Here is a true story you might not know:

Classically, the definition of luminous intensity involved whaling and Imperial measurements.  The CIE, an international group, realized the problems in this definition, both because the definition no longer jibed with modern opinions on conservation and a post-war rejection of systems unique to one empire, and because guaranteeing that this definition could be properly employed worldwide was, in practice, hampered by its dependence on the technological sophistication of those in the respective areas, which is unfair.

With the growing understanding of the revolutionary impact black bodies could play in the collective scientific community, the CIE, an international body, attempted in 1948 to change the old standards.  Making use of this growing respect, a universal that could be employed all over the world was agreed to be necessary, and the definition was thus changed to eliminate false measurements.  At long last, the promise of truth overthrew candlepower.

But this was 1948, well before other revolutionary restructurings on the international stage.  And, problematically, luminous intensity was still held at arm’s length in the scientific community: it existed independently of the standard measurements used worldwide.

Jumping forward 31 years, it was realized that this was no longer tenable, and that science as a whole would benefit from a closer embrace.  Understanding the dramatic impact of Watts, luminous intensity underwent a fundamental redefinition.  After much work, this new unit — given the beautiful name candela, from the most-classical language in science — was made the peer of other standards.

Final note: if you look at the definition of of candela, you will see a cryptic “683″ in the denominator.  This number is significant for several reasons.  It is indivisible; it was made most famous by Sophie Germain, a pioneering female mathematician who fought against oppression and bigotry all her life to fulfill her calling; and, under the Eisenstein definition, it has no imaginary part.  This is not the reason given for its use.  But I think you will agree that it is pleasant to keep in mind.

Holy crap.  Dear Bob Mike: Official Historian of mcgees.org, please mark this as the day when mcgees.org realized the power of YouTube for something other than funny skits and music videos.  Fucking fantastic.

Video:

Government responses to various ad campaigns:

“Join our health club and you will live forever” → Fines
“Join our diet program and you will live forever” → Fines, FDA investigation
“Join our church and you will live forever” → Tax exemption

As some of you know, I majorly ♥ Claire’s Restaurant in Hardwick, Vermont (@clairesvt on Twitter).  Their slogan:  “Local Ingredients, Open to the World”.

I was sitting at the bar last week and a patron from out-of-town, visiting for the first time, was deciding what to eat.  I was witness to this exchange:

Patron:  Is this beef local?

Server:  Right down the road.

Patron:  From a small farm?

Server:  If you’d like, I can probably find out the cow’s name.

You are welcome to find this as creepy as did the last person I told, but if you are creeped out and are not a vegetarian, please spend a long moment working through that one.

Do you know about Sharron Angle yet?  She is the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for the 2010 election challenging Harry Reid. 

So, here’s a HuffPost article about a January 2010 exchange on the Bill Manders show.  You can play the audio at that link, but here’s a transcript:

Manders:  I, too, am pro life.  But I’m also pro choice.  Do you understand what I mean when I say that?

Angle:  I’m pro responsible choice.  There is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kind of good choices.

Manders:  Is there any reason at all for an abortion?

Angle:  Not in my book.

Manders:  So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something [trails off]?

Angle:  You know, I’m a Christian.  And I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations.  And we need to have a little faith in many things.

So — going to try to be exquisitely fair here: if a father holds his little girl down and rapes her, and she becomes pregnant, God could intercede.  If he doesn’t intercede, that’s part of his plan.  We would be sinning and subverting divine will if we allowed the girl to have an abortion.  The proper response is faith in God.

Does that about cover it?

This.  Woman.  Is running.  For national office.

She is the candidate of the more-conservative of the two main U.S. political parties.

Before I move on to the rest of my post, let’s get this vile piece of Angular detritus out of the way.  It is too late to unspeak the words she spoke about rape and incest.  That horse has left.  There is no way you mess that one up that bad.  It’s more absurd than saying, ‘Officer, when I said ‘Open the register and give me all your money!’, I meant to say ‘Do I have to buy something to get some change for the pay phone?’”

So, I’m setting my clock as of the timestamp of this post.  The RNC has 48 hours to withdraw all support for Angle.  That much is a given.  A statement on the order of “We were unaware of the insanity of Ms. Angle, and we apologize for our previous support of her.  The Republican National Committee does not oppose abortion in the case of rape nor incest.  We disown anyone who argues otherwise, for any reason, including superstitious special pleading.”  If they do not, they are complicit.  If they do not, and if you are registered Republican, you must be publicly vocal about how abhorrent this is, and at least write a letter to the party, or you are complicit.  That’s my line in the sand.

OK, now that I’ve established (to my satisfaction) that she is reprehensibly inhuman, or sociopathic, or both, my main point is done.  But I want to take a look at something very interesting that fell into place while researching this post.  I want to argue that this functions as a case study of when some religious conservatives choose to play the “illegally imposing their agendas” card.  Let’s do a little quoting:

Here’s Sharron Angle’s official “About” page on her website:

She is proud of her past chairwomanship of We The People Nevada PAC

We The People used to have a web presence, but no longer.  But that’s what archive.org is for.  Stored on the archive servers 2005-03-11:

There is a strong movement by atheists to ban religious thought form the public square.  This should be recognized as an attempt to establish atheism as the national religion. … The ACLU, NEA, and other organizations are examples of atheistic institutions trying to gain political control and an unfair advantage over Christian groups

So: atheists are trying to illegally impose their religious beliefs (“lack thereof”, actually, but when your only book is the Bible, everything looks like a faith), through political means, to the unfair detriment of some others, in a fashion that would set national policy.

