Nobody In Particular

Restore Point

2012-02-20T19:12:00.000-08:00

"Restore America Now"

Okay, I'll bite. Restore America to what?

Calls for the restoration of the nation always strike me as some of the most silly political rhetoric that I've ever encountered. Part of it is the reversion to childhood idea that some commentators have described. American history, it has been noted, is taught roughly chronologically as one progresses through school. The Voyage of Columbus and other pre-United States American history begins in First Grade, and you move forward in time from there. Of course, it isn't an exact correlation. There's a decent amount of jumping around that happens. But by about the time you're in Junior High, you're more or less done with early American history. And the history that many people learn is geared for children, often quite young. And so, the reasoning goes, people tend to see early history as simple and positive. So it's easy to call for a return to such times, where all of the complications and difficulties of the modern world simply didn't exist.

I can buy that, I guess. But there's another thing that I've noticed. When was the last time you saw a politician talk about going back to the way things were in front of a predominantly non-White audience? I suspect that talking about a return of the values of the middle of the last century would go over like a lead balloon with an audience of say, Japanese-Americans. Giving a speech about how America needs to return to the rugged individualism that tamed the West would likely have you running for your life from a Native American or Chinese-American audience.

For all that, politicians, when confronted with such things, will say that when they restore America to some bygone age, they'll be careful to cherry-pick only the parts that worked for everyone. It's a pretty-sounding sentiment, but I can't imagine that you'd have very much of the past left to restore the nation to, if you did that. While sure, there were opportunities and prosperity then, those things had to costs to someone, just as they do now, and who will be willing to be thrown under the bus this time? And so this is a sentiment that works only for those people that didn't have to pay the price, have no real understanding of the price that needed to be paid and are unaware of what needed to be done to extract it from those who did pay.

Infernal Flagstones

2012-02-17T19:50:00.000-08:00

As soon as I let go, I realized that ~~it was a bad idea~~ I didn't know if it was going to end well. I wasn't even sure that the man understood me. He shuffled unsteadily along the downtown street, the cup that he was holding out for change beginning to fill with dirty rainwater. It had already nearly completely covered the handful of coins that he had begged from passerby.

We'd had a pot luck for lunch at work. I'd lugged down a round loaf of wheat bread, my old rice cooker and, as it turned out, nearly a gallon of chicken noodle soup, made with large, thick egg noodles, angular chunks of carrots (along with other vegetables) and pieces of roasted chicken, some larger than my fingers. (Rice cookers, as it turns out, are excellent heating vessels for thick soups.) I find potlucks stressful, as I try to gauge how much food to bring - I always underestimate how many people any given dish will feed and I dislike bringing home leftovers. Later in the afternoon, when I was cleaning up, I was able to fill a 40+ ounce plastic container with (still slightly warm) soup. The bread had been set aside (someone had brought fresh naan) and the whole loaf was intact. I placed the container in a thin plastic bag, slipped in a fork and a spoon and set it in the paper grocery bags I had been using for transport, with the loaf of bread on top.

As I left the office for a wet Seattle afternoon (one verging, remarkably, on actual rain, rather than the persistent drizzle that normally passes itself off as genuine weather), I had the bag with the rice cooker and my serving spoons in my left hand and the bag with the soup and bread in my right. I'd gone just over a block when the man appeared on my right, on the sidewalk perpendicular to the one I was on. "Good afternoon, sir," he said, his voice no steadier than his gait. He held up the cup. His nails were long and discolored. I looked him in the face. His eyes were unfocused and a broad wedge of his scraggly, otherwise black, beard was stained a bright yellow, as if he'd attempted to drink a large cup of housepaint too quickly. My right hand came up, nearly to eye level. "This bag," I waited until he appeared to focus on it to continue. "Has bread in it. And soup." He didn't acknowledge me. He simply reached out with his free hand, and took the handles of the shopping bag. Somehow, it was a clean transfer - our hands never touched.

Immediately, the scenarios began to turn over in my mind. I've interacted with a number of homeless people over the years and once I'd given the man the leftover food I started to realize that I'd seen this kind before. This man didn't belong on the streets. He needed to be in a nursing home. I started to doubt that I'd done him a favor. By the time I was 10 yards away I wondered if he'd be able to find a place to eat, without the food being stolen from him. By the time I was 20 yards away I found myself worrying that the windfall might somehow cause him come to harm. With every passing step, a new series of events played itself out. None of them ended well. I tried to walk without thinking. The car was welcome. In it, I have to focus, pay attention to what I'm doing. There wasn't time now to worry.

Having had time to turn it over in my head, I realize that it was simply a symptom of a greater concern. The days of a homeless person, especially one who seems to be unable to really care for themselves, are numbered. Of course ALL of our days are numbered (one of these days, I suspect, my luck is going to run out during my commute), but it strikes me that for someone without a roof over their head, I can almost see the Grim Reaper standing behind them, mocking me with the knowledge that they are going to _take_ this person, one way or another. I do things, now and again, but it never feels like ~~enough~~ anything, honestly. I don't ever feel that I've put one more moment between them and the Grim Reaper. But for some reason, with this man, I suddenly felt that what I'd intended to be an act of utility (I was done with bread and soup for a while, and didn't want to see it go to waste), if not strictly of kindness, was going to backfire. That I was hastening the very thing that I wanted to keep at bay.

I don't really know why I suddenly felt that way. After all, it was clear to me that this man had been on the streets for some time. Years, likely. I doubt that he was completely unable to look after himself. Maybe it was simply that he struck me as old and confused. Maybe he just struck me as a bit too Skeksis. Maybe a feeling that I should have looked for something more to do for him had become corrupted. But what's done is done. And will come will come. And I make an uneasy peace with the world, unsatisfied that once again, that I do so on its terms, and not my own.

Axiom

2012-02-15T19:57:00.000-08:00

No story about how a particular practice is unjust that is short enough to be read and digested is long enough to be discussed.

Someone will either open a round of misery poker out of feeling that the omission of any mention of crimes against their group denies them well deserved victim credibility, or start the cataloging of sins to satisfy themselves that those who trespassed against them won't "get away" with anything. Whichever one it is, the discussion will be sidetracked into a tit-for-tat discussion of individual wrongs and perhaps justifications.

The only way to avoid this is to have such a comprehensive catalog of individual incidents of injustice that it would effectively be infinite.

Lead Torchbearer

2012-02-14T21:06:00.000-08:00

"What an evil little thing. Poor thing. And it's not her fault. She's being ... trained to be like that."
Rhode Island State Representative Peter G. Palumbo (D - Cranston)

Okay. I get it. Atheists are Different, and That's Bad. And I'm starting to suspect that Atheist parents are raising their children to be too brittle, using them as weapons against the dominant culture or both. Back when I was an Atheist teenager in Roman Catholic high school, the idea that I would have felt alienated and that I didn't belong over a prayer on the wall would have seemed ludicrous. I had plenty of other reasons for feeling like I didn't belong there, but even the Benedictine monks who ran the place didn't seem put out by my stated disbelief.

But for a State Representative to go on the air, apparently to score points with constituents by bashing a teenage girl who's already been receiving death threats*? Even if Palumbo is being absolutely sincere in his assertion that Jessica Ahlquist is both an evil thing and a pawn of evil parents and/or mentors, that strikes me as the sort of politically craven bullshit that gives politics a bad name. I understand the political impulse to rush to the head of any parade that forms and proclaim yourself the leader. But when you're seeking props for leading a lynch mob, you're feeding into the biggest problem that we have right now - the reflexive demonization of people who publicly proclaim themselves to be different.

Publicly throwing one of your constituents to the wolves shouldn't be a viable campaign tactic, but it is. And I suppose that I understand that. For all of its calls for Democracy and Enlightenment (sometimes, it appears, at the point of a gun), the United States is just as tribal and petty as the rest of humanity, for all that we constantly tell ourselves otherwise. "I'm just like you - I understand your hatreds and fears," works, and so it's a tool in the political arsenal. I suspect that had Palumbo taken the high road on this one, it would have become a campaign tool against him in the next election cycle. And the problem with political courage is that if you're voted out of office, you can't save the world anymore.

* To be honest, I don't normally take such threats seriously. There's some broken bit of the American psyche that revels in the fear and stress caused by threatening to murder those one disagrees with. But when facing the consequences of so serious an action, that same bit of the American psyche forces its host to fold like a bad hand of cards. We, as a nation, have become host to legions of craven bullies, seeking to frighten one another to conformity from the safety of anonymity. But people have been murdered for being outside the mainstream, so it's dangerous to be too dismissive.

Branded

2012-02-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

The trouble with brand management is that it's very easy to move from always putting your best foot forward to attempting to censor reality to project the image that you understand you need to project. Like so many businesses, people and movements that have gone before, Occupy Wall Street seems to be having some difficulties in this area. Tim Poole, once heralded as a chronicler of a movement that couldn't rely on the "mainstream media" to tell the public about what was happening has now become a thorn in the side of those who feel that success demands unaccountability to the authorities and controlling the information that gets out about them.

In the end, it's a simple enough issue - There are members of Occupy Wall Street for whom "civil disobedience" means "not having to obey laws that get in the way." Or, perhaps more simply, anarchy. And there is something to the idea that it's hard to be an anarchist if the authorities know what you look like, and that documentation of what happened destroys plausible dependability. But it's also a question of what's really at stake. Having an open and transparent society is a different goal than exposing the crimes of those you see as villains. People who see themselves as "the good guys" always have a reason for wanting to keep certain information under wraps. And sometimes, their reasons are perfectly valid.

The flip side of that, of course, is the pseudo-Machiavellian idea that one's ends justify one's means, and that being on of "the good guys" is a prima facie justification for one's actions. Whether they see it that way, or not, that's one of the primary things that Occupy Wall Street is fighting against. They may see the current system as the root of all evil, but its backers don't see it that way. They understand themselves to be working to uphold a free and civil society, even one that comes with some drawbacks. And in the name of preserving public support for themselves, they hide the ugly parts from view. That's a function of human nature. We think of ourselves as above it at our peril.

Fame

2012-02-11T22:31:00.000-08:00

We're always surprised when famous, or once-famous, people die suddenly, especially when those deaths come across as self-inflicted. And I think that has to a lot with the way that we view ourselves and our lives. Most of us have difficulties in our daily lives, some of them serious. In fact, if the average American meets their end by gunshot wound, they're more likely to have pulled the trigger themselves than to have been gunned down by a criminal. For many of us, the fame, fortune and adoration that goes along with celebrity would be the answers to all of our problems. But the reality is somewhat less uplifting.

Celebrity comes with its own set of stressors, problems and issues. Not being a celebrity myself, I have no first-hand knowledge of what they are, but when you look at the number of celebrities who have driven themselves to untimely ends, you realize that they have to be there. But we never seem to hear about them. Sure, the news is always full of stories that remind us that a celebrity "struggled with drugs and alcohol," but there's often precious little information about what sparked those struggles. The default assumption is that Hollywood is simply a decadent place, awash in booze and dope, and that some of the people that the entertainment world sucks in simply aren't strong enough to resist its vices.

But it's more likely that the bright lights of the big city simply don't prepare people to deal with the stresses that are placed on them. You could contrast this with the life of a politician, which likely has a heaping basket of its own stressors, but the people who deal with them seem to be better prepared. While politicians often self-destruct, it's rarely at the cost of their lives - but sometimes the effects can be quite a bit more far reaching. (One wonders what would have happened if one Jack Ryan had won a Senate seat in 2004, rather than been taken down by the details of his divorce...) Of course, like most of us, many celebrities learn to roll with the punches, and they survive both the spotlight and the twilight that follows it being turned elsewhere. The problem is that we never hear from them again, and their names fade from memory. The ones that flare brightly one last time before extinguishing, however, sear themselves onto the news cycle one last time, and color our entire understanding of what celebrity is like. That they do this without us in the public ever seeming to gain any greater understanding of the problems that celebrity brings sets us up for another surprise, the next time the media kicks into high gear to bring us up-to-the-minute coverage of a celebrity's untimely demise.

Brothers

2012-02-09T21:08:00.000-08:00

A Reunion in Seattle.

Choose

2012-02-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

[Charles] Murray [author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010] calls for more interaction between the classes; specifically, he'd like upper-middle-class Americans to "drop their nonjudgmentalism and start preaching what they're practicing."

They "are getting married and staying married. They work like crazy. They do better going to church. [They should] just say that, 'These are not choices we've made for ourselves. ... These are rich, rewarding ways of living.' "
Is White, Working Class America 'Coming Apart'?

So... How is that not a choice? Even if I postulate that there are objectively better ways of living than others; that some choices, simply by making and following through on them lead to richer and more rewarding lives, they are still choices. Murray's point, that these are not arbitrary, meaningless choices, becomes lost. Murray focuses almost solely on White America in this book to avoid one of the major pitfalls that he stumbled into in The Bell Curve, the idea that he's preaching that some people are, simply by virtue of who they are, better and more deserving of others.

Depending on how he's worded his message in Coming Apart, he may or may not manage it. While it may be NPR's wording and not Murray's, "less industrious" has become a buzzword; usually meaning "lazy." It gets people fired up for one simple reason - being poor does not usually mean a life of leisure. Unskilled work of the sort that normally pays poorly isn't any easier than more-highly skilled labor. In fact, one of the primary reasons why many parents throughout American history have been so keen to have their children educated was specifically so they wouldn't have to do the sort of labor-intensive work that they themselves had done. You will find it difficult to convince many people that laborers who toil for long days in the fields are "less industrious" than those who spend their time burning the midnight oil in an air-conditioned office tower where a hot (if not always healthy or inexpensive) meal is as close as a cellular telephone call.

Of course, the implicit judgment there is that all work is created equal. That Effort + Time = Wealth, and that's all there is to it - high skill or rare knowledge have nothing to do with it. I don't know if Murray's book supports that, or, if like any number of other people he selected the anecdotes that occurred to him and lets the correlation pass for causality.

Tell Me a Story

2012-02-01T19:26:00.000-08:00

Adam Davidson touches upon our need for a single correct narrative of events that comports with what we want to understand to be true. This is a difficult topic to work with, because the idea of wanting something to be true implies a certain level of intentional self-deception and so people shy away from the thought. But it's important to realize that everything that we believe has a level of conscious or unconscious will attached to it. We believe things because, on some level, we are willing to believe them. While a commitment to our own sense of objectivity often leads us to think that we believe things that we'd rather not, the actual fact of the matter is that if you really don't want to believe something, you don't believe. Intellectual consistency or standards of evidence don't tell us that we MUST believe - they reassure us that it's OKAY to believe.

The central question of Mr. Davidson's column "It Is Safe To Resume Ignoring The Prophets Of Doom....Right?" brushes up against the flip side of this. the tendency to seek reassurance that it's okay not to believe things that, for whatever reason, we'd rather not believe. Even when we've already seen evidence that what we're pushing aside is reality. In Davidson's case, this is a doubly important question. After all, Mr. Davidson is a journalist, and for respected media outlets at that. For all that we should really know better many of us begrudge the time it takes to seek out and synthesize multiple viewpoints into a coherent (if complex) whole, and so we tend to fall back on those media sources that we trust. Although, it should be pointed out that in many cases "trust" is something of a euphemistic way of saying "fits in with my preconceptions about the world."

And this walling ourselves off from "untrusted" sources is dangerous. In the run up to the financial crisis it undermined those who began to suspect that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, and reduced the cognitive dissonance that a belief in economic perpetual motion may have engendered. And it allows us to believe that we already know the truth of the matter - all that we need do is find the right sources to corroborate, and our work is done.

Mr. Davidson, in the long form of his column, makes a very important point, even while he seeks to use it as a means of covering himself, rather than confess to a shortcoming:

The economy is so complex that any forecaster must construct a simplified model that is an inexact fit for reality. Some models explain some periods better than others, but no model explains everything correctly. Choosing just one can be like choosing a religion — you ignore the faults in your own belief system and don’t pay much attention to the good ideas in someone else’s.

The problem is that there’s no perfect model.
Adam Davisdon "It Is Safe to Resume Ignoring the Prophets of Doom ... Right?" The New York Times Magazine. Tuesday, 1 February, 2012.

Instead, I submit that the twin problems that we deal with are that we tend to search for explanatory narratives for complex phenomena that are both simplified and perfect and when seeking to educate us, media outlets cater to this, and tend to seek out models that are not only simplified, but attractive. Few wanted to hear that the economic activity that was being driven by the housing bubble was based on unsustainable levels of debt, masked by illusory growth in household wealth. So no model of that narrative, no matter how correct, was palatable.

But when people with real money on the line were found to have realized that the ground was shifting beneath them, and started preparing for the new reality, we were shocked, and then outraged. But little of what they had done was a secret. Wedded to the rosy models that they wanted to be correct, the financial media simply waved away the story.

I often find myself wondering if the world really is a complicated as I understand it to be, or if I've created an overly-involved and cluttered model of the world because it self-justifies the decisions that I've made. I avoided being caught up in the housing bubble mainly because of circumstances outside of my own control. I'm not certain that I would have avoided being taken in. But while I'm sure that I'm better off with a messy, convoluted and sometimes contradictory worldview that eschews narratives for so many things, I've also learned that it's dangerous to become comfortable with it. Unchallenged, it ossifies, and the world moves on without it, even while it blinds me to the changes. And when none are forthcoming, seeking out challenges is work, and easy to put off until another day. Because I'm a smart person, who's in touch with the world around me. I won't become too caught up in attractive, but inaccurate narratives... right?

Dealing In Outrage

2012-01-30T20:39:00.000-08:00

Did you know that Freddie Mac is betting against hardworking Americans struggling to pay off their mortgages - and stacking the deck so that it wins the bet? It's true! I read it on NPR!

Except that the NPR piece doesn't tell the whole story. In fact, if you think about it in the context of such basic lending concepts of "interest rate risk," why lending institutions sell loans in the first place and what constitutes a "bet," you quickly come to realize that the story here isn't about big Wall Street banks colluding with a government sponsored enterprise to rip off home-buyers who are barely keeping their heads above water. The story here is about how it's pretty much impossible to balance competing interests in a way that everyone comes out ahead. And perhaps how a news outlet spins a story to drive pageviews and position itself as a populist champion for the downtrodden while ignoring important underlying issues that simply wouldn't be as sexy in the current news environment.

To go into detail about how the story takes a financial quandary and turned into fodder for misplaced populist anger threatens to become a deeper analysis of the whys and wherefores of mortgage lending than I'm really comfortable with writing myself. To make a long story short, the FHLMC is in a position where it serves multiple constituencies: the banks (big and small) that originate home loans, the home buyers who take out the loans, the investors who buy securities on the loans and the taxpayers of the United States, who are the ones who have to make up shortfalls in the FHLMC's finances. This particular NPR story pits the home buyers against the taxpayers. The FHLMC stands accused of making it harder for homeowners to refinance, while at the same time having structured its portfolio in such a way that if large numbers of the mortgages it purchased are refinances, it would lose quite a bit of (taxpayer) money. Or, to be a little more breathless about it, "Freddie Mac prevented households from being able to take advantage of today's mortgage rates — and then bet on it."

The story contends that by siding with the taxpayers, that Freddie Mac chose the wrong side. Because, you see, there's a win-win, if only Freddie Mac would take it:

"There is an argument for [... the actions of the FHLMC being better for taxpayers in general, even though it harms many home buyers] and the Obama Administration and the regulator who controls them have to weigh helping out taxpayers generally against more specific homeowners, but as Chris [Arnold] said, it's very possible that a lot of refinancings could help the economy and taxpayers in the long run."
Jessie Isginger, Pro Publica

Part of the problem here goes back to the multiple masters that the FHLMC was intended to serve. Whenever you set up a system designed to look out for the interests of groups whose interests are directly at odds with one another, someone is going to be screwed. NPR and Pro Publica decided that there was an easy way out, in the form of making the assumption that the taxpayer subsidy that would be given to home purchasers in the form of letting them off the hook for the interest that they originally agreed to pay would be made up for in a new refi-financed spending spree that would drive economic activity to the point that all of the lost revenue would be made up.

In other words, THIS would be the economic stimulus plan that finally worked. Proof of that? None. But this isn't unexpected. After all, it only an eight-minute piece. And it would likely take at least a couple of hours to lay out all the reasoning that underlies their position.

But even if it were explained, would it be any less a "bet?" In fact, it seems like more of a literal gamble than buying a mortgage with a payment stream attached and expecting that payment stream to actually be there. Remember how "frugality" was supposed to be "the new normal?" So... what happens if rather than blowing it on consumer goods, a sizable percentage of these people put the money into the bank? Or pay down other debts? In other words, what happens if this new bet, the one that NPR and Pro Publica are pushing, doesn't pay off? What will their headline be then?

All or Nothing

2012-01-30T20:32:00.000-08:00

"Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community -- it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall."
Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield (R - Knoxville)

When a friend of mine pointed out an article about Senator Campfield being booted from a restaurant, he noted that, "The sheer volume of ignorance here dates back to the Reagan administration." I beg to differ. This is the sort of ignorance that many people wouldn't have 'fessed up to during the Wilson administration. But, in any event, it raises an interesting question: Is Senator Campfield REALLY ignorant? Or is he simply pandering to a constituency that simply wants to believe that anyone who transgresses their taboo against same-sex relationships would also have no problem with having sex with pretty much anything else that wasn't a human of the opposite gender?

It's a fairly common practice, and one that's always good for some Red Meat to the base. And if we believe that politicians aren't above saying all sorts of stupid, crazy or otherwise ill-considered things when pandering for votes, why should we be surprised when they reference the lowest form of bigotry out of a desire to appeal to the people who vote for them? After all, bigots can vote too, and like many people, they prefer to live in communities of the like minded. Sooner or later, someone is going to come along who, even if they don't believe a word of it themselves, is going to talk the talk to get into office. (If they can do it without feeling the need to scrub themselves clean for hours every night afterwards, that's too bad - but not unexpected.)

