Saturday night, and I can't stop reloading the blogs to see how health care is doing. Image at the right via kate.

* The White House press corps does not believe you have not heard of V.

* Democratic congresswomen shouted down by Republicans. Matt has the video, and it's pretty astounding.

* Krugman: "There’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980."

* Kurt Vonnemutt.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Mars. Related: 1924, the year Navy radiographers were asked to listen for communication from Mars.

Remember remember the fifth of November.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Michele Bachmann has her party primed and ready to go; how are you celebrating?

* Ezra Klein, with an assist from the CBO, tackles the Republican health care "plan."

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It's already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It's already made its compromises with reality. It's already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It's one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It's another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren't even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn't perfect, but in comparison, it's looking astonishingly good.

* Will New Hampshire become the first state to break the streak on marriage equality? Allow me to repeat myself: I'm pessimistic but hopeful; minority civil rights shouldn't be subject to popular vote.

* But I think what makes [Inglourious Basterds] Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* How polluted is China?

* Will anti-intellectual habits and authoritarian administrative practices kill Wikipedia?

An early Vonnegut story on longevity and overpopulation, apparently out of copyright, via Pete Lit.

Saturday morning linkdump 2: politics edition.

* The Vonnegut-flavored image at right is graffiti fresh from the streets of Burlington, Vermont.

* Vegetarianism, as every school child knows, is evil. I had an upstairs neighbor once who really believed this—he used to tell me all the time how vegetarians were on the fast track to full-on Nazism. Weird guy.

* Birther update: even OpinionJournal's odious "Best of the Web" column says the birthers are nuts. In the L.A. Times, Bill Maher says birtherism is no joke. But you and I know birtherism exists only in the feverish lies of Chris Matthews and Markos Moulitsas.

* Glenn Greenwald has a must-read post on corporate interference at MSNBC and Fox News.

In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEO's agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp...

* Democrats facing big off-year electoral losses in New Jersey and Virginia?

* In the days leading up to Obama's decision to run, Axelrod prepared a private strategy memo -- dated Nov. 28, 2006 -- that has never been published before. He wrote that an outgoing president nearly always defines the next election and argued that people almost never seek a replica -- certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush. In 2008, people were going to be looking for a replacement, someone who represented different qualities. In Axelrod's opinion, Obama's profile fit this historical moment far better than did Hillary Rodham Clinton's. If he was right, Obama could spark a political movement and prevail against sizable odds. He also counseled Obama against waiting for a future opportunity to run for president. "History is replete with potential candidates for the presidency who waited too long rather than examples of people who ran too soon. . . . You will never be hotter than you are right now."

* A new study demonstrating that organic food is no healthier than regularly produced food seems to entirely miss the point of organics.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is upset that Marvel's bringing back Captain America. I'm upset that they're using the word "Vonnegut-esque" in such a way that I have no idea what they mean.

But Marvel won't disclose how he rises from the dead. Executive Editor Tom Brevoort teases that the character has been "on a Vonnegut-esque metaphysical journey," including some soul-searching about his place in the world.

Captain America meets his creator? Becomes unstuck in time? Visits Dresden? Ends the world by accident? Evolves into a dolphin? Becomes trapped in some other thinly sketched but darkly humorous situation? Has great ideas, "if only he could write"? Tell me what it is you're trying to say.

Getting everything together for the big roundtable this Friday is keeping me fairly busy, so it's just links tonight.

* Sad news: Eve Sedgwick has died.

* Matt Yglesias luxuriates in the deliciousness of Richard Burr's low approval ratings. So say we all.

* 'Pentagon Prioritizes Pursuit Of Alternative Fuel Sources.' With the military-industrial complex at our back, we can't fail!

* St. Augustine vs. the pirates.

In the "City of God," St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, "How dare you molest the seas?" To which the pirate replied, "How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was "elegant and excellent."

* The mutants walk among us: 'Woman has developed an imaginary, but useful, third arm.'

* New fiction on the way from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.

* 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs. What could possibly go wrong?

* Can poetry save the Earth?

When books could change your life: why what we pore over at 12 may be the most important reading we ever do. Via MeFi.

There is a kind of no man's land in the literary landscape that can't be called "children's" or "young adult"--it's recognized as serious literature, if a little patronizingly, by the adult world--but which has a specific and perennial appeal to adolescents. I'm thinking here of writers such as J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., those staples of the college dorm. We reserve a special reverence for these authors that is qualitatively different from the respect, even awe, we feel for undeniably great writers like Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy--it's less rational or open to critical discussion. The reaction to revelations of the usual mundane human failings in recent biographies of figures beloved from childhood, such as Ray Bradbury or Charles Schulz, has been not just the surprise or sad worldly shrug we might expect but hostility and denial--a sense that we ought not to have been told such things, as if we'd been told once more that Santa Claus wasn't real or Shoeless Joe threw the series. And Joyce Maynard and Margaret Salinger's troubling memoirs about Salinger--we didn't want to know. Salinger and Vonnegut both give voice to the adolescent passion for justice, their dogmatic, almost fanatical, fairness and decency, and their blooming disgust at the epiphany that the world adults are foisting on them is neither fair nor decent.

