The Song of the Turkeys

I've been trying to write a post about the current foreign policy idiocy of the Teabagger intelligentsia, a group of subversives whose feeble grasp of law, Constitution, and basic foresight and planning has never been more starkly displayed than this week, except that it has been very difficult to keep up with the flaming stupid.  Every day there is more, every bit more is just that much less credible as something a human being capable of walking erect would even consider let alone actually do, and every revelation is more insulting to the dignity and corrosive to the survival of the American republic.  This is a group that needs to be removed from power, heavily sedated, and kept away from sharp objects and writing implements for their own good and the greater good of the nation and the world.  I'm still working on that post, but in the meantime life is happening all around me and I'm going to write about that for a while.

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The turkeys were singing last night.

Ordinarily this would be a metaphor.  I could be talking about the neighbors, or the cloud of young men who infest Our Little Town with their glass-packed 12L 6000-horsepower 4x4 Compensators, reminding us all of their shortcomings in the wee hours of the night.  I could be talking about the mentally deformed members of Congress who have emerged from out of their dark caves to make the US a more unstable and dangerous place or their supporters, who stand in stark disproof of the theory of natural selection, which if they understood that they'd find ironically cheering even if the rest of us just tremble at the thought of them having free and unfettered access to firearms.  I could be talking about a lot of things.

But no, I'm talking about turkeys.  Actual, literal turkeys.  Feathered things, not that bright, generally roasted for Thanksgiving.  The things that Mr. Carlson swore, as God was his witness, he thought could fly.  Six of them in fact, in their infant stage and currently residing in my living room.

Spring is in the air here in Baja Canada, and this means it is time to gear up for another round of 4H events.  The Drama group is rehearsing on Tuesday nights.  The Cat group is doing whatever it is they're doing, though without us this year as neither of our cats will survive another go-round of that.  Art and Photography projects are a-borning.  And Lauren is restarting her Poultry project.

You can only show chickens once in the 4H, unless they're layers - and then all you're really showing is the eggs.  So last year's birds have been retired from the fair.  We still have five of them out at our friend's barn - three hens (Venus, Puff, and Rocky) who have been supplying about 90% of our egg needs since last fall, and two roosters (Sully, the special-needs chicken, and Rosie, my personal favorite).  The others have either been sent off to other flocks, or, sadly, are no longer with us.

Lauren has a long list of chickens she wants for this year, representatives of many breeds and varieties, but we have been slow in acquiring any.  Thanks to a number of obstacles, including an incubator failure at the farm where we buy most of the chicks we get, we were limited to two Sultans.

Why we needed two more Sully's I don't know.  Perhaps the three of them together could come up with a dozen functional brain cells, but I doubt it.  If there were any breeds I didn't think we'd be revisiting after last year it was Sultans, but there you go.  That's what they had, so that's what we got.

They're cute, though.

The two of them were doing fine in their little bin in the living room.  The cats are used to this routine by now and don't really trouble them.  And they are fairly quiet.  They've been there a week or so, now, doing whatever it is that chicks do.  We got them a mirror and they have had a grand time pecking away at the other birds who keep coming up to them.  And you know what?  Every single time they hit them right in the beak!  Every time!  Who knew such a thing?

Then last night Kim and Lauren went back to the farm and came home with six turkeys.

And one more Sultan, but I will skip over that lightly for now other than to ponder the general absurdity of life.

They're cute little things right now, those turkeys, all blotchy black and gold.  And they're small enough to fit the whole half dozen into a bin next to the one the chickens are in.

But sweet dancing monkeys on a stick do they yap and babble, all night long.  Do they even breathe?  They must have some kind of air-recycling mechanism that allows them to bring in air from somewhere else on their bodies (no, don't even think about it) and expel it through their mouths.  Does the military know about this?  Seriously - we could be eating our next superweapons.

Perhaps tonight they will calm down.  I hope so.  They're too small to make a decent meal, so we will have to deal with them for a while yet. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Food, Sex, and Enlightenment

We covered Thomas Malthus in class this week.  Malthus is one of my favorite figures in Western Civ II, mostly because he manages to start with three fairly simple observations – none of which come as any surprise to anyone reading them – and ends up undermining the entire Enlightenment.  I’m surprised I haven’t put this bit up here before, and I’m going to rectify this now.

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In 1798, an English vicar – what in the United States would likely be called a parish priest – by the name of Thomas Malthus published a book with the gloriously eighteenth-century title of An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers.

The wonderful thing about eighteenth-century book titles, as anyone who has ever had to read Moll Flanders will tell you, is that once you have slogged your way through the entire title you rarely ever have to read the actual book.  It’s all pretty much laid out there for you.

