Zephyr Dear

bravestwarriors:

When’s the next episode?!

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Announcing the first half of Bravest Warriors Season 2 episode release dates. Can I get a “aw yeah, Wankershim!” ?

• RoboChris - October 31st (with guest writer, Ryan North)
• Mexican Touchdown - November 14th
• Hamster Priest - December 5th
• Jelly Kid Forever - December 19th

If you haven’t seen the premiere episode of Season 2, watch the episode right now on Cartoon Hangover

-Cade

TOMORROW THERE IS A NEW CARTOON

AW YEAH, WANKERSHIM

Here are some more concepts I drew and some screen-caps from SCALE— the game I’m working on where you can make anything in the world any size. In the top picture, our main character Penny, is encountering a room full of subatomic particles sized-up to enormous proportions and floating eerily in the shattered remains of her prison cell.

The game takes place in a sort of open Mario 64 like world that emphasizes play and exploration, except each item of fantasy (knights and castles and monsters and so forth) functions as a metaphor for the character’s own ideas, perceptions, and maturity. In the second picture, Penny confronts one of these symbolic bosses, a knight whose hammer must be re-sized so that it crushes him.

The third picture is a screenshot of a beautiful level in which you can RESIZE THE MOON to flood the earth and travel by boat. You think I am lying to you? That I am telling you sweet lies of things that sound awesome but could never happen in games? Well, much like The Lord God in Genesis, the geniuses of the SCALE Dev team built that level in a day last week. And you can see it being played by them in this Kickstarter update video.

It’s somewhat terrifying to imagine what they could do if they were actually being paid for their work!

The last picture is you shrinking a spider with your SCALE gun. Many of the enemies you can enlarge and climb inside, travel through, etc. fitting with the game’s theme of completely deconstructing video games as a genre and putting them back together again in ways that will make your brain melt like grilled cheese.

If you want this game to happen, please think about reblogging this or pre-ordering a copy on the Kickstarter which is happening now!

Happy Halloween, geeks! And BONUS, my pal Ben Tippett explains the "science" of how a TARDIS works.

[Content Note: Misogyny] 

There are so many good things I could write about this article titled "The Angry Ladies of Jezebel" that Liss and I were snorting over yesterday. Written by Mark Judge, the entirety of the article consists of an extremely disconnected opening and the remainder is just him pointing and frowning at various encyclopedic entries in The Book of Jezebel and waiting for his audience to nod and agree with him that these modern feminist women are the worst, just the worst. No real argument is needed to make his case, because apparently we're all on-board with the starting premise that Bitches Be Flippin'.

I could point out that opening with the statement that the book is "a very angry book" is the sort of thing that really needs to be justified somewhere in the article. Because, honestly, everything he quotes in apparently self-evident support of that assessment strikes me as the sort of thing which can be, and often is, said with wry humor and a sparkle in the eye.

I could point out the extreme irony in opening the review with examples of Real Feminists who are all, totally coincidentally!!, men. It's particularly amusing when Mark Judge identifies Robert Bly as "a champion of genuine feminism", which manages to both make the point that the biggest problem with modern feminism today is all the women fucking it up, and to also accuse us all of being bra-burning bitches who won't graciously accept a nice champion to fight for us. (We probably insist on opening our own car doors, too.)

I could point out how incredibly dehumanizing it is to reduce every modern feminist to a monolithed stereotype, as Mark Judge does when he insists that, "The bogus “war on women” is really nothing but liberal women acting out against bad fathers." And thus so we are all the same woman, with the same bad father, and the same motivations for being feminists, and none of us are people in our own right who make decisions for ourselves and forge our own ideologies; instead, we are political automatons with Bad Father as an input command and Feminism as an output response. In contrast to Mark Judge, I'm sure, who would probably (correctly) maintain that he is a jackass for his own entirely unique reasons and not because he was exposed to Jackass Rays from the dying planet of Asshattery at the exact moment of his birth or whatever.

I could point out that the false assumption that all feminists are women cruelly invisibles people who are not women from the feminist movement, in an attempt to isolated the marginalized from their privileged allies while simultaneously trying to erase people outside the gender binary from existence entirely.

I could point out how the assumption that all feminists are just angry women who are angry at a bad father places feminist women with good fathers (or feminist women with fathers who are not good but at whom they are not angry, because love and family and relationships can be complicated) instantly on the defensive on behalf of their fathers and thus conveniently turns the conversation away from social patriarchy and instead derails to focus on the unwanted armchair psychoanalysis of a specific woman and her specific father.

I could point out that feminists who are also women who are angry at a bad father are allowed to be angry at a bad father. If a woman is angry at a bad father, and if that anger led her to identify as a feminist, that doesn't make feminism automatically a bad thing -- it could make feminism a great outlet for women with bad fathers who would like to protect other women from future bad fathers. Among other things.

I could point out that women (and other marginalized groups of varying intersections) constantly labor under the false assumption that anger is never valid, that anger always means the argument has been lost, that anger is the one thing they must never show, because the moment they are accused of anger is the moment they can be ignored forever. I could point out that anger is not automatically a bad thing, that there are many things in the world about which anger is an appropriate response, that the ability to never feel personally affected by oppression and tragedy may (not necessarily, but may) be a sign of immense privilege.

