Not Enough Tin Foil in the World, or Politics Explained via Sponge Bob

I go vote every chance I get. If I lived in Chicago or Miami, I’d follow their collective motto: Vote early, vote often. I’m like those poor confused fellows in England who want to vote for their preferred candidate for Mayor of London even though I, technically, live in Manchester.

But the older I get, the more I realize: There just ain’t enough tin foil to go around for the people who really get wound up in this politic slop.

Both parties are blowing it. Fringe parties are just that – the fringe. I’ve voted for plenty of people in fringe parties, always regarding my vote as a protest, a throwaway. I knew there was no chance in hell that H. Ross Perot – Part Mongoose, Part Ferengi – would win. I knew when I voted for Ralph “Charisma Vacuum” Nader that I might as well vote for Darth Vader as Vader might have a better chance of winning.
Ever since my first presidential election vote in 1992 (I voted then, absentee, for Perot while sitting in an apartment in Toulouse, France, wondering why the Bonneville Republican Party had been allowed to include their propaganda in the same envelope with my absentee ballot) I’ve been voting for the lesser of two or three evils. That’s why Nader got my vote in 2004. And let me tell you, I’m just bubbling with anticipation to see who the major parties will put up in 2012.

The Democrats, of course, will go with the incumbency of Barack Obama, unless, of course, his holding action of appointing Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State doesn’t hold. (And if It doesn’t, I hope to see something like this at the DNC convention, with Hillary taking the role of Sandy Cheeks):

The real wild cards will come from the Republicans, I’m sure. And depending on whom they pick, they could turn President Obama into your typical Democratic one-termer.

But, based on whom the Republicans picked last time, this is what I anticipate coming from them in 2012:

I’ll say it right now: If the Republcians pick Sarah Palin in 2012, I’ll vote for the other guy, be it Barack Obama or Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip.

But they’ll have to be careful. As much as I like Mitt Romney, he won’t win an election for the Republicans, though he might fare better against Obama than Palin. No, the Republicans are going to have to find somebody else. Who that somebody else might be at this point, I do not know. Not Bobby Jindal. Somebody who’s experienced in things political and foreign (aside from looking out of frost-encrusted windows, metaphorically, into foreign countries) but who has also been off the radar for a while. Because if you ask me, this next election is for the Republicans to win or lose, depending on whom they select as the contender. Back the wrong horse and they’ll see Obama back in office for another four years. I’m not saying that would be bad, but I am kind of implying that given toe kowtowing to the status quo, putting Obama back in office will have the same kind of magical effect as putting him in office in the first place.
Because, frankly, this is the kind of things we expect from our politicians:

Though we say we want this (meaning the truth):

Of course, the same can be said for the voters on either side of the political spectrum. Collectively, we've got the brain of a diseased fig. We want what we want and don't really care if getting what we want tramples onwhat others want. Dissatisfied with our politicians, we join fringe movements (yes, there are fringes on the left as well as the right; the right just gets air time with the Tea Party crazies; just listen to those flipping out abou the Mother Teresa stamp and not really realizing that The Daily Show is MAKING FUN OF THEM in their little Da Vinci code segment to get a little flavor of the Left's bizarre irrationality.

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NPR Explains. Sort of.

Argh. Just when you think maybe you've got a handle on things, something comes in to change the game.

I wrote earlier about my efforts to understand the current proposed health care bills. Generally, my understanding is growing and, generally, my desire to see a version of these bills passed into law is growing.

Now NPR had to go and remind me of something: The sweetheart deals. So maybe these deals -- like the Cornhusker Kickback -- are still in the bills being considered. Mr. Cornhusker himself, Ben Nelson. D-Nebraska, says he wanted to kickback in the bill -- effectively exempting Nebraskans from paying into portions of the bill while everyone else in the country had to obey the lay -- in order to vote for it, but now favors getting it the hell out. Good thing, because even liberal-way-beyond-leaning MSNBC realizes such deals are deal-brakers.

It's heartening to see, per NPR, that another deal is in the works to kill these deals. That's good news. If we're fixing health care, let the same fix apply for everyone.

Nonsequitur of the Day

Up Wins Best Animated Feature

So Up won its Oscar for best animated film. I'm still pretty sure it won the award for this scene alone, though the rest of the film was a joy as well.

Hope they do as well in other nominated categories, too. Not holding my breath for Best Picture, however.

UPDATE: Aaaaand a win for best original score. Congratulations, Mr. Giacchino!

But wait a second. Logorama wins best animated short, with something like this in competition with it? I guess the Academy saw more in crappy Second Life animation than I did.

And a request: Now that Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker have won the big awards, can we stop with the Smurf photos on each and every Oscar story now? Please?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Alas, no. Now comes the hand-wringing from Avatar's media lackeys, such as Richard Corliss in Time. Avatar lost, by the way, becasue the Academy is a bunch of old, wizened luddites who won't watch a film if they can't see it on their old Zenith television set. Never mind if Avatar had won the Academy would be future-seeing visionaries who want to send a message.

