Democrat Angst

One of the things that I encounter again and again is people's surprise that I'm a fairly nice guy. I mean this in the context of my political propensity to conservatism and my party affiliation to the Republicans.

Why would a nice guy like me associate with those horrible, mean, puppy-kicking Republicans? How can a person who can count to 20 without taking off his shoes fall for all their lies?

Attention, Democrats. The reason that I am not a Democrat is because you have drawn lines that leave me no possibility of considering your party. Caitlin Flanagan has been able to hold out, but it seems as if the author of To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife encountered all the casual contempt and even open hostility that make the Democrat Party inhospitable to me.

...there is apparently no room for me in the Democratic Party. In fact, I have spent much of the past week on a forced march to the G.O.P. And the bayonet at my back isn't in the hands of the Republicans; the Democrats are the bullyboys. Such lions of the left as Barbara Ehrenreich, the writers at Salon and much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan have made it abundantly clear to me that I ought to start packing my bags. I'm not leaving, but sometimes I wonder: When did I sign up to be the beaten wife of the Democratic Party?

Most of the 60 million people who voted against George W. Bush have lifestyles more like mine than the Democratic Party would like to admit. Most of us aren't the Hollywood elite or the nontraditional family. Many of us do what I do, which is go to church on Sunday, work hard and value my marriage. Again, it's not so much my party's platform that rejects the family; God help us all if Bush's brutality to the poor continues much longer. It's a small but very vocal minority, the Democratic pundits, who abhor what I represent because it doesn't fit the stereotypical image of the modern woman who has escaped from domestic prison. Fifty years ago, a stay-at-home mom who loved her husband would not automatically be assumed to be a Republican. The image of the Democratic Party that used to come to mind was of a workingman and his wife sitting at the kitchen table worrying about how they were going to pay the bills and voting for Adlai Stevenson because he was going to help them squeak by every month and maybe even afford to send their kids to college.

The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the '60s--civil rights, women's liberation, gay inclusion--we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues--paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.

And now here we are, living in a country with a political and economic agenda we deplore, losing election after election and wondering why.

It's the contempt, stupid.

I admire Ms Flanagan tenacity, and I'm sure she has enough advice so that she won't need mine; but if the Democrats can't stick a sock in the hate speech of their standard-bearers, they are going to loose many, many more wonderful people like Ms Flanagan--if not to the Republicans, then to a third-party candidate or political cynicism and apathy.

Robot Theocons

I've been watching the Battlestar Galactica first-season DVD set (thanks to Taleena and Todd). I am enjoying it hugely. I've heard some nationally published television critics call it "the best television on television," and I agree.

One of the elements of the show that is so striking is fact that they are addressing several big issues. But because they are operating in an almost cartoon-like setting (and it is cartoon-like in the best sense), they can take up themes and motifs that would be very difficult in a more mundane setting. (Of course doing those themes successfully in a mundane setting would be high art. Battlestar Galactica settles for being great television.)

The theme that I love most, that fills me with glee, is the handling of religion. The only other show that dealt with religion in such an engaging way was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And it turns out that Battlestar Galactica's creator, Ronald D. Moore, was a staff writer for Deep Space Nine.

Last night as Mrs. Islander and I sat watching a funeral scene in the episode "Act of Contrition," she turned to me and said, "They're Christians." I started to disagree and gas on a bit about how they weren't really, they were some kind of fusion of New Age mysticism, ancestor worship, and Mormon backstory, but then I stopped. She was right. No matter what came out of their mouths, their actions, the roots of their behaviors are "Christian."

This is not surprising. Mr. Moore is a product of his culture. And this is not a bad thing. You cannot understand either Shakespere or Oscar Wilde without being aware of the Christian presuppositions of their work. A good writer can provide keen and close observations on their own culture.

What really tickles me is that while the "Colonials" struggle to make sense of their moribund religious beliefs using their modern sensibilities (Gaius Baltar is merely the most outspoken of the skeptics), the Cylons are ablaze with evangelical fervor. The drop-dead gorgeous Number Six delivers street-corner preacher lines ("God loves you Gaius, and he has a plan for your life,") even as she seduces Gaius to allow her kind to commit genocide. The robots have blasted through modernism to arrive at a post-modern religious sensibility.

I guess I would differ from some of my co-religionists in my viewpoint, but one of the things that make Battlestar Galactica so compelling is that they are portraying religious beliefs and religious believers and taking them seriously.

Robot theocons. What a concept!

Can We Blame Lee Harvey Oswald?

The Constant Reader will remember my earlier remarks on the remarkable journey the Democratic Party has taken in my lifetime.

The goo-goo campaign of George McGovern could only have taken place in the wake of the Democratic Party Convention riots of 1968. The riots of 1968 could only have taken place in the wake of the convention seating conflict of 1964.

Now, James Piereson, in Commentary Magazine, focuses on the JFK assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

In Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up, Mr. Pierson reminds us of how vital and central the Democratic Party, and Liberalism in general, were to the American scene. And motes how the political left and right have swapped places.

Liberalism entered the 1960'’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.

What happened? There is, of course, a litany of standard answers, from the political to the cultural to the psychological, each seeking to explain the great upheaval summed up in that all-purpose phrase, "“the 60's."” To some, the relevant factor was a long overdue reaction to the repressions and pieties of 1950'’s conformism. To others, the watershed event was the escalating war in Vietnam, sparking an opposition movement that itself escalated into widespread disaffection from received political ideas and indeed from larger American purposes. Still others have pointed to the simmering racial tensions that would burst into the open in riots and looting, calling into question underlying assumptions about the course of integration if not the very possibility of social harmony.

No doubt, the combination of these and other events had much to do with driving the nation'’s political culture to the Left in the latter half of the decade. But there can be no doubt, either, that an event from the early 1960'’s--—namely, the assassination of Kennedy himself--—contributed heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy'’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders--—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among them--—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of extreme causes.

Piereson reminds us that the nation was ready to see American intolerance as the root cause of Kennedy's death. When the assasin was shown to be a Communist, indeed a Castro supporter, the cognative dissonance was too great for many liberal-thinking people. So they created the Queen Mother of all conspiracy theories.

John F. Kennedy's very coolness (and believe me kids, he was the essence of cool) became the inkblot upon which every kook faction of the Democratic Party, not to mention the Socialists, Communists, and every other party of the left could project their own gestalt.

In the end, the mantle of Paranoid Party passed from the John Birchers and their insistence that flouridation was a Ruskie plot to poison our precious bodily fluids, to the Democratic Underground types that see plots and conspiracies everywhere.

Illuminati, thy name is Haliburton.

The Inevitable "Da Vinci Code" Posting

Our Pastor has set aside the next six weeks for a series of teachings [spurred by | focused on | countering | you-name-it] the upcoming movie release of The Da Vinci Code.

This means six weeks of apologetics (evidences for faith) rather than the church's usual focus on evangelism (declaring the good news). Of course there is a fuzzy boundry between these two categories. It's always good news to hear how your belief are supported by the historic record; and you can't study the historic record without declaring the good news that the evidence is about. And I, for one, am always delighted by a good apologia.

But I must admit that I have yet to read The Da Vinci Code. Years ago I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail (the book from which Dan Brown cribbed much of Code), and had a tough time keeping a straight face.

Years later I read a great brainy thriller that seemed to anticipate much of the current Code madness: Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Let me crib from Gene Halliford:

In Foucault's Pendulum, Jacopo Belbo says: "There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools morons, and lunatics." These classifications, he suggests, can be used to understand how any given individual makes sense of the world.

Cretins are those individuals who seem to go through life without any clear understanding of the world or their place in it. They are---as the current expression goes---clueless. Cretins crush beer cans with their foreheads and go up the down escalator, never realizing the inherent inappropriateness or impossibility of these actions.

Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject... Fools don't claim that that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs.

Morons generally say and do the right thing. The problem with morons is not with what they do but how they think. "Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark...Morons will occasionally say something that's right, but they say it for the wrong reason." One must be very careful when dealing with morons because they often sound both reasonable and logical. Deciding how and why their reasoning is flawed often takes close analysis.

Lunatics. While morons proceed cautiously toward false conclusions, lunatics are not concerned with logical paradox or common sense. Their reasoning proceeds by quantum leaps of faith and mystical inspiration. Random chance is replaced with the belief that all occurrences are interrelated and inherently meaningful. For the lunatic, any event or experience can be used to support their internal belief system. And, says Belbo, "sooner or later [the lunatic] brings up the Templars."

And so we come to The Da Vinci Code, a modern thriller that tells you that the entrire Roman Catholic Church is a giant front operation for...wait for it...supressing the Templars!

Let me end with a link to Amy Welborn's great site, "Jesus Decoded"

The Da Vinci Code is a mess, a riot of laughable errors and serious misstatements. Almost every page has at least one of each. It would be easy to get swamped up in the small stuff, to spend hours debating the relationship of Marian imagery to Isis or who’s who in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks The good news is, however, that’s not necessary. When discussing the factuality of The Da Vinci Code, all you really need to do is stick to a few fundamental points...

I sometimes wonder why people are so fascinated with the Jesus of The Da Vinci Code and why they so resolutely ignore the Jesus we meet in the Gospels and through the Church, why people don’t want to take that Jesus seriously. Why they just want to brush him off and focus on esoteric, abstract windy speeches on inner light offered by a stick figure.

But then I go back to the Gospels, and I read…Sell everything you have and give the money to the poor…love your enemies….Feed the hungry…clothe the naked…visit the imprisoned…Blessed are the poor…those who mourn…the peacemakers…what you do to the least of these, you do unto me…the last shall be first…

Of course. No surprise. No wonder we don’t want him to be the real Jesus. No surprise at all.

Bush vs. the Erotic Thriller

Are these people even trying? Is there any problem or trend in America (or the world!) today that cannot be traced back to Bush and his dark master, Rove?

Even dirty movies fall before their power:

Paul Verhoeven, director of the first "Basic Instinct" (which scored $353 million world-wide) as well as the widely ridiculed "Showgirls" (now regarded as something of a camp classic), attributes the genre's demise to the current American political climate.

"Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States," said the Dutch native. "Look at the people at the top (of the government). We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values. And Christianity and sex have never been good friends."

Scribe Nicholas Meyer, who was an uncredited writer on 1987's seminal sex-fuelled cautionary tale "Fatal Attraction," agrees, noting that the genre's downfall coincides with the ascent of the conservative political movement.

"We're in a big puritanical mode," he said. "Now, it's like the McCarthy era, except it's not 'Are you a communist?' but 'Have you ever put sex in a movie?'"

It's so annoying when you are watching a good erotic thriller and just when the bisexual serial murderess is pulling the ice pick from under the pillow--the jackbooted minions of Jerry Fallwell kick down the door and frog-march you away to re-education Vacation Bible School.

Oh, that hasn't happened?

You mean that the hyper-rich people are frustrated because they are unable to make even more money on sleazy trash, yet are unable to figure out why?

Well, no.

[Nicholas Meyer] admits that the appetite for the genre has taken a hit, and he blames the international market.

"Korea used to be a big erotic thriller market (in the '80s and '90s). Japan, too. You used to be able to cobble deals together based on those markets, but it has become more difficult," said King, who also produced "9 1/2 Weeks" alongside Damon. "There used to be a way to finance erotic thrillers if you had the right cast based on the foreign market. The foreign market doesn't support it in the way that it used to. They are now embracing more mainstream fare."

Part of the problem, King said, is that agents are loath to put their actors and actresses in titillating fare despite the fact that Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Richard Gere and Sharon Stone rocketed to fame thanks to memorable R-rated performances.

But in recent years, some high-profile actors have tackled the genre with mixed results. Meg Ryan, who made her career cultivating a girl-next-door persona, teamed with Oscar-nominated director Jane Campion in 2003 for the titillating "In the Cut." Ryan's performance was widely panned, and the Screen Gems film was a box office dud, earning less than $19 million world-wide.

So everything they said before? About puritanical Americans? Never mind.

But there is something creepy and disgusting on tap in the erotic thriller calendar:

Nevertheless, the studios have only a handful of erotic thrillers in development. They include the Jim Carrey starrer "The Number 23" at New Line Cinema, the Jennifer Garner starrer "Sabbatical" at Disney's Touchstone Pictures and the "Basic Instinct"/Hitchcock homage "Need," which revolves around a psychiatrist, a patient and an extramarital affair.

An erotic thriller starring Jim Carrey. Uuuhghghghghhh....{shudder}....

Bizzaro World

Tivo has really changed my television viewing habits.

I don’t idly flip through channels to see what’s on. What I do is check out my “Tivo Suggestions” folder. Because my “To Do” list has several of the news magazines in it, Tivo catches other public-interest programming. After several weeks of telling Tivo I really didn’t want news programming in Cantonese, Korean, or Cambodian, the selections have settled down to Charlie Rose, Face the Nation, Ben Wattenberg's Think Tank, and a few others.

Last night I was flipping through the Tivo suggestions folder and saw that Tivo had captured The Tavis Smiley Show, and that Tavis’s guest was former Colorado Senator Gary Hart. I checked the listing and saw that Senator Hart was going to be promoting his book, God and Caesar in America. Gary Hart was a real contender for the Democratic presidential nomination to run against Ronald Reagan's pick, George H. W. Bush. Hart was a very smart guy, who said the kinds of interesting things that someone who is not up for office can and will say. I pushed “Play.”

Have you ever felt as if you have woken up in some alternate, bizzaro, reality? That was my reaction to this program. There was Gary Hart, Senator “Monkey Business” himself, telling me why what I believed wasn't authentic Christianity.

Now, Senator Hart did attend Bethany Nazarene College, then went to Yale Divinity. And I think that we need to make large distinctions between the message and the messenger. And yet...

In the interview Senator Hart displayed a real lack of seriousness about issues addressed by Christianity, and I don't mean necessarily political issues.

Hart: ...as I indicate in the essay, I was heavily motivated, and still am, by the teachings of Jesus.

Almost all of which are contrary to the current religious right, which is very judgmental, very divisive. Jesus was non-judgmental, and very inclusive. And in the famous, famous, I guess that's the wrong word. The well-known Sermon on the Mount, those he blessed were the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, those who hungered and thirst after righteousness. The merciful.

I guess that this Oprah-ized gospel plays well with people who are, at best, casual readers of the Bible. But Holy Hanna!

First let's go to the tape: Matthew 5: 29-30, part of that "famous" "Sermon on the Mount"

If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell.

Yeow! Hellfire! But maybe Jesus is ill represented by a single quote. Let's look a little later in Matthew, chapter 25, where Jesus addresses the concept of "judgement."

"But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.

"Then the King will say to those on His right, 'Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world...

...Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

Now, we may debate the terms of this judgement, but I think that in this passage Jesus shows that He is indeed, judgemental.

Next Senator Hart takes on the issue of popular revivalism in American history:

Tavis: I wonder how that you think it is - how do I wanna phrase this? That we got off track? How did we get off track? That is to say, how did we end up, do we now live in a nation where the people, to your point, at least, the way you see it, the people who are talking to us every day about Jesus. So many of these televangelists on the right are not true to what Jesus taught with regard to how we ought to live our lives?

