Joel's humanistic blog

The Bear that Was on the New York Times Op-Ed Page

2011-03-13T13:40:00.000-04:00

Something I'm pretty sure I didn't expect to see when I flipped through today's New York Times op-ed page: a detailed plot summary of an op-ed writer's "favorite children's book" by Frank Tashlin, who has a strong cult following among both fans of his live-action movies and animation buffs who know him for his relatively brief but influential period working on the Looney Tunes (and the book in question was later adapted into a cartoon at MGM, not Warner Bros., but made by Termite Terrace alumni Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble):

The situation reminded me of my favorite children's book — "The Bear That Wasn’t," by Frank Tashlin — in which a factory is built around a bear while he is hibernating. When the bear wakes up, no one believes that he is a bear; everyone is certain that he is a malingering factory worker "who needs a shave and wears a fur coat." The bear keeps protesting, "But I am a bear." Ultimately, his confidence in his own identity as a bear is shattered.

I'm on Twitter

2011-02-01T23:30:00.001-05:00

Well, I'm still figuring out how to use it, but at the beginning of the new year I finally stopped holding out and got an account.

dorkbot-nyc 10th anniversary meeting & party this Wednesday

2010-11-29T17:30:00.000-05:00

This Wednesday, December 1, dorkbot-nyc is having its 10th anniversary meeting with a special extra party:

The 37.8.4-th dorkbot-nyc meeting and 10th ANNIVERSARY PARTY will take place from 7-10pm on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at Location One in SoHo.
THIS IS OUR 10TH ANNIVERSARY! COME HELP US CELEBRATE!
Wear a homemade suit! Wear a crazy dress! Wear your jeans and a t-shirt! DOESN'T MATTER! Come hear three old-timey dorkbot pals rant and rave! Eat some pizza and drink some beer. Bring a cake?!? Bring some blinky lights! Just bring yourself?!? WHATEVER YOU WANT!
It'll be a semi-normal dorkbot meeting that morphs into a casual party/celebration of 10 years of world-wide dorkbot nerd-on-geek action. Meeting starts at 7pm, party continues until 10pm.

The Realist Archive Project is complete

2010-11-09T00:30:00.000-05:00

Ethan Persoff has just announced the completion of The Realist Archive Project, in which the complete run of Paul Krassner's legendary and rare satire/freethought/conspiracy underground magazine has been scanned and posted online. Jesse Walker describes "the lost bridge between Mad and Wikipedia" (with a bonus find of a letter to the editor from a then-conservative Karl Hess):

In 1958 Paul Krassner set out to create a Mad magazine for adults. He was well-qualified for the task, being both a former Mad contributor and, in fact if not always in spirit, an adult. The result was The Realist, a journal whose great innovation was to refuse to label which articles were journalism and which were satire, and sometimes to add just enough truth to a piece of fiction that readers would be left completely befuddled as to what, if anything, they should believe. Some call it a prelude to the underground press. I call it a prelude to the Internet.

Over a three year period, a quartet of issues was posted monthly; the most (in)famous stuff — "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book", the Disneyland Memorial Orgy, the Fuck Communism! poster — was posted early on, but there are plenty of goodies in the later updates; the highlight of the penultimate update was an interview with Albert Ellis by Krassner and Robert Anton Wilson, and the final update is topped off with Krassner's "My Acid Trip with Groucho Marx" (which was already online, but this is a different edition with original page scans and without an eyeball-searing background color).

When "no possessions" meets "his own"

2010-10-08T23:45:00.000-04:00

I couldn't resist combining Google's John Lennon birthday doodle with another famous line drawing portrait:

modern school reunion announcement 2010

2010-09-08T12:30:00.000-04:00

The announcement for the 38th annual reunion of Friends of the Modern School, coming up this Saturday at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been posted. The Friends is an alumni association for people associated with an anarchist school and colony which was at Stelton, New Jersey (near current-day Piscataway), and the reunions are open to interested members of the general public.

I'm back

2010-08-30T23:59:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a while, but after a hiatus, I'm back to blogging! I'm currently doing some long overdue housecleaning, and expect to get back on a semi-regular posting schedule.

dorkbot-nyc kicks off its 10th season

2010-08-30T23:50:00.000-04:00

This Wednesday, dorkbot-nyc is starting the first meeting of its 10th season; as I described it in my post about its 5th anniversary, "its motto, 'People doing strange things with electricity', gives the impression of what to (un)expect. Its dorky arena includes almost anything within the wide bounds of electronics, including both hardware and software, with a square emphasis on low-budget, do-it-yourself, personal projects. The results are geeky, goofy, technical, off-beat, and as wacky as the presenters' personal interests". This promises to be an exciting season; the previous one saw the introduction of a Vimeo account that has videos of some of the presentations.

Chomsky on his inner anarchist

2010-03-14T16:30:00.002-04:00

There's a new video interview with Noam Chomsky (a transcript is also available), based on an open submission thread on reddit, that includes a question about anarchist strategy posed by Roderick T. Long (using the handle BerserkRL, which I find amusing to hear Chomsky read out loud in the video interview; it's the third and final question, starting at 15:40 in the video, and is slightly condensed for time but otherwise similar to the version originally posted on reddit, although the reference to Kevin Carson didn't make the cut; hat tip to commenter "Joel", not me, on Roderick's blog).

Chomsky has been one of the most well-known and intellectually respected anarchists in the world since coming to fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s with articles like "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" and "Notes on Anarchism", but while he's always advocated for a stateless society as the ultimate goal, his shorter-term political strategies are closer to those of liberals and progressives, involving strengthening states at the federal level for the forseeable future in order to deal with corporate power. He's been criticized on this issue before by anarchists such as James Herod and Joe Peacott, but Long's question attempted to get a new angle on the issue by explicitly grounding itself in specific research showing that the conflict between business and state power taken for granted by liberal historiography is largely illusory (which makes it unfortunate that the reference to Carson wasn't included; I'm trying to think of someone with similar ideas who'd have name recognition: maybe Ralph Borsodi? Paul Goodman? Kirkpatrick Sale?), including Chomsky's own (the video shows he's evidently flattered by that). As it so happens, another interview conducted with Chomsky by Equal Time for Freethought in 2007 (which I've been meaning to discuss for a while now, as the date indicates) asked a similar question, partly spurred by yours truly (although I was not responsible for the specific wording of the question), about pro-market but anti-capitalist anarchism, starting at 16:21 (also of interest is the immediately following question, in which Chomsky discusses business support for and corporate state aspects of the New Deal).

In his response, Chomsky covers some of the same ground as in previous discussions; he sees the general idea of decreasing state power as too abstract to be a meaningful strategy, which is not unlike how he's previously referred to people being "seduced by the words 'minimize the state' and sort of trapped in them", albeit still puzzling, since he's recommended Diego Abad de Santillán's book After the Revolution as a very detailed and specific guide to how a stateless society could work; and refers to the weakness of organizations outside of the state such as "cooperatives, community organizations, worker-controlled industry", although this weakness is itself largely due to the state pre-empting such services, and Long has written a classic article on the decline of the lodge system for health care due to just such a cause; he concludes that "there's a very large number of people who are committed sincerely and rightly to the kind of long-term objectives that anarchists have always tried to uphold."

Chomsky has always had an unusual and seemingly disparate mix of intellectual influences, ranging from anarchism to progressivism to socialism to classical liberalism, and even has had kind things to say about capitalism and conservatism (Matt MacKenzie has remarked that in his opinion, "much of Chomsky's supposed anarchism comes not from his socialist side, but from the fact that part of him is still influenced by classical liberalism"), and different parts of his views get emphasized at different times, depending on the context and even on what mood he's in; compare his sympathetic take on Republican former senators Robert Taft and Mark Hatfield to his dismissive one on Ron Paul, while the blistering Bakunin quote that was the source for the title of Chomsky's book For Reasons of State certainly doesn't suggest any enthusiasm for temporarily increasing state power. Also, I thought since back when Long first posted the question last month that it would be more likely to get a sympathetic response if it was asked by someone he knew well, such as Sheldon Richman, who's known Chomsky going back decades via the Cato Institute and who has maintained a strictly libertarian, yet increasingly left-friendly point of view that's well to the left of the stereotypical Cato position (and Chomsky readily admits he has many Cato-style libertarian friends), rather than by a semi-anonymous website post; in a thread on the LeftLibertarian2 mailing list, Richman described Chomsky as being "a very kind and patient man" while knowing him, to which Kevin Carson responded that when debating Chomsky via email, "his patience seemed to be wearing thin rather quickly".

As for the idea that anarchist goals are too abstract, I've been wondering recently about whether a "Fabian" style approach of offering a steady set of incremental, partial reforms that aim at repealing statism and building up civil society gradually would be a good way to make anarchism seem more relevant and less intimidating, along the lines of the decentralist yet egalitarian liberal social security proposal by the Preservation Institute's Charles Siegel. In a comment on an article by Gary Chartier posted on Infoshop News that advocated a number of immediate steps for dealing with health care (ironically, the very issue dwelt on by Chomsky as being hard to deal with due to its "privatized, unregulated" nature), Chuck Munson noted the effectiveness of the article:

Despite my animosity towards anarcho-capitalism, I have to admit that some of the best anarchist/libertarian analysis being written now about relevant topics such as health care is being written by market anarchists and mutualists, who are usually lumped in with the anarcho-capitalists. The most interesting writing on the economy is being done by these folks.

Which begs the question: where the hell are the anarchists, anti-capitalists and left libertarians? With the world economy in meltdown, why aren't anti-capitalists writing any interesting analysis on the situation?

Quote of the day: James Bovard on free trade vs. free trade agreements

2010-02-23T23:05:00.001-05:00

One would presume that an honest trade agreement would simply require little more than a handshake between the political leaders of the nations involved. If trade is free, then what is there to quibble about? But that would defeat the entire purpose of using free trade agreements to give preferences to favored nations and favored industries.

Free trade is not complex; it does not require an army of hair-splitting bureaucrats to achieve. Free trade agreements, on the other hand, usually outweigh the Bible and have more trick clauses than a Hollywood movie deal. (The U.S.-Australia FTA is nine hundred pages of wheedling, hemming, and hawing.)

Free trade minimizes the power of rulers to decimate the purchasing power of citizens. Free trade agreements allow politicians and bureaucrats to pick winners and losers with arcane formulas that guarantee that trade lawyers will never go hungry.

Free trade allows consumers and businesses to benefit from the best goods the world can produce at the lowest prices. Free trade agreements with a single nation divert trade. They give favored treatment to the producers whose governments sign deals with Washington and put the producers of all other nations at a disadvantage.

FTAs allow political clout to trump economic comparative advantage. FTAs seek to shift trade in whatever direction is most profitable to the politicians making the deals, rather than let trade flow from the decisions of producers and consumers.

Free trade agreements make borders more imposing and onerous for every nation except the one that politicians favor. Free trade aims to make national borders invisible for commerce.

The notion of "free trade"—but only with nationalities that American politicians bless—is a charade. This is like proclaiming freedom of the press, and then adding that people can buy books only from publishers specifically approved by the U.S. Congress.

— James Bovard, The Bush Betrayal, pp. 57-8

Sagan book club follow up

2010-02-16T23:55:00.001-05:00

Well, due to a problem with the email software, an old email from the Sagan Appreciation Society that contained a plug for last December's SHSNY Book Club for Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's Acquiring Genomes was sent out just a few days ago; since the next book club meeting in the series, devoted to Michael Specter's Denialism, is coming up this Thursday (after that it's John Brockman’s This Will Change Everything on March 18 and Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction on April 27), it reminded me that I've been meaning to post a brief follow up to my original post. As it turned out, nobody showed up specifically for the Carl Sagan connection, and as it happened, the discussion didn't wind up being about how the book ties into Carl's work in any detail, mostly centering on the differences between Lynn Margulis's theories of evolution and the more orthodox neo-Darwinist approach. However, Sagan fans are welcome at book club meetings (SHSNY can be contacted for specific questions), and I'd be happy to meet up at other events as well.

Paul Goodman essay contest

2010-02-11T23:45:00.001-05:00

There's an essay contest, partially sponsored by the magazine Dissent, currently running (until May 1, 2010) dedicated to the much-neglected social critic Paul Goodman.

Contact featured on DVD Verdict

2010-02-11T23:20:00.000-05:00

As the screen grab above shows, DVD Verdict is currently featuring a link to their review of Contact (the original DVD, not the Blu-Ray edition which they've also reviewed, but oddly, they haven't reviewed Cosmos) on the front page as part of their "Today in Verdict History" feature. And hey, Nick Sagan gets mentioned in their review of the seventh season of Star Trek: The Next Generation! "We discover that Nick Sagan, who wrote the Picard/Crusher episode 'Attached,' is the son of Carl Sagan. Not only that, but young Nick's recorded voice was sent into space aboard one of NASA's Voyager probes in the 1970s, bearing a greeting from the children of Earth."

Mission to Moscow on TCM tonight

2010-01-20T15:00:00.001-05:00

Following up on a screening and an informative panel discussion last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a rarely seen WWII-era propaganda film (not to be confused with the similarly-subtitled Police Academy installment) is airing on Turner Classic Movies tonight at 10PM EST (it's also available as an unrestored print-on-demand DVD via the Warner Archive, no doubt due to the involvement of Casablanca's Michael Curtiz and Howard Koch). During the era of the US-Soviet Union wartime alliance, the film, based on ambassador Joseph E. Davies's visit to the Stalinist USSR, goes all-out in seeing the nation through, well, rose-colored glasses, as an economically productive nation driven to war despite its lack of any aggressive intentions (even the invasion of Finland is portrayed as an act of self-defense), partly due to a treacherous Nazi conspiracy led by Leon Trostky; Stalin is shown as not only a great leader, but a friendly, avuncular fellow who's willing to stop by for a personal chat with Davies towards the end of his stay. (It should be noted that the film is somewhat coy about portraying Communism per se, in a way that's similar to how Richard Fleischer's Che!'s intentionally distances itself from its controversial subject's politics, and makes some stabs at showing free enterprise elements in the Soviet economy, such as bonuses for productive workers and a small perfume store in Moscow; also, despite the BAM blurb saying that the film portrays the Soviet system as "progressive" and Davies meeting directly with FDR, it doesn't compare the Soviet economy to the New Deal).

I've been curious about the movie ever since Jesse Walker mentioned it back in 2004, saying that in addition to the overly favorable view of the USSR, "It would be a terrible movie even if its politics weren't so repulsive: It's stiffly acted, poorly plotted, padded with stock footage, and just generally clumsy. But it's a must for fans of propaganda kitsch." And BAM's screening did not disappoint; while not a "good" film in the normal sense, this is definitely worth watching for its historical value and/or its unintentional humor (it says a lot about the film that the audience at BAM's screening was trying to be respectful, but still laughed at many of the more outlandish scenes), despite being somewhat overlong at a full two hours (including an extra half-hour or so about the war effort even after Davies leaves Russia).

And while most of the unintentional humor comes from the political stuff, and the crew at Warner Bros. does their professional best to make the material work (including an effective, if somewhat heavy-handed score by Max Steiner), there is indeed a lot of clunkiness to go around; from the real-life Davies's uncomfortable appearance at the beginning of the film, to the huge amount of stock footage (despite being well edited by Don Siegel, who hadn't yet started directing; there's enough montage material that Siegel claimed to have worked with more footage than Curtiz), to a very talky script, and some just plain odd decisions (in the scenes where Davies meets and talks with FDR, the latter is played by an actor, but is shown so obliquely that he's barely seen, whereas all the other actors playing real-life figures are shown normally). The acting is generally adequate, and much less hammy than one would expect, although nobody except Walter Huston's Davies has much screen time, and the lack of credits for most of the actors makes it hard to tell who's who in the many small parts (including a pre-stardom Cyd Charisse as a ballerina).

NYC book club to feature Sagan family book

2009-11-09T23:59:00.001-05:00

On December 10, the Secular Humanist Society of New York book club will discuss Acquiring Genomes by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan; details here (Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience has been featured in the past).

Early animated feature "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" screening in NYC

2009-11-09T22:20:00.000-05:00

On November 11 and November 15, the Museum of Modern Art will screen, with live piano accompaniment, one of the earliest animated features ever made (and made by one of the earliest female animators), Lotte Reiniger's 1926 Arabian Nights fantasy The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Reiniger made films by painstakingly animating intricate silhouette cutouts, and the results are gorgeous to behold. The screening is part of a series on film preservation, and so I assume it's a restored version; I haven't been able to find out exactly how (or if) this differs from the version that has been available on DVD for a while, but the runtime given is 8 minutes longer than the DVD's.

Francisco Ferrer centennial today

2009-10-13T00:01:00.000-04:00

I'm too busy right now to do a real post (and I will eventually put up a post about the 2009 reunion, which was highly successful), but wanted to mark the occasion; I've posted previously about the subject here, here, and here.

