Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I tend to think of neoconservatives as libertarians with a foreign policy, so it surprises me afresh every time the libertarian columnists at LewRockwell.com tear into the neocons, exaggerating the size of the neocon movement and then beating on this oversized strawman.

This week Jim Lobe pops his own blow-up neocon doll in Neocon Collapse in Washington and Baghdad. He admits that no top-level administration officials have been neoconservatives, but somehow still sees neocon shadows behind the throne being routed in the aftermath of recent Iraq scandals. As evidence, he offers a fruitless meeting between some former staffers and Condoleezza Rice - how the mighty have fallen!

I’m assuming most of my readers can’t tell a neoconservative from a paleoconservative - I have trouble myself sometimes, even though I’m familiar with the neocon approach to foreign policy. The Neocon Collapse article doesn’t specify what the fatal neocon mistake was, nor what the “realists” are doing differently now that they are allegedly in power. Instead, Jim Lobe’s rant reads like paranoid ravings about neocons being “a key part” of this and “lead[ing] the charge” for that, placing people “in key positions”, “dominating” this, “push[ing] hardest” for that, having “friends” in the media, “outflank[ing],” “influenc[ing],” “circumvent[ing],” and so on.

When the powers of good push back the neocons, they do so in equally vague terms of “wrest[ing] control of Iraq policy from the Pentagon” (as if Iraq policy were somewhere our elected officials hadn’t put it), and a former staffer making “blistering attacks” against “powerful figures” that the media was “ever cautious about taking on” - figures no one has even heard of.

It takes some writing skill to say “I hate neocons for reasons I’m not telling you” in a thousand words or more. Mr. Lobe didn’t have to drop a hint, but I suspect he couldn’t help himself. Which country in the Middle East has “territorial ambitions”? Is it the one that invaded Iran and Kuwait? Is it the one that invaded Israel and turned Lebanon into a puppet state? Is it the other one that invaded Israel? Or maybe the other other one that invaded Israel? It’s a tough question, but he has an answer.

[Update: I’m not the only one who’s spotted this phenomenon. Backspin links Dore Gold on the ‘neocon conspiracy.’]

Lorem Ipsum of the day: The Motherlode can even generate Morse Code

Veronica asked me about FTP clients for the Mac. I’ve been using command line ftp since OS 10.1 - it’s free and reminds me of my misspent youth on SunOS. The first thing that sprang to mind was, of course, Transit (links are coming), but that costs money - I know because I stopped using it when my demo expired.

You never know when a new FTP client has come out (well, I do, but I’m speaking rhetorically here), so I tried Google and discovered…Pure Mac is back! Pure Mac isn’t an FTP client - it’s the ultimate index of Mac shareware. It used to be the site to visit to find Mac software, and then they stopped updating. But now it’s being revived and the FTP page is one of the ones that has already been updated.

So with the help of Pure Mac I was able to recommend - and download for myself - Cyberduck, a free FTP client for MacOS X (10.3 and above) with a very cool icon.

As long as I’m maccing, here’s a link dump:

• Security Cannot Be Spun, another hole essay from DaringFireball
• 12″ Powerbook vs. iBook: What’s a Mac fan to do?
• MacOSXHints on keyboard layout generators
• Tumult HyperEdit, a live HTML and PHP editor
• Fish - make your own virtual aquarium, if you can figure out the cryptic interface
• Various ways to eject a stuck CD
• Spending a year on a Mac - True Switcher Tales
• Did I mention that MT NewsWatcher was finally upgraded?
• MacOSXHints on recording HDTV with your Mac
• I’m pretty sure I mentioned Ecto, a blogging client
• I’m almost certain I mentioned LyX/Mac, but possibly not this LaTeX font tutorial

Despite my fears of the dreaded lost password problem, I upgraded to WordPress 1.2. I did, indeed, experience the Dread Problem, but deleting my wordpress cookies solved it for me. Others have not been so lucky. (I backed up the database before making any sudden moves, of course.)

