Great Games #1: Civilization II

I intend this to be the first in a series of posts about great computer games I've played, and it only seems right to start with perhaps my favorite game of all time, Sid Meier's Civilization II.

I never played the original Civilization, first released by Microprose in 1991, but it doesn't appear to have been too much different from the 1996 sequel, at least in gameplay. In Civ II, you start in 4000 BCE as the leader of a primitive nomadic tribe (represented in the game as a single settler unit) and your goal, over the next few thousand years of human history, is to found a nation, research technologies up to and including space travel, and dominate your rivals either militarily or by being the first civilization to send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri. Yes, the scope of the game is incredible.

The very first thing you must do is choose the site of your capital city. As in the real world, terrain is important. A mountain might be easy to defend, but it could leave you short of food. Best is on a river or seacoast, surrounded by fertile grassland, with good fishing nearby, maybe some hills or forests. Ideally, you want some special resources in the city radius, too. Unfortunately, most of the world is unknown to you. You'll have to explore to discover anything other than your immediate surroundings.

And you really can't waste time. The game is turn-based, which means that you can think as long as you want before making decisions. But when you click to end the turn, game-years will pass. If you don't want to get left behind by quicker civilizations, you need to pick the best spot immediately available and found your first city. That will use up your initial settler.

(screenshot from TheCrankyHermit)

With a city established, you can start building units - settlers, which build roads and alter terrain when they're not being used to found new cities, and primitive armies to defend your realm. And you can start researching new technologies, beginning with such simple discoveries as pottery, horseback riding, and the alphabet. These discoveries open up new avenues for research, permit the construction of more powerful military units, and let your cities build new improvements.

Cities require food to grow, and they normally generate (and require) taxes and production. Much of the fun in Civ II lies in siting your cities, building roads and railroads, improving terrain (mining, irrigating, clearing jungles, etc.), and ensuring that your cities, and your whole civilization, grow. I usually have hordes of settlers - and later, engineers - working everywhere. Civilization isn't just a wargame. Building is at least as important as warfare, and generally more fun, at least for me.

But it isn't SimCity, either. If your civilization is to survive, you must defend it from barbarians (in the early years) and from other nations. I must admit that, in the later years, when I've got a powerful nation connected by railroads, with tanks and artillery and aircraft, waging war is great fun, too. The early game and the late game are both fun, but pretty much for different reasons. In the early years, it's discovering the rest of the world and claiming the best parts for yourself. In the later years, it's building these huge cities and massive armies, and then taking on the world.

(screenshot from 101 Video Games)

In the early years, barbarians are a real threat. Much later, pollution becomes a problem (and a global one - it's not just what your nation does that matters.) Nuclear weapons are another difficulty, once they've been discovered. And as your population grows, it becomes harder to keep your citizens happy. It's really impressive how the game holds your interest with one thing after another like this. And it's hard to stop playing, as you keep wanting to click that end turn button to see what happens next.

Note that Civ II was one of those classic games with a huge - and fascinating - manual. It was a real education in history to read the thing. And it didn't stop there. Within the game was the Civilopedia, giving detailed information on concepts, units, terrain, and city improvements, all at your fingertips. 

Civilization II stayed on my hard drive for years and years. I've never played another game so much, not even close. The idea and the gameplay were equally superb. Civilization III was released in 2001, but I was disappointed in it. Civ III introduced national borders to the game, but this was implemented so poorly, they were almost useless. When other nations trespassed, you could ask them to leave, and their units would be transferred to just outside your nation's borders. But the next turn, they'd be trespassing again. And if you kept asking them to leave, they'd always declare war.

Civilization IV (2005) is the latest in the series, and it got borders right. It also let you play more realistically as a peaceful nation. With Civ II, peace was always temporary, because when you got ahead, all the other nations would gang up on you. In Civ IV, a lasting peace with another civilization is very possible. That was a great advance.

But I still didn't play the game much. I don't know, maybe I'd just played Civ II too many times. There is a limit to how long I can play what's basically the same game. But Civ IV seems like it moves really, really slowly. I never thought that with the earlier game. If you look at the individual features, Civ IV is a real improvement. But I just don't think it's as much fun to play.

Well, Civ II is no longer installed on my computer these days, either. As I say, there is a limit. But I played it for years and years. It is really a superb game, quite possibly the best strategy game ever made.

Edit: The next in this series looks at X-Com: UFO Defense

Glenn Beck more rational than John McCain?

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At the Washington Zoo

(The Far Left Side)

Take Back America?

(drawing by Barry Blitt, New York Times)

In his New York Times column, Frank Rich puts Arizona's hysteria over illegal immigration into larger context:

Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. Lest there be any doubt of that confluence, Rush Limbaugh hammered the point home after Obama criticized Arizona’s action. “I can understand Obama being touchy on the subject of producing your papers,” he said. “Maybe he’s afraid somebody’s going to ask him for his.” Or, as Glenn Beck chimed in about the president last week: “What has he said that sounds like American?”

The hysteria over brown people entering our country is not new, but it's been growing. (And it is hysteria, despite very real concerns about border security.) Here in Nebraska, anti-immigrant fervor is common. Illegal immigrants are the scapegoat for every problem. Unemployed? That's because those illegal immigrants are taking all the jobs. Concerned about government spending? That's due to all those illegal immigrants on welfare, since none of them want to work for a living. Oh, yeah, and they're stealing your Social Security, too. (Funny, huh?)

Some concern is reasonable, of course. Beef-packing plants in Nebraska used to pay well. Then corporations learned that they could break the unions and drastically cut pay by hiring immigrants along the Mexican border (with no concern about whether they were legal immigrants or not). A huge influx of poor Hispanics kept wages down, while posing expensive problems to the local school system and other government services.

But anger was often misdirected at the immigrants themselves, poor people who just wanted a job. A lot of that was bigotry, too. It's easy to whip up hysteria in a situation like this. Heck, there were riots when Irish Catholics - some of them my own ancestors - started arriving in America in large numbers a century and a half ago. And they were white. In small-town America, different means scary. And when times are bad, fear turns into anger very quickly.

Hispanics are the fastest-growing group in America, and that frightens many non-Hispanic whites who've already been unsettled by the huge advances in civil rights in this country. When I was a kid, white men were on top. There was absolutely no question about that. And generally speaking, they still are. But it's not automatic these days. Now, women are becoming better educated than men. And that difference is starting to show up in job opportunities.

And minorities are much more visible now - and not nearly as willing to sit in the back of the bus. White births are supposed to become a minority in America any day now. And even the president is a black man. Is there any wonder we see this "Take Back America" hysteria now?

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. It’s no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state’s 2012 ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that “birther” bill was abruptly yanked Thursday.

Illegal immigration is not new. It's not a sudden crisis. But it's coming to a head this year for the same reason that we're seeing Tea Parties and "birthers." The symbolism of a black man in the White House has created an explosion of fear and bigotry in a certain segment of white America. After all, he'll be favoring "his people," right? (Right,... if by "his people" you mean Americans.) And since Glenn Beck tells us that Obama - the loving son of a white woman - is a racist, with a "deep-seated hatred for white people," who knows what he might do to us?

