Election ‘08

Gah!  It’s finally over.  For two everlasting years we’ve been gagged with stupid stuff about this election.  Enough.  We’ve endured enough.

I don’t care how passionately somebody believes it, nonsense doesn’t improve through constant repetition.  There’s been so much b.s circulated about the election  that for a while I was afraid I had been infected with it.  It’s all just words.

But here’s the truth.  If you believe that the results of this election represent the final death of our civilization as we know it, the fall of the righteous, well, you’re wrong.  And if you think that this election represents the beginning of a new and glorious chapter in our history to come, peaceful, loving prosperity for all, well, you’re wrong too.

So let’s all the losers hang their heads in woe for about five minutes, and let’s all the winners do a little victory dance for about five minutes, and then, for the love of all that’s holy and good, can we just please get back taking care of business?

Filthy Politics, 2008, Part II

Here in Oregon we have a little election competition going on for one of the many get-rich-quick business opportunities available in Washington for ambitious and hard-working young men and women with elastic in their ethics.  I refer, of course, to a soon-to-be-available job opening to be a United States Senator.

These competitions, evidently, require each candidate to pitch gobs and handfuls of barnyard waste matter at the other until each is completely covered with it.  If they weren’t already covered with it.

So, first Jeff Merkley, pardon me, I mean SUPPORTERS of Jeff Merkley, will accuse Gordon Smith of stapling kittens to his garage door.  Then Gordo will accuse Merkley of serving up barbecued puppies at the 4th of July Democratic election rally.  Then Jeff will accuse Gordon of an unmanly affection for George Bush.  Then Gordon will reveal that Jeff is a dues-paying member of the Salem Gang Rape Marching Band.

And it goes on and just gets unimaginably worse.

What bothers me as is that one of these unspeakables is going to win.  It doesn’t matter which one.  The winning will conclusively demonstrate to all those with sh*t for brains that negative campaigning works.

It actually doesn’t bother me that whichever one eventually becomes my Senator is going to turn out to be a sh*t-covered politician.  They are all pretty much sh*t magnets anyway and if there has to be a sh*t storm, I figure let it all fly towards the politicians as they presumably find value in it.

No, I worry about politicians launching projectile sh*t in television advertising, as is going on in the Oregon senatorial election.

Little children might be watching and could have bad dreams at night.

Filthy Politics, 2008

We thought the brownshirts on the left were eliminated by World War II.  Turns out they were just hiding under a rotten log someplace for the last 50 years  And now they’re back.

Monsters of the ID . . .

Now this is a rant.  Except for the subject matter, and the tone, and the point of view, and the conclusion and the uncharitable attitude, and the plain unforgivable snarkiness, why . . . it’s just this side of poetry.

I hate when that happens . . .

Giant inflatable dog poo escapes in a storm. I suppose it’s to be expected. All art needs to be free.

From sun to hydrogen to thundering SUV . . .

MIT has been busy finding new ways to tap the sun’s energy. Use it to power split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Breathe the oxygen. Burn the hydrogen. Power!

But what about all that extra oxygen you’re going to make. Isn’t too much oxygen bad for you?

Burning stuff makes a lot of heat, and heat is power. Burning stuff requires oxygen. No oxygen, no burning.

But what about carbon dioxide? That stuff is a chemical, you know, and chemicals aren’t natural and can kill you. We should pass a law to make them invent some kind of machine to get rid of carbon dioxide.

Don’t need machines. Trees suck up carbon dioxide. We can plant more trees and let the trees deal with carbon dioxide. Trees moderate temperatures, humidity, and wind. And trees are useful as a source of paper to publish magazines with pictures of trees in them. You can make a lot of things out of trees, including more trees, but also wooden spoons, canoe paddles, toothpicks, two-by-fours, oh the variety is endless. And you like trees.

But where are you going to get all that water to make hydrogen? I heard you already can’t water your lawn in Los Angeles.

Two-thirds of the surface of the earth is water. The problem in Los Angeles isn’t too little water. It’s too many dipsh*ts. Water is everywhere. It falls out of the sky.

But what about the polar bears!

Polar bears don’t vote, dipsh*t.

But. But. But we’re all gonna die-eeee!

Yes. That’s so. But we don’t have to live like semi-starved savages on roots, tofu, and grubs, shivering in the cold, between now and then.

Where is our Spartacus?

Many of us pay taxes and some of us find nearly half of what we earn taken to support the schemes of our political class. At some point, it’s time to take a stand. But evidently we aren’t at that point yet. Soon?

