Apparently, not trying to slaughter your girlfriend is insufficient qualification for public office, even in Illinois, and even at a time when Sarah Palin is considered a serious presidential contender.

From here. With a beginning like that, this thing has got to be awesome.

UPDATE:

Okay, I have to quote another part, just because it’s the first time I’ve seen in print the same thing I rant about myself to anyone who will listen to me, which means Monica, and Peaches:

Consider the incoherent platform of the tea party’s new “Ensuring Liberty” PAC. It will “choose candidates based on their fidelity to … the ‘first principles’: less government, fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, states rights and national security,” Ensuring Liberty spokesman Mark Skoda told The New York Times. Really? How do you reconcile the demand for less government with a right wing vision of national security that includes a federal bureaucracy empowered to monitor our travel, our reading habits (on and offline), and our communications (enlisting the aid of telecoms in doing so)? How do you reconcile less government, fiscal responsibility, and lower taxes with support for continued war, not to mention a government that “keeps its hand off” Medicare and Social Security?

Hands off my Medicare indeed.

It’s less than twenty years since the living presence of networked information has become part of our thinking machinery. What it will mean to us that vastly more people have nearly instantaneous access to vastly greater quantities of information cannot be said with confidence. In principle, it means a democratization of innovation and of debate. In practice, it also means a world in which many have already proven that they can ignore what they do not wish to think about, select what they wish to quote, and produce a public discourse demonstrably poorer than what we might have known in the past.

This is an under-discussed aspect of modernity. If you asked me: “What’s going to be the biggest problem for human civilization in the next twenty years?” I would give an answer similar to the above-quoted text. Which might seem alarmist, but think about it: your average citizen now has the power to construct whatever reality he wants. It’s not that dumbasses are bigger dumbasses than they used to be, all else being equal. It’s just that all else is never equal. You can now spend 24 hours a day reading and watching stuff that confirms whatever it is that you happen to believe.

When every citizen sucked from the same three televised teats our mental faculties might have been grossly under-utilized, and our pictures of the world stupendously myopic, but at least our opinions were grounded in a common subset of information. All of us regularly brushed up against opinions we didn’t share, analysis we disagreed with. Not so any longer, and the effects are as corrosive as anything I can reasonably imagine.

Remember that crazy-ass poll of self-identified Republicans? You wonder how half of them could possibly think that the question of whether the President is a terrorist was seriously up for debate? Well, it’s not so hard to understand if you imagine that 100% of their media consumption is exactly this type of lunatic whispering, like having Grima Wormtongue on call every waking moment. And it’s not like only Republicans who are sick with this scurvy, although they probably have it worse than most because the machinery pumping it out is so much more developed. Thanks Rush; Glenn; Ann; Bill.

I swear to god it’s an absolute wonder this country isn’t ten times as fucked up as it is.

In other words: if a guy stands up and says: I want to be reasonable. We need to actually work on stuff instead of trying to ‘win’, and here’s a bunch of examples of that. And the response to this plea is the same sort of idiotic point-scoring and grandstanding — then I don’t know what more can be done. If you have somebody smart, civil, and reasonable, and you find the response to intelligence and civility and reasonableness is just running into a fucking wall over and over, well, maybe it’s true. Maybe nothing better than what we currently have is possible.

Still, this Q&A video is inspiring, if only in the sense that you probably sometimes think, as I do: why can’t somebody be elected president who’s not a complete fucktard, who actually has a modicum of sense, a modicum of articulateness? Why can’t somebody get elected who’s at least as competent as I am?

For better or worse, that person has been elected. You can watch him action at the link above. Enjoy him while he’s here.

Smoking: 467,000 deaths.
High blood pressure: 395,000 deaths.
Overweight-obesity: 216,000 deaths.
Inadequate physical activity and inactivity: 191,000 deaths.
High blood sugar: 190,000 deaths.
High LDL cholesterol: 113,000 deaths.
High dietary salt: 102,000 deaths.
Low dietary omega-3 fatty acids (seafood): 84,000 deaths.
High dietary trans fatty acids: 82,000 deaths.
Alcohol use: 64,000 deaths.
Low intake of fruits and vegetables: 58,000 deaths.
Low dietary poly-unsaturated fatty acids: 15,000 deaths.