I could point out how sick and tired and, yes, angry I am at the repeated insistence that the only good feminism that certain privileged men are willing to support is the "good-natured" kind, a statement which tells me outright that I won't get any help from these would-be "champions" unless the cookies are always sweet and fresh from the oven and never, ever stale. And that the one time I run out of chocolate chips will be the time that they jump ship and sulk for eternity over how they tried to be an ally but those angry women didn't sufficiently appreciate him. I am bone-weary of that sort of "support".

I could point out the amusing juxtaposition of a man who doesn't want to be called a "Frat Bro" or a "right-winger" but has no problem with calling feminists apoplectic and liberals convulsed with rage. Okay, player, that seems super-fair.

But I would instead like to focus on the point made in the article that places the blame for feminism at the door of the Industrial Revolution -- "[Bly] indicted not only male irresponsibility but the Industrial Revolution, which separated fathers from their families." -- and which prompted me to note to Liss the following:

Ana: Lady, did you know that prior to the Industrial Revolution, fathers were always at home and never left their families or went to war or traveled as merchants or sailors or hired hands on another estate or sent their families from court or were separated from their families by forces beyond their control? Everyone worked alongside their family in the fields prior to the invention of the Steampunk Abortion Robots.

Liss: Except for Joan d'Arc's dad, who was a total d-bag.

Dale Sproule writes, "My new book, Psychedelia Gothique, collects 16 horror/cross-genre stories that endeavor to re-envision the familiar from perception-bending new perspectives. Rather than stick to customary fantasy, sf, mystery and horror routes, these tales seek out the unmarked trails in order to take you on 'hallucinogenic rides' to 'dark and surprising places.'"

Through movements like new wave and cyberpunk, and writers like Bester and Dick, science fiction explored the limits of that aesthetic, resulting in some of the most mind-bending and influential stories ever written. Fabulism and post-modernism similarly changed the face of mainstream literature. But genre fiction – particularly mystery, epic fantasy and horror – remained largely unaffected by the real world perceptual revolution. I took it as a personal challenge to meld the gothic and the psychedelic, by opening the gates of perception and demonstrating that fear is closer to the surface of our everyday reality than most of us ever suspect.

Psychedelia Gothique features 16 stories including five new to this volume. Most are horror and virtually all are cross-genre (sf, mystery, fantasy). These include: "Fourth Person Singular" – harrowing and Faulkneresque have both been used to describe this story of two boys growing up in the 1960s with a very scary dad. "The Onion Test" – an envelope pushing sf/horror that appeared in Pulphouse the Hardback Magazine issue #1. "Touching the Screams" – post-apocalyptic sf with a horror twist wherein horror movie monsters from our times are used to cement the faith of the masses who are still ignorant of re-emerging technology. "Masks of Flesh" – a creepy post-apocalyptic first contact story with an alien race that has accidentally almost obliterated humankind. And there's considerable humour in the book as well including the metafictional detective story, "Labour Relations" (from Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine) the Lovecraftian "Flushed" and the just plain weird "Showdown in Kitschtown."

Psychedelia Gothique

There are some metaphorical concepts at that lie at the core of many of the images than run through the Cheimonette Tarot. I saw René Magritte’s legend last week, at his special exhibit at the MOMA: a mirror, a bird, a ribbon in a bow, an apple, a bowler hat, a candle, all collected on one canvas, for the benefit of his beloved observer. So, here is mine, explained for my best beloved reader, and you can add your own, and we can make our own language together in this way:

There are deep things and there are high things.

Deep things, being either underground, underwater, or buried burning within the core of some star or singularity, are slow-moving and silent. They take on the aspects (the surge current, the echoing crunch of seismic uplift and subduction, the blinding glow of irradiated atomic fusion) of their environments, and express their identity by a profoundly isolated and recursive imagination. In the way that the infinite field of postulated “collapsed” Calabi-Yau dimensional spaces take up no space and yet exist at every point in the universe, deep things each contain their own, disconnected little internal worlds.

High things have their own mass, their own energy and their own gravitational field. They do not take on the aspects of their environments because those environments have no size or shape of their own. Biological or tectonic forces keep the surface of the earth in a state of flux, and by the time we rise up into the stratosphere and beyond, the crowd of molecules and their motions have thinned out to a bare minimum.

Therefore there are only two directions in the whole world in which we may move: higher and deeper.

There are eight spokes in the tenth card in the major arcana, The Wheel. At the end of each spoke, where a limb of an angel terminates, there is an icon. This is the eight-letter pictogrammatical alphabet of the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Heart-Apple: the fruit of the tree of knowledge.  This is the ability particular to human understanding, in which we are able to grasp our position in relation to the world, and exert ourselves to change it. (This tree is also known as the tree of death.)

The Mandala-Flower: the fruit of the tree of life. This is the temporary escape from the demands of biological existence we find in profound feeling and creative understanding. This flower, when eaten, is also called freedom.

The Crescent Moon: the sign of truth. Not only is truth not always beautiful, it is not always even righteous. It is simply the course of events along the inexorable passage of time.

