Bureaucrats Gone Wild

White House spokesman Scott McClellan blamed the optimistic jobs projection on bureaucratic "number crunchers."

I suppose the dire predictions of the imminent Iraqi threat were the result of dour "information crunchers". One thing's certain, the Bush White House sure doesn't take much responsibility for anything that happens, unless it's from the good things. Has anything good happened?

I know most number crunchers are wildly optimistic. Or maybe, I'm wildly optimistic in the numbers I crunch when I'm trying to crunch myself a rosy future.

Be cynical, be very cynical.

It was my pleasure to stumble upon an excellent site called Cosmic Baseball. The idea of this imaginary game fascinates me. I'd like to arrange a league. My thoughts on how to proceed go like this:

1. Get friends interested in idea.


2. Draft teams from all available sources.


3. Each player's oeuvre provides grist for the action. Team A picks something (e.g., a quote) from his pitcher's works, and Team B (seeing or not seeing it, maybe seeing a few words of it?) chooses a counter-quote/whatever from his batter's repertoire.


4. Judges decide how the quotes work against each other and assign an outcome that is averaged into the play. (Tricky, I know.)


5. Everyone has fun. Minds are stimulated, tables broken in the excitement.


6. Records are kept...

Will anyone out there come play with me???

Unless the dream within the dream
becomes my daily bread:

I'm lost.

Variation of Words

Day dawns red above the harbor,
cranes move slowly on the quays.
My half-full bus crosses the bridge
     & leaves the docks
            for another dream.

Lofton/Jeter/A-Rod/Giambi/Sheffield/Williams/Matsui/Posada. It's practically an all-star team. How are Rodrigo Lopez and Omar Daal supposed to compete against that?

The most rational article I've read on this whole gay marriage debacle:

"Civil marriage is not synonymous with "the sacred institution of marriage," which existed long before the state started doling out marriage licenses."

Open debate is impossible when judges make law. It's quite likely that the liberal's sacred Roe v. Wade is the source of all conflict in the abortion debates. That is, because the Supreme Court made law, opposition groups needed to radicalize their methods to break through this legal blackhole. Whereas, a natural political debate through legislative processes would eventually arrive at a solution with which the nation could live. (Probably a federalist solution, since some states would reject abortion and others allow it.) Instead it's a rallying point around which opposing ideologies expend enormous amounts of energy.
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Perhaps you've noticed my personal preference for a federal solution to most thorny political issues. I do prefer it. Federal law's scope should be hemmed by constitutional limits that leave the vast majority of day-to-day issues to the states. Though societal mobility blurs longstanding differences, States are still politically identifiable units that form coherent cultures. This culture would be coherent even if a state experienced a 100% population turnover as the new populace interacted and arrived at solutions to social issues. The United States is too disparate a polity to have too many cookie cutter laws applied to all states.
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Now that liberals are using federalism to advance their ideas, it should be noted that the Dixiecrats of yesteryear lost that argument. If Republicans keep power in Washington, these liberal attempts at federalism will also fail.

This insight also reveals federalism's dirty reality. After all, federalism has always been the cop out answer when differing opinions threaten political discord on basic issues of human dignity. Federalism first gave us southern slavery and then Jim Crow laws. A blanket solution of federalism would question the validity of Civil Rights era milestones like Brown v. Board of Education et al. And, of course, the constitutionality of these federal actions and decisions are doubted by many conservatives even still.

What line must be crossed before a constitutional right is trespassed? If Jim Crow laws didn't walk all over black Americans' rights, I guess the constitution is worthless. Hardcore libertarians would say economic pressure would have forced an end to white-only businesses, but that assumes the black community could have become economically important within the context of very skewed playing field. Malcolm X, in his autobiography, advocated that blacks first raise themselves out of poverty and then demand, as equals, their rights, rather than beg the white man for them. This is ultimately the solution for ending discrimination, but it's unlikely that people treated as second-class citizens would have made that leap in the short term. There are times when the whole by-the-bootstraps mentality is plainly ridiculous.

The argument is partly right. These decisions came only after blacks demanded their rights. (I must disagree with Malcolm X, it's not begging to ask for basic rights.) The machine of public discourse began to move, the courts and federal government helped it along. It's also important that many of the decisions did not make law, but merely guaranteed rights to people so far denied them. Ultimately, confronted with a twisted status quo, most people can't continue in their bigotry. (I'll be optimistic.)

