Pipelines and Spoiled Brats

Obamas decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline was very disturbing in two ways: first, because it was precisely what was not needed right now here in America, and second because it shows our President to have no understanding what he is doing or why. At a time when the number one issue should be jobs, and the Keystone would not only provide these jobs in terms of construction and further development of the new oil shale fields that are Americas fastest growing industry right now, but also provide demand for manufactured goods like steel and foundry items from the suffering East and Midwest, our President, already facing a potentially difficult reelection, has decided that he will give up the last chance he has to make his reelection a cakewalk. If the economy booms, then none of the assorted clowns currently running for GOP candidate will even have a chance against him, but alas for Obama, this is one boat he has missed. His reason for this dismal choice for both himself and his country: the claims of some environmentalists.

Now the ball is in Canadas court. An alternate pipeline could run from the same locations in Alberta westward to a small, undeveloped port on an inlet 70 miles long called Kitimat in British Columbia. Not only would it carry oil to China, but it would also carry oil along the well developed Inside Passage seaway to the Puget Sound for refining at Anacortes, WA and the American market. But here, again, the Greens are not satisfied.

So why, precisely, are they not satisfied? The biggest reason they are not satisfied, though it is not the only reason, is because it will "delay the development of non-carbon energy sources." Now for environmentalists in America today, this means wind and solar. Wind is extremely unreliable, and solar is astronomically expensive. What's more, the fact that solar can operate off-grid gives it a natural niche market outside of the regular electric grid, so if it can't be successful with substantial government subsidies plus a niche market, then you know it really stinks. Wind, of course, is unreliable, and a smart grid that would make it more reliable by sharing power from different geographic points would also be so susceptible to electromagnetic storms from space as to naturally be completely destroyed and take months to rebuild every 8-10 years. The alternative proposition of battery farms would be outlandishly expensive and require constant maintenance. How precisely something that requires constant input of material resources can be "sustainable" is quite beyond me.

Another reason they're not satisfied is because extracting tar sands is energy intensive. This charge is true. However, extracting oil from shale by current methods is not energy intensive, and as shale drilling becomes more and more common (tar sands is slightly older technology) the less expensive energy cost will be a deciding factor in terms of switching away from tar sands production to shale production. Right now, the massive expansion of shale drilling, especially in North Dakota where unemployment is only 3.5% (and lower near Williston) as a result, has driven up the cost of purchasing equipment for shale drilling. This is a good thing in the long run as it means more capacity will be available in the future, but in the short run means that shale is unlikely to replace any existing production until this bottleneck is widened. In the long run, this capital cost will be gone and shale will replace tar sands, especially since just the (much smaller far southern tail) of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota contains at least 3.65 billion barrels of oil, and I suspect that this analysis by the USGS was understated partially by pressure from the Obama administration and paritally by laziness, or as the report puts it: "They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates." The first rule of engineering is if you want to be lazy, always understate your result so that nobody cares.

Then there is simply the old environmentalist hatred of economic development. This is somewhat connected to the very last concern of environmentalists to be listed here, but this really is where I begin doubting the character of environmentalists as people. The reality is that, far from being some Garden of Eden, the third world is a place where illegal loggers destroy rainforests, poachers with machine guns kill off endangered species, massive sprawling cities come up over night and coal plants put mercury and radiation in to the air by the bucket full. It is also a place where in Monrovia, Liberia, the people poop on the beach, allowing untreated human sewage to go straight in to an aquifer while also stinking up the air and despoiling a beautiful 5-mile strip of pristine sand. The problem with environmentalists is they expect the full regulatory ability of a first-world country without the society or, frankly, resources, that made it possible. In short, they are spoiled brats.

And that brings us to our final environmentalist objection: locality. I shall begin by discussing the Canadian pipeline, as it is simply their most egregious abuse. All throughout the internet and journalism, we find various environmentalists and journalists, who know nothing about how development takes place, put up pictures of this pristine, perfect wilderness of tremendous natural beauty (that is, for the record, almost completely contained in an archipelago of Canadian National Parks and Provincial Parks) that supposedly will be completely destroyed by the pipeline and economic development.

To put it bluntly, no it won't. People only think it will because they don't live there. If they did live there, they would know that mountains rise straight out of the sea on both sides of the Kitimat Inlet, making any kind of construction enormously expensive, and that Kitimat is at the eastern end of that inlet and the beginning of a long, and nowhere near as pristine or beautiful, flat typical river valley. It also is located SEVENTY MILES EAST of where most of the wilderness is. In fact, this is why the pipeline is sent so far north instead of simply going to Vancouver - to avoid those eternally annoying in the sense that only an engineer can understand mountains. They would also know that if there's one thing the coastline of British Columbia has an overabundance of, its beautiful, pristine, undeveloped coastline. There are no roads on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska running North-South from the Vancouver Suburbs to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of 800 miles, the reason why the most common accidental death in Alaska is plane crashes. It also won't because these areas are already protected as parks, both at the provincial and Canadian federal level, and there are far too many flatter, more valuable, riverside pieces of real estate nearer to Kitimat and the pipeline for lobbying by the businesses to even be profitable to them. It is also true that with a tidal range near 20 feet, any oil spill would not last very long but be swept out to sea pretty fast. But environmentalists think their asinine, immature, irrational fears justify the shutting down of an entire part of the world in economic activity, when everything that even can be done to protect that wilderness already is.

The original locality makes somewhat more sense, but only somewhat, to protest. That of course is the lands through the plains that the original Keystone XL would've run through. Of course, unlike BC, there are plenty of roads in the Plains, and even more in Texas. Lots of 2-lane or 4-lane roads going passed corn fields, unused infrastructure, tiny cities and all. This is true. It is also true that the Great Plains aquifer is pretty big, though one could counter that being so big its really not that easy to substantially impurify, and what oil would do is certainly no worse then what farmlands already do with fertilizers and pesticides. Oil also has the advantage over farmlands with their pesticides and fertilizers that it is not generally to the advantage of oil companies for their pipelines to be constantly leaking. It has yet another advantage that increasing land prices may drive the farms with their pesticides and fertilizers out of business. Further, there is the little matter of refining at Wood River, Illinois and Steele, Nebraska, right over the aquifer and the Mississippi River, where oil leaks and all manner of chemical spills are much more likely to happen then at the pipeline, and where the final expansion to Houston and Port Arthur could've eventually replaced those refineries by economies of scale, in the middle of a swamp where bacteria and a chemical-recycling ecosystem already can handle most water purity issues.

Yet even here, the same picture of the environmentalist as a spoiled brat emerges - unshaking, unwilling to compromise, loud, sort of like a toddler. Instead of seeing that some development, even if not constrained by the great mountains of the Kitimat Inlet, is neccesary to finance and safeguard environmental protection, they would rather shout and scream and yell and let everything go to some third world country where no chance exists for proper controls or procedures to prevent what they want to prevent. The result is that for every ton of smog they prevent in Southern California, two tons come across the pacific blown by winds from China, and the prairie starves, and no one even really pays close attention to what they are saying or any way of making a reasonable solution to the problem. There answer is to criticize China, a country doing its best to get out of poverty, who has no special interest in listening to much of anyone who lives on this side of the Pacific. The result also is that eventually, as people become poorer and poorer, the toddler who cried wolf may really get eaten after all.

We'll all be sad that day, just like any parent would be, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened, and that the child is gone forever and not coming back. When you yourself feed on irrationality, don't be too surprised if you eventually get fed to it. Environmentalists with no respect for reason will not be given reasonable attention, and this will be a collective judgement, not an individual one, applied to all environmentalists everywhere, whether they were part of the problem or not. They will not be heard, nor will anyone else about our very real environmental problems.

Evolution of a Meme

When the world-created the mind-numbing abberations of 4chan and reddit, I don't think anyone expected us to unleash a Golden Age of photography and art. Alas, it seems to have occurred!

Starting from the same birth group, 4chans /b/(random) board, also known as the seventh circle of Hell, as all the "Advice Dog" series, a simple, elegant and professional photograph of a wolf by Montana artist Jeff Vanaugha was cut up, cropped on to a pattern of colored rays and finally, TA-DA!!!:


But wait, there's more! We can't have too much of a good thing right? No, not possible, or as courage wolf would put it, "Get there, get more there!" We had to find more wolf pictures:


Sir Courage Wolf Esquire. This art is wonderful in that nearly anyone can claim it as their own, in this case a Britain and world in a crisis of identity.


