Another blogger responds to the guest post.

I fall into the latter camp, personally. I feel she puts forth such a false persona that regularly varies from ill-informed to bald-faced lying, often with a healthy smattering of damn near illiteracy thrown in. I will not take Palin at her word without significant evidence.

Since no journalists are remotely close to being allowed to investigate (or, frankly, slightly question) her, and she wasn’t that far from being leader of the world’s superpower, this is one conspiracy that I’m willing to give some weight.

This all leads me back to a point I have been making about Palin and her Tea Party movement supporters: it’s not even a matter of relative fact or truth, it is a matter of blatant absence and denial of fact or truth. And when there is no allowance for simple, proven fact, there can be no conversation, let alone compromise.

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

This was a really great debate between the two camps of whether or not to add nuclear power to our arsenal of energy sources sans fossil fuels. The big piece wrong is that they are talking about two different sets of numbers. The pro side is talking about overall current energy needs, whereas the anti side was speaking about replacing transportation energy costs. Once you see that, it undercuts the anti side quite a bit.

Still, it is great to hear those points out. It does seem that with our knowledge, wind can and ought to be a strong power source, and solar ought to be on all suburban and rural rooftops. Hell, you can farm underneath wind turbines, so you might as well plug your tractor in and remove even more of the black energy required to generate our food.

Both points, though, miss a big step: transportation of energy. We lose tons of electricity over our power lines. Superconductors aren’t viable for mass production. Battery power keeps getting better so long as we keep wanting Internet access in our pockets. But how do you think all the electricity is going to get from 10,000 wind turbines to a town?

The first speaker was right that we can hold onto our nuclear waste materials while fourth-generation generators (waste burners, essentially) are developed further. And who wouldn’t love the idea of burning our kill-Earth-ten-times stockpile down to a simple kill-Earth-twice stockpile? That right there should be the front retort of any anti-nuclear energy argument.

So the future is nuclear for base load, wind for topping off that base and for sale (windy in one place, calm in another), and solar for the extra daytime use? Sounds reasonable for me. Now if we can either quit burning fossils for creating and moving our foods (oh yeah, and packaging them), we may do better. Plastics aren’t going anywhere, but I wouldn’t mind going back to a world of mostly wood, metal, stone, and glass.

It would help us all out if we made our food more short-range, for certain. And if I could take a train to anywhere in the region. But if we can at least kick the black energy for using our computers and lights and toasters, we’re at least going to be in a better place.

As I began my first round around my property (easy to find since the neighbors had already mowed this week), a neighbor kid and his friend came and played basketball using my hoop in my yard. The previous owner of my house had athlete daughters, so he installed a professional, adjustable hoop that hangs over into the cul de sac. Neighbor kids regularly come out and use it, especially this teenager, so I thought nothing of it. He waved hello at me while I passed by.

Once I started making passes under the branches of my crabapple, the basketball rolled onto my driveway. I could see the kid coming up to get it out of the corner of my eye and continued to concentrate on not nailing my head on the one low-hanging limb of the tree. After emerging from this big tree’s low canopy, I saw the kid had walked up to me and wanted to ask me something.

“It’s okay if we use your hoop, right?”

“Yeah, totally. As long as you don’t make tons of noise after dark when my kids are sleeping I don’t mind.”

“I never use it after dark anyway.”

“So yeah, no problem.” I said.

“Well the guy from that house came up and said we weren’t allowed. I said you’d let me do it before, but he said it wasn’t your choice, it’s just for kids in the neighborhood.”

“It’s in my yard, I’ve known you for years, and you still live just around the corner. I’d say that qualifies you as a neighbor, don’t worry about it.”

So the kid went back to his friend and game. I put my earbuds back in and proceeded to start another pass.

Soon as I had got myself into a groove, the guy two doors down stomps across my lawn to me. Not the next-door neighbor who would’ve had a reasonable issue, since it’s feet from his driveway too. No, it’s the old guy, my height but twice the width, ragged t-shirt and a bent cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“You know those kids shouldn’t be using that basketball hoop. You know it’s not your hoop right?”

“No, I didn’t know that. I figured it was mine since it’s in my lawn.”

“Well it’s not. It hangs in the right of way. We put it up for the kids of this neighborhood.”