But it makes the problem larger than we like to think that it is. Because Senator Campfield's coded assertion that homosexuals will sleep with anything isn't the problem. The fact that he can go on the record with that without committing political suicide is. And not because the people in and around Knoxville, Tennessee have some obligation to be enlightened enough that sexual orientation doesn't matter. If they want to believe homosexuality is a sin, that's between them and the deity they profess to believe in. But it's still slander to call a thief a rapist. Their unwillingness to stop with what those they dislike have actually done, and to expect those that represent them will not stop there either, is where they cross the line.

P.S.: For a somewhat more plausible explanation of the AIDS pandemic, listen to RadioLab on the topic. I don't know that it's the correct explanation, but it's better than Campfield's.

Nothing To Hide

2012-01-29T20:52:00.000-08:00

"People who are abiding by the law should have no problems with this," said [Fort Lauderdale Police Department Detective Travis] Mandell. "People may feel that their privacy is being infringed on, but when you think about it, every day you walk down the street you are being watched by 20 to 30 cameras from private businesses and homes."
Police roll out video surveillance truck called The Peacemaker

This is a common refrain, designed to put people at ease with more and more police surveillance. And, to be sure, the police are simply doing the job we ask of them. When we say "catch everyone who does something scary and lock them up, and we'll pillory you when you can't," it's to be expected that the police, like anyone else, are going to look for a way to carry out that mandate.

There are a couple problems that I have with this. The first is that I don't trust someone who's a complete stranger any more than I would under any other circumstance, simply because they're wearing a badge. A badge is a symbol - not a mind-control device the keeps people from doing bad things or misusing information that they become privy to. The simple fact that someone is wearing one doesn't make them any more trustworthy than they were an hour before then.

The second is this: What's the definition of "abiding by the law?" Are you sure?

Sec. 16-97. - Misprision.

It shall be unlawful for any person to commit misprision. A person commits misprision when, having knowledge of the commission of a crime or offense in this city, fails to report it to the police department.

Okay, so let's assume they're not going to get you on that one. And you're pretty much covered all around, because you've memorized the entire municipal code of the city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and know everything you can and cannot do. Good for you! That mean's you're aware of this:

Sec. 16-1. - State offenses and county ordinances adopted.

(a) State felony. It shall be unlawful for any person to commit, within the corporate limits of the city, any act which is or shall be recognized by the laws of the state as a capital felony, felony of the first degree, felony of the second degree, or felony of the third degree.

(b) State misdemeanor. It shall be unlawful for any person to commit, within the corporate limits of the city, any act which is or shall be recognized by the laws of the state as a misdemeanor.

So... are you up on the Florida Statutes? Because if you aren't, are you positive that you're abiding by the law?

Of course, it's unlikely that the FLPD will find (or even look for) a way to use their camera trucks to find some poor sod who witnessed or learned about a state-level crime and then didn't report it. And that's not really my point. Actually, despite the exercise that we just went through, my point isn't even that the pool of law abiding citizens is likely smaller than you might think that it is.

Instead, the point is that "People who are abiding by the law," is more or less meaningless as a legal term in this context. Rather it's a public-relations term, that can be roughly translated as "people who trust the police and don't do anything that calls police attention to them."

Which brings us back to the "20 to 30 cameras from private businesses and homes." These can be problematic in their own right, but they, generally speaking, aren't being manned by people who have the power to detain you for simply being weird. (Or, to quote the municipal code, loitering in a place "at a time or in a manner not usual for law-abiding individuals." How's that for descretionary?) The police can, and to a certain degree are expected to, detain you for simply not bahaving the same as everyone else. And let's not forget the more serious laws that you may have unknowingly broken. (And remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse - in fact, there are some cases where being intentionally deceived by another isn't an excuse either.)

The answer to this isn't to expect the police to dial it back a notch. It's for us to start going through and culling out laws. As near as I can tell, I don't live in a jurisdiction with a misprision ordinance, so I'm not breaking that particular law. But then again, I'm not completely conversant in the legal structures of King County or the State of Washington, so maybe if they looked, they'd have me on something else. (By the way, some of you Occupy types may want to watch out.) When our laws are too long and complicated for you to actually be able to know which ones you've followed and which ones you've blown off in the past six hours or so, people start to become twitchy about the whole "people who are abiding by the law," thing, because they start to understand that they don't actually fit into that category. Even if they don't understand exactly why until a police officer shows up at their door with a photograph.

But It Says So Right Here

2012-01-26T20:04:00.000-08:00

"Based on something he read online, an Oklahoma state senator has introduced a bill..."

And it just goes downhill from there.

Personally, I suspect that this guy is actually super-deep cover; perhaps a gerbil or a cabbage masquerading as a human. Or maybe this is simply a particularly convoluted scheme by Plankton to get his hands on the Krabby Patty formula. It's hard to believe that one could get into high school, let alone a legislature, without having figured out that you shouldn't take at face value everything you read on the internet, especially those things that push your emotional buttons. To borrow a phrase, if your immediate reaction is "Must. Denounce. Now," that's the time when getting an independent verification of the facts is most important. After all, it's the people who you're convinced would never lead you astray who you're most likely to allow to lead you astray.

Believe With Me

2012-01-24T21:00:00.000-08:00

I've already written about the somewhat raw deal that people of various faiths find themselves confronting whenever they deal with people who don't believe the same things that they do.

But the fact that Washington State is moving ever closer to legalizing same-sex marriage is giving a certain segment of the Christian community the opportunity to demonstrate that they, too, can seem to forget that not everyone else the world, or even the state, thinks in the same way that they do.

One common lament that has been making the rounds lately is that, "God defined marriage and it is not for man to redefine." Another is: "It is a very sad day when we get to choose which one of God's laws we will obey and which ones we will choose not to." But if one is Wiccan, or practices Shinto, what does it matter what the Judeo-Christian-Moslem god defines marriage as? Why should anyone who doesn't follow an Abrahamic religion or one of its offshoots care? But more importantly, why should they agree that religious strictures from faiths they don't follow are valid reasons for civil and/or criminal legislation? After all, if Christian legislators in Tennessee can convince themselves that practicing Sharia law should be punishable by up to 15 years imprisonment, why would they think anyone else wants to have to follow religious laws from faiths they don't practice? Or religious laws that simply differ from their own understanding of the religion? After all, it's not like the dietary laws were expunged from the Bible; but you'd have a hard time codifying them into law. Hand wringing about "picking and choosing" would likely be of little use.

While "legally-mandated lip service" isn't really the correct term for it, it's one that always comes to mind. Of course a more accurate way to look at things from the point of view of believers is that "Right makes Right" - the "fact" that they are morally correct gives them the right to legislate their beliefs into laws that everyone else must follow. This is perfectly understandable, if not exactly desirable. But it veers into the odd when its presented as a perfectly straightforward reason that everyone should sign on to. Part of it, I suspect, is the idea that often comes up that deep down inside, everyone is actually a conservative Christian, or wants to be. If the Pope can maintain that the targets of forcible conversion wanted in their heart of hearts to be converted at any cost, it's not too much of a stretch to believe that everyone secretly wants to be a pew every Sunday. There's also the corollary that what we're seeing is a childish temper tantrum thrown by a willful Humanity against a parental deity - claims of disbelief are simply disingenuous attempts to get around having to follow bothersome rules. But I think that part of it is also the flip side of what many religious people themselves deal with - the idea that one's own beliefs are so self-evident that no-one can honestly see things any differently. This is aided and abetted by the somewhat homogenous nature of American society. While the United States is not exclusively Christian, it is overwhelmingly so, and so its possible to go quite some time (perhaps one's whole life) without ever actually meeting anyone who professes to be otherwise. And so it becomes much easier to assume that everyone else thinks and believes in the same way. And for many people, the whole world isn't much different than whatever community they are currently a part of - it's just bigger. Despite the fact that the continental United States is some three thousand miles from East to West, people still experience unexpected culture shock after moving a significant distance. Despite the fact that many large states have populations large enough to be decent-sized nations themselves, many Americans are taken off-guard by things that are different than the way they were used to them.

As unbelievable as some find it, however, we do not all believe alike. Therefore appeals to and expectations of a universal understanding and adherence to faith will fall on as many deaf ears as appeals to and expectations of a universal agnosticism have.

Bad News

2012-01-19T20:57:00.000-08:00

"The 24-hour blackout and adverse reaction from Internet users was over the right of business — notably Hollywood and the publishing and recording industries — to make a profit on its work, versus maintaining free and open access to the Internet."
"Internet's dark day: Anti-piracy bills take a beating" The Seattle Times, Wednesday, 18 January, 2012.

First, a question. Does anyone actually know someone who disputed the rights of businesses to make a profit, and claimed that was their reason for opposing SOPA and PIPA? I know of no such people. I suppose that they could be out there, and there are people who oppose profit-making businesses, but if it took SOPA and PIPA to get them motivated, I have news for them: the rules that allow for businesses to make a profit on their work were enacted a long time ago. That ship sailed without them.

For myself, if I had to pick two reasons why most web denizens were upset by SOPA and PIPA, and the reasons for Wednesday's protest, they would be these, the fact that the laws have the fingerprints of MPAA and RIAA lobbying efforts all over them and the lack of due process protections for the accused. (If I'm wrong on that, correct me, please.) Although I'm sure there were many other reasons, these two jump out at me, given what I've been reading online. The other reasons that the article sites for opposition ("Opponents claim the measures would stifle innovation, limit service and impel companies to monitor users.") are also true, but those are more corporate, rather than public, objections.

In portraying the anti-SOPA/PIPA protest as basically being one of Communists for a Free Internet®, the Seattle Times article violates what I've come to feel is the first rule of reporting - presenting factual information in a way that educates an audience that might be ignorant of what's actually happening. After all, if everyone already knows everything there is to know about a topic, why bother reporting on it? And if you're not going to get the facts straight, what has been gained? Any poor sod who gets into a discussion over Congress' efforts to deal with issues of media piracy and intellectual property theft and trots out the line that he read in the Times is going to be treated as at best an idiot and a worst a troll or corporate shill. When, in this case, their real crime is taking an unsourced statement (the article seems to shy away from actually asking incensed internet users why they were up in arms) and taking it as a fact.

Not being perfect myself, I don't expect perfection. But this is more than a simple error; correctly or not, it smacks of an agenda being promoted. And as much as I'm a proponent of never relying on single sources of information, when news outlets appear to be partial, they tar an entire profession. That's too high a price to pay for not bothering to get the facts. (And don't get me started about the title...)

Time For A Change?

2012-01-18T19:33:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's about time that people started calling for a wholesale reform of intellectual property laws (including much needed clarifications), or just our system of laws in general. After all, SOPA and PIPA are not the only bad laws to be proposed. And, if passed, they won't be the only bad laws enacted.

We've become too comfortable in the fact that most of the really nasty laws that are on the books just aren't our problem, and so we ignore them. Sure, waves are made when some media outlet presents the story of the some sympathetic sod who's spending life in prison for what seems to be little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but having that one person released from prison doesn't take the law off the books, and when the person in jail strikes us as just another gang-banger, we shrug and walk away.

The reason why so much money is spent lobbying for intellectual property laws is that entire business models are based around the ability to sell an idea. Often multiple times. And the laws aren't our only worry. When Sawyer and Mann sued Thomas Edison over his light bulb, their claim of patent infringement was based on the idea that they had patented making an incandescent filament out of any fibrous or textile material. They hadn't done any experimentation to determine what material might work - they just applied for, and received a patent for any and everything that fit the bill. They lost. Today, even though the laws haven't really changed, they would have won, because the judicial climate has changed. Patents too broad to be upheld a century ago are now routinely used as weapons. And guess whose pockets the money for the litigation comes from, when Microsoft sues Apple sues HTC sues Motorola, and so on and so on? But when the risk of having a web site taken down due to some errant pop songs comes along, out come the torches and the pitchforks.

We shouldn't wait for these things to be in our collective faces to start understanding what our laws are, and how they may be used - and for what purposes. It's a pretty safe bet that were I an unscrupulous prosecutor, I could have you put on trial right now, with the chance of a life sentence if you were convicted - without a shred of physical evidence that you'd ever committed a crime. It happens all the time in drug cases. The word a felon is enough, even if I'm going to let them out of what you're going to get for testifying against you. Oh, and by the way... Even if you could prove that I set you up - I would have immunity from prosecution.

Nice, huh?

I'm not in the business of outrage peddling, so don't feel badly if you're not ready to be up-in-arms. Besides, I wouldn't expect you to take my word for it. But the United States legal code is a very long document. And it's the things about it that we don't know that can really hurt us. And if we let it stay that way long enough, it will.

Playing The Numbers

2012-01-17T20:13:00.000-08:00

Occupy Wall Street is being credited with starting a nationwide dialog about income inequality. Okay, I suppose. I guess I can give them that. But because I don't think that this is what they really set out to do, they didn't spark a dialog about why incomes in the United States are so unequal.

When I was growing up, my father taught me some very important lessons about work and jobs. Some of them I wish he hadn't, but a couple of them have really stuck with me due to their simplicity and obviousness.

There are two people connected to every job. The person who gives a job, and the person who gets a job. One of these is a better position to be in than the other.

There are two ways to make money from a job. You can either do something that other people can't do, or do something that other people won't do.

Sometimes, I think that people buy in too heavily to the idea of the value of work. Work, in and of itself, isn't worth all that much. People who work as field labor spend a lot of time working, and they work very hard - they don't clear all that much for their efforts. In order to advance themselves, many people in that situation are forced into a level of frugality that many Americans find completely impossible to imagine. Having enough money to save requires a remarkably low standard of living, considering the surroundings.

This is mainly because, despite the fact that many Americans find the work to be difficult, degrading and uncomfortable, farm workers are more or less a dime a dozen. The average migrant simply doesn't bring rare enough skills to the table, nor are they unique enough, to command a higher wage. The people who are making the big bucks on the other hand, often have skills that are very difficult to get. They also have a certain level of connections to people who can recommend them for high-paying jobs, but the old adage that "It's not what you know, it's who you know," has never really been as true as people have thought that it was. Closer to the truth is "It's not just what you know, it's who knows what you know." While there are always those people who park an incompetent friend or relation in a well-paying job simply to keep them out of the way, much more commonly wealthy people can display skills that the rest of us lack.

They have, to use an analogy, won a lottery, and they're reaping the rewards of that win. Sure, there are those people who claim that people who have made their fortunes invariably put in an amount of effort absolutely commensurate with their compensation, but as far as I'm concerned, the term "Just World Fallacy" exists for a reason. But this isn't to say that the people on the top have had all the luck, and left none for the rest of us. Many of us, seduced by the apparent ease with which many people seem to have made it big, spend too much of our time wishing for their talents, rather than cultivating our own. We wish that we'd won someone else's lottery, and neglect whatever prize we might have at hand. Talents, like work, are not created equal, and some people have more marketable abilities than others, and so even if everyone cultivated their talents to the fullest, there would still be a certain amount of income inequality, and as technology makes it more efficient to reach larger markets and larger audiences, the "winner take all" phenomenon that develops exacerbates the problem.

But I think that one of the issues that Occupy Wall Street railed against, even if it never articulated it, was the fact that many of us have become interchangeable, and thus, disposable. And in a world where many of us do not directly create the things that we need to survive, being just another face in an endless sea of people is a one-way ticket to a life of poverty. When Elizabeth Warren gave her talk on "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class," she pointed out that it now takes a college degree to land a middle-class job, where once it only required a high-school diploma. And as college attendance rates push upwards, it's likely to eventually become the case that one will need a graduate degree to stand out enough to command a respectable salary. (On the flip side, the high cost of college and graduate school carries with it a real risk of creating a permanent class divide, with a split between those who can afford the skills required to command high wages, and those who cannot.)

Of course, this also leaves doing things that others won't do. For instance, I always heard, growing up, that garbage men made a fairly decent living, for the work that they did. It was the stereotypical "dirty job" that no-one wanted. But as another example, it's pretty easy to come by "good enough" photographs of everyday people, places and things, and this is really undermining the profession of photography. But the guy who flies back and forth over an airport to get just the right aerial shot of a jumbo jet taking off or treks into the back country for a week and a half to come back with photographs of animals that just can't be seen anywhere else? They're going to be able to command high prices for their work, simply by virtue of going above and beyond.

But neither of these concepts fit neatly into the idea of "merit" as we've often been taught to think of it, and perhaps that explains why there is so much discontent with the way things work. We've been sold, as a society, a somewhat false view of the way things actually work, while the people who see through it go on to make themselves wealthy. But if that's the case, it suggests a starting point for a way out.

Wait... Who Are "They," Again?

2012-01-14T15:18:00.000-08:00

When people refer to "Them/They" or to "the Establishment," am I the only one who wonders just who they're talking about - and if they're taking résumés?

The Dearth of Nations

2012-01-11T19:22:00.000-08:00

For what is a nation?
Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, by “bonds of affection ... mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone”?
If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation? The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birth rate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America.
Pat Buchanan

Maybe I'm just dim, but it seems by this standard that America never WAS a nation. The extermination of the native population was incomplete, non-Christian/non-white people were forcibly brought in to combat a shortage of labor for manpower-intensive cash crops, and immigration has consistently come from pretty much every nation on Earth, to the point where it is said there are municipalities in the United States that have larger ethnic populations than any other city on Earth, including those in the nations of origin. But even if the entire population could trace direct descent to the crews of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria (and there had been women aboard these ships) the United States would fail the common ancestry and culture tests, and quite possibly the religion test as well.

Therefore, it seems unlikely that Buchanan is actually looking to any actual period of American history with this lament (especially not the mid-to-late 1880s) but to yet another of the fictional halcyon days that many people long for. Their very fictitiousness is an advantage - never having actually existed, they are not freighted with the flaws and imperfections that all actual historical timeframes are saddled with. They are wonderfully blank slates, upon which one is able to write whatever fantasies come to mind. And this is what makes them so compelling. They can be the very picture of just the perfection one wants, utterly devoid of any of the complications, messiness and compromises that reality imposes upon the world as it actually exists.

Such fictitious pasts also serve another purpose, in that they become proofs that blows to national pride, economic hardship and social dissonance are all the result of the Other - those who ancestry, culture, language and religion are foreign. All Bad Things were imported from without. And in this, imagined histories become havens from the slings and arrows of outrageous reality by virtue of allowing for a retreat into victimhood. As the many people who prevent one's perfect nation from being created are surely not going anywhere, their stubborn refusal to be deported (or in extreme cases, exterminated) provides a neverending supply of scapegoats, upon whom can blamed whatever new ills tomorrow (or dinnertime) might bring; and their presence can be construed as a deliberate affront - the temerity of people who would rather despoil Paradise than remain in their own justly benighted lands. Even those whose bodies littered the battlefields and lie in patriot graves are unredeemed by their bravery if their descendants are not properly invisible.

By the same token, the fact that the Other prevents the imagined past from ever becoming real means that a similarly imagined future may be dreamed of, but never need be tested. One need never learn how bonds of affection or mystic chords of memory will fare against the temptation to assault, rape, steal from and murder one's countrymen, as no nation is pure enough that some unwarranted mixing cannot be blamed. And thus the very people whom it is imagined create the need for a sanctuary are the ones conscripted to holding open its doors.

It's convenient to wonder where such ideas come from, but it doesn't take much pondering to see how a simple world would seem better than the one we have, which can seem complex to the point of being willfully and maliciously chaotic. Do what you will, but the world is always the greater force, and at times we seem ill-equipped to deal with it. The idea, that were it not for dangerous ethnic groups and sinister elites, that many of today's problems would never have come to pass is often an attractive one. But it undermines, rather than enhances, one's ability to meet the world on its terms. Which is a shame, because the world rarely deigns to play the rules that we wish it to. Couching our complaints about that fact in bigotry simply adds insult (although to whom is sometimes an open question) to futility.

Let's Us and Them Fight

2012-01-09T19:57:00.000-08:00

If you're dependent on government money to make your life comfortable, you're going to feel pain. If you are an American who believes that you can stand on your own two feet, this is going to be a renaissance.
New Hampshire State Representative Seth Cohn - (R) Merrimack

This is the problem that political candidates for office have once they become popular - anyone who claims to espouse your philosophy (in this case, Representative Ron Paul's) can stand up and spout off about it on national radio. And they can often do so in ways that are singularly divisive. I suspect that if you asked Representative Paul about his views on this, he'd be somewhat more conciliatory. After all, if he wins the Republican nomination, he has to run in the general election, and telling the nation that anyone who depends on the government that their lives are about to start sucking will earn him no end of defections to the Democrats (or simply staying home), after all, when a natural disaster strikes, telling people "well, you should either have insurance or enough cash on hand to rebuild from the ground up" is unlikely to be a winner.

But this is part of American politics, especially during primary season, and one that's unlikely to go away any time soon. Pitting "us versus them" (while being somewhat vague about just who "us" and "them" are) is always a sure-fire vote getter. Nevermind that if it's done poorly, it gets just as many, if not more, votes for the other side.

Shady Dealings

2012-01-05T19:04:00.000-08:00

“It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are 'evil': meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing.”
Glen Greenwald “Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies”

"Why Progressives?" I wonder. Haven't Conservatives engaged is just such lesser-of-two-evils thinking, and then told themselves that the "lesser evil" was actually a good? Haven't Moderates given evil things their blessing in return for things that were more important to them? Why should Progressives be any less susceptible to the psychology of Faustian bargains and denial than anyone else? I mean, wasn't this just as much an issue during the Bush Administration? Or was there some strain of Conservatism that found an expansion of government, the demolition of civil liberties and massive deficit spending to be a feature, not a bug? (Although according to one radio news story I heard on the way home, Rick Santorum seemed to be of the opinion that dumping cash into the Money Pit that was Iraq was a perfectly Conservative thing to do, so maybe they didn't have that much of a conflict, after all.)

It seems to me that the United States has never really had a problem with making people unlike us, that we don't like and/or live in faraway places bear the costs for whatever our political class as chosen to bribe us with today. The Atomic Bomb was dropped on Japan not to end the war - the Japanese already knew they were boned - but to force them into unconditional surrender by blowing segments of the civilian population to smithereens and convincing them that we were prepared to annihilate the entire nation - because we found the potential alternatives, a high death toll among American soldiers or a peace with Japanese conditions attached, equally unacceptable. And in the post war period, the United States was very clear about the fact that an anti-American democracy would not be tolerated if a pro-American dictatorship was available. But how many candidates for office ran on platforms of the wholesale slaughter of civilians or the suppression of democracy in exchange for saving American lives or American interests? Once a successful bid for office signaled the end of a need for high-minded rhetoric, people did "what had to be done," the American public said "better them than us" and we about our business.

