Outclassed

When I read what other people are writing online, I remember one of the main reasons I gave up politiblogging regularly. Too many other people writing, and doing it a lot better. I particularly liked this one, today: Grifters' Tale - Mercenary opportunism doesn't respect Party lines.

As the lights go out in Colorado Springs I wonder if the city is small enough to survive. Only in a place where people are close enough to their government to understand the cause-and-effect between taxes, expenses, and legislation can real democratic reform hope to succeed.

Okay, I won't make any stupid Republican jokes today. But I hope I can be forgiven in pointing to a reminder that our illegal and unprovoked invasion of Iraq wasn't as simple-minded as the rightwing warmonger rhetoric tried to make us believe. (If any of you are still interested in Bonehead's reportedly--unusual, not to say abnormal, psychology*, don't miss the opening to the Thrill of the Kill section. Surprises me not at all.)

I actually returned to that site because I'd wanted to link to the first in a series of articles explaining why the USofA should hang its head and cry when Haiti is mentioned. From Thomas Jefferson to Bonehead Bush, plenty of Presidential Administrations have beaten up on Haiti. Admittedly the story is more complicated than this series of articles explains, but IMO they cover the major points. (Also, since I've decided that Bonehead-bashing is a whole different subject than stupid Republican jokes, let me make sure you don't miss Bonehead's contribution to our legacy of shame in Haiti.)

As much as the U.S. government has touted its love of democracy, the affection often has been conditional, based not on the will of a nation’s population but on the elected leader’s acceptance of American economic and political dictates.

You could hardly help knowing that's true, even if you'd only paid ten minutes worth of attention to international events in the last decade.

And, while I'm bashing, contemplate Iraq. Seriously. Read it. That's modern warfare, folks. We came, we saw, we decimated. If you don't like who we are, in the 21st century, it's not too late to demand that we change.

Always remember and never forget you can't nuke a country. Mother earth doesn't know from territorial boundaries. To her, it's all one planet.

The more I realize that we are not who I thought we were, the more depressed--and embarrassed--I become.

To the world, I offer my apologies. What can I say? Founded by intelligent, well-educated, reasonably idealistic men who hammered out a set of reasonably flexible guidelines, this country has nevertheless fallen prey to short-sighted, opportunistic, power-mongering morons.

All I can offer in our defense is that it's the same fault that brought down the USSR but so far we're still teetering along. It's not out of the question that we might get it right one day.

__________

* Honestly? I'm not. Never was. But I know many people were, because I remember seeing headlines now and then, each purporting to offer some kind of explanation of what the guy's problem was.

Me, I classed him as, "stupid, possibly dangerous, maybe psychotic" the first time I saw his smirking face and never found any reason to change that assumption.

Is It Sad To Have A Brain? (don't read this)

So, I'm chatting online with a recently retired friend about how it took her a year or more after retirement to really get her brain around accomplishing anything--to get herself organized so she could start doing all the things she wanted to do.

It was the lack of forced scheduling that tripped her up. I pointed out that most our lives are run by imposed schedules--we have school and then work (not to mention parental schedules), so for our entire lives we're accustomed to thinking of "time" as something that's cut into small slices, only a few of which are ours to do with as we please.*

Those with iron self-discipline might carve out an hour or so a day to spend writing or drawing or knitting or on decorative carpentry or playing in an imaginary sports league (the term for which I've temporarily misplaced) or playing a real sport or experimenting with new recipes, or even donating some time to a worth charity. (Those with iron self-discipline and no small children in the house, I mean.)

But it's an hour. Not exactly a wealth of leisure. Basically, in our society, people have to wait until they retire to figure out what matters to them--to figure out how they actually want to spend their time, because before you're retired, you really don't have enough time to worry about spending it.

In today's world, you have to be 65 (or older) before you have the time to figure out what you want to do with your life!

Put that way, she thought it was bizarre. Me, I think it's an interesting development. Like any species, we evolved with just a few basic needs--food, shelter from extreme weather or predators, and reproduction. Like any species, most of our biology and our instinctive urges are geared toward reproduction--survival of the species.

Because intelligence--self-awareness--turned out to be useful for survival, it's a biological trait that has continued to evolve. In my opinion, the continuing development of "civilization" has as much or more to do with the human brain's need to use that biological trait as with anything else.

Our societies are full of artificial complexities.

As I ponder that idea, from the perspective of my pre-lunch blood-sugar depression, I decide that our societies are also increasingly full of people (young and old) incapable of dealing with these complexities.

It's not so difficult (moving now into the realm of science fiction) to imagine an intellectual fork in the road or that eventually we could develop an intellectual elite--a subset of the population whose brains were supple enough to deal with change and growth.

And the rest, of course, would form a sort of proletariat (no day is entirely wasted if you're given the opportunity to introduce the proletariat into a conversation) that, rightwingnut paranoia aside, would never be allowed enough power to form any kind of Marxist dictatorship. (Marx lived too soon--if he'd lived long enough to see the stultifying effect a new season of American Idol or Survivor has on the bulk of the population, he would have been hard-pressed to think of a way to transition society from capitalism to his ideal communism.)

I can't remember where I was going.

Just think. If Republicans only married Republicans and Democrats only married Democrats, well, then, maybe eventually we'd have a Democratic party too smart to be manipulated by Republican scare tactics and stupidity-mongoring. (I love making up words.)

