The Myers-Briggs Typology - of this blog!

From - http://www.typealyzer.com/

"INTP - The Thinkers"
The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about."

"Might come across as arrogant"? Excuse me? I work very, very hard to condescend, and I don't need some-jumped up computer with an online M.A. in social work and friends who think they're "just soooo perceptive!" evaluating my entire blog personality, dammit.

That Is All For Now.

How You Know What's Coming

I'm just going to avoid the preamble - there is something bad coming down the road, and I know it because all there is on TV are shows about prison and I got solicited at the Home Depot, for the first time in my life, for a job by a middle aged white man who then out-and-out asked me for some money to get back to Texas. Day labor is by far the most recession-responsive industry there is; if a homebuilder cuts a single house, it's the equivalent in man-hours of laying off two men for a year. And he wasn't the only one there.

Now, it's normal to find guys looking for work outside a building supply store - but not two white guys, and not on a SUNDAY morning, when all there is are just the weekend putterers who want to do the stuff themselves (otherwise, they wouldn't be there.) Imagine if NASA engineers were looking for work outside the hobby shop, hitting up the people building model rockets; you'd probably say "Things must be bad at Cape Canaveral; and you'd be right.

Now, if you think that culture responds to society in unconscious ways, then the crime shows one sees on television are the dream state of that culture; when the economy was good, all that was on TruTV and MSNBC and Nancy Grace were cases of rich white girls being abducted - which is perhaps the most perfect analogue for the Freudian castration fantasy of the American bourgeois home. Coming home on JetBlue - remember, I don't own a TV, so I never get that "frog-boil" effect of getting used to the zeitgeist - there was a marathon of "what prison is like" stories; today on TruTV - the same thing. I suspect that this is because, knowing how the crime statistics are going to go, the deep troubled mind of the nation is wondering what exactly the conditions of prison are these days, much in the same way that Sigfried Krakauer discussed the formation of a infantilized man seeking masculinity in group action in the years before the rise of Nazism. Needless to say, I have the full expectation that everything Paulson does will make the economy work - why wouldn't it? he's a Bush selection, and therefore, by proxy, is an extension of the unsurpassed ability of the President to screw up - and it will literally be years before Obama's plan - if it works - has any tangible effects on jobs.

That Is All For Now.

Bush Will Be Very Alone Soon

Oh man, between John "Disappearing Act" McCain and this from the G20, the Republican administration is nothing but a bunch of children. Furthermore, consider the fact that Mitch McConnell wouldn't speak to Harry Reid for about two weeks after the election, because he was so pissed about the Democrats trying to take his seat. Needless to say, karma's a bitch, and there's no better newscaster for pointing out the awkwardness of Bush than Rick Sanchez, who's basically a SoFla broadcasting legend (if there's such a thing) on account of the fact that he says the most bizarre non-sequiturs in human history with this very earnest tone of voice. Here though, he's gold. And he hits it right on the money; if Dubya were a young kid, and I still worked in special education, I would totally have stopped the photo shoot right then and there for a group discussion. But he's a bloody idiotic warmonger who's brought the world's economy down, progressed nothing anywhere, and must probably suck in dinner table conversation at these summits; but then again, there's always this gem from The Onion: "Bush Regales Dinner Guests With Impromptu Oratory On Virgil's Minor Works".

That Is All For Now.

"Exploration is not so much a covering of surface as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape or a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning." Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques.

The latest study to cause some (happy) turmoil in the literature garret of the Ivory Tower is this one: "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge". Basically, the paper argues that literature, with its focus on human relationships and individual experience over quantitative analysis, can reveal systemic problems that plague development. Which is what we in literary studies have been saying since we incorporated the novel into rhetorical studies, but I digress. I should also digress from saying that the authors quote Walter Benjamin quite early on, and do so in a very cavalier and to me annoying way - but I digress from that digression.

More importantly, however, is trying explain how this should work, that novels should be included in training and opening assessments of development strategies. As someone with academic experience on both sides of this particular divide, I proffer my two cents; imagination and cognition. There. Done. Explained!

In short, imagination in this sense consists of understanding how, in the opacity of markets, knowing human affections, tendencies, desires, and relationships brings about a way around the notorious reluctance of people being studied to explain everything about themselves to researchers. As a personal example, I have to admit to my own ignorance, corrected by a novelistic imagination in the case of Random Family. Random Family is one of those books that doesn't change your life - it merely changes your mind, a much less-lauded, and yet more valuable result. Specifically, in my case, the belief that poverty is aggravated by the lack of birth control, abortion services, and family planning in the inner city. What I hadn't thought about, and which the empathy, patience, understanding, and clarity that LeBlanc brought to Coco's family rebuked me for, was the dire necessity of an inner city single mother to try and maintain a man associated with the house. What I mean by this is, is that so often when we hear about the "welfare queen", we assume that she's having children more children to qualify for food stamps or what have you. This is half-right; what she's trying qualify for is the sustained affection and loyalty of a man through having his child. The government doesn't swing by at random with money and food and clothing - a man who cares for his child will, which benefits all the children of a single mother through "offsets", that is, if the father brings clothing for just his child, then it's as if he's given the mother a discount on clothing for all the rest of her children, etc. As such, abortion is, in the real life of the streets, often a self-defeating gesture, in which the man, who now knows that the woman doesn't really have any plans for attaching herself to him, continues to use the woman for sex, without ever bringing any benefits into her home life. Now while all of this sounds fairly obvious when explained this way - at least, it makes middle-term economic sense, if not emotional or long-term sense to those of us in the middle-class or above - it was one of those facts of life which escaped me, and colored my opinions of women - and through my experiences in working in education, I've met several - who had those multiple children without any obvious way of supporting them. I personally am the wiser for having read that book, and as a simple matter of fact, could not, if someone gave me the opportunity, produce a development plan that ignored the reality that trading sex for money isn't the one-night debasement that the "Indecent Proposal" crowd would have it, but rather part of the whole structural economy of the struggling class.

Cognitively, I can do no better than recommend again the "Edge Master Class" series of discussions on behavioral economics. The liberal economic being as posited by econometricians and classical economists alike has of course been thrown out; but the implications of this rejection still remain in the fact that few economic choice studies take into account the "embodiment" of certain economic choices. For example, Dr. Mullainathan talks about "depletion", that is, the wearing down of the part of your brain that says "No, you can't do that, it's better if you wait, do this very carefully, etc." While we tend to think of willpower as something almost mystical, just like a muscle, it grows weary over time. And in this case, I'm always reminded of prison literature, specifically holocaust and gulag literature (ain't that a hell of a course title!) in which individuals make economic choices under extreme duress; and at every point, the writer intervenes to remind you that you cannot predict who will be the moral person in the camp, and whom the devil incarnate.

