I originally wrote this a couple of years ago when I was called upon to defend an assertion -- that science fiction is best regarded as a special case of fantasy.

I would like to start with a little essay about how I came to this conclusion -- that science fiction is actually a subset of fantasy -- because it defines terms and addresses many counterpoints that have been raised.

First, when I say "fantasy" I refer to stories that are about things that aren't. This includes both the purely imaginative (probably won't happen) and the speculative (might happen). Fantasy in this sense is not on a continuum against science fiction, it is on a continuum against realism.

(Although "continuum" implies that it's something resembling a straight line, which I would not be willing to defend.)

One possible rule of thumb: it is a fantasy if filming it would require obvious special effects.

There is a smaller definition of fantasy, call it fantasy definition 2, which basically means "vaguely resembling Tolkien." I believe this is a marketing distinction rather than a literary one, since it doesn't even include most fantasy. It does have a vigorous fan base, however. That fact leads the term "fantasy" to be used as shorthand for "this particular type of fantasy involving elves and dragons and such." So -- those types of stories clearly are fantasy, but they are not the definition of fantasy. They are not the container, they are one of the things contained.

Most of what we think of as "genre" is really just marketing. They put the books in whatever section they expect people to look for them in. So, The Handmaid's Tale is in unclassified "literature" because Margaret Atwood isn't marketed as a science fiction writer. It doesn't have any bearing on whether the book is science fiction. And it's not supposed to. It's supposed to help Atwood fans find her stuff.

Sufficiently popular fantastic writers will often get moved to the "literature" section -- it doesn't make any difference to the content of the books.

One common way people attempt to distinguish science fiction from (other) fantasy is to claim that science fiction is about what is "possible." This definition is problematic because "possible" is not intrinsic to the work. Real world possibilities are always shifting -- some things that seemed impossible once are now possible, other things which once seemed possible are now thought to be impossible. Re: any 50s science fiction about faster than light travel, or life on the Moon or Mars.

This definition would lead us to the fairly awkward position of deciding that most "golden age" SF is no longer science fiction, because it is now known to be fantasy.

But, people don't tend to do that -- we still see Podkayne of Mars as science fiction. So obviously, we're using a qualifier other than "what is now possible."

You might at this point be tempted to use "what the author thought was possible at the time it was written" as a qualifier, but this is still problematic, because the author's personal beliefs are also not intrinsic to the work. We can't conclude that every SF writer who deals in time travel to the past actually believes such a thing is possible.

So, what makes something science fiction, if it isn't the fact that its scientific premise is possible, or that the author believed it was possible when the story was written?

Well, let's look at Frankenstein, held by many to be the first science fiction novel. Mary Shelley writes of a man assembling a new man out of parts of dead men, then bringing him to life through unspecified scientific means.

(Note: movies have implied that this means was electricity. The novel doesn't say, ostensibly because Dr. Frankenstein doesn't want anyone to replicate his methods. But other writings by Mary Shelley at the time show that she was familiar with experiments in galvanism and that her knowledge that a frog's limb could be brought to "life" with electricity probably did influence her thinking when writing the novel.)

There was no concept of scientifiction (early name for SF) in her day, so in her mind she was writing a horrific fantasy, and her twist on it was to involve modern science. Also, we now know that what she describes in Frankenstein is impossible -- an intact and very recently deceased body might be brought back to life through electricity, but a sewn-together collection of corpses never could.

And yet, the book is retroactively classified as science fiction, and nobody seriously objects. Why is that?

Well, its premise is scientific -- it can be expressed as "suppose, using science, we could do X." Also, it is concerned with the effect of technology and scientific discoveries on the human psyche and human society, addressing concepts such as unintended consequences and creator responsibility.

So, it is science fiction because it wrestles with scientific issues and concepts. "Being science fiction" is essentially an attribute of what is otherwise a fantasy novel.

