Before anyone gets too upset: No, nothing happened to RAW. He as far as I know is just fine. :)

The downside: yesterday morning, at approximately 9:15, I and my two roommates were awoken by a pounding on our door and shouts of "house on fire." Not our house, but the next-door neighbor's house. We got all the hoses out and the two of them worked on hosing down the side and roof of our house and trying to contain the massive blaze from hers, while waiting for the fire department to arrive.

In the short term, we got off lucky. Nothing important (that I know of, still waiting on the cleanup company for final word on computer's condition and the other electronics in the room) was burned, though the fire did a bit of damage to the attic. All humans and animals were safely removed from the house, though I had an interesting time carrying Logan and Sen across the street in my bare hands (did not have access to my room in order to grab the kitty carriers by that point).

To reiterate: All are well and safe, house just got a bit toasted. It's times like this you realize which are the important things.

Five years later, my ex-girlfriend finally pulled the plug on my email addresses through her EV1 account. As such, my email situation is in a bit of disarray. Many emails to me will come back with multiple fails, but I will usually get it. Do not send me any email that is addressed to EV1.net. My Bigfoot account will get to me, but you will get two or three bouncebacks from the EV1 accounts. The safest way to email me at the moment is to send it to my gmail account. First and second initial followed by my last name at gmail.com.

Meanwhile, I'm going to have to make sweeping changes to my current email methods. I lost access to my spambox, so now several of my accounts here and there are inaccessible. GMail can probably take care of most of my ills, but I cannot check it at work. I'll have to figure out some form of webmail to use, as the problem at work is more-or-less limited to GMail at this point, not webmail in general.

Just when I start to reach a tipping point with my frustration of the obtuseness of white conservatives when it comes to race, I run across something like Seattle School district's rather stunning definition of race and racism:

Cultural Racism: Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Now, I could get all high-and-mighty about the equivocation of libertarianism and racism. I knew that in the minds of some I am racist because I am a Republican, though being racist because of my libertarian streak is a new one on me - as is the notion that this is apparently the official view of the Seattle school district. But I will more-or-less let the proclamation that a preference for individualism over collectivism speak for itself. Anyone that believes that I am a racist should probably find something unracist to be reading, so you're welcome to leave because I don't think we have much to say to one another.

Independent Sources jumps on the "one form of English as standard" portion, which is a point that Adrianne Truett and others have noted in the past. I understand where they're coming from, though since I do believe certain aspects of English language should be dropped (who/whom, for instance) and common pronunciation is frequently wrong (as anyone that has heard me say the word "continuity" will attest) I can't muster up too definitive a case for language.

The part that caught me most by surprise was that about "future time orientation." Was this meant to say that thinking ahead is racist? If it doesn't mean that, what does it mean. I did a brief Google search and ran across Sound Politics, who helps define the term:

The time orientation of a person or culture can be past, present or future. (There are other dimensions, such as monochronic and polychronic, which we don't need to go into here.) Past-oriented cultures tend to believe all the great decisions were made in the past, and present society is a degenerate version of some past golden age. They don't value innovation highly, preferring to preserve what already exists. Tibet is a good example of such a culture, and fundamentalist Islam fits the definition, too. Future-oriented people, in contrast, believe in setting goals, planning how to reach them and innovating when necessary to accomplish their aims. Western society is the prime example of a future-oriented culture, and even for us it is a relatively recent invention, really only arising during the Renaissance. Present-oriented folks think only about the here and now, not considering how their acts relate to tradition or will effect their happiness in the future. They are impulsive and will not delay immediate gratification for some greater future reward.

The bolded portion of the quote seems to suggest, oddly, that it is not conservatives that are racist but rather liberals. It is conservatives that speak more vigorously on traditional values and whatnot. Stereotypically it is they that want to "build a bridge to the 18th century," would more likely prefer women to stay at home like they used to, and seem to hold the 1950's up as a model society. These are not necessarily positions that actual conservatives support, but they are the kinds of things that the kinds of people that write things like this believe they support. It is liberals that are stereotypically "future oriented" in that they strongly dispute the notion that the great decisions lie in the past.

