I have been watching a lot of soccer lately. My son posited that Spanish spoken outside Spain was somehow non-standard. I told him that by most measures, the "real" Spanish ought to be that spoken in Mexico. Mexico does, after all, have the highest Spanish-speaking population of any country. It was the first empire conquered by Spain and it lies between Spain and the other Hispanophone countries of the New World.
That made me think of the some other major world languages. Where does each Mother Country sit among the speakers of its tongue?
Chinese is spoken significantly only in a couple of small Southeast Asian countries outside of China.
English, on the other hand, is spoken over quite a swath of the planet's surface:
United States 267444149
India 125226449
Philippines 89800000
Nigeria 79000000
United Kingdom 59600000
Germany 46272504
Canada 25246220
France 23000000
Pakistan 18000000
Australia 15013965
Spanish holds sway over a less diverse but still appreciable group:
Mexico 112336538
Spain 47150819
Colombia 46000000
Argentina 40900496
United States 35468501
I will skip some Hindic languages. Mostly this is because these languages are restricted to the immediate vicinity of South Asia. I couldn't similarly exclude Chinese, as it is the most spoken first language in the world. But I also don't know any Hindi. And I'm a jerk.
French
Democratic Republic of the Congo 60800000
France 60578600
Côte d'Ivoire 12740000
Canada 6741955
Haiti 5664000
Also, Portuguese is spoken by Brazil, then Portugal. It is interesting that the great colonizers of the world mostly play second (at best) fiddle to former colonies in terms of their "share" of the language.
The sky had lightened to the hue of early twilight. Rather than the fiery bands of color that often accent the eastern skyline after dawn, the cloud cover left everything dull blue to gray. The shoulders of the jagged peaks of the Organ Mountains were draped in a flowing ashen shawl. A crashing wave was nearly frozen in place surmounting the spires. As I approached the mountain pass, even the mightiest peak succumbed to the flow. From the vantage of the pass, all elevations over a mile disappeared cleanly into the dense blanket above. Some 50 miles to the east, the far mountains were bathed in light even as darkness lingered on the valley floor. The howling winds of night had given way to a gentle breeze bearing the faintest hint of impending snow. Winter is upon us.
Charles Johnson at LittleGreenFootballs had a link up to a New York Magazine article by David Frum. You may remember David Frum as one of Bush, Jr.'s speechwriters. He is a credentialed movement conservative of some note, but we find him here voicing real concert for the state of his party:
...as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.
The abject fantasy of many of his former colleagues is apparent to all but themselves:
Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration.
Indeed, he finds this a party wherein old ideas have been
discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers.
As I have previously stated on this blog, the obvious candidates for a competent Republican administration, Huntsman and Romney, are constantly and consistently attacked for lack of radical right wing credentials. I have even heard Romney referred to as "Obama Lite."
On the topic of governance, Frum details some of the obvious measures that should be taken in pursuit of a resolving current economic conditions, but points to conservative unwillingness to even address them. He points out that whites, particularly among those without a college degree, are the most pessimistic about he direction of the country, quoting statistics found in the National Journal. It is something I have suspected, but on which I had never seen data.
While it is easy to blame an outright propaganda effort, Frum notes that
We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.
...
Republican billionaires are not acting cynically; they watch Fox News too.
Frum describes how voicing such concerns left him ostracized from the GOP elite and GOP instruments. Intransigence has been displayed on both sides of the isle, he says, but
in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted: The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party struggling with more self-imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party.
I find more and more that I am in the boat with conservatives who just want a return to sanity. If the GOP were to hit the emergency shutoff on the "crazy" valve, they would easily walk away with the next election. But they have invested so much of the last decade in it, that perhaps it is too late. It's an insightful article and well worth the read.
I was listening to a podcast and heard the following quote, "I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins." I laughed out loud. Ah, genetics and kin selection humor...
I recently wrote about my wish that Romney get the nomination. Unfortunately, he has made a point of bending over backwards lately to prove right wing nut credentials. I still think he would be a competent president, but I would probably not vote for him.
More recently, I have been looking at Mr. Huntsman. While still a long shot, he seems to be the only one in the race with any integrity. Like Romney, he seems to at least understand the issues. Like Romney, he seems electable versus Obama. He has a long history in politics, dating from the Reagan Administration through the Obama Administration. He has seen foreign service with appointments to Singapore, Indonesia, and China. He has been a governor and a CEO, both of which seem to excite the right wing nuts.