Malthus was a relative unknown when he published this book, but the book almost literally made his name.  His name actually becomes a word in the English language, one that you will run into now and then if your interests move you in a certain direction.  If you ever take a particular kind of biology or political science class, for example, you will run into the phrase “Malthusian logic” or “Malthusian cycle,” phrases that come from “Thomas Malthus” and that come from this book.

The thing about Malthus is that he is one of the early figures in perhaps the most important cultural and intellectual development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the backlash against the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment has been the bedrock of Western Civilization since it emerged out of the 17th century Scientific Revolution.  While other civilizations have come to adopt pieces of it as it has proven useful to them to do so over the centuries, the Enlightenment nevertheless defines Western Civilization as separate from all other forms of civilization on the planet.  Pretty much all of Western Civilization today exists either as an extension of the Enlightenment or as a reaction to it.  But any time you have a movement that powerful and pervasive you will get a backlash.  That’s just how humans are wired.

While the Enlightenment is a complex and sprawling thing, it can usefully be simplified to three basic points. 

First, that human reason is a powerful and effective tool for examining and understanding the universe.  How do you know what you know?  Not because an authority – living or dead, corporeal, textual or spiritual – told you so, but because you figured it out using only the reason that all humans come with hardwired into their heads.  The social and political implications of this are staggering. 

Second, that there are such things as natural laws.  A natural law is a predictor – it says that if you start with these conditions and you take that action you will get this result, and you will get it every single time.  In other words, that the universe is predictable, orderly, and in many ways harmonious.  It is not chaotic or random.  The universe is a machine, say Enlightenment thinkers, and natural laws are the rules that govern how the machine works.  Furthermore, the Enlightenment holds that you can figure out those natural laws simply by using your reason.

Third, that progress is not only possible but also – in the purest form of the Enlightenment thinking – inevitable.  Using the tools of the Enlightenment (reason and natural laws) we can tinker with the machinery of the universe and make it work better.  This is the purpose of the Enlightenment.

Malthus sits on the leading edge of the Counter-Enlightenment, which comes in two overlapping stages.

First, there are people who accept the tools of the Enlightenment – who agree that reason is a powerful way to examine the universe and that natural laws make the universe predictable and orderly – but who argue that these do not actually lead to the purpose of the Enlightenment, progress.  You can use your reason, discover natural laws and end up no better off than you were before, and therefore why bother?  Malthus is here.  Eventually Darwin will be too, which is not an accident – there’s a lot of Malthus in Darwin.  And so on.

Later there will be a second phase of people who reject not only the purpose of the Enlightenment but also the tools.  Reason, they say, is not actually an effective or powerful tool for understanding the universe and thus you need to resort to irrational or anti-rational methods such as faith, emotion, or intuition.  Also, there are no such things as natural laws – the universe is not orderly or predictable, but is instead random, chaotic, and mysterious.  This will get you to Romantics, Transcendentalists, religious fundamentalists, and so on.

Given Malthus’ position at the forefront of this movement, it is interesting to see what he argues and how he does so.

Malthus’ book is not easy reading – he is a highly educated eighteenth-century gentleman writing for an audience of other highly educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, and they did not cut each other any slack.  Nor is much of it original to him – you have to go a long way into Malthus to get to the original part, which is part of its effectiveness.  By the time he gets to the end and twists the knife with the original bits, you are so far down the path of his argument that it is hard to figure out how to get back out of it.

Malthus starts with three basic propositions, none of which are original to him and all of which you already know.

1. People have sex.

Why yes, yes they do.  People have sex.  I have heard this.  There is evidence of this all around us.  People do, in fact, have sex.

2. People eat.

I’m not going too fast for anyone here, am I?

3. These two things are connected.

Now you know this.  You know very well that food and sex are connected in a great many ways, most of which I am not going to get into in this space, and you’re welcome.  There isn’t enough whiskey in the barrel to get rid of some of those images, after all.  But what is a dinner date, after all, but a device designed to get you from the one to the other as quickly as possible?  Now, for some people that means starting with dinner and waiting until after marriage, while for others it means starting with dinner and waiting until after dessert – whatever floats your boat, I suppose.  I’m not here to tell you how to live your personal lives.

Do wait until after dessert, though, as the waitstaff tends to get a bit annoyed otherwise.  Just saying.

But the point is that those two things are connected in ways that are more serious than simply dinner dates because both of those actions – feeding and fornicating – have consequences, consequences that do not play well with each other.

