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02 December 2001
Unwarranted Excitement

Today, many helpless subscribers are stuck dealing with the wishful thinking and corporate compensation policies of Excite@home, which is in bankruptcy, and the sheer greed of those who are either creditors or current end-providers of service. As noted in the bankruptcy court on Friday, this is just a game of chicken between the potential purchaser (AT&T) and the creditors; the creditors want more money, and AT&T wants to pay less. That doesn't sound like an inappropriate bargaining situation, and it wouldn't be, if everything was equal. But it's not.

The people caught in the middle here are the subscribers, many of whom are stuck in monopoly situations where there is no realistic alternative to cable for broadband internet access. DSL is neither available everywhere nor quickly installed; satellite is not a valid alternative, because its upload speed is no higher than a dialup; and virtually all cable systems are local monopolies. The people in charge of the various squabbling vultures (creditors and otherwise) aren't going to be personally affected by anything that happens. The local cable companies are squawking because their 67-80% share of the revenues from local subscribers (for what is reasonably estimated to be 25-30% of the costs) is likely to go down.

And, because this is a bankruptcy proceeding and the law requires so, the only thing that matters is dollar signs.

In a way, this is analogous to the closure of a town's largest employer to keep from having to unionize the plant. The workers (or in this case, customers) are getting a raw deal. For starters, if there was an equitable division of fees, cable-based internet access would cost around 70% of the current customer charges—and that's before dealing with the monopoly aspects of the situations. (Quiz question: Who are the four largest cable companies in the country? And what percentage of the market do they serve? Most crucially, what proportion of this market is served as a monopoly?) In a court of pure equity, these considerations would determine the outcome. Bankruptcy, however, does not take place in a court with much in the way of equitable powers outside specific performance of contracts. Ironic, isn't it, that the stock market trades in "equities"—when it has nothing whatsoever to do with the legal concept of "equity." A nice bit of doublethink, that.

So:

• Shame on AT&T for a lowball bid. Just based on the replacement value of the physical assets, $307 million is low.
• Shame on the local cable operators, particularly Cox, for holding the customers hostage.
• Shame on the executives of everyone involved, all of whom are making five times (or more) what their efforts are really worth, whether measured by increases in shareholder value or some more-neutral (and less ficticious) criterion. Ask yourself a question: Is the CEO of a company whose main business is providing really bad TV worth fifteen times (or more) the annual compensation due a member of Congress, or even the President?
• Shame on AT&T (again) for its efforts over the years to slow DSL penetration down to keep profit margins above 25%.

These issues and numbers aren't very hard to ferret out from corporate securities filings and other public documents. I shudder to think of what's hidden in the documents being kept private…

05 December 2001
The Caves of Styrofoam

Why does so much visual science fiction (TV and cinema) seem to take place in caves? These people are on spaceships, ferghodsakes! So what's wrong with keeping things there?

Some of it is sheer laziness. (That's usually a pretty good explanation for anything that has gone wrong in Hollyweed.) There's a more insidious, and perhaps more obvious, villain, though: money. Those special effect shots on board the ship take time and money. The caves provide another benefit: since they're on a sound stage, they're much easier to light, to get even sound effects (for TV, anyway, where rerecording is not that common), and to keep autograph-seekers out of the shot. Shooting outdoors wouldn't do that, and would require somehow "alienizing" the landscape ("But Captain, every terrestrial planet has coniferous forests dominated by Douglas Firs! It's a law of nature!").

But is this a false economy? (Or should I have asked something simpler, perhaps "Do I ever ask rhetorical questions?") Usually, yes.

Keep in mind that those caves are almost always the site of involved, set-piece action sequences. That requires getting the crew there, and (hopefully) back; creating a conflict that requires them to do so; creating opposition (and if you think sets are expensive, try decent makeup!); in all probability, exterior shots of the planet/asteroid the space/starship is orbiting; and so on. It might make for great shots for trailers. It doesn't make for memorable storytelling or presentation. Thus, the writers, directors, actors, and crew (yes, it really is a collaborative effort, beginning with the script) must work harder to make up something interesting. Unfortunately, this only draws more attention to the deficiencies of the set-piece action sequence, even though many viewers can't articulate the problem.

