"Life"/life

I was playing "Life" with my kids yesterday (remember that game that we always wanted to play as kids because of the cars and the 3D gameboard?) and, during the game, I began wondering how much the game is really like life. For instance, I wanted one of the kids to win, so I decided to begin the game without going to college. You always lose if you don't go to college. I realized that is a flaw in the game (though it's a good flaw, in that it subtly encourages kids to 'stay in school').

So, as I recollect the game, here are some ways "Life" is, and is not, like life.

WAYS LIFE IS NOT LIFE
1. You really can't win unless you go to college. In real life, plenty of people make GREAT money without going to college. And plenty of people (most cafe waitstaff) don't make jack.
2. You have to get married.
3. You can't choose to have kids. They're always accidents.
4. The whole point of the game is to have the most money at the end. Sure, the life tokens reward you for doing socially agreeable things like writing books and recycling, but they reward you with money. (Though I am surprised at how much fun the kids have reading what they did to earn that money, so, in a sense, they realize, more than adults do, that the rewards of life are not entirely monetary.)
5. You have to drive a car through the game. Can't we have a green version of "Life," with rickshaws and unicycles?
6. This one's a little technical, but if you start the game getting a degree, you have to borrow money. However, it doesn't matter when you pay it back--the interest payment is the same. You can sit on the loan until the end of the game at no penalty. It would be more realistic to charge more interest as the game wears on, the simulate the pressure young people feel when their student loan payments start.
7. You don't have to pax taxes if you are lucky and land on the right squares.

WAYS LIFE IS LIKE LIFE
1. It's fun.
2. The most important decisions are ones you make at the beginning of the game. If you get the doctor card and the $100,000 salary card, you've already pretty much won the game.
3. It trains kids that life is a bunch of payments you don't want to make, but you have to.
4. Buying a stock is no guarantee of a return on investment. It's truly a gamble, just like the market, and you can lose money.
5. This last one is mostly based on the current economic climate: it's nearly impossible to make money on your house. It's just a big money trap.

The Netflix Recommendation Problem

I have been a Netflix user off and on for well over five years. I briefly cheated on Netflix when Blockbuster started their online service, but I found Blockbuster to be lacking for at least three reasons.

1. I often got the wrong movie.
2. I often received a damaged movie.
3. Their website was TERRIBLE.

One of the things I hated about their website was its recommendations. Even after I rated numerous movies, it would still recommend movies I KNEW I would hate...Judge Dredd, anyone?

Netflix has created a recommendation engine that is top notch. I can nearly guarantee I will like a film Netflix recommends to me. On the other hand, I have, a few times, had friends and acquaintances recommend a movie and, when I looked on Netflix, the website suggested I wouldn't like it. What did I do? I rented the movie, of course. I can trust my friend over a computer right?

Wrong. Netflix is inside my head. They know my movie predilections better than my friends do. Only once, that I can remember, has the site ever steered me very wrong. It said I would really like "Secretary," and I didn't like it much at all. Other than that, Netflix's recommendations have been stellar.

Right now, I am fighting the urge to rent "American Gangster." Many people have recommended it to me, but Netflix says raters like me have only given it 2.9 stars. I've rented 2.9 star-type movies before, and, while I don't hate them, I have decided not to waste my valuable viewing time on movies that make me go "meh". Sorry, friends, I gotta go with Netflix.

The NY Times recently published a story about Netflix's offer of a one million dollar prize to the person/team who can improve Netflix's recommendation algorithm (called Cinematch) by ten percent. Many people are trying now, and the team in the lead has improved it by 9.44%. What keeps all the programmers from the 10% grail is Napoleon Dynamite...and movies like it. These films are polarizing films, quirkly films, ones that tend to get only a one star or a five star rating. According to the Netflix message board, following are the films that produce the most difficulty for the programmers (notice "Secretary" is on the list).

"Fahrenheit 9/11"
"Napoleon Dynamite"
"What the #$*! Do We Know!?"
"Punch-Drunk Love"
"Lost in Translation"
"I Heart Huckabees"
"The Royal Tenenbaums"
"The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou"
"The Passion of the Christ"
"Oldboy"
"Kill Bill: Vol. 1"
"Primer"
"Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy"
"The Office: Series 1"
"Bad Santa"
"Before Sunset"
"Sin City"
"Chicago"
"Secretary"
"Memento"
"Open Water"
"Armageddon"
"Adaptation"
"Sideways"

I notice a few patterns among the films.

