we shouldn't dismiss the power we have to create new concepts in the minds of others by bumping words together in unusual or original configurations. James Joyce and William S. Borroughs don't so much tell stories as string words together. Yet my experience reading them is still quite stimulating. Delving into their word thickets, I run across idea and concepts I've never encountered, and emerge with my mental boundaries of what exists in the world a bit broader.

Some bands I listen to have lyrics that consist of what are for all intents random words and phrases strung together. Hell, the Talking Heads are blatant about it, with album names like "Speaking in Tongues" and "Stop Making Sense." Yet, somehow, I'm still able to find meaning amid the babble. The songs bang around in my brain long after the songs of writers who were much less obscure have faded away.

When words bump up against words they don't normally partner with, our brain has to burn new pathways to absorb the concept. Even seeming nonsense has the power to activate these pathways--how many of you can quote "Jabberwocky" line for line? How many of you can find meaning in it?

Looking at my own writing, I find it riddled with neologisms. My dragons worship a religion built around evolution; the priests are called Biologians. On Mars, my protags embrace beneath moonslight, in Atlantis, Makan toys with his throatfeather. The speculative genres provide good soil for the growth of new words, which we need to create new worlds.

I've read plenty of writing books on plotting and character, and other books on style. But can anyone point me to reading material on the relationship between thoughts and words? I feel like I've taken my study of storytelling as far as I can go for the time being. I can plot, theme, and characterize like nobody's bizness. I learned these by practice and by studying the concepts. But, putting word after word after word on the page, the very heart of writing, is something I've done without really contemplating how or why I do it. It's so fundamental it seems almost fruitless to study it. It would be like taking lessons on how to breathe or how to walk. Yet, if you want to be an opera singer, you do take lessons on how to inhale and exhale. You might not need lessons on how to walk if you just want to cross a street, but lessons might be useful if you want to cross a tightrope strung between two skyscrapers.

The danger, of course, is that on the rare occassions when I do stop and think about how I walk, I find it makes me clumsier, not more graceful. Am I opening the door to my own doom if I stop to consider every word I place upon the page?

Should we eliminate the minimum wage?

Unemployment among teenagers is sitting close to 24%. It's easy to shrug this off, since most teens live with their families and their lack of income isn't likely resulting in some great wave of human suffering. Still, it has long term repercussions; the kids who don't wind up working in their teens go into the work force as adults with significant disadvantages. They haven't learned such basic work skills as showing up on time and how to conduct themselves among work peers.

Getting a quarter of our future work force off to a stumbling start is a pretty sure guarantee of problems down the line. I think it may be time to think about killing one of the sacred cows of the social safety net: The minimum wage.

First of all, as a libertarian, I accept the notion that there shouldn't be a minimum wage, period. I understand the impulse behind it, but is there any actual evidence that minimum wage laws raise people out of poverty? For years, people have warned that raising the minimum wage would raise unemployment. Usually, it hasn't, because the real world wage of most workers was well above the minimum anyway. And, up until 2008, the debt economy had enough people spending money they hadn't earned on stuff they didn't need that employers sometimes had to hire anyone with a pulse, which is frequently the sole job skill a teenager possesses.

Politically, we could probably never roll back the minimum wage for everyone. We'd get every local TV news show in the nation out talking to forty year old single mothers of eight kids earning minimum wage and the outrage ginned up would scare off even Rand Paul. But, what about a different minimum wage for people under 21? If you aren't old enough to buy beer, then you don't need to be paid enough to get drunk. Either repeal the minimum entirely before age 21, or maybe set it to half the adult minimum wage.

I'm sure I sound heartless proposing this. But I've mainly been thinking about this problem because I know a few unemployed teenagers, and would like to see them catch a break. This seems like a possible path to make them attractive to employers again.

Thanksgiving

Roughly a decade ago, I stopped celebrating religious holidays like Easter and Christmas. It was really difficult to reconcile the celebration of these things with my professed atheism. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is a bit more open ended. Despite it's Puritan roots, it's mostly non-sectarian. If you strip away the core supernatural element of giving thanks to an imaginary force for your good fortunes, it's still a good practice to reflect on the things you cherish in life and thank those who made it possible.

So, I'd like to thank my family, all my cousins, aunts, and uncles, and especially my siblings, Joy, Gina, and Joseph who had to put up with me while I was growing up. To my mom, I want you to know I remember the time I was having trouble with spelling in some early grade and you spent evenings with me going through long lists of words. Thank you for this and a million other kindnesses. To my father who passed away last year, thanks for working jobs you didn't especially like, working in loud, hot factories, in order to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table and books on the bookshelf.

Speacking of working jobs one doesn't particularly like, I'm grateful to my present employer for the steady paycheck and such niceties as insurance. I gripe and moan about my job a lot, but I'm smart enough to know that much good comes to my life because I have work. And, my coworkers are owed a debt of gratitude for putting up with my various quirks. Thanks.

Of course, my day job is only half my work life. Writing is my true passion, and I'd like to thank all the editors who've ever bought a story from me, and also the editors who haven't, but have at least read my work in the slush pile. I'm grateful to the publisher's who've taken a chance on my novels, I'm grateful to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and to a thousand independent booksellers, and I'm grateful to the tens of thousands of readers in the US, the UK, France, and Germany who've read my books. I know I'll never meet more than a handful of you, but you are the reason I keep telling stories. It would be a sad thing for a chef to cook a meal that no one ever ate, and sadder still for a book to be written that no one ever read. Thank you for sparing me from such a fate.

And, speaking of readers, thanks to everyone who drops in here to peek at my ramblings. Special thanks go to Loren Eaton, Eric James Stone, John Brown, Drakonis, Rastranomicals, Mr. Cavin, and everyone else who sometimes pauses to engage in conversation on the topics I bring up.

