Monday's Brains: The Weekend's Haul

Quote of the day!

( Paging Dr. Freud! )

Team Obama Plays Hardball

( Negative Campaign Ads? What Negative Campaign Ads? )

The Misery Index: Highest Since Bush I Held Office

( Misery: Unemployment plus inflation. )

The consequences of Foreign Policy ADD

( This week's winnah: Iran! )

Cooking was a major evolutionary leap

( Good stuff for writers. Bad stuff for raw food enthusiasts. )

Ernest Borgnine gives us his secret to longevity

( Hint: It's kinda like exercise )

Just In Time Massive Fail

Saturday, in a full-on frenzy of packing, I had to take Kouryou-chan out to get a new bathing suit. The one she has is a bit worn and frayed, still usable but Kouryou-chan's getting into that age where appearance is important. We tried the local "box o' everything", every anchor store at the mall, and several children's specialty shops. It's mid-August, the hottest day of the year so far, and the stores have already pulled all of their swimsuits off the racks to make room for their "back to school" sales.

School doesn't start for another three weeks, the summer is still roaring, and the weather here warms up late, yet the retail "just in time" system has no room for regional distinctions. If you don't buy a swimsuit in June, you're screwed for the year.

One cheerful young woman told me, "Come back on Monday" as she cleared out a colorful rack of Hanah Montana t-shirts. "We'll have our whole new inventory up and on sale!" It didn't seem to matter to her that what the bouncy and bored little girl next to me needed was a swimsuit. She wasn't selling swimsuits. She was selling her Fall line already.

We never did find one. Kouryou-chan's a hard fit anyway. She's eight, but she's incredibly skinny and exceptionally tall. Size eight pants just fall off of her, and a size six swimsuit didn't stretch enough to accomodate her long frame. In the end, she's off to summer camp with the one swimsuit she has already. It's a bit worn, but we both think it'll last another week.

Oh, the Bovinity!

As I mentioned earlier, Kouryou-chan and I walked into the local mall. The weather outside was the hottest it had been all year, but enough Seattlites had gotten past their heat-induced coma to drive over and try to revive in the air-conditioned splender of our newly rebuilt shopping center. I was desperately looking for a single, out-of-season item. Kouryou-chan was tired and hot. We were already exhausted from the heat and the effort of the day.

The shocked bovinity of my fellow mall-goers told a single, sad story. Nobody looked happy to be in this huge crush, nobody smiled. My normally lecherous instincts were completely tamped: despite the Abercrombie torsos, the Victoria's Secret and Aerie breasts, the Sephora smiles that blared out of animated displays from every wall, from hanging flat screens and dangling banners, from even the floors, nobody who finds the shopping mall a natural habitat is attractive. High school girls flaunting every square inch of skin they could legally expose destroyed any sexuality or attractiveness they might have had with vicious mouths and vapid eyes. Every child was whiny and overwhelmed, every adult man and woman drained and demonstrably capitulating ahead of schedule to the inevitable degredations of cruel time and megacalorie Starbucks Frappucinos.

Architects call malls "machines for selling," and never have I seen a mall fit that description so well as new Westfield wing of Southcenter Mall. Men and women waddled about, cognitively staggered by the alternating zones of bright and dark, color and monochrome, the blaring, braying advertising, the shiny the sexy the tall thin buxom built handsome beautiful you're So Damned INADEQUATE! message.

No wonder I have trouble finding clothes for my tall, fit little girl: the place is geared to servicing the needs of XXL-Jamaba Juice-sucking porcine mouth breathers.

And of course, for that moment, I was one of them.

Yech.

Post Traumatic Shopping Disorder

Every generation that has produced another thinks that the future is going downhill compared to its own.. Tablets written in ancient Sanskrit contain complaints about how prices are rising, children are disrespectful, and everyone is a gossip. Several ancient Greek plays complain in much the same voice. And today the pundits are everywhere explaining why we're all headed downhill. Next century is the Chinese Century, when the autocracy of the Chinese combined with their pseudocapitalist system, authoritarian fingers embedded deep into the orifices of the economic system.

After my weekend at the mall I'm tempted to join them. As I watched my poor fellow shoppers suffer the indignities of interior designers influneced by Skinner and Torquemada, assisted by McLuhan, and equipped with the latest neuroscience, I watched all these tormented figures and wondered, "Where does all this wealth come from?"

A lot of answers float through my head. Issues about how cheap access to energy has created communities and neighborhoods that cannot survive without that energy, for one. From past industrial innovation, which our current severe anti-intellectualism is fast trying to doom. But the best quote that I found comes from Andrew Bacevish (and a hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for it):

The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.

There's a lot to dislike in that quote. Phrase like "...in an age of consumerism..." and "...the cheif desire of the American people..." make it stand out, but (and I know that's a dangerous word), walking through that mall I couldn't help but feel that Bacevish was putting his finger on something.

I mean, was anyone in that mall generating, you know, wealth? Or were we merely pushing money around, from one cash-strapped entity to another, without real regard for our well-being? Is here a universal sense of mortality salience in the air?

