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Have you heard the news? Abraham Lincoln invented a fore-runner of Facebook. No, really! It must be true because it said so on the internet.

Well, the hoax was exposed within a day, but not before a lot of major news sources fell for it. Here’s an excerpt from the hoax article:

The whole Springfield Gazette was one sheet of paper, and it was all about Lincoln. Only him. Other people only came into the document in conjunction with how he experienced life at that moment. If you look at the Gazette picture above, you can see his portrait in the upper left-hand corner… But just to the left of his picture, and above that column of text, is a little box. And in that box you see three things: his name, his address, and his profession (attorney).

The first column underneath his picture contains a bunch of short blurbs about what’s going on in his life at the moment – work he recently did, some books the family bought, and the new games his boys made up. In the next three columns he shares a quote he likes, two poems, and a short story about the Pilgrim Fathers…

Put all that together on one page and tell me what it looks like to you. Profile picture. Personal information. Status updates. Copied and shared material. A few longer posts. Looks like something we see every day, doesn’t it?

And it goes on:

Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself… Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”

This right here should have tipped anyone who read this off that this was a hoax, by the way: the use of the word “page” sounds very odd here, not at all like someone from the 1800s would use it, and exactly like someone familiar with the internet would use it.

And surely it must have struck the people reading this that the concept is on its face absurd. People would have no need for such a tool back in the 1800s. They already had town newspapers. The faux-proposal sounds just stupid when you put it like this. This, again, should have given the whole thing away.

What this hoax exposed–perhaps unwittingly–is that Facebook is not a lot more useful than a town newspaper. It gives you some ability to stay in touch with your friends, but for the most part it’s just a time-waster. It’s addictive, sure, but not all that useful. It is barely more than a glorified bulletin board. or newspaper.

Lincoln invent Facebook! The idea is laughable at first sight!

He was much too smart for that.

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It’s amazing how President Obama’s stance on gay marriage has “evolved”. Was there ever any doubt what his position was; and that the “evolving” line was a smokescreen to aid him at the ballot box? There wasn’t, at least, not until yesterday.

Most pundits are saying he did it to energize his liberal base. Well, speaking as a member of that base, I don’t feel particularly energized. I already knew where he stood on the issue, and understood that he simply wasn’t saying it explicitly for political reasons. Unfortunate, perhaps, but an understandable move given that gay marriage faces heavy opposition in many swing states.

The whole thing reminds me of the long-form birth certificate incident last year. Everything made sense: Obama wasn’t releasing the long-form birth certificate because that wasn’t what the State of Hawaii gives a person who requests a birth-certificate. The short-form is good enough for everyone else, so why should  it not be good enough for the President of the United States? To go to the trouble of getting the long-form would be to capitulate to conspiracy theorists.

And then he went and released the long-form birth certificate. This muddied the waters, and suddenly what had been a perfectly logical stance on his part became somewhat mystifying. It is much the same thing here: the original plan was quite understandable and rational. Then the sudden, seemingly impulsive change at the strangest possible time. I really don’t know what to think.

It may be Obama has decided to simply “draw a line in the sand”, as they say, and make clear the differences between him and the Republicans. Not an unreasonable idea, though again an odd change of strategy for someone who has typically been a moderate, non-standoffish type.

The thing is, most opponents of gay-marriage had simply taken for granted that Obama supported it. This is because most opponents of gay-marriage are people who will not hesitate in ascribing all manner of things they consider “evil” to the President. By all appearances, they have simply assumed that he is a Marxist, Muslim Kenyan usurper who means to destroy both the economic and moral fabric of the country, and anything he says or does to contradict such claims they assume to be lies or deception. This may indicate to him and his advisers that whatever he may say about gay marriage–or really, anything–is irrelevant to how the public perceives him.

I think Obama is a great President, but sometimes he does have an odd way of timing things. In the end, though, I don’t think this will change anything about the election. I think the fact that he did this suggests he is very confident.

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Let’s check up on Greek politics again, shall we? Things have played out about like I’d expect from the last time I wrote about them.

