Vingt-Cinq
~~~
If you tried to access Whims this afternoon, it may have
failed. It's turns out that Enom.com, a giant Internic registrar, was
down, so when you typed in
www.whimsyspeaks.com,
there was no Enom to resolve the name into an IP address. There are over
500 registrars in the US, but over 100 of them actually use Enom to reconcile
DNS, so I'm guessing a whole lot of sites were down this afternoon.
Over 10 million sites use Enom for DNS routing. Imagine how much
e-business suffered during the outage.
~~~
CDY was tagged "a billion times" in the 25 Things About Me meme, posted them,
and then made them disapparate.
I like the idea of posts-on-a-timer, disappearing after a given period of time.
Blogger should make it a configuration option.
It occurs to me that there are some bloggers about whom 25 things would be
interesting, others who already tell us so much about themselves that it's
difficult to believe there's anything new to know.
Anyway, here goes:
- I once played ping-pong with O. J. Simpson.
- I've had more wives than children.
- As a kid, I worked with 4 other kids to detach the staples from 4x4's supporting the fence around the Beltway, then rocked them out of the ground, all to build a treehouse.
- Sweet Junie is the light of my life.
- I really don't care what kind of underwear I put on.
- The only street food that my mom let me eat in Iran was pan, a flat bread that went for 3 cents.
- I didn't start writing poetry until I was 49.
- My first PhD dissertation was on blackjack.
- I once held the Annandale High School record for sit-ups and the pole vault.
- I tried marijuana once in 1969, and inhaled.
- I once dreamed about getting a tattoo in the shape of a birthmark.
- I remember absolutely nothing about living in Japan.
- I have two friends that drove 6 hours to Hannover listening to German tapes on St. Patrick's Day and all they could say by the end of the trip was "I am not an Englishwoman".
- I spent most of my freshman year at college playing hearts for money.
- I am terrible at using the same coffee cup, and by the end of the day, the office is littered with them.
- When I was 12, I had visions of making a fortune patenting my catfish bait recipe.
- I own over 2,000 wine corks.
- During the late 70's I kept a Joyce Chen cleaver under my mattress for protection.
- My dad thought most teenage jobs were for sissies, so every summer for years I worked construction, or at Atlas Van Lines.
- I used to catch box turtles with peanut butter.
- I have had my hair cut by a murderer.
- I was 15 minutes late to the National Merit test.
- I didn't know that my sister was my half-sister until I was 27.
- I once sat on top of a mountain of Ethiopian pennies that was 20 feet tall.
- I look just like my picture.
~~~
If you haven't
heard, Senator Claire McCaskill is pissed. She wants legislation
limiting the salaries of bank executives taking bail-out money to $400K
– chump change for the Thain's of this world, but
it's what the President makes.
~~~
Republicans
are trying to make life difficult for poor BHO. Bob Cesca provides a
zillion
reasons why that isn't going to happen. Mainly, because he's the
smartest guy in the room.
~~~
Will Rove be
jailed? One can only hope.
~~~
Old Ratface
defends Wall Street mega-bonuses.
~~~
Macroeconomics is
astrology.
The usual nonsense by an expert in one field whose political leanings cause him
to opine in one in which he has no training. The last time I encountered
this was in the 70's, when I ran across the
Institute
for Historical Review. It was the leading Holocaust-denying group at
the time, and their literature was filled with members of academia (many from
Cal State Long Beach, as I recall). None of the faculty members was an
historian, however. They were mainly from the hard sciences with a couple
of sociologists and shrinks.
Dr. Frank Tipler, who
wrote the "macroeconomics is astrology" article is the author of The
Anthropic Cosmological Principle, The Physics of Immorality, and
The Physics of Christianity. Some quotes from the the Wikipedia
article:
In his controversial 1994 book
The Physics of Immortality,[4][5][6]
Tipler claims to provide a mechanism for
immortality and the
resurrection of the dead consistent with the known laws of physics, provided
by a computer intelligence he terms the
Omega Point and which he identifies with
God.
Tipler's 2007 book The Physics of Christianity analyzes the Omega
Point Theory's pertinence to
Christian theology.[10]
In the book, Tipler identifies the Omega Point as being the
Judeo-Christian God,
particularly as described by
Christian theological tradition. In this book Tipler also analyzes how
Jesus Christ
could have performed the miracles attributed to him in the
New
Testament without violating any known laws of physics, even if one were to
assume that we currently don't exist on a level of implementation in a
computer simulation (in the case that we did, then according to Tipler such
miracles would be trivially easy to perform for the society which was running
the simulation, even though it would seem amazing from our perspective).
According to
George
Ellis's review of Tipler's book in the journal
Nature, Tipler's book on the
Omega Point is "a masterpiece of
pseudoscience ... the product of a fertile and creative imagination
unhampered by the normal constraints of scientific and philosophical
discipline".
I don't mean this to be an ad hominem argument, I just mean to point out that
you have to consider the source.
~~~
I think I'll change the list of 25 all day.
Hey, Robert!
I turn 60 next year, and I'm keeping you to your promise.
~~~
Colbert asks about Prufrock. He also has a "mountain in his pants".
It's not a metaphor. Thanks to
Emily for this one.
January 30, 2009
Thief-in-Chief?
Henry
envisions the institutionalization of flarf. Gabe will be the head
flarfiste, Kent will be the Original Sad Clown. Dissertations will be
written about "Jordan Davis, Drew Gardner, Gov. John Connolly, JFK, "Toenails"
Lantucci, Nada Gordon, Gordon Nado." ~~~ Stan
reads "Elmo". ~~~
Five years of flarf. ~~~
Misms, bionobte.
Flarf is out,
Captcha poetry is in. ~~~ Dale gets
serious: "If I had time, perhaps in some future article, I would argue
that Flarf needs to disassociate itself with the capitalist tendencies of tag
clouds and reinvest efforts in providing meaningful contexts for the
collective’s clearly intelligent attempts to account for the cultural
transformations of our time." ~~~ The 2009 FLARF
fact sheet. ~~~ Flarf on
MP3. ~~~ Flarf on
Harriet.
~~~
Do you have words that you know the meaning of but never actually say, maybe
don't even know how to say, that your eyes jump over and you don't even
try to subvocalize them? I have a number of them. One is
apparatchik.
~~~
Apparently,
not
everybody
loves Obama.
~~~
Just what we needed: a new
FICO
score.
~~~
America is officially bankrupt.
Or maybe
not.
~~~
The top ten financial crisis
buzzwords included naked shorts.
~~~
The
death of the billable hour?
