fuck this place

Everything is so fucked.

See? Fucked.

The feeling of helplessness and hopelessness is overwhelming. Everyone in charge of everything is either indifferent or retarded.

Fucked.

We're literally killing ourselves while convinced of our own superiority. Nobody can change this.

So fucking fucked.

Our Supreme Court protects free speech for rich corporations but not for kids with uptight teachers, arbitrarily restricts medical procedures for women, segregates black kids, won't let citizens challenge the rise of theocracy, and drinks the blood of puppies.

YAY AMERICA!!!

Nate bit a Tibetan

After the last post I decided to research more about palindromes. Check this out! It goes on and on:

The fact is, palindromes are out there in the language, waiting to be dug up. Any wordsmith that starts playing around with the word snore during a sleepless night next to some roaring relative will eventually begin to wonder what words end with erons. It won't be long before herons comes to mind and voila! there's a palindrome: Snore herons.

It's true that there are other things that can be done with herons. Snore doesn't have to come first, but that means finding a word beginning with an h, whose remaining letters must spell something backward. Ham is such a word. And so we find ourselves with the exquisite "Ma, herons snore ham." Though more complex, this too is one of a finite number of herons palindromes. The number of h words that contain another word resting in their posteriors is few. The number of four-word palindromes with "herons snore" as their center could easily be listed on this page. If the palindromist is an artist at all, he's like Michelangelo chiseling at a block of stone to find the human body he already knows is inside.

The above scenario-a sleepless night next to bleating kin-is not a fiction. The event occured early in my palindroming career. I was so delighted with the "Snore herons" that I told everyone about it in the morning. But shortly thereafter I was reading Richard Lederer's Word Circus (in the conventional direction) when I happened upon "Snore herons" in a list of palindromic animals. The pearl of wisdom gleaned from this experience was well worth my disapointment. Palindromes belong to the world, not the individual, and they are continually rediscovered. Imagine my joy when I pried the complete sentence-a rarity among palindromes-"Nate bit a Tibetan" out of the language. Since then I've found it in two other palindrome books.

Sadly, even the best palindromes fail to excite some people. You can imagine that if "Nate bit a Tibetan" sometimes gets a blank stare, "Ma, herons snore ham" can inspire undisguised disgust. The innocent passerby, caught off-guard by an insistent, excited palindromist, can't be expected to understand or appreciate the beauty of such a phrase. The truth is, finding a palindrome is in most cases far more fun than being assaulted with one. If you've spent hours toying with the word "snore" you're bound to be more interested in what it could mean to "snore ham" than those who have spent their time following other pursuits. And so, instead of just perusing the palindromes I and others have excavated from the earth that is the English language, try to build your own. Like any true gourmand, you'll better apreciate the meal when you can recognize the ingredients.

Palindromish?

The Celtics now have Ray Allen and Allan Ray on the same team. Weird.

Buy the book

What he said.

reminder

Bush is a dummy and the war is bad and America sucks and there is no god and basketball is fun and I want to go back to school and I'm not good at poker and I miss my cats. /blog

BEARS!

I'm having fun ripping O'Reilly lately. Here's a video Olbermann put together to show what O'Reilly considers more important than war coverage.

more O'Reilly pathetic

Walt: "totally argument pwned by 16 year old kid, then resorts to insulting him"

principles

" Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical"
- George W. Bush

The lack of self-awareness is fucking astonishing.

bits and bits

• The dramatic unveiling of Digby was really really cool. I'd put up links to explain it but I don't feel like it now. So I guess that is just an inside comment for people who know what I'm talking about.
• That kind of makes me revert back to a blogger identity crisis that I fall into from time to time. What am I doing? Am I informing? Commenting? Exposing? Ranting? I dunno. I just do whatever I feel like. Is that still a good way to do this.
• I still get ad revenue from poker sites. I play a few hands on Full Tilt every once in a while. I can barely stand to watch WSOP coverage on ESPN. I still enjoy High Stakes Poker though.
• Speaking of TV, the new season of Man vs Wild started last week. Bear Grylls is awesome. Les Shroud on Survivorman is also awesome, but I haven't seen any new shows from him in a while.
• Brice Lord introduced me to....
  