From online friends, I'll jump to friends I actually see face to face, Dona, Jesse, Stephanie and everyone else I hang out with from week to week. Thanks also to the friends I see only occasionally, like James Rice and the whole Herrmann clan. To Simon and Veronica, I'm especially glad to still know you and thank you for allowing me to be at least a small part of your lives.

Next, I owe an extraordinary debt of gratitude to my fiance, Cheryl Morgan. When we met, I was in a pretty frazzled state. My life was in turmoil as I was struggling to deal with book deadlines, the demands of renovating a house, and the tricky task of figuring out the new contours of my world following Laura's death. Thank you, Cheryl, for finding me in the center of this whirlwind and helping to slowly guide me out. You've granted me a great gift of wisdom and patience and all I have to pay you back is time and love. I hope this will suffice.

Finally, from the personal to the anonymous: Since Thanksgiving is an American holiday, I want to say I'm grateful to America. I'm grateful that the people who founded this country, and the generations of people who have since helped shape and define it, have created a nation in which I'm free to think what I wish to think, say what I wish to say, and be who I wish to be. No one person has brought us to this place. The names recorded in history books are merely a few leaves on a much larger tree. America as it exists today isn't so much the creation of lawmakers and leaders as it is the work of vast millions of people who focus on making the world better for themselves and their families and don't waste a lot of time or energy on hating others. America is a great place to live because of this. Thank you all.

The Exploration of Dangerous Places

Review
The Exploration of Dangerous Places
by Jonah Knight

At Capclave a few weeks ago, I attended a late night ghost story gathering. A few people told stories, some read, but one guy pulled out a guitar and sang about a haunted house. This was Jonah Knight, performing “Empty House,” and instantly I knew I had to hear more from him. “Empty House” fit right into my typical daily playlist of songs by the Mountain Goats, the Decemberists, and the Pogues. The chorus from “Empty House” is:

But this empty house isn’t empty after all
Late at night you can hear things in the walls
Your shallow grave isn’t deep enough at all
To keep your ghost under ground.

“Empty House” turned out to be from Knight’s new album, The Exploration of Dangerous Places. Now that I’ve listened to it a dozen times or so, I can say that it wasn’t pure chance that I first heard Knight at a science fiction convention. His website describes his music as “paranormal modern folk,” which is pretty much on target. Speculative themes run through many of the songs, from interplanetary travel and terraforming on “The Places You Will Go” to cloning an army of duplicates on “King of Nebraska.” I detect traces of Ray Bradbury and HP Lovecraft within the lyrics, such as in “Sleepy Little Creepy Little Town” with the verse:

There’s a nameless faceless thing crawling down from out of the hills
There’s a prehistoric prophecy on the verge of being fulfilled
Everybody in the village likes to gather at the general store
Talk about the screams coming from the mansion
and compare our mysterious open sores

Like Ray Bradbury, Knight is diverse, mixing introspective songs of ghosts and nameless evils with more amusing fare. “Pirate Song” is a jaunty sea shanty, and “King of Nebraska” provokes uncomfortable laughs with its rather disturbing tale of a man who’s cloning an army of followers, especially when we arrive at the heart of the narrator’s motives:

I keep your photograph buried in a book
I have a reference when I forget how you look
I down loaded more DNA
My lawyer friend says it's okay
There’s no expectation of privacy online
I rented a place and bought the stuff
Two more weeks should be enough
to finish off another you
that does whatever I tell it to

Musically, Knight fits in the singer songwriter mold, with guitar playing reminiscent of Nick Drake. Vocally, I’m reminded more of Atom and His Package mixed with early Mountain Goats. Knight’s voice probably wouldn’t get him through an audition for American Idol, but there’s a reason I don’t watch American Idol. What Knight’s voice lacks in range it makes up for in honesty and urgency. Ultimately, you understand from this album that the dangerous place that Knight has been exploring is his own soul, and the songs succeed because he’s had the courage to report back on the monsters he found there.

The album should be released any day now; visit Jonah’s website at www.jonahofthesea.com for when and where you can buy it.

Is Life Devoid of Meaning?

I've said before that I'm essentially a nihilist on the question of whether life has any greater meaning. I reject that there is any non-human power judging us, deciding if we are living correctly or not. From a universal perspective, it makes no difference how you live your life. You can be a nun, a ninja, or a nutcase, but hundred years from now all you'll be is dust.

But is the absence of greater meaning reason for despair?

Only if you think a blank sheet of paper is worthless. Which, as a writer, I definitely do not. A blank sheet of paper may be inherently devoid of meaning, but in the hands of men it can become the medium for a story or a drawing or a blueprint; it can be folded into an airplane or a hat. Love letters may be composed, yard sales and lost dogs may be advertised.

Men aren't lucky enough to be born as blank sheets. We're always going to wind up with culture and genetics scribbled all over our lives and actions. But, once you come to the realization that there is no higher outline for your life, that you are basically free to fill the pages of your existance anyway you wish, you can choose to treat your life as a medium to hold a work of art. Your body and mind can be used to love, to create, to share... or to rage and destroy.

And while there is no higher power to judge you, the same is true for literature, or music, or dance. We don't need a god to approve of these things; our fellow men are all the audience we need when we create art. In fact, sometimes we need no one's judgment but our own to feel happy with our creations. So it can be with our lives.

Unsolicited advice for republicans, Obama, and the American citizen

Last Tuesday, I did something extremely unusual for me: I voted republican for my US congressman. Not that it did much good in my district; my current congressman, David Price, is pretty well gerrymandered. If this election season couldn't budge him, he's probably safe until district lines are redrawn a few years from now.

Whenever possible I vote libertarian, since I'd rather vote for someone I agree with than vote against someone. This time, there was no libertarian running for the seat, so choosing to vote between a democrat and a republican was a bit like choosing whether to get shot in the face or in the gut. I went with the gut shot.