News of a Guillermo-del-Toro-directed Slaughterhouse-Five remake suggests we are living in a second golden age of cinema—but the announcement of Ghostbusters III confirms that film is dead.

In this week's PostSecret. (Thanks, Kate. These tattoos are pretty cool, too.)

The Telegraph has the fifty best cult books. I'm really not sure about a definition of "cult" strained enough to encompass On the Road and To Kill a Mockingbird, but aside from that it's a pretty solid list with a surprising number of personal favorites. Calvino! Adams! Hofstadter! Vonnegut! Someone in a club tonight has stolen my ideas. (via)

In other words, this novel is not a foursquare, detailed, and plausible construction, and shouldn't be judged as one. It is a funny and despairing vision of the last judgment done in comic-book style, and Vonnegut's modesty as an artist combines with his dismay as a man to prevent him from lavishing too much careful portraiture on people not long for a world that's about to crack up anyway. It arrives like the punch line to one of Vonnegut's jokes when you realise that the most realistic feature of Cat's Cradle is the idea of a technology capable of destroying civilisation in a day.

Rereading Cat's Cradle, in the Guardian.

In a happier world, Cat's Cradle might remain a period piece, an anthology of 1960s nightmares and fantasies out of place in a new world order of international law, shared prosperity, and spreading peace. How nice it would be to return to this novel (one I first read, as an adolescent, just before the Berlin wall came down), and discover that the old fears had melted away, without any new terrors to take their place. No such luck. Reading it, you want to reject Vonnegut's pessimism as too easy and comprehensive, like the sour negativity of adolescents - always Vonnegut's best and most devoted readers - but it's not evident that the 21st century will grant us very strong grounds on which to do so. Eight years in, even the silly coinages of Bokonon seem to have taken on, for Americans at least, a certain utility and precision:

Duffle, in the Bokononist sense,
is the destiny of thousands upon
thousands of persons when
placed in the hands of a stuppa.
A stuppa is a fogbound child.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

I've pointed before at one of my favorite passages from Slaughterhouse-Five, in a similar discussion. Via MeFi.

The Village Voice reviews a posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut's previously uncollected work on war, Armageddon in Retrospect, coming out next month.

I know I said xkcd had the last word on Gary Gygax, but I really like this New York Times flowchart detailing how all nerd culture stems from Dungeons and Dragons. Gygax has reached the Kurt Vonnegut/Hunter S. Thomas summit of Internet grief; it's a rare thing to have so many nerdy guys mourning at once. Via Boing Boing.

Click to enlarge...

In other comics news, the creators of the excellent (and gone-too-soon) series Action Philosophers have a new series out this week, Comic Book Comics. There's an interview with the writers here, with a teaser for what comes next:

PWCW: Any ideas on what might come after CBC for the two of you?

FVL: Two words: action presidents. And it's exactly what it sounds like.

I also read the Fletcher Hanks anthology I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets this weekend after being intrigued by a negative review on some blog or another a few weeks ago. (Can't remember where, sadly.) (UPDATE: Paul Karasik showed up in the comments wishing he could see the negative review, which prompted me to look a little harder and finally dig it up.)

I really liked it. Hanks's work has that recognizable Silver Age feel, but with a bleakly nihilistic edge that I think is really interesting; these are fables much more than they are comics, and the poetic justice violence facing the villains grows more and more intense as the book goes on. A coda by the editor, Paul Karasik, reveals through an interview with the artist's son what most readers of the book are likely to see lurking just beneath the surface of these stories: the unhappy middle and lonely end to the life of Fletcher Hanks.

I remember that the negative blog review took issue with the Vonnegut blurb on the back, but I've got to side with Kurt on this one: "The recovery from oblivion of the these treasures is in itself a major work of art."

(UPDATE: Having found the review in question, I can be more specific about the problems Hooded Utilitarian raises. But I don't need to be, because Karasik gets there first and better:

The character, Paul Karasik, from my story, "Whatever Happened to Fletcher Hanks" is a myopic fanboy. He waxes on gleefully about the refined qualities of the Hanks aesthetic while getting a boner contemplating the potential treasures he hopes to score at the house of the son of his idol.

The point was that he was blind to the actual content of the work.

I purposefully left it up to the reader to make the connection between Karasik's delusions (and limited appreciation of Hanks) and the true nature of Hanks' fascistic tendencies as the revelations about Hanks' character are revealed.

The entire idea of the Afterword was that these revelations would resonate with an intelligent reader (who had just finished reading 15 of Hanks’ stories) in such a way that they would come to their own, clear and hopefully disturbing response to the “actual content of his work”

To think that most readers, including Crumb, Panter, and most of all, Vonnegut (who, by the way, if you check the quote, was referring to the unearthing of these treasures) do not appreciate the barely hidden misanthropy bubbling under the surface of these stories is to sell these guys short.

What he said.)