Perhaps Mr. Greenwald writes these columns every so often, pillorying different segments of the American populace in turn, and I just never found about them until his sort of endorsement of Representative Ron Paul as a Progressive's best bet during a campaign season generated a lot of buzz for this particular piece. But if this is the first, I hope it's the first of many. We've made a series of deals with the Devil over the years, and more are coming. We should be reminded of them regularly.

Safe For Passivity

2012-01-02T20:43:00.000-08:00

When I've spoken with people who feel that it's important to "get the money out of politics," it doesn't normally take very long to maneuver them into getting to the actual point - protecting voters they view as less sophisticated than themselves from harmful political messages and candidates. While I understand the intent, I think an effort to do something that perhaps we don't really want to do - namely making representative democracy safe for people for whom representative democracy is most demonstrably unsafe.

If "government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth;" at some level the people are going to have to be active participants in their government. Apathy and passivity just aren't good things to have in a republic. I, for my part, am of the school that says that incentives matter - the more you give people a reason (or, quite frankly the necessity) to be active participants in their government, they more active, engaged and educated they become. When you dial back the need, people re-purpose the time they would have spent on other pursuits, and it becomes hard to get that time back later.

It sucks, because the extra effort that I'm asking that people expend in keeping up with government translates to a direct hit to their standard of living - either they have less time to work, or they have less leisure time. And when you look at people who have enough money that they can simple buy their way out of having to make that choice, it all becomes a pretty in-your-face reminder of how unequal our society has become. But I don't really see any other viable way around it. It's tempting to limit people's ability to participate, either directly or by proxy. But then will come an enforcement mechanism, and that enforcement mechanism will be VERY powerful - after all, it will have a high level of control over what messages are available to the public. If it becomes captured by one faction or another, the sorts of issues that we're dealing with now will seem like child's play.

Our government now is driven by lobbying for a very simple reason. Lobbyists promise money to get messages out. And our society has shifted from evaluating the content and the origin of a message to evaluating the ubiquity and slickness of a message, and so more money buys more effective messaging. But just because someone can put up the biggest, splashiest billboard doesn't mean that I should simply do as it says. And that, in the end, is how to remove the money from politics. Enough of the public has to be involved enough that one can't simply shout one's way to victory, regardless of the message. It won't be a sure thing. There's no reasonable way to get complete participation, but I suppose it's like vaccines. Get enough people onboard, and herd immunity will take care of the rest.

It certainly can't hurt.

Praying For Peace

2012-01-01T13:34:00.000-08:00

Control

2012-01-01T13:29:00.000-08:00

I was puttering around on Slate, when I came across an old Human Nature column from 2005. In it, William Saletan recounts a meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics concerning "legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia in Oregon and the Netherlands." It's the kind of interesting and thought-generating column that I so enjoyed reading back in the day.

If you're interested, you can read the column yourself, so I'm not going to bore you with an attempt to recapitulate the substance of it here. But one of the very interesting points that Mr. Saletan deals with is that of autonomy and control. Seeing parallels in the abortion debate, he warns against "deny[ing] autonomy in the name of protecting it," - blocking a person's attempts to make certain choices, under the idea that no-one would ever freely make THAT choice. (Not mentioned is the next step, in which people cast certain choices as indicative of some sort of threat to autonomy - in other words, the very fact that you have made a certain choice indicates coercion or mental distress or defect, and therefore, your autonomy must be suspended until you have been returned to "right thinking.")

During the column, Mr. Saletan brings up three ways that people have used or advocated to steer people clear of wanting to end their own lives. One) Stalling. Hospitals simply ignore laws that require compliance with a patient's wish to be taken off artificial respiration, until such time as the need for same has passed. Two) Moralizing. One of the council members favors an approach that tells patients "that while it's natural to wish for death, they ought not act on that wish." Three) Improved (and improved information about, and access to) palliative care. "Once you show that suffering can be relieved without killing, almost nobody chooses killing." When the Netherlands began to improve hospice and palliative care, the suicide rate dropped.

Bit if it's true that "No suicide prevention measure for the elderly would be more effective than good end-of-life care," as one council member put it, what's the best way of promoting good end-of-life care? Perhaps paradoxically, my first thought is the broader legalization of assisted suicide. Of the three ways discussed to prevent the suicides of the grievously injured and gravely ill, one of them costs money and requires specially trained people to be effective. If you can simply stall people or base laws on moral strictures that prevent suicide, where is the incentive to improve the palliative care infrastructure?

But, alas, the real world proves me wrong. Legalized abortion has done little to get staunch pro-life activists on board with initiatives for better prevention of unwanted pregnancies. People who feel that you have no right to something often have a hard time accepting the idea that desirable alternatives to that something should be advanced. Look at the case of the Bush and then Obama administrations dealing with North Korea and/or Iran - in neither case does the administration want to make it worth Pyongyang's or Tehran's while to go along; instead they both insist that the governments are acting illegitimately and seem to fear a future pattern of blackmail.

One of the council members cited an Oregon study that found that patients who seek assisted suicide when it is illegal have "an inordinate need for control." But I doubt that they're the only ones. Stalling and moralizing both seek to exercise control over the patient. Perhaps the issue of control needs to take a back seat, leaving more room for people to have options.

Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

2012-01-01T11:27:00.000-08:00

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't see you there.

Have we met? Oh, you're 2012? What happened to 2011? He did? Really? So soon. Where do they all go?

Thanks, I'd always wondered about that. Well, are you sure he's not coming back?

Oh. I guess they never do, do they?

Yeah, we had some unfinished business. It wouldn't help if I said I owed him a hundred bucks, would it? Yeah, I thought not.

No, not really. But I guess if 2011's moved on, there's no chance of getting a hold of 2000 or 1992, is there?

Well, I should have done the entire early 90s differently. I made a lot of mistakes back then. Too bad I couldn't have gotten paid for screwing things up. I'd be a rich man by now.

What did I do wrong? Do you have a year? Oh... crap - I shouldn't have said that. I'm really sorry - that was insenstive of me.

Why thank you, 2012, you're quite gracious. And I really am sorry... I wasn't thinking. They're all out of reach, huh? A pity, that. 1992 was good, you know. Are you sure you can't put me in touch with her? Just for a few minutes? I only want to make a couple of -

Of course. Rules are rules. Story of my life.

What? I'm sorry. I was daydreaming. Have you ever met 2003? He was pretty cool. I was just hoping to run into him again.

Yes, yes, you're absolutely right. I don't mean to ignore you, it's just that I'm -

Yes, exactly. Living in the past. Well, hoping to, anyway. But you're right. That is unfair to you. Let's try this again. Hello, 2012. I'm pleased to meet you.

Hmmm.... You're right. We'd better get started. There's plenty to be done, and 12 months really isn't that long a time. Although I didn't think that 1975 would ever - OW!

No, no, you're absolutely right. One at a time. One at a time.

The Illusion of Authorship

2011-12-31T16:52:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking recently about the idea of Determinism, and its conclusion that there is little or no actual Free Will in human thought and decision making. After a few hours of working the ideas around in my mind and on the page, I have come to a simple question. If Free Will is an illusion, what point does it serve to perceive it? Why would evolution drive humanity to create a complex enough brain to have a subjective feeling of authorship that isn't actually there? This is different from the Table Visual Illusion. There is a reason why the two shapes in the illusion are presented as tables. In the real world, the distance between the leading and trailing edges of the "long" table would be longer than the distance between the right and left edges of the "short" table, were you to actually measure them. And it is this reality that creates the illusion.

But the illusion of free will is not the misapplication of reality into a sphere where it doesn't belong. Sam Harris describes it as simply the human mind being mistaken as to the nature of its own experience. So... what's the point? What advantage is there to the default perception of one's experience being completely incorrect?

While I'm not sure that the answer is actually important, I do find it to be a compelling question, and one that would go a long way towards explaining the experience of consciousness, as I suspect that the two phenomena are related.

Before I Kill You, Mr. Chavez

2011-12-29T20:50:00.000-08:00

This is awesome. President Hugo Chavez, while "thinking out loud," speculated that the United States had developed a secret technology that it was using to give Leftist South American leaders cancer. No, really. The BBC (and Chinese state television) says so.

What's great about this is that the United States has, in the mind of Hugo Chavez, completely crossed the line into cartoon villainy. We have super-advanced super-secret technology (check!), are implacably evil (check!) but can't seem to figure out how to do in the opposition (and check!). The only thing that's missing is the call from the Oval Office to gloat over how this evil plan is so utterly foolproof that soon the entire world will bow down before us! Haha! Haha! Bwahahahahahahahahaha! (Ahem... er, sorry.) After all, if we could secretly target world leaders for cancer, one would think that we'd come up with something that metastasized rapidly, and was more or less inoperable by the time you actually realized it was there. Or do the Scott Evil thing and just have someone shoot him. It's not like Chavez doesn't have other enemies or even criminals in Venezuela.

In a way, though, I'm kind of hoping that he's right. Not only would it be awesome to see President Obama kicking back with a monocle in one eye and stroking his white cat, but I've always wanted to sign up to be a henchman.

Time To Come Clean, Representative Paul

2011-12-25T17:27:00.000-08:00

Well, damn.

There's a thing about buses. No matter how nice they are, the view from underneath them always sucks.

I get, Representative Paul, that the nasty newsletters of the Paleolibertarian days are a thing of the past. And I get that, in modern terms, the 1980s and early 90s are ancient history concurrent with the construction of the Pyramids at Giza. And I understand that in a republic, all segments of the voting public, no matter how repulsive, are entitled to representation. And on the flip side of that, I understand that when faced with political irrelevance, that it can make sense to reach out to those voters that are too toxic for the mainstream parties to openly associate themselves with.

But if you're going to publish a newsletter that traffics in "Confederacy- and Jim Crow-sympathizing, race-baiting and sometimes just plain racist" rhetoric, while also preaching a political philosophy that promotes personal responsibility, you have to know that at some point, you're going to have to own the words that you allowed to be published in your name, just like any of the rest of us would. People more familiar with you and with Paleolibertarianism have been quick to point out that it was likely people such as Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell who wrote the words that you're now on the hotseat for. Be that as it may, however, the buck, Representative Paul, stops with you. Being irritated with CNN, and their spinning of the story for their own purposes, doesn't change that. Neither does appearing on Fox News to talk about all of the things that you've done for African-Americans. It merely comes off as the political version of "some of my best friends are Black," which African-Americans are taught from childhood is the surest sign of someone who can't be trusted.

Like a number of other people, I had a reason to root for you in the primaries, despite not being a Republican myself. While I don't consider government to be an Evil in and of itself, I do think that it tends to become involved in too many things that are are better left alone, and to drag us into enterprises that we would have done well to stay away from. And don't get me started on the obnoxious alliance between Big Government and Big Business that has come to regard the public as useful only to the degree that it serves the interests of corporations. But as it stands, I need my credibility in the eyes of my family, friends, acquaintances, co-workers and myself more than I need to help you tilt at windmills.

Home For The Holidays

2011-12-24T19:25:00.000-08:00

Ferries crisscrossing Puget Sound on a busy Christmas Eve.

Boxed Happiness

2011-12-21T18:28:00.000-08:00

"The debate between faith and reason is a false one. [...] We need both, of course. Only then can we lead fully rounded lives. And, yes, happier ones, too."
Eric Weiner "A Quest To Seek The Sublime In The Spiritual" Tuesday, 20 December, 2011

Why "of course?" As far as I'm concerned, I need faith like a fish needs a miniature castle with a plastic chest of "sunken treasure." I don't consider myself incompletely rounded or imperfectly happy. And, more to the point, after reading this article, I don't understand why "Questing," in an attempt to sincerely believe something that I currently consider to be mythical, will engender that consideration in me. We hear so much about the fact that "Surveys show religious people are happier than the secular," for one major reason - there are religious, spiritual (or whatever else you want to call them) people, like Mr. Weiner, who presume that it's a direct causal relationship, and as such, it legitimizes their belief structure and inculcates them against charges of delusion or lack of evidence. As his closing shows, there is a belief that a certain amount of happiness is locked up within faith as though it were a strongbox, and that only by making ourselves embrace the divine can we get at it. One would expect that of all people, "a former NPR correspondent" would understand that correlation does not equal causality. Were an ironclad study to find that religious people were an inch taller than the secular, you'd still be considered a fool to even consider the idea that finding faith would make you grow.

Despite the fact that many atheists have a habit of regarding other's faiths as being born of either primitive delusion or outright lies, they generally (but not always) do concede the point when they encounter genuinely happy people - even if they're convinced that such happiness is anchored on shaky ground. But as Mr. Weiner, perhaps unintentionally, points out, the faithful often have no such restriction, feeling free to denigrate the happiness of others as incomplete at best and illusory at worst, thinking that they can know the inner life of another simply through determining if that person has faith. And although it's common for people who seek out certain experiences to claim that "you just haven't lived until you've done [blank]," were they to sincerely claim that they only way to inner completeness and true happiness was the One True Path that they had determined, we'd normally find them insufferable, regardless of their sincerity or the genuineness of their concern.

I'm glad that when Mr. Weiner unlocked faith, he found happiness inside - far be it from me to ever begrudge someone else their joy. And I realize that for some people, finding religion does bring them happiness that they didn't have before. But that does not preclude the rest of us from finding extra happiness elsewhere, or (horrors!) even going our entire lives without needing it. Until someone can demonstrate a causal relationship, "truth is what works," as Weiner tells us that William James put it. And for me, what works is a life where each can seek their own path to a fully rounded, happy life.

There's One In Every Crowd

2011-12-20T20:33:00.000-08:00

Ah, yes.

Where would we be without the ever-present stereotype of the smug, urban, coast-living, pseudo-sophisticated, latte drinking atheist who lives for nothing more than to look down his nose at those cursed with the poor intellect to have faith in the divine. Thanks, Mr. Weiner. We really needed that.

But, of course, many stereotypes have a basis in truth, and it's not difficult to find a smug atheist who can't seem to go a day without reminding himself of how smart he is by putting down the beliefs of others. But you know what? It's not that hard to find believers who are of the opinion that faith and belief isn't enough. (Given the fact that if you profess to have no faith in any sort of divinity, you're liable to be outnumbered somewhere in the area of 10 or 20 to 1, in fact, it's pretty damn easy.) They have to be a dick to everyone who doesn't think like themselves. And it manifests itself in a myriad of ways, from the thinly disguised contempt that's passed off as concern or pity, to the opinion that anyone who claims a workable ethical code without recourse to the divine must either be lying or insane, to barely supressed glee at the thought of a vengeful, petty deity punishing someone - not for having done injury to others, but simply failing to be properly obsequious.

My point here isn't to get into the cataloging of sins. Given that there are always more than enough sins to go around, it's always a pointless exercise. It's merely to point out a simple fact of human nature. There are people who are secure enough in what they believe (or don't beleive) as the case may be that they aren't threatened by the fact that others believe differently. And there are people who aren't. Sure, you can make the point that what some people believe is dangerous to the well-being of others. And plenty of people on both sides of the debate make just that point. But if you're confronted with someone who genuinely believes that your beliefs justify you being injured, maimed or killed, it's going to take more than being even a grade-A dick to change their mind. And as for the people who just can't seem to get your facts straight? Have them send you an e-mail. That way they become just another of the millions of people who are wrong on the Internet every day.

In case I haven't already dropped a heavy enough anvil on your head, the world is full of dicks who can't stand to let others believe something different (or, if you must, wrong). Constantly pointing out the same set of dicks as a cheap way of making a point isn't helpful, even if you're convinced that all you're doing is pointing out your own dickery.

Democracy Constrained

2011-12-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

Now - let's make one thing clear from the start. Rachel Maddow is supposed to be an intelligent and thoughtful person, so I don't know that she actually said this. Perhaps she did, but when I searched for it, I couldn't find an actual record of her saying it. After all, on the Internet, not only does anyone not know that you're a dog, but it's also easy to pass off unsourced statements as Gospel truth. So I'm going to leave Ms. Maddow out of this, and simply deal with the quote itself, as I was actually able to source someone saying it.

Here’s the funny things about rights — they’re not supposed to be voted on.
Iowa State Representative Bruce Hunter (D-Des Moines).

In any event, here, perhaps, is a better way of putting it:

Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.
Marvin Simkin.

Well, then that raises one rather important question. How does one protect rights, whatever one has decided that those rights are, in a democracy (either a direct democracy or a republic) when the entire structure of the system is set up to allow people to vote? You fall back on a certain baseline level of what is effectively authoritarianism.

In the United States, the governing authority is the Constitution. And despite common opinion to the contrary, some of its provisions and amendments are directly anti-democratic. Let's take the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Let's re-write the beginning, slightly:

The lawfully seated legislative representatives of the people of the United States shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Okay, so “the lawfully seated legislative representatives of the people of the United States” is a rather long-winded way of saying “Congress,” but isn't that what the Congress is? Without having gone through the exercise of amending the Constitution again, even a unanimous vote of Congress may not enact any measure into law that conflicts with the accepted understanding of the current text. (And given the fact that the “accepted understanding” is defined by the nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, you can see why there is often so much drama around the nominating and confirmation processes.)

The problem is that the text of the Constitution was, for the most part, composed and enacted some time back. Its most recent Amendment is 40 years old. Modern hot-button topics, like effectively enshrining certain Christian religious values into law, may have been around a long time, but the specific forms that they take today, like the fights over abortion and same-sex marriage are fairly recent developments. So, basically, they aren't specifically covered. And things that aren't covered ARE subject to being legislated, with a 50% +1 vote (well, depending on the specific rules in place, but you get the idea).

And that brings us back to the critically important idea of the (current) accepted understanding of the current text. Back in 1967, when the Supreme court decided Loving v. Virginia, Justice Potter Stewart noted that “it is simply not possible for a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor.” Now, in the closing days of 2011, are we moving closer to an understanding that “it is simply not possible for a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the sexual orientation of the actor?” Some suspect that there might be, hence the ridiculous theatrics around a “Defense of Marriage” Amendment. (Although the Amendment idea was ostensibly floated specifically to head off such a reading of the Constitution, it's pretty clear that it was designed mainly to throw a bone to religious conservatives who, in the words of Ellen Willis “feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give [their] religious imperatives special weight.”)

Given the structure of our government and our population, Constitutional amendments designed to enshrine controversial values are unlikely to get anywhere. Even if they do make it out of Congress and out to the states, the proper minority of state legislative votes will likely be incredibly difficult to assemble. As a result, a certain level of krytocracy (rule by the Judiciary) is likely to result. And it becomes the values and rights that a majority of those Justices believe in, and can plausibly justify within the structure of the Constitution, that become inoculated against the votes of the 99%.

Footnote — No, Simkin was NOT quoting Benjamin Franklin - there is no record of Franklin ever having said or written such a thing. Which makes sense. After all, Benjamin Franklin was supposed to be an intelligent and thoughtful person, and the version of the quote attributed to him: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote,” while it may be dear to libertarian gun-rights advocates, is merely a recipe for an anarchy in which any aggrieved minority takes up arms when it loses an electoral contest.

I Guess It Beats "Mission Accomplished"

2011-12-15T19:48:00.000-08:00

We've handily defeated the Iraqi Army in a rout, taken Baghdad and made it look easy. Bring the troops home now?

No.

We've dismantled the Iraqi government and consigned Baathists to unemployment or insurgency. Bring the troops home now?

No.

We've scoured the country for Weapons of Mass Destruction and found exactly jack squat. Bring the troops home now?

No.

We've captured ex-President Saddam Hussein and allowed the new government to hastily execute him. Bring the troops home now?

No.

We have a new President here in the United States, who thought this whole enterprise was a bad idea to begin with. Bring the troops home now?

No.

We've propped up a government that barely has the support of the people and can't manage to secure basic services or security. Bring the troops home now?

No.

We've established a diplomatic presence in Iraq that's roughly half the size of Liechtenstein (no, really). Bring the troops home now?

No.

Well, while we're there, the Iraqi government now insists that we be subject to the same laws that its own police and military are, while we operate on their soil.

Victory! Tell the troops to start packing.

They Proclaimed the Emperor Had No Clothes

2011-12-12T20:37:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it's just the side of me that's sensitive to the ways in which we disrespect one another, but when many people say (or write) those words I detect an undercurrent of judgment - "That Emperor thinks that he's such hot stuff, but he's too stupid to realize that he's naked! And people won't be honest with him because they're afraid of being executed! What a jerk!" Of course, attribution is always a dangerous game, and so it's quite likely that many people don't mean to critique "power" in the way that I take them to.

For myself, when I read the tale, I come away with a different feeling. Once closer to this Hillary Price Rhymes With Orange cartoon. I feel for the character of the Emperor because he's never portrayed as an evil man, just vain and more sadly, insecure. The two quick-witted swindlers realized that and played the Emperor, and those around him, like fiddles. Fairy tales can get away with things that would never fly in any other medium of storytelling, and the populating of an entire capital city with people who deep down suspect that they're actually frauds seems like one of those things. But I wonder if it isn't more true that we know.

This came up in the context of my asking what Occupy Wall Street had done to make people hate them so, and while I'm not sure their crime is pointing out the Emperor's nakedness, I do think that OWS had taken on the role of the boy in the crowd and threatened people with fraudulence, even if they didn't intend to do so. When you're attempting to rouse a populace to rebellion, your primary target is always their sense of Hope. People do not lay their lives on the line lightly, and if you're going to motivate them to risk everything they have, it's easier once you've convinced them that not only do they have nothing, but they have scant chance of ever getting anything. In this, I think that OWS misses the mark, and that in seeking to undermine people's hopes, they are instead, for some people, undermining their sense of Legitimacy, always a much more dangerous proposition.

