Andrew Sullivan sums it up:

No social and cultural moderate can be a Republican presidential ticket in the era of Rove. So McCain was left with the party that brung him - and we now know what motivates that party: fear of the other and religious fanaticism.

In this video from 23/6, we can exactly how little valuable dialogue arose from the three presidential debates:

Funny thing: I don’t exactly blame the candidates for becoming sad little broken records in this reductio ad absurdum. I blame the media for asking the same questions over and over in different words, and for shying away from any unique discourse. I blame campaigns and parties for having very specific expectations of how a debate must run.  I blame the culture of presidential campaigning, which states that a debate must always begin with a cutesy thanking-of-the-moderator, must always contain cutesy personal stories, and must always focus on the very few issues assumed to be “key”. I even have a little blame reserved for of every one of us who watched the debates, found them totally unsatisfying, and just numbly waited around for the next installment.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but everyone is complicit in it.

Even the most ardent partisans I know, on either side, found the debates to be entirely dull. When your debates put a passionate political science professor to sleep (which happened to one of mine), something is tragically wrong.
 
Maybe someday, bloggers and other members of the “new media” will have the power to influence political campaigns, and push for more interesting, unstilted discussion. The YouTube debates from earlier this year demonstrated some promise for the future, I think. But with debates like the last three, we still have a long way to go.

Yesterday I needed to get out the door earlier than usual to get to work.  We have a big order due next Monday and a couple extra hours a day will see it done with time to spare.  But I do need that extra time and I don’t really want to work till seven or eight at night.  Anyway, I’m rushing about trying to get ready and there’s a knock on the door.

Canvassers.

“Yeah?”

“We’re with the McCain-Pallin campaign—”

“Oh.  Sorry, we’re voting for Obama.”

They were young, I’d say early twenties.  She held the clipboard (which seems unusual, I think, can’t be really sure, but I see more men holding the clipboard than women, it’s like control of the tv remote in a way) and both were reasonably attractive.

Both their faces showed their disappointment.

“Is there any way we could dissuade you?” she asked.

I hesitated.  Now, this isn’t fair, but I have come to never expect good language skills from Republicans.  Sorry, I know that’s a blanket statement, but it’s true—”Can we talk you out of it” is more common than the use of the word “dissuade” among the Right.  I think it has to do with the presumption of choice the word implies, which the Right has been having serious problems with the last couple decades.

In my moment of hesitation, he pounced.

“You realize Obama is inexperienced and has ties to Liberal—”

I held up my hand and he actually shut up.

“You just lost me,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because you led with an attack on Obama.  That doesn’t work.  You need to tell me what McCain would do differently than his predecessor.  You don’t start off by telling me what a bad idea it is to vote for an unknown when the known is so shitty.”

They both blinked.  I think at the last word I used.

‘Okay, then—” he began again, gamely.

“No, it’s too late.  I knew four years ago I wouldn’t vote for a Republican this time.”

“That’s kind of short-sighted,” he said.

“Looking ahead four years is short-sighted.”

“Well, look what your choices are now.  Did you know four years ago someone with ties to domestic terrorists would be running as the Democratic nominee?”

“See, there you go again.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Obama.  We’ve been talking here now for over a minute or so and you haven’t told me one positive thing about McCain.”

“He’ll cut taxes,” she said.

“No he won’t.  He’ll delay them.  How do you think the deficit Bush has run up will be paid off?  Somewhere, somehow, it will come from taxes, but both of them will wait till they’re out of office and it’s someone else’s problem.”

“With lower taxes the economy will grow.”

“Taxes were higher under Clinton and the economy grew faster and was more stable.  You’re not making points on taxes.  Try something else.”

“McCain won’t negotiate with states that sponsor terrorism.”  This from him.

“Then he’s an idiot and we’ll pay for it.  Next?”

“You must be a hardcore liberal,” he said.

“Did you vote in the last election?”

“Sure.”

“That’s a liberal idea, universal sufferage.”  I looked at her.  “Do you know when women got the vote in this country?”

She blinked.  “The vote has always been ours…”

“1920.  Before that it was thought women were too stupid to vote.  Do you know when blacks were allowed to vote in this country?”

She looked uncertain.

“It started in 1964, with the Voting Rights Act.  Liberal idea.  There are probably still some counties where the local white bigots keep blacks from voting.  Like, maybe, Florida in 2000?”

He was frowning.  “Thank you for your time, we should—”

I still addressed her.  “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Planning to be?”

“Someday…”

“Imagine you’re married to this guy and tells you how to vote or what books to read or who to talk to.  Would you want to be able to divorce him if it got bad enough?”

“I don’t—”

“Think about it.  Because the problem with the Republican Party right now is this thing called the Religious Right and among other things they’d certainly like to take away your right to divorce an asshole—which is a liberal idea.”

“Thank you—” he said again.

“Next time you bash liberals, read a history book.  Everything that makes this country a nice place to live was originally a liberal idea.  Social Security is a liberal idea.  Unemployment insurance is a liberal idea.  Open access to courts is a liberal idea. The forty-hour work week, liberal idea.  Child labor laws, liberal idea.  Both of which, by the way, the conservatives of the day thought would destroy the economy.  Public education is a liberal idea.  Public libraries, liberal idea.  Laws against monopolies, liberal idea. The list goes on.  All I hear from the Rush Limbaugh crowd is how all these liberal ideas have destroyed the country or are destroying the country, but the fact that he can shoot his fat mouth off on a public medium is itself a liberal idea.  Look it up, it’s called the First Amendment.”

“There’s no need to get angry,” she said.

