I rode my bike across campus to help some people do something, and during that time, I remembered an interview of Dick Cheney I had seen on a TV show.  At the time, he was in a fairly advanced stage of heart failure and I was pretty sure he would die soon.  When he took a machine out of his coat and explained that his heart had stopped working, I hoped the interviewer would say something like "may your death be sudden, and your eternity in hell intolerable by any mortal measure."  But instead, she didn't.  I can't understand how some people get through their days.

After helping the people, which turned out to consist of turning off a television that was bothering them, I saw the newspaper which had an article titled something along the lines of "Serial Killer Rotting in Hell, Family's Pastor Tells Them." without feeling any sense of cognitive dissonance, I felt that it was an extremely harsh thing to say.

Here's my feeling on the matter, though, so you can get a little insight into my judgement.  The serial killer in question, who, by the way is named Israel Keyes, and is maybe not actually a serial killer, was definitely a bad guy.  I would say he's about as bad a guy as Cheney is.  But telling his family that he's in Hell isn't, in my opinion what you have a pastor around for.  If a religion can't be comforting in the face of death and other bewildering stuff, what use does it have?    On the other hand, telling Dick Cheney that you'll be glad when his corpse is no longer haunted by his forever-doomed soul is, in my opinion, just a statement of a widely-held belief.  It would be impolite to lie and say that the fact that he was dying was troubling to you in the slightest.

Luckily for fiction writers, we can't tell the difference between 3 things and a million unless we think about it.

I am a scientist

I have always admired scientists, the way one might admire a lizard. The great disc in the sky didn't bless me with abundant scientific prowess, and I've always thought of science that happens To other people. I don't have the patience for real science, or the meticulousness. I'd rather trust my intuition, and I don't want to control for variables.
I have, however conducted a scientific experiment of my own for several years, and though I wont be writing it up for any of the big name journals like PNAS(tee hee), I'll share the result with you. I have discovered, through painstaking research, this: when people tell you, while you're first getting to know them, that they are assholes, it is because they are assholes, and they want you to know. t

With Citizens United, democracy requires a socialist economy

America isn't a democracy.  The word democracy is used to conjure pride and other sensations in Americans, but the US is a "representative democracy," not a true democracy.  In a true democracy, each citizen would actually debate and vote on every law.  That would be a pretty free society, I suppose, except that since the entire society would effectively be a member of Congress, it would be understood that there wouldn't be a lot of time for anything else.

I'm being a little facetious.  There could be ways devised to preserve genuine democracy while giving people time to, for example, grow food and/or send pictures of their genitals to friends and strangers.  The main point I'm actually driving for is that the US is a representative democracy, meaning that we decide collectively who the people who will decide the laws will be.

As such, the best we can do, as far as democracy goes, is to make the process of choosing our representatives as egalitarian as possible.  We aren't doing that.  "We" are doing the opposite, in fact.  The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision officially allows the rich to buy politicians, for all intents and purposes. Since there isn't any limit to the amount of money that a company can "donate" to a political campaign, they can strongly influence the outcome of any election in the country. 

A medium-sized corporation has tremendously more financial resource than all but the very richest American families.  Since the very richest American families generally run those companies, they rarely go against one another.  In fact, the richest 20% of Americans control about 85% of the wealth in the country, which gives them the ability affect elections in a way that is almost impossible to counteract by ordinary citizens.

So, the combination of Citizens United plus tremendous income inequality in the US means that the US isn't a democracy of any kind anymore.  Since the very wealthy choose the representatives, the representatives represent the very rich.  This kind of government system is called an aristocracy.

Given these data, there are two ways to make the US into a more democratic country.  The first is to overturn Citizens United.  The second is to outlaw wealth.  Which would you prefer?

How to avoid the death penalty and other useful tips

When people called bullshit on this Time cover, that's when I knew OJ would be fine.

There has been a good bit of talk about the death penalty lately, because a guy who seemed like he was innocent and got a rigged trial was executed this week.  A lot of folks are talking about injustice.  Well that's hogwash.  This guy could have taken a few simple precautions to avoid death row.  They're all outlined in this summary of death row statistics.  Here they are:

1. If at all possible, be white at all times.
2. when murdering people, murder non-whites.
3. Whatever you do, don't be accused of killing a cop.
4. the OJ Rule: If you must be non-white when killing a white, be sure to be very wealthy.

 It's that simple folks. 


The OJ rule brings up another thing folks have been complaining about lately, namely that the political process appears to be unequally influenced by rich people's money.  Historically, the rich have had great political influence in the US.  This is because they have money to throw around, and politics at every level are influenced by money.  However, it is important to point out that actual wealth of the people attempting to influence politics isn't important, as long as there is a lot of money from somewhere.  To be clear, a poor person can influence politics, as long as they get a lot of money together somehow, and it doesn't even matter if that money originally came from a rich person or from a very large number of poor people.  So the system is completely equal opportunity.

Another quick point that apparently needs clearing up.  The US isn't afraid of the Middle East developing nuclear weapons because they're worried it would immanentize the eschaton.  The US is, on average, protestant, and thinks the end of the world is going to be a dandy time when they throw off their corruptible bodies and dance up the escalator to heaven in their shiny, immortal duds.  The real reason the US doesn't want countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons is that nuclear powers have to have peaceful relations with one another, and the US would rather not be obliged to not bomb the Middle East when it suits their mood.  The US has an official record of not being nuked by other countries* and wants to keep it that way.  So, while the deaths caused by a nuclear attack to the US would probably be absorbable from an absolute standpoint, it would be a public relations disaster.  Thus, it's vitally important that we keep nuclear capability out of the hands of any Islamic nations, or else we'd pretty much have to stop attacking all of them. 

