OaO Presents: Metaphor of the Day

Reading that menu was like listening to a single musician play all the instruments in a 10-piece band: you appreciate the effort, but the resulting sound is disastrous.

From Layne's most recent restaurant review.

The Calvino

Calvino: Hey Stoat, do you think "Field Sense" is acquired by teaching or by practice, or if it's not either of those, is it innate, or what?

The Stoat: O Calvino, there was a time when the Thessalians were famous among the other Hellenes only for their riches and their riding but now, if I am not mistaken, they are equally famous for their...wait, what?

Calvino: Field Sense. You know, that sports thing that Gretsky had, or Magic Johnson, or George Best or whomever. It's the uncanny awareness of an entire chaotic field of play, the ability to know where your teammates and opponents are at all times, and how their positions will change in the next instant. It's how people of lesser purely physical ability are able to excel in competition. I found this article in Wired Magazine that claims that while it is an innate skill that some people have, that it can also be taught.

The Stoat: Ah...well...you have far too good an opinion of me, if you think that I can answer your question. For I literally do not know what...uh...field sense is, and much less whether it is acquired by teaching or not, and...uh...I mean...um...

Calvino: Well, it seems to raise interesting questions about ability, doesn't it? I mean, there are a lot of skills that seem like they are, for some sense of the word, innate, or different. Creative ability, for instance, or virtuoso skill at a musical instrument, level of intelligence, or athletic skill seem like binary things--you have them within you from birth or you don't. Perhaps you never realize your true level of ability because you never, for instance, take up the violin, but we assume that I, being born without some undefinable talent for the violin, would never achieve greatness no matter how long or hard I practiced.

The Stoat: Uh...the soul of man is immortal...and having been born many times and having seen all things that exist...wait, suppose that we call one of your numerous slaves...uh...see how I only question him...now we draw a square in the dirt...and...er....

Calvino: What if in fact there is no line, that these abilities come in a continuum--we think of the indefinable quality as "potential" and that one person has a different potential than the next. But what if the ability to attain such skills is only limited by focus and desire, and that even these things can be learned, or unlearned? Perhaps one man is indeed "born" with more focus or desire for a particular goal than the next, but that there's nothing about the next man that prevents him from developing that desire.

The Stoat: If then...it...uh...is a quality of the soul, and is admitted to be profitable, it must be...wisdom or prudence, since none of the things of the soul are either profitable or hurtful in themselves, so...

Calvino: Thank you Stoat, you are very wise. I have learned much today.

The Stoat: Well, uh...statesmen must have guided states by right opinion...also...truth...and something about fruit...possibly bananas....

Future Music of the Future

Here's a piece on Salon's Audiofile about musical instruments of the past that never quite made it. It also wonders about the musical instruments of the future (check out the Hyperviolin for a musical instrument that looks and sounds like it came straight out of Soderbergh's Solaris).

Unmentioned, however, is the elephant in the room of music futurama: real time electronic signal processing. Well, okay, not really. The elephant in the room is the computer. There's nothing (besides look all cool and shit) the Hyperviolin can do that couldn't be done with a regular violin, electronics, and a laptop (predictably, Mac makes an application called AU Lab that will facilitate this. Also predictably, they give it away for free in their Audio SDK). Don't get me wrong, this is craftsmanship and skill and it's hard to pull off (Fronesis will, on a related topic, argue vociferously that a certain guitarist for a certain band he likes, while not as technically adept at the guitar itself as other professionals, is highly adept at the signal post-processing, and in turn that the point of a musical instrument is the beauty of the sound you produce with it, and that signal processing is an integral part of modern musical instrumentation. Ergo The Edge is a genius). My argument here is that these new musical instruments are not new--maybe the physical configurations of electronics are, but the instruments can (or do) exist already in the combining of existing equipment.

