Problems with Irving Kirsch's Critique of Antidepressants as Placebos

Recently, a FB pal posted an article run on 60 Minutes based on the work of Irving Kirsch. He's a psychologist who has been making the rounds saying antidepressants don't work - and, indeed, depression is not caused by a chemical inbalance at all. It's a pretty radical claim. The overwhelming medical belief is that antidepressants do more good than harm by a considerable margin. Kirsch believes otherwise. To quote him, "Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don’t cure it.”

(I'm not going to provide links, here, because linking is largely meaningless. You can find someone on the Internet to take virtually any position at all, so links that "prove" a given point do nothing of the sort - they merely show the person can search around for data that agrees with their conclusions. I encourage people to do independent and substantial research on any field that interests them and advise they read books to do it. The Internet has certainly broadened our knowledge, but it has also made much of it shallow and muddy.)

I've been following Kirsch's work for about a year, now. This is shortly after I started taking antidepressants and feeling considerably better - so I had some vested interest in the research. Was the effect I feeling a placebo effect?

For the record, I am extremely critical of psychological research for both historical and theoretical grounds. I think this bias is justified - psychology has not done a very good job of policing itself. The case of Cyril Burt is particularly significant. But was a psychologist who did twin studies. After his death, it was found he had massively falsified his information, lying about the sample size of the twins studies he did, inventing collaborators and their credentials - this has not prevented his work from continuing to be taught. This is unprecedented. I can't think of a single case where a person, caught committing fraud over the span of decades, would still be taught. The articles "known" to be fraudulent have been removed, but if there was no direct "proof" that a given paper was fraudulent it has remained in the academic canon. (Such proof is hard to get, because Burt burned all his notes before he died!) Furthermore, due to the vagaries of attribution inheritance, articles whose substance is based on Burt's findings are still part of the psychological data record - no effort was made to purge the effects of his fraudulent work from the data pool.

I wish I could say this was something that died with Burt. But you can find the continuation of such fraud in psychology in books like The Bell Curve, issues like gender studies and evolutionary psychology - not to mention, like I said, Burt's work has not been purged from the psychological canon; while those papers known to be fraudulent have been removed, the papers that source Burt's work were not and are themselves sourced by modern research.

(An interesting comparison between corrupt scientific fields and how they clean themselves up, or in psychology's case, fail to, is anthropology. Anthropology was, sadly, very much part of the early twentieth century's eugenics movement. After World War II, though, anthropologists, horrified at what they had helped to do, given intellectual weight to atrocity, purged eugenics from its discipline almost entirely. Psychology, whose IQ tests were also used to justify eugenics, who were equally guilty of giving intellectual force for the eugenics massacres of the early twentieth century, well . . . the Bell Curve is still influential. The eugenicists are still there in psychology, they were never purged or repudiated. In short, there is no psychology equivalent to Jane Goodall because the field never cleaned it's house after World War II.)

Theoretically, psychology is a mess. (And by theory, I'm talking about theory in the scientific jargon sense, which is an explanation for diverse phenomenon inside the field of study, demonstrated by considerable proof without substantial internal contradiction.) It is the only science that has no generally accepted theory regarding the field's object of study. This is a very simple statement, but the consequences are enormous. In short, psychologists are not in agreement, at all, as to what the mind actually is. When compared to chemistry's atomic model, astronomy's relativity, biology's natural selection, physics' mechanics and quantum mechanics, so forth and so on, this lacuna is enormous. If you don't agree about what it is you're studying, how on earth can you study it? What, precisely, are you studying? They literally cannot agree.

(This is in contradistinction to psychiatry, which has a very strong, stable theory of mind. Your mind is your brain, they are one in the same. It is a theory for which there is tremendous evidence, of course.)

So, when I read psychological research, I do so with a grain of salt. They have a lousy track record of policing themselves, the worst in science, and no unifying theory!

Well, when you look into Kirsch's work, it's actually pretty atrocious. Not the hypothesis, so much as his methodology and, indeed, his theoretical understanding of human consciousness.

I'm going to tack the methodological failures of his work. In particular, he cherry picked data. For instance, in the APA journal Prevention and Treatment, where much of his early work was published, the editor of that journal called Kirsch's statistical models "clearly arguable" and warned that his paper's subject-selection criteria were heterogenous. In particular, Kirsch only looked at short term studies.

Now, I do not doubt that antidepressants are overprescribed - but prescribing drugs is what doctors do. Most physicians take the attitude that it's better to ere on the side of caution. Because of the difficulties in communicating psychological conditions, when a patient comes in and says they've been depressed for a long time and nothing seems to pull them out of it - what is the psychiatrist to do? Ignore the suffering of their patient? No. They prescribe medication and usually suggest therapy. After all, antidepressants are generally safe.

In many of these cases, however, the depression wasn't clinical. It's not even that the medication acted as a placebo - it's that there was no illness in the first place. So when Kirsch argues, on the grounds of short term studies, that there is substantial placebo effect - he's wrong. It wasn't the medication or the placebo effect that halted the depression; it was just the normal passage of time in an unknown number of cases. How can this be construed as data at all?

For instance, you take a group of people with headaches. Half you give ibuprofin, half you give sugar pills. An hour later, you ask them how they feel and find that almost all of them, in both groups, now feel fine, most of them attributing their improvement to their medication. Out of these groups, how do you find the people whose headaches just stopped naturally, as most headaches do? It's the same with short term depression studies. It is impossible to determine how many of the people felt better not because of the medication or of the placebo.

In psychiatric and psychological studies, there is tremendous self-selection of subjects. People who feel bad tend to join. While in most medical science, they can perform an actual test to determine who has the condition for which they are testing (say, a virus), this is not generally possible in psychological and psychiatric cases in the short term. So it is known that many of the people who join psychological and psychiatric studies aren't sick in the first place, but it's impossible to know how many! How can you determine the efficacy of the placebo effect if you don't even know if they're clinically ill in the first place? The only good method of determining a person's psychological state is long term observation - something impossible to do with short term studies. By avoiding long-term studies, Kirsch is avoiding the very data that would counter his hypothesis. Ouch. That's a huge scientific no-no.

Additionally, the placebo effect is, itself, short term. The longest known placebo effect is two and a half years. Any study that goes over that is just assumed to be free of placebo effects. So, not only does Kirsch avoid the studies that select out the mentally ill from the temporarily distressed, he also avoids studies where the placebo effect is eliminated or minimized due to the long term nature of the studies. Double whammy.

Indeed, the very idea of the placebo effect is itself under fire - using methods similar to Kirsch's, but with larger data sets over longer periods of time, Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter Gøtzsche have basically demonstrated that there is no clinically significant placebo effect. So, who's right? Kirsch who says that antidepressants are placebos or Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche who say that the placebo effect is clinicially insignificant?

This is awful methodology. It's simply scientifically unethical to ignore the data that contradicts your conclusions, to study only those things that allow you to be right. To have scientific legitimacy, Kirsch must address long term studies that are free of the placebo effect and the growing body of evidence that the placebo effect is not clinically significant. He does not do this.

One might ask, then, why he can get these high falutin' jobs, like the University of Leeds and now, well, he works at Harvard. Remember what I said about Cyril Burt, The Bell Curve and evolutionary psychology - psychology is a field full of quacks, even at the highest levels of education and research.