Since I voted republican, and since the last few days a lot of prominent republicans have been talking about listening to the voters, here some advice for the new congressional majority.

1. I'm fine with gridlock and paralysis. If the next two years pass without a single new law coming out of congress, I'll consider that a win. I think of the legal code of the US as a kind of cancer. Two years without further explosive growth might not be a cure, but sometimes simply not getting worse feels like a victory.

2. It's the balance sheet, stupid. I didn't risk a republican vote because I want you to block mosque building, deport Mexicans, hang the ten commandments in courtrooms, or treat gays as second class citizens. The only reason I'm giving you a shot is because enough republicans have given lip service to debt that I think, maybe, possibly, you might actually make some feeble steps toward cutting the growth of government. But, if experience is any guide, you're more likely to grow the debt by cutting taxes and refusing to touch sacred cows of spending like farm subsidies, defense contracts, and entitlements. Tax cuts made sense in the 80s, when income tax rates could be above 50%. Today, most households pay a net income tax of zero. I'm fine if my taxes go back to the Clinton era rates. I'd even embrace a tax increase if serious action was taken first to cut some of the sacred cows I've mentioned.

Maybe I'm in a minority, but I don't think American's feel overtaxed. I suspect most feel over-complicated. For me, as a homeowner with income from writing as well as a more traditional employer, I dread tax time not so much because I have to write a check every year, but because I have to spend days figuring out what it is I owe. I have an envelope full of reciepts for everything I spend going to conventions to promote my books, including a reciept for the envelope. What I can and can't deduct bewilders me. It's been a long time since I took the SAT, but, when I did, I had scores in both the math and the language portions that placed me in the top 2% of the population in both areas. If the tax code stumps me, I can't even imagine what it does to people who aren't as fluent with math and reading. I don't want more laws and loopholes piled on to the tax code, I want the whole thing scrapped and replaced with something comprehensible.

Cut spending and simplify taxes, and I might vote republican again.

Now, for Obama: So far, the spin doctors on the left, including Obama, seem to be in a serious case of denial. They seem to be looking at the election and thinking, "They aren't rejecting my policies; I've just failed to make sure the American public understood all the good I've done for them." President Obama, if you read this blog (which I'm certain you do, since it's part of the president's job to read all blogs that American's write), WAKE UP! HELLO! The average American voter has just screamed at you, "STOP SPENDING!" They understood exactly what you've done, and they don't want you to do it anymore.

So, here's a radical notion: Embrace the mandate. American's have said pretty loudly that they care about the budget deficit. The most radical thing you could do, President Obama, would be to go to the new congress and say, "Here's a plan that balances the budget in six years." Present them with tough cuts across the board, and maybe even a tax hike or two. Make sure the numbers add up not just in the world of wishful thinking, but to anyone with a calculator and too much time on their hands. If you presented a serious budget plan, you would either wind up a winner, or, if you fail, you'd take out your political enemies with you. If you had an actual balanced budget plan and Republican's opposed it without presenting an even more credible plan, it would expose them as hypocrits. If they embraced it, both Republican's and Democrats would share the political pain needed to reduce spending and increase revenue. I think the odds that you'll follow my advice are pretty low, but I still wanted to get it out there on the table. Thanks for reading, Mr. President!

Finally, to the American people: As convenient as it is to blame our problems on Obama or Bush or Reagan or Carter or FDR for that matter, the plain truth is that our problems exist because we elect people to govern and then stop paying attention. Obama complains that American's don't understand everything he's done for them, and he's right. We don't know everything he's done for us or to us because it's utterly impossible for any individual to pay attention to all the legislation and regulation that issues forth from any given administration. But, there was once a time in America when there were people who did this for us. They were called reporters; perhaps you remember them. They worked for something called newspapers. They definitely do not work for television. If you turn on a TV newscast, you aren't watching a reporter. You're watching a talent; they aren't speaking to you because they understand the issues or the facts to any great degree, but because they look good on TV and can talk without mumbling. They can keep talking long after they have nothing to say, such are their skills.

If you want to find actual information, you need to read. Tune out the screaming voices of talk radio and the weepy prophets of television infotainment. Read newspapers and magazines and books. In two years there will be another election, and elections should be treated like final exams. Now is the time to start studying.

Altruism will devour us all

This week it was announced that there will be no cost of living increase for social security recipients since inflation is essentially flat. Immediately, Obama announced that he was proposing a $250 "stimulus" check for social security recipients.

It's easy to assign less than honorable motives to this action. 1. He could be motivated by fear, worried that pissing off the elderly will cost him at the polls. 2. He could be motivated by a desire to score political points: He can propose an increase weeks before an election. Democrats will no doubt support the proposal across the board. Republicans must either say they oppose it, in which case they will be accused of being cold-blooded grandma haters, or for it, in which case they will be exposed as hypocrites in their claims to care about balancing the budget.

My gut instinct, though, is that his motives are probably more noble. Men don't go through the extraordinary physical, mental, and emotional effort of becoming president unless they really believe that they can make the world a better place through their vision and leadership. They may engage in a lot of political gamesmanship and cut a lot of deals that enrich their friends and allies along the way, but at the end of the day, what underlies all these efforts is a genuine desire to do good.

I think Obama passed his health care plan motivated not because it was a giant power grab, but because he's met people screwed by the present system and wants to help them. I think George Bush invaded two countries not because he was thirsty for oil, but because he wanted to make the world a safer place.

Once you set upon the path of doing good, however, it's hard to stop. When people point out that your good actions may be causing harm, it's easy to brand them hard-hearted, or even evil. If you oppose Bush's wars because they were disproportionate responses to the threat, financially ruinous to the country, or too open-ended, you were labeled as a coddler of terrorists. If you oppose Obama's cap and trade proposals, you are branded as a tool of the oil industry and a cheerleader for poisoning the planet.

