David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 41

Thanks for Nothing, Obama!

Shackleton's bravado, incompetence, whisky, and cocaine

The Four Horseman of that particular Apocalypse.

Drinking Ernest Shackleton’s Whisky - NYTimes.com

Whisky lovers also like to imagine that the occasional bracing, restorative tot helped Shackleton and his three companions — Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams — withstand the hardship of their 1,700-mile trek south and back. On Christmas Day, we know, they celebrated with creme de menthe. It’s unlikely, though, especially on the return leg, when exhausted and malnourished and racing to get back before the Nimrod left, that they would have wanted the burden of whisky bottles. What really got them through was cocaine — in the form of pills called Forced March, which at one point Marshall fed the group every hour or so.

The Negro Motorist Green Book

Black History Road Trip: Negro Motorist Green Book Destinations

I was recently at the Henry Ford museum-type-thing (where I'll be again soon for Maker Faire Detroit; come hang with me!!!), where they have a big new section dedicated to vacationing/car culture/highway culture in America. Among the displays was one of these Green Books ("green" both for the cover and the creator, Victor Hugo Green), pinned open to the two-page spread that listed *all* of the black-friendly establishments in Michigan. This book wasn't large--it was meant to fit in your pocket or purse--so it's not like a two-page spread held that many listings, and Michigan didn't even take up both pages. As you can imagine, the entry was dominated by listings for Detroit (already a black haven in the late 1940s), as well as many for Idlewild (an African-American friendly vacation spot in rural West Michigan). Ann Arbor (where I live) featured a hotel and a couple "guest houses" friendly to the Negro Motorist, and there were a few in Grand Rapids (a big furniture factory town). But there wasn't a single restaurant that would reliably serve black families outside Detroit or Idlewild. These two points are separated by 230 miles, and that's with the modern interstates, which weren't built until *after* the last Green Book was issued. So, that was several hundred miles of unlit, often unpaved backwoods two-lanes.

Three-decades later--in the goddamn 1980s, long after Idlewild had withered away because black folk were welcome to go basically the same places as everyone else--this simple fact, this vision of Michigan as a foreboding, barren wilderness devoid of oases or hospitality, still held sway in the minds of many African-American Detroiters. Even now it's not uncommon to talk to African-American teens who know every block of their side of Detroit, but have only the vaguest notion of what might lie west of Dearborn or north of 8 Mile.

So, despite wishing otherwise, this is what I think about when I think about summer road trips in Michgian.

Attention All Steampunks & Booknerds: All 111 Volumes(!!!) of Queen Victoria's Diary Are Online NOW!

Free for your perusal until the end of July.

Queen Victoria's Journals - Home Page

The interface is whack, but start browsing--almost at random--and you'll find some startling and wonderful passages. To wit, this lil bit from page one of volume one, recounting one moment from Victoria's 1832 journey to Wales via carriage:

It rains very hard. We just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. But I can not by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance. The country is very desolate ever where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.

This is the world that even the *richest little girl in all of the British Empire* saw and found remarkable, but by no means shocking or foreign. If you're writing steampunk and this isn't in there, then you're doing it wrong.

Obamacare, Compassion, and Taxes/Penalties on Inactivity

Ari Kohen (a poli-philosophy professor at the U of Nebraska) has been writing a bit about the Supreme Court's support of "Obamacare" (approvingly, of course--y'all know my slant).

I know that term--"Obamacare"-- is meant as a smear, and that we're supposed to call it the ACA ("Affordable Care Act"), but I *love* the term "Obamacare." We should *all* love it. Among normal, compassionate human beings, it should be among our central life-goals to do something that causes average folks to irrevocably link our names to the word "care." It's like being a fully ordained Mensch. I feel like we live in a pretty whack country when we seek to smear someone's reputation by closely associating him or her with the Christian notion of mutual caretakership. Seriously, what up with that, America? Are we a nation of poorly supervised middle school boys teasing the kid who points out it might be wrong to set fire to the cat?

At any rate, Kohen is a much clearer thinker than I am, more concise, and eager to take hyperbole ("This is a tax on *doing nothing*! This is the end of freedom! Worse than Hitler!") back to the brass tacks of *what the actual SCotUS judges actually said.*

His point? Obamacare fits comfortably within the traditional role of government: To incentivize behaviors that are in the best interest of the country and its citizenry. To wit:



Running Chicken: Health Care, Taxation, and the Constitution

Think back to when the blogger was aghast at the notion that there might be a tax on having children. We actually have precisely the opposite — a tax credit for having them! And that means, of course, that there’s a tax penalty for not having them. I have a child; I get a credit and thus pay less. You choose not to have a child; you don’t get a credit and thus pay more. Your inactivity results in a higher tax burden. Just like the inactivity with regard to purchasing health care.

The same is true, as Chief Justice Roberts writes, of home ownership and professional education.

My point? That Obamacare is just that: Our nation writing into law the *fact* that we all should make the well-being of our fellow citizens our personal business, that we should take a personal stake in being sure that our friends and neighbors don't suffer needlessly. You know, like that Jesus guy said. Now, the Jesus guy's pretty popular in America, so you'd think this would go over pretty well.