Some might claim that the religion he shares with Romney may be a weak point. I would argue that, unlike the case of its Christian forebears, at least the con man who founded the Mormon church was an American. Where the money skimmed from gullible Catholics ends up in Rome, the money skimmed from gullible Mormons remains in the United States.
Yes, I think if Huntsman gets the nomination, I will vote for him.
I am at the point in my life where I consider my own mortality often. Not because I am particularly old or unwell. Rather, the statistics tell me that there are more days in my past than in my future. By itself, this is not of much interest. But the thought occurs to me that I must begin to plan. To this point, my entire life has been conducted on the fly. That is to say I have been living from one day to the next bereft of any plan longer than the next few days. Most people my age who do what I do have completed a graduate degree some time ago. Recent encounters with three old friends (isn't it odd how broad the definition of "friend" can be?) have really stricken a chord. Until about a dozen years ago, I spent most of my time flailing in seemingly random directions. Then I settled into a stable career. Now I'm at the point where I cannot progress in my career without abandoning the technical aspects for the mind-numbing tedium of management.
I like what I do, but the nature of my job leaves any potential professional growth at the mercy of the whims of management. Given the state of the economy at present, my management feels that any investment in personnel is money wasted. So I can not expect to actively pursue any higher education while attempting to maintain some semblance of a family life.
This all leads me to one conclusion: I peaked years ago. I began my downward slide in my 30s. Sad.
The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell
240 pages
Holt Paperbacks (August 3, 2010)
I have always been a zombie movie watcher. In the waning years of the last century, my girlfriend (now wife) and I amused ourselves with numerous zombie movies of the 60s and 70s, both classic and obscure. Until reading Seth Grahame-Smith alteration of Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I had never read or even considered horror-type novels (notable exception: Dracula by Bram Stoker). I liked that one enough to go back and read the original Pride and Prejudice. I wondered, then, about the zombie portion. A blogger I like, Tbogg, described this book as
... what you would get if you asked Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy to collaborate on a Walking Dead script.
I'm not familiar with Flannery O'Connor, but the rest of the description sounded intriguing.
The desolation was not as bleak as we often see in stories of the ruined society genre. It is not a cheery picture by any stretch, but it is somewhat less hopeless than most. We follow the path of a somewhat bright illiterate teen aged girl named Temple. The author sprinkles background information throughout the story, but just enough information is given to leave some sense of mystery. She had been born when society was already in deep collapse, which provides for an interesting perspective.
Unlike most stories of the genre, Temple is not on a quest. She is simply living. In the course of her travels, the protagonist encounters characters that are fully developed, rather than the simple hollow characters that often fill in the background. When she finally does acquire a purpose, it is almost ancillary to the narrative. Imaginative and rich (as much as can be expected, given the state), the story was never silly or over-the-top. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a simple adventure story and is not turned off by the intrinsic darkness of the topic.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer
Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
1245 pages
Simon and Schuster (November 1990)
I fully expected The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to be a dry detailed history. At nearly two pounds worth of dead tree, this mighty tome proved intimidating in the extreme. So it has gathered dust on my shelf for several years. Recently, I was on long trip that would give me enough down time to attack it in earnest.
Shirer begins with the standard fare of the youth and background of Adolf Hitler. Having read a number of Hitler biographies in high school, I found little new information here. I was prepared for the aforementioned sleep aid, but I was to find something different. Shirer was a journalist. That made a real difference. To be fair, some historians are excellent writers, but many excellent historians are unexciting writers. Rather early in the story (1925), Shirer would begin to provide first hand accounts of history in the making.
The number of first person observations is staggering. It is nearly unbelievable, except as the job description of a foreign correspondent. We can see that the Shirer's very vocation demanded presence at and attention to so many significant events and such contextual comprehension. Whether it be in the form of personal descriptions of the mood on the street or passionate speeches, or tense meetings, the author offers the reader a real sense of the time.
In addition to the well known, Shirer makes a point of detailing some obscure personages, including a number of crackpots who provided "intellectual" support for the National Socialist movement. It is easy to overlook the "social scientists" that contributed so much to Nazi ideology. In science, those found to be cranks are quickly poured into the dustbin of history. Shirer ensures that the insane ideas of many in this story are brought to light.
