Bandaids

When washing your hands, there is no way to avoid soaking the bandaid on your finger, so don't try. I think that's a lesson for life.

Rush Limbaugh's Job

Rush Limbaugh's job is to convince ignorant xenophobes that the world and it's browner people is complicated and scary not because they themselves are cowards, with shrunken little hearts, too lazy to do their homework, but because of conspiracy; it is all someone else's fault.  It must be quite a relief.

Benghazi is the anti-Bin Laden

Ah, I finally get the right-wing freakout about Benghazi. Remember, it's always been the strategy of Karl Rove and his horrible acolytes that, if your foe is heroic in some way, you don't avoid that, you attack it, you reverse it. So war hero John Kerry becomes, through swift-boating, a coward.

President Obama got Osama Bin Laden. How do you counter that? Why, Obama must be responsible for Americans killed at an embassy in the Middle East! And lied about! It's perfect.

Bio science ... eww.

I really ought to get over my aversion to biological science. It's the next frontier; we're going to learn so much in the next century! The science of living things is so much more sophisticated than our current technology that ... we don't even know how much more sophisticated it is. That's how much more sophisticated it is.

 Still ... ewww.

The Romney Campaign (not)

I have to admit I have found Romney's campaign mystifying, but I think I have it sussed: he campaign's exactly like he does business, there's no strategy involved, it's all for short term gain.  Just like during his time at Bain Capital, where he changed the business model completely to leveraged buyouts because they paid off faster, so does he pivot to the sensibilities of whoever he's talking to at the time.  If he needs conservatives, as in the primaries, he's "severely conservative"; if he needs crossover voters, as in the debates, he's a moderate who sometimes even agrees with the President on policy.

I couldn't wrap my head around the long term game he was running, but that because he wasn't running one.  After all, the people he's really working for, the people who finance him and use their influence for him, already know exactly what he is; they found out in boardrooms, or on the golf course.  He doesn't need to convince them of anything, and he doesn't bother.

The ACA and political "cover"

(quoted from my own post on Facebook, regarding the political process at the beginning of the Obama presidency)

 The ACA is, in fact, a good example of the whole process. No one, not even conservative Republicans, believe that the American health system is in good shape. Even Republicans that believe that our health system is "the best in the world" (it's not) know, if they bother to read the projections, that the system is not sustainable in the long run. Almost no one believes it shouldn't change. So, Obama and the Democrats took a CONSERVATIVE healthcare insurance proposal (Mitt Romney's own, in fact, which was originally a Heritage Foundation counter proposal to the Clinton's health care proposals) which was actually written to make necessary changes while avoiding even a whiff of "socialism", and tried to get bipartisan support for it. The Republicans would have none of it, even though guys like Romney and Bill O'Reilly now say that much of it will need to be re-implemented after it is repealed (evidently the main problem with it is that it is Obama's). So, the Democrats in the Senate passed it, and then the House used that passage to pass it themselves with a bit of budget trickery, and the Democrats and the President took complete responsibility for it, despite the incredible political danger of it, because it HAD to be done. And now, we will cover a much larger group of people, and save a lot of money in the long run, in SPITE of the Republicans, but Obama might lose the election largely because of the ACA (which people hate, until you describe the things it actually does for them, and they find that they like all those things).

 Do you see now why Obama (and Reid and Pelosi) didn't just try ram a lot of stuff through when they had the votes? But now we know they should have, because the Republicans put politics above what is good for the country, to an extreme never seen before. about a minute ago · Like

Iran and Us; kiss and make up pt. 1

All: Iran has no nuclear bomb and isn't working on one , according to both US and ISRAELI intelligence. Also, historically, Iran doesn't start wars. We are mad at them for the hostage crisis, which was a reaction to our deposing of their democratically elected leader, and saddling them with a US supported dictator fOR 3 DECADES. For God’s sake use your heads.