These broad strokes are smudged a little bit by the New Deal and Great Society plans, which liberals seek to preserve and conservatives seek to reform and/or dismantle, but be that as it may that is not how liberals percieve themselves at the moment beyond specific issues (namely government programs).

I'm not trying to prove a point, I just found that tidbit to be quite strange and the more scrutiny I give it, the stranger it becomes.

I'm not really offended as much as I am just confused.

An odd comment from Kevin Drum:

in the postwar era, with the exception of Nixon, no one from either party has run for president, lost, and then eventually come back to win. I suspect there's less to this myth than meets the eye."

Say what? Reagan ran in 1976 and won in 1980. Bush ran in 1980 and lost in 1988. Gore ran in 1988 and... almost won in 2000, though admittedly these were two different Al Gores. As this comment is in reference to John Kerry, the fact that he's a senator would make an election to the presidency more unusual than the fact that he lost in 2004. Now of course what Drum probably meant was that someone won the nomination, lost the presidency, and then came back to win. No one since Nixon has done that, only Hubert Humphrey has tried as far as I know, so that statistic is not particularly useful.

As for the article itself. I cannot imagine the Democratic Party giving Kerry another chance, given what a slam dunk most Democrat-types thought the 2004 election would be. Al Gore is an interesting case in more ways than one. He did win the popular vote in 2000, but if he were to run it would be the third Al Gore in three separate tries. I'm not really trying to say that as a slight to Mr. Gore. In some ways I can relate to Gore in ways that I can relate to no other high-profile politician and have a personal affinity for him even when I don't like him very much. But anyway Bush was very much a different in 2004 than he was in 2000 as Washington changed him, so I don't consider Gore's alterations to be in-and-of themselves indicative of a whole lot, but the current bombastic version of Gore is not the version of Gore that would have the upper hand in 2008.

And I think that Gore knows this. I don't think he particular cares because despite all the ways of crazy he seems now, he does seem somewhat at peace with the presidency being out of his reach.

Dear Roxio,

It was my fault for giving you guys my email address when I registered. I must have overlooked the "don't send me stuff" box or there wasn't one. Either way I should have set it up for my spam address. My bad for trusting you. One thing, though. If you're going to try to sell me stuff, could you refrain from trying to sell me the product that I bought from you in the first place that got me on the list?

Thanks,

The Blogwriter Who Foolishly Trusted You With His Email

An survey by the Institute of Health and Community Studies of Bournemouth University in Britain has yielded some interesting results:

"The good news and, perhaps, unexpected is that the 2005 youngsters have less problematic behaviour than the 1985 cohort and even with the problematic behaviour, drugs, drink and sex, this is still a minority activity," said Prof Pritchard.

"The bad news, however, is that 20 years ago boys drugged, drank, smoked, truanted, stole, vandalised and fought more than girls. Today it is very different. Girls now significantly smoke and binge-drink more than boys.

"They truant, steal and fight at similar rates to boys but have started under-aged sex earlier than boys with 17% of lads in Year 11 having their First-Sexual-Intercourse (FSI) whereas 31% of Year 11 girls have had their FSI, indicating they are going with older boys."

Pritchard blames the Spice Girls. Silly as that may sound at first, he may have a point. There certainly is a push in some entertainment circles for "girl power." One of the things that I've found most interesting about Nashville country music - which generally serves a more conservative audience -- is that you have "girl power" acts like the Dixie Chicks and SheDaisy and Jo Dee Messina while the guys spend most of their time moping about their sad relationship with their drunken father and a broken heart.

But encouragingly, the issue is as much improvement in the self-reported behavior of boys than the deterioriation of girls' behavior. Of course, "self-reported" is the key word here. But even if the difference completely falls on girls' willingness to discuss their misdeeds and boys increasing unwillingness to do so, that could be significant in itself. The stereotype has historically been that boys's bad behavior is tolerated while girls are expected to be considerably more obedient and well-behaved. It could be that in Britain right now it's the boys that feel more compelled to downplay their indiscretions and girls to brag about them. That in and of itself would be quite the reversal.

