Do the right thing

Give them what they want

A lot of people have weighed in on the significance of President Obama's selection as this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Most folks seem to think it's at least a little bit anticipatory. Perhaps the president can put it on lay-away until he's got the political capital to redeem it. Others have been slightly less charitable—which confuses me, of course, since many of the most virulent objectors are overtly and cloyingly Christian. (Of the three great virtues of faith, hope, and charity, only the first seems to carry any weight with them.)

I suppose I could simply sit back and enjoy the spectacle of exploding Republican heads, but I prefer to take the initiative and offer some sure-fire ways to alleviate the anguish of the angry right.

We should give them what they want.

The elfin Michelle Malkin, who always reminds me of the vicious little fairy creatures (bloodthirsty “alate pseudosimians”) in Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, mocked the Nobel Peace Prize award by saying, “The World Apology Tour yields dividends.” Michelle, you see, preferred George W. Bush's unilateral bully-boy approach to international relations. Treating other nations as peers fails to remind them of their inherent inferiority. (As we all know, people are nicer to you if you tell them they're scum.) To make Michelle Malkin happy, I think President Obama should arrange to have her bitch-slapped like the slut she is and hustled off in chains to a confinement facility. (I know the language is politically incorrect and sexist, but Michelle disapproves of prissiness and P.C.)

She likes it when we imprison our minorities, so I think it would be especially appropriate to lock her up in Tule Lake, where Japanese-Americans were penned up during World War II. Visitors to the historical facility could be invited to poke at her with sticks, making it a fun hands-on experience for the entire family.

Malkin could hardly protest. She thinks this is a good way to treat your political opponents and rivals throughout the world. There is no question but that she is one of the president's most outspoken opponents. She would have, therefore, to be gratified that he was following her advice so specifically. Since Malkin posits that the president is deeply connected to Chicago's notorious corruption, it should be easy for him to put out a contract for a bag-job on her.

It's only what she would expect.

Rush Limbaugh, radio entertainer and sexual athlete, says the the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Obama in gratitude for his campaign to create a “weakened, neutered U.S.” To demonstrate his possession of balls that even the Viagra-powered Rush would envy, the president should dispatch a special-ops team to drag him off to one of the empty cages at Guantánamo. They could strip Limbaugh naked (it's only a frat-boy prank anyway, which Rush wouldn't mind), bind his wrists to his ankles in a stress position (it's not torture), and stuff Oxycontin up his ass till he sings the president's praises (because people respect you when you beat up on them).

I'm flexible about this suggestion because Limbaugh isn't. The fat boy doesn't bend too well in the middle, so some alternative stress position might need to be devised. I have confidence that America's patriotic Cheney-trained interrogators are up to the job.

And Rush would be proud of an American president who stands up to those who oppose him.

Glenn Beck is a special case requiring special handling. He thinks the president should turn the Nobel Peace Prize over to the motley crew of malcontents, sore losers, racists, conspiracy nuts, GOP agitators, and idiots that comprised the so-called “9-12 Project.” (The label is especially ironic, demonstrating that Beck and his minions must remember nothing at all about the sense of national unity that prevailed during the aftershock of 9-11.)

Beck should be strapped down into a chair with his eyelids clamped open (à la Alex in A Clockwork Orange) and forced to watch a video loop of George W. Bush's speeches on his determination to track down Osama bin Laden (remember him?). I haven't quite decided whether Beck's eyes should be periodically swabbed with his preferred Vicks VapoRub (which may be losing its effectiveness in inducing his crying jags) or the more potent pepper spray. I'm thinking the latter. Get maximum-strength name-brand stuff like Mace. Nothing is too good for our out-front leader of the wacko patriot fringe.

I'm certain that some sissified liberals would say that my proposals are too extreme, too edgy. To them I say that they have obviously not been paying enough attention to the creative protests of the pugnacious right wing. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

You know what to do, Barack. Earn that prize!

Read more...

Mahalo, Obama!

Happy birthday to you

Today is the birthday of our first Hawaiian president. Barack Hussein Obama was born on this day in Honolulu back in 1961.