A Case of the Sundays

To tell the truth, I don't mind Mondays. It's time to go back to work. I'm resigned to that fate. And since once I'm at work I'm trapped there for ten hours because there's only the formality of a 80-mile one-way walk home through a frozen wilderness and the likes of Terreton and Mud Lake keeping me there, I'm fine.

But some days, it's Sunday evenings that get me down.

I'm still home, church is over, dinner is done and we're settling into an evening of relaxation. Then it hits me: I can't stay up late tonight. I have to go to be early so I can get up at 4 am to get ready for the bus. Huh. The letdown starts.

Same thing used to happen to my Dad, so that's probably where I get it. He and Mom would sit on the porch behind the morning-glory vines, watching the sun set and listening to the noises of sprinklers, cars, children, and the singing birds. Dad would let out a big sigh. Only one night did we ask him why.

"I have to go to work in the morning," he'd say. This from the man whose life and virtue was work. Rarely missed a day to illness, only missed days when the rain or snow made it too mucky to lay brick, and there were plenty of foul days he went to work anyway, just because that's what you do on Monday mornings. No cases of the Mondays allowed, either.

I have a life much easier than my father's, so I shouldn't get down in the mouth as Sunday evening approaches. But still, the melancholy is there.

Plagiarism, Part II

I suppose it's get off my lawn time.

Richard Posner, in his book "The Little Book of Plagiarism," points out that with the advent of digital technology, it's become increasingly easy to catch plagiarists. I'm concerned, however, with his light treatment of the ease with which today's digital environment facilitates plagiarism. He does mention paper mills -- where students can go to buy papers to turn in at school, and focuses on Turnitin, a software program developed to catch digital-age plagiarists. I'm concerned, though, that in the academic world, he's left too many shades of grey, offering loopholes to student plagiarists who don't view what they're doing as plagiarism.

We have a friend who teaches English at a private university. The last time we talked with her, she lamented about a student who had been caught plagiarizing not only the papers he was to turn in for the class, but also the personal journal entries he was to have written throughout the semester in order to pass the class. He stole someone else's personal journal entries and tried to pass them off as his own, and saw nothing wrong with his theft until he was caught. Then, of course, the traditional plagiarists' excuses came out: He was too busy to do the work himself. Now, how hard is it to sit down for five or ten minutes a day and record personal thoughts? Well, pretty hard, I suppose, if you've blown off the assignment a whole semester and have to catch up in a day or two in order to get a good grade. That's sad.

What's also odd about Posner's treatment of plagiarism in the book is that he leaves out personal consequences, never once -- at least I think never once -- mentioning the concepts of guilt or remorse. Are we to the point that those caught plagiarizing do not feel badly for the stupidity they've performed? Or, in a treatise of this magnitude, do personal responsibility and remorse not have a place? Or pride. Pride in a job well done, well cited, creative if not necessarilyoriginal? That's the kind of thing that keeps me from cheating or plagiarizing. I want to know, like Edmond Rostand's Crano de Bergerac, that I rose, if not high, at least alone.

The Little Book of Plagiarism

I just finished reading Richard A. Posner's "The Little Book of Plagiarism" tonight, and thought I'd share a few well-sourced thoughts.

I'm especially intrigued by what Posner calls a "cult of personality" (p. 67) which he describes thusly:

Each of us thinks that our contribution to society is unique and so deserves public recognition, which plagiarism clouds. Individualism also creates heterogenity of demands for expressive and intellectual products, as of physical products and ordinary commercial services; and the greater the demand for variety -- for many new things rather than incremental improvement of the old -- the greater the demand for originality.

I think he postulates that ego -- even ego supporting mediocrity -- is both the source of the plagiarist's drive and the drive of others to root out, expose, and punish the plagiarism others commit. There is a feeling, he says, that in order to be successful, one has to create swiftly and regularly, and that plagiarism aids in this process. There is also the feeling that catching those who plagiarize legitimizes, at least temporarily, our inability to e original or creative -- we say, "Look, they're not creative or original, they're thieves."

To parallel this, Posner suggests the solution may not be in strict punishment of the plagiarist -- although he acknowledges some punishment is justified -- but rather in a redefinition of originality that focuses on creativity, not necessarily uniqueness.

