“Radical Presentism”
Posted by Patrick at 08:11 AM * 113 comments

Cory Doctorow writes about the kind of science fiction I find myself most wanting to read these days. As he says, “science fiction writers don’t predict the future (except accidentally), but if they’re very good, they may manage to predict the present.”

Mary Shelley wasn’t worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn’t worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels. […]

Some of my favorite contemporary speculative fiction is instead nakedly allegorical in its approach to the future—or the past, as the case may be.

Consider Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids (Bantam, 2009), an environmental techno-thriller—Sterling once defined a techno-thriller as “a science fiction novel with the president in it”—set in a mid-twenty-first century in which global warming has done its catastrophic best to end humanity. Finally forced to confront the reality of anthropogenic climate change, humanity fizzles and factions off into three warring camps: the Dispensation, an Al-Gorean green-capitalist technocracy; the Acquis, libertarian technocrats who’ll beta-test anything (preferably on themselves); and China, a technocracy based on the idea that technology can make command-and-control systems actually work, in contrast to the gigantic market failure that destroyed the planet. The play of these three ideologies serves as a brilliant and insightful critique of the contemporary approach to environmental remediation. Sterling especially gets the way that technology is a disruptor, that it unmakes the status quo over and over again, and that a battle of technologies is a battle in which the sands never stop shifting. Casting his tale into the future allows him to illustrate just how uneven our footing is in the present day—and the fact that the book consists of humans getting by, even getting ahead, despite all the chaos and devastation, makes The Caryatids one of the most optimistic books I’ve read in recent days.

All of which has something in common with Mundane SF, but it’s different in an important way. Cory isn’t prescribing rhetorical devices; he isn’t categorically dismissing as “wish fulfillment” stories that include time travel or warp drives. Indeed, Cory isn’t prescribing anything; rather, he’s pointing out how some of the most effective SF works.

Technically American
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 05:04 PM * 88 comments

I almost hate to distress our commentariat with the latest piece of stupidity to sully the aether. But I think there’s some value in discussing these matters, if only to discourage, with the prospect of mockery, journalists who are not motivated by more conventional goads such as professionalism, or truth.

Exhibit A: Marathon’s Headline Win Is Empty by Darren Rovell, a CNBC Sports Business Reporter.

The meat of the article is that the Men’s New York City Marathon winner may be the first American to take the prize since 1982, but it’s “not as good as it sounds.” Take it away¹, Darren.

Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he’s not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.

The article goes on to explain how Keflizighi was born in Eritrea, and African runners are so poor that the measly money that one can make as a runner is “a lifetime full of riches”. But how is that relevant to Keflizighi?

He is an American citizen thanks to taking a test and living in our country.

That’s the usual way, yes. There’s an oath, too; some people do care about that. I’m guessing that Rovell isn’t Native American, so I bet he’s descended from similarly technical Americans.

Let’s do a trivial bit of research on the web and clear up a few facts. According to both Wikipedia and Sports Illustrated, Keflezighi came to the United States at the age of 12, and started running in seventh grade (about a year later, I guess). He was naturalized as a US citizen in 1998, when he will have been about 23. So he’s not a product of the African distance-running culture, and as a college graduate (UCLA, 1998), he’s not dependent on his running to fund his third-world life of poverty. Implying otherwise is—to put it mildly—completely incorrect.

Furthermore, the 1982 finisher whom Rovell cites as the previous American winner was Alberto Salazar, who was born in…Cuba.

(We won’t even go into whether Keflezighi got his citizenship as easily as “a ringer who (sic) you hire to work a couple hours at your office so that you can win the executive softball league” gets work. That level of ignorance about the difficulties of the American immigration process is a whole different field of fail.)

Exhibit B: What I got Wrong About Keflezighi, also by Darren Rovell, CNBC Sports Business Reporter.

The non-apology apology.

I said that Keflezighi’s win, the first by an American since 1982, wasn’t as big as it was being made out to be because there was a difference between being an American-born product and being an American citizen. Frankly I didn’t account for the fact that virtually all of Keflezighi’s running experience came as a US citizen. I never said he didn’t deserve to be called American.

Oh. That phrase “technically American” really doesn’t mean “doesn’t deserve to be called American.” I see.

And I’m a Dutchman.

Rovell is on a bit of a cleft stick. He can either say that the use of “technically American” in his original article was correct, and that American citizenship by adoption is second-class citizenship, or he can say that he did no research whatsoever on Meb Keflezighi, and conflated two unrelated English terms to boot.

He declined the racist² option and went for incompetence:

It turns out, Keflezighi moved to the United States in time to develop at every level in America. So Meb is in fact an American trained athlete and an American citizen and he should be celebrated as the American winner of the NYC Marathon.

<Jon Stewart voice>It turns out? What, was it just revealed, just today, November 3, 2009? Then that Sports Illustrated article that tells the whole story of his childhood was, like, backdated to October of 2005?</Jon Stewart voice>

And then there’s the fact that, to make sense of Rovell’s argument, you have to read “American-trained” for “American-born”, the phrase he uses to differentiate Keflezighi from runners for whom he would “break out [his] red, white and blue.” For a professional writer, conflating two such terms is like a carpenter picking up a screwdriver to pound nails.

The irony is, there is actually a core discussion to be had about American runner training. But it’s covered in the muck of so many assumptions and errors that it’s not worth addressing. That would dignify said muck with too much legitimacy, and its the kind of stuff that damages actual human beings.

The point of all this

It’s useful and necessary to discuss these things, if only to discourage that level of stupidity. But there’s a deeper point than just the question of why this particular man, who has epitomized the American narrative, is being accorded second-class citizen status. Seriously. A man goes from being a refugee from a war-torn country to a college-educated world-class athlete. He demonstrates pride in his American citizenship; most other runners did not wear shirts with USA emblazoned on them. And yet he can’t shake the perception that he’s only “technically American.”

What does that make my children, who are natural born American citizens, but have never lived in the US? What about my cousin, born in El Salvador and adopted at 12 by my uncle when he married her mother? What will it make my niece, when my brother and his wife bring her back from China in three weeks? What does that make the members of our community who have chosen their citizenships, taken tests and oaths?

I get it all the time, as an expat; people want to lessen and belittle my Americanness when they disagree with my opinions. Leaving the US is apparently very unpatriotic; learning about other cultures is suspect, and moving abroad all but treason³. (And taking a second citizenship? Dear Lord, the reactions.) I recall one conversation where I only salvaged my right to an opinion on matters American by mentioning that I am required to file tax returns.

There are similar discussions in pretty much every nation on earth, of course. This deep question of identity is not specific to the United States. Europeans have been wrestling with it since the Moorish Conquest. The rise of the British National Party in the UK is symptomatic of England’s ongoing struggle to see even the Scots as fellow countrymen.

But the matter at hand is the American identity, and I’m relieved to report that the majority of the comments on both of those posts agree that Rovell failed this impromptu civics test. That, at least, restores some of my faith in my fellow Americans, technical and otherwise.

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1. Intentional, yes
2. I’d have gone for nativist if he hadn’t made the race-specific argument about the value of runners’ cash prizes in Africa.
3. And yet nothing cured me of my adolescent disassociation with American culture like moving abroad did. That proved to me that I am immutably American.

Worst Internet Hoaxes
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 02:34 PM * 8 comments

They’ve got an article over at MSNBC today, 10 most heinous hoaxes on the Net. Their definition of “hoax” seems to be rather broad, ranging from the MySpace Suicide to Nigerian e-mails and Work-at-home scams.

There’s a survey on the second page, where you can vote for your choice of Most Heinous Hoax. But they don’t limit it to the choices they presented: There’s an “other” choice with a fill-in-the-box.

I used the fill-in. For me, it’s a tossup between PublishAmerica and Strategic Book Group as the most heinous hoax, but in the end I went with Strategic Book Group. Bobby Fletcher has been (according to the Florida Attorney General) scamming hopeful authors out of $600,000 per year for the best part of a decade. Compared to that, “Save Toby” is rabbit food.

Revolver Books
Posted by Teresa at 07:19 PM * 33 comments

This one’s for Abi, but that doesn’t mean it’s only for Abi.

I was browsing some gift shop canvas booths at Madison Square, and met the people who invented Revolver bound books. You know that old-timey toy called a Jacob’s Ladder that’s made out of flat square blocks laced together with fabric tapes? Revolver books are made like that, except that there are only two blocks, and the “tapes” form the book cover.

Here’s their site. Look at the pictures. Watch the video. It’s a better way to understand the concept.

The inventors describe it as “a binding technique that allows the journal to turn inside out and back again around a floating spine.” I say it’s a way for a book to have two front sections, so you don’t have to choose whether your to-do list or your notes on your novel belongs in front, or your lined as opposed to your unlined paper. It also means your book can have two different covers.

I love this because, like mimeography, chimney-style fire starters, or the magic loop trick for knitting two socks at once, it’s a recent technology that could have been invented any time in the last millennium or so.

“He used…sarcasm. He knew all the tricks.”
Posted by Patrick at 06:48 PM

You may recall Alan Grayson (D-FL) as the freshman Congressman who explained that the Republican health care plan is “don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly” and who told Chris Matthews that he sometimes has “trouble listening to what Cheney says because of the blood that drips from his teeth.” Naturally, having violated the Washington, DC rule that says that liberals are required to be thoughtful, high-minded, and terrible on TV, Grayson is now being cast, by the guardians of our political discourse, as History’s Greatest Monster.

Digby responds to one such guardian, Stuart Rothenberg:

You see, it’s one thing for Republicans to give speeches on the floor of the House saying that Democrats want to murder the elderly or that they plan to create sex clinics and force teenage girls to have abortions. That is simply folksy language these people use to communicate with their people. When Newt Gingrich blamed Susan Smith’s murdering of her own children on liberalism, Lady Frothenberg understood that it was harmless hyperbole. When Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and the rest of the conservative movement leadership say daily that Barack Obama is a black racist who hates America, it’s simply their way, and we all understand that it is just entertainment for the masses who require this type of crude stimulation.

But when one calls a former Enron lobbyist a K-Street whore on an obscure radio show, one has simply gone too far, sirrah, and it will not be tolerated.

There will be a town hall meeting this evening led by Pastor Dick Cheney to discuss the possibility of witches in the village and what types of enhanced interrogation might be used to determine the breadth of the infiltration. Our deep sense of decency, morality and civility demand it. And thank you once again, Lady Frothenberg, for bringing this egregious breach of proper behavior to our attention.

Whatever the rest of you do, don’t encourage this miscreant Alan Grayson to do more of this boorish behavior by donating money at his crude web site: Congressmanwithguts.com. If you do, I certainly hope you don’t plan on being invited into the any of the finer homes and establishments in the Village because you just aren’t welcome there!

Sage advice. Why, if more Congresspersons talked like Grayson, who knows what might happen. Can’t have that.

