Checking my email just now, I have new messages from Amnesty International, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, three different NPR mailing lists, the Center for Inquiry, Think Atheist, Pearl Jam, and the eBacchus wine site.  I am such a fucking cliché.

I maybe could have come up with a better topic for a post than an out-of-office president’s standardized test scores, but I just discovered this in article at Wikipedia on George W. Bush:

Though no official “IQ” test score for Bush has been found, the score he received on his SAT during his final year of prep school at the exclusive Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts is known.  He scored 1206, which has been correlated to an I.Q. of 120.  The score that Bush received on his qualifying test for the military suggests that his IQ was in the mid 120’s, placing him in the 95th percentile of the population …  An article published in the journal Political Psychology, estimated Bush’s IQ at 125. The same study estimated the IQ of Bush’s predecessor Bill Clinton at 149.  …  A lecturer in American politics at Warwick University said: “…[H]e is by no means a dimwit.”

OK, taking this apart.  First, Bill Clinton should have been assumed to have a disadvantage due to his lower socioeconomic bracket in his youth.  All else between them is roughly commensurate: they were both WASPs of about the same age living in roughly the same part of the country, so bias should presumably be roughly commensurate.  Whatever the I.Q. test is measuring — and it is measuring something, it simply fails to reduce absolute “intelligence” to a scalar — it puts Clinton way out in front.  For most I.Q. tests, σ=16.  Cross referencing this with the claims in the cited article show that this is the σ value being used (play with this to find out why.)

Points:

• Bush is at 1.6σ, Clinton is at 3+σ.  This is statistically huge.
• Clinton’s 3σ is 99.9th percentile.  That’s “smarter” than 999 in a thousand people.  Is this starting to sound more like a president to you?  More to the point, perhaps, is it starting to sound more like — Clinton’s estimated IQ by one single paper in a psychology journal?  [And mcgees.org zooms off in a different direction!  Anyone still reading this far?  Anyone comment before reading this far?]
• Zooming still — why the fuck do we care so much about the answer to this question?  It shows up all over the Internet.  Obama hasn’t released any scores, so far as I can tell, and people have estimated his IQ at between — 116 and 160.  Gee, that’s useful!  Tell you what: give me your estimate, and I’ll tell you for whom you voted.
• Bill Clinton did better on his SATs than George W. Bush did.  Great.  I believe I beat both of them.  Does that mean that I should have been president instead of Bill Clinton?  Not remotely.  Not only because I was 14 years old at the time, either.  So much more than (trivial) math problems and (fairly trivial) analogy questions are required for someone to head the Executive branch.  Gah.  Isn’t this completely obvious?  One needs to work well in crisis, to manage people, to handle public attention well, to get by on little sleep, to be responsive when required, to keep a great deal of information in one’s head, to … well, it’s starting not to sound like George W. again, is it not?  But that’s just snark.  The whole idea of reducing something as complex as “intelligence” to a single number — and then pretending that corresponds with the ability to lead a fucking country — is lunacy.  I therefore request you to:
• Read Stephen Jay Gould’s  The Mismeasure of Man.  I have been strongly anti-I.Q. since reading it in college.  I left Mensa upon reading it (in that year of great self-examination, I left the church as well).

Here’s something that is valid, though:

• Bush’s SAT scores put him in the 95th percentile.  Good.  That’s one in twenty.  A thinking person probably should not put all that much in the number.  But you know who does do such things?  Schools.
• Schools.  Since when does “one in twenty” get you into the Ivy League?  I mean, unless you have a famous legacy father and grandfather?  What might one expect of someone literally grandfathered into Yale?
• I’d expect “gentleman’s Cs”.  Which is what Bush got.  This is because the thing most accurately measured by the SAT is, perhaps, how well one takes tests.
• I’ve taken my 1590 SAT scores and my 148-150 IQ as carte blanche to write about how dumb I think reliance on these tests is.  Whatever else may motivate me, the grapes are sweet.

(The intended title of the post was “The IQ Obsession”, but that rather gives the game away, yes?)

As sick as the Scott Brown win in Massachussetts makes me — I love how Republicans, self-styled patriots, flee to the anti-constitutional technique of filibuster whenever it looks like equality is on the horizon, as if 41% minority were somehow a majority — this AP text makes me all the more nauseated:

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Coakley’s loss won’t deter his colleagues from continuing their practice of blaming George W. Bush’s administration … Wall Street watched the election closely. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 116 points … Across Massachusetts, voters who had been bombarded with phone calls and dizzied with nonstop campaign commercials for Coakley and Brown gave a fitting turnout despite intermittent snow and rain statewide

Since when did the Associated Press start allowing Bill O’Reilly to write wire service copy?  They even fell for “tea party” being grassroots.  And NPR posted it rather than their own content.

Now with a 41% minority and astroturfing, millionaires are going to be allowed to tell tens of millions of other Americans and me that we don’t deserve health care.

