pav.alxndr

“Bullying” is such a weak word, isn’t it? The word itself (not the act) always evokes silly images for me, either of cartoon schoolyard lunkheads or anthropomorphized bovines. The word “bully” doesn’t really do justice to what it can mean to the victim of bullying, particularly if the victim is a child, and experiences it day in and day out as I did. Maybe bullying would be taken more seriously if we used more specific and accurate words to define the behavior: abuse, harassment, assault, persecution, dehumanization.

We usually reserve words like this for crimes or significant social ills, and it’s understandable that it can be hard to comprehend them as applying to, say, 6th-graders in gym class. But if anything, the impact on the 6th-grader is potentially far more severe and pernicious than on the adult who is treated similarly.

I recently saw this Reddit thread on bullying, in which the original poster argues in favor of all-out legal prosecution for bullying (which I am not advocating here). “Aquareon” writes:

[One rationale against prosecution was that] they were "just having fun" (at my expense) and that if I could successfully have them sent to juvie or some similarly severe consequence, it would be a disproportionate retaliation.

I reject that reasoning as an adult because of the lasting scars bullying left. Knowing that those responsible got away with it scott free and are now forever beyond my reach has been the source of more suffering by far than the stuff they actually said and did at the time. It has undermined my belief in justice and left me feeling like I am uniquely okay to mistreat, where others are not.

Never getting “justice” for the abuse I endured as a kid is not the the greatest source of suffering for me, but it certainly sticks in my craw all these years after the fact. It’s really that last sentence that truly strikes a chord:

It has undermined my belief in justice and left me feeling like I am uniquely okay to mistreat, where others are not.

That's the damage. In part because there is no meaningful recourse for victims of bullying (informing teachers and other authority figures usually only makes things worse for the victim), and because the perpetrators rarely face meaningful consequences (and when they do, again, the bullying only increases as a result), and because those peers who are not engaged in the bullying show a tacit approval of it by either enjoying the spectacle or staying silent, the message to the young, impressionable victim is, "you deserve this."

How could it be otherwise? The school and its surrounding outcroppings (buses, extracurriculars, etc.), and the people who inhabit it, are a kid’s entire world. When a bullying victim’s entire known universe conspires to convince them that they are “uniquely okay to mistreat,” they will be easily convinced. I certainly was.

And I still feel that way. Of course I know intellectually that this isn’t true, but I’m fighting against years of memorized thought patterns, conditioned responses, impressions of myself that were baked into my brain just when I was at the age of figuring myself out. For all the work I’ve done on correcting this wrong thinking over the years, it may always be that my instinct will be to consider myself subhuman, of all things considered last, with only my higher reasoning to throw my sense of self-worth a rope and hoist it up to firmer ground.

So while I’m not here endorsing prosecution, I do think this aspect of bullying is worth taking very seriously as we figure out what the best response to bullying actually is. “Just get over it,” as I’ve been told innumerable times even by those who love me, just isn’t it.

About a month ago on a Reddit AMA, Dr. Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party nominee for president, was asked a simple question about her official stance on vaccines and homeopathy.

Stein is, of course, a physician, so the answer, one would think, would be simple. For example, “Vaccines are safe and save lives, and everyone who can get vaccinated against preventable diseases absolutely should. Homeopathy is a sham pseudoscience that doesn’t do anything, wasting people’s money and risking people’s health while having no effect.”

Nope. You see she’s running in the Green Party, and hoping to pick up some of that sweet, sweet Bernie-rage. So here’s her answer:

I don't know if we have an "official" stance, but I can tell you my personal stance at this point. According to the most recent review of vaccination policies across the globe, mandatory vaccination that doesn't allow for medical exemptions is practically unheard of. In most countries, people trust their regulatory agencies and have very high rates of vaccination through voluntary programs. In the US, however, regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs. So the foxes are guarding the chicken coop as usual in the US. So who wouldn't be skeptical? I think dropping vaccinations rates that can and must be fixed in order to get at the vaccination issue: the widespread distrust of the medical-indsutrial complex.

Vaccines in general have made a huge contribution to public health. Reducing or eliminating devastating diseases like small pox and polio. In Canada, where I happen to have some numbers, hundreds of annual death from measles and whooping cough were eliminated after vaccines were introduced. Still, vaccines should be treated like any medical procedure–each one needs to be tested and regulated by parties that do not have a financial interest in them. In an age when industry lobbyists and CEOs are routinely appointed to key regulatory positions through the notorious revolving door, its no wonder many Americans don’t trust the FDA to be an unbiased source of sound advice. A Monsanto lobbyists and CEO like Michael Taylor, former high-ranking DEA official, should not decide what food is safe for you to eat. Same goes for vaccines and pharmaceuticals. We need to take the corporate influence out of government so people will trust our health authorities, and the rest of the government for that matter. End the revolving door. Appoint qualified professionals without a financial interest in the product being regulated. Create public funding of elections to stop the buying of elections by corporations and the super-rich.

For homeopathy, just because something is untested doesn’t mean it’s safe. By the same token, being “tested” and “reviewed” by agencies tied to big pharma and the chemical industry is also problematic. There’s a lot of snake-oil in this system. We need research and licensing boards that are protected from conflicts of interest. They should not be limited by arbitrary definitions of what is “natural” or not.