~~~
Why would a
woman with 6 children be taking fertility drugs?
January 29, 2009
Financial Pornography
~~~
There may be only
five red states left.
~~~
Financial
pornography.
~~~
To anyone (read: Republican) worried about the size of the bailout bill,
consider that it will represent about a third of the long-term cost of the Iraq
war. It is only 3 times the size of the last Farm Bill, which supports
only 5 crops and largely
goes to very large agricultural corporations. Millions of dollars
annually go to farm owners who live in Beverly Hills and NYC.
~~~
Next time, skip the blowfish
testicles.
~~~
Cath's Quick Seafood Risotto
This is an absolutely delicious risotto recipe that quick, relatively
inexpensive, and even good for you.
2 large onions, finely chopped
2 T olive oil
1 pint canned clams
5 cups of chicken or fish stock
1 cup dry white wine
2 cups Arborio or Spanish paella rice
2 T fresh thyme or 1 T dried (I can't tell the difference)
1/4 teaspoon saffron (less if you're on a budget)
1 pound of shrimp
½ pound of scallops
The clams will run you about $4, or up to $8 if you use the clams in "pouches".
You might have chicken or fish stock in the freezer, or you can buy a couple of
low-sodium stock (cans or "milk carton") for about $6. Find a bottle of
white for under $5, you don't need Montrachet for this to taste good. The
Arborio is much more readily available in supermarkets now, and 2 cups may set
you back $3-4. I use frozen unpeeled shrimp (on sale for $6-7 a pound),
and frozen bay scallops (about the same price). This serves 4-6 people,
but if you make that 3 cups of rice and adjust the stock up to 7-8 cups, you can
probably serve 8 people with decent portions. That comes out to about $4 a
person.
One thing I love about this recipe is that you can make it in under 30 minutes.
Another thing I like is that I can make a batch and eat it for days (just store
covered in the fridge). Another thing I like is that it's delicious,
without having to add cheese to it (although a little Parmesan/Romano never
hurts). Another thing I like about it is that it only calls for 1 cup of
white wine, which means I can drink the rest while cooking and at the meal.
OK, directions:
- Get your biggest, heaviest pots and heat up the olive oil.
- Get another pot out and warm up the stock.
- Add the chopped onions and sauté until translucent.
- Drain the clams and pour the clam juice into the warming stock pot.
- When the onions are done, add the wine and cook over high heat (I use about three-fourths of the "dial" on my stove) until all liquid has evaporated.
- Add the rice and cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes. Be attentive, you're still on high heat.
- Add one cup of the stock to the rice, and throw in the thyme and saffron. Cook at same high heat until the liquid is absorbed.
- Add another cup and repeat the process.
- Keep adding one cup at a time, cooking until the liquid is absorbed each time.
- Halfway through the last cup of stock (about 3 minutes from the end),
add the shrimp, clams and scallops.
Adding the stock and letting it absorb one cup at a time is what brings out
the creaminess in the risotto, so don't cheat and dump all the stock in at once.
This is Cath's second entry in
Whimsy's Cookbook.
~~~
Let's see: I can believe Rep Tom Price (R-GA) that the bailout bill is a
terrible
idea, or I can believe Nobel-prize winning Paul Krugman that it is
absolutely
crucial. A classic quote from Dr. K:
"Old-fashioned voodoo economics — the belief in tax-cut magic — has been
banished from civilized discourse. The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point
that it contains only cranks, charlatans, and Republicans."
~~~
Trish opines on the
Worst Recipe. Go over and post your favorite. For a large list
of wretched food, check out the
Gallery of
Regrettable Food or
World's Worst Recipes.
~~~
Sullivan has a couple of posts about translation, in particular, an inane
suggestion by Bart Wilson that the word "fair" only exists in the English
language. When I was married to Cath, she used to comment on such nonsense
all the time. My favorite eye-roller was when someone with limited foreign
language skills talked about a friend who was "fluent in 7 languages".
Nobody is fluent in 7 languages. They may be conversational, but
fluency means that you are essentially unrecognizable as a foreign speaker,
excepting a slight accent. Being fluent means that you can rapidly count
and do arithmetic in a language, have dreamed in it, and could conduct a
business meeting.
~~~
Another
reference on the National Review to "The European Welfare State", with all
the usual negative connotations. This is another classic case of
nationalist conservo-speak. Europeans largely love their "welfare states".
The don't pay for university or health care, and have a basic minimum of support
when sick or old. They have substantially stronger unions, good schools,
and much more vacation time. Some European countries are fiscally shaky,
but so are some of our states.
For this lifestyle, Europeans pay somewhat higher income taxes (it depends upon
the country), and a relatively large national sales tax (VAT, and it's now
pretty much identical throughout the EU). There is little or no capital
gains tax, however.
Conservatives would like to have it both ways, of course. They would like
to talk about higher taxes in Europe, and then say that U.S. corporate tax rates
are higher than those in foreign countries.
It's not true.
~~~
I seem to be running into more Franz Wright comment raves lately. A poster
on one of my Bloglines sites (sorry, can't remember who) received an earful from
an Anonymous that may or may not be FW. This all harkens back to the
famous
exchange between FW and Logan, best exemplified by this note to Logan:
If there is ever the slightest possibility of our finding ourselves in the
same room or general vicinity, I want to advise and plead with you to get away
from that place, fast, because if I find out about it, I assure you it is
distinctly possible that I will not be able to resist giving you the crippling
beating you so clearly masochistically desire. I do not wish to kill you or hurt
you, and so I beg you to get away from me, without delay, if you realize we are
in the same room somewhere.
Best, Franz.
For all the chatter about Franz over the years, no one has asked the obvious
questions: How possible is it that FW could wipe the floor with Logan?
What are their respective heights, weights and reach? Have either had
martial arts training? Does Franz bite? Is kick-boxing allowed?
Literary types are generally so wimpy that perhaps the two would just swing a
little and sit down to rest with a Martini. Personally, I think I could
take Franz. We're about the same age and I lift weights and treadmill
every morning. I was also the Annandale High School intramural wrestling
champion. I would start out with indecent gestures and rude insinuations,
like the French guard in
Scene 8 of The
Holy Grail. Then, I would read flarf to him until he begged for mercy.
~~~
Whimsy responds to an excellent
article by Megan McArdle (look in comment section).
~~~
Speaking of outrageous recipes. Check out the
Bacon Explosion: its ingredients are 4 pounds of bacon, encased in an
equivalent amount of Italian sausage. The result? 5,000 calories and
500 grams of fat.