I've been blogging for a few years now, and over that time I've linked to Philip K. Dick related material a whole lot of times. Here, in honor of reading Dr. Bloodmoney this week, are just a few PKD highlights, all to the glory of the man Fredric Jameson once called "the Shakespeare of science fiction":

* "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In some ways this is the definitive PKD essay, and it's the one referenced somewhat famously at the end of Waking Life. [+/-]

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

* Another great essay at Grey Lodge Occult Review: "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others."

We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis: from past to present to future. The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it. The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet. That an orthogonal or right-angle time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes place -- processes occuring sideways in reality, so to speak -- this is almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? What clues -- if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory -- should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all, in any sense, to any degree?

* R. Crumb's comic, "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick."

* The first law of kipple is that kipple drives out nonkipple.

* Philip K. Dick and drugs.

* Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut. [+/-]

Interviewer: What did you think of Vonnegut’s attitude towards his characters (in Breakfast of Champions)?

PKD: Disgusting and an abomination. I think that that book is an incredible drying up of the liquid sap of life in the veins of a person like a dead tree…that’s what I think. I also love Kurt Vonnegut.

* Philip K. Dick and the Kennedy Assassination. (Warning: spoilers for the last book we're going to read this semester, also a Dick novel, Dr. Futurity.)

* Profiles of Philip K. Dick from The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the Times. Interviews with Philip K. Dick. Lethem on Philip K. Dick. Again. Stanislaw Lem on PKD.

* Jameson on Dr. Bloodmoney.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)

I now wish to call attention to another form of addiction, which has not been previously identified. It is more like gambling than drinking, since the people afflicted are ravenous for situations that will cause their bodies to release exciting chemicals into their bloodstreams. I am persuaded that there are among us people who are tragically hooked on preparations for war.

Tell people with that disease that war is coming and we have to get ready for it, and for a few minutes there, they will be as happy as a drunk with his martini breakfast or a compulsive gambler with his paycheck bet on the Super Bowl.

The late, great Kurt Vonnegut, writing in The Nation about America's addiction to war, and more specifically the addiction to preparation for war. Given the date of the issue (December 31, 1983) and the content of the last few paragraphs, it seems to me that he must have written this in response to the invasion of Grenada:

Suppose we had an alcoholic President who still had not hit bottom and whose chief companions were drunks like himself. And suppose it were a fact, made absolutely clear to him, that if he took just one more drink, the whole planet would blow up.

So he has all the liquor thrown out of the White House, including his Aqua-Velva shaving lotion. So late at night he is terribly restless, crazy for a drink but proud of not drinking. So he opens the White House refrigerator, looking for a Tab or a Diet Pepsi, he tells himself. And there, half-hidden by a family-size jar of French's mustard, is an unopened can of Coors beer.

What do you think he'll do?

The invasion of Grenada, of course, was undertaken because of the fervent Communist desire to disrupt the world's supply of nutmeg and thereby ruin Christmas. Or something like that. An imminent threat. You can see we had no choice. Via MeFi.

A rather random assortment of links, even for me:

* How's life? Well, it's practically over, thank God. Cynical-C has another nice Vonnegut link: one of his last recorded television interviews, October 7, 2005. As you might expect, it's great. Here's an excerpt, and here's the rest.



* "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe, Tony Judt's acceptance speech for the 2007 Hannah Arendt Prize. Via MeFi.

Today, the Shoah is a universal reference. The history of the Final Solution, or Nazism, or World War II is a required course in high school curriculums everywhere. Indeed, there are schools in the US and even Britain where such a course may be the only topic in modern European history that a child ever studies. There are now countless records and retellings and studies of the wartime extermination of the Jews of Europe: local monographs, philosophical essays, sociological and psychological investigations, memoirs, fictions, feature films, archives of interviews, and much else. Hannah Arendt's prophecy would seem to have come true: the history of the problem of evil has become a fundamental theme of European intellectual life.

So now everything is all right? Now that we have looked into the dark past, called it by its name, and sworn that it must never again be repeated? I am not so sure. Let me suggest five difficulties that arise from our contemporary preoccupation with the Shoah, with what every schoolchild now calls "the Holocaust"...

* Rules and quirks of baseball. As I've said in the past, rules and quirks are pretty much the only aspect of professional sports that can keep my interest, so this is the perfect link for me.

* Scientists have accidentally discovered a promising new technique for treating memory loss.

* Hillary Only Up By 12 Over Obama In New York? This would be amazing, but I find it a little hard to believe it's really that close.

* Also in political news: Obama wins the coveted Hulk Hogan endorsement.

It's getting close to the one-year anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, and I'm still sad. Cynical-C eases the pain with a nice link to a few "Dear Mr. Vonnegut" columns he wrote in 2004 for In These Times.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

I have not so much a comment or a question for you, but rather a request: Please tell me it will all be OK.

Joe Cararie
Pittsburgh

Dear Joe,
Welcome to Earth, young man. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind!
Kurt

Posthuman Blues has another round of pulp sci-fi art. Here's Kurt, and here's PKD. Via.