evolution

I’m still not voting for Republicans this time, but the pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee for Vice-President pleases me for one reason and one reason only [italics original, bold mine]:

That point’s metastasizing already, in fact, into an argument that picking Palin actually proves McCain’s contempt for women voters insofar as it shows he thinks they’re automatons who’ll vote on the basis of gender and nothing more. That’s pure garbage — the near-hysterical enthusiasm on the right today proves her appeal goes deeper than her sex — but I’m positively aching at the thought of our nuanced left affecting high dudgeon for the next two months over, of all things, identity politics. You turds invented this game. Don’t cry because you’re suddenly getting beat at it. When Hillary stops making “plantation” references to the GOP on MLK Day, Palin will stop pitching herself to women voters, how’s that?

So there’s the pessimism. Now the praise: Not only is this the most galvanizing pick Maverick could have made, but the thought of watching progressives tie themselves in knots over the next two months trying to square the inevitable attacks on the “bimbo” beauty queen with poor, poor Hillary’s sexist treatment by the media is worth it even if [Republicans] lose.

Bring on the storm. I loathe identity politics and its practitioners. Everybody’s doing it these days, but I think most people¹ realize that it has benefited one side (with some imaginative help from its co-partisans in the media), and like with most one-sided, devastating weapons, total war is the only thing that will cause the weapons to be put away for good.

So bring it on.

On the bright side, we have some brand new opponents to “affirmative action”.

I think this just might make politics fun for me again.

1. with a functioning brain and pair of eyes, which narrows the field quite a bit, I’ll admit. [↩]

It’s not her.

UPDATE: It seems to be down to Biden and Bayh. I’m betting Biden, because the fightin’ fightin’ Nutroots™ want a fighty fightin’ fighter , and he’s one of their own. John Edwards disqualified himself; he’s the one they wanted. Not Obama.

UPDATE 2: It’s not Bayh.

Unfortunately, meta is all I feel right now, and as I said the other day, you’re stuck with me.

This is (or used to be) a political blog, and it’s been a rather odd one in that I don’t blog much about politics anymore. It’s not all job-hunting and Guild Wars; I’ve been trying to put a name to what it is I’ve been feeling lately in a political sense. It’s a feeling that many would call “alienation”, but for me, that doesn’t quite get to the heart of it.

It’s more like the knowledge that A) there is no place for me along the continuum and B) it doesn’t appear likely that one will be created. It could be that because I recently reread the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and the late Robert Anton Wilson, my head is full of crazy ideas.¹ Or maybe I’m teetering on the edge of crankery.

If so, I must be the only rationalist capitalist traditionalist crank I know. All I know for sure is that in a political environment driven primarily by “feelings” — and those are driven not only by those for whom emotion is the only faculty they possess or use on a regular basis² but by those who, if asked, would readily claim to be “rationalists” possessed of greater enlightenment than most³ — the rationalist will sound like a crazy man.

It is really hard to suppress bitterness in that environment.

1. ideas that don’t sound so crazy now. [↩]
2. which is most people, let’s face it. [↩]
3. typically lately of the self-styled “progressive” variant, but by no means is that always the case. [↩]

1. Would it be possible to arrange a Presidential candidate that isn’t BFFs with a subhuman lowlife? Obama has Bill Ayers, the Clintons have… how many?, and John McCain has the Keating Five and G. Gordon Liddy.

2. Dude: G. Gordon Liddy? He is still alive?

I feel sort of like a hack for writing this post, because everyone on Earth has already written their own, but that hasn’t stopped me for six solid years and three thousand other posts, so here we go.

If indeed the Jeremiah Wright thing is over, I’ll be glad. It was an issue, a relatively minor one — I went to a church as a teenager where intolerant statements were sometimes made, and I turned out okay. It’s fair to ask why he joined the church in the first place, but again that’s a minor issue as well.

What about Obama’s “connection” — some might say “working relationship” — with Weatherman terrorist William Ayers.

Now that we’re all finished with Jeremiah Wright, I’d like to see some questions asked about that.

Of course, we won’t — the full court press on his behalf has already started, and will be like a tidal wave between now and June; possibly after then.

The newest agent of change is… Jim Slattery. Fortunately for us (and undeservedly so), we have people like Washburn’s Bob Beatty:

Bob Beatty, associate professor of political science at Washburn University, said Roberts must be considered the front-runner, given the GOP’s dominance in voter registration.