Francisco Ferrer centennial

2009-09-22T12:05:00.000-04:00

In only a few weeks, October 13, 2009 will mark the 100th anniversary of the death of educator Francisco Ferrer, an important figure in the history of freethought, education reform, and anarchism, whose execution for attempting to found secular schools in Spain sparked a long-lived movement in the United States to preserve his ideas and introduce freedom in education. I've already written blog posts on the 2006 and 2008 anniversaries, that give the background as well as I can. (I'm not going to organize a full-scale blog-a-thon like my Carl Sagan one, but feel free to post something appropriate on the anniversary, and I'll link to it.) Also, this Saturday brings the 2009 reunion of the Friends of the Modern School alumni association, held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, near the site of the modern school and colony which was at Stelton, New Jersey; this is not just a way for people associated with the school to keep in touch, but a way of preserving the history and discussing related issues; members of the general public who are interested in the history are welcome to attend.

What happened to Google Video?

2009-09-10T00:30:00.001-04:00

I recently noticed that the webpages for individual videos on Google Video (I'm not talking about other pages on the site such as the front page or search pages) have had a bunch of little changes in layout and features made to them. To see what I mean, compare this screenshot of the old interface to the current version of the same video's page.

Frustratingly, some of the old features and video information have seemingly been completely removed, including the "view video at 100% or 200% size" menu options (turning some videos into a blurry mess when blown up to the full player window — yes, you can get around this by making your browser window smaller, but it's not exact, and it shouldn't be that hard to let the user specify whatever exact zoom ratio one wants); the "comments" and "more from user" tabs (the latter tab was always poorly implemented, with its pages of thumbnails to click through, but it was better than nothing); the green text line underneath the video title that lists the video's author info; and the listing, next to the video title, of the date a video was posted (replaced by a less precise "2 years ago" or the like).

The site has been circling the drain for a long time, as other, newer video sites have become more popular, particularly since Google disabled the ability to add new videos to the site earlier this year (though they left the existing videos alone at that time), and the old interface was somewhat clunky. But it was one of the oldest video websites around, and still has a sizable amount of content. And the changes don't seem to be netting much discussion (in fact the admittedly quick searching I've done hasn't turned up any discussion on blogs or elsewhere about the changes).

dorkbot-nyc is coming this fall

2009-08-25T23:55:00.000-04:00

dorkbot-nyc, the funky meeting space for robot builders, programmers, nerds and other "people doing strange things with electricity" (although "We're very flexible on the people, strange and electricity parts"), is resuming this fall after a summer break (as it does each year); the details for the September meeting have just been posted.

Although I attend every meeting, my blogging about dorkbot-nyc has been somewhat irregular over the years (mostly due to laziness), but this season I'll try to be more conscientious about it.

"Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" screening in NYC

2009-08-11T22:45:00.000-04:00

The 1964 film by Sergei Paradjanov which provided the title for Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's book (and whose DVD release was noted here previously) is being screened, in a new 35mm print with subtitles, at Anthology Film Archives in NYC on the 21st and 23rd. AFA's website describes it as "[a] boldly conceived and astonishingly photographed blend of enchanting mythology, hypnotic religious iconography, and pagan magic."

new blog: According to Carl Sagan

2009-07-13T22:15:00.003-04:00

There's a brand-new Sagan-related blog in town; topics in the 4 posts so far have ranged from the evolutionary origins of sports to neglected rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Since Carl weighed in on a truly wide variety of topics, there should be plenty of material to blog about.

(Hat tip: Francois Tremblay; cross-posted to Celebrating Sagan)

Carl Sagan's Barsoomian blurb

2009-06-22T23:30:00.000-04:00

I recently discovered that the back cover of the 2007 Penguin Classics edition of A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs has a prominent blurb by Carl Sagan: "Might it really be possible—in fact and not fancy—to venture with John Carter to the Kingdom of Helium on the planet Mars?" Although the cover does not specify the source of the quote, it's from the "Blues for a Red Planet" chapter from Cosmos; references to his being a fan of the John Carter books since first reading them as a kid appear scattered throughout Sagan's writings, including an anecdote about obtaining a related vanity plate (due to a limit of 6 letters per plate, he had to settle for "PHOBOS" instead of his first choice, "BARSOOM"). And this hasn't been the first time that Burroughsians have noticed Sagan; for instance, consider the Burroughs fansite ERBzine's lengthy tribute to Sagan.

I'd be happy to see more Sagan blurbs on other science fiction books; he had a generally favorable view of science fiction in general (with some caveats about scientific errors and the promotion of pseudoscience) and had nice things to say about quite a few science fiction classics in his writings, for instance in the essay "Science Fiction—A Personal View" in Broca's Brain, or the extended discussion in Pale Blue Dot (which I was quite surprised to see when first reading it) of a 1942 short story by Jack Williamson dealing with antimatter and asteroid colonization, "Collision Orbit" (which was incorporated into the fix-up novel Seetee Ship). (By the way, I've always wondered if the character Jane Carter in Williamson's The Humanoids was a Burroughs reference, with the character's teleportation abilities being a takeoff on Burroughs's use of astral projection to get John Carter to Mars.)

"Carl Sagan Lives On" livejournal community

2009-04-05T23:00:00.001-04:00

As the title suggests, on LiveJournal, there's a community called "Carl Sagan Lives On", described as "an open community dedicated to the life, wisdom, and legacy of Carl Sagan." It's been running since 2003, with 94 posts in total; the number of posts has tapered off recently (only 6 posts in 2008), but maybe this post will encourage a few LiveJournal users to join up (after all, the news that Cosmos is on Hulu prompted the most recent post).

(This is the beginning of a few Carl Sagan-related posts that I'm cross-posting to Celebrating Sagan.)

Cosmos is now on Hulu

2009-03-24T23:00:00.000-04:00

Well, the website which has become known for offering up full-length TV shows (and a few movies) for free, ad-supported viewing (with a selection including a good amount of genre shows from The Addams Family to Firefly, but very light on science shows, and no, this doesn't count) has added the complete run of Carl Sagan's TV series to the mix. I guess this needs no further explanation, but Hulu's description is nice, especially the final sentence:

In 1980, the landmark series Cosmos premiered on public television. Since then, it is estimated that more than a billion people around the planet have seen it. Cosmos chronicles the evolution of the planet and efforts to find our place in the universe. Each of the 13 episodes focuses on a specific aspect of the nature of life, consciousness, the universe and time. Topics include the origin of life on Earth (and perhaps elsewhere), the nature of consciousness, and the birth and death of stars. When it first aired, the series catapulted creator and host Carl Sagan to the status of pop culture icon and opened countless minds to the power of science and the possibility of life on other worlds.

The version of the series used seems to be the same as the 2000 DVD version; it's especially nice to have Ann Druyan's introduction at the beginning of the first episode, as well as the 1990 updates at the end of episodes like The Edge of Forever. (I'm guessing that the DVD music changes are still in there.) And unfortunately, the website is restricted to viewers in the United States.

Man, I can remember quite a few of the home video incarnations of the series, beginning back in the 1990s with occasionally seeing the humongous boxed set of the series on VHS (sometimes with a paperback of the book thrown in for good measure) in science museum gift shops and the like; being completely overjoyed to find a fraction of the show's run on 2-episodes-per-VHS tape at a Blockbuster; the DVD release in 2000 with gorgeous packaging, going for $100 or more; last year's iTunes release for $1.99 an episode; and now, finally, this. I wouldn't go quite so far as agreeing with John Scalzi's comment that "the Internet has just justified its existence" (and the hardcore fans have a copy already, although now they won't have to lend out their copy to friends), but it's definitely the next step.

And of course, the news kicks off another round of Sagan fans' reminiscing about the impact of Cosmos and Sagan (just as the iTunes release did a year ago), in blogs (I'm pointing to a blog search rather than try to pick out favorites) and comment threads like this one.

A libertarian letters to the editor response team?

2009-02-03T23:30:00.000-05:00

I've been mulling over the idea of doing what it says in the title, motivated in part by this misguided take on Herbert Spencer ... details here.

Mystery Quote of the Day

2009-02-02T23:30:00.001-05:00

Guess who wrote this:

One of the odd features of a capitalist system is how socialist it is. Firms interact with customers and other firms through the decentralized machinery of trade. But firms themselves are miniature socialist states, hierarchical organizations controlled, at least in theory, by orders from above.

The answer.

I'm back to blogging

2009-02-01T23:45:00.000-05:00

Well, after unofficially taking a month-long "vacation" from blogging during January, I'm trying to get back to posting on a regular schedule, and am aiming to post something (even if it's just something as short as a quote) daily for the rest of the month.

Carl Sagan day 2008, and an update

2008-12-20T21:00:00.000-05:00

Well, today is the 12th anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing, a date which was commemorated on this blog by blog-a-thons in 2006 and 2007. Ann Druyan and Nick Sagan have both already put up posts to mark the occasion, both pointing to a recent NASA video on the new Carl Sagan Exoplanet Fellowship (also discussed in an ETFF interview with Ann Druyan broadcast last month to commemorate Carl's birthday).

I'm sure that some of you are wondering why I haven't done a blog-a-thon this year, and why you haven't heard anything Sagan-related from me in a while. Basically, what's up: no, I haven't fallen off the planet, and haven't abandoned Sagan-related stuff. Basically, the blog-a-thon was originally intended to be a one-shot event, and only afterwards did I decide to try to repeat it a year later, and possibly annually. And while there were some great posts in the 2007 blog-a-thon, I came to realize that doing an annual event wasn't the best way to go to keep the Sagan fans in the blogosphere connected, since a year in blogosphere time is a very long time to go between updates. After much consideration, I came to the conclusion that the best way to do something regular and Sagan related would be to have something closer to the "blog carnival" format, where there would be a new installment every couple of months or so, and have a theme each time in addition to the basic Sagan one, to give a fresh "handle" to write about. I haven't been able to iron out the details in time for today, but I do have plans to do so.

Beatrice Gross, RIP

2008-12-19T23:55:00.001-05:00

I am saddened to find out that Beatrice Gross, an author/educator who, together with her husband Ronald Gross, co-edited several important anthologies on education, including Radical School Reform (1969) and The Children's Rights Movement: Overcoming the Oppression of Young People (1977), and were called "the Bonnie and Clyde of education" (Stan Isaacs), passed away last month, according to obituaries in Newsday and Great Neck Record.

The contributors to Radical School Reform (see the full table of contents on WorldCat) are a virtual Who's Who of education reformers of the 1960s and 1970s, including Sylvia Ashton-Warner, George Dennison, Joseph Featherstone, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Paul Goodman, James Herndon, John Holt, Herbert Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, George Leonard, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. The book was favorably reviewed twice in The New York Times, by John Leonard and Harold Taylor, and the paper's archives also include the Grosses' article about Montessori education, "Let the Child Teach Himself" (New York Times Magazine, May 16, 1965).

Ann Druyan special on Equal Time for Freethought

2008-11-09T23:30:00.002-05:00

Today, to mark Carl Sagan's birthday (he would have been 74), the WBAI radio program Equal Time for Freethought broadcast a special interview with Sagan's widow and collaborator Ann Druyan (the half-hour interview was originally intended for a fund drive show in September, but not aired in its entirety until now). An audio permalink will be added to equaltimeforfreethought.org soon, but for now, it can be found at the WBAI archive here and also temporarily in WMA format here.

The main news is NASA's establishment of a Sagan Fellowship to study exoplanets (planets outside the Solar System), but the conversation ranges from the profound (how to communicate the wonder of science) to the quirky (an extended discussion of what Sagan ate for breakfast). Check it out!

Cross-posted to Celebrating Sagan.

Quote of the Day

2008-10-29T22:34:00.000-04:00

Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm's 1969 essay "Reflections on Anarchism" (collected in 1973's Revolutionaries, currently in print in a 2001 edition by New Press) is mostly a by-the-numbers Marxist, largely dismissive take on classical leftist anarchism (and needless to say more than a little befuddled at anarchism's revival at the time); he treats the movement as romantic and quixotic (quite literally, saying it's no coincidence that classical anarchism's last hurrah was in the land of Cervantes), and intellectually lightweight: saying that Kropotkin is the only "anarchist theorist who could be read with real interest by non-anarchists", due to his scientific work, as opposed to mere artists like Pissarro and Signac (and presumably the likes of Herbert Read, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Wilde), and whose substantial ideas are redundant with those on other strands of the left. But at one point, the essay suddenly goes in an unexpected direction:

It is possible to construct a theoretical model of libertarian anarchism which will be compatible with modern scientific technology, but unfortunately it will not be socialist. It will be much closer to the views of Mr Goldwater and his economic adviser Professor Milton Friedman of Chicago than to the views of Kropotkin. For (as Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago in his pamphlet on the Impossibilities of Anarchism), the extreme versions of individualist liberalism are logically as anarchist as Bakunin.

Not to mention Karl Hess or David Friedman. What's really funny about Hobsbawm seeing anarcho-libertarianism as suitable for the modern world is that he's known (some would say notorious) for usually taking a Whig-history approach to left movements, seeing them as more advanced the closer they are to Marxism and then Communism; in fact, it is for just that reason that he dismisses the classical anarchist movement, and Civil War-era Spanish anarchism in particular (see here and here for anarchist responses to Hobsbawm on Spanish anarchism), as quixotic and doomed to failure.

See also Jesse Walker on Hobsbawm ("Obviously there's nothing to admire in the distinguished historian's pro-Soviet politics, but I like a lot of his work nonetheless, flaws and all.")

AOL Hometown shutting down, and taking a bit of bronze with it

2008-10-23T23:41:00.002-04:00

Well, with the announcement that AOL's Hometown service is shutting down by October 31, one of the truly old school web hosting sites from the early days of the Web, up there with GeoCities and Tripod, and all of the websites hosted at URLs "hometown.aol.com", "members.aol.com" and "users.aol.com", will be going the way of Xoom into the land of dead bits.

The shutdown is pretty abrupt; the formal announcement was only posted on September 30, and according to it, if webmasters don't back up their website files by the 31st, they'll simply be gone. All Hometown pages have one of two prominently placed banners atop the pages announcing the shutdown, one of which says "AOL Hometown is Closing its Doors. Find out how to BACK UP AND SAVE YOUR FILES before we say goodbye for good." and the other stating that "A Blogger is Always Prepared. DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. Learn how to BACK UP & SAVE YOUR INFORMATION now." (despite the service predating the takeoff of the blog format by several years). And of course, many websites originally at Hometown have long since moved to other hosts and URLs. But when one considers that many vintage websites haven't been maintained in years, the banners' warning will often go unnoticed.

In particular, Hometown was a popular hosting service in the late 1990s for the early wave of fansites devoted to pulp hero Doc Savage. The two most prominent of these were Chris Kalb's The 86th Floor (for the uninitiated, that's a reference to Doc's headquarters being situated on that floor of the Empire State Building) and the long-gone (outside of the Wayback Machine) Jeff Sines's Doc Savage Unchained; other Doc Savage sites that are still up on Hometown include Jim Gould's Doc Savage Collection, the Doc Savage Convention Center, the Doc Savage Game Center, the Doc Savage 75th Anniversary page, the fanfic "The Steel Hammer", and the Wold Newton Chronicles. It makes me feel old (at least in Internet years) that I first saw these sites all the way back in high school, around 1999-2000 (I first got into Doc Savage when a high school classmate lent me some of his old Bantam Doc paperbacks).

Highlights of The 86th Floor include circa-1999 rumors of an upcoming Doc Savage movie starring a pre-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger as the title character, a clever way of choosing either a 1930s or 1960s "look" for the webpages using a background image that reflected the appropriate decade's depiction of Doc, and a quote that captures the excitement of the first wave of Web technologies: "In the 1930s, Doc Savage was a state-of-the-art adventurer. Today's net-savvy fans would have to agree; They can download wav sound files, rare images ... and now Acrobat files!" Chris Kalb also used Hometown to host a personal page and a network of pages devoted to the "hero" pulp genre: a general introduction to the genre, and sites devoted to particular series, including G-8 and His Battle Aces, Operator #5, and The Spider (supplanted by a newer version that escaped from Hometown).

The Doc Savage Unchained site, meanwhile, was notable for being the first Doc fansite with a complete cover gallery (of both the pulp magazines and paperback versions), and for being the home of the Doc Savage webring (a common way of linking similar-minded sites in those days). Also, the links page includes several more early Hometown sites.

I've concentrated on the Doc Savage pages as the ones I'm most familiar with, but I'm sure there are a lot of great AOL Hometown pages that I don't know about; if you know of any, leave a comment or an email!

modern school reunion 2008

2008-10-13T23:18:00.000-04:00

Today is the 99th anniversary of the death of anarchist, freethinker, and education pioneer Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, which sparked the international movement which was founded to carry on his ideas. Since I covered the basic background in my original Modern School post two years ago, I will link to that rather than repeating myself.