I'm also not one to scoff at a laptop being called a musical instrument. Playing one is a skill and it requires practice--I have tried making songs out of sampling, looping, and software instruments, and I sucked at it. I sucked at it so much that it became immediately apparent that I'd need lessons in order to ever get good at it. I am, on the other hand, ignoring this instrument at the peril of my musical career: on MacIdol, the overwhelming majority of the songs posted, and the overwhelming majority of songs listened to, are (for desperate want of a better term) instrumental electronica. Like everyone else making sounds, I'm looking for that next thing, Big and New; I'd bet my money that it's going to come out of somebody's CPU somewhere.

i can't believe i am writing a love note about a computer program

I am not a geek. I am not a tech geek. I do not like tv shows about the future. (I am mtg by the way for those of you not caught on yet. TG is a geek, a tech geek, and a lover of tv shows about the future obviously).

You know how there are those details of your grandparents' -- even your parents' -- lives that you just can't believe because it's almost impossible to imagine the world changing so much in such a short period of time? Like movies were a quarter. Like spaceships were lauched into actual space with actual people in them based on calculations figured on a slide rule. Like going to the airport and flying in airplanes used to be fun. I think sometimes about how I would explain to my kid about film.

Me: Well we'd go on vacation and take a camera, but we'd have to make sure we had film which was this black tape like stuff all rolled up in a canister, and we fed that into the back of the camera after making a special trip to the store to get it, and then we had 24 pictures we could take, and then it was used up, so we had to roll the tape back up and bring it back to the store and leave it there for a few days to get it developed and then go back and pick up the pictures. And more film.

Kid: How could you see the image after you took the picture?

Me: You couldn't.

Kid: How could you know if it was a good picture then?

Me: You couldn't.

Kid: How could you share your pics with other people?

Me: You passed them around.

Kid: Like, literally?

Me: Yes. Good use of the term literally.

Kid: What if you wanted to take more than 24 pictures?

Me: You had to buy more film.

Kid: What about the camera on your phone?

Me: I didn't have a camera on my phone. And it wouldn't have helped anyway as it was at home attached by a wire to the wall.

Anyway, digital cameras are neat, sure. The lack of film and film hassle is liberating. Being able to see the shot after you take it is handy. Being able to take a thousand shots of whatever strikes your fancy is great. Being able to post and share and fix photos is nice. But it's almost too much. I have taken a zillion fabulous photos. I could blow them up and frame them and put them on my wall. I could take them to an art show thus and sell them for 150 dollars apiece except that everyone else now has the ability to take these photos for themselves as well. Mostly, though, they just sit on my computer. There is no point even in getting them printed. It's cool but kind of anticlimactic. I do miss my very-not-at-all-automatic 35mm which i was using up until, um, three maybe years ago.

Today, however, I was ichatting with my mom who wanted to send me some photos and doesn't have her mail set up yet, so she just dragged the photos from iPhoto into our chat, and they showed right up in the chat window more or less instantly. This is worth the price of admission. It is just the coolest freaking thing yet. (A very close second was when we were ichatting with sam who said you have to hear this song and just dragged it from itunes into the chat as well, and we listened to it together, half a world away.) (You see what happens? My prose gets all purple. Computers shouldn't be this romantic.) Also, I had never dragged photos from iPhoto into my iChat before and had no real reason to believe that it could be done besides a hunch that since it would be convenient and cool, mac had probably figured out a way to do it, and since it was a mac, it was probably done exactly the way I'd guess it would be. And this was, just that simply, entirely the case. It is just about exactly like love.

OaO Newsflash: Zombies

So apparently the zombies have risen and are now staggering around the halls of my workplace, groaning things such as, "more brains!" and, "Why haven't you updated your hours in the Scrum tasklist?" If there's one thing that's surprising about the sudden happenstance of the undead rising from their graves, walking among us, and (despite their extreme deadness) being uncomfortably familiar with the Agile Business Methodology, it's how banal it is. Seriously, it's snooze-ville. Sure, they smell bad and their earlier awkward disembowelment of our Java Infrastructures developer is going to delay Friday's planned content launch until Monday. But otherwise, there's nothing. We here at The Odds Are One would have expected the city to be in flames by now, accompanied by mass panic and awesome car crashes on every street corner. But instead there's only the occasional minor inconvenience--having to step over bodies on the way to the coffee machine or having one of them try to eat my neck at the weekly Authentication Services Work Group Meeting and having to beat him off with his own arm. And, of course, the occasional blood-curdling scream. But that's it. Maybe there will be more excitement later.

