I Hope You're Happy

I would like to take a moment to inform you of an experiment many of us can and should participate in which has to potential to greatly enhance our lives and aid in our prediction of earthquakes. The experiment will take place on Monday, April 26th, and carries the official title of “Boobquake.” The recent spate of earthquakes around the world is what prompted the study, that and an Islamic Cleric from Iran, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi  who blamed these recent earthquakes on exposed flesh of the human female. To the experiment’s lead investigator, Jennifer McCreight, this sounded like a testable hypothesis. Participation is simple. If earthquakes are caused by cleavage, providing an abundance of cleavage should produce an abundance of earthquakes, and the date to test this is Monday, the 26th. You can see the facebook event listing at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=116336578385346.

Now you might be thinking this particular cleric is off his rocker, that linking singular seemingly natural events in random parts of the world to certain ongoing and omnipresent morally questionable to some behaviors seems daft, but this sort of accusation is often offered by leaders of several faiths, well, usually just very conservative and vocal parts of faiths, but what’s wrong with a little generalization here, right?

There is a colorful history to such divinations, from Fred Phelps displacing his hate of homosexuality to his deity and blaming everything from natural disasters and wars to the wrath of the good and peaceful god, to Pat Robertson (who was feeling quite aware of having faded from the public spotlight) blaming Haiti’s earthquake on the deal Haitians supposedly cut with the devil in their revolution. In this case, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “It never ceases to amaze, that in times of amazing human suffering, somebody says something that could be so utterly stupid. But it, like clockwork, happens with some regularity.” Now the White House is bound by certain rules of etiquette, and so if they call you stupid, you know you’re far from rational discourse. Since then, earthquakes have struck Chile, Baja California, China, Indonesia, and hell, even very near me in Illinois. Yes, a better study might be put on attention seekers getting headlines in the wake of a natural disaster, but I’m not sure that would be science as much as statistics. I prefer science, particular the science of boobs.

There are some significant instances of this we might study in preparation for Monday’s experiment.  My favorite, I think is Hurricane Katrina for it’s butterfly effect through history. Hurricane Katrina hit  the week after the gay pride parade in New Orleans, and therefore, it was a wicked weekend in a wicked city. The accusations began even before the storm hit, before the levees broke. Fred Phelps, from his church in Kansas (which for some reason never gets a hurricane, and he never seems to blame tornadoes on gays) blamed the storm on the parade. So did Pastor John Hagee from San Antonio, Texas. Their predictions seemed focused on God  wiping out the French Quarter, for its sinful ways. Of course, some people rode it out in the bars in the French Quarter, and it being high ground, and even as close to the river and coast as it is, it hardly received any damage. On the other hand, the low lying areas were, as we know, destroyed, areas full of churches and faithful. Hm, something wasn’t adding up, no matter how much the conservative preachers proclaimed God’s victory over sin.

Within weeks, hurricane Rita was bearing on New Orleans, a lesser storm, but anything at that point would have been a second major disaster, and the preachers were back at it, proclaiming God was finishing off his work in New Orleans, which apparently an All Mighty God couldn’t wipe out a city in one try, but that’s beside the point. Funny thing, though, the storm turned away from New Orleans and moved on to Houston. It was as if some Storm creating deity was angered by the things somebody nearby was proclaiming in His name.

But Katrina’s influence wasn’t over yet. If one hurricane is God’s hand at work on earth, then all surely must be. As an aside, isn’t it funny how hurricanes only hit the same areas of the world, despite them being in the bible belt while the rest of the world goes on sinning? Anyway, as that hatefest we know as the Republican 2008 Presidential Campaign was having it’s crowning event, on the opening night of the Republican National Convention, Hurricane Gustav was coming ashore near New Orleans, as if to remind us all how horribly the relief was handled by the Conservative Religious President of the party in power. It was as if a deity were up there going, “Stop putting words in my mouth, you don’t know what I have to say.”
Which makes me wonder what Iceland did to deserve the volcano eruption of the past week. It’s too cold most of the time to show boobs, and aside from inflicting Bjork on the rest of us and being not particularly good at banking of late, Icelanders seem a pretty innocuous bunch.

