Stupid Is as Stupid Does

Nobody ever reads this blog, but if someone does trip across it I hope they appreciate what it is they found. After all, you can only get so stupid before you can’t reasonably be expected to write anything, therefore, there’s a certain threshold of stupidity where you’ll be lucky to find anything written by anyone that stupid.

I’m beneath that threshold. Well beneath it.

I know this is the case, because I’m told so, often, by the anti-war crowd. Furthermore, I know it to be true, because I know most stupid people at least understand why they are stupid, whereas I’m still trying to figure out the defining characteristics of my own stupidity. I am FAR beneath stupid. If I stand on my tippy toes and reach way up, I can almost touch the toenails of other stupid people on the Stupid Chart.

For example, there is Ann Coulter. In response to her barbed comment, “I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am,” CNN has decided to conduct a QuickVote poll. Why is it that the University of Connecticut students are thought, by Coulter, to be stupider than she is? Well, to my stupid mind, it might very well have something to do with the fact that they booed her speech, heckling her to the point that she had to cancel and hold a question-and-answer session instead. You know, maybe this is the evidence for which I’m looking that supports my own stupidity — because I’m ready to sign on to what Coulter said. There is a quote attributed to Napoleon that address this situation, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”; to me, that just makes good sense. It seems stupid to do this interrupting, which is exactly what the students did. Maybe Napoleon was stupid too.

Well, in CNN-World, we know this must be true, because — why else? — the poll says so. The poll! As of this writing, 63% of respondents say Coulter is stupider, compared with 37% saying the students are stupid. My stupid mind is a little confused as to what to make of this situation, where stupid people are confident enough to let the other side speak and actually respond to what they have to say, whereas intellectual giants apparently have to boo and hiss to make sure their antagonists are never allowed to get a word in edgewise. For anyone who still requires more evidence of how stupid I am, I freely confess that the soapbox-hogging never looked that brilliant or clever to me. Oh, maybe I should go to the Land of Oz and get a brain, so I can start to untangle this.

I do have something in my collection of stupid books, that I have stupidly been accumulating. It took my stupid brain only a few minutes to remember where I’d seen it, and after my stupid fingers flipped through the pages a few minutes more I managed to find it on page 121:

If liberals were prevented from ever calling Republicans dumb, they would be robbed of half their arguments…the loss of “dumb” would nearly cripple them. Like clockwork, every consequential Republican to come down the pike is instantly, invariably, always, without exception called “dumb.” This is how six-year-olds argue: They call everything “stupid.” The left’s primary argument is the angry reaction of a helpless child deprived of the ability to mount logical counterarguments…the “you’re stupid” riposte is part of the larger liberal tactic of refusing to engage ideas. Sometimes they evaporate in the middle of an argument and you’re left standing alone, arguing with yourself. More often, liberals withdraw figuratively by responding with ludicrous and irrelevant personal attacks.

Now, I’d love to proclaim that I’m “learning” something and getting “smarter” by insisting that the above doesn’t make any sense to me. But I’d be lying. It matches my personal experience like a hand fitting into a glove. But I read it in a book, something stupid people aren’t supposed to be able to do, so how can this be? Oh, I get it, my stupid eyes neglected to take note of the cover, which I notice is titled “Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right, by Ann Coulter.” Noted, documented stupid person, voted that way by two-thirds of respondents to CNN’s poll (no dummies there!).

Joining Napoleon, Annie and me at the Stupid Table, I guess, is Larry Elder who began a correspondence with his intellectual superior. It took Elder just two written exchanges before he earned the following retort:

At first, I really thought I was dealing with an intellectual equal when our chats began. You have disappointed me.

And here is the most thundering, incandescent proclamation of my stupidity to date: I have scanned the passages of what Elder wrote to provoke such a reaction, scanned again, and scanned yet again. Suffice it to say Larry Elder is still fooling me, because I lack the mental acumen to get past the illusion and comprehend the full magnitude of his stupidity. In fact, I read the entire exchange, and I can’t even find any evidence of anything stupid. It appears, to my stupid mind, to be a textbook case of being given a “factoid,” and properly questioning the source from whence it came.

Dear Mr. Elder: … How you can support an illegal war waged specifically to line the pockets of rich American Republicans, a war that has killed at least a half a million innocent Iraqis and now well over 2,000 volunteer soldiers, and has made us the most hated people in the world, is beyond my comprehension. I travel the world extensively, and let me tell you that the U.S.A. is completely out of step with the rest of the planet Earth. …

Sincerely,

‘Sarah,’ retired public school administrator and university professor

Dear Sarah,

Please tell me, do you have a source for your statement about the death of ‘at least a half a million innocent Iraqis’? …

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Larry

My stupid mind is currently working on a theory. Since I’m such a raging idiot, it’s unlikely that there is anything to the theory, but hey even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so I figure it’s worth pondering. I think this threshold of stupidity is moving. After all, like I said, it is a good distance over my head, being so well established as it is, that I’m so incredibly stupid and everything. But with the passage of time, I notice this development where if you simply question the “facts” you are given, you are now stupid.

Conversely, you can base opinions on facts, and then when you are questioned about the source of those facts you simply base them on other opinions — this somehow makes you an intellectual superior.

Well. Maybe if my fat stupid head is patient enough, someone will come along and explain it so my stupid brain can comprehend it.

Update: Just for kicks, I linked to this post on FARK. If you have a TOTALFARK membership, you can view the ensuing thread Here. If you don’t, but would like a summary, I’ll just say most of the participants agreed that what I had to say, was, well…stupid.

10 Neediness, 86 Self-Confidence

I don’t think I understand this test. Seems to be on some kind of single’s web site. According to the bar charts, I’m spectacularly self-confident. Maybe they’re confusing self-confidence with apathy about other people.

You scored 10 neediness and 86 self confidence!

We’ve all had our attention whoring moments, but lets face it, some people have made a completely lifestyle out of it. My advice. Either, don’t breed, or at least bleach the gene pool before you do.

I shouldn’t breed? Too late, guys. Sorry about that.

About the time I stopped dating liberal women for good, some decade or so ago, I began to become aware of a phenomenon in which said liberal women tried to manufacture more liberal men. They did this then, and continue to do it today, with their verginers. I’m about to describe, pretty much, exactly what you think I’m going to. I saw they would put out subtle clues that, as they made the God-only-knows-how-complicated decision about whether the rooster would be allowed into the henhouse that night, said rooster’s political opinions were definitely part of the equation. How flattering it was for knight to know that his princess’ special evening with him, was just a tiny figment within a grand master plan to change the political direction of the country!

Perhaps in another time, history would have gone different for me. But Clinton was finishing his second year in office, and my mouth, which couldn’t be silenced, cost me a handful of carnal opportunities. I’m grateful for this. There are men who are much more seasoned than I am and much more intelligent than I am, who to this day don’t understand how empowering it is to tell a woman the following, and mean it: You are right, we’ll both be happier with other people, best luck to you and don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass.

It is seldom done. Men aren’t wired for it. We’re the keymasters, they’re the gatekeepers.

And perhaps that is why there seem to be so many men, who appear to be relatively adventurous, sexually, who are well on their way to old age without having learned this: Women, by and large, don’t crave yes-men. Smart women, stupid women, blondes, brunettes, redheads — when they pick up the essence of a strong, decisive man, it’s like the most powerful pheromone. Men who are decisive about important stuff, “We aren’t buying aluminum siding from that asshole,” or silly stuff — “I like beer, I like hotwings.” I’m not talking about being a raging dickhole just for its own sake.

I’m talking about treating the lady with respect by saving her some freakin’ energy. Making a decision without checking with her, once in awhile. Women crave this, especially the ones that frequently demand the opposite. I’ve written about this before.

But once a man starts down the slope of “Pillsbury Doughboy,” molding and shaping himself into what a woman says she wants, it becomes egomaniacally important to deny what I have written above. So the men become liberals.

It must be an awful existence, because I notice liberal men seem to have dry spells now and then, just like conservative men. How else do you explain these “mating calls” wherein they are forced to advertise their pliable philosophies, in their role as slaves in search of a mistress. And what is up with THAT? Shouldn’t indentured servitude, and unemployment, be mutually-exclusive albatrosses? How badly do you have to screw up to end up wearing both of them on your neck at the same time?

One of these liberal mating-call advertisements has something to do with “appreciating a woman with spunk.”

What I find a little bit silly about this whole thing is, when “a woman with spunk” has our own values, we all appreciate that; and when she doesn’t, who the hell does this guy think he’s kidding? Locked into the timeless “when are you going to stand up to your mother” argument that has resurfaced periodically since Shakesperean times, and before, every man is going to find a spunky woman a raging pain in the ass. When a man advertises that he likes a spunky woman without reservation, what he is advertising is that he never, or seldom, has been in a position where he disagrees with his woman.

And when women have been around long enough to figure out what they like in men, and what they don’t, this doesn’t intrigue them. Not in the slightest.

But we’re all entitled to our personal tastes, so if these guys are out there in an endless search for a “Mommy” figure to tell them what to do and what to think, more power to’em. Here at this blog, however, we have a “You Go First” rule about such things. You crusade for a law against being able to watch TV from the dining room table, you should be among the first to position your dining room table so you can’t see the TV. You think more people should be driving hybrid cars, you should be among the first to buy one.

And if you think there should be more spunky, assertive women flooding our streets, lying in wait to pounce on the rest of us whether we ask for it or not, you should be married to a woman like Barbara Streisand for six months or so.

I don’t mean to complain, here, about women who are opinionated. Good heavens, no. If it were so impossible to be around opinionated people, a lot of us who are not alone, would have to be — and certainly I would be among them. But it’s a cinch that if Babs doesn’t think the Los Angeles Times should be allowed to go about its day, free to think about other things besides the recent sacking of Robert Scheer, her stud James Brolin probably isn’t free to think about too much else either.

And is he free to disagree, perhaps to think something like, for example, it’s about goddamned time the Los Angeles Times got rid of that s.o.b.? That is a private matter for the Streisand/Brolin household to hash out, of course.

But for chrissakes, don’t make me laugh.

LOS ANGELES – Barbra Streisand has canceled her subscription to the Los Angeles Times over the firing of the paper’s liberal columnist.

The newspaper dropped Robert Scheer and several other columnists last month; Scheer speculated he was let go because the Times had tired of his politics.

Perhaps the most liberal voice on the paper’s opinion pages, Scheer had been a Times columnist for 12 years. He was a reporter for the newspaper for 17 years before that.

“Robert Scheer’s column, with its often singular voice of dissent and groundbreaking expositional content, has been among the most notable features that have sustained my interest in subscribing to the LA Times for many years now,” Streisand wrote in a letter she sent to the newspaper and posted on her Web site.

Streisand, a well-known supporter of Democratic candidates and liberal causes, wrote that by firing Scheer the Times had reduced the diversity of voices on its opinion pages. A shortened version of her letter was printed in the Times Nov. 23. The full letter is posted on her Web site.

You know, it really isn’t that hard to figure Barbra Streisand out, and there are millions and millions of people who suffer from her illness, not all of them women. It’s very simple. Barbra cannot state a compelling case as to why you should think a certain thing, because she’s formed an unattractive and unproductive habit of skipping to that last part and simply telling people what to think. That’s where she was years and years ago. Her disease has metastasized, now, to the point where she can’t do anything without telling lesser people what they’re supposed to be thinking. She makes a movie, she must tell lesser people what to think. She runs a website, she must tell lesser people what to think. She writes a letter to the newspaper, she must tell lesser people what to think. She takes a shower, brushes her teeth, washes her naughty bits, takes a crap, she must tell lesser people what to think.

Not this is what I noticed and this is why I think it’s important and this is what it must mean and why…but, simply, this is what you should think. Passing out opinions like hard-candy, as opposed to the well-stated, logically-established arguments upon which those opinions rest. It is a subtle, but meaningful, difference. Barbra, and people like her, wouldn’t understand it. I pity her for that, but I pity her more, for this apparent inability to do even the most trivial things in life, without telling people what they’re supposed to be thinking.

It appears to have become something like a bad case of gas.

I have a short list of final chapters to my existence within this mortal coil, which I absolutely dread. One is burning to death in a car, from which I’m unable to extract myself. The rest of them have to do with being alienated from my own thinking apparatus: a brain tumor, like the one I watched slowly kill my mother; strokes; dementia; schizophrenia; and…

…living with some bitter old cow who wants to dictate to me what my opinions should be.

I’m probably “doomed” to never experience the last of those. For that, President Clinton has my undying gratitude.

A Little Exercise

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, appearing before a judge following his indictment on an itty-bitty charge and a great-big ass-pounding charge, got mixed results on his defense’s motion to have the case thrown out, which is worse than his supporters had hoped. The itty-bitty charge of Conspiracy was thrown out, and the pound-me-in-the-ass charge of Money Laundering was upheld, which means of course that Mr. DeLay will be required to appear at trial. The upholding of the ass-pounding charge is much more important than the dismissal of the itty-bitty charge, because any hopes he had of resuming his House leadership position as Majority Leader, are DOA.

Texas Judge Pat Priest, who is presiding over the case against the Republican, issued the ruling after a hearing late last month in which DeLay’s attorney argued that the indictment was fatally flawed.

When he was indicted in September, DeLay was required under House rules to relinquish the leadership post he had held since 2003. While Monday’s ruling was a partial victory for DeLay, he cannot reclaim his post because he remains under indictment.

The ruling means the case will move toward a trial next year, though other defense objections to the indictments remain to be heard by the judge.
:
DeLay, 58, and two GOP fundraisers, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, are accused of illegally funneling $190,000 in corporate donations to 2002 Republican candidates for the Texas Legislature. Under Texas law, corporate money cannot be directly used for political campaigns, but it can be used for administrative purposes.
:
The alleged campaign-finance scheme had far-reaching political effects: With DeLay’s fundraising muscle, the GOP took control of the Texas House for the first time in 130 years, then pushed through a congressional redistricting plan engineered by DeLay that resulted in more Texas Republicans going to Congress.

This means, without doubt, that tomorrow we should expect to be somewhat inundated with snippets about the “Republican Culture of Corruption.” After all, it was just a little over a month ago that Mister Democrat himself, Howard Screamin’ Dean, warmed us up for the Halloween season by yelling “YEEEEEAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!” No, I made that last part up. He warmed us up for the Halloween season by waxing poetic about the Republican Culture of Corruption:

The Bush White House is the most corrupt administration in U.S. history since President Warren G. Harding’s, said Howard Dean during his first visit to Maine as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Dean’s comments Saturday came as top White House advisers are being investigated for their roles in the outing of a CIA operative and Tom DeLay, the former second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, faces conspiracy and money-laundering charges.