When you have sex, if you have sex often enough – which is a variable quantity – you will ultimately wind up with more people.  That’s what sex is for, after all.  Whatever social, ethical, moral, or entertainment value sex has, from a purely biological perspective the primary purpose of sex is to create more of whatever’s having it.  And it is surprisingly effective at that.  Indeed, statistically speaking, the more people there are having sex the more people they will ultimately create.

Kim is a scientist and she says that historians do not use enough charts and graphs.  So I will begin using a few schematic graphs here.  Remember that they are schematics, though, meant to illustrate a point.  I’m going to go back later and put some reality into them, but for right now just bear with me.

So using my schematic graph, the general population line looks like this:

More sex, more people.

Now, all of those people, when they are not having sex (and occasionally even when they are, which, vide supra, will get no further mention here) need to eat.  And the more people you have, the more eating needs go happen.  So: more sex, more people; more people, more eat.

But this is a problem, because food doesn’t work the way sex does.  When you eat, you end up with less food than when you started.  You cannot have your cake and eat it too.  You start with this much food, you eat dinner, and you’re left with that much food.  So your food supply does this:

The general relationship between terms is now as follows: More sex, more people; more people more eat; more eat, less food.

And this is a problem.

Note what is happening on that graph.  Where those two lines cross, very bad things happen.  Where those two lines cross, what that means is that you no longer have enough food to feed your population, and nothing good can come of that.

Most obviously, when there isn’t enough food to go around you are going to get Famine.  People will starve.  Starvation is a terrible way to die.  The human body evolved under conditions of scarcity, and it is designed to withstand long periods of short rations in order to give you every chance to find more food over the next hill.  But when there is no food over the next hill – or the ones after that – all that means is that it is going to take you a very, very long time to die.  Furthermore, the body doesn’t just shut down all at once – it goes in pieces, and one of the last things to go when you starve to death is your mind, again because your body wants you to recognize and take advantage of whatever is coming over the next hill.  But in this case, all it means is that you know exactly what is happening to you as you starve to death, and worse you know exactly what is happening to your children, your spouse, your neighbors, and your friends.

Fortunately it does take a long time to starve to death, so something else will likely kill you first.

For one thing, if the mind is one of the last things to go as you starve to death, the immune system is one of the first.  Diseases, in other words, will take a fearsome toll on hunger-weakened bodies.  Things that are not usually a problem will become problems.  Things that are usually problems will become epidemics.  And new diseases – things that would take a while to build up immunity to even for well-fed bodies – become Plagues.

Further, hungry people are not patient people.  If you have food and my children are starving and you are not willing to share your food with them, I will rip off your limbs and beat you to death with them before taking your food and giving it to my children.  Those of you who do not have children are right now sitting there pondering the morality of this, debating the pros and cons of my position, while those of you who are parents are nodding your heads and saying to yourself, “Yes, yes, that makes sense.”  Multiply that out across a starving population and you get a general breakdown in social order as the have-nots seek to take from those who have in order to survive.  If the haves and have-nots are part of the same society you will see food riots, civil conflicts, and mob violence.  If they are part of different societies, you will get international conflicts.  But all of these are, in one form or another, War.

And when you add all that together, what you get is a whole lot of Death.

Famine.  Plague.  War.  Death.  There is a reason why those are listed as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Christian Bible.  They go together.  And when they go together very bad things – apocalyptically bad things – happen.

The thing is that all this has actually happened.  This is, for example, the story of the Crisis of the Fourteenth Century, perhaps the most dismal time ever to be alive in European history.  Oh, the Black Death gets all the press, of course, and what attention is left over from that inevitably focuses on the warfare of the age – the Hundred Years’ War, the Jacquerie, Wat Tyler’s Revolt, and so on.  But people forget that it all started with famine.  It all started because in the early 1300s those two lines on the graph crossed, and very bad things happened.

Now the question, of course is can this be prevented?  Is there a way to keep those lines from crossing?

Well, there are two lines on the graph.  Therefore there should be two avenues of approach we can take.  We can attack the population problem, or we can attack the food supply problem.

The problem with attacking the population problem is that, while there are any number of ways to do it, all of them essentially boil down to the same thing: get people to stop having sex.  And good luck with that, intrepid social engineers!  Really!  Good luck!  I’ll be over here with my popcorn, watching you as you try to make that happen.  Because it’s a stupid plan, that’s why.  People are going to have sex – that’s what people do.  Malthus, an intelligent and deeply learned man, was well aware that abstinence-only education was a foolhardy idea that only the most ideologically blinkered would even consider, let alone seriously try to adopt.  People have sex.  We’re wired that way.  Telling them to stop is not going to change that.

So that leaves the food supply line.

And when you put it that way, the question rephrases itself.  Is there a way to keep the food supply line above the population line? 