Baby Courage Wolf, classic comedic juxtaposition. Did I mention that every one of these, has come in to being (including the original Courage Wolf) since June of 2010?


Insanity Wolf, a classic nightmare image with background clearly conjuring the emotions and thoughts required to contemplate it.

Finally, beyond adding to the great library of Meme, there are modifications of existing images:


Monsieur Le Courage Wolf. It may be art but it is not above the stereotype. It also is nowhere near as popular as the other deeper images that convey a far truer message or at least use better comedic forms. This brings up an important point: are unartistic television shows profitable because its what people want, or because they cost less to make and are more predictable, a crucial consideration for those who will spend money to advertise a product on TV, and they are still tolerable to the audience?

Insanity Wolf in turn became a major meme all its own, inspiring numerous spin offs. In the interest of limited bandwidth, we will largely no longer be showing many additional images. However, nearly all memes originated in similar ways - a first, followed by a second, followed by seconds of seconds, each time taking on the watermark and unique thoughts and emotions of the people who created in anonymity before it. I believe it was Ronald Reagan who once said "You would be surprised what you can achieve in life if you don't care who gets the credit."

Some memes also originated as spoofs of the websites where memes originate. Included are "Pedobear," an image of a "Protection Bear" posted whenever child pornography was posted in a 4chan thread, the joke, of course, being that he must show up for the wonderful child pornography, while his smiling bearish face juxtaposed with a creepy pedophile creates humor too good to buy! Also Redditors Wife, who is constantly being ignored in the interest of Reddit, and the various Pokemon memes (including one of Ash Ketchum as a Hispanic) that obviously spoof the fascination of 4chan users with such ridiculously retarded things - in both cases spoofing the readers as opposed to the site itself.

Lastly, let us consider the Baron Ducreaux, in some ways an expression of the longing in our society for civility, depth, and sophistication as it juxtaposes good manners and rap music:


Centuries ahead of his time, the French court painter Baron Joseph Ducreaux famously painted himself using body language that would not become the norm for another 200 years in imitation, according to the artist, of a Mockingbird. (Painting title: Portrait de l'artiste sous les traits d'un moqueur, translated Self-portrait of the artist in the guise of a mockingbird by KnowYourMeme.com) This is far from the only unusual painting that the Baron did in his time with the doomed court of Louis XVI, as he experimented often with facial expressions and features as a vehicle for describing personality, a crucial problem in an era before photography and easy travel, when portraits were used to show wealthy women and men their prospective mates. Though his painting are in the Louvre, what likelihood is there that the Barons work could've achieved such notoriety and widespread appreciation without 4chan, reddit, facebook, and the other pathetic wastes of time of the unwashed masses?

Unfortunately, such widespread appreciation has also inspired modification, including famously the Steve Buscemi Ducreux where Steve Buscemis face is inserted in the place of Baron Ducreaux's, but since in doing so the authors have satirized Steve Buscemi's manner and personality, have they not, albeit unwittingly, contributed to Ducreaux's legacy? By satirizing the satire, a new work of art has been born. Andy Warhol, in particular, DESIRED imitation with his simultaneously kitsch and inspiring works on Marilyn Monroe and soup cans, and purposefully sought out the field of advertising as a place to find true beauty.

There is too often a tendency to call putting weird strings and things on paper modern art, when the true modern art is right underneath our noses, evolving, as always, with the modern world. If any of you wish to further inquire about the art of Memes, I would suggest KnowYourMeme.com, a specialty news site that analyzes online trends, as a broad-based and reliable source.

All images from MemeGenerator.net, and with clear legal intent, discarded works.

Guest Post - Jamie B Musing

With all that's been happening in the news in politics lately, it's been a while since this blog hosted a true culture article. In the spirit of both this and advancing the blogosphere, I present you a guest post from the esteemed Jamie B Musings of "Culture Shock: Everything Pop Culture 5 Days a Week." The above blogger image is authorized for use on this blog only.

Back in college, I was listening to the radio when I heard a story that disgusted and irritated me. It was about two boys, ages 15 and 13, who were molesting their 8-year-old half sister. The mother had left the girl in her brothers’ care while she was at work, and the child reported it to a teacher at her school. The boys claim they got the idea from watching Jerry Springer. It wasn’t just the molestation of a child that bothered me. It was also the fact that, once again, someone is blaming their own actions on media and this case would more then likely stir yet another debate on the effects of media of small children.

This is not the first time this has happened. Different forms of media have been blamed for everything from rape to armed robbery. Different songs by artists such as Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne have been blamed for suicides. Not only that, but the artists have been sued because of it as well. Then there was "The Catcher in the Rye", which has been linked to several celebrity stalkings, including the death of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of former President Ronald Reagan. Once, Christopher Pike, an author of young adult horror novels was asked if he felt responsible for the suicide of a kid who had read some of his books, even though he never promoted suicide in his work. In fact, he portrayed negative consequences for the act in his "Remember Me" Trilogy. What is even worse, many conservative groups use these cases as ammunition to censor certain materials which is not the answer and one step towards creating the world Ray Bradbury wrote about of Fahrenheit 451. What it all comes down to is too many people are trying to use the media to make excuses for the crimes they commit.

I find it hard to believe any sane and rational person would commit a crime just because they saw it in the media. It is time for people to stop searching for the easy answer. Let's face it... there are no easy answers in life. The human mind is a complex machine and I believe when someone commits violent acts, we need to look much deeper than the media to understand them. We also need to be more aware of what's going on around us and act accordingly instead of burying our heads in the sand. Look at the Virginia Tech shooting, for example. The shooter was known to be a problem on campus and had scared more than a couple of students and teachers and that wasn't the first time something that that had happened somewhere. Nothing will ever stop all violence, but I really do believe that we can only make it better if we're willing to look deeper than media to solve the problem.

Mannies wanted

Eugen Keler with his black nanny, 1874. Public domain by copyright expiration.

Not long ago, really only a matter of decades, entire generations of wealthy Southern males and females were raised not by their mothers, but by, usually black, servant ladies who went by names like "Miss Marcy" and "Miss Denise" and who were given the important job of raising the next generation of a wealthy, Southern family. When these men came in to town, the first person they visited was not their parents, it was who raised them.

It was a good deal for the Mannies too. The pay may not have been much, but their erstwhile "masters" were often very generous in the form of gifts and benefits, and this member of the family was taken care of exactly like that - a member of the family. And they could live in a nice room in a nice mansion, and when the family got Filet Mignon or ate out, so more often then not did they.

Today, wealthy, intelligent women with hard careers aren't having children. Now it is true that there is the little matter of passing a bowling ball through a tiny hole (it may be hard to "put a camel through the eye of a needle" in the words of scripture, but women do it on a regular basis), and no one can really help you with that, besides the obvious possibility of cutting you open, but we as a society can help you with what comes after. We can provide Mannies, people to take care of the child you are too busy for, and he will still be yours, and family, but if you are too busy with your career what is not neccesary need not be minded.

It seems that today we have a resistance or hate or even unnegotiableness to the notion of Mannies, to the notion of someone else raising our children, but we shouldn't. Why shouldn't someone who has time look after our kids? Is it better if no one is there for them just because you can't be? Is it better to simply never have children, and never experience any of it, just because you can't handle all of it? And obviously this solution only works for the wealthy. But why shouldn't it work for who it does?

Meet the Proles

Public Domain image by Pearson Scott Foreman

One thing that never ceases to shock me is the tendency of the electorate to hold on to oft repeated lies, even resfuse to hear statements to the contrary of them, and with no candidate has this been more true then Sarah Palin. What do people get out of speaking venom and lies against her? What is it about Palin that makes people not only swallow the lies about her hook, line and sniker, but then dismiss any challenge to those lies as unworthy of their hearing?

In "1984", there were some, shall we say, non-characters called the Proles. They are humans who are non-people, are so lost in their hate, anger, fear and willful ignorance that they will simply hate upon without question whoever the small elite decides as a target, not even quoting their own memories against it. They can be controlled by a single broadcast of the radio.

I don't know what brought America to the brink of becoming Oceania, but something did. Something made us so thoroughly lose ourselves in hate, anger and political parties that we will ignore all reasoning thereafter. Something made us that lazy, that cowardly, that inhuman. I'll leave you to figure out what it was, but when was the last time that someone attacking Sarah Palin gave a good reason why?

Any particular lies you would like addressed will be handled in the comment section.