1. There is a notable lack of blockbusters. The only one I see is Armageddon.
2. Many are more "contemplative" films, like Lost in Translation and Before Sunset.
3. There's only two films that might even be considered political: Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of the Christ. The rest of the films divide us for aesthetic reasons, it seems.
4. The only director I see with two movies on the list is Wes Anderson, with The Life Aquatic (which I didn't like) and The Royal Tenenbaums (which I did like).

I could probably look for more, but I'd like to hear what you think. Any surprises? Patterns?

Book Club

The first book club meeting was quite a success. Nine of us discussed "Revolutionary Road" for almost three hours, and we had a really good time eating, drinking and talking. We even talked about a group outing to go see the movie next month.

In fact, we had so much fun we're going to do it again some time after Christmas. Our next selection is by a local author.



So, if you're interested, order the book and start reading.

Random Rules

The Onion AV Club does a great feature where they ask famous people to put their iPods on shuffle and talk about the songs. They hardly ever do it any more, and I miss it. I don't have time right now to discuss each song, but here are twelve songs that came up when I put my iPod on shuffle.

All Hands On the Bad One - Sleater-Kinney
Winter - The Rolling Stones, Goat's Head Soup
Won't Let You Down - Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos
Nightclub (live) - Rhett Miller
Stupid Memory - Sondre Lerche, Two Way Monologue
Wonderwall (live) - Ryan Adams
Laughing - REM, Murmur
F*ck the Police - NWA
The Other End of the Telescope - Elvis Costello
A Song for You - Gram Parsons
A Good Man is Hard to Find - Sufjan Stevens
One of These Days - Neil Young

Higher Taxes Does Not Equal Socialism

On the day after the presidential election, I asked a hardcore Republican colleague of mine how he felt about the election. He said he was scared.

I asked him what he was scared of.

Among the many things that frightened him, one was that Obama is a "socialist". First of all, it's clear that the guy is listening to too much Hannity and Limbaugh, or watching too much Fox News.

Second of all, the fact that Obama wants to raise the highest marginal tax rate a bit does not make him a socialist. In fact, not only are Obama's proposals to raise taxes pretty modest, they won't have much effect on workers...it will just put more money in the government's coffers at a time it desperately needs the money.

A book I'm reading right now, The Big Con by Jonathan Chait, had a segment discussing the "high" tax rates, while also showing that supply siders, those Republicans who believe that the only key to economic growth is lower taxes, are wrong. In fact, it shows that we could probably stand to raise taxes even more:

Pure supply-siders see changes in tax rates as the single driver of all economic change. What caused the Great Depression? Mainstream economists blame different factors to various degrees, but supply-siders insist that the single cause was the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff. (The tariff surely added to America's economic woes, but to blame a higher tax on imports, which accounted for just 6 percent of the economy, for causing the entire economy to contract by a third is just plain loopy.) Likewise, most economists pinned the 1991 recession on mistakes by the Federal Reserve, but supply-siders blame George H. W. Bush's tax hike. Bush raised the top tax rate from 28 to 31 percent. To think that a three-percentage-point jump in the top tax rate would discourage entrepreneurs and investors enough to tip the entire economy into recession requires attributing to tax rates powers bordering on magical.

Indeed, it doesn't take a great deal of expertise to see how implausible this sort of analysis is. All you need is a cursory bit of history. From 1947 to 1973, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of nearly 4 percent a year — a massive boom, fueling rapid growth in living standards across the board. During most of that period, from 1947 until 1964, the highest tax rate was 91 percent. For the rest of the time, it was still a hefty 70 percent. Yet the economy flourished anyway.

None of this is to say that those high tax rates caused the postwar boom. On the contrary, the economy probably expanded despite, rather than because of, those high rates. Almost no contemporary economist would endorse jacking up rates that high again. But the point is that, whatever negative effect such high tax rates have, it's relatively minor. Which necessarily means that whatever effects today's tax rates have, they're even more minor.