More backstory: I’ve known this kid since he was twelve. When we moved and I started work at the middle school, he had to have been around 7th grade. He’d come into the lab after school or during study hall to work on stuff. He introduced himself when he recognized me from both school and home. Not a straight-A, academic kid, but definitely not a bad apple either. He even chats it up with Austin when the lad comes out and tries to shoot hoops with him. My concern about this teenager using my basketball hoop is obviously quite nil.

“I live around the corner. Big red house.” The kid speaks up from the street.

“Yeah, he lives around here and I’ve known him for years.”

“Well the hoop’s in the right of way. Don’t you know we’ve had a couple of break-ins the past couple of years? Wake up and smell the roses!”

And he starts waddling off, cigarette having never left his mouth. You ever have that kind of person who walks up and said something then walks off? The idea of a conversation never entered their mind. It’s as if the concept of talking to someone you disagree with, even if you both end in disagreement, is completely missing. I find it odd, but more often than not, I know I’m an odd one in the world. This now makes two of five neighbors in the cul de sac who’ve done this to me.

“I know him and he’s fine.” I say as though the conversation was not going to unexpectedly end.

“Wake up and smell the roses!” he mutters again as he continues back toward his house.

I make a wave of disregard with my hand to let the kids know they’re fine to keep on playing. After less than 20 minutes, they head out. I would have too if I was a 16 year old neighborhood kid who just got talked down to by someone you weren’t even near bothering.

I finished my lawn, pissed that whatever was bothering this guy manifested itself against these kids. My sympathetic side tried to give my neighbor the benefit of the doubt. But then I remember that he’s the jerk who let his dog shit in my yard and never thought to clean up after it until I talked to the guy. And it’s his house that holds the shiny black truck without a muffler that is louder than kids playing in my yard and fireworks combined, the truck which wakes me up at night and which my daughter assumes is an airplane. Nuts to him.

And before I get off my soapbox, how dare he assume that teenagers playing basketball in our street is a bad thing. If teens are out and visible and active that means they arenot getting into nasty, stupid, or destructive stuff. This is what we ought to encourage in our society, you jackass.

Then, in the back of my mind, I also think: the neighbor kid is white and his friend was black or south Asian or something. I didn’t look to hard or ask because I didn’t care. But if this was a factor in this whole sorted saga, then I feel much more dismayed.

A great clip from his World Science Festival appearance the other night, especially the bit toward the end:

“One thing I think that as a nation we should be embarrassed by is that the scientists– you can do this experiment yourself, I’ve done the experiment– the scientists, by and large, know more liberal arts than the science that is known by liberal artists.”

Or you can read my longer, less funny version from a couple of years ago. Either way, it’s an important message: It should be exactly as embarrassing in educated company to say “I’m no good at math” as it would be to say “I’m no good at reading.” The fact that it isn’t– that it’s ok to laugh off innumeracy– is a major problem for us as a society.

Read the comments on this post…

This is actually a point I had never really thought about, and even I’m guilty of it. Of course in my family the line was closer to, “Oh, I could do any Algebra or Trig, but hit the wall at Calculus.” And of course, my family is an odd duck. I’m going to go ahead and claim I am not one of those liberal artsy folks who chuckle about being bad at math. But I’ve never called anyone out for laughing at being bad at math. Maybe it didn’t come up as much, because I grew up within music circles and music and math have a very strong relationship.

Back to their point: Orzel and Tyson are precisely right. Math should be a function like literacy. And it’s not even complex math. Arithmetic and basic Algebra should be proudly ingrained in all American brains. We don’t all need to be calculators. My wife regularly comments about how quickly I can multiply through things, but I attribute that to being quickly able to tear down problems (23 x 5 is actually (20×5)+(3×5) in my head) and having being the loot roller for more Dungeons & Dragons games than anyone else I know.

These guys don’t expect that either. They expect that it doesn’t matter what speed you can figure out a problem, they care that you can figure out the problem at all. Tyson properly goes into this with science as well. Organic Chemistry? Nuts to that. Asking how exactly something works, where it comes from, what are its limitations? Reasonable. Even if you can’t understand the specifics, you should at least be able to cut through the bullshit and see if the claim someone is making could actually be valid.

Actually, that ties into what I try to explain to my son. He’s following what advertisements are and it’s easy to see him get tripped up. He’s a knowledge hound, a precise knowledge hound, and I love him endlessly for it. So when some commercial makes a claim that its product does some amazing feat, I have to methodically walk him back and explain that ads, while not fully lying (usually), are shiny exaggerations of what something is actually capable of.