UPDATE (12:15 p.m.): Apparently the zombie who earlier demanded to know about my scrum hours was not a zombie. In fact, it was my manager. The Odds Are One regrets the error.

You Have Read This Post Before

In my high school biology class, Mr. Glover floated the theory that Deja Vu was a time-lag problem--you saw an image, but the chemical symbol of the stimulus reached your interpretive centers from one eye an instant before the other one, so that you saw it twice, and when the second signal came in, you thought, "Hey, I've been here before."

An interesting theory, but it turns out The Wayne (as we called him then--God, the wit of age fifteen) was wrong. We don't store memories as sights, sounds, smells, or sensations, we store them as chemical signals, and remembering them is the process of translating those signals back into things our brain can interpret as the original stimuli. Apparently, we occasionally lose the subtleties of those signals and get confused when the new chemical translation looks exactly like an old one.

Memories feel a certain way, even the ones that aren't particularly happy or sad. That feeling, that sort of, "huh..." is there the instant before the translation of that memory happens and the experience unfolds back into its sensory components. Deja Vu seems to occur at this same level. The titular feeling comes first, a feeling coming from the brain that says, "I'm remembering this." So while it seems like it's a fault of memory, it could just as easily be a fault of encoding the incoming stimuli--and then the brain is indeed getting the same signal from two different places--one within, and one without.

You Have Read This Post Before

In my high school biology class, Mr. Glover floated the theory that Deja Vu was a time-lag problem--you saw an image, but the chemical symbol of the stimulus reached your interpretive centers from one eye an instant before the other one, so that...get it? This is a post about Deja Vu...which I posted twice...so you read it already...get it? Do you? Do you??? DO YOU???????

More Monday Marginalia

A host of new Calculus Affair songs are up at left. I'd been dawdling around the remixing and re-fixing for months and it was starting to drag on, so I made a concerted push this weekend (where "concerted push" == "the minimum effort possible") to fix the last Calculus Affair songs from the RPM Challenge album. Anyway, now we return to the studio to work on the material we've been futzing around with the last couple of months since then. Updates as events warrant.

Also, on Friday I posted a link to a song from one of my favorite MacIdol artists, Zebulon Revisted, in the Music Capsule. Check it out. It is cooler than the other side of the pillow, baby.

Here's Christopher Hitchens on the Paris Hilton saga. It's the horror movie aesthetic writ...something.

And at this point, I'd normally link to that incredibly brilliant Ichiro quote, but Greg beat me to it.

OaO Presents: Hilarity For Nerds™

Courtesy of Alicia:

Werner Heisenberg is in his car on the way to deliver a lecture and, being that he is late, is speeding. Inevitably, he zips past a policeman, who pulls him over. Walking up to the car, the officer knocks on the window and Heisenberg rolls it down. "Do you know how fast you were going?" demands the policeman. "No," says Heisenberg, "But I do know where I am."

The Tide Is High, But I'm Moving On

Slate has one of their News Graph videos up profiling a Larry King interview with the newly freed Jack Kevorkian. It's short and somewhat interesting: they have doctors responding to his comments and they've grouped the results by averred religion (Catholic/Protestant/Jew). The first notable thing is that the Jews are with him immediately, but pretty much as soon as he opens his mouth their support drops off. Then it drops way off when he makes sweeping claims about how all doctors except him have sold off their principles to the government in order to practice (strange how people don't like it when you debase them and everything they stand for), and he loses everybody with the inevitable comparison of self to Rosa Parks (Sarah Vowell and Aaron Sorkin have dealt with that particular bit of self-aggrandizement pretty well).