Not to mention this is a highly politicized area. There are a lot of people who simply reject the idea that mental illness has a physical component. I'll talk more on that in a bit, but my point here is that there are a lot of people who actively reject the idea of mental illness, who believe that mentally ill people should "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", or seek solace in religion, or "just get over it". (Thomas Szasz published, in 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness - a book that was just reprinted last year and still has considerable influence; see also The Manufacture of Madness and more recently The Manufacture of Depression, which came out last year - and it goes back as far as the written language goes - there are always people who say mental illnesses don't really exist, you can read about it in medieval sources, in classical antiquity; Pythagoras said that depression was merely lack of self control, akin to laziness; Hippocrates believed that melancholia - what we call depression, nowadays - was an imbalance of the four humors, which is to say a medical problem. This argument is ongoing, but nowadays is largely farcical. The medical basis of mental illness is well understood.) They are emboldened by a researcher like Kirsch, who gives the air of legitimacy to their beliefs.

Science is not some purely intellectual field - it takes money to do it, and the people in charge of that money are not, by and large, scientists. They are corporations and political bodies, pursuing their own agendas. But no one brings it up that there are non-scientific social forces that reject mental illness for no good reason - but then use their status in order to support research in that area. As an example, the University of Oklahoma's geology department is the ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics. Guess what their position on global climate change is? This is as true in psychology as geology - people with social and political agenda control research funding and publication. And there have always been people who are swift to side with people who say that mental illness isn't physical, that it's a defect in will or character. It goes back at least as far as Pythagoras and Hippocrates!

Additionally, there's just the prima facie stupidity of asserting that you can effect mood with drugs. I mean, prima facie. There are a huge number of studies about the effects of drugs on mood, not to mention nearly every adult reading this has personal experience with alcohol lifting their spirits and lowering their social anxiety. Even more powerful are the opiates - it is impossible to be depressed when you're on Percocet. Unfortunately, these drugs have such dangerous side effects that it is unethical to administer them or they must be administered very carefully. But it's absurd to say that drugs can't effect mood and feelings. It's silly and juvenile! The only question is to what extent does a given drug effect our feeling of depression. That drugs can alter our feeling of depression is simply prima facie true.

The aquisition of funding and possession of high titles does not make a person right. It only means that someone in a position of power agrees with what you say and is willing to give you money to prove it. While it shapes all scientific endeavors to some degree, it is particular pernicious in a field where there is no theory. In psychology's theoretical void, their lack of agreement about what the mind is, anything goes. So you come up with racist crap justifying eugenics and people doubting the physiological origins of mental illness.

Which brings me to the theoretical problems I have with Kirsch's work and all work that supposes a mind/body dualism. Kirsch believes that depression isn't a brain disease. Well, for crying out loud, man, what kind of disease can it be, then? Because all the actual evidence suggests that the mind and the brain are the same thing. All mental activity - thought, reason, emotion, perception - they're all brain activity. If depression exists at all, it must exist as a brain disease because that's where the mind is located. To say that you believe that depression exists but isn't a brain disease makes as much sense as saying you believe in heart attacks but it's not a heart disease.

But we live in a world that is steeped in dualism - the belief that there is some sort of perfected, non-physical sense that exists independent of our flesh. Sometimes it's called the soul, but just as often it's called the mind and the two are mixed up in religion and culture all the time. Dualism is present in all the world's largest religions.

However, that's not science. Science has never been able to find a soul. It has never been able to find a mind separate from the brain. Meaning, Kirsch is proposing something preposterous, again: that you can have a mental illness that isn't in the brain.

I can't say it's short, but those are my main reasons for thinking Kirsch is a quack.

Thoughts on the Second Amendment and Gun Control

A meme is making the rounds at Facebook, today, saying if you support the 2nd Amendment repost this. I almost never repost memes unless I have a snarky comment to make - I generally prefer my communications to be more substantial than memes generally are - and while I certainly could make a snarky comment about the 2nd Amendment meme I figured, hey, what the heck, post more substantially on your feelings about the subject.

For me, it isn't a legal matter. I feel the 2nd Amendment is clear in both wording, precedent and tradition. Americans have the right to own firearms. People who go into the historical origins of 18th century militias to discredit modern interpretations of the law engage, I feel, in distorting history. While it is true that when the 2nd Amendment was written, militias were not armed from a state armory but personal arms, and it is true that, today, militias are armed by the state armory, that ignores the 200 years of precedent and tradition between the writing of the Bill of Rights and today - a history of precedent and tradition that has uniformly supported the right of individuals to own guns. This is clear and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant, lying or so ideologically confused that facts have receded into small points in the distance.

The more complex matter is - should we change the 2nd Amendment? For me, the answer is "yes" and I'll chart out the reasons below after I say this: yeah, guns don't kill people, people kill people . . . with guns. They also rob with them, assault people with them and generally do terrible things with them - and it's my opinion that in a risk analysis sense, applied to the subject of liberty, we'd generally be better off without them.

The two main modern justifications to keeping the 2nd Amendment around are:

1. In such a case as the government of the United States turns tyrannical, an armed population will be able to overthrow such tyranny and;

2. Guns are useful in self-defense and to disarm the population would be to have them fall prey to criminals who would loot and pillage at will, sans an armed population to keep them (or, rather, us) in check.

Both cases are made to sound simple by the pro-gun lobby, but neither is. But, first, let's look at some relevant facts. In the US, 25,000 to 30,000 or so people, every year, who are killed by guns (most are suicide deaths, about 11,000 to 13,000 are murders). Heroin, on the other hand, kills around 2,000 or so Americans every year. So, y'know, guns are about fifteen times as dangerous as heroin. Indeed, the is only one product you can buy that's more dangerous than a firearm - tobacco. Guns are literally the second most dangerous thing you can buy for yourself, even above cars and alcohol.

In a study in 1999, by the Violence Policy Center, every bullet sold in America costs the country around $23 in associated costs - medical care and reduced standard of living because of enduring injury - to the tune of costing the country around $4 billion a year to pay for the right of people to own guns, no doubt more considering the rapidly increasing costs of medical care. So, there is a public cost to firearms ownership beyond simply the violence they accelerate.

The murder rate in the US is just . . . massively higher than in other developed countries. Even those who have crime rates similiar to the US in other areas, such as England, have murder rates that are tiny fractions of those we see in the US. Which makes sense. In England, you get pissed off that your wife is cheating on you, maybe you punch her and/or her boyfriend. In the US, that situation can quickly escalate into murder because it's so easy to kill someone with guns. So while it's true that "people kill people", the ease with which guns allow people to kill other people can't be dismissed with platitudes. Sure, people kill people, but guns make it easy for some angry, humiliated, distraught person to murder someone while in a bad emotional state - which is about where 80% of gun deaths happen, because of a personal quarrel that escalates out of control, almost always having to do with sex or money.

In short, guns are dangerous. They kill a lot of people and do a lot of harm to the public wealth. These facts also cannot be ignored or downplayed. People who do so are guilty of the same kind of twisting of facts used by those who say that the 2nd Amendment doesn't give people the right to bear firearms. The ownership of guns causes a lot of misery and we pay a steep economic price. Those are simply facts.