UPDATE 10/5/2011: Sarah Palin will not be seeking the highest office in the land. She announced that family concerns have simply become too great. The only person in the world who can defeat Sarahcuda is her own daughter, and it seems that she has proved this adage once again.

The Story of Kenmore

The City logo of Kenmore, WA

All along the lake, east of Seattle, are mighty hills and muggy swamps, but there was one place in the far north, right where the lake ended, where the hills turned in to a plain. This spot had plentiful timber, and since it was the termination of the lake, and also flat, the first roads built eastward and northward ran through it. Further up the Sammamish River, which runs through it, was a great floodplain, but here, at this one place, the floods did not occur. Instead were great strands of timber, 20 feet in diameter and 300 feet in to the air.

A young McMaster from Kenmore, Ontario came to Seattle in 1889. A month after he got there, the city had burned down, and his future looked bleak. Kenmore, Ontario was in turn named for the Scottish village of Kenmore, on the Loch Tay in the highlands, by a McLaren who came there long before, from Kenmore, Scotland, and always had the Highlands in his blood. McMaster was not willing to throw in the towel, and heard tell of the great virgin timbers of the lakes northern shore, and knew of the roads that crossed there and the flat plains. He also knew of a river that, with the taming of the floodplains, was now deep enough for steamboats, and a canal they were building from the lake to the sea.

Not much later, he started a Shingle Mill at this point on the lake. There were many sawmills around, but shingle mills were less common, and greatly in demand as the population grew. He also built a great log boom, that both helped feed his shingle mill when demand was high, and helped feed sawmills on the lake when demand was low. Though the entire logging operation was abandoned in 1920, the growing community of Kenmore, named by McMaster for his former home, preserved the boom, maintaining it as a fishing and swimming dock for the good of all.

The community also took an abandoned barn, and in 1952, made it in to their first library. They built a school, and roadhouses, and restaurants, and expanded the road. They built parks, great ones that are still around, and preserved a beautiful old Mission style Seminary as part of St. Edwards Park. The road they maintained and expanded is now 522 Highway, a "State Route" that is a major eastward path in to Seattle. The road north, however, now runs further West, though the older road is maintained for local traffic as 527. St. Edwards Park is now a State Park.

In 1946, a swamp in Kenmore, unused for anything for many years, attracted the attention of three high school friends united after World War II. Jack Mines, Reg Collins, and Bob Monroe built a hangar in the swamp, and purchased a single plane, an Aeronca Model K. Over the years, service would increase in both volume and respect, and today, Kenmore Air is one of the largest seaplane operators in the world, and they are still based out of Kenmore, WA. The managerie of planes, dozens upon dozens of them, on the lot by the road is one of the richest sights you'll ever see.

In 1978, a science-based naturopathy university named Bastyr built itself in Kenmores southern outskirts. The university was started as extensive new legislation at both the state and federal levels had made times for natural medicine turbulent. With the National College of Naturopathic Medicines departure to Portland, Washington state legislators were threatening to suspend all licensing of naturopathic professionals as no college any longer existed in the state. A series of determined NCNM graduates understood that a school firmly built on scientific principles would not only save licensure in Washington, but grow respect for naturopathy nationwide. In the words of Dr. Mitchell, one of its founding fathers, "It was built on the best visions of what a really high-quality naturopathic institution could be." Far from being a stereotype, Bastyr sought full accredation and a scientific basis, and in my personal experience, also created one of the most helpful and down-to-earth professional climates I have ever found anywhere.

For many years they fared well with no city government, growing in population, wealth and serviceability, though they were recognized by the post office as an address, but in 1990, a bill by the Washington Legislature known as the "Growth Management Act" created development committees. These development committees told Kenmore that they would either start a city government, annex in to a neighbor, or let the county decide. The GMA also created a massive bureaucracy for the rezoning of land that leaves abandoned malls unused for decades and creates a major shortage of land for the kind of manufacturing and industry that any state but Washington would love to have. The GMA even, according to a farmer from Stanwood I spoke to, forces paperwork to be filed and consultation with bureaucracy to be made before any field larger then 10 acres can be tilled or planted. By 1998, against the will of its citizens, Kenmore was a "city," though it had been the size, stature and utility of a city for many years.

Despite the fact that Kenmore was built by individuals doing their thing and giving, voluntarily, to the communty, the State had to slip their greedy hands in to it. They forced Kenmore to do the "right thing" and waste tax dollars that never needed to be spent hiring people who never needed to be hired. And all in the interest of "Growth Management."

Sources: (In order of usage)

The public displays at Log Boom Park, Kenmore, WA

Kenmore Air Harbor Inc., "history"

Bastyr University, "At A Glance: Founding of Bastyr University"

Reagan Dunn, son of former Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn (R-8, till 2006), with regards to Totem Lake Mall and other underdeveloped or abandoned commercial properties. (GMA)

A farmer from Stanwood, WA with approximately 100 acres of vegetable growing land (GMA)

Image: Public Domain, official logo of city of Kenmore, click here for link.

Transportation and Time

Public domain, courtesy of Jorge Barrios

At a certain time during the Dark Ages, there were no cities in most of Europe, but just thousands of farms, spread across the clearings and meadows of Europe, and old Roman roads built long ago, crisscrossing between them. At the junctions of these roads, there might be ruins, that would go unnoticed as would whatever tiny, insignificant traffic crossed through them. The ports didn't operate in Europe, even as far away as Italy and Turkey, because of Viking raids, except in a few areas like Ireland, Danegild, and Normandy where the Norse set up there own, and the regions became wealthy as a consequence. In those days, all was done out of the manor house, and trade was very limited. Manors were extremely, bitterly poor, and highly self-sufficient, and noble lords had extreme authority and martial responsibility.

But then technology, bit by bit, began to improve. Castles allowed for the defense of harbors, opening the ports and the seas. Modern quarying developed, and with it a supply of marble. Trade with the Islamic empire brought spices and coffee to the new ports, while increases in population and the size and number of manor houses brought about an ecological disaster, the destruction of Europes forests, and with it the need to travel ever further for lumber and its replacements, clay brick and coal.

At the intersections of roads, you have the fastest route on average to anywhere. While going down the road your travel time to one particular place would decrease, for a few limited industrial enterprises that is indeed good enough, your travel time to all the other places those roads go to will increase so much more. Further, more customers and workers and material will cross through the intersection then anywhere else. Lodges, markets and taverns would set themselves up first, and then manufacturers and stables and warehouses would set up near the market, and with all of these little brick houses would sprout along every alleyway and available road as workers too chose the fastest transportation for their life.

Eventually, highly specialized businesses, utilizing the economic base of the city, would set up as well. These would include law offices, accountants, computers (in that day meaning people who would crunch numbers for you), moneylenders, and craftspeople like blacksmiths serving both sword and plowshare. Church and Government too would notice the city, and the workers and citizens serveable through it, setting up bureaucracy and courthouses, which in the dark ages didn't exist, along with fortresses, great cathedrals, universities and libraries, and comissioning artists and clockmakers to celebrate their authority in great squares and plazas. Criminals too would benefit from the economic base of the city, utilizing its many highways, services and people, as would entertainers.

The reality is that cities are a giant device for the conservation of time, by quickening transportation from one place to another, and the conservation of energy, by decreasing the distance that freight and people must travel to get to its customers and clients. Cities, in the end, are the product of their transportation, and the customers, employers, industry and resources they afford within a reasonable distance. If a city loses this, it has nothing, and is only an overpriced piece of land, but it is because of the ability to save people time, and as a result, allow them to live more, and do more, that people will pay 300 times as much as the same quanity of land in the country to own it. In the words of Ali from Burlesque, when talking about why she left Iowa, "I looked around and realized that I didn't see anyone I wanted to be." You can be more and do more in a city because where you go to do what you want to do is reachable in reasonable time.

Now in the recent past, people would live sixty miles out of the city and commute to wherever it was they worked. When people lived and worked in one place their entire lives, that made sense, but in a world where people change jobs on average every 2 years, it makes sense to be as close to as many employers as possible, and since industrial employers will opt for cheaper land along whatever railroad line leads to their suppliers, while extremely common businesses (e.g. drugstores) will opt for more minor, inexpensive junctions that they have the capacity to serve, not all of them will be in the big city. As we go in to the future, we find the employees act more like businesspeople, and the need for speed (and with it, the city) becomes greater then ever.