Because after all, the food supply line does not actually go down the way I drew it on that schematic graph – you knew that, right?  No, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but you can make more cake.  Food is a renewable resource, and we have this thing called “agriculture” whose only purpose is to turn that idea into a reality.  Can we improve agriculture to keep that food supply line above the population line?

Now if you are an Enlightenment thinker, the answer is, “Of course we can.  Using our reason, we can work out the natural laws that govern the food supply and make progress, progress being defined as ‘people not starving in the streets,’ which is as good a definition as any.”

You could work out new and better ways to get more food out of the earth – better seeds, better livestock, better techniques, and so on.  You could work out new and better ways to use the food you do get more effectively – new harvesting techniques to cut waste, new preservation techniques to avoid spoilage, new transportation methods to get the food where it needs to go before it rots, and so on.  You could even work on the medical end and see if you can get the human body to make more efficient use of the food it gets so as not to need so much.  There are all sorts of options for a good Enlightenment figure to answer “yes” to that question.

Malthus, however, says no.  Malthus argues that no matter what you do you can never keep that food supply line above the population line.  And to see why will require some math.

Neither of those lines from the schematic graphs is accurate, actually.  What do they actually look like?

Malthus argued that human population, left unchecked, would increase geometrically – or, as we would say today, exponentially.  That is, if you start with 2 people, the increase would then go to 4, then 8, then 16, then 32, 64, 128, 512, 1024, 2048, and so on.  Your population line would be an exponential curve, something like this:

This still isn’t the original part of Malthus, by the way.  Anyone with access even to the crude demographic statistics of the eighteenth century could have figured this out.  Benjamin Franklin worked it out in the 1750s, more or less.

But – and here is the original part – Malthus took a long hard look at the history of European agriculture, at the improvements that had been made over the previous centuries and the effects those improvements had had on the food supply, and based on that information he argued that the best you could hope for when it came to increasing the food supply was that it would increase arithmetically.  That is, if you start with 2 food units, the increase would go to 4, then to 6, then to 8, then to 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, and so on.  Your food supply line would be a straight line, like this:

Those of you who have taken algebra are already wincing at this point, because you know very well that it is mathematically impossible for a straight line to remain above an exponential curve no matter how far apart they start.  Eventually – it may take a while, but eventually – those two lines will cross and very bad things will happen.

And if you follow the logic through, what you get is called a Malthusian Cycle:

You start out at the top, with Prosperity.  Your food supplies are more than adequate to feed the population, and everyone is quite literally fat and happy.  Gradually, though, the two lines get closer and closer and things begin to fall apart, and you enter a period of Crisis.  Eventually you get famine, war, plague, and death, and everything will Collapse.  But the silver lining of famine, war, plague, and death is that the population line plunges below the food supply line again, and so you can begin a Rebuilding period.  You then rebuild until you reach Prosperity.

AND THEN THE CYCLE BEGINS AGAIN.

Around and around the cycle you go, in a never-ending pattern of prosperity, crisis, collapse, rebuilding, and prosperity again, each one following the other with unbreakable certainty.  This is not Progress!  There is no progress on a circle!  When drawing a circle, one may begin at any point because eventually you will end up back where you started.  That is the point of a circle, after all.  Your population will outstrip your food supply, bad things will happen, you will recover, and then it will happen all over again.  And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

This is a profoundly pessimistic viewpoint, deeply out of step with the more positive outlook of the Enlightenment.  This is a viewpoint that does not admit the possibility – let alone the inevitability – of progress. 

Yet notice how Malthus arrived at this point.  His argument is highly reasoned – every step along the way follows logically or empirically from the one before in a rational chain that is hard to break.  He has developed a natural law.  Remember what natural laws are – they are predictors.  If you have these conditions and you take that action, you will get this result and you will get it every time.  The Malthusian Cycle fits that description quite nicely, no matter where you start.  Malthus has, in other words, used the tools of the Enlightenment but he has not arrived at the purpose of the Enlightenment.  Reason and natural laws do not in this instance lead to progress.  In that case, what good are they?

And if the tools of the Enlightenment do not lead to the purpose of the Enlightenment, what does that say about the Enlightenment overall?

This is more than just a philosophical debate.  The Enlightenment had some very practical implications that are called into question here.  If the Enlightenment is in doubt, then everything that comes out of the Enlightenment is in doubt.  Perhaps science isn’t the best tool for examining the mysteries of the universe.  Perhaps the optimistic view of human nature that the Enlightenment assumed – that humans are basically good and can take care of themselves and others without authoritarian oversight – is fatally flawed.  Maybe humans are depraved and vicious little creatures after all.  Maybe reason itself is the problem, and it should be abandoned in favor of irrational or antirational things like faith, emotion, or intuition.