What the fuck was that? I mean, I honestly can’t discern an actual position out of this inscrutable wall of pandering.

The best I can glean from this mess is, “Vaccines may have saved lives, but now you should be afraid for your life because Big Pharma.”

And on homeopathy, what the fuck does “just because something is untested doesn’t mean it’s safe” even mean? I honestly don’t know. But then she gets back to making people scared. It’s not the fake medicine that’s the problem, you see, but Big Pharma pulling the strings. I mean, YOU CAN’T TRUST ANYONE.

I so deeply regret my support of Ralph Nader in 2000, but I always maintained a place in my heart for the Greens, those well-meaning hippies. But this is just gross. Stein is a fucking doctor, and she should at least have enough respect for the voters to speak a plain truth about issues that are literally life and death.

And if she actually believes what she’s saying (assuming she even knows what she’s saying), then all the worse. Be gone, Green Party. You once seemed full of fresh ideas, but now, well, you’ve spoiled.

Ariella Barker was a Sanders supporter who tried and failed to get the Sanders campaign to take seriously her concerns about what she called the campaign’s “disability outreach failures,” and problems she saw with Sanders' policies around disabled issues. In the process, she saw Sanders a little more clearly, and now supports Clinton. She writes:

His speeches never change for a reason. It isn’t because, as his supporters allege, he’s authentic and always on the right side of things. It’s because he doesn’t care to adapt, to research issues other than income inequality and the environment, follow up on his lofty ideas with solid policy initiatives or to make any compromises to achieve his goals. Rather, he just plays the blame game, pointing out everything that’s wrong with this country and proposing no specific plans to achieve his goals. He prides himself on being so honest and trustworthy while lying to the electorate about his concern for our well being and Hillary’s lack thereof. In reality, I see now that he doesn’t care about anyone’s well being but his own ability to rise to power.

I don't actually believe that Sanders "doesn't care about anyone's well being," but I think it's clear he's either lost sight of what's important about this election, or perhaps never really understood it.

Sanders clearly doesn’t know how lucky he is to have been who he is, where he is; to have had Burlington, Vermont as his launchpad into electoral politics. There, he had the luxury of running as an insurgent, in a tiny state that is only rivaled by Texas in its sense of independence from national norms, complete with its own secessionist movement. It’s a place where, frankly, a batty old socialist with no party affiliation could become a U.S. Senator.

So this might be why Bernie thought he could ‘insurgent’ his way through the Democratic primaries, and then to the White House. It might be why he thinks he still can, even though he can’t. It might be why he thinks he’s been somehow robbed of the nomination by some chicanery or conspiracy, which he hasn’t.

(A side note to this: I don’t doubt for a second that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC are and have always been in the bag for Clinton, and they certainly scheduled the debates as they did in order to make this as easy a process as possible for her. But I also have no reason to believe that there’s been any malfeasance as is often asserted by Sanders supporters.)

His answer to how he will accomplish all of his goals is always the same: “political revolution.” That’s not a plan. It’s not politics. Freddie deBoer wrote a while ago what he says politics actually is:

Right now I just think there’s this fundamental problem where so many people who identify themselves as being part of the broad left define their coalition based on linguistic cues, cultural overlap, and social circles. The job of politics, at its most basic, is finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction — surveying the people who are just like you and trying to come up with ways in which that social connection is actually a political connection.

DeBoer is a Sanders supporter, and this was written in late 2015. But this critique I think nails the current state of the Sanders campaign, a campaign that reviles everything outside the moral circle of Sanders' rhetoric. What the Sanders crusaders seem to be against in principle is "finding common cause with people who aren’t like" them. That not only means no compromise with Republicans, but with other progressives.

Andrew Sullivan, in his big New York Magazine piece about Trump and the threat of fascism, wrote:

Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands.

This facile conflation has dogged actual politicians since time immemorial. It's what disappoints the left about Obama, and what made Republicans uneasy about Romney. If you actually practice politics, you run the risk of being labeled a shill by those who speak in short sentences made up of little words.

I have no reason to think that Sanders isn’t sincere. I believe he wants to make things better, and that he believes that what he’s doing – as well as how he’s doing it – is absolutely necessary. That doesn’t mean that he’s not also wrong. And now he’s just making things worse.

So I’ve moved the blog again.

I have a blog at the Patheos network, iMortal, which I have not written in for weeks. I’m not entirely sure why, but I wanted to get some distance from a site where I am set up for disappointment. I never earn sufficient pageviews to come close to qualifying for compensation (which is a pittance to begin with), and I find myself feeling shitty about being ignored, feeling shitty about not getting any promotional support from Patheos (I am one of approximately ten-bazillion other bloggers on the atheist channel alone), and feeling shitty about never making any money for my work.

I really wanted to be on Patheos, because I thought it would be a real leg up on some sort of legitimacy as a blogger, but it’s simply not panned out. I haven’t outright quit iMortal and Patheos, but for now I think I will only post there when I have something that I suspect would really do well there. Otherwise, it will remain dormant until such time as I come up with something to put there, or they kick me off. (They’re good people there, especially Dale, who’s a truly great guy.)

