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“Unprecedented” may be the word I might use to describe for the possibility that the Federal Reserve and government apparatchiks will baldly and simply overtly “change the score” on the economic scoreboard to both serve financiers and bail them out of their circular firing squad. [It’s been done in the past but covertly.] Yes homeowners who were duped into buying homes way beyond their means will suffer probable bankruptcy, but they don’t have much to lose in the sense that many didn’t have a down payment and some may have even extracted equity.

Financiers seems to have moved from a pyramid scheme to a game of “hot potato” or perhaps “musical chairs.” So filled with greed and hubris from the massive fees they could charge for every transaction and the cheap money merry-go-round provided by the private Federal Reserve Board, they gave out loans, sliced and diced them, repackaged them and shipped them out…to each other! In so doing they ended up screwing themselves as well as the American public.

Before, in the Depression and during wars, these same financiers and industrialist could stand to gain both power and money by allowing a contraction of supply and a stimulation of misery. But now their books are interconnected and they don’t really have someone to sucker, er, dump their liability on.
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If you try to light a match under micro-gravity conditions (we all got used to “zero-g” so some smarty pants had to go and call it “micro-gravity”) and just hold it in one place, it will self-extinguish. The match will use up enough of the oxygen in its surrounding volume of air to extinguish the flame. It doesn’t have to use up all the oxygen, either; most flames go out in air that still has enough O2 in it for people to breathe—barely.

Depending on the fuel, (e.g. hydrogen needs less oxygen to burn than methane does), the usual figure given is that 14%-16% oxygen is needed to sustain a fire. People can manage on a bit less; Biosphere II dropped below 14% before they pumped in some additional O2, but they didn’t have to contend with elevated CO2 levels; in fact, what they’d been losing was CO2, by absorption into their nice new concrete structure, with bacteria converting soil organics and O2 into CO2. They’d had a bit of a “slow burn.”

Your basic candle flame is fed fresh air by gravity, specifically, the air coming in to replace the hot gases that have become lighter than air in the hot flame. That’s called the “fire draft” and fireplaces exist to direct the fire draft upwards, so the smoke doesn’t choke the people warming themselves by the fire. The chimney/flue of the fireplace also accelerates the fire draft if you build it right, and both Ben Franklin and Benjamin Thompson, (Count Rumford), invented some tricks that are still in use.

So fires always produce an updraft. In truly big fires, the question becomes how the updraft interacts with the local weather. If the local winds are stronger than the updraft, and the fire is big, uncontrolled, and uncontained, you have a conflagration. If the fire creates its own winds, you have a firestorm.
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This post is about the GNF. That is to say, it is at one and the same time, silly, serious, sacred, and utterly beyond mortal comprehension. It tells about a remarkable event that became manifest on 4 December 2006 in the sacred habitat of 3Tops.

As you know, her most sublime visage is outside the East portal of Bergen Tunnel in Jersey City. Here’s a shot of the tunnel I took just s few days ago:

I was in that area on 4 December taking photographs just before sundown. I was standing near the mouth of the tunnel and looked in, as I had done many times before. This time I saw, to my great surprise, a yellow light shining some undetermined distance inside the tunnel, like this (note also the white light coming in from the far end of the tunnel, the Western end):

Please excuse the blur. I was far enough inside the tunnel that the light was fairly dim. I had no tripod to steady my hand for a long exposure, so things are a bit blurry. But the essential phenomenon is clearly visible: There is a light shining within the tunnel at some undetermined distance. I’d been to this tunnel several times, walked inside it too, and this was the first time I saw that light. Couldn’t figure out what it was, but guessed - against all logic - that there might be some kind of air shaft through which light was entering. (If THAT was it, then why hadn’t I seen it before? That question didn’t occur to me.)

So I walked into the tunnel to investigate, figuring that when I got below the shaft I would take a shot up through it. No shaft appeared. I did take this shot once I’d gotten well inside the tunnel to the point where the light seemed to hit the tunnel floor - say 50 or 60 yards.

