One for the Ages

A unionized public employee, a teabagger and a CEO are sitting at a table.  In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it.  The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the teabagger and says, "Watch out for that union guy.  He wants a piece of your cookie."

A Statistical Observation, in the Form of a Prediction

Neither you, nor almost anyone you know, will ever be rich.  I don't mean wealthy.  I don't mean comfortably well-off.  I mean fuck-you money rich.

On the plus side, studies show that money doesn't make you any happier.  So you got that going for you.  Which is nice.

Oh, Yeah. Right.

Once again, hat tip to the Angry Black Lady.

Worthy Quotations

One of the great rewards of a writer's life is that it lets you read all the books you want to without feeling guilty.
-Damon Knight

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas p 16

Why I Love John Cole

Because every now and again he says something like this:

You know what? Screw the damned markets. How about we start crafting economic policy that makes sense for Americans, and the market thing will take care of itself. How about we get people back to work so they can start spending and investing and saving, rather than worrying about the fee-fees of our “producers” on Wall Street. I’ve got a basic premise here I’m working off of- if more people are working, more people are buying shit and paying taxes, the market will be just fine.

 It's the complete lack of bullshit that really makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.  I've been reading this guy for years now, and I can't think of anybody who's made me say "Not just yeah, but hell yeah!" so consistently and often.

Dept. of True Dat

A conservative doesn't want anything to happen for the first time; a liberal feels it should happen, but not now.
-Mort Sahl

Enthusiasm Gap

I've done my level best for some months now to stop obsessively following politics in America.  I still think it's important (being that this is the game that determines the shape of the field and the rules of the game we all play by), but I've been trying to concentrate on other things, for the sake of my sanity as well as many other good reasons.

But I still keep my ear to the ground, if for no other reason than that obsessions die slowly, and one thing I keep hearing in the run-up to the midterm elections this November is about the enthusiasm gap between those on the left and those on the right.  The story I keep hearing goes something like this:  the wingnut right is in ascendance, making lots of noise and getting lots of coverage, because their side lost last time and so they've decided it's the End of Days, and as a result they've gone even crazier (or just gotten louder about it).  And since apparently very few of them work they spend a lot of time protesting and driving up Glenn Beck's TV ratings.  They hate Barack Obama and everything he stands for, even when he stands for the same things they do, and they're all really excited to go to the polls and elect like-minded ignorami who believe things that are completely crazy, like that doctor visits should be paid for with chickens, that social security ought to be privatized or abolished, and that tax cuts will solve the budget deficit.

On the flipside you've got the left, who're upset because Obama hasn't completely reversed the world-historical fuckups of the Bush Administration and because the political realities of actually governing (especially when the opposition party doesn't negotiate in good faith or actually want government to work) require compromises that are disappointing to them.  And apparently many of them are so upset that they are considering staying home en masse come November in order to punish the Democrats for not living up to their dreams and making everything better in the two years or so they've had control of the White House and both Houses of Congress.

Now, I have every sympathy for people who find the Democrats maddening. 

Dept. of True Dat

That earnest, upward-striving society of Eisenhower simplicity, of well-paid factory workers dreaming of a little summer place at the lake, and the Main Streets bustling in the cheerful early twilight of Christmas Eve, and the Beach Boys crooning about "fun, fun, fun," and purloined German physicists stashed in comfortably aire-kooled rooms, turning a few tossed-off equations into moon-shots, and Bob Hope cracking wise before a nationwide audience of car-dealers and self-satisfied Rotarians - well that America has imploded like a weevil-infested hubbard squash in a back pantry. And all the prayers to Moloch by the Jesus boomers in and out of congress won't make it whole again.
-James Howard Kunstler

Dept. of True Dat

When you expect stuff, you get disappointed.  When you don't expect stuff, you get surprised, and that's much better.
-Mike O.

Dept. of True Dat

Conservatives are satisfied with present evils; liberals want to replace them with new ones.
-Anonymous

Truth is a Bitter Pill to Swallow

While we were distracted searching for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Iran began revving up its actual nuclear program and Osama bin Laden and his fanatics ran free to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America’s signature values on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars from Baghdad’s Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still doesn’t have reliable electricity or trustworthy security. Iraq’s “example of freedom,” as President Bush referred to his project in nation building and democracy promotion, did not inspire other states in the Middle East to emulate it. It only perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian logjam it was supposed to help relieve.

-Frank Rich

More Words to Live By

You carry either arms or drugs, but not both at the same time.
-Roberto Bolaño, 2666 p 492

Words to Live By

Pee where you're supposed to pee, and don't steal things.
-Desiree

True Dat

Profiting off crime and war should be left to novelists, filmmakers, and the video game industry.
-E.D. Kain

Epigram

Skepticism is healthy, until it starts closing off possibilities.

Epigram

What you owe your ideals:  a realistic understanding of the historical, political, and social world you inhabit, and a plan for advancing them that accords with that understanding.

Something I've Been Thinking About

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
-Mark Twain

I've been thinking a lot about this quote lately, partly because I've been so engaged in the writing of fiction and the craft of storytelling, but also because of the way it plays into some long-running thoughts and speculations I've been toying with for many years now.

It's long been a contention of mine that one of the primary ways people engage with and understand the world is through stories and narrative.  From the mythologies of the Greeks and the Norsemen to the vagaries of the modern news cycle, one of the primary drivers of any phenomenon's meaning is the narrative structures it can be fitted (or forced) into.  Human brains, by nature, function primarily by recognizing patterns, by focusing in on specific details and then using those data-points to backfill a larger picture.  Later data-points are then interpreted through the established/recognized pattern and fitted into it or, if they don't fit, they are often discarded and/or ignored, since the maintenance of the pattern/larger picture is so important to the perceiving subject's mental and psychological well-being.

This is why truth is stranger than fiction (well, most fiction, anyway), because the world as it truly is is a sprawling mess of a place that is generally too complicated and contrary to make any sort of sense out of, at least by such limited creatures as human beings.  To say things happen for a reason is, at best, an assertion of faith. 

Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.  It's what we want from our narratives.  We need these patterns, these narrative structures that make some sort of underlying sense, because otherwise the world is just this crazy mess of a place in which we are lost, because nothing means anything.  Fiction is truth hammered into some sort of recognizable form, a tool we can use to understand ourselves and the world.

The Free Market of Ideas

The fact that they believe they will lose the debate without that legal coercion speaks volumes about how confident they actually are in the rightness and persuasiveness of their views.
-Glenn Greenwald

This is an almost perfect encapsulation of what I think every time I come across someone who wants to legislate morality or squelch the other side of any debate or conversation.  If your ideals and ideas can't stand up to scrutiny and can't survive the crucible of reasoned argument and debate, if they can't be compared side-by-side and win on the merits, then maybe you ought to reconsider them, because by refusing to allow opposing ideals and ideas to be aired you are more or less saying outright that you don't think that yours are very strong and you don't have very much faith in them.

Yup

There are many ways to distinguish between the two major political parties in the United States, but one of the more obvious ways is in how they choose to implode. Democrats, for example, tend to implode in slow motion, when their own aimless, plodding inertia turns them into lugubrious and easy targets for the right wing media, which scurries around them, draping yet another thin, disingenuous stratum of “they’re socialist grandmother killers!” over them until the whole sludgy edifice collapses from the accumulated weight, and the Democrats are crushed underneath. Republicans, on the other hand, implode like old, fat, gassy stars, when the depleted fuel of their empty ideology can’t sustain further inward pressure from their personal idiocy, and the whole mess sucks down and then spectacularly erupts into a blazing display of abject stupidity.
-John Scalzi