will you be my president again?

"Strength and wisdom are not opposing values." - BC 7/26/04

the robot has learned to think for itself! and he's got a health care plan!

If you're a Bush-hater that just can't get enthusiastically behind John Kerry because he seems like, well, a robot, then you definitely need to read this article from the New Yorker by Philip Gourevitch. He may still seem like a robot, but a likable one like in Bicentennial Man, not like those evil robots in I, Robot. Such evil, evil robots. Such terrible, terrible movies.

Disclaimer: It's long. Very long. Over 12,000 words long. But it's engaging for all of those 20 pages in 12-point font that it takes up in Word.
Sidenote: Kerry's sppeches seem infinitely better when you read the text as opposed to hearing him speak, don't they? Bush's do too, for that matter, but for different reasons. Kerry isn't an engaging speaker but when you read his ideas, they make sense. Bush, on the other hand, is a retard. But when you read the text of what he said, he doesn't sound quite as much like a retard as when you hear him actually trying to say it.

the existential meaning behind Necessary Roughness

When watching Necessary Roughness for the millionth time on television last weekend, I was struck by the existential crisis faced by the University portrayed in the movie. Now, I'm of course not the first to recognize that when Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos changed its name to Texas State University, it also became the heretofore fictional University portrayed in that terrible movie that somehow entertained me when I was a kid. But what I did notice when I watched it this time was that in the first game of the season, Texas State University played the Southwest Texas Bobcats. Which of course is the former name of the current real-life Texas State. And the Bobcat mascot is the longstanding mascot of both Southwest Texas and Texas State, though the Texas State in the movie called themselves the Armadillos. Furthermore, after changing its name to Texas State last fall, the university played its football season and then promptly fired both its football coach and athletic director for recruiting violations, which of course was the very reason that Texas State had to recruit such a rag tag buch of morons in the movie.

So let's see what we can make of this: Well, Texas State and Southwest Texas were different schools in the movie because they played each other. Except that they are the same school in real life, just with a different identity at different points in time. So I think the game in the movie was a metaphor for internal struggle over self-identity -- you know, like in Fight Club. Southwest Texas won the game in the movie so you would think that their identity prevailed in real life. And since the movie was made in 1991, it clearly did for 12 years. But then the Edward Norton character (Texas State) wanted back in control because Tyler Durder (SWT) was getting too out of control - it became a huge party school. So then Texas State retook power in the Fall of 2003 after a struggle, but it couldn't rid itself of all the remnants of SWT - and really couldn't without killing itself because they were so intertwined. So, like Edward Norton's character when he inexplicably managed to shoot himself in the jaw and largely destroy Tyler's dominance without killing himself, Texas State destroyed most of SWT. Except that in Fight Club, Project Mayhem's destruction went on even after Tyler was gone as a reminder that he wasn't completely "gone." And in the case of Texas State, SWT isn't totally gone, either. The Bobcat mascot lives on in the hearts and minds of Texas State students as a reminder of their wild days. And the firing of the coach and AD clearly is in line with all that was wrong with Edward Norton's character - the things he owned ended up owning him.

So really, you could call Necessary Roughness the Fight Club of its day. And you'd be a moron if you did.

who (on first) knew what (on second)?

There's a great article on Slate by Fred Kaplan asking questions about what Bush knew and why he didn't know more about the WMD's. The point of the article is really that, when the CIA assembled all its intelligence reports (some of them conflicting) and came to the conclusion that Iraq had WMD's, the dissent in the 93-page report was just as important as the conclusion. The problem was, it's hard to fit that dissent into a 1-page summary that you give to the President to read. And by the way, the White House is - not surprisingly - refusing to release the summary.

Look, I can deal with a President making a bad decision as long as he was fully informed and believed that what he was doing was right. I might vote against him for making that bad decision, but I can respect the decision that was made as righteous. But when a president either doesn't make an effort to understand the full breadth of knowledge available to him or does understand it and still makes a decision he knows isn't right, I cannot respect that decision. I cannot forgive Clinton for not stopping the Rwandan genocide despite the fact that he knew enough of what was going on to know that people were dying at an alarming rate. And I cannot forgive Bush for creating a White House culture that only told him what he expected to hear.

jimy williams gets fired only after his terrible karma helps lose the All-Star game

Fucking National League. Every year, I get my hopes up that this is the year that the league I've followed since I was six will win the All-Star game. And every year, it seems, I'm disappointed. Somehow, even when the National League has Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Albert Pujols, and Scott Rolen in the same lineup - four players better than everyone on the AL team other than A-Rod - manages to lose every year. This year, it was Roger Clemens phoning it in and giving up six fucking runs in the first inning. He hasn't done that ONCE in his entire career. Until now, of course. I know I shouldn't care this much about the All-Star game. And I wouldn't. Except that the National League NEVER wins. Since I started following baseball in 1988, the American League has won 12 All-Star games. And the National League has won 3. And there was a tie in 2002 that we will never speak of again. One of the three NL wins were in extra innings and only one was by more than 1 run. In that span, then AL has outscored the NL 95-59! The AL is on a 7 game win streak (not including the tie, which we will never speak of again). That means that the NL hasn't won since 1996. Give me something guys!