“The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to have ethics come back to Washington again,” said Dean, the keynote speaker at Saturday night’s annual fundraising dinner for the Maine Democratic Party at the Lewiston Armory.
:
More than 400 party loyalists listened as Dean described Democrats as a party of moral values, while criticizing Republicans as trying to divide Americans over race, sexual orientation and country of origin.

Dean said Republicans should not have interfered in the Terri Schiavo right-to-life case.

“I’m tired of the ayatollahs of the right wing,” Dean said. “We’re fighting for freedom in Iraq. We’re going to fight for freedom in America.”

Dean urged Maine Democrats to run for state office in 2006, and to maintain Democratic control of the State House that Gov. John Baldacci needs to push through his initiatives.
:
The purpose of the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner was to raise money and rally the party faithful, and the event often took a light-hearted tone. Allen made one of several DeLay jokes of the night when he said he heard there was a new television show called “Desperate House Leaders.”

Okay, now fast forward to this last Friday. Ken Rudin, writing for NPR, picked up Screamin’ Dean’s line and started waxing poetic on what has come to be an undeniable trend, wherein the most powerful Republicans face indictment, come under indictment, are sentenced, have to resign their offices, or just generally have a whole lot of legal whispering about their names around the beltway. Being well aware that a big chunk of his column “looks like it was written by the Democratic National Committee, and knowing some of my regular correspondents, I will be accused of parroting the DNC line,” Rudin nevertheless blossoms forward with the stuff that was apparently written by the Democratic National Committee, and proceeds to parrot the DNC line.

So now it’s Duke Cunningham.

When Lewis Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff, is under indictment; when the most powerful member of the House, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), is forced to resign his leadership post following an indictment; when his former spokesman, Michael Scanlon, pleads guilty to bribery charges and agrees to cooperate in the investigation of an associate, top Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff (and one which could also bring down Rep. Robert Ney (R-OH), chairman of the House Administration Committee); when Bill Frist (R-TN), the Senate majority leader, is under scrutiny by the Security and Exchange Commission; and when Karl Rove, the president’s top political aide, is still under investigation by a special prosecutor, the guilty plea and subsequent resignation of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) on bribery charges just adds to the party’s misery.

Let’s do a little mental exercise, shall we.

Since the facts that Rudin recites are undeniable — in fact, now, more damning than they were 72 hours ago — and since, boy-oh-boy, they sure look indicative of Mister “YEEEEEAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!”‘s Culture of Corruption: Let us just give him this. Let us all agree there is a Culture of Corruption in the Republican party. Being a Republican is being corrupt, and being corrupt is being Republican. Let’s just go with that for sake of argument.

Let us further suppose that I’m going to run for Congress. Yes, me. The guy who writes a blog nobody reads. I haven’t led a personal life that would withstand the anal/rectal exam through which one must go when one runs for office — don’t look so relieved — but let’s just say I go ahead and do this. And what the hell, why not run as a Republican? Republicans are filthy, after all, it’s the Culture of Corruption. I’d fit right in!

So Corrupt Mister Freeberg runs for office as Republican Congressman Freeberg. And of course I win; after all, I’m corrupt! Remember? So here comes Corrupt, Republican, Freshman Congressman Freeberg in his brand new limousine with his brand new parking spot and his brand new…aw, I haven’t the slightest clue what those guys have. I’ll bet it’s pretty sweet. My own real live starship? Whatever.

So Morgan Freeberg goes to Congress and starts being a corrupt Republican. La dee dah…boy it sure is fun, being corrupt.

And, since I’m a freshman, I don’t really know the ins and outs of things. I start trusting people I shouldn’t be trusting, because, after all, I’m a freshman. I bribe people who don’t take bribes. I talk at the wrong meetings. I threaten the wrong people. I’m sloppy.

Of course I get nailed! Stupid green little freshman Congressman Freeberg!

And there are over 220 corrupt Republican congressmen just like me, maybe over half of them fresh and stupid. Plus 55 corrupt Republican senators, let’s say, between 15 and 20 of them fresh and stupid. We all get nailed because with our inexperience, we don’t know how to avoid it. Oh, we’re seasoned at being corrupt of course — we just don’t know how to do it in Washington! We just got here!

But the law won’t give us a break. So down the river we go. All hundred and fifty or so of us stupid, inexperienced, fresh, green, gullible corrupt Republicans. We wear pinstripes, while our wiser, seasoned, more experienced corrupt mentors look upon us with a mixture of disappointment, embarrassment, disgust, and maybe some empathy for the ass-poundings the freshman class is about to get. Bye, freshmen!

Okay, let’s step back in reality now. Take a look around. This is not what has been happening.

The Vice-President’s Chief of Staff.

The House Majority Leader’s former spokesman.

The House Majority Leader himself.

A top Republican lobbyist; not one of those fly-by-night dime-a-dozen lobbyists.

The Chairman of the House Administration Committee.

The Senate Majority Leader.

The President’s top political aid.

An eight-term congressman from San Diego and Chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee.

Where are all the know-nothing freshmen in this Culture of Corruption? Are we being asked to believe this is a thing where the senior slimeballs keep hanging themselves out to dry, while the newcomer slimeballs who haven’t even had a chance to become dried and crusty, wisely avoid the pitfalls? What is this — you learn the ropes on your first day, and then as you get older you forget them?

Or is this a poorly-organized Culture of Corruption that continues to send its grand-high-poobahs to do the dirty work, and thus risk getting nailed? While the freshmen just sit around? Perhaps being lazy corrupt people?

Kind of like Captain Kirk beaming down to the planet to fight the lasagna-monsters, while the strong-back weak-minds stay up topside, safely scrubbing the Enterprise’s 23rd-century latrines?

Or is it just an odd coincidence that the senior figures who pose the biggest threat to the opposing party, are the ones that hafta-go-down? And someone, somewhere, is making these decisions, without accountability, exposure, or even scrutiny?

Anybody who stumbles across this blog and reads this post, can make up their own mind. I’ve made up mine.

The Torture Debate

For the nobodies who never read this blog, it may be an item of marginal interest that there is a specific reason why this blog is called “House of Eratosthenes.” It has to do with rules about how to think. Now, over the last year this blog has published a lot of posts that adhere to these rules, without a single mention about the rules; I’m not big on rules, especially rules about how to think. I think these are things we form for our own use and there’s very little value to communicating them to others — even in a blog nobody reads. But by popular demand, from the people who never read this blog, maybe I’ll describe it. Sometime.

Meanwhile, for those who really want to know, my suggestion is to load the name into Google and check out the dude who had the name. The library administrator. It has to do with finding out big things by applying critical thinking, when at first blush it might appear you lack the tools needed to find anything out. That’s all I’ll say now.

Suffice it to say the rules I have in mind about thinking, are being not only violated, and torn asunder, but shredded into fine mulch within our current Torture Debate. For one thing, we have allowed our media to define the credibility of each proposed cognition, against how much said cognition helps or hurts our current President. That’s bass-ackward; obviously, how friendly a proposed finding-of-fact is to the current administration, is completely unrelated to whether it has truthful or logical merit or not. Another problem is that the word “torture” is being used at all. The T-word has no bearing at all on what is being debated, and on this, both sides — provided they are informed and sincere — emphatically agree.

In this broadcast from NPR Talk of the Nation, November 28, the producers have done a great job of presenting both sides of the argument and just generally cutting through the bullshit. However, it concerns me mightily that some things were outside the realm of dispute four years ago, and sometime recently have been moved, for political purposes, back into that realm. This violates another one of the above-mentioned rules about critical thinking. I refer, here, to the proposition that “torture” or whatever you want to call it, actually works.

To demonstrate that, I quote from the write-up of the compassionate, progressive mindset that appeared in October of 2001 in Slate, not exactly an online mecca of neocon dittoheads:

There’s no doubt that torturing terrorists and their associates for information works. In 1995, Philippine intelligence agents tortured Abdul Hakim Murad, whom they arrested after he blew up his apartment making bombs. The agents threw a chair at Murad’s head, broke his ribs, forced water into his mouth, and put cigarettes out on his genitals, but Murad didn’t talk until agents masquerading as the Mossad threatened to take him back to Israel for some real questioning. Murad named names. His confession included details of a plot to kill Pope John Paul II, as well as plots to crash 11 U.S. airliners into the ocean and to fly an airplane into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. His co-conspirator Ramzi Yousef was later convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Similarly unappealing methods helped the CIA uncover the millennium bomb plot of 1999, after al-Qaida terrorists were questioned in Egypt and Jordan.

[Update Oct. 23, 2001: In stating that the millennium bomb plotters were tortured prior to divulging the plot, I am guilty of over-reading an Oct. 15 article by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post. Pincus writes, “The CIA worked with Jordanian, Egyptian, Canadian and Pakistani services, picking up terrorists, some associated with al Qaeda, and moving them to either Jordan or Egypt” and that information from those sources disrupted the bombings. While Pincus did not report, and we cannot know, whether those terrorists were tortured in Egypt and Jordan, he states two paragraphs down that many foreign countries use torture and threats to family members in interrogations. Egypt and Jordan are two of the best-known users of torture in interrogations. Nevertheless, the millennium terrorists questioned there in 1999 may well have been interrogated with full regard for their personal and constitutional rights.]

The CIA has always known that torture works. According to declassified CIA interrogation manuals, the CIA has taught others how it’s done, in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries. The manuals refer to using “deprivation of sensory stimuli,” “threats and fear,” “food and sleep deprivation,” and pain to extract information. The most famous case of CIA use of domestic torture was that of Yuri Nosenko, a former KGB agent who defected to the United States in 1964. Believing he was a Soviet spy, the CIA kept Nosenko in solitary confinement for more than three years in a 10-foot-square concrete cell. He was, for long periods of time, denied food, sunlight, reading materials, and human contact. He claims to have been given LSD. When he attempted to build toys out of lint, they were confiscated. The CIA freed Nosenko in 1967, finally concluding he was a bona fide defector after all. This episode and government inquiries into similar situations prompted the dismissal of many executives of the counterintelligence department in the 1970s.

A more recent case of CIA-sanctioned torture involved Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Guatemalan revolutionary. His widow, Jennifer Harbury, alleges in a lawsuit that the agency financed and indirectly participated in efforts to torture information out of him, leading ultimately to his death in the early 1990s. She also alleges that the Guatemalans who tortured her husband were paid by the CIA and that two had been trained in torture and interrogation techniques at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Last January, in Harbury v. Deutch , the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the torture had not violated Bamaca’s Fifth Amendment due process rights. Prior case law holds that noncitizens’ rights are violated only in cases of: 1) physical presence in the United States at the time; 2) their mistreatment in a country where the United States exercises de facto political control; or 3) abuse in the course of abduction for trial in an American court. The D.C. Circuit relied heavily on a Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990), holding that evidence found during an illegal Fourth Amendment search of a nonresident alien’s property in a foreign country was admissible at trial in the United States.

Folks, we’re being snowed big-time. You can’t write an article in December of 2005, for any magazine, periodical or website, outside of perhaps the most courageous, right-wing, or just plain deliberately offsensive, that blossoms forward with a mini-thesis demonstrating “There’s no doubt that torturing for information works.” You just can’t do it. And yet between October 2001, and now, there has been no mega-scandal involving torture that demonstrably failed to work. We have had a scandal involving torture that offended people — and that’s it. Nothing to demonstrate, or even to imply, that the practice is ineffective.

So flailing around for reasons, between 2001 and now, to believe that “torture never works” or “torture very often doesn’t work,” we’re left concluding the grasping exercise empty-handed. Yet we have some media shills dictating to us that this is the opinion we are supposed to have. We don’t have access to the classified information that would demonstrate this; in most cases, neither do the shills; and applying our best, critical forensic thinking to the information we can get, the most reasoned inference we can form, is that torture works just fine and dandy.

Especially when you compare it to the alternative. Which is to just sit on your ass, make sure the prayer rugs are clean, double-check to make sure the good cream cheese is getting spread on the bagels you’re serving, and pray to whomever you want that the terrorists you’re watching didn’t somehow get ahold of anything sharp when you weren’t looking.

Something To Chew On

The time has come to have a rational debate about if, when and how the United States should pull out of Iraq. I’m happy to see our national ability to have reasoned debates — such as it is — applied for this purpose. I’m pessimistic about seeing that reasoned debate. There is very little surviving in said “national ability.” If it is a V-8 engine, it has thrown a rod or two, is mixing the oil with the coolant, and is badly in need of a new fuel pump, water pump and plugs — it just won’t go. If it is a copier machine, it reeks of burning toner and scalded mouse flesh, it shakes when it runs and makes an excruciating grinding noise, has smoke coming out of it, and the glass thing on top has been shattered by someone’s ass.

You get the point. We can’t think anymore. We may choose to as individuals, but that doesn’t help you when you try to discuss something with someone else.

What does it take to fix this national ability to think things out? Step One, as far as I’m concerned, is to do something about the dreadful bias — something that can’t be done, until you acknowledge it’s there. Here’s my proof:

Many among those who insist the Iraq invasion was a mistake, are going to further insist that they and their representatives are in favor of the War on Terror, but are simply taking the position that Iraq is a bad target. Therefore, the point of real dispute is a military action that was started in March of 2003.

Now, if and when the War on Terror is yanked off the front pages, however this may be done, we’re all set to resume our arguing about domestic issues. In this country, “domestic issues” refers to two things. 1) Old people, many of whom are not only financially solvent, but enjoy summer homes and Winnebagos, renewing their lease upon an ever-expanding assortment of free drugs and medical care, at the expense of thirty-something apartment rats who are barely making ends meet; and 2) Advoacy groups who represent “minority” classes defined by racial, gender, gender-preference, union-membership and language considerations, coming up with lower and lower thresholds of pain and grievance so they can picket, decry, libel and sue.

There are other things we think of as “domestic issues,” but most of them fall into one of those two categories.

And those two categories have a unified-common-ancestor in the New Deal.

The New Deal started in March of 1933. Exactly seven decades before the Invasion of Iraq.

So the Bush administration has been trying to bring democracy to Iraq, exactly seventy years, to the month, later than the Roosevelt administration started trying to bring socialism here.

I mean “socialism” as in absence of capitalism, and I mean capitalism as the broad, simple contract that holds our society together. “I’ll make demands on you and compensate you for fulfilling them, up to but not beyond the point where I’ve depleted the compensation others have given me for the demands I’ve satisfied of theirs.” Corruption of that simple contract. Erosion of that fragile foundation, by which our society had erected its promise that no man shall be the tyrannical master of another — with no new foundation to provide substitute support.

Capitalism has been crumbling, and with it, the promise has been slipping away — as it must. The government forces people to spend huge, and growing, chunks of their lives, for no purpose but to fulfill the needs and desires of strangers.

The white flag is now being forcefully argued as the only fitting final curtain for President Bush’s quest. His quest to spread democracy abroad — while, for seven decades longer, Democrats have labored to bring socialism here.