I have a headache

But politically, what I want is for the White House to be honest. In 1998, the Clinton administration’s HHS conducted some research on needle-exchange programs. Officials found that the programs curtailed the spread of AIDS and did not lead to more drug abuse, but the administration decided not to pursue the policy anyway. They acknowledged what the research told them, but said they’d decided to go in a different direction anyway.

In contrast, the Bush administration just makes up nonsense, denies reality, and intentionally deceives. It’s rather embarrassing.

Awesome words revisited; Procrustean

The last time I took a serious look at what search terms lead people to this site, I noticed a large number of beard related hits. Thus, Man Beard Blog was born.

Now I'm noticing that I get a lot of hits from Google searches for "awesome words" which gives a pretty good link to a See For Yourself gimmick post that doesn't even have any words in it. This makes me think two things. (#1) I've come a long way since including a map of America there, and since my follow up on it; and (#2) I need more awesome words here. Since 99% of my posts now address that point #1, I'll get going on #2.

I don't think I'll be starting a new blog dedicated to awesome words, though I actually went through a phase a few years ago where I decided I was really into learning cool words. I bought several books of amusing or unusual words, most of which I've forgotten. But I'll never forget my all time favorite word. It derives from a Greek myth. Procrustes was a villain who would invite travelers in to his home, where he told them he had a magical bed that would fit anyone precisely. The magic of the bed was that Procrustes would chop off the victim's legs if he was too tall for the bed, or stretch him on the rack if he was too short. "Procrustean" is an awesome word meaning "marked by arbitrary often ruthless disregard of individual differences or special circumstances."

Any further commentary about the awesomeness of this word is too likely to lead back to point #1, so the post ends here.

distraction as policy

"POOR FORM!" strikes again.

Harry Reid says that outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace was incompetent and is immediately hypocritically attacked by the White House and John McCain, among others, for daring to criticize the military in a time of war. Rather than address the substance of Reid's remarks with an honest analysis of Pace's performance, conservative lunatics and their fawning press have focused on the manufactured scandal about whether criticism of the general was appropriate. In a world where basic respect for logic and consistency is valued, this tactic would be laughed at and then dismissed, along with those who use it. Too bad...

recent political reading

US v Bush lays out a very specific case against the Bush Administration for defrauding the American people on the way to war with Iraq. The case is very straightforward and provides ample grounds for impeachment only on this very narrow issue.

Impeach the President is a collection of essays building multiple cases for impeachment. Most of the usual reasons are well covered - Iraq fraud, rampant lawlessness, human rights violations, stolen elections, etc - as well as some interesting abuses that were new to me, like US interference in Haiti.

Al Gore's book was generally very good. His rampage against Bush was heated and devastating. In establishing his broader thesis about the Assault on Reason in America, he makes some very good points about the degenerative effect that television has had on public political discourse, and sees hope in the rise of blogging and similar Internet innovations. I have some complaints about how he sometimes yearns for reason in one paragraph and then praises faith in the next, but overall this was a stimulating read.

Failed States was my first book-length delve into Noam Chomsky, and I'll definitely be going back for more. The loose thesis indicated by the title is that the United States shares a disturbing number of characteristics with the "failed states" in whose affairs it often intervenes, purportedly for the noblest of reasons. These characteristics include a government that acts as if international laws and treaties don't apply to them, that fails to act in the interests of their own people in favor of the interests of an elite few, and whose reckless use of violence endangers its own people. Chomsky is a powerhouse. I found his scathing critique of corporate marketing particularly powerful.

more O'Reilly

Media Matters covers the story that I mentioned a couple days ago, and adds some more information about O'Reilly's remarks on the subject. I found this paragraph interesting:

Additionally, O'Reilly asserted that "CNN and MSNBC put [coverage of the Iraq war] on because they want to give the impression that the war is a loser and Bush is an idiot," adding: "Now, that may be true. The war is a loser, and Bush may be an idiot. OK, I'm not -- that's for you to decide. But that's why they're doing it." O'Reilly claimed that the reason he doesn't "do a lot of Iraq reporting" is "because we don't know what's happening. We can't find out."

So O'Reilly admits that he doesn't know what is happening, and is thus unfit to comment, and that he can't find out, and is thus an incompetent reporter. Also Bush may be an idiot (not that he'd say that himself, perhaps because he is unfit to comment and incompetent at investigating). But he's quite sure that CNN and MSNBC cover Iraq because they want to give the impression that the war is a loser.

