"Radioactive, Huh?" [Tosses into the Back of the Truck.]

I can't wrap my head around this story.

They say this capsule -- about the size of a Tic-Tac -- likely "fell off a truck" as it was being transported.

Was it sitting loose, just rattling around? That seems highly unlikely; it had to have been stored in some kind of container. No one would just lob a bit of radioactive material in the back of a truck and hope it would stay there if it were this small.

Yet none of the stories mention any container, any container recovery, and all have fretted over the possibility the capsule got stuck in a tire tread and toddled off somewhere far from the search area.

Either there's something really missing from the stories being told, or there's something really awry with how Australia handles radioactive material for transport.

I'm glad they found it . . .

Update: Should have gone to the BBC:

This makes a lot more sense.

An Odd Bit of Marketing

I'm not sure what to make of this:

Both videos used in this posting are used under the fair use doctrine.)

Apparently it's not a spoof. It's a real bit of ironmongery marketing put together by someone who thought they could connect with the American people by showing clips from "Animal House" in their thank-you kiss to the nation.

I don't get it. And it's not just because I've never seen, nor do I want to see, Animal House.

However, I did enjoy the ad's nice, subtle use of "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother." (The Hollies did it best):

Fortunately for my cultural literacy, I do understand the other bits referenced in the ad, from the triumphant Harry S Truman holding up the "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline to poor, poor Popeye sinking to the bottom of the drink. But the Animal House bits are lost on me. Who are they trying to appeal to by including those clips? Themselves -- because I can't think of anyone who makes a better parallel to John Belushi's boorish, unadmirable Bluto than a company that literally drove itself into a ditch.

Silly, Silly Stock Market

I no longer believe what the news tells me about the stock market.

Day One: Stocks fall. Reports come in that fears of Greek indebtedness are shaking the market.

Day Two: Stocks soar. Reports come in that strong auto sales and the fact that the Greek bailout won’t be as bad floats all boats.

Day Three: Stocks crumble again precipitously because auto sales aren’t as high as expected and somebody in Greece ate some bad feta cheese.

Honestly, I think they’ve got some kind of wheel or dartboard on which they pick a random target for when the news is good or when the news is bad. If, during the same week, the target comes up the same on a good or a bad day, they come up with nuances that explain away yesterday’s losses or yesterday’s gains, using the same object of adoration or hatred.

But I follow the market. I have to. We’ve got some investments that are doing quite good one day, terribly the next. This is our retirement. Our fat to live off once I’m too old and enfeebled to work.

Our investments now sit at about half of the value they had three years ago. We might have finally hit triple digits on our investments had the Great Recession not struck. But no more. And every time the stock market goes down, I think, well, good thing I’m not going to retire for another thirty years.

Yes, It's A Surfing Sheep

When Man can teach Sheep to surf and Sheep actually looks like it might be enjoying the stunt, my faith in humanity is restored.

The Secret to Sanity: 529-0184.

I’ve got a little advice for BridgeMaxx customers in Eastern Idaho. Write down this phone number and keep it handy: 529-0184.

When your service goes kaput, call this number. They’ll get Jake to come fix you up.

I can say Jake because, according to him, he’s the only tech left. That’s right, BridgeMaxx has one tech left in Eastern Idaho, after layoffs, to do all the installations and fixing and such. He’s grateful to have a job but overworked and frustrated with the folks at the BridgeMaxx call center who make wild promises (“Oh, we’ll have someone to your house before noon”) he can’t keep because he doesn’t know they’re making them. He’s tired of getting to people’s homes and having them seethe at him because of some unknown promise the call center has made them. He’s a one-man band. He’s not a slacker. He’s singlehandedly keeping folks like us as BridgeMaxx customers.

Jake is awesome. We’ve tracked Jake down at his house and he’s come to fix our Internet with a smile. No, I won’t tell you where he lives; that’s my little secret. Besides, we’ve told him if he ever needs any verbs conjugated, he can come to our house any time of day or night, and we’ll help him out.

Don’t call the call center. They’re worse than useless. Aside from checking to see if your account is current and asking you to unplug your modem, then plug it in again to see if that fixes the problem, they either can’t or won’t do anything to fix your problem but send in a work order, which you can do directly by calling the number listed above. At best they’ll put in a work order. At worse, they’ll put you on hold, then hang up on you.

Again, call 529-0184. They’ll fix you up. They’ll get Jake on the case. But remember, Jake is overworked. Don’t yell at him when he shows up.