But, if you still think SF and fantasy are two distinct and separate genres, consider: Is alternate history science fiction, because it is generally published as science fiction? Or is it only science fiction if it involves quantum multiple universes theory, or if the change catalyst is something specifically scientific? (I mean, The Difference Engine, which is alternate history specifically based on technology, as opposed to The Man in the High Castle which is alternate history based on a different military outcome to World War II.)

Or is all alternate history science fiction because Philip K. Dick, an SF writer, wrote the first one? Is Zelazny's Amber series SF with fantasy trappings, or fantasy with vague pretensions of being science fiction? Is Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars series science fiction, even though it has no scientific elements other than being set on Mars? How about the works of China Mieville, who writes extremely strange industrial alternate world fantasy which is also science fiction and horror? Or about Lovecraft -- his Dreamlands series is pure fantasy, but most of his Cthulhu Mythos stories are more or less science fiction. And what would you make of Terry Pratchett's novel Strata -- SF in which space explorers land on a disc-shaped planet and discover an absurd world built by beings so advanced that the result is indistinguishable from magic?

(He wrote it in 1981, so it predates any of the Discworld books -- however, the flat world is clearly a Discworld prototype.)

While there are certainly loose and generalized distinctions between most SF and most non-SF fantasy, I don't find that they hold up well under close analysis. There are too many exceptions. After a while it seems like everything is an exception and the distinction just isn't worth making any more.

Note: this was originally written a year ago, and misplaced on the hard drive somehow. And now here it is back again.

So I'm writing an article inspired by this article in Slate which is mostly about an article in The New Yorker. Maybe somebody else will write an article about my article, although I doubt it. But it could be fun! How many levels deep can we get before we achieve reverse transcendence?

Anyway, the New Yorker article can be summed up pretty well by this quote from it:

"I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll <..> underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century?"

So from this you know that Sasha Frere-Jones is kind of an idiot (the very erudite New Yorker kind of idiot) and probably not black.

The structure of the article is like this: "Indie" rockers Arcade Fire are kind of boring, that is to say, white. Back in rock's golden age of the 50s and 60s and 70s, the performers were not so white. Of course, they were technically just as white, but their music was, in SFJ's opinion, more obviously influenced by blues and soul. So they weren't really so white. Then in the 80s there was Michael Jackson. Who wasn't actually white at all! At least, he wasn't white in the 80s when he was, like, the biggest superstar of all time! And there was Prince! Also not white! And then, starting in the 1990s, there was rap!

"You could argue that Dr. Dre and Snoop were the most important pop musicians since Bob Dylan and the Beatles."

(Er... I suppose you could argue that. You could argue almost anything. But my hyperbole-meter automatically goes into the red whenever anything is "the most important X since the Beatles!" or "the Beatles of X!")

Anyway, at this point the article proposes that during the 80s and 90s "racial sensitivity" caused white musicians to stop stealing from black musicians. Then SFJ goes on to talk at length about his own band, a funk band made up of white boys. (Okay, so SFJ is, as I suspected, white.) He seems to find it very telling that he couldn't quite find the right way to sing for the band's music, because he couldn't rap. In fact, he says "the problem was clearly related to race. It seemed silly to try to sound "black," but that is what happened, no matter how hard I tried not to."

I already know from panels at science fiction conventions that it is very hard to say, "well, in my book I do X" without sounding like a complete git. Turns out the same thing applies to, "in my band we do X." As a reader of the article, I keep thinking, "Dude, you seem to think there's some kind of racial politics involved, but maybe you're just not a very good singer."

Now, moving on to his main point, about "indie" rock, he says, "The indie genre emerged in the early eighties, in the wake of British bands such as the Clash and Public Image Ltd., and originally incorporated black sources, using them to produce a new music, characterized by brevity and force, and released on independent labels."