“Really?  You’re canvassing for a politician who wants to run this country according to some notion of free enterprise which has resulted in a gigantic financial meltdown, appoint a couple of supreme court justices that will vote to take your personal choice away, and probably continue the policy of military internment of civilians without charge.  The Republicans have gutted our educational system to such an extent that you came out of college not knowing when women got the right to vote and I’m not supposed to be angry?  Instead of telling me how good McCain is, you just want to accuse his opponent of hanging around with someone who was connected to a radical group that was gone before you were born, a group that was pissed at the United States because it wouldn’t stop bombing babies in thatch-roofed villages.  And now we’re back at it again in another part of the world, all because the turnip in the White House now thought it would be a good idea to have soldiers in the geographic neighborhood where a bunch of Islamic Mafiosi are hiding and maybe if we’re lucky a bomb might fall on them.  Of course, their actual hiding place is a thousand miles away from where we invaded, but it’s only an inch or so on the globe he’s got in the oval office. I’m pissed because the party you’re working for thinks being tough is a viable substitute for using your brains and then turns around and telling us we’re all gonna do fine because taxes will soon be gone and everyone will have a job!  Because everybody knows taxes are bad for business!  But so is shipping jobs out of the country and allowing corporations to hide their profits in off-shore accounts.  Oh, and by the way, since Government is really the problem, we’re gonna spend as much as we can in order to bankrupt it, so there won’t be any government in a few years for lack of money.  Which means Exxon Mobile will be writing legislation from now on and KBR will be billing us privately for maintaining infrastructure, ADM will be policing itself to guarantee food safety, and after we give all our money to them AIG will take over for the Treasury.  I’m not supposed to be angry?  You two knock on my door to try to convince me to vote for someone that you can’t think of single good thing to say about.  All you can do is try to scare me about a young black man and you don’t even know the history of voting rights in this country.  I’m angry because you swallowed all that rightwing crap without a second look and think because some 72-year-old white man who got shot down because he was bad pilot in a war you probably don’t even know the history of is qualified to lead me into a future he thinks will look like 1956!  So no, I guess I shouldn’t get upset.  I’m late for work and you have just given me the final justification for voting for Obama.  Have a nice day!”

I slammed the door then.

It probably wasn’t quite as smooth as that, but I was gratified by the look of utter dumbfoundedness on their faces.  I watched out the window afterward and saw them actually leave the neighborhood.

Probably didn’t do them a bit of good, but I felt a whole lot better.

Republicans.  Yeesh!

A boss neglects to notice your achievements. A potential love interest snubs you. A stranger acts as though you do not exist. An acquaintance does not respect your opinion. Sometime, somewhere, someone has failed to treat you how you believe you deserve to be treated.

But what, in that ego-crushing millisecond just happened? A bevy of explanations can rise up to explain this injustice. Some bring a modicum of relief- the boss in question had a lot on his plate, the stranger was in a rush. Others not only fail to quell your concerns, they cause a number of more maddening problems to bubble up.

What if, in your moment of neglect, you were just discriminated against? Have you really just been a victim of racism, sexism, ageism, or some other horrifying -ism? You can never know for sure. You cannot confirm whether or not the offender in question is a horrible racist, sexist, ageist whatever-ist.

This looming question, I suspect, tortures many people of discriminate-able backgrounds. The feminist languishes over why, exactly she didn’t get the job in the male-dominated office. The gay couple silently questions why they did not get the apartment owned by the woman with the large cross around her neck. The person of the minority race wonders if, and why, so many people stare at him on the street.

I have heard, several times before, the very tenuous claim that the good-old-days of open discrimination sure beat the hell out of these covertly prejudiced days. Now-a-days, you don’t know if someone looks at you and sees a person, or if they see a caricature. In such an ambiguous situation, prejudice can appear everywhere, and nowhere at all. It can drive a woman, man, minority, old person, young person, religious person, atheist person absolutely crazy if they let it.

I would venture that we all see discrimination more often than it actually happens. My hunch falls back on one of social psychology’s golden children, the fundamental attribution error. It goes a little something like this: we all think like terrible, foolhardy amateur psychologists. Very foolhardy. We all attempt to explain the behavior of others, yet we make a fatal flaw: we assume that most behaviors come from an underlying disposition, rather than ever-changing circumstances.

Thus, as the oft-cited example goes, when a person trips on the street, we say it’s-because-he’s-clumsy, not it’s-because-the-sidewalk-has-a-nasty-crack. In the same way, we may see a potential love interest of another race brush us off and say it’s-because-she’s-a-racist, not it’s-because-she-is-married. Et cetera.

Sometimes, perhaps, we even deserve the discrimination we get. Author and gay-rights advocate Dan Savage sometimes dwells on this topic in his podcast, Savage Lovecast (note: very very mature content). A caller, a young black man, complained that he could find no dateable partners in Seattle, because everyone in town was a terrible racist. Not so, Savage said- based on you arrogant tone and short temper, some of those people probably discriminate against you for being an “asshole”, not a black man.

So Dan Savage doesn’t have the most sensitive approach to the matter, but I do think we all need the occasional brutal reality check. Not every offense comes from a deep-seated, dispositional prejudice within the hearts of others. Sometimes the situation leaves us ignored, unappreciated, slighted. And, sometimes, we are just assholes.

This post stems from the frustration I often feel when I am around some of my more sensitive friends. These friends are devoted to quashing a particular -ism, and they see their target everywhere. Any wrong in the world, any obnoxious advertisement, any horrible comedy movie is a despicable symbol of flagrant sexism. I think they are overreacting. But as I’ve mused before, I’m not a woman, so maybe I’m not sensitive enough.

However, my response, based on my personal way of dealing with occasional “discrimination”, goes like this: Treat all discrimination equally, no matter what reason you suspect caused it.  First, check and see if you “deserved” it- remove  what I call Dan Savage’s “asshole” factor. Slow down, and consider that the slight has a situational, rather than dispositional explanation.

If you didn’t earn the mistreatment, deal with the prejudicer the same way you would a person who simply doesn’t like you. Call the person out on unfairness- if you have evidence of it- and don’t associate with people who treat you unfairly. It doesn’t matter why they neglect you, after all- prejudice against race looks very similar to prejudice against sex, to prejudice against atheists, and to prejudice against people who behave like jerks.