So here’s the something to chew on:

If surrender is a noble and fitting end to one of these campaigns, shouldn’t it be a noble and fitting end to the other as well?

Not only is our media unlikely to consider a positive answer to that, it’s highly unlikely to even seriously review the question. I open the paper every day, and I’m going to see evidence that President Bush’s mission has turned into a boondoggle. I could see a lot of evidence that President Roosevelt’s mission, likewise, has turned into a boondoggle. But I won’t.

Some argue that an uncertain or wavering objective in President Bush’s mission, is proof-positive — it’s a boondoggle. Good heavens, how many differences are there between Social Security 2005, and Social Security 1935? Could a reasonable person infer these differences make Social Security a boondoggle, or at least give it a good shove in that direction?

Some argue that Democracy is bound to die in Iraq, so why bother trying. There are other places to live where one can enjoy Democracy. Well again, good heavens. If you like socialism, there are also other places you can live. Scores of places.

And others argue that the campaign to liberate Iraq has just gotten hard to cheer on. It’s gotten boring. It’s gotten to be a pain in the ass.

So for a third time, good heavens!

The two-year-old war must be ended because it’s lost its pizazz. I would say, speaking as one of the generation that must fund it, the seventy-two-year-old war hast lost even more of this pizazz. If we’re oh-so-bored by the two-year-old campaign to create freedom where there once was none, I hope we become similarly bored by the seventy-two-year-old campaign to end that freedom where it was previously enjoyed.

Too Close For Comfort

When I was a 14- or 15-year-old and my adolescent hormones were goin’ at it like a bag of Butter Lover’s Kettle Korn in the microwave, Lydia Cornell immortalized herself in my pubescent memories by strutting around in those kootchie shorts in the first season of “Too Close For Comfort” with those silky, tanned, toned thighs whose gentle curves betrayed the childbearing shape of her goddess-like hips and ass. Whooie. Well, nowadays the silky, tanned, toned thighs are poking out of a cheerleader’s skirt, but only figuratively, and the cheerleader uniform belongs to the Democrats.

Which is okay by me. How many incredibly sexy starlets, both A-list and has-beens, are shills for Democrats? Tons of them; and nowadays, it takes a lot of A-list starlets to make a “ton”. Except Cornell, apparently, is going to plant her own fists on those childbearing hips and get all uppity and cranky with me, if I don’t immediately and uncritically buy into what she’s selling, that she is in fact a Republican:

Dear Ann [Coulter],

I was a Republican for many years, voted for Reagan and still attend Reagan’s former church, Bel Air Presbyterian. I am writing an article about the Alachua Republican Party and wanted to clarifiy something with you. I had heard about your speech in Gainesville and was troubled in regards to your comments on the First Amendment and the stifling of the free speech of Democrats. Do you stand by those remarks? Do you wish to clarify or add anything to them � and do you really feel that stifling free speech and/or violating/changing the U.S. Constitution is the best way help spread democracy to the rest of the world?

There is nothing self-contradictory here, so far. Cornell says she was a Republican, as in past-tense. So it’s logical to conclude she was a Republican when Reagan was running because she liked Reagan’s stuff, and since then has brought her interest in politics to a halt, or jumped over the fence and become a Democrat. Okay fine, I’ll buy that. Lots of “Republicans” have something different in mind for conservatism, besides of what George Bush is selling. Some days, I’m one of them.

But this screed she’s got going, which apparently she posted some eleven days after her query to Ann Coulter, sets the whole thing on its head:

I feel I�m going insane. Right after the 2004 election when You-Know-Who was elected, I actually developed a nervous tic in my left eye, like the Police chief in the Pink Panther, who was driven berserk by Inspector Clousseau. Of course there’s no comparing the lovable Peter Sellers with the witless, war-mongering leader of the free world, but I don’t want my eye twitch to come back so I’m trying to stop hating him so much. I think I figured out a way to talk to Ann Coulter: turn the other cheek and let her hit that one.
:
During my conversation with [Alachua Republican Party Vice-Chairman Bryan] Harman, I was tempted to be confrontational, but made a conscious decision to remain objective and get inside the Republican mind-set.[emphasis mine]

Waitaminnit Lydia! You don’t need to “get inside the Republican mind-set”! You are already there! Or at least you were. At the very least, you once were.

That’s what you said. I’m just taking it seriously, and look what a problem we have here.

You have a nervous tic in your left eye because “You-Know-Who” emerged victorious against Mister Massachusetts Nuance? What policy changes did you, as a former Reagan-voting Republican, want out of Mister Purple Heart Christmas-In-Cambodia Seared-In-Memory Terrorism-Is-Just-A-Nuisance?

I’d really like to know. You start with Ronald Reagan, and take away everything that does NOT look like John Kerry, you get…nothing. You start with Kerry, and remove everything that doesn’t look like Reagan, you still get…nothing.

Is there something I’m missing?

Or are you, with your perfect legs and your perky breasts that look SO appealing under those super-snug, early-eighties sweaters, ready to receive my personal judgment on whether what you have told me is COMPLETE BULLSHIT or not?

I’ll tell you something else that doesn’t quite add up. Ms. Cornell doesn’t think like a Republican, or like anyone who has ever, ever been a Reagan-voting Republican. Look at that post — the point of it is, that Ann Coulter spews hatred and is bad for the Republican party.

I know Republicans who don’t like Ann Coulter. I know Republicans who don’t like her, because they feel she’s a poor representative, a sentiment which Lydia Cornell obviously shares. They do not present their arguments this way. They say “here are the facts…this is how you can get the complete text of what she said…this is my opinion about it, although obviously you are welcome to form your own opinion…and I don’t feel this is acceptable.”

Not so with Ms. Wish-I-Was-A-European Cornell. Lydia Cornell gives us a snippet. She essentially says, like a Democrat union goon, Trust Me, this is what Ann Coulter is all about. Trust me, you don’t need to read her entire speech to make sure I got the context right. And Trust Me, this is what Jesus Christ Himself would have to say about it — it’s my interpretation, and if you’ve got a different one, that doesn’t matter, because mine is the right one.

That’s not what a Reagan-voting Republican does. And a Reagan-voting Republican damn sure doesn’t get a facial tic about politicians he or she doesn’t like. Reagan-voting Republicans, when laboring under the tenure of powerful politicians they don’t like, simply bide their time and wait for the next elections. When they post blogs about those powerful politicians and what those powerful politicians are doing, they create compelling arguments: These are the facts…this is my opinion…these are the assumptions you must make to form a different opinion, from those available facts, and I find those assumptions to be too extravagant to be maintained.

They present compelling cases for what they believe.

They do not tell their readers what they are supposed to be thinking, at least, not without providing factual support. Like some member of the French cabinet. Or some liberal black baptist preacher who violates separation-of-church-and-state at the drop of a hat during a campaign. Or a union thug.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be harsh. But ever since I cast my first vote for a Democrat, way back when Woodrow Wilson was running for re-election against Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, and all the votes I’ve cast for Democrats since then, I’ve never been able to understand this about my own Democratic party. Why, I’m even thinking of leaving it. Believe me. Please, believe me.

No, seriously. In all seriousness. I think Lydia Cornell has voted for Republicans the same way I’ve suffered from menstrual cramps.

I Speak Of…

Two hundred years after his famous letter to Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, Stephen Nelson and the Danbury Baptists, in which he defined a “wall of separation between Church & State,” Thomas Jefferson’s treasured wall is threatened by the rise of a fundamentalist religion in the United States of America. This religion threatens to take over this country and seize control of its government.

It is a dangerous, double-talking religion. It has lately come to hide behind science; it pretends to present its beliefs, simply by softly questioning more orthodox cognitions deemed to be contrary. The deception behind this is revealed when this religion regards anyone skeptical of their faith, as walking, breathing, unfinished tasks. Those who practice and promote the religion of which I speak, do not seek to form reasoned opinions from established facts — they seek to proselytize. In short, they pretend to participate in epistimology, but what they really want to do is grow their flock, facts be damned.

Their flock is growing like a wildfire. It is difficult to venture beyond one’s doorstep, or into cyberspace for that matter, without encountering several of these practitioners in the course of a single day. Those practitioners pretend to respect our freedom as individuals to select the religion of our choice, but very seldom do they show this respect. To sum it up, nearly all of them believe, with their faith, they are smarter than someone who practices a different faith. They think the rest of us are just big dummies, and are not afraid to say so at all. There is something about this religion that makes people stunningly rude.

Those who promote this religion, do so by simply questioning whatever doesn’t fit; like all religions that seek to find shelter and comfort in quasi-science, they insist on controling the questions. Questions that are inconvenient to contrary theories are encouraged, and when questions arise that are inconvenient to their own faith, the questions suddenly stop. Promoters of this religion, will not tolerate any hesitation, temerity or abatement in questioning what is contrary, but they also will not tolerate questions directed toward what is friendly.

They have begun to spread the canard that the United States of America was founded on their religious principles. They are frequently heard to say “The Founding Fathers were” part of their religion, as if scores of patriots who championed religious freedom as *individuals*, squabbling endlessly among themselves as they did so, must necessarily have belonged to a single faith.

Their religion pretends to simply be a question. But it is not a question at all, it is an answer. It’s a hard, brittle, absolute answer, tolerating no dissent whatsoever, about something unproven and unrefuted that cannot be proven or refuted. It is blind faith masquerading as a set of reasoned inferences.

Our legal system has been hijacked by this religion. On behalf of no other religion, can a lawsuit be filed, and expect to achieve such stellar success, upward through the judicial levels, all the way to the Supreme Court, where such lawsuits either emerge victorious or are allowed to stand. This happens nearly all the time. File a lawsuit friendly to any other religion, and if you can find a lawyer willing to take it, you should expect to see your case thrown out at the most rudimentary level. Especially if that suit can be inferred to be hostile to the religion of which I speak!

The religion of which I speak has already taken over the hallways of our academic institutions. What we now call “science” will analyze, hypothesize, test, and debate, come what may, offending whoever it must, respecting no sacred cows at all — as science should — until the time comes to potentially offend people who practice the religion of which I speak. Then, what we call “science” will come to an abrupt stop, and in so doing betray all of us. The problem is so bad, that our society has for several years now been practicing something called “science” that isn’t really science.

The religion of which I speak has already been placed at the head of several governments. This religion is more hostile to the concept of individual inalienable rights, than any other religion can be — and so, because of all the countries that have enshrined this religion in our recent history, millions of people have been killed. Perhaps as many as a hundred million men, women and children. If you’re sharp, you already know what religion I’m talking about.

I speak of atheism.

The Speech He Should Give

James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense (1977), puts together a speech President Bush could and should give about what’s going on in Iraq.

To summarize, it’s just a fraction of the endless litany of good things that have taken place there, placed into a template fitting the President’s usual speaking style.

We know now that some of our information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was wrong. But we also know now what we have always believed: That Saddam Hussein, who had already invaded both Iran and Kuwait, had the money, authority and determination to build up his stock of such weapons. When he did, he would have become the colossus of the Middle East, able to overwhelm other countries and rain rockets down on Israel.

We have created a balance of power in the Middle East in which no regime can easily threaten any other. In doing this, we and our allies have followed a long tradition: We worked to prevent Imperial Germany from dominating Europe in 1914, Hitler from doing the same in 1940, and the Soviet Union from doing this in 1945. Now we are doing it in the Middle East.

I have nothing to add to this, save for one thing. Documentation of these encouraging events, and many others, has been circulating around the “innernets” for years now; since shortly after the invasion in Spring 2003. This is seldom discussed, although the events are widely known. The alphabet-soup news networks which so regularly are accused of a politically-leftward tilt, who regularly fret over their eroding credibility, and who regularly get kicked in the ass by their own declining ratings as viewers desert them in droves — they could mitigate all of these problems by mentioning a handful of these things more prominently. To the best of my knowledge, very seldom does that happen.

The most bumptious among our anti-war people cite as the basis for their opposition, the mounting death toll among our brave troops. That toll is supposed to be a great concern to them, as is the mission to make it an overriding concern to the rest of us.

I call bullshit on this alleged concern. If the troops are dying for something, they are dying to make the things mentioned in Wilson’s column happen. An anti-war zealot who was concerned about the lives of these troops, would say “I don’t think freeing a nation the size of California from tyranny, capturing Saddam Hussein, giving Iraqis running water and electricity for the first time, free elections, a constitution (etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.) is worth the loss of life in our military” and then such a zealot would give reasons why his cost-benefit equation works out the way it does.

Such a zealot would give evidence that he’s taking these benefits into account, by listing them, and then actually taking them into account. They are, after all, the things for which our troops gave the ultimate sacrifice, whether that exchange was part of the original plan or not.

And the lives and welfare of those troops are supposed to be the objects of all this anti-war concern.

So, no. I don’t think the typical anti-war loudmouth gives a rat’s ass about the dead troops. I should add, of course, that every loudmouth is different. But the paucity of discussion that takes place, about benefits from this military action that are so numerous, is evidence of what I’ve been thinking all along.

Opposition to the war is all about a desired return to our status quo, where we indulge in overwhelming quantity and intensity of discourse about unimportant things. In recent history, that has meant two things: 1) wealthy old people with summer homes and Winnebagos lobbying for greater medical benefits, at the expense of thirty-something apartment rats struggling to make ends meet; and 2) special-interest organizations representing “minority” gender, ethnic and sexual-preference classes, lowering our national pain-threshold every two years so they can find something to complain and litigate about.

Body bags flying in to Dover AFB make it hard to get worked up about those. REAL hard. That is what they want to stop.

So our anti-war loudmouths are really pissed about those bags.

As a group, they generally don’t give a shit about who is IN that bag. You’ll notice they very seldom mention that person — and they mention even less often, the whole point of the noble sacrifice that put that person in there. Evidently, they have an argument that would weaken if they acknowledged anything positive coming from that sacrifice, whatsoever — nevermind that, being a signatory to that sacrifice, the person inside that bag presumably had strong feelings that it was a worthwhile trade.

Self Help

I don’t have television, by choice, so what I know about TV comes from traveling and staying in hotels.

This will come as a shock to anyone who reads my blog and regards me as a sage on all human affairs, which of course nobody does. As far as human affairs that take place on the boob tube, I am precisely as well-informed as the timeless conceptual little green man from another planet who monitors our radio and TV signals.

Maybe the little green man if he somehow had access to Google.

Anyway, I couldn’t help noticing something.

The cable TV I have decided I don’t want in my home, is fairly jam-packed with self help programs. Morning, evening, late night. Commercials, infommercials, plugs for infommercials, movie rentals. Self help up the yin yang.

Roughly half of these programs have to do with identifying what you want in life, and going after it, no holds barred, refusing to take no for an answer, and getting in the face of anyone who gets in your way.

The other half has to do with something called “Dealing With Difficult People.”

Hmmmmmm….

Thanks

Another “Mobile Blog Post” as I find myself on the road once again. This time I’m visiting family. Aren’t we all.