The new version spontaneously reordered my categories, but this advice fixed the problem. I’m hoping to use the subcategory feature to organize my categories better, although it’s kind of flaky.

Note the new blog design. If it looks dull and grey, give it a minute. In a real browser, color will slowly trickle in. I’m using the colorpress script under a semi-transparent greyscale PNG background image to get the colors. Since Win/IE is a piece of aging junk that can’t handle transparency, the most you’ll see with it is some pretty text colors. I’m also seeing some wackiness with the tabs and post content in Mac/IE - the workaround is, as always, to use a real browser. Tell me, though, if Win/IE munges the entries as well. Thanks.

[Update:] With Seema’s help, the Win/IE flashing problem has been fixed and the floating comment box is more or less anchored in the right place. To fix the latter I reduced the number of columns in the textarea from 70 to 40. (I had to edit wp-comments.php by hand to do that. While I was in there I upped it from 4 rows to 6.) The stylesheet then resizes it to the correct size in real browsers. Mac/IE’s float bug is beyond my power to fix, but if you make the window narrow enough (just over the width of the tab bar), the blog will become legible.

On this Memorial Day, Mark Steyn recalls a time when Americans had a sense of proportion. James Lileks always recalls a time when our food was frightening. Gary North recalls a time when Americans hoped to retire in comfort.

I’m two hundred years too young to recall when a man could regret that he had but one life to lose for his country, but I think that when the citizens stop feeling that way the nation is doomed. It’s not necessarily a biological dead end, but it is a political one. I have the feeling tha one of these days I’ll go to sleep in the tattered but recognizable shreds of a latter-day Roman Empire, but I’ll wake up in the Dark Ages.

I’ve been reading too much fantasy lately, and after a few trilogies the religions all tend to run together. I suppose that’s only to be expected when the novels are all set on the same feudal island/peninsula with the same pseudo-Oriental neighbors, but I keep hoping for more than just n gods who are actually one god (where n ranges from 4 to 7) from the religions.

The God Box by Barry B. Longyear is kind enough not to number its deities so precisely. It also achieves what LMB has been trying to do with her fantasy - brings its gods to life and makes true believers out of damaged characters. Like Bujold, Longyear started out as a science fiction writer; The God Box was his first fantasy novel. In it, Our Hero, an unsuspecting carpet salesman, inherits a mysterious box that answers prayers. Like the gods themselves, though, the box answers in its own inscrutable way.

Our Hero soon finds himself on a Quest foretold in ancient scriptures, in which he meets bird people, skunk people, fish people, gods and giants. The biggest sign of the author’s sci-fi background is the god box’s ability to show Our Hero alternate timelines. That sort of reset button can undermine the seriousness of a story (as all Trek fans know), but despite the deep themes of prayer and trust this isn’t a serious novel. It’s short and fun, yet a far better combination of religion and fantasy than many doorstops I’ve seen.

The June Analog also has a couple of stories that stray into religious territory without quite convincing. “Time Ablaze” by Michael A. Burstein is the cover story, in which a time traveller goes back to the Lutheran community of turn-of-the-century NYC. As an adventure it works well, but I never quite got the feeling that Our Hero was dealing with a world that has since disappeared.

“Greetings from Kudesh” by J.T. Sharrah was equally effective as a story, and similarly problematic in its view into the mind of Our Heroine, the first Christian missionary to visit an alien planet. She comes off like the first interstellar Deist, which might have been interesting had that been the author’s intent. There are things a Deist might do to promulgate his religion that a Christian probably shouldn’t, and Our Heroine does one of them without any theological consideration of the problem.

It’s the differences between Christianity and Deism, between pantheism and monotheism, that make them the religions they are. I suppose if sf writers can’t make me believe their characters are real live practitioners of actual religions, then fantasy writers don’t have much of a chance of making up convincing new religions. Even The God Box was about faith qua faith, rather than a particular religion. Yet we owe our oldest stories to pantheons full of overactive imaginations - you’d think fantasy writers would get in on the act.

