Prowed to be A Merkin
When I first moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, the mayor of DC was Marion Barry. He was not a very good mayor–he was too corupt, inept, and apt to be too casual about his illegal drug use–but he was routinely re-elected. He was black and very popular among the black majority in DC. Being a suburban white guy, I never really understood; nor did the people I knew, who were also mostly suburban white guys. Sometime later, the theory developed that supporting Berry was an expression of the you-ain't-gonna-tell-US-what-to-do attitude. Regardless of how often DCs residents pulled the trigger of the gun they kept pointing at their own feet, if anyone pointed it out, well, they'd see who they could push around.
No doubt because of my age, and that I grew up in the 60s, I tend to believe that the current wave of reactionary fervor and American nationalism was rooted there in the civil-rights movement and the feeling of disenfranchisement that it gave to anxious white men. Of course, it did no such thing, since Freedom is not in limited quantities that must be carefully husbanded and doled out sparingly only to the deserving. But they, the White backbone of reactionary America, felt like it did, and it made them angry. Then along came Vietnam, and Nixon, and Women, and Gays, and who knows what other plagues on entitlement of Biblical proportions. They certainly didn't help the old White guys feel any more secure.
Well, no one's going to push them around no more. They never got to nuke Qaddafi's ass (remember how he was certain to destroy the world?), never got to whup the Ruskies, and had to make do with that despot from Panama. Boy, he was a danger, but we showed him!
Well, no more. We went in there and we got that Saddam guy, we got his ass real good, and no World Government is going to tell us what to do. So speaketh the reactionary White guy. And soon America will be a safe haven, ready for Jesus' return.
During the last election, I was willing to believe that the electorate was simply naieve and took all the half truths, untruths, and euphemisms at face value, and thought the boldly outrageous promises to be witty, rhetorical irony.
Apparently not. And this time, there's no excuse really. People know exactly what they were voting for, and they're likely to get it. Is it at all credible that they were just dazzled by the President's new clothes?
Election Day
I always turn thoughtful and philosophical on election day. Today, here in Maryland, is a very pretty election day this time, too. The weather is just perfect for this time of year.
I voted earlier. Late morning is my usual time to vote, well after the morning yuppie rush-hour. I always seem to show up about the time that the rush–such as it is–of retired voters start showing up. It seems to make me feel extra patriotic to be voting along with all these people who get out their canes and walkers and have to expend much more time and energy to get to the voting booth than I do. Are they more inclined to see it as something important to do than younger people?
So now we're waiting for results. I rather like this time in between casting my vote and seeing how things come out. At the moment I'm feeling reasonably optimistic that the American People might wake up in time to elect a less corupt Administration, although I wouldn't bet on it right now. It's a bit of a shame though, that if they do the new people will have to waste most of their effort cleaning up all the Bush messes.
At my polling place (I've always had to vote in churches, which I admit makes me feel a little uncomfortable), we had the new touch-screen, computerized voting systems. It seemed to work fine, but why wouldn't it appear to? A week ago we heard a report on the radio that, in a side-by-side test with traditional voting machines, the computerized system had gotten the same answer! It's far from a surprise that it should, of course. Amidst all the reasonable concern about how easily the computerized systems can be manipulated, this bit of headline reassurance was the result of entirely the wrong experiment, the outcome of a badly designed question. There was no doubt that the computer systems could get the correct count, the questions were all about how easily they could be corrupted to produce a desired answer. Alas, this question was never tested.
Speaking of counting votes and thinking back to the vote count in Florida four years ago, I have another issue about the statistics of counting that I need to write about, namely, the futility of recounts when the voting is that close. Basically, in that case, the result (who won by how few hundreds of votes) was random, and would have been different each time the ballots were counted, corruption aside. It's in the nature of counting things.
Speaking of corruption and voting, I haven't heard any headlines yet today about overt scandals at any polling places, but it was in my mind. While I was waiting to have my name checked against the roll, a man in the line next to me was surprised to discover that his name was not on the list. He was black. What was he thinking right then? One of the judges came right over to help him straighten things out.
Speaking of the polling judges, some of them looked familiar from previous years, but all of them seemed engaged and delighted to be doing something important and helpful. It's creates a nicer atmosphere, and also inspires a bit more confidence in their honesty. As each of us voters left, they gave us a little sticker and said "Thanks for voting", as though they appreciated it personally.