Seriously, how is this man not doubled over in pain at the stupidity of his own ideas? He knows that the people who know more about him about Iraq think it is a losing effort, and yet he finds something sinister in their reporting of the facts that support this idea.

O'Reilly also stated that he "can't speak for Fox News" but that his program does not "highlight every terrorist attack because we learn nothing from that. And that's exactly what the terrorists want us to do. I mean, come on, does another bombing in Tikrit mean anything other than 'War is hell'? No, it does not."

He completely refuses to consider the idea that reporting on violence might be relevant to analysis of the war. He recognizes the possibility that the Iraq War might be "a loser" but doesn't want to say one way or the other. I wonder how he's going to make that determination without knowing anything about it and without accurate coverage of the ongoing violence.

All this would just be further evidence of his being so completely brainwashed into some kind of "America is always good and right and doing God's work" mindset that he can't recognize the logical conclusions of his own partial thoughts. But then he throws in this, making him once again look like pure evil:

Media Matters has also documented O'Reilly's previous expressions of indifference to the situation in Iraq. During the September 25, 2006, broadcast of his radio program, O'Reilly declared: "I don't care what Iraq was, I don't care what it will be," and added that he "[c]ouldn't care less" about the country.

We destroyed their country, killed hundreds of thousands of their people, and committed numerous other atrocities, and he doesn't care about it at all. Evil.

I wonder

A theme I've touched on repeatedly at this blog is that Americans pay way too much attention to trivial bullshit and not enough attention to important things. A lot of the time I blame this on the American public, and a lot of the time I blame it on the media. I wonder which is fair. Thinking out loud here...

One can argue that the media is just a consumer product giving the public what it wants, and there is probably some element of truth to that, but I wonder how much. The study that showed Fox News devoting much more coverage to Anna Nichole Smith than other networks relative to the Iraq War, and the recent press feeding frenzy over Paris Hilton's incarceration are prime examples of news media choosing to cover meaningless bullshit. Basically, massive corporations that own the networks make strategic choices, and those choices drive public demand, at least somewhat.

I bet that if you surveyed the American public, the results would show that they think news programs should devote more coverage to substantive issues and less to gossip. That doesn't mean there isn't a demand for gossip, but people know where the tabloids and E! channel are. The whole infotainment phenomenon isn't something they welcome on the 'respectable' news programs. But, people aren't so concerned about it that they demand changes, and they get sucked into the addictive superficial story lines and passively go along with it.

So to the original question of blame, as always it probably isn't fair to just blame one party. And that means that you can't only blame the public. The media makes choices, and America is a relatively captive audience. But until we fight back and demand better reporting, we won't get it (at least not on TV).

The ironic thing is that I think what is actually going on in the world right now is more interesting that Anna Nichole and Paris combined, in the same train wreck sort of way. Just about everything our government does is a huge fucking disaster, and it would be funny if it weren't so tragic. That is a riveting story line. Why won't more reporters try to tell it?

homeschool

Anytime I try to give thought to my future academic plans, I end up reflecting on my previous schooling. And I always conclude that my previous schooling was a fairly huge disaster.

With that limited introduction, I'll now mention that my new fascination is home schooling. If and when I have children, it is my current intention to keep them out of the mainstream education system as much as possible.

I might post more thoughts on this topic and some interesting links soon.

O'Reilly is evil

There's a lot about the way I used to think that is embarrassing, and among the worst is that I used to think highly of Bill O'Reilly. One way I was taken in is because the man comes across as sincere and intelligent. (He also comes across as pompous, but I can ignore that because my own pompousness gives me natural immunity.) There's a quote from Michael Shermer that helped me to shatter the illusion. "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons." O'Reilly is committed to his political ideology for nonsmart reasons and he applies his intelligence to supporting it. Either that or O'Reilly is pure evil. After this, I'm leaning towards pure evil.

