http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1EXKLVgEx0

I spotted this video on one of Eddie Roth’s posts at The Platform.

I’m not trying to pick on John Edwards. I think he’s a good and decent fellow. Nor am I trying to pick on Barack Obama. I haven’t disguised very well that I admire Obama and I have great hopes for him. My point is really about endorsements and politics in general. Why should anyone care that some prominent person stands up and announces that he or she prefers one of candidates over another? Are we that spineless or are we that empty headed that we wait to see what someone else does before we follow suit?  Or do human animals feel a deep need to run in herds, and that’s just the way it is?

So then it occurred to me that this entire political process is actually a rehash of high school. To be more specific, it’s a rehash of a student government election in high school. Many of you are probably familiar with this phenomenon. There is a lot of energy spent, a lot of people stroking each other and lots of talk about who is “supporting” who. There are numerous posters and speeches and jealousies. Sometimes it gets so wacky that it seems like Lord of the Flies. And this all goes on far too long until someone is chosen to be the “President” of the student body. At that point, the President and all the other elected officers strut about but proceed to do not much of anything important. I’m not denying that it seems very important to those student government officers, I’m sure. Back in high school, though, I wondered what the difference was between a school that had an elected student government and one that did not. I couldn’t think of any significant difference. Whether it has a student government has nothing to do with how good a school it is.

So here we are, in 2008, and it seems like high school every time I read the news. There’s s always another new story about somebody twisting someone else’s words unfairly, or somebody claiming that someone else does or doesn’t like them on the basis of something that has nothing to do with how to run the country. And then there’s that voice of Barack Obama trying to explain how he would address serious problems facing the country, yet getting drowned out by loud and tedious voices of ignorant and yackity competitor candidates, so-called news reporters and pundits. And occasionally we hear from people in the street who are almost proud that they know nothing about the country and nothing about the candidates. It’s all crazy, except that we now live in a country that really does face numerous dangerous challenges and we need somebody to focus on real solutions that will involve difficult choices.

We have such a strange way of selecting candidates! Imagine if we were trying to choose between two brands of laundry detergent. One way to make that choice would be to compare the properties of the two brands of soaps. One of them works better in hot water, while the other makes close smell cleaner (or something like that). Or maybe one of them costs a little more than the other. In a rational world we would soberly compare these differences and make our choice based on our needs.

Now imagine two soap companies competing against each other like our political candidates compete against each other. One of those soap companies would start insinuating that the other was a brand for appeasers, or gays, or that the president of the rival company has funny eyebrows or that the other brand of soap fails to display a little American flag on the front of the box. And then there would be an intense barrage of commercials, for months, having nothing to do with the actual properties of the soap, and people would get all caught up in whether it’s OK for one brand of soap not to have a little picture of an American flag on the front. And then one of the brands of soap would start giving publicity to famous people who would endorse buying brand X over brand Y. And then maybe brand Y would suggest that the company making brand X is less patriotic. Or something like that. And then some of us would run out and buy brand X because some famous person said that he would buy brand X.

Doesn’t it remind you of high school?

I most recently completed “A Briefer History of Time“. This survey of cosmology from the ancients through the latest theories of everything is easier to read and understand than the original. Even less math, better images, and more up-to-date science. It is briefer, yet covers more than the original.

I’d read “Molecules at an Exhibition” before that. It was weaker than Emsley’s previous book, but still a fun survey of everyday molecules that one doesn’t usually think about.

I finally read “The God Delusion” in one part of the house while reading “Two Complete Novels” by Douglas Adams in another. To my surprise, Dawkins cited one of these Adams novels in his book. They balanced each other: One never quite getting to a point, and the other never letting go of one. Both worth reading. But beware of mental whiplash if you too try to read ‘em in tandem.

My recent comfort books were an odd collection: Oath of Fealty and Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle, and/or Flynn, and The End of Eternity and The Gods Themselves by Asimov, and Heinlein’s 1948 “Space Cadet“, among others.

I also skimmed through my Doonesbury collections, reliving election commentary for Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Shrub, and all their opponents. I have the original college Doonesbury collection. Those strips are from before syndicate censors and wordsmiths denuded and dumbed it down for mainstream newspapers.

I also read some don’t-bothers, like Maher’s “New Rules” and Carlin’s “Napalm and Silly Putty”.