Republicans from Fox "News" on down have been exploiting this fearful bigotry for political purposes. But admittedly, they've also got a tiger by the tail. Republicans have been pushing racism since at least 1964, when they saw the opportunity to wrestle the South from the Democratic Party (the South being the most solidly Democratic part of the country before the Democrats got behind civil rights legislation). Pandering to racists was just good politics, and it let the Republican Party dominate at the federal level for decades.

Note that this was recently admitted by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. To the dismay of many party leaders, he admitted that the "Southern Strategy" had been the focus of the GOP "for the past 40-plus years." Is it any wonder that the Republican Party has so few minority members, when they've been deliberately pandering to bigots for the past four decades?

Thinking that this made good political sense, Republican leaders have been wooing the most fearful, the most ignorant, the most bigoted segment of America for decades. Pushing fear was wildly successful at motivating the base, so that's what they did - and continue to do. Racists, gun-toting militiamen, religious fanatics, far-right extremists - all these were valuable to the GOP because they were dedicated, motivated foot-soldiers. And because they would let wealthy corporate interests do whatever they wanted, as long as party leaders paid lip service to their culture war issues.

But suddenly, the tail started wagging the dog. By pandering to extremists, Republicans started driving away moderates. This made the rest of the party even more extreme, which drove away more moderates. Pretty soon, the Republican base started seeing moderate conservatives as traitors to the cause. And now, even long-time conservative leaders are running scared. These days, you can't ever be too extreme in the GOP. The only sin is moderation, and compromise with Democrats is appeasement. No Republican has the guts to stand up to the lunatic wing of their own party, because the lunatic wing is the party these days. It's all that's left.

Outbreaks of nativist apoplexy are nothing new in American history. The last derailed George W. Bush’s apparently earnest effort to get a bipartisan immigration compromise through the Senate in 2007. At the time, the more egregious expressions of anti-immigrant rage — including Arizona’s self-appointed border-patrol militia, the Minutemen — were stigmatized as a fringe by the White House and much of the G.O.P. establishment. John McCain, though facing a tough fight for the Republican presidential nomination, signed on to the Bush reform effort despite being slimed by those in his party’s base who accused him of supporting “amnesty.”

What a difference the Tea Party makes. This time McCain endorsed his state’s new immigration law as “a good tool” and “a very important step forward,” and propagandized in favor of it with his widely ridiculed televised canard that illegal immigrants were “intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.” McCain, like other mainstream conservative Republicans facing primaries this year, is now fighting for his political life against a Tea Party-supported radical. His opponent, the former congressman and radio shock jock J. D. Hayworth, is an unabashed birther who frames the immigration debate as an opportunity to “stand up for our culture,” presumably against all immigrants, legal and illegal alike. In this political climate, he could well win.

McCain, like Arizona, shouldn’t be singled out for censure: He is far from alone in cowering before his party’s extremists. Neither Mitch McConnell, John Boehner nor Eric Cantor dared say a word against Arizona’s law. Mitt Romney, who was mocked during the 2008 campaign for having employed undocumented Guatemalan immigrants as landscapers on his Massachusetts estate, tried to deflect the issue by vacillating (as usual). So did Mike Huckabee, who told The Dallas Morning News last week that “it’s not my place to agree or disagree” with what happened in Arizona. If it’s not the place of a talk-show host and prospective presidential candidate to take a stand on an issue of this moment, whose place is it? There are few profiles in courage among the leaders in this G.O.P. — only a lot of guys hiding under their desks.

I can't feel sorry for the GOP, though I can - and I am - frightened at what they might again do to my country. (Wasn't eight years of unmitigated disaster enough?) In the 1960's, the Democratic Party made the principled decision to support civil rights for blacks, despite knowing that it would destroy the party in the South. They knew that this would be a political disaster, that they'd lose the most solidly Democratic part of our country, but they did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do. Democrats have never been perfect, but this was truly admirable.

And Republicans were gleeful. They, too, knew what this would do to the Democrats in the South, and they cynically proposed to make the most of it by wooing southern white racists themselves. And so they have. Because of this, America has suffered a great deal under conservative political control. But Republicans are starting to see this bite them on the ass. Minorities are becoming a larger and larger proportion of the American electorate. And most whites aren't racists these days, either. Pushing fear might work pretty well with the elderly, but young people are somewhat resistant (not entirely immune, unfortunately).

Now the Democrats have elected a black president, and the bigots are panicking. Republicans are terrified of the demographics on this, and as usual, they're willing to go to any lengths for their political ambition (unfortunately, they've got Fox "News" behind them these days, pushing every lie as hard as they can). White bigots are suddenly hysterical, and this is coming out in the Tea Party movement.

These days, blatant racism is no longer acceptable in polite - "politically correct" - society. As a white man, I regularly hear racist comments, but people invariably lower their voices first. And most of these people will indignantly deny that they're racist. Few people will admit even to themselves that they're racist, and very few will admit this in public. Yes, our country has changed that much. But attitudes don't change overnight, and it's very, very easy to fear people who are different. That's just human nature.

In the Tea Party, that fear is largely redirected - often deliberately - into economic terms, but it is still based in bigotry. It's no coincidence that we have tea-baggers now, but not while Bush was in office. Yes, partly that's because Bush was a right-wing Republican, too, and current tea-baggers are the same people who put him in office and supported every lunatic policy the Republicans came up with. But it's also because Bush was white. You really can't get around that.

It’s harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party’s controlling force — the tail that’s wagging the snarling dog. It’s also hard to maintain that the Tea Party’s nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has “no idea where Obama was born.” The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it’s Obama and the “lamestream media” that are responsible for “perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part” of Arizona’s law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting “they will look at the kind of dress you wear.” Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.

Ah, yes, it's white men who really face discrimination in America. You can't imagine how many times I've heard that. It would be hilarious if it weren't so embarrassing. These days, white men have to compete with minorities and with women. Tough! It's not their fathers' America. (In fact, it's a far better America, as most of us realize.) If the boss hires his nephew or his neighbor's kid - both white, of course - no one thinks anything of it. But if he hires a black man, a Hispanic, or - for many jobs - a woman, then they must have gotten the job only because they're a minority. Clearly, the whole thing was rigged!

Likewise, Barack Obama's election must have been rigged - by ACORN or some Jewish cabal - right? And he's not a "real" American anyway. (The proof? He doesn't look anything like us.)  It must all be a plot. He must really be a Muslim, a terrorist, a Communist, a socialist, a Nazi,...  Again, this should be funny. Anyone less like the "angry black man" stereotype would be hard to find. (Ah, but that just means that he's elitist, right?)  And how is Obama the Nazi when it's the Republicans torturing prisoners and making one segment of the population carry identification cards proving that - for now, at least - they're legal?