So, it seems that the failure of the austerity policies in Greece has led to the people who implemented it suffering huge losses at the polls. Well, that’s only to be expected. A nationalist party, known as the “Golden Dawn”, has made significant gains. Their leader, Nikolaos Mihaloliakos, appears to have modeled himself after Mussolini to an alarming degree.

Why are they so popular? Well, they are anti-austerity. They also are anti-immigrant. Perhaps the most troubling thing I’ve read about them comes from this article in the Miami Herald:

Golden Dawn toughs maintain a security watch in parts of central Athens and, upon request, provide escorts to people going to shop or retrieve their pension checks. If immigrants are squatting in an apartment owned by a Greek, Golden Dawn volunteers will clear them out and fix up the dwelling.

After a Greek man was killed in May 2011, reputedly by Afghan immigrants, Golden Dawn militants stopped traffic every afternoon for weeks, and hauled immigrants off public transport and beat them up, according to Marina Vichou, formerly a journalist with the BBC Greek service, who lives near scene and witnessed some of the incidents. ‘The police did nothing but protect Golden Dawn,’ she said.

As if that by itself weren’t disturbing enough, there is the historical parallel it evokes. Quoting from Wikipedia:

The First World War (1914–18) inflated Italy’s economy with great debts, unemployment (aggravated by thousands of demobilised soldiers), social discontent featuring strikes, organised crime,and anarchist, Socialist, and Communist insurrections. When the elected Italian Liberal Party Government could not control Italy, the Revolutionary Fascist Party (Partito Fascista Rivoluzionario, PFR) Leader Benito Mussolini took matters in hand, combating those societal ills with the Blackshirts, paramilitary squads of First World War veterans and ex-socialists; Prime Ministers such as Giovanni Giolitti allowed the Fascists taking the law in hand.

Some people wonder how the Fascists got to be so popular, when they were all obviously a bunch of bullies. That’s the answer: the government was so weak that people liked having a bunch of bullies to turn to who could provide a primitive kind of order. However, I don’t want to be hasty and assume that the worst things being said about the Golden Dawn are true; I’m just saying it is extremely troubling if true.

Historical similarities aside, though, this is where alliances between cosmopolitan (or “multicultural”) factions and the business interests tend to collapse: when the free market, microeconomic thinking of the businessmen wrecks the macroeconomy, allowing the nationalistic faction to take power.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the average blogger to correlate all his links. We live on a placid island of ignorance, in the midst of black seas of Wikis, and it was not meant that we should check the references. The Wiki editors, each biased in their own direction, have hitherto harmed us little. But someday, the linking together of barely-associated articles will open up such terrifying vistas of the internet–and of our own frightful pagerank therein–that we will either go mad from the revelation, or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of icanhascheezburger.com (Many apologies, Howard–MM.)

It all started with this post from Thingy–I realized I had never found out the origin of the common phrase “it was a dark and stormy night. So, I followed the link and it turns out, it was from this guy Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He was a prolific writer who also coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”.

So, I decided to read some of his books. Being a fan of horror, I chose to start off with The Haunted and the Haunters: or, The House and the Brain. It starts off as a fairly generic ghost story, but the end has some very interesting bits of philosophizing. Not a great work, but an enjoyable read, all in all.

He also wrote a book called Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. I tried to read it, but it was pretty dull. The plot did remind me a little of Arthur Machen’s later work The Novel of the Black Seal, which influenced Lovecraft greatly. But apparently, Vril inspired something of a “cult following”, and by that I mean that people actually thought it was true. The book is about a super-race that lives underground and has a powerful substance “Vril”, which allows them to do all sorts of amazing things. Some, notably the theosophists, believed that “Vril” existed.

Which is curious to me, because I know basically three things about theosophists:

  1. In the paragraph immediately after the one I parodied above in Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft mentions the theosophists briefly.
  2. The Theosophical Society was founded by Helena Blavatsky, who I know about solely because of the lines in the Warren Zevon song “Sacrificial Lambs”: “Madame Blavatsky and her friends/Changed lead into gold, and back again.”
  3. They have one weird logo. Observe:
Theosophical Society emblem, via Wikipedia

I only saw this symbol the other day, when I was reading about the lyrics to the They Might Be Giants song “I Palindrome I”, which includes the lyric “I am a snake head eating the head on the opposite side”. The technical word for this is Ouroboros. That word is also whence the name of the character Borous in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Old World Blues is derived.