Speaking of the little "I voted" sticker now on my shirt, it also says "Yo Voté". It made me think of times still in my memory when the great issue dividing the electorate was creeping bilingualism, particularly in the SouthWest, a cultural scourge that, if allowed to get a foothold, would surely mark the end of our civilization as we knew it. So thought the same type of reactionaries who are now convinced that letting two men marry each other would be the death knell of society as surely as an "exit" sign in English and Spanish. I suppose reactionaries serve some purpose, but it's not obvious to me what the purpose might be. At any rate, I decided that the "Yo Voté" sticker was a sign that celebrating the marriage of two men or two women would–in my lifetime–seem as natural and American as, well, as voting.
Whose Petard Hoists Whom?
The dissembling in this year's presidential campaign–and politics in general–would be much more entertaining if it didn't seem to matter quite so much. Nevertheless, one occasionally has to laugh.
Today had Bush accusing Kerry: my opponent voted for the invasion of Iraq, and now he says it was the wrong war.
Kerry says: My support was based on information that later turned out to be incorrect.
Now, is there anyone (except for the President, who is notably out of touch with reality anyway) who actually believed at the time that the White House was not manufacturing all the "evidence" that they used to justify rushing to invade Iraq?
Of course not. We all knew. Specifically, Kerry and his colleagues in Congress knew. Nevertheless, patriotic blood-lust was running high and it was popular to pretend to believe the manufactured "evidence" and vote to authorize the use of force.
They knew better then. But now, what do we have? With the war going so badly and no WMDs, the White House is forced to pretend that they thought the "evidence" was good at the time, and that it has only now been discovered to have been based on faulty intelligence.
And so, having painted themselves into this deceitful corner so neatly, the White House really has no recourse but to accept Kerry's disingenuously stating that he was innocently hoodwinked at the time, unless the Administration wishes to reveal the even bigger fraud that they knew all along that their "evidence" was all made up. Tsk tsk.
Instrumental vs. Choral Musicians
In addition to being an organist, Isaac is a choral conductor. I am fundamentally an instrumental musician ('cello), although I do some singing, too. Frequently I complain to Isaac about singers who seem to have no rhythmic sense and, in particular, no sense of rhythmic pulse, the feeling that there is an uninterruptable flow to the beat of a piece of music. It's been my observation, that I've grossly generalized, that vocal musicians have no hesitation about putting bits of extra beats–even one or two entire beats–into a bar of music. This is the sort of thing that makes instrumentalist (and dancers!) pull their hair out, or break their legs.
So, Isaac and I were talking about this phenomenon on the way home tonight from dinner, and this time is when we made the connection between the instrumentalists and the dancers contrasted with the singers: the singers are not very physical at all when they produce their music, they just move their mouths, whereas instrumentalists (particularly string players) and dancers are physical when they produce (or respond to) their music. This stuck us as a very sensible guess at what might be at the root of the extra-beat phenomenon.
In: All, Notes to Richard
The Value of Stocks
I've been toying lately with the idea of becoming an economist. It doesn't seem all that hard from what I can tell, and it seems the easiest route to winning a Nobel prize–much easier than, say, physics–since they seem to give them to economists who do the best job of pretending to be a scientist.
The other day I heard the result of some econmic analysis on the radio: some economic indicator (like the consumer-price index) was up. But, so the analysis went, the price increases were very "localized", so that if you subtracted out those things whose price went up, the CPI actually went down!
Clearly this economic analyst doesn't understand statistics, or averages, but believes in the legitimacy of deleting "outliers" (data thought to be "clearly" bad) from a statistical sampling. (This will be part of a future essay on the way statistical sampling works.) Making up bogus data and then making up bogus explanations for it was something I thought I could do pretty well.
It puts me in mind of the anectdote told about Eisenhower (or Truman, or…) who expressed shock when informed that fully half the American people had below-average intelligence! (It's still true, too.)
Anyway, a few days back I was reading about the stock market, and stock valuation, and all the metrics analysts come up with to try to give objective valuations to stock prices. It stuck me that clinging to the notion that stocks even have an objective value is as silly as clinging to the notion, strongly held in the first part of the twentieth century, that the value of money depended on having reserves of gold to back it up.