In the first case, that of protecting ourselves from tyranny, an armed population is as capable of perpetrating tyranny as preventing it - and perhaps moreso. You find any shitty hellhole, anywhere in the world, and you'll find everyone has guns - Columbia, Mexico, Sudan, Afghanistan you name it, in every festering hellhole, guns are readily available. In peaceful, stable nations, you'll generally find gun ownership to be very stricted.

As for stable, tyrannical states? Yes, gun ownership is generally quite restricted, as well, to prevent uprisings. It's pretty hard to get a gun in both France and China - but the US is a lot more like France than China, culturally speaking. Like the French, we have a long and proud history of democratic traditions, a history that China does not have. Sun Yat-Sen is a great man, but Chinese democracy was smothered in the cradle by the warlords and finished off by Mao Zedong. The US, on the other hand, is the oldest democratic state in the world. We have never had any other form of government than republican democracy and over time the conditions of our Republic have improved, bringing ever more people into the franchise. That is the American way - of expanding liberties. We should be proud of that as a national treasure, our longstanding commitment to liberty - imperfect, but improving, always improving. So the situation we find ourselves in is hardly comparable to that of a tyrannical state. It's just not really in us. Never has been.

Additionally, I feel one of the greatest impediments to just, consensual government - no matter the shape - is lack of trust. IMO, that's the biggest problem with government in the US, right now, and almost all other problems either stem from this or their magnitude is increased by it: the people don't trust the government, nor the government the people. I think throwing guns into this mix is a greater threat to our liberty than defense of liberty; I think guns in this mix have a much greater chance of being coopted by a tyrant than used to defend ourselves from one.

Additionally, it's farcical to believe that an armed uprising in the US couldn't be put down by the US military. The only question would be would US troops do that to US citizens - and the answer to that is very complex, depending on the situation we're trying to imagine. I think it would be foolish to imagine that there are no situations where the military would not oppress the people (the actions of the Union Army after the Civil War were so bad that the posse comitatus laws were necessary and just), just as I think it would be foolish to imagine there are no situations where the military, itself, would not side with the people (though if it were to do that, the US could quickly become a military dictatorship, the line between the military supporting the people and the military taking over is a very thin line, so there's that to consider, too).

That's without taking into account the possibility that gun ownership becomes the mechanism of tyranny - I know of no metrics for that, but it's a real threat. Charismatic leaders have been getting the armed population on their side for purposes of tyranny since the beginning of gun ownership; for recent and local examples, just examine any South American military dictatorship, or the current situation in Mexico (whose violence is spilling over into the US, so this isn't merely hypothetical). Miami is also familiar with the violence of guns during the 1980s, which was pretty crazy, and whose violence was not in any measure lessened by widespread gun ownership - that just made it easier for the drug lords and their killers to get their hands on guns.

While admitting there are margins where gun ownership might prevent tyranny, I think we have to admit that possiblity is marginal. Personal possession of firearms is insignificant compared to the power of the military or even the police. Given this, give that personal firearms ownership will only help us overthrow tyranny in a very narrow range of situations, and given the large amount of damage guns do to our society every year (30,000 people dead and 4 billion in damage), it is hard for me to justify gun ownership on the grounds that it prevents tyranny.

In the second case, that of personal protection, there's simply no reliable information that guns stop crime. The number of interventions where armed people chased prevented crime range from around 60,000 a year to 2,500,000 every year - and there is no good methodology for actually examining these numbers. How do you tell when a crime hasn't been committed because someone had a gun? Sometimes, sure, it's easy. Some burglars break into a person's house and get shot - simple and clean cut. But how about those situations where someone hears a noise, goes out to their porch with their shotgun, hears people fleeing and then imagines they've stopped a great crime when all they've done is chase off neighborhood kids using their property as a shortcut? Or who imagine the entire episode because they are committed beyond the bounds of reason to the idea that guns stop crime. Because, in my experience, people who have claimed to stop crime with guns all fall into the second category. I have never known anyone who could verifiably say they stopped a crime because of firearm possession but I've known a lot of people who claim they have - but the incidence of serious crime among my friends seems to be the same regardless of how many people they've chased off with guns; in both cases it's zero (er, if we exclude the violence my friends have committed, hehe; I have a former friend who did kill his girlfriend another who has a conviction for strong arm robbery - but I'll point out neither of them were stopped with guns, either). The lower number is generally believed to be true, as it has better methodology, requiring people to demonstrate there was a crime that was present to be stopped by firearms possession, the higher number basically credits every person who says they stopped a crime as both truthful and accurate.

This has to be weighed against the number of crimes committed with guns. These numbers are much easier to measure - in 2005, 477,000 people were victims of gun-related crime. There were probably a few more than that. That's just the numbers we know about. So, y'know, when gangsters kill someone and no one finds the body, or a crook is shot and doesn't go the hospital, those numbers aren't counted - though they are almost certainly fairly substantial.

So, at best, it's 60,000 cases of crime stopped compared to 477,000 crimes committed with guns. Again, I am lead to conclude, fairly inescapably, that guns are bad for society - that the good guns do in terms of chasing off crooks or whatever is repaid, may times over, by the crimes committed with guns. All those murders, assaults, robberies and the like.

I can also imagine a number of solutions between total criminalization of firearms possession and the current state of affairs. The NRA and other organizations have called for increased need for weapons training (while at the same time lobbying against laws that would make gun safety classes a prerequisite for gun ownership). But the idea has merit - if Americans knew how to handle their guns, the danger of guns would be dramatically minimized.

As would the requirements that guns have trigger locks and gun owners keep their guns in safes (something else also suggested by the NRA who actively combat laws to require it - as you can imagine, I'm fairly ambivalent about the NRA). Yes, it would increase the costs of gun ownership, but it would also save a lot of people's lives and save society a bunch of money in the process.

Hell, it wouldn't even break my heart if gun safety was taught in public schools - it'd be more useful than most of the other things that are taught, and a person's chance of being in a household with firearms, at some point in their life, is very high (around half of all households have guns in them, right now) - so knowing how to handle these very dangerous items is a matter of public good on the same scale as, say, sex education. And would be equally controversial, but it would be a good idea in an armed society and would probably reduce gun violence considerably.

As would the case of restricting the ownership of pistols. Eighty percent of gun crime is done with pistols, mostly because they're easy to conceal. The focus on things like assault rifles is ridiculous. Almost no one commits a crime with an assault rifle (and I would argue the people who own assault rifles are definitely better trained than the average gun owner). You can't really walk around with an AR-15 without being noticed, whereas you can put a 9mm pistol in your pocket.

My point being is that I don't necessarily see a need to outlaw gun ownership. There might be other solutions. But as it stands, it is impossible for me to support gun ownership, regardless of what the 2nd Amendment means.

Afterword on UFC 143

I finally caught up on UFC 143 and I gotta say it was deeply satisfying to see Carlos Condit beat, and beat up, Nick Diaz. And while the fight was close - I scored it 49-46 though I admit the first round was close, and since two of the judges agreed with my scoring, and one gave the first to Diaz, I figure I was pretty spot on - it was definitely Condit's fight. Condit's striking was just too diverse, he was able to move and avoid Diaz's volume punching while connecting with his own strikes. At the end of the fifth round, Diaz was able to get him down and came quite close to submitting Condit with a rear naked choke - so Diaz stole that round, but even so at the very end Condit reversed it and was on top of Diaz. So, good fight, and a profound thank you to Carlos Condit for exposing the weaknesses in Diaz's game: that he fights every fight the same way and if you just plan for that, he can be beaten and, indeed, he can be caused to wilt (which definitely happened in the third and fourth rounds).