For example, Shalamov in Kolyma Tales writes of one person sent on an out-camp extended woodcutting job; basically, the prisoners are taken out into the woods, given an axe and a shovel, and told to chop wood until the guards return in a month or so (after all, where in the hell are you going to run to in Siberia?) What struck me about the story was the fact that, able to eat more in the woods than in the camps, the anonymous narrator tells us that the first things to return were anger, resentment, and rage, and then after that, the urge to think of escaping or something of the sort. Quite literally, the prisoners were too hungry even to think of flight or rebellion; only when they had some food in them, were they able to think of resistance. And this kind of behavior plays itself out in real life as well; the most major prison rebellion in the Soviet Union, the Vorkuta rebellion, was caused when new Ukrainian prisoners were brought into a camp full of long-term Russian prisoners. Hunger is a bitch, and knowing how people react to it, which is something that science, since the University of Minnesota experiment in World War 2, has not been able to test, requires careful examination of literature and observation to understand - if only because quantitative analysis is impossible for ethical reasons. It furthermore appears that poverty has the same sort of effects, if less dire, on political participation in democracies; poor people who feel that things are getting worse are less likely to vote than poor people who feel things are getting better, a counter-intuitive result entirely predictable if one reads The Grapes of Wrath carefully.

I want also to point out that I'm not limiting this to the written word entirely - The Wire, I feel, has as much insight into the failures of our judicial, educational, and media organizations as any given study, and certainly has vastly more appeal. And there are perhaps dozens of others I could name as well. But the notion that fiction and literature have little to tell us, all other considerations - ahem, I'm looking at you Stanley Fish - of beauty aside, is simply false.

That Is All For Now.

Lame Duck For Dinner

The American political system produced a unique phenomenon; because our executive leader is independently selected from our representative leaders, we have "lame duck" presidents. A president is allowed to walk around for two months with all the trappings of power, and the emergency powers invested in the position, but means nothing in terms of what we consider real power - the ability to plot judicial courses, plan legislative agendas, and produce bureaucratic initiatives. George W. Bush, believe it or not, is now - and only now - truly a useless and pointless human being.

And we've done well with the weird "spandrel" that is the lame duck; for instance, consider Prop. 8's current status in the California courts. Essentially, the ACLU has sued CA because Prop 8. represents such a radical contradiction within the Constitution of the state, that the legislature technically has to vote first before it can go to the people. Here's hoping, but the main point is, is that the Supreme Court of CA even has dibs on deciding this because of Judicial Review, the principle in which the courts can hear all acts of the government and determine their constitutionality, and thence order the Executive to do whatever it is the court wants them to do; which comes from Marbury v. Madison, a case, of course, under a lame duck president, that ragingly liberal, socialist, and secularist slaveowner, Thomas Jefferson. So there's a point there.

Then there's James Buchanan's marvelous performance right before the Civil War. Generally, most sitting presidents try to do something when various sections of the nation secede - not James "Yes America, You Had At Least One Gay President" Buchanan, who spent most of his time after losing the election dreaming about returning to someplace called "Wheatland". If you think Obama had it bad, remember that Fort Sumter had already been fired on before Lincoln even slept in the Lincoln Bedroom. That's handing a hat full of shit to a dude and telling him "Yup, you're next in the hat parade."

And then there's the last few weeks - since October 6th, in fact; everything Bush has done since then is subject to review and denial until Jan. 19th, or something like that - the details are in the article. But more or less, ol' Tumbler there is done. Maybe he could take up a hobby or something - he seems like the kind of guy who could really get into restoring old planes. That'd be good for him now, in the middle of an empty large building surrounded by harmless gizmos - as long as he doesn't come out.

That Is All For Now.

"These problems aside, Washington did get his army. He opened the federal repositories to arm the troops he led into the field against the Whiskey Rebels; his force was larger than any he had commanded in the Revolution. The rebellion simply evaporated before such a show of force; the only deaths came from a pistol going off accidentally and a drunken brawl that ended with a fatal bayonet wound. One can only speculate whether the Whiskey Rebels would have behaved differencely had they known just how ignorant of firearms were most of Washionton's troops. Hardly a disciplined force, the goernment militia looted, drank heavily, and beat civilians randomly. It was neither well trained nor well armed. General Samuel Smith, commander of the Maryland militia, reported to the House of Representatives that the majority of the Virginia and Maryland troops were ignorant of the use of arms. Many did not know how to load a musket, and others had never carried one in their lives."
From Michael Bellesiles, Arming America

So, I'm reading that book above; way excellent. All about the fact that no one owned a gun, more or less, from the Pilgrims up through the Civil War, because people really knew nothing and blamed spirits and aethers for bad gunpowder. Americans were lousy shots, with something like one broken gun per fifteen people, and one working gun for every hundred people. It even seems likely that the only reason why the Founding Fathers put that Second Amendment bit in isn't to protect American's gun rights, but to encourage Americans to own guns in case they had to join the militia, since practically no white American citizen even knew how to shoot back then. Hunting had nothing to do with it, since by far the most effective hunting is done with traps, and every government passed huge gun control laws from day one, usually against the poor, slaves, and Native Americans, but also against owning dueling pistols, carrying weapons in public places, and unregulated hunting.

Against that though, is the fact that environmentally speaking, we need hunting now more than we ever needed it in the past, for the simple fact that we've populated so many areas that there simply isn't the ecological robustness for, say, a deer population to go through a full malthusian cycle and recover appropriately. For example, in Vermont in the 1970's, prohibitions on hunting does meant that the deer population reached a point where thousands of deer were starving to death every winter. Therefore, we have reached a weird, ironic point where we base our rights to own guns off of people who neither had nor knew how to use guns and needed the government to prod them to even buy them in the first place, while today, when we actually have strong conservationist arguments to keep some basic hunting guns, we argue whether or not guns are even necessary to our modern society; in short, we didn't need guns then, but we do now - but we think we needed guns then, but don't now. (Note: I'm not talking about pistols and assault rifles and such - which more than likely contribute much more to crime than they do personal safety, and certainly do nothing to intimidate the government and preserve our liberties - but the principle of hunting as a basis for even a single type of personal gun ownership.) Weird thing, society.

That Is All For Now.

Georgia's Private Language

"A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.... 'We can't be lulled into complacency,' Broun said. 'You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him [Barack Obama] to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential.'"

From the AP wire, a loverly quote from a Georgia lunatic. Who happens to be a Representative from Georgia - Athens, surprisingly. What I love is that noting that there's a "potential" isn't the same as "comparing"; which is true, because I've always thought that Georgia representatives had the "potential" to be baby-feasting, widow-impaling, terrorists who use that sick nitrous mask thing Dennis Hopper had going on "Blue Velvet" - but I would never make that comparison at all. Nope. Not me. I also like how Obama could be either Fascist or Marxist, because there TOTALLY isn't a difference between them. Apparently all it takes to be a representative in Georgia is the ability to string together boogeyman phrases, like "Terror rapiss abortionists with hitler's big brother in Mexico and the aclu and Osama and Homos in New York City are abducting hostage planes to assault your drinking water." and you win the sweet electoral cake of Georgia politics. Seriously, there are days when these people sound like a Francis E. Dec recording....

That Is All For Now.

