110 Stories and a Story - It's always a good time to reread John M. Ford's "110 Stories," but especially today. (Thanks Mary Kay for the reminder.) Also, if less impressively, there's my Shanksville poem. Shanksville prose, too.

90% of this Game is Half Mental - Gary Farber has an article that maintains that hypnosis has physical effects on the brain that explain its effect. I'm familiar with theories, hatched by Skeptical Inquirer people IIRC, that hypnosis is a social phenomenon. That people do what they do under hypnosis because of setting cues. (I'm thinking Susan Blackmore here?) This at first blush seems to contradict that - hey, look, brain effect! - but maybe not. After all, since we have brains, pretty much everything has a brain effect including, presumably, "social phenomena."

But for the purposes of a training journal, what grabs me is this:

Using functional brain imaging, he also found that hypnosis affects an area that controls higher level executive functions.

"This explains why, under hypnosis, people can do outrageous things that ordinarily they wouldn't dream of doing," says Gruzelier, who presented his study at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Festival in Exeter, UK.

What this has me pondering is athletic training as self-hypnosis. If we could study the brainwaves of athletes during an intense set of calisthenics or hard drills, would we find "significantly more brain activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus?" Are real jocks, not late-blooming, short-bus specimens like myself, hypnotizing themselves into top performance with their training rituals? Is this a key distinguisher between top athletes and the rest of us?

I mean, "high suggestibility" would explain a lot . . .

Music Notes - Man, am I having fun with the Lost Highway Records electronic jukebox. (Click on Artist's Entrance and then look for the jukebox icon in the bottom right of the webpage.) It'll either shuffle for you or you can pick songs from a pretty big list of Lost Highway artists. Just got done listening to Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer covering "Redemption Song." I was hoping to find something from Elvis Costello's upcoming The Delivery Man release, finally finding the "Monkey to Man" video. There's a ton of other great stuff at your beck and call, if you like Americana. Pretty much nothing if you don't, but you're on your own then.

UPDATE: And don't miss President Bush singing U2's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" on another site entirely. (Via Hit & Run.)

What Are You Writing? - It's apparently not a novel about the atrocities of September 11, 2001, or if it is, you're taking your god damn time producing the thing, as Ruth Franklin notes in TNR.

What it demands is a New York novel, a genre that, like the city itself, has reimagined itself countless times over the last two hundred years of American literary history (and produced some of the greatest American novels) but has yet to adapt to the newly altered landscape. This fall brings a few entries in the category, but as far as I can tell, all are removed from the present day. Contemporary New York has become temporarily untouchable. This is a shame, because New York after September 11 had an extraordinary creative energy. Even if it wasn't ultimately long-lasting enough to fuel a cultural eclipse, that devastating, exhausting, energizing time deserves to be remembered.

I see a few possibilities: nobody has achieved the tranquility in which to recollect those emotions; for better or for worse, the novel is not where the present culture's creative energy most naturally flows; Franklin has missed some; books have been submitted, but publishers have thought they sucked; there are a bunch in the pipeline. You pick, or add to the list.

About That Hiatus - Ginger has an excellent explanation of the essential pointlessness of much political blogging.

Plus, once you've been at it for awhile, you find in some cases you might just as well reuse something you wrote a year ago, because it's all you've got to say on the subject.

The Candidates Speaks (sic) - We've got a couple of real gifted orators running for election this time, eh? Consider the latest from John Kerry: "beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing."

I can see the debates now.

Bush: I'll never stop thinking about ways to harm our country and our people.

Kerry: I'll double the size of US Special Forces in order to conduct terrorist operations.

Bush: Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country.

Kerry: Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing.

Bush: Double the size of our love with women!

Kerry: I'll never stop thinking about special forces dressed as sheep!

Happy Birthday! - To Jesse Walker, author, journalist and all around swell guy, who makes the best chili, gives the best parties and turned 34 yesterday. He will be missed - but hopefully not for a good long time yet. In the meantime, it's great having him around.

On the Jesse Walker front, I should have linked this article last month, but I was on, you know, hiatus.

Music Notes - The Pixies cover Warren Zevon's "Ain't That Pretty at All" and you can listen for free. Via Cakes and Money 2.0. Never my favorite Zevon song, but fun. From the forthcoming tribute album.

Anarchy, State and Blogtopia - Interesting discussion of the pros and cons of libertarian anarchism versus minarchism (advocacy of the "night-watchman state") bounced last week between Arthur Silber and Roderick Long. I am pretty sure that Arthur is right that "the arguments in favor of a version of libertarian anarchism are notably more consistent" than the arguments for minarchism, but disagree that "most of the arguments against anarchism simply don't hold up, as Roderick demonstrates by dealing with the major objections one by one."