Surely I’m late to this mockery — it’s only recently come on my radar — but the GOP is rallying people behind the term “Tea Party”.  That they’re the new “Boston Tea Party”.

Seriously.  What The Fuck?

If I remember my history correctly, the Boston Tea Party was the name given to a gang of citizens who protested against taxation by dressing up like a racial minority, trespassing on the property of big business, looting, and then destroying the looted material.

The Republicans have a name for this sort of person, and it’s not “Republican” or “Patriot”.  It’s “Terrorist”.  Seriously: if a bunch of smokers disguised themselves, broke into a Philip Morris distribution warehouse, stole all the cigarettes, and burned them in the streets as protest, what would the Republicans say about them?  That they’re heroes fighting against usurious tobacco taxes?  Or that they’re “with the enemy”?  Granted, the Repubs would be likely to blame the “fisco-terrorism” on racial minorities regardless of the costumes, so that much tracks.

It’s fucking surreal.  It takes me back to Hillary “cleaning blood off the floor”.

But read Beardy well: the Republicans were looking this absurd right before they swept both houses of Congress, that time also with the help of Rush Limbaugh.  Booga booga.  but seriously, wtf?

These lyrics were written near the end of the Clinton years, in response to the WTO protests in Pearl Jam’s home, Seattle.  Remember that?  Remember those?  Remember, before Bush Ⅱ, when the scale of world conflict was muted enough that trade imbalances made front page news?

Bush has come, Bush is gone.  And gods did I hope I would not have cause to trot out these lyrics.

But yesterday and today, with news of Lieberman holding health care hostage in the Senate, with an intended destruction of the public option — the option that keeps the US from further becoming a corporate state, in the way that the U.S. is a corporate state insofar as its economy is concerned — and news that Obama is tentatively supporting this castration — It.  Is.  Fucking.  Time.  For these lyrics.  Senators (most are millionaires): This is our blood.  We need our blood.  We want our independence from bloodthirsty corporations.  We are deserving — we all are deserving — something more.

Grievance

Have a drink — they’re buying!
Bottom of bottle of denial

Big guy, big eye watching me
Have to wonder what it sees
Progress laced with ramifications –
Freedom’s big plunge

Pull the innocent from the crowd
Raise the sticks then bring them down
If they fail to obey
Oh, if they fail to obey

For every tool they lend us, a loss of independence

I pledge my grievance to the flag
‘Cause you don’t give blood then take it back again
Oh, we’re all deserving something more!

Progress!  Taste it!  Invest it all!
Champagne breakfast for everyone!

Break the innocent when they’re proud
Raise the stakes then bring them down
If they fail to obey
Yeah, if they fail to obey

Pledge your grievance to the flag!
Oh, come on!  Don’t give blood then take it back again!
Oh, we’re all deserving something more!

Have a, have a drink, drink!
Have a, have a drink, drink!

I want to breathe part of the scene
I want to taste everyone I see
I want to run when I’m up high
I want to run into the sea
I want to life to be –
I just want to be –
To be –
I will feel alive as long as I am free

Pledge your grievance to your senators.  Right now, while you’re emboldened and thinking about it.

Dick Gorden’s show tonight had a (truly heroic) woman on who spent time infiltrating white supremacist groups.  There is a long, long post in here for me, that I just don’t have in me tonight, largely because it would have to address this post at length, which I basically got tired of arguing at the time, and that entails trying to guess Bob Mike’s first-round arguments, which can be tiring. 

But to get the snark out of the way so that it needn’t pollute that potentially-good yet-to-exist post, here’s Bob Mike, when we were discussing names for non-theists and non-heteronormative peoples:

My problem with “bright” is that it doesn’t really tell you anything about the beliefs of the person in question.  Whether you like “atheist” or not, the word is at least accurate.  Using “bright” just brings the entire system into the realm of corporate branding.  Screw that …

[W]e’re disagreeing on the most effective method of getting [equal rights] done … I feel that it can be best accomplished by gathering together groups that have similar (if not identical) interests into a single, dedicated mass, so “queer” works for me.

To which the obvious-to-me responses are:

1)  Yeah, fuck corporate branding.  Let’s go with something descriptively accurate like “queer” (?).
2)  Betcha there is an at-least-as-high percentage of intelligent (”bright”) atheists as strange (”queer”) GLBTQ folks! 

I’ve been tutoring a high schooler in mathematics.  It’s pretty rewarding (watching his test scores jump from 65% to 93% has been pretty cool, for instance.)  His mother insists, over and over, that I give him “real world” applications of the math he’s learning.  I happen to believe that the math itself is cool and beautiful enough on its own, but, whatever, I can swing with that.

So he was being introduced to exponential decay (”So why is a power of e?”  “No good reason, actually, but it fits the points best.  Since decays aren’t time-sequenced in discrete jumps, it is modeled best as a continuous function.”)  So, aha, applications!  Chernobyl!

