"This is the new pen...."

I'd said the other day, "I ordered the pen. I ordered the ink." The ink arrived yesterday and the pen today. I'm just so pleased with it. I'm getting back to my artistic proclivities. #Altexit.

"And... that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do."

"All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny."

The Director said sententiously.

A quote, IM'd from Meade, who's been reading my blog this morning. We share a Kindle account, so he can search for "happiness" in the same books on his iPad that I've got on mine.

He sends 2 more from the same book:

1. "You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art."

2. "Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

Obama goes to the bookstore...

... and — using the credit card he only uses about 3 times a year — buys:

1. "The Bayou Trilogy."

Det. Rene Shade, an ex-boxer turned cop...  with a 10-year-old daughter and a killer on his trail. There's poetry in Woodrell's mayhem, each novel—and scene—full of gritty and memorable Cajun details. 

I don't know enough about this to speculate about whether Obama identifies with Shade, but I will note that Sasha is 10. 

2. "Brave New World" ... which is a book I carry around in my iPad and dip into frequently for inspiration. I know Obama is thinking about jobs as he vacations, and perhaps there's something in "Brave New World" about jobs. For example, there's the idea of depriving relieving people of the competition for better jobs and keeping 8/9 of the population in childishly simply low-level jobs where they will be happy:

No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True... they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn’t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes: Thousands of them... And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.

So... 1 + 2... the boxer and thinking outside the box.

ADDED: Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little soma...

"You can't tell me that all these free love hippie dippie types wouldn't embrace some sort of SOMA type narcotic in their later years."

"Just have them sign a waiver, after the age of 70, you're on your own, or the government will provide five years worth of SOMA, and maybe Viagra and prostitutes upon request, and I'm sure plenty of Boomers would willingly hit the death booths at the age of 75 after five solid years of drug-fueled orgiastic living (just don't open any boomer-orgy centers near me, like sewage treatment, it's something that has to be done, you just don't want to live by or downwind from it). The cost savings would be huge, no more retirees living 30 and 40 years on Social Security into their 90s and 100s. Who says Huxley's vision has to be a 'dystopia'?"

Said XWL today, in the nether regions of the comments thread to yesterday's ObamaCare post.

"Brave New World" or "1984" — "Which template would win"?

We used to wonder, Margaret Atwood writes.

During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from Aids, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama: Brave New World was winning the race.

That picture changed, too, with the attack on New York's twin towers in 2001. Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us, it appears, though it's no longer limited to the lands behind the former iron curtain: the west has its own versions now.

On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the gene-rich and the gene-poor - Huxley's alphas and epsilons - and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and - to go one better than Brave New World - for immortality.

Atwood's fear: We get both.

Read the whole thing.

I especially like the part about how she, as a 14 year old girl, struggled to understand Huxley, who wrote things like:

"Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor."

(Here's the line in it's chapter, which includes this sex talk: "'Hug me till you drug me, honey.'...'Kiss me till I'm in a coma. Hug me, honey, snuggly …'")

She asks:

[H]ow close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents?...

We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe... that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough.

"The New York Times editors think that the phrase 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' is in the Constitution..."

Oops! But if it's a living Constitution, surely, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have evolved there by now. Let's run with it! Possibly to things the NYT won't even like.

Now, what is this editorial position that needs LL&PH? Follow the logic. It begins with the realization that when the war is bad, the soldiers will go crazy:

As the Army’s suicide rate hits record levels in the Iraq war, there’s small wonder practically everyone in Congress wants to deal with the parallel emerging crisis of depressed veterans tempted to take their own lives. Everyone, that is, except Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. He stands alone in blocking final passage of a suicide prevention bill in fear that the government’s record-keeping on troubled vets might somehow crimp their ability to purchase handguns.

Even the craven gun lobby should manage some shame over this absurd example of Second Amendment idolatry.

The House has unanimously approved a measure mandating the screening of all veterans for suicide risk, but Senator Coburn worries that veterans’ medical data might be appropriated by other agencies to deny that all-encompassing right to wield arms on the domestic front.

The senator’s office points to another bill near passage — prompted by the Virginia Tech gun massacre — that would encourage states to do a better job of listing mentally troubled individuals on the federal roll of risky gun purchasers. But tying these two measures together is itself evidence of defective reasoning, or at least scurrilous politicking. The Virginia Tech measure has nothing to do with veterans and affects only those Americans formally judged by a court to be mentally disturbed.

It is an eminently good thing that the anti-suicide measure would require medical specialists to keep track of veterans found to be high risks for suicide. But that’s to care for them as human beings, under that other constitutional right — to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Respect for the grave sacrifices by veterans requires the Senate to strike down the Coburn ploy and hurry this vital measure to President Bush.

Why stop at soldiers? Let's have the government come around and check on everyone's sanity and then track those of us who don't meet the standard! To show we care for them as human beings.