As we give thanks for what we have in our lives, can we all come to an agreement about the concept of “Thanks”. Like any other emotional sentiment, a Feeling of Thanks is useless until & unless it *culminates* in something — an action, or an inaction.

Let’s face it: If you have a functioning brain and a life to live, not a day goes by that you don’t feel happy, sad, angry, pleased, and grateful — maybe dozens of times. Most of these impulses come to nothing, and a scant few of them have an impact on what we do.

A successful Thanksgiving is one where your feelings of thanks have an impact on what you do.

So what do you do with this feeling of gratitude, once it’s been validated, an felt sincerely? This is an important question. This is America. We have it good — astonishingly good. Our “poor” people are obese, and have cable TV channels in the triple-digits.

In the final analysis, there are only two big possibilities: You can feel guilty, or you can start figuring out what’s going on, as a first step to making more of it happen. These are mutually exclusive. The abundance of our gifts, our commerce, our gadgets, our technology — it’s a glaring problem crying out for a solution, or it’s a manifestation of something going terribly right that calls out for propagation and multiplication. It’s fundamentally bad, or it’s fundamentally good.

There is no home for “moderates” on this question.

And those who wish to feel guilty, have a vexing conundrum to resolve: How *did* America go about getting all this wealth and abundance for which we’re supposed to feel grateful today?

If it is our desire to spread these gifts to people who don’t have them, it seems like a solid logical conclusion that answering this question is the first step.

Some will say we have this high standard of living because we stole it, somehow, from those who we notice don’t have it. Either we plundered these riches, actively, or we intercepted them passively. Either way, if you accept this premise, then the question I asked above becomes moot.

Except then, I would expect, you will not be joining in the celebration today. In which case I hope you’ll donate your turkey and canned goods to those in need.

I just love activists. Their very name is inspiring. Activist…activist…activist! Someone who takes the initiative. Who sees what needs to be done and does it. Captain of his own destiny. Righter of wrongs! Defender of the defenseless! Punisher of the punishless!

A socially inept control-freak who’s come up with a great way to get laid. By foolish left-wing sluts.

Four decades and some change after social activism became fashionable, there is evidence here and there that, by failing to stand up for itself whenever activists twiddle with its switches and knobs and rabbit-ears, society may be doing the activists more harm than the activists can be doing to it. The harm that is done to the activist, has to do with a gradual unmooring from reality. This is dangerous. Someday, the activist will have to move out of his mom’s apartment, and reality will become a bigger part of his life. His ability to reconcile with that reality, therefore, will become more important.

More important than what?

More important than it currently is to whoever wrote this e-mail to the Hagerstown, MD Herald-Mall, said e-mail appearing to take responsibility for a potentially deadly act of incendiary vandalism:

Last night we, the Earth Liberation Front, put the torch to a development of Ryan Homes in Hagerstown, Maryland (off of Route 40, behind the Wal-Mart). We did so to strike at the bottom line of this country’s most notorious serial land rapist.

We warn all developers that the people of the Earth are prepared to defend what remains of the wild and the green.

We encourage all who watch with sadness while developers sell out the future of us and our children to join us in resisting them in any and every possible way.

The Ents are going to war.

I found this to be particularly interesting where it says We warn all developers that the people of the Earth are prepared to defend what remains of the wild and the green. They took a poll?

Can people of all ideological stripes, agree on this: Activists, by and large, have an unfortunate tendency to remain oblivious to the negative consequences involved in the causes they establish, sustain and for which they recruit.

Could we therefore lend our support to the following proposal: We will find a way to allow the activists to continue with their causes, and with freedom of speech, but we will also find a way to guarantee the activists are the first among those who have to live with the consequences of what they want done. ELF, here, should live in an urban “ant farm” where housing is rare, rents have skyrocketed, homelessness is rampant, but thank goodness there are no town homes. And we will find ways to further this goal throughout all brands of activist zealotry, regardless of how pleasing those activist movements may be to whoever.

Activism, by nature, exists to tell everybody how an elite class of people has decided they all should live, and if they don’t want to live that way, well that’s just tough. It is coercion. Activism is the antithesis of democracy. It is a policy of “You Do This.” We could call my policy the “You Go First” policy.

Gun-grabbing activists get to live in a place where burglars burgle wherever they want, because they know nobody has a gun. Anti-death-penalty activists get to live in a place where murderers walk the streets, secure in the knowledge they’ll never be executed. Anti-capitalists get to live in a place where money is nonexistent, and anyplace you can get a bite to eat, looks like your elementary school cafeteria where you wait in line endlessly to get a big scoop of colorless glop.

That would be fair.

Man, I am rambling. Need to get coffee.

What Are We Arguing About?

Charles Krauthammer’s article flatly states that Intelligent Design is full of crap. Actually, what he’s saying is something I’ve been saying all along, that we’re making a mistake in assuming different theories logically have to be mutually exclusive from one another, when they don’t.

Newton’s religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England. Einstein’s was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.

Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. “He believed he was doing God’s work,” wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation – understanding the workings of the universe – as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Krauthammer belongs to the “It Isn’t Science” crowd, those who insist that, being untestable, Intelligent Design cannot be a legitimate scientific pursuit. I’ve been reluctant to sign on to that, because if I were to do so then I’d have to support banishing the following from science:

Krauthammer has inferred that Intelligent Design proponents — all of them? most of them? some of them? I don’t know! — are pushing the theory of the constantly-intervening God. Sorry, Chuck. I find it to be dishonest to link “you have opposable thumbs because Someone designed you that way” to “when you put your right leg into your pants first this morning, it’s because God decided that six thousand years ago.”

It pains me to say this, but Krauthammer has blundered significantly in the arena of clean, organized, critical thinking, which is where he has been known to contribute the most in confounding disagreements like these. The delta between those two assertions he has welded together is not only significant, but it cuts to the quick of religio-scientific principles upon which this republic was founded. When atheists protest against “In God We Trust” being inscribed on our money, they are frequently heard to assert “The Founding Fathers were not Christians, they were Deists!” Little do the most passionate among them realize, that the most accepted definition of Deism is the proposition that the world was created by a non-intervening God.

That a Supreme Being is responsible for creating us, but not for intervening with our day-to-day operations, is absolutely critical to acceptance of the twin assertions that 1) we “are endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; and 2) it is our “Right, it is [our] Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for [our] future Security.”

Which is to say, we may very well have grown here through a process unguided by any intelligent force, but if that is proven (or accepted) to be the case, then the document I have quoted has been made utterly groundless; and similarly, if we were put here by an intervening Higher Power, that decides for us if we are to part our hair on the right or the left, then it isn’t up to us to do anything at all — let alone overthrow our government — and the document is again made utterly groundless.

Krauthammer is effectively stating that a Higher Power that put us here, by definition, is a Higher Power that, as he puts it, “steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, ‘I think I’ll make me a lemur today.'” How can these be synonymous? He’s trying to make the argument that science and religion aren’t enemies. One of the most potent suppositions for supporting that, is the concept of a non-interfering Higher Power that uses evolution as a tool, which is put in motion and then left alone. Much like the little old lady and the tomato seeds.

I’m afraid Charles Krauthammer has lost track of what we’re arguing about. But haven’t we all? Find me a thousand loudmouth idealogues extolling their opinions of Intelligent Design, on one side or the other, and I can find large numbers therein of folks who will sign on to many, a whole bunch of, or most, of the following perceptions of the disagreement:

1. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that the Judeo-Christian God created everything, opponents assert this is not so.
2. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that some Higher Power created everything, opponents assert this is not so.
3. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that some Higher Power created everything and is watching over it all now, opponents assert this is not so.
4. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that the complexity of nature proves that some Higher Power created everything, opponents assert it does not.
5. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that the complexity of nature surpasses what can be explained by evolutionary theory, opponents assert this is not so.
6. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that evolution is a fact, not a theory, and proponents assert that it is a theory, not a fact.
7. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that they can explain everything in nature with the theory of evolution, without the intervention of any designing agent, proponents assert this is not so.
8. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that the earth is not much older than six thousand years, and opponents assert this is not so.
9. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that man shared the earth with dinosaurs, even using them as beasts of burden like Fred Flintstone, and opponents assert this is not so.
10. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that it is a violation of the Establishment Clause to teach Intelligent Design in the classroom, and proponents assert this is not so.
11. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that it is outside the realm of science to even consider Intelligent Design, and proponents assert this is not so.
12. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert #11 because Intelligent Design is “untestable.”
13. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert #11 because it might prove there is a God, and religion is an enemy of science.
14. Opponents of Intelligent Design stand guilty of telling everybody else what to think, about something that is unprovable.
15. Proponents of Intelligent Design stand guilty of telling everybody else what to think, about something that is unprovable.
16. #14 and #15.
17. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that evolution is a canard, and all species were created in the form we observe them today, opponents assert this is not so.
18. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that evolution is at work only with non-human animals, that man was created in the form we observe him today, opponents assert this is not so.
19. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that evolution had a hand in creating all animals, including humans, but that a Higher Power is also at work in nature, opponents assert this is not so.
20. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that nothing in the evolutionary theory can ever be proven, opponents assert some things can be.
21. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that some things in the evolutionary theory can be proven, and some things can’t, opponents assert all things can be.
22. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that Intelligent Design can be proven, opponents assert that while it’s conceptually possible, it can’t be proven.
23. Proponents of Intelligent Design have a hidden agenda to inject Judeo-Christian religion into public schools.
24. Opponents of Intelligent Design have a hidden agenda to enshrine Atheism as the state-sanctioned religion.
25. Proponents of Intelligent Design do not assert Intelligent Design itself, quite so much as desire discussion about Intelligent Design.
26. Opponents of Intelligent Design do not dispute Intelligent Design itself, quite so much as desire to muzzle any discussion about Intelligent Design.
27. Proponents of Intelligent Design desire to muzzle any discussion about Natural Selection, since religion is an enemy of science.
28. Opponents of Intelligent Design assert that students should not be taught Intelligent Design if their parents don’t want them to be taught that.
29. Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that students should not be taught the Theory of Evolution if their parents don’t want them to be taught that.

So here’s my point: Isn’t it a rather abundant waste of energy, to start proselytizing one’s own point of view, or to insult and denigrate others, without first arriving at some agreement of what we’re arguing about?

Imitation is the Sincerest Form IV

While staying in New York on Monday, I made some observations about Norman Podhoretz’s column that appeared that morning in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Podhoretz himself didn’t say as much, but I was noticing that his article was on the “hard” side. That is to say, his article fell woefully short on the “this is what I am instructing you to think about x” stuff, and ran kind of long on “This is Exhibit A, this is Exhibit B, this is Exhibit C, etc.” I was making the point that there’s a certain asymmetry to the exchange of facts vs. opinions in the debate about Should The United States Be In Iraq. The “Yes, we should” side can use facts and opinions, whereas the “No, we shouldn’t” side can only use opinions:

What if you wanted to smear President Bush’s decision to invoke military action against the old Iraq regime, and you shied away from incendiary speculation, treading only upon established, indisputable fact?

Let us give it a try:

“This administration led us into a war, based mostly (not entirely) on Iraq’s continuing efforts to acquire (not possession of) weapons of mass destruction, which, once we took control of that country, it turned out at that particular moment not to have any.”

Doesn’t have the same punch as “He LIED!!!” now, does it?

Kind of leaves something out when the next sentence is “so let’s impeach him!”, doesn’t it?

This says something. In the inflammatory debate we’re having now, one side can afford to stick to established, indisputable facts, whereas through this exercise the other side would be utterly devastated, losing the bulk of its shock value, persuasive power and emotional punch.

I don’t know if White House counselor Dan Bartlett reads my blog. I would expect hardly anybody does. But how then do you explain this gem which appeared in the Washington Post yesterday morning.

“What bothers me is when people are irresponsibly using their positions and playing politics,” [President George W.] Bush added. “That’s exactly what is taking place in America.”

[Vice President Dick] Cheney’s speech was part of a GOP effort to push back against criticism on Iraq that presidential counselor Dan Bartlett said will continue.

Traveling with Bush, Bartlett said: “There’s a bright line there that the Democrats have crossed. They have no facts on their side.”

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered.

More Timely Than It Looks

This is a lot more timely than it looks, which doesn’t say much because it doesn’t look timely at all. It looks like a rehash. What it is, is a recital of the facts about how the United States got into the war in Iraq. And it’s a little on the long side, so why chew over it again?

To answer that, we have to get into, once again, the difference between an established, undisputed fact, and a reasoned but debatable opinion. The noisiest people who “debate” things in our society today, think they know the difference between the two. Very few of them do.

This article sticks to facts. And it does have an agenda of supporting President Bush. Some people have an agenda of attacking the President; those people don’t stick to facts, because they can’t.

Think about THAT for a minute or two. What if you wanted to smear President Bush’s decision to invoke military action against the old Iraq regime, and you shied away from incendiary speculation, treading only upon established, indisputable fact?

Let us give it a try:

“This administration led us into a war, based mostly (not entirely) on Iraq’s continuing efforts to acquire (not possession of) weapons of mass destruction, which, once we took control of that country, it turned out at that particular moment not to have any.”

Doesn’t have the same punch as “He LIED!!!” now, does it?

Kind of leaves something out when the next sentence is “so let’s impeach him!”, doesn’t it?

This says something. In the inflammatory debate we’re having now, one side can afford to stick to established, indisputable facts, whereas through this exercise the other side would be utterly devastated, losing the bulk of its shock value, persuasive power and emotional punch.

Read up, folks; this is re-emerging, again, as a heady and current topic of controversy. Congress is stepping up the pressure for withdrawal, and Democrats therein are asserting there have been shenanigans going on in selling this war. The President is fighting back, accusing his critics of rewriting history and sending mixed signals to the troops and to the terrorists. Neither side is backing off.

“Fact” means something is beyond the realm of dispute, or at least should be, unless someone is speaking out of ignorance and/or a deliberate effort to deceive. Yet the facts are what are in dispute.

So regardless of your opinion — and you’re keeping in mind what an opinion is, right? — if you want to corner that obnoxious neighbor or co-worker with a different opinion at the next cocktail party, you’d be well advised to read up. In executing the ambush without first brushing up on recent history, even if you think you have a command of what’s been happening here, you risk making a “Hugh Jass” out of yourself.

And my recommendation is that if you find Mr. Podhoretz’s litany a little too long to merit this expenditure of your time, keep your mouth shut. Because you’re the kind of person who should. That’s *my* opinion.

Veteran’s Day

Nobody ever reads this blog, but among those who happen to trip across it, consider this. If you’re part of the great crushing mass of independent thinkers who oppose the War on Terror in general, and/or the War in Iraq in particular, because you have been flabbergasted, flummoxed, overwhelmed and just plain knocked-flat-on-your-ass by the incredible personal sacrifices made by our troops who serve overseas, thank a vet today.