Hart: Well, it's the central question of our time, at least politically, I think. First of all, I think you have to go back to the sixties. The infamous age of sex, drugs and rock and roll. And a lot of people concluded then that America was losing its soul. And as you know, starting with Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening in the 1600s, America goes through cycles of reform and renewal and evangelical reformation and revival.

And this is one of those. What distinguishes this one from the Billy Graham and Billy Sunday and Jonathan Edwards revivals is it's very political. And I think it became political over issues like abortion. And that's what triggered people on the religious right to think the country really was on the path to Hell, and they had to do something about it. And they did it through the Republican Party.

Senator Hart seems to miss the great religious revival of the early 1800s that led great numbers of Christians to get very political--in the Abolitionist movement. That particular revival led to the Civil War and many Americans joining the brand-new Republican Party.

Hart also dodged the political questions of faith. Though he was able to trace the swing of many Christians from neutral/Democratic to the Republicans to 1972's Roe v. Wade decision, he seemed unable to make that connection to the $64,000 question of today's Democratic Party: "Why did it lose the Evangelical and mainstream Catholic vote?" He attributed that loss of support to the mean old Republicans hijacking the terms "faith" and "values," then emptying them of meaning.

When questioned about the popularity of the Republican Party’s message, Hart posits that the Republican Party has been captured by three distinct groups. The Christian Right has taken over domestic social policy, neo-conservatives have taken over foreign policy, and libertarians have taken over tax policy. All three groups are “out of the mainstream.” How does that answer the question of the dominance of Republicans in the recent election cycles was unanswered.

(In my view, all three of those groups feel that they are receiving short shrift from the Bush administration, not to mention discontent by secular groups such as the deficit hawks.)

In all, Senator Hart displays the same deafness to what is happening in current culture as many of the rest of his Democratic comrades, and that's too bad. Hart has the background, the education, and the pulpit, if you will, to engage the Evangelical Right in a real dialog about the role of God in American public life and Ceasar in the American church. I'm going to read his book.

But I'm not expecting much.

Is What's Bad, Good?

Conservatives such as myself complained for years about a dysfunctional welfare system that encouraged poor women to have children to increase their government stipend. But could what once was seen as a bug, be a feature?

Michael O'Hare comments on the long-term depopulation of Europe due to Europeans declining to have children:

...fertility rates in Europe are at levels never observed in countries not at war or the grip of psychotic dictatorships. Even in France, which has had aggressive pro-natalist policies in place since the thirties, the population pyramid has very broad shoulders and fashionably slim legs...

The phenomenon is creepy, but what's like a science fiction movie about zombies is the pervasive lack of concern. Good studies are commissioned and filed away, governments have started some tentative child-subsidy tax programs, especially generous in France, but there's no conversation about it, nothing in the newspapers, an election in a week in Italy and I can't find a word about this impending catastrophe from a candidate in the newspapers or on TV. The current administration seems to have spent its entire term in office keeping the prime minister out of jail, not attending to this (or anything else, as far as I can tell).

What could possibly be more important to Italy than the looming extinction of Italians? And even if the society had decided it's time to roll up the enterprise and pass the peninsula to someone else, or just turn out the lights and close the door, what do the twenties and thirties of today expect to have for dinner when they're old, having paid taxes to support their (more numerous) parents most of their working lives? Why is everyone acting as if this isn't happening??!!

As an italophile on many dimensions, sitting in a comfortable train [this is shorthand for a competent system of public services that provide a high quality of life] between Rome and Milan where life is very good in so many ways, in the land of Giotto, da Vinci, Fermi [supply your own pages of really smart Italians who think outside the box], I find myself suppressing a tendency to grab people at random by the collar and yell at them, "forse queste cose non mi riguardono, ma siete pazzi, voi? ciecchi?" (si, amici miei, questo è per voi) [maybe this is none of my business, but are you people nuts? blind?]

Megan McArdle speculates that the rise in incomes generally, and of women specifically may have raised the opportunity cost of raising a child too high. Yet the United States has a booming economy and we have a birthrate above the replacement level:

...we still need to come up with an explanation of why America, which is still getting richer and putting women into the workforce, isn't below replacement rate. But much of our fertility comes from poor women and immigrants, who have a much lower opportunity cost for childrearing than overeducated professionals like me. Our welfare policy may be inadvertently pro-natalist--since, unlike Europe, the only way for a healthy woman to collect benefit is to have children.

There are two objections that I would make to Ms McArdle's reasoning. First, are there enough children of poor or single parents that can rise high enough in economic class to replace the "missing" children of wealthy non-parents? If not, then the children born to a lower economic strata may be unable to provide the economic base from which future benefits should be paid. (A complaint against the old welfare system was that it made its clients net consumers, not net creators of wealth.)

My second objection is that the question of natalism in the United States is not completely reducible to economics. The US has an Evangelical religious culture largely not found in Europe. That culture is very pro-natal, pro-child. For all the demonization of anti-abortion protesters by the political Left, these people are the expression os a demographic component that my be providing the managers, craftsmen, and artisans that pay for all our Social Security benefits!

UPDATE: Rich Lowrey over in NRO, says this about immigrants that lack a high-school diploma:

The National Research Council reports that an immigrant to the U.S. without a high-school diploma — whether legal or illegal — consumes $89,000 more in governmental services than he pays in taxes during his lifetime. An immigrant with only a high-school diploma is a net cost of $31,000. Eighty percent of illegal immigrants have no more than a high-school degree, and 60 percent have less than a high-school degree.

This may be comparable to native-born children without a high-school diploma. In that case the economic case for the pro-natal consequences of our welfare policy is even weaker than I thought.

Early Spring

So I had to get out of the office. It was just so quite and warm, I thought that I would fall asleep and pitch forward onto the keyboard.

So, even though I Ain't Lileks, I hied my tender self down the block to Zeitgeist Coffee and am mooching free WiFi. They are playing some kind of very weird alt-techno music and there is the sound of grinders and barristas pounding espresso baskets. Very different from the office, provocative. Zeitgeist is the very model for Cafe Nervosa on the old TV show Frasier. Lots of exposed brick and attitude. Very Seattle.

I'm gonna hang here until my vanpool meets at 5 pm.

It's Anxiety About Us

I just posted a response to Rob Harrison on myWhidbey.com. His posting was about the immigration debate that we are currently having in our country. He sets up a straw-man argument by short-quoting Emma Lazurus's sonnet The New Collosus.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I posted the entire sonnet:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Anyway, go read my response there, if you wish. But in the synchronicity of things, the very next page I looked at was Peggy Noonan's column, Patriots, Then and Now.

What this all got me thinking about, the next day, was . . . immigration. I know that seems a lurch, but there's a part of the debate that isn't sufficiently noted. There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.

But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.

It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.

We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.

We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally.

Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows...And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.

So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.

But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.

What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they're joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold--they're paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.

The genius cluster--Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest--that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was "providential.")

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?

Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.

Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they're joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?

Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don't want to be impolite. We don't want to offend. We don't want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.

Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.

Which is exactly my point. When immigrants come to America today, are they imparted spirit?

The latest cat-calls from some on both sides of the aisle are that their opponents aren't patriotic. This is more than just unfortunate--this erodes the framework upon which we carry out or national conversation.

I don't pretend that my country's actions have always been without spot or blemish, but I love my country with full-throated love, and I have no ambivalence.

Jane Galt on Healthcare

I'm been a big fan of Megan McArdle since her Live from the World Trade Center days. She has become my model for not jumping into a discussion without questioning the assumptions. Here are four of her recent blog entries on healthcare, culminating with her suggestion for addressing the problem. I have included excerpts, but this is something that I think deserves a lunchtime read-through of the original entries.

I am going to advocate her approach to my congresscritters.

What's happening on health care?

A few weeks back, I noted that national health care seemed to be the only major policy programme that the left could basically agree upon. Now, I hear the stirrings of a push for national health care rippling through the liberal blogosphere like a rising storm wind.