1986 … Ukraine … how a power reactor works … how criticality works … how operators try to plunge and remove cores so that they don’t get oscillations, which are modeled like this … criticality … radioactive chain reactions … decay byproducts … Strontium 90 … Calcium … incorporated into bone matricies … people with Strontium irradiation are having children now … geopolitics … Soviet Union … government secrecy and inter-state intervention … shit, I’m outside of the scope of math teaching, get back quick.

I think it helped.  So I do the couple-minute review at the end which concluded, poking fun at myself, “And now, if you see Chernobyl in your history book, you’ll know something about it.”

And he says, “Well, maybe.  1986: that’s, like, Nixon, right?”

I try to maintain a poker face while tutoring, but I said, “God, man!  Nixon was before I was born!”

“Well then …?”

“Reagan!”

“Oh.”

“What year were you born?!”

“1993.”

And I’m reminded that Niall will construct sentences that begin with phrases like “Back when Daddy and Nonna were little …”  And then I feel really, really, really old.

John Allen Muhammed, the “Beltway Sniper”, was just executed by the state of Virginia by lethal injection.  The U.S. Supreme Court denied a last-minute appeal.  Many people think this was necessary to provide closure.  I think we haven’t done enough.

For one thing, the news reports I’ve read have said “his family’s reactions were not discussed”.  What the fuck?  His family?  Are we talking immediate family?  We let them live?  What kind of a country is this?  I don’t think they’re talking about kissing cousins, either.  This sounds like immediate fucking family.  As far as I’m concerned, we’re just getting started.

Next stop: he was born in New Orleans.  Now, yes, granted, the Bush administration did everything in its power to destroy the city already, but last time I checked, it’s still fucking there.  This means that potentially there are neighbors, schools — people instrumental in his very upbringing — who are still alive and kicking.

And don’t get me fucking started on the Muslim bit.  Islam is still legal after the rampage?  WTF?

Pinko Justice Stevens dissented from the majority opinion opposing a stay by noting that it is “perverse” to execute a criminal before his appeals process has concluded.  Appeals?!  You’ve got to be kidding me.  This guy gets appeals?!  He’s a fucking terrorist.

But it gets worse.  I’ve heard it proposed that we should have just chopped off the guy’s hands.  Nonsense.  Modern prostheses are awesome.  They have shoulder control.  I was listening to an amputee vet just tonight talk about them.  So they proposed chopping off his arms.  But as far as I’m concerned, he would still have his head, would he not?  And to the people who think we should have just cut off his head?  For fuck’s sake: the guy worked for Farrakahn.  You think a little head-chopping is going to stop him?

But –

[sigh.  deep breath.]

I can deal with these liberals.  I just needed a pause.  There are people — real people — supposed Americans — who thought that imprisoning him for life would have been effective.  “It would get him off the streets,” they argued with straight faces.  “He could never hurt anyone again.”  Blah blah blah unable to differentiate right from wrong blah blah blah human rights blah blah blah counter-productive in a realm where jihadists regularly make martyrs of suicide bombers.  And you thought not killing his family was bad.  Seriously: I know where some of these commies live.  Contact me by email.  We’ll sort this out.

So, I said that I was willing to compromise on paid-for abortions in order to effect health care reform.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and, though it upsets me, I think I really am.  Bob Mike called it having someone “thrown under the bus for this thing”.  I don’t think that’s entirely true, but there’s some truth in it.

In any case, let me balance that a little bit with the Vedder Tuesday for this week.

Porch

What the fuck is this world running to?
You didn’t leave a message, at least I
Could have learned your voice one last time
Daily minefield, this could be my time.  ‘Bout you?
Would you hit me?
Would you hit me?

All the bills go by and initiatives are taken up by the middle
There ain’t gonna be any middle any more
And the cross I’m bearing home ain’t indicative of my place
Left the porch
Left the porch

Hear my name, take a good look
This could be the day!
Hold my hand, walk beside me
I just need to say:

There’s something
There’s something I don’t mind
There’s a choice in my time
I don’t think changing it –
Not a good time to make a change for it
There is something in this that’s different
I know how I want to live
How I want to choose

Hear my name, take a good look
This could be the day!
Hold my hand, lie beside me
I just need to say:

I could not take
Just one day
I knew when I would not ever
Touch you
Hold you
Feel you
In my arms
Never again

Back next week.

All Vedder Tuesday

When Niall had his sixth birthday last month, we had a birthday at Chuck E Cheese’s.  Because they’re six, my mom made the other boy¹ a small bag of “stuff” so he wouldn’t feel left out.  We warned Niall of this in advance, and at first he was very upset, then worked through it, making sure, in his words, “His toys won’t be bigger than mine, will they?”

I was listening to a truly vile Republican on KPCC today — one of those insufferable brats who worries that his fellow citizens could get rewards, too, but might — might might might — be OK with it if he can guarantee that he will be much more equal than everyone else.