So I thought I’d go back to my personal blog, this one, which only yesterday was hosted at Squarespace. Well, Squarespace isn’t free, and it was time to pony up for another year. So I canceled it, and looked for a new home. I tried a lot of alternatives, briefly, but moving almost 800 posts proves too much of a burden for most homebrew blog-import utilities, so that removed Tumblr and Blogger as options. So I’ve imported everything into this Wordpress.com site. It’s not pretty, but it’s something. Whatever, it’s free, and it displays the words I type.

(There will as a result be a lot of broken links in these posts, until I fix them, if I fix them, as anything that pointed to one of my posts at the Squarespace site will just hit a wall.)

I’m trying to care less about my online metrics, my pageviews, likes, retweets, and the rest. I have cordoned off notifications and analytics on my devices, and I am trying not to seek these numbers as often as I used to. I need to stop feeling like I need to be validated by other people’s eyeballs and clicks, most of which are the result of algorithms and social forces beyond by control.

They say that if you do really good work, the audience will find you. Well, maybe my work just isn’t that good, and maybe that’s not the end of the world.

Mitt Romney is not an idiot. He knows that he can’t possibly win a presidential election as an independent candidate. And that’s even assuming he could get onto the ballot in enough states in time, which he can’t, having already missed Texas’s deadline. No Republican/conservative candidacy can win without Texas.

But I still give credence to this Washington Post report about his and Bill Kristol’s recruitment efforts for an anti-Trump candidacy, and it all comes down to this single paragraph:

One related objective is to prevent both Clinton and Trump from clinching a majority in the electoral college and thus throwing the presidential election to the House of Representatives, under the provision of the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. This scenario played out in 1824, when Andrew Jackson won a plurality of electoral and popular votes but was defeated in the House by John Quincy Adams.

I don't think this is a "related objective." I think it's the only objective. A presidential election decided by the House of Representatives is the only path to victory for Mitt Romney who, as I have noted, still desperately wants to be president. When he positioned himself as a fallback/draft candidate back when Trump's victory was not yet assured, he must have known then that his chances were slim...slim but feasible.

And so it is here. It’s still pretty damned unlikely that a Romney independent candidacy could win any electoral votes, let alone enough to throw the election to the House, but it’s possible. He’d need to rack up electoral votes in states where he could plausibly squeeze out plurality wins against Trump and Clinton. The most likely places for that to happen, however, would be states that Clinton is already going to lose. So to make this plan work, Romney needs to eke out wins in a few blue states, and that’s really where this falls apart.

It’s not impossible. If we start with the 2012 race as a starting point, and, for example, give Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Michigan to independent-Romney, the election goes to the House. This assumes that Clinton doesn’t flip any ‘12 red states blue in the mean time. You could also have a scenario where, say, Trump wins Iowa from the Democrats, but Romney wins Virginia. You get the idea. Not impossible, but very unlikely.

But “unlikely” could be enough as far as Romney and the anti-Trump GOP forces are concerned.

Of course, there’d be one more enormous hurdle, which is actually winning an election by the House. It’s not a majority-vote situation there. If the presidential election goes to the House of Representatives, each state’s delegation gets one vote. So the question then becomes whether Romney could convince a majority of Members within each state’s delegation to vote for him. (Oh, and the Senate would pick the vice-president. Fun, right?)

A deadlocked Electoral College vote going to the House would normally be an easy win for the GOP in a two-person race, because of the party’s vast over-representation in Congress. But two “Republicans”? I wouldn’t begin to know how to predict that. But I can say that it represents a glimmer of hope for Romney’s quixotic, last-ditch effort in his decade-long quest to become president.

The challenge today was to be alright with accomplishing nothing. Which turned into something else.

I'm parenting solo with only one of the kids, my 3-year-old daughter, as my wife and 6-year-old son are on a whirlwind trip to visit friends in far-off places. I am enjoying the chance to spend solo time with my daughter, though as my wife will attest, I already exist in a state in which I am constantly wrapped around her little finger. Nonetheless, it's nice.

The week had been productive in a number of ways, not just from work, but in the restarting of my podcast after a brief hiatus, beginning to noodle with music once again, and most impressive to me, my having installed a dishwasher with no help, and no errors. 

But then I had my weekend with my daughter. Saturday was all about catering to her. Her brother was going on an adventure, and she was not, so this was a day to spoil her a bit, and that took the bulk of the day. Today, Sunday, was more or less a normal Sunday, with stuff to take care of around the house, and a kid to occupy (usually it's two of them, and I have a partner in parenting). 

We played with her stuffed animals, we played doctor and patient (I needed a shot of course), and we spent a good amount of time on this beautiful, cool day at a playground. She loves the swings. She could stay on the swings all day. And of course, she must be pushed.

I could feel an anxiety rise in my chest. The work week was about to start back up. Nothing had gotten done in the house. I needed playtime to last as long as it could in order to fill time, and yet I worried over the time that was ticking away. For...what? I didn't know.

I tried to be still. She was in a kind of state of blissful sublimity on her swing, time having even less meaning than it usually does for a 3-year-old. I wanted to join her, at least a little, in that state. It didn't have to be bliss, but I could at least reject the concerns for Things to Be Done, for time filled purposelessly. I could, maybe, just be okay with being there, for as long as it went. 