In reaction to a study showing that Fox News devotes far less coverage to the Iraq War than CNN or MSNBC, O'Reilly says:

Now the reason that CNN and MSNBC do so much Iraq reporting is because they want to embarrass the Bush administration. Both do. And all their reporting consists of is here’s another explosion. Bang. Here’s more people dead. Bang. […]

They’re not doing it to inform anybody about anything. The terrorists are going to set off a bomb every day because they know CNN and MSNBC are going to put it on the air. That’s a strategy for the other side. The terrorist side. So I’m taking an argument that CNN and MSNBC are actually helping the terrorists by reporting useless explosions.

Do you care if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No! It doesn’t mean anything.

People being killed in explosions doesn't mean anything, and by reporting it, CNN and MSNBC are helping the terrorists. They do this because they want to embarrass Bush. That is O'Reilly's position.

First of all, the obvious extension of his position is that Fox News doesn't devote much coverage to the Iraq War because doing so would be embarrassing to Bush. So O'Reilly's clear position is that accurately reporting facts about the world would damage someone politically. In the immortal words of Colbert, "reality has a well-known liberal bias." O'Reilly doesn't even realize he's agreed with this.

Next, note that O'Reilly and Fox News claim to be "fair and balanced" news. Anyone who isn't brainwashed knows that they're a far-right propaganda outlet, but O'Reilly is admitting here that Fox News chooses not to report on the war to avoid embarrassing their far-right Supreme Leader. No wonder Dick Cheney insists on having TVs pre-set to Fox News before he enters a room.

O'Reilly's lame excuse for why avoiding war coverage is acceptable from a news outlet is that war coverage isn't news. This man and everyone like him rants endlessly about how their political opponents fail to support the troops, but then argues that the violent death of an American soldier is meaningless and shouldn't be covered. Very supportive, Bill.

O'Reilly completely fails to realize that the reason explosions and dismemberment and human suffering are so common as to be meaningless is because Bush's military strategy is a miserable failure and has been for a long time. That certainly is embarrassing. If Bush didn't stubbornly insist on maintaining this immoral and insane war against the wishes of the American people, the routine chaos and death that resulted from his immoral and insane and unpopular war wouldn't be the news. The news would be that our troops are withdrawing and that while sectarian violence in Iraq is still unacceptably high (as a direct result of our immoral and insane invasion), it has been decreasing since we left and American casualties are significantly decreasing. Until Bush's stupid war ends, the story remains the same and the media has an obligation to cover it and make Bush look stupid.

Going back to an earlier point, to be fair O'Reilly isn't saying that people dying is meaningless, but that it is so standard as not to be newsworthy. He's not saying that a young man's death is without meaning, just that it lacks meaning as news.

I say I'm mentioning this to be fair, but I actually think O'Reilly comes off worse when the point is clarified, because he goes from trivializing the death of an individual to trivializing and thereby enabling violence on a massive scale. As soon as violence ceases to be worthy of mention, war becomes a more acceptable option.

This reminds me of Arthur Silber's suggestion:

A single major newspaper could provide a noble and invaluable service: if they gave a damn at all about unnecessary death and suffering, they would select the most awful and horrifying picture they could find -- a body with its guts falling out, a bloody corpse shorn of arms and legs, a mutilated face made unrecognizable -- and fill up their entire front page with it, a new one every day. Perhaps after a month or two, enough Americans would demand that their government stop butchering people who never harmed us.

O'Reilly and Silber both acknowledge the same thing, that the American public's attitude towards the war is influenced by the way it is covered. One of those men argues the nation is better served by telling the full truth. One of those men says the truth should be hidden. (If you want to quibble here I'll concede the Fox position isn't that Iraq coverage should actively be hidden, just that if they have to make a decision how to use their valuable air time, reporting the inanity of Anna Nichole Smith and Paris Hilton is much more important. I'd go on to argue that this is effectively the same thing.)

In most situations, I'd say that arguing to conceal reality is a despicable position, even more so for a news man. Reporters are supposed to deliver facts, no matter how horrible, even if they make things uncomfortable for politicians (more like especially if the facts make things uncomfortable for politicians). But when the expressed purpose of distorting coverage is to enable the unpopular policies of an insane and unpopular political leader by making horrific bloody death of American military and innocent Iraqi civilians seem like a more palatable political option, despicable isn't a strong enough word.

Mr. Jones and Me

Believe in me
Cause I don't believe in anything
and I wanna be someone to believe

I share Jim's distaste for the use of "belief" in the context of science.