If this movement actually takes off, I expect that we'll see a great deal of vehement argument between conservatives screaming that the liberals are going to screw up our health care system, and liberals arguing that conservative people are hardhearted bastards who want the poor to die. So before that happens, I thought I'd set down some quasi-reasonable thoughts about what we want from our health care system, what a single-payer US system would probably look like, and what the pro's and con's of such a system would be.

The first point to make is that our health care system is already screwed up. The practice of having your employer pay for your health insurance is lunatic. We should not be surprised at what we get when the person who pays for your health insurance is not the person who consumes it....

Health Care, Part II

Let's think about where the money actually goes:

• 30% of all healthcare expenditures occur in the last six months of life
• 31% of expenditures are on hospital care
• 9% of spending is on nursing homes
• 22% of spending is on physician and clinical services
• 10% of spending is on prescription drugs
• 10% of spending is on dental/other professional care
• 10% of spending is on medical equipment, supplies, and construction
• 7% of spending is on administrative expenses

So how likely are either Health Savings Accounts, which encourage consumers to shop around because they're spending their own money, or single payer, to reduce any of these categories significantly?

In theory, either HSAs or single payer could cut down on many of these expenses. In practice, colour me unconvinced...

Health Care, Part III

It is possible, even likely, that a government-run health care system would be able to batter cost savings out of suppliers of medical equipment, supplies, and pharmaceuticals. But that doesn't strike me as a good thing. The high returns on medical equipment and drugs are what encourage people to invent more such. Get rid of the return, and you get rid of the innovation. Generating cost savings on new technology in order to cover today's uninsured simply privileges one small group of unfortunates over the very much larger group of people, living now or in the future, who have diseases which we can't currently cure. The lucrative American market is currently the only incentive left for medical innovation; I am very much against destroying it.

Single payer advocates retort that pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money on marketing, which is true, but irrelevant--forcing pharmaceutical companies to price at cost-plus will kill the research along with the marketing. Actually, if I were running a pharma company, and something torched my profits, I'd kill the highly speculative research before the lucrative marketing campaigns. If we want to stop pharmaceutical companies from advertising, or selling directly to doctors, surely outlawing those things is a much more effective way to manage it than slashing their profit margins and hoping that they cut only the things you want them to.

Others argue that the government can take over the research. Perhaps the government is necessary to fund basic research; I haven't studied the question. But looking at the defense industry, where the government is the sole purchaser and major funder of new technology, it's very, very hard to believe that applying a similar model to health care would result in greater value for money. Rather, it seems very likely to me that politically popular diseases would get an even more disproportionate share of funds than they do now. Pharmaceutical companies have to pay attention to things like the size of the market, and the strength of demand. Politicians pay attention to how loud the lobby is, which is why breast cancer and AIDS get research funding all out of proportion to the number of people they kill...

Health Care, Part IV

All that's very nice . . . but how do we bell the cat?

Here is my suggestion. It is simple and elegant enough to be explained in a single sentence, yet powerful enough to meet all the criteria above:

Have the government pay for all health care expenditures above 15% of adjusted gross income, and cover 100% of health care expenditures by people living under 200% of the poverty line.

This preserves the market in most health care services--happy [Health Savings Account] advocates! It is progressive, and provides universal coverage--happy single-payer advocates! It directs coverage to those who really need it--the very sick--without a middle class subsidy--happy Jane! And it preserves market prices for almost everything from hospital beds to surgical procedures, since a significant fraction of the market will be paying their own way. That keeps the government from having to set prices, which as Soviet Russia showed us, is generally a bad idea. Most importantly (from my perspective) it preserves the market for innovations in drugs and medical equipment.

It is certainly not perfect. For one thing, I make no promises that it will control costs; I only allege that it will improve quality.

But you know what? We're rich. We're really, really rich. We're the richest country in the entire history of the world.

We're so rich that we have stores full of nothing but beautifully sculpted plumbing. What do we want to spend our money on that's better than health care?

The Next (10) Big Things

One of the things I don’t do on this blog is blog about work.

A few days ago though, I had an experience that took my breath away. I stood in an warm, overcrowded conference room, leaning around the people standing in front of me to see the slides and hear the speaker. What I heard were people laying the groundwork for the next five, ten, or one hundred revolutions in the biological sciences. Yesterday I wasn’t just glad to have a job, I was proud to be associated with my company, Teranode.

The speaker was John Wilbanks, Executive Director of the Science Commons. He had come to our company, Teranode Corporation, to brief us on what was happening in the NeuroCommons project. I almost hesitate to try to recap what he said, because I know that I cannot recapture the jaw-dropping, "Eureka!" sensation I felt.

Creative Commons began as an attempt to create “open source” copyright law. The Creative Commons website allows users to point and click to create a usage license that they can then associate with their creative work. Creators can decide how many and what kind of rights to grant users of their creations.

But what begins as a simple, easily-used tool can create unintended results. The obvious parallel to draw is with TCP/IP and HTTP, the simple, unpatented tools that created the current global network. With the Creative Commons licenses, creative people can allow other creative people to draw from their work, incorporating existing work into new works. If that usage is tracked (as at sites such as ccMixter), it becomes easy to see whose creative work is the most used, the most influential, and the most "important" to subsequent works.

What is interesting and cool in the music community becomes earth-shaking in the science community. Kids, If you thought that the RIAA was jealous of easy access to the product of artists, you haven't seen what science and medical journals do to protect the data contained in their published articles. ScienceCommons is a project to allow scientists and univestities to allow freeer access to their work, so that their work can inform and influence other scientists and labs working in related areas. NeruoCommons is the proving ground for the technologies of the ScienceCommons

Right now academics live by the rule, "publish or perish." Scientists are measured by how many peer-reviewed articles they can get published and how often those articles are cited by other published papers. But cites are a second-order measure of importance. Measuring the actual use the of information from a discovery to enable a further discovery would be a direct measure of the first discovery's importance. The ScienceCommons project makes this measurement possible.

One of the mantra repeated by Mr. Wilbanks was, "We aren't making new discoveries; we are laying "cable" for a new network."

If the NeuroCommons network has a fraction of the impact that the Internet has had for the economic community, watch out.

Monster from the Superego

Some movies are so iconic that rumors of their sequels are evergreen. There are always people talking about a remake or sequel to Casablanca, and there actually was a sequel (of sorts) to Gone With the Wind. So when New Line Studios announced back in 2000 it had bought the rights to Forbidden Planet, fans of Robbie the Robot pricked up their ears.

Well, it's been six years and no remake.

During this morning's commute, the topic of a Forbidden Planet remake or sequel came up. We quickly realized that you couldn't use the "monster from the id." That's been done.

If I wrote a sequel to Forbidden Planet it would have a "monster from the superego." It would have the voice of John Lithgow and it would be constantly nagging the United Planets officers about how they were falling short in thier duties and what would all the other spacemen think?

...And Peter Jackson sleeps easily.

My Take on John Stewart's Oscar Hosting (*YAWN*)

It really wasn't John Stewart's fault that the entire Oscar presentation show sucked doorknobs; but he was the guy standing out front, so he takes the heat.

Part of the problem is bloat. The Academy Awards show is now competing with new award shows the spring up, mushroomlike, on basic cable and the weblets every week. So every year it tries to distinguish itself by becoming more and more long-winded, more and more pretentious and self-congratulatory.

Pretty soon all this self-importance and political "awareness" and "courage" will fuse and they Academy will declare itself the third branch of the US legislature. Or, perhaps some new UN Council on Eating Your (Political) Vegetables.

Once again, it's not fair to John Stewart, but look back at the times Johnny Carson hosted the awards. Carson's shtick as the bemused midwesterner surrounded by Hollywood glamour worked. Perhaps because it wasn't based on condescension to mid-America and uber-hippness.