The GOP, pushed to the extremes by its own far-right base, lost the election in 2008 after eight disastrous years when Republicans controlled the White House (six years of which they firmly controlled all three branches of the federal government). It's funny, because for eight long years, I wanted to "take back America," myself. I was desperate to rescue our country from those far-right ideologues willing to wage war on an innocent country - on credit, no less - if it would advance their political goals.

I wanted to stop the wealthy from treating our Treasury as their own little piggy bank. I wanted to "take back America" from the religious nuts who consider Thomas Jefferson to be un-American, from the timid little cowards willing to let a demagogue torture prisoners of war, from the creationists and the global warming deniers and everyone else who refuse to accept evidence from careful scientific research if it conflicts with their fantasies.

But I assure you, I'll fight long and hard against letting the bigots "take back America" now. We got rid of slavery, we got rid of official segregation, we gave women and minorities and poor people the vote. We regulated the banks. We worked to protect the environment. We created a social safety net - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and now health insurance reform. This is my America, and you fearful little bigots can't have it back!

What's next?

Perhaps when you join a patriarchal church run by celibate old men, still following the top-down, authoritarian, and very Medieval divine right of kings governing philosophy, you shouldn't be surprised by any of this. But as an outsider, I never cease to be amazed at the Catholic Church.

Now they're going after the nuns who supported health care reform:

In the fierce closing debate over health care reform, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops charged that the legislation didn’t do enough to restrict insurance coverage of abortions. Many Catholic nuns and the Catholic Health Association of the United States, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals, looked at the same bill and concluded that it would have no effect on abortion financing. They signed a letter urging its passage, saying the reform was “life-affirming” and consistent with Catholic values.

Now one bishop is punishing the nuns who supported reform. Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt of Greensburg, Pa., has decreed that “any religious community” that signed the letter would be forbidden to use the diocese’s offices, parishes or newspaper to promote programs that encourage young people to consider the religious life. ...

Bishop Brandt accuses the nuns of taking “a public stance in opposition to the church’s teaching on human life.” The nuns did not challenge the church’s doctrine of life from conception to natural death. They saw the bill as a powerfully positive step, because it provided health insurance to millions of people without it, and hundreds of millions of dollars for the care of pregnant women. 

OK, so I don't suppose that this is any big deal, not compared to the child abuse debacle. I don't think church leaders get that, even now. For the rest of us, their complete unconcern for the children who were victimized, covering up the abuse and just moving child-rapists to some other parish, is just astounding.

But the concern of church leaders, from the pope on down, is entirely on preserving the organization itself, the organization that is, for them, family, lover, job, and religion all rolled into one. The people who worship there are just petty, often annoying, details compared to the overarching importance of the institution.

It's not surprising that celibate old men, who've given their entire lives to the church, would feel that way, I guess. Of what importance are children, anyway? Children are just those reproductive units some people have. Children come and go. The Catholic Church is forever. But what is surprising is how dumb they've been about this. Couldn't they at least pretend to care about the victims?

(Ed Stein)

Instead, they persist in casting the church itself as the real victim. So far, that I've seen, they've blamed Jews for the criticism (and, ironically, also compared criticizing the Catholic Church to anti-Semitic violence), the devil, the media (and the New York Times in particular, since they've been publishing embarrassing church documents), homosexuals, the secularization of society, sexual liberation (which "wants paedophilia accepted as just another sexual preference"), the victims' own families, and yes, even the victims themselves ("There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it,...").

According to the Catholic Church, allegations of covering up child rape - and therefore helping pedophiles to new victims - are just "petty gossip," because issues like abortion, gay marriage, and the ordination of women are driving their critics mad. And besides, everyone else does it, right? Priests are no worse than anyone else. (Sorry, no link. Either I misplaced it, or the church edited that post after it received so much criticism.)

Again, the church seems tone-deaf. Everyone else does not do it, obviously. And if you believe the mythology, priests aren't supposed to be like everyone else, anyway. They claim to be your child's intermediary with God, for crissake! They're trusted, which just makes their opportunities for abuse all that much greater. And when they do abuse children, the church response is to threaten excommunication - not to the priests raping children, but to anyone who won't keep it a secret.

(Ed Stein)

So if child rape is just petty gossip, what really gets the church's knickers in a twist? The current pope was once known as "God's rottweiler." Why? Well, not because of any concern with priests raping children, but because of his eager attacks on any theology he considered too liberal. Yeah, gotta hate those liberals, huh? Considered a stern disciplinarian, he worked hard to keep priests from straying from the party line. You get the feeling that parishioners were just a necessary evil, hardly worth his concern.

So, what's next for the Catholic Church? How about priests raping nuns? According to this article, young nuns in Africa and Asia are the preferred choice for priestly rapists because they're less likely to have AIDS than other potential victims. And uneducated young women from the poorest families, taught from birth not to challenge men or anyone else in authority, are easy prey.

But don't worry. The church considers these allegations just "trivialities." Hardly worth bothering about, don't you think?

THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists

and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for the teabaggers and birthers and conspiracy theorists,
and I said “Woohoo! Round those suckers up!”

(I had to laugh when I saw this on Bay of Fundie.)

The Simon Singh Song

If you're not familiar with the Simon Singh libel case in the UK, where he was persecuted by the British Chiropractic Association for telling the truth, check it out here or here. And sign the petition at the Libel Reform Campaign.

Social Darwinism/Economic Libertarianism

In her column in The Washington Post, Susan Jacoby points out that not all atheists are politically liberal. It may seem that way, since the religious right and the political right are both concentrated in the Republican Party these days. But atheists tend to be skeptics (the reverse is usually, but not always, true as well), and we skeptics are quite diverse in our thinking.

And historically, secular thinking - which is basically what we Americans always thought our government was all about - has never been limited to any particular political creed. But Jacoby identifies one long-standing secular philosophy, descended from social Darwinism but whose modern supporters might claim as simply economic libertarianism:

The modern descendants of the social Darwinists are cultural libertarians but economic conservatives, influenced in some instances, as their predecessors were, by pseudo-scientific convictions about racial intellectual superiority--which they attribute not to God but to nature itself. This strain of American secularism and atheism runs from the social Darwinists of the Gilded Age through the eugenicists of the early 20th century and the followers of Ayn Rand's so-called objectivism, to those within secular organizations today who insist on calling themselves skeptics, are offended by the depiction of secularists as humanists, and tend to be as opposed to government social programs as members of the religious right.

The essence of social Darwinism was its assertion (never made by Darwin) that the struggle of organisms for existence in nature was replicated by the struggle of humans within civilization. The poor were poor not because God had decreed it, as religious conservatives had claimed about slavery, but because they simply did not have the wits or the strength to be anything else. The inventor of social Darwinism (though he did not call it that) was the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, whose ideas received a much more favorable reception in Gilded Age America than in his native England. Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and applied it to human beings.