The question in the gay debate is whether the race analogy holds true...

Well, I didn't mean to go on like that.

Dahlia Lithwick perfectly states a point in Slate that's been rattling in my mind for some time now:

"A Defense of Marriage Amendment would enshrine, for the first time, language of intolerance and exclusion in a document that was intended to set forth basic rights. Does President Bush really want to be remembered as the guy who first used the Constitution to codify bigotry?"

Furthering her point, conservatives love "State Rights" when it allows states to exercise traditional bigotry. That is why "State Rights" has long been a racist byword. But it's a shame, since federalism's chief virtue is allowing smaller groups of people the ability to choose what laws are appropriate to their circumstances. Another clear example of conservative federalist hypocrisy is found in the fight against medical marijuana laws. I know these laws are being used as a first step to outright legalization, (and I don't quite know how I feel about that), but federalism should allow states to make these decisions. If the issue was a conservative one, these same persecutors would be crying "State Rights".

I posted this at my home, but I figured I'd post it here so you'd understand why I was rediculously vehement about the faith/morality post a couple weeks back:

Once upon a time, there was a young man named Steve who had lived all of his life in one village in one house. He liked the house and it had served him well, but he decided he wanted to look at other houses and see if there were better ones out there. He started looking far and wide and saw many homes. Eventually two nice men decided to show Steve their home and they told Steve about all the great things it offered. Steve had to admit it looked like a solid home and offered some nice features that Steve really liked as well as also having a lot in common with the house he grew up in. There were a couple points when Steve though he saw defects or cockroaches out of the corner of his eye, but as he turned to look, one of the men would start talking to him and Steve would get distracted. The men asked Steve to go and make the home buying decision based on his gut instancts and Steve agreed. He had always made decisions like this based off of careful analysis and he rather liked the idea of basing this decision off of how he felt instead. Somehow it felt more important and more real to him. In the end, Steve decided to get the same model home that his new friends had.

He moved in and got used to the surroundings. He began to feel comfortable in the house and the more he time he spent in the house, the better he felt about his purchase. He would often be amazed to find a new feature in his home that he had not even realized was there. He was very happy.

But one day, after living in the house for a couple years he decided to explore the attic, which was a room he had never been in before. In the attic he saw termites and strange construction and many things that made him question the soundness of the house. He talked to his friends about it and they said that they had known what he would find, but that they had chosen not to share it because he did not need to know about it at the time. They advised Steve to go back into the attic and that if he did so and had faith, that he would see that the workmanship was really quite fine and that the attic was yet another great thing to love about the house and not something to cause unease. They also said that if Steve worked on doing maintenance (eg watersealing the deck) on the house that it would keep the house and his appreciation of it in good shape.

Steve thought there was some logic in the advice that his friends gave him. He did continue doing doing maintence and became even more vigilant about it than he was before. However, he could not convince himself to go back into the attic. He kept thinking that if he did so that he would become completely disatisfied with the house and that that would leave him in a quandry. Thus he went day after day ignoring the attic, yet keenly aware of it. It began to weigh on his opinions of the whole house. Sudenly, the seeming firm foundation began to seem shoddy.

Steve did not see things improving and did not know what to do. Should he continue trying to make things work in his new house, should he move back to his old house, should he try to find a new house which had some of the features he liked from this house? Steve wasn't sure. He knew that he did not want to be homeless, but he wasn't sure where to go. He talked to his friends Chris and Rachel who had both spent some time in Steve's house and they gave him some interesting thoughts. Chris said that there are many houses out there and perhaps one of them was nicer than Steve's current house. Chris infact was looking for a new house himself and offered to look with Steve. Steve had to agnowledge the truth of Chris' statement and thought Chris' offer was very nice. However, Steve also realized that his friend Chris moved an awful lot and that was not the life that Steve was looking for.

Rachel on the other hand had spent her whole life in the Same model house that Steve owned and she tried to help Steve feel better about the house and the purchase and pointed out that the house really wasn't as much of a fixer-upper as Steve was thinking. Steve also agreed with her and saw that there were only a few areas of the house that really gave him pause, the biggest of which was still the attic.

As Steve pondered, he also though about some words spoken by his friend Lee who had grown up in the same model house, but had moved out and was currently living with his family on the street. Steve did not want to live on the street, but thought that if he moved out of his house without a new house lined up to move into, that he too could end up without shelter. Still even that would be a home of sorts, if not the one Steve wished for. The biggest fear that Steve faced was at not having any place in the world that he could call home. He had always had a place to live, but now he couldn't decide where he should go and there was no place that really felt like home to him.

