Mission: Impossible

SO, the mathematical update. NBC News has Barack Obama leading Hillary Clinton by 171 delegates. That means if she wins a mere 100% of the remaining 86 pledged delegates from Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota, she will be only be 85 delegates behind. Then, presuming (as we should) that she will get the Rules and Bylaws Committee to seat Florida and Michigan entirely in her favour (including zero delegates for Mr Obama in Michigan—the people’s voices must be heard after all, and none of those voices spoke his name), she nets 58 delegates, and is behind just 27.  Then assuming 260 or so undecided superdelegates (remember, Florida and Michigan will be fully seated, including their supers), only 55% have to be convinced to overrule the elected delegates.

Via Democracy in America

The Case for McCain

The New Yorker has the best piece of political journalism I’ve read this year. George Packer gives an interesting and insightful narrative following the currents of the conservative movement from Nixon to Bush, discussing how the dialogue of this presidential race reflects the shifts in the conservative base which has been a long time coming. The most important part of the piece comes at the very end, as Packer discusses how McCain has broken from the Modern Conservative base, how he is feared and shunned by much of the far right which has controlled the Republican Party, but how, in this political climate, that is the only chance for a Republican candidate this fall.

In its final year, the Bush Administration is seen by many conservatives (along with seventy per cent of Americans) to be a failure. Among true believers, there are two explanations of why this happened and what it portends. One is the purist version: Bush expanded the size of government and created huge deficits; allowed Republicans in Congress to fatten lobbyists and stuff budgets full of earmarks; tried to foist democracy on a Muslim country; failed to secure the border; and thus won the justified wrath of the American people. This account—shared by Pat Buchanan, the columnist George F. Will, and many Republicans in Congress—has the appeal of asking relatively little of conservatives. They need only to repent of their sins, rid themselves of the neoconservatives who had agitated for the Iraq invasion, and return to first principles….

It was a remarkably subdued performance. McCain doesn’t try to stir a crowd’s darker passions or its higher aspirations. He doesn’t present himself as a conservative leader; he is simply a leader. His favorite book, according to Salter, is “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” because it’s the story of a man who struggles nobly even though he knows the effort is doomed. McCain says to audiences, Here I am, a man in full, take me or leave me. This might be the only kind of Republican who could win in 2008.

Duh?

The BBC shockingly reports:

The researchers said although it was well known that use of alcohol and drugs was linked to risky sexual behaviour, this study showed many young people were “strategically” binge drinking or abusing drugs to improve their sex lives.

Why else would you go to a bar if not on the hopes that everyone else around you is going to get drunk enough to make some bad decisions?

I hate fat people, and people who are regularly in the vicinity of fat people.

Hebl found that volunteers rated job applicants more negatively when they had been seen seated next to an overweight person than when they were seen seated next to an average weight person. The volunteers had no idea that they were showing not only a prejudice against fat people but also a bias against people who were merely in proximity to overweight people. … Men and women seen in the company of beautiful partners are perceived as being more attractive than when they are seen in plainer company.

It seems that the DFF (designated fat friend) strategy is finally being discredited. The uglier, prettier, or gayer your friends are, the uglier, prettier, or gayer you seem. More here.

Hat Tip Overcoming Bias

Tiny Dancer

Some of my friends were discussing this last night. It’s summertime, so enjoy:

Humorous Vegetarians: I didn’t think they existed either.

From Here.

Now, when I say that vegetarians are normal people with normal food cravings, many omnivores will hoist a lamb shank in triumph and point out that you can hardly call yourself normal if the aroma of, say, sizzling bacon doesn’t fill you with deepest yearning. To which I reply: We’re not insane. We know meat tastes good; it’s why there’s a freezer case at your supermarket full of woefully inadequate meat substitutes. Believe me, if obtaining bacon didn’t require slaughtering a pig, I’d have a BLT in each hand right now with a bacon layer cake waiting in the fridge for dessert.