Kevorkian's touchstone, euthanasia--like stem cell research and other so-called Culture of Life topics--is an issue that doesn't really make sense outside of the broad context of humanity. There aren't any parseable arguments against it on the human level that I've ever heard; instead it's a slippery-slope-based uneasiness that this is the first step on the way to a universe where Michael York hunts you down like a dog after you turn 30. If what we as a whole are really discussing is our future as a species, the debate makes rather more sense. One person being afraid that if we allow euthanasia that ones children will force one into assisted suicide because one has become old and useless probably doesn't constitute a legitimate fear. A population with a collective unconscious fear, on the other hand, that a new offshoot of humanity will emerge that has little to no use for the old one and that this in turn will redefine the value of the life of the old species and the reasonable basis for its euthanasia--it's much farther into the realm of speculative fiction, but it's a much more sensical argument to parse.

If this blog were famous for, you know, anything at all, it might be because it previously lumped together George W. Bush and the Unibomber as members of a collective effort to make our species think about the future it's rushing headlong into. Ted Kaczynski, as you will recall from earlier in this blog, was fucking insane, and the "Culture" of "Life", seeing as how it selectively doesn't include poverty, access to health care, starting wars, or capital punishment, just isn't a useful frame for understanding the arguments it supposedly makes. If, on the other hand, we are all talking about the future of the species and the future of a species that might supplant it, I might be interested in what they have to say.

Secret, The

Someday I'm going to write a book like The Secret, and yet utterly, utterly unlike The Secret. I'd like to title it something like, Dude, Stop Being Such A Dumbass, but I don't think it would sell very well. Instead it'll probably end up being something like, Yes, I Know The World Is A Complex And Deeply, Deeply Fucked Up Place, But Everything You Think You Know About It Is Still Wrong: Or, The Whale.

I like to think that pop self-help books like The Secret and their vast popularity herald the end of Post-Modernism. The twentieth century watched a line that started at Einstein, ran through Heisenberg and Schrödinger, that connected to Gödel and Derrida, and (I hope) will emphatically end with people writing books that claim that since the cat in the box is neither alive nor dead until you open the lid, it is scientifically proven that if you want a iPhone-enabled BMW enough, all you have to do is imagine having it really, really hard, and it will be yours (What? You did that and didn't end up with a BMW? Obviously you weren't doing it right).

The model in which all frames of reference are equally valid, in which the same thing observed in a wave-like way acts like a wave and in a particle-like way acts like a particle, in which the Author is "Dead" and only the Response of the Reader matters has been an incredibly productive and enlightening one. But we as a population took it about as far as it would go some decades ago, and as this model mildews, we have to live with things like String Theory (now celebrating 30 years without a successful experimental result!) and an actual government running an actual country that thinks that through faith it shapes its own reality, and that the only reason its policies are failing is because its critics really, really want them to (critics who, obviously, must have mystical Quantum-Physical powers that they acquired by reading The Secret).

I'm all about the fuzziness of the universe myself, but I'm also all about the fact that only a complete idiot would argue that a depot leaving the train is just as valid a view as the train leaving the depot. A model that implies the existence of alive/dead cats in our universe, while it is the absolute most successful and useful scientific theory ever devised, has at least one glaring, obvious problem: we do not observe alive/dead cats in our universe. Mrs. Transient Gadfly assures me that while this property of the observer affecting the observed is true about absolutely everything else in any discipline, it is just not friggin' true of friggin' cats. And this is the sort of thing about which Mrs. Transient Gadfly is always right. So I hope that The Secret is some kind of signpost at the end of some kind of road, because it's time for a new model.

OaO Presents: The Music Capsule™

The world of music is changing in fashions both rapid and alarming, being fed by two trends. First, the music itself is, for all practical purposes, free. Second, anyone can create a high-quality recording in their home and immediately make it available to anyone else in the world. There are figuratively ten million musical monkeys out there typing on ten million musical typewriters. 99.999% of it is, predictably, noise. But some of those monkeys are producing Shakespeare that, right now, almost nobody can hear through the cacophony.