I do not know that Occupy Wall Street set out to tell people that they are not as capable as they believe themselves - that instead, they are simply the beneficiaries of a wicked system of governance that masquerades as enlightened, and that in a "just" world, it would be they who lived lives of quiet desperation. Or if they are poor, that their lack of skills, brains or resources will condemn them to remain that way for life. The Emperor's chief failing was that he feared to be revealed as someone "unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid." And even at the end of the story, he feared to be called out as having been gulled through his own insecurities. Better, he and his nobles reasoned, to keep up the charade, even once the townsfolk, having lost their fear of the "magnificent fabrics'" powers to label them fools, proclaimed the truth.

Of course the simple answer, accept yourself for yourself, no matter who that turns out to be, is so facile as to be worthless. Were it so easy, many more people would have done it by now. Accept others for themselves, no matter who they turn out to be doesn't seem to be any more workable. So I am unsure of the solution to the potential problem that I have identified. Perhaps there isn't one. It's something that has escaped most of mankind of millenia - it's possible that it's simply my own hubris that leads me to think that I could find one. But, I'm a fool that way. And I'm okay with that, so I'll keep looking. And I if do it right, I'll learn to have no fear of what I find.

Why You Hatin'?

2011-12-11T20:42:00.000-08:00

In the name of full disclosure, I have to admit that when people speak of Occupy Wall Street (or Occupy anywhere else for that matter) as if it were the second coming of Democracy and Enlightenment, I simply roll my eyes. I'm of the opinion that mass protests are the last resort of the politically powerless, and I don't see many of the OWS protesters falling into that category. (Now, if you recall the big pro-immigration from Latin America rallies of some years back - there were a lot of people who, because non-citizens don't get a vote, were effectively politically powerless within the current system.) Perhaps more importantly, I don't see myself as politically powerless, so I'd rather go vote than camp out somewhere.

Before you start - you're correct. My one vote doesn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things. But, by the same token, standing my sorry ass out in the cold with a sign by myself wouldn't make a difference either. Both voting and protests benefit from numbers.

But I really, really, REALLY don't get the Occupy Wall Street Hate Machine that's sprung up. Okay, so there are some yahoos out there holding signs extolling the virtues of getting high. And I'm not sure that all of these guys really understand the distinction between "civil disobedience" and "only laws that I agree with should apply to me." But is that really a reason to hate on these guys like they killed an infant child?

We seem to be turning into a culture that erroneously believes that there is a single, self-evident Truth out there and that you can measure a person's morality by how well they hew to it. But things are rarely as self-evident as we like to think they are.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
- A guy who, for the most part, was perfectly willing to buy and sell his fellow men and force them to work for him.

A lot of this is a side-effect of the simple fact that many of us can't tell the difference between our own aesthetic judgments and objective facts. In English "I consider that fair" and "that's fair" are considered synonymous phrasings, even though if you parse them literally, they're really quite different. I'm also of the suspicion that many of us base our world-views on the idea that our aesthetic judgments ARE objective facts, and when someone comes along who clearly rejects those judgments, the possibility that they may be correct in doing so quickly morphs from a difference of experience to an existential threat.

It's past time that we came to the understanding that in a nation of 300+ million people, with origins on literally every part of the planet, we're not going to find a one-size fits all answer to things. Many of the judgments that we make and apply to things - like generous, fair, just, funny, beautiful or moral are quite subjective, and different people are going to see them differently.

Seeing the Light

2011-12-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

We've all heard about how incandescent light-bulbs are energy-inefficient, mainly because they turn a significant amount of electricity into heat, rather than light. (Which is why you could use one to power and Easy-Bake Oven.) Compact fluorescent lights were supposed to be more energy-efficient and longer-lasting. So even though they cost more than regular lightbulbs, you'd make the investment back over time with the savings to one's electric bill. Being cheap, I figured I'd give it a try. Verdict thus far? Bogus. The compact fluorescents aren't as long-lasting as the incandescent bulbs.

Most of this is just anecdotal - I'm starting to re-replace compact fluorescent bulbs. But thus far, it looks like the potential 7-year lifespan that was advertised for the compact fluorescents isn't going to be realized. But I do have one controlled experiment, as it were - the dining room table. The fixture above the table holds three bulbs. When we moved in, all three sockets had incandescent bulbs in them. (In fact, every light socket in the apartment had an incandescent bulb.) When bulb one went out, I replaced it with a compact fluorescent. The same with bulb two. Last week, bulb one went out again. Bulb three, the last of the incandescent bulbs, is still shining. It was a similar situation in one of the bedrooms, where the bulbs are two to a fixture - I just replaced the second incandescent bulb in the fixture when the fluorescent bulb that had replaced the first one went out.

I'm hoping that I just wound up with a bad batch of light bulbs, and that normally, compact florescents will last as long as advertised. The environmental movement has enough problems without fluorescent light bulbs simply being a more expensive way to light your home.

Show Me the Money

2011-12-09T22:30:00.000-08:00

At the behest of our local public radio station, I spent some time monkeying around with the League of Education Voters budget calculator for Washington state.

It's a simple enough little widget. You have to plug a 1.7 billion dollar hole in the Washington state budget buy clicking a series of check boxes to either cut some program or another or raise tax revenue. As with most things, there's an easy way, and a hard way. The easy way to win this particular budget battle is to simply select the option for the "Income tax for high earners, paired with reduced property tax rates," option and hey presto! problem solved. And the best thing about it is that unless you're pulling down somewhere in the area of 200 grand a year (or double that between you and a spouse) not only does it not cost you a thing, but your property taxes might even go down! Brilliant!

But it's not my personal cup of tea, so I instead jacked up sales taxes to raise about the first billion dollars, moved closer to the goal by eliminating a sales tax exemption on trade-ins and then went hunting through state programs to make up the rest. And that's when things became dicey. Mainly because with any situation like this, in the end, the only question that matters is "Who pays?" And as far as I'm concerned, the best answer is always "All of us." Of course, because of the ways that government programs are structured, "all of us" is easier said than done. In the end, I think I created a plan designed to elicit howls of "outrage" from people along all points of the political spectrum, which means that it would never make it out of committee.

It was an interesting exercise, even if it felt somewhat skewed to the left (no surprises there). I suspect that everyone should try something like this, if only for the general overview of the sorts of things that money is being spent on.

Oh, Now I Get It

2011-12-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent.
"To know all is to forgive all."
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein. Corinne, Book 18, chapter 5.

Otherwise (mis)translated as "to understand all is to forgive all" or "to understand everything is to forgive everything" has become something of a pejorative in American discourse, with many people taking it to mean that if you understand why someone did something you must also excuse their behavior. Politically (and in other contexts) it manifests itself as the idea that anyone who can understand a position well enough to articulate it to others must be a de-facto supporter of said position. (Some academics are spared this, but it tends to be common in the public.) The sad side effect of this is that ignorance becomes a virtue when dealing with people one disagrees with. Although given the human tendency to want to be around like-minded people, perhaps it's more accurate to say that it lends legitimacy to the long-standing idea of virtuous ignorance.

Personally, I don't get it. Having recently had something of an epiphany that gives me a better understanding of libertarian/anarcho-capitalist economic and social policy thought, I find it much easier to compare and contrast with other philosophies that I understand.

But I guess in the eyes of a partisan, this simply makes me too wishy-washy to be reliable.

Man With A Plan

2011-12-05T21:23:00.000-08:00

I wonder: Did Herman Cain really think that he could have won the Republican nomination for President? Before he started climbing in the polls and making the other candidates play his game due to his 9-9-9 plan (which he had to start amending almost immediately), he had been widely regarded as a somewhere between a novelty candidate and a huckster, his eccentricities portrayed as bizarre and off-putting rather than folksy or endearing. About the best thing that people had to say about him was that he was a political unknown who was either promoting his book or angling for a job as a pundit.

He was, in effect, simply another version of Sarah Palin.

But then suddenly, he started to take off. Although "take off" might be too strong a term - "took his turn as the alternative to Mitt Romney" is perhaps a more accurate description. (If you've had anything nasty to say about "liberals" or President Obama that has seen print or been posted on YouTube watch the polls - you might be next.) To hear people tell it, Cain planned it that way. But I'm starting to think he had a different plan.

If you want everyone in the nation to be deeply interested in your business, it's hard to beat running for President. Dating a Kardashian might get you there (regardless of your gender), but then again, that sort of obvious public-attention whoring might just have the opposite effect, as people do their best to avoid your mug staring at them from every gossip magazine in a five-county radius. But suffice it to say that if you run for President, that time that you kyped a Butterfinger bar from the corner store when you were 7 will become the focus of intense national interest. And while Herman Cain actually managed to put on a remarkably good clown act (one worthy, perhaps, of an Academy Award), it's unlikely that he was really so oblivious as to think that his past "indiscretions" would stay a secret forever. But it also occurs to me that perhaps it was unlikely that he was really so oblivious as to think that he had a better-than-even shot at the Republican nomination.

And that's where the clever bit comes in. Cain may just have been bright enough to realize that his past coming to light would give him an "out," once it became clear that he was going to be unable to win the nomination - an escape hatch, as it were. This spared him the fate that has befallen other presidential candidates before him - unlikely to win, but without a graceful means to exit the race. I'm not sure that he would have intended it to get this far out of control - but just because a plan works doesn't always mean it works 100%. Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, and it assumes both that Herman Cain is crazy like a fox and unserious about his Presidential aspirations all along. But stranger things have happened.

State of Denial

2011-12-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

I found out recently from my aunt that my great-aunt, my late paternal grandmother's sister, had died. Cause of death - a knife in a lung. She'd held on for three weeks before succumbing to the wound. I'd met my great-aunt at family reunions and the like, but these were the few and far between events of my childhood, the most recent being when I was in high school if not sooner. Every one of them had been populated by strangers, as I could never remember the members of my extended family, and I didn't have enough in common with them to form bonds that would bolster my memory. So my great-aunt, like her husband, my father's uncle, were little more than a name that occasionally came up in conversation.

One thing that was never associated with those names was domestic violence. And I, being a bit to old to still be a n00b, know full well that my father's uncle didn't just go from being a mild-mannered guy to a murderer at the drop of a hat. My aunt confirmed my suspicions that this was a story that had been going on for a while. It was the sort of open secret that everyone in my father's generation knew about - it was only those of us in the under-50 set who were in the dark about it. My aunt also confirmed the other simple conclusion that I'd come to - that my great-aunt had gone to her death believing that somehow, she'd be able to change the man she was convinced loved her, despite the abuse. And that her, my father, my other aunts and uncles, any number of family members, they'd close their eyes to the possibility that this could happen, and did so until it finally intruded on them.

But it's easy to see denial in others. Much harder to see it in oneself. And so I find myself asking: when do I see unreality, hear unreality or speak unreality? What part of my life looks over my shoulder and mocks me, because I refuse to acknowledge its presence? And what am I risking in doing so? I find it difficult to credit the idea that I might be going to my grave because I can't bring myself to see the world as it really is, but my great-aunt didn't believe it, either. How does one come to see what you've structured your life around not seeing?

Holiday Habits

2011-11-26T19:09:00.000-08:00

Well, another Black Friday (and most of a Gray Saturday) has come and gone. Pepper spray to be the first in line for an X-Box, huh? Well, you have to give them points for originality.

It's easy to fall into sanctimony over the unthinking consumerism that Black Friday both manages to represent and self-parody every year, but it's worth keeping in mind that unthinking non-consumerism will have some pretty serious economic consequences of its own - most of us don't make anything that qualifies as a necessity, except in the fact that it might have acquired enough First-World ubiquity that we "don't know how to live without it." (This despite the fact that we got by perfectly well for a very long time - as late as when I was in high school, if you told someone that you wanted to be a Web Designer, they would have likely quipped that the spiders were managing perfectly well on their own.)

So perhaps the moral of the story that we keep missing every year is that we need more thinking consumerism. It's nice to be enough of an aesthetic that you can sneer down your nose at someone who camps out for a week to get a cheap DVD player. But most of us don't think about what we'd say to the guy who needed to make those DVD players to feed his family. "Take up small-scale intensive farming," isn't helpful, it's glib; those skills are fairly rare and it's easy to screw it up.

In the constant race to have the best hand at Misery Poker, we spend a lot of time claiming that the people with all of the money twisted our arms, but the simple fact is that we made this bed for ourselves and we can make a new one. But, as the saying goes, "In economics, there are no solutions, only trade-offs," so until a better way is really worth something to us, there isn't going to be one.

An Occupy of One's Own

2011-11-24T16:13:00.000-08:00

In local news, Occupy Seattle has gone to court to fight for the right to stay camped out on the Seattle Central Community College campus. With a few high-profile evictions of Occupy activists making front-page news, the back and forth over the movement is picking up steam. Interestingly, here in Seattle, the argument doesn't really seem to be over whether or not Occupy Seattle has a right to camp out - "A permitted City Hall site where limited camping is allowed has been mostly vacant for two months," according to the Times, but whether or not they should be allowed to camp where they want, regardless of any other rules.

With all of the focus on Occupy Seattle and the greater Occupy Wall Street movement, of which it is a part, it's perhaps become too easy to forget that the students, activists and their allies that make up the local Occupy branch aren't the only people who are spending time camping out, and looking for places to stay. In 2004, SHARE/WHEEL's Tent City 4 was created, and ever since, a small community of homeless adults has been living a nomadic existence, moving from one location within the Eastside of the Seattle suburban area to another, often in the face of rules deliberately adopted by local cities to keep them on the move, generally at the behest of citizens who had bought into a hysteria that cast the resident of the tent city as an out-of-control band of murderers, rapists and substance-abusers. With the passage of years, the hysteria, the tent city and the resident have all mostly been forgotten. Nowadays, a church or synagogue offering to host the encampment merits little more than a blog posting, and no-one bothers to comment. Tent City 3, which tends to move around inside Seattle still draws a little grief, but even that's mostly died down.

Of course, Occupy Seattle and the Tent Cities aren't really the same beast. The people in the Tent Cities aren't protesting their situation - simply attempting to make the best of it. They can't really afford to make a fuss over where they're staying, because if they lose the right to camp, they lose what passes for their homes, rather than mostly having to go back to their houses, apartments and dormitories. (Not to say that there aren't genuinely homeless people in Occupy Seattle, but I suspect that no-one in the Tent Cities has volunteered to be there.) And it's that disconnect that is of interest to me. Occupy Seattle can afford to push things farther because they have comparatively less at stake. And in doing so they can stay in the public eye, and thus in its consciousness.

Trying Times

2011-11-21T19:24:00.000-08:00

I've never really cared for self-help gurus. In my personal opinion, they tend to offer pat answers to complicated questions. (Note, however, that I don't say that they're necessarily wrong answers...) I suspect that I'm simply not in the target demographic, being the sort that is suspicious of simple answers to complicated questions.

But my ex-girlfriend was a big fan of Anthony Robbins, and we spent a good deal of time watching his videos. Most of which drove me up the wall. But during one video, he said something that really resonated with me. The scenario was simple - a woman in the crowd was having some sort of difficulty with her husband, they'd come to a compromise and she said that she would try to hold up her end of the bargain. Robbins pounced. I'd expected him to go Yoda-esque on the woman, but after an amusing sequence (amusing to us, anyway - it was frustrating for the woman) where Robbins asked her to "try to pick up that chair," he let off the hook and got to the point. Rather than an variation of "there is no 'try', there is do or do not," he said that when we set out to "try" something that we don't feel we can actually accomplish, what we are often doing is putting in enough effort (or the appearance of enough effort) that we feel we can't be blamed for failure.

Back when the "Supercommittee" to tackle the budget deficit was formed, the first thought that crossed my mind was: "They'll try." I think that other people agreed with me. There was already chatter that Congress would simply break the "Sequestration" rules they'd created for themselves; the only question was would the Republicans manage to block Democratic attempts to halt cuts to social programs while restoring defense spending, or would all of the "automatic" cuts be voted out of existence.

Now, Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington) one of the co-chairs of the Supercommittee, is one of my senators, and she's a nice enough lady. (Yes, I have actually met her face to face. Best $250 I've ever spent. My father was dead right - being a black person at a political fundraiser does make you one of the centers of attention.) But it takes more than being a nice person to break a budget impasse in Washington D.C., it takes someone who's willing to do what it takes to get the job done. And I could have told you from the start that Senator Murray was not that sort. Her job was to hold the line against Republican attempts to roll the Democrats yet again. If they reached a workable deal, so much the better. But the failure to reach a deal was seen as a better outcome than a bad deal, and so she tried. And so did everyone else. The fact that the finger-pointing started some time back is proof of that.

So what do we do now? Well, "we" do nothing. Anyone who thinks that the United States of America is unified in any meaningful way that doesn't involve chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" and/or hating/scapegoating/killing people in some other part of the world who we can blame for our troubles is, in my not particularly humble opinion, a naif. Look at the TEA Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Okay, so they aren't exactly on the same page. But they at least share the common goal of reducing the perceived influence of moneyed interests in Washington. But if you put a dozen people from each side in a room, you'd get a cage match worthy of Pay-Per-View long before they decided to sit down and see if it was worth working together to elect people they felt better represented then nation as a whole.

We all know that the path we're on is unsustainable. Even the Republicans have (mostly) given up on the fantasy that we'll simply borrow billions of dollars and that we'll use it to magically create some super economic juggernaut that will create such a flood of prosperity that we'll be able to pay off the debt without anyone actually having to pay a dime more than they want to in taxes. We can't do what we are doing forever, and that means one of two things - reduced government services or increased government taxes. And in the end, those are really just variations on the same thing - a lower standard of living. You're either paying more to get the same amount, or you're paying the same amount to get less. Or you combine the two, and you're paying more and getting less. Either way, that's money that can't be spent on flat-screen televisions, new paint for the house, gasoline, food or clothing.

The issue, at this point, isn't whether we're going to see a decline in our standards of living (although something could happen to get us out of this - it's happened before) it's when does it start, how far does the decline go, and how much damage to we do to things in trying to mitigate it. If we want to limit the impact, we really only have one option - we have to actually work together. That doesn't mean looking for "compromises" that are thinly veiled attempts to screw over other constituencies. It means understanding that is this important enough to do something unprecedented in this country: putting aside our differences and being okay with the idea that someone might get something that we're entitled to or in need of. There is no more time for trying, shifting the blame can no longer be the goal. We have to do this. One wonders if we consider it important enough.

Onward

2011-11-19T19:51:00.001-08:00

On the Recieving End

2011-11-19T10:54:00.000-08:00

We were talking about the police yesterday, when someone asked why more of them don't carry Tasers. The answer, as it was explained to us, is that to be Taser certified, you have to be tased, and a lot of police officers have conditions that prevent this.

But (assuming this is correct) there's a certain irony in that to be certified to carry a less-lethal weapon, you have to have it used on you, but this is not the case (for obvious reasons) with lethal weapons, and so it's easier for a police officer to have access to lethal force than non-lethal force.

Fall Leaves

2011-11-18T19:43:00.000-08:00

The Rule of Seven Dumb Things

2011-11-15T19:07:00.000-08:00

Every so often, you come across something that doesn't seem to be on the Internet, but really should be. This is one of them. I've made some slight edits, but this is pretty much the way I found it.

The Rule of Seven Dumb Things

Do one dumb thing, and you'll probably be fine. A little self-awareness goes a long way.

Do two dumb things at the same time, and you ought to be careful. But, the deity of your choice smiles on babes and fools, as the saying goes.

Do three dumb things, and you're venturing into difficult territory. Something will probably go wrong, your bruises may be noticeable and you'll need to retrace your steps.

Do four dumb things simultaneously, and you are virtually assured of injury or loss. It will not go unnoticed and you may gain a reputation as a lucky fool or for having cheated fate.

If you're doing five dumb things at the same time, you're going to be seriously injured and risk death. You will be rightly ridiculed by your friends and family while you recuperate. Death hit the snooze bar, but will be back for you after coffee.

Do six dumb things at once and you're going to die. You will draw a large crowd of hushed gawkers. Some might even say you deserved it, and chances are good your casket won't be open.

Do seven dumb things at the same time and you will become an instant posthumous legend. Your demise will be ensconced in college physics textbooks, the NFPA Fire Code and an AP "file photo." You name may become a verb and your descendants will deny their lineage.

Jon Espenshied (Adapted from an oral retelling by Bob McKenney, Chief Electrical Inspector for the City of Tacoma, Washington, for many years.)

He's Lucky It's "High-Tech"

2011-11-13T21:50:00.000-08:00

Herman Cain has appropriated the term "high-tech lynching" from the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to describe what he appears to be attempting to portray as a hateful conspiracy against him. In a very real sense, this represents incredible historical progress. By the time Cain was born, the extrajudicial "mob-justice" murders that comprised historical lynchings had declined into the single digits annually - and you could go for years between recognized incidents. Now, you can count the majority of the incidents that happened since Cain's birth on your fingers and toes, and we consider the practice to be entirely a relic of the distant past. While hate murders, like that of James Byrd, still take place, they are considered just that - murders, and the public aspect of historical lynchings is long gone. I'm middle-aged myself, and while I've heard lynching stories from my parents and grandparents, by the time I was born, the practice had died and seems just as before my time as calling cars "horseless carriages."

I dislike Misery Poker, and so this isn't going to be sob story about the injustice of it all. But it is worth noting that at least two of the women who have accused Mr. Cain of sexual harassment were white. Were this 1911, or even 1961, there would be nothing "high-tech" about what could have happened to him in the face of such accusations. Emmett Till, who died when Cain was nine years old and was only a teen himself, suffered abduction and a gruesome death for far, far less than what Cain stands accused of. And it could be argued that a practice beloved of more anarchic conservatives - jury nullification - played a part in allowing the murderers to walk scot-free. And that racial animosity is what allowed the acquitted, but guilty, men to feel secure in admitting what they had done in a magazine article. The rallying around Cain that many Republican voters have done would have been unthinkable, even considering that at the time, the Republicans were still considered the party of Lincoln. And it seems that many have decided that it the accusers who should be tried in the Court of Public Opinion, rather than having their word taken as Gospel, as it once would have been.

This isn't to say that there should be an uproar over Cain's use of the term lynching. Or that we've become heartless and callus for being able to use the word so lightly, even given the horrific history of the practice (which was not, by any stretch, confined to African-Americans). Just that we should remember, when we hear the phrase "high-tech lynching," that it's not just the "high-tech" prefix that makes the difference. What passes for a lynching these days would hardly have merited the term "persecution." And that we should all be very, very glad of that fact. Especially Herman Cain.