What’s notable is that 11 of the twelve are diet and exercise-related. Allow me to repeat: 11 out of the 12 leading causes of premature death are related to factors entirely having to do with shit you eat or drink, and getting exercise. And the comical thing is that even this 11/12 figure under-represents the truth of the matter, which you will find for yourself by going to the mall – any mall – and taking a gander at the people around you, who may not be close to death, exactly, but who are in wretched shape and already living lives made wretched by the consequences of their idiotic choices.

In all this debate about health care, wanna know the real dirty little secret? Wanna know how to cut health care spending by eighty percent? Have people eat right and exercise. Period. So the question becomes: is this even possible? If the government were to try this approach, in the face of the corn lobby, the wheat lobby, the milk lobby, big pharma, the whole nutritional edifice based on religion more than actual peer-reviewed research -

if, in short, Obama were to declare a one-man war on the actual causes of preventable human health problems, how far could he get? Or is this something we are just doomed to live with? This isn’t a rhetorical question — I really want to know. Because I realize, truly, how large is the gap between knowing the right thing to do and doing it. My own behaviors are far from optimal, which is ridiculous in light of how the consequences are higher for me (because of chronic pain issues) than for the average person.

But if you believe — as I do — that what a government is _for_ is to provide things for its populace that an entity _smaller_ than a government cannot provide, things that require massive coordination, massive infrastructure, and a time horizon longer than what profit-driven private enterprise can manage -

if you believe that, then you believe that health, in all its guises, is _exactly_ the kind of thing the government should be involved in (vs. things that are the exact opposite of what the government should be involved in, like deciding who should be fucking who; or deciding that schoolchildren need to learn to accept Christ into their hearts instead of learning about actual science.) But that still doesn’t answer the question of how much a government could actually do to ameliorate a very bad situation if it were actually thinking in those terms.

Certainly the health care bills floating around now don’t even begin to address the issue from this angle. I wonder if it will ever be different.

Of course, what this really is is a very strong statement about just how much the rest of the world hated Bush, how completely he buggered the national reputation, and how much everyone wants to believe in the United States again. I knew all of these things already, but this news makes me re-evaluate in the same way as the pictures of those monks in Vietnam who set themselves on fire back in the day: if you believe in something that strongly, whatever it is, then people better bloody well pay attention.

Anyway. That’s neither here nor there.

You know that I hate linking to Penelope Trunk, but honor demands it. Her post on how blogs need themes comes at the right time. This is probably why I hate linking to her, not because she’s solipsistic to the point of dementia, which she is, but because the results of her solipsistic dementia so often approximate my own thoughts. Which is probably a statement as strong, in its way, as that of the Nobel Committee, and one I will think about later when I feel more robust to the conclusions I would inevitably reach.

If you’re reading this you know that posting at LSH has fallen off considerably. We kind of peaked around last year’s election when passions were high and drums were beating. But that peak belies a general trough. A few times I resolved half-assedly that I’d do better, post more, but that was a stupid resolution since it was resolved in advance of really thinking about what I was supposed to be resolving, and why.

The long and short of it is that I’m not sure what to say anymore. The distinctions PT draws in her article are, as usual, stated too absolutely, or else maybe just inapplicable in their extrema for my own situation, which doesn’t match her own. I’m not trying to draw a giant audience. I’m not trying to be about any particular thing, and I have no interest in being the definitive source for discussion about top hats, or whatever.