This is, of course, a summary by an opponent of this philosophy. I think it's quite fair as a historical description, but modern proponents will quite likely claim to have abandoned the racism of the past. Fine. But then, what does this political philosophy imply these days? (Note that I'll comment on a few other points in Jacoby's column in the second page of this post. For now, I just want to examine this particular question.)

Suppose that this political philosophy - or the modern incarnation of it - is exactly correct. Suppose that the wealthy are better people than the rest of us - not just better at making money, but better in all qualities that matter. Suppose that successful people deserve their success, and that we should be celebrating that. Suppose, as a strict value judgment, that this is exactly the correct path for our country and our world. What then does that imply?

Obviously - or so it seems to me - this does not imply establishing any kind of hereditary aristocracy, whether based on wealth or anything else. In fact, just the reverse. Clearly, we'd want people to get ahead based on their own merits, not on who their parents were, and not on special advantages which they'd enjoy and others wouldn't. As much as possible, in this game of merit, we'd want to begin with a level playing field, wouldn't we? Doesn't this whole philosophy imply that?

And therefore, as a society, we'd need to insure that all children start off with an equal - or at least a fair - chance. Only then would their success be truly a matter of ability (and luck, true, but we can't entirely eliminate chance as an influence - and likely still a big one, no matter what we do). So this philosophy seems to imply heavy estate taxes, so that all children have to work for what they get, rather than floating through life on the effort of a parent, grandparent, or distant ancestor.

It also implies an intense government effort in childhood - especially early-childhood - nutrition and education. No child should be unfairly denied an equal start on their life, to the extent that we can manage this. After all, we want success to be based on merit, don't we? And free public education at all levels should be uniformly good (or uniformly bad, I guess - but it's hard to imagine we'd think that was the way to go). No child should get a bad education just because he was raised in poverty, and no child should get the unfair advantage of superior schools and superior teachers just because some ancestor was especially successful. (Ideally, of course, we'd want all schools and all teachers to be superior.)

Remember, we're assuming, rightly or wrongly, that this social Darwinist/libertarian philosophy is the correct path for us all. These are the implications of that. If success based on individual merit is our goal, then we must see that we promote exactly that.

Of course, to make sure that children have a level playing field, we must work very hard to improve the resources of the poorest children. Clearly, it would be stupid to focus on making education worse for rich kids, as a way of giving everyone an equal start. I think we can all agree on that, can't we?  But it will still take money - lots and lots of money - to bring educational standards up for everyone else. We've already agreed, hopefully, on the need for a heavy estate tax, but we're also going to need progressive taxation.

Progressively higher real taxes (despite any deductions) on the wealthier members of society won't be a punishment for their success, certainly not. It will merely be a means of ensuring a fair start to all children, so that we really can have a merit-based society. And, of course, it's the rich who have the money, so that's where we must go if we want to actually implement this conservative philosophy.

But there's more. If we want success to be the result of our individual capabilities and effort, we must make sure that fraud and theft is minimized (it will never be completely eliminated, I'm sure). You will be encouraged to get ahead, but not by stealing from others. That would clearly give you an unfair advantage,... and an unfair advantage would mean that it's not the truly deserving people who become successful.

This implies not just strong enforcement of SEC rules and anti-monopoly laws, but also strict enforcement by the Environmental Protection Agency. Obviously, dumping pollution - such as carbon dioxide emissions - into the commons gives the dumpers an unfair advantage by unloading the costs on our whole society while keeping the profits for themselves. This is not getting ahead based on merit.

In fact, we'd need to target the whole "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor" government system which most conservatives seem to push. Rational economic libertarians would still accept "socialist" policies to give every child a good start in life, but would be adamant that corporate costs couldn't be unloaded on the public, for private gain. That kind of "socialism" is just not fair, and it seems to be the antithesis of the philosophy that success should be based on merit.

I'm not an economic libertarian - and certainly not a social Darwinist - but I can enthusiastically support these particular policies. It's only in other aspects of this philosophy where I'd be in opposition. For example, I wouldn't be willing to let the elderly starve to death, no matter how poorly they'd managed their lives. Likewise, I think that health care is a right, not a privilege. As a society, we are wealthy enough these days to afford these things. But I don't think any of that would have a significant effect on this basic idea. After all, it's luxuries - and social status - that's really the incentive for most people.

There would be some difficult decisions, true. No matter what, a child's home life will make a huge difference in his opportunities. Yes, we can make sure he gets enough food, but can we do that while letting his parents starve?  And it's hard to study when you're cold, when you're sitting in the dark, or even homeless. How do you make sure that unsuccessful people suffer as they deserve, while also ensuring that all children start with a level playing field and a fair chance to rise on their own merits. That's probably the fundamental contradiction of this philosophy.

No, I can't go along with it, myself. But I'm not a big proponent of theory-based proposals, anyway, not in the social science arena. I'm more of a practical guy. Identify a problem, examine proposed solutions, and test the most likely of them. OK, we can't ethically treat human beings as lab rats, but we can attempt a solution and then study the results.

People who are too wedded to a particular philosophy see everything through that lens. Idealists have done a lot of harm in the world. Of course, they've also done a lot of good. Without idealism, we'd never get anywhere. But in general, when it comes to politics and to social policies in general, I'd rather look to the practical than the theoretical.

And libertarians of all stripes seem to be overwhelmingly, often ridiculously, theoretical. Most libertarians of my acquaintance take everything to its most absurd conclusion. It's as if they have no regulator at all. Once set in libertarian mode, they move immediately to extremes. But then, this is a generalization, and like all generalizations, I'm sure it's not always true.

Below the fold, I'll discuss (more briefly, I hope) a couple of other points from Susan Jacoby's column.

Non-Belief, Pt. 1: Childhood

All the time I grew up, I never heard anyone express the slightest doubt that God existed. Indeed, as far as I knew, I never knew anyone who wasn't a Christian. Sure, people went to different churches - the Methodist church in our small town, the Lutheran church just outside it, the Catholic church in the next town - but they were all Christian, and the differences didn't seem to matter much to anyone.

I must say that this was nice. It was definitely progress, compared to the bigotry faced by my Irish Catholic immigrant ancestors in the mid-1800's. And it was even more definitely progress considering the European religious wars, and the practice of burning heretics alive, from earlier centuries. As a child, I thus got the impression that your religion was your own business. We went to the Methodist church, but I had friends of many different religions (all Christian, though), and it just didn't matter.

Maybe if there'd been non-Christians around, I would have gotten a different impression, I don't know. I do remember going to the dime-store in a neighboring town with my Mom, when she told me that the owner was Jewish. This was a teachable moment. I don't remember her exact words, but I do remember her point: that some people were bigoted towards Jews, but how that wasn't right. I readily absorbed that lesson. It sounded right to me then, and it still does.

But everyone I knew - as far as I know - was a Christian. Everyone apparently believed in God. Except me. I know how untrustworthy our memories can be, but as far back as I can remember, I remember having doubts, strong doubts. I assume, at some age, that I must have believed what everyone told me. But I just don't remember that.