The world's problems are bottomless. The demand for government to fix the problems is equally bottomless. There will always be men willing to stand up and say, "I can fix this problem."

Unfortunately, while problems are limitless, resources aren't. Obama is going to give out his $250 stimulus checks with borrowed money. We will pay back this borrowed money with more borrowed money. Bush did the same thing with his wars, or his prescription drug benefits. Whoever is president next will follow the same pattern. Clinton is credited with balancing the budget, but he got lucky in that he failed to pass his health care bill. I suspect things would have worked out quite differently if he'd had the chance to do all the good he wanted to do--and not for the better.

The hard truth is that altruism unrestrained by economics or logic will eventually grow into a monster, devouring wealth and liberty in order to crap out comfort and security. The beast is already loose, chewing up our children's futures with massive debt, devouring the lives of innocent men, women and children with wars that can never come to an end. If we cannot kill the beast, we must at least muzzle it. The $250 stimulus seems like a good test. Do not vote for any candidate that supports it. If both the democrat and the republican in the race are for it, vote libertarian. Good-hearted men will be the ruin of us all. It's time to vote for people with the wisdom and courage to say no.

Mid Term Meanderings

With the mid-term elections less than a month away, I'm starting to feel a building sense of doom. Our country is facing genuine problems and I worry that present political trends are only going to make these problems fester.

I won't play Nostradamus and predict whether Republicans are going to win the house or senate. I will ask, does it matter? If they do reclaim power, it will be by feeble margins compared to what the Democrats currently possess. If Democrats are barely able to function in the face of unanimous Republican opposition, why should the Republicans dream that once they have power, the Democrats are suddenly going to be trying to help them pass laws? We are now firmly in an era of kamakazi politics. Republican's are likely to make gains, and think that their strategy of just saying no to everything is a good one to continue if they are a few seats short of taking over either house. Democrats, if they lose control of either house, are going to say, "Hey! The Republican's made us look ineffective by never giving us a single vote. We'll show the same unity in opposition now that they are in power and they'll now get to become the unpopular scapegoat party!"

The timing couldn't be worse. Our national debt is set to devour our future. We've ignored it for twenty years, always trusting that somehow things would work out. It's like obesity; you put on twenty pounds in your twenties, and hey, it's no big deal, you were skinny anyway. Then, in your thirties, you add another ten pounds. But, while you understand you aren't in great shape, the extra weight isn't affecting you that bad. You still live your life more or less normally. And, look around: Everyone is putting on extra weight. Then, in your forties, you add more weight. Hmm. Maybe this is starting to be a problem. Your doctor's been telling you this for twenty years, but now is when you're starting to notice that you're having trouble breathing walking up a flight of stairs. You think, maybe it's time to do something about your weight. Maybe not get skinny again, but watch what you're eating more, maybe take a walk a few times each week. You'll be okay if you can just stay where you're at. It's not like you're so heavy that you need one of those wheeled carts to get around the grocery store. Then, in your fifties, you're riding around on the wheeled cart, still planning to excercise once your gout clears up. And, in your sixties, you're dead.

Our deficit has followed the same pattern. When we first started running it, no big deal. When we got worried about it in the 90's, we did a few years of excersize and got it back under countrol. Then, life got stressful again with the whole 9-11 thing and discipline went out the window and we were back at the deficit trough. Now, we've reached the point where we've gotten so fat and flabby, deficit-wise, that we have to get in shape immediately or we'll become so weak that we won't be able to save ourselves.

Do democrats have a plan to help us escape our debt trap? Nope. Their only plan is to complain that Tea Partier's didn't complain about the debt when Bush was in office. (Though, while I don't consider myself a tea partier, I certainly was talking about the debt during this time.) Do republican's have a plan to deal with the debt? A few here and there have actual plans, but only a few. For the most part, I've noticed in interviews lately that they are vaguely promising to cut spending... except for defense, or social security, or medicare. And, presumably, they won't stop paying interest on the national debt. So... they are admitting up front that they consider 98% of the budget untouchable. This is like promising to drink a diet coke while your heaping up the plates with meat loaf and mashed potatoes and chocolate pie at Bronco Billy's Big Boy Buffet Barn.

If you're obese, the prescription isn't arcane. Eat less, excercise more. Our debt has a similar simple fix: Cut spending and increase tax revenues. But, most obese people (including me) find that they lack the discipline to stick to the formula. Under what possible imaginary scenario are we suddenly going to elect politicians with the discipline to rescue us from our debt?

Masked interviews up at Mallozzi's Blog

Joseph Mallozzi has used his blog to spotlight the Masked anthology during September. He passed along a bunch of reader questions to the various authors and today has posted the collected answers in an interview that offers some great insights into both story telling and superheroes. My own contribution includes a confession of a potentially embarrassing recurring fantasy from my teen years. Also, Joe matched up each author's traits with an iconic superhero; I think he nailed me perfectly. You can read the whole post here.

Koran Burning & Ground Zero Mosque Revisited

So, there's apparently some preacher somewhere in the South who plans to have a Koran burning ceremony on September 11. (I could google his actual name and location, but these details seem unimportant to the point I'm about to make.) His plans have drawn the condemnation of a lot of people, including General Petraeus, who argue that this is going to be offensive to Muslims and unhelpful to America's image abroad.

Well, duh.

I argued that conservatives were wrong to protest the building of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. To me, the prevailing rights were that people should be free to do what they wish with property they own, as long as they comply with reasonable zoning regulations, which seems to be the case. The argument that the mosque might stir bad memories or hurt feelings didn't particularly sway me. To me, protecting rights is a higher value than protecting feelings.

And, the same is true of this Koran burning. This is America: If you are free to burn a flag, you should be free to burn a book. Now, rest assured, I will think less of you for burning the book (or the flag), and so will a lot of other people. But, so what? If you can take the heat, light the fire. (With, of course, due regard to public safety; presumably a fire extiguisher will be on hand.) People who support the mosque in the name of free speech and religious liberty have no leg to stand on in opposing this action.