This can be seen with some very simple arithmetic. As just noted, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy taxpayers in the top bracket had to pay a 91 percent rate. That meant that if they were contemplating, say, a new investment, they'd be able to keep just 9 cents of every dollar they earned, a stiff disincentive. When that rate dropped down to 70 percent, our top earner could now keep 30 cents of every new dollar. That more than tripled the profitability of any new dollar — a 233 percent increase, to be exact. That's a hefty incentive boost. In 1981, the top tax rate dropped again to 50 percent. The profit on every new dollar therefore rose from 30 to 50 cents, a 67 percent increase. In 1986, the top rate dropped again, from 50 to 28 percent. The profit on every dollar rose from 50 to 72 cents, a 44 percent increase. Note that the marginal improvement of every new tax cut is less than that of the previous one. But we're still talking about large numbers. Increasing the profitability of a new investment even by 44 percent is nothing to sneeze at.

But then George Bush raised the top rate to 31 percent in 1990. This meant that instead of taking home 72 cents on every new dollar earned, those in the top bracket had to settle for 69 cents. That's a drop of about 4 percent — peanuts, compared to the scale of previous changes. Yet supply-siders reacted hysterically. The National Review, to offer one example, noted fearfully that, in the wake of this small tax hike, the dollar had fallen against the yen and the German mark. "It seems;' its editors concluded, "that capital is flowing out of the United States to nations where “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has lost its allure.

Here is where a bit of historical perspective helps. If such a piddling tax increase could really wreak such havoc on the economy, how is it possible that the economy grew so rapidly with top tax rates of 70 and 91 percent? The answer is, it's not. It's not even close to possible. All this is to say that the supply-siders have taken the germ of a decent point — that marginal tax rates matter — and stretched it, beyond all plausibility, into a monocausal explanation of the world.

Reverse Etiquette

I think I might try this. It might help keep my blood pressure down.

I SOMETIMES find strangers’ manners so lacking that I have started engaging in an odd kind of activism. I call it reverse etiquette: I supply the apology that they should be giving me.

When the ebullient young woman behind the cash register at the grocery store dropped my apple on the ground, she smiled nervously, picked it up and put it in my bag, but said nothing. So I offered, in a neutral tone of voice, “Oh, I’m sorry.” This did not elicit the remorse I hoped it would — she simply grimace-smiled and said, “That’s O.K.” So I added, “Sorry about that — I really didn’t mean for you to drop that.” At which she stared off into the mid-distance as if receiving instructions from outer space.

Read the rest of the article here.

Obama Unfit to Lead

I've found it.

The smoking gun.

The October surprise



That's right. Over the course of 21 months, Obama was late to nine meetings, and had his cellphone go off once.

I this really the kind of president we want?

Fair and Balanced

In the following clip, a Fox News anchor "interviews" Bill Burton, a spokesman for Barack Obama. Of course, we know before we watch it that sparks will fly. That isn't the reason, though, that I have posted the clip.

What amazes me is not how rude the anchor is. What amazes me about this clip can be summarized quantitatively. The video in the clip is 6 minutes 55 seconds long. The anchor speaks for 4:07 of the clip. That is roughly 60 percent of the total running time.

What journalism school teaches that interviewing technique?

oops

Personal ad

Lane Tower...did you write this?

Ryan Adams's New Record - Cardinology

The new Ryan Adams record comes out next Tuesday, but you can listen to it now here.

Capitalism

First, look at the anti-capitalist poster produced by The Industrial Worker almost 100 years ago.

Then notice where The Industrial Worker was published.

Who knew we were such a hotbed of radicalism way back when?

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit

Slaves to Technology

From an article about how much of the world’s financial stability now lies in the “hands” of computerized trading algorithms:

Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Read the rest of the article here.

You Have To Respect This

McCain was booed by his own supporters Friday when, in an abrupt switch from raising questions about Barack Obama's character, he described the Democrat as a "decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."

A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar," and even "off with his head" have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, "The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight." Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.

"If you want a fight, we will fight," McCain said. "But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments." When people booed, he cut them off.

"I don't mean that has to reduce your ferocity," he said. "I just mean to say you have to be respectful."

Presidential candidates are accustomed to raucous rallies this close to Election Day and welcome the enthusiasm. But they are also traditionally monitors of sorts from the stage. Part of their job is to leaven proceedings if tempers run ragged and to rein in an out-of-bounds comment from the crowd.