And maybe the Lockean Liberalism that is the political expression of the Enlightenment – the ideology of individual rights and equality of opportunity, the ideology that when spun toward leveling the economic playing field yields laissez-faire capitalism and small government but when spun toward leveling the political playing field yields liberal democracy and active government and thus defines both ends of the American political spectrum even today – maybe that isn’t the way to go either.  Maybe humanity needs a government that will monitor its every move, one that will care more about groups than individuals.  Eventually this will get you to genuine Conservatism – the kind that really does not exist in the US no matter what right-wingers say – and from there to any number of ideologies devoted to the welfare of the group: Socialism, Nationalism, and so on.

It’s a simple thing to observe that sex and eating have consequences.  But getting from there to the Counter-Enlightenment is a feat.

News and Updates

1. Not blogging didn’t help any, so perhaps going back to blogging will.  Or maybe the new normal is what it is no matter whether I blog or not, so I might as well just tell stories to pass the time.  I appreciate the encouragement that people have given me, though.  It’s good to hear.

2. If we decide to sell the eggs that Lauren’s chickens are providing us, we already have a slogan:  “Top-Quality Pizza-Fed Layers!  With just a hint of garlic!”  Seriously, they’re just garbage disposals with feathers.

3. We spent this past weekend at the annual weekend-long junior bonspiel here in Wisconsin,  not far from Mid-Range Campus.  There’s probably a few of those, actually, but this is the one we go to.  It’s a lock-in event, where you take the kids up on Saturday morning and they don’t leave until Sunday afternoon – the organizers (wonderful people, the lot of them) serve hot meals, keep the curling going, and provide supervision at night when the junior curlers are supposedly asleep in their sleeping bags.  Except that they're mostly teenagers, so nobody really sleeps.  There were some tired folks Sunday night.  The curling club here in Our Little Town sent two and a half teams – we joined up with the club in the next town over for a joint team, which says a lot about the general level of sportsmanship in curling.  Tabitha and Lauren were on the same team, and they ended up with a 2-3 record overall, which was good enough for a) second place in their Developmental bracket (and good for a very handsome pin with the host club’s logo on it), b) sixth place among the Developmental teams in general, and c) tenth place overall, out of twenty.  This represents a significant improvement over last year, and that’s always nice to see.  We parents are allowed to sit in the clubhouse and watch the games.  It’s surprisingly engrossing.

4. The thing I really like about curling is that sportsmanship is pretty much hard-wired into it.  You say “good curling!” to your opponents before and after the match.  You call your own fouls and woe betide anyone who tries to skimp on that.  And afterward you sit with the team you just competed against and eat, drink, and – if this bonspiel is anything to go by – play cards.  You don’t get that in many other sports, really.

5. You know you’re in Wisconsin when the hotel gives you the “curler’s discount.”  No, they don’t ask for proof (vide supra, point 4).  Curlers wouldn’t lie about such things, and nobody else would think to ask.

6. Once again, I made the tactical error of having all four of my classes take exams in the same week.  You’d think I’d learn, but that’s just the way the units break down so that’s how it goes.

7. So Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) thinks he can “handle” ISIS – some of the most bloodthirsty barbarians currently defiling the earth – because he “handled” the 100,000+ Wisconsin citizens who protested his right-wing extremism in 2011, does he?  First of all, he did not actually “handle” those protesters – he snuck in and out of the Capitol through a tunnel like the gutless coward that he is.  Second, those protesters were Wisconsin citizens - the people he was supposedly elected to represent, although he’s got the Koch Brothers’ collective fist rammed so far up into his lower intestine working him like a puppet that it’s a wonder he can walk erect - and if he can't tell the difference between peaceful protest and terrorism he has no business being in politics.  Third, he seems to have gotten the impression that those protesters were some kind of violent mob howling for blood, which comes as rather a surprise to me since I was there.  Honestly, I’ve been in rowdier grocery lines.  There were volunteers running through the crowd with garbage bags collecting trash so as to leave the place clean.  There were grandmothers.  There were children – two of whom were mine.  The loudest chants on offer were “This is what democracy looks like” and “Thank you!”, the latter addressed to the Democratic legislators who sought to preserve the dignity of a once-proud state.  Our Sock Puppet Governor really needs to grow up and stop playing with his imaginary friends.

8. Apparently there were Oscars given out.  This implies that people still make movies.  I would not know this from personal experience, much to Kim’s dismay.  What can I say?  I’m boring.

9.  Lauren wishes to let you know that she can successfully cross one eye but not the other.  She feels this deserves an exclamation point, so here it is: !

