Salt City Sinner

William Gibson is probably most famous for his novel Neuromancer , an often-imitated masterpiece of slick science fiction. I love Neuromancer. But lately, Gibson's novels have gotten a lot harder to define. They are increasingly set in the present or the near, near, near future, and deal with pretty interesting ideas concerning fashion, capitalism, globalization, and trends. This passage, from zero history , is a recent favorite of mine: ...male streetwear generally, over the past fifty years or so, she said, had been more heavily influenced by the design of military clothing than by anything else. The bulk of the underlying design code of the twenty-first-century male street was the code of the previous mid-century's military wear, most of it American. The rest of it was work wear, most of that American as well, whose manufacture had coevolved with the manufacture of military clothing, sharing elements of the same design code, and team sportswear. That's the type of weird,...

Today's Salt Lake Tribune has an absolutely tragic story about mental health services and their future in Salt Lake. Choice bit: The waiting list is weeks out for an appointment for new patients at Valley Mental Health’s two clinics for the uninsured. And Valley won’t schedule new patients for July at the Resource and Resiliency Clinics because its future in providing those services — outpatient medication management and therapy — is uncertain. New patients who don’t want to wait are heading to the Whole Health Clinic, but it recently closed its doors to new patients because of the increased demand by Valley patients and others. The Utah Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Health is taking calls from patients wondering where to go — and NAMI doesn’t know where to send them. “We are really at a loss as to how to help people,” said Sherri Wittwer, NAMI’s consultant. “There’s nothing except the ER, and they don’t belong there.” They don't belong in the ER for financial rea...

Oh, yes she did : Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is rumbling into the parking lot of the Pentagon on the back of a motorcycle as she starts an East Coast bus tour. Wearing black from head to toe, the Republicans' 2008 vice presidential nominee stopped at a thousands-strong motorcycle ride from the Pentagon to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Palin, who is considering a White House run, was joined by her family. Palin chatted with other motorcyclists and joked about how warm she is in her leather jacket. Temperatures in Washington are expected to climb near 90 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. Jesus what a poseur. She is just as fake and awful on a motorcycle as when she shoots a gun or fishes. If this is how she defines "real American," she's about as real an American as John Kerry or Andy Warhol.

I caught this via Paul Rolly this morning : Mike Ridgway has been an outspoken and obsessed pain in the neck for the Utah Republican Party for many years. He has taken over Republican meetings to call out what he believed were violations of party bylaws, unfair officer selection practices and cliques taking over the party. The result has been resolutions barring the former central committee member, legislative district chairman and U.S. Senate candidate from holding office in the party and even attending Republican meetings. Party leaders have justified the banishment by saying Ridgway has been too disruptive, and by pointing out the party is a private organization and can institute its own rules. Rolly's conclusion is right on the money: But what do you call it when it becomes increasingly apparent that the dominant political party can use the police and courts to harass someone its leaders don’t like?...Ridgway was summoned to the justice court in Lehi (Lehikistan?) Wednesday to ...

I've been reading C. J. Chivers' The Gun , which is about as fascinating a book as I've read. Chivers' book is a history of the AK-47; it's relatively nonjudgmental from a political point of view, and traces the emergence of the AK-47, first as an Eastern Bloc weapon, and then as the world's go-to weapon for criminals, revolutionaries and terrorists. One excerpt I find particularly interesting: Any distillation that treats the AK-47 as a spontaneous invention, the epiphany of an unassuming but gifted sergeant at his workbench, misses the very nature of its origins as an idiosyncratic Soviet product. The weapon was designed collectively, the culmination of work by many people over many years, and the result of a process in which Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov was near the center in the mid and late 1940s. This process was driven not by entrepreneurship or by quirky Russian innovation and pluck, but by the internal desires and bureaucracy of the socialist state. The ...

Few things in life make a hardcore political geek like myself squeal with glee like good policy. Perhaps the best policy proposal (it's still technically more of a goal or pipe dream) I've seen in recent memory got a pretty thorough write-up in today's SL Tribune: It’s not a jail. It’s not quite a halfway house, either. The latest innovation in Salt Lake County’s criminal-justice system may combine elements of both in a "community corrections center" designed to help convicted wrongdoers who wrestle with drug addictions or mental health problems break free from their criminal past. It would offer the county a cellblock-free brand of incarceration that would focus on drug treatment, mental health counseling, job training and life skills in a less-restrictive environment, allowing inmates to transition into the community while serving their sentences. They're taking this idea seriously enough that the County is scoping out possible properties for the facility, ...

Andrew Sullivan's blog pointed me to a post , a very good post, by Sam Harris. Harris is best known as a prominent member of the so-called "New Atheists," who I guess are like the Justice League of America to the old atheists' golden age Justice Society. Like Harris, and, in fact, like many nonreligious people I know, I practice meditation - the exact type of meditation that Harris recommends, in fact: [Despite its roots in Buddhism], this method of introspection can be brought within any secular or scientific context without embarrassment. The same cannot be said for most other forms of “spiritual” instruction. The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is generally referred to as “mindfulness” (the Pali word is sati ), and there is a quickly growing literature on its psychological benefits. Mindfulness is simply a state of open, nonjudgmental, and nondiscursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of...