Instead, I will concentrate on the 36th annual reunion of the Friends of the Modern School, held on September 20 at its usual location at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As usual, it functioned as a social reunion for alumni (mostly of the Stelton school and colony which was near New Brunswick), but this time, the proceedings were enlivened by an unusually large group of interested outsiders.

Author Perdita Buchan spoke about her book Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden (which has appeared previously on this blog) which allots a chapter to eight utopian colonies in the Garden State, including one for Stelton. The Emma Goldman Papers project's and the Kate Sharply Library's Barry Pateman followed up his talk from two years back on Emma Goldman with a similarly scrupulous and informative look at another, far lesser-known anarchist personality connected to the Ferrer movement, Hippolyte Havel. Havel never completed a full-length book (although he did pen the pamphlet "What's Anarchism"), and so is best known for his short biographical essays on Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre that are preserved in their collected essays, but he was interesting in his own right, with an eccentric personality masking a thouhgtful mind, and Pateman has read many of Havel's uncollected periodical works and vouches for their value. And a third event was a panel on "Free Schools of Today", with people from a variety of schools with similar approaches, including Mary Lois Adshead, from Marietta Johnson's School of Organic Education and longtime resident of the single-tax colony of Fairhope, Alabama, who has recently moved to the Garden State herself (and changing her blog from Finding Fairhope to Finding Myself in Hoboken, including her take on the event); Alan Berger of the Brooklyn Free School in NYC; Isaac Graves from the Albany Free School and the Harriet Tubman Free School in Albany, NY; and several people from the newly opened Manhattan Free School. The Alternative Education Resource Organization's Jerry Mintz was there as usual, but also brought a van full of alternative-education people with him, and there were also people from the Beehive Collective. Plus, the mix of insiders and outsiders made the conversations particularly lively. As Dale Burns put it in the Education Revolution e-newsletter, "There was a common idea, an inspiration, a current which electrified the air: the idea of education in its truest form, that learning should be about the learner and the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next. The Modern School was a community in which a school was interwoven, a place where living and learning went hand in hand. A place someone could learn as much or as little as they were comfortable with, where generations could interact freely and neighbors could be depended upon. This is the essence of the Modern School."

Also, the other projects of the Friends of the Modern School continue to move along: last year, they published Recollections from the Modern School Ferrer Colony, a collection of personal accounts by Victor Sacharoff and other Stelton residents (available from AERO here); they continue to maintain the marker at 79 School St., Piscataway, NJ, put up in 2005; and they hope to complete an anthology of writings about the modern school which was left unfinished by the late Paul Avrich. Jerry Mintz has also transfered his recordings of some of the reunions to DVD (such as the 2007 one).

Nancy Wallace, RIP

2008-09-19T23:19:00.003-04:00

I am saddened to find out, from Patrick Farenga on HoltGWS.com, of the passing of Nancy Wallace, a pioneering homeschooling parent and author going back to the very early days of the modern homeschooling movement.

It seems just yesterday that I discovered in the NYPL stacks (largely due to its provocative title and its introduction by John Holt) Wallace's wonderful 1983 book Better Than School: One Family's Declaration of Independence, in which she recounted in a charming, readable manner her experiences homeschooling her children, Ishmael and Vita (at the time, 11 and 7 years old, as depicted on the cover) in New Hampshire and Ithaca, NY, at a time when the homeschooling movement had yet to gather its current legal and organizational status. I can attest that, as Farenga puts it, her "prose was full of gentle insight". (I will definitely put up a review when I get the chance.)

Farenga describes his and Holt's perspective on their longtime, mutually supportive relationship with the Wallaces (which is depicted from the other side in Better Than School), includes some excerpts from Wallace's writing (from Growing Without Schooling magazine, Better Than School, and a subsequent 1990 book Child's Work: Taking Children's Choices Seriously) and reveals that Ishmael and Vita, whose intense interest in music is described in detail in Better Than School, now have a successful musical career, playing together as a violin/piano duo in NYC.

Bookchin and Bugs Bunny: found at last!

2008-09-06T17:09:00.000-04:00

One of the more (in)famous examples of anarchist humor is the original pamphlet cover of Murray Bookchin's famous 1969 essay "Listen, Marxist!", which criticized Marxist groups like Progressive Labor Party that were part of the sectarianism which was pulling apart SDS. The cover lampooned the propensity of Marxist books to put a succession of faces on the cover to correspond with their hyphenated ideologies by including the faces of Marx, Engels and Lenin — but then adding Bugs Bunny to the mix. This was mentioned in my original RIP for Bookchin posted here in 2006, and also by Jesse Walker and Eugene Plawiuk — and Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage:

SDS's 1969 convention, its last, met in the cavernous Chicago Coliseum, amid a veritable counterconvention of reporters (excluded), FBI agents (equipped with long lenses on the third floor of a vacant building across the street), and hundreds of police milling around, in and out of uniform, snapping pictures. Of the fifteen hundred delegates, perhaps a third were controlled by PL. Perhaps another third were divided between the Weathermen and their short-term allies, the upholders of a rival version of a Revolutionary Youth Movement — RYM II for short, in the arcane jargon of the time. (Among the RYM II supporters was a Bay Area faction passing out a pamphlet called The Red Papers adorned with portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.) The remaining third were baffled newcomers, dazed rank-and-filers, and other tendencies casting anathema on all the leading factions—most inventively a grouplet of anarchists passing out Murray Bookchin's corrosive pamphlet Listen, Marxist! with its cover pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Bugs Bunny. The rest of the organization—tens of thousands of national members, and who knew how many members of individual chapters —voted with their feet and stayed away. So did almost all the old and middle-period hands of SDS. Reports filtered back from Chicago as if from another planet— or rather, from a moon in orbit around one's own, for that bone-white light, that silver deathliness, had the familiar look of reflected light.

The funeral had its farcical aspects. To score points against PL, the Weathermen-RYM II coalition trundled out Third World allies; representatives of the Young Lords, Brown Berets, and finally, of course, the Black Panthers, whose Illinois minister of information in the course of a diatribe against the "armchair Marxists" of PL suddenly launched into a celebration of "pussy power," proclaiming that "Superman was a punk because he never even tried to fuck Lois Lane." (The anarchists' Bugs Bunny cartoon turned out more realistic than they could have imagined.)

(I especially like the way Gitlin swings around for an unexpected second mention of the cover.)

But as famous as Bookchin's prank is, it's also one that's more often talked about than actually seen. I remember, when writing the RIP in 2006, looking all over the Internet to try to find a scan of the fabled cover, to no avail. But it turns out that subsequently and with little fanfare, NYU's Tamiment Library put up a scan of the Bugs Bunny cover as part of their Flickr collection of scans of anarchist material from their archives (in keeping with the theme, Mickey Mouse also appears).

A Betty Boop, er, cartoon

2008-08-10T22:58:00.001-04:00

Today's New York Times weekly roundup of political cartoons includes this one by Rob Rogers which includes a reference to the Fleischer Boop-oop-a-doop girl as a representative starlet of her era. What's next, a cartoon about unions that refers to Disney's Alice Comedies?

Framing the sky

2008-06-29T23:32:00.000-04:00

While leafing through George Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain, I was quite happily surprised to discover that an entire chapter was devoted to promoting Peter Barnes's idea of a "Sky Trust" as a means for fighting air pollution.

So, what exactly is a Sky Trust? Peter Barnes (entrepreneur of Working Assets fame) has been promoting the idea of trusteeship as a way of managing common natural resources for quite a while now, including in his excellent 2006 book Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (read it online right now!) It's hard to imagine dividing up an atmosphere into conventional units of private property, but by creating a private, non-for-profit trusteeship that "owns" the entire atmosphere over an area, giving everybody in the area a non-transferable share in ownership and charging those who pollute or damage the air (and redistributing the revenues to the participants), the economic value of the air can be dealt with in a way that discourages pollution and abuse while also preserving the integrity of the common resource. All of this works in a manner similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund, or the single tax of Henry George, in a way that is consistent with market principles.

As global warming becomes a major issue, finding a way to deal with air pollution becomes an ever more urgent matter, and the sky trust is a rigorous yet simple way out. And it's not hard to see why liberals would find it appealing. Perhaps surprisingly, however, Lakoff also finds the means as well as the end congenial, in fact specifically stating that the sky trust is desirable because it maximizes the use of market principles and encourages entrepreneurship (to the point where even babies are participating, since everyone gets dividends from birth on) while minimizing the role of government and thus being immune to lobbying, and being administratively simple without creating the sort of bureaucracy spawned by regulatory administration.

Carl Sagan in the zeitgeist

2008-06-22T23:26:00.001-04:00

Jim Lippard recently devoted an excellent post to a thorough takedown of Zeitgeist: The Movie, a weird, conspiracy theory-centered movie that's been spreading virally online (it can be viewed on Google Video in its entirety) for the past year. This is pretty pitiful even by the very low standards of CT movies like Loose Change or America: Freedom to Fascism (both of which Zeitgeist borrows directly and heavily from); as Lippard puts it, Zeitgeist is a "piece of pernicious nonsense" which is "almost entirely garbage, dependent on crackpot sources". Plus, it's heavily dependent on video and audio footage "borrowed" from other sources, and crude and cheap motion graphics, to fill out its running time. But I find it interesting, almost despite myself, for two reasons:

1: It juxtaposes conventional CT subject matter in its last two-thirds (about 9/11 and the Federal Reserve) with a first third about the origins of Christianity, which echoes (in a confused, Dan Brown sort of way) some traditional freethought views, with quotes from Robert Ingersoll and George Carlin. In fact, it apes Brian Flemming's documentary The God Who Wasn't There so closely that there were even rumors that it was made by Flemming! (Although this section is filled with errors that aren't in Flemming's original, and Flemming has specifically said that one of the reasons he got interested in the area of Jesus-myth revisionist scholarship was because it was unlike the culture around CTs, which he researched for his previous movie Nothing So Strange.) Even though it really never attempts to explain the connection between its three thirds apart from just putting them side by side, as Jay Kinney puts it in his review:

Exactly how all this fits together is left to the viewer’s imagination or, presumably, the film-maker’s hash pipe. Are those who manipulate Christianity for control purposes in cahoots with the Bankers, and were the Bankers in on the 9/11 caper?

Although there is some parallel to the way that the Aaron Russo-style CTs about the Fed and the income tax in the final third of the movie echo the more reputable libertarian critiques of those institutions; in fact, Lippard cites both Bill Woolsey's Liberty magazine article "Who Owns the Fed?" and Sheldon Richman's series "Beware Income Tax Casuistry". This, in turn, brings to mind how little overlap there is between those who hold unconvetional views on religion and on monetary systems, with some exceptions like the Robert Anton Wilson-influenced Douglas Rushkoff (who, in fact, has commented on the parallels between Zeitgeist and his work, with some reservations about "the agitprop nature of its assertions").

2: It includes a brief clip of Carl Sagan in Cosmos at the end (1:56:47 in, to be exact), after the CTs are exhausted and the tone switches abruptly (to quote Kinney again: "Incongruously, after spending nearly two hours trying to scare the bejeezis out of its viewers, Zeitgeist ends on an oddly upbeat note, telling us that Love — not Fear — is the answer, We are all One"), in which Sagan lays down a call for planetary unity: "The old appeals to racial and sexual and religious chauvinism, to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed." (Adding to the WTF factor is the fact that the shot is letterboxed, cropped from its original full screen ratio to widescreen with most of Sagan's lower body missing.) JHB readers know I'm interested in any and all forms of Sagan's influence, and there's something to seeing it in such an unexpected place; after all, the chance of a CT movie quoting Sagan is, well, about the chance of one quoting Ingersoll. Or as James Randi Educational Foundation forum user boloboffin put it far more colorfully in the forum thread devoted to the movie, "OMG, they used a clip of Carl Sagan at the end! Sweet Sufferin' Jeebus."

UPDATE (6/28/2009): I've received an email asking for the specific source of the Carl Sagan quote, and decided to clarify my somewhat vague reference. The quote used in Zeitgeist is from the 13th and final episode of the TV series Cosmos, "Who Speaks for Earth?" (which is freely viewable on Hulu here); the quote appears 24 minutes into the episode. A somewhat different version of the quote also appears in the corresponding chapter of the book version of Cosmos, on page 332 of the oversize illustrated edition and page 275 of the text-only edition (the latter of which can be viewed on Google Books); it runs as follows: "The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal.... A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species."

Is this blog worth $50?

2008-06-06T23:19:00.001-04:00

A couple of days ago, I received an email offering to buy my blog for $50. I turned down the offer, but I've got to say that amount is far more than I've ever made from my blog, and I wonder just how much I'd have to be offered to sell it. Throw in a few zeroes at the end, and who knows....

Anyway, I needed something to write about to get back in action after the longer-than-usual lull, and that might as well be it.

Time Warner's The Earth Day Special (1990)

2008-04-22T22:11:00.010-04:00

Earth Day may be unrivaled among holidays in the nobility of its sentiment, but when it comes to pop culture, its impact is somewhat lacking. Even Arbor Day has an associated Charlie Brown special, but Earth Day? Well, maybe not quite. Back in 1990, the holiday took quite a bite out of pop culture in a celebrity-packed video tribute produced and presented by Time Warner.

When I found an old VHS copy of the special, the back cover blurb made it an imperative to check out:

A fun-packed salute that makes a world of difference.

The biggest stars of the '90s take on the biggest story of the '90s in this informative blend of entertainment and cause. Rich in comedy, song and reports on the state of the planet, The Earth Day Special captures the excitement and commitment of Earth Day 1990 — and shares tips everyone can use to help solve the most urgent crisis the world faces today.

Mother Earth (Bette Midler) is ailing and it's up to folks in Anytown USA to help her recover. So Harold Ramis joins the Wastebusters. Robin Williams busts everyone up with one-liners, then plays straight man to an uproarious corporate weasel (Dustin Hoffman). Dr. Carl Sagan talks facts, Morgan Freeman talks trees and Rodney Dangerfield talks about the "ideal date" (organically grown). Rhea Perlman shanghais Danny DeVito into watching The Earth Day Special — and it opens Danny's eyes to the polluting ways of pals Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and Rick Moranis. Plus, Christopher Lloyd drops in from the future, E.T. drops in from outer space and over 40 other celebrities — including Bill Cosby, Kevin Costner, Magic Johnson, Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand — drop everything to aid Mother Earth.

Nothing so important was ever so much fun!

The summary gives an idea of just how many 1980s/1990s era celebrities appear (and there are even more than are listed), which alone makes it worth checking out for fans of unusual ephemera from that era, but the presence of a little-known Carl Sagan appearance elevated it to a must-see.

The special starts with what the credits call a "Galaxy Intro", in which the camera zooms through outer space accompanied by a somewhat Cosmos-like narration — no coincidence, since the segment turns out to have been written by Sagan and Ann Druyan:

We have searched the skies for signals. Our spacecraft have explored dozens of exquisite worlds in the family of our sun. But as far as we've looked, there's only one place in the entire universe where the miracle of life exists: our own planet Earth. Life is so rare and precious. We must safeguard, protect, and cherish it.

Then the scene shifts to the "Anytown", while an Earth Day procession winds through the town square. The cast listing includes a lengthy array of celebrities, and the working definition of "stars" is a bit, well, flexible, since Bugs Bunny, E.T., The Muppets, Porky Pig, and Tweety Bird are all listed as part of the cast. Sure enough, outside the parade, Bugs, Tweety, and Porky all appear in fully animated form in a Greg Ford-scripted sequence, with variations on their signature lines ("I did! I did see a Mewyl Tweep!").

Robin Williams starts telling a bunch of jokes. Oddly enough for an Earth Day celebration, nature is the butt of most of the jokes, but when he says that Mother Nature is the sort of parent who can't say no, he crosses a line; Mother Nature appears in the personified form of Bette Midler, to set him straight. Not only is she not too happy about being poked fun at, but she's already ailing from environmental damage. Collapses from illness, she's rushed to the emergency room of the nearest hospital, where she is looked after by none other than Doogie Howser, M.D. (!)

While Midler's Mother Earth is undergoing medical treatment, the stage is set for a series of short, mostly self-contained segments involving various celebrities.

Meanwhile, a layer of meta-narrative is added by having the entire proceedings being watched on TV by Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. (When DeVito treats the proceedings as if they're just another TV show, betting "I give you 2 to 1 she [Mother Earth] bites it", Perlman ripostes, "If she bites it, we all bite it!" Adding to the meta-fiction, some segments occur when DeVito tries to switch channels, only to find that every show on the air from Cheers to The Cosby Show to Married with Children has some sort of environmental spin to it, with the Huxtables trading quips about how to incorporate energy conservation into their daily routine and Rodney Dangerfield appearing on a game show where being the potential date partner with the most eco-friendly plans earns him some respect. When it turns out that Jeopardy!'s categories are "Acid Rain", "Garbage Overload", "Deforestation", "Global Warming", "Toxics", and "Ozone Depletion", DeVito exclaims, "I can't get away from this stuff!"