We live, however, in such interesting times that a big chunk of the Republican Party's members cannot accept the simple fact of the president's island nativity. I think that perhaps John McCain is to blame.

More to the point, it may be McCain's parents who sparked the current unpleasantness. It was their fault, of course, that Mrs. John McCain, Jr., bore John McCain III in Panama. Decades later, the U.S. Senate decided that John III was indeed a “natural born citizen” in the sense required by the U.S. Constitution and adopted a resolution to put their opinion on record.

The Senate resolution did not have the force of law, but it reinforced the consensus that John Sidney McCain III was eligible to run for president. But even while the issue was being laid to rest for the presumptive Republican nominee, new attention was being paid to the birth status of the Democratic front-runner. It shouldn't have been an issue, Obama having been born in the United States, but the paranoid fringe was creative enough to theorize that perhaps he had lost his U.S. citizenship when he moved to Indonesia with his mother and adoptive father. The nuttier types began to theorize that perhaps Obama had been born in his birth father's nation of Kenya.

The Obama campaign was clever enough to have a webpage on its campaign site devoted to shooting down scurrilous rumors. Obama obtained an official birth certificate from the state of Hawaii, a legal state document sufficient for all purposes, which his staff then posted on his campaign website. Obama and company then ignored the whining of those who remained dissatisfied, which was wise, because it tamped down the level of attention and put the issue away except among those crazies (like Alan Keyes) who weren't going to vote for him anyway (or for John McCain, for that matter, since he wasn't conservative enough for them).


Now that Obama's presidency is a reality, the disaffected conservative minority (a larger group than the purely insane fringe) is susceptible to anything that might assuage their loss to a moderately liberal candidate. Even more susceptible than anyone would have suspected earlier, creating a situation that feeds on itself. The flames are being fanned by the propagandists who work for the GOP Ministry of Truth. (In difficult economic times, it's easier than making an honest living.)

Lou Dobbs: And this can be dismissed with the production of one simple little document, and that's a birth certificate.

Dustbunny: Producing the real birth certificate would solve all the questions.

TraderRob: I have always wondered why BO didn't simply produce his long form certificate and be done with it.

Douglas V. Gibbs: All he has to do is show proof, and be done with it.

No, none of these statements are true. Perhaps last year Obama could have formally requested that Hawaii dig into its vaults and publish his original “long-form” birth certificate, assuming that it still exists in the state's archives, but that would have been giving too much credence to the nutjobs. So he didn't. Good call.

If he did it now, in response to the fake controversy ginned up by right-wing crazies and those who pander to them, it would not work. It would be denounced as a forgery (no matter what) and people would claim that it simply took the Obama people a year to create a high-quality fake. (I hear it's being prepared in Canada, if you believe Free Republic—which I never do.)

We rode it out last year. We're going to have to do it again this year. There's no help for it, except perhaps for the recreational showering of contempt on the losers who embrace it.

So happy birthday, Mr. President! And if you get us national health care and a rational budget policy, the rest of us can be happy, too. (Especially if you drop the Bush-era signing statements and the notion that the president can order unlimited detention!)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Read more...

The Rite of Confirmation Bias

How golden is your rectangle?

Catholic adolescents in the United States typically go through the rite of confirmation in their early teens. The diocesan bishop comes to your local parish and randomly quizzes some of the confirmation candidates to verify that they have been properly catechized (I say “randomly,” but no bishop goes out of his way to create an incident by calling on the visibly clueless). For many young Catholics, the confirmation quiz, whether they were called upon or not, is a kind of exit interview. Attendance at both catechism and mass drops dramatically after achieving confirmation. All done! (Except maybe for Christmas and Easter. And weddings and funerals.)

In my day (45 years ago), after the quiz and the formal administration of the sacrament, the bishop would also give each candidate a limp little slap on the cheek in token of the pain of human existence. Perhaps it's still done, but I haven't been to a confirmation in decades.

