January 28, 2008 archive

Why doesn’t being wrong count?

This is my problem lately.

It seems that I’m (unfortunately?) old enough to have a memory. And unlike most Americans, who live in what Gore Vidal likes to call the United States of Amnesia, I can remember what politicians said and did, and what the outcomes were.

Throughout my lifetime, politicians who were correct about things generally are not remembered fondly, and they were often not victorious in the next election. Whereas the people who were wrong about almost everything keep getting more Friedman units from the voters, as if we just know they’ll someday get it right.

It seems being correct counts for nothing! We keep electing people who, if they’re intellectually honest, have to constantly apologize for all their wrongheaded ideas and their votes for things that didn’t come close to producing the promised outcome. Or if they’re sociopaths like Dick Cheney, they just deny that they said what you clearly heard them say. Or they deny the actual outcome, by producing phony measurements (aided by the “think tanks” like the American Enterprise Institute, whose goal it is to produce phony measurements while sounding “academic.”)

A scientist would never accept these kinds of results! In a scientific world view, correct predictions are the most important currency, and incorrect predictions are how you figure out what (theory) not to trust. Of course science doesn’t deal with broken campaign promises, but one would assume that would count against the politician who made them and didn’t keep them.

How can democracy be so screwed up?

Some (few) examples below.

SOTU: How To Use A Teleprompter (NOT!)

For me, and I’m guessing for many DDs, it is a painful thing to watch and to listen to Bush “make a speech” on TV. I put that last bit in quotation marks because he never really makes a speech; rather, he reads the text scrolling by on a Teleprompter.

A Teleprompter is a device that displays the text which a speaker is delivering. It can be: 1) placed directly in front of the lens of a video camera (so that the speaker’s eyes appear to be directed at the viewer) or 2) it can be projected onto those little glass screens you see on either side of a speaker’s platform, such as we will see in the upcoming State of the Union address.

My main point in this diary is that, despite the unending pain of watching Bush speak, there is a counterbalance in the humor provided by his robotic use of the Teleprompter in option 2) situations. I’m sure this arises out of the extensive rehearsals he went through with Karen Hughes prior to previous SOTU deliveries.

Sunday evening silliness

OK, this has nothing to do with politics…. but… well, what the heck

An English Laxative

Today I eat what I once ate

But I don’t heat the things I hate

And while we meet before we mate

We do not greet before we grate

I fly the places where I flew

And then I sigh, and then I sue.

The things I buy do not go ‘boo’.

And then I cry to all my crew.

I sit the places where I sat

I still can fit – I’m not too fat

Then I flit off to my flat

Where I will slit one of my slats

I don’t know everything I knew

I go to where there is no goo

I flow the places where I flew

I did the things that now I do.

NYRB on Blogging, Genre, and Professionalism

So there’s an article at New York Review of Books everyone here should read.  Not that everyone should agree with it or draw the same conclusions as does the author, Sarah Boxer — I don’t, for example — but it’s a nice musing on the nature of blog writing and heck, it’s in the New York Review of Books.

I’ll snip some as an incentive to read the whole thing and then offer my (rather lengthy) response, below.  

The question every candidate should have to answer

I don’t want to hear about what Bill Clinton thinks anymore. I don’t want to hear how McCain “wants to be in Iraq for 1,000 years”, that Romney may have wanted a withdrawal date, that any of the candidates is more or less pure on whatever issue or any other chest thumping drivel.

I want to know what each candidate really thinks or if they haven’t actually thought beyond tough talk, suck up platitudes and bumper sticker slogans, when it comes to addressing the extremely fucked up foreign policy path that this country has taken over the past decade.

No more “would you take anything off the table”.  No more “they may be able to restart a nuclear weapons program”.  No more “we have to kill them before they kill us”.  No more “we will not allow [X] to occur, under any circumstances”.  No more “we must be strong and we must also be flexible”.  No more “we must always stay on the offensive”.  No more “we’ll smoke them all out”.  No more “nothing short of victory will do”.  No more “either you are with us or you are against us”.  No more “spreading democracy and freedom”.

No more fluff.

 

Give Me The Tinfoil Medicine

If anyone has links about the ruling elite of this world having their own separate classes of medications, please post links now.

We got sick – very sick – on what we came to understand is an “adenovirus.”  It was the first time a sickness has taken me down in about eight years.

This instant pneumonia strain came down on the gringo express, sickening all kinds of people for weeks, an illness that gladly makes limitless deadly encores for those who overestimate their convalescence, and has emptied restaurants, leaving people gaping 20 feet away from the adenovirus’ victims for fear of succumbing to the racking coughs themselves.  People are terrified of this cough, which others tell us will linger for weeks.

Ah but not doctors.  We went to a Mexican/American doctor who speaks perfect English, and my husband suggested he even stand back, that he not get what we had.  The doctor smiled as if the questions of contamination by his own patients had never occurred to him in his life.  He was fearless throughout the examination, dismissing our worries for his health with a remark that he saw so many patients he “guessed” they gave him immunity.

I call bullfeathers.  It doesn’t work for teachers.  They are shutting schools down for fear of viruses in the US, because 40% of teachers are falling sick in some schools.  If mass exposure to sickness brought immunity, teachers would benefit the most.

Which leads us to larger questions:  why don’t members of Congress die of common things like cancer more often?  How can candidates campaign fearlessly, gladhanding with the masses without catching the epidemics going around?  How can they have no fear, mingling broadly with a largely sick public and yet never fall ill themselves?

I’m not even going to argue the point with anyone as to whether there are separate classes medicines available to the ruling elite of the world (and doctors) which are not given to common people.  I have not a doubt in my mind, after seeing a doctor laugh at what was almost killing us.  He KNEW he would not get what we had, but certainly did not offer us a shot of whatever protected him.

So tell me, who has any links on the separate realms of medications available to rich elite versus the rest of us?

NASA Picks New Orleans Plant for Multi-Billion $ Project

Finally, some good news for NOLA: NASA has chosen the Michoud Assembly Facility in Eastern New Orleans as the site for three of its major contracts for its upcoming Constellation Program.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) — The route to the moon and perhaps to Mars now goes through New Orleans — and the detour couldn’t come at a better time in the city’s struggle to rebuild its shattered economy after Hurricane Katrina.

With thousands of houses still in ruins and its population reduced by almost 170,000, New Orleans is getting a boost in the form of high-wage jobs and contracts for next-generation space systems at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/12/…

More below the fold…

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Simon and Garfunkel II



At the Zoo

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