Think Small

It's weird how inspiration can come from the most random places. An inspirational link and a quick conversation with my brother and, quite suddenly, I'm ready to start writing on this thing once again.

It all started quite innocuously this morning: Get to the office, throw on a cup of coffee and check reddit for all the easy-to-digest liberal nerd rage I can bite off with my dulled political chops. Years of caring too much have turned me from a youthfully deaf, rabid Michael Moore wannabe into one of those more sage, jaded liberals who believes in the goodness of sharing and equality but is disheartened by the empty promise of politics in America.

I noticed one particular headline that suddenly cranked my fatigued morning brain into overdrive:

This is interesting: Julian Assange's old blog. (web.archive.org)

A blog written by an academic from 2006-2007 touching on some high-minded topics such as freedom of information, love, life and humor? Interspersed with random snippets of useful Ruby code? All on a very non-flashy, flat-style page? Totally fucking early 2000's nostalgia! Where do I sign up?

To me, Assange has never been the enigmatic, borderline Aspy with a serious case of US butthurt that many media outlets have attempted to mis-characterize. To me, he's a man who values the academic principle of openness more than the academic definition of journalism. And that pragmatic attitude garners a lot of respect from me.

Professors and pundits alike may argue all day about the proportions of journalism, recklessness, integrity, fairness and freedom that constitute the WikiLeaks initiative. At the end of the day, though, WikiLeaks itself (especially with this latest iteration of leaked cables) is not dismantling the institutions it highlights. At least, not on its own. They're dismantling the facade. They're exposing the way the world works in a very candid way, leaving the accountability in the hands of those who dare to lie, mislead or at the very least not educate the public at large.

I think that's cool, because history tends to favor openness and expression.

Anyways, back to that blog.

Breezing through the international pariah's random, somewhat intimate wisdom, I found myself awash in one big, awesome thought: He blogs for the same reason I have to blog. To put my ideas out there. To reflect and check myself in a public space. To share and clarify and sharpen my position instead of keeping it in my head. I feel like those higher goals are evident in Assange's blog as they are in this one.

Blogging for me has always been more than just an indulgent exercise in narcissism, though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't some significant part of it :-) It's a giant "you are here, and this is where you've been" map for life. I do re-read my shit on occasion. I bet you're not surprised.

Honestly, I know myself well enough to know that I have never been able to keep track of myself well in my head. I lose myself. I make myself crazy with the sort of deprecating, self-defeating nonsense that left me depressed and insular for the better part of this year. But when I unleash the stream of consciousness into a finite bitstream for public consumption, well, those self-defeating thoughts get pulverized like errant letters by a springy, loud, 80's style backspace button.

So thanks to Mr. Assange for helping me realize and see the importance of writing on my blog once again.

I also chatted a bit with my brother today and, together, we came to another conclusion: That each blog post doesn't have to be some big odyssey of a tome. It feels like everything I've written in the past year or so is some historical essay on the recent life I've been living up to that point. But that sort of defeats the purpose I was just talking about. What I ended up with this year was three or four giant characterizations of my life based on those pivotal moments when I was so emotional or worked-up that I just exploded with prose. But those aren't honest. They're moving, but they're not necessarily me on-the-whole.

The odyssey isn't each constituent post. The odyssey is the blog.

(oops, I ended up saying way more than I thought I would. oh well. I promise the next post will come soon, and be small. twss?)

Hormones and latex for everyone!

I don't Drudge that often, simply because Matt Drudge is like Perez Hilton for people with jobs, brains, lives, whatever. When I do happen upon the Drudge report and its eye-piercing siren, though, it doesn't take long to find something incredibly stupid and sensationalist.

Consider this video linked on Drudge a few days ago: Nancy Pelosi insisting that birth control could help our economy in the long-term. Here's the exchange in question, which took place on one of those Sunday morning news shows that you don't watch because you're at church, somewhat ironically:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."

Guys are supposed to heed clear of this issue. It's a touchy subject, no doubt. SHAME ON YOU FOR BRINGING IT UP STEPHANOPOULOS. But now that it's out there, I may as well continue blogging about it, for the lulz and the comments.