On the other hand, the lack of focus at LSH serves mostly to keep me from talking about stuff. I don’t talk about writing because other forums exist better positioned for that, and it would be a waste of time to do it here. I could talk about the shit inside my headspace but I see no point in that anymore. If I’m struggling through a depression I don’t feel like making yet another I’m Depressed Again post any more than you want to read another one; and if I’m not struggling through a depression then what am I to say? Life is fiction, and fiction is drama. To ignore this reality is to damn yourself to a blog that resembles the Twitter feed of someone who doesn’t understand what Twitter is for: “Eating lunch.” “Going to work.” “Picking ass.”

Other themes, which are neither drama nor a catalog of minutiae, are possible, but tend to fall into the writing bin – if I want to talk about Big Ideas then a post here is, frankly, wasted. I don’t have the readership to make a conversation out of that, and what readership I have doesn’t care about the implications of audio illusions on cogntive pleasure.

Anyway, you get the idea. I’m not sure what I should be doing. LSH’s best days were when I was traveling, and I could post and keep friends in the loop, and those posts became records of experiences during an important and vital time. Every day I felt that much was at stake, that whatever shit I was dealing with could change the direction of my life, and so talking about it mattered. Those conditions no longer pertain. If life were a basketball game, that wandering period was a series of overtime free throws. Now, well, it’s the second quarter grind in a mid-season game. And maybe that’s a pathological way of looking at life, but that’s what I’ve got.

So I’m trying to think about what to do. If I should do anything; if LSH should change to something else or just go away. If you have an opinion on this you can post it here, or email me.

Political scientist, Andrew Gelman has some great graphs on the connection between economics and ideology. Comparing income levels, ideology and party idenitification, he and collaborator Daniel Lee found the connection between income and party identification was strongest among conservative Republicans. But the relationship was “close to zero” for liberals. Liberal Dems were spread across all income groups, while conservative Dems had much lower income levels.

My reading is that class continues to play a considerable role in American politics: With the exception of liberal Dems who draw from across the spectrum of classes, the parties and their key factions increasingly represent class blocs. Gelman notes that the connection between economic status and party/ideology underpins America’s increasingly polarized policy debates. He’s right. In the current zero-sum economic climate, it’s only likely to get worse.

I’m especially interested in the “close to zero” part. What does this mean, really? What does it mean about the source of a “liberal” ideology if it doesn’t correlate with income? Is that good, or bad? What does it portend for the future of liberalism, if the people who are liberals don’t have a unifying socioeconomic core?

Unfortunately for celiac patients, the extra cost of a special diet is not reimbursed by health care plans. Nor do most policies pay for trips to a dietitian to receive nutritional guidance.

In Britain, by contrast, patients found to have celiac disease are prescribed gluten-free products. In Italy, sufferers are given a stipend to spend on gluten-free food.

Some doctors blame drug makers, in part, for the lack of awareness and the lack of support. “The drug makers have not been interested in celiac because, until very recently, there have been no medications to treat it,” said Dr. Peter Green, director of the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University. “And since drug makers are responsible for so much of the education that doctors receive, the medical community is largely unaware of the disease.”

My hackles raise. I’d rather have no health care at all, like during those years when Monica and I had no health insurance, then subject myself to this crap.

(From a Times Article via Steve.)

How much does it cost to outfit a pirate mission?

A single mission with 12 armed men and boats costs a little over $30,000. But a successful investor has to dispatch at least three or four missions to get lucky once.

How are the pirates organized? (Are there pirate leaders, financiers, and specialists?)

The financiers are the most important since they organize and plan the big shot operations and are able to pay running cost[s]. Financiers always need to forge deals with traders, land cruiser owners, translators, business people to keep the supplies flowing during operations and manage the logistics. There is a long supply chain involved in every hijacking.

I was gonna make a smartass comment about how I wonder if there’s a mutual fund that buys stakes in pirate hijackings. But then I realized that it’s not really a smartass comment because in a world as highly-connected as this one, we all have a presence in this economic chain one way or another.

But what is most striking, I think, is how good an illustration this is of how when people are fucked, poor, and hopeless, they usually aren’t willing to just sit there quietly and rot. More and more, they make their problems into our problems, and no amount of blasting them into bolivion will make it go away.