Iran and the US; kiss and make up, pt. 2

I'm going to go farther out on my Iran versus US limb: if the United States made peace with Iran (and we should, we're the ones that deposed their elected government and both made them an enemy and set back their democracy by at least six decades) then Israel would probably, if not gain a friend, at least lose a large and powerful enemy in the Near East. Iran doesn't care about Palestine; Iranians don't particularly care for Arabs. The Iranians are enemies of Israel because Israel is OUR friend. It's absolutely insane to pressuring Iran for the sake of Israel; Israel would be much better off if we left Iran the hell ALONE.

Why do Conservatives Hate Social Security?

Republicans and conservatives hate Social Security because of the word "Social".
"Social", to them, means Socialism. This is why some of the more disingenuous on the right tend to compare Liberalism with Nazism, simply because the Nazis used the word "Socialist" in their party name. And "Socialism" means "Communism", in their minds. The Republicans are literally still fighting the Cold War. They're like the Japanese soldiers from WWII who were never told about the end of the war and kept fighting decades later. And they believe that everyone except their own leaders are secretly commies themselves, but in reality their leaders are capitalists, and it's in their financial best interests to keep the "war" going, so they never tell their troops to stand down.
This is why the George W. Bush administration was taken by surprise on 9/11; they were still only concerned about the "Rooskis"! Condoleeza Rice was supposed to make a report on the defense of the United States on 9/12. She never got to make it, obviously, but the content of that report has never been released. Those who have seen it, though, tell us that there was nothing about terrorism in it; it was all about Russia as a nuclear power and Star Wars.
But let's be fair to Condi; she wasn't quite as ignorant as all that; she'd hedged her bet. After the Al Queda-coordinated bombings at our embassies in Africa Clinton had decided to destroy Al-Queda. He asked Richard Clarke to come up with the plan for this. The plan was ready to go just before Clinton left office, but rather than hand Bush a war they decided to give the plan to the Bush administration and let them handle it. Rice was impressed with the plan, and with Clarke, and kept him on the new administration and slowly, very slowly, went over the plan and moved it up the ladder towards the President's signature. After 9 months, the plan had finally been approved by the last group before the President would see it; that was on September 4, already far too late to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
Do you remember Condi Rice ever telling us about the Al Queda threat? Neither do I.

The 10th Floor

I decided to go to college at the last minute, and went to Oakland University in Michigan because they had a “commercial” music program, which I figured would be as close to rock and roll as college could get, and because they offered a scholarship. Since it so late in the season, most of the dormitories were full. The only rooms available were in a 10 floor building. I asked for the 10th floor, because I always want to be on the top, and because “shit rolls downhill” as they say. What I didn’t know was that the 10th floor was an unofficial athletic special interest floor, which had been 90% booked by athletes. The booker didn’t know that either. So, I roomed with Pete, on the 10th floor, surrounded by 6 foot plus, 200 plus pound guys; I was a little intimidated, but the guys were all pretty nice to me. The 9th and 8th floors were all women; it was explained to me that they were “athlete” special interest floors, the 8 floor being women who didn’t have the seniority of those on the 9th. They were also very nice to me, if a little taken aback by my presence on the 10th. On my second day up there my roommate told me I should get involved in some of the 10th floor activities. That night we went through one of the yearly rituals, this one to introduce ourselves to the ladies on the lower floors. This consisted of stripping down to our underpants, pulling our undies up into our butt cracks, and then going from door to door on the lower floors until the ladies came out and said hi. Kind of exciting, really.

Let's Improvise Some Guitar!

Shall we improvise some guitar?

The bass player is playing a low G; what shall we play? We could play a D; that would leave the third undefined, and the listeners' minds would fill in the blanks with whatever they feel right now. Or we could play an F; down low or up high it would create a tension, suggest moving to a comfortable C along a bluesy highway.

We could play a B flat, take it minor, make it a little sad. Or a B natural, move it to a positive feeling, if that's called for. Or an A; the tempered A is a little out of tune to the natural A, but it's still clear enough to suggest harmonic movement. Or an A flat, which would create an almost unbearable tension, and suggest an incompetent punk or a masochistic free jazzer.