So, boobs. Monday. Though, it occurs to me that Monday might not be enough evidence to reach a conclusive result. We should maybe make this experiment happen at least once a year, just so that we have a sufficient data set, or maybe quarterly. Can I get a grant to pursue this?

Appendix fails to assassinate Glenn Beck

The nation asks doctors to put it back for another try.

The Golden State isn’t worth it

After analysis, the studies find that the standard of living in the high tax, high social program, big government state of California, life isn’t as good as in the  no taxes, small government state of Texas, and the residents are leaving to lower taxed states in droves.

Having seen this coming, this is why I’m an advocate of small government. Too bad there isn’t a small government-lowtax social liberal party out there for me to get behind.The Democrats every once in a while show some interest in it, especially after Clinton proclaimed the era of big government is over. The rest of the party just hasn’t come around to that concept yet.

Todd Akin gambles on the Pledge of Allegiance, Loses

If you want to use it as a political weapon, you should take care to say all the words. I’m just saying.

Cheney’s FBI interview featured 72 times where he couldn’t recall

I know Reagan got away with it, but really, he had Alzheimer’s. Cheney is just avoiding the question.

And Lo, the two party system did create a void, and out of this void came…third parties

America is seeing the problem with the two parties, and we all know that being an independent is a bad route to go (Joe Lieberman). Most of Europe has several parties (BUT THEY’RE ALL SOCIALISTS), so it’s about time we got in on the action, and allowed some more voices into the debate. It can’t get any worse (right?)

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative of NY-23 claims Glenn Beck is his hero

No wonder that race got so fucked up that the Republican candidate dropped out and endorsed the Democrat. With an election as strange as that, I’m shocked there wasn’t a former porn star or reality TV b-lister also on the ballot.

As a result of Barack Obama’s policies, lobbyists are quitting in droves

If only there were a pied piper to run the rest of them out.

Iran Accepts nuclear deal

Funny that Bush was never able to do this….

Texas and Ohio voters reject red light cameras

I think that if we can’t get this on the ballot everywhere, we should reject them like the mysterious guy in Chicago: with a cherry picker and the cover of darkness.

Carly Fiorina to run for California Senate seat

Let’s see, she nearly ruined HP and Compaq, got chased out but kept her $29 million golden parachute, and then was economic advisor to John McCain.  This is one chick that has failed upwards. The difficulty on this is she has money, connections and media savvy. The easy way to beat her is to point out how few of California’s citizens have a golden parachute in their contracts. Should be easy to paint her as one of those Wall Street types that caused this whole economic disaster, and who can’t relate to the masses like her Democratic opponent.

Michele Bachmann losing aides like Washington is losing Lobbyists

Michelle Marston has left her for being too crazy.

Michael Steele on the mid-term elections: We’re Transcendant

Presumably, the chairman meant that his party is ascendant, meaning on the rise, and not transcendent, meaning beyond the limits of comprehension.

The quote says it best.

So AT&T sued Verizon, and Verizon said, “Um well, ok.”

Seems AT&T was getting killed by the Verizon ads comparing networks, and sued, claiming false advertising. The expectation was Verizom would drop the ads and they’d settle out of court. Verizon, on the other hand, replied very simply by saying, “Prove it.” See, the burden of proof is on AT&T and if Verizon has its facts together, well, AT&T has little legal recourse.

This lamp is consumer retribution

An LED lamp that connects to the phone jack in your wall, stealing power from the phone company.

Dick Grayson

The Caustic personality of Dick Grayson

I have to admit, I like him because of one of his faults. He’s overbearing, and overbearing as a real personality fault, but this also makes him a no bullshit kind of guy, and that’s really what we need in politics.

He’s so brash, nobody wants to run opposing him

That’s one way to win an election.

The Fox News Beat

Jane Hall left Fox because of how skewed they are

She says she left because they stopped debating the issues, and because “Beck is scary”.

White House to Democrats: Stop providing balance to Fox News

I think the idea is to let Fox News continue to become more extreme and more marginalized.