I don't know that I quite got there, but I got closer.

And then I thought, well, I'm not actually "doing nothing," even though I am working toward being content with exactly that. I am doing something absolutely crucial.

I am raising my daughter.

Raising a child isn't something that is "accomplished." It is not a task. It is a (hopefully) lifelong series of moments, overlapping and tumbling and grinding and slipping by. It is a long line of fractions of seconds, in which I make connections of varying degrees of strength and meaning with my child. It is both glacial and ephemeral. 

It is each push on that swing. 

I didn't accomplish much today. But I did push my little girl on her swing for as long as she wanted. I accomplished a lot today.

I don’t care you if you blaspheme. You can take whatever lord’s name in vain that you please. You can desecrate any holy book that tickles your fancy. Heck, you can even bad-mouth Star Trek. Whatever. But, in the name of all that is good, how dare these people sully the pure, incorruptible symbol of novel delight in pleasant moderation that is PEZ?

Via Lindsey Bever at the Washington Post:

An Easter egg hunt in Connecticut turned dark over the weekend after organizers said adult attendees “rushed the field and took everything,” behaving “kind of like locusts.”

PEZ general manager Shawn Peterson told CBS affiliate WFSB that the candy company hid more than 9,000 eggs Saturday on three separate fields at the PEZ visitor’s center in Orange, not far from New Haven. Staggered start times were planned for different age groups.

But some parents ignored the rules, and the event took an ugly turn.

Nicole Welch told WFSB that those parents “bum-rushed” the area, leaving her 4-year-old son “traumatized” and “hysterically crying.”

“Somebody pushed me over and take my eggs,” 4-year-old Vincent Welch told NBC Connecticut after the event, “and it’s very rude of them and they broke my bucket.”

PEZ said that based on participation in the free event the past two years, organizers prepared for a large crowd; but “the number of families that came out to participate far exceeded anything we could have possibly planned for.”

PEZ is not only about candy and characters (and marketing), but it's also about keeping things under control. You pop the dispenser's head, and you get one little candy brick at a time. It's a way to say, "I'm going to have a treat, but I'm not going to overdo it."

But these people. These beasts. They don't deserve PEZ.

Laudably, the PEZ company is giving free candy to the people who played by the rules and got screwed over:

PEZ said staff members tried to locate participants who were cheated and give them candy.

“We sincerely tried our best to create a fun, free activity for everyone to enjoy,” the company said in a statement to WFSB-TV. “We made efforts to get everyone something before they left and passed out tons of candy and coupons and the front entry and tried to make the best of an unfortunate situation."

I'm going to buy some PEZ today. But what can be done to punish those who behaved so abhorrently? If only there were a PEZ dispenser . . . of justice.

This piece by Darya Rose is about indulging in things that are bad for you, but that you think are making you happy, like alcohol and junk food. But it speaks to me in terms of what I have come to need from my creative pursuits: attention.

Dopamine fools your brain into mistaking reward for real pleasure. In the heat of the moment you believe that following your dopamine urges will guide you to certain happiness, but more often than not it leads you into temptations you later regret. [ . . . ]

Serotonin, GABA and oxytocin are chemicals in your brain that are actually associated with feeling good. They boost your mood, help you relax and cause you to feel close and connected to people and things you love.

Activities that promote the release of these brain chemicals include exercise, music, meditation, prayer, creativity, learning and socializing.

You know this intuitively when you are cool, calm and collected. When everything is fine the rational part of your brain can clearly articulate that these wholesome activities lead to real fulfillment, and that following your urges and cravings usually leaves you feeling worse (with a dose of shame thrown in for good measure).

I think a big part of my problem is that I have allowed myself to believe that the pings of the connected digital world are the signals of something truly fulfilling as opposed to being mental junkfood. But if I really want to heal my brain with the aforementioned cocktail of true-happiness chemicals, I need to find things to do that aren't associated with feedback, pageviews, shares, likes, favs, retweets. Less reliance on dopamine squirts, more serotonin brewing.

Less blogging? More blogging?

Maybe it's time for those grown-ups' coloring books.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I can’t help it. No, I’m not shocked that there might be someone who wants desperately to attack Donald Trump. I am taken aback, however, by the Secret Service. Wait, taken aback isn’t right. Watch this.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

I'm moved. Did you see what those guys did? When a threat to their charge was perceived, they didn't hesitate even a second. They used their bodies to shield Donald Trump. Control had been momentarily lost, a likely attacker had attempted to move on Trump, which meant that there might be others, and that they might have guns. And these men, without even a hint of consideration, formed a wall around Trump, each effectively saying, "Shoot me instead."

Put aside for a moment that it's Trump. Which I know is hard. Just the fact that a person would sign up for a job in which such a binary choice could very likely have to be made, to understand that if the situation arose, there would be no question that you would die before the person you protect.

When it's the President of the United States they're protecting, there's a kind of mystical honor bound up in that sacrifice, you can kind of wrap your brain around it. Even if you don't like a given president, I think we can all sort of grasp how the fate of more than just a single human being is wrapped up in a president's life, that the workings of our society demand that this person be defended at all costs, and that in giving one's life when a president is threatened, you are giving your life not for an individual, but for a country, for an idea. I get that.