Bizarrely, this enormous freakout seems to largely be coming from segments of the pundit universe where Jesus is *HUGE* and taxes are *despised.* That leaves one to wonder what's at the heart of the hyperbolic freakout about what is, in essence, an enormous, Sermon-on-the-Mount-compliant middle-class tax cut?

In my humble, it's the growing pains of a young child getting a new sibling. When mom and dad come home with baby sister, even a toddler can do the math: The denominator in the fraction of the Family's Love they are to receive has just gotten bumped up by one. There is less love to go around. The human loss aversion terror kicks in, and bizarre tantrums ensue.

Of course, over time, we grow and we realize that the magic(k) of Love is that every additional slice doled out *increases* the size of the pie, 'cause Love isn't a goddamn pie we divvy up; Love is a brain made wiser and faster and more wonderful with each additional synapse. More neurons, more connections, more Love.

Right now, as a country, were throwing some crazy tantrums because we just suddenly realized we have an extra 16 million siblings, and haven't yet realized that those extra 16 million brothers and sisters have us, too.

Hey, America, I still love you, because we are each others'.

See You at MAKER FAIRE DETROIT: JULY 28 & 29!

I'll be at Maker Faire Detroit again this year, braving the searing rays of our terrible and merciless sun and shooting off water rockets like a mad man. I'll have a "Cheap Thrills" booth outside, where I'll be showing off under-$10-projects from SNIP, BURN, SOLDER, SHRED (as well as a couple of the new projects from my upcoming book of unconventional musical instruments), signing books, and making free water rockets with all comers (while supplies last). I'll also be giving a half-hour, air-conditioned presentation on Sunday: "Your First Synthesizer: A Weird Little Noise-Toy You Can Build Tonight."

Our own dear Fritz Swanson will also be at Maker Faire (his first ever!) demoing "Letter-press Printing: Data Distribution the 19th Century Way," as will our pal Amy Stevenson, teaching at-home artisanal paper making. See you there!

Reduced rate early-bird tickets are still available, or so I'm told (click through the above link for details).

This really *is* endearing, in my humble . . .

. . . and reminds me about how awkward it is (was? will have had been?) to hang out with 12-year-old me.

A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self: 20th Anniversary Edition - YouTube

*thanks for the tip, Susie in Milwaukee!*

If only there was a handy catchphrase for this system, where you put *debtors* in *prison* for being broke

Just in case it slipped past you in civics class, we outlawed debtor's prisons in the US because they were deemed absurd and inefficient. After all, a person locked in a cell clearly can do little to earn back the money he or she owes you.

We seem to have entered a patently bizarre headspace, as a nation, where we see an individual going broke not as an honored American tradition, but as a terrible moral failing. e.g., *All* of our "Great Men" hit the skids with one or more schemes. Just off the top of my head: Twain only finished Huck Finn because he'd lost a fortune, I believe on a compositor or typewriter scheme, and needed liquor money. Henry Ford and T.A. Edison likewise bottomed out several times before hitting their stride.

We've made it more and more difficult for individual humans to seek protection from creditors once they hit rock bottom, yet seem eager to bail out gargantuan proto-human corporate entities when they show egregiously--even morally ruinous--judgement.

What up with that, America?

Probation Fees Multiply as Companies Profit - NYTimes.com

It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.

“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are real constitutional issues at stake.”

. . .

“The Supreme Court has made clear that it is unconstitutional to jail people just because they can’t pay a fine,” Mr. Dawson [a Birmingham, AL lawyer and Democratic Party activist] said in an interview.

*thanks for the tip, cara!*

"I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script"

I initially clicked through on this because I thought it was one of those snarky Onion-esque op-eds where a wickedly privileged person is a totally dickweed about some really basic aspect of polite human society.

But Olson--who garnered an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for A History of Violence--ends up making a really good point about the vast bulk of folks who "want to be writers," which is that they don't seem to want to spend the bulk of their time reading and writing. It's like someone who wants to be in the NBA but doesn't spend the bulk of his time sprinting, doing pushups, or playing basketball. At any rate, a worthy read (that, I now realize, I'm about three years late in reading. *sigh*)

I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script - New York News - Runnin' Scared

And this is why I will not read your fucking script.

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

. . .

Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter.

Those "Operation Fast & Furious" guns used to kill U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry? They were legally purchased in Arizona

The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal - Fortune Features

Quite simply, there‚s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

. . .

"Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service's criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa's committee.

For me, the real nut here comes in passing, near the top of the piece, where the writer (Katherine Eban) mentions in passing that the valiant efforts of the NRA have crippled simple gun-tracking measures, thus making it *easy and legal* for international criminals banned from purchasing guns in Mexico to do so in Arizona.

I'm a hobby shooter and a gun owner, and I guess I'm even a pro-Second Amendment kinda American, if you wanna force the issue, but still, I want to know:

What the *fuck*, NRA? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? Your paranoid, pandering, pocket-lining pseudo-racist bullshit is *actively* undermining a sovereign nation's attempt to claw back control of the streets from economically motivated thugs. You are *creating* a situation in which international law would conceivably support Mexican drone strikes against Arizona gun shops. How the Hell does that safeguard my rights and freedoms?

(Incidentally, Eban's Fortune piece linked above and excerpted is itself highly contentious right now--but the Wikipedia article on the so-called "ATF gun walking scandal" is pretty even-handed and informative.)

*thanks for the tip, Miriam!*