She Didn't Know Africa Was A Continent

If arrogance is superciliousity combined with ignorance, then Sarah Palin is a megalomaniac according to this formula I just pulled out of my ass:

(Actual Capability + Ambition)/(Assholishness)

I'm including a +/- factor here, where someone who's good but a large asshole will get a small positive score, whereas someone who's evil but has a large assholishness will get a small negative score, so that we could theoretically plot this. Which would be, like, science.

For example, let's compare Martin Luther King to Malcom X; in this case, without having to actually assign values, we know that MLK is much less of an asshole than Malcom X, and got a whole hell of a lot more done, though Malcolm X does have a much higher ambition index. As such, MLK > MX, according to this scale.

In this comparison in the negative you'd have like Castro <> (Note: I went back and edited that inequality in the Castro < Argentinian Junta; when I woke up the morning after, I realized that the math would be all wrong; the better you are in the negative quadrant, the larger the number. Sorry for any confusion there.)

And here's what's interesting about Sarah Palin - she is so incompetent, her own incompetence actually makes her a small force for good in the world. Seriously - because of her Robert Mugabe-like incompetence, she crosses the axis into a world where she is needed and wanted because what she wants cannot be had by people who do not know the countries that make up North America and then declines to brush up on the fact because the people who make these decisions will not let someone that insanely dumb make decisions on those things. I would not be surprised if some Republicans sabotaged machines against McCain this year on her behalf - and I'd respect them more if they did. But I'll miss her, as she rides off on a scrofulous moose, now at the close of her fifteen minutes as the Paris Hilton of politics. She was everything wrong about the last eight years in an impossible way, like a Lewis Carroll parody of Milton Friedman and Jerry Falwell's gay-adopted daughter. And soon, she'll be gone. Sigh.

That Is All For Now.

All The Little Stories Get Their Printing

From Newsweek's "How He Did It" Campaign Follow-up:

"The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'.""

This is going to be a must read for the interim; at some point, someone will write the book on this campaign, and I will read it the way that wolverines consume meat, but until then, this will have to do. But I love that snark of Obama's up there. And now that he's President, I hope we get to see more of it. But read the article for all the other bits of insight into the campaign - like how Sarah Palin basically ripped the McCain campaign off on that shopping spree, which apparently was way more than the 150k we first heard about. Oh, Sarah!

That Is All For Now.

The Most Sickening Picture of The Day

From the L.A. Times, a picture from a celebration for the passing of Prop. 8, banning gay marriage. How someone can celebrate something like that makes me nauseous. Maybe those Christofascistic homophobes are onto something about the link between gay sex and bestiality - because all I see in that room full of pro-Prop. 8 supporters are a bunch of swine. To force someone else to get divorced because you're not comfortable with their relationship, well, as the old Jews say, may you hurt where you breathe. And it certainly shouldn't be something you celebrate, any more than you should celebrate harsher penalties for every crime on the book, failing and closing public schools, and hospitals instituting "no insurance, no treatment" policies - because when you celebrate the failure of government and the institution of punitive measures against people who bear no relation to you, you fundamentally reject the notion of "the social", replacing it with "the natural", in which we are animals fighting for our little scratch of dust, alone, and without hope of progress or unity. That picture - that's the face of hatred of America, not ACORN, Bill Ayres, or Ralph Nader. That's the picture that wants to hurt, ban, and ultimately eradicate anyone who actually uses their freedom to bridge the gap between lonliness and love, rather than buy belt-buckles and sub-prime mortgages. One can only hope that this represents the crest of the wave of sexual hatred in this country, and that over the next few years, we begin to see the repeal of these amendments.

Oh, BTW - "Campaign contributions came from every state in the nation in opposition to the measure and every state but Vermont to its supporters." Fuck yeah, VT. Way to once again lead the country in being goddamn awesome. To recap: first in the nation called for Obama, only law school to lose government money for its opposition to allow army recruiters on campus because of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", Howard "Fifty-State Strategy" Dean, and now only state not to have a single person who gave a dime to California Hatin'.

That Is All For Now.

Post Election Notes

So, a few things. Americans decided a couple of things last night - a black man could be president; gays still aren't really human beings; marijuana should be more legal than it is; abortion is more-or-less acceptable as is; and in Washington, you can finally get help from your doctor in offing yourself.

The California vote is interesting; the gay marriage ban is 52-48, while the abortion limits is 48-52. Which means that about 4% of California's electorate thinks abortion is ok, but gay marriage is not. Weird, weird, weird. I'm trying to put myself in that headspace, and it's not working out alright. I would have to believe absurd things like popcorn is weasels to make that make sense. Ain't nothin' so queer as folk, as they say. On the other hand, 43% of Arkansans voted to let gays adopt; give it another ten years, I think, and then we'll be able to repeal all these inane amendments. Still, CA, I'm disappointed in you. Los Angeles County even voted yes, though the full results aren't in yet.

And then there's that new CNN hologram technology, which is weird and dumb as well. I have no interest in seeing will.i.am Obi-wan-Kenobie'd, and it brings nothing to my understanding. And then there's that "Second Life" thing where they created an entire digital rotunda just to have some guy manipulate a 3d map. I'm sure these technologies have some great uses - these just weren't it. It's kind of like someone invented a technology just to suck. "Try my steel-wire toothbrush! The pain is intense and scouring!" "Ok! Let's get will.i.am to sell it!"

And finally, a fascinating article about psychopathy from The New Yorker. If you don't know much about psychopathy - and you should, since they make up one percent of the population, and yet are almost never diagnosed until they snap and push another person through a meat grinder just for kicks - read up on it. Having met one person who was definitely a psychopath, and a few others who I suspect are, they're absolutely the answer to the question, "What kind of person does that?" I mean, don't get me wrong - schizophrenics and borderline-personality disorder folk are way "interesting"; but it's the psychopaths that scare me. Fisheyes, man. They've got that stare like dead fish, and nothing seems really to change it. Talk about the psychoanalytic gaze....

Or, as they say in the article: "Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system. “I was just excited,” Harenski continued. “I was saying to myself, ‘Wow. I found a real one.’ ”"

That Is All For Now.

In The Beginning, There Is Nothing But Foolishness And Hope

This picture is from 2006, when pollsters first began to query how people would view various match-ups. Needless to say, any reasonable person looking at this would recommend that Obama get comfy in his Senate seat. And yet, here's today's likeliest map:


It looks like someone spilled blue paint everywhere, doesn't it? And yet, here we are. Democrats have a way of doing that; I'm sure Clinton's map in 1990 looked pretty comparable, stacked up against H.W. Bush. Huzzah!


That Is all For Now.

What Next?

So, it seems Obama's going to win; personally, I wouldn't be surprised, given the early voting numbers, if Obama has essentially won already. For example, in Georgia, early voting was already up to 80% of the TOTAL 2004 voting; African-American turnout was 35% of the electorate, when historically it was 25%. Unless there's a massive surge in white McCain voters today that pushes that 35% down to 30%, Georgia could be a miracle win for Obama, despite the overall polling that has it at a McCain victory. Not that I think Obama is going to win Georgia, but I do think that that kind of impetus will bode well for closer states like North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.

But now there's the next parlor game; who will Obama appoint to his cabinet? I put together my dream team below.