And furthermore, the Anaconda Plan didn’t actually take place on the Snake River
Posted by Patrick at 08:55 AM * 145 comments

John Keegan, author of the excellent The Face of Battle (1976) and many other books, is possibly the most widely-respected military historian alive. James M. McPherson is an eminent historian of the American Civil War; his Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) is often called the best single-volume history of that conflict.

Keegan has now published his own history of the American Civil War, and McPherson has reviewed it in the New York Times. And by “reviewed,” I mean “discredited it for the ages,” if even only a portion of the factual errors McPherson cites are in fact present in Keegan’s book.

The analytical value of Keegan’s geostrategic framework is marred by numerous errors that will leave readers confused and misinformed. I note this with regret, for I have learned a great deal from Keegan’s writings. But he is not at top form in this book. Rivers are one of the most important geostrategic features he discusses. “The Ohio and its big tributaries, the Cumberland and the Tennessee,” he writes, “form a line of moats protecting the central Upper South, while the Mississippi, with which they connect, denies the Union any hope of penetration.” The reality was exactly the contrary. These navigable rivers were highways for Union naval and army task forces that pierced the Confederate heartland, capturing Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis and other important cities along with large parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. Keegan acknowledges this reality later in the book when he notes that these rivers “offered points of penetration to the Union into Confederate territory.” Precisely.

But Keegan’s grasp of river geography and other terrain features is shaky. He confuses the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, seems to place the Confederate forts Henry and Donelson on the wrong rivers, has the Kanawha River join the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River (it is the Allegheny River that joins the Monongahela, while the Kanawha empties into the Ohio 150 miles southwest of Pittsburgh) and shifts the state of Tennessee northward, where he says it “gives on to” Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The Confederates did not abandon their strong point on Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River; Union forces surrounded and captured it with its 5,000 defenders. Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga is not a feature of Lookout Mountain, and the battle of Cedar Mountain did not take place in the Blue Ridge.

McPherson goes on. Keegan is confused about when North Carolina was first invaded by the Union; he’s off by two years about when the British government recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent under international law. He misrepresents Lincoln’s attitude toward visiting soldiers in the field and makes the jawdropping claim that the Gettysburg Address “refus[ed] to differentiate between the sacrifice of the North and the South.” He is comprehensively wrong about the condition of the United States Navy at the outbreak of hostilities. Most amazingly, and I confirmed this one by using Amazon’s “Look Inside This Book” feature, Keegan, an eminent British historian, appears to believe that Benjamin Disraeli was Prime Minister during the American Civil War. (It was Palmerston.)

All books contain errors; book publishers, even long-established book publishers with large nonfiction lists, don’t have staffs devoted to “fact-checking,” nor is it clear that the world would be better off if they did. Moreover, as a book editor myself (albeit primarily of fiction) I usually hesitate to point fingers; I’ve made enough mistakes of my own that my more usual reaction is a sympathetic wince. But it’s boggling that no reader at US publisher Alfred A. Knopf noticed that this distinguished historian, at the beginning of Chapter Nine, asserts that Tennessee shares borders with Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It’s equally amazing that nobody at UK publisher Hutchinson remembered that Disraeli wasn’t actually Prime Minister yet in the years 1861-1865. As for the Gettysburg Address, it was entirely about the sacrifice of Union soldiers, the ones being buried in a Union cemetery, the dedication of which occasioned the speech. The address is ten sentences long. It’s not exactly little-known or hard to find. Against my better judgement and all sense of professional discretion, I find myself compelled to emit that cry of the outraged reader: Didn’t anyone at either publisher actually read this book?

NaNoWriMoOThread
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 06:34 AM * 91 comments

ItWaADaAStorNi. TheTriOrTreaWeGo. AsMidReaEaTiZo, ComWeTurOn, OutCon, OpSeWri. ChaStiACaToLi, EnWorSpraInEx, AndPloBeToUnLiSaiJuCaTheWi. ItWa, AsTheSa, AGreDiInTheFo.

NaNoWriMoHaBe. HeAThreToTeUsHoItGo. IfYouDoItBe, AdvIsWe. IfYouDoItNow, FeeFreeToPoWoCouATho.

AllCaVaIsEnTheReOfTheCoPo.

Happier Halloween
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 12:05 AM * 93 comments

Q: Why do demons and ghouls hang out together?
A: Because demons are a ghoul’s best friend.

Q: Why did the Fish and Game officer arrest the ghost?
A: He didn’t have a haunting license.

Q: Why does Count Dracula read The Wall Street Journal?
A: It has great circulation.

Q: What did the skeleton say to the bartender?
A: “Give me a beer and a mop.”

Q: When does a ghost eat breakfast?
A: First thing in the moaning.

Q: Do zombies eat hamburgers with their fingers?
A: No, they eat the hamburgers separately.

Q: What’s the ghoul’s favorite sport?
A: Casketball.

Q: How do you keep a monster from biting his nails?
A: Put him together with screws.

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Photo: Creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike from jpstanley http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpstanley/58277555/ (CC) Found here: Geeky Jack ‘O Lanterns at Geeks Are Sexy.

Sounds like a whisper
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 05:47 PM * 68 comments

The internet is fantastic at getting distant people together. Here I type in Amsterdam, and my words are read in Japan and New Zealand, California and New York. But the net turns out to be a powerful lubricant for local cooperation as well.

Case in point: Freecycle, a clearinghouse for people looking to give things away and people looking for free stuff. It started in America, running on Yahoo! groups. A volunteer in a local area would start a group (and own that group, under Yahoo’s terms) following the set Freecycle rules, then be added to a searchable list of Freecycle groups.

Freecycling took off in the UK with the support of local councils seeking to reduce landfill usage. According to this article, “The UK is probably the most enthusiastic Freecycling country in the world, hosting just 10% of all the branches but handling 27% of all Freecycling activities.”

I believe it. I used to be a member of the Edinburgh group, and we got rid of a lot of things before our big move that way. The people we gave things to ranged from very keen to slightly unhinged with delight about it. I found it mildly addictive, myself, and had to use some discipline not to acquire as well as dispose.

In the course of human events…

But there’s an eternal tension between central control and local independence. Over time, the American founders have centralized and standardized the Freecycle Network (TFN), applied to trademark the term “Freecycle”, and sued at least one person who contested their application. They’ve also sent takedown notices to others, according to Chilling Effects.

TFN has also been moving toward a hosted system under their control, My Freecycle, rather than Yahoo! groups. People who want to start a new Freecycle group (“apply for one” is the phrasing used) are now required to have a My Freecycle ID to even begin the process.

British Freecycle groups haven’t been universally comfortable with this kind of control, which has blocked local initiatives such as locum moderation from neighboring groups, a representative at the local tip (dump) with a laptop, and a proposal to add the ability to lend things out as well as give them away.

The relationship between the American founders and many of the British groups has gone badly sour this year. The British moderators formed a negotiating team to try to resolve the matter, but were not satisfied with the results. Andy Swarbrick, a former Freecycle moderator, has been running a fairly emphatic activist blog about the matter, which has been a useful source of their side of the story. He accuses TFN of inserting ersatz moderators to take over groups from rebellious owners, telling moderators who complain to quit, and forcibly migrating groups from Yahoo! to My Freecycle.

The first public split occurred early last month, when the Brighton Freecycle group became GreenCycleSussex. They released this statement:

Earlier this summer four leading members of the National UK Freecycle team resigned, including the director, in protest at the lack of change. Moderators around the country then formed an Independent Association of Moderators and again tried talking with The Freecycle Network [in the US]. Hoping to negotiate and find a positive way to continue under the banner of Freecycle. This has not been possible.

We acknowledge that what Freecycle does in the community is great. We just don’t agree that we should be dictated to from across the Atlantic and adopt inappropriate policies. We think the members and moderators make Freecycle great.

There has [sic] now been multiple summary expulsions of moderators who have asked for change from Freecycle. All UK moderators have lost their freedom of speech within the organisation. So here in Brighton we have decided to go our own way along with the majority of other Freecycle UK groups.

Then, on September 11 “hundreds of local Freecycle branches across the UK…declare[d] an orchestrated independence from their American parents.” Something like 170 out of the UK’s 509 Freecycle groups left at once, creating a new umbrella group called Freegle to serve as an index and clearinghouse.

TFN has taken a “more in sorrow than in anger” official line to this, though it does accuse the departing moderators of being undemocratic and seeking to profit from Freecycling:

“They simply took over and renamed local Freecycle groups in autocratic fashion and sought to manipulate the media into believing there was some US v UK split,” [Freecycle founder Deron Beal] said.

“Freegle members did not choose to be Freegle members, and Freegle moderators and volunteers do not democratically vote on communal rules. They used Freecycle to build up membership, and then took the members for their own personal gain.”

The personal is political

I’m sure it’s no surprise that my sympathy lies more with the British mods than with TFN. I know and love the sort of people who volunteer to run these things, particularly in the UK, and they’re not very keen on marching in step. It’s part of their charm and their effectiveness, and it’s certainly true to the founding spirit of Freecycling.

(And, of course, I’m irresistibly attracted to the idea that the plucky and independent British rebels are breaking away from distant, rigid and unsympathetic American control.)

But it is, of course, important for mods to remember that “You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs.” This goes for the local mods who moved their communities to Freegle without consultation as well as for TFN.

I guess that in the end, my support really goes to the ordinary members, like the folks I met in Scotland who took my leather scraps and gave me some of their seaweed as a gift, or the couple down our road who got our crib just in time for the birth of their first child, or the guy in Amsterdam who’s trying to find a home for his daughter’s rats.

That’s the real revolution, the turning of that cycle, and it’s going on every day.

Come see Whisperado this Thursday—
Posted by Patrick at 02:35 PM * 22 comments

—at venerable Brooklyn dive bar Hank’s Saloon, where we’ve generally had good gigs. Moreover, thanks to this newfangled idea called “rehearsing”, we may even remember most of our notes and words this time. 8:30 PM, 46 Third Avenue in Brooklyn (corner of Atlantic Avenue), no cover.

Here, have some authentically muddy sound and video from last month’s appearance at Kenny’s Castaways:

Open thread 131
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 04:14 PM * 608 comments

0131 is the Edinburgh telephone prefix. It was changed from 031 on April 16, 1995 (PhONE Day). When calling from abroad, one should drop the 0 and dial 131 after the country code (+44).

Such dusky grandeur clothed the height
Where the huge castle holds its state
And all the steep slope down,
Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky,
Piled deep and massy, close and high,
Mine own romantic town!
 
—Sir Walter Scott, Marmion

See also: a Marmion photoset.

There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, “Oh, why left I my hame?” and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!
 
—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters

I don’t miss Edinburgh in the winter, when the darkness would seep into my very brain. And I don’t miss it in the summer, now that I live somewhere I can get a tan. But sometimes, of an autumn day, I would love a glimpse of pale golden sunlight on Georgian sandstone.