Some cities, like Seattle, are still stuck in the past imagining that transportation is just a quality of life issue, something we can tinker around with in social engineering and throw immesaurable costs on to, but across the lake from Seattle, Bellevue, on I-405, the eastern bypass of I-5, and the third city eastward on I-90, has expanded and improved its interstates, with its own money. The result has been a building boom, dozens of new towers, 40 stories tall, going up and new businesses moving in. Meanwhile, Seattle has lost its largest bank, Washington Mutual, to the financial slowdown, and no one seems quite set to replace it. But they still continue to toy with forcing people on to trains that zig zag at 35 mph instead of heading straight where they go. Voters constantly complain about transportation expense, but what they don't realize is that transportation is the heart and soul of their city life, is what allows them the opportunities they have.

Megafeature: A Summary of the Stings

Source Photobucket

One of the more remarkable innovations of the T.E.A. party has been the use of "sting" operations. These sting operations involve a hapless victim that the teamen in question feel is being disingenuous, and a disguise of a figure that they feel he or she will be honest to. Sometimes the plot itself is so absurd that its practicality serves as a lesson regardless of the result, and then even more absurdly, it is vindicated. Such an example was the sting operation against a ground manager of a Planned Parenthood clinic, who has since been fired:

Planned Parenthood Sting Video

The most disturbing part of this video comes at timemark 8:38, when the manager informs a pimp how to avoid being detected by the law, how to avoid arrest, so that he and his enslaved Columbian girls, scared and far from home, can continue violating the states prostitution law and abort the babies thus produced. The most troubling aspect, however, is the callous and unthinking way she talks to one of the most evil kinds of villains that can exist: a slaver, and not just a slaver, but one who violates females through forced prostitution.

Then there's the issue of government waste. For this we get the NPR sting, a sting against an organization that is supposedly a national radio station of the United States but has long been suspected of bias in favor of progressives. The NPR sting demonstrated (sort of, well get to that in a minute) numerous bigoted statements, from comparing conservative Christians to the Taliban, to hating upon gun owners and the federal standards enforced upon NPR that they do a more then good enough job bending already:

This sting is not without controversy, in fact it may be without support. Sources from all across the political spectrum, as far left as the Huffington Post and as far right as the Blaze (Glenn Becks newspaper/amalgamator) have criticized O'Keefes video for its extremely unethical and dishonest editing techniques. Many, in fact, the left-wing Brudowsky praised Glenn Beck for his extremely professional, objective, and powerful dissection of the "NPR Sting," and I am among many whose respect for Mr. Beck, an icon of the Tea Party and the right in general, has greatly increased. While Becks criticism is in general the most thorough and useful to read through, there is one particular quote from the Huffington Post criticism that I find especially potent:

While Schiller does say the Republican Party has been "hijacked" by the tea party and Christian evangelicals -- and is "fanatically involved in people's personal lives" -- it is evident in the full tape that he is not giving his own view but rather quoting two influential Republicans, according to reporter Folkenflik. Schiller does not challenge those assertions, but they are not his.

O'Keefe is also famous for his ACORN stings, including one where, with his girlfriend, he attempted (and nearly did, with extensive assistance offered) to acquire starting funds for a prostitution house that he would pay back on interest that ACORN could use for political campaigns. Before this, he attempted to have Lucky Charms removed from the Rutgers cafeteria because it is "offensive to his Irish heritage" and apparently caught a conversation with the dining chiefs on tape exposing the absurdity of the situation. He stated that he is "still in [his] bunker producing more videos. We're releasing another video in San Diego right now. I'm focusing on doing what I do best." Although congress looked to punish ACORN with a defunding bill, a Federal Court has ruled that such actions would be the exclusive remedy of the Judicial Branch. This is not the first time recently that we have seen our governments dormant constitutional protections awoken from their sleep, and everyone is watching as the American people push for reform and government officials pit "ambition against ambition" in a classic display of democratic, Madisonian magic.

The organization Life Dynamics dialed up 800 calls to Planned Parenthood stating that they needed an abortion for a 13-year-old to cover up impregnation by her 22-year-old boyfriend. This is illegal in all 50 states, but Planned Parenthood did not report any of these incidences. Just for the record, I actually support the actions of Planned Parenthood in this regard, as concealing a pregnancy is, at least in my mind, a good (if not the only good) reason for abortion as it is a case where putting up the baby for adoption is simply not good enough. This said, I know that many disagree with this sentiment, and technically it is against the (stupid) law, which requires all suspected cases of abuse to be reported to authorities by medical professionals.

And then finally, and greatest of all, is ClimateGate, the sting operation that may have fundamentally altered global environmental politics, and that the Democrat Party at large insists on ignoring the ramifications of. The product of a hacker, 1000 emails among staff at the UK's Climate Research Unit have been made public. Although FactCheck.org, in its examination of ClimateGate, disagrees that it disproves anthropogenic global warming, a conclusion a self-interested Saudi came to, it does agree that the emails show scientists "sometimes being rude, dismissive, insular, or even behaving like jerks" while the public has rightly responded to attitudes and interpersonal aggression, such as declaring global warming "settled science" along with the climategate emails, clearly not conducive to good science. While the ClimateGate emails may or may not (I have not read them myself) show the science to be false, they do show the scientists to be false, and with the alternative sources offered all being government entities (NOAA and NASA), we the public are left with little more then a few university degrees on which to trust theories that could fundamentally alter our lives.

Unfortunately, and we see this clearly with ClimateGate, named for the much lesser WaterGate, "operations" like these can only have a true impact (where the much better funded and marketed "Supersize Me!" failed) when a cultural context exists to support them.

To create such, we have a play with many characters. There's an arugula growing, elite talking, Harvard Law-Chicago Cesspool Obama intent on breaking the budget with spending in excess of even Bush. There's an irrepressible lady from California and gentleman from Nevada who seem intent on shattering any popular or political movement against them. There's a lightbulb ban, an "individual mandate" (thou must purchase something, approved by thine bureaucratic overlords, if thou seekest to breathe) and big shot corporations receiving welfare while "99ers" go cold and hungry in the street. There's government destroying cars to make people buy more and a liberal establishment that wants congress to pass a bill so they can read what's in them. There's an American people who do not even understand all the "Hope" and "Change" that their initially lauded leader has brought.

In short, political overreach, and too much game playing, manipulation and intrigue for an American people who know they will be the ones to pay the bill.

Responding to the controversy, Slate commisioned blogger Weigel held a twitter conversation with one of the publishers of the original, edited, NPR Sting video. The exchange is revealing. The actual conversation reveals an NPR chief quoting a top donor for the Republican Party as saying he voted for Obama because he's scared of the xenophobic, gun-toting, racist post-Obama Party. When Weigel challenges him on this account, the publisher responds: "No, it's really not. Go ahead and try to make the argument Schiller isn't CLEARLY agreeing with them. Go ahead. Moron."

To the publishers credit, the actual tone expressed in the original quote does indicate, at the very least, a fear that the Kingmaker may be right. And a Kingmaker is generally held in high esteem. Also to the publishers credit, while this "edit" is not good journalism, username "simon templar" is not a professional journalist, and clearly feels very overwhelmed as this tweet reveals: "nobody likes an access journalist/tweeter. we'll get you the info/emails you asked for eventually, I'm sure." It is also worth noting that every controversial remark attributed, falsely or otherwise, to the NPR head in the sting, is commonly found among liberals on the internet and in IRL, including, of course, the "gun-toting nutjobs" line that is argued over in this article.

"simon templar" is a common man, pushed in to uncommon work. He is, in fact, out of his league, but right now, who IS in their league?

Which leads me to my next point, what's become irrelevant. While teamen with camcorders flood the internet with "stings," documentaries by top Hollywood directors like Oliver Stone (e.g. "W") go totally unwatched and unremembered. I can't even remember the last time a story about a Hollywood star, a bigshot CEO, or a Harvard professor made the papers. The only "elites" who still seem to make papers, in fact, are the politicians we're all scared of and a few big media demagogues, like Krugman and O'Reilly, who are little more then highly paid whipping boys for the common citizens. In the words of Scripture: "the last shall be first, and the first shall be last."