And you know what? I hear a lot of people complain that BridgeMaxx is slow. I have to say “So what?” Slow is what I’ve come to expect from any Eastern Idaho internet service provider. All of my friends in Utah make fun of my “Idaho internet” because if there’s anyone in the group having trouble with Skype when we do our conference calls, it’s me. But it’s okay. I’ve accepted the karma of slow Internet. Clay Shirky kind of explains it:

In the mid-90s, I got a call from some friends at ATT, asking me to help them research the nascent web-hosting business. They thought ATT’s famous “five 9’s” reliability (services that work 99.999% of the time) would be valuable, but they couldn’t figure out how anyone could offer good web hosting for $20 a month, then the going rate. No matter how many eventual users they assumed, $20 didn’t even seem to cover the monthly costs, much less leave a profit.

I started describing the web hosting I’d used, including the process of developing web sites locally, uploading them to the server, and then checking to see if anything had broken.

“But if you don’t have a staging server, you’d be changing things on the live site!” They explained this to me in the tone you’d use to explain to a small child why you don’t want to drink bleach. “Oh yeah, it was horrible”, I said. “Sometimes the servers would crash, and we’d just have to re-boot and start from scratch.” There was a long silence on the other end, the silence peculiar to conference calls when an entire group stops to think.

The ATT guys had correctly understood that the income from $20-a-month customers wouldn’t pay for good web hosting. What they hadn’t understood, were in fact professionally incapable of understanding, was that the industry solution, circa 1996, was to offer hosting that wasn’t very good.

In other words, we’re still in the “not very good” era of Internet service, given the prices we’re willing to pay for it. I’m a cheap bastard. I know there are faster services out there. But for what I’m willing to pay, the service I get is adequate. Maybe some day in the distant future internet service will be more reliable and faster at the price I’m willing to pay. Until then, I’m not going to rant.

Gaia is Trying to Kill Us

When Pat Robertson said voodoo and a nation "selling its soul to the devil" caused January's Haiti earthquake, most people cringed, shook their head, and wondered why the guy had to say something that stupid.

When Iranian clerics say promiscuity is what's causing earthquakes worldwide, even I, a relatively conservative person, have to laugh when a young American woman uses Facebook to organize a bevy of women ready to dress provocatively to provoke a "Boobquake."

The liberals, of course, have a field day with this kind of nonsense, pointing to these, somewhat rightly, as examples of how religion is spreading nonsense around the world.

But when a liberal commentator -- and not just a few of them, read some here and many examples here -- believes that earthquakes, the Icelandic volcanic eruption and other natural disasters this year represent "Earth striking back," can't we, as rational people, also file them in the Loony Boat?

I certainly will.

What author Alan Wiseman writes at CNN.com is ludicrous. He brings up some shocking, absolutely shocking, scientific evidence that earthquakes and volcanoes occur along tectonic plate boundaries. This is, he says, evidence that melting icecaps and more carbon in the atmosphere is going to lead to MORE earthquakes and volcanoes.

It's looking like this may be a long decade. And if we don't pull carbon out of the way we energize our lives soon, a small clump of our not-too-distant surviving descendants may find themselves, as Gaia scientist James Lovelock has direly predicted, like the first Icelanders: gathered on some near-barren hunk of rock near one of the still-habitable poles, trying yet anew to eke out a plan for human civilization.

Doesn't Wiseman realize he sounds as stupid -- and rightly so -- as Robertson and those wacky Iranian clerics?

Brendann O'Neil, writing at reason.com, thinks so:

Hundreds of years ago, before the birth of the science of volcanology in the 19th century, mankind looked upon volcanic eruptions as warnings or punishments from the gods. The gods were literally blowing their tops, spewing forth fire and rocks and ash to express their disgust or disappointment with we mere mortals and our habit of messing things up.

Now, remarkably, this backward outlook, this idea that volcanoes are somehow semi-sentient forces giving fiery lectures to mankind, is making a comeback thanks to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. The fact that ash from the volcano is spreading across Europe, leading to the grounding of flights and the closure of airports, is being interpreted—even celebrated—as evidence of Nature’s awesome power and “fury” in contrast to weak, pathetic mankind.

So we got voodoo-fearers and promiscuity-fearers on the right, contrasting with "Earth is sentient and trying to kill us all" on the left. Folks wonder why I sag in the middle.

Can human activity increase the frequency of earthquakes? No.

Is recent earthquake activity unusual? No.

But because Wisemann's blatherings and other lib storytelling toes the global warming line, those on the left are as willing to blind their eyes to scientific fact as they accuse those on the right of being blind when climate science is trotted out in front of them. Pot, meet Mister Kettle. Y'all are both a little sooty.