Two years ago, I read Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. It is a very silly book, loaded down with distortions of Catholic history and dogma (which I wouldn't have thought needed any additional twisting or distortion). Brown likes to titillate his readers with revelations of supposedly factual esoterica. It's the old “based on a true story” marketing gimmick. Not content to confine himself to religious fiction, Brown also dabbles in mathematical fiction. After reading The DaVinci Code, I wrote a post about the golden ratio nonsense it contains. In Phi: Good to the last decimal, I explained in some detail that Brown's main character offered many demonstrably untrue statements concerning the golden ratio as if they were recognized scientific facts. The golden ratio, or “phi,” is supposedly deeply embedded in our esthetic sensibilities, but it's all a crock.

Nevertheless, like any popular myth, the golden ratio canard continues to have plenty of believers. An anonymous commenter posted his testimony in a response to my original article. Read it closely. It is a marvelous example of confirmation bias.

I use phi alot. Not because it somohow magically looks good, but because it WORKS ON PEOPLE. Just look at ALL apple products. Open your photoshop, tak some golden ruler made of golden rectangles, blend it and start some measuring. Old ipod is best for this, not iphone. You will see very quickly how they do their GREAT design, which looks easy on the first look, but many people says, there is some hidden beauty in their products. And yes, there is. All their measurements are based on phi. Sometimes not exactly to spice it up, but many times yes. Check spaces around keyboard on the new macbook pro, just check it. And don't tell me now, that phi doesn't work. It works if you know how to use it and where. My opinion is that phi in art is redundant. Nothing more, nothing less. I could live without it in art. But in graphics which is supposed to make me some money? - Here is the right segment for it

Anonymous declares that golden rectangles (those whose sides have the proportion 1 to 1.618) “works on people” in some mystical (though not “magical”) fashion. Presumably this exact proportion elicits involuntary appreciation from viewers and is Apple's secret weapon. Secret weapon, that is, if one considers the iPod, not the iPhone. (Pity, that!) Does Anonymous care that Apple strays from the golden ratio even in its iPod family?


Anonymous is already busily filtering the data. “All their measurements are based on phi,” he says. Unless, of course, they're not: “Sometimes not exactly to spice it up but many times yes.” And therefore many times no.

Martin Gardner famously debunked the same sort of nonsense about the Great Pyramid in Giza by whipping up a similar whole-cloth mythology for the Washington Monument in D.C. It always works the same way: One collects huge amounts of data and then filters out anything that doesn't fit. If the original collection is large enough, the residue is certain to be quite impressive to those who don't know any better.

Anonymous made his task easier by laying claim to golden ratio efficacy even in the absence of the golden ratio. That really opens things up. Consider what happens, if we are allowed to fudge the ratio in a golden rectangle by 5% or 10%. We get an impressive array of rectangles that are “close” to golden. With a loophole that big, it becomes easy to generates lots of compliant examples. The variation comes perilously close to turning even the iPhone golden. Behold!

Read more...

All over coffee

Would you like a splash of bigotry with that?

When I was a bored youngster, tagging along in my mother's wake on shopping trips, I used to pay more attention to the labels in the grocery story. It was the only reading material at hand. At some point, I asked Mom the meaning of the little logo that was discreetly included on many, but not all, of the packages.

“Mom, what's this mean? Is the cereal made from oats grown on the Circle K ranch?”

She looked where I was pointing and quickly smothered a laugh.

“No, honey. That symbol means the food is kosher.”

I was still in the dark. Until that point, I had thought that kosher was a word used only in negation (“That's not kosher!”), such as when you caught your brother cheating at a game. It occupied a very small spot in my vocabulary.

“I don't get it. What does it mean if food is ‘kosher’?”

“The kosher symbol tells Jewish people that the food is prepared according to their dietary rules, but I don't know what those rules are. It can be complicated.”

“But it's okay for us to buy it, too?”

“Sure, sweetheart. Anyone can buy kosher food. In fact, some people like to buy kosher products just because the rules are awfully strict. They figure the food will be better.”

That made sense, because otherwise the store shelves were loaded down with more kosher products than our synagogue-free Central Valley town could support. Most of the “Circle K” stuff was being snatched up by goyim, no question.

