Fitful Murmurs

Rumors persist that the Niners are interested in signing currently-imprisoned quarterback Michael Vick, despite the team’s repeated – and emphatic – denials.  All I have to say is: don’t. It’s been a rough decade, quarterback-wise, for the 49ers; since Steve Young went down for the last time in 1999, they’ve been continually embroiled in quarterback controversies between the mediocre and the inconsistent.  (A quick look back over the men who’ve held the position: Jeff Garcia, Tim Rattay, Trent Dilfer, Alex Smith, J.T. O’Sullivan, and current front-runner Shaun Hill.)

I can understand, then, how the temptation to sign Vick would be strong: he’s a world-class athlete, a game-changer, dangerous both through the air and on the ground.  (Or, at least, he was; god knows how he’ll play when he gets out of prison.)  But it would be a disastrous PR move, a backward-looking move, a signal to the rest of the team that Singletary and York don’t believe that they can build a team out of new, fresh talent.  Not to mention that Vick used the money paid to him by his last team to force dogs to kill one another.

I’ve been skimming through the budget plan released by the Obama Administration today.  I’m nowhere near finished (it’s 146 pages long!) but luckily, I have some time: this budget will work its way through Congress (with much debate, I’m sure) before being passed in a month or so.  I have come across a few things that I think are of note:

• The budget proposes bringing all student loans in-house, so to speak.  Right now, Congress pays various private institutions to lend money to students; the budget proposes instead that the government lend that money directly to students, cutting out the midleman.  As I understand it, this will have the dual benefits of stabilizing student loan interest rates (so that they don’t fluctuate along with the financial markets) and saving the government a significant amount of money, which it can then funnel back into the student loan program.
• The budget does indeed instruct Congress to reform the health-care system, and aims to fund it to the tune of $638 billion over the next ten years.  I don’t understand the particulars of the various plans well enough to comment yet, but based on what I’ve read, the plan should at least come close to universal coverage.
• An additional $5 billion is allocated for a grant-based system of high-speed rail development; this is in addition to the $8 billion that was in the stimulus bill.
• Remember when the House Republicans complained that the stimulus bill would fund family planning clinics?  And said that the Democrats were trying to use the stimulus to hand out condoms to everyone?  And remember when Obama took it to compromise with them, and then not a single House Republican voted for the stimulus bill anyway?  Well, that money is back, too.
• And perhaps most importantly, the budget does indeed fund robots.  Well, space exploring robots, anyway.  “The Agency [NASA] will create a new chapter of this legacy as it works to return Americans to the moon by 2020 as part of a robust human and robotic space exploration program.”

I’ll have more later.  If you’re interested in downloading the budget plan yourself, you can find it at the blog of the White House Office of Management and Budget. (Yes, the OMB has a blog.  Welcome to the 21st century, people.)

On a consistent basis since the Inauguration, Barack Obama has stood up and said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “I’m going to do exactly what I’ve been saying I was going to do for the last year and a half.”  And it’s an indication of how badly we’ve been burned that we treat this as a big surprise.

His speech last night was short on concrete details, but it provided an effective blueprint for the priorities of his administration post stimulus.  He talked about energy.  He talked about education.  He talked about the banking industry and the housing crisis and what he was going to do to fix them, and he talked about healthcare and what he was going to do fix it.  (Hey, it was a long speech.)  He laid out an agenda for his administration that, if successful, will far outlast his term (or two, in that case) in office.  And he did so with almost uncanny confidence and intelligence.  Though it featured less soaring rhetoric than his Inaugural Address, this was, in many ways, a more inspiring performance.

The speech doesn’t really lend itself to interpretation; it’s not like it wasn’t clear enough on its own terms.  You should just go read it instead. Suffice it to say that Obama remains comitted to universal (or near-universal) healthcare, energy efficiency and independence, and higher-quality education.  He wants to impose a merit-based system on schoolteachers.  He wants a cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions.  And he wants to roll back the Bush tax cuts and instead give the middle-class a little more money to work with.  How he’s going to do all that is going to be the interesting part, but make no mistake, he remains committed to doing it.

