The Breaking Time

The positive side of binge drinking

There might be a few negatives.

Yes, I chose the title of this post to be intentionally provocative, but there's some interesting results from this research on college binge drinking:

When drunk, I would feel socially skilled, and wonderfully impulsive, and far more fun than I'd ever been before. I was drawn to alcohol because it allowed me to escape my natural shyness and bond with people I barely even knew.

It's those kinds of positive experiences that fascinate Thomas Vander Ven, an associate professor in the department of sociology at Ohio University. In his new book, "Getting Wasted," he aims to uncover not the dangers of college drinking, but what attracts  students to alcohol in the first place. And booze, he finds, not only helps young students alleviate their social anxiety, it helps them grow close friendships, and find romantic love. By taking care of other drinkers when they're feeling ill, he argues, many student drinkers also get their first taste of adult responsibility, findings that have major implications for the ways in which we think about alcohol.

Vander Ven goes into more detail:

There's been some recent research on this. In recent decades parents have been able to check up on their kids more through technology, through Facebook and text messages, and kids' lives have been more choreographed, whether it's being involved in teams or different kinds of lessons and activities and structured places. A recent phenomenon is the parent-orchestrated play date -- when I was a kid I'd never heard of a play date, you just kind of found somebody to play with, and now parents are organizing this. So when they go away to college they feel more off the leash than they would have in past history. They feel this real sense of autonomy. That might result in them taking more risks, and it also means that they may have less practice in managing those risks.

But if they weren't given the opportunity to solve problems when they were younger, the drinking scene also provides them with opportunities to do those things. Taking care of drunks is a way for them to show adult competence.

Vice, in the sense of something enjoyable but possibly dangerous, exists, and people, in some form, are going to try it. Alcohol, even if technically illegal for many college students, is widely available, socially acceptable and doesn't carry the same risks as a number of hard drugs. So, people drink, and form cultures around its use, some more dangerous than others.

College students, instead of being malleable little darlings snared by a sudden epidemic, are humans trying to find a useful way to test vice.

Viewed from this angle, students raised by a generation of "helicopter parents" have a hell of a lot of risk aversion and awkwardness to overcome, and the culture of binge drinking in college helps them to do that quickly, if in a sometimes nasty fashion.

The idea that part of their precious angel's freedom might be to drink herself silly and make out with someone her parents don't approve of before spending the next day hungover doesn't fit with their view of their child as a reflection to manage, instead of an independent human being who has to find out where their appropriate limits lie through making their own choices.

Since the parents have more money and social influence, binge drinking gets regarded as an epidemic, instead of an utterly understandable response to environment. Combine with the still-present idea that vice is something to perfected out of human beings, this makes for really stupid policy that doesn't really deal with the problem.

Personally, I've never seen the appeal of this particular ritual. I enjoy drinks and conversation, but find the whole puking-hangover mess stupid and utterly avoidable. My family also had the blessed sanity to introduce moderate drinking around meals in my teens. I was too poor — and had too much work to do — to binge drink in college. There are far better ways to figure out one's acceptable level of excess.

But it's important to realize these habits don't form in a vacuum. If people actually want to see a decline in binge drinking (and its very real problems), they should push for a lower drinking age and focus on creating a healthier cultural environment for alcohol consumption to take place in.

Law-less zones: when authority and anarchy shake hands

Just another Pirate Utopia. Photo by Laura K. Gibb.

Some interesting news out of Copenhagen, as the squat of Christiania just won long-sought autonomy:

"'It's not a perfect society, but one of the nice things about being here is that it doesn't have to be," says one resident, who calls himself only Vesinger.

Vesinger delivers his assessment of Christiania with obvious affection. He has lived here with his two little boys for six months, a recent convert to the Christianian way of life.

And it is not hard to see why this tiny enclave just south of Copenhagen's city centre is an attractive location for a family.

Trees and plant life thrive free from human interference and pesticides. It is more racially diverse, culturally open and creatively expressive than your average Danish neighbourhood.

Christiania has been a squat for nearly 40 years, ever since a group of enterprising hippies broke down the fences and set up in the disused military barracks.

And after a recent government ruling, this small society is celebrating its independence as a kind of semi-autonomous region. They call it Freetown Christiania.

---

Under the new rules, residents are allowed to buy their land at knock-down prices and the remainder will be put up for rent by the state.

Although this effectively turns a hippy haven into a local council for Ms Larson, it means for the first time they can exist in security as well as peace.

"It will be a new way of living," she says.