America
Posted by Patrick at 11:06 PM * 33 comments

Also, this.

Do better.

Why I won’t be doing steampunk this Saturday
Posted by Teresa at 07:08 PM * 415 comments

This Saturday at the Tor.com meet-up, that is. I’ll just be dressed as me. It’s disappointing. I’d had a notion worked out in my head for a pair of non-labor-intensive steampunk goggles. Just needed a few things from Home Depot. And that’s where my new mutant superpowers kicked in.

I’ve been waiting a long time for them to show up. Always wondered which one(s) I’d get. Now I know: I’m invisible. Who knew that all it took was being middle-aged and female? But it’s true: I am apparently now invisible to Home Depot employees. I can walk up to one—six of them, actually, though one was a repeat—and say “Hello” or “Excuse me” or “Can you help me,” and have them look straight past me, or turn and ask someone else if they can help them.

It took me a while to believe it was happening. The first one I figured was busy. The second through fourth I figured were tired or overstressed or maybe just stupid. By the fifth one I was starting to get angry, in a polite and controlled way.

I’m usually pretty good at getting shop clerks’ attention, and this time I brought out the full battery: body language, eye contact, making my approach in his line of sight, and speaking clearly and politely. And by golly, it happened again.

I looked at the items in my cart. I was only short two things I’d wanted. Too bad. I abandoned my cart, walked over to Customer Service, and asked if I could have a comment form to fill out. The Customer Service employee—who, bless his heart, could see me—said they didn’t have a comment form, but he listened to my complaint. He seemed sympathetic. I think it was real. He told me that if I wanted to talk to the Assistant Manager—he pointed him out to me—I could deliver my complaint in person. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Assistant Manager had been one of the guys who couldn’t see me.

What the hell. It was worth a try. I walked over to the Assistant Manager. When I was just a few feet away from him, I stopped, planted my cane, and looked directly at him. Damned if I wasn’t still invisible.

It was weird—he was a tall man, but when his eyes moved from one side to the other I could see them making an upward bump in their travel path when they were passing over me. He refused to look directly at me for even a second. I kept looking straight at him. There was no way he could have missed me.

When that got old, I walked right past him toward the door, staring directly at him the whole time. Still no acknowledgement. When I’d gone a few feet past him, I turned back around and stared even harder at him, hard enough that it would have been rude if I’d been interacting with a normal human being. He still pretended he couldn’t see me, though truly, he must have.

Home Depot used to be a good store, but in recent years it’s taken a real dive.

See what comes of union busting?

Seasonal Poetry
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 10:02 PM * 98 comments

Sneezin’ and coughin’ isn’t … much fun
I fought the germs and the … germs won
I fought the germs and the … germs won

I need a tissue but I … got none
I fought the germs and the … germs won
I fought the germs and the … germs won

My joints are creakin’ and I feel so bad
A fever has begun
Well, that’s the worst feelin’ … I’ve ever had
I fought the germs and the … germs won
I fought the germs and the … germs won

(Instrumental Break)

Swallowin’ Advil by the … net ton
I fought the germs and the … germs won
I fought the germs and the … germs won

Some little virus made a … home run
I fought the germs and the … germs won
I fought the germs and the … germs won

My joints are creakin’ and I feel so bad
A fever has begun
It’s the worst feeling … I’ve ever had
I fought the germs and the … germs won
I fought the germs and the … germs won

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• Cold or Flu?
• Why We Immunize
• Flu Pre-Pack
• How To Wash Your Hands
• Flu Redux
• Getting Your Shots
• Pandemic: The Game

Index to medical posts

On the Making of a Cardboard Box Oven
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 07:30 PM * 25 comments

Ideal for cooking Chili-Dog Casserole (see below) for Boy and/or Girl Scouts in camp:

1. Take a cardboard box, such as wine comes in. The top will become the oven’s door, for the whole thing will rest on what was once the box’s side, with the hinge to the left or right, as you will.
2. Line this box (including the inside of the door) completely with heavy-weight aluminum foil. You can use duct tape on the outside of the box to hold it in place. Make sure the cardboard on the inside is Completely Covered. (This is important.)
3. Punch two or three holes of perhaps a half-inch diameter on each side of the box, close by the bottom and close by the top as it will be used.
4. Construct a rack half—way up, using metal coat hangers. You can interlace the hangers with the top hanging-hooks toward one another, and it will be quite sturdy. If you’ve selected a properly sized box you can cut a couple of slits opposite one another in the two sides adjacent to the door, and thread the outside corners of the coat hangers into them, making it nice and sturdy. (The slits, of course, should be the minimum size necessary.
5. Take two metal pie plates. Place them bottom-to-bottom, in the bottom of your oven.
6. Put charcoal briquettes in the upper pan and light ‘em off. Each briquette gives you forty degrees (F) of heat in the oven, so for our chili-dog casserole you’ll need nine briquettes.
7. While the coals are heating up, make the casserole. Place it in the oven, close the door, and cook until done.
8. Serve it forth.

You can make biscuits, brownies, cakes, or whatever else you wish in this oven. The oven will last for several uses. (Do keep it away from flammables, as you would anything that gets hot, and don’t use it in an enclosed place, as you wouldn’t anything that produces carbon monoxide.)

Chili-Dog Casserole
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 12:38 PM * 117 comments

As served at Viable Paradise XIII.

Chili-Dog Casserole by Sean Craven

Reprinted by permission.

A certain individual of note asked me to post the strategy for this dish someplace where people could find it, so here it it.

Chili-Dog Casserole is a horrific conflation of lasagna, Frito pie, and chili dogs. I always play it by ear, so I’ll describe how I made the last batch. This is just an example. Warp it to your will.

This was made for a dinner at the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. My inspiration was the term ‘craptastic.’ As soon as it was explained to me, I said, “Oh, you mean like chili-dog casserole.” After serving this, I was startled to see Hugo winners on their knees in worship before it (I am not joking; I could name names but shall refrain); your results may vary.

Ingredients:

1 bag of Ranch-flavored Doritos
1 package of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs
4 cans of Hormel chili (I prefer Dennison’s, which wasn’t there. I am dying of curiosity regarding Wolf chili, which I suspect may be superior.)
Innumerable fistfuls of pre-shredded orange cheddar cheese
Slices of pepper Havarti
Slices of extra-sharp New York white cheddar
Vlasic pickled nacho rings
About a quarter-cup of French’s yellow mustard

Wash your paws.

Slice the hot dogs the way you would for beanie weenies; maybe 3/8ths of an inch thick. Put them in a bowl, squeeze a big goober of yellow mustard over the hot dog slices and toss.

Go mooch the shredded orange cheddar from Mac’s freezer and swipe a couple of aluminum baking pans. Run downstairs and ask Mac whether you should be using it up or saving some. (The answer in this case was use it up.)

Slice the Havarti and white cheddar into irregular broken pieces until you’re sick of dealing with the unpleasant combination of a cheap serrated knife and a pebbled glass cutting board.

Realize the time is getting late, wash your paws, and start preheating the oven to 325, since those aluminum pans are thin and will probably burn at the preferred temperature of 350.

Get a spoon to handle the hot dogs. Open the nacho rings and set a fork in them for later use.

Spread a fistful (which in my case would be like a cup, cup and a half) of the shredded cheddar over the bottom of the pan. Top with one-quarter of the hot dogs, which should be generously coated with mustard. Look at the time nervously; wish you had the option of browning the hot dog slices in a sauté pan before marinating them in the mustard. That trick really ups the flavor and these people deserve it. They ain’t getting it, though.

At this point, Mac will loan you an oven thermometer and warn you that the ovens are very unpredictable. Silently curse the electric stove. Hang thermometer from a rack in the oven.

Return to your mise. Spread a few nacho rings between the hot dogs on the left-handed half of the casserole.

Open a can of chili. Spread it out over the whole pan in an even layer.

Top with the sliced cheeses, using the pepper Havarti only on the side where you’ve placed the nacho rings.

Add a layer of the shredded orange cheddar.

Go and wash your paws, then take the bag of chips and roughly crush it before opening. Spread a layer of chips over the cheese.

Check the oven. Holy smokes, Mac was right, it’s only like 275 in there. Look at the time nervously, increase temperature to a hypothetical 375.

Hope. Curse electric stoves.

Layer hot dogs, nachos, chili, sliced cheeses, shredded cheese, chips.

Wash your paws.

Check the temperature of the stove; not bad, it’s at just under 325.

Open a beer, drink half in two gulps. Cover your mouth and belch. Set the beer down next to the cutting board.

Wash your paws.

Begin to repeat the layering process, then realize you need to cut more cheese with that horrible knife and cutting board. Curse aloud.

While slicing cheese, knock beer over. It spills between the wall and the table. Set beer upright, get up to fetch a dishtowel, experience a premonition of disaster.

Grab the beer and finish it off before you spill it again, oafboy.

Fetch the dishtowel and swab the wall, table, and rug.

Wash your paws.

Slice more cheese.

Finish the third layer.

Look nervously at the time. Contemplate bourbon (Wild Turkey 101, to be specific.)

Walk across the hall and tell Mac you want to write about a superhero named Overproof.

Return to kitchen. Wash your paws. Set down a fourth and final layer with the last can of chili going on the very top, and mark the spicy side with a nacho ring. Reserve about 1 1/2-2 cups of chips for the gratin. Crush these chips finely. Reserve 1/2 in a bowl covered by a small plate and leave the rest in the bag.

Look at the baking dish. Look at the oven. It isn’t your oven, so you’d better use some aluminum foil on the rack in case there’s any leakage from the pan. Go swipe foil from the staff room. Line the rack with foil, set the pan in the oven, and go take a shower.

Return from your shower, look at the time, open the oven, and inspect the casserole. It is not bubbling around the edges, let alone the middle.

Panic. Wash your paws.

With your extra-clean finger poke a hole in the middle of the casserole and realize that it’s tepid at best. Panic some more while smearing the casserole about as you try to disguise the finger hole. Hope nobody notices it when you serve.

Take the foil out of the oven, since it blocks heat from the stupid electric element on the stupid floor of the stupid oven. Turn up the heat. Move the casserole to an upper rack, unknowingly scraping part of it onto the oven floor with a flange on the oven roof that you cannot see.

Get another beer. Get a cushion from the couch and try and use it for lumbar support as you loll in the armchair. Sip your beer while praying to deities in whom you do not believe that the casserole will be properly cooked by the time you’re supposed to serve it. Reflect on the fact every ingredient can be eaten raw. Think about eating a raw hot-dog. Shudder.

Notice the smoke coming from the oven. Open the oven, note charcoal on the floor and the stupid heating element. Crouch while grunting in pain and see the stupid flange. Go open the sliding glass door. Return to your chair and beer.

Spill beer in crotch when the fire alarm goes off. Leap to your feet and run to the fire alarm. Stare up at it, far out of your reach. Wish you could figure out how to take out the battery. Experience an abject sense of emasculation as you contemplate your inability to cope with the physical world. Take two deep breathes while wallowing in self-loathing. Remind yourself that you are a worthy and loved person.