But a presidential candidate is another thing. And a presidential candidate that is Donald Trump is another thing times a billion. I don't know if any of those guys like Trump, or if they hate him, or if they don't even think about it. But it doesn't matter. When an immediate threat arose, they, as a unit, in almost perfect synchrony, used their bodies as a shield to defend his life.

Words like "brave" and "hero" come to mind, but they don't quite describe the gut-level tug that this kind of willingness to sacrifice oneself induces in me. It's similar to how I feel about stories of 9/11 first responders, those who ran in when everyone else ran out. "It doesn't matter, I'll die so this other person can live." It moves me.

I mean, fuck Donald Trump. That swaggering asshole is a waste of elementary particles.

But my deepest respect and awe to those Secret Service guys, and to anyone who jumps in front of the bullet or runs into the burning building so someone else can live.

Ben Carson, who for some reason believes himself to still be running for president, made what I have to assume was an accidentally astute observation about the GOP presidential race. In Irving, Texas on Saturday he said:

We’re just trying to entertain people. It reminds me so much of ancient Rome — everyone wants to go to the Coliseum and somebody stabs someone with a sword and they go, ‘Yeah, this is great.’ And a tiger tears somebody’s head off, and they go, ‘Ah, this is wonderful.’ And nobody is paying attention to the crumbling society around them.

Well, yeah! That is what it's like! Huh.

I'm a sucker. I used to think that there was some modicum of integrity within Chris Christie. Yes, his brand was based on bluster and boorishness, and yes, he played the game of politics and sacrificed principles when necessary. But I always presumed that there was something honest underneath it all, something true, a genuine desire to do right by people, even if I utterly disagreed with his priorities or positions. Remember how he defended his appointment of a Muslim judge, when his fellow Republicans attacked him? Remember his moving story of a friend's struggle with addiction? Remember his heartfelt praise of President Obama during Hurricane Sandy? They bespoke, to me, a man who, despite the bombast and machinations, had some ethical foundation, some kind of true heart.

No. He's revealed himself as a complete phoney, a liar, probably a severe sociopath. Anyone who can speak the words he spoke today about Donald Trump cannot be trusted, cannot be believed, and cannot possibly have anyone's best interests in mind other than his own. He praised Donald Trump today with the same sincerity and gravity that he displayed in his previous flashes of humanity. But there's no way he believed a word of what he said today.

I have to assume, then, that everything else he's ever said was equally full of shit. Anyone who can ape sincerity that convincingly is dangerous and possibly sick.

I've been naive. I'll never believe him again. No one should. Not even Donald Trump.

[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63s47JnAkAM?rel=0&w=560&h=315])

The editorial board of the Washington Post wants to stop Trump from getting the Republican nomination, citing Trump's lies, threats, lack of an actual agenda, lack of experience, admiration for Putin, and the fact that "he wants the United States to commit war crimes." Where do they turn?

Certainly there are Republican leaders who understand all this: people such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.); former president George W. Bush and former presidential nominees Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney; and governors, senators and community leaders across the country. ... If Mr. Trump is to be stopped, now is the time for leaders of conscience to say they will not and cannot support him and to do what they can to stop him. We understand that Mr. Trump would seek to use this to his benefit, and that he might succeed. But what is the choice? Is the Republican Party truly not going to resist its own debasement?

It would be hard to find a clearer example of how this primary race has been so utterly misunderstood by the political and journalistic class. In the past, these so-called "leaders of conscience" (please) have thrived off of what I described in my previous post as the decades-long project of cultivating a Republican electorate of fanatical ignoramuses. The very men the Post wants taking action to stop Trump are the same who benefited (to greater and lesser degrees) from the fomenting of rage and fear and the celebration of idiocy, the radiation of which Trump is now photosynthesizing. These men and their operations created the Trump candidacy. Trump is their baby.

And the idea that these old-timers could now step in and somehow shame and tut-tut the mob into making a more noble or self-sacrificing choice of candidate is laughable. These men represent much of what the Trump electorate is gleefully rejecting. These voters don't want another Dole-Romney figure. They want a Mussolini-Barnum figure.

A poll out today for Florida shows Trump about to clobber Rubio, ostensibly the candidate to whom "leaders of conscience" should be directing support. Trump is not going to be stopped at the polls. Electorally, this is over.

Which points to the sole way these party patriarchs could stop Trump from getting the nomination, and it won't happen. The Republican Party is not a part of the government (nor it the Democratic). It is a private organization that fosters and supports candidates for political office. The party could, if it so chose, simply change its rules, or suspend them entirely, and decide by fiat that, nope, we're not nominating Trump. Somewhere in a smoke-filled room (or whatever sketchy place powerful people meet these days) these besuited, old white dudes could gather and decide to pull the plug on the primaries, and enact some alternative means of choosing someone else. It will never happen, and it would be a disaster of a wholly different sort. But that's all they've got.

So Trump it is, and may whatever god you believe in have mercy on your soul.

