The Ash Twins Blog

From Wikipedia:

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers filed a suit against God seeking an injunction, in an effort to highlight the issue of public access to the court system. The suit was dismissed due to the fact that God could not be properly notified, having no address. The Judge stated, “Given that this court finds that there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant this action will be dismissed with prejudice.” The senator responded, “The court itself acknowledges the existence of God. A consequence of that acknowledgement is a recognition of God’s omniscience … Since God knows everything, God has notice of this lawsuit.“

From In the Company of Strangers (2004), pg. 121:

[E]ven those with apparently great power – derived from their ability to inflict unchallenged violence – find the sheer complexity of the cities impossible to organize to their satisfaction. The inhabitants of cities interact with each other in ways that no one has foreseen, not even themselves. Conservative authorities – aristocracies, churches, guilds – have always been wary of cities, seeing them as decadent places not only because decadent people choose to live there but also because people’s behavior changes when they arrive in the city. In the city, individuals experiment and invent; they refashion everything from their political ideologies, their relationships with their parents, their sexuality, and the music that moves them, to the industrial processes with which they work. Others have admired cities for just that reason, and for writers such as Balzac the corruption and cynicism of the city — the ease with which people can change their skin — are the very features that give it energy and life.

What does this tell us about life in the internet?

Pragmatism is debated in the public sphere. This is the first time I’ve seen anything written on the topic in mass media in 8 years of reading news.

Daniel Larson at the American Conservative:

Think of it another way: a man of political principles is concerned with using both the right means for the right ends and is willing to let experience inform his assumptions, while the ideologue is indifferent to the means used and willfully ignorant of experience that challenges his assumptions. Any opposition between pragmatism and ideology also seems to me to be misleading from the beginning because what passes for “pragmatism” in government represents adherence to a particular reigning ideology. There might conceivably be some genuine empirically-oriented, sane pragmatism that does not fit this definition, but this is not the pragmatism the political class invokes and it is not the one we are discussing. When a given politician announces his interest in “what works,” we might reasonably interpret this as a statement that he does not intend to overturn established consensus and accepts the constraints and assumptions of the reigning ideology, which broadly speaking means state capitalism at home and hegemonism abroad.

Charles M. Blow, The Demise of Dating:

Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the person, you might consider having sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and, if you really like the person, you might consider going on a date…

[T]he pros are that hooking up emphasizes group friendships over the one-pair model of dating, and, therefore, removes the negative stigma from those who can’t get a date… It used to be that if you couldn’t get a date, you were a loser… Now you just hang out with your friends and hope that something happens.

The cons center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse. Also, there’s an increased likelihood of sexual assaults because hooking up is often fueled by alcohol.

That’s not good. So why is there an increase in hooking up? According to Professor Bogle, it’s: the collapse of advanced planning, lopsided gender ratios on campus, delaying marriage, relaxing values and sheer momentum.

http://hubpages.com/hub/what-are-the-differences-between-shipping-with-UPS-and-FedEx_:

I was selling online and shipping different items, including very heavy, and here is the golden rule for all of your shipments: everything that is going out in a box, will be cheaper to send via UPS. Everything bulky, heavy and that is going to be shipped in custom package – save your money and ship via FedEx. Now, a couple of examples: Zappos uses UPS, Amazon – UPS for books and for other big items FedEx, a bundle of moving blankets would be shipped by FedEx, but a set of moving boxes – by UPS. Hope it saves you some money:)

YouTube Videos Pull in Real Money:

One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site…

YouTube declined to comment on how much money partners earned on average, partly because advertiser demand varies for different kinds of videos. But a spokesman, Aaron Zamost, said “hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month.” At least a few are making a full-time living: Mr. Buckley said he was earning over $100,000 from YouTube advertisements.

Glenn Greenwald’s criticism of Senators Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden for supporting torture in some circumstances is certainly justified, and his explanation of their motivations is reasonable:

[F]or the last year, Feinstein and Wyden were both insistent that the only way to end torture and restore America’s standing in the world was to require CIA compliance with the Army Field Manual — period.  But as long as George Bush was President, it was cheap and easy for Feinstein and Wyden to argue that, because they knew there was no chance it would ever happen.  As they well knew, they lacked the votes to override Bush’s inevitable veto of any such legislation.  So as long as Bush was President, it was all just posturing, strutting around demanding absolute anti-torture legislation they knew would never pass.