Run screaming into the hall.

At this point, a nameless faceless voice will tell you to take out the battery. In your panic-stricken condition (optimally, your hysteria will be informed by sleeplessness, starvation, and the steady mix of booze and pain pills you’ve been pouring down your gullet for days), you try and do what the voice says.

Return to your room, stare up at the smoke alarm. Realize that nothing has changed since the last time you did this.

Run screaming into the hall, where Jim will meet you. Jim will help you open doors and windows, then he’ll grab a towel and fan it at the smoke detector, which will go silent in a minute or two.

Jim will leave after this, giving you the opportunity to reflect on what little you know of his past. Few people have as thoroughly earned their air of command; try not to be bitter. Succeed in this to a marginal degree.

Wash your paws.

Open the oven, pull out the casserole and poke it again. Obscure the second finger hole. Look at the clock. Panic. Turn up the heat.

Return to your chair and finish your beer without spilling it again. Contemplate changing your pants; give up the idea as impractical and over-elaborate.

Get up. Wash your paws.

Put a couple of fistfuls of grated cheese into the mostly-empty bag of Doritos crumbs. Shake it until crumbs and cheese are mixed.

Wash your paws. Take the casserole out of the oven. Look at it dolefully; look at the time. Poke it with your finger; it’s at least warmish. The cheese has started to melt. Curse, with an emphasis on copulatory and excretory terms. Engage in ‘nesting,’ where one profanity is split into two parts in order to allow the insertion of a second profanity.

Obscure the finger hole, then top with a handful of cheese, then the cheese and crumb mixture, and finally with the reserved crumbs. Forget to mark the half of the casserole that has the pepper Havarti and nacho rings.

Go to the staff room. Loom over Mac and plaintively bleat that it’s going to take at least a half-hour, maybe more, for the casserole to finish cooking. She will tell you not to worry. Things will be fine.

After half an hour, remove the casserole from the oven. It looks perfect until you realize that there are a lot of spice wimps around here, and that you’ve failed to mark the side of the casserole that they should eat. Decide that it sucks to be them.

Carry the casserole downstairs, then go back upstairs to fetch more food. On your return, you will find that the casserole pan has been emptied, flattened, and licked clean.

Enjoy your enhanced reputation. Wish you’d gotten a bite or two — but hey. You can make this stuff any time you want.

(Note — you can mix all the ingredients together in a bowl rather than carefully layering them. You can stick beans up your nose, too. Neither practice is recommended.)

---

• Cooking With Light (recipe index)

$9,695 New Age sweat lodge session kills 2, injures 19
Posted by Teresa at 08:40 PM * 746 comments

1. The story.

I recommend starting at VerdeNews.com, a small-town news operation that’s done a good job on this story.

Friday, October 09, 2009: Two die, 19 ill in sweat lodge incident.

SEDONA — Two people have died and a total of 19 were treated at one of three medical centers Thursday night when participants collapsed after a New Age-type sweat lodge experience near Sedona.

As many as 68 people are reported to have packed into a tarpaulin-covered dome at the remote retreat in Deer Pass Valley about 6.5 miles south of West Sedona along Oak Creek.

Saturday, October 10, 2009: Investigators seek answers in deaths, illness during sweat lodge ceremony.

…[Yavapai County Sheriff Steve] Waugh also said that [James Arthur] Ray, who led the sweat lodge ceremony, refused to talk to investigators on site and returned to California.

“We will at some point in time schedule another interview with him,” Waugh said.

“I do not know why he chose not to speak with us,” Rhodes* added. “Everyone else we have spoken with has been very forthcoming with information.”

Wednesday, October 14, 2009: Teamwork: Verde Valley Fire talks about Angel Valley rescue.

There is much finger-pointing in the wake of two sweat lodge deaths at the Angel Valley Retreat. Yavapai county building officials say they issued no building permit for the temporary sweat lodge structure measuring 20 by 20 feet in which 68 participants crowded around steaming rocks.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Spiritual Warrior self-help instructor James Arthur Ray, Howard Bragman, disputes that Ray’s staff built the structure saying that Ray’s contract with the Angel Valley spiritual retreat called for Angel Valley to “design and construct” the sweat lodge.

Three people remain hospitalized, one in critical condition, one is listed as fair and one in good condition at the Flagstaff Medical Center.

Meanwhile, the chief of the Verde Valley Fire District, Jerry Doerksen, and his public information officer, Merry Shanks, told the press Monday about what they described as the “most significant mass casualty event the Verde Valley has ever experienced” from a medical emergency. …

“We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

2. The guy who made this happen.

James Arthur Ray is a failed businessman turned New Age hustler who sells what he calls “the Science of Success,” and runs exceedingly pricey workshops.

A New York Times article on him from 07 March 2009, Even in Difficult Times, a Self-Help Guru Finds a Willing and Paying Audience starts with a description of an audience of some 500 people, many of whom are unemployed and looking for something better, and have gathered in a hotel in New Jersey:

They were here to see a motivational speaker and self-help guru, and paying a hefty price to do so: $1,297 for a high-decibel, two-day seminar. In this case, the speaker was James Arthur Ray, one of the emerging names in the $11 billion self-improvement industry, and the event was called the Harmonic Wealth Weekend. …

[P]articipants ponied up even more money at tables in the back of the ballroom, where they could sign up for more seminars or purchase an assortment of Mr. Ray’s books and DVDs. The showcase item was a package of three workshops, including one called “Practical Mysticism,” on sale for the discounted price of $13,685 (a $5,695 savings), which Mr. Ray pitched throughout the seminar.

Given the current economic climate, industry analysts say it may seem incongruous for those in need to spend this kind of money. John LaRosa, research director for Marketdata Enterprises, a market research firm in Tampa, Fla., expects the recession to mean far slower growth for an industry that had been red-hot, nearly doubling in sales since 2000. The industry includes infomercials, self-help books, motivational speakers, seminars and personal coaches.

“Consumers are being squeezed,” Mr. LaRosa said in a telephone interview. “They’re not going to have as much to spend on discretionary purchases for things like expensive workshops and seminars.”

If the economy is cutting into his business, Mr. Ray, 51, says he isn’t seeing it. “I think it’s holding steady,” he said backstage during a break, as Van Halen and U2 blared over the speakers. “We have over 500 people here this weekend. I think what I’m providing is a tremendous value, and there’s always going to be a place, regardless of the economy, regardless of the market, for people who are providing tremendous value and tremendous service.”

In Mr. Ray’s case, attendees paid to listen to a former preacher’s son and a junior college dropout who has fashioned a successful business on the promise that he can help people build financial wealth as well as strengthen their spiritual and physical well-being. …Though he’s not in the ranks of Anthony Robbins and Phil McGraw (Dr. Phil), his appearances on “Oprah” and “Larry King Live,” and in “The Secret,” Rhonda Byrnes’s documentary and book that have become a New Age phenomenon, have won him a following. His own book, “Harmonic Wealth,” appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for two weeks last spring. …

More on The Secret in just a moment. Meanwhile: a very funny video about the movie version of The Secret.

Drawing on his own brushes with bankruptcy (once in 1997 and again in 2000 after the dot-com bust),

Because that’s exactly the kind of background you’d want in a guy you’re paying thousands of dollars to teach you how to be a success.

Mr. Ray advised the crowd that for every negative turn, there is an equally positive opportunity. “There has to be, it’s the law of physics,” he said.

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” is a Newtonian law of motion. It predicts the behavior of billiard balls and rockets, not opportunities to acquire wealth.

I doubt the error bothers James Ray. It’s hardly his worst offense against science or spirituality. (For that, I nominate pages 51-55 of his book, Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want, in the chapter on The Science of the Law of Attraction, where he invokes Albert Einstein, quantum physics, parallel universes, vertical time, the Everett-Wheeler-Graham multiple worlds theory, and the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory.

Ray is one of the cadre of self-help gurus who’ve been helping push Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a book I myself have described on Amazon as a feelgood book for losers. The Secret has the distinction of being equally loathed by serious magicians (as Diane Sylvan succinctly puts it, “the Goddess ain’t your bitch”), and by the likes of Michael Shermer, writing in Scientific American, who said:

The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts,” we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren’t such pessimistic sourpusses. The film’s promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as “Everything I touch turns to gold,” “I am a money magnet,” and, my favorite, “There is more money being printed for me right now.” Where? Kinko’s?

A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: “It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought.” No, it hasn’t. “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we’re not loving and we’re not grateful.” Those ungrateful cancer patients. “You’ve got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week.” Sure, if you convert your body’s hydrogen into energy through nuclear fusion. “Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” But in magnets, opposites attract—positive is attracted to negative. “Every thought has a frequency…. If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency.”

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell’s equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources.

So there.

I’m reasonably fond of my own arguments in my Amazon review:

If Rhonda Byrne’s advice were any good, neither she nor her publisher would have to publicize her book. They’d just think the right thoughts, and readers everywhere would automatically be moved to pick up a copy.

Average global income would be far more evenly distributed than it is. After all, anyone can hope. Anyone anywhere can think good thoughts.

Alternately, there could be Third World sweatshops available to do our believing for us.

[T]he Evil Overlord list wouldn’t include the observation that an Evil Overlord who shouts “I AM INVINCIBLE!” is a sure bet to die almost immediately afterward.

Las Vegas wouldn’t exist. People don’t place bets they think are going to lose. Gamblers are powerfully into positive thinking. Someone who’s betting heavily while drawing to an inside straight is unquestionably visualizing success, and they’re telling the universe exactly what form they want it to take. They nevertheless fail to fill their straights at exactly the rate predicted by plain old statistical probability—that is, most of the time. …

Positive thinking is all around us. The world is full of unemployed theatre majors, unpublished writers, unsuccessful beauty pageant contestants, unheard-of musical acts, and college athletes who never made the big time. None of them got there by thinking they wouldn’t succeed.

If Rhonda Byrne’s advice were any good, no singer would ever hit a wrong note. That goes double for singers who are drunk.

I know other reviewers have already covered the implications of The Secret’s suggestion that misfortunes are caused by our own negative thoughts. Still, I have to say: NO KIDDING? SOMEBODY PHONE DARFUR NOW!

Look at Enron’s employees and stockholders. They didn’t expect to get screwed. New Orleans residents who didn’t have cars never envisioned themselves drowning in their own attics. Homeowners with subprime mortgages never imagined they’d wind up in foreclosure.

Are we to understand that some families have an inexplicable tendency to attract the same ailment, generation after generation? How is it possible for devout Christian Scientists to die of cancer or eclampsia or ketoacidosis? If a guy in his late 50s has been in denial about his radiating chest pains for the last ten or twelve hours, and the first thing he says when the EMTs come through his door is “I’m not having a heart attack,” has his attitude improved or decreased his chances of surviving the episode?

