Windmill Tilter

The lovely Ms. Machiavelli was just making this observation last night:

I’ve been trying to figure out why God has been sending all those horrible grass fires to Texas. At first I thought it was because God dislikes George W. Bush, and so is punishing Texas. But then in fairness, I realized that God’s time is different than man’s time, and it may be that God is having a delayed reaction to the governorship of Ann Richards, which means the grass fires are the Democrats' fault. Or maybe God doesn’t like Molly Ivins and is punishing Texas because of her. Maybe he’s having a conniption fit about Brokeback Mountain. Of course, most of the sex scenes take place in Montana, while it’s only Jake Gyllenhaal’s pretend marriage that takes place in Texas. So if God was being more exact, He should send grass fires to Montana, not Texas. So maybe it is Molly Ivins.

She is smart.

This is a take I had not heard:

There is no need to yell and scream. No need to be strident and shrill. What is needed is that conservatives learn their proper role. Now by conservative, I mean people who are not creative, but who are, in the main, reactionary.In America, it has long been the case that the creative class tended toward liberality, since that is, in large part, what enables them to be creative. Creativity is a generative and generous act. But many of those who are not creative make the mistake of becoming, or being, reactive, as if reactivity balanced creativity. But this is not the proper order. The proper thing for the non-creatives to do is to be receptive, not reactive. Creativity is the yang, receptivity is the yin. All of life is infused with both characteristics. No one is completely one way or the other. There are simply aptitudes and orientations. America is prevented from evolving naturally by this miscalculation. Instead of great ideas being nurtured and developed by those who would be receptive, instead they are reacted against, shot down, and the balloon bursts…if it is ever given wind in the first place.

But he consistently has the most interesting take, read the whole article:

Funny how things work over there in Conservative Land. If a conservative mouthpiece actually harms national security in the pursuit of attacking a liberal president or policy, well, then, that's just good old hardball politics. Just ask Valerie Plame.And besides, you can always just give it a few years. Then, when everyone's forgotten who actually caused this security breach and why, a smart, Orwellian conservative figurehead can always use the incident later to bash the "mainstream media" for doing its job.

Talking Points Memo has a great post on the historical context of Bush's latest crime:

Jefferson's argument, however, wasn't that the president had the prerogative to set aside the law. It was that the president might find himself in a position of extremity in which there was simply no time to canvass the people or a situation in which there was no practicable way to bring the relevant information before them. In such a case the president might have an extra-constitutional right (if there can be such a thing) or even an obligation to act in what he understands to be the best interests of the Republic. The clearest instance of this would be a case where the president faced a choice between letting the Republic be destroyed or violating one of its laws. But that wasn't the end of his point. Having taken such a step, it would then be the obligation of the president to throw himself on the mercy of the public, letting them know the full scope of the facts and circumstances he had faced and leave it to them -- or rather their representatives or the courts -- to impeach him or indict those who had taken it upon themselves to act outside the law.

Intelligent Design has been trounced in Dover, PA.

"Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

Good analysis here. And here.

The fact that the president authorized illegal and unconstitutional wiretaps will be either his downfall or the downfall of the Constitition. Seems like every time a constitutional crisis happens (Watergate, Internment, etc...), the guilty party/parties are eventually shamed into doing what is right. This time I'm not so sure that will happen. The right has such a hold on the media and their half of the "intellectual" sphere, I think they will continue to do what has been working for them. That is, not admitting guilt or fault on any level. This is what scares me. The only reason the other crises ended was that one branch eventually gave up. Nixon resigned; Bush would have insisted to the (country crippling) end that his branch is sovereign. Korematsu was overturned and Reagan signed an act passed by Congress admitting fault and paying reparations to the internees; Bush would have acted like Michelle Malkin. The bad guys never actually think they are wrong. They just eventually see that what they did was illegal and against a huge amount of public sentiment. If they control the emotions of the public and their lawyers define away criminality when the crime is commited by the President, there is no reason they can't hang on forever. Also, this is funny.

That the United States truly was exceptional. You know, American Exceptionalism, the way of thinking that leads many Americans to believe that when our government tortures or murders or kidnaps it isn't really torture or murder or kidnapping. It's something else. What, I don't know. But it is. Because they're terrorists, or something. Again, why did I think this? I haven't the faintest idea. I just did.