Every human activity is going to offend someone. Islamists may find it offensive to burn a Koran, or draw a cartoon of Mohammad, but certain Islamists also will find offense in my walking through a park holding the hand of my girlfriend. (Or, in my girlfriend driving us to the park. Or my girlfriend being able to read the signs along the way.) Curtailing American freedoms in the name of sparing the feelings of a few people overseas, or even hundreds of millions of people, isn't a trade worth making. But, I also hope that the Americans who agree with this particular argument will also see that the same logic applies to the mosque builders of Manhattan. The fact that millions will take offense is no reason not to say what you wish to say and do what you wish to do in a free society. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Reason Zero: Death

Last year, I did a series of posts called Ten Reasons to Believe in God. I dealt with the most frequent arguments I've heard for the existence of God, such as the argument from design, eye-witness testimony, and documentary evidence such as the Bible or Koran. In the end, I remained firmly in the atheist camp, but I hope I gained at least a little insight as to why some people are believers. Still, looking back at the series now, I'm stunned that I completely skipped what is most likely the most important reason of all. It's so important that I can't really call it reason eleven. It's more like reason zero, a foundational truth that all the others rest upon.

God exists because death exists.

Before this sounds like a retreat from atheism, allow me to clarify that by the use of the word "God" I'm not admitting the existence of an actual deity. God does exist as a tool humans use to navigate the world, a purely human construct or concept like justice or money. It may sound a little deranged to argue that money doesn't exist, since I certainly carry around little green slips of paper in my wallet that I call money, and structure my entire life around accumulating these little green slips. In fact, I've even skipped the step where I collect the paper, and now hungrily pursue mere numbers on a computer screen. These numbers have zero actual value or reality. They exist purely as a shared fiction that makes our modern society possible. Money doesn't need to have any intrinsict value as long as we can all mutually pretend that it does.

And, so it is with God. He doesn't really need to exist as long as a critical mass of people believe that he does. God, like money, has many functions. Money can motivate behavior both good and bad, and so can God. Money can provide a sense of security and well-being, and so can God. But God can do one thing money can't: God provides relief from death.

Being smart enough to understand the future is a pretty horrible thing for humans to have evolved. We are (probably) the only animals smart enough to understand that our deaths are inevitable, and permanent. One day we exist, enjoying our meals, the sunshine, and the company of our loved ones, then, one day, it ends. And, as if the burden of our own mortality weren't enough to bear, we also must face the truth that everyone we love will die, and once they are gone they are gone forever.

Except, of course, we don't have to face these truths. We can, instead, adopt a shared fiction that sidesteps the unpleasant reality. Death isn't inevitable: We were actually created as immortals and death is just a temporary punishment inflicted upon us for our sins. But, one day, God will have finally punished us enough and death will go away. Poof! And, if you happen to die before that glorious day, no problem. God will just bring you back and you'll spend all of eternity surrounded by your friends and family, except for those horrible people who lived differently than you, who will burn in Hell forever and ever.

There are variants of this belief, of course. Some religions just sidestep God and heaven and instead when you die you get recycled into a new body here in this world. If you've behaved well, that body might even be human. And, of course, many people think that bodies are optional equipment, and that when you die you can simply linger on as a ghost, watching over your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren like some benevolent intangible voyeur.

Death is a problem that no human mind has yet solved. But, our shared lie at least takes some of the sting out of death. The inevitability of death is kind of a raw deal: We can't escape it by eating well and exercising, we can't escape it by knowing the right people or having enough money in the bank, we can't escape it because we're famous, or loved by our parents and children, or because our cats need someone to operate the can-opener. The convict on death row, the brave and wise judge that sent him there, and the little girl that was his victim, all wind up with exactly the same fate: death, forever and always. Is it any wonder the mind rebels? Death in its blind and equal treatment of everyone just seems so unfair. You can't blame people for hoping there's a secret way out.

Which, of course, leave me as an atheist on somewhat strange ground. I'm smart enough to understand that money has no inherent value, but I'm also smart enough to understand that my life will be more pleasant if I pretend that it does. I have more access to food, shelter, and comic books by participating in the fiction than I would if I were dogmatic in my rejection of the value of cash. Couldn't the same argument then be made for God? Even if I understand him to be a fiction, wouldn't life be more pleasant if I partook in this fiction? Rather than staring into the abyss of my own inevitable death, or carrying the burden of my ever accumulating losses of people I love, wouldn't life be less stressful if I just went along with the shared coping mechanisms that have been tested and proven effective as a source of relief from the pain of death for thousands of years?

I suppose I'll never know. I've learned what I've learned over the years. I've devoted myself to understanding what's real versus what's false. My knowledge has been burned into me, bright and shining and hot, a candle guiding me through darkness. I can't unburn that candle. Nor would I want to. Because, in the end, it doesn't matter what coping mechanisms you might adopt: You and everyone you love will die. The God escape hatch from death is a door that doesn't actually lead anywhere. Knowing that you can't escape death doesn't devalue your life. Instead, it intensifies the experience. It helps to remind you not to take even the small things for granted. Enjoy that burger you're eating. Kiss your loved ones whenever you meet or depart. Play your car stereo as loud as you like it and sing along, even if you're at a stop light, even if your windows are down. You cannot be aware of death unless you are alive. If you are reading these words, you are alive. You've blood in your veins and breath in your lungs. Treasure these things, and don't waste them.

Atheism may not help you escape death. But it is a kick-ass tool for living life.

