Coming attractions: more posting

- Is it possible that a ball that could fly over the Green Monster wouldn't make it out of Dodger Stadium? This mathematician says no!

- What is left of the Republican Party? Their entire campaign is based on a willful distortion of "You didn't build that!" I explore the pathology

- A new post at my science blog, Pineapples in Alaska, as I try my hand at a bit of science writing.

I seem to have decided to not review Prometheus as it would probably become embarrassing.

So much fear in America

Maybe I shouldn't pay so much attention to what the government and media do. Probably I would be a happier person if I did.

This may seem apropos of nothing, but it's a general reaction to how this country has been going over the past decade or so.

Our policies are predicated on a few things

- We are the good guys

- Terrorists hate us because they are bad guys

- The best approach is to take the fight to them

It's just so hard to hear all sorts of things motivated in the name of "fighting terror". We're engaged in a shooting war in Yemen (without any Congressional vote on it, naturally) and it's really hard to know what the reason is supposed to be. And since we don't really know what the goal is, there's no possible way the process can resolve itself.

I think our processes have completely detached from any plausible rationales. Why is the US fighting in Yemen? Because continued war is good for the people pursuing the war.

Anyway, the war thing is just one of many things that make me feel like I cannot vote for Obama come November. There's just way too much abuse of power going on. Maybe I cannot stop it. But I don't have to act like I approve of it. And given that Obama deceived people like me to get his vote in 2008, I'd feel like a jerk to go along with him regardless of his many broken promises.

Many posting ideas this week:

- the imminent end of the Garnett/Allen/Pierce era for the Celtics

- Prometheus: Noomi Rapace as an academic. My reaction is predictable

- time to play with some science policy posts

But back to the topic. I am tired of being flooded with negativity and fear. I feel like I resist the propaganda, but I'm suspecting that's not entirely true. Not that I'm living in fear, but it's a bummer when so many people are so frightened about everything.

p.s. I wonder what happened to the paragraphs? Apparently I have to do my own HTML now?

bad journalism, example #145356

Dear SI and AP,

About this story:
http://bit.ly/xV0spX

On the one hand, the guy who collected Ryan Braun's urine sample said that there were no locations "within 50 miles of Miller Park that would ship the sample" on the Saturday it was collected or on the day after.

Ryan Braun's camp contends that there are plenty of FedEx locations, at least one of which was open 24 hours.

Two competing claims, only one of which is true, right? So the job of a reporter is to report both claims and let the reader sort it out?

WRONG!!!
So here's what an actual reporter could do.

Get on the damned phone and call FedEx. There is an objective answer to this question and the truth should be easily obtained. If, in fact, the drug collector is full of shit, that's something the readers should be told. If, on the other hand, Ryan Braun is full of shit, that's something the readers should be told. Leaving the question unanswered? That's not journalism.

criticizing movies I haven't seen yet

So, it's Oscar time. And the nominees are named, and I hate most of them. Even though I haven't seen them yet. After the debacle of "The King's Speech" getting Best Picture for a story about an extremely wealthy man who had his life handed to him on a plate, well, I was hoping for more this year.

Let's look at what's going on:

The Artist: apparently the favorite. The strikes against it are
a) it's black-and-white
b) it's a silent film
c) it's about Hollywood.

Because of (c), it's going to win. That's because Hollywood is self-absorbed.

The Descendants
Apparently this is some kind of film with George Clooney. Hollywood loves George Clooney. I think he's pretty good, but you don't have to give him a nomination every year. Apparently the film is about how hard it is for a man to be a parent. Yawn.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
I'm really looking forward to 9/11 replacing the Holocaust as the best option for Oscar bait. After all, it was uber-tragic. Not just regularly tragic.
Tom Hanks dies. Deal with it. At least they didn't kill his dog (Turner & Hooch).

The Help:
Apparently black domestic women in the South have lessons for all of us. I'll pop in reruns of Good Times first.

Hugo:
It's OK to not nominate every single freakin' Scorcese film! It's too late, Hollywood. You dropped the ball with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. I don't even know what this one is about.

Midnight in Paris:
aka 6 p.m. on the East Coast. Owen Wilson plays a screenwriter. Please, screenwriters, stop writing films about screenwriters!!! Nobody else cares! There are 6.8 billion people on the planet, and like 43 of them are screenwriters. Surely you people can do a little legwork and write stories about other people!

Moneyball:
Yay, Billy Beane turned a last place team into a playoff contender that never won a post-season series. Worse, Jonah Hill got an Oscar nomination. Jonah Hill? What's up with that?

The Tree of Life:
I feel obliged to favor this film because the title mentions the subject of phylogeny, which paid my rent for a few years. OTOH, I ultimately found phylogeny to be not exciting enough to stay in. I bet the film isn't even about phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms!! Or, if it is, they probably like Neighbor Joining, like all the drones in computational biology who use an inferior algorithm just because it was published first. Read a book!

War Horse:
See Hugo, above, and replace Scorcese with Spielberg.

And they couldn't find a tenth film? Here's a suggestion: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or maybe include Inception again and make up for 2011!

Two more films from Best Actress:

Albert Nobbs. Um, Glenn Close still looks like Glenn Close. She's got to do more than get a haircut to look like a man. For one thing, she's only 5'4.5" tall. For a guy, that's midget-sized. And she has the facial structure of a women. The sad thing is that Glenn Close really deserves an Oscar for something. But I think I'd giggle a lot if I went to see this film.