Do I "believe in" evolution? I don't really know how to answer that. The scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports evolution as the best explanation for diversity of life on earth, but I don't think belief has anything to do with it, because belief is typically associated with a lack of evidence. I don't really think I believe in anything. I just have ideas with varying degrees of support.

That's probably what those 3 Republicans meant when they raised their hands saying that they don't believe in evolution, right?

nothing new but

The President of the United States of America is a huge fucking idiot:

At a press conference yesterday, he seems to fundamentally misunderstand what’s going on in Washington.

Q: Mr. President, I want to take you back to domestic issues again. You say the no-confidence vote has no bearing as to whether Alberto Gonzales remains as Attorney General. How can he continue to be effective? And it seems like you’re not listening to Congress when it comes to Gonzales, but you are listening to Congress when it comes to Peter Pace.

BUSH: Yes, it’s an interesting comment about Congress, isn’t it, that, on the one hand, they say that a good general shouldn’t be reconfirmed, and on the other hand, they say that my Attorney General shouldn’t stay. And I find it interesting.

This makes absolutely no sense at all. The “good general” Bush referred to is outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace. The administration decided not to keep Pace on in his current position because, officials have told reporters, the Senate might be mean to him on Iraq policy during upcoming hearings.

It led to a reasonable question: why would Bush stand by Gonzales when the Senate has turned on him, but throw Pace under the bus before the Senate even has a chance to consider his re-nomination?

Yesterday, Bush seemed to think he’d stumbled onto something clever — he told reporters it’s “interesting” that the Senate was skeptical about Pace’s leadership and opposed to Gonzales’ leadership of the Justice Department. Bush was so fond of this observation that he mentioned how “interesting” it is twice.

But what on earth is so fascinating?

What’s so unusual about lawmakers questioning a general whose leadership has been ineffective, and then also questioning an attorney general who has repeatedly lied about a scandal? What connection does Bush see here that’s so “interesting”? The whole argument sounded child-like, which regrettably, is fairly common with this president.

Bush elaborated on his AG.

“And as to how Gonzales — first of all, this process has been drug out a long time, which says to me it’s political. There’s no wrongdoing. You know, he — they haven’t said, here’s — you’ve done something wrong, Attorney General Gonzales. And therefore, I ascribe this lengthy series of news stories and hearings as political.”

First, I particularly liked the phrase “drug out,” instead of the correct “dragged out,” in part because of the irony — the president sounded medicated when he said it.

Second, there’s plenty of evidence of “wrongdoing,” and the Senate has repeatedly told the AG that he’s done “something wrong.” Bush does know what subject we’re talking about, right?

And third, this process has been “lengthy” because officials at the White House and the Justice Department have decided not to cooperate with the investigation. This process could go very quickly with basic answers to basic questions, which the Bush gang refuses to provide.

The president is either pretending to be clueless or he is clueless. It’s that simple.

I should also mention that in between the two Bush quotes mentioned, he also said "they can try to have their votes of no confidence, but it's not going to determine -- make the determination who serves in my government" [emphasis mine]. This man is a stupid little child. What a fucking idiot.

"It's my government!! MINE!! I'M THE PRESIDENT!!!" You can't tell me what to do!!"

beyond wow

I don't even know what to say.

update:

Seriously, if this isn't a disturbing insight into the American psyche, I don't know what is. Bombs to make enemy soldiers become super-gay and super-horny so that they would be too distracted by each other's cute asses to fight? Bombs to make people fart and have bad breath? Is our military being run by children?

You know what I hate? Faggots and stinky people! Hey let's build an awesome bomb that would turn bad guys into smelly queers!! AwEsOme LOLOLOLOL!!!1!!!1

Naturally, we called our drink Gator-ade

When I see those Gatorade commercials where they talk about how super-scientifically formulated it is and they show scientists in lab coats monitoring athletes, I always think how bullshit it is, because I pretty much think that every commercial is bullshit. But you know what? Gatorade tastes really fucking good when you've been exercising, and it kind of tastes like ass the rest of the time. Maybe that's just a coincidence. I suppose it could be. But I bet those scientists in the lab coat had something to do with it after all.