But what, exactly does he mean by "incorporated black sources"? English bands in the early 80s had a ska and reggae influence that eventually faded, but SFJ doesn't seem to mean "reggae" when he says "black." His example of the "blackness" of early indie rock is a single group, The Minutemen, and their blackness is established by "frantic political rants that were simultaneously jazz, punk, and funk, without sounding like any of these genres."

Okay, but. But. According to Wikipedia SFJ was born in 1967, which means that he was roughly my age while most of this was going on, and I don't know if he was listening to indie rock in the early 80s, but I know I was, and I know that we didn't call it "indie" then, we called it new wave or punk, and if there is a whiter style of music than new wave, I simply don't know what it is.

There is no discernible funk in new wave. Maybe there's a hint of jazz, sometimes. There is syncopation, of course, a bit of swing. Is swing "black" according to SFJ's criteria for blackness? Cab Calloway was black, anyway. I mean, he looks black in the pictures. Huh, this is weird, according to Wikipedia "In 1941 Cab Calloway fired Dizzy Gillespie from his Orchestra after an onstage fracas erupted when Calloway was hit with spitballs. He wrongly accused Gillespie, who stabbed Calloway in the leg with a small knife." Mr. Gillespie went on to a memorable guest spot on The Muppet Show, and Mr. Calloway appeared on Sesame Street, though I don't remember if I saw that one. But I really liked Mr. Gillespie on The Muppet Show.

Okay, back to SFJ. At this point, after making an assertion about early 80s rock that I don't buy, he makes an assertion about mid-90s rock that I also don't buy: "But by the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term 'indie rock' came implicitly to mean white rock."

While it is true that "indie rock" of the 90s did, pretty much, implicitly mean "white," I seem to recall in the 80s and 90s that "rock" of any kind meant white. There was "rock" and that was white, and there was "R&B" and that was black. Remember the band Living Color? Late 80s rock band, one big hit "Cult of Personality"? They were black, and it was treated at the time as kind of a novelty, because rock bands just weren't black. Even when the bands did "funk metal."

Oh, right, I forgot -- SFJ isn't talking about actual blackness of performers, he is talking about "blackness" of music, so I suppose by his criteria a funk metal band would be sufficiently "black" on account of the funk. Which would make popular indie bands of the 90s Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More... blow his theory.

On to the next round. "During the same period, indie-band singers abandoned full-throated vocals and began to mumble and moan, and to hide their voices under noise. Lyrics became increasingly allusive and oblique." Erm... I'm getting from this that he really doesn't like Nirvana, which would explain why, in an article about musical trends over the past 20 years, he has somehow managed not to mention them. (Of course, he also manages to talk about early 90s rap without mentioning Public Enemy.)

Oddly, the absence of Nirvana -- which jumped out at me -- totally missed the author of the Slate piece, who blithely sums up from SFJ's article:

"To give bite to the accusation [that modern indie rock is boring], Frere-Jones names a few names, beginning with the Arcade Fire and adding Wilco, the Fiery Furnaces, the Decemberists, the Shins, Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, and Devendra Banhart, plus indie-heroes past, Pavement. He contrasts them with the likes of the Clash, Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Public Image Ltd., Bob Dylan, the Minutemen, Nirvana, and even Grand Funk Railroad as examples of willful, gleeful, racial-sound-barrier-breaching white rockers of yore."

According to SFJ, 90s indie music just kept getting whiter, because it was drawing on super-white 60s trends like psychedelic and country music. And now "in the past few years, I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness. How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience -- to entertain?"

Okay, so, maybe neither one of us likes Cat Power, or Low (perpetrators of what I like to call "quaalude rock").

But, again I feel like he's missing the point. True, a lot of indie rock of the 00s isn't terribly danceable. I like to dance, so I notice things like that. But I don't find most "dance" music of the 00s terribly danceable either -- I don't really like to dance to electronica, and I don't really like to dance to modern rap/hip-hop/Justin Timberlake. In fact, that sexyback noise thing will hypnotize me into simultaneous immobility/murderous rage. Try it, if you have the stomach for it. It's fun. Play sexbacknoise and watch me glare at you for three or four minutes without being able to move.