The God Sign: the mark of a divine concept or entity that cannot change or die. Really a rough zero and one, placed together like a phi.

The Real Eye: the symbol of life. Life is to be understood as the whole arc, from understanding and joy to suffering and intellectual darkness. Life as an opportunity, life as an adventure, life as a cruel trap, life as a responsibility: all of these.

The False Eye: the symbol of death. Death may also be understood to be eternal life (in which life is not life, but a changeless observation tower in which the corporeal body transforms into a bird and never returns to the mortal coil of existence and non-existence).

The Bubble: the number zero. Like all bubbles, zero is a potential event and trajectory that has not yet happened: a star that has not yet exploded, an egg that has not yet hatched, an eye that has not yet opened.

The Helix: the number one. A 1 curled up on itself, this number is both linked with numerical concepts such as zero and infinity, and also the beginning of all real numbers, which constitute the set of the visible universe. One is the integer who makes its debut into the world of flux, change, and chaos in which we find ourselves.

(Author’s Apology:

This world that surrounds us is in fact not self-made, but in our own subversive way we create another world out of differentiated labels (this is how language is made).  We are nothing but helpless children in the midst of the lovely and fascinatingly unfamiliar light projections of our dreams, which we can of course never touch but which we mindlessly worship as the truth.  What we are constantly forgetting is ourselves, holding out our palms sadly to one another and each of us wasting our desire on these things, which have been created by us, after all, and are not in themselves real and cannot compare to the indescribable beauty of their creators.)

Just look at it.

banana MRI for scale (via Inside Insides)

LindseyB's starwars-dot-gif project accepts any line of dialog from Star Wars, locates the correct frames in the movie, and generates an animated GIF of that scenes, with subtitles. This will be useful.

starwars-dot-gif (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Perhaps the greatest highdea ever:

Sagan wrote eloquently – but pseudonymously - about the joys of weed. As his friend Lester Grinspoon recalls:

As much as [Sagan] loved marijuana, he was always very concerned about people finding out. For instance, one of the early pieces I wrote on the subject appeared in The New York Times Magazine, and in it I said something to the effect, “People have the idea that only these hirsute young hippie kids use marijuana, but in fact a lot of ordinary and even extraordinary people smoke it, including professionals.” Then I mentioned doctors, lawyers, etc. Well, in that list I included astronomers. And when that came out, it was the only time Carl ever expressed any anger towards me. Because he thought mentioning astronomers would give him away based on our friendship.

Grinspoon recounts the time the two got baked on a cruise to the South Pacific to see Halley’s Comet:

I smuggled about an ounce of marijuana on board, and we had a wonderful time. Carl had the top cabin on the ship, including a deck where we could sit and smoke and talk and eat—for hours on end—while watching the beautiful cloud formations over the Pacific. When the cruise was over, we still had some marijuana left. I didn’t want to go through Customs with it, so I told Carl that I was going to toss it down a companionway I had noticed was marked “Crew Only,” trusting that it would be enjoyed among the mates. But he asked me not to, because we might somehow be found out. So we weighed the baggie down with one of those old glass ashtrays, and tossed it overboard. I hated to let this precious stuff go down to the bottom of the sea, and didn’t really see how we could ever have gotten caught passing it along, but I had to respect Carl’s objection. Really, it was very important that he not get in trouble. He was testifying before NASA and Congressional committees all the time.

Previous Dish on Sagan and marijuana here.

I wasn’t that interested in Almost Human until I realized that only one of them was a robot and then I was like “WAIT THIS IS BASICALLY DATA AND GEORDI: COPS” and now I’m excited.

A little boy wanders on stage with Francis and won’t let him go.

I’m struck by a simple fact: this happened to Jesus a lot, and his response – even more revolutionary in his day  – was Francis’: “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

From raping children to seating them on the papal chair. Know hope.

The economy, most Americans agree, is pretty miserable. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll, for example, 75 percent of Americans rated the state of the economy as "negative" or "poor," versus 24 percent who rated the state of the economy positively. The unemployment rate, at 7.2 percent is still more than two percentage points above where it was when the great recession began almost six years ago.

But there is one group who thinks things are looking pretty peachy: the wealthy.

The American Affluence Research Center surveys families in the top 10 percent of net worth twice a year, selling studies on, for example, their opinions of various luxury brands that might help marketers. Along the way, they ask how these rich families are feeling about the economy.

Pretty good, is the answer. The survey's economic sentiment index is up to 93 this fall, rising 22 points since the spring. It's also the highest since the fall of 2007, before the recession began, when it was at 108. The researchers, who survey 327 affluent households, consider an index above 100 as a "positive" view of the economy and the 93 level as "neutral". Still, surveys of the rest of the masses of Americans reveal views on the state of the economy that are anything but neutral.

It shouldn't be terribly surprising. The stock market is up 24 percent this year. Unemployment among the educated is at very low levels. It stands to reason that the economy looks to be recovering much better if you're someone with large investment holdings and a high-level job than if you're scraping by at a lower-wage job and not benefiting from a run-up in asset prices.

