Pandalbatroy Leatherfeathers

So...

I got in a bike accident yesterday.

First things first, I seem to be fine right now. I was worried that I'd broken my tailbone, but I think that I mostly landed on muscle and that I've mostly got muscle soreness. I'll be getting fully checked out tomorrow (probably some nice x-rays), but I'm not going to an emergency room for something that doesn't hurt too much. Though come to think, the area of my backside that was hurt was right where the chain sits, so I wonder if that wasn't part of what happened.

As for the accident itself, it was entirely my fault. I was in a hurry to get home and my mind was elsewhere, so I wound up running a red light when I didn't have as much visibility as I thought I did. After I'd gotten through the crosswalk I looked over to see a guy going probably 10-15 above the speed limit (30) through his green light.

This is the part that keeps replaying in my mind. My thoughts were totally stuck: "I cannot stop in time. I cannot speed up to pass this car, and he cannot brake. I am going in front of that car and I will be crushed." I don't recall what I did or what decision I made exactly--I must have braked and turned to make it a glancing blow--but the next conscious thought I had was realizing that I would hit the side of the car instead of going in front. Bracing for impact, and being incredibly relieved that I'd laid it down, I wasn't going in front of the car or under the tires.
Then, of course, i was on the street in the middle of an intersection, sharp pain in my lower back, but on my feet and dragging my bike out of the intersection as fast as I could (what with there still being oncoming traffic) while muttering about how that was completely my fault.

The guy pulled over and was completely cool about it all. He made sure I was okay, I apologized about his car (though it looked like I didn't cause any damage, just some wipe-away black streaks). He double-checked that I was all right, and I told him I was fine, just needed to sit down for a bit, which I did. Then tried to fix my bike; a passerby a few minutes later stopped to help, but noticed that the sprocket was bent so I wasn't going to get anywhere. He told me about a local bike shop around the way, but I was 8 blocks from home so I said I'd just walk it back and have it fixed up here. Overall, the front sprocket, the front fender, possibly the front wheel, and the magnetic post that holds the bike together when folded, all are bent. But it looks like the damage should be reparable.

My damage should be reparable. I was lucky.


I was lucky to react the best I could after making a very stupid decision. I was lucky that the driver was totally friendly and sympathetic. I was lucky that, for all the people who may have called me "white devil" around here, there are still others who are totally happy to stop and help a fellow cyclist fix a broken bike, or talk cheerfully with the guy walking a broken bike home. So I feel -- good, actually, about people; because people impressed me yesterday.

( Cut for pix in ur livejournalz, screwin up ur layoutz )

The thing people aren't realizing in this debate is that if you think of tax cuts as being good, there's no reason to oppose government spending instead. Because government spending is just like a tax cut -- it's the government giving some money to some people -- except that you have to work for it. Or, I should say, you get to work for it, since it's drawing from the pool of unemployed people.

Now, Republicans support tax cuts only, because they're allergic to work. No, really; they're the party that thinks that money is something you're supposed to just have, because you're good enough (or better enough) to have it. It's no fair if you have to go work for it...

I'm sure I'm going to be one of, say, half a million whose response to this is "Awww, too bad so sad," but...

These people live in a bubble of irreality so far removed from the actual experience of living anywhere. They deserve to be cast down, to have those ridiculously overprivileged lives torn apart.

"Most well-to-do families take at least two vacations a year" huh? Most American families are lucky if they can squeeze out one. Everyone should be so lucky, but $16k and up for vacations alone? Absurdity.

Also, if you're paying the same amount in maintenance fees as you are in your mortgage -- I'm sorry, you're an idiot, and you're getting fleeced by your management. End of story. You can maintain an ENORMOUS private house in the suburbs for SIGNIFICANTLY LESS than $50k a year; if you're paying twice that for half the square footage, a doorman and an elevator? Then how were you ever entrusted with money in the first place?

Read the article for other examples of ridiculous excess, but look -- these people's ridiculous lives have to be destroyed. They have to be destroyed, because only once they are will housing prices come down for the rest of us; only once their grossly inflated, market-distorting salaries are gone will American households stop taking on unmanageable debt burdens just for the hope of buying a house in a decent school district. These people with their platinum-plated lives have privileges that, in some cases, are absurd, but in others, should be shared by all; and that will remain impossible so long as the incomprehensible income disparities persist.

I'm as ecstatic as everyone else.

I just have two things to say, though.