~~~
I find it amusing that people who couldn't perform brain surgery, repair their
own automobile, or perhaps even balance their checkbooks are suddenly economists
(just review the comments on any of a dozen blogs).
January 28, 2009
And Nothing But The Truth
The history of the United States in 10 minutes, excerpted from the Conservapedia
American
History Lectures:
The first settlers in America were Native Americans, or American Indians. Their
origin is not known. Some claim they migrated from Asia, but that makes little
sense because American Indians are very different in many ways from Chinese and
Asian Indians. Even their blood types are typically different.
The incredible genius of Columbus -- or Providence -- was demonstrated a year
later on his second voyage across the Atlantic. Amid the vast ocean, Columbus
was able to return to exactly the same location that he had reached on his first
voyage on the island of
Hispaniola.
That is like finding a needle in a haystack the size of a football stadium.
Initially, from 1607-1608, the Jamestown settlement lived under socialism,
whereby the group shared its food with everyone no matter how much or little
each person worked. This economic system was a complete failure that led to
"starving time" as no one had any incentive to do any work to provide the
necessities of life. In September 1608,
John Smith
was elected president of the governing council. He ruled for a year and
installed a conservative economic system: "don't work, don't eat!" Under this
new system that replaced communism with free enterprise, after a few years food
production began to increase significantly and by 1614 there was plenty to eat.
Corn is a tremendous contribution by Indians to the world, and it sustains entire countries to this day. Most of us eat lots of corn; corn is also used to make ethanol fuel, and the rising prices for fuel have caused corn prices to increase, which in turn has caused other food and meat to rise in price because animals depend on corn for food. But corn did not exist in Europe during the Middle Ages. Cheap and easy to grow, corn has become one of the most popular foods worldwide, rivaling rice and soybeans. We can thank the Indians.
One prominent textbook claims, under "Rhode Island," that "This belief [by Roger Williams] in the separation of church and state became a cornerstone of the American Constitution in 1787." That is completely false. Roger Williams was long dead by 1787, and there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution.
In the 1730s and 1740s, a marvelous spiritual revival known as the "Great Awakening" swept the colonies. A glorious Christian fervor spread throughout, helping to bring the colonies closer together in terms of beliefs, customs and practices. Led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, this was called "New Light" revivalism to distinguish it from the spiritualism of the 1600s.
George Washington is the most honored person in all of American history. Why was he so great? Was he so great? He was not a brilliant man. He was not a great military general. In terms of military strategy, he was not particularly good. He was inept during the French and Indian War, for example. He did not write anything of value. Think about that as we learn more about him
George Washington was so popular and respected that he probably could have become king. He was in his fifties, about the age of the current President Bush. Even if Washington did not become king, he could have ruled as president for the rest of his life. But his greatness was, like Jesus, to decline power that was available to him in order to advance a greater good.
There were also conflicts between Congress and the President. Due to the American outrage, Congress demanded that President Washington provide papers relating to Jay's Treaty so everyone could see how this happened. But Washington refused, and established the principle of "Executive Privilege" of President: the President does not take orders from Congress and does not have to produce executive-type documents to it.
Adams did not handle the criticism of him well. Recall that he was from Puritan Massachusetts, where it was customary to exclude or even hang someone who challenged authority. Adams' reaction to unfavorable statements about him was to sign the Alien & Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize him!
In the House of Representatives, many Federalists supported Burr and liked him more than Jefferson. But Burr was actually a bad guy. As the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, Burr had access and wealth, and a good deal of charm. Yet even the charitable George Washington, who got along well with everyone, felt compelled to banish Burr for misbehavior during the Revolution. Now the House of Representatives needed to choose between Burr and Jefferson as to who would be President.
The most conservative president of the 19th century (1801-1900) was James Monroe, who was elected in 1816 (after President James Madison served his two terms and then retired). Monroe was so much against national (federal) power that he had even opposed the ratification of the Constitution as an "Anti-Federalist." But that was decades earlier, and by 1817 he was ready to be President. In many respects he became one of the best presidents in history.
Jackson vetoed federal road projects because he was a strict constitutionalist: if the power is not expressly in the Constitution, then it did not exist, Jackson felt. Jackson's most famous veto of a road construction project was his Maysville Road Veto in 1830, which would have sent money to Kentucky, the state of the influential Senator Henry Clay (known as the "Great Compromiser"). Jackson said there was no national benefit to justify federal funding for the project. Obviously future presidents did authorize interstate highways, because there are so many today.
In 1831, gossip and social scandal hit the White House, demonstrating that "National Enquirer" or tabloid-style stories were just as big back then as today. The White House was like a social club, with members of the President's Cabinet of advisers and their wives being the members of this club.
The Oneida Community in Madison County, New York, was an abolitionist movement founded by the minister John Humphreys Noyes. He preached the radical view that perfection was attainable in this life, and his followers became known as "Perfectionists". Unfortunately, he also preached a concept of "complex marriage," whereby men and women married in groups such that every man in the group was married to every woman in the group, and children were raised by everyone. "Bible communism" resulted in no individual property.
To Polk's credit, he really did what he said he would, unlike most politicians. He achieved the greatest territorial expansion of the United States (excluding the later acquisition of Alaska). Polk acquired the territory covered by the future states of Texas, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Washington, and Oregon, and portions of Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Montana.
From this history arose the political rivalry of Lincoln and Douglas, one of the greatest rivalries in all of American history. Lincoln and Douglas were opposites in every possible way. Lincoln was very tall, while Douglas was very short. Lincoln had lots of dark hair,[9] while Douglas's hair was thinning. Lincoln was initially a Whig, Douglas was a Democrat. Lincoln was a wealthy attorney for the powerful Railroads. Douglas was a government attorney for the State. Both were extremely ambitious, constantly running for public office. Both were smarter than most in politics, and both were superb public speakers (unlike, for example, Jefferson, who avoided public speaking). Truth be told, Douglas was an even better public speaker than Lincoln; Douglas was more compelling in style, and funnier.
But McClellan himself had a serious character flaw: he did not want to put his army into battle. McClellan was the best general ever at ... retreating. He could and did supervise massive retreats of his army with minimal casualties and loss of equipment.
A cynic might point to Lincoln's career as a railroad lawyer as the prime motivation for his obsession with unity. The business of a railroad depends heavily on a mindset of national unity; if a country were to break up, then the railroad might not work nearly as well with different sections refusing to cooperate with each other. Today Lincoln is idolized in the North, but is still disliked by many in the South.