Ground Zero Mosque

For a couple of weeks, conservatives have been in outrage mode about plans for a Muslim mosque to be built in New York only a few blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. Liberals have been the main defenders of the mosque, arguing that religious freedom means freedom even for unpopular religions. I honestly don't see how this argument is going to sway a single conservative. The religious right is, let's face it, the Christian right. They are in favor of religious freedom, but the only religion they define as such is Christianity, with the occasional tip of the hat toward Judiasm. Other so-called religions don't deserve any protection or recognition in America because they are so self-evidently absurd or evil that to call them religions taints the word.

You can waive the banner of religious tolerance in front of the conservatives, but it's not a flag that they are ever going to salute. However, I'd like to see some of the conservatives who oppose the mosque respond to a completely different defense: People who own property should be free to use it for any legal purpose they wish. Presumably, the Muslims who want to build the mosque own the land or have a legal lease to it. I haven't heard anyone saying that use of this land was a gift from the city or the state, nor has it been reported that they've occupied the land by force. I know that there are Christian churches in this area, and presumably the new mosque must meet the same zoning requirements that the churches do. So, if they are using their property for a legal enterprise, what gives the government the power to step in and deprive them of this right? And, if conservatives are truly in opposition to the mosque, may I suggest that, instead of protesting or trying to rezone, they simply dig into the deep pockets of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and make an offer to buy the property themselves? This would be the free market solution instead of the authoritarian government solution. They could erect a giant museum there, the Museum of Right Thinking Conservatives that could serve as a shining beacon for the enlightenment of mankind. Just stay away from the men's room if any senators are in town.

If there's one bedrock principal that conservatives are supposed to defend, it's private property rights. If they aren't willing to defend these rights now, do they actually mean anything at all?

My thoughts on turning books into movies....

My thoughts on turning books into movies can be found at fellow fantasy writer Andy Remic's blog, where I've written a post called "Your Book Would Make a Good Movie! (And Why I Know It Wouldn't). While I would be happy to cash any checks Hollywood would care to write me, I tend to have a dim view of the rubberstamp tendency to turn any successful book into a film.

In other news, I'm keenly aware that I haven't produced a blog post here for over two weeks. Eek! I've been staying up late at night working on my kindle edition of Bitterwood, designing covers, troubleshooting fonts, and writing supporting copy. And, at last, it's live! Woo! Anyway, I should soon return to the regularly scheduled programming of offering assinine opinions on subjects that no-one has asked me about. I've got an idea for a further article in my "ten reasons to believe in God" series. Technically, it will the the eleventh reason, but it's a good one, maybe the best one yet, the ultimate truth of why atheism will never truly surpass theism as a way of life. So, keep checking back. This next post is going to be so good, they'll want to make a movie out of it.

Fishing in the Rain

I'm down at the beach this week, making a feeble attempt at relaxing. As always happens when I have time off from my day job I have massive writing goals before me. I'm prepping Bitterwood for Kindle, and I've decided to do a full rewrite. I'm not changing the story much, but I am polishing the prose a good bit. I'd like to finish by Friday, which means I'll likely put in a full fourty hour week.

The other thing keeping me from fully embracing the vacation is the absence of my father. Beach week was fishing week for us. I went fishing last night and spent the whole time thinking about him. It was a dark and stormy night, literally, with lightning far out on the ocean and a steady wind blowing a light rain that never quite reached a level where I decided to give up. The fish weren't biting. But, I had the pier mostly to myself, and there was a beauty to the dark horizon, with the ink black sea rolling beneath black clouds that would turn incandescent as lightning jagged within them.

I stayed out there for hours, thinking about what my father had taught me about fishing. Not much, really. He liked fishing, but wasn't very good at it. But, in the end, fishing isn't really about the fish. I don't think my dad ever said these words, but he taught me the lesson all the same.

And tonight, I'll go fishing again.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.5

Should Gays (and Atheists) Marry?

Few issues unite American's more than the opposition to gay marriage. Even among Democrats, you normally will find few politicians willing to proclaim the union of two homosexuals a marriage, even if they are open minded about allowing civil unions or some other legal partnership.

I admit to having been on the fence. Gay marriage shot to the top of the culture wars after judges in Massachussetts decreed that gays had a constitutional right to marry. I get nervous whenever judges start stretching the meaning of words. Since the founding of our nation, marriage has been commonly accepted as a union between one man and one woman. Even if I agreed that the definition of marriage could and should be expanded to include gays, I would want this changed through actual political debate rather than through judicial fiat. If you allow judges to start altering the meaning of commonly understood words in order to promote some social good, you unintentially grant them the power to do great harm. We live in a land of laws, and we have an open process for changing those laws. Judges shouldn't be able to side step the normal legislative process.

That said, I am 100 percent in favor of gay marriage. I don't want to change the mind of judges, however. I think the first goal should be to change the minds of average Americans. I know that this seems to be an impossible hurdle, and it's an easier, quicker task to change the minds of a handful of judges rather than trying to sway a hundred million voters or more toward your point of view. But, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing right.

So what is my best argument that marriage is an institution that should be open to homosexuals as well as heterosexuals?

Not long ago, I was discussing marriage with an atheist couple. They seemed almost apologetic that they had decided to get married, since it was such a traditional, churchy thing to do. I was familiar with such feelings from my own life. I'm a libertarian, so I don't feel like I should have to seek the approval of a state to decide who I spend my life with. And, I'm an atheist, so I don't need to seek the approval of a god or a church. Of course, our society has built up a lot of legal advantages for married people over non-married people. There are tax benefits, you get breaks on insurance and other shared purchases, and there are estate issue that are vastly simplified if you are legally recognized as the spouse of someone who has just passed away. Once some people have these advantages, it's only natural that people excluded from these advantages would want them as well.

I've never really been happy with the whole "legal advantage" line of thinking. To me, it strips a lot of romance out of marriage. Of course, in a lot of cultures historically, marriage had nothing to do with romance. It was much more nakedly an economic tool than a means of professing love.