But that has all changed now… Obama himself said repeatedly and unequivocally during the campaign that he supports legislation to compel CIA compliance with the Army Field Manual, making it virtually impossible for him to veto any such legislation if Congress passes it.  Thus, Senate Democrats now know that if they pass the law they claimed so vehemently to support, it would actually get enacted.

So now, suddenly, Feinstein and Wyden are sending at least preliminary signals that they are far more “flexible” on the issue — I believe the all-justifying catchword in vogue now is “pragmatic” — than they ever were before.  What had been an unequivocal principle has instantly transformed into caveat-riddled buzzphrases.  I’m sure we’ll be hearing shortly — from many precincts — that those of us who insist that Democrats fulfill their commitment to compel the CIA’s compliance in all cases with the extant Army Field Manual (not some brand new, more permissive set of guidelines written and issued in secret and which provides for exceptions), are guilty of being dreaded “ideologues,” purity trolls and civil liberties extremists.

Greenwald’s argument leaves out a critically important component of the issue: that torture is ineffective for obtaining information. The experts are in agreement: Torture doesn’t work. The pro-torture position is not pragmatic; it’s ignorant:

Erroneous Assumptions: Popular Belief in the Effectiveness of Torture Interrogation:

People generally believe that torture is effective despite strong counterclaims by experienced military interrogators and intelligence experts. This article challenges us to reexamine some of our basic assumptions about torture by presenting four psychological factors—primarily errors and biases in human judgment—that help account for this mistaken popular belief.

Behind this Mortal Bone: The (In)Effectiveness of Torture:

The scant empirical evidence that can be uncovered regarding whether torture is good at eliciting information suggests that coercive mechanisms may not be especially effective interrogation tools.

The Utilitarian Justification of Torture:

Torture is prohibited by customary international law. Yet the practice widely persists. Beneath the rhetoric of human rights talk the utilitarian justification of torture commands a good deal of support among police and security agencies and is detectable between the lines of the discourse of denial. Can torture be justified on utilitarian grounds? Close examination of Bentham’s defence of torture, and the reasoning of the Landau Report in support of `moderate physical pressure’ in Israel, suggests that it cannot. The practice of torture will arguably best be countered by confronting the subterranean utilitarian justifications of torture on their own terms: in the long term it does not work but, rather, undermines the legitimacy of the state itself.

John Stewart proves again to be one of America’s preeminent commentators on the country’s society, politics, and economy:

Salon’s Camille Paglia offers views rarely heard in the American public sphere:

I gulped when Obama also pledged educational reform by putting state-of-the-art computers in every classroom. Groan. Computers alone will never solve the educational crisis in this country: They are tools and facilitators, not primary conveyors of knowledge. Packing his team with shiny Harvard retreads, Obama missed a golden opportunity to link his public works project with a national revalorization of the trades. Practical training in hands-on vocational skills is desperately needed in this country, where liberal arts education has become a soggy boondoggle, obscenely expensive and diluted by propaganda and groupthink…

I may be an atheist, but I respect religion and certainly find it far more philosophically expansive and culturally sustaining than the me-me-me sense of foot-stamping entitlement projected by too many gay activists in the unlamented past. My position has always been that government should get out of the marriage business. Marriage is a religious concept that should be defined and administered only by churches. The government, a secular entity, must institute and guarantee civil unions, open to both straight and gay couples and conferring full legal rights and benefits. Liberal heterosexuals who profess support for gay rights should be urged to publicly shun marriage and join gays in the civil union movement.

From William Safire’s On Language:

[M]etonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh mee, identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it — like “the brass” for high military officers, “the crown” for royalty and “the suits” for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. “Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche,” I wrote in a display of trope-a-dope, “which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole” like “wheels” for automobiles and “head” for cattle.

Noone is a somebody who correctly notes the re-emergence of the synecdoche (sih-NECK-doe-key) in the punning title of a new movie directed by the Oscar-winning surrealist screenwriter Charlie Kaufman: “Synecdoche, New York.” Though panned in The Washington Times as “art-house pomposity,” Kaufman’s new work — whose hero is described as a narcissist haunted by the thought of death — is hailed as one of the best films of the decade by Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post. That reviewer notes that “my death is your death is her death is our death — possibly accounting for the title, which isn’t just a phonetic play on Schenectady but a speech form in which a part of something can stand for the whole.”

I would have said it differently. The life story presented in “Synecdoche, New York” is representative of the life of all humankind. The only constant in human existence is death, so humans are defined by death. Thus the entire movie illustrate’s one character’s quixotic efforts to gain immortality, but at bottom his life is just one slow process of dying.