Burdens

2011-11-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

No one ever has a burden of proof to explain why they believe as they do. That is between them and the Universe, no matter how loud and obnoxious they are about it. Whenever anyone says to you: "If you want my respect, you must explain to me, to my satisfaction, why you believe as you do," simply walk away. That's a fool's game, with no way to win, and you're unlikely to earn anything for the effort of playing.

But the moment that someone asks another to believe and or to behave as they do, THEN they acquire a burden of proof. If someone says to you: "Your way of looking at and interacting with the world is incorrect, and mine is the path that you must follow," then you are more than justified in requiring that they explain to you just why what they do and believe is rational and useful, and just why it serves your purposes for you to do as they would have you. Anyone whose worldview is constructed in such a way that it requires others to follow it should either become very well versed in the finer points of persuasion and negotiation, or should find a more durable worldview.

Obligations

2011-11-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

A lot has been made of Joe Paterno's failure to live up to his "moral obligations" in the midst of the Pennsylvania State child sexual abuse scandal. Which raises this interesting point: Had Paterno's superiors followed up back in 2002, we wouldn't be having this discussion even though Paterno's actions would have been the same.

In light of that, I've come to suspect that most of us never actually fulfill all of the obligations that have been set for us. What happens instead is that circumstances and the community of people around us do most of the heavy lifting, and we just take the credit. This, in turn, prompts us to think of ourselves and others as more active and/or capable than we really are, and thus more less cognizant of the role that external factors play.

Autumn

2011-11-06T19:44:00.001-08:00

Just to Clarify...

2011-11-06T16:08:00.000-08:00

Okay... Let me get this straight. Michigan legislators who are trying to score political points with people who take their cues on life from selective readings of a selectively edited anthology of religious tales (the most recent of which are nearly two millennia old) that some even take to be an accurate history of the world (and in some places, prophetic about the future of the world, despite seeming to have been written while on crack) have basically gutted a piece of legislation because it would protect from bullying and harassment certain people that a literal reading of one of the specific tales in the aforementioned selectively edited religious anthology says should all be killed on sight, doing so by basically saying that if you really, really believe what you selectively read from these old religious stories (or what someone else told you that they said), then it's okay.

Do I understand the situation properly?

And people are surprised/upset/angered by this exactly why? You might as well be hacked off that it rains in Seattle.

Welcome to a republic people, where even those citizens who take their cues on life from selective interpretations of self-serving religious tales of sketchy providence have the right to representation.

Already?

2011-11-05T20:19:00.001-07:00

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Christmastime treason and plot.
Stores see no reason why Christmas gift season
Should ever be forgot.

Didn't it used to be illegal to cram stores with Merry Christmas crap from wall to wall before Thanksgiving? I walked into Target today, and my eyes about started bleeding.

Lumpy Ideals

2011-10-31T21:18:00.000-07:00

But there’s a sense among the [Occupy Wall Street] protesters (though it’s common among protesters for other social causes as well) that the nature and existence of the injustice they seek to eliminate is obvious. An apparent corollary of this belief is that those who disagree with their prescriptions are stupid or evil. And that all that’s required to make positive change is to develop the willpower to do what we already know is right.

Maybe it’s the philosopher in me, but this kind of attitude always rubs me the wrong way. Things are rarely so simple. Here, as in so many other involving complex social issues, there is room for reasonable people to disagree not merely about what ought to be done to correct injustice, but about what really ought to count as an injustice in the first place.
Matt Zwolinski, Does Inequality Matter? Bleeding Heart Libertarians

Sometimes, it's seeing your own outlook on life reflected back at you that exposes the parts of it that you never really thought about before. As a moderate, I see people who believe in obvious injustice all around me. The Evangelical Christian who is convinced that Satan is at work in sexual license. The Anarcho-capitalist who believes that taxation is theft and that power of the state is an evil. The advocate for immigration reform who holds that the right to migrate is non-negotiable. Not being excited about any of these things, I find their black-and-white passion to be quaintly naïve at best and a cynical tool that allows them to demonize all who disagree at worst. And so, in my "reasonable" way, I preached the tolerance of agnosticism, calling on the people I interacted with - especially whose viewpoints I sympathized with - to see the world in more shades of gray, and to embrace the complexity that surrounds us. And now, I find myself asking: "why?"

Okay, the world that I live in is very complex. I understand that, even if some people that I come into contact with don't. If no two of us can really live in the same world, why shouldn't they live in one that's simple and easy to navigate? Leaving aside my Truth Reflex, since I understand that my Truth is valid for no more than a single person, what difference does it make to me if people live in a simplistic world where the answers to life's questions are near at hand? In almost all cases, it doesn't matter a whit to me. They're not going to be able to impose their world view on me in anything approaching a reasonable timeframe. Simple worlds are a lot like action - there is an equal and opposite reaction in someone else's simple world, and while those two go at it hammer and tongs, I can go on about my business. Any real concern on my part that I'm going to wake up tomorrow in a theocracy or an anarchy is pure fantasy.

And given that people do things, and see the world, in the ways that they do because these things _work_ for them (no matter how dysfunctional it might appear to me) a simple debate isn't going to change that. I'm neither mean-spirited nor invested enough to do the world that it would take to undermine people enough that their straightforward worldviews aren't going to work for them. And that assumes that I understand the world well enough - which I don't. I can just barely point to the times when things that I used to do stopped working well enough for me that I gave up on them.

In the end, I suspect a firm belief in complexity and an agnostic view towards things that others have a deep and abiding faith in doesn't really preclude one from being an idealist. It's simply becomes a muddy and jumbled form of idealism where the world is both impossibly complex yet not beyond the ability of people to sort it all out. All idealism is founded on wanting to believe that people can be better than they are. The desire that we'll make positive change through developing the willpower to do what we already know it right is one way in which that manifests itself. But so is the idea that we really are smart enough to make an increasingly complex world work without needing to fall back on simple answers. The realization that we're all idealists of a sort can be a difficult one, especially when the term conjures up a starry-eyed naïf. But the liberating things about seeing your own idealism is that it's easier to not hold other people do it. And maybe that's what we're more in need of these days.

Room For Debate

2011-10-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

I was reading Public Debate, Dialog, and Debate.fm, by Deborah Teramis Christian, and started thinking again about the nature of public debate, especially as it pertains to the Internet.

My personal understanding of things is that HOW we debate really hasn't changed, but WHAT we debate has. While many have lamented that the anonymity afforded by the Internet have lead to people being disinhibited in the way that they speak to each other, it's just as important to realize that this phenomenon also extends to the topics under discussion. Despite the fact that you're never supposed to talk about sex, politics, and religion (and/or money), you could float the entire Web on discussions of nothing else. And the issue with these topics, and those that touch on (or trample over) them isn't that we can't manage to talk about them in an adult way - it's that most of the time we don't actually know what we're talking about.

Now, before you pipe in to assure me that you are QUITE knowledgeable about sex, thank you very much, that's not really what I mean. Many of us are quite well versed in the topics under consideration. But we don't realize that they aren't really the focus of the conversation. This was driven home to me when I was watching Niall Ferguson and Jeffrey Sachs on CNN's GPS show this morning. Ferguson, in my opinion was attempting to speak to the facts, to try and talk about what had really brought down the global economic system. Sachs, on the other hand, was defending his moral instincts, life experience and feelings. In short order, they were talking past one another. It became fairly clear that Sachs, feeling that Ferguson was directly attacking him, was responding in kind, accusing Ferguson of "name calling" and claiming that he is "confusing so many issues." By the end of the discussion, it was clear that Niall Ferguson was speaking about flaws in Jeffrey Sachs' argument. Jeffrey Sachs, on the other hands, was discussing flaws in Niall Ferguson.

This is not surprising. Once, in a discussion on Google+ someone remarked that if you referred to a movie or other media as "lame" you were "automatically" calling out as stupid anyone who liked said media. In a culture in which we don't often differentiate (linguistically, at least) between our esthetic judgements and objective findings of fact, one can see how a discussion shifts from the merits to someone's point to a heated argument about the people involved and/or their own feelings of legitimacy.

The issue is not, as you might expect, that we don't pick up on subtext. In fact, the problem might be quite the opposite, that we are TOO focused on perceived subtexts, even (or especially) when the speaker/writer does not intend them. Case in point: I, for my part, am of the opinion that a primary reason that it difficult for Americans to talk about policy is that we each tend to see our own viewpoints as simple and obvious - anyone who puts more than a moment's rational thought with an open mind to the topic should realize the facts lead them exactly to where the facts lead us. Therefore we tend to have little or no respect for those whose viewpoints differ from our own. They're cretins, dupes, shills, whatever, but the reason for our disagreement is that the person on the other side is either unintelligent, incredulous or immoral. This questioning of the judgment or thoughtfulness of someone that you claim to trying to persuade is both glaringly obvious to me (after a post on Seth Godin's blog pointed it out to me in the first place) and just as obviously counter-productive. But, as my father used to say, "obvious" means that you're only person who can see it. So while many of the discussions that I've observed have eventually produced intimations or outright statements that one or both parties are stupid, being used or actively seeking to undermine the cause of right and justice, the perception that a subtext of active disrespect is at work tends to be mine and mine alone.

And because the subtexts are perceived/unintended, the responses they provoke nearly always catch the target off-guard. And if they then respond to a perceived subtext in what's being said to them... well, you can see how things quickly go off the rails. What's infuriating about this is how difficult it is to control, even when you're aware of it. I know that the perception of a speaker disrespecting others tends to set me off - especially when I agree with what the actual point that speaker is making, and I'm aware that I'm usually the only one who sees disrespect, and I still tend to come out swinging. And I'm usually surprised when the person I'm responding to is surprised that I see them as being disrespectful to others.

As we become more comfortable discussing topics that carry perceived subtexts that are very meaningful for us, I think that we will encounter this more and more. And unless we become not only more aware of it, but learn to exercise control over it, our debates will continue to produce copious heat, but precious little light.

Now What?

2011-10-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

So it looks like Occupy Oakland has gone somewhat off the rails. I've been reading various local and national accounts for an hour, from the LA Times to the Huffington Post. There's a fairly broad range of opinion over just what made things turn violent - the police not choosing to simply look the other way, to elements of the crowd looking for an excuse to riot. In any event, let the recriminations begin.

Walking In Circles

2011-10-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

This cartoon resonates with me. When I read it, my mind says "Yes! That's EXACTLY what's happening!"

And then, my skepticism kicks in. After all, I'm not intimately tied into the system well enough to actually know what's going on. Perhaps this is just another knee-jerk reaction by a political cartoonist with an axe to grind or an agenda to advance. So I started hunting around for some data to look at. Of course, here I run into a problem, and any good conspiracy theorist will tell me what it is - since I can't independently verify the data, it could all be a bunch of hooey designed to throw me off the scent. And I acknowledge that risk. After all, I don't KNOW anything that I haven't seen for myself. I may believe it, but I do not know it.

Given that caveat, I started looking for voter turnout data and immediately noticed a striking parallel. If you head down to Occupy Seattle (as I have on a few occasions), you'll notice that most of the "live-in" (as opposed to "commuter") protesters are mostly relatively young people - late teens to mid-twenties - university and graduate student age, or just going into the workforce. Take a look at Washington State voter registration data from 2010 for the last general election, and you notice that of eligible voters from 18 to 34, a little less and 50% of them (46.47% to be more precise) came out and voted, leaving them with about 16% of total votes cast. Given this, (and assuming it's roughly the same nationwide - which is, admittedly, a pretty big assumption) it's no wonder that young people feel that the national political culture doesn't serve their interests, and is unresponsive. Conversely, when you head to the upper end of the age range, 65+, you find that even though they comprise just shy of one-fifth of eligible voters, they cast almost one-fourth of the votes - about 8 out of every 9 voters in that demographic voted. It doesn't take much mental horsepower to understand why retirement communities are such popular campaign stops.

Now, before I go on, let me re-iterate that I understand that Washington State is not the entire nation, so I'm engaged in a fair amount of generalization. But voter registration is a state and not a federal issue, and so federal numbers by age cohort were not immediately available to me, sitting in front of my computer. I could likely find them, assuming they exist, but that's more work than I want to put into a Sunday morning blog post.

But getting back to my primary premise. According to the United States Election Project at George Mason University, in the 2010 election "the national total ballots cast is estimated to be 90.3 million or 41.4% of those eligible to vote." This number is an estimate because not all states report it. Again, this does leave an opening for chicanery, since estimates are subject to intentional (or unintentional) biasing. It's also tricky because in this case "eligible" does not mean "registered." (According to state data, Washington has about 3.6 million registered voters, the GMU data tells us there are about 5.2 million eligible voters in the state.) But by either measure, you have large numbers of people who are not participating in the process. And one of the central characteristics of democracies and republics is that even when they are working well, they tend to punish non-participation (voluntary or not).

Okay, so that leaves us with some understanding that many people, especially young ones, have turned off politics. How does this interact with interest groups taking over government? To me, this one is easy, and it dovetails nicely with another complaint that both the Left and Right in the United States have with politics - too much ("special interest") money. I have a general hypothesis about why money plays such a large role in politics: people who are not strongly partisan one way or another tend to make up their minds in such a way that correlates more or less directly with the amount of money spent. That is to say, "swing voters" are swung by campaign advertising dollars. I suspected that it would be relatively easy to check this against data. But that turns out not to be the case. Information may want to be free, but the people who compile it want to eat, and so they don't give it away. And so the hard data on the correlation between swing votes and dollars spent isn't at my fingertips. But I did find a couple of nuggets in abstracts:

Melinda Gann Hall, of Michigan State University, and Chris W. Bonneau, of the University of Pittsburgh, used a two-stage modeling strategy to assess whether relatively expensive campaigns improve the chances that citizens will vote in the 260 supreme court elections held from 1990 through 2004 in 18 states.

Results show that increased spending improved participation in these races. Whether measured as the overall spending in each election or in per capita terms, greater spending facilitates voting and money means voters in Supreme Court elections.
Increased campaign spending improves citizen participation in state supreme court elections

and:

In contrast to previous research showing that, because of higher marginal returns to challenger spending, the incumbent's spending advantage cannot explain high incumbent reelection rates, this article shows that in an average Senate election the incumbent's spending advantage yields a 6% increase in the incumbent's vote share.
Estimating the Effect of Campaign Spending on Senate Election Outcomes Using Instrumental Variables

Put together, these would point to the idea that the more money spent in an election, the higher the turnout, and for Senate incumbents, anyway, outspending the opposition tends to increase vote share.

All of this leads me to a hypothesis - young people are disaffected with politics because between their relatively small percentage of the electorate and their low voter turnout, they don't represent enough potential votes for professional politicians to cater to them directly. Among voters who are not strongly partisan, voting patterns correlate with the amount of money spent advertising to them. Between these two factors, more money is spent on wooing older voters, who are less likely to go looking for non-mainstream candidates in an attempt to find very close matches to their individual viewpoints. When you look at political protests, especially those on the left, the main constituency is comprised of people who don't vote in large numbers - while Occupy Wall Street (and other locations) are mainly young people, the large immigrant rally marches had the same issue - the protestors were ready, willing and able to take their message to the streets, but were unwilling or unable to vote. (Note that along with this, another voting group that tends to complain of being shut out, African-Americans, doesn't vote in large numbers, and so the major political parties don't spend much time courting them.)

I passed on majoring in Political Science in college - I was told there were a lot of papers to be written, and I dislike writing. (I blog in a continuing attempt to overcome that.) So now, some time later, I'm not immediately equipped to test my hypothesis. But if I assume that I'm at least barking up the right tree, these are the tactics I would expect would be effective.

Become more involved. Understand your positions, and which candidates support them, even those from minor parties. The more people understand who they want to vote for and why, the less important large advertising buys become.

Older people are the ones who swing elections. Communicate with them, understand what they want, and structure platforms that make getting that incumbent on you getting what you want.

It's about personal relationships. Television tends to be considered more credible than strangers, but less so than friends. Start forming bonds with people.

Will they work? I don't know. But I think that starting on them will break the chain of public apathy and interest group influence.

Transition

2011-10-22T21:38:00.001-07:00

Here is a basic question that we have to answer for ourselves: When does a need for something become an entitlement to that thing?

This is a difficult question to answer, because there are a remarkable number of variables to consider.

Consider the fable of the grasshopper and the ants. The grasshopper frolics all spring and summer, while the ants spend their time working to lay in stores for the fall and winter. Eventually, as the seasons turn, the grasshopper starts to go hungry. Now, considering that this story is a fable, and thus a morality tale, conventional wisdom holds that the grasshopper has to appeal to the charitable instincts of the ants, and if those fail him, he goes hungry. But there is a counter-moral, which holds that for the ants to withhold charity is to fail in their moral obligations just as much as the grasshopper did, and two wrongs don't make a right.

Or consider this conundrum, which we argued vociferously back when I was a high-school student in a Catholic academy. A man's wife is dying. There is a medicine that can save her, but the price that the pharmacist asks is to high for the man to pay. May he legitimately steal the medicine? If he does, must he make amends to the pharmacist? If so, what may the pharmacist ask of him as recompense? What if he asks too much of the man? And so it goes. As you can imagine, it was a very contentious debate.

Leaving these somewhat contrived examples behind, and moving on into real life, things become even more convoluted, partially because things do not scale very well. Generally speaking, we are uncomfortable imposing on individuals measures that we are more willing to impose on communities. Neither do they transfer well - we tend to be less sanguine about measures imposed on ourselves than we are about measures imposed on others. There also the question of relative imposition - sometimes people are willing to impose one part of a deal but not another. (Generally speaking, given a arrangement that works to the advantage of both parties vis-à-vis the status quo, the least advantaged party may be allowed to impose this upon the other party, but the more advantaged party almost never is.)

At the bottom of it all is a simple concept that is often overlooked. Ideas such as fairness, justice and equity are not objective physical characteristics, but rather subjective understandings of certain situations, and defined in relation to how we each see the world. While it's a simple matter to get most people to agree that "Murder is always wrong," (especially given the fact that as a tautology, it's correct by definition) "the killing of someone who has done no intentional harm to you is always wrong," can be a subject of intense debate.

And it's that very lack of objectivity, and our difficulty in seeing and/or conceding it, that threatens to make this an endless debate.

To Confuse Matters...

2011-10-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

Herman Cain versus Social Conservatives on the subject of abortion... Interesting. I'm surprised that more people don't seem to understand that Cain is taking a fairly run-of-the-mill Libertarian stance on the subject (even if he doesn't always articulate it well).

While Cain clearly feels that abortion is reprehensible, he's only slightly less clear about the fact that he would make no attempt to legislate the practice out of existence - he feels that it would be inappropriate to try. Cue the outcry - from the left and the right - basically for an orthodoxy foul.

But this is why it's not quite correct to associate Libertarians with the stereotypical Conservative party line. Social Conservatives tend to be VERY "statist," as the term is used, looking for government intervention in people's lives in the name of preserving public morals (or, depending on your viewpoint, forcing everyone else to pay lip service to their idea of proper religion). Libertarians, with their focus on limiting the role of government as far as possible, generally don't allow room for government enforcement of social issues.

To be sure, the stereotypical Libertarian focus on fiscal matters tends to obscure this, as the prominent Libertarian think tanks and the like tend to downplay support of decriminalizing drugs and other freedoms that the Left tends to hold dear. If you don't become somewhat steeped in the minutia of the whole thing it's really easy to come away with the idea that a Libertarian utopia is a theocratic police state - as long as it isn't funded by tax revenue. But just like the common stereotype of the Left, this is simply another place where Conventional Wisdom proves to be unwise.

Herman Cain's somewhat muddled public statements on this are adding to the confusion about what he really believes, and make it seem as if he's talking out of both sides of his mouth, attempting to be all things to all people. (Or at least those on either side of the abortion debate.) But what's really going on is he's simply not as good an orator as he is a singer, and it's likely that the Republican Party will move on from him, especially if he demonstrates more ways in which he doesn't favor using government as a means of punishing the enemies of Conservative orthodoxy.

Autumn

2011-10-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

Wither the Enemy?

2011-10-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

I've been dropping in on Occupy Seattle from time to time, and I don't know if I understand what it is they're really fighting.

Oh, I understand perfectly well what they think they're fighting. They're perfectly clear about that, if you can stand the marijuana smoke and tune out the mentally-ill homeless hangers-on long enough to listen in for a while. But I wonder if the problem doesn't go deeper, much deeper, than that.

Humanity, in my humble opinion, simply doesn't scale up well. The sorts of small communities in which it more or less doesn't matter what sort of government (or lack thereof) that is in place have to remain small, or things start to go off the rails. We see it time and again. Put enough people into a place, and factions start to form, as people begin to conclude that there simply isn't enough to go around. Combine any given faction with a lack of overall accountability and you have a surefire recipe for problems. It doesn't matter what sort of institution you create. Governments, churches, corporations; they all start looking for ways to secure themselves at the expense of those that they aren't accountable to. Direct accountability only goes so far, and indirect accountability takes more work than it seems that we're ready, willing or able to put into it.

And that's a much harder phenomenon to fight.

Lessons My Father Taught Me

2011-10-12T19:55:00.000-07:00

My father and I had one of those "complex" parent-child relationships, and to a degree, we still do. Still, despite our disagreements, I regard my father as a very wise man. I was thinking of the things that I learned from him, and boiled it down to this list of the most important/interesting things. Sure, most of them are simple aphorisms, but having had the opportunity to grow into them from when I was a child somehow makes them seem deep and profound, in a way that things you understand the first time you hear them don't.

People in Hell want ice water. (I hated hearing this as a child, but as I've grown older, I come to really understand that it's true on a surprising number of levels.)

The definition of "obvious" is something that is so crystal-clear that you are the only person who can see it.

There are two kinds of people in the world. People who believe that you can divide everyone in the world into two groups - and people with some sense.

If you don't know what you're doing, stop doing it until you do.

The trick to getting someone to like you is not to do something for them - it's to get them to do something for you.

There are two people on either side of every job. The person that takes a job, and the person that gives a job. One of these positions is better to be in than the other.

