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Stuff and nonsense...
At least I wouldn't be, if I were him. (HT: Kaus)
William F. Buckley Jr, apparently still alive, posits that the Iraq war may end up killing the Republican party.
I don't think it's impossible, and there is a recent precedent north of the border. In five years, from 1988 to 1993, Canada's Progressive Conservative party went from ruling power and majority to non-existence. (See here and elsewhere.) In our case it was a binding hate, for one reason or another, of one Brian Mulroney. As with Bush if it happens for you, those feeling the wrath of the voters were hapless followers, not the criminal-in-chief.
While your system seems pretty much rigged against the emergence of a viable third party, it's obviously not impossible. Plus it's time, obviously, what you have is more of a one party system with two choices. (And please, this isn't an abortion post.)
I think what any third party needs first and foremost is an exceptional leader. Without that you're not going to get off the ground. Necessary characteristics I think include intelligence, honesty .. no, forget that, or fill in the list yourself, it's too obvious. In addition to all that the person needs to be an ultra-charismatic larger-than-life leader, because he's got to take whatever new party from nothingness to viability.
Not really going anywhere with this, more of a question for y'all: is there somebody, anybody, out there who could be that person right now? I mean blue-sky the thing, no roadblocks at this point .. who could be the person?
My vote below.
Barack Obama: not perfect, and tied to the system, obviously, but those sort of traits. Maybe if Hillary gets in, and does to Bush what Bush has done to Saddam, 2012 is the year
Write your own! No better way to kill off a day at work! It doesn't have to be obscene! It doesn't have to include exclamation points!
Springtime in D.C.
Behold the bounty of earth.
Cherries! Turdblossoms!
Pinky and the Brain
want to take over the world.
Just like Wolfowitz.
Alack! My little red
button. How I long to press
you. So long, Paris!
Alberto, please let
me habeas your corpus.
Oh sweet Gonzales!
Harriet Meirs.
Harriet Meirs. Harri-
et Meirs. Spank me.
I just watched the rerun of last night's Colbert Report, and was treated to the spectacle of Colbert lobbing softballs at Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and current Republican presidential hopeful. Colbert led with a montage of clips showing Huckabee saying the word "authentic" over and over again. In the interview, Huckabee explained his concept of authenticity: "It's like an apple. If you cut into the apple, and it's an apple all the way to the core, that's authentic. If you cut into it and it turns out that it's plastic fruit, there's no nourishment there."
Huckabee then launched into an attack on Mitt Romney, the message being that Huckabee is an "authentic conservative," unlike Romney, who doesn't really hunt, isn't really pro-life, and presided over a state where--gasp!--homos can get married!
Colbert wasn't taking Huckabee all too seriously; he made fun of Huckabee's standing in the polls ("trailing Duncan Hunter, Sam Brownback, and six guys named Thompson"). But Huckabee's been making inroads; he scored some points in South Carolina over the weekend, and made a big splash last week in the press by calling for Attorney General Gonzalez to resign. Huckabee's become sort of a media darling--besides Colbert, he's appeared on The Daily Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, and was a frequent guest on Imus. Of course he's appeared on all the Sunday morning political shows.
This has to be nipped in the bud, right now. So, let's talk about authenticity. Huckabee is a Baptist minister; as such, you might expect him to be an authentic man of peace (you know, like Jesus). Quite the contrary. Huckabee is a fanatic supporter of the war in Iraq (watch here as he paints the war in Iraq as a "struggle for existence."). He authentically believes that Armageddon is coming and that Israel must be defended at all costs. He also is a big proponent of the death penalty, with sixteen executions occurring while he was in office, including a triple header--three in one day! Is he an authentic Christian? I'll let you decide.
Huckabee's apple metaphor is more than apt, as long as you consider the apple to be rotten. Huckabee was the most corrupt governor Arkansas has had in recent memory. He accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from supporters, used state aircraft for personal trips, stole furniture from the governor's mansion, and ignored admonishments from the state Ethics Commission. Besides being a crook, Huckabee was a constant embarrassment to the state. He referred to conservationists as "environmental wackos," called Arkansas a "banana republic" on the Imus show, and lived in a triple-wide mobile home on the Governor's Mansion grounds while the residence was being rennovated. His son once tortured a dog to death, with no reprisals. (Read a summary of Huckabee's tenure as Arkansas governor here.)
One would hope that the press would begin giving Huckabee a closer look, particularly if his campaign begins to pick up steam. He despises such scrutiny, frequently lashing out at the press if they dare to question his integrity or to demand accountability. His thin skin will ensure that he is unable to survive as a viable candidate; the sooner that Huckabee is exposed, the better off the country will be.
In the wake of sensational reports of violence, I wasted an hour or two yesterday playing around with casualty numbers and populations. A lot of fear has been used to sell this war, fear that terrorists might infiltrate U.S. institutions and wreak havoc. Not that it takes Al Qaida to do that, as residents of Blacksburg are recently quite aware. The spectacular murders there have put a lot of focus onto safety measures there as well.
Here at Slate Jake Weisberg latched onto the "regularity" of school homicides, which despite his alarm, are quite rare, amounting to about 20 per between 1992 and 2005 There were about 60 million Americans between 5 and 19 (according the 2000 Census), making the rate of school shooting about 3e-7, on the order of a hundred-thousandth of a percent. A school homicide is nearly a hundred times less likely to occur than a murder in the American workplace, according to these data, which isn't too surprising, especially for the under 10 set. I've got a thousandth of a percent chance of being gunned down by a disgruntled someone at work in any given year. (Although maybe it's a little better than that here. Obviously I'm taking no effort to break down risk groups. It's a fucking Fray post.)