Or, for a crushing comparison, go back to Bob Hope's hosting. Bob, a show business insider from the days of vaudeville, still adopted the stance of an outsider, bemoaning his lack of an Oscar as he skewered those who received them.

Oh, well. Stewart won't be asked back. Maybe next year it will be Kanye West and Snoop Dogg co-emceeing. Bet that would make 'em tune in...

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan agrees with me!

But viewership of the Oscars continues to decline, even in the great movie-loving nation. Why? Here's one practical reason.

What happened to the Oscars is what happened to the Olympics. They became common. They made themselves common. When the Olympics were held every four years, they were a real event. It was something to look forward to and be surprised by: The Olympics are on this year. Four years was enough time for a whole new cast of athletes, what felt like a whole new generation, to come up. Enough time for history to have passed, to have yielded up new geopolitical realities, new reasons to applaud and hope for this nation or that one.

Everyone watched. It was a success. So they decided to get even more success by making the Olympics every two years. It's not an event now, it's an expected thing, part of the usual tapestry. It's more common, less special. Viewership is down.

In the same way, the Oscars used to be the big awards show. Then another came by, and another: Golden Globes, People's Choice, Independent Spirit, Foreign Press.

Movie stars put on their gowns and tuxes all the time now. It must be embarrassing--I mean this seriously--to spend half your year accepting awards on TV, and for what is already highly compensated work.

It's like what happened a few years ago, when network programmers found that "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" was an overnight sensation. So they put it on four nights a week. And it stopped being a sensation.

Hollywood should stop diminishing its own mystique. It should discourage the proliferation of awards shows. They're getting embarrassing for everybody.

Following After a False God

Readers of my blog may know that I am unimpressed with the evidence for threats to mankind caused by Global Warming.

So when a group of Evangelical leaders published "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action." I was annoyed by several issues on several levels.

• As I review the list of signatories I see many names that I know by reputation, some leaders that I have heard teach or preach, many that I admire. But I see none with the technical qualifications to sift through the mountains of ambiguous data on global climate trends and arrive at a coherent, defensible conclusion.

• The signatories have relied for their conclusions on government agencies that have a vested interest in promoting Global Warming as a crisis. If you create a body named the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is inevitable as day follows night that they will produce document validating their existence as a body.

• Is global warming caused by human industrialization? What caused the Medieval Climate Optimum? What caused the cooling the followed, called the Little Ice Age? And what, oh Mighty Brain Trust, caused the warming following the Little Ice Age which began in the 1850s, before industrialization had added significant amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere?

• All predictions about global warming are based on computer-based simulations. The climate of the planet Earth is massively more complex than can be recreated within a computer. Thus, any climate model must require massive simplification of the actual physical process. Unfortunately, these simplifications inject an unacceptable amount of human judgment into the process. They often multiply short-term fluctuations that are of interest to the modeler into long-term trends.

Back in the early days of recreational computing, there was a simple program called Biorhythm. It purported to track various physical cycles in your body and, calculating the time elapsed from your birthdate, tell you when you would be having an optimum day. It was all crap. It was pseudoscience based on 19th-century numerology. But because it spewed out of a computer, people started arranging their days around these rhythms.

The Call to Action states:

Even small rises in global temperatures will have such likely impacts as: sea level rise; more frequent heat waves, droughts, and extreme weather events such as torrential rains and floods; increased tropical diseases in now-temperate regions; and hurricanes that are more intense. It could lead to significant reduction in agricultural output, especially in poor countries. Low-lying regions, indeed entire islands, could find themselves under water. (This is not to mention the various negative impacts climate change could have on God’s other creatures.)

And Michael Crichton is pilloried as a sensationalist for his potboiler, State of Fear!

Ladies and gentlemen, nobody knows what the result of global warming will be. It may produce more rain, longer growing seasons, greater crop production, less reliance on fossil fuels for heat. How dare you stand in the way of the poorest benefiting from the great boon! Is my speculation nonsense? No less so than what is predicted in the Call to Action.

Why is this a matter to be addressed by theologians at all? Is it a matter of the nature of God? Is it the undoubted result of scriptural scholarship?

The reason that I have named this entry "Following After a False God" is because that is how I see this petition. In it, Evangelical leaders are not calling people back to God, they are calling Evangelicals to follow a social and political movement. In it, noted Evangelical leaders join with people who are advancing a viewpoint based on material self-interest (grants, jobs, and noteriety). These leaders are placing a bet that the transnational "Ecology" movement is right about the reality of global warming, the causes of global warming, and the reversability of global warming.

But if global warming is real, what can we do? According to The Independent, it's already too late! It's the Apocalypse!

Can you tell I'm upset?

Of course, this being a church-related matter, we can't just say thanks, I'll pass.

Oh, no.

We have to have a crackpot circulate a petition refuting the claims made in the Call to Action. Of course, the contrary petition had to have more signatures that anybody else's petition, so the petition, supposedly signed by 15,000 scientists was "signed" by posting the text to a website and having unrestricted access to the "signing":

Several environmental groups questioned dozens of the names: "Perry S. Mason" (the fictitious lawyer?), "Michael J. Fox" (the actor?), "Robert C. Byrd" (the senator?), "John C. Grisham" (the lawyer-author?). And then there's the Spice Girl, a.k.a. Geraldine Halliwell: The petition listed "Dr. Geri Halliwell" and "Dr. Halliwell."

Asked about the pop singer, Robinson said he was duped. The returned petition, one of thousands of mailings he sent out, identified her as having a degree in microbiology and living in Boston. "It's fake," he said.

"When we're getting thousands of signatures there's no way of filtering out a fake," Robinson, 56, said in a telephone interview from Oregon.

A May 1, 1998, AP article reported that the petition also bore the signatures of "Drs. '[Maj.] Frank Burns' '[Capt. B.J.] Honeycutt*' and '[Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye"]Pierce'" -- three characters from the hit sitcom M*A*S*H.

Thanks guys. Thanks a pantfull. Please stay off my side in the future, ya hear?

People worrying about crafty Fundamentalists undermining the government in their infinitely subtle ways? Don't make me laugh. I'm much more worried about the Cub Scouts staging a coupe d'etat.

What if the prediction of global warming are as bogus as they seem to me? The transnational progressive scare-mongers will have moved on, just as they did when the predicted "population bomb" turned out to be a dud, when the Club of Rome models failed, and when the "global cooling" didn't occur. But Evangelical leaders who support false prophets should be held accountable for their leading their followers astray.

If this is truly an issue where these men and women wish to speak with the prophetic voice, let them be held accountable to the prophecy. If it all depends on science which is out of their control or understanding, let them be silent.

Things Change

I'm listening to AccuRadio.com at work--the Sixties subchannel is a time machine to my teens--and Love is Blue by Paul Mauriat pops on.

*Shudder*

If you watched the episode of Millennium, "Room With No View," you will remember that Love is Blue is the song that Lucy Butler had looped endlessly to her captives.

No big insights, just that after 6 years that song gives me the willies.

McGovern and the Presidential Campaign of 1968

The delightfully named James Taranto writes about a recent speech by a long-ago Presidential candidate:

The delightfully named ex-politician George McGovern, who lost the 1972 presidential election in a landslide, showed up yesterday in Corte Madera, Calif., and the Marin Independent Journal covered the speech in an article headlined "McGovern Gets the Last Laugh." According to the paper, McGovern sounded "like the kind of wise old sage he wishes the current occupant of the White House would listen to":

Despite a decisive defeat, his Vietnam War-era campaign--the subject of the recent documentary "One Bright Shining Moment"--will be remembered for bringing disenfranchised hippies, blacks, peace protesters and feminists into the Democratic fold on a platform of peace and social justice.