The left screams at the unscientific, religious fiddle-faddle on the right, and yet give Wisemann and others of his ilk on the left a pass because, well, at least they're preaching the right kind of message. Anything that makes global warming something to fear and makes industrial society look stupid and wasteful and unbenificient. Makes me want to ship the far left and the far right to Iceland and toss them all into the volcano.

I Finally Understand Algebra

I see. Algebra is not  "the branch of mathematics concerning the study of the rules of operations and relations, and the constructions and concepts arising from them, including terms, polynomials, equations and algebraic structures. Together with geometry, analysis, topology, combinatorics, and number theory, algebra is one of the main branches of pure mathematics," as Wikipedia would have me believe. It's a simple evolutionary accomplishment meant to make human beings less attractive to predators. if it works for the apteryx, it ought to work for me.

Captin Kirk and the Alien on Planet Trololololololooooooo . . .

Fathoming Obamacare

I really, really want to understand President Obama’s health care proposal. By all indications, a reconciled version of the House and Senate bills, mixed in with the president’s latest proposals, will be sent through Congress and likely adopted. I want to know what all that means for me and my family.

Answers to that question are hard to find.

That the status quo needs to change is obvious.

I buy insurance for my family. It’s an okay policy, but not the best out there. We paid the premiums for two years without a claim. Then the insurance company wanted a price increase. No claims on our part, but the “cost of business” has gone up. So we threw a hissy fit and changed policies and still ended up paying more.

Last Thursday, our youngest boy burned himself falling onto the woodstove (the little idiot was tap dancing on the ping-pong table, fell, and landed on the stove). First we took him to a local private clinic, but because we had the effrontery to have an accident ten minutes before closing time, the doors were locked and the envelope-licking lackey inside was unresponsive to my wife’s door knocking.

The local hospital was just up the street. But did we want to put in a claim and see our premiums soar – we already know what they do when we pay the bill and DON'T USE THE DAMN INSURANCE. So thanks to a few savvy moms in the neighborhood and a nephew who has just finished CNA training, we self-medicated. He’s doing better now.

I would love to have better insurance options. The problem with the current health care bills is that no one – and I mean no one – is doing a good enough job explaining to schmoes like me why the proposed bills will do us any good.

The national media gets failing grades in this respect, and it’s shameful. I’ve yet to see an “in-depth” explanation of how any of the bills will help me and my family. They typically boil down their explanations to maybe sixty to ninety seconds of bullet points: You’ll get tax credits based on the percentage of income you spend on health care! Deficit reductions due to the reforms! This will make your health care more affordable! Those on Cadillac plans will pay taxes to help out the poor schmoes! And then they spend much more time on the politicking of health care reform, rather than telling me, the average American, why I should be excited about it. The media is much more intent on painting the Republicans as the Party of No and as obstructionist and as in the pocket of insurance companies than telling me why I should be excited about the proposed reforms. You’re failing me, mass media. Get off the politics and tell me what’s going to happen if these reforms go through.

What’s even worse is that the White House isn’t doing much better. I’ve spent a lot of time reading what information the White House is offering on the bills, on reconciliation, and on Obama’s proposals and I still don’t know much more beyond what the pretty boys and pretty girls of the media are telling me.

So there are tax credits. Based on income and the amount of money I spend on health insurance, will I qualify for them? I don’t know. The information at www.whitehouse.gov is too vague for me to decide. My interpretation tells me that to qualify for the credits, I’d have to spend between 8 and 9 percent of my income on health insurance costs. Right now, I pay about 5 percent. So to save money, I have to spend more money? No wonder y’all can’t sell this. But if I’m in error, the only way to find out is to submit an e-mail question that’ll take who knows how long to get a response.

Here’s the information I’m getting:

The Act will provide the largest tax cut for health care in American history. Millions of families will receive hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits to help them pay for insurance in the new exchanges. This tax relief for working families will make insurance more affordable for those who can’t get it through work or whose employer insurance is too expensive.

I pay about $3,360 a year in premiums. As a percentage of income, that equals about 5 percent. Now, I don’t exactly have a Cadillac plan – more coverage would be better. But unless the tax credits pay for a significant portion of the increased amount of money I’d have to spend to qualify for them, I just don’t see the use. The percentage I’m using, as provided by the White House, is for a family of four. We’ve got five. Maybe that’ll make a difference, but from what I’m being shown, I can’t tell.

Then there’s this:

Both the House and Senate bills include significant reforms to make insurance fair, accessible, and affordable to all people, regardless of pre-existing conditions. One essential policy is “rate review” meaning that health insurers must submit their proposed premium increases to the State authority or Secretary for review. The President’s Proposal strengthens this policy by ensuring that, if a rate increase is unreasonable and unjustified, health insurers must lower premiums, provide rebates, or take other actions to make premiums affordable. A new Health Insurance Rate Authority will be created to provide needed oversight at the Federal level and help States determine how rate review will be enforced and monitor insurance market behavior.