My favorite example: a box of Kix cereal. Right on the front, it claims to be a good source of Calcium and Vitamin D. Know what milk is chock-full of? Calcium and Vitamin D. So what does the Kix give you? Briefly crunchy filler. And yes, it tastes good and is easy to snack on so we still give it to the kids anyway.

To wrap up, I again agree: if someone makes the claim of being ‘bad at math’ and proud of it, remind them that it’s not okay to be illiterate in the basics of our civilization. We depend on it. I know I’m not touching on the fact math is probably not taught in the ways to reach all learners, but that’s a separate fault. I am sick of people being proud of being ignorant.

My dad is a brilliant man, double mastered in science and engineering. Knows something about everything. He’s why I’m abnormally adept at so much. But he’s a bad speller. He got screwed by an experimental method of teaching phonetics when he was a kid. He’s not proud, it’s just something he has to cope with. Doesn’t mean he can’t string a clear paragraph together or talk to someone about music or literature. So even if you’re bad at math, that’s no excuse for not being able to calculate my change at a coffee shop.

Huge advert on the side of a bus: “FIRST AID IN WARTIME. FOR HEALTH, STRENGTH AND FORTITUDE. WRIGLEY’S CHEWING GUM.”

I’m reading Orwell’s Why I Write right now. He is our grandfather’s generation’s Jon Stewart. I’m working more on this concept as it goes.

It’s like that boring old history stuff is, like, worth learning or we’re doomed to something. Or whatever.

You betcha.

There is one other crucial element in the Times Square case, and it can’t be stressed often enough. So far we have seen a New York-style rather than a Washington-style response to the threat. And while New York is the least “American” of U.S. cities, its emotional and social response is just what America’s should be. Let me explain: 

The point of terrorism is not to “destroy.” It is to terrify. And for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. That is the real case against the ludicrous “orange threat level” announcements we hear every three minutes at the airport. It’s not just that they’re pointless, uninformative, and insulting to our collective intelligence; it’s that their larger effect is to make people feel frightened rather than brave.

I won’t go into the arguments about whether creation of an ever-threatened public mood is deliberate, or what interests it serves. I’ll just say: it works against larger American interests (as argued here), and New York in these past two days has shown the alternative. That is nothing more than: being alert, but living your life and not skulking around terrified. I hate to say that when people act fearful, “the terrorists win,” but it’s true.

It reminds me of the bombing of the London Underground back in July of 2005, which also brought back readings about IRA bombings and WWII bombings. Keep that stiff upper lip and carry on, chaps! We won’t let them beat us into losing our heads. It’s not to say it doesn’t hurt, but damn it all we won’t let our pain be their victory.

It also brings back one of the first words to pop into your head when describing New Yorkers: tough.

(Found via A plain blog about politics.)

Namely it’s Moe’s line I keep hearing: “Immigants! I knew it was them. Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!” I find that hilarious.

But this is The Simpsons circa 1996. Yet it has quite a bit to say about the politics of ignorance and fear that we’ve lived under for a while now. This brilliant piece of satire almost makes me sad that we’ve only gotten worse in the past fourteen years.

Is it really patriotism to buy a flag because everyone else is? Does it really show that you support our troops just because you have a bumper sticker on your gas guzzling truck or SUV? To me the answer is a clear, No.

I responded in his comments, so feel free to click over and visit. I may steal his WordPress theme. I like the tabs.

I have always been bad at concealing my feelings. The look on my face or my posture instantly gives away my opinion on a current subject. It makes my wife’s job of reading my mind most of the time much faster and easier. You’re welcome, honey.

M asked me why I was angry. I told her that I was sick of this false, forced patriotism. The middle of the seventh should be devoted to singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and standing in line for the bathroom.

But no. After the choir of grade schoolers finished “Take Me Out” (apropos), another woman came out to sing “God Bless America”. That was when I started getting annoyed.

Aside from the lyrics being trite, why are we bothering to do this? Because we started it after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Fine. It’s been over eight years. We don’t need another reminder that we were attacked and to reaffirm our allegiance to the United States.

I have spent two hours sitting and watching a game of baseball being played in the middle of the North America continent. Is there any doubt where I could be? I have eaten food born from four cultures in two days. Where else does that happen?