Niall is six, and I can work on training him out of it.  The Repubs, though: I just want Obama to match the picture and say:

¹ Yes, singular.  Really, it’s OK: 1 is the ideal number of guests as far as Niall is concerned, being the smallest integer greater than or equal to the number of guests he’s comfortable having (approximately 0.4).  There is so much of me in him.  While I think I can program out the greed in him, I have no idea how — or, indeed, whether — to code having an easier time at parties, or to like people more.  Something something Jenn something something LiveJournal something something the first indication of a culture clash is people who would use fucking LiveJournal in the first place something something [redacted].

I was listening to The World (Best.  Program.  Ever.)  A reporter was interviewing a woman in Nigeria about her family’s economics.  She was looking for a job to help support herself, her husband, and her nine children.

I think I see a possible area for optimizing Nigerian family economics.

Could we, like, petition the Vatican or something?  Petition them to sell all their (billions of dollars worth of) assets, give the money to Oxfam, and transition all the priests to, say, gardening?  Small-scale rural heirloom vegetable gardening, maybe?  With the gardens at least, say, 10km from the nearest primary school?

</snark>

My name is Joshua McGee.  I am a 30-year-old disabled American citizen.  And I do not have health insurance.

Many of you know me, online or offline.  Unless you found this page through a keyword search, you may be a Facebook friend or a Twitter follower.  You may have found me through a list of links for a topic that interests you, or through a link from the site of someone you respect.  You may have subscribed to the site because you have enjoyed or been moved by something I have written in the last nine years.

I have chronic conditions, many accident-induced, that are disabling.  Maintenance prescriptions for me, if I were paying cash, would cost $1,000 per month.  If a few of these were to become unavailable to me, I would likely die.  As it is, I am unable to afford some prescriptions, and every day the lack of these is contributing to a likely early death for me.  One way I would become ineligible for county-subsidized prescriptions would be if I were healthy enough to go back to work, and did.  If the job were not to have excellent benefits, $12,000/year of my income would be zapped away by the medicines I would have to pay for.

But that will likely not happen.  My accident injuries are crippling, and surgeries to repair them will cost at least $25,000, and probably more.  I will not be able to afford this.  Until I receive these surgeries, I will remain disabled.  This means that without major health care reform I will probably be disabled for the rest of my life.

I am not a crack-head.  I am not lazy.  I am not ignorant.  I have a college degree.  My standardized test scores are well past the 99th percentile.  I paid my taxes for over a decade at a job paying much more than the national average.  I became disabled on the job in a fashion that could happen to you.  To you.  I cannot qualify for meaningful commercial health insurance because of preexisting conditions.

When you hear or read arguments that ignore the people who would be helped by health care reform, picture me.  When politicians more-or-less-directly disparage those who do not have health care coverage already, picture me.  When a rich person worries that his standard of care will go down if others are helped, he is talking about me.  Me.

I am one uninsured American.  There are millions more who do not live in counties as helpful as Los Angeles.  There are millions more who cannot receive necessary treatments to save their teeth, their health, their well-being.  Their lives.

We are not anonymous.  We have names, lives, families, hopes, and dreams.  We all have stories.  There are people who love us, and we love other people.  We are ourselves people.  Real people, real citizens.  Real Americans.  Keep this at the front of your mind.  Picture me.

Please contact your Senator and your Representative.  Please pass on the email, or retweet, or thumbs-up, or Digg, or social-bookmark, or whatever to get this out there.  Please argue with people who would prevent me from receiving medical treatment.  Please stand up for people’s rights.

My name is Joshua McGee.  I am a 30-year-old disabled American citizen.  And I do not have health insurance.

So, The Crest, right?

There is an impossibly divey bar in Temple City by the name of The Crest.  It looked so run-down that for years I assumed it was out of business.  Then I found out it wasn’t.  I just had to go there.  I went there last week — it’s the “country bar” I referenced — not knowing at all what to expect.  What I didn’t expect were $2.75 drinks, though I probably should have from the place.  Also, what I didn’t expect were really nice people working there.

So I went back tonight.

Tonight is Monday.  This is, it turns out, a significant day-of-the-week in American sports.  Oh yeah.  OK.  I figured I was lucky to get a seat at the bar.  I am way weird at this bar.  I’m used to hanging out places at which the weirder you are, the more you fit in.  This is not one of those places.  Par example: Last week I attracted the attention of another patron because of [redacted reason].  He came over to me and we started talking.  He was maybe in his late forties.

This is one of those occasions I’m discovering as an adult where Niall is really useful.  “Kids” is an icebreaker.  He had two sons.  I asked how old they were.  I find out the older one is 24 and the younger “passed away”.

Quick: look very sympathetic and very impassive.  “I’m.  Um.  Very sorry.”

“Oh, it’s OK,” he said.

“I’m.  Um.  Sorry?”

“He was in Iraq.”

“Oh.  Sorry.”

“Don’t be.  I tell people this: and, I don’t mean to offend you, I mean I just met you, but people who are anti-war, I don’t know if you are…”  I am, but quick, impassive!  “I tell people this.  ‘Let’s say someone breaks into your house.  He kills your son, rapes your wife, rapes your daughter, and kills your daughter in front of you.  What do you do?’  ‘Oh, I fucking kill him.’  ‘See?’”