The problem is a simple one: in reality, one does encounter action sequences. Negotiating them successfully does require a certain competence. But relying upon that is a losing proposition, in the long run. As we "line support" officers used to remind the pilots, the guys who win wars are the ones behind the desks, planning, planning, planning, being paranoid about what can go wrong, planning, getting the supplies forward, etc. It's not a bunch of testosterone-enhanced egotists playing with sticks between their legs. (Of course, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has mandated that the commanding officer of any unit with a designated flying mission must be a rated officer [pilot or navigator]—even in a transport unit, in which the logistics of supply systems are what really matter. But, as usual, I digress.)

But trying to impose some sense of proportion and reality on media fiction—whether visual or textual—is a losing proposition, because the people making the decisions about what gets produced/published seldom understand storytelling in the first instance. Exhibit A: George Lucas. It doesn't all have to be bad.

09 December 2001
One Ring to Rule Them All

A few thoughts about talismans, Quest fiction, and the Interminable Fantasy Series™ today, with an eye toward seeing what Tolkien did differently that keeps LOTR from seeming hackneyed, or clichéd, or otherwise derivative—even though, as anyone with more brain cells than George IIIº has (six) knows, Tolkien drew on a lot of other sources for inspiration and more.

The clearest distinction is the absence of true prophecy in LOTR. How many IFSs are built around fulfillment of some ancient prophecy that hangs around the protagonists' collective neck like an albatross? Yet, for all of the seemingly "prophetic" materials in LOTR, examining them carefully indicates that they are merely items of folk wisdom and control nothing. Consider, for example, the nurse/wise-woman's recognition of Aragorn as the rightful king because she recalls an old rhyme indicating that he'll have the hands of a healer. That's not a prophecy; it's a recognition of the reality of preindustrial culture. The prosperity brought by avoiding civil war certainly "heals" a lot. That Aragorn is more-closely associated with healing only adds immediacy to the "prophecy." In any event, this does not drive the plot. The plot is driven, instead, by a group of characters who take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Another key distinction is the role and nature of talismans. In LOTR and other successful Quest-driven tales, the talismans do not have much of an independent role of themselves; they are instead powerful for what they will allow a character to do him- or herself that would otherwise be impossible. Further, the talismans in LOTR are all explicitly created works. The swords are noteworthy primarily for the confidence that they give their bearers and their inability to "misfire." The rings… well, what can one say about them? The whole point is that destruction of the creation will devastate the creator, if only due to the power the creator poured into his efforts. For that is what Tolkien's talismans amount to: a storehouse. Compare that to some of the all-powerful ancient artifacts common in IFSs and you'll see another distinction. In Tolkien, what the characters do with their talismans is what matters, not the talismans for themselves.

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• There are some really disturbing parallels: both are children of rulers whose primary claim to fame was involving the nation in a war of some success while ignoring domestic issues; both have difficulty addressing their subjects coherently in their subjects' native tongue; both are a few cans short of a sixpack; both have a chief legal officer who compares unfavorably with a rabid pitbull; both obtained their family fortune through investments in overexploitation of natural resources. Whether the American George III addresses potted roses as if they are fellow nobles remains, at this time, uncertain. We don't really know what he does in the Rose Garden…

12 December 2001
Ballbearings

It's been some time since I've given one of my obscure history lessons. So I'll inflict one upon you.

The Allied bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was not entirely aimless (pun intended). At that time, strategic bombing was an untried concept. Although there had been some bombing during the first period of European conflict (commonly known as WWI, or the Great War), it had virtually no substantive effect, whether from Zeppelins or aircraft, but instead was a weapon of schrecklichkeit (roughly "random terror"). Thus, there were no precedents.

So what, then, should we bomb?

Keep in mind that one B-52D carries a load of unguided bombs equal to an entire wing of B-17s or B-24s—if they all make it to target. Four times. The "bomb load" isn't exactly equivalent, because modern explosives and the greater destruction of a 500-lb bomb compared to two 250-lb bombs change the balance somewhat. In any event, those huge air fleets weren't capable of levelling a city with conventional weapons—even if levelling a city had been a legitimate military objective. (We'll leave the firebombing of Dresden for another time.)