I wonder what a similar study in the US would say, if anything.

NPR does a rather self-indulgent piece on how the media is "afraid of doing their jobs" or something to that effect.

I'm not sure why reporters should be afraid to do their jobs. It's their sources that have something to fear. Without the possibility of facing consequences, anonymous sources will simply use the media as a bat in intradepartmental disputes, which compromises what they're doing. That may be a good thing if they're doing something I disagree with, but it could compromise things that most of us find acceptable measures to take in the name of national security.

I thought Walter Pincus had a good point at the end that when a story is big enough, people will take chances to do what's right. The government has a legitimate interest in keeping all kinds of covert operations covert. Maybe the current administration is using legitimate rationales for illegitimate behavior; I really don't know. Not all information should be available to us at all times, particularly when it comes to law enforcement, intelligence, and military matters. There are reasons that some thing and there are some things that we shouldn't know about because we don't want terrorists to know about them.

One reporter wondered if things were going to have to go back to the big, bad days where they had to actually go somewhere and meet their sources. Heaven forbid. The non-existent constitutional right to anonymity includes a clause preventing people from being forced to leave their house to get a story, I suppose. Whatever the case, the media's whining here is quite unseemly.

"[I]n real life, we share polite aquaintanceship with all sorts of people who think all kinds of wrong and crazy stuff. We just don’t usually have to hear about those crazy things. At a party we will edge away from the crazy “let me tell you about my views on minarchy RIGHT NOW” guy. Then again, we might have a great time discussing the latest Italian election results, say, or poor draft choices recently made in the NFL, with someone who was, in fact, a crazy minarchist, but who didn’t go out of his way to tell you about it. Unfortunately, the blogosphere is like an extended drunken party in which the probability of you having to hear the crazy minarchist’s theories about government asymptotically approaches 1." -Belle Waring

Affluence and Its Discontents (Robert Samuelson, Washington Post)

You hear the refrain all the time: The economy looks good statistically (4.7 percent unemployment), but it doesn't feel good. Although the United States is the wealthiest nation in history, our quarrels and quibbles with our prosperity are unending. Why doesn't ever-greater wealth promote ever-greater happiness? It is a question that dates at least to the appearance in 1958 of "The Affluent Society" by John Kenneth Galbraith, the former Harvard University economist who died recently at 97.

"The Affluent Society" is a modern classic because it helped define a new moment in the human condition. For most of history, "hunger, sickness, and cold" threatened nearly everyone, Galbraith wrote. "Poverty was the all-pervasive fact of that world. Obviously it is not of ours." No, indeed. After World War II, the dread of another Great Depression gave way to an economic boom. In the 1930s unemployment had averaged 18.2 percent; in the 1950s it was 4.5 percent. In 1946 only 8,000 households had TVs; by 1960 about 90 percent did. [...]

It's often said that only the rich are getting ahead; everyone else is standing still or falling behind. Well, there are many undeserving rich -- overpaid chief executives, for instance. But over any meaningful period, most people's incomes are increasing. From 1995 to 2004, inflation-adjusted median family income -- for families precisely in the middle -- rose 14.3 percent, to $43,200, the Federal Reserve says. People feel "squeezed" because their rising incomes often don't satisfy their rising wants -- for bigger homes, more health care, more education, faster Internet connections.

One of the rules of budget rhetoric is that cutting into the growth of a government program is actually "cutting the program." It's the same sort of thing here: our condition is not improving as fast as we would like, so things are getting worse.