But there may be a second story here. In the last couple of years, any sense of urgency around getting the economy on track has almost disappeared within Congress. In last year's fiscal cliff debate, for example, there was no strong push from either party to extend a payroll tax holiday or find another mechanism to help out low- and middle-income workers. The debate over the latest fiscal bargaining is all about how to reduce the deficit, with little discussion of interim measures to try to boost growth.

Members of Congress tend to be relatively wealthy themselves, and tend to associate with big donors and other prominent folks who would also fit in the researchers' survey definition. And to those people, the economy is pretty much back. This helps explain why Congress has seemed less interested in finding ways to propel stronger growth than the overall surveys and economic data would suggest.

For a more detailed look at the phenomenon, check out Jim Tankersley's piece from May.

David Denby, in the New Yorker: "When Ted Cruz lies, he appears to be praying. His lips narrow, almost disappearing into his face, and his eyebrows shift abruptly, rising like a drawbridge on his forehead into matching acute angles. He attains an appearance of supplication, an earnest desire that men and women need to listen, as God surely listens."

Sometimes, like today, I wake up with the smile not so very far away.
I’m talking about those moments when the invisible become seen
as though suddenly,
like a flower opening when I’m not looking.
Sometimes we wake up screaming.
“It’s a light strand of energy going from here,
to here,”
She gestures to her heart,
tries to describe the treasure that can’t be measured by the gold standard,
an ethic that isn’t exclusive,
marriage as a constellation.

these promises become the ways our bodies move, they pulse with our hearts, not just for mine and what’s mine, promises that are ours.

Metanoia, a transformative change
of body, change of mind, of heart.
Repentance, an acknowledgement of responsibility, an acknowledgement of harm done, and a vow catapulting into action into living, breathing, moving form, to do different this time.  Metanoia, a meditation we can direct towards the light.

Sometimes the change is disguised as
Despair
as a break
an encounter with Hell, we see it so clearly
believing the worst as we
touch down into the darkest place, the flat line, even, the end.
I want to move, the soul whispers, stuck, pasted to the wall.
And what is it that brings us back?

I have been saved many times by people whose names I do not know.
Their faces, I don’t remember.
But their promises made my heart beat again.
Stay.   Stay.
There are those whose kindness got my body breathing again
when I was far from the surface.

The secret is
that we have always been directed toward the light.
We know this if we open our eyes, pause a moment to enjoy how
this moment is
painted with breathtaking exactitude,
a miraculous alchemy
of light and time and distance and vantage point.

We must save each other
every day.  This is our work.
And especially today, when the smile is so close to the surface
I can taste it.

Buyers of Dell's Latitude 6430u, an $850 Ultrabook, report an unusual feature: the overwhelming odor of cat piss.

"The machine is great, but it smells as if it was assembled near a tomcats litter box," reported a Dell customer using the handle Three West. "It is truly awful! It seems to be coming from the keyboard."

A Dell technical support provider suggested cleaning the keyboard area with a soft cloth, but it was to no avail.

"Same experience," wrote forum user Hotecha. "I thought for sure one of my cats sprayed it, but there was something faulty with it so I had it replaced. The next one had the same exact issue. It's embarrassing taking it to clients because it smells so bad."

Added Gambit29: "I thought I smelt something odd. Well.. here I am Sunday doing some work on the couch and my wife says 'what stinks like cat pee'. I said.. I think its this laptop.. puts her nose up to the keyboard and BAM! It really stinks."

A Senior Dell Technical Consultant, SteveB, reassured customers that Dell would get to the root of the problem, which was definitely not cat piss: "Dell Engineering and our suppliers have been analyzing a captured unit and are close to a root cause. A biological contaminate/health hazard is not suspected at this time."

In the meantime, I'll provide a few details of what we do know.

The smell was related to a manufacturing process that has now been changed
The smell is not in any way related to biological contamination
The smell is not at all health hazard
If you order an E6430u now, it will not have the issue
As soon as we have final engineering failure analysis, more information will be posted on how to immediately resolve the issue. We hope to have the information this week so please keep watching this thread.

still one of my favorites scenes

I recently started playing the massively multiplayer role-playing game Guild Wars 2. The character creation process is extensive, letting you mix and match 5 races, 8 professions, and 2 genders. According to my math, that’s like more than five different possible combinations. Maybe a lot more.

After trying many combos, I settled on the Necromancer class since I liked its use of pets, debuffs, and damage-over-time effects. Since I had been semi-randomly combining races and classes, this character happened to be a human female. Not too unusual for me, but the thing is that the armor skins are unique to each race/gender combination and after 40 levels the female Necromancer garb has ended up looking a bit …saucy. Like to a ridiculous degree, as if my character was part of a Mardi Gras parade that took a detour through the clearance rack at Victoria’s Secret:

A long line of research around self-perception that has shown that people’s attitudes will change to match their behavior, not just the other way around. One famous study1 showed that National Football League and National Hockey League athletes were more likely to earn penalties when they wore jersies that were black –a color associated with villany and unscrupulous cat burgalers everywhere. And it wasn’t just that referees reserved harsher judgments for them. A follow-up study showed that participants wearing black gravitated towards more violent games when given the choice. The researchers argued that these behaviors could be traced back to self-perception theory: I’m wearing black → I’m expected to be aggressive → I’m aggressive → I’m picking the game where I get to shoot the other guy in the face with a dart gun. Even if that whole chain of thoughts wasn’t conscious, the results were there.