As a subcontractor to an outfit that contracts work for the federal government, I’ve seen firsthand how well bureaucracy does in saving money, and I don’t say that facetiously. For the most part, the system works. But there are instances where the bureaucracy causes expense, rather than cutting it, so I’m wary.

And then there’s this:

Every member of Congress will be required to purchase their insurance from the new health insurance exchange.

Big deal. They make more money than I do and, as a consequence, can afford better health care. To put us on equal footing, they should also be required to give up their lifetime pensions, with which they can pay for their insurance.

Then I see this nifty little feature. Wow! I can see what “reform means to me!” So I answer the question: I buy my own insurance. I get this answer:

• You will likely pay less---perhaps much less. If you buy coverage like you have today on your own, premiums are expected to drop by 14 to 20 percent. If you get coverage through your job, premiums could decline by up to 3 percent.

• In addition, many Americans buying coverage in the individual market will qualify for tax credits that reduce their premiums by an average of nearly 60 percent – and they will get better coverage than what they have today.

Likely and many. It’s still too vague.

And, yes, this is what it comes down to. Show me the money. Because right now, if my wife or a kid needs to go to the hospital for an urgent need, I'll take them there, lousy insurance or not. If Obama's health care proposals will make that less of an agonizing choice, or make it easier for us to afford, say, dental insurance, or make an occasional visit to the doctor not so much of a financial burden, I'm all for it. Whether my congressmen have to buy insurance from the same pool, or whether the government will work to make forms easier to understand (they've certainly done a great job of this at the IRS) isn't important to me. What I want to know is will this make better insurance more affordable. At this point, I get the vague understand that, yes it will, but until I see the numbers, I don't know to what extent that affordability will extend.
So I submitted my e-mail to the lackeys at the White House. I’ll post updates as they arrive.

UPDATE: The Kaiser Family Foundation has a nonpartisan explanation of the various health care proposals that is actually helpful. Incldued in this link is a calculator that'll show how the tax credits work. It appears under the Obama plan we would qualify for about $3,300 in tax credits -- but that's on yearly premium payments of about $9,000 -- far more than we pay now. Admittedly, the policy picked for this calculator is a bit more on the Cadillac side than what we've chosen for ourselves. Still, it shows a tax credit would be there.

But how is it going to be paid for?

Ah. Here again from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Savings in Medicare and Medicaid. Penalties on companies and individuals who opt out of insurance coverage. And taxes on the rich folks.

This brings me to the second bullet point above: Better health care for my family through these plans. Sure, that appears possible. But I can get better health care now if I just pay more. And by all estimates, if I want better health care under the proposed plans, I have to pay more. Maybe not as much as I would outside the plans, but still more. And since the difference is made up in tax credits, which we get back with our income taxes, we still have to come up with the additional money to pay for the fancier care and then wait for a reimbursement. Maybe that makes for easier accounting, but since premiums are paid on a monthly and not a yearly basis, it still makes it tough on the ol' coconut.

I should note that I found this information thanks not to any national media outlet, which are still, in general, focusing on the politics, but thanks to a local news station which did a story on local college students studying the plan. Thanks, Local News 8.

What's Next? The Eye-Roll Mark?

So Sarcasm Inc., apparently a company of some sort in Michigan, has invented a sarcasm punctuation mark. Take a gander, or a goose if you so choose:

For the amazingly low, low price of $1.99, this company will send you a bit of software that will allow you to reproduce this punctuation mark through that lovely CRTL+greater than key combination. It's not clear whether the little restricted trademark symbol will also be replicated.

This led me to wondering: When was the last punctuation mark-related breakthrough? What was the last bit of punctuation to be invented? Emoticons, probably, but I'm not going to count them because they're merely strings of existing punctuation marks. So, do we go with the colon? The semicolon? Which came first, the whole colon or the half? The "@" symbol? Can't be. That's been used for more than a century at least. Let's see what the Internet has to say.

Wikipedia tells us of the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma," patented in 1992. They provide no pictorials. I think it was a prank. Then there is the "double comma" designed by Russian Artemy Lebedev. He apparently thought the double comma would indicate more of a pause than does the current, fashionalbe, and stylish semi-colon. Leave it up to the Russians to try to develop a new punctuation mark to take over the job of an old one.