Thus far he had been getting along alright living in the seemingly rundown house. The house was everpresent, but he could also ignore his house during day to day life. He did not want to do anything rash and did not want to rush such an important decision as where to live. He also remembered paying a lot of money to purchase the house initially and did not wish to lose that investment if he later discovered this house did indeed suit his needs. Yet he knew somewhere along the way, he would have to figure out a more permanent plan.

At one point there were ceaseless articles about how Howard Dean had become an unstoppable juggernaut due to his method of fundraising and how he leveraged the internet. Why haven't we heard any pieces about what his meltdown means with regard to these? Sure, it is a more complex topic, but someone must have some thoughts. IS Dean still revolutionary and a genious for incorporating new ideas or now that his aegis is off, can we see some new truth about these gambits?

Life's a journal, not a destination.

"Let me tell you what's going to happen when they raise [taxes]. They're going to say, 'Oh, we got to raise it so we can pay down the deficit. Uh-uh. They're going to raise the taxes and increase the size of the federal government, which would be bad for the United States economy."

-George W. Bush

It makes me wonder whether he knows that the federal government has grown faster under his leadership then ever before. Since he's admitted getting his news from his advisors, pure of media bias, I'm starting to think he doesn't know what's going on under his nose. Or he's just a liar.

"The numbers tell the story. The average annual real increases in domestic discretionary spending were 2.0 percent under Jimmy Carter, minus 1.3 percent in the Reagan years, 4.0 percent with George H.W. Bush, 2.5 percent in the Clinton years, and 8.2 percent with George W. Bush."

William Blake would not approve of yesterday's old churchyard myth. I came across his poem The Garden of Love today and was struck by how fitting a rebuttal it presented to my words.



I did, however, qualify my church by saying it should not restrict, but buoy the human spirit. Also, I don't necessarily see tragedy in tombstones, which instead mark the comings and goings of people like me, who've done what I'm doing, and gone where I'm going. (Though I admit the image and description are brutally wonderful for describing religion as it almost always is.) I'd like to write a poem called Love Amongst Tombstones where death and life intermingle into a single awesome expression of our condition.

This reminded me of the Cockaigne picture:

I said at dinner a few night ago, "The idea that kangroos have pockets is very weird." Matilda replied matter-of-factly, "It's not an idea. They do have pockets."
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I sleep, but soon
this dream will haunt
my waking steps.

The dream within the dream
becomes the context in which

I hear birds sing
after a storm.

It will become
everything,
unless I give
it up before

its slow rivers
fill the oceans

and I am drowned.

-while reading Kenzaburo Oe's Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

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Last week I said I'd like to be a library, if I were a building. It's still a fine choice, but it now ranks third on my list.

1) An old country church, surrounded by crooked tombstones, and mossy, mouldy ground. A church so old and unassuming it's almost a natural feature of the landscape. My belfry would house generations of swallows' nests, and my bells would ring loud and clear over the luscious country side. An extravagent interior would contrast the quiet exterior. Inside, beautiful stain glass windows, delicate woodwork, gold leafing, and the aura of ancient sacrifice would combine to bring hope and comfort to those entering the doors. This is my opinion of what a church ought to do.

On my best days, I look past the mere material of who we are and see the invisible hooks that connect every one of us. I see the sum total of our hopes and fears, our inner-goodness; the web of humanity pulses with hope. This is how I want to see life, no matter what is really the case. Nothing changes in the underlying material reality, when I add a spiritual filter on top. Nothing changes if I remember that the filter is an abstraction, and should give hope, not despair; should forgive, not judge.

2) On a similiar principle, I'd like to be a traditional English pub in a build with a shingle outside advertising some silly archaic name. The Prancing Pig or something like it. Inside, the warm light and simple sturdy furniture would witness unending human experience and provide all with hospitality, comfort, and cheer.

3) A library where knowledge frees man from prejudice, and knowledge brings joy to its hunter. Too often I feel the academic learns in order to distance himself from others, or once he enters his studies, his mooring to reality is lost and his life becomes a petty argument about an issue that will be buried beneath the crush of human progress in a matter of mere decades...

I'm headed for Cockaigne. How about you?













Here is a translation of the poem The Land of Cockaygne; the original is here.