So, my question would be, why is there generally such a deep chasm between "music that doesn't suck" and "music you can dance to" these days? Is it just a bad fit between my personal tastes and the whims of pop culture? Or is it a side effect of the increasingly minute stratifications of pop culture marketing? Is it the fault of those weirdly immobile Seattle audiences The Stranger liked to complain about, who set the stage in the 90s for the idea that indie rock and dancing were not in any way linked?

No, according the SFJ it seems to be related to laws against sampling. Except that he says, "For twenty years, beginning in the mid-eighties, with the advent of drum machines that could store brief digital excerpts of records, sampling had encouraged integration." Which, let me think, twenty years on from the mid-80s -- hey, that's now! Which, er, fails to make a case for something he claims started to happen ten years ago. Anyway, now he's talking about rap musicians having to write more of their own music, which I am having a hard time seeing as any kind of tragedy. But his point seems to be that anti-sampling laws discourage cross-genre musical influences. Which seems a little at odds with his main thesis, considering that in the 50s, 60s, and 70s they didn't have sampling. So, actually, I don't know what he's talking about here.

The Slate piece proposes an alternate theory: that you can't dance to modern indie rock because "compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it."

So, it's not race, it's class. I suppose there might be something to that -- "indie rock" does have a long tradition of being interchangeable with "college rock." But when you look at what college costs these days, and how in debt your typical graduate is, and look at the jobs they're likely to get, and compare that to what the guy who fixes your car makes... well, maybe it is class, in a sub-culture sense, but I'm no longer sure that class has any predictable relationship to money.

(And I'm also not sure why, knowing that, we don't encourage smart kids with a mechanical inclination to learn how to fix cars, but that's a whole rant of its own.)

But now we're in the home stretch, the beginning of SFJ's final paragraph:

"The most important reason for the decline of musical miscegenation, however, is social progress. Black musicians are now as visible and as influential as white ones. They are granted the same media coverage, recording contracts, and concert bookings."

Well... yes and no. When you're not a big fan of rap or R&B ballads, it's easy to notice that black recording superstars are indeed huge, but only within a fairly narrow range of musical styles. Anybody working in a different black musical tradition -- blues, jazz, swing, funk, motown, gospel, reggae -- is kind of left out.

(Although white British chick Amy Winehouse seems to be doing pretty well with her own little motown revival, how does that fit into the overall picture? And, here's a thought, if white artists borrowing from black musical traditions is what SFJ wants more of, how does he feel about black artists borrowing from white musical traditions? When I saw Kanye West at Bumbershoot he was accompanied on stage by a string quartet. Or, what about the grand tradition of black opera divas?

There seems to be an underlying assumption in SFJ's piece that musical influence goes one way and means one thing -- white artists borrow "ecstatic singing" and a "heavy African downbeat" from black artists. But rock & roll has been around for generations now. If Led Zeppelin broke new ground by going back to nearly-forgotten blues greats like Muddy Waters for inspiration, somebody Kanye West's age might have grown up listening to Led Zeppelin. Or, you know, not Led Zeppelin. He might have grown up listening to new wave. He might have grown up as fascinated by obscure, forgotten psychedelic garage bands as Zeppelin was by blues artists.

SFJ seems to be creating a narrative where black musical traditions come from some pure, primitive, untouched well of generic Africanness, which all European-descended musicians must drink from in order to achieve authentic rock soul. This narrative is naive, patronizing and reductionist. Why all the fuss about ecstasy and downbeats, and no mention of the blistering political and social conscience or the intricate poetic devices of modern rap lyrics?

(Although, you know, nowadays those intelligent lyrics are mostly found in indie rap of the kind I'm likely to hear on the college station.)