“Hold up, Mysterious Man,” cries the bemused reader. “What the Devil is the point of all this free-association?” Well, I’ll tell you: there was some philosopher I was reading about many months ago who had some sort of reasoning system of free-association, “correlating contents” and looking for subtle inter-connectivities in Nature. It was really interesting, but in recent days I have searched Wikipedia with considerable diligence, but I can’t find his page. I think his first name might have been Charles, but that’s all I can remember. Any information you can furnish me with as to who the guy was would be appreciated.

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I saw a guy at the gym yesterday who had some sort of bizarre symbols tattooed all over his arms. I couldn’t tell what they were, and since he was lifting 50 pound dumbbells and wore an expression that suggested he’d punch you for chatting with him, I didn’t ask about their meaning.

I don’t understand tattoos in general, though. I’ve never seen a person, male or female, who looked better with tattoos. Now, I don’t say it’s impossible that there could be, but I’ve never seen one. Plus, you add in the health risks and it seems to me like it’s just a high-risk, low-reward proposition.

However, tattoos seem pretty popular, so I figure there must be some reason for it. I remember seeing an article in Star Wars Insider a long time ago about people with Star Wars tattoos. Here are some pictures, and while I have to admit the Cloud City picture is pretty awesome, I still don’t see how it could be worthwhile.

I’ve also observed it’s popular to get foreign-language tattoos–especially Chinese or Japanese characters. The danger here, though, is that you should really be damn sure about the language you’re getting permanently written on you. I read a story once about a guy who thought he was getting some awesome slogan in Latin, but it didn’t mean what he thought it meant. It was an insult. You can get away with that with a dead language like Latin, but suppose you accidentally got something stupid written in Chinese. There’s at least 1.3 billion people in the world who would laugh at you. You’re bound to bump into one of them eventually.

Actually, there is one reason I’d consider getting a tattoo, but computer technology has fortunately rendered it unnecessary. I would have considered getting the birthdays of my friends and family on the back of my hand or something so that I wouldn’t look like a jerk by forgetting those events. But I have a computer for that, so it’s a moot point.

Still, I figure there must be something exciting about it, at least to some people. And I’m not trying to criticize or judge the people with tattoos here; if a person likes that sort of thing, it doesn’t bother me. It’s just something I don’t understand.

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I’ve been meaning to blog about this Paul Krugman vs. Ron Paul debate for quite a while. First of all, while I side pretty much with Krugman, do think it’s kind of cool that Representative Paul was willing to debate him. Do you think we’ll ever see Romney debate Krugman?

A few points:

  1. For the most part, they talk past one another. It’s not really a back-and-forth except for a few snarky remarks, (e.g. Krugman’s Diocletian quip). They just say their ideas without responding to the other guy’s.
  2.  Krugman got Rep. Paul good on the question of what Milton Friedman said about the Fed.
  3. On the other hand, he kind of let Paul’s “competing currency” scheme go. There was a lot of currency competition among the thirteen colonies and in the early U.S.  And it didn’t last. Also, what was the Congressman talking about with “legalizing currency competition”? What about BerkShares?

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I once compared the Republican party to the rogue droid G0-T0 from KotOR II. Now, having read Gary Kamiya’s Salon article making the case for robo-Romney, I really don’t know why I didn’t go ahead and compare the Republican nominee-in-waiting himself to that deceptive droid. The similarities are many, particularly in the way G0-T0 poses as a human to accomplish his economic and political goals.

(Hat Tip to Eurobrat for the Salon article.)

*From Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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The tragic death of football great Junior Seau has caused even more discussion over the danger of the game, and what, if anything, can be done to make it safer. Slate is hosting a debate on whether the collegiate game ought to be banned. One of the participants, Malcolm Gladwell, has also written an article comparing football to dogfighting. It’s an interesting comparison, but to my mind, the central and very significant difference is that dogs don’t know what’s happening to them. They can’t agree to fight or not. They’re trained for it and they don’t why. Football players are human beings who can make an informed choice.