For some reason, I didn't ask the logical follow-up. At least, I have no recollection of doing so. I did not ask my mother if any of the labels or symbols indicated that the products were intended for Catholics (or more generic Christians, for that matter). It was probably besides the point anyway. I already knew that Catholics could eat anything they wanted, except for meat on Fridays. Only a silly little boy would have asked such a question.

Oh? Well, guess what! The happy day of Catholic labeling is at hand. No joke!

That is, as best I can tell it's not intended to be a joke. The risible aspects of the scheme, however, are undeniable. Check this out:

The mission of The OVerus Organization is to mark products and services that respect Christian values with The OVerus Emblem, enabling good stewards to choose those consistent with their values.

Can you guess what it takes to “respect Christian values”? (I'll bet you can!) OVerus president Keith Miklas offers some happy-talk about how his company is taking a positive approach. That is, OVerus is in the business of encouraging the purchase of certain items rather than discouraging purchases of certain items.

That's true as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. OVerus is really all about boycotting companies that support equal rights (or rites) for gay people or any formulation of reproductive rights that includes abortion. In their own words,

RESPECT FAMILY VALUES. A product or service must respect family values with its community involvement policies and charitable contributions:

(1) RESPECT LIFE. Contributions to abortion providers are prohibited.
(2) RESPECT BIBLICAL MARRIAGE. Contributions to non-Christian marriage groups are prohibited.

I used to think it was just a little bit tacky when some businesses would include a Jesus fish in their advertisements in the Yellow Pages, but OVerus is taking Christianity to entirely new levels of commercial endeavor. Imagine being able to limit your purchases to products from anti-gay and anti-choice companies!

The vision of The OVerus Organization is to offer an OVerus product or service in every category.

The OVerus website dangles the prospect of heaping up earthly treasure before the corporations it hopes to lure into the fold. Miklas uses the power of his college degree in math (yes, I know; this embarrasses me) to run the numbers:

Per 2001 U.S. census data, 77% of adults in the U.S. identify themselves as Christian (159,506/207,980). In 1999, the size of the U.S. retail coffee market was 108 million people, and valued at $9.2 Billion. It follows that the Christian coffee market is (0.77)(108) = 83 million people, and worth (0.77)($9.2) = $7 Billion annually.

If every Christian in the U.S. switches to OVerus brands, then the OVerus market will equal all $7 Billion. Conservatively, this projection is based on the assumption that one out of five will switch, resulting in an OVerus Retail Coffee Market Value of (0.2)(83) = 17 million people, or (0.2)($7.0) = $1.4 Billion.

It's a compelling prospect, isn't it? (Assuming, of course, that Christians drink coffee at a rate proportional to their numbers within the population.)

Did you perhaps wonder, just for a moment, why Miklas chose coffee for the product in his example? It's not a bad choice, certainly, but one doesn't have to search too far before discovering it's the only logical choice.

That's because a brand of coffee is currently the only OVerus-approved product.

The coffee in question is Esthers Coffee. It's not available in stores, although Miklas has big plans for it.

He should. Miklas is the founder of Esthers Coffee. OVerus is actually a spin-off from the effort to market a “pro-life” brand of coffee. For some odd reason, Esthers Coffee has yet to win the business of one-fifth of Christian coffee-drinkers and the $1.4 billion represented by that market niche. It may have been wakeful coffee-laced nights that brought Miklas to the realization that he needed to play in a larger arena. OVerus is the peculiarly sectarian result.

OVerus. Probably not coming soon to a market near you.

Read more...

The rose-colored sixties

Improving your memory

Does nostalgia improve with age? It must. My father has grown ever more adept at revising his recollections of the past. It's now reached the point that Dad is pining away for the sixties. Remember the sixties? I do. The JFK, King, and RFK assassinations. Vietnam. Nixon. Miseries and disasters. The only thing I liked about the sixties was the space program, which climaxed in 1969 with the Apollo 11 moon landing. But Dad sees it differently:

I remember the good old days and that is not just a saying, They really were the good old days.