Health care link of the day: Chest Pain by Mark Steyn

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong to rule against Ashcroft in his attempt to stop Oregon doctors from prescribing controlled substances in order to kill people. (See the full story at Wired or Reuters.) The federal government has the power under the Controlled Substances Act to regulate (wait for it) controlled substances. This isn’t a grey area like medical marijuana in which the perceived medical need for a drug conflicts with society’s perceived need to keep that drug out of the wrong hands - killing people with barbituates is not a medical use at all. As long as there’s a Controlled Substances Act the feds are well within their rights to (do I hear an echo in here?) control substances.

Should there be a CSA in the first place? Probably not - at this point it seems to be doing more harm than good. In some countries you can go to a pharmacist and get any drug you want, and that seems to work out OK for them. So if the 9th Circuit had struck down the CSA altogether because it was interfering with the natural right of Oregonians to kill one another, I wouldn’t have complained. I’m all for striking down federal laws when they infringe on states’ rights. I’m assuming, for the sake of argument, that Oregonians killing other Oregonians is not a violation of the Constitution itself - though of course Oregonians crossing state lines to kill, say, Idahoans would be a federal issue.

But since there is a CSA, the good people of Oregon should obey it like the rest of us. The CSA need pose no problems for their assisted-suicide laws - barbituates are far from the only method of killing your fellow Oregonian. Obviously these people need to read more murder myteries, or at least more history. Socrates did the dirty deed without a prescription, and Roman ladies had a graceful way with a scalpel that anyone can imitate, regardless of age, health, or medical degree. The Conquistadores wiped out a continent with common household germs. More humane modern methods include the guillotine, the electric chair, and starving the patient to death. A creative physician has a million ways to kill without violating the CSA.

In fact, there’s no reason to involve a physician at all. Assisted suicide is a contradiction in terms - it’s not suicide unless you do it without assistance. If Oregonians want to legalize suicide, they should just go ahead and do it. None of the rest of us will complain that there are fewer Oregonians as a result, I promise. Suicide is an unprosecutable crime, anyway. Now I admit that it might take a little forethought and reading to find a painless method of offing oneself, but since the idea of euthanasia is to put terminally-ill people out of their unbearable pain, really they only need to find a method at or beneath their current level of pain.

The right to kill yourself is an inalienable right in that you’re the only one who can exercise it, and - mankind being as frail as we are - no one can stop you. Unless you’re incarcerated, it’s relatively simple to do yourself in. (Residing in a hospital full of sharp scalpels and federally controlled substances doesn’t count as incarceration.) So this business about assisting suicides is nonsense - that’s just killing people. Needing an accomplice to commit suicide is a sure sign you’re not serious about the death thing. Being an accomplice to someone else’s death is killing (though not necessarily murder), and it’s wrong if you’re a physician. Physicians should do no harm.

But the formerly good people of Oregon are still welcome to go around killing one another if they want, so long as they don’t involve physicians. I recommend a new profession to handle the situation, one analogous to Nurse Practitioners: Death Practitioners. Since there isn’t enough euthanasia business to support my DP’s (yet), I think they should have a sideline doing abortions. Abortion isn’t a complicated procedure - back in the 70’s women used to vacuum each other’s uteri for fun - and there’s no reason for physicians to be doing it. If a complication results of course a doctor should be called in, but physicians should do no harm.

In short, if you want someone killed - yourself, your terminally ill relative, or your fetus - you should kill them yourself. Don’t look to the medical profession to sanitize your acts…or your laws.

Pics of the day: Mike Hollihan’s Kerry Mockery collection. (I especially liked “Positions may change without notice” and “Our Modern Janus.”)
Lit of the day: those of the opposite ideological persuasion may prefer The Bushiad and the Idyossey - political humor in blank verse.