And then there's the Middle East. While here at home we break our own elite peacefully, using the full well-oiled machinery of our democracy and a thousand years of Western legal wisdom, the streets of Benghazi are soaked in blood. The alleys of Bahrain lay covered in shell casings, and aircraft streak over the Mediterranean carrying every sort of explosive payload. In Egypt, the army, a traditional symbol of tyranny and distrust, is helping to provide for what the Arab world doesn't have, insisting on all parties respecting each other and disarming those who would hurt the people. That Army has so much to be proud of, and I know I would be proud to carry an Egyptian rifle right now. In this great moment to be alive, the long oppressed show the irrepressible, stubborn, freedom-loving and faithful spirit of humanity. They also almost exactly mirror the tea party, using many of the same methods, and the sheer tinyness of the media involved makes it nearly impossible for the government to stop the word. The government is stopping army ants with an elephant gun.

And then there's Japan, where ordinary men and women, Japanese and others, have volunteered their time by the truckload to rebuild and service the survivors*, and where the nations eyes lay flatly and squarely pointed towards the power plant workers risking their lives to bring a reactor under control. "She said in an entry on social networking site Mixi that her boyfriend, who also works at the plant, had tearfully told her "you go ahead to safety", before she evacuated in a company car." (Hindustan Times)

And in Britain, flash mobs have become a common occurence.

We find a world suspiciously popular and self-driven, where the elites find themselves unneeded and out of touch. This is the world where Obama is trying to force huge, coercive government actions and sweeping reforms led by, you guessed it, the elites. This is the world that Obama, half Harvard and half machine politician, an outdated relic from a time period that mostly ended in 1910, finds himself in. The past meets the future, my friends, and usually, the future wins.

*Source note: You will need to browse to the end of the article to find this information. Here's a quote:

Fumio and her daughter were among the roughly 600 people (men, women and children of all ages) who had taken shelter on the gymnasium's wood floor, beneath the basketball hoops and nets. Evacuees were offered food, such as warm milk and rice — some of which had been taken from a home economics class — and a place to sleep. A flat-panel television was broadcasting news of the unfolding catastrophe, which by then was focused on the potential meltdown of reactors within the Fukushima nuclear plants.

Collectivism Doesn't Exist - The Thomas Friedman Story

300 degree panorama from the summit of Diedamskopf Schoppernau, Bohringer Frederich, c.c.a.s.a 2.0

I have to hand it to Thomas Friedman. Although much of the time his editorials are total partisan fluff, I believe there is a particular contribution he has made to the wealth of human knowledge that could well survive a thousand years: his splendid analysis of the human group and nation. In his magnum opus, "The World is Flat," which it has been many years since I read, he takes the world economy from both the angle of the nation, the producer, and the self-interested customer. Now, just recently, he has returned to what he is truly good at, with his recent editorial about Egypt.

In this editorial, he outlines Google Earth, a black president with Islamic last name, the rapid spread of information by way of the web, the ostentatious televised Beijing Olympics and a Palestinian populist as major influences on Middle East revolts. The bigger message is the notion of individual human beings connected to a plethora of information that teaches them, and causes them to change their decisions.

See, Friedman doesn't engage in abstractions. He doesn't know what a nation is, because he was never so overtaught as to ignore what his eyes and mind were telling him. Instead, looking at the businesses and the governments and the popular uprisings, he sees a pair of green eyes and a dark face, with a story of decades all his own, a family to support, a life to defend, and shame to carry, he sees a tall, confident businessman at the top of his game entrusted with performing well for his board of directors, he sees a top member of the Communist Party in China and a young child with his entire life ahead of him and an old man with his entire life behind him.

As the youngest child of a Minneapolis ballbearing manufacturing vice president and a navy mother in the 1950's, Friedman was always a bit strange. At a time when gender roles were preset, obligations were expected and life was supposed to be peaceful and sweet, Tom instead had a mother who alternated homemaking, bookkeeping, bridge championships, and telling stories about benchpressing on Navy destroyers, and a father who manufactured things that people don't buy in stores and don't usually know are important or in high demand. (The name of the company was "United Bearing.")

Thomas himself wanted to be a professional golfer, though this was not quite so unusual in the days of Bobby Jones and televised bridge, only to discover a love of journalism and the Middle East. What's more, he discovered a Journalism teacher who did a splendid job of keeping him out of Journalism college. She taught him well enough that he "never needed, or [took], another course in journalism since." As Thomas rightly points out, "Hattie was a woman who believed that the secret for success in life was getting the fundamentals right. And boy, she pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students -- not simply how to write a lead or accurately transcribe a quote, but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way and to always do quality work." Now there's a lesson for all of us! Why not, instead of being Grammar Nazis and focusing on all sorts of ridiculous conventions and overtaught nonsense, we actually try to do our jobs? Still, she was no slouch: "Hattie was the toughest teacher I ever had." No one utters those words without meaning them.

Thomas, in college, took a major normally reserved for indecisive spoiled children and football players, and actually made good with it! He earned a BA in "Mediterranean Studies," and probably set a record for most classes towards a BA in Mediterranean Studies taken without falling asleep on a desk. He followed this up with a truly serious M.Phil. in "Middle Eastern Studies" from Oxford, then got a UPI job as a general assignment reporter in London, on Fleet Street. In London, he married an Economist, from Iowa, whose father built an asset-trading company that invested primarily in shopping malls. UPI later sent him to Beirut, where he would play golf next to a Palestinian military firing range.

From strange lives come important realizations, and when you live like Friedman, how can you possibly see people as groups? How can you ever again stereotype Navy sailors, Bookkeepers and Housewives when your mother was all three? How can you dismiss a business as unimportant when your father worked for a business once dismissed that way? Especially when, as it turns out, ball bearings are actually useful for a great many things...

Not surprisingly, many people are upset at Friedman, and the reason always seems to be the same. They drone on and on about corrupt officials, Halliburton, that administration from which only evil can be expected et cetera and so on! Every time, it's a group, a bunch of people, rather then one person making decisions. It's thoughts made long ago, against the efficient and effective clarity of living in the now. It's giving up on people, and in the end, life. We can't expect to achieve anything because the people are evil, and yet, not long ago, someone very different from Friedman suggested a way out:

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" -James Madison

Even if someone intends on doing wrong, you can use their actions against them. Thus, you are still an individual, as other people themselves can be used as well as helpful. And I'm not even looking yet at the potential of teaching a person something they didn't know. So many people, however, teach us that you are not an individual, but that some kind of group or category exists, when in all my life, I have spotted many strange things but have never once seen a collective!

Thus, Friedman looks only at individuals, and leaves the stereotypes at home. Sometimes it really is that simple to create something truly great, a single good idea, a single good method. Stephen Marshall was write to label Friedman the scribe of the new revolution. The remarkable thing, however, is just how little Friedman had to do. Think of how short Friedmans career is, and subtract away how much of it he has spent writing shameful propaganda, and we see just how absurd the thing is that Friedman has rebelled against.

As an aside, I love High Tories, even though I will never be one. Why, you ask? Because they get it. They understand that there is no such thing as a collective, only individualisms with hierarchy, and individualisms without it, and any number of gray areas in between. You can say you're part of something bigger, but what THING is it? It can only be a person you owe fealty to, as a person is all that exists.

A Hippie and Me

Walden Pond, MA, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years of his life living as naturally as possible. Work of QuarterCircleS, license: c.c.a.s.a 2.5 gen

One of the great joys of riding Greyhound is all the interesting people you meet along the way.

On my way from Atlanta to Seattle, I believe the Missouri portion of the route, I met a man who lives his principles every day. A radical environmentalist, not of the political sort but the real kind, he was on his way to a commune that his friend had set up in the mountains of Colorado. There they import nearly nothing, live almost totally off the land, and recycle every last thing they can.

They use no electricity and have no modern communications except a single old telegraph line to the ranger station reserved for emergencies. There are no roads near where they live, and they wake up every morning to a Rocky Mountain sunrise and a day of their own maintenance. He has been living this way for 40 years now, and is extremely satisfied with his life, where he eats the fruit of his own hands and sleeps under the roof of his own construction. He works FOR no employer, but rather works WITH his friends. He has little material wealth, but lots of heart, and a high quality of life.

As you probably know by now, I am not a radical environmentalist. Still, of this kind I can very much appreciate as I suspect anyone can who has an open mind. We talked of many things, about how you can catch rainwater on your roof, clean it, and drink it, about how vegetables made at home are better then the ones you buy at the store (which my family, many of whose members still grow their own vegetables, knows very much for certain to be true) and sensible policies towards hunting. We talked about business ideas, and how to bring recycling and good living to the people of the cities.