Let's not let this be just our side's version of who we'd rather have a beer with. Late in the campaign, Obama moved away from talking about starting a mass movement, of permanent political involvement on the part of Americans and our generation. But if this is going to mean anything, it can't just be a watershed moment; it has to be a permanent commitment on the part of the electorate to put into place people who will solve the problems we face, and to keep hold of the reins without falling asleep.

On that note -- "Yes we can" is not "yes we did," but something continuous. It is "yes it can be." But the difference between "can be" and "is" hinges on whether we realize the possibilities we dream of.
Change has not come. Change is not done. Change is always coming, and if we forget it, then nothing has changed at all.

OH! I meant to post this earlier --

just a thought. Barack Obama will be our first Black President. But he cannot be the first President to be descended from slaves; his father was African at birth, not African-American.

These two facts are not unrelated.

And I do not believe that the racial divide will be healed as much by this election as so many commentators seem to hope it will be; at the end of the day, it is not just black skin that keeps African Americans down, but being the heirs of slavery (and, consequently, of precious little else).

Since I always have to worry about something, here's my concern for the next four years: that the tremendous, overwhelming wave of support that Obama (and non-wingnut (he ain't terribly liberal) ideas, by association) gets this election will subside; too many people will think that our battles are won; and in two years, we'll see Their committed core voters come out more than Our committed core voters and take away the opportunity to make real gains. That this won't be a sea change, but just an isolated event.

Obviously, I really hope not. I'll have enough trouble getting used to moving from opposing everything the government does to criticizing it for being too centrist; I'd rather have a few more years to practice.

Funny... based on the (very convenient) polling place for my district, the political sign in the window of my apartment may actually be in violation of poll-line canvassing radius laws.

I wonder if the distance is calculated in two dimensions or three? Might actually make the difference in this case...

Duh.
As to whether there is a bigger issue -- plenty of liberal institutions and professors are quite happy to teach J.S. Mill (um, he's only THE FOUNDER OF MODERN LIBERALISM, you IDIOTS), and students are done no disservice by keeping Ayn Rand off any serious reading lists.

Here's a list from a NY Times column (sorry, don't remember if it was Brooks or Cohen) of the various highlights of conservative thought:
"Plato and Aristotle... highlights including Hooker, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Burke, Schmitt, Wyndham Lewis, Oakeshott, Strauss, Kirk, Bork, et al." and in aesthetic though, "again beginning with Plato and Aristotle and including Dante, Puttenham, Swift, Pope, Bergson, Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, Eliot, Pound, and Allan Bloom." Oh sure, never heard of any of THOSE guys before; my classes insisted that we read nothing but Zimmerman, Karl Marx, and occasionally Cornel West.
Mouth-breathing libertarian idiots.

Universities no longer require "civic education and American history" because most universities rightly see that kind of stuff as high school civics. Most universities now have distribution requirements, but no solid specific required courses. If universities are going to have mandatory classes in Western thought, they deserve to be unbiased critical inquiries, not the Western-Civ-Love-Fest that the Campus Watch crowd wants to use to indoctrinate a new generation against the evils of Mohammedanism. They will include JS Mill and Adam Smith, and talk about how Mill was wrong on supporting the Raj and Smith was right about the depersonalization and negative social effects of increasingly specialized labor; they will rightly ignore Hayek and Milton Friedman as side-notes whose insights can be summarized in paragraphs and whose subsequent work and followers are a disgrace to their early promise; they will toss Bork on the dung heap with the rest of the legal thinkers who aren't so sold on the whole "law" idea; they will compare Hobbes and Locke and find both wanting; they will see much to value in Burke, but not much that is applicable to American life. And if we insist on this in-depth knowledge, why would we not also insist on the highlights of Asian civilization? There's as much wisdom (which is to say, flawed inspiration) in Confucius-properly-read as there ever was in Plato's rhetorical self-worship and anti-democracy; as much in Zhuangzi's call for withdrawal from politics as in Thoreau's. But the people who push this "balance-the-universities!" agenda don't actually want students exposed to a critical investigation of important ideas; they want students to be taught to revere particular expressions of those ideas and to look to particular exponents as the paragons of civilization, after which, let nothing be written, only money made.

Universities are called to follow where truth leads. That way is quite leftward of the American mainstream.

Meanwhile, it's like a wing-nut shopping spree -- G-Dub has won eleven weeks of take a dump on the White House lawn while we wait for you to slink disgraced off the national stage.

Ugh, I'm too tired to rant any more. Instead, I give you your daily Ashton Kutcher bashing.

"The greatest ownership is embracement of emptiness."

...sigh.

Discriminatory insurance rate setting should be no surprise to anyone, pernicious as it is. (Certainly it's unsurprising to any under-25 male who's bought auto insurance.)