The big genre franchises of the 1980s aren't neglected, either. In order to show the future impact of environmental devastation, Back to the Future's Emmett "Doc" Brown appears — and yes, he rides in on the DeLorean! In one of the few cases where the crossover potential of the special is realized, he barges in to the emergency room in order to share his knowledge of the future with Doogie Howser, in a true meeting of pop culture "doctors". To represent the Ghostbusters movies, Harold Ramis appears, but not quite reprising his role of Egon Spengler, instead playing that character's "brother" Elon, who works for "Wastebusters". Elon's job is also a bit less glamorous than his more famous brother's — "Our job at Wastebusters is to identify industrial polluters, track them down, and humiliate them" — and sure enough, he accosts Martin Short as a sleazy corporate lawyer from "Diversified Industries" (with Short reprising his SNL character Norman Thurm, who apparently doesn't have a little-known sibling). As for E.T., he shows up in a pile of garbage outside the hospital and produces a book called A Practical Guide to How You Can Save Earth by the people of the Earth for the people of the Earth which he gives to a bunch of kids. And no, I don't have any idea why one of pop culture's most famous aliens was chosen to produce a book "by the people of the Earth".

Sleazy corporate lawyers are something of a recurring theme; in a segment featuring Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams, Hoffman's lawyer ("I can always argue the other side") out-Thurms Thurm, tricking Williams's Everyman into admitting that pollution might not be so bad after all.

In a segment directed by Jim Henson himself (who passed away only weeks after the special aired), Kermit the Frog and other Muppets discuss the effect of pollution on animals. The Muppet Wiki has a complete transcript of the segment, accompanied by numerous screenshots, to supplement its detailed entry about the special in general.

And no movie from that era would be totally complete without a rap song. The special's one features rappers like Will "Fresh Prince" Smith and Ice-T, and lyrics like "Every time you put a paint can in the trash can, you take a piece of the world from the next man".

And last but not least, the Carl Sagan segment! Surrounded by an attentive audience in Anytown, and working from a script written by Sagan and Druyan themselves, Sagan goes into full Cosmos explainer mode, taking on global warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain. The scientific principles at work behind those three phenomena are discussed in as much depth as the brief segment run time allows, adding scientific heft as well as entertainment value to the proceedings. (Sagan is also one of the scientific advisors listed in the credits.)

Long out of print on VHS, and with almost as much time elapsing since its production as between it and the first Earth Day, the special has definitely faded into obscurity over time. More surprisingly, it has received almost no attention from the array of nostalgia websites devoted to ephemera from 1980s and 1990s pop culture, of which it would seem to be the perfect example. The range of celebrity cameos gives a real flavor of pop culture at that moment in time, the science holds up pretty well (that's what you get for getting Sagan on board), and while it definitely has its cheesy elements, it has aged far less badly than some of the contemporary attempts to cross over entertainment with serious issues.

new Education Revolution blog

2008-03-04T23:51:00.001-05:00

Well, my pal Jerry Mintz has finally created a brand-spanking-new blog for his organization, the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO), to supplement AERO's website, his personal site, and his various email-based announcements and mailing lists. Mintz/AERO has done a dizzying array of education-related things over the years: penning the book No Homework and Recess All Day; publishing Education Revolution magazine; running an annual conference; preserving Modern School history ... and simply doing a lot of the raw, exhausting work involved in keeping various education reformers in touch with each other, helping people start schools, helping schools improve themselves and become more "alternative", and the various other stuff involved in keeping an education reform movement alive and moving.

So far, the blog has three posts: the first is a simple announcement post where he says, "I still barely understand what a blog is, but I’m about to find out!"; the second links to and reposts an article Mintz wrote for USA Today last month; the third posts an interview Mintz did for the television show Joy in Our Town. The latter two, in particular, give a sizable sample of Mintz's style and approach.

AERO, incidentally, is indirectly responsible for me starting this blog. In mid-2005, I had been mulling over starting a blog for a while, but hadn't done anything yet. And then, during the 2005 AERO conference, I was chatting with a teacher from the Olympia Free School, who was at the same time typing up an entry on his laptop for his school’s blog (at the time, it was called "Free School Field Days"; the current form of the school's blog is here). As I saw him typing away in the Blogger interface, it just struck me how easy it was, and so I decided to stop stalling around and just go ahead already — and started this blog shortly after getting back home from the conference.

One of the rules of the blogosphere is that it's very self-referential; bloggers like to blog about other blogs with reference still other blogs ... so AERO's will probably be getting a lot more attention from other blogs. It'll motivate me to blog more about education-related issues, too (although I make no promises!)

Welcome to the blogosphere, Jerry!

Education Revolution Blog

new science fiction on Project Gutenberg: Frank Herbert's Operation Haystack

2008-03-03T23:02:00.000-05:00

Yet another public domain science fiction short story whose eBook I helped produce makes its debut on Project Gutenberg. Originally from Astounding Science Fiction May 1959, with illustrations by H. R. van Dongen, joining Herbert's "Missing Link", posted last October. Yes, that Frank Herbert, and yes, it's really public domain ... 'nuff said!

Cartoon Dump

2008-02-17T23:13:00.001-05:00

As Beavis and Butt-Head would say, "Huh-huh, huh-huh, somebody keeps taking a dump in Manhattan."

Cartoon Dump, that is — a twisted parody of childrens' shows of yesteryear combining live comedy and so-bad-they're-good old cartoons, created by animation historian Jerry Beck and Frank "TV's Frank on MST3K" Conniff (MST3K's Joel Hodgson has appeared in at least one CD installment in the past).

CD had previously existed as a live show in L.A. and a set of online episodes, but on January 8 the show came to the East Coast for the first time; and there will be new shows on February 19 (this Tuesday) and March 11.

The January show was really fun. The premise is much like the online version: Erica Doering plays the host, Compost Brite, of a warped cartoon "children's show". She's a perennially cheery and perky character with an optimistic outlook; as the old joke goes, if you gave her horse droppings as a gift, she'd say "Wow, a pony!" And she needs it, since everybody else is completely neurotic, and full of problems that would never see the light of day on a real kiddie show. The most depressed of the supporting characters is, naturally, Frank Conniff's Moodsy the Clinically Depressed Owl. Although he wears a brightly colored anthropomorphic costume, he's also alcoholic and suicidally inclined. And of course, Compost Brite always tries to extract kiddie-friendly lessons about things like sharing and making a difference, even if she's really just driving Moodsy into even deeper depression. For instance, in the third online episode, after watching an atrocious Bucky & Pepito episode, Moodsy says, "There was something about that cartoon — the harsh, barren landscape; the empty, faceless characters; the overall tone of sorrow and regret — it was like a snapshot into my soul." and Compost Brite replies, "Well, I hope your soul said CHEESE!!!"

Unlike the online version (and presumably the LA version, where the online episodes were filmed) which takes place beside a dumpster, this version has no set. So, stretches of live comedy alternate with bad cartoons chosen by Jerry Beck (who introduced the cartoons and the show as a whole, but didn't act in the comedy segments). Contrary to what one might think based on Conniff's MST3K role, the cartoons are presented without any MST3K-style riffing or commentary while they're running, but the abundant laughter from the crowd is accompaniment enough (it alone makes them work much better than the online version).

The venue is pretty cool, too: a combination of comedy club and eatery, with a bar that's separate from the performance area, which doubles as a restaurant. Each of the menus features a picture of somebody who's performed at the club, such as Sarah Silverman (one of many famous comedians who have performed live there). The food is good too (if a bit pricey).

The cartoons themselves? Jerry Beck has really drawn on his vast experience to dig deep into the bottom of the animated barrel. As a result all the cartoons are really old (Jerry pointed out that they're actually old cartoons, in case anybody thought they were modern ones like the Ambiguously Gay Duo made to look old), obscure (they make the crummy formulaic cartoons that air on Boomerang look good) and cheaply and poorly designed and animated (one particularly bad sequence stood out, in which the villain and his henchman dance to celebrate their evil plan of turning people to stone; it's hard to explain in words, but the drawings just didn't flow the way they should). They do tend to be lame rather than actively painful, but still definitely provide a lot of unintentionally funny moments. And the premises are as hilariously lame as one would hope for. For instance:

Mighty Mister Titan (also in the first online episode): an exercise superhero. Really! He does jumping jacks and the like (with 4 or 5 drawings per rep) while enjoining us to join along; some of the exercises are performed in equally jerky fashion by a tip-dispensing stick figure named Tipso.

Super President: a DePatie-Freleng production (!) about, well, a superhero who's also the president of the United States. I'll just quote the show's intro for his awe-inspiring powers:

His power was born in a cosmic storm! Every molecule charged with might! Powers that enable him to change his molecular structure to steel! To granite! To whatever the need requires!

The Adventures of Sir Gee Whiz On The Other Side Of The Moon (also in the sixth online episode; since only one pilot episode of the series was ever produced, this is identical to the version the show used): This time, in one of the last pieces of animation that Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising ever produced (!), the main character is not a superhero, but a leprechaun (voiced by Ising himself) who lives on the moon who takes a little girl (who is so poorly designed that her face looks more like that of a blowup doll) there. One of the biggest laughs came from one of the "aliens" on the Moon, who doesn't exactly put the Selenites of H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon to shame, Señor Ropo:

Here are the six episodes so far of the online version:

And more info:

Hey, I'm on the radio!

2008-02-14T23:56:00.001-05:00

Last Thursday, the NPR show The Bryant Park Project did a nine minute segment on dorkbot-nyc's meeting the previous day. Segment producer Ian Chillag interviewed me at the meeting, and a small snippet from me made it into the very end of the segment; I quote William Gibson's "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." (which I misattribute to Bruce Sterling) as a way of explaining the way ideas show up at dorkbot before they percolate to the larger culture. The quote, and a mention of me, also made its way into the online summary of the segment. (When Rocketboom covered dorkbot in 2006, a small portion of my head could kinda-sorta be made out for a few frames of a crowd shot; not quite as good.) Also, the presenters and Douglas Repetto are also interviewed; and some of the theme songs also appear.

Contact on TCM's 31 Days of Oscar

2008-02-12T23:44:00.004-05:00

On Sunday, February 24th, Turner Classic Movies will be airing Contact as part of this month's "31 Days of Oscar", in which Academy Award-winning movies are showcased.

Check out the TCM Movie Database entry for the film. Sean Axmaker provides an excellent overview of the film, from the production history to the issues and themes involved; Sagan is described as "one of the most effective spokesmen for the advancement of science and space exploration in the world", and the entry also includes a quote from Ann Druyan:

"Carl's and my dream was to write something that would be a fictional representation of what contact would be like," explains Ann Druyan, Sagan's wife and collaborator. "But it would also have the tension inherent between religion and science, which was an area of philosophical and intellectual interest that riveted both of us."

Each night's worth of movies is organized by a specific decade (all the way from the 1920s to the 1990s and 2000s); it so happens that immediately before Contact on the schedule is a somewhat different 1997 alien contact science fiction film, Men in Black. Saganites have mixed opinions on the merits of MIB; Keay Davidson in his biography of Sagan dismisses it as a dumbed-down "mean-spirited bloodbath"; whereas pop-culture-savvy Nick Sagan slipped in an homage (or more precisely, an homage to an homage) to it in his short story "Tees and Sympathy":

I thought that was clear. The reason why I’m wearing a black suit and sunglasses is because I’m homaging Men in Black.

And Phil Plait answers the question of how "a skeptical, UFO-bashing, aliens-aren't-visiting-us-and-excoriating-cow- you-know-whats scientist-type guy" can enjoy the film in his review:

I loved this movie.
Surprised? "What's a skeptical, UFO-bashing, aliens-aren't- visiting-us-and-excoriating-cow-you-know-whats scientist-type guy going around saying he loves a movie whose very premise is that not only do aliens exist, but live among us?" you are asking yourself.
Well, the movie is awesome. It rocks. I laughed all the way through it. It's funny. It's also satirical, poking gentle but firm fun at the whole UFO and alien subculture.

(Also, for all the differences in tone, note that both films use a shot consisting of an extended zoom out from Earth to outer space to comment on humanity's place in the universe.)

(Cross-posted at Celebrating Sagan)

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors on DVD today

2008-02-05T20:13:00.000-05:00

No, it's not a little-known spinoff of Cosmos based on Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's book of the same name, but a 1964 Soviet film by Sergei Parajanov that inspired the name of the Sagan/Druyan book! I know nothing else about the film (it's not even a documentary as one might think, but fiction), but it's Sagan-related enough to take note of here. Some quick links to stuff about the film:

Martin Luther King on Henry George

2008-01-21T17:26:00.000-05:00

From the Georgist Progress Report website, here is an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.'s final book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, in which King supports a guaranteed income rather than conventional welfare programs as the most direct means of dealing with poverty; he includes a quote from Henry George's Progress and Poverty:

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased.

Aside from the question of work motivation, the point is that levels on inequality or equality income levels translate, via purchasing power, to levels of consumption of goods, and therefore dealing with the former directly is more direct and effective than dealing with the latter.

We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Compare to Milton Friedman and George Stigler's point in Roofs or Ceilings?:

The fact that, under free market conditions, better quarters go to those who have larger incomes or more wealth is, if anything, simply a reason for taking long-term measures to reduce the inequality of income and wealth. For those, like us, who would like even more equality than there is at present, not alone for housing but for all products, it is surely better to attack directly existing inequalities in income and wealth at their source than to ration each of the hundreds of commodities and services that compose our standard of living. It is the height of folly to permit individuals to receive unequal money incomes and then to take elaborate and costly measures to prevent them from using their incomes.

Flushing Remonstrance anniversary

2007-12-27T23:18:00.000-05:00

Today is the 350th anniversary of the Flushing Remonstrance, an important document in the history of religious tolerance and a part of local Queens history (as the existence of a modern Queens neighborhood of the same name suggests). Here is a New York Times op-ed about the document.

The meta-post for the second Carl Sagan blog-a-thon

2007-12-20T12:11:00.000-05:00

(NOTE: I will be updating this list periodically throughout the day, as I find new posts.)

Well, today's the day. On the eleventh anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing, fans from all over the world are posting about Sagan, and this post is the portal to them.

I'll keep my remarks to a minimum, since I've said most of what needs to be said already in the announcement post and last year's original meta-post. So without further ado, the list of participating posts (organized alphabetically by URL):

Look out, it’s evil!: "Carl Sagan (1934-1996), In Memoriam"
Allyn Gibson: "On Carl Sagan"
A New Anglican's Journey: "Carl Sagan, 1934-1996"
Ann Druyan at The Observatory: "20 December 2007"
Astroprof's Page: "Where is today’s Cosmos?"
Noch ein Blog
Atheism Central: "Second Annual Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon Meta-post"
Author of Confusion: "Carl Sagan"
Bad Astronomy: "Sagan blogathon"
Lunar Obverse: "Carl Sagan, novelist"
Reflections, Ideas, and Dreams: "Cosmic Perspective"
Extended Phenotype: "Carl Sagan and the 'High-Water Mark'"
Tim Rambo: "My Favorite Sagan Quote, and Commentary"
Sam Harrelson’s Blog: "In Memory of Carl Sagan"
BlueGlowy Records: "Carl Sagan"
A Room With A View: "Carl Sagan Blog-A-Thon"
Centauri Dreams: "Remembering 'The Cosmic Connection'"
Charles G's Blog Space: "Carl Sagan remembered 11 years later"
Wheat-dogg’s world: "My personal journey with Carl Sagan"
Concomitant: "Astronomy as a Means of Exploring the Numinous"
Cosmic Log: "Religion vs. Science vs. Politics"
And Slaters Go Plop: "Carl Sagan Memorial"
Darwin's Dagger: "Carl Sagan"
Just Another Deisidaimon: "Sagan and Bronowski"
Depleted Cranium: "My own experience with Carl Sagan"
Divers and Sundry: "Carl Sagan"
John Pieret at Thoughts in a Haystack: "Real Ghosts" / "Ex Libris Veritas"
The Double Bit Axe: "The Second Annual Carl Sagan Blogathon"
Inane Ramblings of a Demented Predator: "Billions and Billions"
Ex Astris, Scientia: "With this tool, we vanquish the impossible."
Michael Hiebert @ my new cardboard box: "Carl Sagan Blog-A-Thon"
James F. McGrath @ Exploring Our Matrix: "Carl Sagan Blog-A-Thon Quotes of the Day (Ann Druyan)"
The Ethical Paleontologist: "So She Developed A Physics Voice"
Music of the Spheres: "Sagan: Slaying Invisible Dragons, Firmly But Gently"
Friendly Atheist: "Second Annual Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon Meta-post"
gee bobg: "the beginning of wisdom"
The Information Paradox: "Sagan: Skeptic, Scientist and Sheer Inspiration"
kali's temple of doom: "Carl as an Every Day Tool of Self-Awareness"
KiwiBlogBlog: "Carl Sagan"
Melissa's livejournal: "Today marks the 11th anniversary of the world’s loss of Carl Sagan"
My View: "Remembering Carl Sagan"
The Nervous Axon: "remembering carl sagan"
Nick Sagan Online: "The Humility of Science" / "Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-thon 2007"
Omniscopic: "What Carl Sagan gave us"
Open Parachute: "Carl Sagan"
The Passionate Atheist: "Thanks Carl"
The Perplexed Observer: "You Are Here" / "Science as a Candle in the Dark" / "Reflections on a Mote of Dust"
Podblack Blog: "A Girl Called Ellie"
quennessa's livejournal: "Pale Blue Dot"
schneiderism: "Carl Sagan Was Cool"
Science and Religion News: "Carl Sagan on life, death, and religion"
The Spherical Influence: "Second Annual Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon"
simra.net: "11 years without Carl Sagan"
Skeptigator: "Remembering Carl Sagan"
SuggestedThinking.com: "A Couple of Anniversaries"
Blake Stacey @ Science After Sunclipse: "A True Story"
Gateway Skepticism: "The Weight of a Legacy"
NeuroLogica Blog: "Remembering Sagan"
Jon Blumenfeld @ The Rogues Gallery: "Billions"
Thilina Heenatigala @ Universe Cafe: "'star stuff contemplating star stuff': Remembering Carl Sagan"
it’s about time: "The brain is like…"
toomanytribbles, "blogging with carl sagan (on the other side of the pale blue dot)"
Tangled Up In Blue Guy: "Sagan, Miller and Velikovsky"
The Uncredible Hallq: "Review: Pale Blue Dot"
Witches and Scientists: "Carl's marching orders"