Music labels are, as you might imagine, appropriately terrified of this brave new world. I share the fervent hope of many that they'll all sink slowly and painfully into irrelevance, but they probably won't. The "problem" of music on the internet could be solved tomorrow--make all music downloads free, and in return for the right to host that music and advertise (or whatever) along side of it, have websites pay into a fund that is distributed to the artists based on what percentage of downloads their music constitutes (this is exactly what happens today with radio airplay, except revenue distribution is determined by survey, whereas online you could get an exact count. People could certainly create spam-like bots to download their own songs repeatedly to make their music seem more popular than it was, but this is the kind of thing that can be easily detected by statistical fraud analysis. The e-tail giant I work for, for instance, is quite excellent at that sort of thing). The reason this hasn't happened already is that it would make record labels utterly irrelevant.

As with all rich and powerful cartels throughout history, the RIAA as a whole will hang on and use its power as long as it can, suing children and old ladies for pirating music, before finally collapsing and dying. The smart labels, on the other hand, will realize that there is still tons of money to be made in the painstaking process of filtering out the Shakespeares from the screaming cacophonous monkeys, therein finding entirely new streams of revenue and power and giving birth to a new cartel.

I, for one, have decided not to wait. In addition to posting my own songs as I decide they're ready for public consumption, I've started posting songs by other artists who have thrown their art into the current mass music (literal!) free-for-all. Our first artist appearing in the capsule at left is JulianC (I'm guessing it's meant to be pronounced, "JU-lee-ence"), a drumloop-crazed electric guitarist whose concoction I quite enjoyed upon hearing it on MacIdol. As with my own music, I hope you will give it a listen, and if you like it, I hope you'll share it with friends, and so on, and maybe the world will somehow change for the better. If you don't like it, you can, you know, shut up about it.

Persistence of Memory

My nephew lives with my sister and brother-in-law four houses down. He's one and a half, and his vocabulary that I've heard so far consists of two one-syllable words—one of which sounds like "dog" and one of which sounds like "car"—and two two-syllable words, "mama" and "uh-pah." This last one can variously mean "iPod," "apricot," or "Uncle Paul."

I am mowing the lawn on Memorial Day. Down the street, Sister, Brother-In-Law, and Nephew are in the front yard, putting up a new fence. Look Nephew, says Sister, there is Uncle Paul. She points at me. Nephew turns and looks and sees Uncle Paul, far away down the street. Uncle Paul sees Sister and Nephew and waves. Nephew, for whom it is a very new thing, waves back at Uncle Paul, who is far away.

Uncle Paul thinks, Nephew is but one and a half—what if this is the first memory of me that Nephew retains? What if this picture—Uncle Paul is a person who is down the street and waves, is his developmental and foundational picture of me? What if every subsequent memory he has of me is built on top of this Ur-memory, so that no matter what experiences he has of me the rest of our lives, when he calls up the mental model of me from his brain, the most fundamental, inescapable, primordial part of it will be this one, first, experience? There is Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul is far away.

It's My Birthday Too, Yeah

There's nothing particularly noteworthy about turning 34, save that I can now say that I outlived Jesus (in your face, Jesus). There's not even any interesting numerology. Two years ago when I turned 2⁵ on 5/25/2005, now that was cool. But it's pretty much downhill from there.

In the year after turning 16 my brain underwent one more set of (I assume developmental) changes, and then after that it just stopped, such that today I still feel like a teenager, it's just that I hold a job and own a house and walk around in a 34 year-old's body. At some point after that I realized why people get so freaked out turning 30, then turning 40, and so on. The internal them stops getting older while their outside face, and the outside world, just keeps on keeping on.

It's the little secret of the world, that it's entirely populated and run by 16 year olds; 16 year olds who are still caught up with who likes whom, who's popular and who isn't; we hurt and do hurt to each other like 16 year olds. It looks different, sure, but it's only because we don't have those faces any longer.

Further Thoughts on Joss Freaking Whedon

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” (Source linked below)

Regular readers know that we here at OaO espouse a view of our biological and conscious selves that states that we have at the core a brain like any animal, a very intricate and complex stimulus-response machine, but that we also possess a highly evolved ability to post-hoc narrate that stimulus and response; id est you respond to your surroundings and situations in some way and then, some number of microseconds later, you make up a story about why you responded that way. Sometimes that story models the actions of stimulus and response quite well (I decide to go down to the cafeteria and eat french fries because I'm hungry and the guy in the office next door has french fries and they smell yummy...mmm...french fries), and sometimes it really, really doesn't.