On Thursday, McGovern didn't have to remind anyone that Nixon, his old nemesis, ended up resigning in disgrace over the Watergate scandal.

"I went to Richard Nixon's funeral," he reminisced, "and as I listened to the various views being offered that day, the thought went through my mind that, even from his personal standpoint, he'd have been better off if I had won."

OK, so McGovern was in some sense vindicated by Nixon's resignation--and by the next two elections. In 1974 the McGovernized Democrats made substantial gains in both the House and Senate, to which they added slightly in 1976. In 1977 a Democrat became president and the 93rd Congress began, with Democrats holding 61 Senate and 292 House seats.

But it's been all downhill since then. Republicans made gains in 1978, and in neither house of Congress have the Democrats equaled their 1977 peak. The GOP has won five of the past seven presidential elections, and no Democratic candidate since 1976 has received a majority of the popular vote. In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the White House and the GOP took the Senate. Among the Democratic senators defeated that year was one George McGovern of South Dakota. Fourteen years later the Republicans took both houses of Congress.

I've posted about the long decline of the modern Democratic party before. Unlike Mr. Taranto I date it back to at least 1968.

But it is interesting to see people hailing the inclusion into the party the very elements (disenfranchised hippies) that have brought it to present sad estate. (Hey, why were those hippies disenfranchised?)

So what are the 1968 roots of McGovern's rise? (via Wikipedia)

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, McGovern stood as the flagbearer for some of the supporters of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, losing the Presidential nomination to Hubert H. Humphrey, and coming in behind Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy as well.

However, during the convention a motion was passed to establish a commission to reform the Democratic Party nomination process. [White pp. 17-20] In 1969 McGovern was named chairman of this Reform Commission; due to the influence of former McCarthy and Kennedy supporters on the staff, the commission significantly reduced the role of party officials and insiders in the nomination process, increased the role of caucuses and primaries, and mandated quotas for proportional black, women, and youth delegate representation. [White pp. 24-33]

These changes eventually facilitated McGovern's successful own nomination at the 1972 Convention.

The rules reforms that began in that commission eventually led to the reduction of non-committed convention delegates. This led to the absolute necessity of candidates showing strong gains in the earliest primaries and caucuses (Iowa and New Hampshire.)

Though these gains did open up the process and reduce the influence of the "smoke-filled rooms." It increased the influence of crackpot spoiler candidates who could say irresponsible things and sweep the earliest contests. Instead of a Robert F. Kennedy entering a Presidential campaign six months before the convention, we have Al Sharpton stumping for the Iowa caucuses one year before the convention.

Putting the "Fun" Back in Fundamentalism

Taleena, responding to this post, has written:

I want to chime in the comparisons between fundamentalist Christian reaction and fundamentalist Muslim reaction to depictions or parodies of their sacred symbols and personages.

I know that Taleena is here using a verbal shorthand, but since I have a blog I can obsess over anything I choose. Being an obsessive language nerd and having grown up in a Fundamentalist household, I cringe whenever I hear the term "fundamentalist" applied to radical Islamic viewpoints. I realize that it has now become accepted by overwhelming usage, but it was first used as a lazy way to hang a label on a viewpoint that was poorly understood by the journalists covering it, and it is now being used by those who would draw specious parallels between Christians in the Western democracies and Muslims.

Christian Fundamentalism was a response to modernism, specifically to a de-mythologizing of scripture by European theologians.

Wikipedia's article on Christian Fundamentalism is actually not to shabby. Although I'm sure that a true Fundamentalist scholar would find much to dispute. It's a decent introduction.

The major difference between Christian Fundamentalists and Islamic "fundamentalists" is that while both groups call believers back to a literal acceptance of their respective scriptures,

• Christian Fundamentalists acknowledge that since they do not have the original autograph manuscripts of their sacred texts, all Biblical scripture is subject to textual criticism.
• Muslim "fundamentalists" believe that the Koran was dictated by Allah, through the Arch-Angel Jibril, to Muhammad and that the current text of the Koran is identical to what was said by Muhammad to be the Koran .

This distinction arises from the fact that Christian Fundamentalism is a modern (20th century) school of thought that arose in a religious culture based on the Scottish Enlightenment. Islamic "fundamentalism" arose in a stagnant culture as a way to deal with the shame of that culture falling behind the Christian/Secular West in almost every measure.

These are not a small distinctions. They are the difference between "No" and "Perhaps."

For my secular readers, just because you don't agree with Christian Fundamentalists, don't let slapdash labels lead you to conclusions that you can't support intellectually.

Global Cooling!

Reporters report that Scientists say so!

Scientist predicts 'mini Ice Age'

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- A Russian astronomer has predicted that Earth will experience a "mini Ice Age" in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory in St. Petersburg said Monday that temperatures will begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reaches its peak, RIA Novosti reported.

The coldest period will occur 15 to 20 years after a major solar output decline between 2035 and 2045, Abdusamatov said.

Dramatic changes in the earth's surface temperatures are an ordinary phenomenon, not an anomaly, he said, and result from variations in the sun's energy output and ultraviolet radiation.

The Northern Hemisphere's most recent cool-down period occurred between 1645 and 1705. The resulting period, known as the Little Ice Age, left canals in the Netherlands frozen solid and forced people in Greenland to abandon their houses to glaciers, the scientist said.

Link

Of course, this is all rather speculative; but that's what all climate predictions are: speculation. This one is just about 1000 times less unlikely as the scenario in The Day After Tomorrow. As somebody that has worked in the computer (pardon me, information technology industry) for the last 30 years, including gigs at scientific instrumentation and supercomputer companies, I am touched at the naïveté of unsophisticated people's faith in computer models.

Anybody who tells you that their computer model can predict the weather one year from now is not naïve, they are dishonest. Anybody who tells you that their computer model can predict the climate 100 yeras from now is not a scientist, they are a politician, and a dishonest politician at that.

Is an Imam to be Our Inquisitor?

I am an American Exceptionalist. I believe that in the last half of the 18th century a group of men gathered in a colony of England and, synthesizing Classical Greek and Roman with Nordic and even indigenous Iroquois models of goverment, founded what is today the world's oldest democratic republic.

Every time I think that modern technology has taken us so far from the Founders that their writings may be becoming irrelevant, I encounter a tract, speech, or paragraph that give me a shiver of the uncanny at its current applicability.

This is the case currently with the question of whether or not newspapers will print the cartoons that have been used to incite riots throughout the Middle east. That Stalwart of Liberty, the New York Times, presents an article about the cartoons illustrated by a drawing of the Virgin Mary covered in dung.

In 1814, former president Jefferson's Philadelphia book dealer had some trouble securing a French astronomical work on the creation of the world. Jefferson wrote this:

"Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason."

via The Corner

Thankfully I note that there are today a myriad channels of information, and yet there are still some people who long for "an inquisitor" to question "blasphemy against religion."

And no, kids, this does not refer to whether Mom and Dad can force you to go to Sunday school.

I'm Islander, and I'm a Prog-Rock Fan

Yes, I'm a Prog-Rock fan. I started with just a little Yes. I knew that it was wrong, but I told myself I could quit whenever I wanted. Then it was Kansas, E.L.O., and then Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

I listened to songs that filled the entire side of an LP album, 20 minute songs based on a footnote to a commentary to the Veddas. I wept. I got goosebumps when I heard Rick Wakeman's synthisizer work. I was a Trooper.

Well, in the early 1980s, Punk killed Prog. Or did it?