That isn't where I was originally going, but I've lost the thread. When in doubt, just blame Republicans and move on….

Anyhow. I went to surf some news sites and found that others are pondering the gap between our institutions and our intelligence. Or simply publishing articles illustrating that there's a gap between what we know and what we think we know.

bombs

'bots

babies

banks

bullying

broadcasting (Seriously. There's a reason this only word with a rightwingnut audience. Liberals don't need talk radio to tell them how to think.)

For instance, I didn't need this to convince me that there's a difference between looting and survival. I've long suspected that dramatic television visuals of a guy staggering under the weight of a stolen big-screen television were masking the hundreds of potential photos of a man or a woman scavenging for food or water in the aftermath of a monumental disaster (hello Hurricane Katrina) and in the face of governmental incompetence and indifference (hello Bonehead Bush).

___________________

* It's disingenuous to say that these impositions are only a fraction of our days.

I would guesstimate that the "average" commute for a full-time worker is 45 minutes, each way, for an average of 1 hour and thirty minutes spent commuting five days a week.

Many of us have lunch "hours" in offices too-far afield from our home communities to allow us to do any more than work through lunch at our desks (this includes practically everyone I know), or sit in drably beige lunch rooms with other dispirited co-workers. (Okay--maybe it's not that bad. I'm in sort of a mood.) With the work day, that's another nine hours a day gone.

Most of us probably do sleep close to eight hours a night. We waste morning time in such frivolous pursuits as eating breakfast and showering, grooming, and dressing. We'll call that another hour a day and now we're up to nineteen and a half hours. Four and a half hours left.

Well, there's dinner, followed by clean-up. Magnanimously assuming you don't eat take-out every night, I'm going to clock that process in at an average 45 minutes a day. Three hours and forty-five minutes left.

Those of us (arguably) lucky enough not to have offspring or even pets to be fed and walked are now free. All we have to do is change into comfy clothes, empty today's lunch bag into the dishwasher, pick and pack tomorrow's lunch, check the snailmail for bills, check our email for more interesting communications, and collapse gratefully into a chair for the remaining hour or two of the day.

Those of you who have kids, two-legged or four-legged can write the time off--the four-legged ones don't need help with their homework but the two-legged ones don't have to be taken outside and introduced to a suitable piece of grassland to do their business on. Both kinds need a bit of TLC at the end of a long day.

Weekends? Don't make me laugh. Grocery shopping, laundry, house cleaning, taking the car in for service, hair appointments, dental appointments, doctor's appointments, and you-name-it. Some weeks it's a relief to go back to work on Monday, so we can rest.

How do I get side-tracked onto these ridiculous and inane pathways?

Right now I'm tempted to explain to y'all how leaving the television off for an entire evening frees both your time and your brain for other, more interesting and productive pursuits, but I'm uncomfortably aware that this footnote is almost longer than the blog entry, the theme of which I've entirely forgotten by now.

Shoulda' Guessed

So, I'm reading along in this article about Google, China, and the mushrooming cyberwars, and I run across this bit:

In conventional and even nuclear warfare, your assets are relatively easy to measure against those of your opponent. You have 75 tanks and your opponent has 125, but yours are fitted with better weapons systems – roughly even.

And I'm thinking, well, no, not necessarily. But I'm willing to accept it--provisionally--until I see whatever point you're about to make.

Then the article then goes on to say:

Cyberwarfare is not like that. Your assets consist of your opponents' vulnerabilities and your ability to exploit them. This means that to defend yourself, you have to breach your opponent's defences: implicit in any cyberdefence strategy is the development of a comprehensive offensive capability.

And by now the hair is standing up on the back of my neck and I'm muttering, "No, no, no, that's just not true.

I was not, then, surprised to see the next sentence:

This was the thinking behind the Bush administration's Total Information Office....

Any time someone says something that's demonstrably insane, the next sentence seems to attribute the idea to the recent Bonehead/Crookface debacle.

(Unless it's a discussion on the history of something demonstrably insane--in those circumstances, it's invariably traced back to Wretched Reganism.)

P.S. The article goes on to say that while the psychosis of Total Information Assimilation has been abandoned, the most neurotic offshoots live on, under other bureaucratic umbrellas.

P.P.S. Yes, I know that the whole Big Brotherhood of Homeland Security was shoved down Bonehead & Crookface's protesting throats.

Scavenged Links From ?

Because, yes, I am a science fiction geek, I give you History of the Scienceers.

Thanks to Google's recent front-page mention, I found out that Babbage's dream machine got built. How cool is that?

I'm never sure how accurate these things are, but I love 'clocks' that measure in "real time." This one tells how much CO2 we're generating, ticks off the number of crimes occurring in the US, and counts down to the time when we're going to run out of oil, among a lot of other things.

Those of you who know me well know I like few things better than finding more stories on how almost everything is Reagan's fault. If you include a few swipes at Tricky Dick, you might just make my day. 1968 & 1980 - the years this "new" (or, should I say, "neo") Republican Party started their march toward power and the country's decline into madness. (More Reagan 'revelations' here.)

The rest of the evil we see is Bush's fault because he's a congenital jackass who, yes, should probably be prosecuted (except that I can still see a value in the immunity granted to a sitting President). (Darn it.)