Hypersensitivity fixes nothing; I suspect it only makes the labels that divide people more salient. And by seeing all people as potential racists, sexist, ageists etc, we commit the same error that the really prejudiced do.

I’d like to do a bit here on language.  Primarily on how we have seen it distorted over the last few decades.  According to George Lakoff and Geoff Nunberg, the Right has seized the rhetorical high-ground and driven Liberals into defensive postures by altering or subverting the meanings of certain words and phrases.  I tend to think that, yes, they’ve done that, but that also the people who are swayed by such verbal gymnastics are by and large pre-sold on the message.  Many of us out here never did buy into it.

But the effect of making those the Democratic Party has fielded to oppose them look weak did happen, even for those of us who could see through the bull shit.  Once you get someone to start backing up and apologizing for what he or she believes in, the game is over.  This happened to Kerry.  It’s happened to many others.  Republicans have manage to turn “Liberal” into a dirty word, which is bad enough, but the fact that Liberals respond guiltily by admitting, well, yeah, I am, or used to be, but I’m not really anymore, I’m more of a Centrist…

Bull shit.

The problem is that people tolerate euphemism in place of truth and after long enough it gets difficult to cut through it.

For instance, when Obama becomes president, I would like to see a reinforced Truth In Advertising policy.  It has escaped no one’s attention that we are having a bit of a problem with the economy.  Have been a long time now, ever since we realized that consuming happens faster when things are cheaper and cheaper things usually aren’t made here.  We have gradually become more of a service economy than a manufacturing power and this has frankly hurt.  Look at the automobile industry.  Good heavens.  (Let’s not even talk about shipping!)

I think it would be useful to start calling certain things by what they really are.  Chiefly, I am tired of financial institutions referring to things like loans and so forth as Products.  You hear it all the time on television and radio.  “We at the First Institutional Savings and Loan have many new and exciting products for our customers.”

No, they don’t.  A product is something you make.  A refrigerator or a stove are products.  A car is a product.  The computer I’m writing this on is a product.  (You could stretch the point and argue that the words I’m writing are a product, but I think that’s stretching things too far.  My thoughts are not products insofar as they don’t actually do anything anyone else can buy and use until they are translated into an Object you can take home and use.  Ergo, a book is a product, but the ideas therein are not.  Maybe that, too, is stretch, but we’re talking about the economy here, not philosophy.)

Shuffling paper around in different arrangements is not a product.  All they do is take something that has already been “made”—other people’s money—and package it for other to people to spend.  They have not made anything that is intrinsically useful by itself in the way that a can opener or a television or a barbecue pit is useful.

I bring this up because by misusing the term Product in such a way, it kinda sorta looks like banks are on some level manufacturers.  Instead of a service.  You might ask what real difference is makes, and that would be a good question.  Here’s a good answer:  when enough people begin to think and act as if those shuffled bits of paper possess the same kind of intrinsic value that a real Product has, they start swapping them around as if they were cars or lawnmowers, as if profit were something attached to these pieces of paper in the same way.  It leads to an economy of pure motion of money with nothing to base the presumed value of the money on—i.e. Products—and at some point the emperor’s nakedness becomes too evident to ignore and we have an economic meltdown.

Hmm.  Sounds familiar.

So enough of that, already.

I would also like to strike the term “He/she failed to disclose/report/act etc.” from legal language.  It gives the wrong impression.  So we don’t want to say “The Senator lied” because that’s rude.  But altering the phrase to “The Senator failed to disclose his tax returns (or the new house a contributor gave him)” makes it sound like the Senator tried to do the right thing, but just somehow couldn’t manage to do it.  It makes it sounds like it wasn’t really his fault, just, well, he had a bad day.

Bull shit.  The Senator lied.  He didn’t fail to do anything except not get caught.  He tried to not get caught and, gosh, here he is testifying, so I guess he failed at that.  But what he is accused of?  No, he didn’t fail to do the right thing, he didn’t even try.

Such euphemism debases the public discourse.  That’s a fancy way of saying that it erodes public trust.  Gradually.  Slowly.  Which is worse than a quick shock, because slow erosion might not be noticeable until the whole system starts sliding into the swamp.

Centrist is another term I’d like to do away with.  By however one defines the issues, anyone can be tagged as a Centrist.  What does that mean?  It means you’re so afraid of pissing people off that you waffle on important issues.  It means that if a problem requires a fix that is either very rightwing or very leftwing, you won’t talk about it unless you can leach out all it’s vitality.

How does this hurt?  Just look at some of the big pieces of legislation passed in the last 20 years in, say, education.  The problem is that we abandoned (or never had) the ability to offer education to prepare students according to their abilities in favor of a system that slots everyone into a college track, whether it’s right for them or not, and rewarding those who get through college with job opportunites they may still be unprepared for and casting those who either didn’t go to college or didn’t get in to begin with into the neverland of dead-end service jobs.  (Essentially, it is a paper shuffle, like the aforementioned banking practice of offering “products”.) The entire system needs to be revamped and probably more federalized than it is now.  Certainly local school board have become in some cases nothing but ideological battlegrounds…it doesn’t work except for those who are already predisposed to learn and needs to be trashed.  What do we do instead of telling the parents of the land that, in at least half the cases, your darling son or daughter ain’t never gonna be no Einstein no matter what school we put them in and acknowledging that some students, no matter what their I.Q., just ain’t never gonna give a damn about certain curricula and might be better off in shop classes learning to (wait for it) Make Products!  (What? Blue collar education for my little genius?  How dare you!)?  We make the teachers give endless tests to try to get total average scores up and pretend that those scores actually reflect what the kids actually know.  (Paper shuffle!)

Centrist bull shit.