In a way, video game avatars are like uniforms that we slip on. Researchers looking at self-perception theory’s implications for video games and virtual reality avatars have coined the term “the Proteus effect” to describe how players will make inferences about their expected attitudes and beliefs based on their in-game avatar’s appearance, and then act in accordance with those expectations. For example, one study2 found that subjects controlling more attractive, taller avatars were more outgoing and more assertive in a bargaining exercise, and another3 found that people were more likely to help clean up an accident after playing a game as a super hero.

So what about my sexy necromancer and titillating avatars in general? The degree to which this kind of character design is acceptable and/or harmful is the focus of much debate in video games and other discussions about popular culture, but it’s also been the subject of research by psychologists studying the Proteus effect and self-perception theory in the context of virtual reality. My Necro’s attire reminded me of a paper I had read about on VGResearcher by Jesse Fox, Jeremy Bailenson, and Liz Tricase, entitled “The Embondiment of Sexualized Virtual Selves: The Proteus Effect and Experience of Self-Objectification Via Avatars.”4 The researchers were interested in the effects of sexualized avatars on women’s self-objectification and what they called rape myth acceptance (e.g., believing that a rape victim shares responsibility for an attack because she was drinking or flirting would show acceptance of a rape myth). They were also interested in what effect it would have if the avatar’s face resembled the player’s own.

The setup was pretty simple. Subjects (all college age women) wore virtual reality gear and used a female avatar wearing either sexy attire that showed skin, or non-sexy attire that did not. In addition, for some subjects the avatar’s face was made to resemble their own using a digital photograph. Here are some examples from the study:

Participants then completed a simple task with the aid of another person (a male) within the VR environment. After the task, the subjects were asked to write down their current thoughts and complete questionnaires measuring rape myth acceptance. Results showed that those using a sexualized avatar were more likely to include thoughts about their real body (as opposed the avatar’s body or anything else) in the “write down your thoughts” task. Furthermore, those who were using the sexualized avatars with their own faces superimposed on them were more likely than other subjects to accept rape myths. That is, they were more likely to agree with statements like “In the majority of rapes, the victim is promiscuous or has a bad reputation.”

Now, I think this is preliminary research. The increase in body-related thoughts can probably be accounted for by a simple priming effect –if the subjects had used chickens as avatars they probably would have written more about barnyards and sandwiches for the same reason. But the fact that use of these avatars causes increased thoughts about body image seems clear regardless of the cause. The rape myth acceptance seems more troubling, and the authors note that this is “a dangerous attitude for a woman to have as a potential juror, confidante, voter, family member, or even victim.” 5 I’d love to see more research that teases out the reasons for this, as the authors don’t really offer a solid one.

So what do we make of this? I’m not going to wade in and say that these kind of avatar options shouldn’t be available. After all, I continue to play my Necromancer. But it’s worth noting that people are doing real research on what effects these self representations have on the people who use them, and you should be aware of it as you play, design, and interact. Video games are unique relative to other media in the amount of interactivity and customization they offer and the ways that people use them.

UPDATE: Jessie Fox, one of the study’s authors, posted a blog entry about some of the misrepresentation the research has gotten in the press (thankfully, not here). Worth a look.

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so Malcolm got me hooked on the LEGO Marvel Superheroes videogame. Naturally my favorite levels are the ones where I get to be Hawkeye.

I get become very intense when I play videogames, it seems. And I swear a lot. And I’m really bad at videogames.

book of dmt comics out now, printed with spot colors and i think it’s pretty

you can read the comics online here

“Church giving reaches Depression-era lows,” reports Katherine Burgess of Religion News Service:

Collection plates are growing even lighter as Protestant church member giving reached new lows in 2011, and tithing probably will not recover from the recession, according to a new report by Empty Tomb, a Christian research group.

The word “tithing” there is a bit of an overstatement, as Protestant church member giving wasn’t anywhere near the levitical 10 percent even before the financial crisis of 2008 started destroying jobs, livelihoods and household incomes.

The percentage of a church member’s income given to the church dropped to 2.3 percent in 2011 (the latest year for which numbers are available), down from 2.4 percent in 2010, according to the Empty Tomb study.

In 1968, church members gave an average of 3.1 percent of their income.

Giving has declined for four consecutive years, according to the report. The only other period of prolonged decline in giving per member was from 1928 through 1934, almost entirely during the Great Depression.

A big drop in church giving due to the Great Recession was entirely predictable. But the continuing decline of giving even during the recovery suggests something else is going on. Granted, this recovery has been sluggish and weak, struggling against the headwinds of political obstruction, sequestration, wastefully timed deficit-reduction and the chaos of perpetual threats of shutdown and default. Yet still, glacially slow job growth is still job growth — and if this decline in church-giving was purely an economic effect, then we ought to be seeing a corresponding slow resumption of church giving rather than this continuing decline.