"The uneasy, and sometimes inappropriate, borrowings and imitations that set rock and roll in motion gave popular music a heat and an intensity that can’t be duplicated today, and the loss isn’t just musical; it’s also about risk."

Notice the way we have gone back and forth between talking about "popular music" and "indie music"? Which one has lost its soul? Both? Aren't we all just victims of the ever-increasing commodification of art?

Popular music used to be like a big open-mike night, where everybody would go and listen to everything and latch on to what they liked. Now we have headphones on all the time, listening to a pre-selected narrowcast of music by artists and sub-genres we already know we like. How can any cross-pollination occur under those circumstances?

It's still technically summer, but fall is on the way. (Hooray!) So it's time for the annual onslaught of vaguely Halloweeny articles. Which is my explanation for this otherwise random New York Times article on goth, You Just Can't Kill It.
favorite quote:
“I think vampires are freeking sweet because they have such true emotions that no mere mortals can express! I too at times think I am a vampire being with my hate of garlic and how my eyes r sensitive to light.”

I'm guessing the young lady is a Twilight fan.Also, I hate The Family Guy with the burning passion of a thousand suns. (And yet I sometimes watch it anyway, because I find it hard to resist cartoons. Heck, I used to watch Superfriends.)

The article is not terribly informative, but it is accompanied by a very nice picture of a Victorian widow's outfit.

It is also accompanied by a photo essay of various alleged "goths." This essay includes baggy-pantsed male youths (baggy pants = not in any conceivable way goth, no, not even if they're black), catwalk models (kinda goth... I guess... skeletal, anyway), a silent film star (très goth!), more catwalk models wearing sometimes gothic fashions (the ghostly wedding dress and the boots anyway), a top hat which has a bat on it but nevertheless manages to be extremely ugly (maybe it's supposed to be made from human skin?), and a pretty but not particularly gothic dress made of red feathers.

As a personal memoir of gothic history the article starts out well enough, but it takes a wrong turn early on when the quotes from random young people start. I think you are doomed to a certain level of inescapable stupidity if you start asking people "so, why do you do what you do?" Because they will make stuff up. And it's mostly nonsense.

(Although I do want to ask whoever put together the photo essay why they thought young gentlemen wearing long t-shirts and enormous draggy pants were goths. Really, I want to know. Did they tell you they were goths? Did you just assume that everyone in black is a goth? And, good lord, when is that trend going to die anyway? If anything it's getting worse. Just when I thought waistbands couldn't possibly get any lower, they established a new low below the butt. Yeah, young men who want to look really hip are now wearing pants that make them 1. Waddle awkwardly like they need a diaper change, 2. Resemble buttless old men who couldn't quite pull their pants all the way up. I know I'm an old curmudgeon and therefore expected to hate whatever kids today get up to fashionwise, but honestly, trust me on this one, you all look like morons.)

If teenagers who belong to Facebook groups are discovering gothic fashion, more power to 'em. But the attempt to make it mean something... I guess the presumption that it does mean something has always kind of irked me. It's not like fashion is ever completely neutral. Guys who wear khaki knee-length shorts, fanny packs, and yellow Crocs have decided how they are going to dress just as much as a guy wearing black velvet and eyeliner.People who listen to Britney Spears do so (presumably) because they enjoy hearing it, the same as people who listen to Bauhaus. People whose house is full of Thomas Kinkdade prints had to select and pay for them just the same as Edward Gorey prints.

(Although once your house is full of gothic geegaws and vampire books and Edward Gorey, it tends to attract more of the same as gifts. So, come to think of it, I didn't actually select and pay for all my Edward Gorey decor. But I think my point stands.)

(Hey! If you type "hate thomas kinkade" into Google I'm entry three!)

So, I am unable to imagine actually enjoying Ms. Spears' or Mr. Kinkade's oeuvre, nor am I able to imagine being able to bring oneself to leave the house in any combination of khaki knee-length shorts, fanny packs, or Crocs of any color. But that's not the point. The point is that black velvet is seen as a choice, while khaki shorts are seen as the absence of choice, as something that -- I guess -- just magically appears upon the body when you're not paying attention, because nature will not allow you to leave the house without pants.

