It seems to me that this year, more than any other time that I remember, the current field of GOP candidates accurately represents the many, many faces and special interests of the Republican party quite completely. One by one, the republican grandees and commentators that – to me – make the best case for the republican party and conservative policies, are getting thrown out as RINOs and what’s left is pure, distilled essence of republican.  As a result, there is no (credible) candidate who I look at and say, well, I hope he wins. He wouldn’t be too bad. I don’t remember that ever happening before. Worse, each candidate seems to represent some kind of grotesque archetype – a liberal caricature of a GOP politician.

The front runner represents Big Money. In liberal propaganda, Big Money is the core constituency of the party – all the other constituencies were bolted on later to make up for the fact that the Big Money constituency is too small to be a powerful force… if they didn’t have all that money, anyway.

There is the edge-of-sanity libertarian. I personally find the basic ideas of libertarian thinking very appealing but, for some reason, the basic libertarian ideas aren’t good enough for people who make a career out of libertarian politics. The good ideas have to be rolled up in a big ball of crazy before they are ready to be rolled out on the national stage. The best thing you can say is that at least you can believe what he says – unlike the previous guy. I still don’t get why libertarians think they belong with the religious conservatives. I’m eager to see this riddle solved.

There is also the crony capitalist, the-object-of-power-is-power insider who seems (to this outsider) to be the antithesis of everything that republicans say they stand for. But, hey! He talks a good game and has proven – more than all the others – his partisan credentials. If a win-at-all-costs brawler is what you look for in a president, then this is your guy.

The apocalypse-is-nigh vote is actually split this year. One is just a straight-down-the-line religious conservative who genuinely seems to speak for the largest republican constituency: poor, uneducated white folks. The other just froths (and scares me a little). A win for one of these guys might finally resolve the What’s the Matter with Kansas? tension that has been bugging liberals for years.

Then there is the good old boy. When liberals close their eyes and imagine the face of the republican party, this is who they see – and they are a little bit afraid. Maybe those folks should be allowed to secede after all. They are not quite like us.

Last and, for once, least there is the guy who seems to stand for old-fashioned, sensible, conservative thinking which, of course, dooms him to obscurity.

I should probably also mention the fallen heroes of the race. There’s always one candidate who tries to be jes’ regular folks. They always fail spectacularly. Celebrity clowns are rarer.

I’m poorly qualified to comment on what republicans should be looking for in a presidential candidate and I’ve never really understood what makes libertarians find common ground with social conservatives and wall street types and the Christian right. I think this is the election where the republicans finally make up their mind. Are we for government intrusion into people’s private lives? Or are we against it? Are we serious about this deficit reduction thing? Or not? Do we really think massive cuts in entitlements (and taxes!) will make America a better place? Or is that just smoke and cover for rich-get-richer policies? Do we really care about the breakdown in family values or are we going to choose the serial adulterer? Will true believer Christians vote for a – erm – unorthodox believer? And, most fundamentally, do libertarians, social conservatives and big business belong together in the same party?

We are gonna learn the answers to all these questions and more soon, I hope. I’m excited (and just a little bit scared) to find out.

In case the embed doesn’t work:
Feynman on Beauty

Most critics of the critics, like Chait in New York Magazine, rattle off a list of accomplishments that Obama achieved and that liberals should be grateful for. It’s the usual list of left-leaning wishes like health care reform and the draw-down in Iraq that allegedly could not have been achieved by anyone else but, still, none of that addresses my dissatisfaction.

In the centre, conservatives like David Brooks and Douthat claim that centrists are disappointed that Obama wasted his time on health care when he should’ve been focussing on the economy but, nope, that’s not it either.

Conor Friedersdorf comes closer with his continuing observations that Obama has institutionalized some of the Bush/Cheney excesses like starting wars without congressional approval (even wars that I, in principle, might approve of) and the detention and even assassination of american citizens without judicial or congressional oversight. That comes closer to the source of my discontent but it still misses the mark.

An insidious version of the we were dupes narrative says that we, fools all, projected our hopes and dreams on Obama who, like the Mirror of Erised, reflected them back at us. Instead of supporting Obama, we were supporting idealized versions of ourselves. Our disappointment was inevitable when we found that Obama fell short of our impossible aspirations. This narrative infuriates me but I struggle to explain why it does not apply in my case.

