Climate and Conspiracy

Climate Change--Those Hacked Emails It's been a week or more since a gentleman hacker stole a bunch of private emails from the University of East Anglia in an attempt to liberate supposedly secret evidence that the entire climate change crowd is in on a conspiracy to defraud the public. I haven't yet heard if anyone is filing charges against the man, but evidently some folks, especially the Limbaugh-Beck screaming meme crowd, feel this is the new Pentagon Papers and the hacker in question is their Daniel Elsberg. It is an unfortunate fact that some things---like this issue---are so complex that most people cannot follow all the data to the conclusions. They haven't the time, the resources, or, frankly, the inclination. But then if anybody could parse evidence at this level, what would need scientists for? Why would anyone devote an entire life to researching one thing? If Joe the Plumber could actually understand the science behind the Large Hadron Collider, Paleontology, Evolution, and Climate Change, what do we need specialists for? I'm sure someone has an answer along the lines of "We don't! They just sponge off taxpayers and study stuff no one gives a damn about!" I'd like to think most people are not so easily gulled, but I've been disappointed before and probably will be again.

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Left, Right, Center, Lunacy Is Still Lunacy

Several years ago at a science fiction convention I saw a charlatan in the dealers room fleecing people with bogus "kirlian aura" photographs. The person in question had constructed an elaborate chair with complex armrests with hand-shaped inserts and cables. The victim sat in the chair, placed the hands on the plates, and a photograph was taken (a polaroid) that showed a bust portrait int he midst of swirling colors. I got a glimpse of the set up---there were mirrors on either side of the lens reflecting brightly-colored streamers that flanked the magic chair. Somehow, this created a lens flare of multi-hued cloudiness. I am a photographer by training. I know a little something about Kirlian "aura" photographs, enough to know that (a) you can't take them in full light and (b) Polaroid never made a film sensitive enough in the format this person was using to record the faint electrical tracings. You also couldn't run enough electricity safely through a whole human body to create even a thin outline much less the solar flare explosion these prints displayed. They looked nothing like a Kirlian photograph. But people were buying them, fifteen bucks a shot, and I expect the photographer in question made nice change that weekend. When an acquaintance of mine was showing hers off later I made a couple of remarks about the fraudulent aspects of it and all I got for my trouble was frostiness and dismissal as a hopeless skeptic. I confess I took that as my cue to say nothing further. I did not unmask the fraud, which would have been brave and ethical, but might well have gotten me pilloried as a spoil sport. This past year I sat on a panel about alternate religions and mythology at another convention. I was the only self-professed atheist on the panel. When I made my introductions and stated my position, a co-panelist asked me "So you're not a Christian? What are you then?" I was a bit dumbfounded. Did she not know what the word Atheist meant? I expounded. "I'm a humanist and rational materialist. I think all religions are essentially the same. Some are more benign than others but all of them are based on assumptions I can't accept. So I'm not only not a Christian, I am not a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or any variety of Pagan or New Age mystic. As far as I'm concerned, they're all bunk." I was not pilloried. We had a good discussion. I chopped up every religious assertion regardless its source and we all had a rousing good time fencing with each other and I was even congratulated later for having the guts to state my position clearly and forcefully. But afterward, the same co-panelist who asked my what I was if not a Christian came up to me and pressed me further. Do I believe in reincarnation? "No. There's no proof for it. It seems to me to be the same sort of wishful thinking all the rest of them embrace and I have no use for it." I think she was offended at that point. Thinking about it now, I'm beginning to realize why we have such difficulty in public forums discussing religion, especially religion in our political life.