But let's keep it simple, and also play a G. Reinforce the bass note, up an octave or two. The note becomes more powerful; perhaps we're rocking out a bit. We could play the open G string: the lowest of the unwound strings, it has the most complex audible harmonics, and might suggest a folky flavor. It sounds almost comical compared to the other open strings. Or we could play the G on the fifth fret on the D string: it's wound, and has a very different sound than the open string, darker, blending better. Or even the G on the A string at the 10th fret; towards the middle of the string, it is full of odd harmonics, and emphatically more bassy, taking us towards a jazzy feel. Or we couFOR GODS SAKE SOMEONE HAND ME A COWBELL!

Don't Bother

I'll bet you don't care about my chronic ambivalence.

Rush versus Women

I've been seeing a lot of right wing chatter comparing Rush Limbaugh's attack on Sandra Fluke to, for example, Bill Maher calling Sarah Palin a "twat".

No, it's not the same thing at all.  You can't take Maher's statement and infer that Maher thinks all women are "twats".  But Rush wasn't talking about Sandra Fluke, really; he was talking about all women who use contraception.  He was calling all of them "sluts".  He doesn't understand how contraception works, and in his opinion, if those women would just keep their legs closed, they wouldn't need someone else's money for their contraception.  It's one of the most heinous anti-woman statements I've ever heard in public media.

Libertarianism, Amen

The thing that bothers me most about Randites, and Libertarians in general, is that they state some things that really seem to be truths, about personal responsibility, the importance of creativity, that the government that governs best governs least, etc. And then they ruin it by making a religion out of it.

 To paraphrase Ambassador Spock in Star Trek VI, these things are the beginning of wisdom, not the end. The only thing that really differentiates us from other animals is a feeling of responsibility for the greater good; if we don't have that, we are monkeys, at best.

 (Actually, the thing that bothers me most about Ayn Rand is that she was a sociopath. A charismatic one, sure, but still just a human being damaged by her upbringing. Instead of trying to fix herself, she created a religion out of her damaged personality. Which is probably not that uncommon, really.)

The Beginning of My Atheism

(This is not an anti-religious rant. It's just what I consider a funny story). I clearly remember where my atheism started. I was about 8, and sitting in church with my mother (for some reason I was in the big people's church and not in Sunday school, as usual). I was thinking that I knew I couldn't always control my thoughts and that they would go places that weren't appropriate for church. And I knew that God knew everything and could do anything he wanted to, and so I was frightened; what if I thought something really bad that would make God mad? And it occurred to me, the ONE thought I must never think was (remember I was 8): "Poopy Jesus". And started thinking it over and over again. At which point I started looking around wildly wondering how many people knew the horrible thing I had just thought and whether lightning would come all the way down from the sky for me, or if it would start just below the ceiling and therefore not set fire to the church which was, after all, God's house.

The Silliness of the "Double Taxation" Argument

Economic conservatives like to argue that capital gains, that is, income from investments, shouldn't be taxed because it amounts to "double taxation", that is, the person with the investments worked to earn that money, and it was taxed when he received it. The argument is baloney. Let's say you've saved a chunk of money, say $100,000, and now have that money invested in an interest-bearing account (this analogy also works for investments in stocks, etc). You are, indeed, taxed again, but only on any PROFITS that you have made from that investment. In other words, you are not taxed again on that initial $100,000, and in fact if you don't make any more money from it you won't be taxed on it. You are only taxed on any PROFITS you make off of the investment; this is self-evidently money that you have never had before; it is NEW money to you. So it makes no sense at all to say that you are being doubly-taxed on income from investments.

Me and Steve Jobs

No, I never met the man, but like so many of us he changed my life, several times in fact.

I've always been an Apple user (with a timeout in the mid-80s when the Mac became the Mac II and I couldn't come close to affording it, going with a Commodore Amiga instead).