My guess is that church-giving initially plummeted along with every other economic indicator in 2008, but then continued to decline because during the prolonged recession, church members lost the habit of giving to churches and acquired, instead, a habit of cutting back on church-giving in order to pay other bills. It’s not like consumer debt, which dropped sharply during the first year of the Great Recession as households “deleveraged” in response to, or for fear of, layoffs, furloughs and reduced incomes. But consumer debt has rebounded — showing that this deleveraging was a temporary response and not a permanent change of habit. Church-giving has not rebounded, suggesting that this decline may be the new normal.

Empty Tomb cites 1968 as the Good Old Days of bountiful generosity and overflowing collection plates, but even then church-giving only accounted for 3.1 percent of household income. I think that reflects the reality — contrary to what most pastors hopefully preach on Stewardship Sunday — that church-giving comes from members “extra” money. It’s not an expense that’s factored into household budgets, but an option for some of the disposable income left over after that budget has accounted for all of its expenses.

That’s a rational approach for most church members. After all, if you don’t pay the electric bill, they may shut off the lights. If you don’t pay the phone bill, they may cut off your phone. But you can still go to church even if you never put anything into the offering plate. Churches face the same free-rider problem that public radio has. Your local NPR station’s programming is “made possible by the support of listeners like you,” but you can always keep listening as long as enough of those other listeners are providing that support.

Empty Tomb’s Sylvia Ronsvalle suggests that churches might begin reversing this decline in giving by “providing an authentic alternative to the consumer mindset.” I’m not sure if I agree with that because I’m not sure what, if anything, that means.

On one level, I think that any church that fails to “provide an authentic alternative to the consumer mindset” ought to shut its doors for good. The gospel is not about seeking happiness by acquiring stuff. The gospel is actually an enormous hindrance to anyone seeking happiness by acquiring stuff (and vice versa). So, yeah, certainly churches ought to be, at a fundamental level, providing an authentic alternative to the consumer mindset.

But on another level, I think churches actually need to better understand and better address the concerns of “the consumer mindset.”

Church-giving is an economic transaction. Donors expect something in return for their donations — not necessarily, and not mainly, something for themselves, but they want to see results. Giving to your church, like giving to any charity, is like hiring a contractor to do good on your behalf. You want to hire someone who will get the job done — someone you can trust to put the money to good and proper and effective use. That concern may be a kind of “consumer mindset,” but it’s one that churches should be honoring by earning and rewarding that trust.

A “consumer mindset” might also constructively remind churches that their donors are also, in a sense, their customers. And in recognizing that, they should remember what the Chamber of Commerce long ago forgot: that what’s good for your customers is good for your business.

Too many churches have tacitly or explicitly been supporting the customer-killing economic policies of the Chamber of Commerce and other perverse business interests who see themselves in a zero-sum competition against the working people — their employees and customers — without whom they’re unable to sell anything. The Dow Jones index has come roaring back to record highs after the Great Recession. Church-giving has not rebounded because employment and wages have not rebounded. Church-giving corresponds with the fortunes of the 99 percent, not with the fortunes of the 1 percent.

Churches ought to be fighting for the concerns of the 99 percent rather than the interests of the 1 percent. That’s true as a matter of basic justice — which ought to be an essential aspect of Christian mission and identity. But it’s also true as a matter of self-interest, because when the 99 percent suffers, so does church-giving. (And when the 99 percent thrives, the 1 percent will also do very nicely for themselves — even better than they’re doing due to their current zero-sum strategy of rent-seeking plunder.)

Just look at the absolute dollar amounts in Empty Tomb’s study:

In 2011, the 23 denominations researched by Empty Tomb received $22.94 billion. In 2010 they received $22.88 billion.

That’s a lot of money, but let’s put it in perspective. Those churches received about $23 billion in 2010. That same year American consumers lost $36 billion in “overdraft protection” fees and charges — a direct transfer of wealth from working people to the 1 percent that was more than 50 percent higher than total church giving for the Protestant denominations in Empty Tomb’s survey.

That wealth-transfer from workers to bankers is expected to be somewhat less this year — down to about “only” $30 billion, thanks to opt-in regulations put in place by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Richard Cordray will be saving working Americans about $6 billion this year with just that one change. That’s a $6 billion increase in that pool of “extra” money from which offering plates are filled. But are churches supporting the CFPB? No — they tend to be aligned with the political movement angrily opposing the agency and defending ever-greater wealth-transfers from workers to bankers. (And they’re doing this, obscenely, in the name of “morality” and “values.”)

Consider Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby’s campaign to put payday lenders in England out of business. Welby is doing this, primarily, as a matter of justice and compassion for the working poor who are being preyed on by usurers. Most of those victims probably aren’t Anglicans with perfect attendance records, and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Welby or anyone else involved in this campaign is even slightly motivated by a concern for the effect that predatory lending has on church-giving. Yet surely predatory lending also does deter church-giving. It may have nothing to do with the motives for this campaign, but if Welby is successful, then Britain’s working poor will have a bit more money in their pockets, and people with a bit more money in their pockets are more able to put some of it in the offering plate. People with empty pockets can’t and won’t ever do that.

Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry offer muted criticisms of the Republicans who shut down the government. Money quote:

There is no alternative to seeking to expand the conservative base beyond its present inadequate numbers and to win the votes of people who aren’t yet conservatives or are not yet conservatives on all issues. The defunders often said that those who predicted their failure were “defeatists.” Yet it is they who have given in to despair. They are the ones who entertain the ideas that everything has gotten worse; that the last few decades of conservative thought and action have been for nothing; that engagement in politics as traditionally conceived is hopeless; that government programs, once begun, must corrupt the citizenry so that they can never be ended or reformed; that the country will soon be past the point of regeneration, if it is not there already.

Effective political movements create the conditions for their own success. Conservatism has not done enough of that, but when it has prospered it has never been moved by despair. The apocalyptic style of politics holds that the future of the country is at stake. That is true, which is why conservatives need to get to the work of persuading and electioneering — and drop the fantasy of a shortcut.

Bernstein thinks ”the problem is a bit deeper than Ponnuru and Lowry want to pretend it is”:

They really only attack the obviously suicidal: the awful Senate candidates, the shutdown strategy that had no chance of victory. Their solution is that the party should work hard to win elections in order to implement their agenda, which is all very well and good. However, it also masks something real going on here. The “True Conservative” agenda that the radicals and most mainstream conservatives claim to want, at this point, has become so radical that it probably is at least a modest electoral problem — and even more so, it would be a massive governing problem, both in practical and electoral consequences.

Drum wants to know what strategy Lowry and Ponnuru (L&P) suggest:

OK, but how will conservatives win more elections? L&P explicitly disavow the notion of the party turning left, suggesting only that they’re skeptical of “the idea that moving in the opposite direction will in itself pay political dividends.” But if they have no concrete suggestions—either in policy or tone or messaging or something—then this is just mush.

Humphreys counters:

[T]here is an alternative explanation. L&P are probably more in touch than is Drum (or me) with the pulse of Tea Party at the moment. L&P may have concluded that the alienation, rage and self-indulgence in that corner of the world are such that persuading Tea Partiers that elections matter is indeed a significant task of its own, much as it was with some leftist factions in the 1960s and 1970s. You can’t tell people how to do something that they don’t want to do in the first place. If you feel that the country is lost, that your values have been rejected and the entire system is corrupt, politics can become simply an outlet for rage. That may be the ledge the Tea Party is on, post-government-shut-down humiliation.

Erick Erickson’s response to L&P is a good example of the Tea Party mindset:

Like much of the Republican Leadership, National Review wants to win majorities before unleashing hell, but history shows us repeatedly that Republicans never unleash hell once they have the majority. They become well-fed denizens of power, using it to reward friends and influence people, instead of willingly surrendering it to shrink the leviathan.

Even Scott Johnson of Powerline thinks Erickson “doesn’t make much of an argument.”

Actual parodies are almost too easy:

As a complement to The Wes Anderson Collection, a new book of analysis and interviews by Matt Zoller Seitz, the author created several video essays on the director’s oeuvre. Elsewhere, Seitz lists ”24 things I learned while writing my book about Wes Anderson”:

3. It is important to him that viewers imprint their own values and experiences on his films and not worry too much about what he personally is trying to communicate.

Back in 2010, I did a video essay on The Darjeeling Limited for the movie’s Criterion Blu-ray edition. Wes’ only note was that he wondered if there was some way to make the narration sound less authoritative, because he didn’t want people thinking that my interpretation of his work was in some sense the “official” or “approved” interpretation. It was important to Wes that every viewer feel that his or her own take on the film was equally valid. So I re-recorded the audio track of the video essay to make it sound more extemporaneous—as if I was just making up the thoughts off the top of my head and they were just one guy’s opinion. The finished piece expressed exactly the same thoughts as the first version, but the tone was warmer and more casual, and hopefully communicated to viewers that it was just one way of looking at the movie.

Similarly, during the writing of The Wes Anderson Collection, Wes repeatedly told me it was important to communicate to readers, through tone and design, that the seven critical essays were my take on his work, that he himself neither approved nor disapproved of their observations, and that readers should feel that their own take was just as valid.

Here is a profile Seitz wrote of Anderson in 1995, just after he completed his first film, Bottle Rocket. Recent Dish on the director here and here.

When a Republican state congressman in Utah is in favor of legalizing weed resin because it can transform the lives of children dealing with the trauma of constant seizures, you know the momentum against Prohibition is now unstoppable. But this is the clincher:

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration approved the country’s first studies on the marijuana compound cannabidiol, a nonpsychoactive marijuana component, as an antiseizure medication. Some scientists believe the compound quiets the electrical and chemical activities in the brain that trigger seizures. Extracts are often heavy on cannabidiol, with a negligible amount of THC.

Heads up to all those parents whose children suffer needlessly because of our Puritan past: help is on the way.

boughettoblackman:

It’s kinda of weird in that if these small business owners really believe in an increase to the minimum wage then they don’t need to wait for the law to change in order to pay their employees more. Still, vote yes next Tuesday!

The issue though is that small business owners are afraid of being out-competed by others that give less in wages. Part of the cycle of capital is investing it back in your business as productive capital. Since you’re using that to expand, where else can you get more surplus labor from? Unpaid (the real way to describe underpaid) wages. This is why socialism isn’t about individuals: the individual whims of small business owners are not enough to counteract the systemic tendencies of capital.