And you know, I think whoever wrote this overheated editorial -- it's full of "defective reasoning" -- is a little funny in the head. Respect for the grave responsibilities of the editors of great newspapers requires me to recommend that President Bush send medical specialists to test and keep track of them. (And bring the soma, because this is about your right to happiness.) If there is any absurd talk about the individual's right to be let alone, even the craven privacy lobby should manage some shame.

"If I do discriminate, it's that I only want healthy, intelligent people."

If you accept a woman choosing her sperm donor, and if you accept a woman choosing which embryo left over from someone else's fertility treatment to have implanted, will you draw the line at the deliberate creation of an embryo from an egg and sperm donor of the woman's choice?

Before contracting for the embryos, clients can evaluate the egg and sperm donors, and can even see pictures of them as babies, children and sometimes adults....

"People have long warned we were moving toward a 'Brave New World,' " said Robert P. George of Princeton University, who serves on the President's Council on Bioethics. "This is just more evidence that we haven't been able to restrain this move towards treating human life like a commodity. This buying and selling of eggs and sperm and now embryos based on IQ points and PhDs and other traits really moves us in the direction of eugenics."...

"People can say, 'Oh, this is the new Hitler.' That's not the case," [said Jennalee Ryan of the Abraham Center of Life.] "I don't take orders. I say 'This is what I have' and send them the background. If they don't think it's right for them, they don't have to take them."...

"If I do discriminate, it's that I only want healthy, intelligent people," Ryan said. "People will say, 'You're trying to create the perfect human race.' But we've always done gene selection just by who women choose as their husbands and men choose as their wives. This is no different."

When you choose a husband or wife, you're picking the person you want to live with, not just the genetic material. If you've married, how much did you think about the quality of the genetic material you could procure for your offspring? But then, what genetic qualities would you select for your children that you wouldn't care about having in your adult companion? And are there some things you want in your spouse that you'd reject if you knew it was in that embryo you're about to have implanted?

I suppose the fact that I wrote those questions first reveals that I'm not especially concerned about this new step in reproductive technology. The cry of "eugenics" always goes up, but what are the people who raise it really worrying about? Not the return of the Nazis. It's all-too-convenient the way the Nazis pop up to assist in making the argument you already wanted to make. The real objection is to reproductive choice. Once you have disaggregated reproduction from the full human relationship between the parents, what makes you want to draw the line here? Perhaps your objection is nothing more than resentment that only rich people get to fulfill this preference. If so, who are you to intrude on their private life?

One argument against this new practice is that there are so many embryos left over from infertility treatments and that these embryos should be implanted instead. But, as noted in the article, those leftover embryos are made from the eggs of woman who: 1. is older, and 2. has a fertility problem. It still seems more charitable and unselfish to choose them, but does that make it wrong to want better? We have a sense -- don't we? -- that parenthood means an open acceptance of whatever child happens to arrive and that the desire to be selective reveals that one has not met the parenthood ideal.

The contrast between “Brave New World” and “1984,” the nature of Ophelia’s madness in “Hamlet,” and the theme of colonialism in "Lord Jim."

I love the hilarious obviousness of the paper topics chosen to test those on-line paper-writing services. Guess what? The papers they write for you are incredibly crappy.

Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar at Harvard and a confessed “soft touch,” said the grade he would give [the Ophelia] paper “would depend, at least to some extent, on whether I thought I was reading the work of a green freshman — in which case I would probably give it a D+ and refer the student to the writing lab for counseling — or an English major, in which case I would simply fail it.”

He added: “If I had paid for this, I would demand my money back.”

Hmmm... yeah, but you're thinking, I don't go to Harvard. Maybe I can still get by with it.

I hope teachers have a lot of ways to deal with the problem. Students who aren't cheating also write bad papers. It's not enough for students to know the web-bought papers will be fairly bad. They may be rather sure the paper they'd have to write would also be bad.

It's also not enough to use plagiarism detection search engines:

Thanks to search engines like Google, college instructors have become adept at spotting those shop-worn, downloadable papers that circulate freely on the Web, and can even finger passages that have been ripped off from standard texts and reference works.

A grade-conscious student these days seems to need a custom job, and to judge from the number of services on the Internet, there must be virtual mills somewhere employing armies of diligent scholars who grind away so that credit-card-equipped undergrads can enjoy more carefree time together.

At least these search engines are causing the papers to get worse. If students know that -- and I'm trying to help here -- that's a disincentive.

One thing I would recommend to teachers is having paper topics that are very closely tied to the idiosyncratic way the material was presented in class, so that a researcher outside of the class (including a student who skipped class) would not be able to handle it properly.

Another alternative is to base the grade on a proctored exam, which is what I do. Even where the exam is open book, you can ask a question that is not generic, that is tied to the way the material was discussed in class, and that presents a specific question that cannot be anticipated beforehand. And then you have to have the nerve to grade so that only writing that answers the question can receive credit. That's my technique.