Book Review: Mountains of Madness

My final opinion of H.P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness:



I've given this a lot of thought. Now, it's still entirely possible that I'm just not understanding the historical context of the story, I can accept that. But it doesn't make the story any better.

It really should qualify as sci-fi and not horror, and I'm not sure how anyone could make such a mistake. Granted, the genres cross. But they don't typically cross during scientific expeditions where giant plant-animals and germ wads are discovered in Antarctica. That is solidly sci-fi territory, where horror geeks get phasered by Trekkies on a near-daily basis. All the other horror writers know to stay away, and there Lovecraft is flossing his Ancient Ones right in the middle of the Kirk-Picard debate.

I hereby lodge my objection to the subtitle of the Lovecraft book that I have, which goes "and other tales of terror". It should be adjusted, such that it reads "a mildly unsettling tale; followed by some other stories sure to make you walk home at night at the exact same speed you always do, confident in the knowledge that no monsters or madmen are behind you, and that your world is remarkably understandable and in no way alarming". I realize it's long, but it's accurate.

It's a little embarrassing. The truth does that sometimes.

Why Obama is Braking

This is the Presidential Daily Brief. It's full of things that he wasn't allowed to know as a senator, and lots of those things are, in the annoying campaign parlance that we've all grown to hate, "game changers". Obama's been putting on the Foreign Policy brakes pretty hard, and this in my opinion is probably why.

Makes you wonder what he read about Guantanamo Bay. I hope it wasn't that nuclear terrorists have acquired cannons that fire big ugly spiders and they're only surrendering them on pain of Cuban music, but I admit that I fear the worst.

Who To Blame for Mumbai

There's still chatter about how the Pakistani ISI might have had something to do with the Mumbai massacre, especially on the center-right (the left flat-out doesn't care). The ISI would be stupid to do it though, and while that's not impossible, there are too many reasons why it would behoove Pakistan to disallow it if possible.

First, there's no strategic logic to the ISI involving themselves or allowing the Mumbai attack. There's been a solid cease-fire over Kashmir since 2004 and in some places, there's discussion over demilitarizing completely. The only reason that could support the kind of covert action seen in Mumbai would be if diplomatic proceedings had gone dramatically wrong for Pakistan, and they thought it necessary to force their hand to get back into a position of strength in the negociations. To people who follow Indian politics (all three of you), it's clear that this didn't happen, at least not overtly. Public tensions were about normal in the weeks leading up to the attack, so there's really no suggestion that the relationship had gone sour. It's not impossible, just very unlikely.

Second, it's important to remember that while the ISI may have had a significant hand in the formation of Laskshar e-Taiba as an anti-soviet proxy, that this group wasn't formed out of thin air. There was a group of people there before willing to fight or close to that mark, and they were co-opted by the ISI. That's the only way a viable insurgent group starts; without pre-existing internal volition, insurgencies don't start or last, and can only be supported temporarily by covert funding and influence. What this means is that the relationship between the ISI and Lakshar e-Taiba is not characterized by the heirarchal notions suggested by a creator-creation relationship. It's symbiotic; both feed off eachother, but do not neccesarily operate to eachother's benefit and it is defined more by influence than control. Lakshar e-Taiba will have its own agenda and modus operandi, and it will not always be to the ISI's benefit, even if they cooperate where it suits them. Other examples will include the relationship between the CIA and Nicaraguan Contras, and the relationship between the US Military and the 1920's Brigade in Iraq.

And, just like the 1920's Brigade does things that the US Military doesn't always approve of, just like the Contras sometimes resorted to human rights abuses that were detrimental to the CIA's cause, Lakshar e-Taiba will occasionally act without regard for the interest of their co-opter.

It's important to understand that Lakshar e-Taiba is not a "Pakistani" group per se; it's fallacious to label them as such because they're really a transnational terrorist group that happens to operate out of Pakistan. Their interests are Islamist interests, not Pakistani interests, and there's going to be a pretty wide gulf between them on a regular basis. The influences of their base nation take a side seat to the interests of their religious convictions wherever those interests end up in competition. The Mumbai assault is a very good example.

The attackers did throw out some pretty generic stuff about Kashmir, but it was oriented towards the percieved crimes against muslims and Islam in Kashmir, making the assault not a nationalist issue over Kashmir, but a religious issue. This is perhaps what makes it a little confusing when considering whether or not it was really about Kashmir. It was, but in a different context than is normal. Further, the attackers made clear that they percieved Kashmir as land belonging to Islam; to them, the attempted ceding of the territory to China by Pakistan in 1964 is just as illegitimate as the Indian claim to the territory; they're both tahut, just to different degrees.

The result was an islamic attack on India over Kashmir in Mumbai, which was against Pakistani state interests and only has a valid strategic logic when understood in an Islamist context. But it would be short-sighted to leave the blame with nobody but these Islamist groups, because they are so often co-opted by nations as proxy utilities against conventional military and political power. There must be some reasonable amount of responsibility levied on the people and institutions who continue to co-opt these groups, and lend them legitimacy in doing so. The ISI here is only distally responsible, and probably not responsible at all for the Mumbai assault - that one belongs entirely to Islamism (and if the ISI participated, they were profoundly stupid for doing so). But it's also clear that the relationship, however strained now, can't be allowed to continue if halting preventable terrorism is the interest.

Guns (Wheee!)

It's fairly obvious that I'm a gun rights advocate. So it will come as even less of a surprise that I think the Brady Campaign is full of it. Here's something they said today:

"We don't dispute [the gun sales hike] because the numbers from the federal system certainly confirm that there is increased activity out there. We just think it's a bit stupid," said Peter Hamm, spokesman for the Brady Campaign against Gun Violence.

"Anyone who thinks they need to rush out and buy a firearm clearly has not been paying attention to how quickly we make progress on this issue. We don't think these are first-time buyers. We think they are people who already have more than enough guns at their homes to protect themselves and are buying more."

Hamm is very likely correct, that people who already own guns are out buying more. But more than they need? I could make the old arguments that this nation isn't based on "need" and that it's based on individual liberty, but that would fall on perennially deaf ears. So I'm going to use a somewhat different tack that hopefully will make enough sense to become the new main line of counter-argument.

What the Brady Campaign has never understood, and fails to understand even now, is that this isn't a matter of intelligence or legislation. It's a simple matter of Zombies.

Now, just because we've been making shaky progress in the stock market away from the 7000-point, Dow Jones Insta-Zombie level (DJIZ), that doesn't mean that we've escaped the inevitable, and the American Public isn't fooled.

Peter Hamm might say that those people who are out buying guns don't need more. But who is really in a position to dictate the needs of others in the face of a likely zombie apocalypse? Certainly not someone who knows so little about guns to begin with like the Brady Campaign. Even I wouldn't assume to know, because I don't know how many openings of what size are in any individual's household. If I did, I'd know exactly how many guns could be made to point out of them, which is what I would imagine necessity will dictate.

Besides, the people buying weapons now are buying the ones that Zombie Collaborators like Hamm don't want us to have because they're the effective ones. Everyone knows that.

Publishers Sell Good Books, Dummy

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers. -- Jimmy Breslin

Maureen Dowd. Don't leave, please, just bear with me a moment.

She's on vacation, and Timothy Egan is filling in with an opinion piece up at the New York Times about writers and writing, which launches a boring and predictable diatribe against a couple of conservatives who have the gall to put their thoughts into printed words. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait. This column will still be here when you wake up from your idiocy-induced blackout.

Good, you're awake again. I'm sorry I had to do that. You're stronger for it.

I certainly understand the sentiment that's behind that third-grader's rage, but it fails completely to strike a sympathetic chord with me because you can't even make it from the front door of the Border's to the Seattle's Best coffee shop in the corner without passing through a section filled with more pretentious crap than anyone without a triple-pierced lip will ever want to read. It's also pretty clear to me that there's plenty of room in said Borders for two more books, even if they are by Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

And I may be going out a shade far on an already precarious limb, but I'm going to go right ahead and say that there may well be other bookstores out there.