Bad news? Diaz won't get crushed by Georges St-Pierre. Instead, Condit will be crushed . . . though probably not as hard because Condit didn't call GSP a chicken. I almost wanted Diaz to win so GSP could beat him, but narrowly decided I'd rather see the Diaz hype train derailed sooner rather than later - and if Diaz lost to GSP, well, who in welterweight hasn't? But losing to Condit means that Diaz is just one of many contenders at welterweight, he isn't some dominant fighter.


The ridiculous news? Diaz is an ass. The first thing out of his mouth in the post-fight interview is how he didn't "accept" that Condit won. Diaz specifically said that he pushed forward the whole fight and landed the harder strikes. Diaz also disparaged Condit's brutal leg kicks that really slowed Diaz down in the later rounds. The first is true - Diaz did push forward. Into Condit's kicks again and again. But it a lie that Diaz landed the harder strikes. The hardest blows were definitely landed by Condit - a roundhouse kick to the face (well, he landed several, but one in particular) and a spinning forearm. And those leg kicks? Some of them were just savage. So, pathetic. Diaz lost, but he whined like a spoiled brat about it.

Then Diaz said he's going to leave MMA because . . . oh, Diaz mumbling BS. There's not enough in it for him or something. He has some fantasy that he can be a top level boxer which will earn him more money.

Which is sad. While Freddie Roach has said that Diaz is the best boxer in MMA - and who am I to disagree with Freddie Roach when it comes to judging a boxer's skill? - that's a far, far cry from saying that Diaz can be a successful professional boxer. Diaz's boxing is very good for MMA, that's undoubtedly true. But many of his fights in MMA he's won by submission. He's got top notch Brazilian jiu jitsu. You can't do that in boxing.

Not to mention the same weaknesses that Condit too advantage of - Diaz's basically lousy footwork - can also be taken advantage of in boxing. The same way Condit beat Diaz will work for any boxer. Diaz will come forward, so long as you disengage so he doesn't corner you and volume punch you into oblivion you'll do okay. And pro boxers, as a rule, have really great footwork. MMA guys? Not so much, because they've got to be canny about takedowns so they have a more square stance and don't move around as much. And Diaz has bad footwork for an MMA dude (which is why Condit landed so many leg kicks; Diaz is flat-footed and plodding).

My prediction if Diaz actually goes into boxing is that he'll get a couple of novelty fights. Oooooh, it's an MMA champion in a boxing ring! See the dog talk! Well, if they're low tier fighters, he'll win. If they're middle-tier fighters, he will lose. Diaz will never be a top level boxer getting the big paychecks he imagines he'll win - and in short order, he'll be getting smaller paychecks than he would be getting in MMA where he is a legitimate title contender. He'll never be that in boxing.

So, not only pathetic that he's leaving MMA with his tail between his legs because he got whipped by Condit (c'mon, man, learn to lose, it's part of all sports!), but it's stupid. And sad.

(It also makes me wonder what his manager, Cesar Gracie, is doing with his money. Diaz lives a very modest lifestyle. Last year, he earned at least $1.1 million in just paychecks for his fights. With promotions and such, it was probably at least twice as much. So, you've got this guy who lives with two other dudes in an apartment in Stockton - he doesn't even live there alone, he shares a place - he drives a crappy car, while I'm sure he spend a fair bit on weed it's not that expensive given his wealth. But he's always whining about how he doesn't have money. Diaz would hardly be the first fighter to be taken advantage of by his manager. But if that's the case, even if he could be a top flight boxer, he'll still be ripped off by Cesar Gracie.)

Next, someone will have to come in and stop the Nate Diaz hype train. Sure, he had a goon win over Cowboy Cerrone, but that's because Cerrone came out and fought an angry and stupid fight. I'm sure a disciplined Cerrone would have won that fight . . . and I think that everyone, from now on, will train not to fall for the Diaz brothers' cage tricks like the "Stockton slap" and the trash talk. Not to mention that from now on, Nate is deep in the shark pool of lightweight. It doesn't get easier from here, so, go Dan Miller, who is a legit contender.

Other noteworthy things? Hell, yeah, Dustin Poirier's mounted triangle armbar was wicked. And Stephen Thompson's karate KO was pretty nifty, too - and the announcing was great. It was Thompson's first UFC fight, and it didn't look like he was hitting with a lot of power, and Joe Rogan was walking about how Thompson was definitely hitting Stittgen and styming Stittgen's offense but it didn't look like he'd hurt Stittgen and as Joe was saying that Thompson laid out Stittgen. Hell, yeah, karate! So, that was cool.

I also think welterweight has turned over. Josh Koscheck won his fight by a razor's margin split decision and I agreed with the minority judge. But with Jon Fitch having been KO'd in his last fight, with Josh Koscheck's uninspired victory over a very modest fighter, Jake Shield's getting clobbered by Ellenburger and Thiago Alves having already self-destructed, I think that there's going to be a whole new cast at the top of welterweight - Carlos Condit, Jake Ellenburger, Diego Sanchez and before too long Rory MacDonald. I also think that Thiago Alves can go back up to the top if he overcomes his fear of wrestling. But a lot of the old guard the UFC wants to put aside because and they're largely at the end of their careers, anyway.

I was sad Ed Herman won because he's a jerk, but he's finally become the fighter everyone thought he was when he was on The Ultimate Fighter. He might be a force to deal since middleweight is going to turn over very soon - Anderson Silva only has a couple more fights in him, and he's got a really tough test against Chael Sonnen, who came within a hair's breadth of beating Silva last time they fought. And regardless if Silva wins (and I hope he does), he won't be fighting too much longer. He's thirty-six and he's got injuries. He's got maybe two more fights in him.

I think Renan Barão is going to be fighting Dominick Cruz very soon. I think it will be a good fight, judging how Barão fought against Scotty Jorgensen (who Cruz also fought, so there is some grounds for comparison). And I like Scotty Jorgensen, but I don't think he's going to be a top guy at 145 for much longer - he doesn't seem to be developing. Oh, well.

Notes on Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

Edit: I wrote this a couple years ago. The differences between the Occupy San Francisco movement and the Occupy Oakland movement - which saw 400+ people arrested in Oakland this weekend, and demonstrate the willingness of minorities to resist authority relative to their well-heeled white counterparts in San Fran, has encouraged me to post it, again, with minor edits. So, here we go:

On recommendation - and with the caveat I might not like it - I read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I initially walked down the library to get it, but thanks to budget cuts the library is now closed on Fridays. Then I got to walk home in the rain. But, hey, it's California rain, right? I can't bitch too much.

Spoilers follow.

I'd never read fiction by Doctorow before this. At some point, several years back, I read something he wrote, or was written about him, about alternate distribution channels. I think the upshot was that online self-publishing was going to level the playing field and allow works to be selected primarily by talent. I didn't buy it, then, and I don't buy it now. While talent will be one component of success (such as it is now) there'll be a lot more important things . . . like having invented Boing Boing and having an existing audience of fans. I bet that helps. So, what he saw (or how I interpreted it) was that somehow online would make things fair. I just saw it as further externalization of labor to unpublished writers; now, instead of writing a good book and having to go through the various hoops to get it published you'd have to become an Internet marketeer or something. Maybe I got it wrong - this was several years ago and I didn't do anything like research on the article - but it was enough to incline me away from reading his books. I can be pretty ruthless about the subject. There are plenty of good writers in the world. If I have any reason at all to move on to another writer, I do. It's not like the world is going to run out of good books before I die, right?