Thus, the planners had to choose a target set that was a legitimate military target, that could in fact be seriously interdicted, and would have a significant strategic effect. In southern Europe, that meant going after natural resources, since that area was not a major locus of Nazi-controlled industry. Thus, the notorious raids on the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. But northern and northwestern Europe had a plethora of rich industrial targets. Just bombing the nearest factory would be unwise; it would risk aircrews and aircraft without a realistic payoff, as there wasn't nearly enough destructive capacity (certainly not in 1942 and 1943) to just indiscriminately crater entire areas.

One obvious target was the steel industry. However, the German steel industry, as much through accidents of history as anything else, was both somewhat decentralized and in areas with good natural defenses (such as the rolling terrain and heavy soils of the Ruhr valley, which tended to confine and absorb explosions). The German armaments industry was similarly decentralized, and further was constantly changing (just as was British industry).

An analyst somewhere decided that there was one bottleneck in German industry: ballbearings. Virtually all industrial machinery, whether weapons systems or machines for making weapons systems, depends upon the movement of metal against metal. Realistically, this requires bearings. (Engines are not an exception, as the piston is just a special form of reduced-friction bearing.) There were very few factories in Germany capable of casting ballbearings, and the factories were all within 100 km of each other.

In the end, the strategic damage to the ballbearing industry did not bring the Nazi war machine to its knees. Not only had the Allied planners overestimated their own destructive capacity, but they failed to account for counterplanning by the Germans. However, the plan did its job: it gave the Luftwaffe tunnel vision and attrited the defense forces, leading to a rapid and almost total collapse in February and March of 1944. So, after a fashion, it worked.

As an exercise for the student, consider whether the same principals of target selection apply to:

1. The last military SF novel you read;
2. The 11 September atrocities;
3. The following campaign in Afghanistan; and
4. The air campaign against Iraq since 1990.

Your answer should consider compliance with the laws of war as a limiting factor—even if the planners of the campaigns apparently did not.

15 December 2001
Modest Hilarity

For no particular reason—actually, for a number of damned good reasons, but privilege and legal ethics prevent me from specifying—I think I'll just tell a few jokes today. Some of these, however, are not jokes. There are, after all, only three lawyer jokes (the rest are all true).

A lawyer alone in a small town will starve. Two lawyers alone in that same small town can each make a very nice living.

A young lawyer at a big entertainment law firm died in his sleep. St. Peter welcomed him to the afterlife, and began considering his life to see whether he'd be going Up or Down. The lawyer protested that he couldn't possibly be dead, as he was only 32. St. Peter looked at him and sighed. "Well, you do look 32, but I'm sorry—you are indeed dead. Your billable hours indicate that you're 76."

A small-firm lawyer drafted a will for a rich old widow. When she came by to pick it up, he told her the fee would be one hundred dollars. The widow reached into her purse, pulled out cash, and thanked the lawyer for his work. After she left the office, the lawyer walked over to the office safe. As he opened the safe door, he noticed that the money seemed a bit odd. He looked more carefully, and saw that he had received not one $100 bill, but two. Of course, this raised a serious ethical problem: Should he tell his partner?

Q.  How do you make a bulldog lawyer?
A.  Make him chase parked ambulances.

A blind snake and a blind rabbit met in the forest. The rabbit suggest that they each feel the other to identify each other. The snake touched the rabbit in several places, and said, "You have large ears, large hind legs, and fur. Are you perhaps a rabbit?" The rabbit then touched the snake in several places, and said, "You have cold blood, scales, and venomous fangs. Are you perhaps a lawyer?"

Q.  What's the difference between a litigator and an alligator?
A.  Only one of them is an endangered species. The wrong one.

16 December 2001
Thick Heads

Yet another completely inappropriate choice of music for a commercial popped up today while I was watching football. Just as I remarked a couple of years ago, but this is perhaps worse.

This time, while watching a football game (sorry, boys, but Dad's going to watch some foobawwl once in a while), a Hyundai commercial popped on with a fairly peppy bit of flute music. Since I am, after all, my age, I recognized it quite quickly. This light, fluffy, sporty car was being accompanied by light, fluffy flute-based rock: Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick." The name alone is bad enough—comparing a sports car to a brick.

Those of us who remember things like this, though, will remember that the Thick as a Brick album came with some, umm, interesting packaging that provided a rather different perspective on the contents. Thick as a Brick was the album that looked like a particularly lurid British tabloid, and the tabloid itself told the story of a 12-year-old boy who wrote prizewinning erotic poetry (along with a picture of Derek and his, umm, 'ho). The lyrics include such automobile-related lines as "your sperm's in the gutter | your love's in the sink."