I had long wondered about the extreme negative view of Chamberlain taken by modernity. In Shirer's description, however, we see that if anything Chamberlain deserves more discredit. While it is true that we have the envied position of 20/20 hindsight, it is nevertheless difficult to imagine the events unfolding as the did absent the machinations of Mr. Chamberlain.
Shirer tells a story with myriad contributing factors to the devastation of the second World War: the unwillingness of the Western powers to risk war, the extreme willingness of the same Western powers to sacrifice smaller nations, the intransigence of the Poles (owing to mistrust of Russia), the disinterest of the United States, and many others. The politics of each individual nation and the interaction of nations and blocs within nations are brought together in an enthralling narrative that reads better than a novel. Sadly, in this set of circumstances, the cynical outlook most often matched the reality.
Inside an overarching narrative, we see a tapestry of smaller stories. With the vast resources of meticulous Nazi documentation made available at the Nuremberg trials, Shirer is often able to tell each vignette in subtle detail and ending with the fates of the participants. On the darker side, the reader hears more of the unadulterated evil of individual Nazis than is pleasant. Of course, the story would be incomplete absent the sadism. At times, the reader may find himself wishing to skip whole sections, but to do so would trivialize the effect of Nazism on modern society.
This work is a monumental record of the era and a terrifying reminder of the vast potential for evil intrinsic to a culture of fear.
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition? by Robert M. Price.
I listen to a lot of podcasts. Through this medium became familiar with the voice of Dr. Robert Price. Formerly an evangelical preacher, Dr. Price's study into the foundations of the Christian Bible led him to stray from the proverbial path. He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, and his fascinating off-the-cuff discussions of Bible history incited in me a previously unknown interest in the Bible as a great literary tradition. Also interesting is that Dr. Price is a conservative, bucking the trend among apostates. When I found out about his new book, I was anxious to get a hold of it.
I travel a lot for work, and it just happens that this book was unusually well suited for this. Given Price's vast knowledge of the Bible (Aside: I could sit and listen to Price have one-on-one discussions with another Bible scholar such as Hector Avalos for hours. It is really amazing how they can bring to a discussion specific points and counterpoints with relaxed conversational fluency. I would love to be so knowledgeable on a subject.), much of his effort would be wasted on explaining minutiae to lay persons. Instead, he refers to Biblical passages. While the book can certainly be read without looking up every single passage to which the author refers, I am a bit compulsive about things like that. Thanks to the Gideons, however, I didn't need to drag a Bible along with me everywhere I went (the idea of getting the Kindle was to stop lugging around several pounds of dead tree material on every long trip). It took me much longer than a typical book of this length, but the added insight gained from browsing the source material was worth it. Price obviously loves the Bible. It is not mere collection of myths and traditions. Rather, it represents many generations of work and even the history of its creation is fascinating.
I had always considered the historicity of Jesus an accepted fact. Podcast interviews with Price and other scholars informed me that this may not necessarily be so. With an understanding gleaned from decades of careful scholarship, Price lays out much of this esoterica to the lay person. Just having read this single book, I find my own knowledge of the Christian Bible has greatly increased. This book will not make you a Bible scholar, but it will probably make you more knowledgeable of the Bible in general (and the Jesus story in particular) than the majority of its supposed adherents.
Sometimes even I notice trends among the random noise with which I am so often inundated. Having spent much of the last couple of years drinking in the nature and implications of statistics, I find that ultimately my sights are set on economics. Books recently read have tended to push me in this direction. From books on pure statistics to others with a more ancillary relation, I see that all that I am interested in is within the purview of statistics, but is called economics. Nevertheless, I cannot help but to be drawn in to the fascinating field of stats. I have read a translation of Gerolamo Cardano, and originals by Blaise Pascal and John Maynard Keynes, but I think more can only help to increase my understanding. Someday, I may even know enough be practically employable.
I have been away on a combination of personal and professional travel to Hawai'i. Including this post, I will have made an average of one blog post per month. That has pretty much moved me from "blog" territory into "occasional rants by some weirdo" territory. I hope to be updating a bit more often now. Among the things I've missed are that I've read these books without reviewing any of them.
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man
Lost in Shangri-La
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Extreme Fear
Sleights of Mind
and possibly others. I have just been too busy. It's a weak answer to be sure, but I fully expect to get back into the swing of things despite taking yet another graduate statistics class. We shall see.
The One Percent is a 2006 documentary addressing the gap between the richest 1% of the population and the rest. Producer/director Jamie Johnson is heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. In this film, he conducts a number of interviews, interweaving them with commentary. It is not nearly as polished as most documentaries, and not nearly as depressing as those of this ilk tend to be.