Until today, even I could not have articulated where Obama fell short of my expectations. You could’ve listed all the obvious accomplishments and advances and I would have nodded but said… yes……but….but…

Today, Friedersdorf hit the nail firmly on the head.

Here’s Obama circa 2008, via Lawrence Lessig, via Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

“If we do not change our politics — if we do not fundamentally change the way Washington works — then the problems we’ve been talking about for the last generation will be the same ones that haunt us for generations to come.”

“But let me be clear — this isn’t just about ending the failed policies of the Bush years; it’s about ending the failed system in Washington that produces those policies. For far too long, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, Washington has allowed Wall Street to use lobbyists and campaign contributions to rig the system and get its way, no matter what it costs ordinary Americans.”

“We are up against the belief that it’s all right for lobbyists to dominate our government–that they are just part of the system in Washington. But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem, and this election is our chance to say that we’re not going to let them stand in our way anymore. Unless we’re willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change.”

“Unless we’re willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change.”
“If we’re not willing to take up that fight, then real change–change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans–will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo.”

And here’s Lessig’s version of Obama’s promise:

I was convinced by Obama. More than convinced: totally won over. It wasn’t just that I agreed with his policies. Indeed, I didn’t really agree with a bunch of his policies–he’s much more of a centrist on many issues than I. It was instead because I believed that he had a vision of what was wrong with our government, and a passion and commitment to fix it… In speech after speech, Obama described the problem of Washington just as I have, though with a style that is much more compelling.

This is it exactly.

When Obama took the throne he was overwhelmingly popular and he could’ve used some of that popularity to hold congress’s feet to the fire to bring about some change we could believe in. He didn’t.

Starting with the stimulus bill and continuing through the long-drawn out health care bill everything was passed with the usual scuzzy compromises – the special deals for the conservative democrats in the mountain states and the reach around for the public sector unions.

He campaigned heavily through the primaries and the general on ending the Bush tax cuts for those earning more than a quarter of a million dollars and on closing Guantanamo. On both those issues, it wasn’t the evil pubbies who did him in, it was the craven politicking in his own party. Either could’ve been a good moment to show that things would be different in Washington. He could’ve whipped out some soaring rhetoric on the presidential megaphone and marshalled some of his popularity into heat for Pelosi and Reid. Instead he played it safe and let the political wheels spin.

In the end his popularity just leached away. What a waste! Instead of investing his political capital in good causes, he hoarded it like a miser. If he had spent some of it to bring the changes he promised, he would have earned interest on his investment ten-fold. Instead he let it moulder in his safety deposit box where it eventually withered away.

The biggest tragedy of all was the way he let the pubbies win the war of words over health care reform. How on earth were the pubbies able to distort a message about controlling healthcare costs into a story about pulling the plug on grandma? Since when have republicans cared about grandmas? Leaving responsibility for selling health care reform in the mouths of Pelosi and Reid was negligence of the worst kind.

Still, if the economy picks up a bit over the next year, I expect he’ll be re-elected. This time around, instead of soaring rhetoric, I expect he’ll pull out the dirty tricks. People will still pull the lever for him with heavy sigh that at least he’s not as bad as the other guy.

/heavy sigh. Time to renew my green card.

“If we do not change our politics — if we do not fundamentally change the way Washington works — then the problems we’ve been talking about for the last generation will be the same ones that haunt us for generations to come.”

- Barack Obama, 2008

42 million with no health insurance? Oh well, at least 260 million have it. That’s pretty good right?

12 million illegal immigrants? Send ‘em back where they came from. Been here 25 years? Got kids who are grown up and can’t go to college? Should’ve thought of that before you came here.

Liberals tend to think of those numbers as actual people and imagine each one as having hopes and dreams and frustrations and families and lovers which makes it so much harder to come up with sensible policies that don’t leave someone, somewhere out in the cold.

I don’t think you can govern efficiently when you imagine every decision about health spending as someone’s grandma who can’t get a hip replacement and every deportation order as a family being torn up by the roots. Liberals would be so much better off if they could just think of people as statistics.

Despite my earnest belief that it’s better not to care, I was pleased to see Gingrich’s gaff [Gaff. n. when a politician accidentally tells the truth] on immigration.

Here’s Conor Friedersdorf, talking about Newt’s slip up last night.