Some other time, we’ll pick up the debate about whether logical sincerity has been betrayed, or is being adequately serviced, by the hair-splitting exercise of “supporting the troops while opposing their mission.” We have time to do that, tomorrow, next week, next year, thanks to those folks. For today, we can agree that regardless of how that debate turns out, these people deserve thanks. Drafted or not, wounded or not, having-seen-combat or not.

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types IV

I’m glad this girl has lived, so far, and I’m glad that she appears to have been somewhat pretty. I’ve noticed those among us who oppose the death penalty, do so out of concern that “civil liberties” be accorded to “the least among us” and respected once they are so accorded. As if, when you make sure some malt-liquor-gulping, woman-beating, puppy-kicking piece of scum can enjoy his constitutional rights, you’ve somehow ensured we all can, and every man, woman and child from sea to shining sea can rest easy. Or that, if you defend the right of a very wealthy corporate executive to keep his money, you have defended that man alone; in the fight to defend freedom for everybody else, this was just a waste of time.

Ah, except people who think that way have an unfortunate tendency to be excited into passion, action, or noisemaking only when pretty girls are abducted, beaten, raped or murdered. So maybe what happened to this poor girl, will cause our anti-death-penalty types to re-think a thing or three.

Her name is Lauren Huxley. She’s 18, and remains unconscious in critical condition after having been beaten, tied up, doused with fuel and set on fire at her home.

Lauren Huxley’s parents and sister Simone today pleaded for information about what they say is an “inexplicable” attack on the teenager.

“We have no idea who did this to her and we have even less idea as to why anyone would do this,” her mother Christine Huxley said.

“She’s turning 19 on Christmas Eve. She is the most beautiful girl, so innocent and she’s never confrontational, we are at a complete loss as to why anyone would hurt her.”

I recognize that phrases like sick twisted fucks incorporates strong language that is not fit for a diverse and uncontrolled Internet audience. But there is no phraseology suitable for mixed company, that can adequately describe what is happening here. Some people are born with the wrong wrinkles in their brains to safely exist alongside the innocent, who in turn have a God-given right to be protected. That’s not a logical leap at all, nor is the supposition that whoever did these terrible things to this poor girl, has that wrinkle.

Killing is wrong, you say, even when you kill someone for having killed? Yeah, sure. I’d like to see you say that, after someone close to you suffers a horrible attack like this, and then, God forbid, expires from it. Letting people like this live, is really no different from letting them go. And letting them go, is condemning yet more innocent people to burn to death in puddles of flaming gasoline.

Who is really in favor of that? I would hope nobody. Okay then, you people suffer from delusions. That doesn’t make you bad people, but I see no reason why the innocent have to keep suffering because of your delusions.

Update (11-11-05): For whatever it is worth, thanks to the superior writing in this article, it is seems established that Ms. Huxley is not a burn victim.

Lauren Huxley, 18, was found by fire-fighters when they were called to a blaze at her Northmead home, in Sydney’s west, about 4.30pm (AEST) on Wednesday.

They found her tied up and unconscious, with serious injuries and covered in petrol.

Ms Huxley was last seen getting off a bus, from Baulkham Hills TAFE, just around the corner from her home about 2pm on Wednesday.

Police, who are treating the attack as an attempted murder, said it was thanks to the rapid response by fire-fighters that the blaze had not spread to the garage and to Ms Huxley on the floor.

This has no bearing whatsoever on the viciousness of the attack, certainly not on the intent of the individual or individuals responsible for it. They were sick twisted fucks yesterday, they’re sick twisted fucks today, and they possess vital organs that could be put to good use in much more worthwhile individuals.

The Fifth Division

Last month I had offered my thoughts about the one-dimensional blue-state/red-state spectrum, and my opinion that it was inadequate for describing the issues that are really dividing America right now. Believing, still, that we have disagreements about principles in this country, not about whether George W. Bush is a big doo-doo head, I further offered my encapsulation of what these principles are. I came up with five, four of which I listed, the last one of which I kept under wraps with the promise I’d discuss it later. This fifth division amongst us, I said, is more important than the other four.

The fifth division is Abiding By The Contract: Should individuals in our society be bound by it, or not?

Let’s review what The Contract is.

1. You perform services and make X money;
2. You demand services of others and compensate them with Y;
3. You get to keep Z, which is the difference between X and Y;
4. If you want Z to be bigger, you provide more to others or demand less from others;
5. If Z is less than 0, you must diminish your savings, or else cede your personal decisions to other people because they are no longer entirely yours to make.

This is a gross oversimplification, because today we have all kinds of things in America that help to corrupt this contract. Taxes represent one corrupting factor; social safety nets represent another. In divining one’s political philosophies, it is a far more accurate technique to keep in mind The Contract, than to simply listen to the philosophies word-for-word. For example, a social program exists to keep people of modest means out of trouble. But we have a lot of people of modest means who get into trouble because of tax issues. So it makes little or no sense that the people who want a more robust social safety net, are the same people who like to make taxes more punitive. That is, until you keep in mind The Contract. These people simply don’t like it. They want it to be corrupted.

This is proven by the abundance of very wealthy individuals who favor more confiscatory taxes, and brag about this position in spite of their comfortable position in life — and by the paucity of these individuals who then brag about paying surplus taxes. Very few people say “The IRS didn’t charge me enough, so I cut a bigger check and that’s the end of the issue until next year as far as I’m concerned.” These people never seem to want to do that. They want everybody else along for the ride. If Bob is rich and Bob doesn’t think he’s been charged enough, and he simply leaves a “tip” to the treasury, The Contract remains relatively uncorrupted. The impact of this decision is felt only by the public treasury, and Bob. It can even stay a confidential transaction, in addition to being a private one, if Bob so chooses. Well, I can’t help but notice, there are no Bobs, none that speak up anyway.

So very, very few people who proselytize for higher taxes, really give a rat’s ass about a solvent treasury. That’s not the issue for them. The issue is The Contract under which we all live.

There are a lot of people on the other side of the wealth spectrum who don’t like The Contract. These people are weary of living a life in which Z consistently turns out to be close to, or below, zero. They’re tired of it, and who can blame them? But I’ve learned these poor people who are ready to eradicate The Contract, have their own Code of Honor: They wince, uncomfortably, when the cost for some vital service is high — but when a business opportunity comes their way, and a prospective patron offers to pay them an unexpectedly high wage, they still wince uncomfortably. So the opportunity comes their way to change Z, and they pass it up. They don’t want to pay big money out, and they don’t want to take it in either. They simply don’t want to deal with money. It makes them uncomfortable.

Now, a lot of these people work very hard, and — far from wanting to rip people off by making demands for services and not paying for them — they simply want to be spared uncertainties in life. This is a natural development from working long hours for a prolonged period of time, and having nothing to show for it. Once the spirit of Achievement Through Excellence has been fully driven from you, it’s easy to fall prey to mediocrity: Fine, I’ll punch my time clock and work my ass off. Just spare me, after my fifteen hour shift is over, from this desk with the stack of bills on it. I’m not in the mood. Every two weeks I take in seven hundred dollars and pay out eight hundred. I get it already, one number’s bigger than the other. Call me a failure, call me what you will, I’m tired of the same ol’ math problem, sick of sweating over it. Just let me do my hard work, make that phone stop ringing, and I’ll forget about Doing Something Truly Great. And by that I mean, ever.

I don’t agree with that personal decision, but I certainly understand it, and I have to question if we who abide by The Contract have the right to compel others to do the same.

Maybe the solution is to go ahead with the Two Americas, one blue, one red. America has historically been at its greatest, when it has found ways to let individuals live their lives in the way those individuals choose to live. Let’s go ahead and draw the line, but draw it first & foremost along a question regarding this Contract.

Do you want to live by it, or not? Let’s cut the crap.

And then those who want to opt-out of the Contract, can have whatever government they want. Make it look like France. Hell, make it look like Star Trek and get rid of all the money. Free chocolate sundaes on demand, work whatever hours you want, three hots and a cot, and nobody can have a gun, or a bigger house, better education, faster connection to the innernets.

After all, there’s only one political ideology that is truly economically dangerous to everyone, and it’s Thing I Know #4:

In a society where people strive for excellence based on the net of what they do, you can’t have people demanding things for free — and in a society where everybody is guaranteed the same amount & quality of stuff, you can’t have people striving for personal excellence. These are things that don’t mix.

I think that’s where America has been going wrong. We keep trying to mix it up, to create some successful “hybrid.” We do this so that we can all live together in harmony. Meanwhile, it is written nowhere that such a hybrid is possible, or even that we as a species were meant to all live together. We are, as we’ve demonstrated repeatedly, a tribal species. Maybe the time has come to form a tribal society.

Super Duper UN Man

It pays to stop by once in awhile and visit FlashBunny. Like for example, if I didn’t check it out today, I never would have found out about Super UN Man.

No comment from me needed here, you can form your own opinion.

Summit II

Well folks, it’s looking more and more like I was right when I said things were cresting out and we were due for a downfall. People are definitely getting stupider. Eight propositions were up for voter approval in the special election yesterday, and all eight of them bit the mat hard.

We hate things the way they are, but we love them the way they are.

Meanwhile, some guy has posted a thesis about why libertarians are idiots. I know it’s just some random page on the vast innernets, but I know he represents a lot of people. His argument is this: First, he wants to single out the extremists who actually want a small government, “if you voted against Bush, we can probably get along just fine”. Okay, so if you’re a reasonable guy you should want a BIGGER government than George W. Bush wants. Wow.

And why should we want this? What’s wrong with the people who don’t? “It’s hard to read libertarians without concluding that they’ve never been out of the country — perhaps never out of the suburbs”.

They don’t know what Latin American rule by the elite looks like; they don’t know any way of running an industrial economy but that of the US; they don’t know what an actually oppressive government looks like; they’ve never experienced a depression; they’ve never lived in a slum or experienced racial discrimination. At the same time, they have a very American sense of entitlement: a gut feeling that they’ve earned the prosperity they were born into, that they owe the community nothing, that they deserve to have whatever they want, that no one should stand in their way.

In short, they’re spoiled, and they’ve evolved a philosophy that they should be spoiled.

Wow. Just wow, wow, double-wow.

I don’t mean to diminish this guy’s message. After the his-own-buttocks buffet Governor Schwarzenegger was handed this morning, it’s clear this hater of individuality is far more numerically significant, today, than I am, and his opinion is important. True, his argument is pure sophistry. There are people who passionately agree with him, who are disgracefully cloistered in by tiny neighborhoods they’ve never left, and there is a demonstrable link between the cloistering and the passion. True, there are enthusiastic libertarians who have lived under “rule by the elite” and this oppressive existence has fomented their libertarianism; Ayn Rand, herself, comes to mind. And true, those two examples by themselves devastate his blatant generalization intellectually. But as far as charting a course as to where California goes from here, as well as the nation, I think he’s far more important than I am.

The public is in the mood for a little bit of hammer-and-sickle redistributionism.

Note how well the article is written. This guy is no dummy, and I think he’s being sincere. So we have a social environment wherein a fairly sharp mind can be convinced that libertarians are spoiled and dull-witted, and redistributionists are sophisticated and by-and-large enjoy a broader world view.

These people think our society will end up more prosperous if, whenever individuals become prosperous, they are compelled by the law to separate themselves from that prosperity and give it to people who think work is for suckers, so that everyone can share. Then, we should expect, next year those prosperous people will work just as hard to be prosperous.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. I know reading this kind of stuff just fills me with enthusiasm to fill out the job applications and get that better education so I can beef up that salary. All those people on welfare depending on me, as they say.

Sheesh.

Sorry, I’m just not in that cheerful of a mood this morning.

Revenge of the Euro-Pansy America-Hating Douchebags

Revenge of the Sith showed up finally, Saturday. Maybe I’m biased here, but I can’t find anything really positive to say about this marketing technique. I pre-order the movie, and my reward is that I get it on November 5th or so, while the Soccer Mom/Redneck Wal-Mart shopper gets to waltz in and pick it up on the 1st. My reward for all this advance planning is paying $14.86 instead of $19.99, a savings which is promptly eaten up by the shipping costs. Eh, some things it makes sense to by on the innernets, some things it don’t. But I digress.

Shortly before this final Star Wars installment came out there was this buzz going around that it was a Bush-bashing movie. This is based mostly on a line used by Anakin Skywalker, shortly after he turns to the Dark Side. Uh oh, I just ruined it for you if you haven’t seen it, huh. Anyway. He says something to his former mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, “If you are not with me, then you are my enemy.” Kenobi is supposed to further cement this relic of my childhood memories into the Fahrenheit 9/11 genre with the reply “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” There ya go, further proof that George Bush sucks. He lied to get us into a war that took 2,000 American lives, he smirks, he swaggers, he’s an evil genius who took over the country, he’s a raging imbecile, and he’s a Sith Lord.

Well, this whole outlook on the final Star Wars chapter has been bugging me every time I watch that part of the movie because from where I sit, there are quite a few lines that come swinging back around the other way. I will not go so far as to say it is a pro-Bush movie, only that I see a mixed set of messages. A lopsided mix of messages. There is a whole mess of one-liners, character setups, and plot developments that appear to be 1) artificially inserted for no other purpose than supporting the War on Terror, or 2) created for the support of a storyline that, intentionally or not, supports the War on Terror. I was going to write up a list, but someone else beat me to it.

The example that I think is most important comes first, but this author does not put quite as much weight on it as I think it deserves:

In the film, Anakin states something to the effect that the difference between a Sith and a Jedi is that the Sith are emotional and turn inward and are selfish in the Force, while Jedi are ruled by logic turn outward and are selfless. Being selfish and emotional are the literal hallmarks of contemporary liberalism. It�s all about how you feel, doing what you feel is right. There are no moral absolutes. At one point Obi tells Anakin that Palpatine is evil, and Anakin responds that he believes the Jedi are evil. Obi believes in absolute moral evil, whereas Anakin takes the liberal position that “one man�s terrorist is another man�s freedom fighter.”

Here’s the dialog in question as I lift it from the DVD, in the middle of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s ferocious duel. See if you’re reminded of one side or the other in this whole Iraq debate, as the two actors speak:

Anakin, at 1:58:23: “I should’ve known the Jedi were planning to take over.”

Obi-Wan (exasperated): “Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!”

Anakin: “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”

Obi-Wan: “Well, then you are lost!”

(The two contestants glower at each other for ten or twenty seconds or so)

Anakin: “This is the end for you, my master.”

Now really, let’s take a couple steps backward and look at what you have going on here. You have this punk kid who is abundant in his power and potential but unwise in the ways of the world/galaxy, completely lacking in perspective, who is ruled by his emotions. He’s sold out his “country” and is pulling this opinion pretty much out of his ass that the “Jedi were planning to take over.” His incredulous, wiser elder, with this What in the blue fuck is the matter with you tone uses exactly the same argument the Republicans are using, that this guy offscreen is just plain evil — he just plain is! — and what is the matter with you that you can’t see it?