Let baseball be baseball, let everything else that surrounds us be great and plentiful, and let the fact of our location be implied. Even when I sat in the freezing wind of a rugby pitch in England, I didn’t go, “Oh no! Where am I? I better check my passport and make sure I didn’t go Brit.” I loved enjoying that game as a part of their culture, just as I love our game as a part of ours.

I don’t need reminders that a) I’m in America, b) people died so we’re singing this stupid song, c) I’m not a believer in half of the lyrics, and d) we’re in the midst of poorly guided wars. Let me watch my baseball, even if the Twins are playing like fools, and forget the fact that bad things are going on.

Then “God Bless the U.S.A.” came over the loudspeakers.

I’ll bet I looked like a kid who just got told he couldn’t have a second helping of ice cream. If “God Bless America” is trite, this song is all-out asinine. Before the game began, there was a high school marching band roaming around the warning track playing Sousa marches, for crying out loud. Is this garbage really necessary?

I pity anyone who has to sit through that nonsense for every game.

Oh, and as any writer or drug addict can tell you: excessive use diminishes effect.

Recently, since the election of Barack Obama, common sense has left the Republican Party completely. We are in the era of craziness. As David Frum has written, a deal was there to be made over the healthcare bill. Instead, this ideological purity blinded the GOP. As LBJ said it, instead of being inside the tent pissing out, we choose to be outside the tent, pissing against the wind. And we got splashed by our own nonsense. Why did we do that? Well, when a political party shrinks its electoral based to below 30% and is composed by one demographic group, all that is left are a bunch of zealots. We shrank it by kicking out of the party those who believe that abortion should be legal but limited. We shrank it by kicking out those who believe that an $11 trillion economy, like ours, needs a strong government, not a government that can be drowned in a bathtub. We shrank it when we sanctified Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, and canonized Sarah Palin. These are the leaders of my party nowadays. How did we go from William F. Buckley to Glenn Beck? How did we go from Eisenhower and Nixon to Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann? I do not know. What I do know, however, is that these leaders remind of me of the leaders of the Whig Party. And if they continue on their nonsense, they will bring the collapse of the GOP.

I do not recognize myself in the Republican Party anymore. As someone said it before, I did not leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me. I have the same ideological positions on most of the issues that I had when I voted for Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush in 2000. However, I just cannot trust the reins of our government and nation, of this formidably complicated and complex gigantic machine that is the USA, to the amateurish leadership of the Republican Party.

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor  those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don’t really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay. 

That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War. 

This is who they are–the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn’t “have had all these problems,” this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a “Real American” with no demonstrable interest in “Real America” then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.

When it became the party of ignorance, proud of anti-education, anti-book learnin’, I was out. I don’t know if I can ever come back unless it collapses entirely.

9:27 – The board is taking up remaining amendments on the high school world history course.

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

9:51 – Dunbar’s amendment striking Jefferson passed with the votes of the board’s far-right members and board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas.

9:56 – Here is what the Library of Congress says about Jefferson’s influence: “Recognized in Europe as the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson quickly became a focal point or lightning rod for revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas.” The Library of Congress notes, in particular, Jefferson’s influence on revolutionaries in France (including on the Declaration of the Rights of Man), other European nations, South America and Haiti.

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

From Flowing Data:

FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

]]> http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/03/07/one-more-from-sullivan/feed/ 0 http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/03/02/fighting-for-the-past/ http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/03/02/fighting-for-the-past/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:02:13 +0000 Fry http://www.thefryside.com/?p=2106

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

[From 1984 by George Orwell]

There is an easily understandable truth to the phrase, History is written by the victor. The victorious are the ones left after the battle to tell the tale, so it is their story. Even ‘his story’ seems like the etymology of the word, though it is not.

Logically, however, it seems as though it should not be the case. Fact is fact. What happened, happened. Right? The American Revolution went from this, to this, to this.

But we humans are limited, isolated souls. We cannot truly know anything beyond our own experience. So when we look upon the past, we see it through our own eyes and nothing more. Try as we might to keep the past even-handed, it remains clouded by what we believe actually happened.

And that belief as to what happens tempers our current state of mind. We justify our current decisions based on that foggy history, to either follow the path or run counter to it. The hardest to cope with of all is when evidence points to a different conclusion than what is believed to be true.

This is where a new battlefield has opened up, and it follows the words of George Orwell exactly.