Is it inhumane to deport an illegal immigrant who came to the United States 25 years ago, established roots, obeyed the law, raised his children here, and now has American grandchildren? Yes, emphatically so. But I suspect that when Newt Gingrich made that assertion during Tuesday evening’s GOP debate, he upset a lot of conservative Republican voters.

Short of calling immigration restrictionists “racist,” the quickest way to upset them is to say that they’re “heartless,” as Rick Perry once put it, or that they suffer from a lack empathy or compassion. That’s the sort of thing liberals are always saying when they attack immigration restrictionists, who resent the accusation even more when it is made by their fellow conservatives. I can imagine how they feel. For the most part, these immigration restrictionists are just as humane as anyone. They give to charity, do volunteer work, help out people in need.

Talking of Newt, I’d like to call to everyone’s attention that I predicted him as the next Republican presidential candidate about two years ago. Sure, he’s a pompous, hypocritical windbag responsible for much of the animosity in american politics today but, to a lot of people, I bet he’s that guy who “presided” over the huge boom in the 90s and stuck it to that upstart Clinton in the Lewinski Affair.

The man is odious but he deserves some credit for speaking a rare truth on illegal immigration. Unfortunately for him, that probably cost him the support of the people most likely to vote for him.

Before we could like things, we had to decide whether something was 3 stars or 4 stars and I could never decide whether 3 stars meant this is pretty good or I am quite disappointed in this but not enough to give it two stars. 4 stars for me means it’s fairly bloody amazing but not quite up there with the all time greats but for someone else it might be it’s not their best work and, frankly, I am a bit disappointed. What if you change your grading scheme three years into using, say, Netflix? Would you have to go and recalibrate all your scores? And what does it mean when something is three and a half stars?

No. Like is so much simpler. You either liked it or you didn’t. If you want to say some thing more, you can share it or blog about it.

Like is liberating too. You don’t have to give it too much thought. If it made you smile, click the like button. It’ll make the person at the other end smile too to see that little red number 1 that says “Pew, Barney McGrew and four others liked your post”.

For some reason, +1 doesn’t quite have the emotional effect that like has. I click +1 all the time on stuff like posts in Google Reader but I am never quite sure where all those 1s go. Does Google have a big bucket of 1s somewhere that I’ll get to enjoy later?

I click like all the time now, even on my stuff, and I get to smile twice. Last night, I reviewed a ton of old posts to see if there were any problems in my new layout and, of course, ended up reading them all. Every time I read one that made me smile, I clicked like. I didn’t even care that no one else would see it. Try it yourself. Start with the highlights down there in the fat footer.

• Just finished another theme.
• Garbage disposal still broke.
• Bathroom still needs renovating.
• Still no blinds.
• We have a new fence.
• Sansa was recycled.
• I made that pendulum table!
• Didn’t renew ceremonial deists site.

From my main list:

• I relearned to draw.
• I did learn to make tapas.
• Dance with daughter should be coming up soon.

I started from the most basic theme template I could find – Starkers – and converted it to use all new html5 tags.  Starkers has no CSS, so I was starting from scratch.

Here, for posterity, are my three themes side by side.

Best part of the whole exercise? I have confirmed once and for all that PHP is absolutely the nastiest programming language I have ever come across. I don’t get why it is so popular at all. Debugging wordpress is like doing a surreal jigsaw puzzle where you are looking for a brightly coloured machine tool to match the giraffe. If there is an organizing principle, I couldn’t find it. It seems completely random whether it grabs markup from a template or spits it out from a function or a widget or a plugin. It’s amazing that WordPress is so good.

I’m not quite done yet. I have a few weird tags left to style. I want to do something with responsive design and I want to do something special for ipad and iphone. When I am done with all that, I might make it work on IE ( < 9.0 ). Google Analytics says I get hardly any visitors with IE (72% of visitor time on my blog comes from macs and ipads!) but my mum has IE so I either need to make it work or fly to England to install Firefox for her. That’s probably the cheapest option to be honest.

PS. If those side-by-side images are still aligned vertically when you read this, it’s because I haven’t figured out how to style the image gallery yet. I didn’t even know wordpress had a gallery plugin until just now.

PPS. If anyone needs a site built in wordpress – find someone else.

I might be wrong, if this finding, described at Animal Wise holds up.

