Echoes

I'm reading, American Lion, Jon Meacham's biography focused on Andrew Jackson's two term as President, and Meacham's writing about pre-Civil War America unmistakably echoes the present day polarization of America. Here's one example (p. 58):

The rise of a nation with a large number of voters..., dependent for infomration and opinion on partisan newspapers, meant that a president had to project an image at once strong and simple. His ideas should be expressed clearly for the ordinary voter, who ... had only so much time and energy to devote to divining the details of a leader's political creed. In a democracy like the one taking shape in America, the people considered both the content of a politician's message and their impression of his character in deciding whether to support him. George Washington was the first and greatest such example, a man called to power not only because of his views but also for his reassuring bearing. He was a man with whom the people felt comfortable. Jackson's political appeal came out of the same tradition - a tradition in which a leader creates a covenant of mutual confidence between himself and the broader public. If the people believe in the man, then the more likely they are to give him the benefit of the doubt on the details of governance.

We of course have only recently emerged from a period when having a beer with a recovering alcoholic was the perverse standard of our selection of a president. Maybe we haven't even emerged, given the continued prominence of beer diplomacy.

One big difference between now and the 1820s and 1830s is how thoroughly electronic media worm their selling messages into our lives. Two centuries ago, a yeoman farmer could at least escape the bullshit of so much political image-making for the much more useful and less noxious real cow patties. Now the caf at work plays Fox propaganda all day, and many of its viewers buy it long before all the smears and adulterants can be composted out.

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Update (7/30): Of course, big shallow fetid media outlets want to keep politics on the level of beer-drinking. Why not girls in bikinis, too?

Palin by comparison

If the media is soooo sure that we need more attractive women in our news, Sarah Palin doesn't cut it, compared to, say, Monica Bellucci.

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Faith and proof

The Shroud of Turin is a proven fake. Proven. It's not a coincidence that the face looks like a 14th century painting. That's exactly what it is.

Faithful believers simply cannot be dissuaded from a story they like. No amount of scientific evidence is adequate.

Witness what a thin tissue of bullshit suffices to overturn definitive radiocarbon dating:

[Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives,] asserts that the words include the name “(J)esu(s) Nazarene’’ - or Jesus of Nazareth - in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.

This fails on level after level. Frale's opinion of what a forger would do in no way answers to the word proof. A "Princess Bride" rejoinder is tempting.

But even Frale's rationale - fear of heresy - is utterly unconvincing. The forger was concocting a holy relic for, no doubt, profit. He was already a heretic. He was already a mortal sinner. He would have been at great pains to make a convincing forgery. The people he was trying to fool weren't such naifs as Frale; they would have noticed the contemporary usage that she claims a forger would have been too afraid to avoid, and that very usage would have clued them to the forgery.

The press, of course, is ever pleased to purvey more bullshit to the credulous in its audience. They're happy to push Frale as a researcher and only in passing to note that she's a historian, that she has no qualifications to dispute the science.

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Update (5/8/2010): Here's a story in much greater detail that shows how obvious the so-called shroud is actually a painting. (h/t Pharyngula)

Just powers from the consent of the governed

Had I been within range of the Internet yesterday, I would have published this as a reminder of the Declaration of Independence.

These men, had they failed, would have been executed for treason. Instead, they despoiled the divine right of kings.

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Sarah-nades

Has any other failed VP candidate's travel schedule ever received as much attention as vacuous Sarah's?

Update: If the media needs a picture of a pretty woman, how about Elizabeth Banks? She's quite a bit more beautiful than Palin.

I suppose it's too much to ask that we might pick news - and women - on some other criteria.

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Resting now from struggle

Far be it from me to speak ill of the war dead on their day of special remembrance or any other day, but it is still right for us to recall that what they did was not to act as superheroes but rather, as ordinary people, to rouse themselves to give something extraordinary. To my mind, that makes them all the more honorable.

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Stress positions

Why wouldn't all evangelicals immediately make the connection between the torturous martyrdom of Jesus and the torturing of Islamic jihadis? How many messiahs are they creating by favoring torture, even if they believe that all messiahs besides theirs are false messiahs?

The sad truth for many Christian evangelicals (of course not all): Their religion is part of their conservative and violence-ready culture and they choose only the parts of Christianity that fit that culture. The golden rule? An eye for an eye was good enough for their daddies. Moral constraints about anything other than sex? There hardly seem to be any.

These American Christians are faithful, not moral.

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Man's inhumanity to humanities

The parlous state of the economy is only the news hook for this story.

University humanities departments have been suffering for a long time, whether times are fat or slim. My sister the English professor makes sure I don't miss that fact, but I'm sure the New York Times has previously reported on it, too. In this mercantile and mercenary age, learning for the sake of learning, which is in fact learning for the sake of being a better and more fully realized and capable human being, is just so squishy and old-fashioned.

An intemperate question: If we're failing to educate young adults in the humanities and we're failing to teach them enough math and science for the technology we have and that that we want to have, what are we teaching them?