Wish I thought of this:

I think what you can say is that the Bush team is cynically manipulating public sentiment for the sake of pushing the limits of presidential power. It's a brilliant move, really, tapping into an aspect of the psyche that has been preconditioned by a hoary myth that has been perpetuated over the years by Hollywood: the notion that the action-driven hero's instincts for "saving lives" are superior to careful reasoning and principled restraint.But it sure is weird for a bunch of people who make a living out of deriding "Hollywood values."

Tax cuts for the wealthy are actually in the best interests of the poor and working classes. Why did I believe it? I have no idea. I guess it was because Rush said it.

He loves me! The Anonymous Liberal really, really loves me! Read the comments.

So many in the media/political establishment are attorneys. Because of this, burdens of proof should be fundamental in their analysis. Unless you are paid to destroy all notions of proof and fair play:

Charges of bias require no substantiation whatsoever -- they merely have to be seconded enough times so that they become, ipso facto, truth-esque. And once they're truth-esque, they simply must be addressed, lest the credibility of the whole organization be questioned by a "great many" people, none of whom are acting out of bad faith, none of whom can be dismissed as cranks or ideologues. It's a bizarre state of affairs. The onus has left the accuser. Somewhere along the line, the burden of proof was lifted from them and dumped on the accused. So now our methods for evaluating bias are fairly similar to British libel laws: the plaintiff needn't prove that you're biased, but you still need to prove that you weren't. The very fact that such questions are being asked is more than reason enough to conduct a full and pointed investigation. Never mind that most who've participated in the discussion mock the premise: that so many are not asking such questions even further proves that such questions must be asked. If you think it's bias when someone else accuses bias, you're obviously biased.

Minimum wage laws are harmful to those who make minimum wage. The market will eventually provide wages higher than the current minimum wage laws provide and the only things keeping the wages down are liberal policies. I know, it's ridiculous on its face.

To my vast readership, please check out this article. My wonderful girlfriend worked on the legal stuff regarding this play starring Chita Rivera when she was interning with a theater law firm. Apparently, it has opened to rave reviews. Broadway, and the rest of humanity, should thank her.

Then don't be a pharmacist! Then don't be a doctor!

John Silber, the gentleman who presumably helped Boston University rise from the ashes to become a poor man's Harvard across the river, apparently is not as smart as everyone thought he was. While tooling around the internets, I found an article he wrote for the New Criterion which was cited approvingly on a creationist website to prop up the absurd Intelligent Design theory. Check this out:

A second excellent piece is in The New Criterion by John Silber, the straight shooting former president of Boston University, entitled Science versus scientism. Silber explains skepticism of evolution is met by dogmatic assertions: "The critical question for evolutionists is not about survival of the fittest but about their arrival. Biologists arguing for evolution have been challenged by critics for more than a hundred years for their failure to offer any scientific explanation for the arrival of the fittest. Supporters of evolution have no explanation beyond their dogmatic assertion that all advances are explained by random mutation sand environmental influences over millions of years."

First, "straight shooting" is usually code for bigoted or shallow. In my experience, Silber's "straight shooting" was actually extreme callousness with a side of slight bigotry. I'll try to compile other examples when more motivated but I'm a little too irritated at the fact that he single-handedly destroyed a number of sports teams at BU, including baseball, football and wrestling. Second, there is no excuse for anyone, never mind an intellectual, to be commenting on evolution (not Darwinism, which is the creationists tactic to try to limit evolutionary theory to some cult of personality and hero worship to take it down to their level so they can "discredit" it by calling it just another form of religious faith, which is a strange tactic to use to discredit something, especially when the whole point of ID and creation science is to lend credibility to their faith-based worldview) without knowing basic facts. Evolutionary theory DOES posit theories about the beginnings of life, and they are far more serious than any Intelligent Design guess as to the origins of life. In fact, a recent Nova on PBS discussed how some scientists are getting nearer to recreating the conditions which they believe sparked the first lifeforms, and hope to be able to do so themselves. Let's be clear. Intelligent Design is basically this: I will repeat endlessly how there are gaps in evolutionary theory, then ignore reasonable explanations for these gaps, and further ignore conclusive explanations of why Irreducable and Specified Complexity theories and Probability theory do not disprove evolution, yet continue to parrot these "common sense" theories, then claim that ID is just dispassionate science, while at the same time failing to adress the fact that EVERY ID proponent is a practicing and believing Christian, usually born-again and fundamentalist, and fail to explain their ties to explicitly creationist groups (most of them old-earth creationists, you know, the ones who think the world is 6,000 years old), and, while again claiming that ID is dispassionate science, hysterically accuse evolution proponents of anti-religious bias. There is no one who knows the contrarian itch of an ill-informed conservative better than I, but how does an intellectual fall into these traps? Seriously, how? Because I have no idea.