Let me be about as clear as I possibly can, using both boldface and italics: Children are a burden on society. Every child that attends school is a costly and risky investment in America's future. Every mouth-to-feed that puts an American family on Medicaid or Welfare is drawing from your pockets. Every kid who flunks out or fails to contribute to the workforce is a enormous loss for the American economy. Take your high school class' dropouts, multiply by about 20,000, and you'll start to understand the enormity of what I'm scratching at.

Back in high school, I begrudgingly read Bill O'Reilly's book-of-the-moment, Who's Looking Out For You?. It was an incredibly insensitive assessment of the American people, with lots of glaring racism and old-farty complaints about how these aren't the "good ol' days" anymore. But Bill actually got one point to stick in my head pretty hard: Unplanned, unwanted children are depleting government programs. Of course, his point was that unwanted black children born out of wedlock were depleting government programs for the entitled, working white man. Racism by any other name? Yes. Remember that there are many white Americans milking the system, too, and they know how to navigate the system better than anyone else.

Now to my point: If we didn't live in a culture that demonized birth control and family planning and underfunded programs to get it into the right hands, maybe our country wouldn't be in such a rut right now. Maybe if we funded programs to actively cut down on the number of deserving welfare recipients, we could put the net gain toward something proactive and useful. And maybe if we encouraged people to plan their families according to their income and their future, half of America wouldn't be degrading into a poor, awful slum.

Maybe if these huge families didn't need huge places to live, America wouldn't be seeing a record number of defaulting mortgages. After all, that's the most simple explanation as to what broke the credit market last year. Yes, yes, the current crisis is a much more complex situation, but who's to say that the entire thing would have been a hiccup rather than a depression if families had been small, succinct, and not drawing from the great American coffers.

You can blame popular religion and the far-right for that one. After all, trailer parks are chocked full of redneck couples feeding their 12 children with the money withheld from your paycheck, simply because they didn't use condoms, birth control, or get a non-surgical abortion early into the pregnancy. Selfish, right? It's actually the Christian thing to do: Bring children into this world that you can't support, because the government will help you. And ironically, the far-right are the same ones calling for a reduction in welfare and social security. Genius.

I really wish someone would explain why Republican senators and their constituents refused to fund the family planning programs in the stimulus package passed this week. Obviously, Americans are pretty bad at family planning without help-- the average American family stands at 3.14 members yet we have over 6 million families and 33 million individuals living below the poverty line. Obviously, people are going to keep screwing and accidentally getting pregnant, whether or not you chose to believe that simple fact. And obviously, this isn't going to stop without government intervention. Our country cannot wait five-hundred years for private interests and churches to fix the problem.

It's a downward spiral that elicits memories of Idiocracy. As families start too young and grow too large to support, the majority of our country becomes stupider and stupider. And to end on a wacky, popular literary allusion: Atlas will be crushed by the weight of the world long before he even has a chance to shrug.

[DRUDGE FLASH 2009: PELOSI SAYS BIRTH CONTROL WILL HELP ECONOMY]

Where was I supposed to go? Detroit?

I have a very limited range of sympathy for the Big Three automakers here in America. These companies have pushed grossly inefficient, unnecessarily large, and ridiculously expensive vehicles down the throats of consumers for over a decade, with pride, joy, and images of American flags set to country music. And before that, they were wiping their asses with pink slips and delivering them to thousands of blue-collar Americans as the automakers exploited the merits of NAFTA for their own selfish benefit. NAFTA passed under the assumption that US industrial leaders would expand their businesses into Mexico and Canada, not move a majority of their manufacturing duties out of the country in order to turn bigger profit margins.

They've helped to enforce a worldwide stereotype of American greed and disregard for the environment.

And now they're paying. The Big Three used their greedy, teeth-lined suckers to draw all the money they could out of America's unhinging upper-middle class, and coffers once padded with dot-com era dividends are shrinking. Or at least shrinking enough to make people think about where they're putting their next paycheck. Suddenly, the UMC is asking themselves why it makes sense to drop a Benjamin every week just to get to work. Or even half a Benjamin. Suddenly, those machismo-inspiring F150's and those divider-hugging H2's don't seem like the best status symbols money can buy.

People aren't visiting their local Ford dealership and laying down a year's salary on a new gas-guzzler. But more importantly, they're not buying the cheaper, used SUV's and pickups that saturate the pre-owned vehicle market. Not only are the self-righteous automakers getting screwed, but they've also inadvertently screwed the entire auto sales industry by saturating the market with four-year-old sport utility riggers.

