Paradox Or Irony? I've been having a weird reaction to the news that the bailout has been rejected (for now) by the House. Strangely, the more panicked Congress gets, the stronger grows my suspicion that this may not be The Great Depression 2.0. This isn't a rational or thoughtful impression by any means; I'm still trying to figure out why I feel such a thing. But to read about John Boehner "choking up" on the floor of the House in fear that the bailout wouldn't pass activated my radar. It almost seems like they are overplaying this in an attempt to scare us into anything.

Talk radio is not helping this impression, because the quotes from the democratic members of the finance committee from 2004 which Rush played this morning showed how they were utter lackeys of Fannie and Freddie. And a local host read excerpts from the bill which failed today, and, as is most legislation, is frightening in its open-ended inadequacy. Making one man the most powerful in the world who does not have access to nuclear launch codes, for a prolonged period of time, and whose decisions will be law, does not fill me with good feelings. Furthermore, even if the bailout does "make money" for the federal gov't, I won't see a dime. Congress will spend every dime recouped and more, as they always do.

I am still prepared to believe that this bailout is the least bad of the bad options available to us, but for some reason I've begun to doubt that not having the bailout is going to be worse than a temporary credit freeze and the markets working things out by themselves-which of course will bring plenty of pain. But the market should work it out faster than a bailout, and besides the Fed has been dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the markets anyway. It's not like the government is doing nothing absent a bailout.

In a month, of course, I could well be eating my words, awkwardly typing a post about how I was wrong, the barrel I'm wearing interfering with my arms as I try to type. But, as I say, this is an inchoate feeling, not something I've "reasoned out". The latter would be especially hard for me to do, since I am all but innumerate when it comes to matters of finance greater than checkbook balancing.

Crying on the floor of Congress. For Christ sakes.  ¶ 23:00 1 comments

  Fun With Dentists I went to the dentist today for a cleaning, and while he was looking in my mouth, I noted to him that one of my teeth had a rough patch between filling and the inside edge of the tooth. He poked at it for a bit and said it looked fine.

And of course, when I bit into something at dinner tonight, off came that very side of my tooth. Fortunately there's no pain, as the rest of the filling is still in place, but I'm going to need a crown for that tooth. That'll be the second one in two months. The other one is the same tooth on the opposite side of my mouth. Heh.  ¶ 21:04 0 comments

  Gratitude A big quandary for me, as a non-believer, is that I don't know what to do with my gratitude, so to speak. I am grateful for many things, but I wonder if it means as much if I'm not grateful to a higher power for them. Can one be grateful to random chance? Or do I simply ruminate about how lucky I am, and appreciate that it could all be another way? That's so inadequate, but perhaps that's all that's left to me.  ¶ 20:44 0 comments

  An Open Letter Dear MobileMe,

If it's not too much to ask, I'd really appreciate it if you would cease deleting hundreds of my Address Book contacts at random intervals and for no apparent reason. Half the time when I look at the list of recent calls on my iPhone, all of the names associated with the callers have disappeared, leaving only a list of phone numbers, only some of which are familiar to me.

I realize that the upgrade of you has been flawed and traumatic, but it has been a few months now, and it's time to get yourself fixed. Otherwise I'll have to find a safer, but less convenient way to synchronize my contact data, which might make you sad. Or it might not.  ¶ 23:27 0 comments

  Intellectual Honesty I've always admired Camille Paglia. Though I disagree with her about many things, and even though some of her positions horrify me, as in the case below, she is intellectually honest.

From http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/index.html.

Writing about abortion in the context of helping the Democrats improve their lot in upcoming elections, she writes:

"The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.

"Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement — leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women — an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

"But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book,"Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

"Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship."

Whatever one makes of her argument (I think it is monstrous), she is being brutally honest about the philosophical moorings of her libertarian, atheist, pro-abortion position. Moreover, she treats those holding an opposing view as having a valid argument, even in some ways as superior(!), and treats it in good faith, while she also attempts to faithfully recapitulate it. She then refutes it without logical sleight-of-hand. Short of actually converting to the opposing idea, I don't see how one could ask more from an opponent arguing against an idea. Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I'm very, very, impressed by this excerpt. Would that all of our public intellectuals argued this way.

Cons: "nature's fascism" is tedious and meaningless to boot.

  ¶ 23:12 1 comments

  Nicotine It really seems to help me concentrate and focus, not to mention perking me up. I'd like to have a convenient non-smoking way to ingest it in the morning. It is so much better than caffeine. In the evening I can have it in its ideal cigar form, but that's not practical during the work day. I could have a small cigar at lunchtime, but my co-workers can smell smoke on one's clothes. They complain about co-workers who work in parts of the building far from them even if they have to walk by them briefly. That disdain I'd rather skip.  ¶ 23:07 0 comments

  I'm In the Target Demographic And this means that so many commercials use songs I know. Today I was watching a commercial for the NFL which, shockingly, promoted the NFL, and I realized that the song they were using in the commercial was "Everyday Is Like Sunday" by Morrissey. It took me a while to finally stop laughing long enough to explain why to my puzzled family. Either someone at the NFL wasn't paying attention, or he has a healthy sense of irony. It's hard to imagine a person with less likely interest in American football than Morrissey, and the lyrics of the chorus are:

"Everyday is like Sunday
Everyday is silent and grey"

The song is about a man who walks though a seaside tourist town in England, wishing that it would be nuked out of existence, and him with it. That sounds like exactly the sort of message that the NFL would want to associate with their product. Maybe it'll be picked up as the new theme song for Monday Night Football.  ¶ 22:59 2 comments

  Too Many Books, Too Few Proofreaders I've lately read a few books from small presses about mixed martial arts (MMA). I've observed from this that there aren't* enough proofreaders, let alone editors, employed by these publishers. For example, in the book I've just begun, the author of the foreword spells "foreword" two different ways in the first two sentences. These books are so riddled with spelling errors and bad syntax and usage which are so basic that a proofreader should be able to catch-and be allowed to-correct them. Or do these presses already have proofreaders and editors, who are not catching errors, either out of laziness, or more depressingly, because they're not aware that they are indeed errors? I hope it is the former, as the latter is terrible to contemplate.