Sorry for the lack of updates last night, but at 6 PM local time yesterday I mysteriously vanished. It had nothing to do with this Christian "Rapture" thing, of course. I was abducted by aliens, and am presently in stasis in a nutrient tank and on my way to Alpha Centauri in their vessel's equivalent of a luggage hold (obviously, I'm not writing this). I'll get back in the saddle as soon as I can - I figure that once they do the most cursory of scans and/or probes, they'll realize that I'm a defective specimen but basically decent sort, and return me to Earth.

It's redistricting time! Hooray! The Trib explains : The Legislature’s Redistricting Committee will hold a field hearing at 6 p.m. Friday at the Lehi Junior High School Auditorium, 700 E. Cedar Hollow Drive, in Lehi. This public hearing is the first of 17 scheduled around the state. Utah, like every other state, is required to redraw its political voting maps every 10 years. The official purpose is to preserve the concept of “one person, one vote” by ensuring equal populations in every district. What could possibly go wrong? Wait...what's that, buried at the very bottom of the Trib's article? What's the very last sentence in the entire piece? The panel is comprised of 14 Republican lawmakers and five Democrats. I'm sorry, what was that? The panel is comprised of 14 Republican lawmakers and five Democrats. The panel is comprised of 14 Republican lawmakers and five Democrats. The panel is comprised of 14 Republican lawmakers and five Democrats.

In my bid to transcend reality and become the next Monitor of the DC Multiverse , I monitor (obviously) as many media "signals" as I can. One thing I particularly enjoy is my daily rendezvous with Glenn Beck and his lovable sidekicks Pat and Stu. I used to catch at least 1-2 hours of Beck every day: now that he's no longer re-broadcast from 4 to 7 PM, I can only usually get in about an hour of Beck. This morning, Glenn Beck took me by surprise by indirectly endorsing and lauding non-violent direct action. The set-up for this turn of events is as follows : ten members of Jewish Voice for Peace attended Pastor John Hagee's annual "Yay, Israel!" Rally for the purpose of standing and disrupting services to bring attention to Hagee's unwavering, ultra-hawkish support for Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian population. If you're familiar with Hagee, feel free to skip this paragraph, but if the name vaguely rings a bell or you have no idea who he i...

It's always nice to be recognized for good work (instead of, say, the worst air quality in the United States ). It looks like Salt Lake has earned some of that recognition. From the Trib : The Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young released an annual report on Monday looking at how governments globally plan and build key infrastructure projects, and repeated warning of recent years that America is falling behind as budgets are cut in tough times. But it added, “Despite fiscal constraints, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Salt Lake City have successfully moved projects forward” — and suggests that other areas look at how they did it. And how did we do it? In Utah, the study praised how cities, counties and planning agencies in the Salt Lake metro area backed the Utah Transit Authority’s expansion of its TRAX light rail and its FrontRunner commuter rail — including supporting voter approval of a sales tax increase to help fund them, and cutting bus service to afford expansion of ...

Umberto Eco's "On Ugliness" contains an essay by some 16th century thinker about caricature, and what it means about our view of what is ugly (the author makes a relatively straightforward argument about something out of harmony and exaggerated helping us understand harmony, etc.) I don't think that necessarily applies to modern caricature, which can be both more subtle and more complex. On the occasion of Osama bin Laden's death recently, Ralph Steadman created perhaps the best portrayal of OBL* that I've ever seen: Look at the face: half of it is a giggling, ape-like horror, the other half an overly pious, stony religious zealot and ascetic fanatic. The body is misshapen, the head propped up by what is barely an arm. There is, of course, the blood spatter, alluding to but not wallowing in the terrorist's violent end. Below, Steadman has clearly rendered bin Laden's legacy, the throne upon which his hunched body and heavy head squat. It is a throne m...

I expect this kind of garbage from Republicans - that is, the false implication that we can reduce dependence on foreign oil by drilling domestically even though many of the oil and gas leases currently already granted aren't being used because our domestic refinery capability is far, far behind our drilling capacity. There have been good moves and bad moves on Obama's part when it comes to energy policy. This would fall quite definitively into the latter category. From the BBC : The US will seek to expand domestic oil production in an attempt to reduce dependence on imported oil and bring down fuel prices, President Obama says. That exact quote - domestic oil = less foreign oil and lower pump prices - is shallow, horrible, and false, and could have (in fact has!) come straight out of the mouth of a Sarah Palin or a Newt Gingrich. It gets worse: Despite the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Mr Obama said the Gulf remained a core part of the country's future energy...

Well, this is just adorable. NPR ran a story this morning called "Spinning the bin Laden Tale" that is a pretty fair and accurate summary of the military's strategic communications operations, and how the death of bin Laden has kicked off a second battle to control the narrative (beginning with that debunked 'he used a woman as a human shield' story and continuing right up to the 'porn stash found in OBL's compound' trash that ran yesterday). As NPR notes : The war on al-Qaida is in part a propaganda struggle, fought with the aim of changing attitudes in the Muslim world. Finding and killing bin Laden was not enough. Almost as important was what came afterward: the work of telling the story of the operation in such a way as to advance U.S. interests. That's decent reporting. It's definitely an insider's perspective, arguing that the recent glut of propaganda is designed to change Muslim attitudes, without acknowledging that the STRATCOM (an...