Beatty said critical numbers in the general election would be 41 and 26.

“Roberts has been in Washington 41 years and Slattery for 26 years,” Beatty said. “It’s a battle of which person who spent a lot of time in Washington is an agent of change.”

Slattery, who lost the 1994 gubernatorial race to Republican Bill Graves, said he was running again for public office because the U.S. Senate was “simply not getting the job done.”

Slattery, if you’re not aware, has been… a lobbyist in the time since he was… a Congressman. For six terms.

We are all idiots.

Bill, on speculation of impending food shortages:

One difference [in the relative price of food-ed.] of course is processing - we are paying the vast majority of our food money for someone else to put it in a form that is convenient for us. The cheese is shredded, the bacon is sliced, shrinkwrapped and refrigerated, the breakfast cereal comes in a multicolored cardboard box with an internal liner and a little plastic toy. So long as that is the case, America does not have a food cost problem as much as we have a packaging cost problem, and that kind of a problem is much easier to overcome…

A second difference is transport - it simply costs more to ship bananas from Guatemala than tomatoes from Hays. Some things may be going away or will become prohibitively expensive. So be ready to make substitutions.

Our system has allowed us the luxury of spending far more on packing and moving our food than on the actual food. And that has been a cushion that will buffer the costs of food so long as we are willing to make substitutions and a few sacrifices of convenience on our own part.

It’s entirely worth your time, especially now, to invest in a few good kitchen tools and learn to use them properly. It might also be worth it, if your living space permits, to cultivate a “green thumb”. Depending on others for food — which billions of us do, even in America (even cooks, thought of in a certain sense) — is seemingly becoming less wise by the day.

It is also amazing to me that ethanol is still being pushed¹ as an alternative fuel source. Its production is not efficient, and it is literally taking food out of the mouths of others, particularly those with little else but the land they walk on. This happens in more ways than one: besides growing things that could be eaten that are instead shipped to ethanol processing plants, government resources that could be spent on something that is efficient (or, horror of horrors, returned to the citizenry for same). Any farmer will also tell you about the deleterious effects of growing a single crop on a given patch of land for long periods. Furthermore, as Bill also notes, the rush to take advantages of artificially-increased corn prices decreases the supply of whatever else might have been planted, thereby raising those prices as well. Finally, when ethanol is finally found not to be the answer to the fuel question, where does that leave the ersatz food-producers?

Ethanol — “liquid pork” — is not and will never be² the answer to anything except the question of what makes a good funnel of tax money to fuel processors.

It might make me a bad Kansan to say it, but all subsidies geared toward the use of ethanol as a fuel should be stopped.

1. an “E85″ gas station just opened up in Lawrence. [↩]
2. It may be that it’s better to instead use switchgrass-based ethanol, because switchgrass can be grown on land that is not as good for producing food. But you still can’t eat switchgrass when times are tough. Is it the best use of the farmer’s limited resources? [↩]

And the time we’re all supposed to pretend never occurred, and the people we’re supposed to pretend never existed.

ABC News:

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved…

…Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., lambasted what he described as “yet another astonishing disclosure about the Bush administration and its use of torture.”

“Who would have thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to approve torture?” Kennedy said in a statement. “Long after President Bush has left office, our country will continue to pay the price for his administration’s renegade repudiation of the rule of law and fundamental human rights.”…

…At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of “principals” fully understood what the al-Qaida detainees would undergo. The principals eventually authorized physical abuse such as slaps and pushes, sleep deprivation, or waterboarding. This technique involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning.

The small group then asked the Justice Department to examine whether using the interrogation methods would break domestic or international laws.

“No one at the agency wanted to operate under a notion of winks and nods and assumptions that everyone understood what was being talked about,” said a second former senior intelligence official. “People wanted to be assured that everything that was conducted was understood and approved by the folks in the chain of command.”…

…Not all of the principals who attended were fully comfortable with the White House meetings.

The ABC News report portrayed Ashcroft as troubled by the discussions, despite agreeing that the interrogations methods were legal.

“Why are we talking about this in the White House?” the network quoted Ashcroft as saying during one meeting. “History will not judge this kindly.”

Ya think?

I’ll keep this short, because it’s past my bedtime:

Told ya.

To quote one of their own: It’s who they are, and it’s what they do.