If I worry about drunk drivers, and then some night I get t-boned at 60 mph by an irresponsible lush with a DUI record as long as my arm, is the accident actually my fault because I had all those negative worries? If I’ve got a cheerful toddler with me, who’s responsible for her death? And if I kneecap Rhonda Byrne, and set fire to the warehouse where her books are waiting to ship, will she apologize to me for thinking thoughts that obliged me to do it?

It’s only logical.

James Ray’s own gospel, Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want, which I mentioned earlier, says the law of attraction will let believers “create wealth through all aspects of their lives—financially, relationally, mentally, physically and spiritually.” Ray says “wealth” a lot. I think it’s his favorite word. See, for instance, the blurbs on his website:

James boasts the unique and powerful ability to blend the practical and mystical into a usable and easy-to-access formula for achieving true wealth across all aspects of life.

and

His Journey of Power® events fuse together the wealth-building principles, success strategies, and the teachings of all great spiritual traditions and practices that he has experienced and assimilated over the last 25 years.

Ray also has a workshop for becoming a spiritual warrior, which was what everyone was doing in that sweat lodge in Sedona. “Becoming a spiritual warrior” sounds impressive, but it doesn’t seem to mean a lot, at least not as Ray explains it on his website.

3. The Spiritual Warrior come-on.

The quotes that follow are taken verbatim from James Ray’s Spiritual Warrior page.

“Virtually all top achievers know that to really get ahead, you’ve got to be willing to color outside the lines. Here’s why…”
—James Arthur Ray

He never says who these top achievers are, or what they’ve done that constitutes “coloring outside the lines,” and he never explains how this will make you a success.

“Coloring outside the lines” just means you’re not following standard patterns. It doesn’t say whether following them is the right choice. Does learning a new trade constitute coloring outside the lines, because it’s new, or is it coloring inside the lines, because you’re still thinking of your work in terms of mastering a specific trade? And while we’re on the subject, doesn’t the fact that his clients are paying thousands of dollars for James Ray to give them permission to color outside the lines mean that they’re still coloring inside the lines?

Ray is arbitrarily privileging one of two symmetrical choices. Claiming that “learning to color outside the lines” will bring you success makes about as much sense as choosing to always turn right at intersections, or always passing up the first choice you’re offered and take the second.

Let’s face it, in our culture (no matter what people say), uniqueness is not rewarded.

If that were true, there’d be no point in cultivating uniqueness, much less paying thousands of dollars to do so.

When you were in kindergarten, you were taught to color inside the lines. When it was time to snack, you snacked, and when it was time to take a nap, you took a nap. Conformity was a highly-rewarded virtue.

If he thinks that constitutes pointless conformity for its own sake, he’s never had to supervise a roomful of kindergarteners. In the meantime, he’s right: our culture doesn’t automatically reward small children for ignoring the rules, procedures, and skills they’re still struggling to master.

In elementary school, it became even more important to be just like everyone else. If you dressed a little differently, you were laughed at. If you spoke funny, you were ridiculed. And God forbid you had your own ideas and opinions…

Am I supposed to recognize myself in that? Are you? Are all of us? Because everyone I know suffered that same trauma.

In high school and college, it became absolutely critical to fit in… But by this time, you were good at it. You knew what was expected of you, and if there was any way you could, you delivered.

I am not in the target demographic for this part of the pitch.

Yesterday’s biggest nerd is today’s richest man in the world (and he doesn’t even have a college degree). Do you think he colored inside the lines? Hardly.

Do you think Bill Gates got where he is by hanging around in woo-woo sweat lodges, or by exhausting his working capital paying for workshops and inspirational speeches? Hardly.

So here you are, attempting to achieve your heart’s desires, and all you’ve ever been trained to do is stay within the lines and do what everyone else does.

So here’s the question: will “coloring outside the lines” will get you your heart’s desire? And is it a universally applicable strategy?

In Spiritual Warrior, you’ll build upon what you started in Practical Mysticism.

Remember Practical Mysticism, a workshop mentioned in the NYTimes article I quoted earlier? Attendees started by paying $1,297 for “a high-decibel, two-day seminar,” throughout which Ray pitched a package of three workshops. One of them was Practical Mysticism, regularly priced at $19,380, which he was offering at only $13,685. If this is the usual procedure, the seekers in Ray’s sweat lodge had paid him at least $24,677 - $30,371 total, though it may have been more if they attended the other two events in his three-workshop package.

You’ll become privy to techniques (many kept secret for dozens of generations) that I searched out in the mountains of Peru, the jungles of the Amazon (and a few other places I don’t care to recall).

Paging Carlos Castaneda! What secret spiritual warrior tradition did James Ray study in Peru and the Amazon? If he’s supposed to have studied it prior to his “flirtations with bankruptcy” in 1997 and 2000, why didn’t it keep him from screwing up? If he studied it after his bankruptcies, there would have to be a significant gap in his post-2000 personal timeline to accommodate this spiritual warrior apprenticeship. Personally “searching out” secret traditions takes a while. So does mastering a genuine spiritual discipline.

(Note: Whatever Ray was studying among the Indios of Peru, it’s highly unlikely that he was studying it between 1980 and 1991, when the Sendero Luminoso movement was active. One side or another would have shot him.)

Mastering these (quite esoteric) practices

So esoteric, in fact, that no one else knows about them. One has to wonder how James Arthur Ray found out they existed. One also has to wonder how many languages he speaks. It’s a relevant question.

Let’s arbitrarily keep this simple and assume he was dealing with Quechua-speaking Peruvian and Amazon populations, because otherwise we’d have to think about the hundreds of languages spoken by indigenous Amazon tribes, some of them singular isolates; and then we’d have to wonder how Ray knew which of those tribes to go to and ask about their ancient secret esoteric spiritual warrior traditions. I’m not assuming that James Ray speaks Quechua, but if he’s got some Spanish, there are plenty of bilingual Spanish/Quechua speakers he could hire to translate for him.

Curanderos are part of Peruvian culture. If you go googling on them, you’ll find woo-woos and tourism sites referring to them as shamans. I wouldn’t call them that because shaman is a Siberian word, and shamanism is a Siberian tradition, but woo-woos use the term pretty damn loosely. (Personally, I’d think better of them if they spent their own culture’s terms, and referred to traditional practitioners as wizards, or Wise Men, or priests. They’d object, of course: wizards makes it sound like D&D, Wise Men makes it sound like a Christmas pageant, and priests makes it sound like religion. And so it does! Funny thing, that.)

Anyway, insofar as Peruvian curanderos have the jump on traditional healers and counselors anywhere else, it’s because they have access to Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi or Trichocereus pachanoi). Like other hallucinogens (and a good many spiritual disciplines), they’re a technology for taking off the cover plates and poking at the underlying machinery. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on the machinery and what you do with it.

I’m not going to assert that any specific person took any specific actions, down there in Peru. I’ll state as my personal opinion that I very much doubt James Ray did any significant first-hand research in Peru and the Amazon. And I’ll observe that there’s exploitive Ayahuasca tourism in the Peruvian Amazon, just like there’s sweat lodge tourism in Taos and Sedona, “spiritual shopping” in Glastonbury, and travelers manifesting Jerusalem Syndrome in (where else?) Jerusalem. If James Ray logged actual time in Peru and the Amazon, I expect he did so as a tourist. (And I suspect—nay, hypothesize—that the biggest lesson he learned was, “Hey, you can sell this stuff!”)

What I don’t believe is that James Ray is teaching his followers effective techniques he learned in South America. The message he constantly preaches is wealth, wealth, wealth, like Scrooge McDuck diving into a swimming pool full of money—wealthy body, wealthy mind, wealthy relationships, wealthy everything.

The native peoples of Peru and the Amazon don’t have easy lives. They aren’t especially healthy, they’re materially impoverished, and they’ve gotten pushed around a lot by the outside world. If they’re an illustration of the results you can expect from James Ray’s “spiritual warrior” program, why would affluent gringos want to absorb it? Whatever those traditional practitioners in Peru are doing, it’s clear that it doesn’t attract wealth. And if James Ray has reformulated and transformed those teachings into a powerful “spiritual warrior” thingie, why isn’t he down in Peru, teaching his reformulation and sharing the wealth with the people who made it possible?

What a jerk.

(My actual suspicions about the source of Ray’s Peruvian claims are even less complimentary; but never mind.)

required me to think and act more differently than I’ve ever had to before. At first it was quite grueling, but the results…well…all I can say is, “Wow!”

That’s certainly saying nothing.

Remember “quite grueling.” It’ll be relevant.

It wasn’t until I had completely mastered these concepts and techniques that I was able to combine them with state of the art scientific technology

The closest thing to “state of the art scientific technology” Ray uses is spammy online self-promotion, plus Twitter—he’s an enthusiastic Twitterer. Not long after the sweat lodge debacle he went back and deleted all his tweets from that night, but Tech Crunch got hold of them anyway:

JamesARay: is still in Spiritual Warrior… for anything new to live something first must die. What needs to die in you so that new life can emerge?

JamesARay: Day 5 of SPW. The Spiritual Warrior has conquered death and therefore has no enemies, and no fear, in this life or the next.

Commenters have observed that Ray’s advance promo for the Spiritual Warrior thing in Sedona says very little about what’s going to happen there. You have to wonder whether the participants knew what they were getting into.

and, as always, create practical real-life applications (you should know my style by now).

Uh-huh. James Ray created the practical real-life applications of this esoteric Peruvian/Amazonian warrior tradition. That’s very odd. What kind of warrior tradition doesn’t come with practical real-life applications already installed?

Check it out:

* You’ll accelerate the releasing of your limitations and push yourself past your self-imposed and conditioned borders (no more coloring inside the lines)…

* You’ll carve out your own destiny and quickly develop the strength and determination to live it…

* You’ll learn (and apply) the awesome power of “integrity of action”…

* You will (perhaps for the first time in your life), have a gut level understanding of “The Four Enemies of Power.” You’ll learn to recognize them at a glance, and instantly defeat them when they arise…

* You’ll define and enforce your own boundaries—without someone else telling you what they should be…

* You’ll experience a new technologically-enhanced form of meditation that creates new neurological pathways, allowing you to experience powerful whole-brain thinking (this one’s gonna knock your socks off)…

Remember all of these when we’re asking why participants stayed in James Ray’s misbegotten sweat lodge beyond the limits of their own endurance.

* You’ll experience, at the spiritual level, the ancient methodologies of Samurai Warriors; and gain a true understanding of the authority and strength that come from a life of honor.

Samurai? A lifetime of pious discipline, self-control, self-sacrifice, nonstop training, subordination to hierarchy, strict adherence to the class one was born and raised in, disregard for personal wealth, and next to no tolerance for coloring outside the lines? What does that have to do with Peruvian mysticism? Or with N’Am sweat lodges? Or the law of attraction, or the modern American quest for wealth and self-fulfillment, or anything else Ray has been talking about?