Point being, the market for books is large, and very, very wide. These two people aren't going to push the hungry masses of starving artists out of print and into obscurity. They were there to begin with.

John Kennedy Toole was dead before he was published. A Confederacy of Dunces won him a posthumous Pulitzer. Were his publishers rushing potboilers to print which prevented him from getting a foot in? Probably. It's pretty hard to market a comedy of the type he wrote. Is that the norm? Not really.

JD Salinger was famous during his liftime, because people thought that what he wrote was poignant. Vonnegut was famous in the same way. So was Hemingway. So was Twain. This was because their writing was exceptionally good on a regular basis.

The next generation of Twains, Vonneguts, and Hemingways won't be kept down by potboilers either (hopefully, the next Salinger will be an exception). They won't be, because their writing will be exceptionally good on a regular basis. People who are having trouble breaking into the industry, by and large, are having trouble for a reason.

And the reason isn't that Sarah Palin wants to write too.

New Layout

It's much prettier this way. The vintage photo above is actually of Main Street in Stevens Point circa 1908. It makes the site look much more respectable until one gets to the content.

The Great Tragedy

The Panic of 2008 is going to be in the history books. It is going to challenge us severely in the years ahead. But there is something worse. Something much more troubling.

And that, dear reader, is the looming dearth of refrigerator magnets.

With the economy shrinking, fewer businesses will have the capital to create advertisement in sticky-thing form; they will be forced to spend on advertising that's actually effective. This means no more free magnets clinging to our refrigerators, loudly touting the superiority of Don's Muffler Service while holding up our childrens' art projects.

The side effect, of course, is that we will forget what our childrens' art projects are like at all, with no way to keep them visible on our refrigerators there will be no way to see them.

An entire generation's creative side is going to be lost in it's infancy.

Good Day

Chemical Ali is sentenced to death today, which is great.

And here, Muslim groups in India want to deny burial to the Mumbai terrorists.

These men are not Muslims. Why should we give them place anywhere? There is no place for them in our hearts and in our cemeteries," said Hamid Abdul Razzak, president, Dawat-e-islami.

Amen to that.

And, better still, the Thai protests that have lasted for 3 months over election fraud have come to a successful close. Kind of makes you wonder why the whining left couldn't do something like that for the last 8 years if they were really sure of a stolen election.

It's a good day for civilization so far.

Reading List

None of these are new releases, but having just run into them at a bookstore here and having not seen them elsewhere, they've made it onto my list fairly easily.

Tell Me How This Ends

Reconciliation

Who's Responsible for Mumbai

There's a long and very complete description of the Mumbai assault at Long War Journal. You should read it, because it's very useful and I'm about to draw heavily on that account.

The link to Pakistan is obvious. Some of the fighters belong to Lakshar e-Taiba that has camps in Lahore; the ship is linked to a port in Karachi, and a sat-phone on board the ship documents a recent call to the city. However, given the nature of transnational terrorist groups, this link is incidental. It doesn't really matter much because it doesn't tell us anything new about Pakistan or terrorist activity. Moreover, it's not really clear just where else they would have come from - it's the only plausible base country within striking distance by sea or land. Sri Lankan terrorists would have better things to do, and everyone else is too far away and not sufficiently Islamic.

The attackers are very clearly your average, run-of-the-mill islamists. They want their fellow Mujahideen released from Indian prisons, they make statements about the suffering and abuse of the Muslim people in India and Kashmir, and they are generally opposed to Hindu control over Muslim lands. There's an important distinction here, because to them, it's not about Pakistan and India and national territory - it's close, but not really the same. It's about Islam, and reclaiming Muslim lands from the infidels, whether they're Hindu infidels or Christian infidels or, sometimes, Muslim Innovators.

So the real question, is how likely and useful would it be for Pakistan to exploit this close-but-not-quite shared interest and help with the attack?

I think that it's very unlikely. People may point to the level of training as evidence of government involvement, but terrorist camps are surprisingly well organized and disciplined. Lots of us labor under the assumption that the terrorist camps are shoddily organized and the trainees can't fight well, but that's not really true. With strong economic support, these camps trained the Afghanis who pushed out the Soviets, so that's worth bearing in mind.

The relative calm over Kashmir has been helpful to both countries, especially to Pakistan who has the US in it's face about their contributions to Afghanistan. It wouldn't pay to foment instability with two nations at once. And while that doesn't mean they're not doing it, it wouldn't help their chances in Kashmir and I'm assuming that the ISI is a rational actor in all this.

But Islamist networks are rational actors too. When they choose targets and methods, they do have a political goal in mind aside from outright murder, even though they are far more likely to resort to outright murder in pursuit of those goals. The Islamists in Mumbai had an agenda, but I seriously doubt that their attack was sponsored by the ISI over Kashmir. They didn't send enough messages about Kashmir specifically, and they spent too much time just being violent Islamists with no message other than their own.

Had they been exceptionally vocal about Kashmir (or even just on-message about it), I'd believe the ISI was in on it somehow. Since they weren't, I'm almost positive that the ISI wasn't involved.

In the end, it looks a lot like the 1994 hijacking of an Air France jet by Islamic militants. Well organized, manifestly political, but it was just terrorists doing what they do, and that's conspiracy enough without dragging government motives into it, even if there are plenty.

What India Needs

You know what India needs most right now?

Not this.



Some of the Mumbai attackers came on a boat from Karachi, Pakistan. It's definitely going to strain the relationship, whether the attack was about Kashmir or not - and there's going to be some reasonable speculation about that.

To me, it doesn't look like it's really about Kashmir, but it's also very hard to tell. Citing Al-Qaeda-like tactics doesn't really hold because that's how these cells operate; that's what decentralization is. They can trade skills and very likely they did, but where they go and how they wage their jihad after that is entirely up to the cell or the individual terrorist, who could direct their efforts to the Balkans, or against Russia in Afghanistan, or in Indonesia. It's been that way since these camps came up, especially with terrorists being trained in terrorist camps in Afghanistan in the early to mid 1990s, and the same is probably true of camps in Pakistan's FATA right now. It's pretty likely that these attackers learned their skills in a Pakistani camp.

That said, Pakistan wouldn't benefit from an infuriating attack on India just when things were starting to calm down between the two nations. The way to resolving the question of Kashmir isn't by turning loose a handful of loonies, so it's clear to me that this wasn't an underboard government effort. That said, Islamic terrorists have a habit of both excusing any fatality that they might cause, and aggressively pursuing terror campaigns when they feel that Muslim lands are threatened - and these guys probably felt that way about Kashmir.

It doesn't really matter where these guys came from. They may have trained in Pakistan, but it's very possible that they were Indian muslims before they went off to the camps - the claims that the attacks were done by the Dekan Mujihadeen would seem to support this. Or they may be of Pakistani origin entirely, and chosen India as the front for their individual jihad. Either way it doesn't matter, because it tells us nothing really new about the way terrorists operate. We know Pakistan is a safe haven, we know that terrorist groups - if they are actually operating - are transnational. It's pointless to renew a scuffle with Pakistan over old information.

It does, however, lend the US and India some traction in pursuing the camps in the Pakistani FATA. If Pakistan is supplying trouble for more than one country, it's possible to justify more aggressive action against the camps, which would be very helpful to everyone involved.

Weather

The season still hasn't decided to settle into winter just yet. It was very cold two days ago and now it feels like spring again. I can't help but wonder if Obama decided against Eric Holder; then it would all make sense again...

The Truth About the Market Crash

I have a panic plan, which until yesterday I expected not to need. I figure if the DJIA breaks 7000, then I'm going to radically restructure my budget on the expectation that when the market does get that low, a zombie apocalypse is really more a matter of time than misguided government science.