This brought back a lot of memories and I enjoyed it. I hope you enjoy it too.

Dad

---

The “good old days”? I certainly hope my kid brother is keeping an eye on our father, because dear old Dad is losing it.

Attached to his message was a link to a video. The title is Back to the Sixties. I watched it in perplexity. This was what sparked Dad's nostalgia?

The video opens with “A Summer Place” as its soundtrack. Lines of text appear on the screen, informing us that the sixties were a time when a McDonald's hamburger was only 15 cents. Unemployment was 5.5% and the minimum wage was $1.00 (per hour, I presume). So far, so good, I suppose. The video also pointed out that a teacher's annual salary was $5,174. Ouch! The dollar was worth a lot more back then, but I'm still not impressed. But maybe Dad liked the idea of low-paid teachers. (He should look at my sister's salary. It's still true.)

The soundtrack switched to Elvis singing “It's Now or Never” as The King's discharge from the U.S. Army was celebrated. Was Dad an Elvis fan? Actually, Dad's reaction to Elvis on the television was more along the lines of “Goddam hick! Shaking his hips like some kind of sissy!”

Okay, so there was one little glitch in the comforting retrospective. But why should anyone continue to resent the long-dead Elvis? Perhaps the video has other delights in store for us.

Indeed, it begins to roll out a cavalcade of sports greats from the sixties. Baseball players. Football heroes. And:

“Muhammad Ali was The Greatest!”

Oops! To quote my father from that two-fisted era: “That goddam Cassius Clay is a draft-dodger who hates this country! And white people!”

But now the video has moved on to Chubby Checker singing “The Twist” while teenagers jump about on American Bandstand.

“They call that dancing? What the hell is that? They look like spastics!”

It's the British Invasion of 1964 as The Beatles sing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I remember my father's reaction to The Beatles when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show:

“Goddam beatniks! Look at their hair! Do they think they're girls?”

“The House of the Rising Sun” plays while the video producer's favorite TV shows of the sixties are displayed. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In? There must be some mistake.

“‘Sock it to me’? What the hell does that mean? It's probably some goddam obscene suggestion is what that is.”

The Zombies are singing “She's not There” as favorite entertainments from the sixties continue to be displayed. Movies! Camelot! West Side Story! (Sorry, no movie musicals for Dad, please!) The Dave Clark Five takes over with “Glad All Over.” Then it's the Surfaris with “Wipeout.” The video is paying tribute to the great surfing fad of that decade.

“Goddam beach bums!”

The video switches to Chantay's “Pipeline” and now we're finally confronting Vietnam. And, OMG, there he is! Nguyen Ngoc Loan is using his handgun to summarily execute a captured Viet Cong prisoner. It's the infamous news photo that encapsulated the brutality of the war. (Only the naked little girl running from a napalm strike is more famous.) Ah, the good old sixties! Perhaps the video has lost the thread of its own argument. At least its list of assassinations includes Malcolm X along with Dr. King and the Kennedy brothers. Dad was actually pleased back when Malcolm got hit. And he wasn't certain it was a bad thing with King, either. A pity about the Kennedy boys, though.

The Supremes are singing “Stop! In the Name of Love” while the video takes note of the bizarre unisex fashions of the era. Unisex?

“Goddam queers!”

The Lovin' Spoonful sings “Summer in the City” while the screen displays the happy thought that back then “Foreigners learned and spoke English.” That's right, by golly! (Well, except for my grandmother. I don't recall Dad complaining about his mother's failure to learn English. And now it's much too late to oppress and insult her in the way that patriotic Americans should!)

When I hear Buffalo Springfield singing “For What It's Worth,” I'm thinking: This is a protest song! Dad hates protest songs! (“Goddam protesters! They need a bath and a haircut!”)

And it doesn't get any better when The Fifth Dimension launches into “Aquarius” during the tribute to Woodstock and “Hair” and the psychedelic era.

“Goddam hippies!”

For someone like me, who was a teenager in the sixties, the video was weirdly evocative. But I was conscious of it being a nasty time and wondering what was going wrong. I'd never want to go back there. In his old age, though, Dad has mellowed out and thinks he's singing along with the sixties. Maybe he should watch it again and this time actually pay attention.