The one way to become rich by doing a job is to do a job that other people can't do, or that other people won't do.

There's little point to redistributing wealth. The problem that most people have isn't that they don't know how to obtain money - it's that they don't know how to keep it, and therefore, most of the money will eventually wind up back where it started.

Feel the Beat

2011-10-09T19:08:00.000-07:00

Because it just isn't a lefty protest without a drum circle.

Phat Company

2011-10-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

"For the top 100 companies, about 30 percent of their total value is bound up in this thing called brand."
The World's Most Valuable and Fastest Growing Brands

Or, put another way, 30 percent of the value of the top 100 companies is derived from the fact that a certain level of sales is driven entirely by brand loyalty. Now, this is an average - the numbers by company vary widely - "Brand contributes about 20% to GE's total earnings, whereas Coca Cola is nearer to 80%." In effect, were I selling the exact same product as Coca-Cola (think a white can with "COLA" on it in black stenciling), my earnings would only be about 20% of Coke's, all because of the brand name on the can.

And we think nothing of this. People could literally save 30% on a regular basis by focusing on factors like price, location and quality.

On the other hand, I bet that you couldn't find a government anywhere in the nation that sees anything close to a 30% margin, even on its best day. But we always seem to feel that it's government that's ripping us off...

I Need A Dollar

2011-10-06T21:16:00.000-07:00

The juxtaposition of hard times, unemployment and despair with jaunty, addictive lyrics and upbeat tempo is jarring, but strangely compelling.

Worst. Advice. Ever.

2011-10-04T20:15:00.000-07:00

The Economist, a magazine that I normally enjoy reading, is doing what I dislike most in the media - fear mongering.

Outside of the simple fact that emoting never solves anything, telling people to be afraid sends exactly the wrong message. What will our fear accomplish? Every time we as the public respond to a situation with inchoate terror, politicians (well meaning or not is for the reader to decide) rush to make the case that they need more powers to deal with the situation; which they eventually become reluctant to part with, even once it becomes clear that the problem isn't being solved, because the exercise of those powers enables them to claim to be acting, and if those powers are relinquished and a new crisis arises, the political opposition is going to be quick to lay blame. And not only do those power come with limitations on how we can live our lives, but the trade-offs they entail start to erode our ability to care for ourselves and each other. In other words, the ability to protect requires power that increases the need to protect. And the cycle goes on.

Saving the world economy is possible by the actions of us, as people. We're always told to think of our lives as if life were a railroad, with us as passengers at the mercy of the engineers and conductors. But I think that an expressway is a better metaphor. Traffic jams are a fact of life, but if we are all skilled drivers - and are willing to lean on our horns when people start getting out of line - we can, collectively, minimize the delays. Okay, so we'll need the help of the D.O.T., or a traffic cop now and again. But if we all understand the rules of the road - especially those that we've created for ourselves, we can create a well-functioning (if very imperfect) system.

I know I keep coming back to this metaphor, but it speaks to me, and so it's always at hand. I understand the search for a Good Shepherd, but shepherds eat mutton, too.

Creativity

2011-10-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

I need so see if this guy will sell me some. As near as I can see, this thing is constructed completely of Bionicle parts.

Speaking to Motive

2011-10-01T16:09:00.000-07:00

Ursula Goodenough asks: "What motivates a [climate change] denier?" And she basically received a number of different answers. One motivation from the deniers/skeptics that wrote in and a number of attributions of motive from people who weren't themselves deniers, instead being people who worried about climate change.

Goodenough posted six on the various attributions that climate change "worriers" attached to the skeptics. One matched the motive that skeptics themselves gave. The other five covered a variety of different bases, but didn't really line up with what the skeptics themselves claimed, and more than one was a thinly veiled expression of contempt.

I suspect that if you ran the experiment the other way, you'd see a similar pattern, with skeptics attributing motives to worriers that were largely unrelated to the motives that worriers claim.

Any wagers that worriers who believe in the other five motives think that someone is lying? (And vice versa?) And that causes a problem, because people tend to behave as if the motives that they have attributed to others are accurate, and then expect those people to admit to them. This is why we never get anywhere. We attribute motives to other people and then demand accountability for those motives as a condition of dialog.

No wonder no-one's talking.

Calling a Bowl a Spade‏

2011-09-23T19:52:00.000-07:00

"Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians – not us – who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: On borders and security; on refugees and Jerusalem." President Barack Obama.

Okay, then, Mr. President. Given that at least 95%+ of the American population is neither Israeli of Palestinian, why the fuck are WE involved in this, then? Why is it that the Israelis can pretty much always request the United States to insert itself into a process of solving a problem that we didn’t create (not to self – NEVER give something to a Briton and say “divide this equitably, please”) and you yourself seem to be saying is none of our bloody business, while the Palestinians should be barred from seeking help and recognition from abroad. Mr. President, most of the Arab and Moslem worlds already regard us as having sided with the Israelis; even I don’t believe that we’re the impartial third party that we claim to be, and that’s without yahoos like Texas Governor Rick Perry and his “let’s start another damned crusade” bullshit of “As a Christian I have a clear directive to support Israel.”

Look, sir. I get that we have interests in the region, and that we really don’t give a flying fuck about the “Arab Street” as long as their governments continue to keep the oil pumping and look the other way when be blow their citizens away for being feloniously scary. I get that we regard Israel as an important enough ally that we’re willing to overlook any hinky crap that they might be up to. We expect the same of our own allies. I'm not a naïf. I don’t live under a rock. Apparently dysfunctional as it is, this is the way that international diplomacy works. But must we pretend so aggressively that we’re something we aren’t? What’s wrong with treating this whole situation with a wink and a nod? Why insist time and time again – with a straight face, no less – that we’re neutral and then continue to do things that prove that we aren’t?

Lead a Horse to Water

2011-09-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

"Bad leadership equals bad outcomes."

Okay then. I'll accept that for a moment. But it seems to me that it leads to this corollary...

"The sole measure of a leader's competence is their ability to consistently create good outcomes."

Anybody want to be a leader? Anybody? Anybody? (Bueller...?) After all, if you do it correctly, everything will be okay, regardless of the other factors in play. Right?

My point isn't be a cheerleader for President Obama. I'm not impressed, either.

But if we read facile statements like "Bad leadership equals bad outcomes," and then all nod our heads in agreement, we buy into the single most corrosive aspect of the Cult of Leadership - that all we need is the right leader, and everything will be okay - that there is no problem in the world that proper leadership wouldn't have forestalled. But all of the leadership in the world doesn't un-break something if it turns out that it's fundamentally broken.

It doesn't take a degree in finance to realize that we'd set a baseline for our economy that included borrowing a certain amount of the funds that we were spending, and that we couldn't sustain that indefinitely. And the longer you let it go a) the harder it becomes to sustain, b) the more significant the hit when you decide to stop sustaining it or c) the bigger the miracle you need to make it go away without feeling any pain.

Sometimes, all good leadership is capable of is making the best of a bad outcome.

Could the President have done something differently that would have fixed the situation and have been considered worth the cost? Maybe - but certainly not with an Executive Order. This idea that if he'd only have come up with the perfect solution that Democrats and Republicans in Congress would have seen the light and passed it during a chorus of Kumbaya strikes me as suspect, at best.

Yes, the buck stops at the President's desk. But we shouldn't regard that as an invitation to pass it ourselves. It's said that "Nothing is impossible to the person that doesn't have to do it themselves." So, if it's so easy, maybe we should be putting our heads together, rather than waiting for someone else to rescue us.

Because if bad leadership equals bad outcomes, so does willfully following what we have already identified as bad leadership, even if we seek absolution in so doing.

Quick on the Trigger

2011-09-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

I think that Matthew Yglesias is too quick to take umbrage at a perceived slight against the masses and jumps back into the realm of "the Public is always to be above Criticism," perhaps because of Brooks' use of the word "sins" which connotes intentional wrongdoing.

Perhaps a better wording of Brooks' closing could be thus: "Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their inattention to politics, ignorance of the issues, wishful-thinking-driven decision-making and just plain bad luck. Then they get angry and cynical when it turns out that it can’t."

And I think that Brooks has a point here. If you buy a home because prices are going up, up, up, and you don't want to miss the gravy train and your sister-in-law some said that guy who knows a guy who's related to this woman who slept with her cousin told her that "real estate never loses value," you're taking a risk, especially if you don't set out to understand what's actually going on. As far back as 2007, it was clear that home prices were rising so fast, relative to wages that it couldn't go on forever, or even much longer. (I'm not going to claim I saw a crash coming, however. I figured it would simply plateau.)

The job of government isn't to make everything turn out okay, regardless of our own actions (I suspect I'm starting to sound like Ron Paul here). It can't be, because if we consistently covered each other all the time, we'd all go broke. I understand why Mr. Yglesias is upset, but I think his focus on the word "sins" is a bit too strong.

Does it Matter?

2011-09-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

The common Christian idea that to not believe in a deity is to believe that there is nothing in the universe greater than oneself always struck me as strange.

The idea that the Universe is structured God > People > Everything Else seems nonsensical to me.

After all, had I to dropped dead in the middle of typing this, eight minutes from then, would anything have noticed? But - were the Sun to have gone out during that time, after about eight minutes, I'd have been very (and eventually fatally) put out. So I'm pretty sure that Sun > Me is true. Just like Earth > Me, Trees > Me and Viruses > Me are true. So assuming that a deity has the top spot, I'm nowhere near second place, and so the absence of that deity does not put me into first.

And in a very real way, that makes me irrelevant. In fact, most of us are irrelevant. The Universe does not miss us when we become absent, and neither do most of our fellow humans. But we don't like that; and it makes sense why. Chapter 3 of The Origin of Species is "Struggle for Existence." When Darwin explains this term he tells that he uses it to encompass three different scenarios - the Struggle for Existence within a species, the Struggle for Existence between species and the Struggle for Existence against the environment. All of these would be short-circuited by the failure of individuals to fight to survive, and a general feeling that it doesn't make any difference tends to short-circuit the will to fight to survive. Therefore, it is possible to make the case that our own understanding of our importance in the grand scheme of things is programmed into us by Nature.

And so we create all sorts of mechanisms, designed to tell us that we're important. The idea that God loves us. The idea that all people are equals. The idea that how we behave during life always matters, and there will be repercussions even after we die.

But everywhere we look we are bombarded by indications that, actually, we aren't all that important. As individuals or even large groups, most of us wouldn't be missed, except by those people who know us reasonably well. From 2002 to 2008, how many people were murdered in the United States? Pick a round number. Would you have any clue if you didn't have Google at your fingertips? The answer is a little over 100,000 people. Can you put your finger on what difference it may have made? How the world is any different? We're still here as a nation, let alone a species, and still kicking butts and taking names. Can articulate one thing that we're doing to prevent these deaths? Or perhaps, can you articulate one thing that you're doing?

And I think that this is the source of the uproar over Wolf Blitzer's question to Ron Paul in the recent debate, and the crowd's reaction to it. Where some one may or may not have said "Let him die," what many people really heard was, "He doesn't matter." And even though we often seem to behave as though that were true, we don't normally profess it. And many of us become profoundly uncomfortable when we feel that others do. And I think this is because many of us fear that it is, actually, true.

Look at the abortion debate. Really, it's an argument over who matters more - pregnant women or the fetuses (feti?) they carry. When I was in a parochial school growing up I was taught that the fetus was who mattered. If necessary, the mother was expected to go to her death to preserve it, regardless of the consequences to anyone else. New life trumped those already born. On the pro-choice side, a different argument is made - that the life, health and autonomy of the woman are important and should have weight, rather than simply being cast aside in favor of a conceptualization of women as little more than baby delivery vehicles - unimportant, except for this function that they carry out.

The many facets of the debate over the Affordable Care Act also reflect this. Remember "Death Panels" and "Rationing Care?" Both of those were tropes brought up by opponents of the Act to convey to people the idea that if the ACA were to pass, that their inalienable right to Importance would be, in fact, alienated, and decisions over who was worthy and who was not would be made by "faceless government bureaucrats" - otherwise known as "people who don't understand how important you are." On the flip side, those who support the idea of the government taking steps to ensure access to a certain level of care see critics as advocating a system where people without means are left to fend for themselves when they are in need - unimportant.

But it manifests itself in other ways, too. The Federal government spends a pretty good chunk of change every year making sure that the President of the United States of America is kept safe - and to a lesser extent, that protection is extended to ex-presidents, as well. We're told that the President is a Very Important Person and it would be Really Bad if anything were to happen to them. But there is an entire line of succession, some 17 people long, designed specifically to ensure that the government keeps functioning in just such an instance. This not to say that just because there is a contingency plan in place, that one doesn't guard against the possibility, but realistically, nothing short of a new World War could get through the cocoon around the President, let alone manage an effective decapitation strike against the United States, and so a lot of the expenditure seem more about projecting how Important the president is, rather than protecting him from any sort of credible threat.

In spite of the fact that, really, in the grand scheme of things, we're only temporary, we put a lot of time and effort into convincing ourselves and each other that we matter, that we're relevant - that we're important. Like a lot of things that are baked into us from the start, we're not as aware of it as we could be. In fact, being too aware of it is seen as pathological. We are supposed to matter, and to resist being irrelevant. But the Universe carries on, unaware of our efforts.

Playing the Odds

2011-09-16T18:44:00.001-07:00

It’s been said time and again that people are poor judges of probabilities, especially when any meaningful degree of precision is called for. Whether you see this as a facet of the collective construct of socialization we call human nature or simply a limitation of the human condition due to the working of the brain, this fact has been demonstrated over and over again. People tend to weight a potential risk of loss much higher than a comparable opportunity for and equal gain and they tend to weight the risk of rare but mediagenic (interesting) occurrences as much higher than the risk of common but mundane happenings. And of course, they tend to underestimate the risks inherent in any activity that they have become emotionally invested in.

However, as in so many other things, we believe ourselves to be more capable in this area than we otherwise are, often insisting that our understandings of the probabilities are correct even when it can be directly demonstrated that they are not; and sometimes, even when we are shown why.

As a result, any system that requires that people be able to accurately assess risks and opportunities for it to function properly is, in effect, doomed to eventual failure in a critical area. By the same token, any system that bases itself on the inaccuracy of human assessments (and on telling the people who made them that they are, in fact, accurate) becomes beholden to those inaccuracies; and must then concern itself with conforming appearances to the skewed reality that the flawed assessments predict, rather than what reality dictates. As time goes on, the fact that each flawed assessment is flawed in its own way requires an ever increasing number of doctored appearances, and/or the contention that appearances that differ too greatly from the preferred, including those that mirror reality, are at best incorrect and at worst deliberate fabrications.

The Wrong Bad Idea

2011-09-15T20:28:00.000-07:00

In the wake of members of the crowd appearing to enthusiastically cheering for a man to die if he became critically ill after refusing to purchase medical insurance came the news that a former Ron Paul campaign manager, Kent Snyder had died of complications from pneumonia not long after Representative Paul had suspended his 2008 bid for the presidency. The Paul campaign did not offer health insurance to it's staffers and because a pre-existing condition "made the premiums too expensive" for Snyder to afford, according to family. This has been picked up on as proof that Paul is a heartless bastard, who would rather allow even people close to him to die, rather than see them insured.

This is an unfair characterization. First off, Snyder did not die from lack of care. In fact, the total bill was $400,000. If anyone got the short end of the stick here, it was the hospital. Secondly, exactly what Paul advocates happened. Friends immediately started raising money to pay off the debt. I don't know if Ron Paul himself contributed. Personally, I suspect that he did, but I have no way at my fingertips to verify that.

But it does expose a flaw in the libertarian conception of how health care should work. Health insurers, being primarily for-profit entities who are trying to make money, are going to avoid insuring people who are more likely than not to end up taking more money out of the pool than they put in. Their options to voluntarily contract with others to reduce their risk of being bankrupted by medical expenses are limited, leaving them with nothing other than charity to fall back on. And it's worth stating that in a strictly Libertarian society, it would be considered inappropriate to mandate that hospitals care for all comers - they would have the freedom to pick and chose who they dealt with, just like any other business. And in a society where entering into good contracts is the responsibility of the individual, abuses could be rampant.

That said, it's worth pointing out that the Left's current rallying cry - the most Americans with the resources to ensure that others don't suffer premature death due to lack of care - is also problematic. If Americans are so unwilling to pay to keep one another healthy that the only way to ensure public health is by mandating that everyone pay into a pool and threatening consequences for non-participation, democracy starts working against you. You either need a situation in which an "enlightened minority" strips the majority of the right of refusal, or you start turning the electorate against itself, encouraging the less well-off to vote that the better off shoulder the burden and then hoping that you don't trigger a tragedy of the commons.

This highlights the central issue of most ideological positions - they tend to have views of human nature that are too rigid to adapt themselves to reality. And, when it comes down to it, all politics is about working with and/or controlling human nature to sustain societies. Just as the libertarian idea that charity can be relied upon is flawed because it doesn't scale well, the progressive idea that the tendency of coercive systems to corruption and authoritarianism can be controlled indefinitely by properly educated leadership is just as flawed because it presumes that the right people can always be elevated into positions of power.

There are valid criticisms of Representative Paul's position on how health care should be funded. The idea that he favors simply allowing people to die from lack of coverage is not one of them. Given this, the Left's rush to score points with this to energize their base and cast aspersions on the Republican candidates as a whole is unbecoming and should be abandoned.

Place Gun, A, To Head of Hostage, B

2011-09-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

BOEHNER SOUNDBITE: Job creators in America basically are on strike. And it's not confusion about the policies. It's the policies themselves.

ANDREA [SEABROOK]: His answer? Reform the tax code, making it fairer and to lower rates. Cancel or change all government regulation of business, that could cost money to the economy. And make deep cuts in federal spending, including reforms to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Boehner Lobs Supply Side Shell In Fiscal Trench War With Obama

When I heard this, my first thought was: "What on Earth was John Boehner thinking?"

If you take even a moment to consider the subtext of this, you come away with the idea that there are few jobs because the people with the power to create them refuse to do so as a way of pressuring the government. In other words, the high unemployment rate, and the misery that it engenders is due to "Job creators" who are willing to deliberately allow their fellow citizens to suffer for lack of work because of a squabble with the government.

This seems odd to me, mainly because Speaker Boehner isn't running to be the Republican nominee for President. He doesn't have to frame things in such a one-sided and ideological manner. We I a business owner, I don't see how I could publicly agree with the Speaker's assessment. Especially when he could have just as easily said that business owners can't create jobs.

This is the problem with the drive to put as much distance between the ideological sides as possible. As savvy a politician as the Speaker of the House of Representatives has gone on record as characterizing the nation's high unemployment rate as a hostage scenario - and he's siding with the hostage takers. Perhaps he feels that there is a large enough Republican base that this is a sound strategy. But I suspect that he simply forgot that not everyone who might hear him has the utmost faith that his ideological stance is anything more than that.

Socializing Risk

2011-09-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, my father taught me an interesting lesson. "If you let them," he said, "many people will buy what they want, and beg for what they need. Responsible adulthood is to first buy what you need, and then those things that you can afford of what you want."

That is what makes the flap over Wolf Blitzer's question to Representative Ron Paul so confusing to me. Ron Paul and other putative Libertarians are being derided in favor of a theory that says, in effect, "If people buy what they want, and then - through their own intentions - cannot pay for what they need, society should force its other members to do without things that they want to cover the shortfall." I understand the sentiment, especially if you are of the mind that without allowing such deliberate free-riding, it's difficult or impossible to ensure that those people who cannot afford even the basics are well cared for. But it seems to me that it's susceptible to one of the same criticisms that's often leveled against libertarianism. It doesn't scale well. We understand this, because we don't practice it on a larger scale than out own borders. Why is a destitute person in sub-Saharan Africa allowed to die of preventable diseases simply due to poverty if it is unconscionable that a fellow American who deliberately took a risk is not to be saved? I don't see how the simple fact of being born outside of a geographical border changes that calculus (and neither, I might add, do most Libertarians, who feel that the African should be free to come here and avail themselves of resources without restriction).

Even Communism expected that people would work to the best of their ability, and then take out what they needed - not everything they could carry. Had they been correct in that, the Soviet Union should have had massive surpluses to share with other parts of the world, or even to maintain itself in grand style. But it simply couldn't scale to the population of people that it had to manage, and corruption took hold. And those corrupt people weren't the poor, who took a little extra now and then - they were the already well off, who took advantage of the mechanisms that the state put in place to force contribution to enrich themselves.

I know that we see ourselves as more enlightened than that. "We," we tell ourselves, "will get it right. Few enough of us will succumb to the temptation to free ride that this will work for us where it failed before." But I'm not so sure that we're either more intelligent, more ethical or more responsible than others who have tried less one-sided social contracts than the one that is proposed here, yet still had them fail.

And the vitriol that the debate sparks, even though the issue seems fairly cut-and-dried to me, leads me to suspect that I'm correct to be uncertain.

Open Letter

2011-09-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

Look lady, I know that you were very disappointed, and likely insulted, that the 1930’s book on birds that's been in your family since your grandfather's time (or since you jacked it from the library as a kid) didn't fetch a better offer than 25¢ from the buy counter at Half-Price Books. Unless the book was a lot more beaten up than it appeared, the offer of a quarter seemed really low to me, too.

BUT - That wasn't the fault of the guy at the checkout counter and your passive-aggressive messing with him simply made you look like an idiotic twit. He was confused and uncomfortable, the rest of us were bewildered and you seeming happy to have made someone who hadn't done you any harm squirm left a foul taste in everyone's mouths. You could have just expressed your disappointment, politely and plainly. Or you could have been really smart and taken the book to a professional who specializes in rare books and gotten it appraised instead of bringing it to a used-book chain.

The real world isn't like an episode of "Raid the Attic To Sell Off Your Grandparents' Stuff and Get Rich Quick." On TV, they select the people who they show, and weed out the people who aren't sitting on something that turns out to be worth a small fortune and/or who just wouldn't make good television. (Don't wait by the phone. The call's not coming.) If you actually knew enough to be able to accurately appraise the value of your book, you also would have known that the people most likely to buy it wouldn't randomly wander into a used bookstore in a half-empty strip mall looking for one. Nor are they likely to pay top dollar for a book that some random choad offers up on E-Bay. And even if they would, E-Bay would want a cut to be the middleman, so you wouldn't see all of the money in any event.