So maybe Sarcasm Inc. is on to something here. Or maybe not. After all, while the folks at MIT developed the Smoot as a new unit of measure, it hasn't caught on anywhere else outside of Cambridge. So maybe the sarcasm mark -- which looks like an unmentionable object circling in a flushed toilet -- will catch on, but for $1.99, you won't find one here. I, for one, believe punctuation should be free. Or at least phonetic, as Victor Borge demonstrates:

Odd thing is, however, they may have a point. I've learned from experience both in ordinary online forums and in more formal online forums, including class forums, that sometimes a sarcastic remark can't be read that way by others -- and that can cause trouble, from hurt feelings to a good old-fashioned flame war. Some have taken to posting things like "/sarcasm/" when they're being sarcastic, so Sarcasm Inc. is simply looking for a shorthand way to do that. If it catches on, their new punctuation mark could be a hit. but I'm not sure selling it for $1.99 will get it into the mainstream. It's interesting to see, however, how the spoken word is used far more often than the written word in such instances -- and it shows how unable some are to pick up on sarcasm if it's written, in the absence of aural and visual cues. Frank Smith, I think, would love this.

Phantom Dog

Ever been in one of those relationshps where you're not quite sure how everything fits together? That's how we're feeling about our dog right now.

Technically, he's not our dog. Technically, he might not even be a he, though Michelle says she has looked as the dog -- medium sized, some kind of collie mix, black and white -- darts away from her as she approaches.

The dog appeared in the alley behind our house, oh, sometime in early summer, June perhaps. At first, we never saw hijm, we just knew that an awful lot of pet dishes were showing up in the alley, licked clean and looking slightly chewed. We gathered them up and took them around the neighborhood, finding homes for some of them. But they'd soon be back.

Then we saw the dog. Fleetingly. If it saw us first, it hid, and if we approached its hiding place, it took off.

We're getting closer to it now. It's to the point if it's lying in its favorite spot in a makeshift shelter Michelle made for it out of grass clippings and a pile of scrap lumber and it sees us coming, it doesn't run. it does look at us, with its glowing eyes. Michelle's been trying to coax it closer to the house with food and water, inching the bowl closer and closer to the house each night. We'd like to see what's on its collar, because we're quite certain someone is missing this dog.

Mic helle's niece's dog -- a similar farm-type dog to the one in the alley -- was stolen a few months ago, along with a few other farm dogs in Swan Valley. The dog turned up in Lewiston, Idaho, of all places -- a spot about 10 hours away, so there's little chance the dog walked there. So we're wondering if the dog in our alley is a similarly lost abductee. Once we can actually get close enough to him to look at his collar, we'll see.

Mysterious Nyuks

I think I’m going nuts. Or I really did just hear the first eights of the "nyuk nyuk nyuk nyuk" The Three Stooges are wont to make. Why would someone in the trailer issue such an abortive nyuk? Why are my ears so attuned that I can hear an eighth of a nyuk⁴ at a hundred paces? Yes, I have some Three Stooges DVDs at home, but I can’t remember the last time I watched one of them. And I didn’t watch a lot of them as a kid, either. Oh, a few, but not enough that you think my brain would have a nyuk on an E-Z recall memory circuit linked acutely to my peripheral hearing. Maybe it was just a weird noise, and my brain, seeking to classify that weird noise, went through my Inner Box of Weirdness and came up with a nyuk as a possible explanation.

Oh, Balloon Boy . . .

I feel badly for Balloon Boy.

What kind of parents want to make their kids the center of this kind of drama: Faking his departure in a homemade helium balloon, attracting the world's attention as they worried (okay, most of us were worried, there were some Ridnitzes out there who were hoping the kid would die) about this kid, only to find (no surprise there) that the kid was hiding in the attic above the garage, ignoring the calls of his parents and other searchers as they looked for him.

They're trying to teach this kid to lie, now that they've admitted the stunt was a publicity hoax they hoped would put them back in the limelight for, well, I'm not really sure. CNN doesn't say.

Fortunately for Falcone Heene, the little kid couldn't tell a lie.

"You said it was for the show," the kid said on Larry King Live, as Wolf Blitzer, living up to his blitzy beard, pursued the father when his little kid said that live. When I heard this drama Thursday, when I heard that the balloon was empty when it landed, I knew they'd find the kid at home. And I suspected highly that the whole thing was a stunt. A family that chases storms, gets on reality shows and otherwise draws attention to themselves isn't one that would be beyond setting up this kind of stupid stunt.

So I'm glad Falcon, in his innocence, couldn't tell a lie. I hope he's not the only one in the family who learns something from this.