My career in private industry suggests this answer:

• Not enough writing to be clear on any topic - often not enough to be grammatical
  
• Not enough math to understand the limits of business metrics - particularly not enough statistics to grasp the fuzziness and error built into the firmest looking number
  
• Not enough literacy to connect on much beyond superficialities
  

Instead, we're teaching spreadsheets and PowerPoints - oh, and instant blind assent - as if they were business. But marketing, plenty of marketing, in our perpetual attempt to convince customers that what we're offering is actually better than it really is.

We've lost sight as a society of vital cultural values such as citizenship, consciousness of the impact of our own society, and empathy for one another. Reading a novel won't directly make a better widget, so many of us won't consider doing it, as if all there is to being human is grasping and getting. Perhaps this is why so many Americans have abased themselves so far as to favor the instruments of torture in Bushist policy.

But I have a humanities degree, so what do I know?

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Things that make you go mwahaha

Michael Steele is going to get down, get funky, get loose. Problem is, he and the RNC are thirty years too late for even that lingo. Hell, mass market rap is nearly thirty years old.

Upshot: He's selling, not buying. It's just another micron-deep image makeover of no substance or sincerity, in short normal Republicanism.

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Time for ridicule, not a spanking?

As long as I can remember, North Korea's response to any controversy or criticism has been to take its hysterical rhetoric straight to DEFCON 2-year-old:

But Pyongyang said Thursday that it was ready for an "all-out confrontation" with South Korea, calling President Lee Myung-bak a traitor and accusing him of "frantically inciting hostility" toward North Korea and "kicking up ... war hysteria," North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency said.

Their tantrums would be funny if they didn't have such a large and relatively well-fed army and an insane leader.

While it hardly seems productive to respond in kind - and Hillary doesn't - is it time to open up a new front in diplomacy and poke fun at their, ah, lack of maturity, perspective, and proportionality? Of course, as with most two-year-olds, North Korea's frantic screaming usually means they feel left out and want attention - and probably something else.

I'm guessing they need more food aid to feed everyone besides the army.

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Update (2/21): Hillary opts to spank North Korea:

"North Korea is not going to get a different relationship with the U.S. while insulting and refusing dialogue with the Republic of Korea," she said.

Money-changers in the temple

... only this temple is the temple of democracy. Glenn Greenwald links to billmon's diary on Kos (how did I miss that billmon is baack!):

What I was really wondering is how the American elites could feel so confident in their own entrenched positions that they could so blatantly ignore or defy reality -- as illustrated by the two Washington Post stories juxtaposed above.

The answer, I suppose is either that they have lived so long in the bubble of power and privilege that they no longer realize that moments like July 1789 or October 1917 can happen, or that they are supremely confident that populist rage can always be channeled to the right, where it can be easily controlled.

Either way, it amounts to the same thing: A total unawareness that at the end of the day, the only thing standing between them and the guillotine is sheer social inertia.

The elites do think that they are in charge of our inertia, that their conscious efforts succeed at making most of us into sheeple.

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Godless liberals

On this, Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, some intelligent commentary on religious diversity is a good thing:

Obviously, these data only compare the importance of religion in people's lives -- they say nothing about what being highly religious means in different parts of the world and among different faiths. Nonetheless, it's fascinating to note that in terms of religiosity, Americans span a range that invites comparisons to some predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East and tribal societies in Southern Africa, as well as to some relatively secular nations in Europe and developed East Asia. Examining regional variations within many other large countries would almost certainly uncover similar diversity.

Recognition of that fact should give Americans pause when we're tempted to apply blanket generalizations to other cultures; for example, to say residents in those nations are less devout or more prone to zealotry than people in America. It should also help those outside the United States avoid applying such oversimplified judgments to Americans.

This is one case of a much greater rule: Large populations are wrongly stereotyped by those who are ignorant of them.

The implicit challenge for me: Recognize diversity among conservatives.

In recognition of (historical) diversity among Republicans, let me also celebrate Abe Lincoln's 200th birthday. He was a liberal for his time and resistant to fundamentalist piety, though he was not godless.

Lincoln, the first Republican president, would find himself marginalized in the party he helped to found, by the political descendants of the Southern Jeffersonians and Jacksonians whom he opposed throughout his political career and defeated in war. While today's Democrats are not necessarily the party of Lincoln, the GOP definitely is not Mr. Lincoln's party anymore.

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(h/t Pharyngula)

Dolly Parton's boobs

Any time you can get Dolly Parton and even one 'boob' into a headline, you can bet somewhere in our tabloid media, someone will thrust the, uh, disinfotainment. Comedy gold! And the cherry on top is a menstruation joke.

Really, I just can't make this bullshit up by myself. I'm just glad to have the help of journalists everywhere.

Update (2/11): I can't claim with faux innocence that I didn't expect traffic from searches looking for an even better view than this baby is getting. But seriously...

Update (2/20): Still getting traffic, useless traffic I'm sure, but imagine if I had said, "Scarlett Johansson's boobs." Then I'd still be getting traffic long after I'm dead. Anne Hathaway's boobs? Even better for the googled acquisition of page views by non-readers. This is what newspapers do when they forget that their core audience is not the people who want a little bullshit from their cable news stations, but rather readers who actually want factual (i.e. boring) news reporting.