One more.  Also from the cached PAC page:

The radical homosexual movement and other groups seek to destroy the traditional family structure which is the underpinning of society.  Their agenda should be opposed.

Gay activists (and, remember, the ACLU was implicated above) are trying to destroy the underpinnings of society.  Their agenda should be opposed.

So, tying it together: silly, silly, silly me.  You know how crazy-liberal I am?  I thought one of the underpinnings of society was undoing the harm caused by fathers who rape their children.  I thought that, given that We the People and I agree that “The establishment clause prevents the combining of the state with religious organizations”, that dictating the definitions of what family means — not only who can get married, but why it is OK to let a god mediate when a “traditional family” is destroyed by a villain from the inside — on the basis of what the god the person speaking happens to believe in is interpreted to desire — could be considered … pretty much nuts.

But that’s just me.  I’m an atheist.  I, therefore, am probably using this unfairly in an effort to make my lack of religion the official national religion, to the unfair disadvantage of these Christians.  Who, of course, have no such desires.  Unless they win.

(For the sake of rigor:  I haven’t been able to determine [help?] what years Angle chaired We The People, and cross-reference it against archive.org caches of their “Principles” page during her tenure.  Until I get this, it is just conceivable that this politician who thinks that abortion is not justified even in cases of child rape does not believe in a conspiracy of gays and atheists to destroy America.  I think that’s unlikely.  I expect you would think so, too.  But let me know if it’s that’s the case.  I’ll have to Google for another example.  In the interests of efficiency, I’ll start with listings of Tea Party candidates.)

Someone stopped me on the street in Hardwick:

Person:  You have hang-ups.

JHM:  I … I’m sorry — what?

Person:  Hang-ups.

JHM:  {blink. blink.}

Person:  Your shirt.

JHM:  {looks at shirt}  Oh, that’s clever.  Sorry I didn’t laugh the first time.

JHM, internally:  WTF?!

I was wearing this shirt that I designed.  If you are interested in ordering one — this is just info, not a sales pitch — I increased the image size by two clicks and it still printed accurately in XXL.  I think it looks much better that way, but Zazzle wouldn’t let me post the product with an oversized image:

Hanger Shirt by joshuamcgee
View more Politics T-Shirts

North Korea is in the World Cup for the first time in 44 years.  They have a pretty good striker, Jong Tae-se.  Problem is, he’s not North Korean.  He was born in Japan to South Korean parents, and has never lived in North Korea.  He plays for a pro club in Japan.  In advance of North Korean international matches, he goes into the DPRK embassy in Tokyo, switches his South Korean passport for a DPRK one, and upon his return, reverses the procedure.

Their coach, however, is North Korean.  The skill is home-grown — but lest you think that this has nothing to do with Kim Jong-il, the coach gets real-time coaching advice from Mr. Kim.  On cell phones.  In the coach’s words, “mobile phones that are not visible to the naked eye.”  Mr. Kim designed these phones, by the way.  In addition to inventing the hamburger.

Most North Koreans know little about soccer.  They also, of course, are almost never allowed outside the country, and, if they were, any resident soccer fans would be unlikely to be able to afford transportation to South Africa.  North Korea’s solution: Pay more than 1,000 Chinese nationals to sit in the stands — all dressed identically, by the way — to wave DPRK flags and cheer appropriately.

A plan with South Korea to broadcast World Cup games to North Korea fell apart.  Something something North Korea alleged to have sunk a South Korean ship.  Not that big of a deal, though.  Very few DPRK citizens have televisions.  They do, however, have radios.  In Pyongyang, every house comes with a radio.  A radio that cannot be turned off.

Source: ABC News

Excerpt from “Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History” by Mark Morford:

Hey, kids!  Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Black people?  Back in 1800 or whenever?  They liked being slaves.  True!  Many savvy, industrious Negroes actually volunteered for that fine, desirable position.  It was a completely balanced, fair, hugely successful system, until those damn liberals came along and ruined everything.  I know, right?  What a shame.

Do you know what else?  America was wholly victorious in Vietnam.  It’s a fact!  Kicked some serious enemy butt!  Mission accomplished!  Sure it was a little bumpy for awhile, but President Nixon, that great and wronged American hero, put us on the righteous path in the end, wrapped that sucker up beautifully and made America the noble Superman to the world.  Hey, it’s the truth!  You can look it up in your history textbook!

Of course the venom is justified.  But the best use of sympathetic venom is not to curl up and let it take hold but to stand up and find the antidote.

This is not the first time the issue has crossed the mcgees.org desk.  It did 8 years ago as Texas Textbook Bonfire.  But don’t just get pissed.  Get moving.  Write letters.  Better yet, donate to almost anyone in the “Sleeve” section of the mcgees.org sidebar.

Get moving, people.  Work now, snark later.

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.