And Anakin’s Euro-pansy douchebag response is the classic John Kerry nuance philosophy of (as the Right Thinking blogger points out) there are no absolutes, it all depends on your point of view. The guy who possesses a better sense of perspective about what’s going on, realizes (“then you are lost!”) that he’s having a futile conversation with someone who isn’t listening to reason, and seems to come to a mutual agreement with his former apprentice that the political debate is over.

The young “lost” guy then prognosticates that the Good Guy’s demise is close at hand — very much like the mainstream media and liberal bloggers are predicting, nowadays, that the White House is about to collapse (“Is it on its final days? Is Scooter Libby’s indictment the beginning of the end?”).

I suppose there is a certain symmetry to all this, at least on the surface, and that for every snippet of this movie that seems to cheer on the Republicans there’s another one designed to appeal to the MoveOn.Org crowd. And vice-versa. But this particular line of dialog is critically important to the entire six-chapter saga. All the way forward (backward) in Return of the Jedi, in a line that is clearly supposed to show the audience What It’s All About, the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi chastises Anakin’s son Luke that “You’re going to find that a great many of the truths we cling to, depend greatly on our point of view.”

And indeed the Ghost of Kenobi is right about that. But he, and by extension George Lucas, is emphatically stating that all points of view are not equally valid. It’s not a game with a monkey and a spinning dartboard; if this, somehow, is inconsistent with the intended message of Star Wars, then Lucas and crew have quite by accident made an insightful and prescient comment about life. You are individually responsible for the points of view that you hold, and whether these lead you to the Good Side of the Force, or to the Dark Side. It is, as the saying goes, Your Desssssstiny. Point-of-View and Destiny are inextricably linked.

And if your “point of view” makes it easy to swivel the roles of good & evil, back, forward, and backward again, this Lazy-Susan spinning-around is a harbinger of a destiny that ultimately won’t have a lot of appeal to you. And no, outside of the movies it doesn’t get you a glossy, scary helment or a spiffy-looking suit.

Update: I was thinking about this before, and forgot about it, and then after I wrote what you read above I had this flashback. I was thinking about one scene that had a huge impression on me the moment I first saw the film in the theater, and the Right Thinking author completely missed this. At 1:13:20 there is the “Fork in the Road” for the entire friggin’ movie, which means, the whole Star Wars story. Mace Windu and Chancellor Palpatine duke it out right in front of Anakin, the three major characters arranged neatly into a simple triumvirate of Good, Bad and guy-who-has-to-make-tough-choice. Palpatine and Windu start zapping each other with force lightning, and simultaneously, have a political argument in front of Anakin. That’s gotta be tough to do while you’re being zapped, although admittedly the exchange doesn’t approach William Buckley heights of sophistication:

Palpatine (zapping Windu): “He’s a traitor!”

Mace Windu (absorbing and reflecting the zaps back): “He’s the traitor, Aaiiigggh!!”

Palpatine (face getting distorted by his own lightning): “I have the power to save the one you love!” (His plosives become distorted as his lips lose shape) “You must choose…ugh!”

Holy Crap. The social commentary is burning through this so incandescently you’d have to be blind to miss it.

If Anakin enjoys the luxury of a studious examination of what is good and what is evil, he will side with Mace Windu and the forces of good. Cornered, Palpatine turns everything around simply by denying Anakin that luxury: I have the power to save the one you love. He knows that once this factor is introduced, Anakin will cease to care about anything else.

As he changes tactics, from “He’s the bad guy” to “I can save the one you love,” the distortion of his features takes place right then and there — a reflection of how truly insidious this brand of demagoguery is.

Forget about terrorists. Vote for us, or those Republicans will have your grandma choosing between her meds and her next can of dog food.

You know why there are so many people who were bitterly disappointed in Star Wars I and II, and were all set to trash this movie, instead having to grudgingly admit it was, at least, the best of the three? It wasn’t that Yoda had a bigger role or that Jar Jar had a smaller one. It was because this movie had the best drama. We were supposed to identify with Anakin, especially with his flaws, and we did. Deep down, we all have what it takes to become embroiled in a battle between right and wrong, and abandon the Good Fight once we see that the side of “wrong” has some perceived power, however delusive that may be, to save the ones we love.

We have the capacity to care about what’s good, and then forsake the pursuit of good, even align ourselves with what we know to be evil — out of love. It is a flaw of compassion that burdens nearly all of us. If half of us enjoyed immunity from this, the drama would be no good. But in real life, half of us fall prey to favoring love and compassion, over our innate and God-given recognition of good and evil, while nearly all of us have the capacity to do so.

So we can all relate. That’s what good drama is. Beats the snot out of watching some stalk-eyed soprano amphibian prattle on about “Meesa People Gonna Die?” and “How Wude!”

My Wine Club

Sometime in June I had some company over and we finished off a bottle of white wine I had in my rack. It was such a unique delight I had to snap a picture of the bottle before throwing it out. That’s probably not the right way to do things, because these fancy-schmancy vintners like to use all that uppity artistic writing and junk on their labels, I knew at the time I should be making an effort to write things down. So I had to do some Googling before I went shopping. Here is the link.

Ask The L-Words

Leonard Pitts, writing a column that appeared in my local Sacramento Bee newspaper, supplies a question which defines a true social conundrum for the times in which we live (link requires registration). He appears to want an answer, although he has the beginnings of a hint he would like to offer. Describing “an otherwise anonymous fellow who used to rant on our voice mails,” he expounds further:*

I was awed by the guy’s ability to cast absolutely any topic in terms of liberal inferiority. “Naturally, you liberals support the infield fly rule,” he would rasp. Or, “Only you liberals would choose paper over plastic.” I exaggerate less than you think I do…”liberal” is the catchall explanation for Everything Wrong, one-size-fits-all terminology for Those Who Disagree…we use the L-word the way we use all words of opprobrium and scorn. As if, having said this, you need say nothing else.

Which must be convenient, but convenient is not a synonym for right. So I wish some of us would stop pretending that shouting “liberal” is a way to explain reasoning.

Okay, Mr. Pitts writes very clearly, so it should be easy for me to figure out the message here. He seeks to know why the “L-Word” is perceived by many among those who use it, as an adequate substitute for a persuasive argument as to why something is wrong. Plainly, the lecture behind his musings is that we should stop doing it. In effect, he’s arguing that at a time when Americans identify themselves as conservatives much more often than as liberals, we should indemnify the word “Liberal” from any sense of shame that permeates it within the community it describes. Put more concisely, he has tasked us to elevate the esteem of the “L-word” above what it earns from those who associate with it. And if it’s not too much more to ask, kindly explain how you came to regard this as such a dirty word.

My response to Mr. Pitts, is, don’t ask me. Ask the L-Words. They are the ones who are afraid to carry the label, even as they enthusiastically seek to proselytize the ideas behind it.

There is even some justification for gratuitously and derogatorily attaching the label to disfavored ideas, without waiting for endorsement from the opposing side. I will not go so far as to delineate the plastic-versus-paper argument alongside a liberal/conservative fracture; I’m unsure how your caller came to glean that from our national discourse, and confess myself ill-equipped for trying to figure it out.

But I can advise you that “liberal” has earned itself a certain disrespect by becoming a brand-name of sorts, rather than any set of guiding principles.

For example, if you were to tell me someone I’ve not yet met believes in a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, I think you will agree I can predict with virtual certainty, this person does not believe we should have a military presence in Iraq. I can make book on this, offering three-to-one odds, or even higher. If you tell me this stranger is opposed to spousal- and parental-notification laws, and is in favor of partial-birth procedures, we can probably agree it’s a virtual certainty this person thinks “Saddam Hussein was not dangerous.”

The funny thing is this: To believe, against the evidence, against what our leaders on both sides of the political spectrum have been telling us about Hussein since the early 1990’s, that the Butcher of Baghdad “was not dangerous” — this doesn’t have a whole lot to do with killing babies, or whatever you choose to call that procedure. The two issues are not connected by a concern for the sanctity of life, or making peace & not war, or a sense in the potential of humanity or complete nihilism. They are completely disparate issues.

But what you and your caller apparently agree are “liberals,” have demonstrated a strong tendency to buy up these two disparate positions as a package deal. And there are more positions like this. To draw another example, if you show me ten people who think vicious, child-raping serial killers should be spared from the death penalty, I’ll show you at least nine people who think that perhaps bedridden old people in persistent vegetative states, should not be. Show me a hundred people who want to “raise the minimum wage” so “working families” can have an edge, and I’ll show you ninety people who want to repeal tax cuts so that other working families can’t have too much of an edge.

The same goes for so many other positions that are entirely disconnected from each other in terms of philosophical values — except where they directly contradict each other — but solidly riveted together, watertight, in terms of the equilateral support they draw from those who call themselves “liberals.”

Why is that?

I can’t tell you. I don’t know. You will have to ask them. But I have a gut feeling if you can crack that nut, you’ll have the answer to why most of America holds this label in such deep contempt.

——————
*It’s not me.

Hungry People

One Letter to the Editor of the Sacramento Bee today asked, in regard to an article two weeks previous called “Psst, Maria,” “Does The Bee want California to be the leader in food stamps, too?” Another one commented on data in the same article, that they show “California has come up with a good plan to reduce dependency…Obviously, The Bee missed the point.” Yet another one made an observation that on television, “The poor people…were – all of them – fat. Not slightly overweight, but fat.”

Intrigued, I put the paper down and dialed up Google so I could find the article, “Psst, Maria” from October 17. Then I read it. I was shocked by what I saw.

Editorial: Psst, Maria
Want to help the poor? Talk to Arnold

Published 2:15 am PDT Monday, October 17, 2005

It was hard to escape the irony. California first lady Maria Shriver, briefly reprising her role as TV news reporter on “Oprah” this week, traveled to Virginia and Kentucky to interview families living in poverty, a worthy issue for any journalist to highlight. But as she accompanied Candy Lumpkin, a Virginia woman, on a grocery expedition with food stamps, did the first lady know the extent of poverty in her own state and how California has the lowest level of food stamp usage in the country? [emphasis mine]

Unlike Virginia, California requires its poor residents to submit to finger imaging, a finger-print-like system, to qualify for food stamps. And unlike most states, California also requires food stamp recipients to apply for federal food assistance every three months instead of the typical twice-a-year requirement elsewhere. Both factors help account for low food stamp usage in California.

As she quizzed Lumpkin about food choices – did she prefer low fat to whole milk, Shriver asked – did the first lady know that her husband vetoed a bill that would have jettisoned the humiliating and error-prone finger imaging? The bill also would have scaled back the once-a-quarter food stamp application process that is needlessly burdensome to California’s poorest residents. [emphasis mine]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of the bill that would have made it easier for poor and hungry people in California to get food betrays a meanness at odds with the first lady’s obvious sympathy for the people she met mired in poverty on the other side of the country.

There’s another irony. As Shriver traveled to Virginia and Kentucky, the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, [emphasis mine] released a survey that said Fresno has the highest concentration of urban poverty in America. Brookings ranked cities with neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line, defined by federal guidelines as an income of $19,350 a year for a family of four. Fresno ranked even higher than New Orleans, No. 2 in the survey.

The next time the first lady wants to interview poor people, she can stay at home. She might even want to invite her husband to go with her.

Dubya, Tee, EFF?!?!?!?

We have people who work at the only newspaper in Sacramento, which is the capital of one of the largest states in the nation, who can write editorials unsigned. I would have to presume this means that they are so high up in the structure, that their opinions, for all intents and purposes, are the opinions of this capital’s-only-newspaper. Although I have little idea who these people are, they hold positions of great responsibility. Much higher than some guy who writes for a blog nobody reads.

And they see nothing wrong with using food stamp usage as a reverse indicator — unbelievable! — of how badly a regional economy is doing.

They introduce any unacquainted readers to the Brookings Institution as a “Washington, DC based think tank.” There is some precedence for referring to Brookings in this way, or as a “centrist/nonpartisan” outfit, but only among journalists who want to deceive. It is far more established, and reasonable to at the very least call them “progressive.” They are funded by Teresa Heinz-Kerry. Any promoter of a “centrist” canard, upon being asked for a conservative position by E. J. Dionne, would have to answer by scrambling furiously and futilely.

They think the fingerprinting process of food stamp applicants is “humiliating and error-prone.” Clearly they don’t like it, although perhaps the space constraints have precluded them from explaining exactly why. I would have thought building a case on this would be Priority One. There are some Bee readers who require a little bit more than something like “it’s bad, you’re supposed to disapprove.”

The people who wrote this think an application process is “needlessly burdensome.” How long is this application process? The point of “needlessly burdensome” comes shooting past awfully quick for me if I’m well-fed and trying to defraud the system, but if I genuinely need the help, why, I may never see it. Give me writer’s cramp. Before I’m done pushing the grocery cart around the store, it will be a distant memory, especially if my family’s fed for the next month and otherwise would not be.

What in the hell are these people talking about?

I can think of only two things. They want more fraud in the system, or else they don’t believe in the fraud. They must want a greater demand to be placed on public assistance — they have said so — and they don’t want the resulting traffic to meet any resistance. They want throughput.

I would hope, if God popped out of the sky and said “I’m God, don’t worry, every belly in Fresno is full tonight, I guarantee it” they would drop the issue. I hope that, but I don’t think so. I’ve been watching the journalism profession for a long, long time. It’s clear to me that in a world with no empty bellies and little need for public assistance, newspapers just don’t sell as well.

Have Fun With Them

If there were any readers of this blog, which of course there aren’t, they would recall a long-standing tradition here of noticing how our media outlets pretend their techniques are perfectly objective while they are actually anything but. This is our fault. As Americans, we tend to do a dandy job of understanding the impossibility of trusting what has not been questioned, but we do a very poor job of cataloguing what we need to question.

That last sentence has a high density factor. Go back and read it again if you have to.

Still confused? I’ll give you an example in the form of our Number One Contentious Issue: Iraq. There is a “pro-war” side and an “anti-war” side, and we’re now starting our fourth straight year (before the invasion as well as after) debating what is right and what is wrong about invading Iraq. Our media steers clear of improperly promoting viewpoints about this that would be entirely personal, by sticking to reporting the facts. And it is accountable to us when it deviates from fact and drifts into falsehood, especially to the blogging community.

But which facts does it report?

For the media, the world is just a big playground here. The United States has done some things that fall short of the high standard of civil behavior we have set for ourselves; our enemies have done things that fall short of any standard of civil behavior whatsoever. What will our media talk about? They get to decide this on their own.