With this in mind, and without a shred of guilt about it, I find myself aligned with a good majority of Republicans who say it's high time that Detroit sank into bankruptcy. Congressional Democrats-- or at least a good number of them-- are pushing for a bailout of the American automobile industry. Justification ranges from "if this happens, we'll move from recession to depression," to "we have to do everything we can to prevent lost jobs in this economy."

I call bullshit.

Okay, not completely. We DO have to do something. Here's my ideal "something":

• Enforce our current bankruptcy rules on the auto industry with heightened scrutiny and a general sense of direction. After all, Chapter 11 exists FOR EXACTLY THIS SORT OF SITUATION. We don't need new rules-- we need to stick to the ones we've used for decades.
  
• Use that "bailout" money-- or part of it-- to fund the socialized programs that will help Detroit's blue-collar workers transition into the NEW American auto industry. THIS IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF SITUATION THAT WARRANTS AN UNEMPLOYMENT AGENCY AND WELFARE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
  
• Dump some more bailout money into academia and privately-funded ventures to develop short-term fuel efficiency solutions. WE FUND SCHOOLS SO THAT BRAIN POWER CAN PULL US OUT OF SITUATIONS LIKE THIS.
  
• Set auto efficiency goals that Ford, GM, and Chrysler must meet over specific timetables in order to receive SOME federal subsidization.
  

That doesn't sound too hard or overly complicated, but it seems like a majority of people in Washington (save for some Republicans and fewer Democrats) think that holding up a failing industry and not holding it accountable is a good idea.

It's also important to note that BANKRUPTCY HASN'T HAPPENED YET. The automakers feel "threatened," and so they're begging Congress for a handout. I'm a liberal but, really, I hate handouts. Especially speculative handouts to companies that exploit foreign labor, push grossly expensive products, and STILL can't turn a profit. Handouts to Iraqi war vets, the transitional unemployed, and socially unstable families looking for assistance? Maybe, but certainly not the auto industry.

Detroit: Get with the program and start moving toward hybrid-electric vehicles. Stop inundating American culture with the need for behemoth steel death machines. And take some responsibility for your current place in the world.

Whew.

Must... not... talk... about... politics!

...too late.

I have a question for John McCain supporters, and it goes something like this: How can you still respect your candidate after he chose Sarah "You Betcha You're Fired, Walt" Palin to be his running mate?

Seriously. I'm soliciting the body of people who read my blog posts to give me an answer to this question because, for the life of me, I can't come up with any particular reason that seems compelling. At least, not compelling enough to make me vote red come November.

Ignore, if you will for a moment, every stupid thing that John McCain has ever done. Ignore the whole "bomb, bomb Iran" thing, the Keating Five scandal, his messy divorce with his first wife, the fact that he married a wealthy girl to jump-start his political career, and every gaffe he's ever, ever committed. Try to imagine John McCain as an affable war veteran with a Purple Heart, a commendation for his military service, and tons of hands-on experience in politics.

What we have is a well-spoken, 72-year-old American running for President of the United States with the experience and leadership needed to revitalize both the country and his own faltering Party. Maybe you don't agree with every single one of his opinions, but he's at least moderate enough to re-unite the country.

Okay. Let's take SuperMcCain and say he has to make one decision-- choosing a running mate. Luckily, as a Republican, he has an breadth of smart, affable, educated politicians to pick from. He could pluck from the body of other Republicans who wanted to run for POTUS: Mitt Romney comes to mind immediately. Mitt is charming, charismatic, and would certainly bolster McCain's chances of election given the looming economic crisis. He could pick Mike Huckabee, the good Doctor RON PAUL, or even Rudy Giuliani. While those guys all have their pitfalls, they also bring to the table some trademark characteristic that could pull our buddy McCain ahead in the polls. And they're mostly respectable picks.

But our good friend, Senator John McCain, the hypothetical perfect war vet with leaps and bounds more experience than his opposition, decides instead to pick SARAH FUCKING PALIN to be his vice presidential nominee. He picks a first-term governor from ALASKA. He honestly looks at a list of PROMINENT REPUBLICAN WOMEN and picks a random name from the top.

Would you really still support this guy, even if he was perfect in every way that appealed to you? Wouldn't you feel a bit, I don't know, betrayed? Wouldn't you feel like he was putting politics above country? Wouldn't you feel like that other guy, even though he has "D-IL" appended to his name in, was at least more genuine?