State: Bill Richardson
Treasury: Paul Krugman (though it'll probably be some tool like Jamie Dimon - more likely, one of Dimon's underlings.)
Defense: Wesley Clark (I know, I know - I just can't remember any of the other senior Defense appointments/representatives from the Clinton years.)
Attorney General: Patrick Fitzgerald
Interior: Lincoln Chafee
Agriculture: Tom Vilsack
Commerce: Robert Reich
Labor: Austan Goolsbee
Health and Human Services: Barry Bloom
Housing and Urban Development: Stanley Allen
Transportation: Tyler D. Duvall
Energy: William Jeffrey
Education: Gregory Mankiw
Veterans Affairs: No Damn Clue
Homeland Security: Tossup between a governor and a career FBI/D.O.J. person
Director of National Intelligence: REDACTED

Yeah, DHS and DNI are two that I really don't know; they're so new, there's no sort of track record of what kinds of institutional policy are going to influence the selection. As for the rest, they're from the higher reaches of Dem. politics and liberal-leaning intellegensia, with some career bureaucrats thrown into the mix. That's also not including Obama's "I.T. Czar" position that he has claimed he wants to create, and who will probably be someone like Paul Allen or Larry Ellison or Carly Fiorina. I daren't hope he'd put someone like Larry Lessig or Nicholas Negroponte or even Steve Wozniak (or maybe Richard Stallman? - no, I must be on crack) in charge.

Anyway, join in with whomever you'd like to see; rotisserie cabinetry for everyone!

That Is All For Now.

Oh, I'm Gonna Miss Our Little Damaged Sarah When She Goes

Seriously, I've started to grow fond of Sarah Palin - she's so, so, so adorably dumb, and if it weren't for the fact that her ignorance lets her imagine for an instant she's bright enough to run anything that goes on in the lower 48, then I'd pat her on the head each time she tries and give her cookies often, because, well, she's apparently a gin-u-wine buffoon, like the kind we used to have in the South when some local banker made his addle-pated little brother mayor just so he didn't have to look at the idiot drooling on the deposit slips and molesting the tellers during lunch.

Here, she gets pranked by two Quebec shock-jocks, pretending to be President Nicholas Sarkozy. I will say this for her - she's a "real gal" enough to know that when you're pranked, you ask what radio station did it. If that had happened to Dubya, he would have just slammed down the phone - and if it had happened to Clinton or H.W., both of them would have instantly known something was wrong when their French came back with "wey" instead of "oui". I'm surprised she didn't request a song while she was at it. And as far as I can tell, this is the real deal. Awesome. Especially since it shows that Sarah Palin is so narcissistic, she thinks the President of France actually has time to personally call the substitute of a losing American senator. "Oh, well, he probably just wants to check in and show his support!" thinks Sarah, blissfully unaware of anything called "state protocol." "I hope he votes for me!"



That Is All For Now.

A Long Post On A Short Course; Or Economics, Psychology, and Empathy

"MULLAINATHAN: But if you have two dimensions now, you can end with cycling, and cycling has this essential feature that every time someone comes in, it changes the preference ranking, and then the equilibrium is upset, so then some other guy has a different decision to enter, and it turns out one of the things that emerges is that you can get no equilibrium. The features that generate no equilibrium cycling ... which is the notion ... that's what I mean by people want simplicity but can never get it."

"THALER: One footnote on this ... notice if we continue on mortgages as an example, 30 years ago there was essentially one kind of mortgage; 30-year fixed rate. The government passed the Truth in Lending Act that said you have to report interest rates in a uniform way which was APR, and that basically solved all the problems. Choosing the best mortgage, they gave you a sufficient statistic. You look at that number, and you're done. We have zillions of kinds of mortgages. APR is no longer a sufficiency statistic...."

From Edge's "Master Class" Series (A Short Course In Behavioral Economics)

Long story short here; I know that I've abstracted two abstract quotes from this discussion, but they're very important in trying to make sense of the whole market problem, since there seems to be a general trope that two things have happened: Greedy Homebuyers went and bought massively overpriced houses at crazy, unrepayable rates, and Greedy Lenders used fraudulent means to sell people awful, complicated loans. And neither of these answers are accurate - there's no greed there, really. But the fact that we call either side greedy ignores the immediate question of the separation of legitimate self-interest from excessive greed, and the longer term question of what we will ground our empathy (if we find either group empathy-worthy) upon. By which I mean, if empathy is the result of the combination of sympathy and understanding, then how does our understanding of the psychology of economics interact with our general sympathies for those in poverty, and those who aren't necessarily in poverty, but are being forced to give up their expectations and plans for economic reasons.

"MULLAINATHAN: I want to close a loop, which I'm calling "The Irony of Poverty." On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. You're getting cut twice. You are in an environment where the decisions have to be better, but you're in an environment that by the very nature of that makes it harder for you apply better decisions."

To return to those quotes, they're in the context of a discussion about multi-dimensionality in economic problems; in short, how to model the choices of a individual in a system where a given measure changes for an associated variable, instead of remaining constant for all variables. For example, Dr. Mullainathan previous to the quote at hand cites how when you go to Krispy Kreme, you buy four donuts, at which point they offer you an upgrade to a dozen for only 39 cents more. If you model that problem on a demand curve, what happens is that you get the same shape as an old rollercoaster; you get a straight line demand curve (since the price for each donut up 'til four is the same, the per-unit demand is the same) at which point you see a huge drop in demand for donuts purchases between 4 - 11 and a correspondingly massive jump in demand for dozens of donuts. This is not rational. According to classical theory, the consumer goes and buys enough to satisfy rationally determined needs; there should be no actual difference in the per-unit demand curve, since if a person has accepted a per-unit price point for one donut, and they only want four to eleven donuts, it doesn't make sense to purchase more donuts even at a reduced price, because they over-fulfill a given consumer's actual desire. Except that we very well know that when you can maximize your purchase at a greatly increased weight, the opportunity of the value overwhelms the actual utility of the purchase. And so much for classical economics.

This furthermore is the problem behind both the "greedy" homeowners and the "greedy" lenders, since they both faced similar versions of the problem above in pricing their relative purchases. Homeowners simply weren't walking into a lender's office with their minds tuned like Excel spreadsheets; rather, they were being presented with the exact same "Why borrow $200,000 for a house that costs $300,000 at a fixed rate when you can borrow $250,000 at the same initial interest rate, but which switches to a floating Adjustible Rate Mortgage a few years down the line?" that the individual is when they're presented with the "super-sized" K.K. donut dozen. And the economists response is that it's much more intelligent to take the dozen and the larger mortgage, and then save the extra donuts until you want them, and to invest the extra capital in improving the value of the home (re-modeling), buying a pricier home (upgrading), or by using the money for something else of equal or greater personal or professional value (such as vacations, buying stock, paying for school, etc.) If you're not going to do that, says the economist, then the lower mortgage is for you. Which is not something that anyone thinks looking at those numbers.What people think, when they're looking at those numbers, is basically not whether they need the extra money, it turns out, but rather how can they support taking that much more. The reason why I can make that assertion is because of "priming", which is one of the other topics discussed in the Edge series, which basically causes a change in cognition by changing the environment. In this case, the presentation of more options produces a change in valorization; that is, if one only came in and saw two rates, one would choose the lower one - but if one is presented with a higher rate and a lower rate (in an ARM), then one is no longer thinking comparatively but probabilistically, which is a much, much more difficult thing, given over to any number of influences completely unaccountable by current economic measures, in that one, according to the economist, has to take into account is all of the future expectations of earnings, costs, life changes, emergencies, and general feelings about the macroeconomic situation - keep in mind that the valorization of any of these items, as you'll learn if you go through the Edge series, are wildly changed for each and every combination of states that one assumes. Even something like thinking "What if I paint this one room, and get tired of the color in a year?" changes the valorization of the house if you change it to "What if I paint this one room and I get tired of the color in ten months?"