(Likewise I think we should do away with Right and Left in all such debates, because these labels do nothing.  Once we allow that labeling is somehow constructive, actual constructive discourse is in danger of fleeing.)

Also in advertising I would like to see the use of the claim that “You can save money by buying this today!”  This is one we’ve been living with since television came around and it has always annoyed me.  Let’s be clear—you do not “save money” when you buy something.  You may spend less this week on the same thing than you would have last week, but you’re still spending.  This is ad-speak nonsense that twists things around to convince you to part with your dollars.  You may get a good bargain, but you  haven’t saved anything, they didn’t deposit the difference in your bank account, and you probably didn’t put it in the bank either.  This is perhaps a minor quibble, but it is part and parcel of American’s lack of understanding about the dynamics of market-based economies.

Which leads me to…

I would like to see the phrase “Let the Market decide” stricken from the language entirely.  I know this will never happen, because language doesn’t work that way, but really, what a load of horse hockey.

The Market decides nothing.  Never did, never will.  The Market does not have an intellect.  The Market is an effect pool, wherein the decisions of individuals vying for competitive advantage cumulatively result in an outcome.  But like the weather, these outcomes are feral, sporadically predictable, and never—NEVER—altruistic.  Letting the Market decide is like letting your car go where it wants without putting your hands on the wheel or taking your foot off the gas.  Occasionally it actually might get somewhere you want to go without killing someone in the process.  No one bothers to ask where the Market got its education.  No one bothers to ask who pays for “adjustments.”

This is a phrase used by people who want very much to be allowed to screw over anyone they think they have to in order to secure their presumed slice of the pie.  The assumption is that such avarice will be checked by competitors who will stop them because that would limit the competitor’s ability to get his slice of the pie.

Few ever really triumph in this game, but that’s not really the point.  The point is that those few are the ones who decide what the Market will do—it is not a natural phenomenon, is very hands-on manipulation by private citizens for their own benefit and to the detriment of those who can’t compete.

I don’t actually have a problem with that as such.  It does drive many of the plus-direction economic benefits of our economy.

But it leads to excesses and abuses against people who have absolutely no way of defending themselves from the consequences of market collapses—which happen cyclically and occasionally catastrophically, like hurricanes.  It is absurd to argue that something that is essentially brainless has the right to be left alone by regulatory entities.

Damn, people, the government is part of the Market, if for no other reason than by virtue of being a Customer.  To argue that it should stay out of it and let it run free is absurd.  (The free enterprise fans don’t let it run free—they do everything they can to manipulate it.)  And since the government ostensibly represents us, then it follows that such regulations as it may apply to this wild and mindless beast in order to protect our interest are not only prudent but essential.  We don’t let wild tigers roam free in city streets, do we?  Why would we be so gullible as to believe the Market, left alone, will look after our interests?

But the phrase gives full voice to the nonsense notion that there is a master plan, an overmind, a naturalistic intelligence that we must not cage, that the Market is somehow alive and should have rights.  It dumbs us down with a false image and lulls us into a false state of helplessness.

Controlling the Market is not Socialism, it’s common sense.  People who make a lot of money do not have a right to so at everyone else’s expense.

In that vein, I would like to do away with the term “CEO Compensation Package.”  I have no problem with the older term “Bonus” because they imply different things.  A bonus is by definition a reward for success.  A compensation package is a negotiated arrangement that is completely independent of performance, and judging by the way things have been going for some time now, clearly there is no relation between reward and success anymore.  I would prefer to call it Pillage.  In many instances, it is simply theft.  Calling it a Compensation Package renders it innocuous, with no real causal links to the destruction of a company.  It is a lie of effect.

I’m looking forward to a change in the way things are talked about.  I would like to limit the attempts of the corrupt in politics and business to hide what they do behind phrases that have legalistic or pseudo scientific auras about them that make them somehow less nasty than what they really are.  We don’t fully appreciate what language does to us when we accept it uncritically.  And it certainly wouldn’t hurt anyone to have things called what they are.

Well, it would hurt some I suppose.

I’ve been musing about the meanings of these words lately, and I’d like to share some of these musings with my extended brain here at Dangerous Intersection.

I. Faith

First of all, faith. In the typical science vs. religion debate, faith usually gets defined by the science team to mean believing something is a fact, in the absence of, or despite evidence. Many religious people, though, have in mind something more like they way Senator Barbara Jordan uses the word in this quote:

My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.

Senator Barbara Jordan, Statement on the Articles of Impeachment House Judiciary Committee, July 25, 1974.

Her faith in the constitution, Jordan explains, flows from the ringing words of the Preamble “We the People…” And as she herself wryly acknowledges, her faith was based on a misapprehension, a failure to accept the evidence:

…when the document was completed on the seventeenth of September 1787 I was not included in that “We, the people.” I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake.

Of course, all the historical evidence, and the all the evidence of her personal experience growing up as a second-class citizen in the segregated south, unerringly pointed to the fact that Barbara Jordan had never been meant to be part of “the People” empowered to participate in the government of these United States.

Jordan’s faith, then, was not in the words of the document - after all, constitutions with even more eloquent language about human rights and democracy have been left to gather dust in the state vaults of many a dictatorship. Rather, her faith was in the process of amendment and interpretation outlined in the Constitution, and ultimately, in the ability of the majority of the populace to recognize Barbara Jordan as one of “the People.” One can only think that throughout most of her early life in Texas, Jordan could not have observed much evidence to support that this would ever happen.

So, faith, in this sense, means a basic trust that holding to certain principles or to a certain course of action will ultimately lead to a good outcome, despite apparent evidence to the contrary.

(more…)

This title is an incisive quote from our regular responder, Karl K. My personal and immediate response to this statement is, “Duh”. Naturalism, or the acceptance of the results and conclusions from the application of the Scientific Method, has created huge advances in the survival and comfort of all humanity. In the couple of centuries since the Enlightenment, more progress has been made toward that goal than in the previous 50 centuries under theistic ruling philosophies. There is great utility for society as a whole in following naturalistic views.