In Texas, there is a board of education that controls the content of a huge amount of school textbooks. A single board, in one state, dictates the content they want in most schools.

How this is possible is through textbook manufacturing. Texas publishes a single list of approved textbooks for all of its schools. Texas is a huge state. So, if a publishing company wants guaranteed millions in sales, they cater to Texas. And since they’ve catered to Texas, those books become the books for much of the whole country.

As one would expect, Texas, as a whole, has stronger religious leanings than average. And this board has a solid voting bloc of religious conservatives. This fact would normally be balanced out by California’s liberal-secular leanings, but since that state won’t be purchasing textbooks for another half a decade (good planning, that’s what that is), Texas is now wielding far more influence over the market than it previously did.

Up now for their curriculum decisions is social studies. History. Our very past is going to be altered by the present. Alterations to make sure that there are well-mentioned gaps in Darwin’s and Galileo’s advances in our very world. Show Reagan as a hero, followed by the grandeur of Newt Gingrich. And be sure people see that our very founders were espousing Christianity and rule under Biblical law.

It is the last point that is most confounding to my knowledge. I have read our founders, not just read about them. Most of them were Christians, yes, but that was merely the default. The far more reaching fact about them was that they divorced their personal faiths (which were from numerous sects) and knew that their inspirations came from Enlightenment philosophy of reliance on themselves to get through existence.

These people honestly believe they are setting history right. That is what is so tough to fight. And it is a subtle fight over words. What is most impressive is that they are thinking in terms of generations. If they rewrite history now to deceptively emphasize the religions of our Founders over their actual beliefs, then it will be thirty years before the ramifications are fully felt.

As Mr Coates mentioned when I first read about this on his blog (also followed up by Mr Sullivan), it is hard not to leave this subject on a sour, depressing note. The effects of such an intellectual coup are difficult to see as too harmful in a world becoming coated with ubiquitous information. It also requires a vast amount of effort to maintain a campaign such as this over decades.

Still, it is always worth fighting against such willful acts of ignorance and deception.

My recollections are not perfect, of course, but Nate Gunderson should be able to help me fill in the details. The exchange is roughly as follows.

“So, you’re the infamous Ryan Sorba,” I said.

“Yep!”

“You’ve made quite a name for yourself.”

“Haha, yeah. Where are you from?”

“I go to college around here, American University.”

“What are you studying?”

“I was double-majoring in Political Science with a political theory focus and International Relations with an Islamic Studies focus, but I think I’m going to drop the latter. I can’t take the relativistic preaching, the whitewashing of the burqa, Sayyid Qutb, the entire religion.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. So what did you think of my little tirade, then?”

“Oh, I thought it was quite evil, actually. I’m gay.”

“You mean you think you’re gay.”

“No, I’m gay. Do you think it’s a choice?”

“I think it’s the result of a complex process of social and environmental factors, but that it’s reversible.”

“So, like, why is it that over one hundred animals have been observed engaging in homosexual sex in nature?”

“Well, only 0.2% of animals are known to do that — ”

” — I mean, mammals, obviously, not ants, birds — ”

” — you know, animals masturbate, your dog humps your leg. Does your dog talk with a lisp?”

“Do I talk with a lisp?!” I yelled.

“A little bit.” (I later asked a couple of gay friends if I have a small lisp; both of them said I have no lisp whatsoever. Aron, who is straight, has said my voice is sometimes theatrical, but that I don’t have a lisp.)

“Rudy Giuliani has a lisp — is he gay?”

And then he went off on what he affectionately called “his tirade” — giving the same mangled pseudo-Aristotelian spiel about how natural rights have to be grounded in natural law, meaning substance, and the final result of the reproductive organ must be a reproductive act, and all of that.

“Yeah, yeah, I get your argument, I understand it, ” I tried to interrupt, But he said that I didn’t, and he finished.

“But the vast majority of married couples partake in sodomy — oral sex, anal sex, fetishes. Hasn’t your girlfriend ever given you a blowjob? I think the government should just get out of the whole marriage business!”

Everyone around us agreed with that statement. Sensing some momentum, I went on: “I’m the one who says that my values shouldn’t have anything to do with government. It’s you who wants to impose his own biases upon the rest of the world!”

Nate Gunderson pondered why it was such a burning issue for Ryan.

“Because conservatives should not be upholding groups who support homosexual marriage and sodomy.”