General George Custer was a highly popular and charismatic cavalry officer who sported long yellow hair and the latest fashions in his clothing. But he also graduated last in his class at West Point, in contrast to many of the Civil War officers who took their coursework more seriously. In 1876, Custer led his men to Little Big Horn (now in Montana) to address some conflicts with Indians. Custer's superiors opposed an immediate attack on the Indians, and told Custer to wait before leading the charge. Overly aggressive and perhaps attempting to become a hero, Custer charged ahead anyway.
Once the Civil War ended, the powerful forces of capitalism brought the United States new prosperity remarkably quickly. Most countries, not benefiting from the free enterprise that exists in the United States, would take 50 to 100 years to recover from such a devastating Civil War. But the United States recovered in less than 10 years. By 1875, the United States had a budget surplus (taking in more money than it spent), and it enjoyed a budget surplus for every year until 1893! In contrast, rarely has there been a budget surplus in the past 30 years.
As the United States became more powerful in the late 1800s, and particularly in the 1890s, we began to "flex our muscle" and exert influence over small foreign countries. This influence by a large, developed country over a smaller, less-developed one is known as "imperialism". We were getting bigger and more powerful. Thanks to Manifest Destiny, we had expanded to the Pacific Ocean. Many felt, why stop there? The United States took Hawaii in the 1890s.
A fascinating and influential political movement began to develop around 1900: the progressive movement. It started with a Republican governor of Wisconsin named Robert LaFollette. It was not so much a political party as a movement that can be summarized in two words: "better government." Not "less government" that a conservative like President James Monroe wanted, and not "more government" that a liberal like Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted, but "better government."
Roosevelt was neither a liberal nor a conservative, and after serving as president he even left the Republican Party to start a new political party based on his own personality. He had his own "maverick" style similar to that of the recent Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
President Wilson did not like
tariffs and felt they caused
conflicts with foreign
countries. He wanted to replace
tariffs with a "graduated" or
progressive income tax that hit
wealthy (primarily hard-working)
people more than poor (primarily
lazy) people.
Intellectual thought in the
early 1900s was dominated by an
embrace of "social Darwinism."
The theory of evolution was
proposed by Charles Darwin in
England in 1859 and was
gradually promoted by atheists
in schools. It was widely
rejected by scientists in the
first several decades, but
pressure built to replace
Christianity with Darwinism at
universities and schools. The
theory became more popular in
England than in France, and was
not widely accepted or taught in
the United States in the 19th
century. (To this day most
Americans reject the theory of
evolution as it is taught in
schools.[5]
In business, advocates of
"social Darwinism" included
Herbert Spencer in England and
William Graham Sumner in the
United States, and they felt
that civilization depended on
unregulated business activity so
that only the fit would survive
and thrive.
So many people flocked to watch
the trial that it was often held
outside the courthouse in
Dayton, Tennessee. An atheist
(and bigot) H.L. Mencken, the
leading journalist of the first
half of the 20th century,
traveled from Baltimore to give
his "spin" (bias reporting) on
what happened. Mencken's account
misled the world into thinking
that Darrow (and Darwin) had
won. In fact, the opposite
occurred: Bryan won, Darrow's
client Scopes was convicted, and
the Tennessee law remained in
effect for nearly another 50
years. Tennessee has remained
conservative to this day;
Tennessee voted against its own
liberal resident Al Gore for
President in 2000, giving George
W. Bush the national election,
and in 2008 presidential
candidate John McCain defeated
Barack Obama by 15 percentage
points there, despite Obama
winning by 7 points nationwide.
Some jazz clubs and silent movies began to have the same undesirable influence on morality that Hollywood brings to culture today. The "flapper" was a new lifestyle for young ladies that encouraged smoking, shorter dresses, drinking alcohol (which was illegal), taking cocaine (deadly but legal then, illegal now), and overall immorality. The name comes from a silent movie called "The Flapper" that was produced in 1920, and today the name is often associated with the type of dress. But an immoral lifestyle came along with it, and tobacco companies promoted it in order to profit from an increase in smoking by women. A musical appeared mocking how women were beginning to act so much like men that all men needed to grow a mustache, because that was one thing women could not do!
Hoover had to face a pathetic march in D.C. by poor soldiers from World War I who demanded a bonus. Called the "Bonus March," this ended in riots and was a political disaster for Hoover. Future generals George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur put down the riots using tanks and troops, fearing that the nation was on the verge of a communist revolution.[2] Today troops are almost never used to deal with domestic violence, because it causes such harsh emotions.
FDR's aggressive legislative program became known as the "New Deal," which meant expanded government programs supposedly to help the economy and the unemployed. The New Deal consisted of passing many new laws (legislation) and creating new government jobs for people. Critics of the New Deal point out that if the jobs were really needed, then free enterprise (private companies) would be doing it already.
The New Deal did not help lift the nation out of the Great Depression. The economy improved a little from 1933 to 1940, but the depression never really ended.The Japanese proved to be tenacious fighters and there was much fear in the United States of Japanese nationalism. FDR forcibly moved Americans of Japanese descent in California to internment camps to keep an eye on their suspected spy activity, despite their American citizenship. The Supreme Court upheld this internment despite an apparent violation of constitutional rights in Korematsu v. United States (1944). This reflected how the Supreme Court has always deferred to the other branches of government on military matters ever since President Andrew Jackson defied a Supreme Court ruling about the treatment of Indians in Worcester v. Georgia.
As president, Truman was an impulsive and not very bright man. He still holds the record for the lowest approval rating (only 23% of the country approving of his performance) in his last year in office (1952). When there was an ugly strike against a steel company, he impulsively ordered a government takeover of the entire company (the Supreme Court later invalidated his action). When a reporter wrote a negative review about his daughter's piano recital, Truman said he wanted to punch the reporter in the face for it. When General Douglas MacArthur wanted to be more aggressive in the Korean War, Truman simply fired him.
After the
war, in 1947,
President Truman
instituted
Loyalty Boards
to check on
government
employees to
ensure they were
not communists
attempting to
overthrow our
form of
government. From
1948 through
1950, a young
congressman (and
future
president) named
Richard Nixon
held hearings
for the House
Un-American
Activities
Committee, which
investigated
communists who
had infiltrated
government and
Hollywood. The
most famous
hearings
concerned the
investigation
into Alger Hiss,
one of FDR's top
aides who
continued to
hold key
positions in
government and
decision-making.
Hiss
dramatically
denied that he
was a communist,
but it was later
proven that he
was. The
Committee also
investigated the
"Hollywood Ten"
to try to root
out communism in
Hollywood. Alger
Hiss was exposed
by Whittaker
Chambers, a
former
homosexual
communist who
found Jesus,
married, started
a family, and
then testified
against Hiss.