Incidentally, the GOP picked Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to respond with his own speech, delivered from the Governor’s Mansion, about an hour after Obama’s ended.  I hope that as many people as possible saw it.  It was flat-out one of the worst delivered speeches I have ever seen in my entire life.  Jindal seemed more like he was hawking wares on a late-night infomercial than a man gearing up for a possible Presidential run.  At no point did he make any sense whatsoever.  It seemed as though he hadn’t even heard Obama’s speech at all: he came out as being for tax cuts (as did Obama); for a continued military presence in the Middle East (right after Obama said he would up troop pay and send more troops to Afghanistan).  And in te most bizarre leap of logic I have ever heard, he laid out how botched the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was, but then instead of drawing the reasonable inference from that – that George Bush was a terrible President – he instead said that Katrina proved how Americans actually don’t want the government to have any power, because they screw things up.  Bobby: The American people did not want to see less government intervention in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Katrina.  They wanted to see more.

Jindal also came out, bizarrely, as being against volcano monitoring, of all things.  “While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes… $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.”  First of all, it may not be the best idea, as a governor of a state, to put air quotes around “volcano monitoring”, as if it were something that you had never heard of before.  But even beyond that: sometimes volcanos blow up.  We’d like to know before they do, so that they don’t kill anyone.  What problem does Bobby Jindal have with that, exactly?

If Bobby Jindal doesn’t run for President in 2012, this speech will be the reason.  But I hope that they do nominate him.  Please.  Put this guy on a stage with Obama.  He’ll tear Jindal to pieces.

I’ve been meaning to link to this post from the Google blog for a couple of days, because I think there are a number of things about it that are interesting.

Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and we believe consumers have a right to detailed information about their home electricity use. We’re tackling the challenge on several fronts, from policy advocacy to developing consumer tools, and even investing in smart grid companies…

Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter, which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we’re testing it out with Googlers first. But we’re building partnerships with utilities and independent device manufacturers to gradually roll this out in pilot programs. Once we’ve had a chance to kick the tires, we’ll make the tool more widely available.

I think that this is a great idea.  A lot of evidence shows that a good way to motivate people to save energy is simply to show them how much energy they’re using, and as the blog post points out, the amount of information provided by the electric companies is usually woefully slight.  The idea of logging in to a dashboard, from your computer, and being able to precisely track your energy usage – that’s pretty cool.

I also think, though, that the degree to which Google is inserting itself in many facets of our lives is … interesting.  (Interesting, not worrying; not yet, anyway.)  With remarkable speed, and aided by a ferocious amount of intelligence, Google has become the most dominant company in our lives.  In its original function (as a search engine) it is now totally dominant; as of December 2008, 62% of all web searches were done with Google.  (The next competitor, Yahoo!, captured only 16% of the market share.)  But it has also inserted itself into almost every aspect of our internet life: to a large extent, it is the way we advertise, watch videos, blog, read our email, block pop-ups, track our websites, write documents, get directions, read the news, shop, and talk on the phone.

I was reading Robert Heinlein’s excellent novel Friday the other day.  The book was written in 1982, and is set in a not-so-distant future in which the United States (and presumably the world) has become highly Balkanized: there’s the Chicago Imperium, and the California Confederacy, and so on.  But more powerful than any of those are “the corporations” (of which IBM is specifically mentioned), which are complex, leviathan entities, more powerful than any of the world’s governments but with shadowy motives and organizations.

I’m not directly comparing Google to the corporations in the book; the company’s motto, after all, is “don’t be evil”.  But as Google prepares to move out of the purely digital world and start helping us keep track of our lives here in the physical world, it’s worth thinking about what the company’s eventual goals are.  It was incorporated a scant ten years ago, and now we wouldn’t know what to do without it.  What is this company going to look like in ten more years?  How about fifty?

There is no way that this is going to end well.