You can see my shadow in the middle. Look how long it is. Count the number of ties my shadow crosses. Well, doing that’s difficult, they blur together further out and, of course, the shadow doesn’t start with my feet, more likely somewhere near my knees. But there are a goodly number of ties there, at a distance of, say, 16 inches from center to center. Whatever light that is, it’s hitting me at an oblique angle. It can’t possibly be coming in from an overhead shaft. It must have been coming in from behind me. But what light could that be? There are no street lights or other artificial lights in the area.
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By Michael Bérubé

Well, I’ve been meaning for weeks to write something about Barry Bonds and steroids and sports, to follow up on Bill Benzon’s work. I remember Bill asking me whether Tiger Woods’ Lasik surgery should be considered a form of performance enhancement, and I replied that laser vision is useful mainly for putting and chipping, not for the rest of the game; when Bill asked how much of the game consists of putting and chipping, I said, “uh, most of it.” But right around then, Tiger went and lost the U.S. Open to Angel Cabrera, and he lost it on the greens while Cabrera boomed out these ungodly long drives. I believe Cabrera had the longest driving-distance average for the week, and long drivers never win the Open. (It requires more precision than long drivers usually possess.) So go figure. And then, of course, there’s the fact that Cabrera smoked cigarettes on the course throughout the tournament. Unheard of! Don’t tell me nicotine isn’t a performance enhancer. . . .

Anyway, within a few weeks, Lance Armstrong had publicly defended Floyd Landis, tossing in the claim that some hockey players are juiced; Gary Player showed up at the British Open and claimed that ten (unnamed) golfers are steroid users; and before I knew it, the issue of steroids in sports had gone way beyond my ability or my desire to deal with it. (Just for the record, though, I am typing this post without the aid of caffeine, my daily performance enhancer. I wanted to be “clean” just this once.) So here’s all I have to say about Barry Bonds today:

One of the most revolting things about this spectacle is that it allows a certain kind of white guy the opportunity to profess his undying, if retroactive, admiration for Hank Aaron, regardless of how said white guy actually felt about Hank Aaron 33 years ago. Now, I’m not saying that Aaron doesn’t deserve our undying admiration. He damn well does. But for all I know, some of the same people who were fuming about Aaron surpassing Ruth in 1974– hell, maybe some of the people who were threatening Aaron and his family– are now pretending to be outraged at Bonds on Aaron’s behalf. Feh. What a truly disgusting scene that was when Aaron was chasing the record; no one can blame Aaron for not wanting to relive those years. And how very stupid of Babe Ruth’s racist supporters, as well, since everyone knows the Babe was black.

And then we have the secondarily disgusting spectacle of the ghoulish Bud Selig, who, having colluded with other MLB owners in the great Free Agent Collusion Scandal of yesteryear, is now posing as a beacon of integrity and rectitude in fallen times. Feh and feh again, I say.

At least one thing remains clear, however: the record for career home runs by a white guy is still owned by Harmon Killebrew. I don’t recognize that drug-bloated McGwire fellow as a legitimate wearer of the crown.

Some preferences and prejudices are so deeply ingrained that often we don’t even realize we are harboring them. And even if we are consciously aware of them, the correctness of our particular perspective on the matter seems so patently obvious that it doesn’t even occur to us that anyone else in the developed Western world could have a differing view, because, how could they? Why would they? They couldn’t, and they wouldn’t. Right?

When one is suddenly confronted with a radically differing view of something (regardless of, or perhaps because of however mundane it may be) that couldn’t possibly have a differing view, the shock of it rattles to the core. First, because you are caught off-guard - you can’t be prepared for something you didn’t know existed. Second, because without warning, you have an entirely different world view of the matter to contemplate. And in situations where the long-term, ruminating over it for years type of contemplation is not required, it still might be something that stops you in your tracks (literally), and demands that you drop whatever you’re doing and contemplate it right now.

One of my so-deeply ingrained-it’s-below-my-radar prejudices got hit with a brick recently on the seemingly mundane subject of teeth. It happened when I read a passage in a book about the late, great British cellist Jacqueline Du Pre.** In the Winter of 1967-68, Jackie’s sister, Hilary, relates that Jackie said the following while relating tales of her experiences giving concerts in America:

‘You know, Hil, I’m fascinated by American mouths’, she suddenly announced, changing the subject completely. ‘Rows of perfect teeth, set in a hideous grin and a gushing “aren’t we pals” expression.’
Her mouth stretched to reveal a mass of grinning teeth, as she pranced around the kitchen.