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The Line Between

I have to write a new bio. I've been needing to do this for some time. I had a few prepared bios for conventions and such, tailored depending on who I sent them to. Magazine bios, con bios, conference bios...they all required a bit of tweaking. But they're all pretty much out of date. I'm going to do this during the coming week. Cull through all the details that would seem to make me an important person, someone people might wish to come listen to or see. I have a difficult time with these, which is why I write most all of them in third person. I have to put myself in a frame of mind that I'm writing about Someone Else. Apropos to that, this past weekend I received my copy of the new documentary The Polymath: or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany. In the course of watching it Saturday and Sunday, we heard him say that he considers himself a rather uninteresting person. I found that resonant. When I'm writing a new story, I tend to put myself in the character of the protagonist. I see myself as That Person. And almost always, when I start on the subsequent rewrites, one of the problems I have to fix is that the main characters of my stories are uniformly weak compared to the secondary characters. A couple of years ago I had a revelation about why that is. Mainly, because I don't see myself as a particularly interesting person. So that translates into the protagonist, who is generally interested in the other characters, who then become relatively more imbued by interesting characteristics. I have to then go back and add in all the missing stuff the main character requires. Which brings me to the writing of a personal bio. What is it about me that is interesting to other people? Now, I'd like to be interesting and sometimes I think I am. But in the course of the day, I don't even think about myself much less what it is about me that makes me worth note. This is perfectly sane behavior, as far as I'm concerned. Who does go through the day cataloging their specialness besides narcissists, obsessives, terminally vain, or profoundly insecure people? I stipulate that I'm vain, but it limits itself to personal grooming, physical fitness, and an attempt at erudition, none of which controls my life, and all of which are practices I think more people should embrace if for no other reason than a sense of public politeness. But I'm always a bit dismayed when people actually pay attention to me or think I have something worth saying. (I stress again, I want to be someone like that, I just don't happen to "feel" it.) So the personal bio usually becomes a list of things I've done. It seems a common way to deal with the self-conscious aspects of a productive life, to place your credentials, as it were, Over There In That Box. You can point to the file and say, well, if you want to know about me, look in there. And in that file you'll find my publications, my award nominations, and the work I've done, etc etc., and, oh year, I live in St. Louis, I have a dog, I'm in love with Donna and so forth---which are still components, in a way, rather than actual revelations. I don't think there's anything wrong with this approach and I certainly don't think strangers have a right to expect more, but it's not exactly a biography, is it? It's more like a resume. It doesn't say anything about the fact that for me different music produces different kinds of writing, that if I'm trying to get inside the head of someone tormented I often listen to Ligeti and when I'm creating landscapes, I want Vangelis or Sibelius and when I need action, I find Last Fast or Joe Satriani or Bartok really helps. It doesn't cover the fact that I use much of my music to unlock a feeling I can't quite identify just for myself. It doesn't say anything about how much I like late evening sunlight shafting through miniblinds (or how the same effect, late at night, from streetlamps, really turns me on); or how the late afternoon sunlight across open fields in September strikes a kind of heroic melancholy in my mind, like the atmosphere of final days or impending loss or the denouement after a mighty adventure; or the fact that I've never read a book that has made me weep, but there are certain films that do it to me almost every time... In other words, bios like this don't say much about me. But my stories do, if you remember that they are not and never have been biographical. A paradox? Not really. You put what you feel into a story. How that feeling is evoked is unimportant as long as it's true, and you don't need personal revelation in terms of history to do it. Everyone has these feelings, and they own them, and they were all evoked differently, so fiction that talks about the personal need not be about the author to work. But you still ought to be able to say something in a bio about yourself that makes you at least seem interesting to total strangers. I'm still working on all this.

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God Is God, Law Is Law, and Stupid is Stupid.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The surprise is we haven't seen this "solution" proposed more often as overtly. Here is a lesson on how not to try to make intractable cultural traditions compatible with intractable reality under dubious moral imperatives. But what this really shows is the limit of patience. People hammer away at something that refuses to yield to the methods being employed and rather than change methods, eradicate the problem. This sort of things make it so easy to be a cynic.

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Church To State: “Do What We Want Or Else.”

The divide between church and state seems on the one hand to be growing but on the other narrowing, especially when you consider how intrusive established religions have been. Representatives of the Catholic Church sat in Nanci Pelosi's office of late while negotiations for the health care bill were ongoing, overseeing what she would do about abortion. Now this. Any way one reads this, it comes out as a threat. The quid pro quo is explicit. "If you don't bend to our will on this, we will stop services your city relies on." I have in the past believed that the tax exempt status of religions was a necessary work-around to preserve the fiction of separation. In the past, there have been instances of state intrusion directly into religions in, for one example, state funding for programs in parochial schools. There was always a quid pro quo in such offers and practices. But never has a representative of the state sat in the office of a minister while he drafted a sermon to be sure certain details got left out or included. Never, despite massive abuses by religious institutions in real estate and related financial areas, has the state moved to revoke 501(c)(3) status. It may be that any state official who tried it would be booted out of office summarily, but nevertheless that has been the unspoken law of the land. Seems the courtesy doesn't go both ways. If that's the case, I think it is time to revisit the whole issue. If the Catholic Church sees itself as providing services as an arm of the civil service sector and allows itself the conceit that it may use that service as a lever to influence political decisions, then they have implicitly given up due consideration as an inviolate institution, free from state requirements of taxation and regulation. Seems fairly clear cut to me. Obviously, there will be those who disagree. But it's time, I think, to seriously reconsider the state relationship to so-called "nonprofit" "apolitical" tax exempt institutions.

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