There is also the oft-made comparison of football players with Roman gladiators, but I believe that many, perhaps most, of the gladiators were captive soldiers from armies the Romans had defeated who had been enslaved and forced to be gladiators. Again, they had no choice in the matter.

But, you may say, it does not matter whether the fighters are man or beast, slave or free; the problem is in what such a violent sport means for our society. What kind of people are they who watch a violent game, with the participants suffering awful injuries, for entertainment? As Gladwell observed, it is the support of millions of fans that makes the choice to play pro football so appealing.

For myself, I never watched football for the “big hits” or anything like that. I watch for the strategy and the fun of seeing how teams use schemes and planning to foil their opponents. But it’s true that hitting hard is a key part of the game. It is well known, for instance, that a key part of New York’s ability to stifle New England’s offense is that they are able to hit Brady and throw him off his game.

And the violence and the injuries do create a conundrum for the well-meaning fan. No one wishes such ill on another person who is, after all, just someone earning a living. But there is still the inescapable truth that if a star on your opponent is unable to play, it makes it that much easier for you to win. And winning is “the only thing”, at least according to the great football coach Vince Lombardi. It was this unavoidable system of incentives that led to the Saints’ bounty scandal. It is also what makes people concerned that such a violent game is so popular today.

I don’t think anyone can ever ban football entirely–it would confirm the worst nightmare of every libertarian were the government to do that. The government would, however, be entirely within its rights to ban minors from competing in it, which I think would cause irreparable harm to the college game, and probably change the pro game quite a bit.

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Somebody famous once asked “if time travel is possible, where are the time travelers?” Presumably they would disguise themselves to fit in, but you have to assume there would be lapses. Maybe the people we think are crazy are really time travelers. That might explain things. Or maybe the people who think they are time-travelers are crazy.

Thingy posted some musings of her own about Andrew Basiago’s story, and it set me thinking more about time travel. Personally, I’m quite confident that Basiago is either playing a hoax or else a bit touched in the head–I swear, “project Pegasus“. Really?– but I do wonder about it on a theoretical level.

The most plausible means of time travel was that I’ve read went something like this: if something could go into a black hole and not be destroyed, it could theoretically reappear at any point in the Universe and at any point in time. The problem is, nothing that we know of can survive going into a black hole. (Obviously, I’ve oversimplified a lot here, mostly because I don’t understand it too well myself. This might help.)

Then, of course, there are all the paradoxes that arise with time-travel. They make for good stories, but they also seem to suggest it’s impossible. Oh, well. It’s a question better minds than my own have had difficulty grappling with, I know that.

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David Wong, writing in Cracked, lists “5 ways to spot a B.S. Political Story”. He highlights certain words that appear in political headlines, and what they often signify. It would be easy to blame this on lazy journalists; however, it’s really very easy to find yourself repeating the same phrases that are familiar to you. And it’s a huge hindrance to writing about politics. George Orwell famously advised in his essay Politics and the English Language:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Great advice, and so naturally very difficult to heed. I’ve probably fallen back on time-worn phrases countless times in writing this blog. As people acquire language largely through imitation, it’s only natural that we fall easily into imitation when using it.

Wong also laments how stories often couch everything purely in terms of political points scored. He writes of the headline “Slowdown in U.S. jobs growth deals a blow to Obama.”:

How about the millions of people who are out of work? Hey, guys, I don’t know if you realize this, but the world actually exists. Those numbers on the screen represent actual humans who are actually suffering. No, really! It’s not a video game!

The reason the press has to couch everything in this manner is simple: otherwise, they get called for political bias. Wong talks about stories that treat, for example, the healthcare law as merely a political “horse-race” issue, but the poor writers have only two other options:

  1. Write headlines like “Supreme Court to render millions uninsured”–a headline which would cause all the Republicans to gripe even more than usual about “liberal bias”, and whine that this was “value-laden language”.
  2. Capitulate to the Republicans entirely and write headlines like “Supreme Court to free millions from yoke of socialism”.

The first thing will never happen, because hell hath no fury like a Republican who is mad at the press. The second thing is out at every news source that has some interest in the truth. So, all that’s left is the horse-race approach. After all, no one can complain that it’s biased.