However, then Karl proceeds with the following non-sequitur:

Can I therefore assume that you would concede the point that if somebody has to die to solve some of the world’s problems it should be people like ERIK who preach religious dogma in a manner that offends you. In fact this would apply to anyone who says interpretive science needs to be knocked out of its prominent position in our secular society be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu, [...]

Actually, evolutionary theories (one subset of naturalistic conclusions) prove that variety (a wide bell curve in every characteristic) is necessary to the long term survival of societies, as well as species. Only people with narrow world views advocate eliminating non-aggressive adversaries. Genocide is practiced by theists, not naturalists. Usually by theists of the newly-formed personality-cult sort as with Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. These cult leaders claim to be scientific to the world, yet the first thing they do is purge actual scientists and intellectuals, leaving a core of pseudo-scientific yes men to lead their institutions. They all refuted Darwin. Look how well that worked out for them.

It is a scientific necessity to keep around those who disagree, if only because they might be right despite all evidence currently available. Even if there is no God, maybe the belief itself has social utility. The basis of the scientific method still is adversarial in nature. Advances come when someone disproves currently accepted theories. But solidly disproved ideas that keep appearing as new insights by those who refuse to peruse the news of the views they refuse are not helpful.

The problem with the term “Utilitarian” is that it means different things to different people. To the Saved-by-Jesus crowd, it appears to mean selfish and without regard to society. It seems that many of the Faithful were raised with the odd idea that morality comes from carefully following ancient rules, rather than understanding the effects of ones own actions as a part of living society and its future. To rational atheists like myself, the morality of Utility is implicit. If an action provides for the greater good, then it is useful, has utility. If it also gains something for myself, then great! See Utilitarianism.

(more…)

Jon Stewart’s team explores Wasilla:

One has to admit that Gov. Palin is an awfully good sport.

Yes, it’s really her saying “Live from …”

Maybe there’s something wrong with me.  I am not enthused about the coming election.  I hope Obama wins, but only because I have had enough of the Republicans and their wistful, “wish it were 1952 again” attitudes, and the ideological leech they’ve been carrying around since 1980 that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy.  The fact that the Constitution actually does permit us to successfully fight that possibility doesn’t mean we can’t grow very, very tired of the effort.

But I’m not a huge Obama supporter.  I like a lot of what I see and hear, but I’ve learned to discount that.  Politicians, even when they tell the truth, are seldom capable of delivering on promises—the system is too complex and fluid—and I’m never sure where the gravy will go anyway.  What I have admired is Obama’s refusal to be pinned to the wall.  He seems to know that the most important thing is to keep one’s options open, because as much as he thinks he knows now about what’s going on, it has been clear to me that once someone wins the election, the subsequent “orientation” sessions coming into the White House must be hair-raising.  They hear things they had no idea were going on, things which doubtless change whatever they thought they were going to do.

Whoever wins will have three big foreign policy problems to deal with, as well as the ones that have become fixtures.  Pakistan, Iran, and China.  (Yes yes yes, Palestine, Russia, and the chaos that is Africa—but those are constant, always there issues.)

Pakistan is a problem because, despite the fact that it is a democracy, the ruling class has never—NEVER—considered “the people” worth considering.  They act like most such quasi-dictatorships and relegate the public to some category of irritant that must from time to time be molified.  This had led to a severe gap in aspiration between the two elements, which is why Pakistan can’t do much about the Taliban camped out in its western provinces.  They have been on the brink of an Islamic revolution for 20 years and unless something is done to rectify the dysjunction between The People and The Government, it will happen and it will cause us no end of grief.  Never mind Iran, Pakistan already is a nuclear power.

Iran is the biggest bully in the Middle East right now, but they are fragile.  We keep paying attention to Akmadinijad (sp?) and his rants, but he actually doesn’t run the country.  It may be possible to cut a deal with those who do, but it must be done carefully because they had pushed their people to the brink of another revolution, albeit one which may be less volatile than Pakistan’s.  Iran has a very modern-thinking population of young people who chafe under the Islamic rules imposed from above.  With this global financial collapse, Iran is actually teetering on the brink of insolvency—despite having huge oil reserves, they have no refineries to speak of (they buy gasoline from abroad) and their budget is stretched thin on any number of fronts.  They depend a lot on China for revenue.

Speaking of China, they have been buying debt.  Which for a while made them look like they were poised to start gobbling up markets and becoming some sort of financial superpower.  The problem is, debt is solvency.  If the debtors can’t pay, you have nothing but a promise.  And if we can’t service our debt and cut back on imports, well, China will find itself in a very difficult position.

But they are also flexing their aspirational muscles in other directions.  China is building its first aircraft carrier.  Very expensive and one must ask Why?  They have never been able to sustain foreign military adventures.  They do not have the logistical know-how to extend themselves militarily past their own borders.  We’ve seen this time and time again.  Vietnam, Korea, Russia.  So why an aircraft carrier?  Prestige?  Who would they target?  Or defend?

Taiwan, of course.  Stay tuned.

But getting back to the financial issues for a moment.  China has been attempting to buy its way into international markets for a long time now and has been filling in the gaps left by other financial powers, especially in Africa, but also int he Middle East.  Given the way the markets have been going, we have to ask what happens to all those new money roads they’ve been building if they suffer a collapse.  Whole economies are becoming dependent on Chinese investiment.  Chinese fragility is coupled with an absolutist self-serving protectionist viewpoint (much more severe than ours) and in times of crisis, they’d just abandon their commitments.  Where does that leave those parts of the world?

I have no answers, but I believe these will be the biggies for whoever inherits the Presidency this time, and they will have to be dealt with sooner than later.

Domestically?  Well.  Health care is, I think, primary, for many reasons, and it’s clear that McCain wants to get the government out of the health care business.  It’s going to implode and he doesn’t want government involvement at any level.  But that’s not realistic.