I do very clearly remember believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. In fact, I still remember when I asked my Mom if the Easter Bunny was really true. She just said, "What do you think?"  That sticks in my mind, because I still think it was a great answer. Maybe she didn't mean it this way, but I took it to mean that I had to decide for myself what to believe, not just when it came to the Easter Bunny, but with God, too.

But I don't think I believed in God even then, not really. After all, there was plenty of evidence for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Someone brought us gifts at Christmas and signed the tags "from Santa." And plenty of people claimed to have seen him. In fact, we kids almost caught Santa one Christmas Eve. He had to leave so quickly that he left his empty toy bag behind. (I remember that it looked remarkably like a plain white pillowcase - but that still didn't make me even slightly suspicious.)

And someone always hid the Easter Eggs that we'd colored the day before - and brought us baskets of chocolates, too. Where did they come from if it wasn't the Easter Bunny?  Who left me money for my baby teeth if it wasn't the Tooth Fairy?  I understand now that none of this was good evidence, but at least it was evidence. And it wouldn't have taken good evidence to get me to believe in a god, not at all. But I did need some evidence.

As I say, I didn't know anyone who admitted doubts about God. But some people were regular church-goers, some were less frequent at services, and some rarely or never went to church. And how nice a person was didn't seem to have any connection to how religious they were. Some of the nicest people I've ever known have been deeply religious - and some of the nastiest, too. I always got the impression that going to church was supposed to make me a better person, but it really didn't seem to have that effect on other people.

I was always surprised to see that people who were so devout in church turned out to behave normally - some good and some bad - outside it. Clearly, church didn't make people good. Some people who went to church were already good, and some weren't. It was as simple as that.

And, of course, everyone was convinced that they'd go to Heaven when they died, and that unspecified "bad people" would go to Hell. But even as a child, I understood that they couldn't possibly know that. If you were alive, you couldn't have first-hand knowledge of the afterlife - and that was pretty obviously the case throughout human history. Santa Claus brought me presents every Christmas. Would I still have believed in him if those gifts were only supposed to arrive after I was dead?

This is how I remember it, although I could be wrong, of course. As I say, our memories are quite malleable and very unreliable. I did go to church, for awhile - I enjoyed the singing - but it all seemed very peculiar. Why did everyone else seem to believe all this?  I just didn't get it.

Now, admittedly, I used to read everything I could get my hands on. I know that there was a time I didn't know how to read, but I can't really remember that, either. Reading has always been a big part of my life. And as a child, I was always desperate for something new to read. I would dig through boxes of books in our basement - most of them very unappealing - looking for something to read. I went through the tiny library in our little town, and the even tinier library in our school. I was always reading.

And so my childhood in that small Nebraska town wasn't as provincial as you might expect. I learned about the rest of the world through books. I read about Mormons in Zane Grey westerns, sometimes as victims of bigots, sometimes victimizing others. I loved Charles Dickens (until high school English classes put paid to that forever). I read my Dad's childhood adventure stories. I read Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, falling in love with the Jewish daughter, Rebecca (or perhaps that didn't happen until I saw Elizabeth Taylor in the movie).

I read dog books and horse books. I read Harold Bell Wright. I read biographies of Alexander the Great and William the Conqueror (my disappointment with the endings of both books emphasized to me the difference between fiction and non-fiction). And for awhile, I was wild about ancient Greek and Roman mythology, understanding very clearly that these were religious beliefs at one time, too - but now just unbelievable stories.

So I wasn't restricted to just what I heard in my church or my town, or even to what I learned in school. (I remember my science teacher in 5th grade - who was also a Sunday School teacher, though not in our church - telling me that tattoos were wrong because they were "pagan.")  But I wasn't reading atheist manifestos, either. In fact, my all-time favorite childhood book was Swiss Family Robinson (not the Disney version, but the original 1812 novel by Johann Rudolf Wyss), in which the heroes were deeply religious Christians.

I never advertised my disbelief, just because it never seemed to be anyone else's business. (I didn't deny it, either, but I don't remember anyone who didn't just assume that I was a Christian.) It didn't occur to me to ask Mom and Dad. Perhaps that's because of Mom's answer about the Easter Bunny. Or perhaps it's just because I understood that they couldn't really know any more about it that I did, that no one had any special knowledge when it came to something based only on belief.

I remember some bull sessions in high school (one of my best friends - and a very nice guy - was deeply religious). But although I was amazed at how differently people could think - even given the same facts, we came to completely different conclusions - it didn't seem to be any big deal. After all, what difference did it make? This was America, where religious freedom was enshrined in our Constitution.

Well, the world has changed a lot since then, hasn't it? In Part 2 - whenever I get around to it - I'll explain how I came to decide that I just had to start publicly outing myself as an atheist.

___
Note: The rest of this series, including Part 2, is here.

"A Case of Conscience" by James Blish

(cover image borrowed from another good review here)

I just re-read A Case of Conscience (1958) by James Blish, our April selection in the ClassicScienceFiction Yahoo Group. I first read it decades ago, but this is one book that stayed in my memory all those years (that's unusual, for me).

I'd say it's held up pretty well, but parts of it seem rather odd these days. It starts with four humans on the recently-discovered planet Lithia, which contains an intelligent reptilian species. Their job is to learn about the planet and recommend whether or not the planet should be opened for human activity. But basically, they're just trying to see what use the planet might be for human beings. After all, what good is a planet if we can't put it to our own use?

No one seems to be particularly interested in the Lithians, the first sentient aliens humans have ever encountered. No, they just wonder what good the planet might prove to be (for them), and whether there are any hidden dangers there. It's base colonialism, yes, but it also shows an incredible, almost unbelievable disinterest in what would actually be one of the biggest discoveries in human history. A whole 'nother planet with a brand new people, with their own history, their own culture, their own thoughts,... and all we care about is what use we can make of it.

Oddly enough, that's not the story. No, it just seems to be understood as... natural. Well, this book was written in the 1950's, but still. This mindset is just bizarre, don't you think?

Anyway, one of the humans has discovered vast supplies of lithium there, so he wants the Earth government to use the whole planet as a giant fusion bomb factory. (There's absolutely no concern or even interest in what the Lithians might think of this.) Note that they don't actually have any enemies on which to use the bombs, since the Earth is all under one government, controlled by the UN. And the friendly, planet-bound Lithians are the only aliens ever discovered. But that seems to be just an insignificant detail. Surely if you build enough bombs, you'll eventually find someone to bomb, right?

Maybe some group will try to revolt on Earth - and need to be nuked out of existence. Or maybe they'll find some other intelligent species, one not so welcoming as the Lithians, one with the temerity to actually want to "stay out of our frame of influence." (How dare they?!?)  We'll be "damned glad if we're able to plaster the enemy from pole to pole with fusion bombs" then, right?  (Ah, the 1950's! This brings back the wonderful stench of Joe McCarthy, doesn't it?)