Well, I won't be reading anything else by him absent a miracle (or, y'know, at least a strongly worded recommendation from someone I trust). Because I found this book abysmal.

The book is written in the first person and while I briefly found the narrator interesting, he swiftly got on my nerves as a deeply shallow middle class white boy of excessive privilege, a spoiled rotten consumerist brat whom I swiftly came to loathe. Worse, the book pretends to be deep but is actually an inflatable kiddie pool.

I read somewhere when Alan Moore was complaining about the movie V for Vendetta that one of the things he didn't like about the movie is that it created a false conundrum, the choice between democracy and fascism. And that was silly because there's no real comparison. Whereas the comic was about anarchy and fascism, an altogether difference choice.

Little Brother is about a white middle class young man who, after a 911-style bombing in San Francisco, is accidentally picked up by Homeland Security. For five days he's interrogated, somewhat roughly, because he's a crypto kid and tosses some attitude their way when they order him to give up his passwords. After some abusive treatment - like denying him food for a day and letting him soil himself - he breaks, gives them the passwords. After he's released, he decided to overthrow the system.

The future he sets up is a surveillance state after the second terrorist attack. This is the system that the hero of the story fights against, except he's not really fighting against it, just the narrow parts of it that directly effect him and other affluent people. The social impact beyond affluent white people are simply never brought up.

It reminds me of that interview with Moore about how he didn't like the movie because it created this weird false conundrum. Between democracy and fascism, there is no choice. Between a deeply intrusive security state and lack of the same deeply intrusive security state, there is also no choice. That is not, however, what we've got. Perhaps Doctorow really thinks that's where we're going, or maybe it's just a fear of his. However, while the kid, before his incarceration, rebelled against the "security" around him and thwarted it as much as he could reasonably do, he and his friends weren't too concerned about the broader social implications of the already present security state. Y'know. Gitmo and extraordinary rendition, illegal combatants, waterboarding and the like. The book was released in 2008, meaning it was written most likely in 2007 or 2006. It isn't about current security practices and their abuses, but about some fictionalized version of them where the paranoia has grown so great that even middle class Frisco kids are caught up in it. THEN it becomes a problem.

Which, as a kid raised in a trailer park, raised all kinds of alarms. First, I don't believe that white middle class Frisco kids and their rich parents would factually be inconvenienced for very long. Think security lines at airports. How long did fast track passes take to be invented so if you had enough loot you could breeze through security?

But it's the second one that really put me on a slow burn. Across the bay from San Francisco is Oakland. You don't have to imagine a world where there's another 911 to see a place where a crazy security state is in place. There are neighborhoods in Oakland where 1 in 3 adult men have been in prison, and at any given time 1 in 10 of them are in the hands of law enforcement. Black people spend eight times as much time in prison compared to white people. It's actually worse for Indians, but I'm talking Oakland because Oakland is right across the bay from San Francisco and about the same population. Oakland is definitely the elephant in the room because this book takes place in San Francisco.

So, worse conditions than described in the book actually exist, just across the bay. And the book's complete failure to mention the persistent social conditions in Oakland, much less have it dawn on the hero of the novel that maybe those oppressed Oakland people might have something to tell him about the nature of the revolution he's planning or at least the nature of the system he's fighting. I mean, it isn't like there have been any revolutionaries in Oakland ever before, right? That could never happen in Oakland!

Of course, at the end of the book it's safe to be a white male middle class kid in San Francisco, again. Since at no point did anyone get down to Oakland, or the social conditions that previously existed in Oakland were mentioned, I'm gonna guess they're still fucked. (It was very briefly mentioned that non-white people might see things differently. A non-white person gives up on the quest because of fear. Which, fuck, is goddamn racist. While white kids like the protagonist were living safe in their affluent Frisco housing, Hispanic Californians have been, year after year, decade after decade, putting their asses on the line to make the world a better place. But it's the Mexican who gives up because it's dangerous! HOLY SHIT. Again, y'know, it's the brave white affluent kids that change the world. Ugh.) (The woman of the initial group also is too gutless to take a stand. She has family in North Korea so she knows how bad tyranny can get - and rather than this being a driving force encouraging her to fight to stop it from happening in America, y'know, I guess she's a girl, an Asian girl at that, she chickens out. Ugh. So toss some sexism into the pile – girls can't be revolutionaries, I guess.)

The message I took away from the book: When the revolution comes, it's going to be run by rich male white kids from affluent backgrounds to free themselves from tyranny. If that sentence makes no sense to you, well, it doesn't many sense to me, either. I think that it might make sense to rich male white people from affluent communities that have absolutely no fucking clue whatsoever what's going on outside their comfortable affluent environments and have tricked themselves into believing that they're somehow a persecuted class, or even a class that could be persecuted. That happens all time, y'know, how up becomes down and rich white men believe they're really the persecuted ones, but it's stupid.

Which is really offensive. The US has real problems. We imprison more people than communist China. Not more per capita but more period. You don't have to create another terrorist attack to imagine an America that engages in massive surveillance of its citizens and arrests them on arbitrary and idiotic charges and imprisons them for irrational, illogical periods of time in a mockery of justice. You just have to go to Oakland. But rather than do that, Doctorow creates a scenario which is substantially better than the actual situation for many Americans and has a rich male white middle class kid take this fake ass stand to return to a fucked up status quo that the character, and author, seem ignorant about. It comes off as coopting revolutionary consciousness to support the status quo to me.

Something else I found offensive, too, y'know, going along with how the book is about saving affluent white kids to throw raves and equally deep things is the idea that the worst thing that will happen is increased surveillance in the case of escalation of terrorism in the US (there is a brief period at the beginning and very end of the book about real issues like illegal detention and torture – but most of the book is entirely free of this consciousness; even the narrator admits it). I mean, OK, that's what the book is about and it's a real problem, I dig that. But if there was another 911 style attack by al Qaida (as is in the case in this book), one of the real effects would be a dramatic increase in military activity in the Middle East. As in "carpet bombing". But also in the sense that it is almost certain a draft would be instituted. We're already stretched thin. The draft is already be bruited about. Any serious expansion of militarism would demand it. But the book's analysis of a terrorist inspired future stops at the inconvenience to well off kids in Frisco. So while I understand that the book is reasonably limited in scope, that all writers have got to choose what they're writing about, the analysis as presented in the book is so deeply limited I'm finding it downright narcissistic. Things outside the extremely limited initial perceptions are simply left unexplored, unmentioned.

(A friend of mine also mentioned that if the Oakland Bay Bridge was destroyed that San Francisco would be a ghost town. There would be vast and immediate consequences to the city beyond the feds throwing up roadblocks and checkpoints. But he lives in Oakland so what would he know, right?)