Senator Richard Lugar is the Ranking Minority Member on the Senate Foreign Relations Comittee, and tomorrow he is releasing a report entitled “Changing Cuba Policy – In the United States National Interest”  that is, I think, a tremendously important document.  It recommends a complete, top-down reevaluation of American policy toward Cuba, and sets forth a few areas in which Cuban/American relations can be easily and productively improved.  I would really recommend reading the full report (link will open a PDF), as it’s only eight or so pages long, but here’s a summary of its main points:

1. While economic sanctions have been effective foreign policy tools in the past, the US embargo of Cuba has been an ineffective policy that has failed to install the democratic government it was supposed to.
2. The current policy toward Cuba has at least four major weaknesses: it undermines our relationship with the rest of Latin America; it hurts Cuban-American cooperation on things like narcotics trafficking and immigration; it provides the Cuban government with a convenient scapegoat; and it prevents us from taking advantage of recent developments in Cuba to push for change.
3. The Cuban government has become institutionalized, and is unlikely to be dislodged in a quick or easy fashion.  In particular, the possibility of an uprising is slim, at best.  Policy toward Cuba will have to include negotiations with the current government, rather than waiting for a new one to take its place.
4. Though Cuba has taken some small steps in the direction of liberalization, they should not be mistaken for a government-wide reform.
5. Many Cubans are dissatisfied with their government, especially with regard to the economic situation.
6. The Cuban government appears open to substantive negotiation with the United States.
7. The report ends by recommending a number of areas ripe for Cuban-American cooperation, including talks on drug trafficking; alternative energy; agricultural trade; and medical trade.  It further recommends creating a bipartisan committee to continue making recommendations as the situation progresses.

Of these, I think that #3 is particularly important.  There is simply no situation in which our negotiations with Cuba are not conducted with the Communist government.  It will not fall when Fidel dies.  It will not fall when Raul gives up power.  It is firmly and indefinitely an institution, and our future position toward the island will have to take that into account.

I also think that #5 should somewhat be taken with a grain of salt.  It is indubitably true that many Cubans are dissatisfied with their government.  But the United States has consistently underestimated the ferocity of Cuban nationalism.  By and large, they are comitted to the idea of self-determination, and are wary that the United States in particular is trying to interfere with their right to govern themselves.  So while most Cubans acknowledge that their own government is flawed, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be supportive of the United States.
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A few days ago I had tea with an old friend, and then we went to see Coraline at the Regal Cinemas Theater at Union Square.  (This is, I have to say, a great way to see movies.)  It was a good film, but a frustrating one, too, and I’ve spent some time over the last few days trying to figure out what so bothered me about it.  I went out and bought Neil Gaiman’s book (which I read a few years ago but didn’t properly remember), and after finishing it this morning I realized that it threw several of the problems with the movie into sharp focus.

For the unfamiliar: Coraline (the film and the novella) is about a young girl who discovers a mysterious door in her new house.  Late one night, the titular heroine goes through the door and discovers a mirror version of her house, complete with mirror versions of her parents – her “other father” and her “other mother”, both of whom have buttons for eyes.  The latter of these turns out to be an evil, spiderlike creature, who has lured Coraline to the mirror-world for unclear but certainly nefarious reasons.

The film looks amazing.  I’m not generally a big fan of 3D movies – the older technology simply didn’t work for me, and the newer technology gives me headaches – but this is hands-down the best application of the tecnique that I’ve ever seen.  (Granted, the last film I saw in 3D was Beowulf, which had a whole host of problems unrelated to its dimensionality.)  But even on a regular screen this film would look dazzling; rarely has stop-motion film looked so rich and beautiful.

Coraline is also probably the strangest film ever given wide release.  Henry Selick, who adapted and directed the film, is indeed the man responsible for The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach – but he also directed Monkeybone, a film that Brendan Fraser (who is showing up a lot here recently) called “the most expensive art film of all time”.  While Focus Films has understandably been downplaying that particular project in its marketing (“From the director of Monkeybone!” isn’t exactly guarenteed to fill seats), Coraline does share Monkeybone’s manic, madcap disregard for reality as we know it.