And the decision to get a tan -- for people who work indoors anyway -- is just as much a choice as wearing sunscreen.

While partisan bloggers and the sun scare industry will use this as an opportunity to undermine Gov. Palin and demonize the indoor tanning industry, the fact is that Governor Palin’s decision to get UV light from a tanning bed positively impacts her health.

—The Indoor Tanning Association, regarding the tanning bed which vice-presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin had installed in the governor's residence

Approximately four years ago, I was in an airport waiting for a flight to the Boston Worldcon, and the Republican National Convention was on CNN. I tried to sleep through Zell Miller's yelling, but I had odd, fitful dreams instead. I had a dream where America's relationship with George W. Bush played out like a story from Will Eisner's A Contract With God, where everything is in sepia-toned pen and ink, and people live in tenements and shout at each other and hang laundry and stuff.

So I drew that here: Mary & George: A Romance.

That story ended before the 2004 election.So I drew this: Mary & George: Epilogue.

In 2005, after Katrina, I had the idea of doing a sequel where Mary wakes up and finds the basement is flooding, but I couldn't think of where I wanted to go with it, so I didn't do anything. Still, the idea hung around, knocking about in my head. Eventually this came out: Mary & George: The End.

In case it helps, Aunt Della is the Democratic Party and Aunt Ronnie is the Republican Party. They are not any particular member of either party.

I know my caricature of Hillary Clinton looks really weird, but it's because I'm a sucky caricaturist and not because I was trying to make her look insane or anything. The picture of her jitterbugging with Mary comes from a picture of actual jitterbuggers, where the angle makes it look like two women are dancing with each other, although if you look close you can see where they're actually holding hands with male partners and not with each other at all.

The jumprope chant is an amalgamation of a couple of different ones that are already in use, I didn't make them up. Mostly.

Whatever happens next, the saga of Mary & George is over.

Texas still leads nation in rate of uninsured residents...

But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."

I shouldn't need to explain why this comment is so ridiculous, but I will anyway. First, Mr. Goodman seems seriously confused about the difference between health care and health insurance. You see, Mr. Goodman, health care is what you might get if you go to an emergency room, or a clinic, or a regular doctor, or something like that. Health insurance is supposed to help you pay for it.

You know what happens if you are having a heart attack and you go to the emergency room and they treat you? They send you a bill. Which, if you have insurance, you can try to get your insurance to pay. Otherwise, the hospital expects you to pay for it. Sure, you might not have the money to pay for it, but that does not stop the hospital from trying to collect it, including nasty things like destroying your credit or sending the bill to a collections agency that will hound you night and day.

And, if they don't succeed in collecting the money from you, the hospital either eats the cost or gets money from the government -- the care itself doesn't magically cost nothing just because it came from an emergency room. In fact, care from an emergency room is usually far more expensive than similar care from another source. In part that's because of what an emergency room is for: saving your life right this very minute. You can't really go to the emergency room for, say, a routine prescription.

Which is another incredibly stupid thing about this statement -- where on earth did Mr. Goodman get the idea that the only kind of health care people need is the kind of immediate, right now, save-your-life care that emergency rooms are required to give? Does he, or anybody he knows, ever go to the doctor? Do they get checkups? Screenings? Flu shots? Prescriptions? Do they seek medical assistance to manage diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol? Does he know anyone who's ever been treated for cancer? Because I'm pretty sure that you can't get any of that in an emergency room.

Finally, this is moronic from a public relations standpoint. Not only does it perpetuate the image of Republicans as sociopaths indifferent to human suffering, but also it demonstrates a bizarre lack of seriousness on matters of policy. His cavalier wording, "Voila! Problem solved" makes the whole thing sound like a joke.