Also, in the online version of the book, each chapter has an advertisement. It really, really, really undermines your "stick it to the Man" gig when you shill Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders in your book. It'd be like Rage Against the Machine ending a set with "drink Diet Pepsi!" A serious part of the problems with America - as opposed to the weak ass "problems" that afflict the middle class kids in this book - are these huge corporations and the undue influence they have over people and the government. They're part of the security state that Doctorow fears! Right now, many of the people he shills for are actively working to bring about the security state that the book ostensibly rails against! Argh! Every actual violation of a person's online privacy rights has been totally engineered by big corporations, sometimes the exactly corporations he shills for, such as Amazon! AAAARGH. It makes my brain hurt.

(Indeed, the book is a catalog of product placement. Innumerably the snooty goods the characters bought or used were named, complete consumerist crap, so it's mentioned that the jeans are from the Gap, and the whiskey is Bushmill's single blend and that the Oreo clones were from Whole Foods. It made me think of American Psycho, except that was a parody of consumerism and a fine book. It makes me think of the insanity after 911 when Bush told Americans to go shop or the terrorists would have won. I mean, shit, I know this book is vapid, that it's basically about the rights of middle class white kids to do whatever they want without responsibility. But the extent that includes shopping is ugly to me. I find the book's obsession with crass materialism an indictment against it, especially as it coopts revolutionary concepts. Fightin' for the right to shop. Ugh. I normally hesitate to call a writer a whore, but the shoe fits and it's a six inch stiletto pump.)

The terrible things in the novel are stopped by appeals to a journalist, which is as tired a cliche as I can currently imagine. I didn't realize that were people who still thought that the press mattered. C'mon, guys, face it: Watergate was a fluke and thirty years ago. It's past time to move on from the fiction that Watergate was anything other than a fluke, even in a fiction. I have some trouble believing that there are people who still believe in the power of the press after so many years of lies and omissions. They didn't go after Bush who was a bigger crook than Nixon. They did go after Clinton . . . for all the wrong reasons. The press is impotent except where it is a tool. When a small press tells the truth about something, no matter how real, no matter how demonstrable, no matter how true, the press crushes them and it's been decades since the straight press has even tried to say something difficult and controversial. But, y'know, in this universe a single story is enough to literally cause Homeland Security to be dismantled in California by order of the governor (which is also deeply stupid – the US government would not allow that to happen even if the governor ordered it, which also would not happen). The stupid, it burns!

This might be the worst book I've actually finished (I finished it only because it was actual research, if it had been for pleasure I would have stopped about a quarter of the way through but I decided to tough it out to the end because it was, y'know, research). I found it deeply classist and somewhat racist and sexist, and also intensely shallow while pretending to be deep. I was constantly aware of the contradiction between supposedly fighting the system while shilling for it at the same time. So, I actually found this a much more difficult book to read than Twilight because at every turn I was offended. The writing isn't even any better. The narrator is a shallow spoiled little punk who oozed privilege out of every pore of his body. Twilight was offensive in just a couple of ways. Little Brother is offensive down the line (and, frankly, about things more personal to me; while I recognize the sexism in Twilight I am not a woman so I don't feel it as acutely as many women do).

I will end with this. The revolution will not be televised. It will also not be webcast. It will also be a revolution. The ghost of Emma Goldman is lined up to smack Doctorow in the mouth. George Orwell's ghost is next in line.

Except this isn't the end, hehe. I read the book online, so I was able to jot down many of my thoughts as I was having them. I present them below. If you just wanted a review of the book, you can stop here. There was no elegant way to put them into the review above - or at least not an elegant way I could be bothered to do - but they might illustrate addition things I didn't like about the book. In case I wasn't clear above, I didn't like it at all.

There were other . . . flaws in the book. It comes off, to me, as a lot of wishful thinking. There are places where Doctorow literally believes that people met at raves and LARPs are worth trusting with the revolution. I think only a person who exists in a context where they have never been legitimately oppressed can think this, because both organized crime and revolutionary cells work differently. The whole "ring of trust" noise works well for rich white kids who think that they need to be protected from the law enforcement but the truth is that law enforcement doesn't much care about the doings of most rich white kids (compare the drug arrests for, say, possession to get an example of the disparity). They're not spending a lot of resources in that direction. They're far more interested in busting the clocker in Oakland than keeping tabs on rich kids in San Francisco . . . because they the youthful indiscretions of those kids are just youthful indiscretions. All of them - not even, really, almost all of them, but approaching 100% - will become, after their youthful wild oats period, the sturdiest defenders of the status quo.

Perhaps this is a revelation! Orwell was wrong. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he posited that Big Brother would watch the top 15% or so of the population, the people with some status and wealth. What we see is actually the inversion of that. The wealthy can be trusted to indoctrinate themselves. They're the winners in the class wars, right? How common is it for a person born into affluence to say to themselves, "Well, it's just chance that I was born here, and I don't deserve it, and I'll give it all away as soon as possible." What they tend to say is quite a bit closer to, "My parents worked hard for this, and it's far that we live in a society where wealth is heritable, and in the end I deserve the wealth and privileges I have because it's fair for them to be heritable. Indeed, the fairest society is one where wealth is infinitely transferable, without any pesky taxes or other considerations at all." Or, in other words, give someone a million bucks and they WILL find a way to justify why they deserve it, in large. So, you don't need to pay too much attention to what the affluent do. They train themselves. The people you've got to watch out for are the bottom dwellers, the proletariat, the workers, working poor, whatever you want to call them. These are the guys you've got to watch constantly, drag into court and imprison as often as possible (and when that doesn't work, murdering their leaders is a pretty good option).

So, in my thinking, when you get all your middle class affluent raver friends together to create a "ring of trust" what you're doing is false applying the logic of a pre-oppressed group to an oppressed group. The FBI will get up inside that shit in about twenty minutes, break someone down who'll give them everything, and the only reason that it doesn't happen now is because not a lot of law enforcement is wasted with ravers. They're all down in Oakland arresting black people.

**

The pedantry really grated. The hero would make these, y'know, pronouncements. Some were clever, most were not and a few I found deeply stupid. It eventually just became an opportunity for Doctorow to try to sound intelligent. And, of course, he is intelligent, but when you have one character spouting platitudes to himself and no one actually even knowing what these platitudes were to say, "Dude, those are just fucking platitudes that have scant bearing to life as it is lived" it becomes tedious to me. It stops being a novel and becomes a poorly written essay because it's impossible to separate the author's intent from the voice of the characters.

So there's all this stuff I kinna want to say about privacy, secrecy and the the rest - but how do I know what Doctorow thinks and what the narrator of the novel falsely believes? I have no way of knowing. That frustrates me because the narrator of the novel is often a dithering idiot who clearly has no idea what the hell he's talking about and tosses out diswitticisms like they have meaning. But is that because the narrator is a dithering idiot or is Doctorow expressing beliefs through the agency of the narrator (perhaps poorly, being forced to speak in the in character voice)? I dunno. And because I don't know, I don't know how to treat the ideas in the book that I think are poorly stated and, I believe, false.

**

It also reminded me of the dot com boom. Y'know, when you had these economists saying that the "Internet changed things forever". So, you have all these hacker kids goin' after the government like . . . the Internet changed things forever. Like traditional tools of law enforcement simply don't exist much like there was this bizarre belief that the traditional tools of the economy were irrelevant.

**

A good part of the novel is also a virtual tour of San Francisco, which the narrator repeatedly tells us is awesome. It is reasonably so, yes. But I sometimes get a clenched feeling in San Francisco because it's so affluent. So it's nice but also like sandpaper on my skin if I stay there too long. I actually feel better walkin' 'round Oakland because its both more diverse and more lived in.