Or maybe we were supposed to think of the spacious, comfortable back seat in that Hyundai…

19 December 2001
A Passion Play

In keeping with the Jethro Tull context discussed last time, we'll move on to a different album. Let's consider passion. We'll go out a bit on a limb and talk about the most passionate individuals in Western societies: intellectuals.

OK. I can already see your heads shaking. (No, I didn't install a webbugcam at the top of the page.) I didn't say "lust," though; I said "passion." That American advertising culture has equated the two is no fault of mine! Most intellectuals—including me—have been told more than once that they're too intense in arguments, or even casual discussion. That's merely a sign of passion. That it's a passion for something abstract instead of a sex object is one of the main barriers between the intellectual and the nonintellectualº—intellectuals often have difficulty accepting the central role of sex (or beer, or football, or whatever) in the lives of nonintellectuals, and nonintellectuals simply cannot understand the central role of abstract thought and the joy of learning in the lives of intellectuals.

Of course, that's not to say that intellectuals have no sex drive (and I've been slapped enough to prove it!). But it is to say that an intellectual's passion expresses itself in truly foreign contexts—which makes it that much more difficult for others to understand when it does express itself in more physical aspects. This is where so many, many fiction writerss fail. Those who are intellectuals can very seldom express the fish-out-of-water passions in a way that doesn't undercut the characters. Although she's not going to win a Nobel Prize for Literature any time soon, Joanne Rowling appears to be an exception here. Other speculative fiction writers who successfully manage this include Ursula K. Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, Harlan Ellison, and Sean McMullen. On the other hand, those writers who are not intellectuals can very seldom express the abstract passions in a way that doesn't make any characters who are intellectuals little more than objects for ridicule—if they exist at all. To pick on a few dead white men here, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Heinlein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Lin Carter, Robert E. Howard, and Fritz Leiber stand out for this failure.

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• This is not to imply that a "nonintellectual" is necessarily less intelligent than an intellectual. Remember Kevin Kline's character in A Fish Called Wanda? The arrogant grad student in the bar at the beginning of Good Will Hunting? Those are good examples of stupid intellectuals. It is only to distinguish among the objects of their various passions.

21 December 2001
Endgame

As the end of the year approaches, I'm beginning my annual evaluation of the books of this past year. I am far from pleased with what I've seen.

• The serious nonfiction offered this year has been, sad to say, quite stale. There has been little or no risktaking; even those authors with an explicit polemical position (such as everyone who has attempted to write on Ballotgate) do so virtually by rewriting earlier polemics with different names. On the whole, it's not quite as bad as 1982; it is nonetheless far too close that that black hole for my comfort.
• The so-called mainstream fiction has been, if anything, worse. Overall, this has been the weakest year in noncategory fiction since the Johnson Administration. I can only think of two books that have a realistic possibility of being read in a quarter century, and even they will almost certainly be read as part of a "read everything the author wrote and write a paper" course.
• Written speculative fiction has been only marginally better. The bottom has fallen out on the short fiction market, and that segment is being propped up at the moment by a number of authors who are trying unusual viewpoints often more closely associated with litcritshit. Even the usually reliable writers of short fiction have been below their own standards. Long fiction is hanging on by its fingernails, in grave danger from the recent publishing industry consolidations. Looking forward into next year, the announced publication schedule through April is at best grim.
• Sad to say, the brightest spot has been cinematic speculative fiction. By working outside the system, Peter Jackson was allowed to stay true to (at least) much of the spirit of Tolkien's trilogy, and Joanne Rowling's hawklike gaze seems to have done some good for young Harry. For the first time in a number of years, there has been only one truly abyssmal speculative fiction movie, and it's not really fair to call Lara Croft speculative fiction.

What really set me off was the announcement today that Hugo nomination ballots have been mailed. I had to stop and think hard before I could come up with five novels published this past year worthy of even the flawed recognition of the Hugo system. So I have very high standards. So sue me.

24 December 2001
Blindfolds

Today's entry in Deputy Diana's journal brings back some pretty unpleasant memories. I've been there before as an EMT and slightly later on as an ER/OR tech. That is grim enough.¹ I've also been there, though, as the commanding officer—of both victims and drunk drivers. One of the victims was on the day after Christmas.