Understandably, women are up in arms about the price discrimination here. Insurance companies, however, claim there are actual actuarial differences that account for the distinction. I wouldn't be surprised; our culture has historically made it a part of masculinity to "tough it out" when one is sick, rather than going to the doctor. Women use more medical services, and that's probably a large part of why life expectancy for American women is 5-6 years longer than for American men; women take better care of themselves, especially compared to unmarried men (since married men are more likely to have a woman force them to seek medical treatment and otherwise stay healthy).

Anyway, discrimination often happens for reasons that seem sound if approached only from a business/marketplace angle and not from the perspective of fairness. It'd be a much better situation both to equalize the premiums, and to make every effort to encourage men to go to the doctor more often. All that deferred health maintenance is bound to show up later on in their health needs later in life. (Actually, I wonder if anyone reading this has the time/interest to do research on the rate differential for men & women over the age of 55 or 65; I bet it starts to run the other way.)


PS -- this makes me never want to buy an Asus ever again. Er, not to mention that mainland China is incredibly creepy in its corporatism and its totalitarian tough-on-crime stances (Giuliani would fit right in). And yeah, Asus is doing there exactly what it wishes it could do in Taiwan, but doesn't quite have the clout to do on a regular basis (despite the rampant political corruption and general callousness of the overly free-market tendencies of that country).

This was an interesting article (from a few weeks back -- forgot to link it!), not so much for its content (two cheers for evidence-based medicine, given the trenchant criticisms of unthinking over-commitment to this approach) as for the fact that you don't often see a by-line including both Newt Gingrich and John Kerry.

Also, John Kerry was Lt. Governor under Dukakis -- what were we thinking, running him?

Unrelated, this musical listening test is pretty cool. Think of it like a meme, but for science!

Also... I hate you WikiPedia. For linking me to this and thence compelling me to read this and this.

P.S.:
Could the Onion have been any more spot-on with this, the way they called the Bush Years in 2001?

In a year in which almost every pronouncement about America's racial zeitgeist from the High Temples of the Press has been wrong, I am officially asking you to shut up about it before you jinx it.

...Okay, the above statement, while mercifully brief, sounds like the impending twitterization of this journal. Since I'm nothing if not long-form, I was going to prepare a line-by-line of the latest from everyone's favorite barrel-dwelling catfish, David Brooks. (BTW, guess what champion of "American exceptionalism" is Canadian?)
Anyway, I then realized that nobody else was really interested, and he's so much of a blowhard I can't stand reading him three times. So we'll skip the exercise, sorry kids.

Very brief thought:

We're entering an age in which everybody, not just those crazy Chomsky readers, realizes that the range of viewpoints presented in the mainstream media is very narrow, much more narrow than the scope of legitimate positions on the issues. This has resulted in people flocking to other, even less well-vetted news sources, and generally embracing only those sources that flatter their existing preconceptions.

One of the big casualties of this is that (thanks the the last fifty years of oversimplification and bias) we're rapidly coming to a point where no one has any real concept of what reality is. Someone cited in this article can wilfully disregard Obama's reported positions on gun control, because she just naturally knows better. The McCain campaign can continue claiming that Obama will raise everyone's taxes, even though his plan says the exact opposite, because duh, "everyone knows" that's what he'll do, forget whatever he or anyone else says.

Those outside the Free Republic still suffer from the same syndrome. Weren't we seeing polling results within days of each other going from a 10% Obama lead to a statistical dead heat to a 2% difference to another 10% lead? MSM commentators tried to analyze these as due to new revelations during the final weeks (Joe the Plumber has made it an even race again!) but the far simpler explanation is that the polls are not accurately reflecting public opinion; at the end of the day, there's just a lot that no one actually knows about what's happening right now.

"Citizen Journalism" stands as a possible solution to that, but only if we actually read a variety of opinions and try to insist on stories that are credible and vetted (even though reality is sometimes not credible, alas, depending on your prejudices). (Oh, one more for good measure.) And I think that the growing incredulous-credulousness of the American public is substantially a result of the mainstream media's years of poorly representing reality; people don't know who to trust, but know enough to think they can safely disregard anything they don't agree with that's in the papers, without engaging with it at all.

I suppose that is easier than just reading The Guardian, huh?

PS:
Note I'm not endorsing the corrupted-postmodernist view that there is no such thing as truth or reality, or that we cannot have real knowledge of what actually happened. I'm just saying that given our current information sources, we definitely don't; and even to the extent that true knowledge of the real situation is theoretically impossible, we can get a pretty good approximation if we put in the effort.