Or maybe not.

Read more...

Who's your papa?

Popes in America

The Eternal Word Television Network is knocking itself out with coverage of Pope Benedict's visit to the United States. And why not? Benedict XVI is the chief executive, prophet-in-residence, and officially infallible official of the religion EWTN was organized to promote. It's quite an event when the man at the top of your hierarchical pyramid comes calling. On his birthday, too!

I heard some snippets of EWTN's coverage of the papal visit. The commentators alternated between gushing accounts of Benedict's progression through his itinerary and pettish whining over the insufficiently deferential coverage in the secular media. (If only the CNN reporters would kneel, bow their heads, and beat their chests as they extolled the virtues of Benny Hex.) One EWTN talking head especially decried the mass media's insistence on referring to recent Church scandals and reporting about dissidence within Catholic ranks. Said this commentator (as best as I can recall), “I wish they would stop talking about divisions in the Church. There are no divisions. There are observant Catholics and non-observant Catholics.” It's very impolite of the secular media to take dissident Catholics seriously (especially when such Catholics are mean enough to deny their weekly contributions to criminal enterprises like the Boston diocese until the inaptly named Cardinal Law was driven out of town).

The pope is a symbol of Church unity. To object to the pope's policies is deny one's duty to submit to his leadership. There is, nevertheless, a great deal of casual dissidence among American Catholics, most of whom confine their rebellion to keeping their fingers crossed while popping contraceptives. More militant dissidents can sometimes be found carrying pickets in front of cathedrals and agitating for the ordination of women and other unlikely reforms. But they're pikers. The real dissidents have their own pope. Or popes.

The business of rival popes—or “antipopes”—has been in the doldrums a long time. The Catholic Church itself seldom bothers to list any antipopes after Felix V, who contended with Rome in the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, there are some fascinating characters around today who insist that they—and not Joseph Ratzinger—are the authentic pope of the Roman Catholic Church. If you don't fancy Benedict XVI, you could always pledge your allegiance one of these fascinating schismatics: popes in America!

The old guy

Perhaps the most conventional of today's antipopes is Lucian Pulvermacher, a harmless old man whose followers style themselves as the True Catholic Church. The Roman church, in their view, went off the rails when John XXIII convened Vatican II. Pulvermacher's congregation regard him as the true vicar of Christ, faithful to the traditions supposedly abandoned by the Romish popes (who are therefore disqualified from office and not true popes at all). After staging a papal election in Montana (in which he was the only candidate), Pulvermacher adopted the name Pius XIII, making explicit his claim of being the successor of Pius XII, whom he regards as the last legitimate pope.

Pulvermacher is reportedly living quietly and out of the public eye in Washington State. His followers are few in number and it's unlikely that Benedict XVI loses much sleep over the activities of his obscure rival.

The young guy

If Pulvermacher is not your cup of schismatic tea, then perhaps David Bawden has that necessary extra bit of amusing eccentricity. Bawden lives in Kansas and was elected pope with the assistance of his parents and a few friends. His wackiness has attracted more media attention than Pulvermacher's low-key antipapacy. Bawden uses the papal name Michael I and doesn't fret unduly over his lack of holy orders. While Pulvermacher is at least a renegade priest, Bawden has never been authorized to celebrate the Catholic mass. He missed out on ordination when he was dismissed from a seminary. One might think this would handicap someone who aspires to the papacy, but nothing daunts David Bawden. He presides from a throne in his parents' thrift shop.

Michael I generated some excitement in 2006 when he hinted that he might move from Kansas to relocate near some of his devotees in Colorado. That all came to naught when it was decided that it would be better for the antipope's followers in Colorado to move to Kansas instead. Unfortunately for the Colorado schismatics, they have been unable to sell their homes despite efforts on their behalf by their preferred pope. In flogging one of the properties, Bawden unselfconsciously wrote “This is where Pope Michael stays, when he is in Colorado. This is a fine family with young boys.” But still no sale.

Read more...