S.T. Karnik holds his own one-man Grammy awards ceremony and gives the nod to several new examples of Prog-Rock:

Among the most promising recent debuts are the appealing retro-progressive rock album Peace Among the Ruins, by Presto Ballet, and Motions of Desire, by the talented Norwegian band Magic Pie (the lyrics of which are sung in English). The latter release is delightfully inventive and enjoyable, with a definite classic song in the 20-minute opening track, “Change,” a tune that spices up classic, Yes-style progressive rock with elements of hard rock, soaring power balladry, folksy pop, jazz fusion, funk, and whatever else they found in their kitchen sink during the recording sessions. These guys can play.

As good as those discs were, the Debut Album of the year is A Doorway to Summer, by Moon Safari, produced by Tomas Bodin of the Swedish prog giants the Flower Kings. Like the legendary rockers Yes, Moon Safari creates long, progressive rock songs filled with memorable melodies and bright, cheerful, musical textures. Acoustic guitar, Hammond organ, analog synthesizers, mellotron, soaring vocal harmonies (all sung in English), and other classic early ’70s sounds are prominent in the mix, and there is real energy in the performances. This is one of the most tuneful, buoyant, and delightful albums of recent years.

I can see that I need to put down those 1970s albums for awhile and listen to some new stuff.

The only thing that gives me hesitation is the thought that the only limit to the length to a song by Yes was the length of an LP album side. Somewag pointed out that it CD technology had been available in 1973, Yes's songs would have been 60 minutes long.

How much room is available on my D: drive?

Selling the Lie

I remember back in the 1980s when the line, "I want my MTV," was current and MTV actually played only, you know, music. At this time the big news was that Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, wasn't in the MTV video rotation. The question on America's lips was, "Would Jackson be the first artist to break MTV's color barrier? Would he be the Jackie Robinson of pop music?"

(This was the cute, black, talented Michael Jackson. The one who was stunning the world with his chart-smashing albums; not the sad, creepy, pedophile Michael Jackson currently hiding out in Bahrain.)

There was a news program at the time that profiled the programming directors of MTV as they decided what videos would make it into their playlist. The image of the programming team, the very heart of MTV, was stunning: it was a corporate boardroom filled with white guys (an two white women) in business suits, planning how they were going to sell their latest picks to their compliant teen viewership. They were listening to the latest hopefuls and deciding which ones fit their corporate image.

The irony of a multi-million-dollar media outlet having a corporate image of raw, working-class hero rebellion was a rich beyond words. But this is the music business; and this is how that business has been run from the beginning.

Jonah Goldberg makes this point in his syndicated column:

I am astounded by the naivete of young people -—- black and white --— who actually buy the canned rebelliousness not just of rap music but of most pop music.

[Kanye] West is simply the latest example of decades of hucksterism. Under the headline "The Passion of Kanye West," the rap star graces the cover of Rolling Stone posing as a bloodied Jesus with a crown of thorns. I particularly enjoy the publicity around the piece. Clearly borrowing from the same press release, publications across the country proclaim that the "outspoken rapper defends his brash attitude inside the magazine."

Ah, yes. It's about time. After all, it's so rare to find a rapper with a brash attitude. Normally they're shy, retiring types overflowing with modesty and humility. I was particularly enamored with the "aw, shucks" Andy Griffith personalities of Niggaz Wit Attitude and the late Tupac Shakur.

...

It'’s all such an obvious con game. We hear so much about how kids today are cynical, skeptical, media-savvy, and so forth. But if they're buying this hooey, they're idiots.

When asked by Rolling Stone if he's worried that his outspokenness might cost him a Grammy, Kanye replied, speaking in the third person: "Kanye is always opinionated and outspoken, and now that it's Grammy time he turns into a house nigga? Come on. That's not even realistic." Right, but the suggestion that the guy with eight Grammy nominations is a pariah, never mind suffering from Christlike persecution, is entirely plausible?

Obviously, none of this is unique to rap or "black" music (quotation marks necessary because white suburban kids are the biggest market for the stuff). Big corporations have been marketing "rebellion" since the 1950s. And the kids fall for it every time. In 1968, Columbia Records promised in an ad that "the man can't bust our music!" Madonna made her career glamorizing slattern chic and attacking bourgeois morality. Now she peddles children's books.

Today, there's a great cellphone commercial in which a corporate executive explains to his assistant that his new billing plan is his own private way of "sticking it to the man." His assistant replies, "But sir, you are the man." The boss says, with some dismay, "I know."

As far as the music industry goes, Kanye West is the man, but he won't admit it. Instead, he sells himself as a victim of a society that can't handle his truth. Four million records sold and saturation adulation in the media suggest that it can handle his truth just fine.

The problem is, it ain't the truth. It's just a scam for kids too stupid to recognize they're being played --— again.

Want to be a real rebel? Read a book.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Cartoon Bruhaha Followup

In an earlier post I made the following statement:

There seems not to be a clear consensus about the propriety of publishing the Mohammed cartoons. Hugh Hewitt feels that it was indifferent to the sensitivities of the Islamic world, and points to a political cartoon in the US that offend conservative sensibilities. His point: "...don't cheer the vulgar and the stupid."

I differed with Mr. Hewitt and compared the publishing of the cartoons to the US Navy's "Freedom of the Seas" exercises.

Over at National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg writes about the issue of giving offense:

Personally, I didn't think the cartoons were particularly good. They also seemed to be published out of a desire to offend Muslims. The editors, and many defenders of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, claim otherwise, saying that they needed to prove there was a climate of fear in Denmark generated by Muslims. So they offended Muslims, and effectively proved, at the least, that there were Muslims eager to generate a climate of fear.

But the issue of "offense" is a distraction too. Let's assume that the publication of the cartoons was motivated entirely by a desire to offend Muslims — or at least some Muslims. How does that change the way we should view events now? If I needlessly offend my neighbor, shame on me. If, in response, he burns down my house and threatens to murder my entire family, who cares what I said in the first place?...

Overreactions are usually about something bigger. The whole point of the "last straw" metaphor is that small things can set off disproportionate reactions. One Muslim protestor in Britain held up a sign saying "Freedom Go To Hell!" Do we really think that a handful of cartoons in Denmark transformed him from a Jeffersonian democrat into a jihadi? Was the holder of the sign "Behead Those Who Insult Islam" a pacifist until recently?

Maybe, just maybe, these guys brought some issues to the table long before they ever heard of these cartoons.

He closes his article with the question of why the U.S. Government has tut-tutted the publication of the cartoons, even though we have a long history of press freedom:

Denouncing the State Department for criticizing these cartoons only makes sense if you look at this situation through a very narrow prism. The U.S. government is fighting a conventional war in two Muslim countries and a clandestine and diplomatic "global war on terror" that involves the entire global Muslim community. I don't like the U.S. picking on little Denmark either, but we should at least recognize that the Bush administration has in mind a bigger picture than those who think this is just about some cartoons.

Self Importance, Cultural Importance

Apparently the sitcom Will & Grace was planning a Very Special Easter episode:

NEW YORK (AP) — Britney Spears will guest star on an episode of Will & Grace, NBC announced Tuesday.

The pop star will appear as a Christian conservative sidekick to Sean Hayes' character, Jack, who hosts his own talk show, on the April 13 episode, the network said.

Jack's fictional network, Out TV, is bought by a Christian TV network, leading to Spears contributing a cooking segment called Cruci-fixin's

But doggone it, them Fundamentalists are gittin' uppity again!

Via IMDB, this nugget.

The Rev. Don Wildmon's American Family Assn. (AFA) is taking credit for killing a planned Will & Grace episode on NBC that reportedly was to feature Britney Spears as a Christian conservative co-host with Jack, the gay character portrayed by Sean Hayes, on Jack's Out TV cable channel. According to an early NBC news release, she was to appear in a cooking segment of the show called "Cruci-fixins." The network later said that the script for the episode had yet to be written "and the story line will not contain a Christian characterization at all." In a statement on Monday, the AFA said, "When NBC said that the script 'has yet to be written,' what they didn't tell you is that the 'story board' had been completed, and the offensive material was scheduled to be a part of the episode." Wildmon himself was quoted in the statement as saying, "Plainly put, NBC heard from their affiliates that they did not want to go through another Book of Daniel situation while losing millions in advertising revenue." NBC recently canceled The Book of Daniel following an AFA letter campaign that, the organization claims, generated hundreds of thousand of written protests.