What?! A Brit making disparaging remarks about American teeth? Granted, the statement is mostly a reflection on the socio-cultural differences between the British and Americans, but it’s the physical appearance of our teeth that lends the genuine creepiness factor, not the behavior. That a British person would find one of our most prized physical characteristics to be the icing on the altogether off-putting cake that is an American never even entered my mind. The Brits don’t make fun of our teeth, we make fun of theirs. That’s the order of things.

Or so I thought.
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Hot gingerbread and dynamite
Boy, I drink nothing but that each night
Back in Nagasaki/Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo!

It was a lovely morning In Hiroshima town,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.
And the sun, how bright it shone
From a sky without a cloud,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came.
Can’t you see that flash of fire ten times brighter than the day?
And behold the mighty city broken in the dust again,
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again.

Hail the day so long expected,
Hail the year of full release.
Zion’s walls are now erected,
And her watchmen publish peace.
Through our Shiloh’s wide dominion,
Hear the trumpet loudly roar,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

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It was an early Saturday morning more years ago than I care to remember. I eased the car, overburdened with a U-Haul trailer, into the parking lot of an all-night convenience store south of Memphis. Things had reached a critical point; driving all night on top of the cumulative effects of several months of emotional and mental stress had left me dangerously fatigued. I did not even think to ask my passenger to drive, we had passed that point months ago. Never a coffee drinker, I had partaken liberally of that foul brew - but something more was needed. Not prepared to seek more effective - but also more illegal - remedies, I brushed past the copies of Elvis’s will for sale and purchased several packs of cigarettes. Never a smoker, I had hit upon the dubious idea that the best plan was to chain-smoke the rest of the way to Ohio. The decision was about par for the course - to quote Richard Brautigan, “I still can’t figure out what I meant by living the way I did in those days.”

In any event, all reached Ohio safely, car and passenger were dropped off, driver and passenger bidding each other fond adieu. A blessed, but short night of sleep, an uncomfortable frazzled passive aggressive morning with the parents and two flight segments later I was back in Houston. Back where the next unsuccessful relationship, which had bumped up uncomfortably close to the end of the prior one, demanded attention at once on the far side of town. So it was an even more sleep-deprived, groggified shadow of a functioning human being that showed up Monday morning to go through the motions at work. But though the wheels of mindless work grind slow, they do in fact grind, and in time I headed home.

Home! Alone! The holy grail!
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There are plenty of people more suited to direct political and social commentary than I am. I’m more of a “meta” guy, heavy on the philosophy and intellectualization, not so much on the direct assessments of political organizing and such.

This is not to say that news of the world doesn’t penetrate; it certainly does. I will however, persist in trying to get at the more meta aspects of it all, in part because someone should, and also because it’s my own style of psychic defense.

So, in that spirit, I offer a generalization that I formulated several years back, in talking to a friend I shan’t name about a subject that I shan’t divulge. But as a result of a series of conversations, I came to understand what I think is a worldview that is shared by a lot of people, maybe even a majority, when thinking about moral issues. It goes like this:

There are good people and there are bad people. It is the duty of good people to thwart and punish bad people. Anything that happens as a result is the fault of the bad people, not the good people, who are always blameless, because they are good, and have good intentions.

If I have this wrong, you won’t be able to find anyone who fits this description. Well, there is another possibility that I see no point in discussing.

Social Darwinism actually predates Darwin, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” several years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. Spencer was more Lamarkian than Darwinian, actually, but “Social Darwinism” was the fittest catch phrase. Add the broth of 19th Century racial theories, and you have a truly toxic brew. Stephen J. Gould has suggested that an opposition to Social Darwinism was behind William Jennings Bryan’s opposition to biological Darwinism, and I find it plausible though there are those who disagree Gould’s suggestion would mean, among other things, that Bryan got another bum rap from history.

One of the funny-but-also-sad things I sometimes see are the bumper magnet decals that show a Darwin fish being eaten by a Jesus fish, seemingly suggesting that the car owner doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, but does believe in “survival of the fittest,” i.e. Social Darwinism. Certainly that is a general attitude from a good many people on the Right. Dog-eat-dog society, but let’s not consider the natural world as anything other than divinely planned. Well, that’s okay; dogs were intelligently designed.
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