By similar rough-order-of-magnitude reasoning, my annual odds of getting killed in a traffic accident are about a hundredth of a percent, or one in ten thousand. That rate is enough that in a moderately-sized community, it'll make for an impressive headline every couple of months when it happens to (hopefully) someone else. I take this as a good point of reference for risk assessment, call it the I-95 test. Driving on the highway represents a sufficiently low level of risk to my life that I consider it basically beneath notice. How does a homicide at school shooting to driving on the highway? My kids are a thousand times safer there than in the car with me.
It's harder to generate a yearly stat on terrorism, of course, but unless the mushroom cloud is really looming, it's not high. Even considering only the year 2001, you had a better chance of having a skyscraper fall on you than having your office-mate go postal, but you were still 200 times more likely to die in a flaming car wreck.
Over in Iraq, the odds of a civilian dying in combat are about 65 thousand/20 million/4 years, or about a tenth of a percent--a hundred times more likely to get shot by a soldier than I am to rack up my Subaru. The annual odds of dying there as a result of the war is over ten times higher than that, better than one in a hundred, and that's to say nothing of the kidnappings, threats, desperation, poverty, and general lawlessness. You are probably acquainted with a hundred people. That's like taking half a dozen kids from every school in the U.S. and putting a bullet into them.
Recently, General Petraeus told the Washington Post that "Iraq is going to have to learn – as did, say, Northern Ireland – to live with some degree of sensational attacks." That comment is hard to swallow, considering the United States' overwrought concern about any sensational attacks is, approximately, how this excursion slipped through the congress.
Yesterday's news also had an item about a bombing at the Technical University of Baghdad. The radio mentioned some 200 casualties there so far (trying to grab that one from memory, OK), and reports have, unsurprisingly, the Iraqi University system in shambles. The casualty rate may be exceeding 1% among what's left of the Iraqi intelligentsia, but people are still going to the University. (Of course, it's not clear their odds of survival are much different outside of school, and there can't be many other constructive ways to spend time, but still.) Would an annual 1 chance in a hundred of getting killed be enough to keep an American student from an American university, where the casualty rate is a more like 0.00001%? Is 1% annual chance of violent death something people can live with? A blogger (who knows who he is) got me wondering last week why the ants don't more often rise up. Maybe the answer is that a lot of people can bear those odds for a few years.
Okay let's try this dance again. This is really annoying.
I'm trying to learn how to use a new voice recognition system. My old one finally ate its shorts and this new one is kind of like dealing with the Rainman. I have to speak very slowly and carefully or I may as well be sending up smoke signals.
Once I get it taught I think it will work well. The state-of-the-art has definitely improved since the version I have been using all of these years. Luckily the headset doesn't appear to pick up helpless laughter or swear words, or least it's more enough not to try to transcribe them.
One large flaw I'm running into is that it doesn't appear to speak directly to my writing organization system. At this time the only application on my system will talk to properly is Word. And even there it's crawling like a six-month-old baby. It's taken me nearly half an hour to speak these three paragraphs and get an accurate result.
I remember when I first started using the other system. I remember how painful it was to teach it how to understand me. That one required over 50,000 words before it would even begin accepting natural language. This one did better than that after only one chapter of Dogbert’s management wisdom.
Making corrections is harder than it needs to be. I'm not quite sure how to make this work. Since I'm on a laptop the hotkey they have mapped the correction menu to does not exist. At some point I'm certain I will figure this out. But there will be grumbling as I do.
In the meantime, if you run into something in my writings that sounds like it came out of the Jabberwock if you could drop me a discrete e-mail I would greatly appreciate it.
Long ago, I had a dream about Mt. Rainier. I couldn't see the mountain; I only knew it was Rainier because it was a dream, and because of a certain quality of light that filled every piece of the dream, a diffusion in the Doug firs, a green that I've never seen anywhere lower than 7,000 feet above sea level, and a refraction among glaciers.
Moloch's description of running reminded me of this dream, and made me think of light. Kyu once wrote a post on a similar theme (and better), but it seems to be gone. Here's my effort. Please feel free to add others.
Seattle
When I lived in Seattle, I played frisbee for hours on end. In the mornings I got up and ran around Green Lake, then settled into the Honey Bear Bakery (now sadly extinct) to do my Chinese homework over a pumpkin muffin. I biked to school, I biked to frisbee, and when I coasted back home, sunset and streetlights glowed across the lake and into Elliot Bay. You could breath light there, better than air.
Oregon
I had a Seattle flashback over the weekend when mrs. august and I went to Oregon for a wedding. We drove three hours south of Portland, to a town prey to the logging industry. A river flowed behind our hotel, and the flowering trees (pink dogwood, magnolia, cherry) reflected the riverlight. Driving back, mrs. august read aloud to me from Julie on Julia, and I fantasized about boning a duck. When we got home, I made scones, which cooled in racks on the dull marble.
Norfolk
Light in the Northwest feels fecund and alive. In Norfolk it feels like a swamp. Humidity makes the light heavy, as does the monotonous flatness. The city is near the (failed) Roanoke colony and the (successful) Jamestown version, and in both cases one imagines the English arriving to great disappointment. Oysters make life worth living, but the light is only bearable at dawn,. I prefer Norfolk at night – its movie theaters, its docks, its diners where my friends and I tried to sober up.
Taipei
The light here is both humid and blinding, heavy like Norfolk, yet the world becomes vaster in the Taipei sun. At times the mountains and clouds seem illuminated from every angle, and the world cast in a sweaty blue. Then comes the rain, and there is no light. Getting off the plane in Taipei is like cleaning your glasses. It's as if light had an electric charge, and one crackled with every act of vision.