“That’s a really good reason for being in Afghanistan, and not a very good reason for being in Iraq,” I reflexively reply.  Oh holy fuck.  Not cool, McGee.  This is not the safe, rarefied air of the liberal blogosphere.  This guy’s son died in Iraq.  Also, fuck, drunk Republican!  Do I need to duck?!

His gaze stumbles, and he gestures in a placid, equanimous way.  “Well, you never know,” he says.

“No, I guess you don’t,” I say.  Fuck.  Recover now.  “And what greater sacrifice can you make for your country?”  In the spur of the moment, this strikes me as ridiculously poor logic but something that might sound consoling to a conservative.  I was right.

Back to tonight.  The almost-run-in did not deter me from returning.  I went back.  The bartender remembered me.  Not my name, but remembered that I had said I was going to return.  And football was on the television.  I settled in and ordered my bizarre regular drink.  She said, “Oh, that’s right!”

She brought me the drink and asked me, “Hey, want to join the football pool?”

“No,” I demurred.  “I don’t know enough about football to join a football pool.”

“Oh, that’s OK!” she said.  “You don’t have to.  You see, we take the score and go across, then we take the score and go down, and the person in the square wins the pool.  It’s $150.”

Working.  Working.  Working.  Nope.  “I’m sorry?”

“See, it works like this.”  She pulls out a piece of paper with that week’s pool.  “We take the first team’s finishing score.  We count that score across.  Then we take the other team’s score.  We count that score down.  Then we look whose name is in the box.  Like, pretend this is me.”  She points to ‘Paula’.  “She’s one-two-three-four-five-six across.  Then one-two-three-four down.  If it’s six to four, she wins.  So it’s kind of random.”

That’s.  Not.  Even close to random, I think, but, impassive is the name of the game.  “Maybe next time,” I say.

So no one knows me here.  No one knows how weird I am.  The know my drink is weird, they know I look incongruous, they know I have some weird habits that I have to declare in advance so they don’t get me thrown out on my ass.  They also don’t know I’m a vegetarian.  And they have $8 steaks.  Steak.  Been a long time for steak.  What the hell, right?  I order a piece of a dead cow.

And they deliver it.  I had ordered it medium rare.  I figured they’d overcook it, which was OK.

They didn’t.  It was seared, and — I believe this is the right term — slightly warmed inside.  Well, fuck.  OK.  I start to eat the steak.  I get halfway through and, oh shit.  Body does not like this.  I quickly ask bartender to watch my bag, and I go to the restroom.  And vomit.  Just a little bit, yes, but, retch.  And kneeling in the bathroom, I think to myself, OK.  You have to pretend you’re someone else to get by in here.  You don’t like the music.  You don’t like the sports.  You like the bartender, but are somewhat afraid of getting killed by the other patrons.  What the fuck are you doing here?

You know what?  I couldn’t come up with a very compelling reason.  So I went back and said, “Could I close this out?”

Bartender looks at my half-finished steak and untouched potato and salad and asks, “Would you like a box for that?”

Oh.  Right.  Box.  You’re supposed to look like you’re going to eat this later.  “Great!” I say.  Internally: Hurry.  Pepto Bismal required.

Box is fetched, I make haste, and I am … OK, if I say “Crest-fallen”, it’s going to look like the post was a wind-up for the pun.  I actually just thought of it now, but I’ll avoid it anyway.  I am … determined to find places to hang out where I don’t have to be someone else.  Somewhere with weird punk hairdos, somewhere with asshole bartenders, somewhere with indifferent patrons, and, unfortunately, somewhere with $8 drinks.  Will it work?  Well, you never know.

I thought I’d excerpt a joke from an upcoming post — patience, flock — remembering a “Partnership for a Drug-Free America” TV agitprop spot from when I was in high school.  Over some hellish black-and-white scenes, the sad voice intones, “Nobody ever says, ‘I want to be a junkie when I grow up.’”

And my response was, “Well, I believe you just did.”

Please someone get the joke in the post title.  That’s even more important than telling me how many times you can say “agitprop spot” without getting tongue-tied (I’m at “one”.  At one with the that’s basically the joke in the title….)

L’esprit d’escalier is one of the most useful French terms to know.  It successfully predicts that a slow wit, a few hours, and a blog can turn someone into Cyrano, albeit a still-slow-witted one.

So, usually I’m not that fast.  Today I was.  A commentator on NPR was discussing Bagram Airfield, where, notoriously, prisoners were tortured to death (fuck “allegedly” and “arguably”) in 2002.  They were beaten, hung by their arms, and subsequently died.

“You know, the Bush Administration talked a lot about another guy who was beaten, hung by his arms, and died,” I said.  “They also used it as an excuse to hate the Jews, and they started praying to the guy.  How did they not know this would produce martyrs?!”