President
Woodrow Wilson
would have been
a supporter of
the United
Nations, just as
he supported the
League of
Nations. His
motto was to
"make the world
safe for
democracy."
Today, the
"neoconservatives"
adopt a similar
worldview. They
seek to expand
and install
democracy in
countries all
around the
world, such as
Iraq and Iran.
Others, however,
argue that
democracy is not
compatible with
religions in
other parts of
the world, such
as Islam.
Conservative
Congressman and
2008
presidential
candidate Ron
Paul recently
wrote an essay
entitled,
"Making the
World Safe for
Christianity,"
observing that
democracy in
Iraq has
increased
the persecution
of Christians
there.
Court decisions made it difficult or impossible for States to deny government benefits (such as free public education) to illegal immigrants. Accordingly, their entry into the United States continued to grow. Estimates are that 10-20 million people now live in the United States illegally, most having arrived by crossing the United States-Mexico border but not all of whom are Mexican. Congress is bitterly divided about how to address this, and some propose building a wall along that border. This promises to be one of the biggest issues facing our nation in 2009, as both Obama and McCain favor granting "amnesty" to illegal immigrants who are here, but many voters oppose this.
McCarthy was highly effective in exposing communists in key government jobs, and liberals hate him for it to this day. Ultimately his opponents were able to foment public pressure against him, and other senators "censured" him near the end of his career after McCarthy was embarrassed during hearings in 1954 concerning communists in the Army. The term "McCarthyism," coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's attempts to expose communists, became synonymous with the overzealous use of innuendo, rumor and guilt-by-association to destroy someone's reputation. In fact, McCarthy and Congress had a duty to uphold the Constitution and guard against infiltration of government positions by anyone committed to overthrowing our constitutional system, as communists were.
The Cold War lasted until the early 1990s, when communism was overthrown in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But communism continues to this day in China (the world's most populated country), Cuba, Venezuela (with oil, one of the most powerful countries in South America), Vietnam and North Korea. Some view communism as being good in theory, but bad in practice as it requires suppressing freedom of speech, religion, the press, and even education in order to survive. But others view communism as evil in theory, as it imposes material equality on all with complete disregard for God's different gifts and purposes for different people.
The Republicans moved quickly to pass important legislation. They passed (and the states ratified) the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution in order to limit future presidents to two full terms in office, so that no one could ever again repeat what President Franklin Roosevelt did in dishonoring President Washington's precedent of serving no more than two terms.
For the purposes of this course, remember that the Taft-Hartley Act finally ended the unions' enormous power. And not a moment too soon, because there were many crippling strikes that badly hurt the country's economy in 1946 after the end of World War II. Ever since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, Democrats have tried to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, without success. It remains essential today to protect the right of workers not to join a union, and the Obama Administration and Democratic Congress may try to weaken it in 2009.
By the mid-1950s an undercurrent of rebellion in culture began which is not shown on television shows. One evening in 1955 in a book shop in San Francisco, a man named Allen Ginsberg (who grew up in Newark, NJ) stood up to read a long poem called the "Howl". It was an attack on the conformity, materialism and hypocrisy of the 1950s. This was the beginning of the "Beat Generation," captured best in Jack Kerouac's book "On the Road." The Beat Generation advocated freedom, drugs, and being different simply for the sake of being different. The name comes from "beat-up" lives of its leaders, which were often ugly. Both Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, for example, suffered and died from illnesses associated with alcohol abuse.
The hippies and others who disliked authority and tradition had help from our court system, and particularly from the "Warren Court." Just as an "Administration" is named after the president at the time (e.g., the "Truman Administration"), a period of time on the Supreme Court is named after the Chief Justice at the time (e.g., the "Warren Court" refers the Supreme Court years when Earl Warren was Chief Justice).
The greatest damage done by the Warren Court was probably its decision banning official school prayer in public school, which had existed for hundreds of years. The Lord's Prayer was being said daily in New Jersey public schools, for example, which many students' grandparents might recall. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Warren Court prohibited this and public schools have been declining ever since; some consider this decision to have been the worst since the Dred Scott case just before the Civil War.
Some civil rights activists became militant and violent. From 1966 through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers collected weapons to resist police and promoted a violent approach to establishing civil rights. Many of them were arrested and went to jail. This shift from a productive movement to a destructive one was marked by the abandonment of Christian values and a pronounced move to the left; key members of the Black Panthers, such as Angela Davis, were also Communists.
Jesus said that "you will always have the destitute with you." President Johnson promised that his programs would eradicate and eliminate poverty. Jesus was right and most of the programs of the Great Society are failing today. In fact, many concluded that the "Great Society" did more harm than good, as in giving people an incentive not to work and even for mothers to divorce so they could claim welfare. Future Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York, who had served as an assistant secretary in the Labor Department of the Johnson Administration, was later critical of the Great Society. Moynihan's later message "to messianic Great Society liberals - we thought we could do anything [-- was that "the] central psychological proposition of liberalism is that for every problem there is a solution."
But Johnson's own arrogance, manipulation and intimidating tactics became his undoing. In the fall of 1964, Johnson was up for reelection and, like many presidents before him, he became paranoid about the possibility of defeat. The Republican Party nominated the conservative Barry Goldwater, and he was delivering tough, uncompromising speeches against Johnson. Johnson, who was completely self-centered, watched public opinion polls closely.
Henry Kissinger, a foreign-born adviser to Nixon who essentially ran the Nixon Administration, settled the war in the Paris peace talks in 1972 and 1973 on terms that required the United States to pull out and let Vietnam fall to the communists. A decade later, a memorial was built in D.C. that commemorates those who gave their lives. Some say that the fighting was not in vain, because it slowed down the growth of communism long enough to save the neighboring countries until the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
Ronald Reagan, born to a poor family in Illinois, was taught to read by his mother at home.[1] Like his father, Ronald was unsuccessful at most things in life, but had a positive attitude instilled in him by his mother and the "Disciples of Christ" evangelical Christian faith. He played sports but was not very good; took economics in college but did poorly; became a second-rate sports broadcaster; and then went on to a second-rate movie career. But through it all his upbeat optimism about people and America continued.
Also in 1983, communists backed by Cuba invaded Grenada, where there were over one hundred American medical students. Reagan immediately sent in our troops and saved the students, bringing them back to the United States safely. Students were seen on television kissing the American soil as soon as they got off their planes.
