Who loves Sarah Palin?

John McCain has stunned the pundits by selecting Sarah Palin for vice president. But other than her youth, inexperience and isolation from national politics, Palin is a brilliant choice not because she will attract Hillary votes or resonate with women, but because she's a creature of the Republican base -- anti-abortion, anti-environment, pro-oil -- right down the line a hard right conservative. Just the kind of person John McCain has been having trouble raising either money or enthusiasm from. Palin secures the right so McCain can move to the middle. All the punditry about her being an outsider or being a ploy to bring over disaffected Clinton voters is missing the point. This is a choice born of weakness and desperation. McCain sacrificed any shred of plausibility (commander in chief-wise) to shore up the crumbling right. Don't believe me? Check the right wing bloggers like hotair.com; they love Palin.

What makes a guy

One of the Drinking & Reading Society’s favorite scientists (can one have a favorite scientist?) just came out with another interesting finding.

Sean Carroll, a UW-Madison molecular biologist, has at least shed light on what happens at the genetic level to make males and females of any species look so different. Though the work was done by studying markings on fruit flies, the same genetic mechanism is likely responsible for the male moose having big antlers, male lions having impressive manes, and male peacocks having those long and showy tail feathers. In humans, the process could help explain how men end up being larger than women. And hairier.

You can see the whole story “What makes a guy a guy?” in the Wisconsin State Journal.

What I want to know is what makes little boys love trucks, young guys love sports with balls and all guys love beer & pizza?

An Environmental Hero

Heroes are not reasonable fellows. They do what they do because they see things differently from ordinary folks. Maybe they see things more clearly. And it's in their nature to take action when the opportunity presents.

These things come to mind because we went to the Sierra Club's farewell party for Bruce Nilles at which he was justly feted for doing some incredible heavy lifting on the issues of air pollution, global warming and coal power. To us and the other folks in that room, Bruce is clearly a hero and deserves to be.

But to others, he is not. Wednesday there appeared a nasty blog by a guy named Rich Trzupek, an industry apologist who is a pretty knowledgeable about pollution but who has let himself go straight over the edge in frustration and, I suspect, envy, in a completely outrageous personal attack on Bruce. Blogs like that are one of the things wrong with the world these days. You can google it; I won't give the link 'cause it seems too much like smut.

Bruce Nilles is an environmental hero and Mark Trzupek is not because heroes don't care about being reasonable, or making compromises, or measuring progress little by little. We need reasonable people and progress in fact does get made little by little. But the world would be a sad, gray place if we were all Mark Trzupek. We need the Bruce Nilles of the world even when they are unreasonable or difficult - even when they are wrong. (And he's not wrong on this!) This quote from Maurice Maeterlinck's Our Social Duty says it better than I can.

At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear lest the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight which nature drags along.

Let us think of the great invisible ship that carries our human destinies upon eternity. Like the vessels of our confined oceans, she has her sails and her ballast. The fear that she may pitch or roll on leaving the roadstead is no reason for increasing the weight of the ballast by stowing the fair white sails in the depths of the hold. They were not woven to molder side by side with cobblestones in the dark. Ballast exists everywhere; all the pebbles of the harbor, all the sand of the beach, will serve for that. But sails are rare and precious things; their place is not in the murk of the well, but amid the light of the tall masts where they will collect the winds of space.

The fruits of his labor

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - A gunman entered the Arkansas Democratic Party headquarters Wednesday and shot the party chairman, who was hospitalized in critical condition, authorities said.

I'll bet this news item won't show up on Rush Limbaugh, just like the Unitarian Church shooting in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago didn't make the cut for Limbaugh's trenchent commentary. Hmmm. Violence directed against those dreadful liberals who stay awake at night dreaming about ways to steal your freedom, your guns and your money, and plot at every moment to destroy our precious traditional values is just a matter of a few nutcases, nothing to worry about, folks. Now let's get back to more hate speech.

No comment needed

WASHINGTON — The United States this year will have spent $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released Tuesday.

The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, according to people with knowledge of its contents, will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies, in a war zone where employees of private contractors now outnumber American troops.

The Bell tolls for McCain

Recently John McCain confessed to a reporter that his favorite book – his guiding light – is Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. A great book, but the insight it provides into McCain’s character ain’t so great.

In a surface reading of the book, it’s easy to assume that Robert Jordan sacrifices himself at the end in a hyper-romantic bid to help his newfound lover Maria escape, and/or from his anti-fascist principles. There is much to admire about Jordan's bravery and commitment to the anti-fascist cause, but it is his sacrifice at the end that is the defining moment and no doubt is what attracts McCain to the book. But there's a darkness in his decision that I'm not sure McCain can see.