"We do not have to worry anymore about whether the government will throw us off our land. Hopefully now that we have won our right to own the land, then we will be able to feel more secure and start to deal with some of the problems that exist here."

Ah, "we won, now what?" the question would-be revolutionaries in every field have to grapple, specifically, Christiania's relatively lawless status has drawn increasingly violent drug dealers:

There have been outbreaks of violence including gun battles on the streets as rival gangs fight for control of Christiania's drugs trade.

On the notorious Pusher Street, skinheads with pitbulls glare menacingly from behind their stalls draped in camouflage netting at anyone who looks like they might be there to do anything other than buy drugs.

Society: never a simple issue.

Christiana's problems aren't new ones either. Back in 2008, I did a brief write-up on the history of the Kowloon Walled City for Coilhouse. Instead of hippie idealism, in that case the lawless zone was founded on a far more mercantile culture, but it faced many of the same problems. As I summed it up then:

Yes, the anarchistic types out there are correct when they say that the Walled City is evidence that humans can co-exist, and even thrive, without laws constantly piled on them. But it’s not that simple. After all, without massive police raids (government incarnate), the place would have probably become a mob-run tyranny. Its residents had a degree of freedom that anyone who comes home to piles of bills or endless forms can’t help but envy. They also had darkness, a lower life expectancy, filthy living conditions and huge numbers of drug addicts.

If the problems with the drug gangs keep building, Christiania will probably need police raids, ironically, to keep its ungoverned character. Anarchists, by ideology or default (as in Kowloon) have never been particularly good at handling organized violence. At the same time, while a hell of a lot greener than the urban labyrinth that was Kowloon, many of the other traits seem similar: functionally self-governing, relatively peaceful, ensconced in a niche and free of some of the surrounding society's ills.

This brings up a paradox: in both cases, lawless areas had their lawlessness preserved by, well, the law. So, what does one do with that particular contradiction?

Big Black Market: The drug money bailout

Imagine this map in a Charlotte banking executive's PowerPoint presentation

An investigation from The Observer reveals that Wachovia, a major bank, laundered billions for Mexican drug cartels:

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year's "deferred prosecution" has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn – a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico's gross national product – into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.

It gets better, mind you, with Wachovia hanging out the whistleblower who discovered the laundering out to dry. As a case of major financial malfeasance, this is bad enough. But this paragraph in particular struck me:

The conclusion to the case was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the "legal" banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.

At the height of the 2008 banking crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said he had evidence to suggest the proceeds from drugs and crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to banks on the brink of collapse. "Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade," he said. "There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."

That's big news, revealing the metamorphosis of corporate finance into a creature with enough tentacles in both government and the black market to draw from both in time of crisis. This is not entirely unexpected. Remember how one of the major factors behind the housing bubble was "everyone else is making shit tons of money off it, why don't we?" The black market, after all, is a growth industry that accounts for 15 percent of the world's GDP. For an amoral organization looking for quick profits, it's a natural fit.

The problem of the cartels' drug trade is its own issue, but historically financial entities had to (mostly) stay away from the black market on any massive scale. For all their white collar crimes, banking institutions do rely on legal guarantees to operate, and so are structurally more vulnerable to the law than the "black collar" sector.

Now? The line is fading, and Wachovia escaped with little more than a slap on the wrist. For future joint ventures between the legal and illegal markets, few things could be more auspicious.

P.S. If you happen to have an account at Wachovia, this might be a good time to switch to a credit union. They don't rely on murderous drug gangs and don't treat their customers like shit.

The Rundown: bodies on the highway

The body of a man killed execution style and wrapped in bin liners lies by the side of the Acapulco-Mexico highway November 16, 2006. REUTERS/Stringer

*Drug Wars A stunning set of pictures inside Mexico's drug war. Fair warning, the picture above is one of the least graphic in the set, which includes everything from blinged-out .45s and narco-saints to headless bodies hanging from a bridge. A harrowing look inside how ugly a drug-fueled civil war is.

*New Haven uses SWAT team to crack down on nightlife New Haven, Conn. has apparently decided people drinking and attending strip clubs is such a dire threat that it needs to use the SWAT team — with masks and assault rifles, no less — to round up the patrons, on a search warrant that produced a single, unrelated charge. This comes on the heels of Operation Nightlife where police started rounding up clubgoers and were widely reported to have attacked and tased a Yale student. Bunny Colvin's rant from The Wire — "call something a war, and pretty soon everyone starts acting like warriors" — comes to mind.