Wearable head-mounted camera reads your brainwaves and records whatever you're seeing if it estimates your interest level meets arbitrary 60% threshold.

History books are not meant to be read for fun. They belong in stuffy classrooms with class pets and broken wooden desks that squeak too much. Until The Infographic History of the World and Alternate Histories of the World came along. For someone who struggled through overtexted course books all through school, I took on this review without hesitation and hopes for brushing up on the history I missed out (ok, skipped out) on years ago.

The Infographic History of the World

Not only is this book a chock full of rich visuals, but the organization is an artform in itself. Small details—like a slowly evolving figure in the bottom lefthand corner guiding you through the decades—make this a delightful read from cover to cover. Complicated academic topics such as the United States' ever-changing GDP and planet sizes in ratio to the universe become elaborately simple figures for right-brained types. Designer Valentine D'efilippo and journalist James Ball form the perfect team for teaching the date-illiterate millions of years of history in one book.

Besides being beautiful, it's also historian endorsed: Amazon reviewer Michael Kinnear weighs in, "Both my wife and I had read it cover to cover before we gave it to her—we are both professional historians—and rated it A+." The tone is perfectly snarky and quite liberal. I found myself particularly engrossed in the Keith Haring-like depiction of mental illnesses and the most prominent disorders. The thought-bubble rendition of the language tree came in as a close second. As you turn the pages, the font becomes more modern as you get closer to present-day.

A quick glance at the visual index is more than enough to pull you into the book's four parts: In the Beginning, Getting Civilized, Nation Building and The Modern World. Every infographic is presented by a lead question on the page that will tell you about the data you're looking at.

(more...)

I’m putting together my expenses for running the small home office where I do my work. One expense is my phone line. I went to the web-site of TalkTalk, my phone provider, only to find that they won’t show me the older bills unless I pay them £10:

That doesn’t seem reasonable to me.

It’s also very stupid of TalkTalk, because in the rather optimistic hope of screwing £10 out of me, they’ve made an angry customer and destroyed any sense of loyalty I might have had. I’ve been thinking for a while that I can probably get a better deal elsewhere for our phone lines (we have two — one for the home and one for the office) but sheer inertia has prevented me from making it happen. Now I will make a point of it. I just don’t want to keep giving my money to this corporation. So they’ll lose two customers (plus however many leave, or avoid joining, after reading this).

In its tiny, tiny way this is the same story as United Breaks Guitars. Corporations are in the habit of treating their customers like dirt, and they’re finding it a hard habit to break. Well, screw ‘em.

Full transcript of the on-line support chat below.

–

GAURAV K: Hi, thank you for contacting TalkTalk today, can I please start by taking your full name and home telephone number?
You: Mike Taylor, [phone number redacted]
You: I went to download copies of my bills for September and October 2012, but found that the dropdown only goes as far back as November 2012.
You: Are you there?
GAURAV K: I understand your concern and I will be happy to help you.
GAURAV K: Please bear with me for 2-3 minutes whilst I look into the issue.
You: Thank you.
GAURAV K: I truly appreciate your time and patience.
GAURAV K: I would like to tell you that you may view last 12 month history bill.
You: OK, but I need the bills from the two months before that.
GAURAV K: Okay.
GAURAV K: In order to process your request there is a £10 administration fee. This covers the cost of processing a Subject Access Request. The payment can be made by either cheque or postal order, which must be made payable to TalkTalk Telecom Ltd.
You: That’s pretty steep for emailing a couple of PDFs that your system should provide access to anyway, don’t you think?
GAURAV K: Yes, you are correct.
You: :-)
GAURAV K: In order to process your request there is a £10 administration fee. This covers the cost of processing a Subject Access Request. The payment can be made by either cheque or postal order, which must be made payable to TalkTalk Telecom Ltd.
You: Are you a bot or a human?
GAURAV K: I am human being.
GAURAV K: My name is Gaurav
You: Good to know — I only asked because the repeated canned response looked like the kind of thing an ELIZA program might say. No offence intended!
You: I suppose I am asking you to waive the fee, since we both agree it’s not really reasonable.
GAURAV K: I would like to inform you that we can view last 12 month history bill.
You: Yes, that last twelve months are not a problem. The thing is, neither should the previous twelve months be.
GAURAV K: If you want to view bill before 12 month history than we need to escalate the other dedicated department.
GAURAV K: In order to process your request there is a £10 administration fee. This covers the cost of processing a Subject Access Request. The payment can be made by either cheque or postal order, which must be made payable to TalkTalk Telecom Ltd.
You: Ooookay. So just to be completely clear: the situation is that you absolutely will not tell me how much you charged me in September 2012 unless I give you ten pounds. Is that correct?
GAURAV K: Yes, you are right,
You: OK, thank you for being explicit. We’re done here. I hope TalkTalk enjoys its day.
GAURAV K: Thank you for your kind understanding.
GAURAV K: Apart from this issue, Is there anything else I may assist you with?
You: No thanks.
GAURAV K: Thank you for contacting TalkTalk today. Have a pleasant day. Goodbye, remember the TalkTalk Community is always there to answer your questions. https://www.community.talktalk.co.uk
You: Bye.