As Nancy Pelosi would say (like a fucking idiot), "thank Sweet Lord God Jesus for the miracle of science that You gave us in Your sweet Lord Goodness." And by "sweet Lord Goodness" she meant Gatorade.

NBA woes

It is currently halftime of game 2 of the NBA finals. The Spurs are blowing the Cavs away, up 25 points, and we've got a feature on Tony and Eva's wedding coming up. Somebody please put my out of my misery.

The liberal media showing their love for Al Gore

If you hate the liberal media as much as I do and can choke down yet another example of how biased and liberal they are, just check out this blog post by the Anonymous Liberal. Being a liberal himself, he loves the way the uber-liberals at the Washington Post spin everything in a pro-liberal way, especially towards their liberal hero Al Gore. They can't stop praising Al Gore for everything he does, and they always give him the benefit of the doubt and overlook his gigantic personal flaws. That's what you get when you have such a pathetic liberal media dominating the news. Thank the good sweet conservative Lord that we at least have Fox News to be fair and balanced!!!

Increasingly Difficult

This man is relentless, and I have a hard time ever disagreeing with him, no matter how radical he sounds:

It is becoming increasingly difficult to take us seriously as a country in any way at all, or to grant the United States any measurable degree of respect. The United States government is certainly a very significant and serious threat -- both to its own citizens, and to the rest of the world. But that is about the only way in which it is serious.

With regard to almost every other issue, the United States is variously contemptible, vicious, brutal, hypocritical, and laughable. And we become stupider as a people with each day that passes, as this last episode proved still one more time.

Check out the link for the full explanation of the "last episode" to which he refers.

blah blah blahg blag blog

As I've made this blog a repository for my socially unacceptable ideas, those ideas are less likely to reach the people who most need them. People who used to read my blog when I wrote about poker and sports and movies have stopped reading now that I write about religion and politics.

At first they used to post comments, or talk to me directly. Their tones became less friendly, and then they stopped entirely. Now I'm left with a few regular readers who are generally supportive of my ideas, and a bunch of random traffic that google throws my way.

I suppose that some of my regulars have been exposed to some new ideas and made modest changes to their mindset because of this blog. So I've traded the opportunity to expose lots of people to radical (relative to their current frame) ideas, for the ability to have a dialog with like-minded people. I suppose it is possible that some of those who have left will remember what they saw here and it might influence them at some point. And it has been cool to make some new friends and get to know a few people better.

Also, I have cats and I'm selling my house and the NBA finals start tonight. Woohoo I've exposed you to new ideas. That's what this is all about.

RUDY RUDY RUDY

Giuliani: Worse than Bush

...

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

...

The Paul incident went to the very heart of who Giuliani is as a politician. To the extent that conservatism in the Bush years has morphed into a celebration of mindless patriotism and the paranoid witch-hunting of liberals and other dissenters, Rudy seems the most anxious of any Republican candidate to take up that mantle. Like Bush, Rudy has repeatedly shown that he has no problem lumping his enemies in with "the terrorists" if that's what it takes to get over. When the 9/11 Commission raised criticisms of his fire department, for instance, Giuliani put the bipartisan panel in its place for daring to question his leadership. "Our anger," he declared, "should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone -- the terrorists who killed our loved ones."

...

"The likelihood is that more people will eventually die from the cleanup than from the original accident," says David Worby, an attorney representing thousands of cleanup workers in a class-action lawsuit against the city. "Giuliani wears 9/11 like a badge of honor, but he screwed up so badly."

When I first spoke to Worby, he was on his way home from the funeral of a cop. "One thing about Giuliani," he told me. "He's never been to a funeral of a cleanup worker."

Indeed, Rudy has had little at all to say about the issue. About the only move he's made to address the problem was to write a letter urging Congress to pass a law capping the city's liability at $350 million.

News from the "Are You Fucking Kidding Me" Department

MORE MAD COW PLEASE! THANKS!


update: better maybe?

escape?

BOB HERBERT: The Passion of Al Gore

Al Gore is earnestly talking about the long-term implications of the energy and climate crises, and how the Arctic ice cap is receding much faster than computer models had predicted, and how difficult and delicate a task it will be to try and set things straight in Iraq.

You look at him and you can’t help thinking how bizarre it is that this particular political figure, perhaps the most qualified person in the country to be president, is sitting in a wing chair in a hotel room in Manhattan rather than in the White House.