As they progressed with their research, Panksepp and his colleagues found that many of their rats seemed irresistibly drawn to tickling, chasing after the ticklers and making substantially more play chirps while being tickled than during any other behavior. But the researchers weren’t content with anecdotal observations, and over the course of several years and a number of experiments, they systematically documented a dozen separate lines of evidence suggesting that the rats’ tickle chirping corresponded behaviorally to playful laughter in young human children.

The Rat Tickler

Animal Wise has plenty more great articles like this one. I recommend it for home-schooled (and regularly-schooled) kids.

The quality of the interviews has been mixed at best. I loved AC Grayling’s but, then, I always love his writing. Others, not so much.

Today’s interview just sparkled or, rather, whatever the antonym of sparkled might be. Smouldered, perhaps.

You should watch it, especially if you are someone who thinks that philosophy has no relevance to ordinary living. Prepare to be burned.

Adam Phillips: On Pleasure and Frustration

I love the show RadioLab (from W-Y-N …CCCCC!).

It’s an hour-long show but I never get to listen to it because I can rarely find an uninterrupted hour to put aside to sit through a whole podcast. Sometimes, I’ll catch a bit on the actual radio in the car but I always regret it because I’ll catch it in the middle and I’ll make it home before the end of the show. It almost makes me wish I had an hour-long commute so I could hear a whole show.

Recently, I have been trying to listen to the show in bed and I try to get an hour in before I sleep. I rarely make it through the first guest before I drift off and I wake to find my wife pulling out my earphones and half the show is over. I have listened to half of many, many radiolabs and, often, the same half of a radiolab over and over as I tried to catch up on the one I slept through yesterday which, of course, makes me even more sleepy because it’s boring to hear the same stuff over and over and you don’t always realize you’ve heard it already until you’ve heard it again. With me so far?

Anyhoo.

Today, I have friends coming over to play silly games involving sheep and barrels of indigo. For one reason or another, I haven’t slept for a couple of nights so I thought I’d get in an hour’s nap so I can better monopolize the tobacco and the mating room. What better way to guarantee that I would sleep than by listening to a RadioLab show?

Trouble was, the show was incredibly interesting [isn't it always? - ed] and about 10 minutes in I was trying desperately to stay awake so I could hear it.

The second segment was about a woman who temporarily lost her memory (something something locally  something amnesia – I forget what exactly) and her daughter took her to the hospital thinking she’d had a stroke [been there -ed]. One of the fascinating symptoms was that the woman couldn’t form new memories and would ask the same questions over and over.

 What day is it?

How long have I been here?

Why am I here?

What’s wrong with me?

And, over and over, her daughter would patiently answer the same questions. Eventually, she noticed that the conversation wasn’t just repeating a similar pattern; it was repeating EXACTLY THE SAME PATTERN with a frequency of exactly 90 seconds.

They have a recording of the whole thing and they were able to overlay one round of conversation exactly onto the next and see that they were exactly identical with identical pauses and identical expressions of surprise from the mother. Eventually, a little variation crept in such as, the daughter observing to her mother that, not only have we had this conversation already 183 times already today, we are about to have it again in 5…4…

Sadly, this was all eerily familiar to me too. I don’t remember that the repetition was quite so regular but I too took someone very dear to the hospital with temporary amnesia.

In the beginning, she knew that she was forgetting and worked hard, like the guy in Memento, to keep everything straight and apologized in advance for the fact that her memory was bad and that she was sure to forget things.

Our patterns of conversation were eerily similar to the lady in radiolab.

Can you explain to me why I am in hospital? Why are my parents here from Malta? It must be serious, right?

I patiently explained one hundred – no, one thousand – times that she had a tumour that was pressing on the part of her brain where memories get made and that they couldn’t remove the tumour because the operation was too dangerous. Each time I explained her situation, her heart broke a little more but each time she amazed me with her bravery and stoic acceptance and determination that if there was a way to get through, she would find it.

One day though, she refused to believe my explanation and started to argue. Dick that I was, I argued back.

I am NOT losing my memory! My memory is fine.

I’m sorry but it’s true. In a few minutes, you’ll have forgotten all about this conversation and you’ll ask me again.

I will not!

You will…

Will what?

Forget this conversation…

What conversation?

Oh…never mind….

I felt like such a shit for arguing and redoubled my patience the next time around.

The lady in the RadioLab story made a full recovery and was able to laugh at a terrible and frightening part of her life. My story did not have such a happy ending and it pops back into my memory sometimes in those twilight moments between waking and sleeping. I hope I never forget.