On the bright side, the Astros fired their manager, Jimy Williams today. And then promptly replaced him with Phil Garner, what has a sparkling career managerial record of 708-802. Yes, that's right. more losses than wins. In fairness, he did manage the Brewers and Tigers, both of which suck. But good managers can make bad teams decent and Garner...well, I don't know. Frankly, I don't care. I just wanted Jimy Williams the fuck out of town. I normally don't jump on the "Dump the coach" bandwagon because, around here, any time a team loses, everyone jumps on that bandwagon (see Mack Brown, who has led UT football to the greatest 4- or 5-year span of winning in 40 years, and still gets shit for not being able to win 'the big one' - whatever the hell that means. Isn't A&M a big game? Hasn't he beaten OU 3 times out of 7? He's beaten the shit out of Nebraska over and over again, even back when they were good. You can say, oh no, those were because he had Major Applewhite, but if you give him blame for losses, then you have to give him credit for wins). Anyway, tangent over. I still thought that Jimy needed to go. He was the worst manager I'd ever seen in Houston - and we had Terry Collins and Art Howe. He had his chance. He finished second both full years he was here after the Astros won their division 4 of the previous 5 years under Larry Dierker, who was fired for not being able to win in the playoffs (the "big one"). Well, guys, you can't win in the playoffs if you don't even make it, can you? Why didn't we see this coming? Jimy got fired from the Red Sox in the middle of 2001. Not surprising if you ask me, but here's what is. The Red Sox were 12 games OVER .500 when he got fired. No one gets fired in the middle of the season when he has a winning team! His players and the general manager hated him, that's why he got fired. At this point, there's probably nothing that can happen (save for a miracle turnaround and an absolute freefall by the Cardinals that will get us the division, but we're still only 3.5 games out of the wild card and something had to be done. If nothing else, we'll get a change of pace and anything that changes the pace we've been on is welcomed by me.

all cricket, all the time

Sorry to write about Cricket so much, but does anyone remember the episode of Sports Night where they get a wire report of some phenomenal cricket performance that's destroys a world record or something and so Jeremy feels like they have to report it because it's such an amazing feat. "He did something that no one else in the world has ever done before. We have to." But then, none of them know what the hell the guy did. Something to do with wickets. Yeah, that's how I feel with this article from BBC Sport (not sports, sport). I just don't understand.

Speaking of Sports Night, what a great show that was. Hey, they're bringing back the Family Guy, why not Sports Night? Peter Krause can do double duty with Six Feet Under and that play he's doing. Felicity Huffman's run on Frasier is over and she's doing jack shit right now. Joshua Malina...is he still on the West Wing? Oh well, they're both Aaron Sorkin shows, he can share. Josh Charles? Josh Charles hasn't done anything worth mentioning in his entire career other than Sports Night and Dead Poets Society (oh and Christina Applegate's love interest who works at the hot dog place in Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead). He should jump at the chance. Sabrina Lloyd has no career. Whatsoever. Come back, Natalie! Robert Guillaume had a stroke when Sports Night was still on the air, probably influencing his subsequent film choices. I don't know...can we tear him away from The Land Before Time VIII to rekindle the Sports Night magic? No, seriously, he was in The Land Before Time VIII.

Come on, we can do this! I need intelligent television, damnit! So little Sopranos, so much Yes, Dear.....

this guy needs a tv show

This is the best story I've seen in a long time. Apparently the Education Secretary of California, Richard Riordan, was visiting a library in a publicity event and a preschool girl named Isis came up to him and asked if he knew that her name meant "Egyptian Goddess." Instead of correcting her like a normal asshole and telling her that Isis actually IS an Egyptian goddess, he inexplicably replied, "It means stupid dirty girl." She repeated herself and then he said, "Hey, that's nifty." By the way, this was all videotaped.

Apparently, this guy has a history of doing stuff like this. When he was mayor of Los Angeles, he greeted hunger strikers outside of his office while eating a hamburger. But it gets better. I can phrase this no better than the wire report on Salon. so here it is:

A group of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, planned to protest Riordan's remarks at the Capitol Thursday.

But the organizer, Democratic state Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, canceled the protest after an apparent mix-up over the girl's racial background.

Dymally was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News Thursday saying the child was "a little African-American girl. Would he (Riordan) have done that to a white girl?"