But my point here is that this terrible government oppression that the white male affluent protagonist is fighting against is nevertheless not so bad as to stop San Francisco from being awesome. Oh, sure, he can't play his ARG because of security, but, I mean, that's the level of the stand he's taking, here. One of his real gripes against the security state is . . . he can't play a computer game anymore. So sad.

Oh, sure, there are other reasons. Like one of his friends has vanished (and is irrelevant through most of the novel), and there are real curtailments to civil liberties - but these curtailments are things a whole bunch of other Americans have lived with for a long time. Worse things, too. But, again, to figure that out might require crossing the bay and there's no way that's going to happen. Unless Berkeley is involved. That'd be OK. The rest of the East Bay? Well, who cares what people in Oakland do.

**

Most offensive moment: the narrator decides he has to escape. He's contacted by another person who's been a fed snitch and also wants to get out, and she says that she has a safe house down in SoCal. He agrees to go with her but, okay, this is what he does to cover their escape - he gets around a 1000 people, on false pretenses, to act in such a way that insures that the government will crack down on them, leading to police assaults, gassings, hundreds of arrests and at least some of those people to prolonged incarceration and interrogation at a secret prison camp.

Furthermore, the safe house isn't guaranteed safe. He suspects the person who contacted him is a fed - indeed, admits to having been a fed. So, he has no confidence in this person and on those grounds, he still gets a 1000 people beaten, gassed, some arrested and a few no doubt for lengthy incarceration and interrogation.

How can one parse this as anything other than cowardly and stupid? Cowardly because he considers his own personal safety - no, not even his own personal safety, a fairly shaky chance at personal safety - more important than the wellbeing of the people he duped into screening his escape. And stupid because, y'know, if he wanted to leave town he could have just gathered his things, including his girlfriend, and just left the old fashioned way. Y'know. Hitchhiking or on a bus or whatever. Which would have been safer and more honest.

It's offensive because it's so deeply stupid and deeply immoral. Which is never, in itself, a problem. People do stupid, immoral things all the time. But no one in novel catches on its stupidity and immorality. It's presented as if it was a good, reasonable plan instead of a stupid, immoral one.

**

Hippies. The book talks about hippies in a good way, about how the hippies changed the US for the better. While there's some truth to that, some other related and relevant things never get mentioned. Like how when hippies - middle class white kids - got involved in the civil rights movement it had already been going on since 1954 (or, if you prefer, been going on since a Spanish bishop came over in the 16th century to try to stop slavery from taking hold in the New World in the first place). After Rosa Parks and Montgomery and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a decade of civil rights demonstrations . . . in Little Brother, the hippies get the credit.

The book never uses the words "Martin Luther King, Jr." or "Malcolm X" or "Southern Christian Leadership Conference". But, y'know, we get hippies. They're the ones who did it. Really. So, again, color me insulted and color the book white. Black people need not apply.

**

Perhaps the thing I hate the most is the cooption of revolutionary consciousness. I mean, I know I'm not a revolutionary, not in the sense that I'm going to be going out and trying to fight to change the system. I've got a lot of social anxiety so I'd rather work at what I'm doing, y'know? Maybe that's cowardly of me, I dunno, I sometimes wonder about if a person's not out there on the lines, so to say, if they're not chicken. Maybe I've just convinced myself that I'm some sort of intellectual resister, like Sartre was in France (tho' with a much smaller following and impact, of course). But I feel like I'm a pretty radical guy. Even to most radicals I feel pretty radical.

What I see here, tho', what happens with some urban ad campaigns where something edgy is subverted to support the system. Y'know, like a hybrid SUV talking about how good for the environment it is, stuff like that. He uses all these edgy subculture stuff - like Emma Goldberg and Howl and On the Road - and subverts it to support whiny affluent white kids fighting the man so they can shop at the Gap.

Yeah, Emma wouldn't be part of any revolution where she couldn't dance. But this ain't a revolution. He's using Emma Goldberg to shill for Borders. He's using Ginsberg to help his product placement. I would say that you've got to admire the chutzpah, but I think I'm quite a bit past admiring shamelessness.

**

As a sort of the final slap in the face about the classism angle, near the climax of the book the narrator finds some kids that are part of the secret hacked network he'd set up. He needs to get online and they take him up to this multimillion dollar condo with a doorman and such. The kid he hooked up with was a trust fund baby.

Yeah. This is the resistance. Trust fund babies. It's the millionaire resistance.

OK, now I'm done. It's out, off my chest.

My nightly ride meets Critical Mass

I'm sure to the horror of some who will read this, the house that Adrienne and I have bid on is on the border between Overtown and Wynwood, the nearest major intersection is NW 2nd St and NW 20th Ave, just a little to the east of the University of Miami hospital. Since our current place is in the Design District, near NE 2nd St and NE 45th Ave, it's just a hop, skip and a jump over to whereabout our house will hopefully be, so I've been riding around, exploring that neighborhood. (And would greatly appreciate it if they finished up with the Venetian Causeway construction. It's bone rattlingly bad in places and I'd like to ride over to South Beach and with the MacArthur Causeway's bike lanes closed . . .)

Since I grew up in bad neighborhoods all my life, the fact the Overtown side is sketchy isn't a big deal to me - it feels like home. I guess I must be reasonably streetwise because I am finding the people to be friendly and such. I *like* working class, urban people and get on with them just fine - as I am one, myself. Regardless, I like the neighborhood and I'll like it more when I learn which streets aren't dead ends!

None of that is the point of this post. Here goes the point:

Last night, I was out riding - again, don't worry. I have lights, helmet, a flag, the whole nine yards. The neighborhoods I ride in are pretty used to people who take far fewer precautions than I do to be seen at night. I'm a pretty safe rider, I generally obey traffic laws (the one I most often break is running red lights because my trike isn't noticed by any sensors, so otherwise I'd have to wait until a car came and triggered it, ugh) - both as a matter of personal safety and because I wish to set an example.

Apparently, the last Friday of every month, a group called Critical Mass does a ride around about the neigborhood that I hope to be calling home, soon. I encountered them at several points during my own ride.

First off, looking at their rules, they break several of them. They say they obey the traffic laws, but they don't. They run red lights, they take over several lanes of traffic, they don't yield to anyone - this is typical behavior of cycling groups, but it's to be noted.

Second, it was not a very Miami crowd. It was, how to put this, mighty white. The neighborhoods through which they ride are pretty black. No, check that. They are *extremely* black. Wikipedia tells me that Overtown is 75% black and that certainly checks out with my rides through that part of town. Wynwood and about 60% Hispanic and 15% black, so not precisely neighborhoods full of blond dudes with pale skin.

Additionally, in my experience, Wynwood and Overtown have a very high number of actual cyclists. Like, a lot. More than I've seen than in other other neighborhood in Miami-Dade, with the exception of Miami Beach (which has a lot of tourists biking around). And with this whole "buying a house" thing taking six freaking months, I've have opportunities to more or less *scour* Miami. I've been through pretty much every neighborhood north of Homestead (and even some of that) and south of Pembrook Pines looking for neighborhoods that I believe to be undercapitalized. That Overtown, the poorest neighborhood in Miami, should have a lot of cyclists is not strange - way cheaper than a car, right? There are a lot of cyclists and many of them are black in the actual neighborhoods through which Critical Mass drives.