This should lead to the holy war the fundies are seeking.

Richard Pryor. He was funny.

Here is a new feature on the world famous Mayberry Machiavelli blog. Lyric blogging. It's in the tradition of irreverent {Blank} blogging sweeping the internets, started by Atrios and his Friday Cat Blogging. I will not have a day, but it will happen when the inspiration hits me. Competent lyric writing is a skill I admire above most. This will never include Linkin Park, Staind, Limp Bizkit or any of those manly rockers who write lyrics which are so literal and sentimental that only a 14-year-old girl or a drunk fratboy who isn't listening to the lyrics anyway except when the part comes around in the hook which tells them to jump or scream or break things but when he's alone in his dorm room and he listens to the lyrics they appeal to him because he's also just so mad at the hot girl who doesn't want to do what he wants so he thinks he can push her or scream at her when no one is looking but that's ok because his immature emotions are validated by what passes for platinum-selling lyrics nowadays. Anyway, this song is a great example of lyric literalism that works. Some just get it way before some others (me) do. By the way, this song is on Yield which was released in February, 1998.

I read this article a while back when it first showed up on Huffington Post but worried that it was too hyperbolic to link to. Screw it. This is what every atheist wishes his/her drunken rantings sounded like. And I'm pretty sure the author was drunk.

So, here we go again. The next round of bloodbaths promises to continue on as a bunch of witless barbarians fight over the same goddamn piece of worthless land. And I’m the bad guy for saying religion makes the world a worse place? I posit that the real bad guys, who are going to get the rest of us killed along with themselves, are the Muslim Ayatollahs and the Israeli settlers. Though I think the original Zionist idea – and more importantly, their choice of locale – was misguided to say the least, what’s done is done. Every reasonable person knows what can bring peace – give the West Bank and Gaza Strip back to the Palestinians roughly along the 1967 borders, no right of return to the Palestinians for Israel proper and split Jerusalem in half. I know it, you know it, and the entire world knows it. But we won’t do it because of the religious zealots on both sides. You wonder why I can’t stand these religions. For the love of God, Yahweh and Allah, let’s save the people of the Middle East by getting rid of the absurd religious beliefs of the Middle East.

This guy made the points I wish I had made about Barkley and how he is much more politically complicated than the "I have a black friend" crowd on the right will ever admit. All that matters to them is that he once said he wanted to run as a Republican.

I'm starting a nationwide movement built around the premise that Carlos Delgado, newly traded to the Mets, should sit down and shut up. It's not what you think. By sitting and shutting up during the playing of God Bless America at ballgames since the start of the Iraq War, Delgado has been one of the only prominent athletes playing in any of the American pro sports to take a stand against the War. He got away with it in Toronto and Miami, but the wounds are relatively fresh in New York and the Mets front office has "come to an agreement" with Delgado whereby he will stand during the song and to not discuss his political views publicly. The meatheads are going to boo him regardless so I say stay seated. Since when did playing a game for a lot of money mean that you should abandon your political ideals. History always proves them out. And no matter how big you are, if you are an empty hole of commercialization, you still lose in a lot of peoples' minds. I can see if you are a lobbyist for Big Oil, your firm might have a problem with you going to Greenpeace rallies, but you would have no soul to begin with so it wouldn't occur to you to have a social conscience anyway. He's a ballplayer. It's too bad that we had to wait until they were retired to hear most of what Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Curt Flood, and Jackie Robinson had to say about anything controversial. Why is it usually up to players of non-team sports (Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe) to take stands?