Why, you may well ask, do I mention it now? Well, that very show is finally being broadcast. The bit in which St. Louis Contradancers like myself will appear is just a couple of episodes away. It’s the CW’s iteration of “Farmer Wants a Wife” filmed just barely in the next county, near where the Missouri river joins the Mississippi. I say iteration because the show had already been a local reality show hit in 11 other countries before a U.S. company picked it up.

Now, I can’t say who was still standing in our episode. I don’t even remember. I don’t really care.

I am amused by the middle-of-nowhere pretension. Sure, it is in the flood plain, and out of sight of any big city. But it is also less than a half hour drive from major population and commercial support. The St. Charles airport that they flew into is about 15 minutes closer to the farm by bus than is Lambert International Airport. Lambert was the primary hub for TWA, before the industry crashed in 2001.

We were just there for a barn dance. It was fun. Cameras were everywhere, all the primaries wore wireless mikes, and camouflaged lighting kept things warm up in that depression era barn loft. Backstage has always had more appeal to me than the audience point of view.

But now I’m watching my first reality show. Sure, we record it and watch it when convenient. It is fun to see people on TV that we’ve met, in places where we’ve been. But now I have even more awareness of all the setup, production, and post production that goes in to making these 40 minute episodes.

It is obvious that Feith appeared on the The Daily Show in an attempt to try to:

A) salvage his own sordid reputation, and
B) convince the audience that the Bush Administration didn’t lead the charge to invade Iraq, drumming up false intelligence in the process.

Feith failed miserably on both accounts because Stewart refused to play the role of a nodding bobblehead. In fact, Stewart showed himself to be a better interviewer than most members of the mainstream news media. It was refreshing to see Stewart challenging Feith at every turn.

For an evidence-based version of how this country came to occupy Iraq, watch “Buying the War,” a Bill Moyers video, showing that the Bush Administration consciously and intentionally pulled all the necessary strings and the mainstream media marched in lockstep.

The United States didn’t end up in Iraq because of a series of accidents and mistakes, as Feith tries to argue. The Downing Street memo and Richard Clarke’s accounts, among much other evidence, shows that the Bush Administration planned to march into Baghdad regardless of the evidence. They got their way, and now they, including Feith, are acting like it’s not their fault. Now we’re seeing an extended media campaign of shameless revisionism.

1) He can’t use email while he’s President “for security reasons.”

2) He gave up golf after UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello was killed in Iraq.

I know that no one cares anymore. It wouldn’t do any good to impeach him because an equally prolific liar, Dick Cheney, would then officially take over. How many more days until the next President is sworn in?

More technology spells more helplessness when that technology fails. If only I had just suffered through the heat, and adjusted to it; if only I had elected to write a letter by candle light! Instead, I became attached to the convenience of modern goodies. But technology is not the first or only huge complicator in our lives. No, today I’d like to focus on stuff. Things, junk.

We all have too many pieces of stuff lying around our homes, all designed to make life easier. I often suspect these handy doohickeys waste more space and money than their limited “uses” justify. I’ll take some examples from my own apartment:

The banana hook, a simple fruit-bearing tool. Few kitchen objects have such absurd specialization as this, barring the grapefruit spoon. Not even a devout fruitarian could really rationalize the space devoted to dangling a single, specific food product. Imagine if we required a special hook for every kind of produce in the house- my small kitchen couldn’t bear it, and I wager few could. Fortunately, we don’t need hooks for all our fruits. We don’t even need them for bananas. Don’t believe the shrewd marketing- a humble bowl will do. But at least I didn’t invest in the even more absurd banana hammock, right?

Sometimes, even our stuff has its own stuff. I’ll turn again to my kitchen for an example:

The mug tree holds my ceramic cups for me, even though I have a fully functional cabinet that could do the same thing. What aspect of life does this silly object simplify? It saves me from opening a cabinet door once in a while, I guess. In return for its valiant service, the mug tree only asks that I let it suck up more precious counter space, and allow it to occasionally tip over, chipping the very cups it presumes to protect.

But my mugs have even more “stuff” of their own:

Ah, the coaster. Generations of children have faced continual nagging, parents and grandparents reminding them to use this wonderful table-saver. What a sham! Not only must we have mugs (to drink our hot beverages) propped atop mug trees (to hold our mugs), we also need a table atop which to set the mugs. But wait! You must set the mug on a coaster on the table. This attains the perfect balance of having something, having somewhere to set it, and ensuring that the whole process causes no damage to your “stuff”. All this stuff, just to take a drink. Perhaps someday the coasters will have coasters (after all, saucers have doilies).