*LGBTIQQAA Yes, that's now the going abbreviation. I remember when it was gay and lesbian, then, around the time I was in college, LGBT became popular, and that was fine. But at this point, the acronym's stretching to the point of uselessness.

There is a term, however, that covers all those groups and their struggle for rights without resorting to a ludicrous degree of political correctness or tongue-twistingly garbled abbreviations: human.

*Catholics in US overwhelmingly support homosexual unions Many do this in direct defiance of their official hierarchy, and in percentages greater, in some cases, than the rest of the mainstream populace. A reassuring sign and a reminder that adherents to a creed don't always follow the attendant hierarchy. Again, the lesson is to be careful lumping traditions into too-neat boxes. There is No They.

*Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? A surprisingly decent series on the rise, hybridization and collapse of a subculture(s?) by Steven Hyden over at The Onion's AV Club. A good look at the way grunge and alt music linked into culture trends in one of the last eras before rock n' roll (along with mass music in general) splintered or become totally retro. Particular kudos for the way Hyden manages to balance enthusiasm with a realistic look at the limits of art.

*Experimentation, orgasms and the rise of anal sex Slate journalist William Saletan looks at changing sexual trends. Interesting material here on a social revolution steadily continuing in the background, though some of the "whoa" tone in Saletan's is a little puerile.

*'39 Queen doing an acoustic (what? yes!) presentation of one of the peppiest, saddest songs ever written about space travel:

Intermission, with music (and swords)

Yeah, it's been dry here this week, dear readers, and for that you have my sincere apologies. I suppose I could make the usual mumblings about being tied up with a heavy journalism workload or busy trying to set up an awesome film festival for my fellow Ashevilleans. All things that are nice and (relatively) sober.

No, those sneaky Germans at Silver Strain snuck out (terribly bootlegged) footage of what I and my terribly decadent friends have really been up to. But I admit the music is awesome. So while I recover from quaffing mysterious liquids out of smoldering goblets, enjoy. Blogging will resume shortly.

§ - TIMES 3 feat.☾∧† ◯ from § on Vimeo.

The hippies are loose

An excerpt from Harry Reasoner's 1967 documentary on hippies. Posted because it's an interesting look at how a social movement is viewed as utterly strange and full of portent at the time of its inception. Nowadays, however, hippies are viewed as one among many subcultures, and not very much threat to the mainstream (and my how that definition has changed) at all.

Food for thought, certainly.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The Rundown: It's the goddamn Breaking Time!

And Frank Miller is insane...

Frank Miller goes absolutely insane, with Batman, parts 1, 2 and 3: After coming off a news-writing binge that ended at approximately 7 a.m. I'm in the mood for some goddamn humor, and this hit just the right chord.

For those of you that don't know, Frank Miller, famed in earlier years for his classic, gritty remakes of Batman, has undertaken one final swan song, All-Star Batman and Robin, that personifies what he's become known for in his later works: utter stark, raving madness. This is well demonstrated by the panel above, which is actually fairly mild compared to the rest of the series.

Seriously, it's hard to appreciate the actual, sheer depth of the batshit (har har) until you actually see it for yourself. The I-Mockery version above is the perfect place to start, and as well as being fucking h

On a more thematic note, Miller is in the unique position of both helping to birth an artistic trend (grimdark superhero remakes) and play a major role in its final descent into clueless self-parody.

From Avatar to Fern Guilly in Five Easy Steps Also known as "White guy rebels against evil organization who wants valuable resource, joins indigenous tribe, hooks up with native hottie when someone's about to die. Hero bonds with important creature, wins over tribe, has a hippie moment and ends with (usually a repeated hippie bullshit line." This covers a surprising amount of stories, many making millions upon millions of dollars. I'll leave you to speculate why.

Legitimizing the illegitimate The excellent blog The Polis looks at ways of "legalizing" the slums that are a horrific, but often vital part of expanding urban centers around the globe. Essential Breaking Time reading.

Robots get sensitive skin An important technological step, though it further confirms my dire suspicion that technological progress will grind to a halt once researchers can fuck their robots.

The Story of Dune Fifty years ago Frank Herbert, a middle-aged journalist, sat down to write what would become one of the most innovative and influential sci-fi novels of all time. A surprisingly satisfying LA Times piece.

SEC charges Goldman Sachs with fraud And times just got real interesting. 

Blog Concerts The excellent Robin LeBlanc has dreamt an idea whose time has come, and a way to turn those writing binges into pure, transcendental art. Read it. These need to become a reality, soon.