It hit me: why hasn't Critical Mass canvassed these black cyclists to participate? They're literally riding through the neighborhood, part of the reason for the ride is to raise awareness of cyclist issues (totally legit in Miami; Miami is a dangerous place for both cyclists and pedestrians, far moreso than the national average). But the very people who would be best served by increased awareness and who need more bike lanes as a simple matter of public safety *are not included*! So, white people come to a black neighborhood, ostensibly to address an issue that is important to the neighborhood, and seemingly make no effort whatsoever to include the people *in that neighborhood*. And while they're doing it, they're often riding bikes that are six months salary for the median resident of Overtown.

Needless to say, I won't be participating in any Critical Mass rides until this issue is dealt with. I'm trying to frame a letter to the organizers bring up this issue and how, y'know, offensive it is. I'm not good at writing polite letters, I tend towards the, uh, forceful. D'oh! Yet, I'll try.

They also said that recumbent bikes are welcome, but I got a number of hairy eyes from dudes when I chanced to be going the same direction as the Critical Mass ride. It was weird. Everywhere I've ridden my trike, the response has been overwhelming positive . . . except among a bunch of cyclists. I'd heard and seen on the Internet that there was some weird beef between recumbent riders and upright riders but I'd never felt it, before. In my letter to Critical Mass, I'll leave that part out. Maybe it was because I was wearing headphones in violation of their rules (yeah, and the law, and I know it's not even a stupid law, but that's my one general concession to riding safe, I need my tunes, man; and as a rule I was *definitely* riding safer than them . . . which is a rationalization, but I recognize that). Still, it was weird.

Anyway, I'll stop rambling, now.

New additions to Team Velvet Fist

We've gotten a bunch of new members to Team Velvet Fist MMA since coming to Miami, so I though I'd give everyone the lowdown about them!

Alberto the Alligator



Born in Brazil and immigrating to the US at a young age, Alberto is a superb technical grappler - particularly for anaconda chokes and d'Arce chokes. And while he's got a superb takedown defense, his takedowns are only mediocre - though he's improving. He's also extremely tough and has powerful, if wild, striking, too, with his tail and all. But he's got a few holes in his game - his striking isn't first rate and, well, he's kind of stupid. We had hitherto thought that Roxie the Rhino was the dumbest one in Team Velvet Fist, but Alberto has her beat.

Additionally, while it is difficult to say he has motivation problems because he never shirks a workout, no matter how rough Godzilla makes it, he sleeps a lot. He doesn't remember most of his fights because he slept through them - even the ones he won!

Unsurprisingly, his favorite fighters are Jacare Souza and Rousimar Palhares.

Bigsby the Buffalo



The most experienced of our fighters, until recently, Bigsby has been fighting in smaller circuits in the Great Plains and Midwest states using a unique form of fighting: prairie fightin'. I've got to give him credit, with his great physical size for the plushieweight division, tremendous takedowns and powerful striking, Bigsby is definitely a force to contend with in the issue. If he has a flaw, it's that he lacks polish - but TVF will fix that up properly!

But, man, does he drink. He also has . . . questionable bathing habits.

What? No, Bigsby! I wasn't saying anything about you . . . no, no! Don't! Oh, please, don't!

I em sory fer sayin bad thigs aboot Bigsby. Bigsby es teh besttest fiter in teh whol werld! Please breng him beer. Bigsby liks beer butt I, Kris, em meen adn woont giev Bigsby mor beer.

Danni the Doggie



Ahem. I am back. Danni the Doggie is a very talented catch wrestler in the old carny style, having learned it from athletic acts in traveling fairs, mostly in the West. Her striking is good old Gypsy bareknuckles fighting, as one can tell from her scrappy appearance, she's not afraid to get involved in fisticuffs, either!

Danni is, however, kind at heart, and has taken Canute under her wing - particularly protecting him from Patty the Parrot's vicious verbal (and perhaps physical) onslaught. It's fair to say they don't get along. She notes Judo Gene Lebell and Frank Gotch as her inspirations for pushing the art forward.

Fannie the Flamingo



Fannie is a Florida native who has returned from years of exile to the frigid north. Using her long limbs and speed, she has an extremely graceful and precise form of striking. She's primarily a counterfighter, dodging out of people's way and then returning with devastating blows. Her real problem is when someone gets their hands on her, she doesn't always know what to do - she's got great balance, but needs to improve her takedown defense, and she definitely needs to work on her sweeps and submissions. But she's got so much promise! She's got unlimited potential!

In person, she's a hoot. Always fashion conscious, she is perfectly coifed even before a fight. She's got a heck of a Southern accent and is brash and sassy. It's impossible not to like Fannie the Flamingo from Florida!

Canute the Canuck



And . . . then there's Canute the Canuck. What can I say? He's hopeless. He was mostly in the car because he got caught up in a drinking contest with Roxie, Bigsby and Edward the Efalunt. He got very drunk and the next thing you know he wakes up and we're hundreds of miles away from his prior home! While he's certainly got the size and strength to be a good fighter, and to judge by the many, many savage beatings that he's gotten from Patty the Parrot before Danni took him under her wing, he's tough as hell, he just has trouble getting into the spirit of mixed martial arts.

He is also a quiet but sincere Christian, whose faith is being sorely tested by the "filth" that we constantly expose him to. When I tried to show him Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, he couldn't make it a minute into the first episode before screaming and running away in horror! He is constantly wishing for us to watch something "uplifting", not vampire soap operas and depressing crime dramas and people snapping other people's arms.

Poor, hopeless Canute. Who knows what the future will bring for him?

I mean, look at this!



He built a pillow fort. Do MMA fighters build pillow forts?!

The Joys of Mental Illness

In my previous post, I discussed my fallout with the Miami Secular Humanist's Meetup group. In the comments, something really interesting just happened, and by interesting I mean awful.

One of the commentors, Anthony Camilo, did one of those sarcastic parting shots that online dudes do when they're withdrawing from a conversation but feel the urge to get in some kind of last word. I'm certainly done it, recently, even.

Except . . . the subject we were talking about was, in part, my mental health. Let me lay out what he said, so you don't have to go fetch it from my last post:

Let me start by apologizing for each and every word I've written on your blog. I have been extremely unfair to you and after reflecting up on it I must admit that you are a reasonable human being and a well adjusted man who displays no sociopathic behavior whatsoever and is clearly in full control of all his faculties. A man who has empathy for others and has firm grasp on reality. There is not a hint of paranoia in you. You are also a paragon and hero to all those who are dealing with mental illness and most would be proud to call you their spokesman.

So, he basically calls me a sociopath who isn't in control of my faculties. To wit, he's saying what I've been quite honest about: I am mentally ill.

Which means he's mocking a sick person. He's making fun of my mental illness. I wonder if he also mocks people in wheelchairs?

Which is today's lesson about being mentally ill and the discrimination that mentally ill people face.

Edit: He removed the offending post. Too bad I'd already copied it here. D'oh! But before he did that, probably while responding to my post where I just said he should be sarcastic better, he posted:

You are a piece of shit and a douche-bag?

Classy, man, just classy. Then he deleted everything, made another sarcastic post (!!). Maybe this time he'll actually give up. Who can say?