Worshipping at the church of Tim Hortons (Mark Steyn, Macleans)

"Americans aspire to independence," he told the Star's man. "Their model is to drive out of town, Gary Cooper with Grace Kelly, and get on their ranch and she's in the kitchen and having babies and he's standing at the ranch gate with a gun, saying, 'no trespassing.' "

I don't know if, in the course of their research, Messrs. Kidd and Adams ever visited any "communities" -- in, say, New England, or old England, or Belgium, or Slovenia, or even Canada. But, if they did, they might have noticed that you drive through the outskirts of the "community," past the various "dwelling units," and arrive at the centre of the "community" -- often called a "village green" or a "town square" -- and smack dab at the centre of the centre you'll see a big building with a cross on it, and perhaps a sign saying "St. George's Parish Church. Consecrated 1352." Nonetheless, undaunted, two grown men are willing to argue in the Toronto Star that Americans have to make do with going to church because they've lost all sense of community.

Liberals and conservatives alike bemoan the death of community, but liberals stake out the peculiar position of expressing concern that individuality often trumps community while generally setting themselves up as opponents or religion, community standards, and the very things that have historically made community bonds.

Study Finds English Are Healthier than Americans (Joanne Silberner, NPR)

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association comes to a conclusion that has surprised even the researchers who conducted it. Middle-aged whites in England are significantly healthier than middle-aged whites in the United States. That's despite the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person on health care. [...]

Michael Marmot of University College in London said the results astonished him and the other researchers.

"Americans have more diabetes. Americans have more heart disease. Americans have more respiratory disease and other diseases, as well," Marmot says.

That's twice as much diabetes in the United States. And nearly twice as many people in the United States reported cancer.

"It was a bit of a big shock," Marmot says. "I just didn't imagine we'd find it consistently across the board, with worse health in the United States compared with England." [...]

It's not the different health systems. With its higher health-care expenditures and greater availability of technology, the United States should score better, not worse.

It's also not the distribution of healthcare towards the wealthy: the richest third of Americans score comparably to the poorest third of Britons. Stress seems a sufficiently pervasive suspect. Funny that as harried and insecure as we are, we remain some of the happier people on the planet -- happier than the British, even.

Many of you already know, but I haven't made the official announcement.

Camille wraps up her residency at the end of June. She has accepted an offer for a Fellowship in the Great State of Texas. Austin, to be exact. We move down at the end of June.

I don't have any work lined up down there, but I've been polishing up my resume. I've added two years of XHTML experience (six months programming, ten months as a quality assurance person, and 6 or so as the supervisor of the programming team) for whatever that is worth. It was worth more than answering phones, I'm sure.

The job market in Austin is always tough, but it will probably be better than it had been in Idaho Falls and Pocatello, and all things considered I've done phenomenally well up here.

If I don't find work pretty early on money is going to be tight. The job unfortunately doesn't pay much more than she's getting up here, but Austin is going to cost considerably more. On the other hand, we both look forward to there being no state income tax.

We will actually be older than the average Austin resident, but that'll be the least of the culture shock we're going to get moving from Mormon Idaho to hippie Austin.

I'm already scoping out music shows to go to. She still hasn't seen Phil Pritchett play and Austin's no-smoking bar scene will help considerably. I also have a number of friends in the Austin-San Marcos area (and, of course, three hours away in Houston). Dad says that he will visit every week there is a UT home game.

We're both quite excited. OU graduate Camille says that the town is too infected with burnt orange, but that she could get to like it.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of east coast bias, his groundbreaking health care proposals, or simply everybody getting their turn in the spotlight, but I find the hopes being placed on Mitt Romney interesting. Not just hopes, but expectations. The ordinarily astute Ross Douthat:

I think Schmitt is too hard on the chances of McCain and Romney - not because both men don't have their weaknesses, but because, as he notes, the rest of the competition is pretty thin, and it's very thin-ness will tend to highlight McCain and Romney's strengths. Which means that unless Giuliani gets into the race - and perhaps even if he does - it's probably going to come down to those two.

I find it pretty difficult to believe that the GOP is going to ultimately leave the race to someone whose made his career publicly thumbing his nose at his party (while privately voting with it a vast majority of the time) and a Mormon aristocrat from Massachusetts. The two principle candidates would be varying degrees of disliked by one of the party's core constituencies: evangelicals.