The girl is white, with blonde hair.

What else can this story possibly have? It's utterly fantastic! If we can get a little Schwarzenegger in there, proclaiming the comment "unacceptable in any context" while groping a woman's chest, it would be perfect. Oh wait, that happened too (though I made up the part about the groping. What can I say, I got greedy).

a new world order to call my very own

In the most recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Niall Ferguson wrote an article titled, "A World Without Power" (requires registration). The main thrust of the argument was that we shouldn't allow ourselves to slip into a world without a hegemon because non-governmental organizations (NGO's) would then essentially dominate the global political landscape. His main issue is with religion predominating over secular government, but he also gives the examples of terrorist groups and criminal syndicates. If a hegemon does not exist to organize the dominant global political order to fight (in the case of terrorism and crime) or subdue (in the case of religion) malevolent NGO's, then we'll regress to a world of Crusades and Inquisitions.

I sort of buy that. Maybe it's because I'm scared to death of organized religion and he's playing on my fears. But he makes a good point. When there's a global, political power vacuum, there are going to be a lot of grabs for power. Who says that all those hands have to be nation-states? And if we're at a point at which no state is strong enough to create a hegemonic stability, who's to say that an NGO that tends to unite across national borders couldn't dominate the political landscape and become that hegemon? The Catholic Church did it for a long time in Europe, until the rise of the nation-state, and Ferguson's argument that we could regress to something similar is slightly overstated (perhaps intentionally so), but is nevertheless substantially valid.

But this made me think about a "which is worse" scenario: 1) A multi-polar world (a la the 2 or 3 decades leading up to WWI) in which competing states all think they're capable of being hegemons and thus try desperately to wield power while preventing competitors from doing so; or 2) The "apolar" world described by Ferguson in his article, in which NGO's and radical organizations proliferate and dominate. The apolar world wouldn't necessarily be anarchic, just dominated by a different type of hegemon than we're used to. Multi-polar worlds lend themselves to huge state conflicts (like WWI, for instance). But an apolar world would probably have great violent conflicts, as well, just not necessarily state-sponsored ones. So my conclusion is, I have no idea which is worse. But I can reasonably speculate as to what system is best.

I know we all hate the "arrogant policeman that always knows what's best for you better than you do" position in which Bush has placed us in the world political structure. But it's not the fact that we're the dominating force in the world that's the problem. It's the fact that Bush is abusing the strength that our status as unipolar hegemon affords him. I believe that the world needs a dominating force in political and other international affairs in order to function well. Those of us who pretend to know stuff about this call that the Hegemonic Stability Theory. I also tend to think that a bipolar world can be just as stable as a unipolar world while providing checks on the abuse of power by one of the hegemons. I don't mean that we need another antagonist power, such as the Soviet Union, to counteract us and to provide a stark opposition to American hegemony. I mean, rather, that I would welcome a powerful international political force that would counterbalance rather than counteract our power. I think the EU has the best possibilities for providing such a force -- on a grand scale, they are friendly and not directly antagonistic, but if they were powerful enough, they wouldn't just go along with whatever we say -- but they have problems, as Niall Ferguson points out.

He says that they will have trouble exerting more power in the future because their relative strength in the world is waning. He attributes this in large part to the dramatic aging of their population. The older your population gets, the smaller it gets and, generally, the less economic power you have. Ferguson thus says that the EU needs to up their immigration rates to at least that of the United States if they ever want to gain hegemonic power. A problem he ignores, however, is that immigration to European countries is much different than immigration to the United States. European countries are largely homogeneous, and the U.S. is, well, not even close. Almost every country in the EU has a distinct culture that would lose some relevance if immigration was allowed in greater masses. Insofar as the United States has a culture, it is a culture of multiculturalism. It's a lot easier for us to accept immigrants than it is for European countries. That said, if the EU ever wants to become a world power on the scale of the U.S., it has to start thinking of itself as a union first, and as individual states second. I know that's U.S.-centric thinking (the only way you can succeed is to be more like us), but there has to be some sort of unified action that no individual country can contradict if the EU ever wants any respect. So accepting an immigration bump is probably what Europe has to do.

Ideally, this would be my New World Order (conspiracy theorists beware!), along with regional hegemons that guide the various other regions of the world and that are friendly to the global hegemons. For instance, Brazil or Argentina in Latin America, Japan or (in the next few years) China in Asia, and maybe (if they get their acts together) Saudi Arabia and Iran (yes, Iran) in the Middle East. The point is, we're doing okay right now as the only hegemon in the world, but it can't last forever. And you can already feel it slipping. We have to prepare for what's next. And I don't want it to be a multi-polar or apolar world.

So yeah, this blog post is going to change everything.