I brought up recycling human urine, a relatively easy process and one that can render high quality drinking water. He thought it was a great idea, for people like me. Unfortunately its greatest likely customer, California, probably wouldn't agree. They would think of it as icky, even if it makes sense and gives them cleaner, safer water then their own pipes, which it does, as there is not one ounce of open soil in a closed, above ground machine.

Here's another idea: theoretically, you can put nuclear waste in a highly shielded barrel, and then drop it in a large pool of seawater. The result will be that as the barrel absorbs the radiation, it will heat to a tremendous temperature, and then turn the seawater in to steam. The salt and impurities and all uncleanness will be left behind and you will have as close to pure water as can be acquired anywhere deposited in a pool by gravity, just like the earths own rain. This would provide a great practical use for nuclear waste, and lower the price of water throughout the world while saving the earths aquifers and ecosystems from drainage and tampering by urban water systems.

But California wouldn't do that either.

He thought it was interesting to meet someone on the opposite side of the spectrum from him, someone who works with society rather then removing oneself from it. Unlike the hypocritical SUV environmentalists of California, he had no anger, no venom, no dislike, and no insecurity. He knew he was doing what he was able to do, and he needn't do more. The peace he had inside of himself grew outward, and came to include anyone in his presence.

Perhaps the environmental advantages of environmental legislation are overwhelmed by the spiritual malaise they create. No law, no order, no head of state made my friend become a hippie, he did it out of his own heart, and he desired none, but the people of California grow old in a place where every aspect of economic action is dictated by government, where as a utilities company, I don't have the option of saving aquifers by using nuclear waste to desalinize seawater, because the government has a law against that. I don't have the option to recycle my own urine, because I don't have a license for that, and even if I did I couldn't mass produce the machine so I couldn't afford it. I don't have the option of creating a commune near San Simeon, because the land, though cheap, is off-limits to all development heavier then ranching. I can't collect my seawater, because that would be against zoning laws. I can't raise pigs and chickens in my backyard, because that would be uncivilized. Indeed, we are too civilized, far too civilized perhaps even to live.

One of the unsung virtues of the free market is that it actually creates hippies. This is something Jefferson understood as he confronted a form of big government far more minor then todays in the name of a peaceful agrarianism. Men in black ties and suits, unless they are volunteers, must be forced and manufactured, and business does not have the ability to do this by itself. Train systems only become irreparable when an AMTRAK takes over their routes.

The Amish built primitivist towns and small farms in the Midwest centuries before bureaucracy, but bureaucracy today creates Monsanto, Cargill, and other huge agricultural companies that have replaced the small family farmer with legions of Mexican, often illegal, immigrants, who do not even know the language of the land, have no real home or place to call their own, raise their children in a constant, hateful flux, and are entitled to almost none of the fruit of their labors. When they grow too old, they are illegal, so no one can take care of them, and they are illegal because the INS is too big. Monsanto also once patented a new biogenetically engineered seed, and when the wind carried it to a neighboring farm, sued the owner for copyright infringement. The name of that case was Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, a textbook example of the law being right, and the morality being wrong.

The reality is that no matter how we choose to live, like my hippie, we must take responsibility for our lives. If that means recycling our urine to support our urban resources and having factories by our houses, we must take this as the just price for living so well in other ways. The people of California had once seen their standard of living rise, and now that they have stifled their commerce, destroyed their car factories, ruined their peoples creativity, frozen their once dynamic cities and neighborhoods, and plundered their farmland, they demand to keep what they had when they were useful. Not only is this hypocrisy a damnable disgrace, and deserves the very wrath of God, but its consequences are seen in the spirit of the people, now a small, petty people of soft, worthless disagreements, judgmental notions of class, paranoia and hate. I suspect very strongly that these people don't live full lives, and their crime rate indicates a toxic level of personal brokenness. Just like my hippie, we must live with our cities maintained and our nation growing, or leave, with our way of living behind us, to somewhere we can live. Our tenacity is an illusion created by our prosperity, and our prosperity lasts only as long as we work to maintain it.

Is Anyone from Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, or Yemen Reading This?

If they are, I think I have something to say

A Contemporary Military Map of the battle of RI. Library of Congress ID g3772n.ar300400. Public Domain.

There's always a tendency to speak only of current examples, but the great democracies of the Western world had centuries of, often very bloody, legal and political history leading to their current status, a history that the Islamic world does not have. They also have a culture that held certain things as sacred, certain non-biblical things in fact, that the Islamic world did not hold to.

Instead, we see in the Islamic world a great desire to keep Islam in the government, even as separation of church and state is necessary, and a great desire for a morality and justice that Feudalism long ago hardened Europes heart against. We see in the Islamic world a desire at once for freedom and order, at once for individual and group dignity, and we see fights within society that must be resolved.

As such, I wanted to share the story of a former democracy, one that was absorbed in to America in 1776, its traditions and system destroyed in favor of the federal constitution. A democracy created by a pastor, a Puritan pastor, with freedom of conscience for all and a work ethic that made its small, rocky-soiled state an early center of industry and commerce in America. That democracy is Providence Plantations.

The pastors name was Roger Williams. He grew up the son of a wise and just merchant and trader, who gave to the poor in life and in his will. His home parish in London was the sight of great religious tumult, including the burning at stake of many puritan martyrs who died for nothing more then their belief in God. Graduating from Cambridge with a degree in theology and great life experience, Roger Williams headed across the seas.

He may well have been driven out, as he was already at that time quite controversial, and in 1630 he began his mission to the puritans of New England, only to find just as much controversy in America. Among the places he preached the longest and loudest was the town of Salem, which if it had fully received him, might have averted its horrendous infamy for burning withces at stake 60 years later. Salem denied him, and thus Salem carried its shame, and still does to this day.

Salem denied him so thoroughly that he was about to be deported back to England, at which time he fled southwest, to the lands of the Narragansett Indians. There he befriended many, and was given the gift of land. He named it Providence, in honor and thanks towards God. In later years, the colony would repay the kindness of the Narragansett by housing Quakers and Jews fleeing form their own persecution, thus demonstrating the true refuge, forgiveness, justice and charity of Christ.

In 1643 he headed back to England to acquire a charter for his colony. The toes he stepped on long ago forgotten, the English granted it to him, and he incorporated three towns, Providence the capital, Newport, and Portsmouth. He also, on the way there, wrote a book on the Indians he knew, titled "Key into the Languages of America," granting him respect on his authority for perhaps the first time in his life.

He was not unknown to commerce, starting afterwards a Indian trading post at Cocumscussoc, but when the needs of his colony called him, he gave it up, selling it likely at a loss in 1651 in order to head back to England to have his bastion of freedoms charter confirmed. Thus he showed, at once, a skill with Mammon, and a willingness to disregard it for what was more important. He actually failed, but his fellow John Clarke succeeded, gaining a full and correct charter by 1663, while he handled important family business that held him back until 1654.

Unfortunately King Phillips War (1675) did see his colony burned to the ground, but he also lived to see it rebuilt. He stayed a preacher always, and kept his colony a free refuge always, open to all religious beliefs, and all religious debate. The example he set and the sheep he led would become the tolerant, but comparatively pious, religious traditions of modern America, even though his democracy was later swallowed up.

Samuel Slater, in 1790, built the first successful cotton textile mill in America at Blackstone River. Manufacturing would grow more rapidly in Rhode Island then almost any other American colony. The people of Rhode Island kept that free spirit alive, striking against unfair merchants in 1783 and refusing to participate in the war of 1812, and did away with all slavery in its limits voluntarily under the State Emancipation Act of 1784. Thus they let their religion, true religion (Isaiah 51), guide them as their hearts and law were free!

Sources:

http://www.rogerwilliams.org/biography.htm

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~rigenweb/history.html

Politics in Quotes

With so much dirt and horse handicapping in the news, and maybe even a little here, I wanted to take a moment to show politicians for who they really are, and I find no better vehicle for this then their most insightful quotes, and especially those insightful about themselves. These quotes were extracted from various places over the internet, primarily BrainyQuote but a few others as well, and I hope you'll learn a thing or two about how people who agree with you and disagree with you come to their conclusions.