The only reason I can see for invoking the samurai is that Ray felt he needed a little more emphasis on the “warrior” part of the concept in order to maintain the overall balance of the presentation, even though historic samurai values are seriously at odds with the rest of his program.

All this guy has to sell are his words. If I’m right about the sudden anomalous presence of “samurai” in the mix, he allows himself far too much latitude when he’s striving for effect. Given that degree of imprecision, he could be saying anything.

Someone who believes that words and intentions are magic ought not be that sloppy.

Look, you’ve most probably spent your whole life staying within the lines to get what you’ve got (or at least a major portion of it). Join me outside the lines in this heroic quest for higher consciousness.

There is no sacrifice—only greater and more magnificent results, wealth, adventure and fulfillment.

Four points. First, if the idea is to make you a warrior, with or without concepts like samurai and honor being thrown into the mix, you can’t say “There is no sacrifice.” The possibility of loss, death, and self-sacrifice is always going to be part of what it means to be a warrior. Without that, all you have is an oaf in fancy dress.

Second, there is no real change without some sacrifice. Becoming something different means giving up some of what you were.

Third, this is yet another message from James Ray to his followers in which he tells them to ignore signs of possible trouble. It’s not a responsible message for someone who runs boundary-pushing, physically stressful, improvisational mass therapy sessions.

Fourth, it’s bleeping disingenuous for him to say “there is no sacrifice” right before he announces the price of this little shindig in Sedona.

You owe it to the rest of your life to get to Spiritual Warrior as quickly as you can. The investment is ONLY $9695 per person.

Here’s a joke Elise Matthesen told me:

Q. What’s the difference between Pagan and New Age?

A. Two decimal places.

The point being that New Agers will accept insane markups. It’s why they’re preyed on by so many parasitic species.

4. What happened.

From the New York Times:

Kirby Brown, 38, of Westtown, N.Y., and James Shore, 40, of Milwaukee, died on Thursday after collapsing inside the Angel Valley sweat lodge. Three other people were airlifted in critical condition to Flagstaff Medical Center.

One of them, Liz Neuman, continues to be reported in critical condition.

At least seven other people have died in ceremonial sweat lodges since 1993 in the United States, England and Australia, according to news accounts compiled by Alton Carroll, an adjunct professor of history at San Antonio College who also moderates the Web site Newagefraud.org.

The same list can be found on the In Memoriam page at Don’t Pay to Pray, and in the Huffington Post comment thread.

James Arthur Ray, a self-help expert from Carlsbad, Calif., led what was billed as five-day “spiritual warrior” experience at Angel Valley, which concluded with a tightly packed sweat lodge ceremony. Participants paid about $9,000 each for the weeklong retreat, which included seminars, a 36-hour fast and solo experiences in the forest.

The “solo experience in the forest” was a “vision quest” in the uninhabited country around the ranch following the 36-hour fast. On the day of the sweat lodge fiasco, participants were served a buffet breakfast in the morning, then sat through a few hours of seminars before the sweat lodge got going around 3:00. Near as I can make out, the sweat lodge session went wrong somewhere around 4:30, and had become a multi-victim emergency scene by 5:00.

By the way: as with sweat lodges, sun dances, and other traditional ceremonies, Native Americans complain that vision quests are being misused by non-Indians. As one writer put it, vision quests are supposed to be undertaken by youngsters in their teens; but since kids that age don’t have much money, non-Indian entrepreneurs sell inauthentic vision quests to middle-aged spiritual adventurers.

If you’re not familiar with the long-term anger and dismay of Indian tribes over the misappropriation of their cultures, especially their traditional religious practices:

Plastic Shaman.
New Age Mystics, Healers, and Ceremonies.
New Age Religions and Plastic Medicine Men.
Paying to teach and “play Indian.”
Native American Wannabe FAQ
For All Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life.
A Line in the Sand. (On cultural property.)
Our Red Earth.
Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances.
Blue Corn Comics’ Stereotype of the Month Contest.
The Ripoff of Native American Spirituality.
Spiritual Commodification and Misappropriation.
Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.
New Age (and other) ripoff sites.
Don’t Pay to Pray, incl. their list of frauds.
New Age Frauds and Plastic Shamans, incl. their NAFPS Forum.

One of their biggest objections to inadequately trained poseurs running their own versions of these ceremonies is that if you do them wrong, people can get hurt.

Back to the story in the New York Times:

The authorities say that at any one time 55 to 65 people were packed for a two-hour period into a 415-square foot structure that was 53 inches high at the center and 30 inches high on the perimeter. Mr. Ray’s employees built the wood-frame lodge, which was wrapped in blankets and plastic tarps. Hot rocks were brought into the lodge and doused with water. Mr. Ray, who conducted the ceremony, left the area on Thursday after declining to give a statement to the police.

The largest Amerind sweat lodges I’ve heard of will hold eight to twelve people, max. They’re made out of natural materials that “breathe,” and they don’t use airtight construction methods. The hugely oversized sweat lodge James Ray had built was crowded, unventilated, had no interior light, and was swathed in impermeable plastic tarps. No one seems to know how hot it was inside the structure; but as many commenters (some of them experts) have pointed out, Ray created a set of conditions where it was impossible for him to monitor the people who were under his guidance.

There’s a largish picture of the sweat lodge here, and more (if smaller) photos at ABC15.com’s Northern Arizona news site. You should also read Jim Macdonald’s entry about heat stress.

Switching over to the AP version of the story:

Between 55 and 65 people were crowded into the 415-square-foot space during a two-hour period that included various spiritual exercises led by Ray, [County Sheriff Steve] Waugh said. Every 15 minutes, a flap was raised to allow more volcanic rocks the size of cantaloupes to be brought inside.

Authorities said participants were highly encouraged but not forced to remain in the sweat lodge for the entire time.

This is where I get All Judgemental. Remember Ray’s come-ons?

At first it was quite grueling, but the results…well…all I can say is, “Wow!” :: You’ll accelerate the releasing of your limitations and push yourself past your self-imposed and conditioned borders. :: You’ll carve out your own destiny and quickly develop the strength and determination to live it. :: You will have a gut level understanding of “The Four Enemies of Power” … and instantly defeat them when they arise. :: You’ll define and enforce your own boundaries—without someone else telling you what they should be. :: You’ll experience a new technologically-enhanced form of meditation that creates new neurological pathways, allowing you to experience powerful whole-brain thinking. :: There is no sacrifice—only greater and more magnificent results, wealth, adventure and fulfillment.

As I said earlier, “Remember all of these when we’re asking why participants stayed in James Ray’s misbegotten sweat lodge beyond the limits of their own endurance.” If you have the sense God gave a soda cracker, you do not (1.) promise people results that will both transform them to the point of temporarily estranging them from themselves, and automatically provide them with the means to endure that transformation; (2.) put them through multiple exercises that are both psychologically and physically challenging; (3.) push them to test their own limits, and give them the impression that bailing out of the exercises is wussy, a defeat, and a waste of their ten thousand dollars; and (4.) fail to monitor them closely for signs of distress.

Fasting, vision quests, and sweat lodges are all stressful, and they all produce altered mental states. Basically, they’re mind/body hacks. That’s why they’re so dangerous: they operate in an area where mind and body interact in strange ways, and normal judgement is suspended. Under those circumstances, someone trustworthy has to be there to exercise judgement for you. If the person guiding you is also pushing you to test your limits, they have to be even more careful and pay even closer attention.

“Cosmic Connie,” on her weblog Whirled Musings, talks about this class of problems:

[W]henever there is discussion about the negative aspects of selfish-help/New-Wage stuff, and particularly, it seems, when tragedy strikes, there is invariably discussion about how we shouldn’t place all of the blame on the gurus or leaders; the followers should bear some personal responsibility as well. I agree. Even so, as I said in a recent post about another New-Wage workshop-related tragedy (and please forgive me for quoting myself, but I’m too lazy to paraphrase):

I’m all for personal responsibility. But one problem with these seminars and just about everything else in the New-Wage/selfish-help industry is this: While the [legal] disclaimers are whispered out of one side of the mouth (or written in fine print on one page of the web site), what comes out of the other side are the loud (or large-point-size) proclamations that THIS technique or path or technology or course or workshop or whatever will improve the quality of your life and deliver miracles—whoever you are, and no matter what your problem is. Add a bunch of poetic marketing copy, and throw in a few filmy trailers with mystical music and special effects interspersed with ecstatic testimonials from “graduates,” and you have a very powerful emotional cocktail.

Back to the New York Times again:

Dr. Carroll, who is partly of Mescalero Apache descent, said the Angel Valley sweat lodge was the “best example I have seen, sadly, in a long time of why it is extremely dangerous to conduct sweat lodge ceremonies without proper training.”

Katherine Lash, a co-owner of Spiritquest Retreat in Sedona and a veteran of more than 100 sweat lodge ceremonies, said she had never heard of a sweat being conducted with as many people as were involved in the Angel Valley event. “In my experience it has been very rare to have more than 20 people,” she said.

Limiting the number of people inside a sweat lodge is critical because the person leading the event is supposed to carefully monitor the mental and physical condition of each participant, experts said.

“It’s important to know who is responsible for your spiritual and physical safety in that lodge,” said Vernon Foster, a member of the Klamath-Modoc tribe, who regularly leads ceremonial sweat lodge events in central Arizona.

So how did James Ray get around that requirement? Simple: He always has his attendees sign a comprehensive waiver. There’s considerable interest in whether the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office will bring criminal charges.

5. Interpretation.

There’s been a lot of online discussion of this event. The most interesting comments I’ve seen have come from Duff McDuffee, at a weblog called Beyond Growth. He’s written three entries about James Ray, two of which are recent and deal with the Angel Ranch fiasco. The earliest of the three, Good News: You Can’t Have It All was posted in August of this year. I can’t summarize the whole thing—he makes a long string of connections—but here’s a core statement:

Let’s continue with James Arthur Ray, as he is such a clear example of the excesses of personal development culture. If you click the pyramid marked “begin your journey” on Mr. Ray’s website, the headline on the next page asks…

“Are you 100% totally and completely happy with your life?”

The implication is twofold:

1) that Mr. Ray is the first person ever to answer this question “yes,” making him either a pathological liar or a narcissist (or both).

2) that everyone on Earth needs to purchase his products, forever, until they too are as perfect as him.

The biggest irony is in the video clip. … Ray begins by talking about the “large amount of stress and fear lately” due to the global recession. “Who could imagine that some of the largest banks in the United States could go belly up?” He then implies that we are not in a global recession but that this is merely media scaremongering, and then says “but stop, just suppose I could show you a way to use the Law of Attraction, as well as the six other Laws of the Universe, to rise above all external circumstances?” Uhhhh, say what?!?