His parents should have known better. There are certain children, at a certain age -- and Falcon Heene certainly fits in this category -- that are innocent and guileless. They're not going to lie because they don't see the point, they don't know what a lie is. My five-year-old is like this. There's no point in asking my kid to keep a secret because the truth always comes out. Not that it's malicious -- it's just the opposite. They simply see no sense in telling something contrary to the truth, rather than anything else. And it's the truth -- not what someone tells them is the truth. How many times have I said or implied that, yes, we did do this or we did not do that so he'd tell his mother what I wanted him to tell him; to tell him my version of "the truth." And it never works. He tells the real, honest-to-God truth. And I get in trouble for it. Which is right. I hope he keeps it up.

So the Heene family is getting the publicity they deserve, though, perhaps, not the kind of publicity they wanted.

Homo Rhetoricus

I’m very confused.

Of course, some confusion is to be expected among those who live in the era of the Daily Me and the era of Truthiness, in which we choose increasingly to consume media and opinion that already match with what we think and believe. New opinions are brought in and subsumed by the Daily Me, but only if those opinions meet our expectations of truthiness – things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts, as defined by comedian Stephen Colbert.

I’m not convinced this is entirely a new era. The Daily Me and the concept of Truthiness may have new, shiny names in our age, but they reflect the same basic selfishness and wanton adherence to the current sophistry and rhetoric that is as human as armpit hair. Sinclair Lewis, in documenting and satirizing 1920s America, for example, paints in his character of Babbitt the conformist – the 1920s version of the Truthiness-seeker – who would not exactly feel out of place with “postmodern” relativism today.

We need more characters like Lewis’ Doremus Jessup, the journalist in It Can’t Happen Here, who gets fed up with the rise of totalitarianism in Lewis’ fictional America and does what he can to question authority and be civilly disobedient. And that doesn't mean ridiculing those who seek after truthiness rather than trugh, because in the definition of truthiness there's enough relativism to make realists squirm.

All this is coming up because I spent most of a sick day yesterday reading Lynne Cheney’s Telling the Truth, one of more than three dozen books we got in boxes that came to us in a roundabout way from a Teton valley lawyer looking to downsize his collection. Cheney does an admirable job attacking the objective relativism of the day – the supposition that truth can’t be discovered because truth is what appears to be true to whomever seeks to define truth. Reading her book, of course, is ironical, because she’s wife to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who seems to have applied concepts of objective relativism over, say, the past eight years, emulating quite a bit the previous eight years of the Clinton Administration and, perhaps, providing a prelude to the Obama Administration now unspooling before us (if you’ve got doubts, just check out the number of people who are scraping the “Question Authority” bumper stickers off their vehicles since the regime change brought in Nov. 4.

As erudite as Cheney’s book is, it concludes with a contradiction I can’t quite get over. She writes:

As I look back over this book, I am struck by the high level of arrogance that often exists among those who maintain that there is no truth except the one they would have us believe. They redefine our words and our lives for us, and expect us to go along. They rewrite the past and are shocked when we object. And this arrogance is often combined with an amazing lack of thought to the consequences of what they are preaching.

So, which is it she objects to? That people “maintain that there is no truth except the one they would have us believe,” or is it the arrogance behind some of those who believe their truths are self-evident? She spends just over 200 pages attacking relativism – the absence of truth – in academia, politics, journalism, and in the lives of many who consume what is produced – and yet in her conclusion seems to apply a relativist approach to deciding what is true. I hold truths that I believe are the only truth out there. But I am not arrogant about those truths. Am I a relativist, or a realist? After reading Cheney, I’m not sure.

Cheney, by way of explanation, however, seems to rely on “searching for truth,” rather than arriving at that final destination, in her reasoning against objective relativism. But searching without arriving, while opening the mind to many possibilities, does little to resolve the final question. Objective relativism may seek to make the whole world grey, but the realism Cheney subscribes to only narrows that band of grey slightly.

The only way this makes sense to me (and here comes my bit of truthiness) is that it’s the arrogance she objects to, not to the fact that some claim to have the only path to enlightenment. To think otherwise destroys her reasoning, unless I am grossly misreading things.

This might be why I found the philosophy course I took in college to be so boring. Round and round we go, without actually landing at the airport.

But that’s okay. At the foundation of all things, I find great strength in my ignorance on many matters. That doesn’t mean I wallow in ignorance, but that I am aware of my ignorance and am doing what I can (reading, studying, writing and thinking) to get rid of what little bits of ignorance I can. I’m far from the homo rhetoricus that Prof. Richard Lanham of UCLA describes, as quoted in Cheney’s book:

Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality is public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment . . . He thinks first of winning, of mastering the rules the current game enforces. He assumes a natural agility in changing orientation. He hits the street already street-wise. From birth, almost, he has dwelt not in a single value-structure, but in several. He is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to prevailing in the game at hand . . . Rhetorical man is trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it. Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful . . . Rhetorical man does not ask, “What is real?” He asks, “What is accepted as reality here and now?” He is thus typically present-centered. Past and future remain as possibility only, a paradigm he may some day have to learn.

