The filibuster and why It doesn't matter whether Obama's EPA nominee gets confirmed or not

Hello, sometimes I write a blog.  I actually write more of them than you see if you are subscribed, because I post much fewer than I write, since I get to thinking somewhere along the line that the stuff I'm writing is stupid.  But today's post I did publish, because I'm super disappointed by the Senate Democrats' preposterously shortsighted decision to end the filibuster by forcing a simple up/down vote on presidential nominees.

First of all, let me explain what the filibuster process is and is not.  When a senator filibusters a vote: he isn't standing before his peers and talking like Jimmy Stewart pretended to do in that old movie.  All it really involves in most cases is that the senator makes a phone call and says he's blocking the vote and then the vote cannot proceed.  This is a very, very stupid thing to allow, and I'm surprised that ANYTHING EVER gets voted on when that's all it takes. 

Even though the filibuster as it is currently used is stupid and obstructive, filibustering is an important thing to be able to do, and by forcing a simple up/down vote by essentially nullifying the filibuster rules, Hairy Reed has just eliminated the filibuster as an option.  It's true that being able to block a vote by making a phone call is essentially a subversion of democracy. However, rather than eliminating the filbuster altogether, amending the rules of the filibuster so that the Senator must at least  actually be present in the chamber would be a much better move.  Frankly, the standing filbuster is a good system.  It's a much better idea to make a senator stand and talk the entire time they are blocking a vote.  That way, if a senator feels compelled to block a vote, they can do so, but only through expenditure of some personal energy.  It would seriously cut down on the frequency of the filbuster's use, but preserves the tactic for dire cases.

If the filibuster rule isn't amended by then, I guarantee that the next time the Republicans are in majority in the senate, Democrats are going to regret having backed the nuking of the filibuster rule. 

My Life Has Been Revolutionized by a Coffeemaker (plus boring minutae)

I have this love/hate relationship with coffee. Whenever I tell people about it, they don't seem to understand, but I tell people about it all the time anyway, because I'm a self-obsessed boor. I have a love/hate relationship with that too. In fact, I think that loving and hating kind of go along with each other. You don't know something, anything really, well enough to love it without knowing it well enough to hate it, too. This goes for everything: people, coffee, your society, your phone, whatever.

My friend Rebecca moved out of her place, and she is trying to get rid of some stuff she doesn't use, so she gave me this coffeemaker that we had originally found together when we dumpstered at the university. If you like to collect stuff that you probably don't need, (lord knows I do) then you really ought to be aware that at the end of every college semester (mostly in the Spring, and less so at the end of other semesters), idiot kids move out of their dorms and throw everything they had in there away. I have found a lot of good clothes, several computer speaker systems, furnishings of every description, movies, fancy calculators, durable foodstuffs, personal journals, valuable books, original artwork, stuffed animals, cleaning products, kitchen appliances, school supplies, deadly weapons, sexual aids, and live plants, to name a few items. What really keeps me coming back, though, is the odd things, like a set of billiard balls, a battery-powered air pump, a box of 40 12-volt electric motors.

My stepdad goes to thrift stores all the time and pokes around looking for treasures. He's been enormously successful at this, but he was actually doing it so much that he had to stop for a while. It was consuming his life. He had something of a routine where would drive out to Palmer on a weekly basis to check the stores out there, which he says tended to be more interesting. He knew every thrift store in a 40-mile radius of his house, and he went to all the worthwhile ones nearly every day. He filled my parents' 5000 square foot house with the most amazing things. He bought a sitar at a Salvation Army once. He found a gramophone at the ASPCA thrift store. He's found hundreds of things of that nature, and he buys them to keep them. He repairs them if they're broken, as he's a brilliant tinker and craftsman, and having restored them to their former glory, or generally something better than that, he just keeps them, in the way that a dragon keeps a hoard of jewels and gold. It's not merely avarice, I think, that causes him to do this. He has a respect for the objects themselves, a sense that they have a right to exist somewhere and to be appreciated.

This coffeemaker is so much more efficient than my devised means of making coffee. You add grounds to it, you pour cold water in a rear reservoir, flick a switch, and go stare at something for a dumb couple of minutes. When you come back, there's a pot of coffee waiting for you, perfectly brewed, no grounds in it. It's amazing.

You have to understand that the way I made coffee before this didn't exist for the purpose of making coffee entirely. The object which made my coffee before was a sort of monument, or maybe more reasonably, a trophy of my interest in solving problems with bits of things I have on hand. It's a cone coffee filter jammed into an Erlenmeyer flask. I poured hot water over the grounds, a little at a time to keep it from overflowing. The parameters of this method could vary wildly in terms of the amount of water I added, which was difficult for me to judge, the amount of grounds, the length of time the water took to filter through them, the temperature of the water, and whether I had managed to keep all the grounds out of the reservoir or not. It generally made pretty bad coffee, since very few arrangements of those parameters tend to produce something good.

I bought the Erlenmeyer flask at Arctic Brewing Supply years ago. It's a standard piece of chemistry equipment: an inverted cone of Pyrex with a neck and a bottom and graduations to indicate volume. The brew shop sold them because they're a convenient way of making yeast starter. Being Pyrex, they can be heated directly over a flame, which is useful in brewing, since you want everything to be completely sterile or the yeast will get it's ass kicked by wild bacteria and you'll end up with something that tastes like crap (incidentally, that's where abominations like “Belgian IPA” originate from: improper sterile technique). I was hanging out at the shop one day, and these spun out biker types pulled up in a shitty minivan and wandered around the store mumbling to themselves.  They were looking for a Pyrex flask to make meth with, and Peter told them he didn't have any.  After they walked out he told me he had to keep them in the back, since would-be meth cooks come in all the time looking for them, and he doesn't want to be Arctic Meth-brewing Supply. On a whim, I bought one, and I've used it for various things ever since.  To clarify, I have never made meth with it, since I figure the stuff is cheap enough that I can just buy it when I want it.   I got the cone filter attachment at a moving sale, and I had to poke holes in it to allow air to escape as I added water, because it fit so perfectly into the top of the flask.

I essentially made coffee in a homemade hourglass, and it took about that much time to make coffee. This new machine is great. It does its job well, leaving me with more time to do other stuff, like cook breakfast, which I'll talk about some other time.

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