Humans, in the words of Neal Stephenson, are stupendous badasses. But an inescapable fact of our evolution from carbon chain to stupendous badass is that we got here by being unimaginable bastards. Nature, red in tooth and claw, did things we probably don't want to hear about in order for our genes to make it to this point. Somewhere along the line a particular strain of genes thought it might try cooperating with other gene pools instead of brutally trying to wipe them out and see how that worked out, and lo and behold it worked out pretty well. But we're still animals, and the cutthroat bastardry that got us here remains in our genes.

Say you're a male of a mammalian species, and you one day realize that the only way that your genes are going to survive is to impregnate a female and make sure that the resulting offspring survives long enough to reproduce. Then you realize that, as far as reproduction is concerned, your role as a male begins and ends at fire-and-forget (God, I love that metaphor). The gears and wheels turn in your animal brain some more and you realize, "holy crap, after she's impregnated she could just go off and take my offspring and I'd never know what happened to it. Or worse, she could go off and get impregnated by somebody else at the same time and I'd end up protecting somebody else's genes. I have almost no control over this process. This simply won't do." And Bam! You've got womb envy. The terror of not having control over the most basic needs of your genes causes the red-in-truth-and-claw part of your brain to kick in--it sees that the female of the species is generally smaller and weaker and can be physically controlled and decides that anything it needs to do to re-assert that control must be done.

When this mammal is also human and is well practiced in post-hoc explanations for its behavior it feels, you know, a little bit awkward about just exerting brutal control over half the members of our species, so we need to come up with a narrative about why that's okay. Sometimes...actually, pretty much all the time...we wind up with religious dogma. We couch our unimaginable bastardry in some story about how it's written in a Very Important Book that someone somewhere said it brings dishonor to our family when a woman has sex with the wrong person, and therefore she must be killed (or when the religion stops working, we couch our bastardry in made up science that purports to prove what the purveyors of that science already take as a given).

I believe and hope that the tide that made individual bastardry a successful evolutionary strategy has long since turned, and that cooperation amongst a widely diverse gene pool is replacing it as the best strategy for long term survival. It's only that these things happen on a much longer time scale than any human will witness that forces us to continue to endure the unimaginable bastardry that we do to each other. And it's the fact that we exist in such an in-between state that we live with such twisted justifications for that bastardry as "Honor Killings."

I wish we'd evolve just a little quicker, though.

Joss Freaking Whedon

Joss Freaking Whedon!

Monday Marginalia

First off, sorry about the mess. I realize my blog looks like complete ass right now, and would be an embarrassment even if I weren't someone who BUILDS USER INTERFACES FOR A LIVING, but...uh...nope, no, I got nothin'. It's bad. I will fix it soon.

UPDATE: I'm not convinced that this is much better, but I couldn't stand looking at it the way it was any longer. More changes sure to come./UPDATE

Second, the latest result of my cleanup work from my RPM Challenge album appears top left. It's your standard 80's New Wave rock song critiquing String Theory due to its untimeliness, and continues to herald my inexorable march away from alt-folkiness towards I have no earthly idea what.

On the topic of the RPM Challenge, apparently some fellow musician contacted Starbucks and got them interested in an Hear Music compilation of RPM artists, and I got an email this weekend that I was "nominated" (for some very loose definition of the term) to have a song on the/an album. This, as with all things that are both musical and make money, seems very very iffy to me, but who the hell knows.

Speaking of things in email this weekend, I also got a note from my old college friend Layne, to whom I hadn't spoken in years, and who now seems to be a food and travel writer living in Buenos Aires. This is, by far, the coolest thing that anybody I know is doing with their lives, so for starters I've added her blog Go Where the Taxista Takes You to the HBC. Read it and live vicariously.

