| Dear Reader (the moving walkway is ending. Attention, the moving walkway is ending. Attention the moving walkway is ending),
I know I hide it from you, dear readers, but I've been in a lot of airports lately. I started writing this G-File last week at O'Hare in Chicago. Since then, I've been back home to D.C. -- twice -- to Las Vegas, Albuquerque, and Phoenix, where I am now (at Sky Harbor International Airport: America's Crappiest Mid-Size Transportation SphincterTM where I had one 6:00 a.m. flight cancelled, another hopelessly delayed, and am now waiting on a third). I'm on my way to San Francisco for a luncheon speech, and then I'll be in Seattle by tonight. Then it's off to an undisclosed location for two days, and then I'm in Dallas.
Before we get to what very few people call the "substance" of this "news"letter, a quick travelogue. This week's tale of adventure: Chicago. The windy city, hog butcher to the world.
Love that town. I spoke at a bar event organized by the Heartland Institute and America's Future Foundation. They had whiskey waiting for me. Good times.
The one hitch: On advice of a plurality of Chicago-savvy Twitter followers I took a cab straight to a place called Portillo's with the intention of buying a Chicago-style hot dog. But by the time I committed to going to Portillo's, they explained to me that I would be defying my thymos, my destiny, all that is holy, the old gods and the new, man code, Zagats, the Shanshu Prophecy, the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies, the Taxi Customer Bill of Rights, and the Seven Habits of Not Necessarily Effective People if I didn't get the Italian beef sandwich instead. "Big."
With cheddar.
And hot peppers.
Oh yes, hot peppers.
So that's what I did. I was so excited waiting for it, I half expected Morgan Freeman to narrate the moment like I was seconds away from my friend Andy Dufresne at the end of the Shawshank Redemption. The spirit of "I hope" filled me, though not as thoroughly as the awesomely awesome Italian beef sandwich. And while I've become convinced that I should have gotten the Italian sausage combo, it was fanfrickingtastic.
Anyway, after walking for an hour in the hot sun and then smoking a cigar, my perspiration level lay somewhere around Albert Brooks in Broadcast News, George Kennedy in Cool Hand Luke, or the perimeter of a full Big Gulp sitting on the hood of your car in New Orleans. I have no doubt that if there were a race of giants who considered the musky manbrosia of Italian beef mingled with cigar and Irish whisky to be the scent of the gods, I would be dangling from the rearview mirror of an enormous Bentley right now.
Perhaps even worse, however, was that I got stood up by Iowahawk who had promised on Twitter that he would attend my talk. I was much chagrined by his absence. I was even more dismayed to learn that the cornhusking jingoist doesn't even live in Iowa. He lives in Chicago! As I explained to the audience, this is a scandal of enormous proportions. I haven't been this dismayed since I learned that Elizabeth Warren isn't an Indian and that the Cherokee don't eat crab. (I think it'd be awesome if they made like a Quest for Fire-type movie where the Cherokee of the 15th century made the roughly 700 mile trek to the ocean to find some crab and proactively verify Elizabeth Warren's cherished Indian recipes.)
Take Your Time
I'm sure you read it already, but just in case, there's an interesting new paper that says we probably won't be able to get to the nearest star for another 500 years, at least. In "Energy, Incessant Obsolescence, and the First Interstellar Missions," M. G. Millis argues that we won't have anything like the energy required to get a vessel, or even a manless probe (Note to self: Add "manless probe" to the "Things That Sound Dirty but Aren't" file) to Alpha Centauri -- or to slow it down once it gets there -- for a very long time. I have no idea if he's right, and if you actually think I'm qualified to check his math well, bwahahaha.
From what I gather, he extrapolates growth in energy trends, carries the one, adds the numerator to the other thing, and figures we need boatloads more energy to send stuff a kabillion miles away.
What caught my eye was Ezra Klein's summary of one point made in the article:
Millis, who's now at the Tau Zero Foundation, also raises an interesting paradox. No matter when we launch the first interstellar probe, it'll take a long time to reach its destination. Which means it's quite plausible that we'll later invent a newer, faster interstellar probe that gets to the star even sooner, with more modern equipment. Which raises the question of why we even bothered to launch that first probe.