Not so much this week, at GOP rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and other states.

When a visibly angry McCain supporter in Waukesha, Wis., on Thursday told the candidate "I'm really mad" because of "socialists taking over the country," McCain stoked the sentiment. "I think I got the message," he said. "The gentleman is right." He went on to talk about Democrats in control of Congress.

On Friday, McCain rejected the bait.

"I don't trust Obama," a woman said. "I have read about him. He's an Arab."

McCain shook his head in disagreement, and said:

"No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with (him) on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about."

Read the entire story here.

Conservative David Brooks Gets Controversial

One of the most popular conservative voices in America, David Brooks, has written a column that is sure to infuriate many of his fellow Republicans (though maybe not true conservatives). He argues that the Republicans have abandoned the war of ideas in favor of a war of class.

...Over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

He notes that the class warfare has led many of the educated professions to switch to the Democratic party:

Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

He also noted that this year, the Republican party had the chance to return to its intellectual roots. Instead, it was the most blatant class warfare ploy yet:

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

Read the entire article here.

Book Club

The inaugural meeting of the Woodard book club will be held some time in November. The idea is to have it be a monthly couples thing, though if you want to come alone that would be fine too.

If you are interested in the book club, just send me an email. The date will be set here in the next week or two, and we'll let you know by email what day will work best.

If you want to come, you should start reading, and you can order the book here.



If you're like me, you don't want to know anything before you start reading, but if you are NOT like me, you can go to Wikipedia for a detailed discussion of the novel.

Trivia:
Time Magazine chose "Revolutionary Road" as one of the 100 best novels in English since 1923 (why that date, I don't know).
Kurt Vonnegut said, "It's 'The Great Gatsby' of my time... one of the best books by a member of my generation."

Perhaps It Will Open New Doors

Hairdresser

Kids These Days...

Each year Beloit College publishes a "Mindset List" that show us old fogies the differences between the youth world and our world. As its website describes it:

This is the 11th year that Beloit College has assembled these observations that help to identify the experiences that have shaped the lives–-and formed the mindset—of students starting their post-secondary education this fall.

The Mindset List is not a chronological listing of things that happened in 1990, the year they were born. It is instead an effort to identify the worldview of 18 year-olds in the fall of 2008. Of course, our students come from many backgrounds and different traditions and these generalizations may not apply to all. The list identifies the experiences and event horizons of students and is not meant to reflect on their preparatory education.

It is also not deliberately designed to make readers feel really old!

I chose a few facts about the graduating class of 2009 that surprised me.

1. Boston has been working on the "The Big Dig" all their lives.
2. Pay-Per-View television has always been an option.
3. Iran and Iraq have never been at war with each other.
4. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker have never preached on television.
5. Money put in their savings account the year they were born earned almost 7% interest.
6. They never saw the shuttle Challenger fly.
7. Digital cameras have always existed.
8. Tom Landry never coached the Cowboys.
9. CNBC has always been on the air.

Find more here.

The Money Meltdown

I just came across this link--I haven't done much reading yet, but the site promises to be a great place to get a better understanding the financial crisis. I plan on spending some time there this week.

I have listened to Alex Blumberg's "This American Life" show (called "The Giant Pool of Money"), and it helped my wife and me understand the root causes of this debacle, though it was released before the financial system became the debacle it is today. From what I understand, the sequel to the show will be on TAL today, and it will pick up where the last show left off.

The site is http://www.themoneymeltdown.com/

Unbelievable

Just fast forward to the 2:55 mark.



Watch CBS Videos Online

Mystified Druids

The most recent New Yorker ran a piece about the current fiscal problems. Its emphasis was on the consequences to New York, but within it I found a very brief primer on why we're in this mess.

Any attempt to find causation or fault for what happened last week is fraught. So many things have gone wrong; so many people are to blame; so many people are now screwed. Often, the media exaggerates the significance of the ups and downs of the financial markets, while the sophisticates in the marketplace take them in stride. Not this time. Last week, the most farsighted market players were flabbergasted, even as they comprehended that they were witnessing a capitulation to some kind of greater truth—that Wall Street had got caught up in a pyramid scheme of its own devising. (The market soon recovered its truth aversion by demonizing short-sellers. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, of New York, called them “looters after a hurricane.” Jim Cramer, on CNBC, took to invoking terrorists. The regulators, here and in London, clamped down....)