On that note, I also must admit that I ate a double-double with cheese and animal style fries to celebrate the end of finals.

Murder has never tasted so delicious.

People just don’t understand

The only way we can curb oil consumption (and subsequently, carbon emissions) is by increasing the price of consuming oil. Period.

The NYtimes has now reported that Hillary Clinton has sided with John McCain in advocating his terrifyingly stupid idea of removing the federal gasoline tax during the peak-travel summer months.

You can either have cheap gas and make everyone happy until we have a planet suffocated by global warming, or you can incorporate the external costs of consuming oil (through taxation), raising the price of gasoline and making some people less-happy.

Yes, some people will no longer be able to avoid their cross-country car-trips, but that’s kind of the point isn’t it?

Obama and Lincoln

This is an excellent synthesis.

In his prose, Obama of necessity lagged far behind the resplendent Lincoln. But what is of lasting interest is their similar strategy for meeting the charge of extremism. Both argued against the politics of fear. Neither denied the darker aspects of our history, yet they held out hope for what Lincoln called here the better “lights of current experience”—what he would later call the “better angels of our nature.” Each looked for larger patterns under the surface bitternesses of their day. Each forged a moral position that rose above the occasions for their speaking.

Why We Party

I had a conversation with a good friend this week about the legitimacy of going to parties when it seems like there are so many more productive things we could be doing with our time. The question had been raised by her younger brother who is a Stanford-bound engineer and is obviously critical of the hedonistic lifestyle which all of us ASU students doubtlessly lead.

So why do we party? What is it that causes people to want to consume positively unsafe quantities of alcohol which leaves them hopelessly hungover and often regretting things they said/did/ate the night before? And what causes to do this week after week after week?

A lot of people justify week-end partying with tried-and-true excuse of “just blowing off some steam,” and while I think that this is a legitimate aspect of the desire to party, it definitely doesn’t explain away all of the habits we see.

What makes humans human is their capacity for language. Not tools, not walking upright, but the ability to communicate ideas verbally: this is what makes thought possible,  art possible. Everything that we have built around us depends upon our capacity for communication. And, it’s what makes us human. Without language a man is just another animal, so a man apart, a man without language is no man at all. I think most people recognize this; they recognize that our social existence is what makes us who we are and shapes the way we see ourselves and the world around us.

For this reason I believe that one of the most important exercises of our humanity lies in gathering communally to share thoughts, ideas, and to a mutual recognition of coexistence. So that’s the framework the party provides: a common gathering place for people to share their ideas, to define themselves, and to be with other humans embracing the sacred social obligation implied by language. But, many of you may ask, why so much alcohol? It would seem that the presence of alcohol inhibits the sharing of ideas and does everything but facilitate communication.

The presence of alcohol plays an important social role in that it helps to ease the social stigmas, the rules for communicating, and allows people an excuse for breaking out of the shell of “who they are” while “trying-on” other types of action and attitudes. It let’s people say what they think (in vino veritas) with substantially reduced repercussions, and allows people to communicate themselves in a way freed from the constraints which they place on themselves when interacting with sober society.

Without the alcohol, people might as well be at the office. Alcohol gives people the excuse they need to shed their masks, to embrace a part of themselves which they are forced to hide most of the week. So partying is important for people in so far as it provides a social stage in which people can share themselves without the constraints and judgments of polite society. They can try out new ideas, new actions, new personas without being severely critiqued.

As human beings we are obliged to communicate who we are, to share ourselves with others, and to embrace our language as a tool for shaping each others’ worlds: late nights and lot’s of beer allow people to do that in a sense much more real than anything that occurs otherwise.

Sock Puppets.

Anytime someone says something on TV, remember: whoever asked them to speak already knew what they were going to say and why they were going to say it. This is just up at the Times, and it’s probably going to cause a stir.

The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

I’m not going to have time to read this all tonight, but my prediction is that everyone is going to read this and realize that this conflict of interests is exactly what someone should have asked about years ago.