I’m far. Yet sometimes so near.

Graduation: Then What?

Maybe I'll jinx things by mention this, but I'm now one week -- and one passing grade -- away from having a masters degree in english, with an emphasis on technical writing. I'm not saying this to brag; I'm mentioning it because if (and I certainly hope when) I pass the final class I'm in -- it ends Friday -- a significant chapter of my life will close, and another will open.

I'll be able to add a few more pretentious initials to my signature. I'll contemplate a course of study that might lead me to other pretentious initials, though at this point I'm not sure if a doctorate with a technical writing emphasis is right for me. Maybe something in English, but then again I'd have to look at how much ground I'd have to re-plow. I have to admit of the courses I've taken in my university career thus far, the ones that stand out the most have been the English ones, and a few from this masters program, specifically those focusing on writing for the web (which I still don't quite know how to do properly, so I'll continue trying).

I chose the fuzzy graduate clip art for this reason: I"m not sure where I'll be going next. This degree, while handy, does nothing for me in my current job, but may help me in future employment pursuits. Furthering my education more would also help, because, like bachelors degrees fifteen years ago, masters degrees are becoming a dime a dozen these days. That's kind of frightening, because I've worked hard these past 2 1/2 years to earn what I'm hopefully earning this summer. What it does do is help me get my foot in the door at BYU-Idaho, though I can't say I'm smitten with the idea of teaching.

I do know it's going to be weird, not having classes and homework. I've gotten so used to those two things over the past few years I might be a little antsy, trying to figure out what to do with my time. There's always the novel, of course, but then again, there's always the novel. And with the economy the way it is, I'm not sure there are a lot of openings for types like me, and if there are, there are certainly a lot of types like me out there with freshly-minted masters degrees. So do I get more out of this than a bit of gleeful angst about the future and a certificate to hang on the wall (for which I'm going to have to rearrange things now, thank you very much)? The assumption is yes. That's the state of the world now. Assume, but don't plan on anything too solid. Hope without guarantees.

Jury Duty, Part II

It was surreal, sitting there in the jury box with twelve other people, none of whom I'd ever met before. Listening to presentations on evidence, watching surveillance videos, trying to understand how the law applies.

I won't give the details. Enough can be found here to suffice. What will be interesting is to watch how the comments come in on that newspaper article, to see how others in the community judge our judging.

I'm certain only one of the twelve others (twelve jurors and one alternate, total) was anxious to be where he was (he told us so). Despite that, all of us had "better" things to do. Some had classes to attend. Some had classes to teach. All had jobs and families to attend to. But we stayed there, eight hours the first day, 12 1/2 hours the next, because of reasons varying from civic duty to the threat of punishment to, yes, curiosity to see how the system works.

I entered the process convinced every man is innocent until proven guilty. Though that resolve wavered throughout the two-day trial, I have to say that I wanted to err on the side of innocence. I have seen loved ones go to prison on what I thought was flimsy evidence of intent -- the rule of law that applied here as we were asked to judge the intent of a man accused of burglary and grand theft -- so I did not want to treat intent lightly. I can bear witness that, at least in this case, the system bent over backwards to ensure that innocence was presumed, not guilt. The system may be slow, sometimes farcical, often confusing and rarely painted in terms of black and white, but I can say at least to my estimation, the system works.

No black and white, certainly in this case. As the statute says, the crime of burglary includes intent. We worried long and hard to discern intent. How can one determine the intent of another individual, when intent lies in the heart and in the mind. We had to decide, however, that intent is shwon in actions committed. In some ways, this case is very similar to this one (sorry, free subscription required) which went to the appeals court which reaffirmed the lower court's (the jury's) decision. Ample evidence in action led me to believe intent was there. I strained hard to examine intent, to figure out how I might react in similar situations, to account for my own intentions. I had to consider all the evidence, my sympathies, my belief that everyone at heart is a good person, and then consider what to do to be right. I believe I reached the correct decison, as did the jury as a whole.

This doesn't stop me from feeling badly for the defendant. Sympathy helped me maintain an open mind. But in the end, there was no reasonable doubt.

Jury duty is not a lark. It's not fun. For me, it was serious work I would much rather have avoided. While I was glad the trial did not last into a third day, I do not begrudge the time we spent talking about the evidence and thinking about what we might consider. If there were snap judgments on my part, they were always on the side of innocence. I do not envy those who have to do this often.

