Archive for: February 2010
Man as machine
In the 1920s, the German writer and artist Fritz Kahn produced a series of illustrations depicting the human body as a machine, most famously in the 1926 poster, Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace):
Now, another German artist, 20-year-old Henning Lederer has created an animated version of the poster:
Hat tip: Flowingdata.com.
Krugman on government inefficiency
Liberal economist Paul Krugman is fielding questions in a live chat on the New Yorker website, in connection with a profile of him in the current issue. On the subject of the inherent inefficiency of government:
[G]overnment isn’t nearly as bad — or the private sector nearly as good — as it’s often portrayed. I know I lot of very good, very hard-working government employees; and while I don’t work for a large corporation, I do read Dilbert.
Down syndrome – a footnote
Pedro Almodóvar
Last Thursday, the Cape Breton Island Film Series showed Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, which Roger Ebert describes as, “a voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penelope Cruz, using the devices of a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath.” It’s a lush, layered melodrama, with lots of surprises hidden among its folds, including this utterly unexpected footnote to Contrarian’s conversation about whether medical science should try to “cure” Down syndrome.
The central character, Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), is a movie director who turns to script-writing after a brutal car accident leaves him blind. Early in the movie, Harry’s devoted agent, Judit García (Blanca Portillo), urges him to get started on a new screenplay. Mindful of Harry’s fragile finances, she suggests “something with fantasy or terror for kiddies is what it sells best.”
Harry: I thought of doing a story inspired by Arthur Miller’s son.
Arthur Miller
Judit: The writer who married Marilyn?
Harry: Yes. After Marilyn, he married the photojournalist Inge Morat, and they had a son. The kid was born with Down Syndrome, and Arthur Miller hid it. He doesn’t even mention him in his mémoires, and never wanted to see him. Despite his wife’s pleading, he never wanted to see him.
Judit: How terrible!
Harry: But one day they met by chance. Arthur Miller was speaking at a conference in defense of a mentally handicapped person who had been sentenced to death after a forced confession. Seated in the audience was his son with Down Syndrome. After the speech, the son went to the podium and hugged his father effusively. Arthur Miller had no idea how to shake off this unknown man until the man released him and said:
“I’m your son, Daniel. I’m so proud of you Papa.”
Although the scene prefigures the importance of father-son relationships in Broken Embraces, the movie never mentions the Millers again.
Lluís Homar
Arthur Miller, who died in 2005, is not only one of America’s greatest playwrights, but also the unofficial tribune of the Left—a celebrated humanitarian who courageously stood up to the anti-Communist fear-mongering of the 1950s. Growing up in a liberal New England family of that era, Contrarian was raised on The Crucible, Miller’s play about the Salem witch hunt, a thinly disguised allegory about McCarthyism.
The exchange between Judit and Harry left me stunned, and wondering how much of it is true?
Virtually all of it, it seems, up to and including Daniel’s surprise embrace of his father at a September, 1995, conference on false confessions in Hartford, Connecticut, where Miller spoke in support of Richard Lapointe, a mentally challenged man who, his supporters contend, was falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to die. Vanity Fair broke the story in this 2007 exposé.
I’m still gobsmacked. Right-wing bloggers have had a great sport proclaiming that they always knew Miller was a no-good hypocrite. Their left-wing counterparts have been at pains to point out that, in 1966, when Danny was born, institutionalizing infants with Down Syndrome was still the norm, and the course advised by most doctors (though increasingly ignored by mothers like Morat, who wanted to raise Danny at home, but bowed to the great writer’s wishes).
Now in his 40s, Danny is said to be doing well, holding down a job, and living quite independently. Apparently at the urging of his son-in-law, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Arthur Miller saw his son more often in the last decade of his life. Six weeks before he died, the playwright added a codicil to his will granting all four of his children an equal share of his estate.
While we can take some comfort in the fact that Down’s syndrome infants are no longer bundled off to institutions, our pleasure should be tempered by the knowledge that Richard Lapointe, the handicapped convict championed by Miller, is still seeking justice. His re-trial resumes in May.
Perhaps most important, Miller’s ignorance and shame should not obscure the equally dramatic story of Danny’s capacity for love and forgiveness. Let’s hope no one finds a cure for that.
McJellyfish
David Beck of Clarkson University and Jennifer Jacquet of the University of British Columbia won an honorable mention in the illustration category of the [U.S.] National Science Foundation’s 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for Jellyfish Burger.
Other winners include a comic strip about brain development, an animation showing why identical twins become less similar as they grow older, and a two minute video about airline routes. Fuller account here. Slideshow of other winners here. Podcast interview with some of the winners here. (The last two sites may require free registration.)
MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery – yet more feedback
Previous installments here, here, and here. A longish dissent from reader Jay Wilson:
The way you make it sound, we, the public, are the ones who indirectly caused this problem by forcing our poor beleaguered elected representatives underground and into making the kinds of reckless spending judgements they made. I take issue with that.
As you said in your blog, “Upon taking office, most MLAs set aside established careers in exchange for a job with far less security than comparable positions in the private or public sector.” That once was the case, for a good reason. Once upon a time, MLAs made very little money as elected representatives. To offset their costs of travel, constituency responsibilities, etc, they were given expense money. Fine.
Then more people from different walks of life started getting involved in politics who didn’t necessarily make as much as the usual assortment of doctors, lawyers and businesspeople who had mostly made up the elected ranks. Not to mention the complaints from the very sorts of individuals you referenced: People from higher-paying occupations who said it wasn’t enough to live on and they could make more in the private sector.
Over time, a new sensibility developed along the lines of “Let’s pay them a better salary so that they can afford to live while serving our best interests.” In the interests of fairness, the thought occurred to some that the money spent on expense accounts and the like could be decreased as now these elected officials would actually be making more. That’s not what happened.
In fact, as salaries continued to increase, so did money for expenses and then it diversified into a whole host of different expense categories. MLAs were getting money for everything and the kitchen sink, and who made these changes? Who increased their salaries and expense money? Who made the rules so deliberately ambiguous and full of holes so wide you could drive a tank through them? They did, behind closed doors and in quick legislative motions, with cursory mentions in the local press for the most part.
Please don’t try to excuse MLAs for their sorry behaviour. This is about three things: A pronounced sense of entitlement, a disconnect from reality and pure abject greed. Maybe it isn’t on the same scale as the scandals in Britain and even Newfoundland, but those three things are present in each situation and they are things we should all be vigilant against.
MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery – more feedback
Previous installments here and here. Paul Pross, emeritus professor of public administration at Dalhousie and the author of several books on lobbying, NGOs, and the formation of public policy, thinks we are being too hard on our politicians:
I first met a politician fifty years ago. Since then, as a political scientist teaching at Dalhousie and, since retirement, as an active party member, I have met many more. A few turned out to be crooks. There were some self-important, pompous twits. But the majority were decent men and women who worked hard at a challenging and often stressful job.
They don’t deserve the abuse being heaped on them.
We should ask why MLA’s spend their allowances in the way they do.
For example, most MLAs seem to have bought cameras. Why? This is an electronic age and photographs are an important part of making the work of the MLA visible to voters. MLAs need photographs of meetings with constituents and the events they attend to put in newsletters, press releases and to use as videos on websites. Leaders and some other MLAs need professional quality equipment because, as Stefan Dion discovered, leaders can’t afford to look amateurish. Professional equipment can be expensive.
MLAs’ charitable donations have also been criticized. MLAs are approached by numerous charities and worthy causes. It’s hard for them to refuse, or even to give a small donation for major local projects such as a recreation centre or purchase of hospital equipment. So many politicians donate far more every year than most of us.
We clearly need updated and more explicit rules governing politicians’ expense accounts. But we should ensure that they adequately support legitimate political expenses. In fact, we have less need for highly detailed regulations than for rules that encourage respect for public money and discourage a culture of entitlement.
The media could help to achieve that if effort were put into showing the public exactly what politicians do when they are not sitting in the Legislature and why they spend what they do.
False positive – II
A few weeks ago, a swab test of Contrarian’s laptop at Stanfield International Airport registered traces of nitroglycerin, leading to an additional interview and a 95% thorough physical pat-down. Details here.
The Canadian Air Traffic Safety Agency (CATSA) has apologized in writing to a Winnipeg-based human-rights activist for a similar incident. A swab test of Ali Saeed’s hands – not his laptop – turned up traces of trinitrotoluene, or TNT. After questioning, Saeed was permitted to board his flight for Denver. His return flight was uneventful.
Regular readers will know that Contrarian detests many aspects of airport security. Recent air travel through South America — where officials do not obsess over the amount of mouthwash among your toiletries, passengers carry pop bottles aboard unchallenged, and metal detectors do not have such hair-triggers that the rivets on your Levis set them off — reinforced my view that Canada has been unnecessarily craven in adopting idiotic US screening standards.
But random checks for explosives strike me as one of the few CATSA protocols that actually carries some protective value. In my case, the secondary screening was carried out professionally and politely, and the CATSA supervisor summoned to deal with the situation explained the nature of the alarm and what might have triggered it. I have no complaint about the incident.
So why did CATSA apologize to Ali Saeed? Because officials broke protocol by telling him about their findings.
CATSA’s procedures stipulate that screening officers must not discuss an … alarm with passengers… We are sorry that this is not what occurred. We extend our sincere apologies for the screening officers’ actions and the stress it caused you.