I had a rather unusual method of dealing with drunk drivers under my command, but it did seem to work. Since I had taught English composition, and was doing graduate work in English at the time, I decided to apply my education to these quaking airmen and NCOs. (The one officer under my command who had a DUI did not get such polite treatment.) I did not yell. I did not give a long lecture on the evils of driving under the influence. Instead, I made them do part of my job for me. Sort of.

One of the grimmest duties of a commanding officer is writing the notorious "letter to parents" (or spouses, or whoever happens to be the next of kin) upon the death of a servicemember on active duty. It's the most difficult writing I can admit to having done (four times, unfortunately). Since I hated to do it so much, I figured that nobody else would like it, either. Thus, I gave the hungover, frightened enlisted person some homework: writing, for my signature, the letter I would have had to send to his or her parents if he or she had gotten killed while driving drunk. In two hours. I didn't say that I had no intention of "grading" the letters, because the purpose was to make the bastard think about how close he or she had come.

For some strange reason, I never had a repeat offender, despite remaining in command of a couple of units for nearly two years apiece. And the rate of DUIs went way down about six months after I started this policy.

I hate drunk drivers. Personally, I'm not entirely certain that the Central American solution (El Salvador) isn't the best way to deal with repeat offenders: After conviction, the perp is offered a blindfold and a last cigarette. The probability that an individual with two convictions for drunk driving will (or will have) be involved in a vehicular fatality—even if only his or her own—is about six times that of handgun owners being involved in a firearms-caused fatality. This is not an excuse for handguns;² it is instead an expression of disgust at double standards.

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1. By the way, seatbelts do work. I only ever had to unbuckle one dead body; the other 54 had not been wearing seatbelts.
2. To quote myself from a while back:

   Whether one agrees with gun control or not, the arguments that I've seen against gun control are at best specious. The Second Amendment establishes a contingent right, not an absolute right. The Constitution at that time prohibited standing armies (Article I, Section 8, Clause 12), leaving the militia as the only regularly organized armed force. The "right to keep and bear arms" is thus that of the National Guard. This interpretation is also consistent with the normal use of "People" in the collective, not individual. The NRA (and other, more extreme elements) have categorically refused to even attempt to refute this argument. Instead, they assume their desired conclusion.

   The same goes for other implements of destruction, such as 1,000kg cars with drunks behind the wheel. Driving is not a right; it is a privilege. It is often a very necessary privilege, but a privilege nonetheless.

29 December 2001
Goodbye, Dave

It's the end of a year nearly as famous as 1984 before it ever came. Just as in Orwell's story—which was not a prediction, but a warning—the reality is distinctly different from the story's depiction of the future. We have no moon base, not even a functional space station, let alone nuclear-powered spacecraft and suspended animation. And HAL… we're not even close to HAL. Any HAL we did build would be a lot smaller than Kubrick's vision, as the microprocessor was just barely in the physics labs at the time. However, we don't have nearly the software required to even do realtime semantic and contextual speech recognition, let alone have a computer read lips.

Perhaps we should be very glad of that. Kubrick and Clarke completely ignored the Orwellian flip side to HAL. Ground-based systems would be far more capable than HAL, if only because the space and power limitations of a shipborne system would not inhibit performance. HAL can read lips; a grimmer counterpart, whether operated by a government or merely an overpowerful corporation—let's call him Omnilinguistic Bimodal Recursive Integrated Electronic Network, or OBRIEN—would be far more intrusive, although perhaps more subtle than the telescreen of Oceania. Would you really want Steve Case, or Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, or Ross Perot not just providing essential parts of the system you blindly use every day, but reading your mail before you do? Worse yet, how about John Ashcroft, Jerry Falwell, or a foreign power?

This distinction, which is only one among many, shows just how optimistic Clarke and Kubrick were. If there is one thing that the twentieth century should have taught us, it's that Lord Acton's epigram ("Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely") is, if anything, an understatement. Acton meant that those with power were corrupted. The events of the last century demonstrate that merely the desire for power is enough for absolute corruption. Considering only the abuses of communications privacy in this country since 1907 is frightening enough, before one considers other abuses. And, contrary to the scions of the Old Left who pretend to a radicalism they don't understand, we've had it easy.

The greatest enemy of justice and fairness is ignorance.

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