I look at the fantasy genre as a good example of creativity over uniqueness as strong evidence that originality, while admirable, may be overrated, and is a poor excuse for condoning plagiarism. J.R.R. Tolkein, in my opinion, owns the fantasy genre and will continue to own it for many years to come. Others who write in this genre will invariably be compared, favorably or unfavorably, to him. That's because of the nature of the genre: Unexpected heroes, journeys, pitched battles against overwhelming forces of evil, magic, mysticism, and, as Tolkein himself might put it, "the unexpected luck of widows' sons" (from The Hobbit). Finding a truly original approach or story line or characterization in the genre is, in my opinion, nigh to impossible. That does not mean, however, that creativity is impossible. That Tolkein owns the fantasy genre is a boon to those who would create in this genre as well, as Tolkein helped establish the genre as a modern phenomenon. There are few original writers in the genre. There are, however, countless creative writers in the genre, and if, by plot, setting, characterization and other elements the stories may appear similar, there is a wide forgiveness among fans of the genre. I can lionize Tolkein, but at the same time accept the works of C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett, Robert Aspirin, Frank Herbert, Clark Ashton Smith (though he came mostly before the Tolkein phenomenon) and Ray Bradbury, thanking my lucky stars that while they may not be original and unique, they are all ultimately entertainingly creative. That's what I look for in an author.

So, to say that originality is dead and use that as a cop out for plagiarism, patchwriting, or any other such shady writing approaches, is reprehensible. Want to re-tell the story of Silas Marner or Cyrano de Bergerac? That's fine. Look at screenwriter Steve Martin for such excellent treatment which he freely attributes to the original authors. Want to enjoy a fine parody of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera? Read Pratchett's Maskerade. Wonderful creativity, even if the book is directly derivative of Leroux's original work.

Even the things I'm writing now are hardly original. I hope, however, to prove they are creative in the end.

Posner defends such approaches, as do I.

Anyone seriously struggling with the creative ego or pondering a delving into plagiarism would do well to read Posner's book and consider his arguments on creativity versus originality. They're well worth the read.

Battling the Ice Giants

In a way, it's kind of sad.

Each year about this time, my wife and I both wage a battle against ice. We're ready for winter to go, and with the sun getting stronger and the air getting warmer and the snow on the roof melting and filling the gutters and downspout with the melodious trickle of liquid winter, we get giddy.

We start attacking the ice.

First to go is the ice that cakes in the driveway. Michelle this year chipped away at it with a shovel until just about every square inch of driveway is clear. But then there's the conundrum: All the melting ice and snow causes a lake to form at the end of the driveway. It's inches deep. When the cold invariably comes, it freezes over, making the end of the driveway a slippery slab of ice. So while the water is still liquid, we chisel away at the ice and gunk in the gutters and pound our way toward the French drain in front of the neighbor's house. We reached it today, but there's still a formidable ice dam between the drain and now both our driveways. So tomorrow, weather permitting, I'll be out there chiseling awy at that last bit of ice until the dam is breached and the drain is reached.

But to make that truly effective, I had to clean the gutter in front of the house. That meant a lot of lifting, including prying up 100-pound slabs of ice and tipping them into the yard. I used to throw them in the street, but that got to be untidy, so into the yard they go.

I love this ritualistic time of year. Phooey to those who say we don't have rites of passage in our society. This one certainly counts for me.

Thanks, Wayback Machine

This is probably one of the oddest things I’ve ever encountered on the Internet: Internet fossils.

It starts first with the Wayback Machine, (their inspiration may be found here) this handy little web archiving service that, for some terrible reason, is backing up and preserving for posterity every durn fool thing that’s ever been put up on the Internet. Which is a fine, glorious thing to do, because who knows, in the distant future, if people will want to know what the World Wide Web looked like in its birth, when people were putting up crap without all the flash (and Flash) and color and, well, debonair and urbane sophistication with which we handle the Internet today?

So, folks, witness a few fossils from my own Internet past. Yes, thanks to the Wayback Machine, I discovered today a plethora (Yes, Jeffe, I know what it is to have a plethora) of pages I created while a student at the University of Idaho way back in the ancient year of 1996. Yes, the web pages you’re about to see are fourteen years old. Please handle with care. They’re brittle with age, especially the photo gallery, which already has many broken links.

First of all, my “index” page. How quaint. An index page. Yes, this was back when we had to hand-craft our pages using HTML chiseled from papyrus and then wrapped in a bollock’s hide and stored under a water fall for three weeks. This page, folks, was last updated Dec. 21, 1996. I graduated in May of 1997. I’m not sure why I never went back to revise or add to the pages after I left school. Probably because I was a complete idiot at HTML and had no idea how to get back to these pages once I didn’t have access to University of Idaho computers.

So witness what you missed when you didn’t know me back then. My index page starts out like this:

(Yes, I was, and still am, a Secret of NIMH freak.)

And you bet your boots there’s more.

My Complete and Utterly Cool NIMH home page.

My page dedicated to sagebrush.

My ‘personal’ page, containing book reviews.

More book reviews.

A page for the book and film Watership Down (I was and remain a complete anthropomorphist and geek).

Another for the movie Babe (yes, the talking pig one).

Columns I wrote for the student newspaper.

And, finally, an essay I wrote in an English class that won me a 1996 University of Idaho Banks Award. As you can see, we were pretty good about bragging up our accomplishments on the net, even way back then.

So, even though I didn’t start this current blog until late 2007, I now have proof that I have indeed had a web presence since 1996. Fourteen years, baby. I feel sooooo very important right now.

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.