True stories: 1) in the very late 70s I heard and fell in love with the Fairlight sampling synthesizer, as used on records (records!) by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. But I couldn't afford a $30,000 Australian computer/keyboard. The closest I could get was a keyboard/computer card combo for the Apple II called the Alpha Syntauri. It was a strange and clumsy system, and it didn't sound that good (it was 8-bit and sample length was limited to about 1 second), but it taught me so much about computers and sound. In fact, it forced me to learn about both in the GEEKIEST WAY POSSIBLE, and had me doing things like walking around making recordings of strange noises and then isolating single waveforms from a short samples, or building sounds additively by combining sine or more complex waves. And most of the time I'd just get something that sounded like a short in my audio cable. Fourier transforms anyone? Perhaps you'd like to play with a light-pen?

But ... having this machine allowed me to get my very first full time paying job in music, when I was hired to play keyboards(!) in Michigan's premier 60s cover band (my boss, Steve King, being almost as tech-obsessed as I was). And that job gave me the experience and $$ to record my first album. The rest is history (however obscure, it still happened in the past).

2) In the late 80s I realized I needed my nights free to work on and perform my own music, so I quit my cover band and pursued the profession of my fathers, that is, being a lawyer. But I thought I'd try such a seemingly-boring profession out before committing, so I got a paralegal certificate (this was when paralegals were a very new thing) and got a job as a legel secretary in a firm in Birmingham, Michigan. We were a group of legal secs that contracted work for various area lawyers. We used PCs running DOS; Windows 3.0 had just come out and I was very excited, I could actually fool programs like WordPerfect into running in a multitasking, graphical environment. But anyway ... I happened to impress one of the lawyers we did work for, and he was ramping up his Workers Comp practice and needed someone to work full time. So I went to work for Vern Leopold. Vern liked his computers (although he knew little about them) and decided to get the best, so he bought Macintoshes. He is still the only lawyer I've ever seen who maintained a Mac-based office. And those things were beautiful, elegant machines. I spent hours playing with the colors (up to 60K!) and writing form generation programs using Filemaker Pro. I finally realized that working with these wonderful machines was going to be my career, and since 1994 I've only done computer work.

So as you can see, without the work and integrity of Steve Jobs my life would have gone in a very different direction, at least twice. Tonight, I spent a couple of hours recording original music on my current Macbook Pro using the most elegant hardware and OS available, MacOSX, and now I'm writing this blog post on that machine.

Goodbye Steve. All my respect and admiration are yours, forever.

Hugh

Presidents and TV

I'm getting kinda tired of people complaining that Presidents have to be TV stars. Of course they have to be TV stars; every Presidential candidate must work well on the media of the day. Lincoln made good "stump" speeches; that's how candidates connected to the greatest number of people in his day. FDR, Truman and Eisenhower were all great on the radio.

Let's look backwards a bit at people's ability to talk on TV: Obama = great; GW Bush = not great (but better than Kerry or Gore); Clinton = very good; GHW Bush = better than Dukakis, not as nearly as good as Clinton; Reagan = great; Jimmy Carter = better than Ford ; Nixon = started out terrible on TV, hired experts and got MUCH BETTER. Are we seeing a pattern here? The ability to connect to people on TV is extremely important, and before the Democrats nominate another Kerry or Gore or Dukakis, they really need to keep this in mind.

It'll be interesting to see who can capitalize on Internet exposure in the future, although Obama does that quite well too.

Colin Powell

I wonder why Colin Powell never ran for President? I'll bet the Bush administration left a really bad taste in his mouth. And I mean that metaphor in the meanest possible sense ...

Blown

Very interesting article about quantum effects on the macro level in the June Scientific American. Some of the possibilities are very interesting: bird migration might be a quantum effect; photosynthesis might achieve it's near perfect efficiency due to quantum entanglement. Most interesting: gravity itself might not be a "force" in the sense that electromagnetism and the strong force are, but might be an emergent property of quantum mechanics at the macro (universe) level.

A mind is never happier than when it's blown.