Observations for no reason:

While waiting for Melina & family outside the Aleksanterinkatu exit of Stockmanns I noticed a stylishly dressed man taking picture with a digital camera. But instead of taking pictures most of us would want, his were of security cameras and various pieces of window displays. (I'm not talking about the whole display here, but just a purple board in the background, etc...) If not for the display shots, I'd say I've seen my first practicing member of the sousveillance resistance.

Maybe he was...

His body screamed contradictory messages, both coolly aware of his "persona", but almost nervously snapping the pictures. He never paused to frame it, or think about the shot, just snap, look around, move on, repeat.

Maybe he was just casing the joint...

In general, I'm for anything that fights back against society's overlords. Maybe, once I get a digital camera, I will join the resistance myself. (I've been fleshing out an idea for a multi-purpose Last Gasp site on its own domain where I can include bits and pieces of ideas I've had, or stolen over the last few years. A page of "Surveillance Near You" might be fun.
The bottom line, though, is surveillance isn't going to go away. Every action we take is going to better recorded and better sorted than ever before. It scares me, since I harbor a lot of tin-hat instincts, but it's only truly frightening when it goes one way. Big Brother was awful because the power of knowledge was concentrated with power.

Already we've seen citizens challenge authority by recording their actions, such as the Rodney King incident and the subsequent videos showing improper (to say the least) behavior from those that ought to enforce it. Pictures do lie, of course, but the more pictures you can bring to bear on an action only clarifies the situation. The King video was unclear because it only showed the cops wailing on a pathetic man. What happened before the tape started rolling? What else was going on? More tapes, more information.
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Just before the mad-snapper a familiar lunatic, who provides a surprising amount of conservational fodder for Melina and me, walked past. As usual he was screaming at the top of his lungs that former-Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen and former-Finance Minister Sauli Niinisto are terrorists, Mafia members, and just generally corrupt. Melina noticed him first over a year ago and we've often seen him since, shouting up and down Aleksanterinkatu. Once, Melina saw him near Sokos, but whether this means he targets department stores, or just that we frequent them, I cannot say.

But nuts are a dime-a-dozen, what makes the Shouter stand out is his utterly normal appearance. He's no down-and-out bum whose booze-addled mind makes him do stupid things. If not for the shouting, I'd never look twice at him. He appear Mediterranean, he's not Finnish, though his cries are. I can't say whether he's a man on a mission, a nut with an obsession, or just bored. He's definitely behind the times, since the SDP/Kokoomus coalition government Lipponen and Niinisto were leaders of was voted out of power last March. (It's now a Keskusta/SDP coalition.)

I don't even know if I want him to be sane. If he's sane then his commitment to this issue is astonishing. As a amateur critic whose unwilling/unable to go professional, I often feel my opinions, rates, praises, and so forth are just whispers in a ferocious wind. If I truly cared about an issue, where could I go to be heard? Blogging is a crowded, spotty world, as arbitrary (more so, I guess) in its elevation of mere mortal to prophet as the journalistic world. (Though this is a blog, it's private. I've toyed with going public for the hell of it, but I wonder if I'd still want to post stupid verses that would otherwise never see the light of day, but do illustrate my thoughts, etc...) But the ideal of protesting about an issue close to your heart in a public venue has been diluted in my understanding. I think instead of scripted marches, organized events, all sanctioned and arranged by quasi-official organization. I don't think of a man with his lungs alone yelling his way into the public consciousness. But this is how a lone man is being heard, though no one listens.

New teams in American professional sports have the most pathetic names possible. I don't know whether if in their quest to offend no group the names are toothless, or if time and familiarity has turned otherwise meaningless names into something grander than the sum of their syllables, but the plain fact is news team names suck. Most of the time they sound like elementary school mascots. (I went to Barrett Elementary where Barrett Bobcats worked and learned, we kept our standards high! It's from our school song, which I still remember.)

But it can't just familiarity that breeds acceptance, since foreign teams have cool names I am not familiar with. I'm sure you're all familiar with the ever popular Nippon Ham Fighters, and maybe even the Culiacán Tomato Growers, but it turns out the Mexican Winter League is chock-full of good names. If the Expos (another stupid name that time hasn't improved) move to D.C. I hope they change their name to something like the Washington Political Hacks, Washington Poll Takers, or Washington Blowhards.

"The government must exercise fiscal responsibility by limiting spending growth, focusing on the results of government programs, and cutting wasteful spending," - George Bush

Happy Birthday, Groundhog.