Posts in Dutch:

de Volkskrant: "Uitspraken van Carl Sagan"

Posts in Flemish:

Sereniteit: "11e verjaardag overlijden Carl Sagan"

Posts in French:

Elisabeth Piotelat: "Carl Sagan"

Posts in Spanish:

La Calavera: "Persona: Carl Sagan"
Cuaderno de bitácora: "Recordando a Carl Sagan"

And special thanks to all who promoted the blog-a-thon ahead of time:

hyper-textual ontology: "Tomorrow - Sagan blog-a-thon"
Friendly Atheist: "Second Annual Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon"
The Jaded Skeptic, Odd Jack: "2nd Annual Carl Sagan blog-a-thon is coming next month"
Greg Laden: "Carl Sagan Day Coming Up"
PZ Myers at Pharyngula: "Sagan-a-thon"
A Whore in the Temple of Reason: "Carl Sagan Blogathon"
toomanytribbles: "blog-a-thon reminder" / "the second annual carl sagan memorial blog-a-thon"
Tangled Up in Blue Guy: "Carl Sagan Blog Tribute Upcoming"

utopia in New Jersey

2007-12-13T16:18:00.000-05:00

Today's issue of the Newark Star-Ledger has a news story about various utopian communities that have been in the state of New Jersey, including the anarchist Stelton Ferrer colony, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall, and the single-tax colony Free Acres: "Utopia, N.J.: Trying to create a better world in the Garden State" by Vicki Hyman. (Hyman contacted me due to my post on Stelton.) The article is based on a new book of the same name which examines the above and several other utopias, Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden by Perdita Buchan, published by Rutgers University Press. The article touches on the range of leftist ideologies behind the colonies, and about what remains of them (Free Acres is the only one that still exists, with "a lush, wooded feel and cooperative air"; remnants of some of the others survive, for example here is some information about the buildings that still remain from Stelton).

UPDATE: I found an online article by Buchan on Free Acres, from New Jersey Monthly magazine.

new science fiction on Project Gutenberg: Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey

2007-12-08T23:56:00.000-05:00

I'm proud to announce that the science fiction short story "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum (1934, following the version in the 1949 collection A Martian Odyssey and Others) is now available at Project Gutenberg.

It's revered as the first in a number of stories by Weinbaum that appeared in 1934-5 (followed by "Valley of Dreams", "Flight on Titan", "Parasite Planet", "The Lotus Eaters", and "The Mad Moon") that marked a milestone in the realistic depiction of alien creatures. He overcame the problem of making aliens seem like disguised humans, or being monstrous just to be scary; the aliens were meticulously logical (which was often extended to entire ecological systems), yet strange. (On the other hand, I find most of Weinbaum's non-alien stories to be decidedly lesser, and far more gimmicky and cheesy; aliens were as necessary for Weinbaum's fiction to shine as water was for Esther Williams.)

Gutenberg has a few other stories from A Martian Odyssey and Others, mostly non-alien stories, but including the sequel "Valley of Dreams", which picks up right where "A Martian Odyssey" leaves off, and manages to convincingly develop the nature of the alien creatures, and believably answers some questions raised in its predecessor, while leaving others unresolved.

Wish Arthur C. Clarke a happy 90th birthday!

2007-12-04T21:07:00.000-05:00

We have science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke providing cogent and brilliant summaries in nonfictional form of many aspects of science and society. — Carl Sagan, "Science Fiction — A Personal View", in Broca's Brain

The revered science fiction writer (and science popularizer/futurist, and inventor, and humanist) Arthur C. Clarke — author of 2001 (book and movie), Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, "The Sentinel", "The Nine Billion Names of God", "The Star" and many others — will be turning 90 this month. To mark the occasion, Thilina Heenatigala, a friend of Clarke's and the General Secretary of the Clarke-cofounded Sri Lanka Astronomical Association has started a blog to celebrate Clarke's 90th birthday. He is sending an open invitation to all Clarke fans to post birthday wishes as blog comments for. December 16th is the special date!

Heenatigala is also a big Sagan fan: he organized a special screening of Cosmos for undergraduates last year, and was inspired by the blog-a-thon. And JHB readers will also recognize my interest in old-time science fiction as a recurring theme here — see my tribute to Jack Williamson last year — so it's a real honor to pay tribute to a living legend whose first sales, "Loophole" and "Rescue Party" (both about aliens who find the tables turned on them by clever humans) were published in 1946.

new science fiction on Project Gutenberg: Frank Belknap Long's The Mississippi Saucer

2007-12-01T21:48:00.000-05:00

The science fiction short story "The Mississippi Saucer" by Frank Belknap Long (from Weird Tales, 1951) is now available at Project Gutenberg. As the title implies, an early take on the flying-saucer idea, it is brief enough (ten pages) that I'll avoid spoiling it by saying more about it ... so, read and enjoy!

First week

2007-11-25T23:00:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been a full week since I first announced that I would be repeating the Sagan blog-a-thon this year, and so far the word has been getting out pretty well. Last Wednesday, PZ Myers plugged the blog-a-thon in a Pharyngula post that led to a massive influx of visitors to this blog (according to Site Meter, there were 372 hits that day, compared to around 15 on a usual day). Also, kudos to toomanytribbles for being the first to spread the word, less than an hour after my announcement and before I had emailed anybody about it.

On a somewhat related note, I haven't yet mentioned here my first Celebrating Sagan blog post, about a popular web video in which Sagan (and Contact's Jodie Foster) appears.

Announcing the second annual Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

2007-11-18T23:07:00.000-05:00

It's that time of the year again. In just over a month, on December 20, 2007, we will reach the eleventh anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing — and the first anniversary of the wildly successful first-ever Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-Thon. Far exceeding my wildest expectations, this became a truly worldwide celebration, featuring more than 250 posts in 11 languages! Sagan fans are truly cohering into an online force to reckon with.

For the second blog-a-thon, I'm keeping the format pretty much the same as last time:

First, I start with a post (this one) to announce the blog-a-thon now.
Then, I leave it open to participating bloggers to post something Sagan-related on their blogs sometime near December 20th (a bit late is OK); interested people without blogs or otherwise unable to post on a personal blog are encouraged to submit something to the Celebrating Sagan website (I am able to post material directly to the site, or one could contact the site's webmasters). Let me know about your posts via email or blog comment.
Finally, on December 20th, I will post a second, separate huge "meta-post" that consists solely of links to all the participating posts.

For those who like nice round anniversary numbers, or want to use them as a source of ideas, this year saw quite a number of significant Sagan-related ones:

July 11: the tenth anniversary of the release of the film Contact
August 20: the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of the Voyager 2 spacecraft
September 5: the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of the Voyager 1 spacecraft
November 8: the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Planet Walk in Ithaca, NY

For more info, check out Larry Klaes's Tompkins Weekly articles commemorating all three anniversaries:

See you in a month!

Martian parent: David Gerrold interview

2007-11-01T22:48:00.000-04:00

This has been covered before on this blog, but since Martian Child is finally opening in theaters, I want to point out that Equal Time for Freethought's interview with author David Gerrold is available, including a discussion of the novel of the same name that formed the basis for the film (as well as Gerrold's real-life childraising experience that formed the source for both).

Planet Humanism

2007-09-26T22:55:00.000-04:00

A quick note: my blog has recently been added to the Planet Humanism blog aggregator.

a few more Sagan updates

2007-09-20T22:54:00.000-04:00

Exactly what it says ... stuff that's happened since last time.

The audio of the three ETFF Druyan interviews (of which transcripts were already up before) has gone live on Celebrating Sagan. Here's the widget:

By the way, to get to a MP3 of a segment, right-click on it and select "Download this song."
toomanytribbles has a really nice post about my last round of updates. On the ETFF interview transcripts: "all three pieces are stunning."
Patrick Fish, the Sagan Gathering guy, has posted a video for me on YouTube: Ithaca Times for Joel Schlosberg, Extra Sagan, No Cheese:

Rushkoffiana 1.5

2007-09-12T23:51:00.000-04:00

Today's the right time to drop in a note about my plans to do a follow-up to this previous post about Douglas Rushkoff. I've wanted to post thoughts about Get Back in the Box and Nothing Sacred, and Rushkoff has dropped hints about his truly intriguing upcoming project, which will be about corporatism. But instead of a real post for now, I'll throw out a link to a video of a Rushkoff event about "Testament, Get Back in the Box and Corporatism", which took place at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble on February 28th of this year; I really should have blogged about this a long time ago since I was there, and can be seen in the audience:

some new science fiction at Project Gutenberg

2007-09-10T22:29:00.000-04:00

Three new eBooks that I worked on have been added to Project Gutenberg:

"A World is Born" by Leigh Brackett, from Comet magazine, July 1941.

This short story is one of her "sword-and-planet" stories that took place in the rest of the Solar System; of course almost nothing was known about what the planets were like, so this provided the opportunity for writers to imagine what might be there. Brackett's versions drew upon existing genre tropes, but had a special quality of their own; the environments were vivid enough to almost be characters of their own. In this case, the setting is Mercury; Edmond Hamilton aptly described her version of it:

The Brackett Mercury, lacking the glamor of Venus and the haunting sadness of ancient Mars—there is no history here, and no beauty—has a certain harsh authority even so. Nature is the chief villain, and a convincingly nasty one.... Leigh's concept of a world where tremendous mountains went up literally beyond the sky, where the cliff-locked valleys were racked by violent storms and sudden rockfalls, and life was a precarious thing beset by heat and cold, thirst and starvation, is a nice little view of hell.

Two paperback novels: Space Prison by Tom Godwin and Legacy by James H. Schmitz

(Well, Legacy was posted back in May, so it's old news, but I expected them to be posted at around the same time.)

Space Prison is about a group of humans stranded on a truly hostile planet (not unlike Brackett's Mercury), with minimal resources and nasty creatures. It follows a recurrent Godwin theme of solidarity against a hostile universe.

I actually read Legacy a few years ago, well before becoming a DPer, as part of a Schmitz kick after Baen put his works back in print (also prompted by finding Guy Gordon's venerable Schmitz Encyclopedia fansite in the early days of the Web, a bit before the reprints started). What stands out in my memory is the characters, in particular the protagonist Trigger Argee, who was in a few short stories but really shines here.

As was common with paperbacks, both novels are retitled (the original titles are The Survivors and A Tale of Two Clocks, respectively.) Another thing the books have in common is that the folks over at Baen are fond of them, so that not only have they put those books in print, but unbeknownst to me when I started working at them, they were both online in their entirety at the Baen website; here are links to the Baen version of Space Prison (where it has the original title The Survivors) and Legacy. But at least those versions don't have the original front/back cover and blurbs, like this one has.

Oh, and Space Prison got Boing Boinged!

I'm now an official Sagan celebrator

2007-09-04T22:32:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce that I'm now an official contributor to the Celebrating Sagan website and blog. This is a site that appeared at around the same time as my blog-a-thon last year, and which had a similar mission of remembering Carl and his legacy. In particular, it was specifically designed to accept reader contributions, in particular from readers without blogs, so it turned out to be a good complement to the blog-a-thon. (And so, I'm able to post contributions that are emailed to me -- although you can also send them to the core team.)

We'll see where this goes ... but one thing that's in store is audio I sent them of three half-hour interviews of Ann Druyan from Equal Time for Freethought, to go with their "Sounds of Sagan" collection. For now, transcripts of the interviews are available on ETFF's website:

ETFF episode 50, July 13, 2003: This show was about general science issues, and includes a large number of listener call-in questions.
ETFF episode 130, May 15, 2005: This show was devoted to the Cosmos TV series.
ETFF episode 193, October 15, 2006: This was devoted to the Varieties of Scientific Experience book, which was newly released.

My composer friend Daniel's music website

2007-08-28T22:32:00.000-04:00

Nope, don't confuse it with this old post about his MySpace page. My friend Daniel DeCastro put up, earlier this summer, an honest-to-no-God, really real webpage to show off his composing talent:
DeCastro Music
In particular, it has a wide selection of music (far more than the old MySpace page), as well as his thesis. Happy listening!

A New History of Leviathan online

2007-08-27T23:29:00.000-04:00

A favorite long-out-of-print classic of historical scholarship is now online as a free PDF eBook: A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State, edited by Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard. This is a left libertarian favorite that's little known outside of that circle, but it's easy to see why it's so well remembered.

Turning the mainstream view of the political spectrum inside out, the collection features a tag team from the radical Left and Right taking on the historical mythology of the corporate center. As the introduction by the two editors puts it, one editor, Rothbard, "is one of the intellectual leaders of the new 'right-wing libertarian movement' ... a firm believer in laissez-faire capitalism ... a free-market economist, a former contributor to National Review ... [who] favors removing the privileges of the large corporations and returning to laissez-faire"; the other, Radosh, "emerges from the ranks of the New Left ... he was an active member of the Wisconsin Socialist Club, and functioned as an associate editor of the radical journal, Studies on the Left ... a libertarian socialist ... a firm believer in the necessity of socialist revolution ... [who] favors a decentralized socialist economy". Similarly with the other contributors: for instance, William Appleman Williams and Martin J. Sklar on the New Left, and Leonard Liggio on the libertarian side.

So, what could possibly draw these extremists together? As the introduction says, "each, because of his critique of liberal ideology and concepts, has been able in his own work to transcend the ideological myths that enable the large corporations to mask their hegemony over American society." Both ideologies include an emphasis on spontaneity, voluntarism and decentralism, as well as a deep-seated and genuine opposition to corporatism -- not only to the overt power of corporations and the immediate harm they do, but to the more subtle political and ideological forms of corporate influence (which are often disguised, ironically, by anti-corporate rhetoric) and the historical roots of how they arose. And so, both groups of contributors dissent form a "Leviathan Corporate State" that is driven by an exaltation of stability and control, and which combines leftist rhetoric about helping the weak and restraining the power of business with a reality of indirect subsidies and priviliges towards corporations that cement their dominance of the economy. And so, each side takes on its own sacred cows: Radosh has the essay debunking "The Myth of the New Deal" and Rothbard trashes Herbert Hoover's "Myth of Laissez-Faire".

Now that this book is freely available, let's hope that it finally reaches a wider audience and gets both leftists and rightists to rethink their assumptions about American history and ideology.

Albert Ellis and Sherwin Wine, RIP

2007-07-25T23:41:00.000-04:00

Today, the newspapers are carrying obits for two different prominent humanists. Here's the New York Times ones for Ellis and Wine.

I never met Ellis, although he's appeared occasionally at humanist events in the NYC area; and I met Wine only once, when he gave the keynote at Humanlight 2003. (In fact, I sat next to him in the car when going back to NYC, so it's unnerving that he died in a car accident.)

Jackie Chan's ghost site

2007-07-10T23:20:00.001-04:00

The second of two quick notes on my recent stuff elsewhere on the web:

At Steve Baldwin's Ghost Sites blog, he's posted an analysis I sent in about a time capsule from the 1990s Internet: the official book promotion site for Jackie Chan's 1998 autobiography I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action, which has been preserved intact virtually unchanged from the date of release.

Thorstein Veblen and The Icelandic Commonwealth

2007-07-10T23:05:00.000-04:00

The first of two quick notes on my recent stuff elsewhere on the web:

Here's Thorstein Veblen's description of the Icelandic Commonwealth, from his book An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation as existing in a quasi-anarchist form, where the government lacked most of the usual functions, such as defense, and coercive power. I sent this passage (which I discovered while proofreading the book in Distributed Proofreaders) in to Roderick T. Long, who had written about Iceland in a similar vein here and here; he hadn't seen it, and neither had David Friedman (the other libertarian most well-known for seeing Iceland as a model of anarchy).