…Ray goes on to explain that when you understand the secrets of the Universe (which elsewhere says he learned from Peruvian Shamans amongst other spiritual teachers and gurus), you can succeed no matter what external circumstances. Implied is that he too used to be a loser like you, until he discovered the Laws of the Universe. Now he’s a winner, his life is perfect, and your life can be perfect too…

James Arthur Ray is suggesting that to solve the problem of the global recession, we should do exactly what caused it. He’s recommending that we deny reality and inflate our expectations—exactly what happened with the housing bubble, the subprime mortage crisis, the crisis on Wall Street, the credit crunch, and all the other aspects of the U.S.-led global recession we are now experiencing.

It would be worth reading even if the Angel Ranch fiasco had never happened.

McDuffee’s main article, James Arthur Ray’s Spiritual Warrior Event Kills 2, Injures 19 in Sweat Lodge Fiasco—

Whoah! Breaking news! The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office has upgraded its investigation to a homicide inquiry. I’m going to go live with this post and finish up the last few paragraphs as soon as I can.

Where was I? Right. McDuffee’s main article. Best single source of information I’ve found, on several counts.

One of them is McDuffee’s superior collection of James Ray’s tweets. As our estimable readers will no doubt recall, Ray is an indefatigable twitterer, but right after the debacle with the sweat lodge he deleted all his recent tweets that mentioned death or the Spiritual Warrior workshop. TechCrunch got its hands on four of them before they disappeared from Twitter Search, but Duff McDuffee got fifteen. I’ve collected sixteen—McDuffee’s lot plus an extra one TechCrunch snared—and mine are transcribed text, not images. I’ll be posting them anon.

Another reason it’s so informative is that McDuffee has been following this story closely, he’s got good sources of his own, he’s familiar with the self-improvement scene, and he’s been posting updates all along. He doesn’t mince words:

Two hours in a sweat lodge!? This is insane. … But this is the logic of these kinds of workshops—break you down to build you up. Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within is very similar—long hours, no breaks, constant full-on exercises. While there is usually no explicit instruction that you must remain with the group, the pressure to do so can be enormous even when way beyond your limits.

I’m guessing that these deaths and injuries were not a result of “carbon monoxide” (which tested negatively) but intense psychological pressure to remain in a dangerous situation far beyond the limits of safety and sanity.

I know several people who have gone to the hospital for various reasons after “large group awareness trainings” such as Ray’s “Spiritual Warrior Event.” Many people online have complained of received mild to moderate burns on their feet after Tony Robbins’ firewalk, for example. It’s time we brought these gurus to justice and demanded that personal change workshops be safe for all.

When something goes wrong in such a seminar due to it being overly intense and dangerous, usually the victims are blamed for “not taking 100% responsibility,” thus dodging the responsibility of the seminar leaders. Personally, I think we should hold James Arthur Ray 100% personally responsible for the death of these two seminar participants, up to and including going to jail. …

The excessive focus on pushing past your boundaries (treating inner objections as “resistance”) is in my opinion what creates the conditions for dangerous approaches to personal change. …

UPDATE #7

AOL has a new article giving some back story on the two who died. The woman, aged 38, “was an avid surfer and hiker who was ‘in top shape,’ took self-improvement seriously and had a passion for art, a family spokesman said.”

Some other relevant quotations from the article:

Nineteen other people were taken to hospitals, suffering from burns, dehydration, respiratory arrest, kidney failure or elevated body temperature. Most were soon released, but one remained in critical condition Saturday. …

I am especially concerned that participants had fasted for 36 hours and had just broken their fast. I recently tried fasting for 36 hours. The first 24 were wonderful, then I started going into a kind of toxic shock, feeling nauseous like I had the flu (which is apparently common), so I broke the fast at about 36 hours. I wasn’t ill, but it did take about 24 more hours to feel normal again. I would have had a very difficult time doing anything strenuous, let alone a two hour sweat. A friend who fasts regularly says that one’s first fast can be the most challenging, but that they can get easier over time. For anyone fasting for the first time, this fast alone could have been quite challenging. If it had only been a two hour sweat, the risks would have been greatly reduced.

And again, “highly encouraged” to stay within the sweat lodge is almost certainly an understatement of the intense psychological pressure most participants in such an event feel to conform to group norms. I think participants in seminars should be “highly encouraged” to speak up when they feel that a process is too much for them. In my direct experience on both my own path and in facilitating change with others, there is no sane reason to push yourself or anyone else so close to death in order to engage in conscious transformation.

UPDATE #8, 10/13/09

[From the NYTimes:]

Fire department reports released Tuesday show the incident wasn’t the first involving a sweat lodge ceremony at the resort. Verde Valley Fire Chief Jerry Doerksen said his department responded to a 911 call in October 2005 about a person who was unconscious after being in a sweat lodge.

Angel Valley resort owner Amayra Hamilton confirmed that Ray was leading the sweat ceremony during the 2005 event. Ray’s spokesman declined to comment.

WOW! Ray almost killed somebody in 2005, but wasn’t stopped. This is exactly what I’ve been attempting to warn people about with my guru criticism on this blog and elsewhere.

Ray’s spokesman, Howard Bragman, has said Ray would speak when it’s appropriate. He declined Tuesday to address the Brown family’s concerns. …

A statement released by the family of Liz Neuman, who remains in critical condition at the Flagstaff Medical Center, said she is in a coma and doctors are working to stabilize damage to multiple organs

In addition to the other two dead, there is another woman in a coma!

Two others remained hospitalized. Fire officials say the victims exhibited symptoms ranging from dehydration to kidney failure after sitting in the sweat lodge.

Two dead, one in a coma, two more hospitalized. Do they have health insurance? Why kidney failure?

Duff McDuffee, if you’re reading this, that’s one question I can answer. Kidney failure accompanies severe dehydration. As for the “damage to multiple organs,” see Jim Macdonald’s piece on heat stress. Once the hypothalamus packs it in, you get cascading system failures. I’m not sure they make dice that’ll yield the saving roll Liz Neuman needs.

6. Questions answered, and new questions.

Update #9 is the prize catch. It’s McDuffee’s notes while listening to a 90-minute podcast that includes an interview with someone named Shawna who was there, helping with the fire:

Shawna has done many sweats in the past. She was invited to help with the fire for the sweat. When Shawna arrived at the location, her friend who had invited her was very upset and said “something went terribly, terribly wrong.” She ran to the sweatlodge. There were people lying in the dirt and sand around the lodge, with other people attending to them.

Bad scene, severely disoriented ambulatory casualties, paramedics dispensing IV hydration.

2 hours later, the other people still looked like they had suffered from physical trauma, shivering in blankets.

That’s because they’d suffered physical trauma. They were in shock.

One woman told Shawna her story, she passed out in the sweat lodge. She was in the very back of the sweat lodge. Most of the people who ended up with a severe trauma were in the back of the sweat lodge.

Location of the victims was a datum I’ve been waiting for. If the worst traumas were clustered together, it was the sweat lodge environment that injured them.

When the door was being opened in the lodge to put in more rocks, air rushes in. She was so far in the back and the door was so small, she never felt any relief, no fresh air. This is very unusual, probably unintended. Usually opening the door, everyone feels some fresh air before the next round. She wondered if she was even breathing any oxygen by the end.

Since she could still walk and talk, I’d say the answer was yes.

2 days prior attendees had gone into a vision quest where they were encouraged to fast and not drink any water. Sedona is a desert, an extremely dry climate. Participants were already dehydrated and then sweating it out.

Hmmmf. Sedona isn’t extremely dry; it’s just very dry. You still have to drink lots of water, though.

James Ray is a coastal Californian, and I am biting my tongue.

That morning they had a breakfast and encouraged to hydrate, had about 4 hours to rehydrate and get nutrition in them. In Shawna’s opinion, the sweat was way too long, should be 4 rounds not 6.

People were throwing up water.

Okay, I can call that one. If they were trying to hydrate but their bodies weren’t accepting water, they were already in shock. These people were in trouble. Jim Macdonald, who’s present here in a chat window, adds that they wouldn’t be throwing up pure water. It would be acidified water, so their acid/base metabolism would be going out of whack, and their entire ability to move oxygen in their blood would be compromised. To which I reply that that might account for the woman Shawna talked to feeling like she wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

James Ray was in the sweat lodge with them when people were going into shock, passing out, and in some cases dying. He was supposed to be responsible for their well-being.

Shawna … shared with her husband that she was seeing people dead, passed out, etc. when “relief was on the other side of that door.” One man said “yea, I wimped out, I got out on the 5th door…I wasn’t playing full on.” This man had shamed himself, felt like he was letting Ray down. Shawna defended him as maintaining his own limits, speaking up to authority. This man questioned Ray’s authority and took care of himself, Shawna told him. And then he took that in and said “and thank God I did that, because I was well enough to carry the other people out.” …

He may have saved his own life, and he may have saved others, but it took Shawna pointing it out to him for this man to realize he wasn’t a failure for bugging out early.

Continuing on with excerpts from Duff McDuffee’s notes:

Shawna interviews Jim Tree, a Native American man who does ceremonies. Many reactions from the community—not a sweat lodge ceremony, but a huge aberration from what a Native American sweat lodge is like. He’s never seen more than 20 people at a lodge.

Years of training to be sensitive to everyone in the lodge. Sweat lodge construction has certain materials—red willow branches for frame. There is a reason for this. Plastic tarps trap in gases. …

“We do fast the day of the sweat, but don’t fast from water. Start hydrating all day of sweat.”

“This was a recipe for disaster.”

“Usually people prepare for a year for a vision quest.”

The elders have been warning people. Apparently the elders went to Ray and confronted him and told him that he shouldn’t be doing this, that “you’re hurting people.” Most every time people have been nauseous and sick for the six or seven years Ray has been doing this event. …

Jim was stopped from doing lodges after a year from the elders and trained more to sense the condition of people in the lodge.

During the 5th or 6th run, people were calling out to be let out and were denied. “That would never happen” in Jim’s tradition.

No kidding. If that can be substantiated, James Arthur Ray is in a world of trouble—and he deserves to be.

Pouring the water is gently sprinkled on the stones to precisely control it. Ray poured water from the bucket directly onto the stones, creates an uncontrollable amount of heat.

Jim would be glad to have Ray call him and talk to him about all of this.

This is really bad. People have been sick and nauseated almost every year, which is a clear sign of overheating. One person collapsed and was unconscious in 2005, which datum prompted Jim Macdonald to remark, “When you start passing out from the heat, you’re on the friggin’ edge.” This year, by report, participants who wanted to leave weren’t getting to do so. Some unspecified elders are said to have previously remonstrated with Ray, to no effect. If this all comes out in testimony, Ray could be looking at several counts of negligent homicide.

7. If magic is real, it’s terrifying.

Duff McDuffee’s third entry about James Ray, The Dark Side of The Secret: Reading James Arthur Ray’s Sweat Lodge Disaster through a Magickal Lens, was the one that spooked me. He turned the event around and looked at it from a completely unexpected POV:

[W]hat if we read this event through the eyes of magick? James Ray claims lineage in the Western esoteric or occult tradition, so perhaps we could learn something interesting from reading this terrible event in this way that would deepen our understanding. Perhaps we could even find some ideas for moving forward in a positive new paradigm for personal development.