The "smear" campaign against Thomas was one of the worst in American history, and Thomas himself appeared on national television to bitterly describe it as a "high-tech lynching." In a flagrant violation of the rules of the Senate, the staff of a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee leaked a confidential FBI background report to the National Public Radio (NPR), which contained a vicious personal allegation about Thomas's past. Nothing was proven and there was much reason to disbelieve the allegation
The Republican Congress that took over in 1995 passed several important conservative laws, including a massive welfare reform (this was in last week's lecture) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which established that federal law would recognize only marriages between a man and a woman and that one state did not have to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another state. Clinton, chastened by the landslide defeat of his Democratic Party, began to govern more like a conservative. He also wanted to win reelection in 1996, and he knew he had to move in the same direction as the nation: to the "right" (more conservative).
In spring 1999 at a public high school in Columbine, Colorado, two anti-Christian bigoted high school students massacred 12 students, one for believing in God, and a teacher. Clinton and liberals seized on this event to push hard for gun control. But in the presidential election in 2000, voters in the pro-gun, rural states of West Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas remembered and voted against Democratic candidate Al Gore, causing him to lose the election.
President George W. Bush described himself as a "compassionate conservative," which meant expanding government to give more "entitlements" (handouts). He did slightly cut taxes, but let government spending increase beyond control.
Barack Obama resigned from his position as one of the two U.S. Senators from Illinois upon being elected president. That created a vacancy to be filled, according to Illinois law, by the Democratic Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. On December 9, 2008, the Governor of Illinois was arrested by federal officials based on secret tape recordings of his recent phone conversations.
January 27, 2009
Tuesday Mash-Up
Whimsy, the Optimist
America
has seen problems worse than the current one and finagled its way out of it.
There are a few more safety nets. People may have to work longer to get to
retirement, but people also live longer and stay productive. Unemployment
may hit double digits, but gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, and many food
items are much cheaper. Reduced global growth should contribute to
eco-gains, and the funds targets for infrastructure improvement should make our
lives safer and contribute to alternative energy research and deployment.
The insane distortions of the financial industry are probably over for a decade
or more, and more smart young people consider productive careers. Even
with the meltdown, the dollar is very strong and the U.S. is considered the
safest haven for investments by most of the world. We may be starting a
long period of military de-investment (although, there's still a bit too much
blood lust concerning Afghanistan). The inevitability of demographic
changes virtually ensures the decline of the GOP for the forseeable future.
Our new president has an approval rating close to 80% and has assembled an
impressive team based more upon competence than politics/loyalty.
Darling we can't stop this train
When it comes crashing through
But let me show you what love can do
~~~
Whimsy, the Pessimist
I think there are a number of things masking the possible devastation of the
next few years. One, of course, is the inordinate trust most of us have in
Obama and his administration. More importantly though is the accelerated
sense of time we all enjoy. If
blood is the new
black, hummingbirds are the new metronomes. It's been all of 3 months and
the economic meltdown is so yesterday, and the fact that Krugman and
others are really worried about the next 12 to 18 months reduces to ennui
the 4th time we hear it. Meanwhile, Microsoft lays off 5,000 employees
(the first layoff in their history), and even larger layoffs take place as
entire companies go under (30,000 employees of Circuit City are without a job,
20,000 at Caterpillar).
It's probably healthy to look back, though the parallels aren't perfect.
The stock market crashed in 1929, but by early 1930 it was back up to pre-Crash
levels. At that point, "credit was ample", but declines in big-ticket
items increased. Deflation set in, making every dollar worth a lot more.
Although this made commodities cheaper, it also made debt more burdensome.
A lot of people lost homes and farms. It took years for all of this to
amount to the Great Depression. We have a lot more tools available to us
now (although monetary policy isn't one of them). I have a strong feeling
that Obama has been made aware of just how serious this is, and how early in the
game we are.
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.
~~~
"What makes flarf different from Anne Coulter?"
An interesting
discussion at The Possum, involving Dale, Henry, Kent, Michael, Gabe, Joe,
Matt, and a variety of Anonymouses.
~~~
Weather Underground says that Longmont's temperature is current -9.1 degrees. Also, that our low for the day will be 18. Go figure.
~~~
I've been listening to Joni Mitchell's extraordinary Blue recently.
Over and over again. My God, what a voice. I heard James Taylor
covering "River" and
remembered that the last time I heard Blue, it was on vinyl.
Blue songs are like tattoos
You know I've been to sea before
Crown and anchor me
Or let me sail away
Some You-Tubes from Blue:
California
Blue
My Old Man
A Case of You
River
Little Green
Carey
All I Want
This Flight Tonight
~~~
Joshua Clover doesn't
read anything at all like Elizabeth Alexander. And that's a good
thing.
January 25, 2009
No Expiration Date
It's weird to see your own signature on a rejection slip, particularly on
someone's
web site of rejection slips. It's an impressive collection.
Der and I cleaned up the basement last week, something that has been needed for
at least a decade. In the mix, we found two big boxes of rejections,
possibly a thousand or more. In my early days of submission fervor, I
would send out ten to twenty subs a week. From the comments on some of the
rejection slips, I must have been hitting the litmags a little more often than
they liked.
Other things we found included:
A box of generic Coco Puffs with an expiration date of 2002.
Two jars of home-canned "Red Pepper Salsa" dated 1995.
Four sets of dumbbells.
Hundreds of feet of Romex cable for AC wiring.
A book of paper airplane instructions and folding stock.
Two Acoustic Research powered speakers I bought (and then lost) in the 90's.
Dozens of clips of 10-penny nails for a nail gun.
Packages of pasta so old that they had no expiration date.
An Easter basket.
One wooden arrow with red, white and blue flight feathers.
An unopened model of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.
A beautiful unused leather wallet for keeping your passport.
A ten-pack of Ivory soap from 1998.
The mortarboard I wore at my PhD graduation.
A battery-operated Santa Claus on a surfboard.
Most of this made it to Goodwill, but Der took a few items as memorabilia.
~~~
Do you think the governor of the Internet is named Blogoyavich? Anyway,
from around the blogosphere:
'Becca on poetry reading patrons: "I can always tell who is or is not engaged. For instance, if a couple have a glass of wine or 2, then step out for a smoke, then come back in, then order a pizza on their cell phone during the reading, then go outside to wait for it, I figure they are not totally engaged."
Reb on poetry critics:
"Would I want any asshole to perform brain surgery on me? "
Trish on The Ready-Set-Grow Series: "When I finally saw a true
penis, I was unprepared."
Christine, "The Wedding Night".