Of course, by the laws of Social Newtonianism, that sort of means they must also become more extreme and marginalized. I wonder if they’ve found some sort of Social Gravitation constant I haven’t worked out quite yet.

Lessons Learned is a new series to ihopeyourehappy.com analyzing current political events by comparison between those making the policies, or illustrating what we see better in hindsight, lest we repeat the mistakes of the last administration, or last month.

Lessons Learned #1: Iran

The Obama Administration made more progress with Iran in one face-to-face meeting over tea than the Bush administration got in eight years of demands for preconditions and threats. If these promises hold true, it would be a remarkable turn around for U.S.-Iran relations, that is unless the Republicans continue to undermine Obama’s policy by continuing to advance a subverted foreign policy via rogue statesmen like they have been for the last few months. I’m not holding my breath on them coming through on the promise, I suspect Iran will lead us on following the example of North Korea, but only time will tell on that one.

The lesson learned is dialogue will bring resolution, while demands and threats without discussion will only breed suspicion and fear, but we should support this with some historical analysis, don’t you think?

The start of the current political climate in Iran began with the Ayatollah’s revolution in 1979. The United States was quite aligned with the shah, and so as the revolution flipped public policy, America was officially on the outs in Iran. There was the embarrassing hostage situation leading up to Ronald Reagan’s election, and that even more embarrassing arms for hostages arrangement that really didn’t do anyone any good, and which actually began as a way to establish friendlier relations with Iran. After that whole affair, it wasn’t like America was going to come back with open hearts and let bygones be bygones, and Iran, well, they just got new toys and weren’t willing to share. We can look at that whole event as one of the lessons in horribly bad foreign policy. Let’s just say that anytime weapons are involved in peace negotiations, peace doesn’t seem to happen.

But relations never got better in the 80’s and the Clinton administration didn’t do much with Iran in either direction. We spent a lot of time preoccupied with Iraq and the new threat of al Qaeda (along with the other tension points of the world, Bosnia, Somalia).

The Clinton Administration began a very hard line on Iran. They were the first to accuse Iran of being a state sponsor of terrorism. He put in sanctions against their main industries, and took a hard stance before the election of a moderate President, Mohammed Khatami. This changed Clinton’s idea of how to deal with Iran, but his first steps were to make conciliatory gestures, and that showed a certain amount of weakness, I mean, if somebody is suddenly just giving you things, aren’t you just going to hold off and see when the giving will end and then consider the person a weak negotiator?

But with G-Dub Bush came a change in policy. We would no longer talk without preconditions being met. We would threaten from afar. We would use international forums to threaten. And we wouldn’t talk even through back channels.

Whereas Bush thought this was tough, Texan diplomacy, it provided Iran’s leadership with excuses to blame, villify and target the U.S. We were no longer an uncertain entity to them, we were the enemy, and once a nation becomes your enemy, there’s any number of ways to play them to your citizens. We used the same tactics. We never found Bush sympathetic to the ethnic diversity, Texans don’t do that very well. I know, I have one in my family.

There was also that whole thing about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. We said our intelligence was solid, we invaded based on that rock solid intelligence, and then found none. Obviously we made it all up as an excuse, (politically, a “pretense”) and who knew what we were going to make up about Iran as an excuse to invade. Maybe something about a nuclear weapons program?

By calling Iran part of the infamous (like el Guapo) Axis of Evil, you don’t leave yourself much space to make friends, especially if you happen to have the most powerful military in the world being very active just over the border. We did a lot to make Iran a nation of Bogeymen, the new Russians who were out to kill us all, a backwards and uncivilized place who if they only could produce the technology would nuke our allies, and our nation as well.
By four years into his administration, it was very clear this stance wasn’t making much progress, not with Iran, not with North Korea. While they weren’t the main focus of the administration prior to the 2004 election, in his second term, the tensions only grew. We didn’t make any friends in the Middle East with Iraq. We weren’t greeted as liberators, Democracy didn’t flourish, we’re still there, still working on it, and Iran had plenty of fun with us by allowing cross border raids on our troops and the indigenous Iraqi Kurds and then threatening rightful military response for any cross-border transgressions.