(Ha!  See that?!  My nose is pointy, and I got a cheap wisecrack out of illegal war, torture, and religious persecution!”)

Could we play Mad Libs for a second?  The Economist on Country’s Elections:

Mr. Politician comes off as a very cautious, pragmatic, vague and increasingly shrewd politician … most can agree that Mr. Politician is hardly the perfect representative of the reformist, liberal nationality who have taken to the streets … “[H]e’s no radical reformer.  But what’s happened is that simply by representing an alternative, Politician became a vehicle for the expression of the hopes of people who are far more radical in their reformist attitudes than anyone in the dominant power structure”…

President of a nation: “[T]he difference between candidate and other candidate in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.  Either way, we were going to be dealing with a national government that has historically been hostile to another country, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood”

This behind-the-scenes video of President Obama’s cameo on The Colbert Report is glorious.  But it’s also a little disturbing.  I find it funny — presumably many do — but if W. had appeared on, say, Rush Limbaugh’s show to do a bit the premise of which was abusing the office of Commander-in-Chief, I would have had a fit.  So would much of the rest of the blogosphere.  As I said, I like it — but it’s perilous, and I would rather he not buddy-buddy (reference to Palin intended) with liberal humorists.

(OK, who will be first to post that I missed the premise of the humor?)

I’m doing this post without Web searches to help my point, namely, that when one gets 95%+ of one’s news from NPR, not only does one get a skewed selection of stories (I saw a checkstand tabloid and asked my mother “Is Patrick Swayze really dying?”), one never knows how to spell anything.  If I had ever read a story about the man, I might have a vague clue of how to spell the Iranian president’s name.  I think I could utter (the American pronunciation of) the syllables, and I bet it starts with an ‘A’, but even that is a guess.

Sometimes, though, the misconceptions can be more fundamental.  Consider the proposed environmental regulation that I kept hearing as cap in trade.  This made no sense to me, if for no other reason than that politicians are rarely so forthright about the negative consequences of policies.  Toying briefly with Cap’n Trade — presumably a lovable mercantile sailor with a cool hat — I saw on a blog today cap-and-trade.  Oh.  So, that’s like, “An upper limit on allowable discharge of pollutants by corporations, a market in which unused allowances can be auctioned, and a catchy three-short-word moniker”?  That would make sense.  I suppose a quick Wikipedia search would clear that up, but, again: that’s my point.

It is startling, the degree to which President Obama manages to be pitch-perfect all the time (OK, almost.)  Even with great writers, his delivery at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, linked to above, is impossibly adept.  Compare this with professional comic Wanda Sykes’s sharp-intake-of-breath-inducing material.  If Bush’s slide-show of his failing to find WMDs under tables and behind furniture was nauseating at the time, it is even more stark and hideous when compared to our current President’s remarks.

So while I laughed at the President’s self-effacing lines (”In the next 100 days, I will strongly consider losing my cool”), I thought the point would be over-stretched in Salon’s Obama is Spock — Salon just being Salon.  And while I found the article, at times, wince-inducing with its metaphors, it is hard to resist an article that quotes a famous MIT figure that both are people who can “bitch slap you with [their] brain[s]“, Obama himself as saying “Issues are never simple“, and (OK, this one is pretty sketchy) a comparison of the Obama cabinet to the Enterprise crew.  Read (or plod) through it, though: the payoff involves Leonard Nimoy, a sardonically-Vulcan observation, and a certain famous split-fingered gesture.

I’ve begun, and deleted, my varying comments about this about half a dozen times so far.  I’m giving up.  Here it is:

The [Organization of the Islamic Conference] resolution [proposed in the UN] says “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism” and calls on U.N. member states “to combat defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general…”  — Reuters

I don’t even know.  This just makes me want to cry.  If the leadership of fifty-six countries can parse that paragraph and interpret the logic as A→B→C, let alone advocate for it, what possible chance is there going to ever be for peace worldwide?

Readers will know I am no friend of the Republicans (this as one of a billion possible links) — and though some attentive reader is going to claim that this is another instance of my thinking that a prominent black man is full of shit, Andrew Breitbart was fucking railroaded on Bill Maher by Michael Eric Dyson, the studio audience, and (to a somewhat lesser degree) by Maher himself.

Did anyone see this bullshit?

Breitbart confronted Maher by asking him to provide references when he accused Rush Limbaugh of racism.  This is not impossible to do, and Dyson did provide some (one of which was even relevant) — but Maher?  He passed the buck, asking if Dyson “wanted to take” that one.  Back up your own fucking claims, man.

Dyson (and, look, I’d say this in a moment about Dershowitz, Paul Kurtz, or any number of other people — this is not a black thing) indeed did try to steamroller Breitbart with ten dollar words (yes, I knew them all, and I would still be a dick if I spoke like that in an argument, which I expect I’ve done); insinuations of speaking in “code words” when it was very clear (to me) that Dyson was doing this very thing; and self-conscious affectation of urban African-American diction at precisely the points one would choose if one were suggesting that Breitbart was himself a racist.