I'm just glad it didn't happen over halloween, when the zombies might have snuck up on us, dressing up as people dressed as zombies so we wouldn't notice.

It must be almost redeeming for a pretty large portion of the population of Montana that this is happening. I guess building that bunker and living off of canned meat for the last four years has paid off pretty well for them. On the other hand, a state with a population like Montana's is going to look essentially the same both before and after the zombies, so it's not like they'll be able to put all of their stocked arsenal to use against them. There are no atheists in foxholes, and no heroes living off of spam in creepy bunkers.

I think the rocketing firearms sales confirm my suspicions, as well. Obama, whatever else he might bring, is going to bring the zombies fast and hard, and on some level, we all know it.

Technology is Wierd

My new Ipod, the 80-gig classic, failed on me. Fortunately, it was within the valid return period at Target. I traded it back in for a new gen-2 Ipod Touch. It didn't cost me anything extra to trade for it, and it has more or less become the most indescribably useful thing I own in the course of a week. I read all my news on it. I read Instapundit on it. I've sent emails, schedules, and contrived a very elaborate alarm system for myself with it.

It plays music too. 8 gig is enough to hold my entire library and have plenty of space left over.

It's like a tiny little CIA guy that knows everything, can find anything, and doesn't mind singing a song occasionally.

TV hasn't even been around for a hundred years. Just imagine what we'll be able to pull off in twenty years.

We're Not Really That Nice

I think the folks over at PJM a few days ago were making a fairly obvious mistake when it comes to a comparison of the left’s reaction in 2004 to the right’s reaction in 2008, and I’m a little surprised at them to be honest, but post-election blog flurries can do that sometimes.

The 2008 election is nothing like the 2004 election for at least two critical reasons. First, and most obvious, is that the right ought to be expected to behave much more maturely than the left did in 2004 because it hasn’t already lived through four years of an Obama administration. The left in 2004 had already had to deal with four years of George Bush, a man viewed as deeply committed to ideals totally contrary to their own. They had already suffered through four years of conservative rule, which they blamed literally everything on, by the time 2004 rolled around. I have to believe that the right would be reacting very differently if they had already dealt with four years of liberal rule under which the worst terrorist attack in history had taken place. I certainly know that I would be less than charitable. If you have to compare this election to a Bush election, it has to be the election of 2000, where the Presidency changed party hands last. Which brings me to the second reason that we ought to expect to react differently.

The 2000 election was even less like this most recent election than 2004 was, for the simple reason that it was, by all accounts, incredibly bizarre. Further, the results were questionable on a historically significant basis; what happened there had happened only once before, and since that was the obscure Rutherford Hayes versus Samuel Tilden election, it might just as well have never happened before to essentially everyone who wasn’t a biographer of men with incredible beards. 2000 was an extremely close election, neither party was a clear underdog, and as a result both parties had a reasonable expectation of winning. That’s why so many leftists complain about a “stolen” election in 2004; it was too close to call, and somebody called it.

In 2008, some of us may have managed to temporarily fool ourselves about a McCain win, but I think the reality is that we all knew he would be unlikely once the financial crisis hit. On the right, folks were at the very least subconsciously prepared for a loss that they likely saw coming. Losing wasn’t anywhere near the shock that it was to the left in 2000 or 2004. I do have a point in all this aside from discouraging the somewhat overzealous back-patting that’s going on in the center-right blogosphere.

The point is, this is exactly what an election should look like if we’re concerned about elections being viewed as legitimate. It wasn’t too close to call, nobody flipped out except those already prone to the habit, the Supreme Court didn’t get involved, both sides more or less saw the result in advance and had a chance to make peace with it, and once it finally happened, folks were generally ready to bury the hatchet and move forward. At least, that’s the vibe I’m getting now, and I really hope we keep that up. It reflects well not just on the right, but on the democratic system as a whole. It’s an example to the rest of the democracies in the world – some of whom can use the inspiration - as to how these things are supposed to go. It’s a great American statement that says “I don’t know how you folks transfer power in whatever sorta system you got there, but ‘round here nobody dies and everybody celebrates the one headed in and the other headed out, and that’s the peaceful beauty of democracy.” And, while I realize that’s a statement by America as a whole, it sounds really good if you imagine Fred Thompson’s voice saying it.

What I’m much more interested in when it comes to the new attitudes that will be forming on the left and right on each side, is how the left will carry their win. The last eight years have not made it clear that they can lose gracefully, though I admit they were, at least in 2000, sorely tested by the circumstances of the election. It will be interesting to see if they are capable of recognizing the formation of hubris in themselves as readily as they noticed it forming in the Bush administration. The left taught me that word in 2005; I wonder if they’ll know enough to know how to avoid it now.

The most fun part about all this, in the final analysis, is that now, I’m the minority, and the left is the authority. I get to listen to all my favorite punk music again without feeling even slightly like a hypocrite. They seem awfully proud of America when things are going their way. I was proud of us before it was cool.

Leave Bitterness To Its Owners

Remember all that talk in 2004 about how many people were moving to Canada if Bush won again? And remember how they didn't, and how they continued to infest our country with their hippie rage and discontent?

Of course you do. It was the underpinning of the American Left for the last four years. The bumper sticker that said "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention" was like holy scripture, and damn if they didn't live by it. I think we all remember the moonbattery, the preposterously colored costumes, the paper mache puppets, and the sudden resurgence of white females wearing dirty dreadlocks. But it's important to remember something here, especially now.

All of those lunatic, mind-bent people were wearing their bitterness and anger just like they were wearing that stilt costume of Bush dressed as an oil-sucking vampire. It became all they had for a very long time, and it defined their character too.

Let's not do that. I don't want to see conservatives and thoughtful libertarians out in the street wearing feather boas and speedos because they're upset about having a Democrat in office. We owe it to ourselves to leave that territory for the hippies so that in the next 4 years, we can still find something to laugh at.

So to all those conservatives and independents talking about moving to Canada: put the puppets down. You don't really want what comes with that anyway.

Sober up, kids.

We're approaching zero-hour for the 2008 election pretty quickly, which inevitably means that a lot of the people involved have completed the long and difficult process of losing their minds, and to a significant degree among the electorate, there's really no more vote-winning or losing going on. It's all over except for the screaming, as the saying goes.

Which, if you haven't noticed, people are doing a damned lot of. When it's all over except for the screaming, that also means that there's nothing else going on to distract you from the screaming. I think it's worth stopping for a moment and, on both sides, taking a little reality check of what's coming out of our mouths.

A story at Pajamas Media essentially promises the end of capitalism in the US as we know it, a depression, devastating restrictions of first amendment rights, and probably a marked decline in the quality of corndogs. Why not. This from the Pajamas Media that I once regarded as more cool-headed and objective and less prone to fits of panic than most news sources. Now they're just another biased online news source, and I can pretty easily see a time coming when I have to fact-check them just as rigorously as I have to check guys like DailyKos.

Speaking of whom...

They're not doing any better. Just when you thought they couldn't abandon thought for propaganda anymore because they were out of thoughts, someone writes this post about how Obama is going to change America and the world by sheer power of his blackness and photogeniety with children. Nobody's playing the racism card harder than the left is at a time when it is absolutely clear that it's not really a factor, and may actually be helping Obama.

I seem to be finding myself sadly alone in this political landscape because I don't actually believe that Obama is Jesus 2.0 or Satan Classic. I think it's time for people on both sides to acknowledge that he will not be the Messiah the Left expects, and he will not be the demon that the Right expects. Probably. There's always the off chance that he might actually pull one off, but that's not how the presidency works in anything but extremely rare cases.

If it sounds like I'm assaulting people's personal passions, then I think I'm striking exactly the right tone. This is politics. There are no saints, no angels, no demons, and everyone is a sinner. You don't make it to the national political stage without pulling some shit here and there, no matter who you are. There are no perfect people, no perfect policies, and absolutely no historical reason for anyone to expect either. Passion doesn't really have a place here, because it blinds people to those realities.

