The front page of today’s Times features an ugly story about dust-ups at the region’s gas stations, with nightmarishly long lines of cars and correspondingly frayed tempers. It is easy to view the scene from an imaginary point in the future, as we look back on the drawbacks of medieval life. The automobile in America is already a concrete symbol of stupidity. It’s not the cars themselves that are to blame — technology is almost never responsible for bad behavior. But it’s the use to which they’ve been put, animating the tacky suburban simulacra of millionaires’ enclaves that surround the city today. Compounding the problem, almost every one of those mini-castles is surrounded by a moat of lawn that can double a homeowner’s consumption of fossil fuels (fertilizers, gas for lawn mowers).

The automobile extends a promise of autonomy that adolescent males cannot resist. Prom night crashes aside, no real harm there. The harm is in the civil structure of low-density housing that makes it impossible to outgrow the teenager’s attachment to his car.

And who’s to say that billions of Chinese don’t have the right to have fun? Some example we’ve set!

***

I could hardly believe it, but Nate Silver really did make his experience of poker both lucid and fascinating to me. The Signal and the Noise is 99.999% signal. Even in its brief moments of advocacy it is clear and bi-partisan. The closing of the chapter devoted to “A Climate of Healthy Skepiticism,” in which he analyses the difficulty of climate forecasting in terms that he has already laid out beautifully throughout the course of his book, Silver writes,

It is precisely because the [political] debate may continue for decades that climate scientists might do better to withdraw from the street fight and avoid crossing the Rubicon from science into politics. In science, dubious forecasts are more likely to be exposed — and the truth is more likely to preval. In politics, a domain in which the truth enjoys no privileged status, it’s anybody’s guess.

The dysfunctional state of the American political system is the best reason to be pessimistic about our country’s future. Our scientific and technological prowess is the best reason to be optimistic. We are an inventive people. The United States produces ridiculous numbers of patents, has many of the world’s best universities and research institutions, and our companies lead the market in fields ranging from pharmaceuticals to information technology. If I had a choice between a tournament of ideas and a political cage match, I know which fight I’d rather be engaging in — especially if I thought I had the right forecast.

***

It was too cold outside for shorts, but that’s what I was wearing inside, and I didn’t want to change just to run around the block. The first errand was to Duane Reade, where I had to refill two prescriptions. They had the more important of the two, but would have to wait until Monday for the other. Fine and dandy — I’d come back to pick up the important one tomorrow. But then, after I’d been to the liquor store and to Gristede’s (where there were Entenman’s coffee cakes on the shelf — yay!), the cell phone rang. I hoped that it would be Megan or Ryan, but it was Duane Reade, robo-calling without any specifics to tell me that my prescription, unspecified, would be delayed. I dumped the groceries and went out again. Would I have to manage both medications, stretching them out? Happily, no. The robo-call was, in addition to confusing, completely unnecessary.

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2012 at 10:41 am.