Sound complicated? It very damn well is. Now let's back off, and combine this ugly nest of biting complexity with another observation from psychology - humans are most stressed in situations where they feel they lack control, but are still going to be punished when things go wrong. Overwhelmingly, situations like this lead to all the classical symptoms of anxiety and depression disorders, even in otherwise healthy individuals (in measure of the level of punishment, of course.) Given that one obviously has no control over the world economy, and the housing economy, or even one's job security, individuals are clearly making decisions that are at best only probabilistically rational (something like trying to calculate the odds of risk/return in a casino), rather than the binary "yes/no, good/bad" schema of most individuals when assessing the behavior of strangers.

Hence, empathy. If we're to try and understand what's going on here, it's necessary to take into account that the vast majority of actors here undertook what they did based on acceptably rational reasons that turned out to be wrong because of a peculiar quirk in the human mind which causes value thresholds to be irregular; that is, relative social value. Now, this includes "keeping up with the Joneses", but extends beyond that into understanding how one's given economic position determines access to social goods that aren't included in pure economic exchange. Classic, and most heartbreaking example - good schools. Spots in desireable schools are indirectly related to wealth in that though no one pays individually for public schools, the better ones tend to be middle class-and-up neighborhoods. As such, an individual in buying a house might very well buy a home far beyond their means, that they would lose if/when the rate goes up, on the very reasonable estimation that if they're trying to put a child through a good public high school, and as long as housing values remain at least stable, they can be in-and-out of the house before the rate increase kicks in. The value of the school in driving the individual to accept a ruinous mortgage never shows up in the economists assumptions, nor does it show up in mortgage statistics, which is why it's easy to simply dismiss everyone who took a mortgage as either dumb, greedy, or both, when really every person in this crash could be noble and prudent and it still could have happened.

Empathy then, in this situation, is needed before we apportion blame. It's easy and well-deserved to blame the speculators who packaged these loans; but at each stage, it was a good and prudent thing to do - it made a way for banks to make profit out of sub-prime loans initially, which therefore encouraged them to lend more to lower-income individuals, who therefore were able to achieve "leverage" in an economic sense, which potentially could have served as a means for greater economic security; the economist De Soto's anti-poverty proposal works in a similar manner to this, and he's gotten all sorts of awards for being clever. So calling for the heads of Wall Street traders is pointless; in virtually every case, you'll find that each person was just a normal person doing their normal jobs. What empathy, as an emotion, knows however, is that normalcy is no grounds for not scrutinizing what is going on. Empathy is as much about understanding as it is feeling - which is of course troubling, since individuals who feel that they have no need for others empathy (and there's no one like the successful to feel they need nothing from the unsuccessful) also feels that they do not need the understanding. The quote that most troubles me about this whole affair is the anger A.I.G.'s representatives had towards the S.E.C. and Fed and the rest when they brought to light A.I.G.'s outstanding liabilities; A.I.G. literally believed that just so long as no one knew about the extent of how much was leveraged in the CDOs then there wasn't a problem. It goes to show how the difference between the "magical thinking" that individuals use when estimating value, and the cold hard price-setting, information-providing machine that is the market when described by various Austrians and Friedmanites. As such, as we come to know more, we should always realize that the only ethical course is one in which the vast scope of human motivations is held against the constant realization that all of it must be continually not only scrutinized as much as possible, but always made available for scrutiny to take place in the first place, even if the scrutiny never comes.

They Don't Love You, So Go Blow Up.

When I walked into work today, there was a sign labeled "Renaissance", with an arrow pointed to the right. Have I told you how long I have waited for someone to to FINALLY give me those directions? Figures it would happen when I had to go to work. I'm filing papers, and just down the hall is the Black Prince at Agincourt and Petrarch getting all weird over Laura and Erasmus. Fucking Erasmus. Like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air whenever he sees a cab with dice in the mirror, I also knew that this sign knew where, but I said nah, back home to Bel-Air. Wait, no, fuck. Back to work.

In other news, this is a sad little study that just came out, via Wired's columnist Bruce Schneier:

"Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida."

Great. So even terrorists these days are people who just want to fit in and don't pay any attention to the news. I would have like to have thought that radicals were, you know, like radical. Individual and well-informed and only regretfully violent. Apparently not. Apparently terrorists are just like Hannah Montana fans with a lot more semtex, and with equal willingness to kill anything that moves to be the coolest, biggest Miley Cyrus stalker possible. Sigh. When the world has reached a point that indie scenesters are more authentic than al-Qaeda and FARC, you know you're marking off a very strange set of days on the universal calendar. Like the months of Sucktober or Weirdcember or something.

That Is All For Now.

How To Lose A Campaign In 10 Easy Steps

Previously, I had written about the "entitlement" issue in common between Hillary Clinton and John McCain; essentially, they felt, having become the inheritors of their respective party and media institutions, that that alone would be enough to assure them first the nomination, then the election; to reference that a bit better (since I don't think Hillary felt entitled in the Veruca Salt sort of way, though I think John McCain does), I want to post a pair of post-mortems on their respective campaigns, and urge you, dear reader, if you're interested, to ponder the structural similarities between the two.

This first one comes from the New York Times Magazine, and it's about the implosion in the McCain campaign; this second one comes from The Atlantic, about the good Senator's inability to see far enough ahead that she would have to fight the political equivalent of World War One style trench warfare against Obama. Here's also a piece by the same author, written earlier in the campaign; it's not particularly prescient, but it does give one a good sense of what goes on in a campaign, and how a campaign divided cannot stand. My motivation for this is largely because I came across a pair of annoying articles in Dissent, both about how sexism contributed to Hillary's defeat. First one here, second one here. They annoy me because they both refuse to acknowledge that Hillary simply didn't put the time, strategy, and money into planning for a genuine, get-off-your-ass-and-knock-on-doors, fifty-state, full-season campaign (not to mention the genuine and legitimately infuriating way she pushed for the inclusion of Florida's and Michigan's votes after agreeing they wouldn't count.) Remember, Hillary was broke well before the primaries ended, even though she wasn't really all that much behind Obama in fundraising, and had a several year head start, and a rolodex basically of every single rich donor in the U.S. She simply didn't take seriously a serious candidate other than herself, and paid the price. One could even argue that she made a wise decision in trying to load-up the election by winning early and earning momentum - in that case, she paid for her ticket and took her ride. Nothing sexist in that, regardless of the innumerable and unjustifiable things that many said. 