The problem neither candidate has addressed yet is the shortage in G.P.s, which is accute.  It won’t matter what you do to shift payments around if the price keeps going up because doctors over-specialize.  So-called primary care physicians are getting scarce on the ground because (a) medical school debt is HUGE and general practitioners don’t make the coin to pay for it and (b) malpractice insurance is distorting all other costs.  Both factors need to be addressed before costs start coming down.  Preventative medicine is the way to go, but saying that doesn’t help anything if there aren’t enough consulting physicians at the lowest level to counsel well care.

CEO compensation packages must be addressed.  I am loathe to see any kind of legislation limiting how much money a person can be paid, but it’s not the actual sums that are at issue.  It’s what those sums are paid out for.  If CEO pay was tied exclusively to improved performance of the company (not the stock), then the problem might correct itself, but if you pay someone that much just because the company didn’t do as badly as expected, then you have a fundamental disconnect.  That disconnect is exacerbated if while slowing the failure of a company is done while paying stockholders higher dividends from increased revenue from monkeying with the books, then you have a recipe for total collapse.  CEOs should only get bonuses while their companies are in the black and improving that way.

Alternative energy sources.  Another biggie and this one has probably the thorniest public relations problem.  The first thing we need to do is start telling people the truth about bio fuels and energy expectations—but that ties into education, which also needs reparing.  No Child Left Behind must be scrapped.

Just a few things that occurred to me while I was sitting here this morning.  And why I am not enthused about Obama.  He may well be the one to handle these issues, but I’m not going to put money on him being able to.  If anything, he has my sympathy.  No, I’m much more concerned about the congressional elections.  That’s where the power of this country really is.

Anyway, I just wanted to share some of these thoughts.  Have a good day.

I was having lunch with Joe the Juggler at the City Diner earlier this week. He was showing me some papers he found in the wall of his house. The original owner in 1892 apparently was in the personal rubber products business.

Back then, this was a euphemism for (shocked whisper) a birth control device. The Comstock Act of 1873 made it illegal to send even information about birth control through the mail, much less the rubber products themselves. Several states had laws completely prohibiting such things, as well. So this gent sold coupon books to would-be salesmen, who sell individual coupons door to door along with an instruction manual.

The coupon was to be mailed with another fee to the manufacturer, to have a non-descript disk (I’m guessing) of rubber shipped direct to the home. Arguably, such a disk can be used to stop a drain, or something. Very scandalous. That’s why the instructions are delivered by hand. The total cost was about 2 days white collar wages for a single “rubber”. Quite a savings over retail.

Contraception information was decriminalized in the U.S. in 1936. Can we keep it that way? Heard of the “Global Gag Rule”?

So, on October 14, 2008, Christmas Carols assaulted us in the City Diner. Twice. On a 70 degree afternoon. Only 71 more shopping days till the virgin birth.

I love basic the concept of Lego. It’s a very clever set of blocks with which you can build almost anything. But going to a Lego store is also a peek into the kind of country America has become.  We are a country of warmongers.

I took each of these photos in the Lego Store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. For starters, I do want to recognize that Lego makes simple kits that you can use for building anything you want. For instance, here’s a basic starter pack that doesn’t include any guns:

If 280 pieces isn’t enough for you, you can graduate to this 700 piece set. Look at Dad, acting as though he is content building little houses. I know what Dad really wants. He wants his kids to get a little older so that they can build things with guns!

Here’s a hot rod car. But what’s a mere car to a kid?

We need to be inspired by people we see on TV. Hence, Spongebob Squarepants makes a joint appearance with Legos. Now . . . if we only had a gun . . .

A GUN!!! Are you crazy? Why would you need a gun? Because that’s what so many Lego kits include. Guns of all shapes and sizes! Notice the guard in the tower. He has his own Lego gun. I suppose he has it so that he can shoot that guy trying to make an escape. I wonder why they don’t show the mortal injuries that can be inflicted through the use of Lego guns?

It seemed like most of the Lego kits were created with a media celebrity or guns, or both. I’m not denying that there are some Lego sets with either of these, but you’ve seen most of them already, at the top of this post. I’m not really trying to blame the Lego Company. I assume that they’ve tried making peaceful kits without celebrities. I assume, also, that those kits just don’t sell very well. The rest of this post will show you that violence sells, even when that violence is sponsored by Lego.

If you travel to Mars to explore, make sure you bring a space ship with a LOT of GUNS. If you discover life on Mars, shoot it!

I guess I exaggerated when I wrote that most Lego sets have guns. (more…)

My interest in explanations was brought to a new higher intensified while I watched a movie. I must regress many more years to tell the entire story. Before I begin, though, I need to assure you that my story is absolutely true.

About 20 years ago, I awoke at about 3 a.m., and I saw the strangest thing. A small orb with a soft greenish glow hovered five feet over my bedroom floor, about an arm’s length out from the foot of the bed. The orb was about the size of a ping-pong ball. I walked toward the orb until my face was one foot from the orb. I tried to see if I could account for the glowing ball by checking for an external source of reflected light through the bedroom windows. I couldn’t find any such external light source, though. The orb itself was glowing and it was still in my bedroom. I considered touching the orb with my hand, but I didn’t. For a moment, I wondered whether it would try to communicate with me—a strange thought, given that I have never believed in disembodied sentience.

I noticed that the orb was slowly descending. It didn’t make any noise. After 30 seconds of descending, the orb reached the floor, then it took the shape of a sunny-side up egg as it melted into the bedroom floor. I went downstairs from my second floor bedroom to the first floor to see whether the orb was “melting” through the ceiling of that room, but I saw nothing. I went back upstairs and sat awake in bed for several minutes, wondering what it possibly could have been. I decided that I didn’t have a clue. Eventually, I went back to bed.