I’ll take this opportunity to disown the above household items; they belong to my roommate. Nonetheless, I have plenty of junk I ought to evaluate and remove. I invite everyone else to take a similar tour of the home, scouring the surroundings for useless garbage. More importantly, try to make sure these little helpers don’t end up on your list of future purchases. Don’t worry, I’m not a radical anticonsumerist- I don’t really advocate a world without air conditioning or computers. But I think I could live with a world free of mug trees, hard-boiled-egg-slicers, toothbrush holders and other useless trinkets.

So, are we as a nation doomed to become more and more ill-informed? Is our standing in the world only going to get worse while the populace is lulled into distraction by the TV screen? Is there no reason for hope?

Well, actually, there is. But it’s not the media is improving. Rather, it’s that Americans are increasingly recognizing its failings and abandoning it in huge numbers (HT, as always, to Glenn Greenwald).

Those trend lines tell an alarming story. The combined average audience for the big-three evening newscasts in 1980 was about 53 million viewers. By the fall of 2006, when Couric was getting ready to make the jump from NBC’s “Today” show, the three national evening newscasts had a combined audience of about 27 million viewers.

How’s that for a trend line? The evening newscasts lost about half of their audience over 26 years. They lost viewers at a rate of 1 million a year, and they’re still losing them. Last week, according to numbers Nielsen released Tuesday, the combined audience was 21.5 million.

The rise of blogs and the Internet has undoubtedly accelerated the decline, but it is not the sole cause. As the article says, this downturn began as long ago as the 1980s. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, people’s declining opinions of the news industry are partly the cause:

As we have noted in other reports,since the early 1980s, the public has come to view the news media as less professional, less accurate, less caring, less moral and more inclined to cover up rather than correct mistakes.

…The number of Americans with a favorable view of the press, for instance, dropped markedly in 2006, from 59% in February, to 48% in July. The metric can be volatile, but that was still one of the lower marks over the course of a decade.

And in one of the most basic yardsticks of public attitudes, the number of Americans who believe most or all of what news organizations tell them, there were continued declines. Virtually every news outlet saw its number fall in 2006.

With continuing stories like the revelation that the news channels hired bought-and-paid for Pentagon agents to spread favorable propaganda about the Iraq war in the guise of an “independent voice” - and those same channels’ ongoing and shocking blackout of this story - it’s not hard to understand why the American public is increasingly abandoning them and turning to other sources, such as the Internet, for news. And the sooner the better, I say.

Granted, on the Internet, it’s easy to find sources of information that are more fiercely partisan and agenda-driven than even Fox News, and whose disinterest in the facts is even worse than the traditional media’s. But the great virtue of the Internet, as former Vice President Al Gore said in The Assault on Reason, is that it’s a medium where the barriers to entry are low. Anyone can participate, and this makes it very easy to find a broad spectrum of differing views. Thus, in a key sense, the news from the Internet is balanced in a way that news from traditional sources can never be. (Of course, I’m preaching to the choir here, aren’t I?)

This productive cacophony of views is a far better analogue to the marketplace of ideas than the traditional media, where a few unaccountable individuals have enormous power to shape the focus, tone and direction of coverage that informs (or fails to inform) millions of people. In the increasingly diverse media landscape of the future, it will be far more difficult for meddling politicians and wealthy corporations to manipulate public opinion to their advantage.

A new poll (charts, pdf, 3.1mb) shows that 85% of U.S. adults agree that the presidential candidates should participate in a debate on how science can be used to tackle America’s major challenges. The poll found no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this question. A majority (84%) also agree that scientific innovations are improving our standard of living.

The poll, commissioned by Research!America and ScienceDebate2008.com and conducted by Harris Interactive®, shows that 56% strongly agree and 29% somewhat agree that the presidential candidates should participate in a debate to discuss key problems facing the United States, such as health care, climate change and energy, and how science can help tackle them.

So here’s my initial thought: How can 15% of Americans oppose any debate by the presidential candidates on the relevance of science to solving key issues such as health care, climate change and energy? Who are these incredibly ignorant people? Americans have been shown to be incredibly ignorant. Maybe the 15% don’t know enough to know that they are ignorant? Don’t they realize that science has much to offer to analyzing these issues and potentially solving some of these problems? How can anyone be against having an open discussion on these issues?

I must admit, however, that in light of the bizarre questions forced on candidates during many previous “debates,” I am reluctant to watch any further “debates” on any topic. I wonder, then, whether the 15% are mainly anti-science or whether they are anti-debate . . .