You simply can’t get in trouble with the public for ignoring something. Other editors, sure. Anybody who has channel surfed during a news hour, knows this to be true. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX all talk about Abu Ghraib at the same time; they all talk about Reagan bombing the evil empire at the same time; they all talk about the weather at the same time, and they all talk about a family of really cute duckies holding up traffic on a two-lane road at the same time. The rigidity of the template is a settled matter. But the public? Stupid readers and stupid television watchers, they get excited over anything. One guy gets mad at you for not talking about Palestinian terrorists bombing Israelis, you just ignore him — until you can’t, and then you print a letter from a guy who’s mad you didn’t talk about Israelis bombing Palestinians. Print the two letters next to each other, and you look perfectly centrist.

In other words, an opinion that the media should have discussed something, that it didn’t, is exactly that: An opinion. You can’t “nail” the media for not doing their jobs, with an opinion. And there’s something proper about that, but there’s something improper about allowing ourselves to be entirely defanged in this venue. If our media ever fails us spectacularly, as some believe it did before September 11, 2001, it will fail us by refusing to talk about something important. And even with the advent of the blogging community, we have no checks against this.

That’s one way they can hose us. Here’s another. In addition to enjoying unlimited latitude in choosing facts to report, they can choose to ask whatever questions that they want.

There’s a great example of this in the abortion issue. There is a pro-life side, which believes the baby’s right to life overrides the right of the mother to terminate her pregnancy, and there is a “pro-choice” side which believes the opposite. Certain questions have a potential to splinter-up, and thereby take power from, one side or the other. Question A might be “should a woman have the right to terminate a pregnancy after a rape, or when her life is in danger?” and this splinters-apart the pro-life side. Some folks on that side will answer yes, and some folks will answer no. The pro-choice side of the line stays united, the other faction is intellectually broken apart.

Question B might be “should a woman be denied the alternative of abortion if she is blatantly and repeatedly using it as a method of contraception?” This would have the opposite effect. The pro-life faction would stay united, the pro-choice group would come apart at the seams.

You hear Question A asked quite a lot. You very seldom hear Question B. That’s an example of persuading people toward one side over the other, while pretending you’re not doing it. That’s what our media does to us.

I’ve found it is an educational exercise, and quite an amusing one, to use this technique on intellectually lazy camps of thought that have yet to self-destruct into smithereens even though they cry out for the chance to do so. And there is no camp of thought more deserving of this, than the anti-war camp. They could be busted up six ways from Sunday by the right question, but within the media and without, they seldom have to address the question.

Well, I have freedom of speech like anyone else, and therefore have been inviting noisy anti-war zealots — who in turn show little-to-no reluctance to accept — to more precisely define the stance they want to take. This is great fun. These people really do think, as they narrow down their intellectual position, that their bedmates from coast to coast are actually along with them for the ride, on every single word. After all, they are so righteous. No man alienates his own allies in a battle for what’s righteous, does he?

Which Is It?

1. Saddam Hussein’s regime was not dangerous, and we were wrong to do anything.
2. Saddam Hussein’s regime was not dangerous yet, and we should have given it time to get dangerous before we did anything.
3. Saddam Hussein’s regime was dangerous to other people, but not to us, and didn’t care about us, and it wasn’t our place to do anything.
4. Saddam Hussein’s regime was immediately dangerous to other people, and would have been to us someday, but not at the time we overthrew it so it wasn’t our place to do anything.
5. Saddam Hussein was trying to become dangerous to us, but we struck too early and now we have no evidence, which has resulted in an alienation of our allies.
6. Saddam Hussein’s regime was dangerous to us, but because we bungled the invasion we let all the evidence go missing and now we got nothing.
7. Other?

I’m positive that with a little work, that list of options could be greatly expanded.

But it’s more than just a fun exercise to ask the anti-war camp to stipulate where exactly they stand as individuals. It is our sacred duty. If we are going to safeguard our liberties by vigorously questioning controversial positions taken by our fellow countrymen, we need to vigorously question all the controversial positions, not just the ones the powerful elites in our media don’t like.

The Dustbin

I have this dustbin in my head that is full of “facts” that I don’t out-and-out deny, and which in many cases I believe to be true, sometimes enthusiastically — but which have other problems. Some of them need more evidence to be useful. Others have already been proven to the greatest extent they can possibly be proven, and still, they aren’t useful. For reasons like these, the items in my dustbin have already received as much attention as they merit, and will get no more attention from me even if everyone around me is obsessed with them.

To grasp this concept, you have to acknowledge when we draw inferences about things, we may come to the conclusion that a thing is true without coming to the conclusion that it is usefully true. A lot of outspoken people are spending a lot of time trying to convince people they’re right, when what they really need to be arguing is whether a certain action or inaction can be justified because they are right.

Maybe it’s worth taking an inventory of my dustbin, because it is likely a lot of other people have the same dustbin.

One example is men who can’t handle the fact that their wives make more money than they do. I’m told this is a problem, and I have been told this for a long time. Over this time, this has gradually been relegated to the dustbin. It won’t merit a single quarter-second of additional serious thought out of me until I meet a flesh-and-blood example of a frustrated, under-achieving, egotistical husband. I’ve spent my whole adult life working, and half of it to support this-or-that welfare-mom who was conditioned to think she couldn’t possibly make more than six dollars an hour so why bother trying. I’m plumb wore out. If my sweetie wants to step all over my fragile male ego by making twice as much as me, then go right ahead.

Every working man I have personally known, has felt the same way. We’re all very secure in our under-achieving wage-slave male egos. If there are any men who think differently, I’d love to meet them. I’ll bet if they’re out there at all, they’re all under twenty.

Children who “have” to be on Ritalin and other drugs because of their “mild” or “borderline” ADHD: Yes, the parents are right when they say the medication “helps.” Yes, there are hyperactive kids. No, every single kid who is an active or passive discipline problem, is not necessarily one of these.

Children who need this medication to perform, who eventually blossom into adults who do not need this medication or any other kind of medication: Sure, I believe it happens. I’d like to know how often. Shouldn’t someone be asking that question? Shouldn’t anyone considering putting their children on the drug, be insisting on such an answer before going forward?

Other things in the dustbin: The men who “force” women to whittle their figures down to ninety pounds at five-foot-ten, so that the poor waifs have to barf their way into a hospital to make their callous, shallow, and downright mean studs happy. Sorry, I’m not buying it anymore. I think the Kate Moss fashion trend was started by women and homosexuals in the fashion industry. All the straight men I know, like to see curves.

Hate crimes perpetrated upon the Muslim community in the wake of the September 11 bombings, and other incidents: I emphatically believe some of them have happened. I do not believe they have happened to the extent they have been portrayed, nor do I believe our media has dealt with us honestly on this. To whatever extent you believe something has to repeatedly happen in order to become a pandemic, epidemic, or even a significant societal concern, I am unconvinced this has ever surpassed that threshold.

Genocidal acts by Christians in history: I keep hearing about the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. That’s reaching back in history almost a thousand years. Shouldn’t there be more examples? Two is a trend, three is a pattern. All we have here is a trend, not even a pattern.

What else? There are the men who push up the male insurance premium rate by being worse drivers than women. Oh, there are reckless males out there. But reckless is a helluva lot safer than oblivious. Those soccer moms on their cell phones are driving ENORMOUS cars they can’t control, the cell phones are always the flip-style clamshell thing, that makes it four times harder to check your blind spot during a lane change. I’ve never heard of a woman pulled over for using a cell phone, nor have I heard of a woman, once pulled over, actually getting a ticket. A little crying, and you’re let off with a warning, which means the premium paid by the fairer sex goes down. So yes, you pay less for insurance, and no, you’re not safer drivers. Find me a reckless man, and I’ll find you two oblivious women — who have never been in accidents before, but God only knows how many they caused.

Terrorists who aren’t Muslims: Again, I’m convinced there have been some. I’m convinced there have been several. All I keep hearing about is this Timothy McVeigh guy.

You don’t need to believe in a God in order to make ethical decisions: I think that’s true. I think atheists and agnostics make decent decisions all the time. But to believe they are on par with the religious, in terms of their potential to do these decent things, you have to believe humans have the innate quality of doing palatable things, not simply justifiable things, when they aren’t being watched. I’m winding up my fourth decade here of interacting with people…sorry. Not buying it.

Slimy, filthy, dishonest rich people who didn’t work for their money: I know for a fact they are out there, I just don’t know how many of them there are, or if the fraction they represent is meaningful in any way. The rich people I’ve met treated me pretty good. Something tells me that to the extent I have made myself comfortable, I owe it to my successes in emulating their methods, and to the extent I have failed to do so, I owe it to the differences between their behavior and mine. Sure looks that way, from where I sit.

Pot is not a gateway drug: Those who have trashed their lives with harder drugs, I’m sure, represent a hodge-podge blending those who have smoked pot and those who never did. So this is a description of an aggregate entity using a singular attribute, which always gives rise to fallacy. If there were nothing to the theory that it’s a gateway drug, shouldn’t it be easy to convincingly discredit it, banishing it forever from the realm of subjective opinion? This appears to have not been done.

Homosexuals are simply born that way: Those in the scientific profession have been arguing for this or against this, while waiting for some hard evidence to come along and support what they’re arguing. We ought to have the technology by now to ferret out the genetic attribute, DNA strand, or brain wrinkle, unless the “switch” is buried somewhere in our makeup where we can’t yet go lookin’. Technology can do quite a lot at this point, so that would be some deep burying indeed. I’m convinced some of them are born that way. I’m also convinced some aren’t. Why does it matter, anyhow?

We were awfully mean to the Indians: Absolutely true. More than one euro-sympathetic white guy, who was alive at the time, wrote down on paper their opinion that our behavior was atrocious and demanded atonement. But it’s disingenuous to base policy decisions on that, without taking into account what Indians did to the Caucasian settlers in return. One disturbing thing that keeps surfacing from history, is the Indian who attacks Anglo-Saxons out of fear, because he knows someone who was killed by entirely different white settlers. Okay, now wait just a minute — that’s supposed to be exactly what was reprehensible and hideous when the white settlers were shooting the Indians: You’re killing Sioux Indians because some Cherokees killed your momma. Tribe A had nothing to do with Tribe B, hence the injustice. It was wrong, and bred distrust, when either side did it. How does any of this affect what we can do about it now? I don’t know. That’s the point.

Rush Limbaugh knowingly broke the law when he abused Oxycontin. I’ll buy that. Again, what are you going to do with it? Prosecute him? It’s already been tried, and the case ground to a halt because of patient confidentiality laws. Discredit some or all of what he says? That’s called an ad hominem attack; it’s flawed, intellectually lazy, and stupid. If you’re not going to prosecute and you’re not going to discredit, there’s nowhere to go with it.

My dustbin has so many things, and I think everybody else’s is bulging too. I sure hear a lot of people bitching about how too many people do too much bitching. Now that my dustbin has so many things that I have to write them down to keep track of them all, I think the problem is not that we bitch too much, but that we’re bitching about the wrong things.

The Disease

The One For Whom I Have Unlimited Affection received an e-mail last night which stumped her. It seems to be one of these things that’s going ’round the innernets, as they say, and she was at a loss as to understand how it came to her from where it was supposed to have come from. She was also at a loss as to how to reply to it. I, on the other hand, was not. I volunteered to form a reply. So this morning, she passed it on to me:

NYT, September 7, 2005

THE CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL has issued a no-nonsense warning about a new, highly virulent strain of sexually transmitted disease. This disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior.

The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim. Many victims have contracted it after having been screwed for the past 4 years, in spite of having taken measures to protect themselves from this especially troublesome disease.

Cognitive sequellae of individuals infected with Gonorrhea Lectim include, but are not limited to, anti-social personality disorder traits; delusions of grandeur with a distinct messianic flavor; chronic mangling of the English language; extreme cognitive dissonance; inability to incorporate new information; pronounced xenophobia and homophobia; inability to accept responsibility for actions; exceptional cowardice masked by acts of misplaced bravado; uncontrolled facial smirking; total ignorance of geography and history; tendencies toward creating evangelical theocracies; and a strong propensity for categorical, all-or-nothing behavior.

The disease is sweeping Washington. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed and baffled that this malignant disease originated only a few years ago in a Texas bush. Please inform any of your friends and associates who have been acting unusual lately.

And here is the reply that is going out. I wish I could say it was an extraordinarily difficult exercise of Herculean difficulty. I can’t say that. The words just flowed.

House of Eratosthenes, October 27, 2005

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF HEALTH has issued a no-nonsense warning about a new, highly virulent strain of a deadly, possibly airborn virus. This infestation defies all known logic, therefore it is impossible to determine exactly how it is transmitted.

The virus is called Blayma Lameduck. It seems one of the most hazardous ways to come in contact with the virus is through theater seats, especially when watching political propaganda thinly disguised as documentary films.

The most reliable symptom of infection is a tendency to place irrational blame on elected officials who are actually not running for re-election, for such things as: rabid-wombat-crazy terrorists murdering our troops overseas; hurricanes, tornadoes and other weather patterns; network executives ending their own careers with sleazy tabloid journalism and forged documents; and Vietnam era posers being caught fabricating Christmas trips to Cambodia. Other signs of infection include: inability to differentiate fact from opinion; inability to disagree with others, while simultaneously showing a modicum of cordiality and respect; sudden cessation of critical thinking ability, particularly when reading glossy brochures from MoveOn.Org; inability to incorporate new information; hallucination of xenophobia and homophobia where none actually exists; inability to accept responsibility for actions; rigid and irrational insistence on re-living a certain election that took place in Florida five years ago; righteous indignation during war protests; schizophrenic imaginings of extraordinarily malicious properties behind otherwise harmless Christian symbols; hero-worshipping of slutty behavior; and a marked tendency to place unlimited intellectual faith in certain dimwitted Hollywood celebrities. Victims of Blayma Lameduck have also been known to engage in reckless intercourse with strangers without the slightest demonstrated knowledge of who their sex partners are. These may include, but not limited to: terrorists, terrorist appeasers, nihilists, Nazi sympathizers, Communists, ethnic activists who want to kill white people, Islamic extremists bent on making the world a Muslim theocracy, various factions who want to destroy Israel, and limousine liberals forcing everyone else to subsidize and patronize the public educational system, while simultaneously sending their own children to private schools.

The disease has swept America with astonishing speed. Physicians and psychologists caution that while very few are susceptible, and it appears they have already been infected, this virus has the potential by 2008 to explode into unlimited, nationwide Gore. If any of your friends or associates have been acting unusual lately, don’t bother trying to inform them of this or anything else, it’s probably too late.

The Bicycle Diaries — or Are Jewelers Scum?

I live within three miles of the Jedediah Smith Trail, and for the first time in my life, I own a bicycle that really does have to be locked up because it’s worth stealing. The Trek 7300 24-speed hybrid, oh great hairy wombat gonads in the morning, this thing kicks so much ass. It just goes. Zoom!