10.  It’s blue and bronze.  I can understand those who say black, and I can understand those who say gold, but anyone who says “white” really ought to be sharing whatever they’re on with the rest of us.

Down Time

I find I have nothing to say these days.

It’s winter in Wisconsin, which means that it is cold, grey, icy, and inhospitable outside.  I’m actually okay with this, as it means that I can stay in with my books and my tea and nobody feels any need to give me moral criticism for not being Out And About the way that apparently all the good people of the world are by reflex action.  On the other hand, though, it’s not much to write home about.  It’s a quiet sort of life.

There’s a lot going in politically, as the right-wing extremists currently masquerading as the once-proud Republican Party careen ever closer to their goal of subverting the Constitution and American civil society entirely and replacing them with a one-party Gilded-Age theocracy of the damned.  The problem, as is probably evident by now, is that even considering the matter is infuriating to someone who actually has a clue what this nation was founded upon, as I do, and that makes bad copy.  That plus the fact that I was born in Philadelphia and therefore pessimism is my birthright makes me rather corrosive on the subject these days.  I can ruin people’s days merely by expressing my views, and who needs that?  Better to stay quiet, perhaps.

I’m reading some good books, but those go onto the end of the year posts.  As far as sports go, I’m enjoying soccer and hockey when I get a chance.  American football is over and baseball hasn’t started.  There’s a lot of curling going on around these parts as well.  Other than that there are no sports of any note.  I lost interest in movies years ago.  Not much to report upon, really.

My semester is phenomenally busy – for all that Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) insists that university faculty are lazy, I’d put good money on the fact that I’m working harder than he is, and I’m not even tenure track.  Most university professors I know would be thrilled to be forced to work a 40-hour week.  They wouldn’t know what to do with all their new-found free time. 

So it’s been kind of quiet around these parts.  Perhaps it will pick up soon, though.  You never know.

News and Updates

1. Tabitha has joined the Dungeons and Dragons club at Local Businessman High.  She seems to be enjoying it so far.  She was worried at first that they would not let her join, since she didn’t discover the club until well into the school year.  “Nonsense,” I told her.  “I know exactly what the membership of that club looks like, because – while I never got into that game in high school (God alone knows why, as I was precisely the target demographic for it) – I was friends with most of the guys who played it.  You are an attractive young lady.  Trust me – they would KILL to have you in that club.”  And it turns out that Father knows best, at least in this instance.

2.  The benighted kids who make up that club insist that dwarves are not fireproof, however.  Honestly.  What good are flammable dwarves?  How can you expect to use them as projectiles when facing dragons if they are not fireproof?  Kids these days.

3. The Home Campus Trivia Team emerged victorious from this year’s annual fundraiser for the local orchestra, recapturing the crown that had been ripped from our grasp by Local Parochial School by a rather healthy margin last year.  This year’s victory was a near thing, and we look forward to trying to defend our title next year.

4. The girls went skiing for the first time this year this past weekend.  From all accounts they had a grand time.  Rather than sit in the lodge all day and grade papers, I ended up on another trivia team at a fundraising event for a local baseball team.  It was a good time and we came in second, in large part because you needed to have grown up in that town to know a good portion of the answers.  “Name the last six mayors”?  Seriously?  I don’t think I could do that in the city I grew up in, let alone anywhere in Wisconsin.  And yet it was a good time anyway.

5. We would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.

6. Every time I hear about the budget proposed by Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) it just gets worse.  Today’s fascinating reveal was the part where he used the bill to cut the salary of the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  There are a number of problems with this beyond the fact that it is toddler-level petty, but perhaps the biggest one is that it is flatly unconstitutional to reduce the salary of a sitting judge during their term in office.  But since the right-wing extremists currently staging their psychotic episodes in the name of the GOP firmly believe that laws, constitutions, morals, and ethics are for other people to follow but do not apply to the special little snowflakes that they are themselves, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that little stunt.  Stay tuned for the further adventures of Sock Puppet Governor (tm) in his quest to subvert a once-proud state and become the GOP presidential nominee.

7. He just might become that nominee, despite the fact that his grasp of issues and ability to speak coherently on any topic other than his own purported magnificence has been compared unfavorably to the former half-term governor of Alaska.  Given the announcement by his owners that they would be spending nearly a billion dollars in the 2016 election cycle it is entirely possible they may just buy the nomination outright, which would put Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) front and center.  Free market capitalism in action, folks!  That whirring sound you hear is the Founding Fathers spinning so frantically in their graves as to create electricity.

8 I kind of feel bad for the non-insane conservatives out there who have nobody to represent them in the American political arena anymore.

9.  I got my first invitation to join the AARP this week.  I think it might be worthwhile, if only to legitimize my demands that those meddling kids get off my damned lawn.