All Tomorrows: Sovereign Bleak

I should have posted this earlier this week, when it went up, but the political season's heating up in Asheville and my job has kept me quite busy. This is happy news though. After a long, work-induced hiatus, I've returned to the Coilhouse blog with a piece close to my heart, on how the vision of a dark tomorrow became the norm, and some of the writers who made that happen.

A main reason this topic's particularly important to me is because I give sci-fi a little more credit than most, and not just because I happen to really like it. The idea of not just a few writers, but an entire genre striving to write about what happens next is a radically new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things. Isolated and wonky as sci-fi can often be, its very existence impacts the kinds of futures we envision and strive for (or fight against). It often functions as the proverbial pebble in our collective mental pond.

So, without further ado, read the whole thing:

I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

---

Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. The pilot finds a stowaway; a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother.

The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.

But space captains are heroic sorts. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. This time will be different. Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training; surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace.

No. There is no solution. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.”

The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity.

Godwin’s classic was only the beginning. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world.

This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future.

The Rundown: Avatars in the late, late night

Photo by Robbie Cooper

It's past one in the morning and my sleep schedule is shot all to hell, both from a nasty head cold and the medicines I'm using to fight it. And I've seen so many interesting things, readers, that it's high time I shared some of them with you. Thank insomnia.

* Behind the Avatars A fascinating photo series from Robbie Cooper that puts people's images side by side with the virtual avatar they've created. In a more fractured cultural landscape, we increasingly individualize our identities, with countless cultures and fantasias to draw from. To top it all off, there's now virtual worlds to roam around in where we can create new visual identities with a few clicks.

Like the best photography, Cooper's series speaks volumes. In lesser hands this could've ended up with simple exploitative gawking ("Wow, look at who chose to have a hot chick as their avatar hur hur"), instead it's surprisingly poignant and doubly interesting for how many avatars do resemble their offline bodies.

* Children by the Millions Wait for Alex Chilton Speaking of brilliant poignance, Joshua Ellis' superb essay from Coilhouse 04 has now made its way to the online edition. It starts with a personal story and makes its way to the mutated state of our current cultures.

Ellis' time predated (and was radically different from) mine, but like all the best stories it resonates no matter where you are. This is a piece still has me thinking about its points large and small, long after I first read it. Only the best essays do that.

* Keats in Space Molly Young's interesting call for a re-fusion of poetry and science, harkening back to the days when Milton's poetry graced astronomy books. I don't think Art and Science can merge as comfortably as some might believe, but this is an excellent reminder that both mentalities can learn from — and need — each other greatly.

* The State of the Internet Operating System Tim O'Reilly (poetically, at some points) breaks down exactly how the fuck the internet does what it does and how quickly that's changing. For those of us to whom the nuts and bolts of technology don't come that naturally, this is an excellent primer on how infrastructure matters — and why we should pay attention to what form tomorrow's may take.

* Stealing Krakatoa If anything that better sums up, in the most batshit supervillain way "Well fuck, the future's here" than Indonesian black marketeers hauling away the most famous volcano on the planet, I can't think of it.

* Lawmakers announce bipartisan transparency caucus Interesting, and while I'll have to see where it goes, worth applauding. I hope this marks the point where some of the Gov 2.0 ideas begin transitioning into the larger political realm. The air can get a little rarefied up there.

Just in case you're wondering, here's all the bastards on Twitter.

* Iceland bans stripping, adult entertainment, declared female-friendly haven Ah, Neo-Puritanism ain't dead yet. A disturbing story on a number of levels, not least because the reaction of some media is to take the idea that women need to be sheltered from witnessing or participating in certain acts as empowering, instead of disturbing paternalism Bullshit, of course, and Salon's writers justly call them on it.

* Captain Planet is not as cool as a jetski Just think about it for awhile. He's really not.

The Miracles of Our Great Founder, pt. XVII

George Washington Fights A Bengal Tiger On A Sinking Boat During A Hurricane, via BuzzFeed

As some of my readers may know that one of the Breaking Time's goals, among many, is to spread the Washingtonian Cult, the revelation that the founder of this great country was no mere mortal, but a God Among Us.

In the past, we, er, me have presented uplifting hymns to this effect. I am now greatly pleased to see that this revelation has spread to those talented in artwork, who now exalt the deeds of Venerable George. Lo, observe that the Britishers imported the most ferocious beast they could find to slay Washington, but using the Shaolin Flag-and-Saber techniques taught to him by Betsy Ross, he was able to send the creature to the dark, watery tomb that awaits all who serve Blighty.

So say we all.

Yeah, it's been a long day. Drinks, everyone?