I said something I don’t quite recall, and he mentioned something about how he could “take me on” physically if he needed to, to which I mentioned that his quick resort to force and threats said a lot about his political philosophy.

He said at around this point that he needed to go, and put out his hand to say goodbye. I stared at him, refusing to shake his hand, and he said “Well, I don’t really want to shake your hand, you’re intrinsically evil.”

We all started walking away, with him talking to his girlfriend, and me talking to Nate, blasting Sorba more.

Someone who was with him asked Sorba: “Really, though, he had a point: why do you care about this so much when the economy is in shambles and the debt is growing and spending is out of control?”

“Because it corrupts the youth and the culture,” he replied.

When we reached the area near the escalator downstairs, he turned on his camera. I put out my arms, striking a mocking pose, but realized he kept holding the camera at me.

“Wait, are you recording or taking a picture?” He was recording.

“Ah! OK…Well, I’d like to say, then, that the person behind the camera is a Hitler Youth waiting for a fuhrer to sweep him off his feet into a grand national project so he can sacrifice individuals like stock-fodder to his own biases.”

He turned off the camera and approached me. I told him he should get his girlfriend to give him a blowjob so that he could experience the joys of sodomy. He put two of his fingers an inch from my face and said that he’d want to fight me if a girl wasn’t around. “Ah, the use of force!” I said again.

It essentially ended, there.

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

‘Nuff said, as they say.

The speed reading is definitely coming along, I think. My retention is higher. I’m getting closer to my goal of reading about a book a week, plus I’m able to consume more delicious content online. Hopefully that’ll make up for the fact I can’t listen to podcasts any longer since my kids keep getting louder.

So here are a few lines from The Art of War that struck me. From Chapter 2, Waging War:

3. If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

Chapter 3, Attack by Strategem:

18. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Chapter 13, The Use of Spies:

4. What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.

5. Now, this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.

5.1 If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.*

6. Knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

27. Hence it is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying and thereby they achieve great results. Spies are the most important element of warfare, because on them depends an army’s ability to move.

That all spoke quite a bit about what has happened in the world in the past decade, and even so about the Cold War as well. Who would have thought that actual, evidential knowledge would be useful in conducting war?

*Not actual quote from Sun Tzu.

I am naturally a libertarian (except when it comes to children), and would lean Republican, but have yet to vote for one. I can’t see myself supporting a party overrun by Jesus with an M-16. I’ve never been able to fully support Democrats because I think they want government to do too much for us, plus I don’t much care for Unions or hippies.

So to me, the speech went well. I like to hear the ideas of rolling back the government a bit in order to, you know, pay for things we promise. And I really liked that Obama vocally disagreed with the Supreme Court (Roberts as CJ = we’ll be paying for Bush for a long, long time), and that he admonished both parties in Congress for failing to do work.

Democrats, you have a majority, do something with it. Republicans, just saying ‘no’ to everything isn’t leadership. Seriously, this is why I can’t support any of you right now. (Note: I do support Democrat Tarryl Clark for Congress in my district for so many good reasons I named above.)

It’s been interesting reading the immediate responses to the speech out in the blogosphere. The truly liberal are ragingly pissed about Obama’s concessions to cut spending and still wanting to work with Republicans. The political commentators seem wary that the speech did anything. And, well, I don’t have many conservative writers in my RSS feed because they sound as though they’re foaming at the mouth more than anything else.

Frankly, I thought Obama passing the responsibility on to Congress to get things done, particularly telling Republicans that if they have a better idea, he’d like to hear it. I think that’s a great way to call them out on their empty critiques.

I spent the speech just sitting there watching and reading a couple of other live-blogging events. There were only a couple of points that made me react. Here’s from my Twitter feed:

Did he really just end the Iraq war, or has that date always been set?

YES! Repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell! [I actually clapped and shouted 'Yes!' when I heard that.]

These are big deal things to me, and he had better follow through. Now, I know Obama said that combat troops would be out of Iraq, so that means we’d still have support personnel on the ground. Frankly, I see a permanent base there, similar to the leftovers of World War Two.

As for DADT, I’m excited, but the history I’ve read from other blogs is to be wary. Many things have been promised in the past to the gay community and so many went unfulfilled. But I can see DADT ending with Iraq engagement and taking care of two big shifts in the military at once.