Former President Jimmy Carter would take Trump over Cruz, and so would I. Jimmy says:

The reason is, Trump has proven already he’s completely malleable. I don’t think he has any fixed (positions) he’d go the White House and fight for. On the other hand, Ted Cruz is not malleable. He has far right-wing policies he’d pursue if he became president.

This is exactly the point I've been making about Trump vs. Cruz, but President Carter put it perfectly. Trump is malleable. He pretends to have an ideological agenda, but it's all show. He just wants to win the big popularity contest and get the job. He may be terrible at it if he gets it, but he won't be guided by some absurd belief that the creator of the universe must be placated through government fiat. The only supreme being he cares about is himself, and he'll do whatever he has to do to keep things running to his satisfaction.

I'm not saying he'll reveal himself to be a closet liberal (though one never knows), but that he'll roll with it. He won't embark on crusades, he'll cut deals. He'll allow himself to be influenced, he'll feel the political winds, and he'll probably try to get a few things done. It'll be pragmatism and ego, not zealotry. (And, with Cruz, also ego.)

This is why I used to half-jokingly tout Mitt Romney for president, at least for the GOP nomination. Yes he was poised to be the most likely to be able to defeat President Obama, but it was a more palatable thought than a Gingrich or a Santorum getting the nomination and then somehow winning the White House. Romney wasn't just "moderate," he was, like Trump, malleable. He'd want to get things done. If it meant chucking Republican dogma or snubbing Tea Party dumbasses, then so be it. If the political tides shifted in a particular direction, he'd have leaned into them in order to keep things stable.

Cruz is not malleable (except his god damn smug pompous shit-eating fucking ass-face). He's a fanatic. Trump is a salesman, Cruz is a maniac. If I have to choose, I'll take the salesman.

 

Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard reports on research that shows how animosity toward nonbelievers can be reduced by the religious having an imaginary, positive conversation with an atheist. And most of the subjects said they didn't know any atheists personally:

Those who engaged in the imagined conversation "expressed significantly less distrust toward atheists" than those who simply ruminated about the subject. The researchers conclude this more positive attitude was driven by "more comfort with atheists, and more willingness to engage with atheists."

Moreover, a reduction in distrust, which the researchers call "the central component of anti-atheist prejudice," was even found among religious fundamentalists. Perhaps they enjoyed the imaginary give-and-take.

This is encouraging, but just soak in the irony here.

Talking to an imaginary atheist makes a person who normally talks to an imaginary superbeing feel better about atheists.

We've been doing this all wrong this whole time. Think of all the social advancement we could have already made if we'd just been make-believe.

I was not a Trump skeptic when he entered the race. I didn't know how far he'd get, but I knew he'd be a big factor, and as he plowed ahead and stayed on top, I was also not one of those who thought he'd implode. His support, I believed, was rock solid, with a floor that other candidates couldn't match. But I don't think I could ever really articulate why he would do, and has done, so well.

Then I read this interview with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at Huffington Post by Howard Fineman, and it all made sense. Fineman writes:

Trump deploys fame for fame’s sake; taps into populist expressions of fear, hatred and resentment and shows a knack for picking fights and a braggart’s focus on the horse race. All of which allow him to play into -- and exploit -- every media weakness and bad habit in a chase for audience and numbers.

And Goodwin tells him:

Do we know, at this point, about his modus operandi in business? Do we know how he treated his staff? Do we know what kind of leader he was when he was building his business? I mean, I don’t know the answers to these things.

All I know is that, when I see him now, it’s like his past is not being used by the media to tell us who the guy really is.

This all rings more truthfully to me than the idea that Trump is some kind of political savant. I do think he's probably smarter than his competition in a number of meaningful ways, but a better and broader explanation of his success is that his shtick happens to align perfectly with the way the news media produces content today.

The media and Trump are equally obsessed with horse race poll numbers. The current news paradigm is to churn out content with every tiny, potentially interesting development, and Trump practically gives off spores of content fodder. The news media delights in conflict, especially personal conflict, and the potential for controversy or the possibility of offenses given. Again, Trump provides and provides. And I assume that this is half because he's playing all of us, and half because it's just what he is. We the audience demand vapid, garbage content, and Trump gives us exactly what we want.

Here's a subject that Fineman and Kearns don't cover: the electorate to which Trump is appealing. It's hard to imagine a Democrat-Trump, some leftward counterpart that has Trump's bravado but fights for social and economic justice. No, Political Trump is a product custom made for an electorate stoked into rage and fear and happy ignorance by the very party that now fears the Trump takeover. The GOP primary electorate has been primed for a candidate like Trump, whether the party knew it or not. They've been fomenting paranoia about Obama, minorities, women, "religious freedom," Iran, Muslims, and whatever else you can think of, and they're shocked that perhaps some chest-thumping candidate might swoop in and, confidently and joyously, embody those paranoias.

Trump is a man of our times. Goodwin in the interview with Fineman says that deeply researched print journalism is what could have better exposed and explained someone like Trump, "because [of] the way sentences work." There's something kind of perfect for that. In an age of clumsy tweets and Facebook memes, the antithesis of whatever it is Trump is, might be "the sentence."

Here's what I think of the state of the race on the night before the Iowa caucuses.