Blog maintenance

2007-07-09T22:32:00.000-04:00

Over the last few months, I've been making some incremental minor changes and improvements to the blog. I'm not slapping a "2.0" label or anything like that, but I feel it's worth keeping track of; they should add up to a better site experience. This includes, in no particular order:

Somewhat belatedly, switching over to the new version of Blogger
Cleaning up the HTML coding on pictures (and adding a few new ones)
Adding categories (a New Blogger feature) and extending the categories back to older posts
Deleting spam comments
Deleting some posts I was unsatisfied with
A major reorganization and expansion of my sidebar (made much easier by New Blogger), making it a much more complete account of my stuff around the web
Finally getting a traffic analyzer, via Site Meter, providing a lot more info about traffic than I had (which was basically none)

And also ... I'm going to try to commit to a more regular posting schedule; I make no promises, but will try to post at least every 3-4 days.

As always, feedback is important, so let me know what you think of any of the changes I'm making.

Troll 2 summer tour

2007-07-05T22:48:00.000-04:00

Among bad movie fans, one particularly special favorite is the 1990 "best worst movie" Troll 2. Without the typical features that bring attention to well-known bad movies — big-name stars, a large budget, a recent release date, a showing on Mystery Science Theater 3000 — but solely on the strength of sheer badness and massive filmmaking ineptitude, it's charmed its way into a cult following, a near-permanent space on the low end of the IMDB Bottom 100 (including occasional stints all the way down at the #1 spot), and a RiffTrax.

And this summer, Troll 2 is being featured at an ongoing series of special theatrical screenings, featuring a newly rediscovered 35mm print, at cities across the United States! The next two are this weekend in Seattle, and new cities and dates are being announced. Plus, they will have a large proportion of the original cast in attendance, who are fully appreciative of the movie's badness and the strange following it's gained, who will hang out and take Q&A; and different screenings will have various other events to complete the experience.

Last fall, I was at a similar one-shot screening/cast appeareance/Q&A/party for the movie in NYC (the main difference being that the movie was screened from a DVD, before the print was discovered). It was really a hoot, from the cast, to the outrageous T-shirts and other "merchandise", to the energy of the fans. Here's some stuff that gives a taste:

Photos at Flickr here and here
video from cast member Darren Ewing
fan video of the Q&A session
fan video of George Hardy recreating a famous line at the Q&A
video of a fan-made mock trailer that was shown at the screening

Free Voice of Labor at IMDB

2007-06-16T22:27:00.000-04:00

When Stephen Fischler and Joel Sucher's pair of 1980s documentaries Anarchism in America and Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists were released onto DVD last year, the home video availability, much like Bird and Shaffer's The Wobblies doc, led to a resurgence of interest in both movies. Some time afterwards, I noticed that while the former had an entry on the comprehensive Internet Movie Database, the latter did not. So about a week ago, I finally decided to try to make my way through the IMDB update process and submit it for inclusion in the database ... and it's paid off: Free Voice of Labor has a brand-new page on the IMDB!

(And yes, I should eventually post some thoughts on the actual content of both of Fischler and Sucher's movies ... there was a flurry of posts shortly after the DVD's release, and I felt like I was coming late to the party at the time. But yeah, they're recommended, and I wanted to get out this announcement now rather than later.)

Sci Fiction archive going down

2007-06-13T12:11:00.000-04:00

I can't believe this. Last night, I stumbled upon the archive of the webzine Sci Fiction on the Sci Fi channel website for the first time — and saw that it was going to be taken down by the 15th! (The magazine ran from 2000 to 2005, but even when it stopped publishing, the archives were left up ... until now.) It's really too bad, as it has an impressive lineup of both new fiction, and classic reprints. The latter, with its truly old-school lineup of authors — Robert Bloch, Zenna Henderson, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, Manly Wade Wellman — brings back a lot of memories of hunting this stuff down in musty paperbacks, including one tale (Fredric Brown's "Mouse") where I was left hanging because the ending page was actually ripped out of the book! How did this never get on my radar? Note to self: how did I never, say, Google "Allamagoosa"?

The news has been picked up by bOING bOING after I submitted the link, where Cory is understandably upset since one of his stories, "Jury Service", was published there. (Welcome, bOING bOINGers! Here's more posts on science fiction.) Hopefully this will get the word out of the SF community.

Guess the mystery Georgist

2007-06-10T15:18:00.000-04:00

Guess who wrote the following:

For the better part of a decade, I taught dozens of students ... the basics of Georgist economics, drawn for the most part from his classic Progress and Poverty.... As George explains, most taxes are fundamentally unfair, yet the least objectionable is the LVT. Taxes are problematic, as they are a burden on production, increasing its costs.

The answer.

(inspired by this)

Sagan Gathering note

2007-06-05T23:07:00.000-04:00

Since I've mentioned on this blog the Sagan Gathering that was scheduled to happen in Ithaca, NY this past weekend, I think I ought to give a somewhat disappointing update. Through personal communication with organizer Patrick Fish, I found out that due to having to recover from an unexpected health emergency earlier last week, he was unable to participate in most of the planned events, and therefore (since as of this time, it's a one-man operation) had to call off most of the events. And as it happened, the Festival got rained out anyway.

On the bright side: the preparations for the Gathering have unearthed a lot of goodwill towards Sagan's legacy in the Ithaca area, and have laid the groundwork for a bigger, better Gathering next year. Frankly, it's reinvigorated my Sagan-ania. And some Sagan fans did show up to participate in the Festival and tour Sagan-related locations in Ithaca on their own, including one all the way from Indiana.

Upcoming Chomsky interview on ETFF

2007-05-24T22:39:00.000-04:00

The next two Sundays, Equal Time for Freethought's Barry F. Seidman and Neil J. Murphy will be interviewing one of the show's most famous guests ever: the one and only Noam Chomsky! The show is partially inspired by The Humanist magazine's publishing an interview with Chomsky earlier this year; where as one would expect, he addressed his take on humanism in addition to his usual political topics. In this interview, Chomsky deals with a range of subjects, from humanism, the role of religion in politics, the free will question, human nature, to politics and economics.

A few weeks ago, I helped the producers draft some of their interview questions. Now, I've just finished listening to the unedited version of the prerecorded interview, and I'm really happy at how it turned out. There's definitely areas where one can disagree with Chomsky: for instance, all of the ETFF crew take a much harder determinist position on the free will question than Chomsky, and his politics is his familiar, frustrating mix of Smithian classical liberalism and more mainstream social democracy. But in all cases, Chomsky makes his points very well, drawing on a vast array of knowledge, but also willing to say what he doesn't know (or doesn't think is yet known to science). Look forward to it.

Remember: ETFF airs Sundays, 6:30-7PM at 99.5 FM in the NYC area, and streams at WBAI's website, and can be heard afterwards at WBAI's and ETFF's audio archives.

John J. Pierce in the New York Times 2

2007-05-13T20:43:00.001-04:00

Science fiction critic/editor/fan John J. Pierce is at it again. For the second time this year, he's gotten a letter to the editor about science fiction published in The New York Times. Last January, as previously seen on this blog, he weighed in on Heinlein's ever-controversial Starship Troopers.

Today, the NYT printed his response to a snooty article on Philip K. Dick. The article was one of many that take the "science fiction for people who hate to admit that worthwhile literature is science fiction" tack: take a single science fiction author (Bradbury, le Guin and Vonnegut are common examples) and proceed to argue that the author has some special talent that is completely different from the bulk of science fiction authors, and that their literary value is mutually exclusive to the science fictional aspects of their work. So, this article will note Dick's origins in pulps and Ace Double paperbacks, and then follow it up with "you don't read Mr. Dick for his prose". In response, Pierce notes that "it saves a lot of time and a lot of reading to anoint a single science-fiction writer as the only one worthy of consideration". To provide some examples of equally worthy authors, he plugs Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber and James Tiptree Jr. The latter did recently earn some attention from the NYT when a biography of her received a front-page book review; and only last week, a letter to the editor focused on science fiction author Leigh Brackett's screenwriting career.

Also, Pierce accurately notes that the recent film The Last Mimzy "hasn’t inspired the slightest interest" in Henry Kuttner, who wrote the source story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". (Many of the reviewers didn't even realize that the credited author "Lewis Padgett" was Kuttner's pseudonym.) For me, the missed opportunity involved was a huge disappointment; it seemed like Kuttner was about to get his due at last, and that Hollywood would finally "get it", and realize the large amount of source material lying around by people not named Philip K. Dick. Alas.

At least the grand old The Best of Henry Kuttner collection has been brought back into print as a tie-in book, complete with Ray Bradbury's excellent introduction. As it so happens, the "Best of" series (in which Pierce edited three of the volumes) also had an entry for Dick; the entire series was published in the late 1970s, just before Blade Runner catapulted Dick into the spotlight.

Addendum: Sha LaBare points out in the comments that I should have credited Kuttner's wife and fellow writer C. L. Moore as co-author of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (as well as most of the other stories in The Best of Henry Kuttner).

dorkbot-nyc may 2007 flyer

2007-04-27T16:53:00.000-04:00

Next Wednesday evening, dorkbot-nyc will have its May 2007 meeting (the last until next fall). Douglas Irving Repetto has put up a flyer I made for the occasion. Also, he's posted photos I took at the December 2006 and January 2007 meetings.

I'm also using this occasion to kick off something I've been meaning to add to this blog for a while: an "upcoming events" section in the sidebar. For now, I'll be maintaining this manually (let's hope it stays reasonably current), but if I figure out a way to automate it, I'll do so.

new ETFF transcripts: Gerrold and Price

2007-04-18T23:52:00.000-04:00

Science fiction is the most subversive of all literary genres. You can get away with stuff in science fiction that you can't get away with anywhere else, because half the time, the people you are holding up to the light don't even realize that you're doing it. —David Gerrold

Three new transcripts I did have been added to the Equal Time for Freethought archives.

David Gerrold interview with Barry F. Seidman, August 7, 2005

This is an informal chat with the renowned science fiction writer, touching on his experience with Star Trek, and his novels such as The Man Who Folded Himself, When H.A.R.L.I.E Was One, the War Against the Chtorr series, and The Martian Child, together with his real-life parenting experiences that formed the inspiration for the novel. As it so happens, the latter is the basis for a movie that's coming out this June. I wrote about this show when it first aired, in one of the earliest posts ever on this blog.

two Robert M. Price interviews with Neil J. Murphy: June 11, 2006 (Da Vinci Code) and December 25, 2005 (Christmas)

In these two provocative interviews, Robert M. Price takes on the established view of Christian history (the second being a counterpart to the Jewish-themed Hanukkah interview with Douglas Rushkoff aired the same day); in the former, he also deals with Dan Brown's claims surrounding The Da Vinci Code, as dealt with in Price's book The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (see also this article summarizing his research). Hopefully the DVC fad still has enough steam left in it to garner us some attention, as the movie was released to DVD only last fall. Price has a lot of fun tearing into Brown's sloppy research and far-fetched conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Jesus and the apostle next to him forming a vague "M" shape in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper painting is evidence of a hidden code representing Mary Magdalene.

(thanks to Wikipedia for the images; sources here, here, here, and here; Creative Commons, public domain, and fair use images)

Neil concludes that "Dan Brown has raised the right questions with the wrong answers". Along the way, Price even slips in a sci-fi reference, with a sly example from the mythos of Superman comics.

By the way, one issue dealt with tangentially is the lack of Crucifixion revisionism in DVC. While doing the transcript, I found an interesting quote from Brown in his witness statement in the court case between him and Baigent and Leigh. I think this says it all:

One of the ideas in Holy Blood, Holy Grail — perhaps even the central idea — is advertised on the back of my copy of the book: "Is it possible Christ did not die on the cross?". This is not an idea that I would ever have found appealing. Being raised Christian and having attended Bible camp, I am well aware that Christ's crucifixion (and ultimate resurrection) serves as the very core of the Christian faith. It is the promise of life everlasting and that which makes Jesus "the Christ". The resurrection is perhaps the sole controversial Christian topic about which I would not dare write; suggesting a married Jesus is one thing, but undermining the resurrection strikes at the very heart of Christian belief.

Personally, I don't know what to make of the DVC furor; as silly as it's gotten, the book's themes do address a lot of unanswered questions people have. The whole aspect of fictional works whose authors exaggerate their basis on fact is nothing new; for instance The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with its tagline "What happened is true. Now the motion picture that's just as real." (As snopes sez: "Sort of.") And really, it's hard to hate a book, no matter how bad, that includes references to Project Gutenberg in the acknowledgements and a pretty obvious allusion to the feminist classic The Chalice and the Blade (also on the DVC official bibliography).

more Sagan stuff

2007-04-11T23:42:00.000-04:00

Last week, The Ithaca Times ran a great new Sagan-related article by Larry Klaes, "An Organizational Voyage" (Klaes also kindly reposted the article in the comments section of this blog, as well as on Celebrating Sagan). It centers on Sagan fan Patrick Fish's efforts to plan an upcoming Sagan Gathering to coincide with the late May/early June Ithaca Festival. The article also touches on how Pat was influenced by Sagan (he's one of the Cosmos Premiere Generation); and describes Pat's trip to Sagan's gravesite, documented further on Pat's YouTube page. At the site, Pat found two articles from last December, both also by Klaes, that somebody left there and which were preserved in the snow: "Bloggers remember Sagan" from the Ithaca Times, about the blog-a-thon I initiated; and "Sagan and the Scientific Experience" from Tompinks Weekly, about the Varieties of Scientific Experience book. It's hard to express how touched and surprised I am by this.

For even more from Klaes, check out his in-depth review of the Contact film and a 2003 Ithaca Times article on Sagan's protege Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Pat contacted me about a month ago, and since then we've discussed his plans and all things Sagan. And just as Pat was partially inspired by my blog-a-thon, he's in turn galvanized me to get back to things Sagan.

Pat is now looking for people who are interested in participating in the Gathering to contact him, which you can do at this email address.

Birthday candles for "beautiful dynamite"

2007-03-08T12:10:00.000-05:00

I don't dance like Cyd Charisse. But women identify with me. And while men desire Cyd Charisse, they'd take me home to meet Mom. — June Allyson

As the Legs fansite reminds us, today is the birthday of Cyd Charisse, who danced in some of the greatest classic musicals like Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, and Silk Stockings. Last month, the site had a form to send birthday messages, which would then be printed out and mailed to Cyd herself; the site now has the update: "Thank you to all those who sent birthday wishes to Cyd throughout the month of February! The letter has been sent. If I get a reply, I will post it here."

Paul Avrich

2007-02-16T22:49:00.000-05:00

Today is the first anniversary of the passing of the historian of anarchism Paul Avrich. He wrote numerous books about the history of anarchism in Russia and the United States, and combined careful scholarship with a personal emphasis on the people involved.

I met Avrich twice: at Bluestockings in summer 2003, and at the 2004 Modern School Reunion. In the former, he did a presentation about anarchist women, to match the bookstore's feminist theme -- but to make it more specific, he narrowed it down to those he had personally known, which turned out to be quite a lot! Also, I had on me a handwritten list of books about alternative education that were mentioned in Ron Miller's Free Schools, Free People, when I realized that Avrich's modern school book was included on the list! Both organizations paid tribute to Avrich in 2006 (the former memorial including Stanley Aronowitz as speaker).

NY Times on Sagan

2007-02-13T23:13:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times Science section has a front-page article on Carl Sagan and the Varieties of Scientific Experience book. It alludes to the recent tenth anniversary of Sagan's passing and covers a wide ground of Saganania (much of which will probably be familiar to Sagan fans); Ann Druyan is quoted.

John Holt on Milton Friedman

2007-01-17T19:05:00.000-05:00

When and to what degree should we citizens be allowed to protect ourselves against the crooked and incompetent, to decide what we will buy or use, or who we will work with, and when should we be protected whether we ask to be or not, and if so how, and by whom? Beyond that, is our present system of giving licenses through S-chools a good way, or the best way, or the only way of doing this? I think it is none of these. Too often the protectors don't protect, but turn themselves into a new conspiracy to exploit and defraud the public. We could probably protect ourselves quite well against many (but not all) dangers, if we were not early in life made into expert-worshippers, and if we could easily find out the truth about the dangers. Thus, the conservative economist Milton Friedman has said that even medical doctors should not be licensed. If someone thinks he can heal others, let him say so, and get what clients he can. But require him to make open to everyone both his methods and the results of his work, including the names and addresses of all his past clients, so that would-be clients can check up on him. To a large extent, people with money enough to choose do this now; they would not think of going to a doctor (or dentist, or lawyer) without asking former patients or clients what they thought of him.