I thought that overall, Johnson did a fair job of presenting the wealthy individuals he interviewed. While he doubtless had the opportunity to edit the interviews of such men as Steve Forbes, Roy Martin (of RoyOMartin lumber), arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, or Paul Orfalea (Kinko's founder) in such a way as to show them in a bad light, I don't believe he did so. In fact, I thought Steve Forbes seemed more agreeable, more reasonable, and more likable than he usually appears. I wouldn't even disagree with most of what he or Paul Orfalea had to say. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman (Economics - 1976), on the other hand, came across as anything but cultured or academic. He appeared combative, almost delusional, and ultimately mean.
Not having a track record, it is hard to say whether Johnson treated Friedman fairly, but it is hard for me take out of context the cartoonishly evil "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." in response to how the poorest fare in the transfer of wealth upward. More to the point, this exchange occurred:
Johnson: "I'm just advocating a slightly more progressive tax structure."
Friedman: "That's Socialism."
...
Friedman: "The one thing you can depend on everybody [sic] is that he's going to put his interests above yours."
I find this last line interesting in a way that I hope to address in a long piece someday. But I digress.
One other individual who said things that might be considered damning on some level was Roy Martin. He made it clear that his entire economic view was shaped by Christian dominionist theology. Matthew 19:24 states, "And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Mr. Martin's understanding of this seems to be that the difficulty the rich man encounters is due to the great responsibility that God (namely, the Christian god) has placed on him. In his view, he has taken on that burden and will execute it in accordance with the wishes of his god. Note: that is my interpretation of Mr. Martin's words, so I may be mistaken as to his intent. But Martin does leave us a good quote that I think can summarize the philosophy of many wealthy Christians:
"America has been blessed because of its Judeo-Christian background, its alliance [sic] to the Ten Commandments. And its laws are based on that and that's why it's been blessed. If it gets away from that, it will fail." I think most former Christians understand. Not that I find his views any less disturbing, mind you, but I understand.
Bill Gates, Sr. and Oscar-Meyer heir Chuck Collins are presented as activists working in support of the Estate Tax. Far from being hippies (as, apparently, is Nicole Buffet, Warren Buffet's disowned-due-to-her-appearance-in-this-movie granddaughter), these two appear to be rationally acting not for anything like Socialism but, rather, a more fair tax burden.
In a way, I think the almost amateur feel to this movie gives it a certain charm. Johnson's technique will improve with work, but I think this film accomplished its mission.
Scanning the mood of the blogosphere, I find a number of liberals hoping that a borderline unelectable borderline sane person like Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry gets the Republican nomination to run against Barack Obama in the election. The idea is that either of these two is so radical as to ensure the reelection of the incumbent. That is an interesting theory. First, I do not think that is true. Historically, a crumbling economy has spelled doom for an incumbent president. Even when it is obvious that the lion's share of the blame for the current economic situation lay in the hands of Bush Jr. and Clinton, Obama has made a show of capitulating at any hint of a challenge. In fact, his handful of accomplishments have not appeased the "Free Mumia" hippies to the extent that they are actively calling for the Democratic Party to challenge Obama in the primaries. Given their obliviousness to the obvious, they can almost certainly be counted on to take their ball and go home during the general election. As such, I would certainly prefer that a reasonably competent former governor be the challenge.
If a Romney candidacy spells doom for the reelection of Obama, there are a number of things to consider:
1) Obama is from the Neville Chamberlain school of negotiation.
2) Where every Obama deviation from the hippie platform is unacceptable, right wing assholes will vote for their guy with 100% certainty, regardless of his transgressions.
3) Since there exists no possible means for anyone to defeat an incumbent Mitch Romney for reelection (as the Supreme Court recently legalized unlimited flow of right wing monies directly to candidates), Romney has every reason in the world to govern the country as he did the state of Massachusetts: reasonably and competently.
4) Nomination of any other single candidate would open the floodgates. That is to say that allowing such an obvious loon as Bachmann (she had 23 foster children and is the beard of Benny Hill impersonator Marcus Bachmann who is extremely preoccupied with the sex lives of gay men) or Rick "Texas should secede if Obama continues to be a Negro" Perry.
Even if one of these bizarre caricatures of right wing nuttery were defeated, the fact that he or she had been presented to the American people (and, further, the world) as a viable candidate for the most powerful position on the planet will announce for all perpetuity that clinical insanity is not a bar to the presidency.