More than America needs a Maverick or a Messiah, right now it needs a couple hours of sleep, some coffee, and maybe the number of a rehab clinic.

Odd Coincidence

Last night after work, I went to help out my girlfriend and a gaggle of her friends at a haunted house that they were assembling for a charity. That was cool enough all by itself, but in the process of renovation, the owner found a cluster of newspapers and a few copies of the Saturday Evening Post from late 1930 to early 1931 in one of the walls.

I found one front-page article from the Chicago Herald & Tribune from October of 1930 most interesting. The article unabashedly fixed the blame for the depression on Prohibitionists, giving the stock market crash a complete pass and even calling it a necessary event to keep people employed. After all, if people make too much money, they'll stop working!

And it also said, and I quote, that the practice of prohibition "has vastly increased insanity", when it was supposed to reduce it.

Perspective makes a lot of difference.

The Feingold Effect

Senator Feingold was in Steven's Point this morning to give a speech for the college Democrats. I was in attendance because whether I like him or not, he's half of our senatorial representation and he sits on some pretty interesting committees. I realize that riding my bike through winter weather at 8 AM to see him speak makes me look like a serious hippie, but bear with me.

The speech was pretty locality-oriented and wasn't very interesting. Something about how Obama supports minimum pricing for milk and McCain doesn't, an implication about how he can't trust a republican president with oversight of the intelligence agencies. He'll be giving this speech in something like twelve campuses across Wisconsin.

And if turnout was anything like it was today, that will get his message out to about 612 people. Today's speech drew a crowd just short of sixty.

Media's Murder Bias

Its pretty obvious that the media leans to the mainstream left these days. It's a very widespread and heavily documented public perception, and interestingly enough, it has been for a while. But going through my news crawl today really spells out just how media does their slanting. Their methods aren't particularly diverse.

Just repeating the hate, instead of saying it themselves, absolves them of actually being called hateful; they let other people do that and write up a story, and you're just covering it. Exhibit A: Sarah Palin Effigy Hung in Halloween Display.

As illustrated, the public is big enough that someone will always step forward to do the jackass dance and make the rest of us look like morons. But, it's only speech and that of course should be protected, however asinine. If it's not liberals in West Hollywood joking about the murder of republican candidates, then it's Exhibit B: Skinheads' Obama Assassination Plot Foiled. See how one seems whimsical and the other seems terrifying? Well, let's look at the horror of that skinhead plot more closely:

The men planned to wear white tuxedos and top hats during the assassination attempt, which would have involved driving as fast as they could toward Obama and shooting him from the windows of the car.

The plot did not appear to be very advanced or sophisticated, the court documents showed.

I think that's probably a safe bet. White tuxedos are rarely a good idea. But that's not going to stop media outlets from piling on the scare to make you think that this hate is more mainstream than it is. Even FOX joined in on this, knowing that you're going to read the headline and not the part where they're a couple of rednecks who want to dress up like The Penguin and execute a plot that would be beneath even his least-skilled henchmen. But the effect of the stories is that thinking about Palin's lynching seems whimsical, while thinking about Obama's seems shocking and horrible. That's not an accident; the stories are from the same source and don't run without an editor's approval. The impact of each story is intentional.

Still Alive

I'll be back in Mad-town this weekend, to celebrate Joy's birthday and to get the stuff that I forgot to prep for winter.

I"m working on a longer piece about what Obama & Biden's foreign policy may look like, especially with the recent advocacy by Colin Powell. Stay tuned, it should be interesting.

The Left's Great Challenge

Without looking like a defeatist, odds are good that Obama is going to win in November, despite McCain's possible resurgence. If he does, then the left has the white house and maybe the congress, and something else that they haven't had in eight years, and I'm going to go right ahead and say that they won't know what to do with it.

They'll have legitimacy, and with legitimacy comes responsibility, which the left has been abjectly averse to for the past eight years, preferring to trade it for bitterness and overt intolerance. As long as they were a minority, they had an excuse for it as far as political considerations go; parties lacking power tend to resort to methods of gaining attention that are outside the official system; protests and general activism. The left has been all about it for the past eight years, by no means rivaling the social upheaval surrounding the Vietnam war but emulating it in many respects and going beyond it in others.

Over the past eight years, these people have been in their own narrative element. Conspiracy theorists have reigned like no other time in history. Violent leftists from third-world nations have been glorified on a baffling scale (and stylistically have even merged with Obama's merchandise). Antiwar protests have been prominent and occasionally actively violent. Participants have claimed everything from governmental suppression of their 1st amendment rights to, just occasionally, full-tilt physical abuse at the hands of what they saw as Republican cronies and operatives. This isn't the culture that's driving all of Obama's constituency by any measure, but it is a foundational culture on the left that will have newfound legitimacy come November.

They'll be facing a fundamental problem in being an insurgent party: because they will be responsible, they can't rely on the same old tactics of misinformation and minority tactics. Their credibility will matter, their maturity will be expected, and their moderation will be needed instead of their typical triple-dose of bile. If they can't deliver on those expectations, they're going to keep having problems and their success might be short-lived. But that all remains to be seen.

We'll have to see if there's going to be any truth to Obama's claims to being "post-partisan". Personally, there's nothing I'd like more than to strip politics of the unabashed division and supercharged, fuel-injected rhetoric that has gripped it for so long. I just have my concerns as to whether Obama and the Left are the people who are going to usher in a new era of reasonability and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. They haven't really established a history of it.

"Red Dawn" and Slate

The Instapundit pointed out an article at Slate that compares the movie Red Dawn to America in Iraq, with the reviewer taking the opinion that America looks a lot like the Soviets do in that movie, and the roles are reversed.

The insurgents are at first merely scared, angry kids, but they're hardened by
the viciousness of the Soviets. Seeing nothing to lose, they become suicidal
terrorists who assassinate, bomb civilian targets, gleefully murder wounded and
captive Russians, and eventually martyr themselves in theatrical, insane ways.

Fair enough, that definitely happens in the movie. But rather than keep playing that same tired old "Us versus Them" card, if you look closer the movie is actually pretty instructive on how insurgencies work. It's not about fascism, despite the reviewer's claims. What's actually being represented in the ruthlessness of the Wolverines is desperation.

In my memory, Red Dawn celebrated America and its virtues. But its guiding
ideology is actually fascism. The only politician in Red Dawn, the mayor of
Calumet, is a quisling who rats out his neighbors for execution. His son, the
student-body president, turns out to be the traitorous Wolverine, seeking
immediate capitulation to the invaders and eventually leading the Soviets right
to the band's hideout. Swayze takes command of the Wolverines by force, forbids
a vote about whether to surrender, and demands that his fellow guerillas obey
him without question.

The point that's being madein the movie is one that's visible in Iraq now, Northern Ireland under Stormont, and about a thousand other places on earth where political disenfranchisement is so extreme that oppressed minorities don't see any other way to preserve themselves and their interests but force of arms. In Red Dawn, the Wolverines are absolutely dedicated, from the very beginning, to their own preservation. Fighting the Soviets is actually a sort of afterthought after months in hiding, when they realize they're still dependent upon society for a number of things, and even if they preserve themselves, the predations will be carried out against the helpless of their own ranks. The authoritarianism is a requirement of survival.

Watching it now, I think one of the greatest points of the movie is not that America is the bad guy, or that America has become what the Soviets were. The biggest point, by far, is the display of Americans becoming insurgents not to defend their way of life, but to regain it from an oppressive aggressor. It acknowledges that human psyches work the same way in any country, and it actually provides a very useful perspective about insurgencies and how they see themselves: as standalones in a world gone completely off the deep end. Their characteristics - fanaticism, ruthlessness, asymmetrical warfare, and occasionally the appearance of insanity - serve a larger strategic purpose in holding the group together and wearing down the will of the dominant power.