Suzanne's Lit Windowpane
gets reviewed: "These poems are often syntactically innovative. They also
are lyrically attentive to the ear, short and well-controlled, yet playful and
imaginative."
Ivy is doing a reading in Cardiff.
Doesn't that sound exotic?
Christy
has some new things in the shop (and I'm a sucker for jewelry. Well, for
other people, I mean).
Shanna notes
the best list for Warsaw Bikini and My Zorba.
So does Danielle.
Jenny hearts L.A.
Emily notes that "Obama" is a
really different name than the usual Taylors and Wilsons and Johnsons and Fords.
Nada revisits Japan.
Maureen is nailing down the
flowers.
Gina gets a blurb from David Shapiro (eat your heart out, Jonathan).
Lisa quotes Levi: "Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the Palestinians".
Laurel finishes Baxter the
Kosher Pig.
~~~
That's right, all women (I probably could have slipped Jane Dark and
Rhubarb is Susan in there, on
a technicality). Why? Because women are more interesting. They
write about interesting things. They don't go on and on and on about
thematic arc or self-centered blather or the state of eco-poetics.
So there.
~~~
There's a
penis
in my Polly Pocket, and other stories of corporate irresponsibility.
Four
ways that George kept us safe, including "No documented alien abductions".
Yesterday's news of the personal auto-plane prompted me to consider
Helicopters for Everybody.
Junie and I like to watch HGTV, particularly those surreal programs where young
couples whine about he lack of marble in the kitchen of the $495,000 home
they're considering. This from Frank Rich,
No Time for Poetry: "Cable networks like Bravo, A&E, TLC and HGTV produced an avalanche of creepy programming catering to the decade’s housing bubble alone — an orgiastic genre that might be called Subprime Pornography. Some of the series — “Flip This House,” “Flip That House,” “Sell This House,” “My House Is Worth What?” — still play on even as more and more house owners are being flipped into destitute homelessness."
Total compensation in 2007, including large bonuses, for the top 5 investment
banks: $66 billion. After losing hundreds of billions of dollars in
market cap, not to mention investor holdings, these same banks reduced
compensation from 30% to 70%. That still means
hundreds
of executives received bonuses averaging $200,000 (over and above their salary).
You don't hear so much anymore how top investment bankers are "the smartest guy
in the room". I always used to wonder how anybody could believe that.
Essentially, these guys were one part attorney, one part accountant, and one
part high-stakes gambler. The ranks of investment banks were filled with
Ivy League MBAs. When I was in the Business School, all my buddies in the
Math Department , Computer Science Department and Physics Department used to
shake their heads at the laughably easy courses involved in an MBA. Even
the sharpest of my MBA friends weren't even remotely the smartest guys in the
room. The smartest guys in the room (assuming they were at my house,
sipping wine, eating dolmades and smoking weed on the balcony) were the guys
getting PhD's in astrophysics or number theory or economics or political
science. There were probably a lot of smart guys in the Arts too, but I
didn't hang with them.
Or think of it this way: You put Mohammad, DeDeo, Clover, Corey, Archambeau
in the Big Office at Merrill Lynch, and
Thain
is going to be the smartest guy?
(Yes, I know there are no women in the list. There are just as many smart
women on the web, they just don't show off as much).
January 24, 2009
Buh-Buh-Bye
I wasn't the
only Inaugural Weeper.
~~~
Krugman
points out how the Taylor Rule applies to the current economy. The
Taylor Rule prescribes what interest rate the Fed should use to create the
stimulus (or damper) to return the economy to the correct balance of GDP growth
and acceptable inflation. The reason that fiscal policy is now required
(tax cuts and Federal spending) is that the Taylor Rule says the Fed needs to
cut interest rates down to minus 6%. In other words, the model shows that
the proper borrowing rate to "cure" the economic problem is that you pay the Fed
6% a year to loan them your money (in the form of Treasury obligations).
~~~
I always thought that Longmont was a pretty boring name for a town. Not so
the many English towns, like Penistone and Crotch Crescent.
~~~
Things I Hate About Vista (and what Microsoft is doing about it:
7).
~~~
Buh-buh-bye,
George.
~~~
Der would LOVE
this.
~~~
These are for Cath, who was kidded unmercifully by her children about Benjamin
Buttons:
Oscar nominations came out today. “Benjamin Button” got 13. That’s as many as people who have actually seen the movie.
All of Hollywood is abuzz with news of the Oscar nominations: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” got 13 nominations, one for each hour of running time.
If you haven’t seen it you should; it’s like “Forrest Gump” meets “Forrest Gump.”
~~~
Apparently, there was
no Holocaust.
~~~
Jay-Z's great line about where the country finds itself:
“99 Problems But a Bush Ain’t One.”
January 23, 2009
The Morrow Thing
It was 75 yesterday and it's 25 today, so I think this must signal the end of
the "Obama Honeymoon". The GOP is whining that he hasn't hugged them and
listened to their constant babbling about extending the "Death Tax" and similar
blather. To which whining about the GOP's new respect for bipartisanship,
BHO apparently intoned: "[Yeah, but,] I won".
Sweet Junie has headed back to Wisconsin to endure even worse weather than our
wimpy "25 and snow flurries". In Wisconsin, "25 and snow flurries" can be
translated as "you might want to wear a sweater to that family picnic".
Ron noted today that there were
three instances of poetry in The Inauguration, the best of which by far was the
rhyming sermonette by Reverend Lowery. He also notes that the whole riff
where you find "when the red man can get ahead, man", may have been pulled from
the collected works of Muhammad Ali. I think the funniest line is this:
"One of my sons,
tho, who has heard quite a bit more poetry than most of my suburban friends, was
more interested in
Alexander’s stilted delivery which paused.
After. Every.
Word. He wanted to know if Alexander had had a
stroke."
As I am a civilian in the Poetry Wars, I have
often heard Actual Poetry Warriors intone lines from their poems like this.
I don't do it, but that's because I assumed that I didn't have the proper MFA or
something. And, as I recall from hearing WCW read "Red Wheelbarrow", not
only did he not do the Every Single Word thing, you would have sworn there
weren't even any line breaks.
Speaking of Ron, he actually linked to one of my posts this week and I only had,
like 80 hits. Was it not very interesting? Is Ron losing his Linking
Power? Zounds, what a disappointment!
Of course, the most depressing thing about Ron's blog is that somebody dies
every 3 days. Who knew there were so many poets? The second most
depressing thing is his reminder that he gets more hits in a day than some of us
get in a month. That sad news is barely mitigated by the fact that
we don't have to work as hard.