I sheepishly mentioned this weird and disorienting experience to a few close friends in the days after I saw it, always shaking my head with some embarrassment. It bothered me that the thing I witnessed appeared to be something “outside” of physics. I sometimes wondered whether I had been dreaming. I’m sure I hadn’t been dreaming, though (but too bad I didn’t write a note to myself that night “I saw a strange glowing orb tonight”). I don’t have any history of having any hallucinations or visions, nor any episode of vivid dreaming.

Fast forward about eleven years. About nine years ago, I happened to watch a PBS drama in which a female character was literally scared to death when a ball of light floated across the floor of her house—others in the drama referred to the phenomenon as “ball lightning.” After the show, I ran a Google search for “ball lightning,” and found dozens of sober-sounding testimonials. Large numbers of people have also seen things similar to the orb I saw (if you Google “ball lightning,” you’ll be amazed at the large number of reports). Then I found a Scientific American article describing “ball lightning. This column, which was titled something like “Ask the Expert” no longer appears to exist intact. I did copy down the expert’s answer, word for word, when I first read it. Here’s what that early version of the article said:

Ball lightning is a well-documented phenomenon in the sense that it has been seen and consistently described by people in all walks of life since the time of the ancient Greeks. There is no accepted theory for what causes it. It does not necessarily consist of plasma; for example, ball lightning could be the result of a chemiluminescent process. The literature abounds with speculations on the physics of the ball lightning . . .

Ball lightning is typically described as a luminous ball one to 25 centimeters in diameter having about the intensity of a 20-watt incandescent lamp; the phenomenon usually occurs after a lightning strike. It almost always moves, has a top speed of about three meters per second and floats about one meter above the ground. The motion can be counter to the prevailing breeze and can change direction erratically. Ball lightning may last up to 10 seconds, whereupon the ball extinguishes either noiselessly or with a bang. There have been many observations of ball lightning inside of houses and even in airplanes. There have also been a number of observations of ball lightning passing through closed glass windows, with no apparent damage to the glass.

[Again, the new version of the above article has been updated and elaborated].

Upon reading the above description by a scientistic expert, I experienced an intense feeling of relief. To me, this information served as an explanation with real consequences: I wasn’t dreaming. It wasn’t a spirit. Don’t touch glowing orbs! Science might figure this out someday . . .

[Wikipedia also offers an article about ball lighting. This will show my age: back when I saw the ball lightning, there was no World Wide Web; there was no Google ]

Here’s an experiment: I am betting that you, the reader, were also intrigued to learn about ball lightning and you also had a gut feeling that the phenomenon was at least somewhat “explained” by the above article I found at the Scientific American website. (more…)

From the first time I saw him perform I loved the deadpan comedy of Steven Wright. His view of life is coldly objective and sometimes skewed, but always funny. Here are a few of my favorite one-liners, some of which are relevant to the ongoing conversations here at DI.

Last night I played a blank tape at full blast. The mime next door went nuts.

If a person with multiple personalities threatens suicide, is that considered a hostage situation?

Just think how much deeper the ocean would be if sponges didn’t live there.

So, what’s the speed of dark?

How come abbreviated is such a long word?

I went for a walk last night and my kids asked me how long I’d be gone. I said, “The whole time.”

If you’re sending someone some Styrofoam, what do you pack it in?

Since light travels faster than sound, isn’t that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak?

If it’s zero degrees outside today and it’s supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be?

What would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way?

Why are there 5 syllables in the word “monosyllabic?”

Why do scientists call it research when looking for something new?

If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?

Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it.

If “con” is the opposite of “pro,” then what is the opposite of progress?

Should you trust a stockbroker who’s married to a travel agent?

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, “Where’s the self-help section?” She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

If all those psychics know the winning lottery numbers, why are they all still working?

War doesn’t determine who’s right, just who’s left.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

“Did you sleep well?” “No, I made a couple of mistakes.”

I was in the first submarine. Instead of a periscope, they had a kaleidoscope. “We’re surrounded.”

I went to a general store. They wouldn’t let me buy anything specifically.

I went to a restaurant that serves “breakfast at any time”. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

The other day, I was walking my dog around my building… on the ledge. Some people are afraid of heights. Not me, I’m afraid of widths.

I filled out an application that said, “In Case Of Emergency Notify”. I wrote “Doctor”… What’s my mother going to do?

Isn’t the best way to save face to keep the lower part shut?

Want more? Go here.

I’m currently reading Rob Walker’s 2008 book, Buying in: the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. I’m finding Walker’s chapter on “Hello Kitty” especially interesting in its own right and also because his description of the success of Hello Kitty has helped me to understand Sarah Palin.

Walker repeatedly points out that corporate logos are symbols and it is the consumers of modern corporate symbols (not those who create or promote those symbols) who imbue these symbols with meaning. Hello Kitty is an especially good example.

The Hello Kitty logo was created out of thin air in 1974 by the Japanese firm, Sanrio. Hello Kitty was not a character in a movie or story. When Hello Kitty was created, the symbol was “empty of specific meaning.” The Hello Kitty artwork was the work of an employee of Sanrio, Yuko Shimizu, who had been asked to design some logos to place on some small vinyl purses. Fast forward to the present. Hello Kitty can now be found on toys, clothes, computers, watches and lingerie. The symbol has had “astonishing success.” The Hello Kitty line has developed under licensing arrangements worth more than $1 billion a year in sales.

What is the secret of hello Kitty? According to Sanrio, “We work very hard to avoid things that would define the character.” The “mouthless cat” cannot be said to stand for any social or cultural idea, according to Walker. “Hello Kitty stands for nothing.” Yuko Shimizu indicates that she was simply trying to make an image that would appeal to little girls. A scholar named Brian McVeigh (quoted by Walker) indicates that Hello Kitty succeeds because the symbol has “projectability.”