The polls right now for Iowa are more or less meaningless. Yes, Clinton and Trump are both up a little in the final pre-Iowa poll, but it doesn't really matter. Save for the poor bastards in single digits, the Iowa caucuses are one of the least predictable "elections" in modern politics. For candidates within a few points of each other in polling, everything can hang on innumerable (and entirely banal) factors: Will it rain? Is there snow? Are people too busy? Are babysitters available? Are there enough cars and vans to bring people to caucus sites? Do enough people give enough of a damn about who becomes the nominee to show up, or is everyone pretty content with whoever winds up winning? Did we call enough people? Did we knock on enough doors? Did we know on too many doors, and call too many people, and become annoying?

Hell, if it's really close for the Democrats, it could all come down to which campaign has been nicest to O'Malley, as his utter lack of viability in just about every caucus site means his few voters will have to go with a second choice. The candidate O'Malley's voters like better could decide the whole night.

I was in the Hillary Clinton war room for the 2008 caucuses, and hopes were pretty high. I think the prevailing sentiment was that we would place a strong 2nd (behind Edwards, I thought), but alas, we were trounced by Obama and edged out by Edwards to land at 3rd. Remember the Democratic race in 2004? Wasn't Howard Dean supposed to win that with Gephardt close behind? They came in 3rd and 4th.

So forget the polls as far as the top tier candidates are concerned. For Clinton/Sanders and Trump/Cruz, this is up in the air.

So while I won't predict any winners, I will predict this: Iowa won't really matter. Let's say Sanders does win, and by a meaningful margin. He could take that momentum, build on his support in New Hampshire, and win big there, too. A rocket-launch to the nomination, right?

Look, it'll totally suck for Clinton if she loses both Iowa and New Hampshire, and Hillary Death Watch will be on full alert. But I can't for the life of me foresee a scenario where Sanders takes these wins and turns them into victories in South Carolina, Nevada, and the big states for Super Tuesday. Does anyone really think Sanders can win in South Carolina, where the African American vote is the whole ballgame? Or in California? Or New York? It's possible, of course, but at this point it seems absurd to think so.

I think Iowa is slightly less meaningless for the Republicans, only because a decisive win by Trump could indeed begin the end of the race, for it would certainly catapult him to an even larger victory in New Hampshire than he is already likely to enjoy. I am skeptical, though, of a Trump win in Iowa, simply because I suspect his on-the-ground operation won't match the religious fervor of Cruz's supporters. And if Cruz does win, it's no big news, it's more or less expected, so the race remains one between him and Trump, and we trudge on. Nothing in the race's dynamics change as a result of a Cruz victory.

Iowa's greatest impact will likely be to begin the weeding out of the also-rans. The bottom half of the Democratic candidates more or less lopped themselves off after Iowa in 2008. I can't see any reason for folks like Fiorina, Santorum, or Huckabee to trudge on once they get shellacked in Iowa. (And I suspect Huckabee is readying to endorse Trump after Iowa, and so a Cruz victory could be heavily dampened by a key establishment-evangelical nod like that.) Alas, Iowa losses likely won't deter Kasich, Bush, or Christie, who have their hopes pinned on New Hampshire. And Rand Paul seems to be running for something other than the GOP's presidential nomination, so who knows.

On the Democrats' side, O'Malley will stay in the race as long as he technically is able. Why? Bernie or Hillary could get hit by a bus or something, and he wants to be ready to fill a spot just in case.

What do I know? A year or so ago, I certainly thought Cruz would be one of the main contenders for the GOP nod, but I also thought Rand Paul would be his main competition. I could be entirely full of it.

But that's never stopped anyone from making predictions before. And I think at this point in my career, I've learned at least something. I can't wait to find out!

Everyone you love and everyone you know and everything you touch will someday be gone. We will lose our lovers, our friends, our parents, our children, our animals, ourselves. The pain will be almost intolerable. The jobs we define ourselves by will end. Anything you make with your own two hands will eventually be dust. It will take only a few generations for you to be completely forgotten within your own family.

This is by Elmo Keep (she who is responsible for so much of the Mars One reporting/debunking that I’ve written about on this blog), who has written a positively brilliant, lengthy piece for The Verge on transhumanism, Zoltan Istvan, and the effort to harness technology to make human life, in some form or another, everlasting. Read the whole goddamn thing.

And this passage by Keep about the unbearable inevitability of death, this is exactly why I (like other white, male, no-longer-young tech enthusiasts) am so attracted to transhumanism in the abstract. We find ourselves living at a time when the ascent of computer superintelligences and, simultaneously, our ability to “meld” with computers are remarkably plausible. Perhaps not certain or even likely, but it’s out there in the hypothetical “someday.” If you squint, you can almost faintly see the event horizon of the Singularity.

And because I’m/we’re no longer young, we feel the tension, the gravitational pull, the off-putting gaze of death. We don’t have to squint to see it over the horizon. We just can’t quite tell how far away it is, exactly, but we know for certain it’s there.

So it’s a race, of sorts, or we imagine it to be. Two runners, death (nature) and immortality (technology), and the finish line is our lives.