Fun With Numbers

I just finished my Physics test, and I have some issues.

First among them is, surprisingly enough, the way a professor with a doctorate in astrophysics counts her problems. In the review, she said there would be three problems to solve on the test that wouldn't be multiple choice. The difficulty with that is that when test time came today, there were indeed three questions - but each had an A, B, and C part that required you to solve something else - they weren't integrated questions.

That's actually nine questions, so far as I know. It's only frustrating because solving them made me late for my Tai Chi class, and if you're late to the dojo, you don't get in. I haven't missed that class until today. That's issue number two, just to maintain a correct count. It seems to be a difficult practice for lots of folks these days.

Between congress and my professors, I might need to make counting a continuing theme of this blog.

Notes to Myself

Good news first, is that on my first test on Bureaucracy I got a 93. I dropped some points because I didn't feel the need to include an example of administrative tunnel vision, but naturally I won't do that again. The example he was looking for was the FHA's tunnel vision on foreclosure rates, and how that contributed to suburban expansion and may have even exacerbated the racial divide. Fair enough - this teacher gets examples, even if he doesn't ask for them.

Haven't got the results of my American Policymaking test back yet, but it was pretty straight- forward and I'm pretty unconcerned about it. It was multiple-choice, which means two things: it caters to the lowest form of knowledge (recognition), and the speed with which you can complete one generally drives the absolute number of questions up, which of course drives the cost of making a mistake down. I'm sure I did well.

Energy and the Environment test is today, in about an hour. I'm totally unconcerned about this one too, because it's really a 10th grade physics class masquerading as a college course. No sweat. I might even enjoy it.

One of these days I'm going to take some pictures of this place, so I can do a photoblog about a typical Friday up here. The same eight anti-war protesters occupy the same bus stop with the same signs every Friday as I ride downtown to work. I usually wave because we're all regulars here, might just as well be friendly. At least they're a quiet bunch, no annoying chants or anything. There's not enough of them for that.

I'll be heading back to Madison this weekend to get winter stuff, because it looks to be coming in fast up here. Maybe I'll get some antennae for my TV so I can watch the news, if they're still there.

I also hope to have a pretty decent review of the last presidential debate, or at least one important and revealing exchange, up within a day or so. I realize that the economy is in full panic mode, but that doesn't change that there are other important things out there. I fully agree with Politico that it was an awful, horrendously uninspiring debate on both sides when neither candidate has any excuse for being uninspiring. We're making history on all fronts right now, and both men came across as canned. But canned in a way that's been left out overnight so that there's not even fizz; just the lukewarm vanilla flavor of day-old root beer and shame.

There's no energy in either of these guys. One wonders if over a year of campaigning hasn't taken the fire out of them. First guy to get a second wind earns himself a point swing, how does that sound for incentive?

I don't care who you are..

This is funny.

Kos, and Surviving the Election Holocaust

I realize that the people over at Kos aren't supposed to run around saying sane things. That would be absurd, and frankly there's no room in the world for that. But I will say that this entry is particularly stunning for it's depth.

It's perhaps the single most hyperactive "gotcha" moment I've ever read. Coming from Kos it's not surprising to see the term "unhinged" redefined, but when I spend my time alone, at the back of the Student Union with my own mocha, hunching over it and cursing under my breath about assheaded partisan politics, its exactly that sort of thing that I'm probably cursing about. If it's not that, then it's my lack of central heating, and I may at any given moment be arguing with myself about which I hate more.

The point is that this sort of thing is exactly why I don't really fully engage in election politics. On both sides, they're the political equivalent of that one guy who doses up on speed when everyone else is out for a decent night of drinking: people want to get into it, but they just don't want their hearts to race and they'd like to maintain control over the volume and pace of their speech.

Or at least, I would. And I'm really genuinely bad at it when something sets me off, and those things multiply by several thousand when you start dealing in election politics. They redefine partisanship in ways that would make God and Satan give eachother sideways glances.

At this point in the debate (as in all points of it, actually), there is no gray area. You're a Nazi or a Jew, a Slaver or a Liberator, The Colonel or a Chicken, Autobot or Decepticon. And for most people, the only thing that matters is who can come up with the most obscene attack on the other's character, true or not, because the public generally doesn't care if you correct it. Obama is a muslim, and Palin charges for rape kits.

Now make an educated choice in this environment. You can't. There's so much static that if you participate in that level of debate, you won't hear anything useful because nobody's broadcasting anything useful. You'll be making choices based on voices you think you heard in the midst of white noise.

I can't wait til the election is over, no matter who wins. The last seven years have so badly divided the public that it is a real difficulty to speak with people who disagree with you in any kind of rational, respectful manner. Jefferson would agree with me that this is a horribly destructive state of affairs. You're supposed to be able to talk with your neighbors. You're supposed to be able to speak to eachother to mutually see what each party needs and wants and more than that, to realize that your opponents aren't roving packs of Sharpteeth from The Land Before Time.

They're people. They want, ultimately, all the things you want: peace, security, stability, freedom. The disagreement is only about what to do to get those things. But we will not have that sort of realization on any meaningful scale in this environment.

Micromanagement

In my pseudoscientific management course that I took at MATC, among the other questionable principles they threw at prospective leaders was the idea that managers typically have "a high tolerance for ambiguity".

Last week on Monday, my manager explained all of the night lead's duties to me verbally while I took notes. On Tuesday, she emailed me a Word document detailing all of the night lead's duties, and read it aloud to me from her own paper copy. I printed that so I would be able to reference it quickly. On Wednesday, she gave me my own paper copy and emailed me the Word document again, and asked if I had any questions, prior to verbally repeating everything that was in the document. Thursday, nothing happened. But on Friday, she provided me with another printed copy, then an "updated" email copy of that same document (the only thing updated was two words regarding my break time), and a printed copy of that. Then she read it aloud to me again, pointing to where the words that she was reading appeared on my screen.

That means I have about five written copies of the same information if you include my notes, and three electronic copies.

Having reiterated several times that I had no questions on the night lead procedures, she encouraged me to call her at her house once she had gone home to resolve anything that I didn't think was clear. Now to be clear, at no point was she ever even slightly condescending about any of this or even marginally impolite. She was being very nice and exceptionally patient, and explained to me that I have been doing impressively well, and that these aren't remedial courses because I'm doing badly.

The night lead procedures aren't difficult. I have to watch for incoming claim emails and forward them on to get set up. I have to clear up any remaining internet claims. I have to do mail runs every hour on the hour. I have to take calls for assistance from other night employees. My break is at 6:15pm every night. This is as far from rocket science as cliches can get.

But because of all this, it's pretty clear that my manager hasn't got that typical ambiguity tolerance. For whatever reason, valid or invalid, it's psychologically important for her not to ensure that I know these things, but to ensure that she says them enough. It's not a matter of her educating me, but it seems much more as if she's trying to reassure herself. The constant reiteration is really a measure against her own anxiety. As long as everything I do matches what she does to a T, then she will have trained me right.

It's not as if her job is on the line if I don't do well. But for her to know that she's doing well, she has to give me absolutely no wiggle room to do anything wrong, no matter how minimal the consequences of a mistake are. Compliance is as close as she can get to confidence.

The difficulty with that is that by forcing compliance through reiteration of commands to people who know what to do, you lay your own insecurities bare by advertising them, and people don't like insecure leaders; they look weak and dependent. I would know; when word got around that my old supervisor at Best Buy peed sitting down because his wife didn't like the mess, any credibility that he may have had went right out the window. As you might imagine. The point is, the more you give to your own insecurities, the more you take from people's confidence in you. Take enough, and they won't trust you when things get hard.

I think the major thing preventing me from having a micromanaging personality is that it takes so damn much effort. Between that, and the repetitive motion of all that copying and pasting of work instructions, I just don't think I'm cut out for it.