For utter cluelessness this is up there with Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners" comment, although I think it has an even higher moronitude factor. What's up with McCain surrounding himself with idiots, anyway? Is it to make himself look smarter in comparison?

Speaking of which, Sarah Palin -- wow, what a piece of work. The more I see of her, the more I become convinced that she is exactly like George W. Bush, only more so. Bush concentrate. She seems to have his attitude toward leadership, anyway -- it's about getting other people to do what you say. All power, no responsibility. Like how little kids imagine being president.

This means that she is disturbingly popular among certain groups, such as the rabid Republican base and Internet trolls and raging misogynists. Also, has anyone else out there noticed the Republican double standard in full swing? The very same people who fell all over themselves making tacky sexist Hillary Clinton comments seem to be the ones all huffed up over the "sexism" of anyone who dares to criticize Palin or suggest she is in any way unfit to be president.

In other news: the FBI predicted as early as September 2004 that the booming business in shaky mortgages had to potential to be an "epidemic" with "as much impact as the S&L crisis."

But nobody listened because the agent who made this report also had an obsession with aliens and bizarre meta-government conspiracies.

(By the way, did you know that John McCain was one of the Keating Five?)

The FBI was pretty early to catch on -- earlier than The Housing Bubble Blog, earliest post December 2004, but, not earlier than the folks over at iTulip.com, who called it in August of 2002.

And they were all well before this guy:

Washington Post, Thursday, October 27, 2005; Page D01

U.S. house prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years, noted Ben S. Bernanke, currently chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony to Congress's Joint Economic Committee. But these increases, he said, "largely reflect strong economic fundamentals," such as strong growth in jobs, incomes and the number of new households.

I remember reading quotes like this in 2005 and wondering just how dumb they thought the American people were -- I mean, incomes might have been rising, but they were not rising by 25 percent over two years.

Overpriced real estate -- just like overvalued stocks -- are a bit like a game of musical chairs. Wait, better: hot potato. It is possible, if you aren't deeply in denial, to see the bubble forming very early. So you know the music is going to stop at some point, but you also know that there's going to be a lot of money to be made by selling at the top of the bubble. The game is to sell at the last possible moment before prices start to go down again. Time it right and you end up rich. Time it wrong and you end up with a rapidly cooling potato that nobody wants.

This provides incentives -- maybe perverse incentives -- for the very people who are most likely to notice the bubble forming (investors) to deny the bubble's existence.

Also, it seems to me that there were political forces fueling this bubble, especially in the later stages. After the stock bubble collapse, we were probably due for a bit of a recession anyway, greatly exaggerated by the aftermath of 9/11. I believe Bush wanted a sort of Reagan-like scenario, where the economy could go deeply into recession during 2001-2002 and then be bouncing back by the time he was up for election in 2004. If you review Bush's rhetoric during the 2000 election, and early in 2001, he seemed to be actively pushing the idea that we were in a recession. And why not? It was early enough in his presidency that he could still blame it on Clinton.

But, by 2003-2004, the economy needed to be seen to be recovering. Other than the already bubblicious housing market, I don't think it was. So, even though other indicators suggested that he tighten the federal money supply, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan kept interest rates at historic all-time lows, and even (in a speech early in 2004) urged lenders to offer home purchasers a greater variety of "mortgage product alternatives." Hello, impending sub-prime market collapse.But it kept things looking good -- to some people at least -- for a while longer. Long enough for Bush to get in for a second term. Then, in January 2006, Greenspan quit.

I think he knew what he was doing.

Finally saw The Dark Knight over the weekend. I was... disappointed. The film is so hugely popular, with an almost universally positive critical reaction, that I was expecting better. At two and a half hours the movie is waaaaaay toooo loooong and tends to be dull whenever the Joker isn't on the screen. Also, it's kinda racist. (Come on, I can't be the only person who noticed that Gotham's criminal underworld is way more racially diverse than Gotham's regular overworld.)