I know that it's ego-boosting to be mean to people in service professions. It gives you a feeling of being superior to your fellow human beings that you use to salve the bruises that you sustained when people who think that they're such hot stuff put you down. And I know that you don't care that the people in line behind you thought that you were little more than a mean-spirited wench with remarkably poor social skills. When confronted with not getting something you thought you were entitled to, you set out to hate on a fellow American who was doing nothing other than what he was being paid to do and wasn't a party to your hurt and embarrassment. I've long been of the opinion that we don't need terrorists - they're amateurs compared to the spite that we have for each other. And who do we have here? Why, it's Exhibit A.

Okay, I've railed on long enough, and in doing so proved that it actually is possible to waste part of the Internet. So I'm going to wrap up with the first thought that crossed my mind once I actually figured out just what the Hell your issue was.

Grow up. We have enough problems as it is.

Four Color History?

2011-09-10T23:02:00.000-07:00

Looking for some short reading material, I picked up The Big Lie, by Veitch and Erskine. The basic premise is a woman uses the Large Hadron Collider to travel back in time to try to stop the World Trade Center attacks on September 11. (Don't ask.) Her efforts are derailed by her husband and his co-workers who are utterly convinced that even if her story of hijacked aircraft was true, the towers couldn't possibly come down due to aircraft strikes.

Patriotic, isn't it?

I'm not going to rate The Big Lie as September 11th fiction, because I don't find the Truther movement to be compelling, and the story is really in service of that. What I find more interesting is the use of the Futile Time Travel trope. I've never cared for this trope, because the time traveler always turns out to be something of a dolt, despite the fact that they've managed to master time travel. And this instance is no exception. Rather than calling in a bomb threat or pulling the fire alarm or even actually starting a fire in the building, our intrepid time traveler from today (2011) decides to show people on her iPad what's going to happen to them if they stay put. And she doesn't go to the NYPD or the FBI - she goes straight to her husband's office, in a risk management firm in the World Trade Center.

To be fair, these sorts of stories are hard to tell. (And this particular story has the added burden of using time travel to lay the groundwork for a conspiracy narrative.) You have to explain how someone who knows exactly what terrible tragedy is about to happen can't manage to stop it. And the easiest way to do that, is, frankly, to rob them of the sense to do the obvious, despite the fact that they have all of the information they need. Now this particular story also throws in the added complication of having the time traveler arrive in the past later than she intended (which is a trope all it's own), so she's rushed and supposedly not thinking straight. But this brings up another issue with time travel. If you can hop back to a point where you are effectively in two places at once, and you realize that you didn't get it right, why not just try again? If you honestly think you can alter history, a la "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," you basically have all the time in the world.

I don't know if the average reader is going to be more concerned with the storytelling style than the content of the story, like I was, but I found the cliches and tropes that they used to be distracting. When you're trying to tell a story that you feel is important, how you tell it matters. Because the tropes they used tended to break suspension of disbelief, the basic preachiness of the story became evident, and that weakened the impact. While I'm not sure how else you'd tell the story they were laying out, I don't know that I'd have used a speculative fiction format. The idea that one could go back and prevent it all from happening is an enticing one, and I almost think the story would have been better if it had been allowed to succeed, although this may have opened a can of worms the writer would have found difficult to contain. In the end you have a typical (if slightly paranoid) comic book story, although the heroine is perhaps a little less competent than we'd come to expect.

For Your Own Good

2011-09-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine lent me a copy of Robert Frank's "Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class" and, starting last might, I blitzkrieged my way through it. The basic premise is simple - rising income and wealth inequality is bad for everyone, and that it harms the middle class in particular. It's a very interesting book, lightly and deftly written. It avoids a lot of jargon and going off into the weeds, although this does make it seem a bit unsupported at times. A number of Frank's ideas have gained some mainstream traction so I was familiar with them already - even so it was interesting to see them in a complete intellectual context.

The basic jist of the book can be summed up this way. The spending habits of people at the upper end of the wealth and income distribution tend to foster a certain level of necessary imitation - not only from their peers, but from people farther down the ladder, as we do not judge solely in relation to our own circumstances, but have to "keep up with the Joneses," as it were. As the distance between the top and the bottom increases, the people at the lower end of the ladder find themselves spending more and more simply to try to stay in the race; and it is a race that they cannot voluntarily drop out of, because there are very real social, economic and physical consequences for not playing.

One of the major tenets of the book is that we often engage in behaviors that are very smart from an individual perspective, but pointless or even counter-productive when we all engage in them. The common explanation of "the Tragedy of the Commons" is an example. If I share a common pasture, it makes sense for me to utilize as much of this "free" resource as I possibly can. But when everyone does the same, the pasture is quickly overgrazed, and there is nothing for anyone. Accordingly, conservation of the pasture only makes sense if everyone else does it, otherwise those who conserve are simply leaving resources on the table to be exploited by others who will overuse them, and the overgrazing still occurs.

By the same token there are activities that are "smart" when everyone engages in them, but have nasty potential consequences for the individual. These examples are the ones where Mr. Frank devotes most of his energy. One is that we'd all be better off if we bought smaller cars - but if I have a small car, and you have a large one, I have a much greater risk of dying if our cars collide, so the smart thing for me to do is buy the largest vehicle I can afford (where size is roughly correlated with cost). Such scenarios are important to the book, because they establish the necessity of spending that we would otherwise consider to a function of conspicuous consumption, and thus, purely discretionary.

It was all very interesting, but I started to sour on it towards the end, when Frank began making policy recommendations. Mainly because Frank falls back on the common refrain of the committed social engineer: When confronted with behaviors that are socially desirable, but lose out to behavior that are individually desirable, the way to promote the socially desirable behaviors is to artificially poison the individually desirable behaviors. In other words, you promote the behaviors you want not by making those behaviors more rewarding, but by making the ones you don't want less rewarding.

I understand the strategy, but not only does it demand a high degree of control over people's lives and circumstances, but it presumes that you've accurately covered all of the possibilities. Making "A" less attractive to promote "B" presumes that there is no third option "C" that people will find more attractive than "B." Making "B" more attractive than "A" on it's own merits seems like a better choice. But no-one ever seems to advocate for it. Part of it seems to be a focus on outcomes, crossed with a dualistic world-view. If all I want is more of "A" and "B" is the only viable alternative, promoting "A" or discouraging "B" aren't functionally different. In the end, I think a lot of it comes down to: "Once we've done this, people will see the benefits and then they'll come on board. But right now, it's too hard to explain it to them, and getting it done is more important than garnering public support." I've never felt that this was a winning strategy. People don't support items that they don't perceive as being in their best interests, regardless of how often someone else declares that it is. And when something they don't support is foisted upon them, they start looking for ways to get around it. But I am starting to really wonder why it's so common, considering the limited number of scenarios in which it would be the optimal path.

The Godfather Clause

2011-09-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

While it is said that religion succeeds to the degree that is not subject to tests of proof, there is an interesting phenomenon that I have noted in religious people, most notably Christians, do expect that their faith would survive scientific tests of proof - even though most of the things they offer up as proof wouldn't pass muster under any other circumstances. For example, for many, if not all, non-believers, the relationship between God and the Bible is a classic case of circular logic. The Bible tells us what we need to know about God, and it is God who vouches for the accuracy of the Bible. Nothing controversial there. But what's interesting is that Christians who are otherwise perfectly capable of calling out circular logic when they see it will argue the point that the Bible-God relationship is circular. (This is, I suspect, an artifact of the idea that we tend to understand circular arguments to be false - therefore we also tend to feel that an argument that is true cannot be circular.)

Related to this idea is the concept that faith is validated by the length of time that it has endured and the breadth of its adoption - the idea that the fact that billions of people believe and that belief goes back so far into history acts as sort of proof. Which again, is something that otherwise isn't considered scientifically valid (although it's popular in advertising). And many believers are quick to dismiss a consensus that contradicts their worldview. In this respect, religion has a sort of literal "Grandfather Clause," which is interesting mainly for its invisibility to the faithful themselves, despite the fact that the differing burden of proof that faith often claims is a integral part of the definition of faith.

For many, I suspect that there is something lacking in the idea of faith, perhaps because of the relative uniqueness of the concept. Therefore they seek to obviate their faith, which has the ironic effect of bringing it into even higher relief.

The Third Road Not Taken

2011-09-06T19:49:00.000-07:00

If you look at what's going on today, Robert, in America, we're having an economic crisis and the politicians are having an election and it's like they don't even overlap. And what we argue is that's because the incentives of politics today — money, gerrymandered districts — are so misaligned with the needs of the country that they become like a closed circle, operating on their own, and something's gotta break through that, and what we argue for is an independent, third party that actually can show that there is a huge middle in this country that demands a different politics.
Thomas Freidman "Thomas Friedman On 'How America Fell Behind'' All Things Considered. National Public Radio. Tuesday, 6 September 2011.

There is, in my opinion, a major flaw in Mr. Freidman's analysis. Given that it is we, the voting public-at-large, that elects politicians into office based on those very incentives — namely money and gerrymandered districts — why would you expect that a new political party would change that? After all, there are already plenty of political parties in the United States. If you only take those that came up since the turn of the century you get: the America First Party, American Populist Party, American Third Position Party, America's Independent Party, Boston Tea Party, Citizens Party of the United States, Green Party of the United States, Independence Party of America, Jefferson Republican Party, Modern Whig Party, Objectivist Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Populist Party of America, United States Marijuana Party, United States Pirate Party, Unity Party of America and the Workers Party. How many more do we need before we realize that it's not enough to wish for a "third," or a seventy-fifth, party to come along?

Money is important because most Americans who are not politics junkies make little to no effort to actively go out and seek information on new political parties. After all, how many of the parties I listed above had you heard of before reading them? So in order to reach people, which should be as simple as setting up a website, political campaigns have to spend up to millions of dollars on advertising. I could put up a website with nothing on it but videos of Felicia Day doing calisthenics in a kaftan and, via simple word-of-mouth, generate more unique visitors in a day than many of the websites for the above political parties will in their entire existence Don't get me wrong, Ms. Day is an attractive woman, but if watching her work out while dressed like a middle-easterner is more compelling than politics, yet another new political party won't solve the problem.

And the same with Gerrymandering. This practice (the name of which is an affront to salamanders) only works because once you know what party line most people follow it almost never changes. So if you properly Gerrymandered district to be Democratic or Republican, it more or less doesn't matter what policies one espouses, only the party they belong to. The person whose party affiliation matches that of the constructed voting block wins, virtually invariably. Again, exactly how is a third party going to change this? Especially in a culture that derides any vote other than for the two major parties as literally thrown away.

I understand where Mr. Freidman is coming from. But a third party is not going to come in and rescue us, for the simple reason that we wouldn't willingly go with it unless we were certain it was going to win. And the idea of a third party rising to parity with the "big two" from a standing start is laughable on its face. But, perhaps more importantly, once we change the way we interact with politics, by becoming more willing to seek out an evaluate differing positions to understand which ones we feel best represent us and which ones represent the best chance to improve our lives — and punctuate that with a willingness to change course if things aren't quite what we expected, we won't need to be rescued. The two major parties will have lost their holds on us.

Half of What You See

2011-09-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

About a week or so ago, I was listening to the radio, and I heard a news story that contained an untruth. I knew that it was untrue because I had the proof right there in the room with me.

Now, the media getting things wrong has been one of my pet peeves for a while, and I've typed out a few posts on it from time to time. But this time something occurred to me - no-one is ever always right. We know this. For my part, I understand that I don't "know" anything that I wasn't there to witness or otherwise have first-hand knowledge of. So why do we expect "the media" to always get it right?

Now, this isn't meant to be a backtrack from my previous criticisms of inaccuracies - especially those that could have been avoided with a little research on Google or in a library. The relevant point here is this: Why do we treat any given statement from a single media source as obviously accurate? Especially when so many news sources simply pass along stories from the Associated Press or other news agencies? It seems to me that any piece of information that doesn't have some sort of independent confirmation should be treated as at least suspect, if not unreliable. After all, no-one's perfect, right?

And in this regard, another point occurred to me. Weblogs, like this one, are free for the asking. I met a guy whose hat has its own online presence. (Don't ask - he said it was a long story, and I took him at his word. While making sure that he wasn't between me and the exit.) Basically, as long as you're in a place with reasonably unrestricted access to the Internet, you can be your own reporter. Many activists already are. Will a lot of the information gained in this way be wrong? Likely. After all, if you're only going to believe half of what you see, it's sensible to believe some or none of what you hear. But it's also possible to obtain more than viewpoint on something, if enough people are writing about it. And you can usually tell from the way something is written if the author was there, or if they're just repeating something that they've heard from someone else.

And that is really the only way to have confidence that what you've learned is true. To have multiple unrelated sources, all telling roughly the same story. And we have the resources for that - although for readers, the time might be an issue. But between us, we should be able to create a more reliable and accurate means of getting the news out. It's worth it.

News That's Unfit to Print

2011-09-04T19:10:00.000-07:00

So a friend of mine finds a link to an article on Yahoo! that asks "Do you know how to spot skin cancer?"

Well, to make a long story short, the article at the other end of the link was basically paid advertising from a cheap skin-care products company done up to look like a serious article on warning signs for skin cancer, complete with a link to an assessment that like would have breathlessly exclaimed that you need their products.

In this case, while they didn't manage to gain a new customer, they sure managed to scare someone out of their wits. I'm a bit annoyed with Yahoo for allowing that sort of thing. If an article is a paid advertisement, is should be noted as such, rather than being tucked in with the news articles. Of course, they don't shoulder all of the blame - after all, the sponsorship of the article wasn't hidden, and even if the name wasn't familiar, a quick Google search would have revealed their business.

But I can understand how having to always be on guard becomes tiresome after a while.

Dawn

2011-09-04T18:39:00.000-07:00

And Eos arose, rosy-fingered, from the edge of Oceanus, to open the gates of Heaven, and herald the arrival of Helios...

Hold the Lettuce

2011-08-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is trying to drum up support for a nationwide moratorium on political contributions.

While the message was ostensibly aimed at Washington DC, it should also be taken to heart outside of the beltway, because there's a simple point for the rest of us - we should stop attempting to buy elections. (Although it turns out the "we" in question is a very small group, overall, given that only four one-hundredths of one percent of Americans give more than $200 to candidates.) Given that Schultz normally donates to Democrats, it remains to be seen if Republican donors will see this as an opportunity to step into the void, and try to make the money race work in their favor. History suggests that it will. Honor is nice, but winning is better.

If Schultz somehow manages to significantly lower the amount of money that flows into political campaigns, it could have a transformative effect on American politics. That alone makes it worthwhile.

Hidden Hues

2011-08-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

I went down to Lake Forest Park this past weekend, to take some pictures of a small peace monument that the local anti-war activists had erected. I was late getting there, and so the "early crowd," a handful of support-the-troops types, were already present when I arrived. And I ended up spending most of the next two hours speaking to both them, and the peace activists that followed them.

Both sides, it turns out, are terrible salespeople for their respective positions. But I did learn something interesting about them, and perhaps, activists in general. It seems, that no matter who you talk to, one of the reasons why their message doesn't gain any traction is that the gullible masses have been hoodwinked by the lies of the "mainstream media." The universality of this idea is striking, if for no other reason than it doesn't ever seem to strike any of them as odd that the other side says the exact same thing - it all becomes part of the narrative of conspiracy and victimization. But it struck me as odd. And the conversation with a peace activist helped it all fall into place.

I'd pointed out that the peace protests had been going on for some time. Pretty much every weekend for the past eight and half years or so, yet they weren't making any noticeable difference in things. There was no public outcry against the wars. And the number of people who attended their weekly rallies was steadily shrinking - even some of the regulars had stopped coming. Surely, I reasoned, the problem was that their simple signs, while photogenic, just didn't have enough space to really make the point in ways that were important to people. Perhaps they needed a website, I suggested.

I was told, in no uncertain terms, that it wouldn't work. People simply wouldn't come and read something that didn't jive with what they already wanted to understand was true. The best you could do was to engage people face to face, and hope to convert them. And that's what the signs were for, to raise their awareness and interest. But, I pointed out, what if people aren't interested in what's on the sign? The man's own sign was about bringing the troops home. I'm ineligible for military service, and I don't know anyone who's active duty, so while it would certainly be nice, the troops coming home doesn't mean anything to me, directly.

"So," I asked him, "If you guys get your way, what's in it for me?"

And this is where the familiar pattern emerged. The man launched into an animated diatribe about all of the ills that "the fascists" as he called them, had perpetrated upon the United States. It took some doing, but I finally managed to stop him long enough to say that it was all fine and good, but it still didn't answer the question of how his dream of a social democracy would be of direct benefit to me. So he switched tack slightly, and narrowed his focus to gasoline prices. I tried to explain to him that gasoline prices hadn't really made much of a difference to me over the past few years. Which started him down the path of attempting to convince me that I had been damaged by higher gasoline prices, but was too brainwashed to realize it (because questioning your audience's judgment and/or sanity is always a winner).

Anyway, I suspect that you see where this is going. I simply couldn't seem to get him to engage with me on the topics that I was trying to convince him were important to me, personally, in a way that explained to me how my interests would be advanced. But what was really odd about it was I couldn't convince HIM of that. He was dead certain that he was addressing the topics I was raising head-on. Suddenly, it all clicked. Unable to understand that I didn't find his argument compelling because it didn't relate to things that I was concerned with, the only reason he could see for why I wasn't won over was that someone else had gotten to me first. But to me, he was creating a massive false dichotomy. The simple fact that "the fascists" were bad didn't mean that his particular alternative was any better - it was still an unknown quality to me. It's part of the problem of attempting to define anything in terms of what it is not. What it's not can be a awful lot of things.

In the end, I wasn't able to get him to understand that he wasn't making a compelling case. Or, perhaps more accurately, I couldn't convey to him that I saw the world as something other than black and white. I guess it's like attempting to explain to someone's who's color blind that they've mis-colored something. The picture they draw looks just like the world around them as they see it. What frame of reference do they have for someone else's vision?

The World May Never Know

2011-08-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

The Economist asks: "What’s Schadenfreude in Chinese?"

It turns out that there is a phrase that translates into German as "schadenfreude." It is (in Mandarin, anyway) the idiom 幸灾乐祸 (Xìng zāi lè huò), which means "To gloat over others' misfortune."

But because the moderators at The Economist take "You may not: [...] Post Messages in any language other than English;" to mean NO non-English characters are allowed, even if the rest of your comment is in English, you can't actually post it to their site; and so any comments that actually contain the Chinese for "schadenfreude" are removed. This is, of course, the way of things with no-tolerance policies. This one can be faulted for being somewhat unclear, but, on the other hand, it does seem to be applied across the board, as I wasn't the only person to run afoul of the policy.

Now You See It...

Since this particular post was solely the Chinese text of the phrase, it was a more clear-cut violation of the policy, but one expects that at least some of the moderation staff realize that they've done a pretty good job of sweeping away the answer to the question the magazine itself posed.

Now You Don't

There's something amusing in that. Not the least of which is the fact that The Economist is being fairly draconian in enforcing their website's commenting rules. Of course, since The Economist is not a government agency with any enforcement powers, what they're doing isn't censorship, per se. But they are doing what they've been willing to criticize others (including China) for. Enacting sweeping blocks against what people can say, presumably to protect their readers, and responding sternly to transgressions, even when no harm was intended.

Blowing Bubbles

2011-08-21T15:20:00.000-07:00

A lot has been made of the role of the "Housing Bubble" in the current economic malaise. But I think that a large part of the problem is that there may be a much larger bubble at work here that hasn't been spoken much about.

Here's what I mean. In the run up to the most recent recession, personal incomes for most of the people in the country were flat, and in some cases, once you adjusted for inflation, they were falling. But... when home prices started to take off, people didn't pay much attention to that. Between rising home values, and the ability to turn that into cash via home equity loans, people "felt wealthier." But most of it was "paper wealth." In effect, people were taking out loans based on an opinion of the amount of money that someone would be willing to pay to buy their house - they didn't even have to have an offer in hand or a potential buyer lined up. And so things collapsed when it finally got to the point where that expectation - that someone would want to pay that price - turned out to be misplaced. And so the "paper loses" came rolling it. But no-one wants to take them. The homeowners claim it's not their fault, and the banks have more money anyway, and the banks want the federal government to take the loss, and the public is already grumbling about the money that was spent propping up the automakers... You get the idea.

Okay. With that out of the way, let me move on to another bubble that may be at work here. Right now, the United States government has, in effect, made a number of promises to people as to services it is going to provide, goods it is going to produce or secure and funds that it is going to disburse. But, at this moment, in order to keep those commitments, it is borrowing 40¢ of every dollar that it is spending. And one of the more or less unnoticed features of the current fighting over the budget is the idea that the United States economy will grow large enough and quickly enough to allow us to repay those loans - which had once been a staple of the "deficits don't matter" crowd - has quietly been abandoned. And so, eventually, the expectation that government will fulfill its promises will turn out to be misplaced. And to the degree that those promises have been converted to "paper wealth," there are going to be losses.

And I don't think that many people realize just how much their standard of living has been propped up by public spending. While people are quick to point out things like Medicare and Medicaid or Social Security, the fact is that there are a lot of other programs. One is the FDIC. One thing that you sometimes hear people saying is that "Savings is investment." To the extent that this is true in the United States, it is only true because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has turned bank savings accounts up to a certain size into a zero-risk investment vehicle. Otherwise, any savings that you absolutely needed to be able to draw upon later couldn't be made available for investment. And in invest, you'd have to accept the possibility that you'd loose your principal and/or (likely and) not having access to your funds on your own schedule. And simply storing money for safekeeping would involve a cost. But there are other costs as well, that we often don't think about - I have more free time than I otherwise would because I don't have to keep careful track of what's going on at my bank - if they go under due to bad loans, that's not my problem.