Veep Debate Blog

Live Portion

Before I say anything else, I have to say that I came in late. I haven't heard it all, won't be able to tell you who won. Nobody will actually be able to anyway, but least of all me.

I have to hand it to Palin though, she sounds confident enough and she seems to be taking this debate suprisingly well. I haven't seen her speak before this, and I admit to being impressed. Extra points for using Reagan's line from his Carter debate, that took moxie. The shining city reference felt a little bit canned though. She looks right at the camera every time too, rather than the studio audience. The Wall Street Journal said she might do that, and that she's underrated when it comes to televised debate.
.

Biden is much less charismatic (his maleness might have something to do with that), but he's also doing a good job. I don't hate him, even though I hold a grudge against him for his Iraq Partitioning idea. He's playing up his grassroots a little hard, but he is pretty genuine when he talks about family, and I do appreciate that. Even if he has multiple apparent misunderstandings of the VP's Constitutional role.

The only person doing a bad job is whatever churl is handling the damn microphones. Get it together, man.

Palin looks like she has cold coffee-stomach type jitters. It has a very specific sound and body language that she's definitely displaying. Not the same as outright nervousness, but maybe she should cut back on the pre-debate caffeine.

Postmortem

Palin seemed to stumble a lot more than Biden, but that stands to reason. She's sort of new to this, and Biden's done all this for a damn long time. She had some pretty nervous giggles and I wish she didn't, and I wish her delivery was cleaner, because Biden really showed her up when it comes to delivery, even if he had some distressing misrepresentations of the Constitution.

I'm actually willing to let that go though, obviously the VP presides over the senate even if there's no tie vote, Biden knows that because he's been in the senate for a damn while now. He knows, even if he failed to communicate.

Palin's "energy independence" ideas ring just a shade hollow though, because there's nobody who's not for that. It's just a matter of timetable and method of pursuit, and frankly I wouldn't drill in ANWR if it were up to me. High gas prices are pushing alternative and efficient energy technologies, and undercutting the prices five to ten years from now means disincentivizing that market shift and slowing the research of those technologies. But, to be fair, in 5-10 years the cost of energy provision could possibly be so high that we could safely drill in ANWR without substantially slowing alternative and efficient energy research. I can see both sides of that, so the rhetoric doesn't go very far from either person without a fairly involved analysis and projection of what the energy market is going to look like in 5-10 years. Which I admit that I don't have. So nevermind, I guess.

There's no winner here, but I'll say the same thing that folks said about the first McCain-Obama speech: Obama didn't lose, and that's a sort of win for a newbie. Palin didn't lose, and that's a sort of win.

Here's the thing. Palin came across as a little bit generic as a conservative the same way Obama comes across (at least to me) as a generic liberal. Tossing out Reagan might get her in with a certain demographic of voters on the right, but it may not be the best thing to grab the centrists. The same goes for Obama and his constant Kennedy references.

Then again, grabbing the center was never the point of Palin's candidacy. McCain can do that well enough on his own, and early on he polled badly with the mainline conservatives for being a RINO. Palin is supposed to round those votes up by being the conservative.

America has it easy this year. No matter what happens, we either break the color barrier or the gender barrier, both desirable things. Everyone gets to be a progressive, which is part of the genius of Palin's candidacy: it defuses some of that Angry Left rhetoric against what they see as the racist, androcentric Conservative class. Ted Rall must be furious.

My only advice to the McCain campaign: let Palin out of the box more. She did just fine, cut her some slack and let her get comfortable with talking policy. Remember all that "Obama's just empty rhetoric" stuff that went around? The same stuff is going around about Palin, and so far rightfully so. Fix that. A VP without policy abilities is not an asset to your campaign.

And my advice to the Obama campaign: Put Biden back in the box. Palin, with coffee-stomach jitters in her only VP debate, held her own against your own big policy gun. Put Biden to work on some policy stuff, because he'll be good at it, and let Obama handle the rhetoric and appearances from here on out. He's much, much better at it, and Palin can't hold the line against him.

Note to both campaigns: the public has completely finished with the rhetoric. Start honestly debating policy and drop the gotchas, or you're going to start fostering public distrust in the election process, and that's going to bring out the Paultards again, with their damn Bill Hicks quotes. Put some substance down, or lose the audience.

Micromanagers

My boss sent me an email today, just to let me know how she phrases a particular type of email that she sends all the time. Before she sent me that email letting me know how she phrases it, she spent no less than three minutes telling me how she phrases those emails. Not the why, just the how.

I realize that three minutes doesn't sound like a long time. But just sit there for three minutes, and do nothing.

See that? Boring and annoying at the same time, right?

Good thing they pay me at work, or I just might not go. And with any luck at all, she'll become more hands-off as I gain competency. I can't tell how it's going to work either way at the moment.

I don't know if I'll ever really understand the impulses that would drive someone to even want to micromanage. The more hands-on you are with the people you're supposed to be supervising, the more liable you are for their mistakes. And, as they build competency and you keep telling them the same things, you're going to breed resentment. And, in an environment where the magnitude of the mistakes that you can make - and the consequences of those mistakes in terms of work added - are muted, there's not much point to that.

That is to say, more resentment than just telling people what to do all day long will, which is quite a bit, depending on how much respect those coworkers have for you. And odds are, if you micromanage, that level isn't very high to begin with.

The Public is Always Right

Ron Paul taught me to trust Libertarians just as much as I trust everyone else with a party subscription. They certainly aren't immune to the occasional case of the crazies.

Over at Instapundit there's a poll asking whether or not congress will pass bail-out legislation this week. I think its pretty likely, and I'm not really crushed that they didn't pass the other one on Monday. Nobody was in love with it; the whips didn't even bother rounding up votes, everyone who had to make a decision was scared senseless and anyone who didn't was angry about the whole thing, somehow.

Conservatives didn't like the idea of mucking around with the free market that much. Democrats balked at giving the Treasury Secretary as much power as he wanted. The public, as could be expected, didn't see their interests represented because they are shortsighted, panicked, and it wasn't adequately explained to them just what the hell was at stake.

As far as the commenters over at that Instapundit poll, they pretty much spell out how basically everyone in the public feels about it: they didn't trust it, and won't trust the next one unless there's some serious bipartisan support, as well as a very clear description of why doing nothing is a bad idea. I'd probably start with "778-point drop and $1.2 trillion in equity lost". I'd follow on that for every "Wall Street Fat-Cat" that loses his or her job, three other supporting jobs are lost.

That can turn into a lot to have on your conscience for the sake of ideology.

Hooray For Objectivity

Today one of my professors quoted a story in a "journalistic context" about how when conservatives are given a piece of information they like, they believe it even more when that information is discredited. I had to ask him where he'd read something like that, so I did. He mentioned a magazine that I've heard of a number of times before, and I couldn't quite place it. But I knew when he said it that I wasn't going to like it, once I remembered.

The magazine was The New Republic, of the Stephen Glass scandal fame, the Ruth Shalit scandal fame, and most recently the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal. This is a magazine that I know best for its repeated publication and intentional support of stories they know to be fabrications and plagarisms. And one of my professors reads it quite intently.

My beef here isn't that they're a lefty publication, that's fair game. What bothers me is that if I were to give you one, single, shining example of the downfall of journalistic integrity and the propaganda games that many media outlets have turned into, I'd have to say it would be TNR under Franklin Foer.

Another win for academics, right?

Junkyard Wars Bicycle

I corrected my previous post; as it turns out there are 435 members of the House of Representatives. It's not because I can't add, it was because I was including Puerto Rico in the population count. I thought it was ok to do that, but apparently they're not really a state yet, sort of the way the U.P. isn't technically Wisconsin.