Tattoo Dreaming

If I were ever to get a tattoo, it would be something like this.

This tattoo, by the way, is one possessed by a customer of Aunt Clara's over at pinkbunnypajamas.com, which is where I recommend you go for all of your Pink Nightmare needs.

Jury Duty

I'm not going to work tomorrow. Instead, for $10 for the day plus mileage, I'll likely be sitting in a jury box, doing some kind of note-taking, deliberating or, if the trial is boring, a little sleeping. Maybe not that last one, sure.

I have mixed feelings about the experience. It'll be interesting to see things from the inside of a courtroom, but I have no illusions that it'll be anything like what they show on television. It'll be plodding, deliberative, and very likely boring.

Part of me wonders if I shouldn't try to get out. I understand if you're the sole income-earner, sometimes they let you off. But as I'm a quasi federal employee, there's likely not much sympathy there. I'm hoping, however, that this will be some kind of selection process tomorrow rather than a trial and that I'm rejected for some kind of technicality. I've been brushing up on my Federalist Papers and, if that doesn't work, I'll try the ploy a former Hispanic boss said he'd use -- he said he'd tell everyone there that he hated white people. That might not be as effective a ploy for me, however.

So tonight I plan to beef up on my jury persona by watching "Ernest Goes to Jail." It should be most enlightening. Anybody got a leaky pen?

Captain Obvious Calling In

ABC news and -- if ABC news is to be believed -- financial institutions worldwide are aflame (not with passione, but with flame) over a report written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley Europe intern in England about how teenagers consume technology.

The report, if you care to read it, is here, but frankly, I'm confused as to why anyone thinks this is so revealing. Morgan Stanley Europe, in its introduction to this three-page report (bulked up with five pages of cover, index, financial gobbledlygook at the end, et cetera) certainly is all hopped up about it:

At the vanguard of this digital revolution are teenagers. While their habits will obviously change (especially when they start employment), understanding their mindset seems an excellent way of assessing how the media landscape will evolve. To this end, we asked a 15 year old summer work intern, Matthew Robson, to describe how he and his friends consume media. Without claiming representation or statistical accuracy, his piece provides one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen. So we published it.

Yes, published it, typos (in his report and the introduction) and all.

But why? The report doesn't reveal anything we don't already know about teen technology habits: They like their mobile devices and games, the cheaper the better, though they're willing to pay more for more features; they don't want to pay for music and see nothing wrong with piracy, though they will pay to see concerts and films; they don't read newspapers.; they don't like advertising, be it outdoors or on the Internet. They are also capable, it seems, of writing up a three-page statement of obvious generalities and getting a major financial institution all spun up about it.

Morgan stanley knows this. they say in their introduction that "these trends will not necessarily surprise." So why all the hype?

Or is this a viral marketing ploy, which Robson says teens enjoy so well. Does Morgan Stanley want to be seen as the Hip, Now stockbroker? If so, they'd better do better than a poorly proofread PDF.

Yes, as MS points out, the implications for profit models are shifting as we move into the technological era. But frankly, we don't need Robson's report to point that out to us. That profit (and delivery) models for newspapers, music and other bits of entertainment and informative gewgaws have to change is, to put it simply, blindingly obvious. And we can't all decide that viral marketing is the way to go -- because as soon as they become ubiquitous, the new, ripe crop of teenagers will tire of the tactics and demand to be entertained/sold to in some other manner. We might quite possibly see viral marketing become cliche and passe as are billboards and newspapers, so there's no salvation there.

Confusion, not Anthropomorphism

I am, perhaps, a little confused.

The rage these days among those pushing for gay marriage is to point to the animal kingdom and say, well, there are gay animals, such as these two penguins at the San Francisco Zoo, so same-sex attraction is completely natural.

Um.

So, they say, they seem to know what's going on inside the heads of two penguins. They seem to think that because two male penguins hung out together and were allowed to incubate an egg and successfully raise a chick together that, ergo, they must have a seme-sex attraction. Really? Talk about grasping at straws.

This kind of thinking is highly illogical. If two men hang out together and successfully raise a child, does that make them gay? Or does that make them two humans who have successfully raised a child in spite of sexual orientation, hetero or homo? The desire to see a child raised successfully by two ladies or by two males or two females is hardly evidence of gay animals -- it's evidence of the drive to survive. It's sophomoric to assume that two male penguins -- a species known for cooperation between partners in incubating eggs and raising young -- are gay because they succeed.

Find a new argument, folks. One that makes sense.