Breitbart was completely right that Social Security is a “box of magic” that needs to be confronted.  Breitbart was completely right that it is disingenuous — he didn’t use these words, I’m speaking for him now — to hold up Obama as a paragon of virtue and call Clarence Thomas a “ventriloquist’s dummy” (yes, Dyson said that — actually, he said “a ventriloquist”, but I think I got what he meant.)  Breitbart was off the map when he laid into “black studies” professors and “post-structuralist” intellectuals, and in a number of other places, but look — ok, don’t look.  I have no idea who is going to jump on this thread, or what accusations they are going to make.  But I will stand to my last breath demanding that someone fights fairly.  What I’m saying:

1. If you make an accusation and you cannot cite references, you are a dick.
2. If you respond to someone’s point, delivered in simple language, by laying in with long words and demanding the other person “let [you] finish” when you did not allot them the same courtesy, you are a dick.
3. If you continue to rework your argument when challeneged, and then claim that that’s what you’ve been saying all along when it is completely clear that you have been doing nothing of the sort, you are a dick.
4. And, yes, I’m a dick.

Oh, and by the way: what the hell is a “talking eTrade baby”?

Beardy has a fascinating graph.  The responses are even more rad.

Stay tuned for a link to the MeFi question I am working on composing, after I make sure I understand a nonzero amount of this problem.  Note: a math degree does nothing to help with all of this.

Let’s see if this shows up for subscribers, or if you’ll have to visit the site:

If you’ve read the authors’ book — Our Kampf — or if you think it’s extreme dickishness to forbid you from reading a site without first reading the book [raises hand] — maybe read the article Bush’s ‘Peace In Our Time’.  It’s bitter.  Excerpt:

Israel’s “policy” (if that’s the word) is clear: Peace with Syria; Gaza is Egypt’s problem; and the West Bank is Jordan’s.  This means a Two-State Solution is dead.  Its funeral is taking so long it even has a name: Peace Process.

The Independent:

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 … was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasizes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict”.

Readers who know the problem here will be joined by those who will immediately pick it up. The Israelis say that they are not required to withdraw from all the territories — because the word “all” is missing and since the definite article “the” is missing before the word “territories”, its up to Israel to decide which bits of the occupied territories it gives up and which bits it keeps.

In related news, I was just given a parking ticket!  Can you believe it?  Yes, there was a sign that said “No parking”, but I told the cop that I didn’t park there on Wednesdays or Thursdays!  Just Saturday!  When I was not parking on Wednesdays, I was indeed not parking!

Egads.

A group of laborers who refuse to be paid in cash have attacked a community of space robots with purple vacuum cleaner heads.

I’m sure I got some of that right.

Less goofily: in college I read a book called Extraordinary Groups: An Examination of Unconventional Groups that covered, in the chapter with the greatest depth, the Rom community.  Not cool how they’ve been treated.  Their common name, itself an inaccurate slur (inaccurate because they are not from Egypt; slur because it means, in Europe, “y’aint from ’round here, are ya?”), carries connotations of thievery and fraud, and can be used pejoratively in casual conversation, frequently by people who don’t know they are doing it.  They survived persecution, marginalization, and, finally, murder in the gas chambers of the Third Reich, but (AFAIK) no one has built a museum for them yet.

So, please, no riots, OK?  No attacks.  No “gypsy cabs”, nor having someone “gyp” you.  In a sense, they are where Jews were before WWII, an allowed target of hate.  We needn’t hate.

But, you know, keep your wallet in your front pocket.  Just to be safe.

The book: as of this writing, there’s one for a penny.  It’s a good book.  You can afford a penny:

From the ACLU:

An American man detained in the United Arab Emirates at the behest of the U.S. government was released from State Security custody — where he was detained incommunicado in a secret location — and has been transferred to a prison in Abu Dhabi after suffering severe torture.

Naji Hamdan’s transfer came only one week after lawyers for the ACLU filed a lawsuit alleging that the U.S. government was responsible for his detention.

On December 2nd, Naji Hamdan, who lived in the Los Angeles area for more than two decades, was allowed a phone call to his brother, Hossam Hamdan, a resident of Los Angeles.  Hamdan reported to his brother that officials transferred him to a regular prison on November 26 and that his captors routinely beat him and kept him in a freezing underground room during his months-long detention by State Security forces.  The torturers kicked him with their military boots in the location of his liver, knowing that he has a liver condition.  On some occasions, they beat him so badly that Mr. Hamdan passed out for extended periods of time and believed he would die.  On at least one occasion, they strapped his arms and legs down to an electric chair, while threatening to use it.

Hamdan’s description of the torture and interrogation he endured makes clear that American agents have been involved.  Although blindfolded by his torturers, Hamdan reported that some of the interrogators spoke native American English and were not fluent in Arabic.  In addition, the agents interrogated Hamdan on topics about which only U.S. federal agents could have knowledge, such as a meeting he had with FBI agents.