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Don't call us

One of the grassroots challenges of modern politics is how to reach voters. For years, electronic mass media has dominated the conversation. Dumbed it way the hell down, too. It's one reason we have middle school level politics, for example tendentious dipshit idiot Jon Keller heavily pimping another stupid story tonight on WBZ-TV, this one about the Oval Office thermostat. Yes, the Clinton rules are back.

Nowadays, though, TV ads are not very effective. It's hard to find an audience that won't mute them or surf away, and no one seems to be trying blipverts. You have to repeat them so often to get people to notice that they alienate most other viewers.

The telephone often doesn't work, especially not robo calls. But even a call from a real person doesn't work if that person is a stranger. I have a thick hide, but lots of people can't stand being told to fuck off, which happens no matter who you make calls for. Sometimes even I'm tempted, though usually I just laugh at the Republicans who call. But we have caller ID anyway, so we usually don't even pick up the phone.

What's left? In any campaign bigger than a dozen precincts, it's very hard for the candidate to go door to door for more than photo ops. Real grassroots work is what's left. In 2006, Deval Patrick built a huge network of activists, and they talked to their neighbors. In 2008, Barack Obama nationalized the idea, and it worked.

People don't hang up on their neighbors and friends. Social networks, old and new, are the pathways that are left. Of course, it always helps to have an extraordinary candidate. So, when I put my local state rep candidate together with a friend whose public school related email list is vast and nonpartisan, my candidate made the person-to-person sale and got an important email endorsement that didn't come from the campaign, although I provided basic biography.

Because we no longer trust mass media sources and because audiences are too fragmented to reach electronically anyway, politics is going back to the future. Permanent neighborhood level organizing is going to be the wave of the future.

Starbucks the clinic

More research shows that coffee is good for you. Wonder if decaf works, too...

Now if we could just get a sunny day to raise our vitamin D levels up here in the frozen north.

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Mealy-mouthed

The Boston Globe is unwilling to state what's plain as the nose on their face:

With a few strokes of his pen, President Obama charted a new path yesterday in the fight against terrorism, signing executive orders ... to ban harsh interrogation tactics, such as waterboarding, that the Bush administration endorsed but that critics consider torture.

Look, we've prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime. Not someone we disagree with - we ourselves did this. Objectively, waterboarding is torture, and any media worth having would say so in no uncertain terms. Instead, our media acquiesces to the Bushists' redefinition of the word, as if that makes it a point that's arguable.

Of course, the pro-torture pantywaists are out in force commenting about the impending end of the world due to the new fact that America has again forsworn torture. I'm sorry but they can no longer get their thrills from imagining Jack Bauer at Guantánamo wiring up the scrotums of inmates to 120 volts.

We beat the Nazis, the fascists, and the Soviets without resorting to torture as a matter of policy. I think we can handle a bunch of 13th century throwbacks.

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Fiction stranger than fact

The shit of the wingnutted bull is all over the conservative, uh, movement.

Pro-torture wingnuts once again appeal to fictive imagination in lieu of, hell, reality. Reality is so much less tractable and more messy. It's so unpleasant to find out that the world is not what you had fantasized that it would be.

Of course, the Republicans also make economic decisions based on the ridiculous absurdities in Atlas Shrugged. Many of them also derive their science from a 2000-year-old book that contains a full display of every naturalistic ignorance of the age of its origin, none of which should be mistaken for reality in the 21st century.

(h/t Atrios)

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Equal time

Sarah Palin's back in the news (when will we see the back of her in the news?), so it's time for a picture of a beautiful woman (no, not Angelina Jolie).

Since quite a few of you may be women or gay men, here's a stunning guy, too (no, not Brad Pitt).

P.S.:

She also said news organizations have unduly criticized the upcoming marriage of her 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, to Levi Johnston, a former electrical apprentice in the North Slope oil field.

Levi has already washed out of his apprenticeship. This kid is in no way prepared for marriage.

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Reality-based

Good government (among other things) requires hard-headed looks at reality. That's the only way to understand disasters. It's also important when things are going well.

NASA has taken a hard look at the crew deaths in the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster. Now, of course, NASA has had safety management problems for a long time. The engineers warned against the 1986 Challenger disaster, just as they did in 2003. Management was too removed from the risks to make the right choices.

Still, NASA did take the blinders off this time in a way it did not regarding the Challenger. Thank goodness then for Richard Feynman, who apparently never had blinders on in his life. (I highly recommend What Do You Care What Other People Think? It includes his personal report on the Challenger disaster.)

The New York Times story sanitizes the death, not just where the report (PDF) itself redacts personally identifiable information. The astronauts suffered rapid decompression and blunt force trauma, either sufficient to kill them quickly and acting within seconds of each other. Asphyxia is a bit of tepid word to describe the bends (ebullism evident in recovered tissues), which would be excruciating although mercifully brief in this case.

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Merry Christmas

I know I can be pretty relentless with political and social analysis, but for moment, I'm just going to wish everyone a joyful and meaningful day, whether you celebrate Christmas or not. And if you're out having Chinese, enjoy your movie!

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