In my case, being told what the swab test turned up and what common household chemicals (hand cream, heart medication, household cleaners) might have triggered the false positive, helped persuade me that the episode, while not fun, was reasonable and appropriate.
So it seems to me CATSA has apologized to Saeed for something it did right, and by implication, promises not to do right again.
Ceremony
I hesitate to start this, for fear of luring Olympic-worshiping bores out of their rec-rooms, but US bloggers had a field day with the perfectly hideous opening ceremony in Vancouver. My favorite was Heather Havrilesky in Salon.com, Moneyquotes:
Some dramatic photography paired with soaring music and a lot of melodramatic prose. “Here, where a swerving coastline submits to waves of glacial peaks, where the mapping of the Western world came to an end, the discovery yet begins anew!” Praise Jesus! Who writes this stuff?
Nelly Furtado and Bryan Adams perform the lamest song since that thing they play at the end of the NCAA basketball tournament, “One Shining Moment”: “This is your moment, your time to run like the wind!” I’m flashing back to Up With People. First Nations dancers are jumping up and down like the fraudience at a Miley Cyrus concert.
Now here comes a tribute to “the frigid North.” It’s snowing. Donald Sutherland is murmuring into a microphone somewhere. People in white are walking through the snow….
“The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass speaks to me, and my heart soars,” says Donald Sutherland….
Now here’s a tap dancer on the platform, and more maple leaves. Now there are swarms of tap dancers. Tap dancing doesn’t exactly read in a stadium. Oh, we’ll fix it by adding sparklers to our heels.
Wow, this is quite seriously not good. Now more maple leaves are falling from the ceiling. There are quite a few identifiably uncoordinated people in the mix out there. Oh God. When will it end?
Naturally, Canadian readers fired back, including this beaut from someone who styled herself, Sweet Jane.
We put the proudest, butchiest lesbian ever on an international stage to sing the living shit out of a song widely considered to be among the best ever written. Ever. We’re understandably proud of that. You don’t think it was appropriate. Go read the words – conveniently googleable! (Also, that lesbian? Totally allowed to get married here in our hopelessly-decade-behind-the-times little backwater. When, oh, when will we ever catch up to rest of the world?)
Now the good news, for those who imagine such things to be important, Nate Silver’s wonderful poly-sci statistics blog, Fivethirtyeight.com, projects that Canada — Canada! — will win the most medals at these games.
Don’t worry. We’ve sent Nate’s slide rule out to get it checked.
Hat tip: Fritz McEvoy (but don’t blame him for the snarky stuff).
MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery – feedback
Contrarian reader Kirby McVicar responds to our post on MLAs’ pay and public begrudgery:
The question that springs to my mind is: “Who are you and what have you done with Parker Donham?”
Resigned MLA Richard Hurlburt
What I hear you say is, ”Well, MLA’s only stole a little bit, and it’s the media’s and the public’s fault for not providing adequate salary.” Are you serious?
What does this line of thinking say to all the honest MLA’s who did not steal from the public purse: “You missed out on an opportunity we, the public and the media, set up for you. How stupid of you!”
I agree that politicians need an independent body to set remuneration policy that is binding, but this issue should not be confused with theft from the public purse.
Where is the CBC Parker, from the “Harry and Parker Show” who would have spent 15 minutes railing against such a rationale? Has the election of an NDP government outed you?
I was out of the country, but wasn’t it a Tory MLA who resigned? After the jump, more reader reaction.
A nation of ‘fraidy cats
By 7:30 a.m., today, it had stopped snowing at Kempt Head.
Total accumulation: 2-5/8ths inches.
Cancellations: Cape Breton Victoria School Board; Strait Richmond School Board; NSCC Marconi Campus; NSCC Strait Campus; Mayflower Mall (until noon, except for anchor stores); and pretty much every other event you could think of.
Imagine! Two and five-eighth inches of snow! In February, in Nova Scotia! Gadzooks! Why hasn’t the army been called?
What on earth has happened to us? What has turned us into a nation of cowering, cringing, ‘fraidy cats who darsn’t get out of bed in the morning, lest something bad happen.
Something bad might happen. Get over it. Haul on your galoshes. Brush off the car. Get to work.
[Yes, dear readers, I understand there was significant snow in parts of the province, including Halifax. But not where I live. Our province is dominated by Halifax-rooted reportage, so we were bombarded all morning with the shrill weather warnings that have become the norm for Environment Canada and the CBC. Our province also has huge school boards, whose administrators seem to feel that if it's snowing in Bay St. Lawrence, they must cancel classes in Louisbourg, where is may be five degrees and drizzling.]
As a people, we have lost the ability to assess risk. An unachievable, zero-risk approach has infected every aspect of our lives. How this happened, the huge price we are paying for it as individuals and as a society, and what can be done to rein it in, will be continuing topics on Contrarian.