Again - the contrast between these two and Obama could not be clearer; off the top of my head, I can't even name Obama's campaign head, though I can could name several advisors - compare this to the fact that during the primaries, I basically was scouring every couple of days for Solis-Doyle stories (like how she wouldn't work when her soaps were on, and wouldn't call donors back.)  Whether or not one likes Obama, his policies, or his style, he most certainly understands how democracy works. Whether or not this translates into actual leadership remains to be seen, but it seeing it in action gives me a feeling akin only to how I imagine I would feel if I saw the ghost of George Washington getting off a UFO piloted by King Arthur - this isn't supposed to be happening, but it's one of the most awesome things I've ever seen.

The long-term implications of those Dissent pieces - not that they in-and-of-themselves mean this - is that the professional classes in America will continue to deceive themselves that everything is still just a matter of them waiving their hands and making it so; what's really radical about Obama is that he promises that if one takes democracy seriously, and not as a hot new energy drink that all the kids are going to want to buy if you just have Miley Cyrus drink it while half-nude, then Americans will appreciate and respond to that message. Half of everything, so they say, is just showing up. Obama - and his volunteers - showed up every day this election, and I can't think of anything I've seen in politics in my lifetime that was genuinely both so concrete and reassuring. "Blockbuster" campaigns are over; now it's about getting a hundred million people to make and post their own little movies on YouTube. 

That Is All For Now.

Spam Quote Series #2

"Don?t get old with arms folded ? struggle for your life!  Efficiency stays on the first place for antibiotics."

See, I think this is a poem by someone trying to reconcile Dylan Thomas with the modern confrontation of medical treatment and ever-efficient capitalism; the efficiency there is the subject of the sentence - as such, it acts on "the first place for antibiotics", which is clearly infection, but from how it reads now, efficiency usurps priority over treating infection. With that interpretation in mind, of the efficiency of production more important than the disease, the first sentence becomes a call to arms for an otherwise uncertain populace. Clearly, this is brilliant. Or I've a damaged, conspiracy warped mind. Whatev.

That Is All For Now.

McCain Has No Friends Because He Has The Cooties.

I know, enough with the McCain stuff, right? But I had to post this because it is so completely unintentionally funny; from ABC's Politico:

"Another GOP strategist lamented that McCain lacked a core group of rich friends who were willing to part with their money. Harold Simmons, a Dallas billionaire, underwrote the entire cost of the initial Ayers ad for AIP — but his investment wasn’t matched by other wealthy Republicans.

“In 2004, Bush had a cadre of donors who wanted to see him succeed,” said this source, citing “oil guys.”

“But McCain doesn’t have that, and this is where it really hurts.”

I just have this mental image of lil' John McCain, sitting in the back of his bus, waiting for a friend to call, logging into MySpace to see if someone accepted his friend request, then to Facebook to see if anyone poked him back. Sarah Palin's like totally supposed to come over later and work on some homework, but she really doesn't like him and basically just sits there talking on her cell phone to her friends while he does all the work. She's such a slut. Then John's gonna go back to his bedroom and fall asleep watching Wings:MiGs Over Korea while thinking about someday becoming America's First Real Official Gladiator.

That Is All For Now.

Settlements and Statements

From Time:

"When he built his house in the early 1980s, Kennedy says, his water request was denied. He can't even remember the number of times he asked the city's service director for help, only to have nothing happen. Then a house went up next door. A white family moved in, and one day Kennedy saw his new neighbors watering their lawn. "They'd be out there with a hot tub out on the porch," he says, "and I was still going down the road [to the local water treatment plant] with a pickup truck every day."

Basically, for those of you who are TL;DR for the full article, a black community in a white part of the state of Ohio just got awarded 10 million for the fact that, I don't know, they were denied running water for fifty years, despite being only a few hundred feet from a water main servicing white communities. And yes - if you read the article, it's pretty blatant that it solely has to do with the race of the community, and that this is not just tort-mongering.

I'm glad I saw this; I have to work really quite hard to keep myself from falling into that "systemic racism" trap, whereby only a few idiotic white racists exist, and the real problems are all of the "invisible knapsack" variety. Nope. Plenty of good ol' white folks who just don't give a good goddamn about minorities pretty blatantly, if not abusively. And if you're of the Ron Paul mindset - explain to me where we'd be on civil rights if not for the Federal Government? I mean, this is Ohio we're talking about here - one of those places that has a Union memorial practically in every town center.

On a happier note - a list of 50 favorite words, from the Beeb. Personally, I'd like to add a few of mine: 

Ultracrepidarian - someone who talks on subjects of which they have no knowledge;

Lethelogia - to forget a single word; 

Rhinotillexis - to pick one's nose.

That Is All For Now.

Reagans In The Rear-View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are.

From The Next Right (http://www.thenextright.com/jon-henke/sarah-palin-and-the-right)

"If Ruffini thinks Palin will be the leader of a grassroots revival, then I think he is probably over-optimistic. As an abstraction, Sarah Palin is a fantastic leader. She's a genuine outsider, she's stood up to her own party, she's pursued and won major reform fights, she's made difficult cuts in spending, and she's generally in line with the Republican grassroots on policy issues. And she's a fresh, interesting face for the Republican Party. (italics mine)

But to be the substantive leader of a political movement, she needs three things:

1. A clear, but sophisticated, political philosophy
2. A serious governing strategy to move the ball forward on her political philosophy
3. A support base, including grassroots and elite infrastructure, that can mobilize to defend her and advance her agenda

I understand why Palin is a compelling idea. I just haven't seen much evidence that she's got the serious substance behind the marketing abstraction. At least, not right now. Remember, Ronald Reagan spent decades writing, speaking and working on difficult political issues, thinking deeply about what he believed and why, before he was taken seriously as a major movement leader. And even then, he stood upon the shoulders of giants. The next leaders of the Right will not be riding an emerging Movement into power; they will be building a Movement anew."

It is always interesting to see movement conservatives claim intellectual heft as part of their party; not to mention the ease with which they Stalinistically erase their history (wasn't "compassionate conservatism" technically the last "clear but sophisticated" conservative intellectual movement? Why hopscotch over to Reaganism? I'd love to see an "intellectual" Republican explain to me why "compassionate conservatism" failed, or how Reaganism as economics is different from general "Washington Consensus" economics.)

But I digress; what has consistently interested me about the Republicans this year is their "team of mavericks" meme - that basically you can have your herd of cats - and eat it too. A party that finds as its highest point of esteem rebellion against the party is a party that will never win anything. Remember how Tom DeLay had a "little black book" that listed every lobbyist who raised money for the GOP, and if you weren't in it, you didn't get access? That's not the way to run a government, but it is the way that you keep power in an government, and if Republicans think they were done a disservice by that blatant "pay your dollar and take your ride" brand of politics, then they just weren't the wealthy Republicans, who made out like - and often were, if you've been paying attention to the contractors in Iraq - bandits.