We could argue very strongly that Ahmadenijad and his Holocaust denying, conspiracy theory creating self. We talked very strongly, with rhetoric that their population did not agree was true, and so what did they do? They looked for the strongest most equal paranoid voice they could find, an illustration of my Theory of Social Newtonianism (equal and opposite reaction). We elected Bush, they found a local Glenn Beck equivalent and mouths were shot off and nothing much got done but posturing. All of our talk about how they would nuke our allies led them elect somebody who would nuke our allies if given half a chance.

Obviously these tactics weren’t working. The question became when would Bush recognize this and change course, and he never did. For this reason, I think Bush suffered the longest and most extensive lame duck period of any president. It lasted practically his entire second term. I think even a good deal of his voter base woke up on the morning after election day wondering what they had just done.

Now we have Obama, and we have found that his campaign promises of open dialogs without preconditions have been welcomed. You could make the argument that any change in approach would have been welcome to Iran for at least investigative purposes. Pleasantly, this turned out to be the real deal, and talks have just developed a favorable result, a more than tentative deal to allow Russia to refine and deliver Uranium fuel rods suitable only for power generation. And this happened in what, a couple meetings and discussions over a few months? This is the sort of progress that justifies that Nobel Peace Prize, premature as it was. We all know this was as much a middle finger to Bush and Cheney as it was a vote for Obama, but that prize in and of itself gives Obama credibility to push a peaceful foreign policy ahead.

We can look at the stolen election in Iran as an indication of what Iran wanted, but didn’t get. I think we’re mostly at the point where we can say that The Clerics and Ahmadenijad did some pretty intense rigging to pull off what they did. We elected somebody willing to speak intelligently and calmly about the problem, willing to make a deal, and willing to examine the issue from both sides. I think Iran wanted the same.

NPR turns the cameras on the healthcare lobbyists

In the first hearing on healthcare reforms, NPR reporters turn the cameras away from the Senators and on to the people who are trying to influence them. Help them Identify people in the room. I want to see little “i” spermies over every head in the room. It can be like Whack-a-mole, get enough points and win a prize: a new health care system.

I’m going to pay attention to this issue, since as you know, I’m fairly intensely fucked by the economics of the current health care system.

Once again, WRITE TO YOUR REPS IN CONGRESS ABOUT THIS. NOW.

Reporter sets up a nice lob, Obama Shuts him down

Harry Smith of CBS takes some comments out of context to give Obama an easy attack on Bush, Obama corrects him before tellign him that he’s heard the question enough, answered it enough, and he should just move on. That’s bipartisanship you can believe in.

Meanwhile Bill O and Glenn Beck play with dollies

Enough said.

And Iran’s #2 is rallying support to remove the Supreme Leader and hold a run-off election

Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Assembly of Experts (the body with the power to choose and dismiss the Supreme Leader) is in the city of Qom—the country’s religious center—trying to rally enough votes from his fellow Assembly members to remove the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from power. News out of Iran suggests that he may be succeeding. At the very least, it seems he may have gained enough support from the clerical establishment to force a compromise from Khamenei, one that would entail a run-off election between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main reformist rival Mir Hossein Mousavi.

If this doesn’t work, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a Student’s Rebellion II: Revenge of the Nerds

How Environment Science works, as opposed to global warming denial propaganda

The article explains it in actual human terms, the links go to abstracts only the fairly scientifically literate can understand. This is one other piece of the puzzle in the study of global warming. One more thing the lobbyists will have a hard time denying.

Here’s a very interesting reform proposal

Former IBM CEO says short term gains-like day trader gains should be taxed at 80% and long term, say five years, should get 0% tax. This would certainly encourage investment in the future. 80% seems steep, but the current is 35%.

How to develop your own bullshit detector

Sure, they call it a baloney detector, but we know what it really is. Michael Shermer from the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

Speaking of bullshit

The scientologists have some new ads out.

Michele Bachmann being crazy again, like that’s news

Something about the census being used to round the political opposition up. She isn’t saying they’re planning it, just that they could maybe kind of sort of be but not really because saying that would make her look stupid.