I don't get it. I really don't understand any motivators that would compel you toward voting McCain after a stunt like that. Then we load Palin down with her inarticulate speaking skills and her whole Troopergate scandal and her radical Republican views and, well, I think you get the point. She's so far divorced from what this country needs right now-- a uniting leader both domestically and abroad-- that you've got to wonder whether McCain is thinking more about the country or getting four years in as president before he croaks.

If McCain truly is the person he purports himself to be, he would have picked an equally affable running mate.

So please, someone, tell me what's motivating your McCain vote at this point. I'll accept "I'm afraid of Barack Obama" as an answer, because some people are honestly too thick and too consumed by the idea that Democrats are immoral and tax-crazy to be swayed by reason. Maybe you really hate socialized health care enough to put Palin in line for the Presidency. Maybe you're voting McCain with a guilty conscience. If you are then please let me know, because that'll help expand my understanding at least a little bit.

And I'll also accept "I follow party politics because that's what I've always done and I'll fight you tooth and nail until the bitter end," because that's exactly how Bush became our President, let alone got re-elected. That and John Kerry was a turd sandwich.

Some things just aren't meant for print

Note: I pumped this out over the course of two hours a few days ago with the intention of submitting it to the student newspaper I've come to love so much. However, after facing the grim reality that it's too pompous and the very subject matter makes it unpublishable, I decided to slap it up on my blog instead. Enjoi!

As 2008 sheds the diaper of January and heads into the hormone-driven, lovey-dovey adolescence of February, you're probably noticing a shift in the student dynamic all around campus. Things seem more tense. Undergrads are pounding their fists and sharing some ill-toned sentiments at dinnertime. Graduate students trudge on per the usual, but that trudge has seems slightly affected by worldly happenings. Your Facebook account has probably become awash with invitations to support political candidates. That's right, kids: The election season is ramping up, and the very Thresher you're holding right now is bound to become a battleground of political nitpicking in the months to come. You may even become part of the madness.

But let me save you the trouble.

There's a certain clockwork mechanism to writing about politics and politicians during an election year. First you pick a topic, you write about it with varied degrees of fervor and one-sidedness, consider the opposing viewpoint for about two or three lines, and then dash it into freedom fries before your eloquent and thought-provoking send-off. Then you wait a week for some angry alumni or tenured professor to dash you to shreds using words so incredibly long, you'll wonder if they only teach them at the Ivies. Such is the process at every print institution in this nation, from the Podunk Press to the New York Times. And after you notice the doldrum process repeated article after article, election after election, you start to wonder as I have-- what's the point?

There is no point, besides maybe trolling the campus for attention. Take a look around you. We live in a world of instant information access, not a world of cheesy "I Like Ike" parade floats creeping through downtown with loudspeakers blaring campaign slogans. The age of the "elect this guy" political column came to an end after Al Gore plugged in the Internets so many ages ago. And likewise, the archaic concept of thoughtful political discussion has given way to armchair experts flinging quotes from their favorite blogs in order to sound smart. Today, people turn to blogs, web sites, iPhones, and even their make-believe online friends to decide which lever to pull on November Fourth. The decision is not made by the best-versed columnist or politico anymore, and perhaps that's a good thing.

This attitude towards political opinion applies most definitely at Rice. Consider the audience, for example. Professors and academic staff have been voting for the same party for the past fifty years. Likewise, students are pretty set when it comes to the issues that matter (i.e. drinking age, the right to carry firearms at school, whatever Ron Paul says) and had their minds made up months ago concerning which candidate to support. You can thank the Internet and national media outlets for starting campaign coverage back in 2005 and forcing opinions on us before we knew, say, anyone's actual stance on the issues. And don't forget that smart people, whether they're actually smart or just told they're smart by their friends, are usually some of the most thick-headed people you'll ever try to persuade. Good luck doing that in six hundred words.

So what's an op/ed page-- nay, the entire campus-- supposed to do with itself if one-sided, Crossfire-like bickering has become moot? There is such a thing as healthy political discussion, of course. It requires a mindset akin to a typical Rice student after a couple of drinks-- just enough to get them talking but not quite enough to get them shouting obscenities at their loved ones.