Did anybody watch The Book of Daniel other than the producer's families and the Rev. Don Wildmon? Not according to the ratings.

Both the Rev. Don Wildmon and the reporters who write these nuggets are in a symbiotic relationship. He fulminates about pop culture, they inflate his importance, then warn against his influence.

Invasion on Hold?

Via Slice of SciFi:

February 02, 2006

Invasion Gets KO'd In Six

Submitted by: Kyle Nin

The slow-paced Shaun Cassidy scifi creation Invasion is being put in the back of the top shelf of ABC's closet in about six weeks from now in order to make room for a new mid-season crime drama called "The Evidence."

As early as 3 weeks ago ABC execs were touting their faith in the show and vowing to stick with it. Whether this remains to be the case or not only some time will tell. Until then the last episode of Invasion before it's unscheduled hiatus will be shown near the end of March.

Bad news for the Islander family. We have been enjoying the genre-bending* series since it premiered last year. Part paranoia trip (much in tone like Invasion of the Body Snatchers), part weird soap opera, the story started claustrophobically in a small Florida town, and it has just started to open up both geographically and in its cast.

I won’t mourn it just yet, but I’m getting disgusted by network executives that get all twitchy when a new series doesn’t become this season’s Cheers or Friends.

------
* Longtime aquaintences will know that I have a weakness for SciFi-based genre-bending television shows. Examples? Well, Alien Nation and Firefly spring to mind.

Fantasy Title Generator

Todd, over at Speak Like a Geek, sent me this link to a website that generates titles for fantasy novels:

http://nine.frenchboys.net/novel.php

In just a couple of tries I got:

Castleِ Winterِ and Mistress
Citadelِ Runeِ and King
Summerِ Ladyِ and War
Sunِ Heraldِ and Master

As you can tell, I have a weakness for triplets! But if you see a novel as requiring a beginning, middle, and ending these titles practially plot out the book for you!

Cartoon Depictions of Sacred Figures

Sebastián Schiavone over at myWhidbey.com has a post linking to the cartoon depictions of Mohammed that have sparked riots across the Islamic world. He concludes his post with this question:

Would cartoons of Christ in a similar light be as offensive to Christians?

Well, ruling out Jack Chick tracts and those odd little cartoons in Good News for Modern Man, there are quite a few less-than-reverent cartoon depictions of Jesus.

Exhibit A: South Park's Pilot, The Spirit of Christmas (Jesus vs. Santa) pretty much takes the cake:

Jesus arrives in South Park and at the local mall he accuses Santa of blasphemy. Santa challenges him to a fight and the violence between the two quickly escalates. Even Brian Boitano can’t help the boys who’ve found themselves in the middle of this fight.

Swear words were used 26 times total in this episode, out of them, the F-word was use 16 times. 7 kids were killed-including Kenny.

Well. How many people were killed in the riots that followed the showing of that episode? I mean, how many Starbucks were looted. Yah mean that Trey Parker and Matt Stone's cars didn't even get keyed?! What's up with that?

Exhibit B: I find it very interesting that during this weekend of Islamic riots, the Fox television network re-ran it's Simpsons Christmas episode. I don't keep up with the Simpsons these days, but out of curiosity I had Tivo-ed the episode and watched about 15 minutes this morning as I munched cereal and gulped my morning coffee.

In this episode, the Christmas story is re-enacted with the Simpsons as the Holy Family: Homer is Joseph, Marge is Mary, Lisa is the angel Gabriel, and Jesus is portrayed by Bart! The depiction (as far as I saw it) was rather harmless, but as far as depicting the center of your religious beliefs in a cartoon, it did make the Danish cartoons seem small beer.

And the Christian reaction? (Crickets chirping.) The contrast to the Islamic riots is rather breathtaking.

So I guess that the question of whether depictions of Jesus in similar light is offensive is subjective. I don't think that you would have to look very far to find a Christian that would be very offended by these characterizations (especially the South Park episode.)

But the question is not how we feel, it's how we act. I don't watch South Park, and neither do most of my co-religionists. How do we deal with the offense of the program? We change the channel and deny the station that airs that program our eyeballs and so deny it the ad revenues derived from those eyeballs. I don't deny that there are some people who would get violent about these depictions. There are always fringe actors in all belief systems. But Western European/American Christians are devoted to the concept of freedom of religious expression--even expressions that offend them.

Can we finally get past the bogus characterization that Islamic and Christian fundamentalists are indistinguishable?

UPDATE: There seems not to be a clear consensus about the propriety of publishing the Mohammed cartoons. Hugh Hewitt feels that it was indifferent to the sensitivities of the Islamic world, and points to a political cartoon in the US that offend conservative sensibilities. His point: "...don't cheer the vulgar and the stupid."

I really disagree with this view (though I defend to the death his right to say it!). I think that it is at times salubrious to cause some offense. Let me give an example:

The United States Navy is more powerful than all the other navies in the world combined. Periodically, they conduct "freedom of the seas" exercises right off the coasts of hostile, paranoid countries. These exercises often result in loud protests, complaints filed with the United Nations and even weapons fire and death. We don't stop these exercises when they offend another nation’s sense of sovereignty, because we feel that the concept of “freedom of the seas” is so important.

Likewise, western culture is based upon the free exchange of ideas and viewpoints, “the marketplace of ideas.” If we start saying that there are things that cannot be said, that cannot be expressed, our culture is untrue to itself.

Galileo certainly annoyed the Church when he espoused the Copernican model of the solar system. Should he have shut up? Is it time for the scientific community to apologize to the church for "offending its sensebilities?"

Attention, Operatives of the Patriarchy!

...Known agent Norah Vincent has penetrated protocols 5-Alpha through 9-Gamma. Critical intel, vital to the Patriarchy, has been compromised...

After reading the raves of Ms Vincent's latest book, and hearing her interviewed by Glenn and Helen , I bought and am reading her book, Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again.

I am only halfway through, but I'd like to record three impressions while they are fresh in my mind.

First, Ms Vincent has really made a hugh leap into male culture. Her ability to see what she has looked at serves her well. When she first joins a bowling league, she encounters the three other guys that compose her team. When she's introduced to them she wonders if their terseness and abruptness means that they are treating her with hostility. Then the team captain shakes hands with her and she gets it. Their quite reserve is a sign of the respect they show her as an equal.

I can't count the number of times women have tried to get me to 'fess up and explain "what's really going on," when men are quite in each other's company.

Second, there is occasionally, in reading the book, the dizzyness of infinite regression. She is a woman, passing as a man, giving a woman's viewpoint on what men are like when women aren't around. And I'm a man, reading this woman's book on being a woman passing as a man, reporting on the women's view of men.

It's like when I was a small boy at the barber shop. The barber had mirrors behind the chairs and on the wall across the room. Sitting in the chair I saw an infinite number of little boys, receding in the distance. Somtimes I wondered if I was the boy, or if I was just a reflection and the real little boy was the next little boy or the ten-thousanth little boy in that series. And then the barber would whip the towel off my neck and I'd run outside into the sunshine.

Finally, by describing her view of men, Ms Vincent must necessarily compare and contrast that view with her certain knowlege of women. By doing this, she clarifies (to me) much about the female culture that I find baffling.

Though this book isn't for everyone, I highly recommend it to anyone who has been baffled by the opposite sex. If you have the opposite sex all figured out, save your money.