But, we live in a culture that has intertwined love and marriage. If you love someone, and keep loving them long enough (a very flexible standard, "long enough"), you marry them. And, that's the sweet and simple reason that atheists do frequently decide to get married; it's a declaration of love. You just want the world to know. To deny gays this same declaration of love seems small minded and small hearted.

I can almost hear the protest now among the defenders of traditional marriage. If a homosexual couple, or atheists, or whomever, wants to hold a big party and dress up in fancy clothes and make a public declaration of their love that includes cake, go for it. It's still not marriage, since the primary goal of marriage, they would argue, is procreation, which homosexual couples are biologically incapable of. Of course, this would also exclude the elderly from getting married. Or, people who are sterile for some random physical malady. Or, people who just don't want children. "Do it for the kids" seems to me to exclude too many people who we do already allow to marry.

As far as the big party, the actual wedding, that's just one day. Weddings do not a marriage make. However, in the traditional vows, you do find what I think are the most honest reasons that homosexuals, atheists, and, well, everyone, should desire marriage: "In sickness and in health, till death do us part."

If marriage were just a contract people entered to raise kids, then everyone could just get divorced after those kids grow up. But marriage isn't a contract only to work together to raise kids, or to be best friends laughing together when times are good. There's a bargain you enter in marriage that overrides everything else: You agree to be the person who will never abandon your partner just because he or she gets sick. You are agreeing to be the person who will change your partner's diapers if they get paralyzed in a car wreck. You are agreeing to sit by a bedside and hold their hands when they are withering away from cancer. You take a stand and say, "I will not abandon you in your times of greatest adversity," with the bargain being that your partner will do the same if it's you in the intensive care unit.

We live in a culture that seeks to restrict marriage from some people, while at the same time, heterosexual marriage seems to have lost its sticking power. The vows for many "traditional" couple seem to have been edited to read, "for better or for worse or until we get tired of each other, or until someone hotter comes along." It's not gays who are the biggest threat to traditional marriage. I think instead it's that we've overemphasised the warm and fuzzy romantic feelings that start a marriage and lost sight of the end game.

Marriage isn't just about the wedding. It's also about the dying. And whether you are straight or gay, Christian, Rastafarian, Hindu or atheist, you are going to one day get sick and die. It's the universal human condition, and marriage and families are the best tools we've developed as humans to help us endure our endings. To deny this comfort to anyone seems to me to be the worst sort of inhumanity.

Cultural Obstacles to Scientific Literacy

I think it's a relatively undisputed premise that Americans are falling behind in scientific literacy. Most objective measures of how our students rank compared to other countries show declining proficiency relative to other nations. Partially this decline may be due to other nations improving their scientific education. Still, while I know that eye-witness testimony is the worst kind of evidence, my own personal experience of trying to find people to intelligently discuss science leads me to think that the situation is even worse than what gets reported. Science, for most people, is something they were forced to study in school that instantly vanishes from their brains the second they hit the real world. Why?

Here are eight possible answers:

1. Religion. I know, as an atheist I'm probably supposed to argue that this is the most important cause. Fundamentalist religion pushes back against fundamental science, disputing such ideas as evolution and the size and age of the universe. On the other extreme, new age religions mangle quantum mechanics in their attempt to seem legitimate (see the movie What the Bleep Do We Know for a truly grating example). And don't even get me started on Scientology. Still, the tensions between religion and science have existed since the time of the Greeks. I don't think it's the primary culprit.

2. Our education system in general. It ain't just science where we ask, "Is our children learning?" An argument can be made that as politicians have tried to improve education, they've wound up instead improving bureaucracy. The right has tried to blame teacher's unions and the breakdown of the family brought about by liberalism. The left has tried to blame a lack of money and right wing censorship. All these things may contribute, but I don't think they quite get at the heart of the issue. I think I'm fairly well educated in science, but my education didn't come primarily from a formal education. Instead, I'm a voracious reader of books and magazines that report on science. The science I was exposed to in high school didn't have as much impact on me as the science I was exposed to reading Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould. The information is out there for anyone who wants an education, completely free, or nearly so. Why don't more people make the effort to learn?

3. Technology. In a counterintuitive argument, as our technology has been improved by those who do understand science, it's weakened the minds of everyone else. I will use the analogy of the automobile: At first glance, the car has improved our mobility. We can move our bodies dozens of miles in space in a matter of minutes. But, the price we've paid is that, unless we really work at exercise, we are weaker and have less stamina than our ancestors. A century ago, the average person could probably walk a dozen miles and think little of it. Today, a dozen miles would be a challenge to most people. The use of machines to improve mobility weakened our bodies. Conversely, the use of machines to improve our knowledge may be weakening our brains. If I ever lose my cell phone, I'm screwed, because I can't remember any one's phone number. And why bother learning history since, if you ever need to know the reason the civil war was fought, you just pull out your smartphone and look it up on wikipedia? The easier and more available information has become, the less value we place on it.



4. Affluence. Our grandfathers came to this country and took jobs as janitors and cops and coal-miners so that their kids could become doctors and lawyers and rocket scientists so that their kids could become performance artists and coffee shop baristas. Of course, affluence doesn't rob people of all ambition. Some of these people have accumulated really great action figure collections. Wealth insulates people from the consequences of their own ignorance.


5. Science fiction. Heresy! So many science geeks, including myself, will report that science fiction opened the door to their interest in science. But, I also think that a lot of my education has been one long string of disappointments as I discover that so much of the foundational assumptions of science fiction, like faster than light travel, time travel, interstellar civilizations, laser pistols, jet bikes, transporters, robot butlers, etc., become less plausible the more science I know. I've bounced back from these disappointments, but I wonder how many other people wound up bummed out that science fiction has made so many promises that actual science can't keep?