The news of Hamdan’s transfer comes after the ACLU filed a habeas corpus petition in federal district court in Washington, D.C., alleging that the U.A.E. detained Hamdan at the behest of the U.S. government.  Last week, U.S. District Judge James Robertson ordered the government to respond to the petition.

Hamdan, who was born in Lebanon, lived for more than two decades in the Los Angeles area, where he ran an auto-parts business and helped manage the Islamic Center of Hawthorne, a mosque and community center.  In 2006, he decided to relocate his family and business to the U.A.E

Hamdan’s detention in the U.A.E. was the culmination of years of surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).  This summer FBI agents traveled from Los Angeles to the U.A.E. to question Hamdan further.  Approximately three weeks later he was detained by agents of the U.A.E. state security forces.

Hamdan’s brother and others who know him from his activities at the Islamic Center of Hawthorne have all said that he is a peaceful family man who would never support violence.

I have been exceedingly even-tempered of late.  I relish it.  I just don’t get angry about things, and certainly not the rage that I had for a while.

But my blood is boiling.

Fuck.

Did you read that blockquote?  Read it.  All of it.  Twice.  Rumor is that President Bush is considering preëmptive pardons for top administration officials for their complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition.

Even tempered, yes.  But pardon is a little bit too lax for me, nonetheless.  I’m thinking something more moderate, such as summary execution in the Rose Garden.  Followed by cake.

Fuck.  How did this happen to our country?  The old quote is about good men doing nothing being the only thing necessary for evil to triumph.  But we didn’t do nothing.  We fought with every peaceful means we had available.

On 11^th September 2001, four airliners were hijacked.  On 12^th September, the world’s largest power was hijacked, and flown by people who had no idea how to land, just how to steer into the National Archive building, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are held.

OK, that preceding paragraph was unbelievably corny.  I almost deleted it on preview.  So, more concisely: Fuck.

Fuck.

I thought about sending this to my “Everyone!” email list, but thought better of it.  I owe half of the list members large amounts of money, and two thirds of them I don’t know well enough to bombard with political messages (there is a very interesting overlapping-sixth in there.)

For y’all, though, http://www.fivethirtyeight.com.

You’ll thank me.

I just saw a special-interest election ad on television:

After Massachusetts legalized [interracial] marriage, our son came home and told us the school taught him that [white people] can marry [black people].  He’s in second grade!  We tried to stop public schools from teaching children about [interracial] marriage, but the courts said we had no right to object or pull him out of class.

Do note that these warm-hearted followers of Jesus consider it a mortal sin to detach a bundle of 32 cells from a uterine wall but apparently have no qualms about denying rights to Real Actual Adults.

Fine print on the bottom of these pesky California election ads is insufficient.  It needs to have a pathetic, hateful, and ideally terminally ill old man come on and say “I’m James Dobson, and I approve — and funded — this message.”  I am willing to negotiate about whether he should be forced to wear an SS uniform while reciting the sentence.

It’s rather a good thing that I didn’t get to write the No on Prop 8 tagline, because “Don’t be a fucking Nazi, asshole” is probably not the most even-handed approach to this issue.

A former colleague of mine had once written an expert program to help physicians diagnose different sleep disorders.  He thought the coolest (his word) occurred most frequently in otherwise healthy young men from Southeast Asia.  I don’t remember the name, but by his description, it is a degenerative neurological condition in which the sleep center of the brain is slowly destroyed.  One gets progressively more severe insomnia until the sleep center is gone, then is incapable of sleeping and dies (from lack of sleep) within a week.

The only sleep disorder I’ve found in Google that is correlated with being a young Southeast Asian man is SUNDS, but the details don’t match up.

SUNDS, though: “Sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome”.  That has been associated with an extension of the heart’s QT interval.  And I’m on medication that can cause lengthening of the QT interval, such that I have to have regular EKGs.

So yeah, panicked insomnia is fun.  I think, “Oh my God.  I am never going to be able to sleep, and I’m going to die.”  Completely rational, right?

Thought so.

I just knew that there had to be another reason for resenting being Southeast Asian — something other than Henry Kissinger alone.

Think the United States will start supporting the ICC when that fuck dies?

Thought not.

Wikipedia’s list of war crimes.  I think they forgot to list one of the possible crimes against peace: WAR.  Damn.  Am I missing something?  Isn’t war by definition a crime against peace?

Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, aggression, treaties, blah blah.  Can a country (the U.S., to pick one at random) really sidestep this by claiming that another nation (pick one) is trying to weaponize a particular metal?  A metal of which the first nation has already weaponized and deployed approximately 1.86 trillion times as much?  And actually fucking used those weapons on Real Live People?

I did finally get to sleep yesterday, and slept my normal 3.5 hours.  You know how you can cut your foot on a piece of broken glass, and only then realize just how many steps you take in a day? Insomnia is like that.  We tend to take sleep absolutely for granted, like breathing.  And then we forget how to.  Fun stuff.