I'm generally an optimisitic guy. And usually, I believe that free systems will produce the best possible outcomes. The Chinese have an innovation problem, and it takes Western-style innovation to create answers. Bjorn Lomborg has an editorial in which he claims that every dollor spent in research and development of low-carbon alternatives is worth ten dollars implementing existing technologies. The same is probably true of any industry. But the Chinese are good at adaptation. They could never invent CHO bioengineering, but they can probably implement knockoffs eventually, and maybe without the troubles they had with Heparin.

Today, I can easily see the US becoming a third-world nation, the majority of its territory slowly cannibalizing on its own corruption-infested fat, while powerful, bordered city-states supported by international cash, and defending with private armies their water and electricity supplies, supply rare pockets of Western-style research and development to the rest of the world. A train from one city-state to another through this American landscape passes hundreds of billboards with messages like "Darwin knows there's a God now!" and "God said, I believe it, that does it." (This isn't an original observation; actually, a train ride from the Washington Metro zone to Miami does resemble this!)

Well, at least the Enlightment will limp along for awhile. A kind of hothouse Enlightenment, protected from the harsh, cold twin realities: of autocratic voraciousness on one side and intellectual laziness on the other. Like most hothouse products, kept alive only because it's economically useful to someone.

Wow, there's a whole book or two in there.

And double-wow. My trip to the mall must have traumatized me quite a bit. Three posts in a row to process all that.

Attn Democrats: For Your Love of Country, Please Shut Up Now

All day today, I've read and/or heard left wing pundits whining about the recent event at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. Warren asked question of John McCain and Barack Obama regarding their faith and the way that faith would inform their presidencies, and apparently that's got the entire lefty chattering class up and screaming that it was a "violation of the First Amendment's separation of church and state" (yah, I'm looking at you, Stephanie Miller) and a "violation of the Constitution's ban on religious tests for public office" (you too, Rachel Maddow).

It was nothing of the sort. It was mainstream, ordinary electioneering.

Read the Constitution of the United States. All Article IV, section 3 says is that our government may not forbid someone from holding an office for reasons of that person's religious affiliation. All the First Amendment says, traditionally interpreted, is that our government may not recognize any religion as official, may not fund or otherwise advantage any religion over another, and may not bar or otherwise interfere in a citizen's ordinary practice of his or her religion.

Rick Warren is not our government. The Saddleback Church is not an official state institution. Warren is, from an electoral standpoint, an ordinary citizen (albeit one with a large and influential audience), and ordinary citizens are allowed to ask any questions they want; to interfere in that would be an unwarranted attack on our liberty as citizens and electors. If the government forbade that speech then that would be advantaging a religious viewpoint (or an irreligious one). Warren is free to host election events and if he somehow maintains the appearance of political neutrality he might even benefit from that traditional constitutional violation, tax-exempt status.

Get over it. No laws were broken, not even in spirit, not even in appearance. Not remotely.

A similar idea is that somehow we asked questions of the candidates that we'd be forbidden from asking if they were interviewing for a job. Some pundits even go so far as to claim that the presidency is "a job."

The presidency is a political office. I have no illusions that it's not a daily effort, but it isn't a "job". He doesn't get "hired." Campaigning is vastly different from interviewing for a job, and the role of president is equally different from that of CEO. Presidents, governors, even mayors get powers that are far beyond the financial disadvantaging that a boss may use, and we are (and should be) allowed to ask any questions we want.

If you want to ask questions about whether on not John McCain's too old to be President, you have to let the other side consider if Obama's religious enough. They get to make that decision the same way you do.

Good News: New Story! "Journal Entry 140 / 01054: Razing Castles"

Ah, in all of the angst, my Engine of Doom has posted another story to the website. Razing Castles goes back a long ways, back to near the end of the First Millenia, when I was mixing things up and starting to think about the long future of the Journal Entries. The last gasps of magic are still present in the Journal Entries universe (one of the things about the series I regard as a mistake, but oh well, it was a kitchen sink series when I started), and sometimes they show up with unintended consequences.

Edit:
[Gack... Apparently, I've already posted that one, and awhile ago. I'm not sure how it wound up back in my 'Pending' directory. I'll review the to-post list and, well, I'll think of something. Sorry about that.]

Friday w/Kouryou-chan

Vampire child

I spent Friday at home, working on side-projects that the office environment would more or less have distracted me from, and I think I came up with a way to generate a Webware-to-Django dispatcher and event manager. Haven't quite wrapped my head around the Session interface, but that's just a simple matter of programming.

The main reason I stayed home was Kouryou-chan. It was the last day of her summer camp, at which she'd been doing all sorts of things, including some kid-friendly acrobatics at the local motion-and-ballet school, and she wanted to show off. It was fun. I have no idea why she was dressed as a vampire; neither did she, but the photograph was nifty so we kept it.

lisakit came over for dinner, giving me some adult conversation while Kouryou-chan spent her afternoon outside with the neighborhood children. We had grilled burgers, roasted onions and curly fries for dinner, and spent the evening playing Boggle. It was nice and quiet, and I'm grateful to have nifty kids and such wonderful friends.