Given Obama's anemic defense against right wing attacks, I can't even say that if Romney were elected, his administration would be any worse than Obama's.
If Romney gets elected, it will not be the end of the world. If Bachmann or Perry does, on the other hand, it might. To add a chill to this discussion, I should mention that Bachmann and Perry both ascribe to fundamentalist Christianity that depends critically on the end of the world. Election as president would grant him or her the capability to make it happen.
I have completed the semester in which I devoted all my free time to learning the supposedly amazing tricks statisticians of the last hundred years have come up with to allow normal people to understand complicated things. While statistical tools allow us to accurately assess any number of things, overall I think the "display" mission of statistics has failed.
Try to convince a person that things like economics are absurdly obvious when viewed via statistics, and they will accuse you of being an O-bot. Basically, if you refuse to accept that Barack Obama is exactly as incompletent as George W. Bush, you are a tree hugging hippie. If I claim that 3+3=5, and my opponent claims that 3+3=89, then my refusal to accept anything less than 3+3=47 is unacceptable intransigence on my part. The more I think about it, the more I say, "Fine." I am not among the filthy peasants that vote against their own interests. In fact, I am among the group that (mostly falsely*) believe they are the beneficiaries of insane right wing actions. As such, as long as I suffer no major health problems, I will continue to almost tread water. Overall, my net income will decline next to the mean, but my increase above the median will accelerate. Yes, the acceleration above the ignorant poor who vote billions more into the pockets of billionaires will continue. Most of the transfer from poor-to-rich will be into the pockets of the super-rich to be sure, but I will benefit*. At least I will "benefit" in the sense that I will be even farther beyond the filthy peasants that dwell in ghettos, trailer parks, and barrios across the nation.
Fine. I only wish I could be as cold to the undergender. The major platform of those who will soon take over this nation is the eradication of reproductive rights for women. More than anyone else, this enormous segment of the population will suffer under their own Quislings.
Do you want to get elected? Be a traitor to you social class! If you are a willing to spout incoherent right-wing canards while possessing --insert subhuman traits such as dark skin, belief in the wrong gods, or breasts here-- , then you are perfect for our outreach program.
I can wish evil upon the underclass as the trappings of acceptance of fealty. Unfortunately, a nation is only as good as its treatment of out groups (how, again is it that a 51% of the population is an out group?).
*Real wages continue to fall for all but the wealthiest, but the real wages of the upper middle class are falling more slowly than those of the peasants, so they will still gain relative to the middle class and below.
I recently heard about a scientific article. I do a reasonable job of keeping up with general science. But I had not seen a particular article yet. Apparently, it had to do with the general decline in efficacy of trials as they progressed through the standard scientific cycle. A rule of thumb seems to be that the initially claimed efficacy can be safely halved to get closer to the true response. He analyzes the reasons for this, and offers up recommendations for helping to reduce the problem. At one point, however, he dives off the deep end. It's only in one paragraph, but it does harm the net usefulness of the article. Here is the paragraph in question (from Nature News):
Less likely, but not inconceivable, is an effect stemming from some unconventional process. Perhaps, just as the act of observation has been suggested to affect quantum measurements, scientific observation could subtly change some scientific effects. Although the laws of reality are usually understood to be immutable, some physicists, including Paul Davies, director of the BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University in Tempe, have observed that this should be considered an assumption, not a foregone conclusion.
The SGU crew did a pretty good job of dismantling this, but I thought I should go one step further. I have heard the following phrase thrown about with reckless abandon over the last couple of decades:
"The observer affects the observation."
In the subatomic world, this is certainly true. When an object under observation is of a size similar in scale to the radiation with which it is viewed, this is the case. Precision depends critically on the difference between the size of the viewed object and the wavelength of the radiation used to view it.
Similarly, in the macroscopic world an observer can make a difference. While studying a neolithic culture in some isolated rainforest, the presence of a technology-encumbered scientist can certainly have an influence on the behaviors of the culture under scrutiny.
While they may appear similar on the surface, they are really very different concepts. In the former, we are limited by the fact that objects on the scale of atoms are so tiny that incident photons or particles we may use to attempt to see them will push them noticeably. In the latter, on the other hand, we are speaking of the practical impossibility of observing isolated people while being an outside influence. But Schooler's otherwise good article didn't seem to point to behavioral factors, but actual physical factors. Also, having read Paul Davies Cosmic Jackpot, I think I can safely call him a borderline crackpot. He may do good science, but he infuses his popular writing with quasi-magical bullshit.