I guess I'll have to ponder this idea some more and write about it, as I keep promising to do about most fragments of thoughts. In the meantime, if any of us thinks up a way to exploit this realization commercially (i.e., that stocks do not have intrinsic value), let me know.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Notes to Richard
Being a Wedge Issue
When I think of it, I like to read things at Democratic Underground. I particularly enjoy the column written by "The Plaid Adder". (Do you suppose Dick Cheney will call me up in high dudgeon if I mention that The Adder is herself an out lesbian?) Anyway, she concluded her column called October Surprise by writing
My partner just called; she's coming home from the phone bank. It's been a rough year to be a wedge issue. John Cornyn has called us box turtles; Rick Santorum has called us perverts; Alan Keyes has called us selfish hedonists; and now John Kerry has been pilloried for calling us all God's children. After four years of fighting to protect what we love about our country from the people who are trying to destroy it, I think we have earned the right to call ourselves patriots. And together with the thousands of ordinary Americans who have joined the battle this time around, I think we can also call ourselves the October surprise.
I suppose I just liked it enough to put it here. It's my blog, right? Besides, I know what she means about it's being a tought year to be a wedge issue. I'm also in the mood for a bit of October surprise.
Martin Gardner on Natural Selection
REM dreaming surely serves some useful function, otherwise why would evolution have invented it?
–Martin Gardner, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2000), p. 216.
Like any good scientist, and uncomfortably like many bad pseudo-scientists, I have my own share of crackpot theories that I believe in. One of them is the idea that an abundance of people, scientists and non-scientists alike, misunderstand and therefore misapply the concept of Natural Selection in evolution, because of a rather simple but profound confusion concerning the logic of the "excluded middle".
They mistakenly believe that natural selection works positively to select for beneficial characteristics, rather than negatively to select against detrimental characteristics. To the excluded-middle people (e.g., "You're either for us or against us" or "If you don't hate homosexuals then you're promoting homosexuality" or "You either trust the President or you hate America"), this distinction has no import, since they see the two as logically equivalent (and would likely dismiss it as some sort of double-negative drivel).
This mistaken view would have it that newly developed characteristics fall into one of two categories: 1) a characteristic that is beneficial to the organism's survival; or 2) a characteristic that is detrimental to the organism's survival. Unfortunately this ignores the third possibility: 3) a characteristic that is neutral to the organism's survival.
I'm sure that on first reading this third option wouldn't seem to get us much further in clarifying the operation of Natural Selection, but it does. There are implications, which I'll try to get back to discussing later, that bear on the ridiculous notions that theorists invent to explain things like elephants' trunks, and those silly controversies about "missing links" and the "half-an-eye" or "half-a-wing" conundrums.
Newspaper Spin
I subscribe to "Outlet Wire" a daily serving of gay-related newspaper headlines from stories found on the internet compiles by Outlet Radio. In a recent listing, we saw the following two headlines, side by side:
"Gay Marriage Plays Quiet Role in Elections" [AP via ABCNews], and
"Gay marriage dominates US elections" [Navhindtimes]
Which is it to be? Are we so trivial that it makes no difference, or so important that most straight Americans can think of nothing else during this election season?
Republican Lemmings
In an e-mail to me, my father asked the rhetorical question:
Why do so many of the middle income people, who are the largest segment of the U.S. population, think they are so well off under the Bushies?
I think the short answer is: greed. I believe this is related to a phenomenon about which I've planned to write at some length (naturally), related to the differences in perspective between 1) those of us who understand our statistical chances of winning a lottery and don't waste our money; vs 2) those people who understand the chances, but go with their overwhelming feeling that "someone's got to win–it might as well be me!"
Middle-class Republican Lemmings remain mired in the mid-twentieth-century brainwashing that Democrats are tax-and-spend, wild-eyed liberal pinko-homo-commies, while Republicans believe in small government and fewer taxes. They persist in these erroneous notions despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, particularly the middle-class Lemmings, who have apparently missed the insurgency of wild-eyed theocratic & despotic reactionaries that have taken over the Republican (cut-taxes-and-spend) party.
So, even though the Republican party has now become the spend, spend, spend party of ever bigger government and severely reduced civil liberties (not to mention elective wars for profiteering corporations, etc.), Republican Lemmings continue to think that voting Republican will give them, individually, a better chance of getting ahead where, it is mistakenly assumed in this scenario, that getting ahead means leaving lots of others behind.
Faux Facts
An editorial in The Charlotte [NC] Observer (Oct. 17, 2004), while detailing very good reasons why these former supporters [i.e., the newspaper] of Bush will support Kerry in this election, makes the following statement:
The president's tax cuts, combined with increased federal spending,
did help the economic recovery.