As a minarchist/constitutionalist, I'll cop to inconsistency of principle. But while I agree with the anarcho-capitalists that All governments are gangs, I don't think governments are the only gangs. It's an observed fact that, wherever and whenever you go, armed groups will gather to dispossess people of the fruits of their labor, because it's easier than working, or at least more fun. Long waves off the idea that the "private protection agencies" beloved of anarcho-capitalists might go rogue as unlikely, but how unlikely is something that has happened everywhere at all times - the strong setting themselves in power over the weak? Long seems to think that few protection agencies would want to incur the extra costs of regularly engaging in violence for gain, but the gain is fabulous - an absolute right to arrogate to yourself any of the wealth in your zone of control that you choose and to redistribute whatever amount of it you deem efficacious to whomever will most cement your lock on power. That's quite the main chance to have one's eye on.

This of course sounds like what we have now, but it's worse than that because unsettled. Under constitutionalism you know which gang will hold sway and you can, equivocally and temporarily, befuddle them with trickery - tedious procedural bindings that minimize their discretion while still allowing enough of a taste of the power they crave to make it seem worth it, to them, to comply. It never works for long and our own Gulliver has been slipping bond after bond for some time now. The general welfare clause seems, in retrospect, the trojan horse of the Constitution. But the bigger mistake was the founders' faith in "checks and balances" in the context of "separation of powers."

The idea behind checks and balances under separation of powers is the restraint of mutual jealousy - each of the three branches will be so zealous of its prerogatives, and so wary of overreaching by the other branches, as to want to keep the other two in line. This has proven spectacularly ineffective in practice and in retrospect it's not hard to see why.

Imagine a totalitarian society where "all that is not forbidden is required." Every aspect of life falls under the purview of government, with approximately a third of life each under the sway of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. In such a circumstance, any gain in power by one branch entails a loss of power by at least one other. The other branch is highly motivated to defend its turf. One of those branches directly commands the armories and the other two don't but let's not sweat that detail. In that polity, you could indeed see each branch vigorously checking the power of the other two. Of course, in that polity, it does you and me no good, because we are not "free" in any aspect of life - the only question is which of three institutions exercises absolute control over it.

The problem is that the same incentives toward vigorous checking and balancing don't apply to (initially) limited government. Under limited government there is some territory of our lives (social, political, economic, esthetic) under the sway of one or more branches of government, and a theoretically larger region that is unclaimed territory. There we have liberty. The problem is, if one branch of government decides to make inroads into the unclaimed territory, it is not necessarily impinging on the prerogatives of another branch. Since the other branch is not directly threatened, it need not vigorously resist the assault. Indeed, where would be the profit in exerting itself to turn back the onslaught simply to restore the status quo ante - the end result is that sphere of life regains its ungoverned status and the branch that exerted itself accrues no gain in its own power and privilege at all. All it may have done is ticked off the other branch and motivated it to make an assault on some power the "checking" branch does hold. Now if the checking branch dislodges the original malefactor and sticks around, it has gained something, but the result for the citizen is the same - what was under the sphere of liberty has fallen under the sphere of (some branch of) government.

Far easier and more profitable, from a power, status and bureaucratic perpetuation standpoint, for each branch to nibble at separate regions of the unregulated sphere. If the government was truly limited initially, it can take quite some time until the branches come into unavoidable conflict. And when they do, they have options beyond simply checking and balancing each other. They can arrive at modi vivendi that beat zealously opposing the other branches at the margin.

The incoherence of the "checks and balances" approach to limited government is that the problem it identifies - governmental institutions are fundamentally self-interested - it can only solve if government agencies are also either paradoxically selfless or unreasoningly spiteful. Faced with a conflict between the people and the Executive, the Legislature must either identify with the people or hate the Executive with such instinct that it never stops to consider How can I make this deal work for me? In real life, the average legislator has his eye on a job in the executive, the average jurist needs the legislator's favor to get his next, cushier appointment, the average executive functionary plays golf and sleeps with members of the other two branches. A strong class consciousness binds the three "warring" branches into a commonality of interest.

And, in the end, so much for limited government. Just as democracy "can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury," a constitutional republic can only exist until its governmental components figure out the loopholes in its charter. A country where the legislature votes on a far-reaching piece of internal security legislation without insisting on time to even read it is pretty well along in that process. I'll miss the place.

But this item was supposed to be a critique of anarchism, wasn't it? Gosh but these things happen. Point being, as Philip Marlowe concludes Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye,

I never saw any of them again--except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.

Which is to say, governments are inevitable because gangs are inevitable. I'm not saying we should lie back and enjoy them. Rather, baffle them with our bullshit as long as we can, and wish the next guy better luck. He has our failures for his school.

(P.S. See this old Procrastination comment thread.)