You Just Get More

Any old amateur blogger can reprint for you some funny and ironic political quote that, by the time it appears, everyone has already seen on account of they, too, watch The Daily Show (you dumbshit). But here at The Odds Are One™, we give you more. We'll actually delve into the quote, go the extra mile, give you that extra insight that you just can't get anywhere else. We can offer this unique service because we sit around reading our own damn blog while we eat dinner--that's just how pathetic we are. Or else it's because of how much we care about you, the loyal reader. I'm sure it's one or the other.

Anyway we here at the Odds Are One™ are reading the A.G. quote below and it's suddenly struck us, why would he say that? I mean, that's really weird. That's like, mental short-circuit weird. It's Meta-Freudian-Slip reverse syllogism weird. Let us go over what we know: Gonzales is an intelligent man, and quite possibly in some metaphorical and/or non-metaphorical sense, Gonzales has sold his soul to a neo-religious ideology that, as most of them do, tells itself that its actions are for the good of the many when they are in fact good for the needs of only a very few. I'll come back to that in a moment, but one other thing we should take as an a priori is that Gonzales is in fact cognizant of the fact that the attorney firings are in the news and that he is aware that he's there in the House testifying about it.

Here's what I'm coming up with:

The Slip seems pretty straightforward: he's been rigorously coached, or coached himself, to repeat that there was absolutely nothing improper about the attorney firings. But he clearly also knows it isn't remotely true. His cheatin' heart will tell on him. His conscious mind isn't going to let anything slip through his mouth that betrays this fact, but his subconscious is just dying to let it out, and subconscious outwits the conscious by constructing a reverse logical syllogism that Alberto's forebrain can't quite parse in time to intercept the FTP packet his cranial nerves have sent to his mouth. "If there were a crime present the press would be reporting on it. So clearly there is no crime here, because if there were...oh...crap."

At the same time, this seems to clearly pinpoint his own internal ethical compass. Imagine the logistical nightmare that you'd have to engage with in your moral center in order to be where Gonzales is: "Sure, I'm an intelligent man and I've done a lot of things you wouldn't have liked to have done in the name of the ideology but I was doing it for the benefit of the party by getting more members of that party elected to office, which I owe to the party because people before me did what they had to do to get me where I am so I can...do a lot of things I wouldn't have liked to have done...wait a minute, wasn't I just here?"

So he knows that he's doing something wrong here, but he tells himself it's not really wrong. If it were really morally wrong to fire attorneys for partisan gain/lie in front of Congress/Start A War That We Know To Be Wrong But Is For The Greater Good And Will Stabilize The Source Of Our Energy Needs For The Next Century Or Two And Will Hold Those Interests For Our Children And Our Children's Children So They Can Live In Peace And Security Even If The Rest Of The World Goes To Hell On Account Of Fuck Them...*ahem*, if doing any of that were really wrong, the Freedom of The Press, the great protector that is our Fourth Estate, would come to our rescue and report the truth, and the people would rise up against them. I'd aver he thinks this because he is a child of Watergate, but I'm just guessing. This must be the specific form his own personal cognitive dissonance is taking right at the moment he's speaking (or maybe this is just what's on his mind this month, or, you know, this career). "If what I am doing were wrong, the press would be reporting it and people would be demanding answers, but what I'm doing is not wrong and I know this because...crap...here I am again." In one sentence he's given you a perfect zen koan for his own personal mental state.

If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it.

Yeah, Al. You'd probably hear about it.

OaO Presents: They Actually Said That™*

And it would be pretty darn difficult, if not impossible, to make a decision for political reasons and expect to get away with it. If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it. We'd probably read about it in the papers.

-Alberto Gonzales, testifying in the House Of Representatives on May 10th. Transcript

*"They Actually Said That" is an utterly non-trademarked catchphrase about which The Odds Are One apparently harbors some feeble hope that...something...oh, fuck it.

Truth

Ah, you, writer of XKCD, with your minimalist line drawings and your nerdish, nerdish hilarity. How polished your humor, yet how jejeune your philosophy. Fear not, you too shall soon learn the precariousness of trying to model The Truth.