He’s pushing his book “The Assault on Reason.” I find myself speculating on what might have been if the man who got the most votes in 2000 had actually become president. It’s like imagining an alternate universe.

The war in Iraq would never have occurred. Support and respect for the U.S. around the globe would not have plummeted to levels that are both embarrassing and dangerous. The surpluses of the Clinton years would not have been squandered like casino chips in the hands of a compulsive gambler on a monumental losing streak.

Mr. Gore takes a blowtorch to the Bush administration in his book. He argues that the free and open democratic processes that have made the United States such a special place have been undermined by the administration’s cynicism and excessive secrecy, and by its shameless and relentless exploitation of the public’s fear of terror.

The Bush crowd, he said, has jettisoned logic, reason and reflective thought in favor of wishful thinking in the service of an extreme political ideology. It has turned its back on reality, with tragic results.

So where does that leave Mr. Gore? If the republic is in such deep trouble and the former vice president knows what to do about it, why doesn’t he have an obligation to run for president? I asked him if he didn’t owe that to his fellow citizens.

If the country needs you, how can you not answer the call?

He seemed taken aback. “Well, I respect the logic behind that question,” he said. “I also am under no illusion that there is any position that even approaches that of president in terms of an inherent ability to affect the course of events.”

But while leaving the door to a possible run carefully ajar, he candidly mentioned a couple of personal reasons why he is disinclined to seek the presidency again.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t really think I’m that good at politics, to tell you the truth.” He smiled. “Some people find out important things about themselves early in life. Others take a long time.”

He burst into a loud laugh as he added, “I think I’m breaking through my denial.”

I noted that he had at least been good enough to attract more votes than George W. Bush.

“Well, there was that,” he said, laughing again. “But what politics has become requires a level of tolerance for triviality and artifice and nonsense that I find I have in short supply.”

Mr. Gore is passionate about the issues he is focused on — global warming, the decline of rational discourse in American public life, the damage done to the nation over the past several years. And he has contempt for the notion that such important and complex matters can be seriously addressed in sound-bite sentences or 30-second television ads, which is how presidential campaigns are conducted.

He pressed this point when he talked about Iraq.

“One of the hallmarks of a strategic catastrophe,” he said, “is that it creates a cul-de-sac from which there are no good avenues of easy departure. Taking charge of the war policy and extricating our troops as quickly as possible without making a horrible situation even worse is a little like grabbing a steering wheel in the middle of a skid.”

There is no quick and easy formula, he said. A new leader implementing a new policy on Iraq would have to get a feel for the overall situation. The objective, however, should be clear: “To get our troops out of there as soon as possible while simultaneously observing the moral duty that all of us share — including those of us who opposed this war in the first instance — to remove our troops in a way that doesn’t do further avoidable damage to the people who live there.”

I asked if he meant that all U.S. troops should ultimately be removed from Iraq.

“Yes,” he said.

Then he was off to talk more about his book.

[my emphasis]

update: Daily Howler blasts Herbert for wondering how things could be so bizarre

I miss these guys

We decided it would be best if the cats were not in the house while it was on the market, so they're staying with my sister until we sell it. Getting them up there was an adventure. Here are some pictures of their last weekend here.


Hattori Hanzo:








Katsumoto:

Retroactive blogging

I found the journal I brought with me to the Philippines. Here's an entry:

11/10/06 - Calamba

The pollution is overwhelmingly bad. The river is full of garbage, and Sonny tells me it is actually better than it was before the typhoon. The street where Lola lives, Bantayan, is full of exhaust from the jeepnies and tricycles that are constantly filling the roads. These are poor people but they pay for these rides? I wonder if a system where people use bicycles a lot (like in China?) would work here? Nobody has said anything directly about this pollution, although Sonny's comments hinted at it. I wasn't sure if he was proud of the river or shared my sadness about its condition. Kira says the pollution upsets her mom, and Kira remembers playing by the river when she was little, which couldn't happen now. Today we're touring a volcano, which should be fun and exhausting.

Here are pictures we took of a tricycle and a jeepny, in a less polluted area.





They're like cabs and buses, respectively.

Here's a picture we took from the bridge over the polluted river I mentioned. People live right there.