Hello Kitty’s blank cryptic simplicity, he argues, is among her great strengths; standing for nothing, she is “waiting to be interpreted,” and this is precisely how an “ambiguous”– and let’s be frank: meaningless– symbol comes to stand for nostalgia to one person, fashion ability to another, camp to a third, vague subversiveness to a fourth.

“Without the mouth, it is easier for the person looking at Hello Kitty to project their feelings onto the character, explains a Sanrio spokesman quoted by McVeigh: “A person can be happy or sad together with Hello Kitty.” Hello Kitty, McVeigh argues, is a mirror that reflects whatever image, desire or fantasy in individual brings to it.

Belson and Bremner (also mentioned in Walker’s book) return to this theme repeatedly in their own book on Hello Kitty.

“What makes Kitty so intriguing is that she projects entirely different meanings depending on the consumer,” they write. The cat is “an icon that allows viewers to assign whatever meaning to her that they want.” . . . not only can Logos have meaning, and not only can that meeting be manufactured– it can be manufactured by consumers. Ultimately, a cultural symbol that catches on is almost never simply imposed, but rather is created and then tacitly agreed upon by those who choose to accept its meaning, wherever that meaning may have originated. That’s what Hello Kitty is: a cultural symbol. And a successful brand.

(Walker, pages 15 to 19). This idea of an empty and projectable logo also seems to describe Sarah Palin. Many conservatives loved Palin before they knew anything substantial about her. Granted, they knew Palin could read a teleprompter and rev up a crowd of conservatives, but what did they know about Palin’s character, her knowledge base and her ability to govern? They knew nothing about those critically important issues early on, but that didn’t stop them from making wild claims that Sarah Palin would make a great Vice-President. Now that freely available information shows that Palin is actually an ill-informed, spiteful, secretive woman deeply entrenched in cronyism, many conservatives love her all the more.

Those who, in the absence of substantiating evidence, believe that Sarah Palin has what it takes to be Vice-President are projecting. They are defining Palin rather than taking the time to learn who Palin really is.

Even though Sarah Palin actually has a mouth, her well-rehearsed beauty pageant smile, combined with the serious office she seeks, leaves us with a wide range of interpretations of who she is. Is she your girlfriend, your mother, a small town mayor, a Vice-President, an attack dog, a flirt, a hyper-moral woman, a neo-conservative, a maverick, a super-mom, a neglectful mother, a quick-study or someone who is proudly ignorant? Palin offers a lot of real estate to you as material for your personal projection as to who she is. And, vague as all of this is, this is as coherent as it gets–this is who she is, at least for those of us who are allergic to facts.

Hello Sarah.

Discussions in the comment sections of many posts on this site chaotically tend toward the strange attractor of one generally off-topic issue: Why does Creation/Evolution seem correct to you? It is usually a discussion between Creationists who believe that the scientific conclusions are based on faith, and Naturalists who believe that the Scientific Method is best tool ever invented to extract sense from chaos.

In the beginning, Natural Philosophers (now called Scientists) in the West all believed in the Bible. Bishop Ussher gave the final word on the age of the universe according to the Bible in the early 1600’s, and the Church had all the answers. But then the idea emerged that one can actually test Aristotelian conclusions (purely rational and based on “what everybody knows”) with observations. Copernicus demonstrated with careful observation and applied math around 1600 that only the moon itself orbited the Earth, and all the other planets circled the Sun. The church accepted this, as a philosophical observation, irrelevant to the place of Man in the Universe. Then Galileo made a gadfly of himself by publishing popular books mocking the Pope for publicly continuing in the preaching of Geocentrism when it was clear, with the aid of a telescope, that not only did the planets orbit the sun, but that some of those planets had moons of their own. Many moons, placed where Man couldn’t even see them without modern technology.

Well, it just snowballed from there. Newton, a devout Christian, developed math in the late 17th century that accurately modeled the behavior of pretty much everything that man could observe at the time (the Laws of Motion). And those models showed how things naturally happen, without need for divine intervention. Then  in the mid-19th century, J.C. Maxwell developed similar rules to explain electromagnetism (light, electricity, radio, etc). Discovery after discovery kept challenging the universally held beliefs in many areas. Gravity wasn’t related to nor caused by sin. Demons didn’t cause disease. The basic elements weren’t Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Air was a complex substance, but caloric and phlogiston weren’t. The planet and the universe steadily got wider and older and more complex as more and more evidence collected by true believers forced them to acknowledge that nature is as it is, and not how interpretations of the ancient texts described it.

(more…)

After a long hot summer on California’s Central Coast, when smoke filled the air and ashes fell from the sky, it rained last weekend. Time for UC Santa Cruz students to run naked through campus in the annual tradition of “First Rain”!

Caution: video contains very small naked people.

Richard Heinberg, a Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, knows that energy-from-oil is connected to everything else that we do.  That is why we are facing a monumental change in our economy within the next few years.   And we are not prepared in the least.

What can we expect?  Here’s Heinberg’s opinion, from an article he entitles “Dress Rehearsal”:

When the next supply crunch comes, we could well see prices of $200, $250, or $300. But again, the rise won’t be steady and unending; we will  again see a spike followed by a plunge—this time maybe back to $150.

Meanwhile, will oil at $100 be an occasion for sleepwalking or strategic regrouping? For policy makers, this is a time to think clearly about long-term measures to reduce demand pro-actively and support the development of renewable energy sources. For citizens, it is an opportunity to make the effort to change habits, buy a smaller car, and get involved in community Peak Oil prep work . . .

The world has had an unmistakable wake-up call from the global oil alarm clock; merely to press the snooze button would waste what may be our last opportunity to act before necessity makes us react in ways that are less than optimal.

Wick Allison was Editor in Chief of The National Review from 1990 through 1993.  Allison donated a lot of money to John McCain during the primaries, but he is now endorsing Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States:

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

Allison concludes his endorsement by commenting on what has happened to conservatism by using a quote of Eric Hoffer:  “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”