Now, the rest of those qualifications show a profound ignorance of politics; how again is she a "genuine" outsider? Is anyone not from a political family an outsider now? Because Sarah Palin strikes me as no more an insider or an outsider than Obama - she ascended the greasy pole just like any other citizen not born a scion of a political family (such as your Gores, Bushes, McCains, and Byrds, for example.) Her fiscal record is vastly more populist than either classically conservative, or even neo-Keynesian Republican (think Nixon's "We're all Keynesians now") - after all, she raised taxes to give each citizen of Alaska more money from the Permanent Fund, something straight out of the Huey Long playbook, so that "cut taxes" bit is more of a magic phrase than an accurate assessment. And by generally in line with Republican policy issues, I have no clue what this Henke means; aside from her views on guns and god, there isn't much in her speeches that wouldn't give a Ron Paul supporter the conniptions, which is where the new and final schism in the current GOP is probably going to come from. And in the light of that kind of GOP emphasis on reform - the kind of Paulite reform that destroys the Department of Education, for example, that makes up the real intellectual direction of the party these days - Palin ain't got nothin'.

If honesty is a virtue - and when it comes to self-examination, it generally is - then the GOP is far from virtuous these days. Coming off of Bush, and attempting to understand what happened outside of the freak event of 9-11 that lead to their dominance, the GOP wishes to believe that the "silent majority" still is "Waiting for Righty", which is simply not the case. The bailout put a nail in the common belief that Wall Street ultimately could be trusted to make Americans wealthy through unregulated, off-ledger speculation rather than capital reinvestment in infrastructure and industrial capacity (though lord knows Corporate America wrung every tax break and tariff it could by claiming it was going to just that, just as soon they finish shipping all the lathes and wrenches to the subsidiary in Ciudad Juarez.) The "ownership society" (again, another conservative intellectual concept strangely quiet these days - perhaps because those people who took it seriously now own a share of a society worth 40% less than it was a month ago) is a dead issue; the unions are starting to reverse the last four decades declines in membership, political registration is through the roof, and the domestic issues that Democrats constantly own on are front and center - especially since we've already negotiated a 2011 withdrawal from Iraq (not that anyone's really talking about it.) In short, the GOP is a party falling apart, and the fact that they're even talking Sarah Palin as a serious potential candidate for the resurgence of the party is moonbat babbling at its most enjoyable. Sarah Palin can't create a conservative grassroots movement - she's all that's left of it. And if the Republican thinking class can't see that, then they are in for a rough couple of decades.

That Is All For Now.

Spam Quote Series #1

It's been a sad observation of mine that no modern poet brings me as much insight, laughter, and outright appreciation for the limitless possibilities of modern English as what comes through my spam box; as part of an ongoing series I'm starting right now, I'm going to start posting the spam titles that amuse me best. Today's is:

"Long time depressions can be dangerous for the state of mind of a person - stir her up with pink viagra."

Now, keeping in mind that Viagra is famously a little blue pill, nonetheless, I can see how generic brand Viagra could end depression, in the same way that I can see how boats would make good airplanes - if they could only get it up.

That Is All For Now.

Referencing The Campaign

Since I've gotten in the academic habit of footnoting (which I didn't do yesterday, despite the massive amount of sourcing a rant like that should have), I figured I'd link to two of my favorite fivethirtyeight.com stories. If you haven't visited fivethirtyeight.com yet, you should, like, immediately; better yet, fire up the interwebs' flux capacitor and check back in the primaries when Nate Silver was just "Poblano", and was beating every other professional pollster in the world while being just another commenter on the Daily Kos (shades of Peter and Valentine Wiggin becoming world leaders in Ender's Game!)

Anyhoo, aside from being a sabremetric master, Nate's also been travelling around the country visiting the campaign offices of both candidates to get a sense of what the numbers aren't telling; and the visits are clutch in understanding why Obama's going to win:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-northern-virginia.html

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-troy-ohio.html

The first one follows a day in the life of an Obama outpost; the second is the same, but has with it a trip to a McCain outpost that is cut very short, and I'll leave you to read it to find out why. Needless to say, it's not good for McCain. 

And if you're sick of polling numbers, and the "meat-market" aspect of politics above doesn't do it for you, then there's this diatribe against the "permanent polling practices" of today's pundry and populace from The National Review: 

This new, frenetic age of polling has not necessarily led to more empirical certainty. The very instantaneousness of polls like Leve's threatens to shape perceptions as much as record them. And the deluge of polling data has just given partisans another opportunity to cherry-pick facts and impugn their rivals. In this besieged environment, even pollsters themselves fight bitterly over the best way to measure public opinion and whether the likes of Jay Leve have it exactly right--or very, very wrong.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a3894827-4373-4f9b-a0e9-ebbc88036375

That Is All For Now.

Back Again With Hitchens

“I rather feebly took the line that one should give her the benefit of the doubt and not be condescending, but it does now begin to look as if most of what she claimed for herself, from the ‘bridge to nowhere’ to the ‘troopergate’ business, was very questionable at best, and much of what her critics said was essentially true…The problem with Gov. Palin is not that she lacks experience. It’s that she quite plainly lacks intellectual curiosity….”

With that quote in mind, I figured it was a good time to recap the election from the last time that I posted; I'll eventually move on to other topics, but for right now, it seemed an appropriate way to bridge the gap (at least that's the gap according to my Facebook Notes) without resorting to that "sry I not write mor lol" that most blog-break apologies are. Anyway, so, it's pretty much over, was the moment the economy collapsed.

Last I wrote: First off, there will be quite a bunch of noise in the morning about Obama's victory, Edwards' second-place upset, and Clinton's "stunning" third placement. Here are the temporary numbers, with seventy five of the 1781 precincts still yet to report: respectively, 4520, 4067, and 3947. A hundred and twenty votes does not an upset make, especially when one considers that Edwards has been essentially canvassing Iowa like a well-groomed locust for the last four years, spending more time there than Clinton and Obama combined, and visiting all 99 Iowa counties at least twice. Furthermore, as you can guess from the numbers, there ain't that many Democrats in Iowa to begin with. So as far as this being the triumphant victory of Edwards, not so much. It does however show that Obama has a surprising - shall we say, Kennedy-esque? - ability to turn charisma and inexperience into that "breath of fresh air" cliche that passes for glass-half-full political writing whenever the writer doesn't want to admit that the old party hack is detested by the politically active commoners. Predictions - Obama remains highly competitive with Clinton, who still has the major machines locked up - New York, Florida, Connecticut, and who knows where else - while Edwards dyspeptically burps into erratic contention in the South and militia-heavy Rocky Mountain states.