A Few Ideas in Wisconsin

I’m not really upset anymore when Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) lies to me.  Honestly, I’d be more surprised if he didn’t.  The man has a strained relationship with reality to begin with, and I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the weather let alone anything of actual substance.  I’m not sure he’d be capable of telling me the truth even if he wanted to do so.  Old habits die hard.

No, what upsets me is that he puts so little thought into his lies.

He clearly believes that the rest of us are stupid.  That we will swallow whatever half-assed excuse he offers for the most recent assault on the dignity, worth, and future of the state of Wisconsin without questioning him or doubting his story.  Part of me thinks that this is because he believes he’s the smartest person in the room and the rest of us are all just automatons there to do his bidding, not worth the time or effort needed to come up with lies that are at least plausible, and part of me thinks that he honestly believes the lies himself – that whatever nonsense he is spewing at the moment is the Truth and we’re all just being unreasonable for not accepting it at face value and swooning over his bravery in facing this harsh, harsh world.

This, of course, is one of the definitions of psychotic.

The latest iteration of this sad tale comes as Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) is pushing his budget for the next two years for Wisconsin.  The budget is of a piece with the rest of his policies, an act of vandalism rather than sound financial planning. 

Having spent most of his re-election campaign lying about the vast surpluses his slash-and-burn policies must have created during his initial assault on Wisconsin, because they must have, he now turns around and declares that rather than invest those surpluses in our children’s future he needs to continue his slashing and burning because – surprise! – none of those surpluses were actually real.  They were just another of his sincerely believed lies, trumpeted loudly enough to sucker his base into voting for him again so he could have a platform for implementing Charles and David Koch’s agenda in a presidential campaign.  The man is a sock puppet, but anyone who hadn’t figured that out by last November is likely beyond hope now.

His budget merges agencies, diverts funds from public education in order to expand the right-wing fantasy of private school vouchers, defunds public radio (the most reliable source of information in America, according to several studies I've seen), cuts medical benefits for senior citizens, and guts the Department of Natural Resources (and eliminates much of its ability to protect Wisconsin’s natural resources until long after his reign of terror ends).  The biggest cut, of course, is targeted at the University of Wisconsin System, which will absorb $300 million in damages even as it is legally forbidden from finding new income sources to make up that loss, because that’s what passes for responsible fiscal planning among the modern right wing.  It will cripple the UW, and that’s precisely the point.

Education just makes the peasants uppity.

On the other hand, he does want the state to spend $222 million on a new stadium for the privately-owned Milwaukee Bucks basketball team.  Bread and circuses for everyone!

So far none of this was unexpected.  Like many of the leaders on his side of the aisle these days, Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) has made no secret of his hatred of the kind of informed citizenry that the Founding Fathers knew was necessary for a republic to survive and he has done his best to prevent such a citizenry from surviving.  It will take a few years for the state to collapse completely, so I'm sure he figures he’ll be safely on his way when that happens and it won’t be his concern anymore. Won't he be surprised.

What did strike me – and many others – as rather more vicious than usual was his attempt to destroy the University of Wisconsin System at its core.

The University of Wisconsin rests on what is called the Wisconsin Idea, something that no other public university system has copied.  It has been part of state law for over a century now, and it identifies the UW as integral to the health and future of Wisconsin as a whole.  It reads as follows:

The mission of the system is to develop human resources, to discover and disseminate knowledge, to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses, and to serve and stimulate society by developing in students heightened intellectual, cultural, and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise, and a sense of purpose.  Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition.  Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.

The Wisconsin Idea sets out a vision of a society where educated expertise is valued not merely for its practical benefits but for its ability to make this a better world for those living in it and for those still to come.  It ties together the university and the state, and upholds the social compact made between free citizens of a republic, a much more enlightened burden than that made between lords and peasants.

Naturally Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) has a problem with this.

So, buried deep in his budget, was the Wisconsin Idea According To Governor Teabagger (A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of Koch Industries), to wit:

Notice first and foremost, the addition of the phrase “to meet the state’s workforce needs.”  Translated out of the Teabaggerese, this is a demand for the University of Wisconsin to degenerate into a taxpayer-funded corporate training center.  While this is certainly in keeping with the right-wing corporatist mantra of privatizing profits while offloading costs onto the public, it does raise the question of why, if corporations are the highest form of institutional life on the planet, they can't handle that themselves.  But that's the direction he wants us to go in.  If it ever gets enacted, maybe they’ll rename the football team to match.  Go Trainees!  Fight!  Fight!  Fight!

While there is only one message in the added text, there are two big messages in the deletions.