I believe this campus should spend less time worrying about which tuckus is going to fill the Oval Office throne come 2009 and more time reflecting upon what this country actually needs: Open minds, friendly spirits, and the return of the rational-thinking voter. Or we could all reflect on this campus' many needs: Communication between the administration and the student body before major construction projects are undertaken, a sense of identity that can hold tight in the wake of the Second Century speedboat, and, of course, a Waffle House.

Ron Paul, you are making me die

Story highlights, for those who need them:

• I hate the Republicans. Except for Romney, who has a chin I would marry.
• Rice University students are stupider than you might guess.
• Ron Paul isn't stupid but he's responsible for my sleep apnea.
• I have a hundred-year plan to turn pollution into gold and candy. Elect me.
  

So I'm watching the Des Moines Register's big little Republican debate right now. If you can imagine staring right into the sun while simultaneously having your ears are assaulted by a thousand fire ants, you might have an idea how painful this experience is for a liberal douche like myself. But I haven't talked national politics in a while and I feel like I owe it to the people who don't give a flying shit about flailing magazines at Rice University to change the course of this blog.

If you want an idea what the political climate at Rice University stands, you don't have to look much further than this little slice of cyberspace: http://www.rontorice.org/.

Seriously, take a look at that site for a minute. Bask in its sub-Web 2.0 look. Be transported to a time when the Internet's worst web sites didn't even look that great. Check out those YouTube videos! Then realize that this is a real candidate who has won the hearts of every college student looking for an anti-establishment hero.

Holy fucking dogshit. Not at my college.

Ron Paul is systematically taking pieces of my soul with a melon scooper, day by day, scoop by scoop. It's not his policies that drive me insane. His ideas are good ideas. Diversifying America's economic basis? Not too shabby. Libertarian values? I'm down with some of those. Ron Paul is one of those starry-eyed politicians who has a lot of great ideas.

Great ideas that could only be implemented AFTER we dismantle the entire government, arrest every corporate board member in the country, make drugs safe for everyone that uses them, reverse America's established foreign doctrine, and forget the lessons that established the institutions and rules I just brought up.

My problem is that Ron Paul's supporters just don't get it. The things he wants to do-- dismantle the Federal Reserve, for example-- would take more than the two terms a US President is afforded. And yet there are students at Rice University who don't see this. They're wrapped up in the armchair expertise of the same people who start flamewars on FARK and Digg.

I'm going to interrupt this politically-charged post to let everyone know that at 2:30 every weekday on PBS, there's a wickedly strange show called "Between the Lions" broadcast to children all over the world. Try to imagine what would happen if Wonder Showzen's producers actually made a for-serious children's show with the same effects and transitions as WS, and tried to get you to read, you'd have this shit. And it's restoring those little pieces of my soul.

Anyways, what was I saying? Something about Ron Paul.

It's like Rice students never took a serious history class back in high school. Even if Ron Paul were to try to implement one of his policies, he'd meet impossible opposition from, oh, THE DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS WHO HAPPEN TO HATE REPUBLICANS. Remember how much policy Clinton got pushed through the GOP Congress during the 90's? Like, two things. Maybe you weren't reading Time when you were 8, but I was.

And I'm criticizing his ideas under the the unrealistic assumption that he wouldn't just be a tool of his party after his election, which is after all the way American politics have worked since Jefferson.

You realize that, right? No candidate as maverick as Ron Paul has ever been endorsed by a major party. Ever. And if Ron Paul runs as an independent, you might as well write in your vote for that other rich Texas politico...


...remember him? Seemingly old, starry-eyed man who wanted to reinvent America for the better and had a rabid base of grassroots support? H Ron Paul... err, H Ross Perot.

Ron Paul. Ross Perot. RP + RP 4 Ever.

All Ron Paul is going to do is eat the votes of college students and educated Internet-dwellers, which is ultimately going to put Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney's Chin in office. And then you'll get another four years of Republican shadow government and basically the opposite of Ron Paul's happy-go-lucky worldview.

You can fight for the improvement of the world, but your revolution is going to ultimately bring this country down. In America, you draw in the lines to get things done, not write the world LOVE backwards and teabag the IRS with a blimp.

But if you still can't see all this, go ahead and register Republican. Inflate their supporter numbers and allow them more sway. Whatever. Just don't vote for Allen Keys. He's fucking CRAZY.

And that's all I'm gonna say about that.