I also had a protracted exchange of email with a writer who simply wouldn't admit that "disinterested" and "uninterested" are two different concepts, each requiring its own word. Here were his general points, followed by the gist of mine:

1) They mean the same thing.

No, they don't.

2) Yes they do.

No, one means "unbiased, neutral; impartial", the other means "not interested; bored".

3) Well, the primary definitions are different, but "disinterested" has a secondary meaning which means "uninterested". Look, it's right there at dictionary.com!

But be careful there, because modern dictionaries tend to add as an alternate definition anything that a large enough number of people use incorrectly.

4) Language is "malleable".

I'm not sure what that has to do with two words having different meanings.

5) Well, I knew from the start that they meant different things, but people think they mean the same thing, so I went with it.

Is that a reason a professional writer should find compelling?

6) I wanted an adjective for "doldrums", so I used "disinterested", because I wanted the alliteration, so it was literary, see. If you had really read my work, you'd know that.

But it's alliteration based on at least one word in the sequence being incorrectly used.**

7) Out of a million plus people who read the piece, you were the only one who complained.

Well, I don't know why that is, but it's irrelevant to my point.

8) Look, language is malleable. We shouldn't let a kangaroo court dictate usage, but we should also try to get it right, I guess. But if I need it to be wrong, because I'm trying to engage in wordplay or something highbrow like that, I'll do it all night long, baby.

Sigh.


For some reason, thinking about this makes me sad that I didn't pursue a true liberal arts education.


*the Blogger spellchecker flags "aren't", but "are'nt" is OK. It's nice of them to help me make my point.
**I was going to point out to him that "doldrums" already connotes being uninterested, but stuck to my original point. After the enervation of working to establish the pretty incontrovertible point about "disinterested" and "uninterested", the prospect of taking up unnecessary adjectives with him was too much to consider.  ¶ 23:44 0 comments

  Melancholy What do you do when you realize that nothing you have ever done or said was original or even interesting? I guess you identify with the huge mass of humanity over the other .00001%*. So there's that to take some cold comfort in. And yes, I realized this at a much younger age, but that nasty ol' mid-life crisis has been punching me in the gut with it. Fortunately, I have my wife and kids, so I can't take this too seriously. But I could do without thinking about it.



*an estimation, based upon the number of zeros I was willing to write.  ¶ 23:39 2 comments

  Have I Lost Bob Crane? I'm sure the two of you are asking yourselves, "what happened to this: http://dongately.blogspot.com/2004/07/60s-sitcom-star-inadvertently-shows.html?". Well, the short answer is that it didn't take. Or to put it with some hope, it hasn't taken. Faith is difficult when research into genetics and biology reveals daily more and more about what makes us tick. And when a close friend of mine, one whose intellectual and philosophical chops I respect a great deal said to me, "I'm through with God", that was a significant blow to my confidence in being able to reconcile God to the modern world(or the modern world to God). It's not impossible, mind you, just more difficult, and it may prove to be beyond me.

But since I haven't updated on this topic since my last post on it, I have an anecdote. After writing it, I went to an Episcopal church near my home, to see what the service would like. This was more for the benefit of my children, who I still haven't gotten around to getting to church. That's another subject. Anyway, I took my place in a pew, followed along with some hymns, after which it was time for the sermon.

The priest got up and began to talk about what was wrong with Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign. As he went on about how Reagan didn't understand how tough life was for the lost and the least, all I could think was, "most people devote one hour a week for spiritual succor and a time away from the world where they can meditate on God and worship Him, and you're blathering on about 20-plus-year-old drug control policy? At least Nancy Reagan gave her audience credit for being autonomous beings possessed of free will. You're taking the typical Marxist tack of describing people merely as ciphers of input and ouput." (maybe we are, but the Marxist explanation would then still be hopelessly reductionist) Instead of yelling this at the guy, which tempted me, I just got up and walked out. And that was it for that church.

I may still just join the Presbyterian church near me, holding my nose whenever the brain-damaged politics of the PCUSA rears its ugly, utopian, head.  ¶ 19:34 0 comments

  Middle Age I think it's finally starting to hit me. Though I'm not much over 40, middle age is starting to close in. While I was most worried about physical degeneration, that hasn't turned out to be much of a problem. There's a hidden blessing to being not athletically gifted, and it is that it is harder to see one's skills erode when they were meager to begin with.

Psychologically, however, it has been more difficult. Most of my close friends live in other states. It is hitting me that there are things about my personality which I may not be able to fix. And while I've never had particularly grandiose visions of achievement, I didn't expect that the rest of my working life may be characterized by having to work very hard just to hang on by my fingernails.

The good news is that I haven't fully accepted this, and that these are the problems of prosperity.  ¶ 19:25 2 comments