But it’s in the adaptation that Coraline runs into trouble.  The novella was about an extraordinary young girl who discovers a mirror world behind a door.  The film is about a young girl who discovers an extraordinary mirror world behind a door.  Selick seems to have assumed – wrongly – that the most interesting thing about the book was the spectacle of the mirror world, and his unrelenting focus on this leaves Coraline (the character) in shreds.  In the book, she’s charming and smart and determined to do the right thing, no matter how scared she is.  In the movie, she’s just kind of irritating.  She wanders from place to place in almost a daze; she has almost no impact on the plot at all.  She’s all pluck and no character.  And to pour salt on the wound, Selick has taken her big triumph – the veritable climax of the book – and given it instead to her next-door neighbor, a character who did not exist in the book.

These are no small flaws; indeed, they are the difference between a film that is great and a film that is merely impressive.  The individual parts of Coraline are flawless (the score is another aspect that deserves mention), but the sum of them is oddly bland.  When we left the theater my friend turned to me and said, “It was good, wasn’t it?” But then she stopped, and looked away and sort of frowned.  “But you know, it wasn’t as good as I thought it was going to be,” she said.  And that’s the way I felt about it, too: enjoyable; impressive; but never as good as I wanted it to be, and if I had the choice between spending two hours watching the movie and spending two hours reading the book, I know which I’d choose every time.

Incidentally, this trailer – which stars the author himself – is pretty excellent.  And I reviewed Gaiman’s newest, The Graveyard Book, for PopMatters awhile back.

I don’t have any strong feelings toward Shepard Fairey’s iconic “HOPE” poster. I don’t really know why – it just never struck the same chord with me that it did with other people.

On the other hand, I think these are absolutely brilliant:

So, after being kinda snotty about Twitter in the annals of this blog, I broke down and got an account – mostly because I realized that I was manually following certain people (read: Brent Spiner) anyway, but also because I realized that I was acting the same way about Twitter that old people act about blogs.  And while I haven’t been doing much with it yet, I have to admit it’s kinda fun.  So if you’re into that sort of thing, you can follow me at KyleDeas.

Incidentally, about four hours after I created the account I was randomely friended by a fake Alexander Stubb, the real version of whom is the current Finnish Minister for Foreign Affairs.  You might not think that the Finnish political world was an arena ripe for comedy.  You would be wrong.

The verdict: meh.  The pilot seemed to get better as it wore on, in that it was more fun to watch Eliza Doshku negotiate with kidnappers than it was to watch her badly ride motorcycles.  But there are a few inherent plot problems that I simply don’t see how Whedon is going to solve.  The show is about a group of operatives (the “dolls”) who are continually having their memories wiped and replaced with new ones by a large and mysterious company.  So, if someone needs. say, a high-class escort for the weekend, the company inserts one set of memories.  If they need a kidnapping and ransom consultant, the company inserts a different one.  But I couldn’t figure out why they would bother with the ethical and technological problems involved with wiping the memories; why couldn’t they just go find a good K&R person?

Anyway.  We’ll have to see how it goes, but for the moment it’s no Firefly.  That’s perhaps a bit unfair, though, because one of the most appealing things about Firefly was the way in which it was so weirdly self-assured, right from the beginning.  There was no learning curve, none of that awkward time at the beginning where the producers and actors are growing into the show.  It started out awesome and it maintained the pace (well, except for that ill-advised episode with the whores) right up until the untimely end.  That’s unusual, though.

I am glad to see Battlestar vet Tahmoh Penikett get picked up by another major show.  With the series winding down – and production already over – it’s going to be interesting to see where some of these actors end up.  (Incidentally, in the pilot of Dollhouse, a minor character refers to Edward James Olmos as “comforting” and “fatherly”.  Let me be clear: Edward James Olmos will not comfort you.  Edward James Olmos will kick you in the face if you get in his way.)