And he suggests that they force the Lithians to work in these bomb factories, keeping them ignorant so they don't learn how to make bombs themselves. That sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Would this be slavery? Of course, not! Sure, they'd be forcing the aliens to work, but after all, they do plan to pay them for that work, although the Lithians don't use money and don't want anything the humans would exchange for their forced labor. But again, those are just minor details.

And again, oddly enough, that's not the story here, either. No, the real story begins when the Catholic priest, a Jesuit who's one of these four humans, advises that the planet be quarantined permanently. Why? Well, the aliens are a very nice, friendly, honest people with a pleasant, peaceful culture,... but they don't have any religion at all. How could this possibly be? Obviously, there's only one explanation possible: the whole thing must be a trap - a trap set by Satan to convince humans that they don't need religion!

Yeah, bizarre, huh? But what's really bizarre, is that the other three take him seriously! They don't agree with the priest, but they don't burst out laughing, either.

This is only the beginning of the book, but it's like reading something written in the Middle Ages. The mindset is really strange. Presumably, all this must have seemed reasonable in the 1950's, but it seems bizarre as hell today. (I guess maybe we have advanced, a bit.) By modern standards, no one in the book is particularly likable, and Earth society certainly isn't at all admirable. OK, this wasn't supposed to be a utopia even back then, but I suspect that it was meant to seem reasonable, even expected. Now, it just seems to be insane.

But don't get me wrong. This is really just the premise of the book (a book which won a Hugo Award in 1959 for best novel of the year.) If you can shrug off the mindset, and accept the premise, the story itself is interesting, even today. These four human beings return to the Earth, taking with them the gift of a fertilized alien egg. And that alien, damaged in transit and raised in a laboratory, becomes a major focus of the rest of the novel.

The question remains:  Is all this a supernatural trap, designed by Satan specifically to drag human beings into Hell? Or is it just what it appears to be, a different species with its own evolved biology and its own culture, which just doesn't happen to include the belief in invisible magical creatures? The neat thing about this book is that everything can be interpreted either way. You can accept the priestly explanation as being the literal truth, if you want. Or, just as easily, it can all be interpreted rationally, since there are perfectly reasonable secular explanations for everything. Even the very memorable ending of the story can be interpreted either way.

I loved this when I first read the book, and I still do. And after these four people - plus the alien egg - leave Lithia, things seem more reasonable (given the 1950's mindset, admittedly). The Catholic Church accepts the priest's explanation that it's all Satan setting a trap (with the pope's minor correction that Lithia must be just an illusion, since Satan isn't supposed to be able to create anything else). But the rest of the Earth seems to be... well, not rational, since they go ahead with the bomb-making proposal, but at least secular.

[As an aside, one interesting thing about this future Earth is that almost everyone lives underground. That's the result of the "shelter race," that part of the Cold War which followed the race for fusion bombs. This was the race to build bomb shelters, which ended up with the whole world living underground. I think it's interesting, because it must have seemed like a very plausible future history back in the late 1950's. When I went to grade school back then, there were always piles of Civil Defense pamphlets at every school function. They included plans for building your very own bomb shelter, and each urged all Americans to do so as a defense against nuclear war. (I could never understand why my parents wouldn't build one, especially since there were all those scare stories about how the Soviet Union was ahead of us in building shelters.) So I really enjoyed seeing this "shelter race" trend projected into the future.]

A Case of Conscience was one of the first science fiction books with a religious theme. But I admired it, and still do, for the clever way the author let each reader decide for himself what was really going on. You can interpret everything the way the priests do, that it's all about this supernatural battle, with Satan and God both being unhealthily obsessed with human beings. Or you can interpret everything in a secular fashion, since there are rational explanations for everything that happens. And your feelings about the outcome - whether the book is a tragedy or a triumph - will depend entirely on that interpretation. That's neat.

On the other hand, as I say, the mindset is hard to accept these days, especially since it doesn't seem to be criticized at all in this book. And no one, to my mind, is actually likable. Earth society is grim and unpleasant (ironically, Satan - if you accept the religious explanation of things - has created a far nicer world than Earth's religions have), and none of the humans are particularly admirable. (Priests are still required to be celibate, and I thought that this one, Father Ruiz-Sanchez, acted rather creepy when he was around the young woman in the story.)

A Case of Conscience is worth reading for any fan of science fiction, just because it is such a famous classic in the genre. It's still interesting today, though not particularly likable. I don't think I'd recommend it for its entertainment value, not these days. But it's an interesting example of 1950's science fiction.  (For another - brief - example, read on.)

Stephen Colbert

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Ben Nelson does it again

Ben Nelson (D, NE) is one of my senators - for my sins, apparently. The other is Mike Johanns (R, NE), who was a member of the disastrous Bush administration and whose sole accomplishment so far has been jumping on the bandwagon against ACORN, based on a faked video, just before they were driven into collapse. Yeah, a real pair of winners, huh?

But Nelson angers me more, mostly because I've always had to grit my teeth and vote for him, figuring that the alternative would be even worse. Not any more!  With his "Cornhusker Kickbacks" and his providing "bipartisan" cover to Republicans, I figure an official Republican wouldn't be any worse. Nelson gives Democrats a bad name. And with him out of office, at least there'd be a chance - if only a slim one - that a real Democrat could get elected to that Senate seat sometime.

What has he done this time? He joined the Republican filibuster against the financial reform bill!  OK, so it's not at all surprising that he'd vote against the bill itself, since his constituents have always been banks, insurance companies, and other financial corporations. (At least, I'm sure that's how he sees them.) And he's always been terrified of being seen as a Democrat in Nebraska - since our state is so red - so he normally tries to out-Republican the Republicans. After all, nothing matters besides getting reelected, right?

But he didn't just vote against the bill. He voted - with every single Republican - against letting the bill even come up for debate. He voted against letting anyone even have a chance to vote on the bill itself. Yeah, the filibuster used to be a rare tactic used in exceptional circumstances. Now, the Republicans filibuster pretty much everything.

And since Nelson was timid enough or desperate enough or just plain loony enough to vote with them, now the Republicans proudly proclaim that their filibuster was "bipartisan." Gah!

Of course Johanns voted the same way, but he obediently follows the Republican party line in everything. He wouldn't put the country above politics if his life depended on it. These days, you just expect that from Republicans, don't you? The surprise would be if they acted in any other way. Admittedly, with the lunatics in control of the party, a Republican politician doesn't dare even hint that he might work with Democrats to craft worthy legislation. Just look at Lindsey Graham.

And really, I wouldn't be so mad at Nelson if he'd just voted against this bill. I wouldn't be happy with him, but I wouldn't be this furious. Because that's what democracy is all about. We've elected our representatives (even though I don't like either one of my own Senators, majority rules) and in that capacity, they vote on legislation. But that's not what's going on here. That's not what's going on with any of these bills. Instead, Republicans - and one loony Democrat - are simply blocking votes from occurring at all.