First, there is the wholesale elimination of any suggestion that the UW – and by extension any government agency – has any responsibility for promoting the general welfare.  How silly of the Founding Fathers to put that phrase in the Constitution, after all!  Clearly Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) knows more about the purpose of government than James Madison!  The parts about extending knowledge beyond the boundaries of campus, stimulating society, and improving the human condition are obviously Communist propaganda and do not fit into the modern right-wing refusal to accept any responsibility for anything, even as they drain off the accumulated achievements of past generations.

This, by the way, is the main reason why you cannot call them “conservative.”  Genuine conservatives, fired by the spirit of Edmund Burke, would be horrified at such obvious moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

Second, there is the rather telling deletion of the search for truth.  Truth is not kind to the modern right wing.  It has a disturbing tendency to contradict their carefully constructed and hermetically sealed ideological worldview, and therefore must be avoided at all costs.

Which brings us back to the lies.

I’m guessing that Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) didn’t think anyone would burrow down deep enough into the budget to catch that before he and his cronies, minions, and lackeys in the legislature had rammed it into law.  Given the irresponsible speed and reckless criminality with which they had worked to shove previous bills through the legislature before they could even be read, this is not an unreasonable assumption.  But someone did, and then all hell broke loose.

Turns out people rather like the idea that the University of Wisconsin is dedicated toward making the entire state a better place.

At first Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) attempted to defend this change, but eventually that became untenable.  So he declared that it was all a “drafting error,” and not meant for consideration.  This despite extensive documentation that the specific deletions and additions were explicitly ordered by his staff, right down to the last comma.

I’m sure he believes his own story. 

Me, personally, I’m offended by the sheer half-assery of it.  Look, guy – I know you’re going to lie to me.  It’s how you came to power. It’s how you maintain power.  It’s what you’re building a presidential campaign upon.  But you know, the kind of rank incompetence you bring to this task is pretty much on par with the kind you display in most other areas of your administration.  Try harder next time and see if you can at least achieve plausibility.

Atta boy.

Diving Into the Great Salt Lake

Well that was a day.

Today was America’s greatest secular holiday, a celebration of wretched excess that dwarfs any other on the calendar, which is saying something.  I know that there are a great many people who do not like the Super Bowl or sports in general – many of whom get rather snotty about it, frankly, as if this somehow makes them Better Human Beings than the rest of us – but I always look forward to it.

This year had an extra edge to it, though.

It didn’t have anything to do with the game itself.  I don’t particularly like the Patriots, a team whose basic attitude toward the rest of the world seems to be smug disdain, and while I have a sneaking fondness for the Seahawks it doesn’t actually amount to caring whether they win or not.  For all that it was a great game – some phenomenal plays, a fair bit of back and forth, a close score, and within forty seconds at the very end one of the most spectacular catches I have ever seen and one of the most boneheaded play calls ever made.  So from a football perspective, it was a perfectly fine evening.

No, my interest this year was dietary.

It’s been a year now since my doctor did that finger-waggle thing that doctors do when confronted by middle-aged men who insist on eating like graduate students.  And for a year now I have been dutifully cutting back on the salt in my diet, much to my dismay.  I eat more healthy foods and less junk.  I have cut out salty snacks pretty much completely.  It’s about as boring as I thought it would be, but there you have it.  I have been good.  I have the medical results to prove it.

But not today.

Super Bowl Sunday is the one day out of the year where Americans are legally obligated to eat junk food, to consume in vast and irresponsible quantities food that has no natural ingredients whatsoever, food that can only be considered food by virtue of the fact that it does not kill you there and then, food that should be regulated by treaty and would subject people to criminal penalties if forced on the unwilling rather than snorked down by the barrel by people paying for the privilege.  It is a day set aside for chips, wings, dips, and other consumables of which nobody over the age of 40 should eat more than a handful.

On this day, my diet could go suck eggs.  Which are low-salt and should make it happy.

For myself, I had plans to fall off the low-salt bandwagon with a thump that could be heard on the other side of the continent.

It snowed today here in Baja Canada – great billowing gusts of dry, powdery flakes that blew up in the air, obscuring visibility and keeping people home who would otherwise have gone to the homes of friends for shared food and beverages.  So all of the snacks that we had planned to bring we just had to eat ourselves, beginning at 11am and continuing right through the final whistle of the game.  I gave it my best effort, and it was glorious.

Oh, tomorrow I shall return to my diet.  For the next 364 days I will eat things that middle-aged men should eat and look back on today with that mixture of satisfaction and mild embarrassment that comes from doing stupid things intentionally and without regret.  And I will look forward to next year’s Super Bowl, whomever is playing.

You have your holidays.  I have mine.