6. Science television. Heresy again! Right now, you have television channels like National Geographic and Discovery with a lot of programming related to science. But, the focus is on the big and flashy stuff. If one watches Mythbusters, you might come away with the notion that science is all about making things blow up. Biology, you might assume, is all about finding great white sharks and harassing them into biting your dive cage. The study of dinosaurs on television has become the study of animation and cgi effects rather than the study of fossils. Again, I worry that science television sets up expectations that actual science can't keep. Darwin wrote an entire book on the behavior of earthworms; don't expect the Discovery channel adaption any time soon. Science can and does take place in the absence of animated dinosaurs, great white sharks, and explosions.

7. Politics devours science. Of course, politics devours everything. But, our news media outside of the segregated science shows tends to turn all scientific questions into political questions. For instance, the ongoing oil spill in the gulf has a hundred different scientific elements that deserve reporting. The physical changes that common materials experience once they are under a mile of water is important here. Ocean currents, food chains, coastline migration... there are a lot of scientific questions I'd like to see more reporting on as a result of this spill. Instead, the focus has been almost entirely on what facial expression and mannerisms Obama adopted while talking about the spill. Strip away the politics, and reporters seem bored by the subject. Once they've filmed a few dirty birds and talked to a couple of fishermen, they run out of ideas on how to cover the actual spill.

8. Removal from nature. This is, I think, the biggest culprit of all. Science is the study of reality, and the whole goal of civilization seems to be to remove people from close contact with reality. We spend our lives sealed up inside boxes--our houses, our cars, and our stores, and don't spend that much time outside. I was reading Mark Twain recently, and was struck by a passage where he chronicles the journey of a small caterpillar. His writing is rich with details because he didn't spend his childhood watching television. He spent it outdoors, finding his entertainment in bugs on leaves, on wild islands in the river, and beneath night skies that still had stars in them, rather than a dull silver haze of light pollution. Science has been turned into a subject, something you learn in classrooms, on television, and in books. But, the roots of science come in experiencing the world around us and asking, "why," and "how," and "what the heck is that?" If you want your kid to get interested in science, lock them outside this summer. Let them sleep in the backyard and get curious about all the stuff crawling over them. Take them fishing and let them take apart and devour a fellow denizen of the planet. Get them someplace as dark as you can so there's a chance, at least, of seeing a shooting star.

Newton discovered gravity sitting under an apple tree, and Einstein figured out relativity while biking through Alpine villages. I don't think anyone has yet reported any scientific advances that came to them while they were bowling on their Wii.

What I Should Have Said...

I just arrived back in Hillsborough from ConCarolinas. I'll write more about the con on my other blog when I have the time, but right now I want to continue making an argument that I took part in during my last panel at the con. The panel in question was on censorship. I was making the deliberately provocative statement that there was no true censorship in America, not compared to the censorship you would find in China, Germany, or even Canada, where the government can step in and put you in jail for what you say or publish.

Now, it might seem like censorship takes place all the time. For instance, Comedy Central made South Park censor their depiciton of the prophet Mohommed. There are plenty of books that school libraries remove from their stacks because of parental complaints. The FCC will slap you with fines for saying certain words on television. Also, you have the whole movie rating system where you have restrictions on your audience if you show certain body parts or depict certain acts.

However, in all these cases, the underlying speach or art could still be legally published by the artists. A filmaker can release his film without seeking a rating. The makers of South Park could have quit in protest, and posted cartoons of the prophet Mohammed on their various blogs and other media till they were sick of drawing him. If the local school library won't carry "Susie has Two Mommies," any parent who wants their kid to read the book is free to order it off Amazon.

In none of these cases is the government going to come and put you in jail.

Where the panel went horribly off topic, however, is that another panel member told me how she'd been investigated by social services for being a witch. Someone in the audience chimed in and told me they knew someone whose children had been taken away because they were witches. I expressed an extreme amount of skepticism. First, I believe that social service workers are perfectly capable of abusing their power and taking children away from loving parents for reasons that are wrong or mistaken. But, the law plainly prohibits the government discriminating against the religion. You cannot have your kids taken from you because of your religion. Now, actions you take because of your religion might be a different thing: The fundamentalist Mormon's who were having their 14 year old daughters "marry" their 80 year old prophet a few years back are an obvious case where religion lay at the root of removing the children, but the actual laws broken were statuatory rape, not the belief in wierd crap.

The panel closed with the last word going to somone who told the tale of a topless dancer who's kids were taken from her even though her profession was legal. I had no time to respond to this. I'm certain that such things happen; no doubt topless dancers have children taken away all the time. But, I don't think this constitutes censorship; presumably, even if her child is taken away, a topless dancer is free to keep on dancing. And, I'm reminded of the very famous case of Courtney Love losing custody of her daughter. One could argue that it was to prosecute her for her famously foul-mouthed lyrics, but I suspect that the judge was moved far more by the fact that Ms. Love was also an ill-tempered drug adict. (Whose music I admire, by the way.) At the risk of slandering all topless dancers, I suspect that, in the cases where children are removed, there are other facts at hand arguing for the removal of the children.

Sure, there are actual cases of governmental censorship where some prosecutor with a name to make is going to go after some gay bookstore selling a racy calendar or comic book shop selling japanese tentacle porn. Standing up and defending the free speech rights of these people is important. But, I feel like most arguments of censorship amount to little more than whining and/or promotion. For instance, any list of books banned in recent history is going to include the Harry Potter series, removed from many a school library for promoting witchcraft. I don't think any statistics could possibly drawn to prove this, but I suspect that in schools that ban the book, you'll wind up with more kids reading it than you do in schools that just allow it the book to go onto the shelf. It's hard for me to accept the notion that a book is "banned" if I can walk into my local grocery store and buy a copy. Complaining about censorship on a book that sells millions of copies simply devalues the word.

Am I missing something here? Is there some horrible wave of oppressive silencing of free speech going on that I'm missing? Are our prison's filled with writers, artists, and musicians guilty of nothing more than expressing unapproved thoughts?