Personally, I wonder if the current filibuster rules are even constitutional. But either way, Republicans are abusing the system. Republicans are simply not allowing democracy in the U.S. Senate. The whole country should be outraged by this. And we've got one "Democrat" (only because he wouldn't have a chance, ironically, of getting elected as a Republican in Nebraska) helping them do it.

Oh, well, at least this isn't Arizona, right?

PS. I called Nelson's office here in Lincoln to express my displeasure, and I've got to say that I feel sorry for those people answering the phones. What a job!  No, I was polite. But many Republicans here in Nebraska dislike Nelson at least as much as I do, so do they get any calls from people who are happy? I suspect that even telemarketing might be more fun than answering calls for Nelson these days!

Arizona, the Meth Lab of Democracy

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This is Jon Stewart's take on the lunacy going on in Arizona (only some of which was mentioned in my previous post). Why does he always make the point so much clearer than our news media do?  Funnier, too, of course.

Have Republicans completely lost their minds?

Dumpiphany

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

Dan Ariely

This isn't new, since Dan Ariely gave this talk at the TED Conference in December, 2008, but it shows both optical illusions and cognitive illusions, which were mentioned in my previous post. Besides, it's really entertaining.

How to Think Rationally

Modern liberal democracies are based on the belief that the truth will win in an open marketplace of ideas. But as we're discovering more and more often these days, people aren't that rational. I'm not just talking about Fox "News" and the Tea Party movement, but about all of us.

There's a natural human tendency to believe what we want to believe and dismiss any evidence that contradicts it. In fact, hearing evidence against our beliefs often reinforces them. Professional political liars know this, and take advantage of it. A bald-faced lie will not only be believed by many people, but attempts to correct the lie will just increase the effect. It's win-win for the liar.

The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the marketplace of ideas - complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. - George F. Kennen

This is human nature,... and it's rather scary, don't you think? Of course, we see it every day in politics. Sarah Palin should have been laughed into insignificance with that "death panels" claim, along with every other Republican who gave it lip service. They all knew that it was a lie, and so did any rational observer. But it still worked politically. It wasn't even close to being true, but it fit the narrative they were pushing. In politics, that's success.

And studies of Fox "News" viewers, many of whom still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks or that we really did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, have shown that these false beliefs are actually strengthened - greatly strengthened - when these people are shown evidence that they're false. Apparently, just reminding them of the circumstances when they formed their original beliefs serves to cement those false beliefs even further.

What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing. - H. L. Mencken

But it's not just politics. It's everywhere in human societies. Medical researchers find that their careful, evidence-based discoveries are disregarded by people who just "know" that they're wrong. And it's not only anti-vaccine activists who refuse to accept scientific findings - basically, all of them - which go against their preconceived notions, either. This is common, very common.

Climatologists struggle with global warming deniers. Biologists struggle with creationists. Pharmacologists struggle with homeopaths. But in all of these cases, the scientific consensus is clear. It's just that ordinary people refuse to accept the science. In fact, in this study, people were more likely to believe in ESP when they were told that scientists rejected it.

Truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. - Stephen Colbert

But don't get too smug. This is human nature, and it affects all of us. We are all likely to accept evidence that confirms our existing beliefs and dismiss that which doesn't. We pay more attention to data that confirms our biases, and we trust it more. When we've made up our minds, we resist changing our opinion, even when the evidence indicates that we should.

We pick sides - not just in politics - and we naturally root for our side, whatever that happens to be. It's not just on the conscious level, but unconsciously, too. It's very easy to believe what we want to be true and very easy to dismiss what we don't. That's true for every single one of us. So what can we do about it? Read further if you want my suggestions.

2009 Hugo Award Short Story Nominees

This isn't particularly new, since these stories were nominated for a Hugo Award last year, but we've been reading them this month in the ModernScienceFiction2 Yahoo Group. We haven't gotten to the 2010 Hugo nominees yet, but three of those stories were also nominated for a 2009 Nebula Award, and we read them in March. We'll get to the other two soon enough, I imagine.

Anyway, these are the five short stories nominated for a Hugo last year. All of them are (legally) available free online, so I'll include the link to each story.

My favorite of the bunch was the eventual winner of the award, "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang. In a strange tale of a mechanical world, a sentient robot dissects his own brain to discover the secret of intelligent thought - and the doom which awaits his whole universe. The comparison to entropy in our own universe is clear, and quite clever. It's really a unique story, and very good - not one of my all-time favorites, but easily good enough to top this list.

"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson is a pure fantasy which was also nominated for a Nebula Award (the only short story in 2008 which was on both ballots), and which won the 2009 World Fantasy Award for best short story. This is another odd story, but it's also cute, romantic, and pleasant. Aimee runs a magic act where 26 monkeys vanish into a bathtub, and she has no idea how it's done.

I didn't think the story was anything special when I first read it a year ago, but I liked it better this time. Maybe my expectations were too high last year. I've been disappointed in a lot of award nominees lately, so maybe my standards are simply lower now. Or maybe I've just finally wrapped my head around the fact that the Hugo is awarded for science fiction and fantasy. I really don't know.

"Evil Robot Monkey" by Mary Robinette Kowal is a short, sad story about a chimpanzee with an implant - making him smarter than other chimps, but still just an animal to humans. It's very good, but very short, which I guess is why I didn't rank it above the previous story. And good as it is, it really doesn't bring anything new to science fiction.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great little story. And this is a classic theme in SF - for good reason. But I expect a lot from award nominees. And three of these stories were really unusual (two of them successfully). So maybe this story just suffers in comparison.

I was less impressed with the last two nominees, but Michael Swanwick's "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" really tries to be unique. In fact, I think it tries too hard. It's a shame, too, because I think there was a good story there. And I've read some excellent short fiction from Swanwick in the past.

Narrated by a man's protective suit, which is imprinted with the mental pattern of his lover, this is the story of the lone surviving human and a millipede-like alien escaping from a destroyed alien structure/city and traveling across a hot - boiling water hot! - jungle world.

The story is actually stranger than it sounds from this description, and it comes close to being quite interesting. But I'd say it's too consciously stylish (that's really the best way I can think to describe it). The descriptions, for example, don't work. (Can you picture an alien face "like a cross between the front of a locomotive and a tree grinder"?  Me, neither.)

And the ending,... well, I still don't know what I think about that. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what I think about the whole story. I guess I'll say, "Nice try." It's an impressive attempt, but ultimately unsuccessful (for me, at least - it must have worked for other people, I assume, or it wouldn't have been nominated for this award).

Finally, there's "Article of Faith" by Mike Resnick. A robot worker at a church decides that he has a soul and tries to worship with the congregation, with unsurprising results. OK, it's obvious from the start where this story is going, but it's still emotionally effective. But I had two big problems with it.

First, too much of it doesn't make sense. I just couldn't maintain my suspension of disbelief. The robot is too ignorant about some things (and ignorant like a two-year-old: "God must be very large to need such high ceilings"), while being too knowledgeable, too perceptive, in other situations. OK, that might actually make sense, except for where he was ignorant and where he was perceptive. I just couldn't buy it.