Anyway, as I mentioned a few days ago, I managed to destroy my bike yet again. So here's what's left:

• Blue Sun Tour frame, old, struts slightly bent from my first crash.
• New, chromed out Sun Tour fork, replacing demolished fork, hacksawed down to fit.
• Original back wheel with a Wal-mart mountain bike sprocket cluster and freewheel.
• Original rear derailluer, put back after a brief flirt with Wal-mart mountain bike derailluer.
• Araya front wheel, replacing devastated original front wheel.
• One brake set (rear) with salvaged mountain bike brake pads.
• No forward derailluer, as the original has been completely destroyed.
• No chain guard, as it was bent beyond use inexplicably.
• Pacific Girl's mountain bike handlebar, replacing roadbike bars.
• Single trigger shifter and brake for rear brakes and derailluer, from previously mentioned Pacific Girl's mountain bike. Works beautifully. Forward brakes removed due to pointlessness.
  
• Same handlebar wrap.

I put this together on Sunday, and it really works beautifully. The straight bars are very long, which makes the bike very easy to control precisely. They'll be nice in winter, when it's a shade slippery. I did all of this precisely because this bike is so beautiful. And at $550, it's a bottom-of-the-line Cyclocross bike; I challenge you to find a CX bike for cheaper.

Between the sticker shock of a new bike, and how very much I enjoy tinkering, I had plenty of motivation to fix the one I had up. And I think there's something charming about having a bike that's got about the same luck as I have.

Bailout Bounce

Let's talk about "expected to pass" for just a second.

This generally means that a bill is expected to pass. I know, I was confused by this concept as well. But precisely how do you get from the minority whip saying "80 votes with good floor energy" and the majority whip saying "120 votes expected" to saying the bill is "expected to pass"?

I realize that I'm not a math major, but unless we've somehow entered the Quantum Mechanics field of vote counting, 200 of 435 is somewhat less than 1/2. To venture a guess, I'd say it's about 45.9%. Maybe this is my inexperience talking, but when one estimates 46% in favor, I wouldn't imagine that it's safe to jump right to "the measure is expected to pass".

According to the Wall Street Journal today, party leadership (especially the democratic leadership) didn't even make an attempt to whip their votes, and let individual reps decide for themselves. So they did, and they based their decisions on what their constituents were saying. Which, for about 36 reps, was "I don't understand this and I'll make you pay for it in a month if you push this through". I get why they voted against the bill, and we can't really fault elected representatives in the house for doing what their constituencies tell them to do. That's why they're called "representatives". If we didn't elect free-market republicans to make free-market votes when we tell them to do it, then there are much bigger problems afoot.

And then of course, you have Pelosi's inspiring little speech on the floor that was every bit as classy as giving a pregnant woman six shots of Absinthe. Way to bridge the divide, idiot. I'm not suggesting that Pelosi has a history that would suggest that being a bipartisan leader when it matters most, but it is just about the pinnacle of tone-deafness when you need to whip votes to your side and you roll out a comment like, "It is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush Administration’s failed economic policies". Yeah, that'll make the friends you need.

The issue here isn't that she's not allowed to be partisan, or that republicans voted on the bill and not her speech. The issue is power playing. For the representatives who backed down when they heard those comments, its because up until that comment flew, it was understood by everyone that this was a bipartisan effort - one that included some old-guard republicans, who frequently aligned themselves with the Bush Administration's policies. The speech was viewed by those representatives as an attempt to take what was a bipartisan action of epic proportions, and turn it into a Democratic Party win in the House by way of simple rhetoric.

Republican reps will be damned if they're about to let her do that. 12 lost votes later, the minority whip actually has to say that you can't do stuff that's going to push away the yes votes when you need them.

Its like a really bad ice headache.

Never mind that the bailout package is another economic policy advocated by Bush and a Treasury Secretary that he appointed. While most people would experience some cognitive dissonance when bashing the Bush Administration's economic policies in general in an attempt to push forward one particular Bush Administration economic policy, Pelosi, mercifully free of an understanding of what leadership in congress is, does it without even blinking.

Try it again, this time without a transparent attempt to snatch credit.

Pen Blogging - I Don't Need A Reason

I spend a lot of my time writing, and my penmanship needs all the help it can get because there are days when I can't read my own notes. I probably failed a test because I wrote a paragraph about the "llack freedom marmot". But when my penmanship is that bad, I generally have the help of a bad pen.

By "bad pen" I mean any pen where the ballpoint is sticky or drags a lot, any pen where the ink skips, or flows so heavily that I smear the words when I write a sentence (I'm left-handed, so that happens a lot). That means that for the most part, the Bic Roundstic medium point is just about as low as I can go without becoming frustrated or poorly educated. The fine points scratch like pencils and skip like schoolgirls, and I just can't tolerate that kind of behavior out of a pen. Similarly, all those needle-fine Pilot Precise-V pens can take a flying leap; they're the worst culprits when it comes to runny, smeary ink. Every time I use one, the bottom of my hand gets so black it looks like I got frostbite from an alpine expedition gone wrong.

Not to mention the fact that if you have bad paper, these pens turn a notebook into wet toilet paper full of tiny, .5mm holes at all the intersections in your lettering.

As a result of the pen industry's general failure to produce a pen that doesn't scratch, skip or bleed without costing eight thousand dollars or being made with such a wide barrel that you have to write with a clenched fist, I usually retreat to using automatic pencils - the technology seems more complicated than that used in a pen, but for some reason they're far less frustrating, and at least there's a point to it when they scratch.

But, there is one pen that I can write with that doesn't give me any of the usual inky hell, and it's not shockingly expensive and the barrel is only a little bit larger than strictly necessary. May I present to you, the UniBall Jetstream Sport.



When I went to England, I got two plain Jetstream pens with retractable points before I left, and I took literally all of my notes with them for four classes, for the duration of my three-month stay. They didn't run out, and they very rarely skipped (I had some Jetstreams before, but they were the plain capped-type and had some skip issues). They wrote so smoothly that I could actually hear my lecturers over the sound of them writing, the points didn't drag at all, and the ink dried fast enough that I never had to worry about smearing.

My only complaint was that the barrels were pretty big, and that made an otherwise very graceful pen feel a little clunky. They were covered in black rubber from point to tail, they had big clear logo windows on them, and were generally wasteful of petroleum-based resources.

The Jetstream sport is a very happy step away from that nonsense. They write with the same smoothness and the same non-smearing ink, and they feel a shade more graceful because the barrel doesn't feel like it's wearing a wetsuit. Now, if I could just get a whole pack of black or blue Jetstream Sports, instead of just getting one black in a fivepack of rainbow-colored pens with pastel pink and green inks, probably for the purpose of celebrating Easter and Diversity at the same time.

Now, take all of the above for what it's worth. I just hope that I haven't convinced too many fringe lunatics that I'm actually a corporate whore for Big Ink.

The Presidential Debate

Ok, so I didn't actually watch it, I was at work. But I did read a whole bunch of news stories about it, every live blog on Instapundit, and watched some snippets of video from CNN, and I think that qualifies me to evaluate this particular event, for all it's actually worth.

Which isn't that much. All I can really say for it is that it was ever so slightly less ridiculous than just watching a long string of competing campaign ads back-to-back, for the most part. But there were useful nuggets in there.

Impressions

Both candidates carried themselves very well, so huzzah for that. As several livebloggers noted, Obama's pronunciation key seems to have been misprinted and he sounded just a shade less informed than usual on foreign policy. My girlfriend pointed out that Obama sounds a lot like Dave Chapelle, when Chapelle impersonates a white person. For McCain's part, I'm tempted to agree that he spent too much time letting Obama chew him up without inflicting some consequences. And as far as his extensive trips to the middle east, that's great, but there are these people out there called Foreign Service Officers who can do that for you. Good on him for having those experiences, but let's keep the utility of those experiences in perspective.

I suppose I should mention that those weren't the useful bits.