Most of the politicians quoted here are current, but a handful of quotes from previous generations, and especially Ronald Reagan, Malcom X and LBJ, are provided as well due to the continuing impact of these figures and their political heirs:

"One thing about the Senate, it is not the most efficient organization." -John McCain

"You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” -Rahm Emmanuel

"I respect people who feel things passionately. I do. But when someone is a judge, that is not what they should bring to the bench. It is not really passion, except in rare instances, that serves the bench well. It is, rather, an ability to understand the law and follow it." -Charles Schumer

"Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them." -Ronald Reagan

"I didn’t come here to be partisan, I didn’t come here to be bipartisan..." -Nancy Pelosi

"After a century of striving, after a year of debate, after a historic vote, health care reform is no longer an unmet promise. It is the law of the land." -Barack Obama

"I sat next to [Sarah Palin] once, thought she was beautiful, and I think she's very happy in Alaska, and I hope she'll stay there." -Barbara Bush

"A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." -Sarah Palin

"Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy." -Rudy Giuliani

"You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, `You are free to compete with an the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." -Lyndon B. Johnson

"I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence." -Malcom X

"Faith crosses every border and touches every heart in every nation. " -George W. Bush

"A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about." -Newt Gingrich

"She wants a new California, I want the California of my forebears." -Jerry Brown

"Blunt? Direct? . . . maybe you might say honest and refreshing. Maybe we can see that in your paper tomorrow." -Chris Christie

Guest Post - Roy Sanders is Magic (and other discoveries at the CHoA Autism Conference)

Yet another guest post from our good friend Walt Guthrie on the "social sciences." Enjoy!

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I wasn't expecting much from this year's CHoA Autism Confernce that was held last Saturday.
Boy, was I surprised.
Who knew that Roy Sanders had magical powers?

But I'll get to that.
Let's take the events of the conference in chronological order.

First up was Catherine Rice, a behaviorist from the CDC, who was there to give us the obligatory What-Is-Autism? opening presentation.
The talk actually touched more on issues of classification than anything else I have seen so far in these types of events. In the course of her presentation, she inadvertently raised a couple of interesting points. First, until 1980, the DSM classified autism as a type of schizophrenia.
Now here's a question (one that I didn't actually ask): In 1979, WAS autism actually a type of schizophrenia and in 1981 it WASN'T schizophrenia? The implication from Rice, of course, was that this is an example of how far the understanding of autism has come. But, as my numerous public questions to "experts" make clear, the classification of autism, even today, is divorced completely from empirical evidence. James McPartland, in my questioning of him, admitted that the use of the word "disorder" in the classification of ASDs was purely definitional.
If autism, or any word, is only whatever a designated authority structure says it is, then that's what it is. If autism is defined as schizophrenia, then it's schizophrenia. And if it's defined as a disorder, then it's a disorder. And if it's defined as two parts from this column of symptoms and three parts from that column, then that is what you have.
If you believe that the evidence points to the moon being made of cheese, then upon arriving on it, you may be forced to admit that no, the moon is not made of cheese. If you DEFINE the Moon as being made of cheese, then upon discovering that the orb revolving around our planet is actually composed of a different substance, you may be forced to admit that it is not, in actuality, the Moon.
If autism,as defined, is different from autism as experienced, then it's pragmatic utility as a useful term, even for the "science" of behaviorism, is questionable indeed.
Which was brought more into focus by Rice's second tidbit. She declared that there are those with autistic traits who are not counted as having an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She compared it as the difference between neuroses and psychoses but then didn't really touch on it again.Yet, given how much of her presentation was related to doing counts of "ASD" cases in the general populace and whether or not the rate of autism is rising, this would seem to be highly pertinent Let's follow this line of reasoning. All autism is a disorder (thus ASD). Some people have autistic traits but, they are not disordered. So now, at least according to Rices' brief explanation, we find out that, a little bit of autism equals no autism at all.
Now, why not the easier explanation of: some people have autism and they're fine with it? Is it because that interpretation would be injurious to the autistic population? Or would the real victim of such an interpretation be the behaviorist money train for whom every diagnosis is a ka-ching?
I asked Rice, what the methodological procedure was for labeling the entire autistic spectrum as disordered (taking into account that she doesn't consider autistic-lites as part of the spectrum). It was at this point that Roy Sanders, the Medical Director of Marcus popped in to shut me off.
Hmm.

Next up was Felissa Goldsmith, a child psychiatrist from Marcus
Dr. Goldsmith treats a PowerPoint presentation like a teleprompter. And that's not a compliment.
There was little new here. However, there was such an underlying contempt for autistic kids in her talk that I had to check with Linda later to confirm that it wasn't just me picking up that vibe.
To give just the most egregious example: Goldsmith suggested more than once that parents should be encouraged to mourn their children's autism like a death. And to do this on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. This easily was the most sickening thing I've been exposed to all week. ("Daddy will be down in a moment, Timmy. He's mourning the child he wanted that you'll never be.") This is the advice you'd expect to come from a monster and I said as much.
I asked Sanders, if this was the official policy of the Marcus Center. Boos from the audience. He curtly dismissed the question as inappropriate.
Well, it's not like I was the one who brought it up.

Dr. Michael Morrier, from the Emory Autism Center, gave a somewhat uneven presentation on ABA that ended up focusing on how his people do it over there. I want to say some good things somewhere and it might as well be here. As I told Morrier after the presentation, he is the least offensive behaviorist I have ever encountered. When asked about his center's use of aversives, he replied that they don't use any.
Giving Morrier the benefit of the doubt, if I was forced to send a child anywhere for the application of ABA, Morrier would probably be my choice.
Still, even if he seemed more of an actual human being than any other behaviorist that I have ever personally met, he still was, after all, a behaviorist. At one point, talking about instilling eye contact as a habit in children, he observed that one could be TOO successful. If children make eye contact all the time they become creepy staring machines. And Morrier noted that regular run-of-the-mill kids don't make eye contact all the time either. Instead, they do it 63% of the time. (Or something like that number, I neglected to make a note of his actual percentages and all the figures that follow in this paragraph are approximations of his actual numbers.) Morrier was quite explicit that the goal was to get the autistic kids to make eye contact at EXACTLY the same percentage of the time as normal kids. He even talked about making up the gap (as if this were some sort of missile crisis from the 1960s) between the two groups so that children who begin training at age three are 14 percentage points behind in eye contact percentages and those that begin at age 4 are 28% behind.
Morrier never felt the need to explain why a random sampling of non-autistic kid's eye contact percentages (or any other behavior) should serve as the golden mean against which all similar autistic behavior should be measured. There was no suggestion that it might be possible that regular kids might be indulging in too much eye contact and perhaps should receive some therapy to tone it down a bit.
There was no evidence presented that, having trained children to achieve the same percentage of eye contact to non-eye contact, that these children were indeed receiving the same benefits from this activity. Presumably, eye contact is a skill that delivers information to those engaging in it and that the everyday children doing it were themselves benefiting from the activity.
Certainly a question that you might think should be asked is: do autistic children, trained to make eye contact, receive the same benefits as regular children naturally engaged in the same activity? Or are they merely being trained to pretend that they are not autistic? A previous speaker at the AAC made a big deal about how his research has shown that those on the spectrum tend to gain their information about people from studying mouths rather than eyes. Assuming that this is indeed the case, and that all these babies haven't had laser pointers slapped on their heads for nothing, then wouldn't you want to know if forcing a child to shift his primary attention from mouth to eyes will be accompanied by an increasing ability to make use of this information? Or, will the child be left in a worse position, forced to concentrate on areas of the face he is less equipped to easily decipher?