To a degree, this is just a factor of a moderately socialized economic structure - certain risks are spread throughout, and that brings certain benefits with it. But then that 40¢ rears its ugly head again, and we realize that this can't go on forever. Again this is just the nature of the beast. Where the problem arises is the extent to which people have structured their finances and their lives around the expectation that these programs are going to continue. Going back to my example of the FDIC, when it was created, back in 1933, it was intended to be temporary. Granted 77 years isn't exactly forever, but it's unlikely that it's going to be wound down any time soon, and so people have come to make commitments based on the idea that it will always be there. This paper wealth, and the paper wealth created by other government programs, is no less a part of people's lives than home prices. And so if the expectations that underlie that paper wealth unravel, there will be losses. And the fight over who winds up holding the bag will go on, and the economy will founder until it's resolved.

Not So Different

2011-08-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

From talking to people on both sides of the American political divide, I've learned a few things from each in the past month or so.

"The Media" is suppressing the Truth. The Majority agrees with them. You just don't know that because the media gatekeepers are maliciously working for the other side due to an ideological commitment to falsehood, and no amount of public outrage or money can change that.
Lies are everywhere. No matter where you look, people believe falsehoods that have been foisted upon them by the very people who are supposed to be looking out for them.
The People don't really know what's best for them. They've been conditioned to believe that what is really the truth is actual bad for them, and so they wall themselves off from anything that they disagree with. You have to confront them, and pry open their minds, one at a time.

For some reason, I find it interesting that both sides believe the same arguments. Number 2 is especially interesting, mainly because if you ask someone they'll give you a list of things. I've almost never heard any of them come out of the mainstream media. In fact, the only "widespread lie" that I have heard came from a source far enough out in the political wings that I promptly blew it off.

But what's really interesting is that both sides will tell you this, and it doesn't seem to compute when you tell them that you've heard it all before - from the other side. I guess the idea that they have something in common just isn't their thing.

Double Dipping

2011-08-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

So good, you can't eat just one.

I was at a local park taking pictures for the 400 calorie project, and I decided to put the food on a nearby picnic table when I was done photographing it. After all, I wasn't about to eat all of those calories myself.

The crows clearly preferred the cookies to the slices of bread, I think because it was easier to fly off with a whole cookie. And since the crows were clearly wary of getting too close to me (read: within about 15 or 20 feet), anything they could snag and then fly off with was a good thing.

This particular crow was willing to be a bit more patient when he was in the line of fire, and would pick up a cookie, set it atop another cookie, and then pick up both of them at once, and fly off, netting 160 calories with a single trip into the danger zone. Of course the more cautious crows, waiting at various points outside the frame, would immediately swoop in as he made his getaway, hoping to force him to drop a meal that they could get without having to get too close to the dangerous, camera-wielding predator that was keeping the area under surveillance. (The crows were fortunate that the ducks never figured out what was going on. Being willing to pretty much stand on my feet for a free meal, the more or less tame local mallards would have fearlessly picked the table clean then waddled over to ask for more. Which may explain why we eat duck regularly, but "eating crow" is only an expression.)

In any event, it was educational to watch the birds interact with the food, each other and me. I should do it again sometime.

Let Someone Else Pay

2011-08-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

Need a quick way to save some cash during these tough economic times? Just cancel your garbage service, and instead, dump your trash at the nearest apartment complex.

Starting not very long after the collapse of the housing bubble, I started seeing spikes in the amounts of material in the trash compactor and recycling dumpsters. Whereas before it would be rare for either to ever completely fill up, they'd go from empty to completely full in sometimes less than 72 hours. Or you'd drive by in the morning, and there would be a huge amount of stuff that hadn't been there the night before. Sometimes, you'd find a bed or a desk stuffed into the trash compactor in the middle of the month.

The head of maintanance was a fellow expat Chicagoan, and we'd chat whenever we got the chance, and he told me that it was people from the local neighborhood, driving into the complex at night to dump their trash. "Go look out in the area on trash day a few times," he told me. "See which houses don't have garbage cans out." So I did, and lo and behold there were a few houses that never had garbage cans out. Once, you could chalk up to them just forgetting it was trash day. But when I went through for the third time in as many months, and the same houses still didn't have trash cans out when everyone else did, I started to grow just a bit suspicious.

Then I started to pay more attention. Every so often, I'd come home late, as in after 9 pm or so, once it had gotten dark, and there would be a someone, a couple, or maybe even a family unloading a remarkable number of bags and boxes from a car or large pickup truck. And they'd watch me, as I went to the mailbox, or dropped something in the recycling bin. Sometimes, you could tell that they didn't belong there - they were quiet, and hostile to being addressed in any way. Other times, they'd try to be friendlier about it. They'd explain, unasked, that they were moving out, and just finishing cleaning up. On the 10th of the month. Possible, but not likely. Espcially where no moving trucks or piled-high pickups had ben seen recently. One time, I saw another resident confront someone, and be threatened with bodily harm if they didn't back off. The threatening man and his wife dumped some furniture, climbed back into their pickup truck and quickly fled the scene as more residents began to arrive.

I can't say that I'm surprised by this, given that trying to get something for nothing is almost a large a part of the American Dream as home ownership. It's a large part of the reason that we're in the state that we're in right now. Large sections of the country aren't densely enough populated for any reasonable level of taxation to pay for the infrastructure and services needed for the place to viable, and so the rest of us end up funding it, either through direct infusions of tax money or by paying off the bonds that the federal government has floated to borrow the money needed. But it's smaller things as well, Anyone who works in an office environment likely knows at least one person whose idea of shopping for school supplies is to raid the copy room for pens, notebooks and binders.

One of the things that I find many Americans to be remarkable good at is pleading poverty, regardless of their circumstances. I've known people in steady jobs with salaries that reach nearly six figures, and who have enough money that they don't keep it all in one bank because of the limits of deposit insurance who still think of themselves as being on the verge of living on the streets. It's this sort of constant insecurity that drives people to see themselves as needing to "share" in the things that other people have. It won't be until we start seeing ourselves as at least secure, if not affluent, that we'll stop casting our eyes on what others around have.

Bitterness

2011-08-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

"The West have been talking about supporting internet freedom, and oppose other countries' government to control this kind of websites, now we can say they are tasting the bitter fruit [of their complacency] and they can't complain about it," wrote one commentator in official Communist Party mouthpiece, People's Daily.
London riots: China raises questions over safety of 2012 Olympic Games

Translation: How's that irony taste, chumps?

Western governments, here in the United States and abroad are going to have to do a better job with making the case for going after social networking sites, or, more likely, simply drop that line of reasoning, if they are going to avoid looking like hypocrites in front of the rest of the world. It's going to be hard for them to claim that only protesters in countries that they happen to have some sort of (generally) adversarial relationship with are engaged in legitimate action, while their own citizens are simply lawless hoodlums.

The Lunatic You're Looking For

2011-08-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

"Corporations are people, my friend...every (thing) that big corporations earn ultimately goes to people."
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the Iowa State Fair, Thursday, 11 August, 2011.

"Dear friend,

Did you see what Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said yesterday? He actually told an Iowa crowd that 'Corporations are people.'

Corporations are people? Could the GOP be any deeper into the pockets of big business?

This is a perfect example of the crazy ideology we’re up against, and what our Emergency Media Campaign is designed to fight. We need to raise $50,000 by midnight to send this message from coast to coast: Corporations are NOT people. People are people, and we must put the needs of the American people – not multibillion-dollar corporations and their tax loopholes – first. Will you help us?"
The Democratic fundraising e-mail that landed in my inbox on the 12th.

Sigh. Here we go again. I don't think that it takes too deep a reading of Governor Ronmey's comments to understand what he was trying to say. Rather than referring to any sort of literal or even legal "personhood" for corporations (which has already been established by the judiciary), he was making a more or less valid point. Corporations are comprised of, well, people. Including those shady shell corporations that people and businesses set up to hide their activities from scrutiny. All corporations are effectively simply legally recognized groups of one or more people. And, up to a point, the money that is made by corporations does eventually wind up in the hands of people, although Mr. Romney seems to forget that corporations can and do hold assets in their own names, sometimes precisely because those assets are therefore not controlled (in a legal sense) by the people who run the corporation. (And perhaps more importantly, Mr. Romney left out the fact that when the money "ultimately goes to people," it's in a very skewed distribution.)

In my opinion, a more salient criticism of Romney's statement would have used the entire context, not just a convenient snippet. Of course, this isn't the way that political fundraising works. It's about hyping the idea that the Opposition of made up of unhinged ideologues who must be fought to prevent them from victimizing us all. But, for the sake of argument, let's say that Mitt Romney IS actually crazy. As in should be in inpatient treatment for psychotic disorder crazy. So? How does telling me that obligate me to believe that whatever candidate or group of candidates needed $50,000 by midnight last night is any LESS crazy and ideological? Or simply even a better option? The basic logic of a false dichotomy - Republicans are crazy, so you'd be better served to vote Democrat (and give them money to convince others to do the same) - is on full display here. And of course, the Republicans likely do the same thing in their mailings - them = bad so by process of elimination us = good.

Of course, this is nothing new. But the unthinking regularity of it all makes it ever more tiresome.

Spread the Word

2011-08-11T18:55:00.000-07:00

So I'm reading Google+, and Will Wheaton posts about the end of Eureka. Now, I haven't watched SciFi, excuse me - SyFy, in quite some time. Mainly because it all started to seem like random low-budget crap, and eventually, reality television started to make an appearance. Eureka seemed to have broken that particular mold, but the announcement that it was being cancelled was the first I'd ever heard of it, so I wouldn't actually know.

Something tells me that even though Eureka was SyFy's highest-rated show, it simply wasn't pulling in enough viewership to attract decent advertisers. If the commercial breaks had pitches for alarm pendants, acne creams and shady out-of-state lawyers looking to sue over unpronounceable diseases resulting from sketchy medications, it wasn't drawing in enough people. While I'm not as tied into the science-fiction scene as I used to be back in the day, it's not like I've dropped off the face of the Earth, or anything like that. So why didn't I hear about the show while it was still a going concern? Especially one that everyone thought was so amazing? So I find myself wondering to what degree the community of viewers who were passionate about the show were passionate about evangelizing it to other people. Don't get me wrong, Will Wheaton's a pretty great guy, from everything I've heard. But, I've never actually met him in the flesh. Surely someone a bit closer to my everyday life had seen the show?

Yes, yes, I know that the network is supposed to be doing the promotional work, but, as the saying goes, "if you want something done right..." Corporate executives are in the game for the money. And that money comes from advertising dollars. And advertising dollars come from companies being willing to pay to piggyback their message on the back of a television program. If you're watching a television show, and the commercials that come on are for things that have no resonance for you or for anyone you know, there could be a problem. The audience is too small and/or too broke for advertisers to want to pony up enough money to reach that audience for the show to cover its production costs and the desired profit margins. Well these days (like most days), the only science fiction fan with any money is Paul Allen, so if you want a show to last, you've got to get it a bigger audience. So next time, shout it out loud, people! Okay, so it's cool to be into something before everyone else is into it. But if it doesn't last long enough to catch on, there won't be a something left to be into. And "I was into it before it died a whimpering death" just doesn't have the same cachet.

Blah, blah, blah

2011-08-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

Seattle is considering an ordinance that would require employers to provide some amount paid time off for sick employees. Unsurprisingly, the debate on this is basically a series of ideological talking points, repeated over and over again at ever louder volumes. (Since, obviously, if they other side isn't swayed, they must not have heard you.) You'd think that this would be a relatively straightforward cost-benefit analysis. Yet both sides appear to be scrupulously avoiding approaching it in that way. And so the dueling echo chambers ramp up the volume.

Easy!

2011-08-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

Because there's always a simple solution, isn't there?

This seems to cast the problem as one of access, rather than buying habits. It's not like it's hard to find fresh fruit in the Seattle area. This billboard is not in one of the "food deserts" that it proposes to change. There's a supermarket within walking distance, as well as a butcher that sells organic meats, a store where you can get fresh bread and any number of small restaurants of varying cuisines. And given that the supermarket is open 24 hours a day, if you're buying tobacco, rather than fresh fruit, access isn't the problem.

Still, I understand the sentiment behind it, and the "think of the children" call to action. But perhaps everyone would be better served if they kept their attention on the customers, and let them drive the changes they want.

50 Pretty Good Rules

2011-08-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

Nobody In Particular is starting to drift back into Things Aaron Dislikes, so here's a little something I picked up from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer a few years back that I really enjoyed.

It was called 50 Pretty Good Rules for Life, and it was written by a man named Bill Center, who wrote a reader blog called A Radical Centrist on Globalism and Trade. (I should see if he's still writing it elsewhere.) Of course I don't follow all of the rules - I've pretty much chucked #3 right out the window, but they make for a pretty good outlook on life, which most of us could use. Especially those of us who revel a bit too much in our own cynicism.

Always play by the rules!
Treat everyone you meet with respect and dignity. Never intentionally alienate anyone. You can never have too many friends.
Avoid cynicism and sarcasm. No matter how cynical you become, you'll never be able to keep up. [But I'm getting close... I little longer and I'll be out in front, let alone just "caught up."]
Nothing is impossible to the person who doesn't have to do it themselves.
Once you know a person, if you can't get along with them it's at least partly your fault.
Never be vindictive. When doling out punishment, always err on the side of leniency.
Never stand so close to your position that when your position goes, you go with it.
Be an encourager. Never ridicule dreams, quench hope, or give up on fellow human being.
Express your gratitude. We owe a lot to others. Thank them often.
Be generous. Help those in need. Tip big. Don't hesitate to pay more than your fair share. It won't lower your standard of living.
You can't make someone else's choices. Don't let someone else make yours. Choose to be happy.
Call your Mom. If it's too late for that, call someone else who'll be equally happy to hear your voice.
The details are just as important as the big picture.
Listen carefully. Opportunity often knocks softly and wisdom sometimes whispers.
Respect your elders. If things work out really, really well you will eventually be old yourself.
Stay calm. Lighten up. The first report is usually wrong. Except for rare life-and-death instances, things are seldom as bad as you imagine and almost always look better in the morning.
Vote or keep quiet.
Try at least twice as hard to understand the views of others as you do to explain your own. It helps to start by assuming not everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot.
Always know where you're headed. Have a personal mission, vision and goals. Set high goals for yourself and high standards for yourself and others. Have at least one truly audacious goal.
Fortune favors the well-prepared. The harder you work, the luckier you get.
Get up early. Get to work early. Go home early.
When dealing with the media, remember, they always get the last word. Never do or say anything you wouldn't want to read about on the front page.
Take responsibility for your own life. Never blame circumstances, other people or bad luck. Life is not fair. Don't whine – ever.
Don't expect people to follow your advice and ignore your example.
Treat children as your equals. Don't patronize or talk down to them. Cherish them for who they are, not who you'd like them to be.
Take good care of yourself. You're gonna live longer than you expect and good health is a joy and productivity multiplier. Death is nature's way of telling you it's time to slow down.
Be loyal. Keep other peoples' secrets and don't burden them with yours.
The world is changing, and will continue to change, like it or not. Our challenge is to help ensure it changes for the better.
It is rare for someone to remark, "Gosh that speech was too short."
Don't waste too much time trying to stifle bad ideas. It's tough enough to get a really good idea implemented.
Pray for wisdom and courage, not for stuff.
Be yourself. If that's not good enough, try harder. Never stop working to improve yourself.
Become a good mentor and learn to accept mentoring from others. No matter what stage of life you're entering, you've never been there before and you still have a lot to learn.
Learn the power of forgiveness and practice it. Forgive yourself first. Don't dwell on past mistakes. Learn from them and vow to do better in the future.
The only way to accept a complement is to say "thank you" and then do your best to live up to it.
Hire people who are smarter than you are, then listen to them and take care of them.
Strive for excellence, not perfection. Seek quality and value in all things.
Remember, overnight success usually takes at least fifteen or twenty years.
Media bias is inescapable. Avoid consuming only the news with which you agree. Limit your daily media intake or risk distorting your view of reality.
A successful marriage depends less on finding just the right mate than becoming just the right mate.
Never say you don't have enough time. You have precisely the same amount of time as everyone else. Use it wisely.
It's hard to be truly humble, which is mystifying when you consider how much we have to be humble about.
Share credit; shoulder blame.
Have the courage to always say and do the right thing regardless of the consequences to you.
Never hesitate to say: I don't know, or I need help, or I made a mistake, or I'm sorry.
Don't gossip or speak ill of others.
Stay open to new ideas, new experiences and new people. Darwin posited "survival of the most adaptable" not "survival of the fittest." It's more important to be adaptable than to be tough. [Darwin borrowed the term from Herbert Spencer to stand in for "Natural Selection." (On the Origin of Species, p. 77.)]
Trust your instincts. Be decisive, even if there's a chance of error or mistake. Don't let risk of failure stand in the way of a good decision.
Stick with the optimists. Things will be tough enough if they're right.
Sometimes you gotta break the rules – especially when confronted with a "no win" scenario. When necessary, ask forgiveness and press on!

Danger: Falling Anvils

2011-07-31T20:30:00.000-07:00

I'd been reading How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter Schiff, but I put it aside. I'm not sure I'll ever finish it. I picked it up because Schiff was one of the few people willing to go public with his opinion that the Housing Bubble was just that, a bubble, and that it had to pop. And he took a lot of heat for that view, even being laughed at to his face on cable television.

So I figured, "Here's a smart guy. I'll buy his book, and see if I can learn anything." Big mistake. How an Economy Grows... could have been an excellent introduction into the Austrian School of economics for the uninitiated. But the book's smug ideology, hectoring tone and simplistic moralizing quickly made reading it wearisome. Far from being a useful introduction to Von Mises and his followers, the book becomes a Randian screed, with Schiff's anger, bitterness and anti-government sentiment driving the whole thing forward. Those that Schiff is most angry with, "economists and politicians," are universally spoken of and portrayed as incompetent and/or smug, deceitful confidence artists, who, instead of sincerely believing in what they are doing, are deliberately perverting the system for their own gain and/or egos, at the expense of the book's upright, hardworking but dim public. While any introduction to a body of knowledge must, of necessity, simplify, Schiff simplifies some items that don't fit with the narrative that he wants to promote clean out of existence, and others are quickly glossed over. The basic format is that of a simplified ongoing narrative, not terribly unlike a children's story, and as the book progresses, Schiff treats the reader more and more like a dim-witted child, taking great care at the end of each narrative to lay out the very same points he just finished delivering so anviliciously. Perhaps he suspected that the constant hammering rendered the reader brain damaged, and so in need of help grasping the concepts.

Overall, I was disappointed. Not because the book turned out to be a partisan screed. After all, Christopher Hitchens has never met a screed that he didn't like, and I find him to be a massively entertaining writer. And I have some sympathies for Austrian economics myself. But How an Economy Grows... is either written for the ideological True Believer who enjoys the thought of the committed Keynesian being either chastised or defensive upon reading or the economic naïf who knows so little that they don't realize when they're being spoken down to. Either way, it was an opportunity squandered.

Third Columnists

2011-07-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

While many people are confident that Congress and the President will come together on an agreement vis-a-vis the debt ceiling before the United States is forced (or chooses) to default on interest payments on the national debt (as opposed to simply going into a shutdown), I'm not so sure. It should be remembered that one of the primary goals of "Tea Party" Republicans is not simply to do something about the debt, but to shrink the size of government. Given this, the BATNA position of a default suits their purposes just as much as the serious reduction in spending that they're after.

As an aside, the Balanced Budget Amendment talk is pure posturing. Given that the federal government is currently borrowing a bit over 40% of the money it spend, the crash in spending or the severe tax hikes that would be needed mean that it's unlikely that you could get the amendment through the states, even the Red states, since they tend to receive more in Federal funds than they pay in taxes. They'd be unlikely to be willing to watch all of those funds evaporate, and the more-populous Blue states would likely not be a mood to share revenues.

Anyway, in the case of a default, it becomes less attractive for investors to lend money to the United States, and thus it becomes more expensive for the nation to borrow money. This is just fine if you're in the mode of attempting to shrink government, because the less money government can borrow, the less it can do. And if you can hold the line on tax increases (which will be a much easier job when the economy starts to recover) then recessions become a good time to shrink government by choking off its access to funds.

So, my personal opinion is that part of the reason why Speaker of the House Boehner is having such difficulty with getting all of the Republicans on board is that with the split in his caucus between more Reaganite Republicans and the Tea Party and/or Grover Norquist crowd he finds himself saddled with a number of people who are nominally on his side, but who are actually okay with a failure on his part. And, given that, a deal that allows the government to borrow its way clear of a default is by no means a sure thing.

400 Calories

2011-07-25T21:56:00.000-07:00

It's more or less an article of faith among many people, including many Americans, that Americans are overweight primarily because they've never met a foodstuff they didn't like. It seems that the idea of some morbidly obese person going to Crapplebee's and ordering a Grub-blaster Gut-bomb on a platter so large it takes three men to carry it to the table resonates with people (or at least their sense of moral superiority). But it's much more likely that rather than stuffing themselves, many Americans are simply eating calorie-dense foods. Like, for instance candy bars, which pack a LOT of calories into a small volume. The idea came from realizing that a King Size package of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which is 4 normal-sized cups or two of the Big Cups, has the same calorie count as three full pounds of broccoli. So I decided to take pictures of the two of them to illustrate just how much of a difference there was. And along the way I figured I'd grab some other foods, and add them in. And I'll likely add some more things (white and wheat bread come to mind) when I have time.

I also wanted to show that the smaller, calorie-dense foods do tend to be cheaper than the less-dense foods, especially when you're talking about prepared foods. (I'm somewhat surprised at the hostility you find to this concept - like the person online who derided the idea that "energy dense foods are cheaper" because, in his words, "this does seem to violate basic economics...," as if foods were priced by calorie count.) I only priced out those things that came in 400-calorie sizes, I didn't take the time to figure out what part of a bag of chips or box of crackers would cost, since you don't normally buy them that way.

So... here's part one of the project. The pictures aren't aimed at being artistic, although I'm sure that a competent photographer could do wonders with this. They're mainly about illustrating relative size, with the 11-inch dinner plate being a constant for a point of reference. Right now, I think that you get the contrast between the broccoli and the Reese's, but the rest of it all seems about the same size, so I'll have to see if I can find other things that really stand out when compared against one another.