Awesome.

"Unlike those more expensive delicacies [the canned tuna, crab, chicken, and oysters also offered by the commissary], former prisoners say, the mack is a good stand-in for the greenback because each can (or pouch) costs about $1 and few -- other than weight-lifters craving protein -- want to eat it."

Man, I like mackerel. I guess I'd better stay out of prison.

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001506.html

I tend to get a little pessimist sometimes about happenings in pretty much every aspect. I'd love to take this space for people to throw some links about how common people are using the Internet to fight back against the corrupt and the powerful. Please please please add links, I'd love to see them :D

Meanwhile, while you were worried about the economy...

Of course, no present or future President would dream of trying to disperse protesters with a whiff of grapeshot...

Had today off. So I met up with moonlightalice for a late lunch and came home, hoping to gchat some, prior to meeting up with brontoz0rus who was showing off my car to a potential buyer.


About 3:30 I got home, checked my email, saw a note asking me to water the plants on the balcony. (The new apartment has a small balcony to which we've added some over-the-railing planters). I dished out the first pot of water without incident, got another one, and this time closed the door behind me so I wouldn't let the hot air in.
...which turned out to be a bad move, as the door handle was locked.
So I was locked out on a ~4 sq ft balcony, covered in potting soil, in the sweltering heat, in boxers and a t-shirt. So I did the natural: denied that this stupid door could possibly lock out anyone, let alone me; considered breaking the glass to open the handle; pounded on it futilely. Then I started shouting down to random passersby (keeping in mind that this is still Harlem) asking if someone could please call a locksmith and/or somehow get a message through about the car pickup. A nice woman who worked at either the school or the hospital said she'd call, but couldn't get through to T and took 20 minutes to get a locksmith; she told me they were coming in half an hour, so I was mollified... for the first hour and a half.

Thankfully around about 6:30 my landlady came home so she was able to key in and let me off the balcony. I'm just lucky that I wasn't in direct sun...

So you're probably aware of the vehement denials from the McCain camp about this NYT article.

This has been such a big flap that it occupied all the morning reporting on CNN -- they even had Pat Buchanan on to blow, hard, about what an outrage it all was, and there's breathless denials from McCain. All of which seem inexplicable given how mild the article itself actually is!

Ferinstance, the end of the article gives McCain the last word already! --

"Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career."

...well, yes! If you believe this is true, why are you jerking around so much? It's an article about how McCain's confidence that he is doing nothing wrong may be a liability to his campaign, because it encourages him to act in ways that might seem inappropriate. That's ALL it said -- not that anything actually WAS inappropriate.

Is it so hideous that anyone breathe a word suggesting the possibility that not every Republican politician is divinely anointed? Or doth Johnny Boy just protest too much?

Just got back in from staring at the moon, which was looming redly over the eaves of my house.

And thinking, as I usually do when I actually stop to appreciate the sky, about interstellar distances; how fast, on the lunar surface, that advancing wave of darkness must be moving, while it's imperceptibly slow here on this rock. And then, in turn, of how many millions of like rocks there are out there that I'll never have the chance to see up close; and that there's even so much of this one planet that I'll never see, not really; it's so difficult to thoroughly know even a few acres of cornfield, let alone a state or a nation or a world or a people. I've always longed for transcendence; or, failing that, more time -- enough at least to satisfy my curiosity. I sometimes wonder if curiosity isn't my strongest guiding characteristic, however antisocially it may express itself, and however much my drive to be open to it is perversely limiting of possibilities.

Anyway, I was really just posting to point out that all the NASA pages, pretty much every page about the lunar eclipse, keeps pointing out that yes, it IS SAFE to look at a lunar eclipse with the naked eye. Just like, y'know, THE MOON. Sigh...

In re: this.

I'm not going tos ay much of anything, just that it's funny how the mainstreamists will always continue to describe the folks who support equalization of our world's vast disparities of wealth as "extremists," even while acknowledging that they were right all along.

...okay, fine, I am going to say something: the basic problem is that there are too many people in the world. It is not possible for a population of seven billion to all live even a middle-class American lifestyle. Free trade does marginally increase the efficiency (i.e. profitability) of most industries, but it also spreads the rewards quite a larger number of people. Even if it were not the case that most of the "efficiency" stateside goes to lining the pockets of the super-rich, the whole thing is flawed on its face, because money over people = not enough.

We've charged ahead with these programs because the academic economists don't think about what their equations pragmatically mean, and because the government is only responsive to the desires of the 4% who're actually getting enriched.