Over the past thirty years, Wall Street has honed the art of creating and selling financial products with an increasingly tenuous connection to reality. It has been an extraordinarily creative period—a modernism of money, with an equivalent trend toward abstraction. Relatively simple derivatives evolved into ever more arcane contrivances. The risk and the leverage piled up, and, in the short term, the billions rolled in. This is over now.

Glenn Greenberg, a value investor who started as an investment banker in the nineteen-seventies, thinks that Wall Street has been chastened. “It’s kind of like when you get in a big mess and you say, ‘Please, God, if you let me off this time, I’ll never do it again,’ ” he said.

One problem is that the contrivers mistook their art for a science. A pre-modern money manager explained last week, “They looked at it all as a science experiment.” They tested each new product—each hypothesis—against a bunch of historical precedents, running computer models to see how the product would fare under the conditions of various bygone catastrophes. “The problem was, they didn’t have any historical precedent for when it all melts down. The historical precedents they used are not relevant.”

In fact, it wasn’t science at all. It was more like what anthropologists and psychologists call magical thinking—the tendency to believe that wishing it so makes it so. For years now, people have clung to the conviction that you can have outsized returns with little risk, leverage without recoil. This is what the clever financiers claimed that their inventions could do. Their colleagues and clients wanted to believe them. They all wanted to believe that their credit-default swaps could continue to insure against debt defaults.

It’s hard enough to understand credit-default swaps when you know what they are; if you don’t know, forget it. But since they are one of several inventions that may sink this city, and maybe the country, into a new era of penury and thrift, if not downright depression, let’s have a go: a credit-default swap is a financial contract between one party and another which protects against a default on a debt. The trick on Wall Street has been to negotiate and trade them like crazy; there are sixty-two trillion dollars in credit-default swaps outstanding. The question of their worth has mystified even the druids who created them, especially because, it turns out, the swaps haven’t really insured against anything.

The article can be found here.

Traffic (the car kind, not the drug kind)

The book I'm reading right now, Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt, has some fascinating information he has gathered from studies. Here is a sample of his writing style that shows how densely researched his book is (endnotes cite the studies he refers to).

Studies have suggested that drivers of small cars take fewer risks (as judged by speed, distance to the vehicle ahead of them, and seat-belt wearing) than drivers of larger cars. Many drivers, particularly in the United States, drive sport-utility vehicles for their perceived safety benefits from increased weight and visibility. There is evidence, however, that SUV drivers trade these advantages for more aggressive driving behavior. The result, studies have argued, is that SUVs are, overall, no safer than medium or large passenger cars, and less safe than minivans.

Studies have also show that SUV drivers drive faster, which may be a result of feeling safer. They seem to behave differently in other ways as well. A study in New Zealand observed the position of passing drivers' hands on their steering wheels. This positioning has been suggested as a measure of perceived risk--research has found, for instance, that more people are likely to have their hands on the top half of the steering wheel when they're driving on roads with higher speeds and more lanes. The study found that SUV drivers, more than car drivers, tended to drive either with only one hand or with both hands on the bottom half of the steering wheel, positions that seemed to indicate lower feelings of risk. Another study looked at several locations in London. After observing more than forty thousand vehicles, researchers found that SUV drivers were more likely to be talking on a cell phone than car drivers, more likely not to be wearing a seat belt, and--no surprise--more likely not to be wearing a seat belt while talking on a cell phone.

One of the themes running through this book is the danger of perceived safety, and he points out time after time how much more safely we drive when we perceive risk--that is one of the reasons why, for instance, roundabouts like the ones in European countries have 90% (yes, 90%!!) fewer fatal accidents than standard intersections. When we approach a roundabout, we have to pay attention because we perceive a higher risk, while approaching an intersection with a green light makes us feel safe, often leading to us missing dangers like drivers speeding through red lights.

It's a fascinating read.