Iron Lady. Could we please stop worshiping right-wingers? In the past decade, we've seen a Best Actor go to an English King and a Best Actress go to an English Queen. Enough already! We've had the revolution. And Margaret Thatcher was a terrible PM. If the UK hadn't been lucky enough to find oil in the North Sea, her austerity measures would have succeeded in destroying the economy completely.

Oh, but she beat up Argentina. Wow. Enough wars already. Yes, Meryl Streep should have about five more Oscars by now. But not for this one.

I'm off to see a black-and-white silent film because apparently I live in 1926 and that's all the cinema has.

Best comment yet about the Paterno cover-up of the Sandusky child rapes

"Nuke it from space to be sure."

- commenter at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, presumably referring to the town of State College, PA

a new attitude towards liberal thought

Just something I'm thinking about, looking at the nearly-defunct DCDL list.

These are dark days for liberal idealists. After enduring 8 years of incompetent warmongering conservatism, many hopes were raised when Barack Obama was elected. After all, Tea Partiers told us he was ultra-liberal. He promised to close Gitmo! Maybe he would enforce laws!

Well, that didn't really work out, did it? The party establishment has, by now, made it clear that they are far more interested in the desires of their wealthy donors than the desires of their rank-and-file. Liberals are repeatedly patronized and told that certain political strategies are "unrealistic," or that the US is a "center-right" nation, or that everybody loves conservatives. Meanwhile, not only are conservative policies driving the country into a ditch, they are wildly unpopular!

So, what's the solution? A "SUPER-committee" to ensure that odious policies that everybody hates are forced through Congress with little debate, and in a manner such that each party will be able to blame the other.

Seriously? This is the opposite of democracy.

Well, the US of A is in the midst of a creeping type of global class warfare, as the drumbeats of austerity economics beat on, flying in the face of their repeated failures internationally. Because - god forbid somebody be a Keynesian! God forbid somebody show some kind of tolerance for inflation!

Anyway, I was going to riff on the topic of the defeated liberals. Many liberals suffer from a delusion of living in an Enlightened State. By this I mean that they thing they have achieved some sort of Perfect Understanding of Human Nature and that all they need to do is Educate the Masses. Part of my inspiration here was from seeing the abandonment of DCDL, but part of it was from watching this:

MP@HB

(Yeah, Terry Gilliam is a wee bit un-PC there, isn't he.)

Anyway, if you approach liberal philosophy as an educational task to be conducted in earnest, you're probably going to burn out at a young age. The problem is that, a basic level, people suck. So trying to educate people to stop sucking so much is not something that's going to work.

And by "people suck" I mean, namely, that trying to convince the population of the virtues of an altruistic pursuit is hopeless. This kind of goal is a bad way to sell liberalism, as conservatives will smirk, and patronize, and lecture you about how young people with big hearts are liberals while wiser, older people become conservatives.

Liberal institutions and thought exist not because they satisfy some masturbatory need for people to feel good about themselves. They exist because they have fitness in an evolutionary sense. Keynesian economics exists because it was the only system that worked when free market capitalism brought the world economy to a screeching halt.

So, the key to selling liberal policies are that they work. Also, they are fair. And they have appeal to a broad base. Indeed, even the Republicans will pursue these kinds of policies when they need a boost in the polls. That's why the SUPER-DUPER-committee has been constructed in a way such that Obama will take the blame even as the government enacts right-wing policies.

That's enough for now.

Dreading 9/11

OK, so next Sunday is 9/11/11, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.

I'm dreading it.

Why? Well, there's the massive revisionism that has been going on for years, especially with regard to the real-time performance of President Bush. I remember how that day went down. Bush spent the day flying all over the country in search of a safe haven, leaving sub-ordinates to figure out what was going on. And then, after playing duck-and-cover for two days, he came out on TV and made a speech that exuded confusion and fear. In the years that have passed since then, Bush and his advisors have created a mythos portraying him as the "decider-in-chief" who stepped forward in a manly fashion and took charge of the situation. After all, he went to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium!

A little-known fact: the National Geographic channel (NatGeo) is part of the Murdoch empire. So, small surprise, they've given Bush an interview in which he can tell his side of what actually happened that day. "I felt fear, grief, ..and determination" or some such nonsense.

But that's really only the half of it. What really gets me is this effort to turn 9/11 into some kind of holy day, along with the "Ground Zero" part of Lower Manhattan into a shrine. It seems grotesque to me how people embrace their own victimhood, especially citizens of the richest country in history. This narcissism, this feeling that we are uniquely betrayed by the evil of others is mind-boggling.

Our electorate refuses to come to grips with the violence we export. Mind you, I don't have a problem with commemorating the victims of 9/11. But really, well over a hundred thousand people were killed by our invasion of Iraq. And we still don't have a good explanation for why we did that!!

At its core, American exceptionalism is nothing more than narcissism. It's a very popular cultural movement (Who dares speak against national self-love!?) but it's been quite destructive over the past decade. So when the same people who endorse "pre-emptive" air attacks against Iran, who cheered on when our drones started falling in Libya, and who basically root for the expression of American force as the answer to all of our international problems - when these people weep about our victimhood on 9/11, it's hard to swallow.