I’ve been waiting for this environment/equipment juxtaposition for seventeen years now, back when my Iron Man ambitions had more to do with the Burke-Gilman Trail that winds around Lake Washington in Seattle. If you define “waiting” as “forgetting about it indefinitely and going to work on building up that disgusting middle-age pudge.” But I digress. Yesterday morning, successfully gobbling up all the miles between my place and the zero-marker at Discovery Park (I did, I really did, see picture), I was faced with the task of making it back home again. Second half of the return leg, I was noticing the miles were ticking by MUCH more slowly. This signals the seasoned adventurer that a reliable ETA is a figment of history, and whenever the journey ends, the physical pain is bound to be just beginning. There is no point to these two paragraphs, except to explain exactly how it came to be that I was listening to AM radio for six hours in a row, my original intentions allowing for only three.

The six hours have thoroughly convinced me of something which, up to yesterday, was simply a shallow, smoldering suspicion: There is something abysmally wrong with the jewelry industry.

It’s not that I’m in favor of some new external oversight, such as regulation, watchdog agencies, or the like. But if someone isn’t in favor of these, I don’t want to hear another word about Enron, Exxon, Halliburton or bank ATM fees.

I have conflicted feelings about this. I was tuned in to KFBK, which I have respected for a long time as a meticulously scrupulous advertiser, and still do. I think they turn away less-than-ethical accounts, evidence of which I am bound to never see, therefore of course I can’t prove this. But I have faith, because I know the goods marketed on that station are high quality. A business advertises there, I go to that business, and I’m satisfied. So a friend of KFBK is a friend of mine.

But this unnamed jeweler has been flooding the airwaves with the same advertisement — for years. The script has remained virtually unchanged. As a favor to us guys, who are like fish out of water with this whole jewelry schtick, this grandfatherly type is going to take us aside. While we’re listening to the radio, so our ladies won’t catch us actually asking for directions about things. He’s going to tell us the ins-and-outs, or at least about as much of this as he can in thirty seconds. Just enough knowledge that later on we can pretend we know something! Every straight guy knows, this is invaluable. We tip waiters ten bucks or more for it: Make us look smart; make us look good. Being “all-knowing” is one of those things that actually works. Just a shot at the poontang, Mister Waiter, and here’s your ten-spot.

But when you listen critically to these spots, over and over again, as I normally would not have been doing, you start to notice something: There is no meaningful intention for this commercial to be heard by a guy. There can’t be. It is intended to be heard by the lady. The lady, then, duped into thinking she has intercepted a message intended for the “opposition,” can then drop hints. And as we all know, the hints will continue to be dropped until they produce the desired results, or… well, or nothing. The hints will be dropped until the goods are bought, period.

I won’t pick on any one particular jeweler because there would be little point to doing so. I heard spots from two, or more, and the pattern was clear from this plurality that this perpetual hint-dropping cycle was the goal. “Advice for guys” was never anything more than a Trojan Horse.

A guy wants pussy. A guy who is a jewelry customer, wants to spend a certain amount of money to get guaranteed pussy. This is true of all straight male jewelry customers. For this clientele, there is no — none, zero, zip, zilch, nada, butkus — reason to spend that finite amount of money on anything that detracts from that primary goal. Here is a great example: “Start[ing] a collection.” A collection? Collection? Are you out of your freakin’ gourd? As if the kid’s Bionicle collection isn’t busting your ass already, just as you’re recovering from Gotta-Catchem-All Pokemon?

Here, let me define, for purpose of all gift-giving, what a “collection” is. A collection is a way of guaranteeing there will be no pleasant surprise, in the purest sense of the word “surprise,” while practically guaranteeing there will indeed be a disappointment somewhere along the line before the collection is complete. Jewelry or not: If you “start a collection” for someone as a gift, then you are a fool. A fool.

And in the realm of exchanging material items for sex, every straight guy over twenty-five already knows this.

Jewelers: Your craft is old. My bones may be dust before you ever get yours, assuming you ever do. But if I live to see the day, Jesus Jumpin’ Christ on a Pogo Stick I’m going to enjoy it so freakin’ much. I have never completely trusted you, not since I first heard about that asinine two-month-salary rule.

I have nothing at all against wolves, until they dress up like sheep. I respect your right to earn a profit and to maximize that profit. But your shenanigans do not help guys get laid, they get in the way. Since your world of capitalism is compelled to continue spinning on its axis by the desire of guys to get laid, there is something terribly perverted about this.

Political Pie

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about things that had previously made no urgent call on me for additional thought, because I have an eight-year-old son who likes to ask questions. Maybe that’s a good thing. Blundering into intellectual territory, in my patriarchally babbling way, that demands some definition for “red states” and “blue states,” I find myself wondering what things must be like for him. When I was his age there was nothing going on in politics that intruded into an eight-year-old’s domain — with the possible exception of this thing about uppity women and that “Lib” stuff. But regardless of your age, you just can’t get away from that issue about colors of states. It’s everywhere.

I’m terribly concerned about what is happening here. Long ago, before I was ever really interested in politics, I learned that the “spectrum” of liberals and conservatives was a myth. If it wasn’t mythical, then at least it could be said the single dimension fell woefully short of describing why people voted the way they did. And even now, if you exclude moderates from your analysis, attending only to True Believers on the right and on the left, it remains true. What *is* a “Conservative”? Several people willingly call themselves this, and among them, the faction is badly splintered. Some of them harbor no reservations about George W. Bush, or anything he does. At least, none that can’t be tolerated for the sake of a larger ideal. Others within this camp, have some real misgivings about him. These stalwarts insist that our President spends too much money; he lets too many illegals into the country; he does far too much compromising with the Democrats in Congress. And furthermore, anyone who would tolerate such things can’t call himself a “Real Conservative.”

That’s a hot-button issue. Another one is the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. At least those two disagreements are supported, on both sides, by hard facts. Then there is the matter of the upcoming — perhaps? — indictments of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. As of this writing, if you’ve made up your mind on whether Libby, Rove, and other indictees are deserving & worthy of continued support, you’ve made up your mind ahead of the facts. But that doesn’t stop conservatives from disagreeing about it. That’s three issues. There are more, that threaten to splinter and fray this end of the “spectrum”. That isn’t what spectrums do, so this is one reason why I find the single dimension inadequate for our times.

The same thing is happening on the liberal end. It has become a sure-fire tactic, for the red-stater cornered by an unsolicited debate about Iraq at some social gathering, to narrow his attacker’s footprint by coaxing the opposition into describing the anti-war position in more narrow, specific terms. He can say, Let us dispense with “Bush Lied, People Died” for just a second so I can get a good understanding of your position. Are you saying, Mister Liberal, that Saddam Hussein was a beneficial influence on Iraq, or that he was a source of great harm but this problem was entirely out of our bailiwick and we should have left well enough alone? Was it an acceptable exercise to invade Afghanistan and not Iraq, or were both operations morally reprehensible? Whether the “Liberal” chooses A or B, he suffers strange bedfellows who would answer the opposite, en masse. Suddenly, the pro-war defendant is arguing with an antagonist who represents not 55 or 60 percent of the electorate’s wishes, but something more like 12. But that’s something more important than a shrewd cocktail-party tactic; it’s a symptom of liberal dry rot which most liberals, if they can’t cure it, would like to keep under wraps.

This union under bumper-sticker-slogans, thinly masking a complicated division beneath the surface, is the source of the crushing defeat suffered by The Left last fall. Before a list of complaints about the status quo can be energized into a New And Imroved Plan B, several of the complaining factions lending their voices to the complaints must be alienated. They would have to be told they have joined a critical majority in complaining, but are part of an expandable minority in forming an alternate vision. Having formed both the complaint and the vision with their most turgid emotions, liberals have left themselves unable to reconcile with that bittersweet message. Even for the sake of eventual victory.

There is another problem with this one-dimensional, blue-state red-state canard — one that stems from the complex issues involved with time. Today the question of state color is defined along short-term situations. Blue-state people think George Bush is an idiot. Fine and good, but as far as being an issue, the man carries a built-in expiration date. Red-state people have their temporal problems too; they think we should stay in Iraq until the job is done. That’s wonderful, but someday the job will be done. Throughout that day, and beyond, most people who identify with one side or the other are going to want to stick with that side. They’re supposed to have deep-rooted, philosophical reasons for being there, and let’s face it: “I think George Bush is too stupid to eat a pretzel” is not a deep-rooted, philosophical belief.

Nontheless the beliefs are there. If you understand a complete stranger is opposed to abortion, for example, you have better-than-even odds that this person is also opposed to gun control, even though on the surface collecting guns doesn’t appear to have much to do with a woman carrying a pregnancy to term. Evidence of peer pressure? Not at all. When it comes to gut-wrenching policy decisions like these, most people seem to write their decisions in the indelible ink that comes from the well of their personal convictions. Whether that inkwell resides in their hearts or their brains is another question altogether, but based on what I see, even the most docile and compliant among us are unwilling to switch sides to please whoever is present. The “Chameleon” who changes his colors based on the company he keeps, seems to be on the brink of extinction.

I think that’s a good thing.

What are the philosophical questions people ask before they decide whether to become a blue-stater or a red-stater? That is the list that must be made before one can achieve true understanding about what is happening here. And that is no simple task by any means. If you’re going to chart this out into some kind of “pie” diagram — I’ve taken my own crack at this, below (click the thumbnail to view) — you can only entertain two or three questions, but it would appear there are a few more than that. Maybe as many as eight to ten, and that’s after you’ve weeded out the identity-politics questions like “Can a black guy be a racist?” and “Are men scum?”. I’ve identified five, and only five, out of what remains:

1. Sense Of Purpose: Now that we’re here, do we have some kind of moral obligation to do something meaningful, or is it a waste of time & energy to even try?

2. Faith in Authority: In a democratic society, once the commoners have invested governmental authority in the elites, which of these halves labors under the obligation of earning the trust of the other? Those who govern, or those who are governed?

3. Abundance of Life: Does the sanctity of life, in *all* its forms, preclude the worthiness of the individual goals we have formed for ourselves as thinking people?

4. Quality of Life: Is the quality and comfort of our day-to-day existence a critical goal of that existence that precludes all, or most, other goals? (Mutually exclusive from #3).

5. This is more important than the other four. I can’t capture it on the accompanying diagram, so I’ll cover it in another post later.

These are elementary questions, from which more complex positions can possibly be charted with greater precision than the old “red/blue” spectrum would allow. For example, if your answer to Question #1 points to a nihilistic mindset rather than a purposeful one, and you think what little point there is to our existence is more toward making life a more secure venture rather than a higher-quality one, you might be inclined to adopt all kinds of furry animals, and oppose the death penalty. Beasts, murderers and pedophiles, after all, have as much right to eat food and breathe oxygen as the rest of us. And your odds of being a “Blue-Stater” would probably run about 60/40. Conversely, a pure-bred capitalist would be overwhelmingly likely to be a Red-Stater, and answer “No” or “Not Applicable” to Questions #3 and #4. If you think we are driven by a great purpose, and that purpose has to do with improving the quality of our lives and the lives of others, your answer to Question #2 can be almost definitely ascertained: You are suspicious of authority, and believe our leaders should earn the trust of the electorate, rather than the other way around.

They are also very heady questions. Polite company will avoid them, and for good reason: People don’t want to “hang” with other people who would answer these questions in different ways. Even those who endlessly extoll the virtues of “diversity” — when the rubber meets the road, those people are talking about “diversity among those people who would answer Morgan’s four questions exactly the way I would, everyone else can just go pound sand.”

That’s the way people are, I’m afraid. It is our nature. We’re a tribal species.

And that is why we are so contentious today. Our political lines have been drawn based on how we look at life, and what the ultimate purpose of that life really is. It is easy to decide that stuff based on feeling, and difficult to base it on thought. The feelings are hazardous, because they’re not up for debate.

I hate tomatoes. Many a woman has tried to argue with me to make me like them, starting with Mom. They’ve all failed. You can’t argue with a feeling. And that’s the arguing we do today. It has to do with conclusions that are deeply personal, and aren’t going to be changed. Yet our public policy demands acceptance, or refutation, of these personal convictions so they *must* be debated. Perhaps we are doomed to keep yelling at each other, and calling each other big doo-doo-heads, until some of the things in our governmental structure are tucked back into our portfolios of personal preference, where they belong.

Upstaged

I’m a little too busy to write one of my endless, rambling essays around this and there isn’t too much more I can add anyway. I’ll let the article speak for itself.

Today’s timing couldn’t have been worse. A preceding segment focused on the incessant rains and ensuing flooding in the northeast. For days now, beautiful, blonde – and one senses highly ambitious – young reporter Michelle Kosinski has been on the scene for Today in New Jersey, working the story. In an apparent effort to draw attention to herself, in yesterday’s segment she turned up in hip waders, standing thigh-deep in the flood waters.

Taking her act one step further, this morning she appeared on a suburban street . . . paddling a canoe. There was one small problem. Just as the segment came on the air, two men waded in front of Kosinki . . . and the water barely covered their shoe tops! That’s right, Kosinski’s canoe was in no more than four to six inches of water!

An embarrassed Kosinski claimed the water was deeper down the street but that her producers didn’t want to let her go there for fear she’d drift away. But Katie and Matt, perhaps peeved by her attempted scene-stealing, couldn’t resist ribbing her.

Matt: “Are these holy men, perhaps walking on top of the water?”

“Gee, is your oar hitting ground, Michelle?”; inquired Katie, as she and Matt dissolved into laughter.

According to the WorldNet Daily article on the same subject, the canoe segment came right before another story about President Bush “staging” a videoconference with some soldiers serving in Iraq. WND’s source was another blog called Newsbusters, which points out some interesting things about Today’s parallel & opposite accusation of President Bush staging his videoconference.

In a deliciously ironic twist of fate, shortly before airing a segment aimed at embarrassing the Bush administration by suggesting that it had staged a video conversation between the president and soldiers in Iraq, the Today show was caught staging . . . a video stunt.

In the Bush/Iraq segment, Today screened footage indicating that prior to engaging in a video conversation with President Bush, soldiers on the ground in Iraq were given tips by a Department of Defense official.

But the only advice that the official was shown as giving was a suggestion to one solider to “take a little breath” before speaking to the president so he would actually be speaking to him. It was also stated that some of the soldiers practiced their comments so as to appear as articulate as possible. But there was no indication, or even allegation, that the soldiers were coached as to the substance of their comments or in any way instructed what to say.

Just my opinion, but I think we’re in for such a weird and surreal three years here for two reasons. First of all, President Bush is not running, and can not run, for re-election. Second, if you’re going to build entire political platforms on despising one guy who isn’t even running for anything anyway, isn’t it a strange pair of indictments? Started an “illegal and unjust war” that “resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis”…and…staged a phony conference.

Impeach him, he’s a war-criminal, mass-murderer and phony-conference-stager.

These people take themselves absolutely, one hundred percent seriously. Just unbelievable.