I can't imagine why McCain is trying to cancel the VP debates

Palin rumors

From "The Onion" story concerning rumors about Sarah Palin:

In addition to the five children that the media are aware of—Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig—Palin also has nine secret children: Frag, Moss, Scoot, Skiffer, Minnow, Plow, Snatch, Twiglet, and Drum.

Howard Beale, my hero

This is a great monologue from "Network," a movie that came out in 1976, and is still a little ahead of its time.

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

She would be a hearbeat away from the nuclear (or should I say nucular) button

At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates.

McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.

Read the article here.

These People...

I try to stay out of politics. I think it's mostly theater--complete bullshit akin to two medieval monks arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

But imagine my surprise when Barack Obama took issue with what I considered the scariest statement a Republican has made in WEEKS: "Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America -- he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?" said Palin.

I was shocked. I turned to my wife and mimicked--"These liberal pansies actually want to ensure your constitutional rights!!" I couldn't believe an American could cheer for Palin's sentiment. And, apparently, neither could Obama.

September 08, 2008
FARMINGTON HILLS, Michigan
ABC.com

A fired-up Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., took on his opponents -- "these people," he said incredulously, in a familiar refrain -- for shamelessness and dishonesty.

"I have said repeatedly that there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution," Obama said. "During the Republican convention, you remember during the Republican convention, one of them... said, ‘Well, ya know, Sen. Obama is less interested in protecting you from terrorists than ... reading them their rights.’"

"Now, let me say this," Obama continued, "first of all, you don’t even get to read them their rights until you catch them. So, I don’t know what, they should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later. Hah! I mean, seriously! These folks.

"Catch ‘em first!"

Obama said his position on this "has always been clear. If you’ve got a terrorist, take ‘em out. Take ‘em out. Anybody who was involved in 9/11 –- take ‘em out."

But, the former constitutional law professor argued, "What I have also said is this: that when you suspend habeas corpus -- which has been a principle, dating before even our country, it’s the foundation of Anglo-American law -- which says, very simply, if the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' and say, 'Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.'

"The reason you have that safeguard," he said, "is because we don't always have the right person. We don’t always catch the right person. We may think this is Mohammed the terrorist, it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.

"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism, it’s because that’s who we are," Obama said as the crowd rose to its feet, applauding. "That’s what we’re protecting. Don’t mock the Constitution! Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up! It’s worked pretty well for over 200 years!

"These people!" Obama said.

Idle chat

I was at Rainbow Beach Resort last weekend when I saw a man park his truck in front of the office and go inside. That, clearly, is not exceptional. What was exceptional was that he left his truck running, and he was inside for 10-15 minutes. My first thought was what a waste it was to leave a car running like that. But my next thought was "How long is too long to leave my car running? Should I turn it off if I'm idle for one minute? Two minutes?"

I went online searching for the answer, and I came across an article in Slate Magazine. The author, Brendan Koerner, did some research of his own, and determined that I should turn my car off if I will be idle for only ten seconds. That really surprised me. He estimated that adhering to this rule (except, of course, at red lights) would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions by over 15 million metric tons per year.

He also noted that, in the winter, it is wasteful to idle our cars to let them warm up. It is much better to drive it immediately after starting up, but to avoid quick acceleration during the first 12 minutes of driving.

You can read his reasoning for his claims here.

Wilco

I just saw Wilco for the second time. The first time was at Bumbershoot in 2002, and it is one of the two best concerts I've ever seen (the other was a Costello show, also at Bumbershoot in 1996, when he was playing with the Attractions, I think for the last time ever).

This Wilco show (the first time they have ever performed in my fair city), at what locals still prefer to call the Opera House, will not crack the top two, but it was definitely top ten. First of all, they played for two hours, while most modern concerts have a hard time breaking the 1.5 hour barrier. Second, they played a great selection of material--at least one song off each of their albums, I think. Third, they were mixed very well. I could hear every instrument clearly, and the sound was so true that I didn't even need to put in earplugs like I usually have to because of my terrible tinnitus. Fourth, the band was very, very tight. They're just crack musicians, all of them.

The best part about the Wilco show in 2002 is it made me love Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a record I wasn't fond of at the time. The same happened at this show--because of the concert, I like Sky Blue Sky a lot more now.

In the end, this show solidified my feeling that Wilco is probably the best band working today, and one of my favorite musical acts of all time.

Take a look at the setlist here.