—John Holt, Instead of Education, chapter 16

John J. Pierce in the New York Times

2007-01-15T23:33:00.000-05:00

This weekend, the New York Times book review had a couple of letters in response to a previous review of John Scalzi's novels which commented on one of science fiction's most perennially controversial novels, Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. One of them is by John J. Pierce, who points out the long history of contention over the book and how Heinlein liked Joe Haldeman's The Forever War despite the latter being a direct critique of his book. It's an example of how irreverent and open debate is encouraged in the genre; as Gregory Benford put it, while in "serious fiction ... proceeds from canonical classics that supposedly stand outside of time, deserving awe, great and intact by themselves", science fiction books constitute "immense discussions, with ideas developed, traded varied; players ring changes on each other — a steppin'-out jazz band, not a solo concert in a plush auditorium."

Pierce is recognized among science fiction fandom as a critic, editor, and fan. He edited and wrote introductions for a number of excellent entries in del Rey's 1970s series of collections of the selected short stories by classic authors: The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun (the only volume of short stories ever assembled of one of the unsung early masters of the genre), The Best of Murray Leinster, and The Best of Cordwainer Smith (later followed by a larger complete collection of the author's short stories). He's also written four critical books on the history of science fiction (which I haven't read, but look intriguing): Foundations of Science Fiction (1987), Great Themes of Science Fiction (1987), When World Views Collide (1989), and Odd Genre (1994). I've also seen him at Lunacon in 2003 and 2005 on panels discussing topics such as favorite pre-20th century and out-of-print science fiction, and the New Jersey Humanlight celebration in 2004.

The Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon Meta-Post

2006-12-20T12:09:00.000-05:00

Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing, and as I promised in my original announcement, here is my promised meta-post for the Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-Thon with a gigantic list of participating blog posts.

I've been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of responses, so it's still incomplete. While I will be updating this list repeatedly, if I've missed your post, you can email or post a comment. Also, note that it's fine to post after the 20th.

Sagan's wife and collaborator Ann Druyan has started off her new blog today with the post Ten Times Around The Sun Without Carl, while his son Nick Sagan has posted his memories of his dad and his official blog-a-thon welcome following his posts here, here, here, and here. And Louis Friedman, who along with Sagan was one of the founders of the Planetary Society, has posted his memories of Sagan at the Planetary Society Blog.

The new website Celebrating Sagan has gathered a staggering amount of material. It's focused on user contributions, which may be useful if you don't have a blog but have something to say.

The blog-a-thon has been covered at The Ithaca Journal, Cornell's Chronicle Online, MSNBC, USA Today, The Syracuse Post-Standard, and China News Daily.

I've posted my own memories of Stephen Jay Gould.

A big thanks to everybody who participated! Also, thanks to Hell on Frisco Bay for providing the inspiration and model for this blog-a-thon, with a blog-a-thon for the centennial of the birth of Warner Bros. animator Friz Freleng here and here.

And now, the big list:

Posts in other languages:

Catalan

El friki català

Chinese

Remainder Book

Danish

codegirl.ck

Dutch

French

German

andy69

Italian

Amedeo Balbi @ Keplero

Portugese

O Bule Orbital
Helder Sanches
A Lâmpada Mágica
Liberdade na era tecnológica
Olho e meio
Que Treta / That's BS! (Portugese and English)
Random Precision
Roberto Tietzmann @ Bloquinho de notas

Russian

Клуб научных журналистов

Spanish

Stephen Jay Gould

2006-12-18T22:58:00.000-05:00

Recently, I found out that some choice Stephen Jay Gould essays from The New York Review of Books are free online at the magazine's website (hat tip to 2xSlick on the agony booth forum). One is the first Gould essay I ever read, "Dinomania" (1993, also in the then-new collection Dinosaur in a Haystack), where he deals with the Jurassic Park phenomenon, and in particular takes the movie version to task dumbing down some of the themes of the book. Another is "The Streak of Streaks" (1988, also in the collection Bully for Brontosaurus) about Joe DiMaggio's hitting record, with Gould's memorable account of his personal encounter with his sports hero when his father caught a ball from DiMaggio.

So, to complement the many bloggers who are posting anecdotes and memories of Sagan for the Sagan blog-a-thon, I'll describe my own memories of meeting with Sagan's friend and fellow science writer Gould, who also died far too young (Sagan would be 72 today, Gould 65).

The time was fall 2000, when I was entering my first semester at NYU and Gould's essay column was still running every month in Natural History magazine. Like Gould's father catching DiMaggio's baseball, I had the unexpected luck of getting into Gould's class "Reading Darwin". During that semester, he had decided to try something different and teach a class for freshmen, with a small class size and a discussion-oriented format, about The Origin of Species which would deal with the literary and historical as well as the scientific aspect of Darwin's book. Even more unusual was that a few of the classes were held at his apartment in SoHo, which was also the studio of his wife, artist Rhonda Roland Shearer.

In addition to reading Origin chapter-by-chapter and discussing it, students had to write a term paper that dealt with some issue connected to the book. For my paper, I compared the theory of evolution as developed in Origin to the nascent field of artificial life, in which the evolutionary process is simulated on computers; I used Steven Levy's pre-iPod-era book about the field, Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology. I hoped to show that not only was the approach of computational simulation a valid way of learning about evolution, but that it could fill in some of the weaknesses of the theory of Darwin's book. Gould had some fun with his comments on the paper; for instance, when I inadvertently used the word "good" three times in a few sentences, he quipped "too much of a good thing".

I never saw Gould after the class; I thought I might, never suspecting he'd be with us for less than two more years.

Sagan stuff that isn't on the web

2006-12-16T12:41:00.000-05:00

I realized I should complement this list with one of notable current Sagan stuff that isn't online.

The big news is the new book The Varieties of Scientific Experience, based on rediscovered transcripts of Sagan's 1985 Gifford Lectures edited by Ann Druyan.

Look for Sagan stuff in the latest issues of The Planetary Report and Skeptical Inquirer.

On the 20th, there will be a memorial dinner in Dallas, Texas.

Sagan stuff from around the web

2006-12-04T23:55:00.000-05:00

As inspiration for your blog-a-thon post, here's a collection of cool stuff related to Carl Sagan that's available online.

A 1994 CSICOP keynote by Sagan on Point of Inquiry, together with a new interview with Ann Druyan. A transcript of the keynote's Q&A session was rediscovered and published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine in 2005.

Ann Druyan also discusses Carl in an interview by Skeptic magazine's Michael Shermer.

A NASA video of a 1972 panel on extraterrestrial life, also featuring Ashley Montagu.

Carl Sagan on Charlie Rose in 1995 and 1996.

Carl Sagan on MySpace.

The website and blog of Carl's son, science fiction writer Nick Sagan.

The website of Don Davis, space artist who illustrated such Sagan works as Cosmos and The Dragons of Eden; including his memories of Sagan.

Announcing the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

2006-11-26T14:46:00.000-05:00

Next month, December 20, 2006 will mark the tenth anniversary Carl Sagan's passing. In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial "blog-a-thon" among Sagan's fans throughout the blogosphere. If you're a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you've done that's been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence....), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers.

A list of Sagan stuff online that may be a source of ideas.

Carl's son Nick Sagan on the blog-a-thon.

Publicity for the blog-a-thon includes Cornell University's Chronicle Online, The Ithaca Journal, digg, bOING bOING, and countless blogs. Welcome, everybody, and thanks to all who have publicized it!

See also another very cool new project, Celebrating Sagan; if you're not a blogger, you can contribute your memories and stuff via email.

Update: the meta-post is here!

r. i. p. science fiction's searching mind, Jack Williamson

2006-11-26T13:43:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago, one of the great classic writers of science fiction passed away: Jack Williamson. His famously long career spanned from the Gernsbackian beginnings of the modern genre in 1928 to a final novel, The Stonehenge Gate, published in 2005, and was already a nonagenarian when I started reading him in the late 1990s.

I've enjoyed a great deal of his science fiction, which is always marked by a sense of adventure and imagination. The early The Green Girl sends its heroes beneath the sea in a Verne-inspired "omnimobile". The Legion of Space and its sequel The Cometeers were some of the most entertaining of the early "space operas". The dystopian "With Folded Hands" and the subsequent The Humanoids contain a famous treatment of robots which was influential on both the field and actual AI researchers like Marvin Minsky. Hal Clement thought that The Legion of Time was "the best time travel story ever written"; not only was its treatment of alternate timelines one of the earlier ones, but the specific "war fought by time traveling soldiers from different eras" premise was taken in a very different direction by Fritz Leiber in The Big Time and related stories about the "Change War". While he was one of the first science fiction writers to treat the theme of cloning (he mentions his 1954 "Guinivere for Everybody" as being one of the earliest examples), he did a little cloning himself: in 2001, I submitted Iskandar from his 1934 Weird Tales science fantasy "The Wizard of Life" to the "clones of Fu Manchu" listing of characters inspired by the famous villain on Lawrence Knapp's definitive Fu Manchu website. His stories also inspired some memorable art, like the February 1939 Astouding Science Fiction cover that marked the debut of that magazine's frequent cover artist Hubert Rogers. And his influence also appears in nonfiction: Carl Sagan devotes a good portion of the chapter "Remaking the Planets" in Pale Blue Dot to a discussion of Williamson's 1942 tale "Collision Orbit" (which I haven't read, but which is available as part of the book Seetee Ship), as an early attempt to deal realistically with asteroid colonization and antimatter (the rhodomagnetic robots of "With Folded Hands" and The Humanoids also get a mention in Broca's Brain).

In addition to frequent appearances in multi-author anthologies (Isaac Asimov includes two Williamson tales in his anthology of personal favorites Before the Golden Age), del Rey's 1970s The Best of Jack Williamson has a nice selection of his stories, and for the fan who's devoted to truly digging in to Williamson's work, Haffner Press has a comprehensive series of collections aiming to cover his complete short stories and many of the shorter novels; five volumes have been published so far, covering Williamson's work up to mid-1940. Fittingly, the first volume, The Metal Man and Others (1999), has an introduction by another of the grand old-timers, Hal Clement — whose classic short story "Proof", about intelligent creatures from the Sun, was published in 1942; and whose final novel about a water world, Noise, came out in 2003 (I was lucky enough to see him at Readercon 14 the previous year, where he read from the then-forthcoming novel).

(via bOING bOING, which coincidentally also mentioned his late novel Terraforming Earth two months ago.)

modern school reunion

2006-10-13T22:17:00.000-04:00

Today is the 97th anniversary of the death of Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist and freethought educational pioneer whose persecution by both church and state and execution on trumped-up charges led to outrage and an international movement to emulate his ideas.

Ferrer and other European educators wanted a "modern" approach to education based on freedom and reason, in place of the traditional one based on coercion, rote and indoctrination. Emma Goldman, who visited Sebastien Faure's French modern school La Ruche, conveys the atmosphere of the school in her description from her autobiography:

He [Faure] had taken twenty-four orphan children and those of parents too poor to pay and was housing, feeding, and clothing them at his own expense. He had created an atmosphere at La Ruche that released the life of the child from discipline and coercion of any sort. He had discarded the old methods of education and in their place he established understanding for the needs of the child, confidence and trust in its possibilities, and respect for its personality.

Not even at Cempuis, the school of the venerable libertarian Paul Robin, which I had visited in 1900, was the spirit of comradeship and co-operation between pupils and teachers so complete as at La Ruche. Robin, too, felt the need of a new approach to the child, but he still remained somewhat tied to the old text-books on education. La Ruche had freed itself also from them. The hand-painted wall-paper in the dormitory and class-rooms, picturing the life of plants, flowers, birds, and animals, had a more quickening effect on the imagination of the children than any "regular" lessons. The free grouping of the children around their teachers, listening to some story or seeking explanation for puzzling thoughts, amply made up for lack of old-fashioned instruction.

The Modern School attitude was equally hostile to the approaches of parochial and public schools; in his biography of Voltairine de Cleyre, Paul Avrich vividly describes her opinion:

She shared his hatred for the Catholic Church and its authoritarian educational methods, which they both had experienced at first hand. At the same time, she rejected the public school, which she considered an agent of government indoctrination, instilling a blind obedience and "revolting patriotism" in the minds of the children.

Of the modern schools that were founded in the United States in response to Ferrer's death, the longest-lived was the one that started in New York City in 1910; after being shut down, it moved to a newly formed utopian colony of Stelton in New Jersey in 1915, both of which lasted until 1953. This school was involved with numerous other experimental ideas, including modern art, and benefitted from the talents of many well-known people: not just anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, but many distinguished artists, writers, and thinkers like Will and Ariel Durant, Mike Gold, Robert Henri, Rockwell Kent, Eugene O'Neill, and Margaret Sanger.

Far ahead of its time, the modern school movement is little known or appreciated today, with some attention from anarchists and alternative educators (but for some reason, virtually none from the freethought community).

For more information on the complex history of the movement, see Paul Avrich's definitive book on the movement, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States, or the section on the Stelton colony in The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America by Laurence Veysey; Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre have written powerful shorter essays about the subject. The new-to-DVD documentary Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists also has a section about the Modern Schools.

The memory of the Stelton school and colony is kept alive by the Friends of the Modern School, many of whose members grew up at, or were otherwise personally involved with Stelton. On September 16, they held their 34th anual reunion (and the third consecutive one I've attended) at Rutgers University. While the reunion is a way for Steltonites to keep in touch, interested members of the general public are welcome to attend; many of their discussions address wider issues (I'm sorry I didn't attend in 2003, when the main talk was about the decline of the labor movement). One regular attender for more than a decade and a half has been the indefagitable Jerry Mintz, who has covered the reunions regularly in his magazine Education Revolution (and its former incarnation AERO-GRAMME); he also has available a video of his interview with the Modern School's Nellie Dick. (On the other hand, Friends secretary Jon Thoreau Scott has regularly appeared at AERO's conferences, and has presented about the Modern School there.)

Part of the meeting was devoted to remembering members of the community who had passed away in the last year, including Paul Avrich, the historian of anarchism; and Jim Dick Jr., son of Stelton directors Jim and Nellie Dick and co-founder of the Summerhill Society in the 1960s (which had a role in starting the period's free school movement by bringing the approach of A. S. Neill's Summerhill to the United States).

Barry Pateman, associate director of the Emma Goldman Papers (and editor of a number of books including Chomsky on Anarchism), gave a spirited talk on Emma Goldman's life and the vital role of the Modern School approach to her ideas. Emma was highly involved in the New York City modern school; and while her ideas about free love are relatively well known, her equally revolutionary ideas about children are not.

Also, Stelton seems to be on its way to being recognized as part of local history: not only was a marker and plaque put up last year at the site of the school in Piscataway, but it's mentioned as a historic New Jersey site in the 2006 edition of the Raritan-Millstone Heritage Alliance's Guide to Historic Sites in Central New Jersey (p. 45). Ironically, the book lists it right next to Camp Kilmer, a military camp created during WW2 next to the Stelton colony and which played a large role in its decline.

Transcript of Rushkoff ETFF Hanukkah show

2006-10-09T13:25:00.000-04:00

My second transcript for Equal Time for Freethought is now online: from last year's Hanukkah season, Barry Seidman's holiday interview with Douglas Rushkoff.

The interview started off with a subversive look at the historical origins of Hanukkah, based on Rushkoff's treatment of the subject in his book Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism. The role of circumcision led to a discussion of the modern Jewish take on the practice. The holiday also led to the issues of assimilation in general, and of Passover as another holiday which Rushkoff had an alternative take on. The touchy topic of what a humanistic secular Jew should think about the Israel situation was dealt with. Even technical difficulties were an opportunity for discussion: when noise interfered with the reception as he was discussing Passover being a de-idolization of the Egyptian gods, he said "I hear strange and exciting sounds" and "It's those gods coming back at me now". After the interview was over, Barry said, "Very interesting concepts. I was born and raised and grew up Jewish and didn't know half these things he talked about, myself."

Rushkoff on Judaism:

In some ways, I see [that] Judaism at its best is really just civilization. It's really just a set of ethics and laws and reminders that human beings should matter to one another. And you get your idols out the way, so that you can appreciate one another instead of these idols. Whether they're ancient gods, or modern gods like money and power and fame and those sort of things.

and on how his interpretation is out of sync with more traditionalistic ones:

[I]t's gotten to the point where I don't talk about Jewish issues, Judaism, as Judaism, anymore. Because current, modern Judaism as practiced, for the most part, is so antithetical to what I see as the humanism underlying Judaism that I think it's easier to do humanism as humanism. It's easier to make the world a better place without, in some cases, being so publicly affirmative of where it might have come from for me. Because other people get the opposite message from it.... I'm finding when I do a talk or an event under a Jewish banner, people in attendance generally are less willing to engage with Judaism for real, than people are if I just go speak at a Barnes & Noble or somewhere about media or culture or something else.

fall dorkbot

2006-10-02T23:29:00.000-04:00

Last month, dorkbot-nyc got off on a roll with its first meeting after the summer hiatus.