To wrap up, I want to note the Republican response to the State of the Union. Interesting to note, Governor McDonnell gave the response before an actual assembly rather than in front of a camera in a room. It’s just different than what has been done before.

However, Governor McDonnell said nothing. The entire time, he sounded like an empty shell. I kept waiting and waiting for a single idea that could be presented as an alternative to any of Obama’s plans. I heard mention of off-shore drilling, but that was all, and Obama even hit on that himself.

So it was a non-speech. Even my wife kept repeating to me, he’s not saying anything. But according to pundits, the bar was so low, all he had to do was not cut an audible fart in front of the camera. Good job, McDonnell. At least your speech was only ten minutes so you didn’t have to worry about saying anything relevant.

Can you paint the stakes in detail? What will be the cost of not passing this bill?

I’m going to put the choice very simply– If you pass the bill things get quite a bit better. If you don’t pass the bill things just continue to get worse. We all spend our time saying that this is not a perfect bill. That this is not our first choice. That If I were king I’d create a single-payer utopia. That’s because we’re intellectually honest. But that’s been a mistake. It’s obscured the fact that this bill is a tremendous improvement in the situation.

The basics of it remain the same. The people who really get helped are the people who end up without a large employer giving them insurance. For those people, this bill is a hedge against extremely bad luck. It’s a hedge against the worse part of the system–You lose your job because you have breast cancer and now no one will insure you. You have out of pocket medical bills that go up to 90 thousand. On an average day, none of that happens to us. But there comes a day that is not the average day, and that’s when everything goes wrong. This bill says we won’t allow it to go too wrong.

Beneath that there is the basic subsidy scheme. In 2019 you’re spending 200 billion a year in subsidies on poor people. When was the last time you’ve heard about government helping low income folks like that? It just doesn’t happen anymore.

Support for Amtrak must be strong–not because it is a cherished American institution, which it is–but because it is a powerful and indispensable way to carry us all into a leaner, cleaner, greener 21st century.

Consider that if you shut down Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, it is estimated that to compensate for the loss, you’d have to add seven new lanes of highway to Interstate 95. When you consider that it costs an average of $30 million for one linear mile of one lane of highway, you see what a sound investment rail travel is. And that’s before you factor in the environmental benefits of keeping millions and millions of cars off the road.

In 1830, the first steam-engine locomotive, the Tom Thumb, graced America’s railways. Its first run was a rickety 13-mile trek from Baltimore to Ellicott Mills, Md., but it became much more than that. It marked the beginning of a new journey, heading straight into a better, more imaginative American future.

The first part of the phrase aside*, for now, sending our troops abroad does not ‘defend our liberty’. If we said such a thing to our Founders, they would have scoffed (Franklin would have laughed). It would be essentially nonsense. It still is.

Liberty’s opponent is Tyranny. Our ruling organizations are what dictate how free or oppressed we are. To defend our Liberty is to take up protest or, at worst, arms against our own government.

The French fought for Liberty against their kings. The Indians fought for Liberty against foreign British rule. Blacks fought for Liberty against our institutionalized Jim Crow. Even right now, Iranians are fighting for their Liberty to elect their leaders.

The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan have never been remotely capable of threatening our freedoms. Not even Al-Qaeda terrorists came close to ruling us, or even off-setting our power.

The only place that can erode Liberty in the United States is Congress. That body politic holds the key to fighting Tyranny. It is the bastion of our great Republic, the one that gives us voice in how we govern ourselves.

Congress is a body designed to be slow and deliberative, to put much time and thought before levying taxes or entering us into wars. And in that time, the people are to go about their business, knowingly free from government intrusion.

Our Liberties have been lost at the hands of our own fear-fed representatives. We can be listened to, imprisoned without trial, and even tortured. All this because our Great Legislature deigned to give unchecked powers to the Executive.

Liberty is not defended by sending troops abroad, because Liberty can only be defended at home. It requires constant vigilance and participation. At most what we are doing is sending our troops to protect our interests or hunting criminals. We defend our Liberty against the forces of our Tyrannical government, though it is with damn good feeling that our volunteer military would side with the people.

*Back to the former point: Supporting our troops is a double-edged sword. Technically, supporting our military means paying for their engagements. Not supporting them would be to cut off funds and would bring them back home. And really, we have yet to pay a dime for our two invasions, so we haven’t even supported them at all yet. Technically. This is a semantic argument all around after all.