Numbers

At Instapundit, 73% said McCain won, and 9% thought Obama won. There's no poll at DailyKos, but the liveblogging was overwhelmingly positive for Obama, and they link to an external poll where Obama landed 78%. At AOL, the split is a little more even, 46% saying Obama over 44% McCain. I can't call this anything but a draw. Interestingly enough, while Obama is generally talked about as the favorite handler for the economy (in every news story I read, especially at Kos), McCain is still leading him on the AOL polls of that question by 6%.

I've actually wondered about the AOL demographic for a while, because every week or so I check their straw polls, and the only electoral vote that Obama wins there is D.C.; it's usually 63% or 64% in favor of McCain for president, and that number hasn't really fluctuated, even with Palin being added to the ticket. I wonder if AOL frequenters are diverse enough to be considered a random sample.

Content

The only thing that stands out as a statement from either candidate is Obama saying that he'd dispatch troops across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to hit militants if need be. McCain was absolutely right; you don't say something like that out loud. I'm even pretty perturbed by the idea that we let it slip that we were doing it a couple weeks ago. That's an operation that's dangerous enough that it should be understood policy for pretty much everyone that you just don't ever talk about it until it's all over, and the people who were doing it are old and gray and can write books about it with supremely macho titles (like "Havoc Wind: The Ssgt. Max Fightmaster Story").

I have no problem with candidates talking tough about exercising our full range of powers to keep American interests safe. But I don't think it's prudent to ignore the political realities of being a third party in an unstable and very hostile region. You have to work quietly, or you're dead. Obama may have been trying to appeal to the more hawkish in the audience, but I think he ended up looking a little more like a novice as a result. What you're willing to do in a covert manner, you don't mention in public. If you mention it in public, you sound like you're willing to do it overtly, and it's assumed that you understand the consequences that might have.

Overall Reaction

Kos posters seem to be convinced that McCain is a flyweight when it comes to economics, but that's definitely not the whole story. With Wall Street in the condition that it's in, and knowing that he's going to have to beat Obama on economics in the future, I think it'd border on profoundly stupid to suggest that McCain can't or won't learn enough to win out. McCain knows what the important issues are, even if they're not his favorites, and for the record, he has economic advisors for pretty exactly this reason. If this debate was a tie, then I strongly doubt that it's as damaging for McCain as the Kos folks would like to believe.

And as for the Livebloggers linked at Instapundit, McCain isn't a foreign policy heavyweight. He's a juggernaut, and for him to not have absolutely and mercilessly crushed Obama in that exchange is a failure. He should have shot back more and played off less. There was no reason for him to play softball there.

The public opinion on this debate shook out pretty predictably: everyone thought their guy won it, had the facts on his side, looked more poised, acted more gracious, burned more calories. Check out the Instapundit live blogs and the Kos posts and tell me otherwise. It will be interesting to see if these debates have any measurable effect on public opinion come November.

Anyway, I broke a pedal off my bike (no, I don't know how) and I need to think about fixing it.

Do A Good Job

The last few weeks have been ridiculous when it comes to economic policy. Until pretty recently, Wall Street was something that I thought I could pretty safely ignore; I figured "It's the market, it can handle itself, we're not in the 1930's anymore".

Needless to say, I've been putting a lot of effort towards trying to understand what happened, why it happened, and whether or not this bailout plan will fix it. Since I've been reading the Wall Street Journal to do that, I've had to take a crash course in economics, which I've really never been good at because, as I've said, up until recently I was pretty safe in ignoring it.

Long story short, when it comes to this, is that I don't have enough time to get to know what's going on in time to have an educated opinion on this. I know a little about markets, a little about what happened and what the idea behind the proposed fix is, but that's it. I have to trust our elected representatives to do what's right, and hope they do a good job.

This was a very bad time for me to re-engage in politics, but there's nothing for it now.

Professors

So far, classes are going as well as can be expected. My "Energy and the Environment" course isn't really much about energy or the environment, it's really a remedial physics course that so far has taken four weeks to explain how conservation of energy works. I suppose you have to teach this stuff to somebody, but it's pretty aggravating to have to go through this kind of high-schoolish course again this late in the game.

Actually, I'm reasonably sure I did more complicated experiments in high school, where I was graded on my understanding of the subject matter and not how well I laid out an Excel 2007 spreadsheet. What's the difference between a 14 point font header and a 16-point font header? 3 points off your lab grade, according to the professor.

My professors are pretty uniformily and predictably liberal here, but it's better than Ken Barrett back in Madison. At least these guys are happy to run with the Sarah Palin rumors without issuing corrections instead of going full-on crazy. One has to wonder what posesses such supposedly smart people to latch on to such ignorant and obvious rhetoric. When a guy who writes a book called "Bureaucracy and the Policy Process" gets onto a five-minute tangent with some ham-handed joke about McCain's VP pick, I can't help but wonder if his mental faculties haven't seen some sort of decline in the intervening period.

These really are smart people. They're experts in their field, they write decent books and one of them writes for the Wall Street Journal four times a week. So why do these guys get sidetracked and feel the need to regurgitate rumors about banned book lists? I actually have a theory about this.

My Bureaucracy professor said last week that being able to teach is like being able to write your own script, direct your own cast and perform in your own movie five days a week. I doubt that many lecturing professors would disagree with that. There most definitely is a theatrical element to a lecture, and its pretty likely that anyone who has ever lectured knows it. And the most popular type of movie on earth is one where you give the audience what it wants, and there's really no question as to what that is when it comes to college kids taking care of the general education credits with a political science course.

They'd almost be stupid not to do it, especially if it meant their students disengaged from the subject matter. If you're going to teach people anything, you have to hold their attention, and objectivity and neutrality gets you no attention at all.

Horror Writer Needed

I just finished H.P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness, and I really don't think I fully understand the horror. It was interesting enough, but the suspense and actual scare factor never materialized. All I'm really left with is a desire to read more of his work to learn more about the imaginary world he created, which was pretty interesting. But I'm a long way from scared of it.

Maybe it's a matter of timing, but then again Bram Stoker still scares people and so does Edgar Allan Poe, so I don't think the antique factor is enough to exonerate Lovecraft.

So the question is, who are the classic horror writers who are still scary, and not just listed on the Required Reading lists at high schools?

Blog Comments

I was surfing a few of my usual political blogs today, and I decided against my better judgment to read the comments that were made on one of the posts. It's really too bad that the intelligence level of most internet commentators doesn't match that of the original poster.

It'd be a beautiful world if people could add something useful in comment sections more often. Or just shut up. But this guy can rant about it much more capably than I can.

Colors

Quick note before I leave: you should know that I was deeply conflicted about the color scheme. I'm not entirely sure there's a more gay set of school colors I could really pick aside from purple and yellow, but they are the school colors here and I feel strangely obligated to include them.

My apologies, I didn't mean "gay". That was inappropriate. I meant "alternatively lifestyled".

The First Week

Here's my first post, shortly before a few friends and I walk to the bar for some celebratory first-week-of-class drinks.

For anyone stopping by this blog at random, this blog will contain lots of things, and absolutely none of them will be useful to you in any way. With any luck at all, that means you might come back here. A lot.

I haven't actually gotten much of anything done yet. I did manage to decide to blog about my experiences at University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, but other than that, I'm still working on it.

Thus far, I've really only managed to secure a job, get acquainted with the syllabi for all of my classes, and lob myself headlong over the handlebars of my bicycle. The blue fleece I was wearing even left a skid mark on the sidewalk, which I'm weirdly proud of.

This blog won't have any particular focus aside from that of my major, but I won't spend a lot of time getting very militant about the politics that I'm studying - if I've chosen a side so quickly, I'm not studying very honestly. In other blogs I've focused very specifically on American strategy in Iraq, but you won't see that so much here. This will be more of an experiential exercise, and the content is going to be whatever it will be.

Anyway, it's just about time to get intemperate, so that's where I'll leave it for now.