Bret Doar showed his hybrid roboticized musical instruments including the Huffyphonic Gyrobanshee 1000, a combination of a bicycle wheel and a guitar. Jon Lippincott demonstrated Vis Virtual Universe, which displays and navigates through a surreal 3D animated solar system, which he wrote from the ground up in C++ (which fit in with my blenderheaded fascination with all things related to 3D computer graphics). David Kareve explained his exhibit which uses freaked-out crash test dummies to explore the culture of fear reinforced by the terror alert system; I was tickled to see that his presentation of the various spoofs of the terror alert system included the Sesame Street one that I've had on my blog sidebar almost since the beginning of the blog (which I got from freeman, libertarian critter):

The next day's installment of the popular video blog Rocketboom did a segment covering the meeting. For more media coverage, dorkbot's instigator Douglas Irving Repetto is featured in the recent book Makers: All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things In Garages, Basements, and Backyards by Bob Parks.

This Wednesday brings October's meeting. (In fact, I made a flyer for the meeting which just went live on the site last night, who knows whether anybody will see it).

Barclay ETFF transcript now available

2006-09-23T15:33:00.000-04:00

My transcript of Barry Seidman's Equal Time for Freethought interview with Harold Barclay, author of People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy, is now online.

ETFF makes love, not war

2006-09-18T21:30:00.000-04:00

If you talk about the scientists who have said, "Well, we're very aggressive and we can't escape it because that's our nature", they have almost always been only looking at the male side of the human equation. — Judith Hand

In late July and throughout the month of August, Equal Time for Freethought ran an extensive and detailed four-part analysis of the origins of violence and the prospects for peace, as informed by the issues of gender, human nature, and hierarchy.

On July 30, August 6 and August 13, an epic three-part, 90-minute show aired with host Barry Seidman interviewing Judith Hand and Douglas Fry, respective authors of the intriguing books Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace and The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence.

Both of these authors brought to light much interesting information about the interconnection between patriarchy and violence, and pointed to, well "the human potential for peace" (hard to improve on a book with the phrase "human potential" in the title) as shown in bonobos and many startlingly low-violence, sexually-tolerant, and gender-egalitarian societies, from hunter-gatherers to a favorite example of Riane Eisler and Marija Gimbutas, the ancient Minoans — societies whose nonviolence is ignored, downplayed or denied, despite being based on firm documentation.

Oddly enough, the guests denied any particular connection between religion and violence, with Hand saying that wars are fought over resources, not beliefs — failing to make a connection even when Barry brought up the work of Hector Avalos, who in Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence has documented how religious faith can lead to a perception of increased scarcity (especially over intangible resources like "sacred space") and thus dovetails with resource-oriented explanations for warfare. As an extreme example of the degree that fundamentalist beliefs can affect a person's priorities, consider this statement by bin Laden associate Abu Jandal in a recent interview with 60 Minutes:

I have great hopes for him and pray to God that he will finish what his father was not able to finish. I pray that he will become a martyr. Frankly, I hope that my son gets killed and becomes a martyr for the sake of God Almighty. You’re sitting here, but you’re not ready to see your daughter killed for America. I, on the other hand, am ready to see my son get killed for the sake of Islam.

Also less-than-satisfying was the discussion of the role of social hierarchy and the State. For instance, they enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a Kennedyesque strong national leader leading an effort to attain peace, but it's no accident that a superficially value-free statist approach has been used for quasi-scientific, quasi-military projects like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program. Similarly, their interest in a United Nations-type world quasi-government; such a large-scale State would be even more vulnerable to the internal, but ignored as institutionalized, violence characteristic of existing States (and documented by people like R. J. Rummel); Gene Sharp has pointed out some of the obvious problems with world government:

World government is either unrealizable, or if achieved would itself be likely to produce a world civil war, become tyrannical, and be used to impose or perpetuate injustice.

Part of this stems from a confusion between the functions of courts and government, as in this quote from Fry:

If you take this broad perspective, you realize that we have basically spent 99% of our existence as a species living in these small bands and having to get along with each other, but there's been no overarching social control. As we look at social evolution, this is come much later, when you get the development of chiefdoms and then States. That pattern you see is that when you have a State developing, the State governments usually through courts of some sort, manages to deal with conflicts within that society in a non-violent way. And we're all very familiar with this, but we don't think about it in this broader perspective; that's one of my points. One of the key gems of anthropology is it broadens our perspective. So, one of the points I'm making for how to bring about a successful adventure here into the future for humanity, is that we just simply have to take some of the conflict mechanisms that we already know about, such as courts, which work very effectively at solving disputes without violence, and apply them at a higher social level.

So this is one of the lessons that I think comes through very clearly. In other words, hunter-gatherers, if you have a dispute and it gets violent, basically two guys have to fight it out, fighting over that woman, and maybe somebody gets killed. And that's the justice of the hunter-gatherer band. If you go to a State system, you have people who make decisions and have the ability to enforce those decisions. And this is something that's good for the whole society. So at this point, by analogy, we have a global system which is not really a system at all; it's just a series of hunter-gatherer bands, if you will, by rough analogy. And we're able to keep our order within the bands fairly well, but when we come into contact with each other, there's no overarching authorities to help work out the differences.

In fact, a court or judicial system can and should exist independent of the State, and does not require a State-like power to enforce effective sanctions. Consider the concept of "polycentric law" — multiple competing court systems not backed up by a state — or this article about a Gandhiesque Indian People's Court for an example in practice.

On August 20, Barry Seidman followed up by looking at the same issues from an anarchist perspective, interviewing Harold Barclay, author of People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy. Barclay was cautiously hopeful about the matter, stating that anthropology "sustains the view, at least, that anarchy is not an impossibility". In the process, he gave a harsh critique of the views of E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker, as attempting to dismiss the role of culture in determining the possibilities of human behavior. And unlike the previous guests, Barclay was quite willing to bring up the role of organized religion:

After all, you have in ancient Mesopotamia, one of the earliest hierarchs were the priests of the religion. And they were able, therefore, by the use of their office and position, to manipulate populations, to incite them to warfare, and so forth. And this is what goes on over the last several thousand years: the appearance of a group of people who are the top of the pile, and are able, then, to control by various kinds of uses. Not just by force, but by "conning" them, if you will, into believing.

As it so happened, he was pretty dismissive of libertarianism as being simply apologism for capitalism; Barry then immediately mentioned Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman as examples of stereotypical capitalist libertarians, both of whom never claimed to be anarchist in the first place.

Unfortunately, the anarchy didn't last long: the very next week, Esther Kaplan's interview featured a rant about how the Religious Right's seeking-out of massive new federal subsidies, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars at a time, is actually part of a dastardly "plan to defund the Federal government":

It's part of a long-time conservative plan to defund the Federal government. Not, of course, the military wing of the federal government and not the ability of the federal government to give away corporate largesse, but certainly the social service function of the government. And the more that you defund the publik skools, the more that you defund Medicaid, or de-fund veterans' hospitals, or defund social programs, or defund road or subway repair, the more that public service begins to seem shoddy and inadequate, because now, the schools are overcrowded; now, the subways are not functioning and they're late, and now the social services are inadequate and crowded. And so you create a self-fulfilling prophecy where government no longer deserves to be funded because it can't run its social services correctly.

So then, you punt off that role to the private sector. Things like the faith-based initiative are transition moments where you're giving that federal money to the faith-based groups, but then you can simply at some point defund that as well, and you've kind of gone back to another era, where poor people, unemployed people, people injured on the job, et cetera, et cetera, people slammed by disasters like Katrina can no longer turn to the federal government, where the federal government has reneged on that role, and therefore they can only turn to charity. It was a brutal world when that was the case, and that's certainly where the conservatives who are running our government right now would like to see things return to.

But the fuzzy "social" programs that liberals love have always been tied up with militarism and corporatism, as well as the destruction of the organizations of mutual aid and self-help among the poor. And contrary to the idea that the only thing wrong with publik services is that they're underfunded and overcrowded (perhaps the only problem that could be cured by infusions of money), I think that Will Rogers got it right when he quipped, "It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for."

What's more, after a visit to Kaplan's website, I found that back in January 2002, Kaplan had written a Village Voice article "Keepers of the Flame" (which I had remembered, but not that she was the author), which portrayed the anarchist antiwar protesters in a very fair manner, especially in the hysterical post-9/11 atmosphere. But it's actually no surprise; "anarchists" who aren't all that separate from the "progressive" mainstream left are indeed horrified at the thought that people "can no longer turn to the federal government" and "can only turn to charity". As Ken Knudson said:

Now most anarchists when they attack capitalism strike it where it is strongest: in its advocacy of freedom. And how paradoxical that is. Here we have the anarchists, champions of freedom par excellence, complaining about freedom! How ridiculous, it seems to me, to find anarchists attacking Mr. Heath for withdrawing government subsidies from museums and children's milk programmes. When anarchists start screaming for free museums, free milk, free subways, free medical care, free education, etc., etc., they only show their ignorance of what freedom really is. All these "free" goodies which governments so graciously shower upon their subjects ultimately come from the recipients themselves — in the form of taxes.

So after you've read all my long-winded commentary, the shows themselves:

Douglas Fry & Judith Hand, part 1: MP3 WMA
Douglas Fry & Judith Hand, part 2: MP3 WMA
Douglas Fry & Judith Hand, part 3: MP3 WMA
Harold Barclay: MP3 WMA

New Fu frames

2006-09-16T23:05:00.000-04:00

Since its debut in the early days of the Web in 1997, Lawrence Knapp's Page of Fu Manchu has been the definitive Internet resource about Sax Rohmer's classic villain, charting Fu's influence, incarnations, and imitators. The site has just posted some screen captures I made of Fu Manchu's "cameo" in the Warner Bros. cartoon Have You Got Any Castles (1938) (thanks to ReFrederator for posting a nice print of the public domain cartoon online), as well as expanding its description of the appearance. Way back in 2001, I also contributed to the site's list of "clones" of Fu Manchu, the Fu-in-all-but-name in question being Iskandar from Jack Williamson's science fiction fantasy The Wizard of Life (1934).

Oscar Wilde on pain, pleasure and Christianity

2006-09-08T22:32:00.000-04:00

A passage which deserves to be better known, from Oscar Wilde's famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods – Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in His mother's arms, smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble, stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew Him crucified, they drew Him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. But He did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth. They painted many religious pictures; in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome and was bad for art. It was the result of the authority of the public in art matters, and it is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the subject. Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great artist at all. Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with His, and to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to mediaeval art. There He is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: He is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; He is a leper whose soul is divine; He needs neither property nor health; He is a God realising His perfection through pain....

Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day....

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

r. i. p. Murray Bookchin

2006-08-13T14:48:00.000-04:00

Following Paul Avrich in February, another major figure in the anarchist movement, Murray Bookchin, passed away last month.

Reason's Jesse Walker has posted an RIP, which also discusses the interactions between Bookchin and libertarianism. Like many individuals on the left and right (Ronald Radosh comes to mind), Bookchin was willing for a period to ally with libertarians, which he later downplayed when he became more dismissive of libertarianism. To illustrate this, Walker has an amusing side-by-side analysis of Bookchin with libertarianism's Murray Rothbard, with whom he at one point collaborated on something called the Left-Right Anarchist Supper Club, but he later dismissed him as an advocate of "naked greed" with "repulsive" ideas.

I wasn't particularly familiar with Bookchin's stuff or his "social ecology" philosophy of eco-anarchism, but I've read a few bits. His famous New Left rant "Listen, Marxist!" was a critique of the influence of old-school Marxist factions like the PLP (Progressive Labor Party) in SDS, and the waning of the Old Left in general ("Marxists lean on the fact that the system provides a brilliant interpretation of the past while willfully ignoring its utterly misleading features in dealing with the present and future."). The famous "Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao — and Bugs Bunny" cover on the original pamphlet doesn't seem to be posted online anywhere. He also contributed an introduction to Sam Dolgoff's anthology The Anarchist Collectives about worker self-managment by anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. This contains a delightful passage where he boldly sets forth Hegel's distinction between faith and freethought:

Hegel brilliantly draws the distinction between Socrates and Jesus: the former a teacher who sought to arouse a quest for knowledge in anyone who was prepared to discuss; the latter, an oracle who pronounced "truth" for adoring disciples to interpret exegetically. The difference, as Hegel points out, lay not only in the character of the two men but in that of their "followers." Socrates' friends had been reared in a social tradition that "developed their powers in many directions. They had absorbed that democratic spirit which gives an individual a greater measure of independence and makes it impossible for any tolerably good head to depend wholly and absolutely on one person.... They loved Socrates because of his virtue and his philosophy, not virtue and his philosophy because of him." The followers of Jesus, on the other hand, were submissive acolytes. "Lacking any great store of spiritual energy of their own, they had found the basis of their conviction about the teaching of Jesus principally in their friendship with him and dependence on him. They had not attained truth and freedom by their own exertions; only by laborious learning had they acquired a dim sense of them and certain formulas about them. Their ambition was to grasp and keep this doctrine faithfully and to transmit it equally faithfully to others without any addition, without letting it acquire any variations in detail by working on it themselves."

Less worthwhile is Bookchin's grumpy tirade Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm against bohemianism and individualism, especially its hatchet job on individualist anarchism and ethical egoism. (Given his weary dismissal of a good chunk of anarchism, I wasn't too surprised to find out that he abandoned anarchism altogether in the last few years of his life in favor of "communalism".) Perhaps the most tantalizing item on his bibliography is two broadcasts on WBAI, "The Transformation of our Environment" (1962) and "Economics as a Form of Social Control" (1974). Also, Matt Hern's Field Day is an outstanding critique of the culture and politics of schooling, largely from a Bookchin-influenced social ecological perspective.

Barry Seidman on the religious left

2006-07-08T22:44:00.000-04:00

My friend Barry Seidman's article "A Critique of the New Religious Left" has been published on truthdig, "[i]n the tradition of Sam Harris", the popular author of The End of Faith whose "Atheist Manifesto" was previously published on the same site. As the title suggests, Seidman's article examines the attempts associated with people like Michael Lerner and Jim Wallis to tie left-wing politics to religion, which often involves a glossing over of the flaws of religion and a contemptuous downplaying of secularism as a source of social inspiration. In doing so, he utilizes the strong critiques of religion, including moderate religion, associated with people like Harris, Hector Avalos (whose book Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence is extensively cited), and Brian Flemming. There's also a nod to Carl Sagan's inspiring scientific insight that "humanity is the universe’s first successful attempt to understand itself" and a brief presentation of the positive aspects of the "naturalistic left" and the often-downplayed consequences of naturalism on human behavior (which as of now seems to have inadvertently been removed from the article):

By naturalistic left, I am referring to the core of scientific humanism. Naturalism holds that human beings are fully included in nature, that we are connected and united in each and every aspect of our being to the natural world. There is, under naturalism, nothing supernatural about us that places us above or beyond nature. Naturalism as a guiding philosophy can help create a better world by illuminating more precisely the conditions under which individuals and societies flourish, and by providing a tangible, real basis for connection and community. Therefore scientific humanism, built on—among other things—naturalism, represents the binding social, political and cultural thread that can unite people of different cultures, beliefs and values into a common framework of respectful co-inhabitance, while at the same time articulating a vision of a shared humanity in which all the peoples of the world can prosper.

The article isn't perfect. While it's welcome to see the sort of historical critique done by Avalos introduced to a wider audience, it doesn't quite gel with a critique of the messy world of modern politics, in which secularists have to work with religionists while maintaining their own marginalized position ("There is an old Vulcan proverb ... Only Nixon can go to China"). Moreover, overly relying on Biblical analysis opens the door to valid critiques, such as Katherine Yurica's, that the article is itself being too literal-minded. Wallis's 2004-election-aftermath book God's Politics, a main focus of the article, is not substantive enough for a weighty critique, as well as already being past its expiration date; see Leora Bersohn's critique, which is sympathetic to Wallis's point of view, for a definitive takedown on the book's sloppy writing and weak reasoning. Much of the psychological analysis of religionists who "have not been able to mature past the need for a “parent figure” or "put away its childhood toys" is condescending.

Still, the article was more than enough to spark a discussion of an issue usually ignored. The dialogue between Seidman and readers in the comments section runs to over sixty posts, including everything from nasty dismissal ("Lord preserve us from Hebrew 'scholars' who don’t know s*%t from shinola") to enthusiastic support, such as Stephanie Ferrera's comment that

This reminds me of a statement Edward O. Wilson made at the Georgetown University Bicentennial in 1989: "I submit that humans are exhalted not because we have risen so far above the other species, but because understanding them very well elevates our very concept of life." Seidman captures precisely the position that I have been trying to define that I call "naturalistic spirituality." Thank you!

Fireworks and Spinach

2006-07-08T20:31:00.000-04:00

A number of classic cartoons that have fallen into the public domain are available on Archive.org. One that's appropriate for the season is the 1957 cartoon Patriotic Popeye, featuring America's favorite sailor (and two of his nephews) engaged in summer pastimes.