For demonstrative purposes, here is a calculation of the uncertainty of a macroscopic (yet still very small) object:
Note that I changed the inequality to an equality for computation purposes (that's how MathCad takes function assignments), meaning the calculated value is simply the minimum uncertainty. The result is so minuscule, though, that even a much greater value would still be immeasurably small. It's been well over a decade since I've fiddled with anything quantum mechanical, so I may have forgotten a step somewhere. Regardless, the ridiculous smallness of the uncertainty in position of macroscopic objects was something my modern physics professor emphasized.
Ratko Mladic and Joe Arpaio made the news this past week. One was arrested, and the other had a number of associates arrested. I haven't noticed anyone comparing the two, and I think that's a shame. Way back in the time of the Nuremberg Trials, the question was asked, "how could regular people just look away?" Mostly people do not look the other way. Actually, what I mean is that they don't look away under certain conditions. Namely, decent people will call out the monsters among them when the government is not, itself, comprised of monsters. People like Ratko Mladic or any of the innumerable "legal" mass murderers of history are nothing more than guys like Joe Arpaio in lawless lands. To be fair, Arpaio is fairly popular in Arizona and even more popular among right wing "law and order and tougher sentences (except for white collar crime)" types. But those who are familiar with his ilk are less impressed.
"Who could line up captives and machine gun them down? Surely not one of us. We are decent people." Words like these were spoken throughout Germany in the latter part of 1945. "People like us" do not murder men, women, and children hour after hour and day after day for months on end. Certainly cremating the infant corpses is not something that can be done by sane humans. Yet, we routinely encounter this sort of person. The difference is that most of these would-be war criminals rank self preservation very highly. In a stable society, then, these activities would land them in prison or worse.
What makes me think this of Arpaio? He enjoys humiliating his victims. Yes, I will call them victims. The people who are counter-Constitutionally subjected to ritual humiliation (yes, for sane people, ritual humiliation is cruel or unusual) may be scumbags. They may deserve far worse. But we are a great nation precisely because our justice system is not revenge-based. Suppose bin Laden had been captured. Certainly he deserves no less than torture. He murdered thousands, with many suffering terribly. But we are better than that. The reason "skinning alive" is not listed as a possible sentence for child murder is that we are better than that. A roomful of men over two hundred years ago understood that a government is only as just as its actions. Societal turmoil is just the impetus to allow the monsters to slip their leashes. When I see one of these diseased minds in positions of prominence, I see them as the miserable weasels who claim to have been "just following orders" to excuse the atrocities which they had so thoroughly enjoyed a year before.
Since the Rapture seems to have missed me, I may as well do some more of that book-learning. So I will likely be spending much of my time delving through the arcana of statistics and not so much in other leisure time activities. I even started out by installing the R language on my laptop. I'm sure this will be even more fun than the last time I did this. After a single lecture, I remembered how much I dread higher math. Oh well.
We should leave the term "politically correct" in the hands of those who use it as it was intended. It is primarily a complaint. It appeals to those who feel wronged by modern sensibilities. That is to say, they are greatly put out by having to use what they apparently think is subtlety. It's hard work implying that swarthy people are lazy, good-for-nothing born criminals. Extra effort is required to imply that rape victims had it coming. And you can't even call that homo down the hall a faggot without everyone getting all bent out of shape. It's hard out there for a Limbaugh listener.
I know it is a stretch to call members of the of the American media's Active Stupidization Program "journalists," but that's the niche they fill (as, say, naturopaths and chiropractors are called "doctors").
Every day at lunchtime, I stroll over to MSNBC to check out the headlines. More often than not, I will find something in the following pattern:
Teen Mom Trades Baby For Concert Tickets
House Republicans Blast Democratic Spending
Commission Slams Management Ethics Violations
Tot Found Alone in Bus Station
I'll forgive for the moment that positively trivial items are routinely included among headlines of national or global importance. (For now. Grrr...) I understand that headline writers want to grab the attention of the reader in few words. Nevertheless, I wish hateful things on these people. I wish that each time one of these loathsome beasts vomited such tripe onto my computer screen, he was sentenced to write the following sentence longhand one thousand times:
Teen Mom Slams Baby Daddy for Forgetting Tyke at Terminal