Also, the story is very, very similar to "Samaritan" by Connie Willis, a much better short story (her first, I think) written clear back in 1978. OK, in her story it's an orangutan, not a robot, who gets religion, but that's really not a big difference. The two stories are still very similar.

Now, I'm certainly not claiming that Resnick copied the Willis story, not at all. But if you're going to nominate a modern story for an award, a SF story that is very, very similar to a 30-year-old story, the new story really needs to be better than the old one. This one isn't. For both of these reasons, "Article of Faith" gets my lowest ranking here.

The Dandelion King

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who likes dandelions. No, that photo isn't of my yard, but from this blog post in the New York Times by "the Dandelion King." And it's not so much that he likes dandelions as that he's surrendered in the war against them.

As I’ve told my neighbors, I feel bad about lowering the value of their property. I mean, it isn’t my goal to have a front yard that, by standard reckoning, is unattractive. The unkept look of my lawn is just a byproduct of a conclusion I reached a few years ago: the war on weeds, though not unwinnable, isn’t winnable at a morally acceptable cost.

Me? I like dandelions. I think they're a wonderful sign of spring. They're really lovely, don't you think? Even the seed heads are kind of neat, though all flowers get a bit ratty after the blooms die. But that doesn't keep you from enjoying other varieties, does it? So why should it matter with dandelions?

And I really dislike the monoculture lawns that are supposed to be the ideal these days (a wrong-headed idea heavily promoted by the lawn chemical industry). I dislike the whole idea of a monoculture - especially a chemically-maintained one - and I just think they're boring, too. Sure, keep your grass neatly cut, but... more than that? Why?

A healthy lawn should have a diverse mix of species. It should be a place that rabbits love, and birds, too. The soil should be rich with organic matter, not drenched with chemicals, and it should be filled with a variety of worms. (Can you believe it? Some people ask Backyard Farmer how to kill their nightcrawlers, because they don't like the tiny holes and lumps of dirt - the natural aeration - the worms create.)

It's also true that I grow a lot of fruit trees, bushes, and vines which are easily damaged by broadleaf herbicides. My grapes, in particular, are highly susceptible to 2,4-D. I often get damage just from herbicide drift from the neighbors.

But not from many of them. In my neighborhood, a lawn full of dandelions, clover, and violets is not unusual. But I still think I'm highly unusual in liking lawns like that. Certainly, I've never met anyone else who's expressed agreement with me on this. Luckily, I don't need validation on my opinions.  :)

I am trying to get buffalo grass established in my lawn, at least on the parking, where it's sunny enough. It's naturally short, it's very drought resistant (once established), and I just like the look of it. But I'm not doing a very good job of it. Partly, that's because I'm not as interested in the lawn. And partly because I'm very, very busy with all my fruit-growing. That's been a lot more work than I ever expected.

And I have a garden in the summer, too. And a lot of other interests, including - just recently - this blog. My lawn is far down the list in importance. I keep it mowed, but that's about it. Luckily, dandelions don't need much care (another thing I like about them).

Faith Healing

This is copied, with permission, from several posts - and one brief email - by John Palmer on the Skeptics Forum Yahoo Group. I thought his personal experience with this faith healer was very interesting. Of course, this isn't meant to be statistically valid, just... interesting.

Note that I've pieced this story together from multiple postings, so I'm the one at fault if it's at all disjointed. I tried to fit things together without actually changing anything John wrote:

I am a musician who was hired for a five night gig which turned out to be a healing evangelist. I played for half-an-hour per night, then left the “show” to eat, returning to collect my gear at the end of the evening. That meant that I was in a position to observe the goings on for twenty minutes or so each evening while I waited for it to end.

"Okay, so how does an event like this unfold?" I wondered, very nervous after being let in only forty-five minutes ahead of the audience, to set up our gear and do our sound checks.

It began with the local pastor introducing the "healer" and calling out that "god loves a willing giver" so as to get the money collection going. The "healer" then came over to us to ask us to play a song while people dance and gave money. He asked something like " Can you play Dum do wo do sunshine god, whoa, yes lord?"

That was the point where I was thinking this was going to be a gig like no other. Just to mention that I have studied violin for 45 years, classical, bluegrass, country, jazz. But. No. No don't know that song. Anyway we hacked something together with a little rhythm to it.

After that the "healer" just starts to do a John Edward kind of thing, calling out really obvious concerns in this manner: "I can feel that someone here has family troubles".

When he has about twenty people all standing at the front of the hall he starts going along to them, one after another, staring at them closely, yelling really loudly at them and pushing them, in many cases they fall right back. Right back into the arms of the fortuitously positioned ushers.

The first night I thought it was a pure entertainment for those involved. There seems to be a general amusement at the goings on. For example the "healer" would call out: "I feel that there is someone out there who can't sleep!" Even easier was when he would call for those who had "family problems" or "concerns for a loved one".

The thing is, that first night, I thought of the evening's events as being the very definition of theatre: "the willing suspension of disbelief". It seemed like fun, an amusement, everyone laughed when he said things like: "Sell your house" or "throw away your diabetes medication".

I never dreamed anyone would take it seriously. ... Really it was all so funny, and everyone was just cracking up throughout the evening. Really having what looked to me to be a lot of fun.

But John decided to get some phone numbers and check back with a few of the believers to see if they felt they'd really been healed.

My follow up focused on six believers and their outcomes over a six month period. With contact initiated by me at 30 days, 90 days and 180 days.

My six case studies had the following afflictions: 2 people with diabetes, one with cancer, one wheelchair bound with arthritis, and two with undiagnosed conditions - one with a sore shoulder, one with problems sleeping.

I asked each of them the following questions:

Did you observe, or feel any changes during the healing?

Did you follow the advice, or direction given by the "healer"?

Do you believe you were healed?

If yes to the above question is there any medical evidence of healing?

Do you believe anyone else was healed?

I wanted only yes and no questions to keep it as simple as possible.

Summary:

After one month 4 of 6 respondents claimed to having been healed.

After three months, only the cancer patient claimed to have been cured. Quote: "My doctor told me it's a miracle, there is no medical explanation for my complete recovery!"

After six months, not one subject claimed that they were healed. However most respondents claimed that OTHER people had been healed.

The only person who claimed to have medical evidence is now in his last days, succumbing to various cancers throughout his body.

What can I say? It's perfectly natural that people in pain hope for a miracle cure. And it's not surprising that most of them might think there's some improvement after that elaborate charade.

Partly, that's due to the placebo effect, and partly because illnesses regularly have ups and downs. As this tragic story shows, even cancer goes into spontaneous remission on occasion, though that doesn't always last.

And yet, though none of these people were cured by this faith healer, they all thought that other people had been healed. I wish John had asked them if they'd go again, or recommend the faith healer to others. I suspect that they would.