So, not too bad, right? I got that Edwards was going to flame out, and that it was between Obama and Clinton, that Clinton was going to run on her strongholds - and that the ground presence was what was important. Of course, I don't know how many people saw that Obama in particular - I sure didn't - was building the most effective Democratic grassroots movement since McCarthy back in '68 forced the Democrats into a backroom deal on Humphrey and burned the party to the ground. Except the opposite; it seems that Obama has out-Reaganed the Republicans, to a degree, at least so far as gettting the "intellectual" Republican movement to support him, much in the manner that what are now the neo-liberals supported Reagan's interventionism and globalization. But that's somewhat off topic; what is relevant is that I don't think anyone expected that Obama would win through what are ultimately only the most honorable means. Certainly, politics is nasty, and certainly, it's not like Obama hasn't raised criticisms or had his sharp moments - but you don't see the kinds of volunteer response that Obama has originated unless the candidate both genuinely can get people to show up AND knows what to do with them, which seems in retrospect to be Hilary's greatest drawback. Not the entitlement that everyone claimed, but her "other" sense of entitlement, which was that holding the major organs of the party was sufficient for victory, staffing local campaign offices be damned, rather than that "she felt she deserved it," which is something far more true of McCain than Clinton.

Anyway, I was way wrong on McCain, and I don't want this to be too long; in short, I predicted that it was going to come down to Romney and Huckabee, with Giulani a go-nowhere psychotic (yeah, you try running as a pro-gay Republican anywhere outside of the five boroughs; good luck with that) and McCain and Thompson running for third. Well, Huckabee was the best challenger to McCain at least, who had an equal sense of political entitlement as Clinton, but still had the most fawning media narrative out there. Which is why the narrative of this campaign is actually, believe it or not, genuinely reassuring, insofar as it's a case where people actually getting out and campaigning is the main wellspring of politcal energy this year; let's examine the case, shall we?

The nut of the problem for McCain is that he never, ever, ever ran a campaign. Not really, at least until 2000 against Bush. He inherited the Senate position from Barry Goldwater, which in Arizona carries about as much institutional weight as the Ring of The Fisherman does in the Vatican. This means that McCain has no institutional base outside the Republican Party itself. This is important to remember, because one of the things that we tend to forget about our political parties is that they themselves very rarely have much in the way of "swing"; only about 50% of voters vote based on party affiliation (about 20% vote completely Republican, no matter what, with 30% being the Democratic share, give or take your location/time) which is statistically speaking, a relatively poor measure predictor of voting outcomes, with things like age, religion, race, and education all being relatively stronger correlates to how an individual is going to vote. As such, getting people interested outside of the nomination is key; Bush did this in spades, relying not on an organized, national machine (believe it or not, Bush neither in 2000 nor in 2004 had the money for that kind of campaign) but rather on the pre-existing voting structures reached best, again, believe it or not, through the mass-mailing, Richard-Vigerie-esque campaigns that have brought us such howlingly bad political propaganda, such as this year's "Obsession" DVD that led at least one person to spray tear gas into a mosque. And of course, the most important of all these networks is the religious one, with Dobson's "Focus On The Family" being the most notable. Now, while a candidate can of course purchase the time of mass-mailing groups to bombard sympathetic voters with material, the simple fact of modern campaigning is that getting associated with such slime immediately turns voters off, if they think that the candidate had something to do with it. As such, the Republicans, who in a previous, pre-internet world, relied on the general difficulty of finding out funding and advertising relationships to keep their race-and-red baiting out of the media spotlight; now of course, they can't, and they have to rely on the grassroots to spread the mental pox that Obama is an infant-slaughtering muslim. And, to repeat, McCain has no natural base. He's not a "real" Christian, (at least by the Falwell-Left Behind-Dobson standards); he's not particularly beloved by business (keep in mind that those earmarks he decries so often are the very bread-and-butter of innumerable small businesses across this country; I once knew a guy who hated Democrats, but voted Clinton because he believed that the Dems. had some hand in getting a contract to make a hundred test wetsuits for the Navy); he's not beloved by the elderly, the libertarian, or the rightwing media groups; and he's basically not beloved in Washington much either, and not because he's a "maverick", but because he's an "asshole", which is what we normally call people who call up their colleagues and shout at them, as McCain openly admits. As such, McCain needed someone to bridge the gap between himself and the increasingly disaffected base; Palin, with that in mind, and the immediate effect she had on his relationship with the Fundies and moderate females, was in that sense a great choice. Who turned out to be a shocking moron, but that's what happens with vice presidents sometimes (Quayle, Agnew, Ford, and Eagleton all come to mind in this regard.)

Which brings us back to the quote; it's from Chris Hitchens, who is generally as wrong as wrong can be, and is wrong here too, but is for once wrong in an interesting way. Basically, Palin's problem is not her lack of intellectual curiosity. Nor is it her lack of experience. Palin's problem is that she was an opportunistic political pick that was never, in any way, shape, or form planned to produce an effective leader for this country. And this is what the media seems to miss, in watching the rancor she produces at her rallies, the turn-around in partisan media the way that, say, Limbaugh talks about McCain, and the lack of general media presence she has; she wasn't designed to "re-energize" the base - she was designed to be the base, the entire locus of a kind of relationship that McCain has never bothered to create, but that she herself did in Alaska, out of her own guile. And in this regard, Sarah Palin is vastly more experienced than McCain, which is why there's all this talk about her "going rogue", i.e., making all sorts of statements far to the right of McCain's own positions, and how the McCain people are "hiding" her, blah blah blah, is that she's essentially, because of her background and McCain's, independent of him - something not true of Biden, who is from the institutional side of the Democratic party, and is therefore entirely following Obama's construction of a genuine popular campaign.

Hitchens' resentment to Palin is transparent, especially for someone as addicted to name dropping as he is; most of his articles look like someone threw a guest list for Davos into a shredder and pasted the scraps into an mad-lib for neocon children. A candidate who essentially goes off the radar seems to him like the abdication of leadership, since he's not drinking gin in her presence. In reality, Hitchens' resentment - and the resentment of the media in general to her - is the resentment of someone who doesn't really understand what's going on, or else daren't speak its name; Sarah Palin was a wise choice for a foolish group of people, and her failure to impress the media is essentially meaningless, since she was selected to make up for all the shortcomings that McCain has everywhere else BUT the media. If Sarah Palin is not intellectually curious, she does have a work ethic and a sense of glad-handing that McCain disdains as only a true patrician can, and which comes out every time that he actually faces an angry plebe (as when he got himself into the oh-so-delicious shouting match with a group of union workers about how they wouldn't pick lettuce even for $50 an hour, a statement that could only come from the mouth of someone who cannot even comprehend working a manual job.)

Which is to turn to Obama now, whose groundwork I cannot - cannot, mind you, cannot - praise highly enough, whatever else I believe about his policies. Obama's people show up, seven days a week, to hold up signs in every kind of weather - you know, the kind of behavior normally reserved only for teenage girls on behalf of whomever is this week's plastic groaner on MTV, not politicians. People only do this when their neighbors and friends are doing it, and when there's an expectation from others that you'll do your part. The constant contact that Obama has made a structural part of his campaign is one of those simple things that Dale Carnegie noticed a hundred years ago that helps not only to win friends and influence people, but quite literally, gets them past things like skin color, education, and age in fundamental and permanent ways.

So, that's that - when the race ends, I'm sure I'll go back to writing about the usual conflict between awesome and fail that makes up my own personal beautiful and sublime.

That Is All For Now,

M.