I'm not saying that neither of these men will win, but one of them is going to suck the wind from the sails of the other pretty quickly and the smart money has got to be McCain. Then the race will probably come down to McCain and a social conservative favorite (interestingly, with the establishment warming to McCain, it'll be McCain and the establishment against a rebellious religious - or cultural - conservative in a party supposedly run by religious nuts) such as Sen. George Allen or Sen. Sam Brownback. It may go down quite differently than that... but I am almost certain that by the time we get past South Carolina the strongest candidates will be McCain and Romney.

I haven't finished reading Stephen Rose's "The Trouble With Class Interest Populism" yet, though on the first couple pages he takes on Thomas Frank, who wrote the widely regarded What's The Matter With Kansas.

I've heard liberals ponder before why it is that many of the nation's poorest states vote Republican when it is (in their view) so obviously against their self-interest. They reason that on pocket-book issues they should vote Republican. Rose addresses that point, but I think even if one were to concede that the Democrats are better for Idaho or West Virginia or Dakota on ecomonic matters, I'm not convinced there's anything wrong with voting for or against parties on that basis.

If economic issues are to be the dominating factor, why don't Democrats just give up on social issues altogether? Give up the battles on abortion, guns, and so on and they could win over the midwest. If the debate is -- or should be -- centered around economic issues, this would be a tremendous victory. Except that it wouldn't because a number of liberals would either stay home or support a third party.

But they know as well as we do that social issues matter. It's the dominant factor in political alignment.

Should it be?

Liberals, would you give up abortion, tolerance of homosexuality, and strict separation of church and state in exchange for more aggressive welfare programs of your choosing?

Conservatives, would you give up abortion, TV smut, and guns for lower taxes and government?

I'm more an economic conservative than a social one, but even I have difficulty swallowing that one.

I heard something today that it never occured to me that I might ever here:

"It's like the Pepsi equivalent of Surge."

For those of you that don't recall, Surge was a green citrus-flavored sugar-and-caffeine powerhouse released by Coca-Cola in 2000-02 or so. It replaced Mello Yello and was after a couple short years replaced by Mello Yello.

The comment was made by a woman at Taco Bell when her son asked what something at the Pepsi machine was.

It looked like he was either looking at Sierra Mist or Mountain Dew

If Sierra Mist, they were of course wrong. Sierra Mist is Pepsi's answer to Sprite. A very poor answer at that. In that sense, I suppose, it is a bit like Surge.

If Mountain Dew... well that's techincally correct. Mountain Dew is the closest thing Pepsi has to something that tastes like Surge used to. But calling it Pepsi's equivalent of Surge is like calling Denver "the Boise of Colorado." The two have a pretty good deal in common (dirty capital cities with a substantial portion of the state's population and a more liberal tilt than much of the rest of the state), but you don't equate the relevent item with the comparatively irrelevent one. Boise could be called the Denver of Idaho, for instance, but calling Denver the Boise of Colorado seems wrong. Even if it's right, it's just wrong.

To RAW:

You were right. I saw V for Vendetta in IMAX this Friday, and your assessment of the movie (now that I've seen it for myself) was correct: there's no built-in "hey look this is really Bush" moments or anything.

That being said, they did all they could to draw as strong a parallel to Nazi Germany without actually just blatantly saying so. Not only did they change the name of the PM to Sutler (to sound similar to Hitler), they gave him facial hair evocative of the man, created a "symbol of the Party" that looks vaguely swastika-ish, and whenever they showed Sutler's "rise to power" in flashbacks, it was always in the form of news conferences where he was waving his hands and framed by flags very similar to the old newsreel footage of pre-WWII speeches by Hitler.

So, you were right. But I can see how either side (given their filters) might walk away with the idea that it was aimed at Bush, because the loony left spend a lot of time trying to draw Bush-Hitler parallels in their rhetoric, and so they'll be looking for an opportunity to do so just as, the moment the hitlerian references become obvious, the hard-core right wing will become defensive.