Here's the interesting part ("We'll be the judge of that." -- The Couch). For years I've been trying to find a Ray Bradbury (Praise Be upon Him) story that makes a very similar point. I read it when I was like eleven years old ("You're like an eleven-year-old now" -- The Couch), but have never been able to track it down. That hasn't stopped me from invoking it a few times in columns on global warming. Basically, in the story, humans set out in a space ship for the nearest star. They don't have faster-than-light (FTL) technology, so they plan on going into suspended animation for hundreds of years and/or breeding generations of new explorers en route (I can't remember). A couple months into the trip, they briefly encounter a space ship that has FTL tech. The captain says, "Right then, let's go home."
The crew responds, "What are you talking about? We just left Earth!"
But the captain explains that if faster-than-light propulsion can be invented, it's ridiculous to spend centuries moving slower than light only to get to your new planet and find it populated by your great grandkids. Or, something like that.
What's this got to do with global warming? Well, take the Kyoto Protocols (please!). According to Kyoto's drafters, the treaty would have delayed projected warming by about four years a century later. I'm writing all of this from memory so someone can check my math, but my point is right. Incurring massive costs to negligibly minimize a problem a century from now is ludicrous.
Think about how much cheaper things get as you get richer. And I just don't mean in the relative sense. As you get richer over time, things actually get cheaper thanks to technological improvements. Less than ten years ago, flat-panel TVs were outrageously expensive. Pretty soon you'll be able to get one if you supersize your Happy Meal.
If global warming is a problem, there's very little Earth can do to stop it -- right now. But what seems like an insurmountable problem today is often a trivial problem a few decades later. That doesn't mean you can't research the issue, indeed you almost surely should. But the trick to solving most of the world's problems lies in getting rich as quickly as possible so as to make insurmountably expensive problems trivially inexpensive problems. Despite what you may have been taught about Indians or Africans or ancient Celts, poor people are terrible stewards of their environment. For instance, if my kid were starving to death, I would happily feed her fresh panda.
Madagascar 3
I liked it. Really. I laughed. It moves quickly and works on levels for all ages, just like the previous two. In fact, my daughter, a huge fan of the franchise, (not to mention the entire talking-animal oeuvre) thinks it might be the best one yet. She's wrong, of course. But, still, she makes a good case. It's certainly better than the second one, I think.
But I have a criticism. I know how absurd this criticism is. Really, I do. But I'm going to throw it out there just in case I'm not alone.
I thought it was less believable than the first two.
There are internal rules to works of fiction, particularly sci-fi and fantasy, that authors and filmmakers need to be very careful not to break, lest they also break trust with their biggest fans. One of the reasons the Star Wars franchise went off the rails (other than the really crappy writing and Jar Jar Binks) was George Lucas's lack of respect for the internal logic of the universe he created.
The same holds for cartoons. The later Tom and Jerry cartoons are an affront to all that is holy (okay, maybe not all) because they make Tom and Jerry friends rather than existential foes. It's like making Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty into a Hope & Crosby road movie team. In Bon Voyage Charlie Brown, they violated the sacred rule of not showing grown-ups, never mind giving them real voices. In the realm of Peanuts, adult language is boiled down to "Wah-wah" sounds and nothing more. It was a travesty.
Now, the sins of Madagascar 3 are nowhere near as profound because the rules are nowhere near as rigid. But still, what meager constraints that did exist for the franchise are simply thrown aside. I'll spare you the spoilers for another time.
Book Stuff
The book stuff is winding down of course, and pretty soon the Tyranny of Clichés blog will as well. There's time enough for a post-mortem, but in the meantime a few things.
Here's my interview on C-Span for After Words. I've gotten a lot of nice feedback on it.
Here's the latest mondo list of book blurbs. If you know of any reviews I've missed, let me know.
Here's my column today on Obama's Truthiness
Various & Sundry
Bears! My wife has a complicated attitude about bears. She secretly loves them, but she is ideologically offended by what she calls "bear propaganda." As an Alaskan, she finds the naturechannel-Hollywood-MSM treatment of bears to be a national scandal. Whenever she catches my daughter and I watching some nature-channel show on bears, she says "bear propaganda!" When my daughter says, "Aw look how cute" about a grizzly, her mommy will reply "that thing will eat your face." Anyway, this is for her. Five fictional bears and whether they'd kill you.
Play dough (and I don't mean Sheldon Adelson's super PAC donations) was created as wallpaper cleaner.
World GDP from year 1 to year 2008.
41 Biden facial expressions you must know.
The NSA's nom-de-budget was Bureau of Ships.
Awesome slo-mo slinky video!
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