This story from the Baltimore Sun: Md.-based Intelligence Agencies Helped Track Bin Laden NSA and Bethesda-based Satellite Agency Credited For Their Roles Contains the following extraordinary piece of information: Parachini of RAND said the rule of thumb has been that every six hours, NSA collects an amount of information equivalent to the store of knowledge housed at the Library of Congress. This led old friend and incorrigible rapscallion Blaze Masterson to crunch some numbers: as of april 2011, the LoC has gathered 235 terabytes of data. that's around 78,330,000 mp3s in six hours. that's nearly 4 million hours of surveillance in six hours. assuming all their targets are being audio-wiretapped throughout that six hours (and that's being conservative), they're doing full-time surveillance on 652k people in the US. That's around 1 in 400 people they're monitoring--and that's only if they're monitoring full time. I'd assuming it's probably more l...

Well, there you have it. Life is full of surprises. I surprised myself by formally "joining"/throwing my hat in with Peaceful Uprising , the environmental/climate issues organization that is backing Tim DeChristopher, AKA Bidder 70, in his civil disobedience and its consequences. To clarify, I am not an advocate of most direct action, and probably will not engage in it personally with PeaceUP. Since I've now climbed aboard the Peaceful Uprising boat (it isn't powered by coal, but rather by a magical solar/wind hybrid engine we stole from some friendly space aliens), I will not be blogging overmuch about climate/environmental issues here, unless something fairly major crops up. If I'm approved as a content provider at PeaceUP, I'll post those entries there - if not, I might just link to contributors who are better informed and have a longer history with these issues than I am/do. Most of my blogging will still go on here ("THANK GOD," say my two fans...

Since most of my political leanings can be roughly categorized as "left" (even if they are of varying degrees of leftitude), many people are surprised to learn that I am a gun owner and advocate for greater gun rights and less gun "control." I throw scare quotes around "control" there because few laws put forward by gun control advocates really do much of anything at all to "control" gun traffic in the United States. As with most prohibition practices - whether the dangerous activity or item banned is an automatic weapon or a fat sack of reefer - a ban or strict control does very little to limit access to said naughty activity or item, and quite a bit to drive trade into a grey or black market where any regulations at all, even the less restrictive and sensible ones I might support, are rendered meaningless. This is the first leg of my three-legged gun rights stool. Leg number two: also as with most prohibition practices, the advocates of greater...

Today , Rio Tinto/Kennecott Copper and the Utah Air Quality Board will be holding a public air quality meeting regarding their request to increase mine output from 196 tons a year to 270 tons a year, and extend the life of the mine by 20 years(!). The new mining operation will eat deeper into the Oquirrhs in search of molybdenum, gold, silver and copper. Considering the state of Utah's air quality , this is probably not a good idea for people who prefer to breathe air that they can't see. The meeting is at the state Office Building in the main auditorium, 450 N. State Street, from 1:30 to 3:30. If you haven't already developed COPD or some sort of hellish downwinder plague, feel free to come on down and let Kennecott and the UAQB know what you think. UPDATE: the board approved the expansion 5-4. This may not be the end, however: there is concern among board members and others that the EPA might put the kibosh on the expansion. Also, Rio Tinto/Kennecott have to pass muster f...

Well, there's certainly one way to react to the news:

It would have been better to have granted even Osama bin Laden due process - in this case, perhaps a trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity. That said, years of watching COPS has taught me a valuable lesson: "dead or alive" is 99% up to the would-be arrestee. Compare OBL's finale to Saddam's: Saddam went relatively quietly and was granted due process and a trial (how fair that process and/or trial were is up for debate). Osama, on the other hand, went down "in a firefight," which suggests to me that he was not interested in being taken alive. In that case, I'm glad that we could oblige him. Anyway, T-minus one or two days max before the right makes a huge issue of the United States' relatively respectful handling of bin Laden's corpse in accordance with Muslim law. I expect to hear a lot of wingnut froth and babble about wrapping OBL in bacon or something (classy).

It's long been my opinion that solar is one of the best renewable energy sources available to us. It's what sustains life on Earth, after all - our planet is basically adjacent to a damn-near limitless source of energy, if only we could harvest that energy. One massive caveat has always been the efficiency and/or economic viability of solar. Welcome to the end of that caveat. From ScienceBlog : Two technologies have dominated efforts to harness the power of the sun’s energy. Photovoltaics convert sunlight into electric current, while solar-thermal power generation uses sunlight to heat water and produce thermal energy. Photovoltaic cells have been deployed widely as flat panels, while solar-thermal power generation employs sunlight-absorbing surfaces feasible in residential and large-scale industrial settings...“We have developed a flat panel that is a hybrid capable of generating hot water and electricity in the same system,” said Ren. “The ability to generate electricity by i...