Jordan makes a conscious decision to put himself in harm’s way, not to advance the cause or aid Maria, but because he’s just damn dead tired of fighting and wondering why. The fateful decision to cross the road under cannon fire at intervals rather than all together was certain to give the fascists time to zero in on the last rider – Jordan. If they had all gone at once, they would have been away before the tank gunner could get the range.

Hemingway gave us the key to Jordon’s decision in a conversation with the partisan leader Pablo:

"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?"

Pablo’s fear and ambivalence ultimately seep into Jordan’s heart and fuel his fateful decision - perhaps the only decision that would make sense to someone who could not live with his romanticism, but didn't know how to give it up.

Personal bravery and a willingness to put the country's cause first are admirable in any case, and we have seen much of that from our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have just suffered through eight years of a romantic commander in chief. I’m ready for some realism an I'm ready for a president who can tell the difference.

Two turntables and a microphone

I went to the opening of the Obama office in Madison Sunday. Wall to wall crowd standing in the sweatbox heat and everyone having a good time. It was actually a cross section. There were the usual pols and the usual fresh faced and earnest student coordinators, but the vast majority were middle age, middle class homeowner types who didn't need to be there on a Sunday afternoon. Actually Gov. Jim Doyle called it just right when he said this is the election we have all been waiting for, possibly the most exciting moment in politics since Kennedy. That seemed to be the motivation for many in the throng.

Doyle, incidentally, has come a long way from his stiff and stumbling speaking style of 6 or 7 years ago. Sunday he was relaxed and funny and hit just the right notes. And the cool part was the music was provided by a DJ spinning disks. Jazz, techno, whatever. He had a microphone but didn't use it; probably just as well. But the music was good and the thought was even better.

It's enough to give a guy some hope.

Mislead by philosophy

Darwin wasn't just concerned with the physical world, but in the tradition of philosophy going back to Plato, his real theme was the nature of reality. Countless "philosophers" had gone around and around on the nature of God, exhausting not only themselves and the limits of "reason", but thousands of bleary eyed readers who probably came away shaking their heads and wondering if they were too stupid or if all that reasoning just didn't add up. Unfortunately, many of them decided it was their own failing that they didn't understand.

So Darwin asked the philosophical question, "does it make sense that God would have individually created and destroyed all these species, or is it more rational that God allowed them to be created and destroyed by some secondary cause?" His choice of "secondary cause" is at the root of the dispute about evolution vs creation.

As if anyone could figure out the mind of God by means of reason. Such an arrogant creature is man.

In illustration, I will close with this story from James McGrath's blog exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com. I always find something of interest there.

A man finds himself before the pearly gates of heaven, having just died quite suddenly and unexpectedly. St. Peter meets him. "Welcome, friend!" he says, "Would you like to come in?" The man says that he doesn't yet feel any different, and asks what will change when he goes through the gates. St. Peter explains to him, "You'll be given a fresh start. Since your past would inevitably influence your ongoing existence in countless negative ways, we will erase all your memories. Since the form in which you existed as a human being was frail and fallible, your body will be replaced by a glorious one incapable of sin or error."

The man looked at St. Peter puzzled. "If you do all that to me," he asked, "in what sense will I still me me?"

"Good question," answered St. Peter. "This new self will still have your name and will incorporate those few elements in your prior existence that were in no way, shape or form entangled with the sin, suffering, and other miseries of human existence."

"You know what," the man replied, looking around at the clouds and seeing that there were other people who were outside the pearly gates, "I think I'll pass. What you are offering would negate the value of everything I've ever learned, everything I've suffered, everything I've done - in short, everything I am!" And at that, he walked away.

St. Peter watched the man until he was out of sight. Then he looked up and said to God "Still no takers."

"They make me so proud of them, sometimes," came the cheerful booming voice of God from above.
St. Peter then went away too, to watch Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind...

Do unto others?

The Justice Dept hiring scandal revealed in the past week of course comes as no shock. We all knew that was going on, didn’t we? It was only the so-called shrill, liberal mainstream media who maintained their silence all these years until the tide finally went out so far on the Bush Admin that even a beaten dog could find the courage to howl just a little. But that’s not the point.

The question is what are “we” going to do about it? In sports, if you play with an ineligible player, you forfeit the game. But there’s no commish in this game. No instant replay.

So when the Obamans come marching in next winter, the question is will “we” behave the same way and load up those same positions with our people? Or will we allow the Bush team to keep the gains they made with 12 men on the field? The former makes all of the change rhetoric sound suspiciously like a lie. The latter makes us just a bunch of chumps waiting to be taken advantage of by the self-righteous chest-thumpers on the extreme right who actually doesn’t see that they did anything wrong.

Call me a wimp, but I'm hoping we can have the courage to follow the latter course.