Stop press! I know that newspapers like to deal in facts (although they frequently find ways to finess the issue–another essay topic), and this looks like a fact, but it is not. Despite its appearance of scientific certainty, it is neither certain nor even a scientific question.
It is, in fact, an undecidable question. With only one US economy, and one tax cut made at a singular point in history, there is no experiment in progress whose outcome can determine whether the alledged cause–the tax cuts–had an actual effect–economic recovery. NB: this observation has nothing to do with misdirections, say, like arguing whether we've actually had a "recovery". It is simply a statement that this proposition is, in principle and in fact, unknowable as a statement of truth, and it might be better not to present it as though it were.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
Gay Rights, Civil Rights
Margaret Kimberley, in her Freedom Rider: Gay Rights, Civil Rights column from The Black Commentator (issue #110), talked about comparisons between discrimination faced by gay people and that faced by black people, and how "the black experience" as an image has been co-opted by opponents and proponents of gay equality, lately in the "debate" about marriage equality for gay people. Speaking of the opponents, she says:
The sleaziest among them even endorse George W. Bush because he is right on what they see as a moral issue, having defined immorality purely by sexual activity. Waging war or kidnapping an elected head of state are apparently not worthy of mention when morality is discussed. One particularly foolish reverend, Gregory Daniels of Chicago, made this unforgettable statement: “If the KKK would oppose gay marriage I would ride with them.”
This clarifies for me the uneasy feeling (always bordering on jaw-dropping incredulity) that I have had throughout the "debate"–and, indeed, most anytime that the subject of homosexuality comes up–namely, how disproportionate the response has been from opponents. Obviously, this can, has been, and will continue to be the subject of many essays, but here's one form of the question put in rather stark terms:
Is keeping two men from marrying so important that black people should get into bed [as it were] with the KKK to make certain that it never comes to pass?
World Poll on US Election
This article in La Press [Montreal] reports on a survey done by 10 newspapers around the world (and from outside the US).
In the startling pull-quote
In a world overwhelmingly opposed to the re-election of President George W. Bush and to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the United States [i.e., Republicans in deep denial] can look first to the Russian and Israeli peoples for support.
we have ample fodder for amusing smear headlines like "Bush Supported by Russia" and such. La Press reports several results, things like most people think the US invasion of Iraq only increased world terrorism, or most people do not think US Democracy is a good model right now for government. The comfort in all this is, such as it is, that it's the current American government and not the American people who are out of favor with the World's population, a version of "hate the sin, love the sinner" suitable for application to Bush Republicans.
As I hear repeated more and more now, particularly by non-Americans, the stupifyingly impenetrable question remains: since voting for Bush is such a patently stupid and dangerous choice, why do the polls insist that the election will be so close? Cynical as I am, I don't really want to believe that all the obvious reasons could be the real reasons.
Maryland Drivers and Turn Signals
My friend and colleague, James Howard, asks in his blog: why don't Maryland drivers use turn signals? (The poor boy is originally from Ohio but then, I'm originally from Kansas, so perhaps that has no bearing.)
At any rate, I once formulated an hypothesis about Mayland drivers and the use of turn signals. In the DC suburbs here, a great many people work for the federal government; seemingly most in our city (Bowie) work for the National Security Agency. That's the background observation.
I figure most people around here, therefore, approach using turn signals on a need-to-know basis. It's part of their built-in outlook on life, and they view it as a security issue. Is there any reason that the driver behind or in front of you really needs to know that you will be turning?
Either that, or it's related to competitiveness in driving (which phenomenon is one of the foundations for my Theory of Driving Behavior, about which I'll write more someday, including my short list of Rules for Washington Driving). In short, the thought process goes like this: "This is my road, asshole, and no way am I going to give you any power over me by indicating that I'm about to turn."
As I write this, I realize that whichever effect is at the root of the behavior, it is basically anti-social, non-cooperative behavior. This is, of course, contrary to safe driving and smooth traffic flow for everyone.
(Memo to self: work on the game-theoretic analysis of anti-social driving behavior, which will demonstrate that most of the things that irritate us while driving are brought on by our own bad driving habits.)
Beginning the Blog
I have finally succumbed to continual questions about why I don't blog by starting this blog. I'm not altogether convinced that I am spontaneous enough to make it worth saying anything in this fashion; on the other hand, I find more and more that each day brings additional disconnected and disjointed thoughts, and that I need to keep them someplace. This is it.