When I begin to think about the deaths of Ray’s seminar participants in this way, I find myself having a change of heart towards the man, far less cynical about his words and basic message while still holding him accountable for what transpired. Perhaps you will have a similar change of heart.

James Arthur Ray as Powerful Magician

From the magickal perspective, it’s not that James A Ray has been bullshitting us about a mythical Law of Attraction, but that he is indeed a powerful magician who attracted some very powerful, albeit unwanted results. We’d want to ask, “how did he attract this experience?” and “how can we protect ourselves from attracting similar experiences?”

We can see Ray as having successfully evoked the Warrior. The event was called the “Spiritual Warrior.” Fifteen tweets in seven days (all since deleted, but captured here) mentioned death, the Warrior, or war, and two mentioned words and actions being congruent. A magician casts spells with his or her words and intent, thus influencing reality. Ray evoked the Warrior, and powerfully so. As he would say, “energy flows where attention goes.”

This is the power of Intent and Word, cultivated by magicians to influence reality. One could see this disaster as “the dark side of The Secret,” which is not just “negative thinking” but even positive intentions gone horribly wrong. Thus, positive thinking and intent are not enough if they lead to negative consequences. Indeed, Ray himself emphasizes that the results one brings about in life are what are most relevant to one’s spiritual progress. Therefore this result should be read as part of the whole of Ray’s spiritual/magickal attainment. Or as he said, “The kingdom of heaven/expansion is w/in. But it will always be measured w/out. Your results tell and [sic] interesting story…They tell the truth”.

(Much thoughtful commentary follows. You should all read it.)

I too was struck by the content of James Ray’s deleted tweets—so full of death, war, and sacrifice, not to mention warnings that not everyone would make it through. However, I wasn’t struck by the same thoughts as a result. Since I don’t like cynicism, I’ll credit the difference to Duff McDuffee and I having very disparate worldviews.

What I thought on reading those tweets was that if James Ray honestly believed what he preached, if he truly believed that thoughts and words and intentions are magic, he would never have written those tweets and sent them out into the world. Therefore, my much more mundane conclusion was that he never believed that stuff in the first place.

What disturbs me is that the universe nevertheless contrived to behave as though the things he’d been preaching were true.

First Frost
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 01:29 PM * 132 comments

The first frost, whitening the grass today,
Surprised the summer’s final cloverheads
And scattered them with diamonds as they lay
Like amethysts beside the cattail beds.
The mist moves like the Lord upon the face
Of silver waters ruffled by the wake
That trails an onyx grebe. The pearly lace
Of clouds drops sunbeams on the waiting lake.
But still the rows of indecisive trees
Stand dithering between the green and gold,
As if they’ve months to go before the freeze.
So, muddy-leafed, they watch the fall unfold
And wear this day the way that little girls
Play dress-up in their mother’s finest pearls.

So. Um. Yeah. How’s the weather with you?

The Nomination Thing
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 02:47 PM * 98 comments

As I said earlier, the Nomination Thing looks to become a one of those tiresome canards that get trotted out to discredit an entire worthy endeavor (in this case, the Nobel Peace Prize). Basically, I see a lot of comments implying that, because nominations close in February, the Nobel is not based on anything Obama has done since then. These comments are almost always one-liners, and feel like unthinking amplifications of some earlier source. The meme rests on two assumptions:

• He should not have been nominated because he had just started his term (and, by extension, that nominations are quality controlled)
• The evaluation period closes when the nomination period closes. In other words, nothing that occurs after the nomination date is taken into consideration.

I decided to investigate these assumptions, using the highly sophisticated technique of actually reading the Nobel website.*

So, first. What, exactly, goes on with Peace Prize nominations? The qualifications to submit a nomination are quite broad:

1. Members of national assemblies and governments of states;
2. Members of international courts;
3. University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes;
4. Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
5. Board members of organizations who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
6. Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; (proposals by members of the Committee to be submitted no later than at the first meeting of the Committee after February 1) and
7. Former advisers appointed by the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

That’s a big pool of nominators, many of whom (at least in the US) will have strong partisan agendas. Considering the current American political scene, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to Obama, Biden, McCain, Palin, and Clinton were all nominated. According to the page on the award process:

In recent years, the Committee has received close to 200 different nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. The number of nominating letters is much higher, as many are for the same candidates.

Now, we won’t know who was nominated for 50 years, because the Nobel foundation keeps nominations secret for that long. But I thought I would test the breadth of the historic pool by searching the database of nominations from 1901 until 1956. Did you know that Hitler was nominated in 1939? (It was withdrawn.) Stalin was put forward in 1945 and 1948. And, not to be left out, Mussolini was also nominated twice, both in 1935.

More recently, Tony Blair and George W Bush were jointly nominated in 2002, according to one qualified nominator.

So I think we can conclude, based on process and available results, that the nomination pool isn’t significantly vetted as long as the nominators meet certain standards. A newly-inaugurated US President with a record of community organization, a voting record against the Iraq war, and a message of international collaboration wouldn’t even be a controversial submission.

As for the second assumption, that the committee based the award on Obama’s actions as at the closing date of the nominations? Once again using my super-secret technique* of reading the website, I see that the investigative and voting process lasts right up to the beginning of October:

February-March - Short list. The Committee assesses the candidates’ work and prepares a short list.
 
March-August - Adviser review. The short list is reviewed by permanent advisers and advisers specially recruited for their knowledge of specific candidates. The advisers do not directly evaluate nominations nor give explicit recommendations.
 
October - Nobel Laureates are chosen. At the beginning of October, the Nobel Committee chooses the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates through a majority vote. The decision is final and without appeal. The names of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates are then announced.

In other words, the committee evaluated the nominees until August, and then voted on them in September. I’m certain they didn’t do this in Grand Jury-level seclusion, either, so if Obama had been going along promisingly until the end of August and then lobbed nukes at, say, Madagascar, they’d have adjusted their voting accordingly.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that the choice is open to some serious debate. But I think that questioning it on the basis that nominations closed at the beginning of February is classic disinformation: spinning a fact into a lie.

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* I’m being sarcastic here because I’m surprised how many people whom I otherwise respect seem to be incapable of looking at an original source that’s readily available online.

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 05:18 AM * 125 comments

Congratulations are in order. From the Nobel website:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Personally, I think this comes a little early. The last sitting President to win it, Woodrow Wilson, founded the League of Nations. Obama has yet to do anything of that magnitude.

But I reckon it serves as incentive as well as reward, and it gives him leverage in certain circles. It’ll put the wind up the sails of the isolationist branch of American society, of course; expect shrieking commentary.

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And I see it’s started. A couple of observations:

1. It’s really boring to say that it’s the prize for not being George W Bush without actually talking about what that entails. The joke has been retweeted to death already; it probably has its own hashtag.
   People with no commenting history who pitch up here and say that particular really boring thing are going to be treated as drivebys. I’ll append IP addresses to your comments, and everyone is invited to mock your username. (If you comment here regularly, you’re allowed to say it, but be prepared for yawns. If this is not your desired outcome, try being more specific.)
2. Nomination does not equal award. It is true that nominations closed very early in the Obama presidency. That does not mean that the award was decided then, nor on the basis of what was known at that time.
   I strongly suspect that pointing out the date of nomination is going to be a wingnut marker. It has all the hallmarks: it’s both factually true and entirely misleading, and it is designed to reinforce existing views rather than inform. Anyone who chooses to do so on this thread should do so in full knowledge that it makes you look naïve, slimy, or possibly both.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a sideshow opportunity!
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 01:31 AM * 18 comments

October 9, 1992 was a normal Friday evening on the East Coast of the United States. Then, just before 8:00 pm, a streak of light as bright as a full moon crossed the sky, heading northeast. The meteorite took about 40 seconds to fly from somewhere in Kentucky to Peekskill, New York, where it changed forever the fate of a 1980 Chevrolet Malibu.

Considering how brief the flight was, it’s impressive that sixteen videos of it are known to exist. (Most of them were shot at football games.) The recovered piece, identified as an H6 monomict breccia meteorite, massed 12.4kg (27 pounds 5 ounces), but photos and video show that there were probably more. Apparently, they didn’t hit anything interesting, and have therefore never been found.

There are plenty of informative articles about the meteorite on the web. It’s neat. It’s a genuine Thing from Outer Space. But the object from this story that gets the eyeballs when it tours the world, from Paris to Tokyo? The car.

Because nothing has yet fallen out of the sky that is as weird as the people on whom it falls.

Pastorale
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 04:02 PM * 133 comments

Hey, guys, Teresa, Patrick and Jim have gone off to The Island of Spotty Internet Connectivity for the week, leaving Avram and me with the keys. In the fine traditions surrounding the absence of cats, that means the mice should throw a party.

And it occurs to me that it’s been a while since we’ve had a poetry game. In the spirit of a fairly recent entry on Tor.com, I thought we’d do one on settings.

Classic literature, after all, is full of poetry about settings. But there’s precious little about the really neat and wonderful places we find inside the covers of genre books. I thought we could fill in this gap a bit by immortalizing some of our favorite settings in verse, either original or pastiche.

Here are a few seed crystals, including of course the one really classic filk in the genre.

1. Come live with me and be my love,
   And we will all the pleasures prove
   That we in dark and deeply mined
   Chasms of black Moria find.
   
   And we will sit beneath the ridge
   And watch the Balrog keep the bridge
   Above the fiery pit whose smoke
   Makes even orcish fighters choke.
    
   
2. The watchmaker
   Who rigged for me
   The warp drive flange
   Out of space debris
   Has given my crew
   A working ship
   So we’ll make it through
   From this scouting trip.
    
   
3. We’ve tried each spinning space mote
   And reckoned its true worth:
   Take us back again to the homes of men
   On the cool, green hills of Earth.
   
   Rocannon has windbeasts
   And hilfs who act like lords.
   But you just might, if you have to fight,
   Be spitted on their swords.
   
   To ice-encrusted Gethen
   Our coming was foretold.
   But who’d have known we’d sleep alone
   And wake up twice as cold?
   
   The dusty moon Anarres
   Is home to anarchists
   Who can only live because they give
   And by gifts their world exists.
   
   While rich and fertile Urras
   Is plagued with poverty.
   The poor all cry looking at the sky
   That the moon’s the place to be.
   
   On peaceful settled O
   The Night and Day are wed
   Sedoretu build on the vows fulfilled
   Both in and out of bed.
   
   The Hainish sent out ships
   For many a planetfall.
   But changeling breeds in time have needs
   To be Ekumenical.
   
   We pray for one last landing
   On the globe that gave us birth;
   Let us rest our eyes on the friendly skies
   And the cool, green hills of Earth.