Finally it was Sanders turn.
During his presentation, Sanders literally sat on his hands and continuously kicked out his legs and pointed his feet which might have been adorable if he was a shy, pretty girl in a sundress instead a self-conscious middle-aged introvert seemingly hyper-aware of his own poor public speaking skills.
Sanders attempted to use his own personal situation to illuminate what parents in the audience would face and the things they should do to prepare for raising a child on the autistic spectrum. And, as might be expected, it was the same old, tired checklist, although this time it was wrapped in a droning awkward wallow of self-pity and look-at-me-I'm-a-martyr-for-raising-an-autistic-child self aggrandizement.
At the conclusion of his talk, I asked the question why, in the two years of this particular conference, which seems to be aimed squarely at the parents of autistic children, that they had not chosen to include a single adult or teenager who was actually on the spectrum. Someone who might be able to explain to the parents what their own children were actually experiencing.
Sanders was dismissive of this question as well.
I then asked why, with all the usual suspects that he was recommending parents consult, he had not included actual people on the autistic spectrum who could possibly contribute a valuable understanding as to why their children thought and acted as they did.
His response was that not all people who claim to be on the spectrum actually are.
Well, THAT'S awfully cryptic, Roy.
His meaning became clear soon enough, right after the meeting. And it was at this point that I discovered that Roy Sanders' has magical powers. For he revealed to me, much to my surprise, that I am not on the autistic spectrum.
Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying. Don't you have to take a bunch of intricate expensive tests and pay a bunch of money to get an autistic diagnosis? Well, yeah. That's what I thought. A major part of this whole four hour plus drone-a-thon I had just finished sitting through was about the importance of getting special testing. Nobody said anything about just dropping Roy Sanders into the room and having him magically deduce it.
But his magic didn't end there. He had an even more dazzling trick up his sleeve.
It seems, rather than being on the spectrum I'm a "schizo" something-something-something. I'm afraid I didn't catch the full diagnosis. DSM labels are like your kid's Pokemon monsters. What grown-up with a life really has the time to keep up with them all? But I invite Roy to publicly post his diagnosis to this group so that I might be properly discredited as an autistic advocate in a public forum.
This later part was all relayed to me as he walked briskly to his car, making so little eye contact with me that he practically called out for a session of ABA and Christmas day parental mourning.
I'm sure you can imagine my internal dialogue:
"Huh? What? What are you doing? You can't walk away now after dropping that on me! I'm going to need counseling. YEARS of therapy! Preferably behavioral because that's science! I need to come to terms with this diagnosis! This changes my entire life! I need to know that there's hope for me and that I can live with this schizo-whatever-whatever and still have hope for a happy and productive life!"
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, was not the magical diagnosis enough, and, in his quick retreat, he sure seemed like he had some place he needed to be. Perhaps, and I'm only speculating here, Saturday is the day of the week he reserves for mourning his own adopted child's autism.
And, of course, declaring me off the spectrum was probably an easy call. After all, if I am on the spectrum, it's not like Sanders or the Marcus Center are in a position to make a buck off of it.

In reality, his is the game pseudo-scientists play all the time, employing the magical intuitive powers that their credentials supposedly convey to conveniently discredit their adversaries.
Sanders was explicit that if I continue to pursue matters as I have that I will soon find myself barred from meetings such as this one. How much easier that will be if he is in a position to use his special magical insight to claim that his critic doesn't have standing.

I have spent years now arguing just how untenable the behaviorists' and their allies position are. I have shown you how they can't answer the simplest of questions.
Sanders, being the stupid man that he is, thinks that if he bars me from the meetings that he will have won. If it happens it will instead be a complete and total vindication for myself. I have, since my early days in Bob Morris' group, argued that you can't do business with these people. Nonetheless, in the time since then, I have treated them as the scientists I know them not to be. I have asked them to justify their uses of simple words they use everyday like "disorder" and those from our community who have attended these meetings have seen their complete inability to do so. What more do I need to do to show their essential fraudulent nature?
When I am barred (and i think it is a matter of when rather than if) I will have demonstrated, once and for all and for everyone here in the autistic community to see, that the behaviorists and their allies are unwilling to engage the autistic community in any form of real dialogue or debate that does not at first begin with a servile acknowledgment of their superior knowledge and authority in all matters pertaining to us.

I was asked, after the meeting, why it was that I couldn't be nicer. Bob Morris was nice. And they repaid his niceness by treating him with contempt and running the clock out on him.
The people charged with fixing us, hate us. Loathe us. Talk about us as tragedy, a collection of deficits and disorders. They encourage parents to MOURN when their children are identified as us. They think the best that we can ever be is a crude approximation of them. They compare us to animals. They compare us to AIDS. They compare us to cancer. They compare us to death.
And in doing all this they enrich themselves.

The time for nice, from me, or anyone, is past.

Way, way past.

Walt Guthrie

Nihilism and Love

I've been away for the past few weeks, travelling Greyhound and seeing family. This article is partially about Loughner, partially about me, and partially about God.

This may sound bizarre, but I think, to a very small degree, I can empathize with Loughner.

Loughners obsession with Giffords, according to his friend Tierney and Mother Jones, had almost nothing to do with any political movement. In fact, Loughner himself asked Giffords "what is government if words have no meaning?" When she inadequately answered his question, he became very angry at her, often calling her a "fake" in the presence of his good friend Tierney.

Loughner was mostly a loner, living largely by himself. Thus, he tended to encounter the worse side of people, the side that wants to control and push away. He also never really be He himself was a control freak, even keeping a dream journal to look for hints in how to control his mind, which he had faith in as a source of another reality he could conquer for himself. His obsession with words indicate a kind of politicization in its strictest meaning, but not the one we would be familiar with, rather the kind of politicization one would find in office politics or academic politics, the politicization of someone with no ideology and a lot of lust for power. In his safe, according to the AP, was found the name Giffords, next to his signature.

Why do I say I may empathize with him? After encountering someone ironically very similar to many profiles of Loughner, academic, obsessive, paranoid, and having a hard time with a Greyhound bus company where the employees take priviliges paying customers are not entitled to, and being told I wasn't humble enough, and being isolated from nearly everyone, I contemplated a killing spree, just because I felt, after 48 hours on a bus run by a company that had me totally under their control and didn't even permit me to drink alcohol or cuss or be five minutes late for the bus when I'm getting food but finds it quite reasonable to not keep a parts shed for when the windshield motors break down in Montana, like a total slave, and wanted something, anything, for myself. Everyone around me was rude, vicious, and would hurt me over anything. If I got in to an argument with one of these powder kegs, I would be kicked off the bus for making noise. I thought of bombing Greyhound especially, just to put them out of business. Eventually my desire for the blood for others turned to a desire for the blood of myself, when we came to a canyon out in North Dakota for a rest stop, and I looked down and contemplated jumping.

What stopped me from jumping? The thought of my mother crying. What stopped me from contemplating further a killing spree? The thought of my parents shamed. I felt like a marked man, having such horrible, capital thoughts, thoughts of actions that can bring shame to not only me but my loved ones, of such actions that both can and should lead a person to death, and also how easy then it seemed for a person to be totally disposable and hated, and for a long time I cried silently. I called my father, and that made me feel better, but still, the shame of having such an awful thought, the fear of such thoughts, and the realization of just how pointless people suddenly seemed at all levels, combined with an already stressed psyche, brought me nearly to suicide.

Later on, we encountered the little small town of Alexandria, Minnesota. We were only there for ten minutes, but a lady helped me when my coffee cup exploded, the driver kidded me around about my fear that someone would steal my laptop, and overall the warmth and openness touched my heart. I also heard a story, at the register, of a man from Tennessee who was traveling to Seattle by Greyhound and ended up being so sick and tired of the bus that he got off it, and is still living in Alexandria! And that's when I realized just how valuable people were, how complicated, loving, faithful, interesting and all other things people can really be, and why they would be so valued in the eyes of God. "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot." (Matthew 5: 13, NIV)

In addition, soon after one of the people who made me feel bad got his! That made me feel even better.

But back to Loughner, whose name could be pronounced "loner" in some languages, he was a very nihilistic man. "If you call me a terrorist then the argument to call me a terrorist is Ad hominem." -Loughner. In High School he engaged in drinking nearly to the point of death, and smoked marijuana nearly every day while talking to friends about conspiracy theories. He believed in very little. He was very atheist, and believed people were essentially sheep herded by government. Not only did he believe that God didn't exist, he didn't even believe the world existed. He didn't like guns until he finally wanted to use them. He apparently did volunteer time at a Book Festival, but his political diatribes were highly incoherent, and his obsession was always with control and meaning. He believed in nothing, and a little rudeness from Gifford was all it took.

Loughner had no one, and he saw only one side of people. According to neighbors and the AP, he "kept to himself and was often seen walking his dog, almost always wearing a hooded sweat shirt and listening to his iPod." He loved nothing but control. And how could he love more? His view of what was important was so small, so limited, so, in fact, meaningless. "The question [to Giffords] was classic Jared: confrontational, nonsensical and obsessed with how words create reality." -Two friends of Loughner and AP.

People have meaning, and are beautiful even though they are also somewhat evil in their actions and thoughts, God looks after even Cain (Genesis 4:15), and soon Loughner will get to find out just how much meaning words can have when the judge passes sentence against him. He will get to see how meaningful government can really be, and maybe some fine day the meaning of that beautiful little girl he shot dead will haunt him in his sleep when he can no longer control his dreams and his "second reality" is filled with images of his tragic and evil past, and he finds all around him that he lives entirely in what he has already done.