There are, without doubt, many dozens of poets I could talk about, after doing a
proper blog walk with sensible shoes (as they say about the hero's girlfriends
footwear in every English murder mystery) and collecting up the best tidbits.
On the other hand, as the temps have dropped like a rock, and Sweet Junie is not
within hugging range, and Der has flown back to Chicago, and Ky is on the other
side of town, and as I saw both of them last night when Cath whipped some killer Fast Seafood Risotto (which needs badly to be in Whimsy's Cookbook), and I have a pound of hamburger (7% fat, of course) and cheesy
buns and a bookcase filled with DVDs, I think I will just burrow in and see you
on the morrow.
Or maybe on the morrow after that. I'm not sure how the whole morrow thing
works.
January 22, 2009
Post Inauguration Anti-Climactic Syndrome
Junie held my hand and we watched. It was a short time of overwhelming
emotion. Everyone of over a billion people must have felt as I did
– that strange and wonderful immediacy, as if we were there. Not watching history,
but helping make it by our collective hope, our good wishes. It was
so human it was almost difficult to watch. If it hadn't been for
the Reverend Lowery's injection of comic relief, I think I would have had tears
dropping into my lap the whole time. Junie was having trouble not
sniffling too, but didn't want to ruin her mascara.
~~~
It
doesn't take long to get back to silliness. The Yahoo news page includes:
The flying car: At a price of $194,000 and forty presales, the Transition
should be ready in 2010. What an insanely stupid idea. It can be
operated by anyone with a "sport pilot license", which doesn't require as many
hours of training as a private pilot license (oh, there's a great idea).
In a perfect example of an agency behaving in a way to further its existence,
the FAA created the sport pilot license in an attempt to increase the dwindling
number of amateur flyers.
Plastic surgery for the dead: An increasing number of clients have
prepaid for de-wrinkling and other procedures for their future corpse.
The carnivorous sea squirt: Hooda thunk? Sea scientists have
discovered an aquatic "Venus fly trap" living off the coast of Australia, 13,000
feet from the surface. All that pressure must make it irritable.
Hummer Bummer: Drivers of Hummers get more tickets than anybody, in fact
4.63 times as many (don't you love the pseudo-scientific aura of all that
precision?) Surprisingly high up the list are Scions and Subaru Outbacks.
~~~
In other non-essential news, BHO ordered Gitmo shut down, closed the CIA secret
detainment centers, instituted tough new rules for lobbyists, unblocked access
to Presidential documents, and called a bunch of world leaders.
January 19, 2009
Happy MLK!
Sweet Junie and I will be volunteering this morning. I think that all that was left was sorting socks at the local OUR community help center. Happy to be doing something, though. If you can't volunteer today, think Green. Think: that lime Jello your mom made with the little marshmallows on top and the canned pears at the bottom, and the coagulated Jello at the bottom because it never got stirred correctly. Or something of your ecological choosing, of course. See you after the Inauguration!
January 16, 2009
Parabolic
I read something interesting today. As you or may not know, most large-scale telescopes don't use lenses – they use mirrors to focus light collected on a large surface to a focal point. The mirrors need to be formed (as one piece, or as individual pieces) as a parabola to obtain the desired effect.
The parabola has the property that any ray hitting it "straight down", will be bounced to the same focus point. Thus, many photons can be collected at one point, adding information and improving the image. Now, it's possible for you to create a parabola. Just fill a glass a third full with water, place it on a lazy Susan, and spin it. The water (even better if you drop some coloring in it) will creep up the sides of the glass and form a parabola.
This is, in fact, how they have been making parabolic mirrors
for years. They place molten glass in a very large vessel and rotate it
until it is the shape they desire, then slowly cool it while it is under
rotation. All that's left at that point is to apply some mirroring
material to the surface. A good-sized mirror, created in this way, will
cost a million dollars or more.
It occurred to someone recently that the "glass on the lazy Susan" principle
might work with mercury, eliminating the need for the glass altogether.
They're called liquid mirror telescopes, and there's one in use in Canada.
Because the mercury (and other suitable low-melting alloys) must be spun to coat
an inexpensive parabolic fixture, they can only be used pointing straight up,
but that's not as much a problem as you might think (you just wait until what
you want to see passes by you, or relocate the mirror to some location that
yields interesting results).
All of this is probably old hat to Simon, but I thought it was fascinating.
~~
I read another chapter of The Origin of Species last night, and it's like
reading a long letter from an amateur naturalist. Which is, of course,
what Darwin was. He was not the only person to cook up ideas about natural
selection, but he certainly gets all the heat in fundamentalist tirades.
Since most of what Darwin posited is so obvious, it's difficult to understand
what all the fuss is about. Obviously, if a species develops trait that
increases its survival rate to the point where it is more likely to produce
offspring, then that trait (assuming that it's inheritable) will persist and
eventually dominate over long periods of time. What causes an individual
member of a species to acquire a new trait? Usually a gene mutation, and
the vast majority of them either disable or kill the individual. However,
some of them are harmless and a very, very small percentage of them are helpful.
Current opinion seems to be that it's the harmless ones that may make all the
difference, because they linger in a population long enough to be instrumental
in adapting to some new environmental challenge.
This directly addresses the flaw in the Intelligent Design argument. It's
not an impossible miracle that hundreds of separate evolutionary steps creating
the eye and optic nerve (they have dozens of other examples). It's that
each mutation was either harmless or served some other function for a while.
Only when a collection of new traits combined to produce some symbiotic
arrangement to cope with the effects of a new environment, or provide a new
facility, that the individual mutations merged into some useful function.
This addresses directly that proposition of "irreducible complexity" that the ID
folks bring up as the proof of a Designer.
~~~
My copy of Sharon Mesmer's Annoying Diabetic Bitch showed up today, just
like Der said it would. Der played a gig in Ft. Collins last night as an
extra guitar for a band of four friends who have been traveling and touring.
They all live in Milwaukee and all went to Columbia at one point, which is where
Der met them. My good-hearted ex, Cath, has been putting them up and
feeding them and letting them practice in the basement for most of a week.
They are very professional, going over a small part of a song (most of what they
play is music they write) over and over again, sometimes with all the band
members (keyboard, guitar, bass guitar, drums), sometimes with a few, sometimes
for the vocals a cappella. At one point, the keyboardist took out his cell
phone and held it in the middle of them during a segment, to get an idea what it
would sound like, upon replay. It's really gratifying to see young people
working so hard for something they believe in. I wish them luck, and as
soon as they have a MySpace page, I'll let you know.