It’s not fraud if you believe it . . .

Shouldn’t schools teach something like, oh, the difference between a fact and a myth? Shouldn’t the schools that teach teachers, maybe teach the teachers something other than the science of feelgoodology and self-esteemics? Maybe the teachers could be taught how to teach the difference between facts and erroneous beliefs.

Of course it must be comforting to think that there are other ways of knowing, other paths to certainty, other than doing the hard work of observing, testing, and measuring, verifying, cross-checking and just plain following up. But there just aren’t. And belief doesn’t make it so.

And it would be pretty to think that people who publish information should feel some sense of kinship with facts, should feel embarassed if they participate in the communication of improbable beliefs and thereby add to the world’s growing fund of stupid. At least journalists, investigators, or academics should try to avoid inserting their own wishful thinking into places where truth should be.

But they don’t. Either they don’t care, or they don’t think their audience will care, or more likely they don’t think their audience will know the difference, or even worse, they flat don’t know the difference themselves.

You can’t interview three people on the street at random, obtain two opinions, then report, in a well-groomed baritone, “There is widespread disagreement about . . .. Back to you in the studio.”

You can’t report that self-styled psychics are helping the police in a crime investigation, and not bother to follow up to say that everything the psychics said was demonstrably untrue and misleading.

It’s not science if an environmentalist reports that bacteria live on toilet seats. They are small, completely white, and will can sometimes entirely cover a toilet seat in public restrooms. (If you see a black toilet seat, it’s not bacteria. That would be a virus.)

That’s why, if you are looking for information, the world wide web should be thought of as the home of a million lies. And that’s why schools should teach b.s. avoidance skills. Even the b.s. broadcast by true believers. Maybe even especially b.s. broadcast by true believers.

It isn’t all that hard. Often, verbal “flags” signal the near presence of nonsense. For example, any sentence introduced by the word, “Dude,” is likely to be stupid.

The observation that experts [doctors, science, physicists, insert your choice] don’t know everything or any particular thing , does not turn an otherwise stupid statement into a smart statement.

Self-evidently stupid beliefs are not actually secret information suppressed by powerful conspiracies profiting by keeping the people perpetually ignorant of the truth. Those who remain perpetually ignorant require no outside conspiracy to achieve their happy ignorant condition. No help is required.

But if you are buying, there’s a lot of people willing to sell.

Pay no attention to that uranium . . .

Five hundred and fifty tonnes of Saddam’s yellowcake slipped out of Iraq.

Sure am glad he didn’t have any notions about assembling weapons of mass destruction or anything like that. I’m pretty sure that we, with our U.N. allies, went into Iraq purely to steal their oil (presently at $4.25 plus a gallon in Oregon) and not for any considerations of international security or anything. We can always trust the mainstream press lords’ denials of administration proper motives. Right? Hans Blix would have told us if otherwise. Right?

Independence Day Lawyer Joke . . .

I celebrated Independence Day the way I celebrate best. I went to the golf course.

I met a guy and he seemed okay at first. On the seventh hole he asked me what I did for a living and when I told him, then he wanted to tell me a lawyer joke. People like to do that when they find out a person is a lawyer. But I think I’ve heard about every funny lawyer joke there is in the last 35 years, and a hell of a lot more that aren’t funny. In fact, none of them are funny any more and none of them are new any more. And I’ve pretty much decided I’m not interested any more.

I’ve used up all my patience with devious, weenie, passive aggressive b.s. And for sure don’t expect me to validate weenieness by laughing at antagonistic insults.

So, when this guy on the golf course asked if it would be okay if he told me a lawyer joke, I said, “No. It’s not okay. I’d mind.” Because I would, dammit.

So, what do you think his reaction was? HE was offended! He was offended because I declined him permission to offend me, of all things. (And he knew he was going to be offensive — that’s why he asked for permission in the first place.) And when he said he didn’t mean anything by it, I said, of course he did; he just expected to get away with it.

So we continued to play golf in silence, neither having much to say to one another. (I shot one over par, and that didn’t make him feel any better.)

Okay, yeah, I know. Noblesse oblige. I should be bigger than people like him. I shouldn’t stoop to their level. But that makes me an enabler. So from now on, when people ask me what I do, I’m never going to tell them I’m a lawyer.

I’m going to draw up as much pride and dignity as I can and say, “I’m an Attorney-American.”