We’re rooting for the Singularity, or at least for technology to save us from death. But right now, it’s no more than rooting, and for an underdog no less (or no more). If you’re like me and pushing 40, being saved by technology is a lot less likely than it is for, say, my kids.

But even so, we’re talking about something ineffable, really. A notion, a dream, nothing that’s been proven to be the case, to be imminent. We don’t know that technology will defeat death, or even vastly extend and preserve human life. We just really, really hope, and see inklings of possibilities. But that’s not enough for anyone to be hanging their hats on. To be working on? Investing in? Sure, fine.

I can’t afford to get my hopes up about it, though. I couldn’t bear the disappointment. The grief-upon-grief-upon-regret. I can watch for developments, and I can cheer on advances. But I can’t let myself believe in it.

But, oh, would I like to. I would like to so very much.

John Scalzi has a good post of observations about the Trump-demagogue situation, echoing the drum I've been beating for a while about the existing GOP electorate:

Trump has been leading the GOP polls almost without interruption for months. He’s not an outlier. He’s there for a reason. The reason is that the GOP has made space in their party for race-baiting xenophobic religious bigots, and has done so for years by conscious and intentional strategy. Trump did not bring his supporters into the GOP. They were already there.

And he rightly laments this state of affairs:

Right now, in the United States, the leading candidate for president of one of the two major political parties — the leader by a substantial margin — is openly talking about denying an entire class of people their fundamental Constitutional and human rights, and being cheered for it. It’s not right, it’s bigoted and hateful, and yes, it absolutely is dangerous.

But here's the thing. The GOP has been doing this for years, generations even, and at the establishment level. It's not always Muslims, of course. For the past 20 years or so it's been a lot about gays. Not barring them from entering the country, but denying them constitutional rights to marry and be as they are without discrimination or harassment. An entire class of people. Right now, the GOP literally boasts of its ability to obstruct African Americans (especially poor ones) from voting at all. An entire class of people. They go to the cruelest, most cynical, most desperate lengths to make sure that women have no say whatsoever in whether their body will be used to produce another human body. An entire class of people.

Shift your perspective just slightly, and it becomes not just about one or two unfavored groups, but the superiority of one: Christians. The right kind of Christians, of course. Rather than bellowing about the rights that some group or other does not deserve, they maintain that there are special rights that only Christians deserve. The right to flout the law, to assertively deny others' rights because they think their religion tells them to, and even the freedom to reject responsibility for the ransacking and despoiling of the planet because the Bible says it's okay. These are bedrock principles of the Republican Party.

So I wish the political-journalistic establishment would spare us all the shock over Trump's version of this. The Republican Party is explicitly devoted to taking the humanity away from entire classes of people, and asserting the superiority of rich, white, male Christians. They are all Trumps.

In a sense, nothing really changed about the dynamics of the race as a result of the first Democratic presidential debate, but that in itself is extremely important. Clinton performed as excellently as I expected, and probably reminded many folks why they liked her to begin with. Sanders also did himself some good by setting himself up as a substantial and passionate contrast to Clinton. With neither of them making any meaningful mistakes, they served to solidify the existing situation, which is a win for Clinton.

O'Malley may have helped himself to a percentage point or two in the polls, if for no other reason than that he was fluid and enthusiastic, and appeared to be a plausible alternative to the current top tier. But he gained nothing that truly effects Clinton's or Sanders' positions. I do have to wonder if O'Malley's slickness came across as sincere or contrived to the average viewer. He was laying it on quite thick at times, and as an actor and a veteran political observer, I don't trust my own view to know how he comes across to others.

Webb and Chafee performed abysmally. I was genuinely embarrassed for both of them, especially considering that they both seem like good, well-intentioned public servants who would otherwise probably deserve a fair shot at consideration. But Webb was all grouse and resentment (and weirdly threatening China), and Chafee was an unmitigated disaster. I can't think of anyone in a presidential debate who has ever performed as poorly as Chafee did tonight, and I'm including Quayle. For his own sake I hope he drops out tonight.

But again, Webb and Chafee had no effect on the larger race, and tonight really only served as a chance for voters to rule them out, and perhaps -- perhaps -- consider O'Malley. Which merely buys O'Malley a point or two at best.

So, as I said, this debate changed very little, other than to settle the race for a while, to where it more or less has been anyway.

With one exception: Joe Biden.

I don't know if Biden is still considering running, and I'd be shocked if he was. But after tonight, it doesn't matter. By not participating in this debate, I believe Joe Biden ruled himself out of the race. The fashionably late don't get to be president, and, learning the lessons of Wesley Clark, Rick Perry, and Fred Thompson, he must know that. Biden is, as of tonight, a non-factor in this primary race.

And that is a big, big win for Hillary Clinton.

The power went out on my block tonight, and it was weird. It started around 10pm, I was the only one awake in the house, and there were no lights outside either. So here I was, alone, in a big blanket of near total darkness. Except for my phone, of course. Which I used to draw this. Me, a little freaked out, in the dark.

  <img src="http://nearearthobject.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/wpid-wp-1444705554360.jpg" alt="">

Finally getting to get some creative use out of the stylus on the old Note 5. Which I also used to write and publish this post!

Oh, and literally the moment I posted this picture on social media, the power came back.