I found Mozart Was a Red: A Morality Play in One Act by Murray N. Rothbard at LewRockwell.com and was duly amused. Even if you’re not familiar with the cult of Ayn Rand’s personality, this one-act play is fun in a general cult-of-personality way.

I’ve also been reading Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, a very unauthorized biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Two of the sites where I was reading it are 404 at the moment (Operation Clambake and Nots.org), whether because of legal action by the Scientologists or simple server problems remains to be seen. (Scientologists go to more extraordinary lengths to keep the mythos of their founding personality alive than Objectivists do.) You can find a copy of BFM at Religio.de. It’s long (I’m still not done) but enthralling - truth really is stranger than fiction.

[Spam in a can.]

Classical Values is an interesting blog that explains the sudden rise in support for gay marriage as a sort of Libertarian trickle-down effect. That is, the heterosexual majority isn’t concerned about equal rights for homosexuals per se, but in greater tolerance in general, which will somehow translate into greater tolerance for themselves as well.

It’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s the real story. He cites two other possibilities - that the majority loves homosexuals, or they hate the conservatives who object to homosexuality. If hatred of the Religious Right were behind the opinion polls, I think there would have been more of a flap over the partial birth abortion bill. Only one possibility is left: love of homosexuals.

I don’t know where it comes from, or how long it will last, but that seems to be the underlying explanation of the blogosphere’s affair with gay marriage. I see sympathy for gay marriage as analogous to sympathy for the AIDS cause. I’m fascinated by the latter to this day - that a sexually-transmitted disease that’s nothing more than the syphilis epidemic of our day was perceived not as a self-inflicted, preventable disease but as a tragedy on the order of juvenile leukemia is just boggling - unless people are fond of the victims. (If you think people care about the African victims of AIDS, take a look at the Malaria Clock. Malaria is preventable and treatable, yet the carnage goes on unnoted.)

Why the love? It’s probably an American thing - we tend to like our neighbors no matter how odd they are, whereas in certain other countries going against the flow is sufficient grounds for a lynching.

[This entry brought to you by spam in a can.]

Wired link of the day: Arise, Mickey, and walk!

Speaking of paralysis, I was reading about sleep paralysis somewhere lately and when I mentioned it, people seemed to think that my hypnapompic hallucinations were weird - and this is the blog category for weird. Sleep paralysis is what keeps those of us who don’t thrash around when we’re asleep immobile. If you happen to become or remain partly conscious while you’re paralyzed, things can get weird. For one thing, you’re paralyzed, and any attempt to move may result in a sense of astral projection - but real problem is that people tend to sense a presence in the room. Hence you get succubi, incubi, old hags sitting on your chest, aliens experimenting on you and the like. Because you’re conscious, it all seems very, very real, though technically it’s classed as a hypnagogic (when falling asleep) or hypnapompic (when waking up) hallucination.

Here are some sleep paralysis links:

• A brief description of SP from wikipedia
• The scientific explanation, complete with big words and a survey for fellow paralytics
• The Sceptical Inquirer investigates the alien abduction angle
• An anonymous account of SP
• A non-anonymous account, with a quote from Moby Dick

I don’t usually hallucinate anything - I just can’t move. It tends to happen when I take a nap in the middle of the day…which I may be doing now, since this entry is spam in a can.

This spam in a can blog entry was brought to you by WordPress and the Edit Timestamp checkbox.

I’ve converted Eric Costello’s old technicolor Blogger template to WordPress. Back in the days of MovableType I’d converted it to MT, which was much more of a headache. This switch was relatively painless. See the demo! Download the two required files: colorpress.css and colorpress.js. The instructions are simple and can be found at the top of either file.

As you can see, I’m not actually doing the trippy technicolor thing myself, but I converted it because I do want to incorporate a similar effect into the blog at some point. As I write this, it’s late, late at night, but if all goes well this blog entry will become visible tomorrow morning. Future canned blogging will also be labelled “spam in a can” because I like the way it sounds.