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Showing posts from July, 2009

Something to check out

Garrett's Tales from the Peace Corps. Since I'll likely be somewhat out of touch for the next couple months, Garrett's a good place to go if you're looking for some meditations on the South Africa Peace Corps experience. He's got a bunch of pretty penetrating posts on the whole business. I read it from beginning to end.

Staging

Tomorrow, we get a vaccination for yellow fever, and then it's on the plane to Johannesburg. I'm the only person in the South Africa group that is alone in my room, which is kind of lonely. I did get to hang out with a great married couple--we went to sushi (unagi, I will miss you deeply), and had a couple beers. The staging orientation was interesting and bewildering--there's a lot to remember, I just hope I make it there with my stuff in one piece. It's a 17.67 hour flight, with one stop for refueling in Dakar.

Big News

So I joined the Peace Corps, and on the 23rd I'll be heading to South Africa to start training. So long as I don't wuss out, I'll be moving into some kind of township in September. Right now, I'm in a hotel in Washington DC (man, Matt was right , the buildings are short here), and the douchebag baggage attendant in Cortez refused to put my luggage on the plane because I was 10 minutes late for check-in (apparently you have to be there 45 minutes before boarding). That might make marginal sense for a medium sized or large plane, but this was a 15-seat cropduster, half empty. The baggage check was literally 30 yards from the plane. I walked out on the runway and got to stare at the wide-open baggage compartment, then sit on the plane for 15 minutes. So of course they sent one bag to LAX and the other to Tajikistan or something. Anyway, I hope they show up eventually--though I think I could probably survive without them. I anticipated this would happen and brought t

Grr

I usually like Matt Yglesias a lot, but this just pisses me off: I think another way of thinking about it is that Dawkins has basically tried to reformulate atheism in the evangelizing and illiberal mode of illiberal evangelizing religion. Thus, much as right-wing Christians and right-wing Muslims can simultaneously loathe each other and have structurally similar views, so, too, can “new atheists” join the party. Elsewhere you have a liberal ethic adhered to by people who identify with different spiritual traditions and also by what I think are “normal” atheists, just people who don’t identify with a religious tradition, rather than people who want to construct a self-conscious atheist identity and go to battle over it. First, conflating someone like Dawkins (who is a little pissed at religion for my taste, but otherwise a great educator and science popularizer, and quite liberal) with bona-fide douchebags like Harris and Hitchens is stupid. Second, it's a hideous exaggeration to

Some pictures

Calico Trail: This thing is a real bitch on a bike; this time we were on foot. There were half-mile sections on Calico so rocky and steep you couldn't even push the bike, you had to carry it. That's Mount Wilson in the background. Monarch Crest Trail: This trail was pretty easy on a bike, and really cool as it runs right along the Continental Divide for a ways. There were so many people on it, though, that what sticks out is being overtaken by someone about every five minutes. Still pretty though.

You could plow this groove and plant some crops

Dig it!

Scientist survey

Check this out. I'm pretty much square with the majority on every topic. Mostly what struck me is the success of the right-wing attack on the scientific consensus around global warming and evolution.

Lame

Jeffrey Goldberg is in Durango. He writes : There aren't any hot chili peppers in the blistering sun, just a really crappy Best Western motel and a tourist railroad that runs to Silverton that seems like a nightmare to someone such as myself, who is always looking for an exit from crappy tourist adventures. City folk...sigh. The railroad is actually pretty cool--a genuine old-time narrow-gauge steam engine on the old route, which is spectacular and sorta scary. Get one of the open cars, and it's well worth the money. Also, you can use it as a taxi for a hike up into Chicago Basin , which is absolutely amazing. A bit crowded for a mountain valley, but it's tightly regulated and the mountain goats are very friendly.

The Gaza 21

Apparently about a week ago, a bunch of human rights workers, journalists from 11 countries, and a a former US congresswoman (Cynthia McKinney) were en route to Gaza with humanitarian supplies, but were halted and imprisoned by the Israeli navy. Juan Cole has more . Also see here . It seems the point of this exercise is classic nonviolent resistance, MLK-style. You attempt to provoke a violent, disproportionate response from the oppressors to sway moderate opinion in your direction. In this case, though, the response of the media is crucial, and in this case I haven't seen a single story from a major US outlet. Currently an American Idol retrospective is on my television, which is clearly more important than a humanitarian crisis perpetrated by an blockade in obvious violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Kurt Vonnegut

From #2: "It seemed to me that science fiction writers were writing about the most important issues of our time, and that the mainstream writers and those most respected by critics were still dealing with the subtleties of human character and motivation and all that. Meanwhile, we've created these monstrous engines and social schemes and so forth which are having more influence on us than anything else. So I created Kilgore Trout to say 'maybe these guys can't write so well, but they're sure talking about what needs to be talked about.'"

Healthcare costs

Lo! I was just talking about how Megan McArdle often makes ridiculous arguments--and often about things I sort of agree with! Here she comes with another doozy ...but Ezra Klein got there first : You know, I'd been wanting to write a post semi-agreeing with those questioning the massive savings to be gained by replacing the relatively high administrative costs of the private sector with the relatively low administrative costs of the public sector. But then Megan McArdle and Alex Tabarrok began making a lot of really weird arguments about the Soviet Union -- seriously -- and, sorry, but that's where I get off the train. We live in a world with actual examples of national health-care systems. France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Japan, Sweden, Italy, Taiwan and Israel all have them. They are cheaper. With lower administrative costs. And comparable health outcomes. And they somehow exist within a largely private economy (Also: Read Jon Cohn !). Pretty much what I was thinking,

Megan McArdle

I've never been able to pin down exactly why, but Megan McArdle bugs the crap out of me. Today, Yglesias in his deadpan way eviscerates a McArdle post on relative economic performance of presidents. Maybe it's just leftover bad taste from the Hilzoy/McArdle spat a while back, but nearly every post I read of hers makes me cringe. I think it has something to do with the often non-sequitur nature of her arguments.

Robert S. McNamara, RIP

He died today at 93. I've always been fascinated by him. A troubled soul, who it seemed was never really able to come to grips with his role in life, but tried to make up for it in his own, halting, self-serving and ineffectual way. Yet I can't help but view him with a lot of sympathy. Clearly an astoundingly brilliant man, and clearly a product of the technocratic fetishism of the 50s. Driven, wound to the breaking point. One must remember that other figures of that time--George McGovern comes to mind--did oppose the Vietnam War from the start, and deserve moral accolades far greater than that of McNamara. Yet not many others who were neck-deep in the conflict tried to deal with the lessons of Vietnam in any way. It's fair to say that he was devastated, haunted by his role in the war, and spent most of the rest of his life trying to atone for it, unlike say Nixon or Kissinger. I also don't think he can be compared with Rumsfeld. One must remember that in the 60s