The movie has been called (in both the positive and the rare negative reviews) "dark" and "grim" and "sadistic" and "perverse" and other things suggesting a grisly horror-movie intensity. But mostly I just found it emotionally uninvolving. It's very talky, for an action movie, and most of what people have to say is kind of stupid.It sort of meanders along and some of the individual scenes work, but they don't add up to a satisfying whole.

The critical consensus is right about one thing: Heath Ledger's post-punk take on the Joker is the highlight of the film. It's all gimmick: a bizarre constricted wreck of a voice, a reptilan lip-licking tic, strange feral body movements, and it all ends up working perfectly to suggest completely deranged genius.Still, the movie lets him down: he gives a full-body performance as the Joker, but the movie is all quick-cuts to isolated body parts. (People, Flashdance was more than twenty years ago, can't we get over it yet?)

The Joker is meant to be a figure of pure, disorienting chaos, and some of the early scenes with him have a frightening, mesmerizing quality -- frightening because you have no idea what the character is going to do, what he's actually capable of. But that tension eventually drains away as you realize: the only thing he's ever actually going to do is blow stuff up.

This movie is lousy with stuff blowing up. But -- in order to avoid an R rating? -- nothing else of consequence seems to happen. Oh, except when Harvey Dent's face catches on fire, which is a side-effect of something blowing up, so I don't think it counts as "else." In the script, the Joker says that he "likes to use knives" instead of guns, and, in a rare and welcome touch of humor, when he's arrested his pockets are described as full of "nothing but knives and lint." But then we never actually see him use a knife on anyone.

This is the Joker, people! We should see him kill people in numerous ingenious ways! We should see him mess with people's minds! The Joker's stunts should be brutal, but they should also be darkly funny. His dialogue has some nice touches of odd humor -- the way every time he tells someone the story of how he got his facial scars, he tells a completely different story, for example -- but his stunts don't.

Oh, yeah, another flaw: this movie has a serious humor deficit. It's like somebody involved in the scriptwriting kept cracking a whip and saying, "Make it grimmer! Grimmer, I tell you! Wait, that line, somebody might chuckle at that line, that line must go! No laughs! We are making Serious Drama, here, people!"

In a movie where the Joker is chief villain, that is simply inexcusable.

Not only are the Joker's stunts insufficiently humorous, but they seem kind of random, as storytelling. There's no sense of escalating stakes or rising tension, and the emotional climax actually happens about halfway through, leaving most of the movie as dreary falling action. So then there's a second climax, a variation on the classic prisoner's dilemma, with ferries that might blow up, which ends up being almost completely uninvolving because 1. We are tired of stuff maybe blowing up at this point, and 2. We don't know anything about any of the people on either ferry. The movie is two and a half hours long, surely they could have spent a little time working some additional characters into the story.

Finally, the ethical dilemmas and contrasts in the movie ended up being unconvincing and rather tedious. People spend a lot of time saying sentences that contain words like, "vigilante, outside the law, needs a hero, the best of us" but they don't really add up to anything. It's conversation about a topic substituting for a story about a topic.

For example, in the last couple of scenes, the movie seems to come down firmly on the side of lying to people. But it doesn't do this by showing how, ironically, lying to people can make for a better world. Instead it has characters talking. Batman says, "we should lie to people about what really happened, so that they can continue to believe in this thing we imagine they believe in which is for some reason better than this other thing they could believe in," and Commissioner Gordon says, "yes, yes, by all means, you're absolutely right." And then he explains it to his kid, just to make sure we get it. And then everybody stares moodily into the distance. So, uh... maybe that is the irony, maybe we're supposed to think that Batman is being an idiot. But it doesn't come across that way.

I guess I didn't hate it completely -- I mean, it is a darn sight better than Batman & Robin, which made me want to claw my own eyes out of my head -- but it did nothing to restore my faith in the action-adventure blockbuster.