*The US has nuked itself over 1000 times

Quick test of your perception of reality

Hey, you know how you know things? Well a lot of what you know, you learned from wathching TV and movies.  Here's a great example.
Think of an eagle, soaring high in the sky.  Then think of the noise the eagle makes.  listen carefully to that sound in your mind.  It sounds like this:

That's a red-tailed hawk.  Eagles actually sound pretty different:

Somebody decided that eagles don't sound how they look, so they changed the sound you always hear accompanying eagles on TV.  Did you know that?  If you didn't, what else might you not know?

Fighting lies with truth works better now than it used to

Dishonesty in argument is something that often dismays me about politics in our country. One of the observations I've always smugly considered to be an indication of the genuine moral superiority of left politics over right politics is the way arguments have generally been formed by the two major parties.¹ The left will make an effort to explain the actual idea they are proposing, and the right will make up outrageous lies, lies that can't possibly be true, to support their own. Ronald Reagan gained notoriety as a person who was good at this, and since then, his successors² have really developed hyperbole as a rhetorical tactic that is marvelous to behold. The beauty of the tactic of just making shit up is that if somebody comes out and says "That's not true." the burden of proof is magically on the accuser. You can say that atheists or Muslims are snatching children all over the country and turning their skin into kites every day, and it devolves to somebody else to fact-check that obvious hogwash.

Meanwhile, the liar wins the argument with their lie. In fact it's better than that, since people opposing the liar will now have to spend time straightening out the truth. The other side is continually on the defensive, playing catch-up with verifiable fact, which takes a while, to counteract the lie, which can be made up on the spot.

The bigger the lie is in the first place, the better. That way, the liar can backpedal from their original lie and say that they didn't mean that actual atheists or Muslims are actually skinning and kiting actual children on a literally daily basis, but rather that they want to, and that they will if we don't prevent it by cutting Medicare.

But I'm not troubled by this as much as I used to be. In a town hall setting, it was about winning the argument in front of the people in the room. The liar convinced a few hundred people, and the lie would persist unchallenged in a lot of those people's minds. Now, the way most people will hear about the argument is by reading an article that presents some analysis of the statements after the fact, ie, that they lied. This is great, because BS doesn't hold up to scrutiny. We have armies of people who can and do check facts on behalf of liars, just to demonstrate the liars' dishonesty in a larger public forum. This is a kind of journalism. So when Senator John Kyl says that "Well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does" is abortion services, Journalists all over the country are completely delighted, because it's so clearly not true and they can prove it. The next day, or later that day, even, there are dozens of articles about how that's not true. And the argument percolates to the Daily Show, where John Stewart shows that it's not true, and The Onion lampoons the lie, driving home the ridiculousness of the statement. Millions of people who never would have heard John Kyl's name have now been informed that he's a liar. Now John Kyl is the guy who lied while attempting to defund Planned Parenthood.

I'm not smug about it anymore, either. Because of the likes of the Huffington Post, it's no longer true that left-of-center political advocacy doesn't plunge wantonly into the sensationalist in the interest of winning. You can't believe headlines on Huffpost, since they're intentionally misleading. Just go there any day and pick a random headline and you will have demonstrated my point. They're not even the worst perpetrators. I get a lot of emails from left organizations that are trying to drum up support for different causes. Some of them are clearly written by dishonest people who don't even go on to educate the reader, and will then advocate calling or writing a legislator. They seem to think the end justifies the means. They figure that if enough ignorant hysterical people call up their senator and demand that they vote a certain way, it'll be worth it in the end. I'm pretty sure this isn't true³, and generally when I see a pattern of this type of email, I will unsubscribe from the feed and tell them why.

Of course, their are things people can lie about, even things that are certainly false, and they'll get away with it. Clinton lied about his personal life all the time. David Wu can lie about his sexual improprieties and his knowledge of pharmaceuticals. But these lies are mainly lies about their frame of mind and their perceptions. When Clinton said he didn't inhale, he was saying "I pretended to smoke a joint to look cool," which is kind of stupid. When David Wu said that sex with the 18 year old daughter of his lifelong friend was consensual, he's admitting a lot things about himself that call his judgment into question. When he says he thought the Oxycontin⁴ his friend gave him was ibuprofen, he's saying that he can't tell whether he's on powerful opiates or not. The lies don't help his argument much, since he's basically saying "I'm not a drug-abusing rapist, I'm just retarded." He still has to resign in the end.

Bottom line: You can't get away with lying about matters of fact anymore. It hurts you more than it helps you. It's not longer possible to successfully lie about what's factually true. You can only lie about what you believe, and then the lie reflects on you. The longer it takes for Republicans to recognize that fact, the better, since it makes them look like assholes.

Notes
1. Jesus, I know the Dems aren't left at all, but they play one on TV.
2. Who engage in a kind of hollow, ritual-worship of the man without really knowing anything about him. Sound like anything else to you?
3. Probably because I have enough contact with my legislators to know that they do not base their decisions on public opinion, but rather on private, corporate opinion.
4. Oxycontin is twice as powerful of an opioid as morphine. If you take it, you will become a 50's jazz musician. There is no way to fail to notice that you have taken Oxycontin, unless you take so much of it that you go on the nod.