The Thomas Chronicles

The Justice Department Pseudo-Controversy

Are the Democrats ready to have a full-on Constitutional battle over the firing of 8 District Attorneys? More and more, they’re using the thin pretext of this concocted scandal to commit a frontal assault on the Office of the Presidency. Apparently, they were dismayed attacking the President through the War Powers Act. Instead the Democrat controlled Congress is trying to emasculate the Presidency by limiting the Executive authority to hire and fire people; thereby, eroding the power of the Executive Branch.

There is no getting around the fact that the President needs people he can trust around him to execute his policies. Is he supposed to have people undermine him all the time? How can anyone govern effectively like that?

Perhaps I’m over reacting. For the moment we’re only talking about District Attorneys, but the Democrats are blowing this up to a full-blown scandal when there has been no wrongdoing. So a few folks got the can. Big freakin’ deal. I see it all the time in the corporate world.

I don’t know much about the nuances of the law here. Perhaps on a technicality, maybe Gonzales acted inappropriately. But for the House to use its power of subpoena dig up some dirt on the President through his proxies… this just reeks of a glutton’s thirst for power.

Am I missing something here? Who knows? Maybe our honorable Congress is acting from real principles and convictions.

What do you think, dear Constant Reader?

Viruses and Life on Mars

Last night, some friends and I watched the introduction to Stephen King’s mini-series, “The Stand”. I know it probably offends an author’s vanity for someone to say that his best work occurred close to 40-odd years ago, but I don’t think much of his other works reach this level (I haven’t read them all yet).

Sorry, Mr. King, if you’re reading this (Yeah, right. Like he’d be reading my blog.), but I think you’ve hit on a concept with “The Stand” that would be really difficult to rival.

During the course of the show, we paused to discussed the fact that we don’t really know what a virus is. What? you might ask. People die of it every day, every minute across the globe.

Yep. Strange but true. These floating bundles of joy are exponentially smaller than a cell of bacteria, and they kill millions of people a year. And on occasions, their rampages across the globe make the antics of Hitler and Stalin and Mao pantywaists in comparison.

The Black Death… The Spanish Flu… Smallpox… Malaria… Chickenpox… The Marburg Virus…

All these deaths and sickness so ingrained into the human experience… and we can’t even tell if these things are alive!

We’re using science to answer a fundamentally metaphysical question: What is life?

Dovetailing into this quandary is all our excitement over the past decade over possible life on Mars. Every now and again, the History Channel has a special on possible life on Mars and lays out the “evidence”. (Yes, I said the History Channel. They couldn’t be bothered with real history, since they prefer being commercial spokesmen for tracters, toilets and beer. I mean, really, what does the history of the screwdriver have to do with anything? I get more history from the Discovery Channel. But I digress…)

The one simple question that’s never asked is: what is life? We’ve got to know what it is to identify it, right? We don’t even know what a virus is and it’s been killing us before history was written.

Curiosities and Paradoxes

Is it just me or does time seem to run a bit faster nowadays? Years feel like months. Months weeks. Weeks days. And days like hours.

On the one hand, the proliferation of all these personal powerful computing devices— PC’s, BlackBerries, Cellphones, and some MP3 players with more hard drive memory than my laptop— has made life much less labor intensive. Jobs that used to require three or four people to do would now require one person. Some jobs, most notably manufacturing jobs, now only require a few people on the assembly floor and a technician to manage all the robots. (Yes, folks. The loss of manufacturing jobs is not all outsourcing. Most of it is because of ROBOTS. You ever seen the assembly floor of a candy factory? More machine than man.)

Other the other hand, in tandem with all these new-fangled devices, people are moving increasingly faster and faster to the point of madness. The five minutes you saved by using your cellphone instead of running to the nearest pay phone you now spend rushing to your next appointment. The twenty minutes you saved by placing your presentation on your laptop rather than on a piece of cardboard now enables you to cram into your schedule two more appointments to your day.

Gee, how wonderful…

It’s like these things grease the skids into an ever manic existence.

A couple of generations ago, my friend’s grandfather stared at the ass of an ox for 16 hours a day at the end of a plow. With the time left over, he memorized the Bible, all of Shakespeare’s works, all the Federalist Papers, and the entire U.S. Constitution. He also raised his kids and read them to sleep each night; that is, after he checked their homework. All this and it was such a slower world.

The upside of this is that these trends seem to be cresting and is on the decline. I observe people starting to slow down. Perhaps sanity will follow.

Related Post:

ShrinkWrapped: Be careful what you wish for
Current World News: Virus Outbreak Sickened Over 150 Prison Guards and Inmates!
World History Blog: Planet of the Apes on the History Channel?

In the 1980’s, the BBC first aired a memorably episode of Yes, Prime Minister where the British Prime Minister, the right honorable James T. Hacker, attempted to manipulate his permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, into accepting his tax cuts by threatening him with a heavy increase in taxation of tobacco.

The episode was titled “The Smoke Screen“. One of the brilliant things about this show was that it illuminated the mundane, inane and complex inner workings of government and presented all of it in a humorous way. In this one episode in particular, in the constant war between the Civil Service and their political masters, Sir Humphrey refused the tax cut on principle, since, “traditionally, taxes aren’t raised by measuring the government’s financial needs, but by levying as much as it can before deciding what to spend it on.”

As a leverage on his proposed tax cuts, Hacker threatened to accept the anti-smoking lobby’s proposals to ban all tobacco advertisements and dramatically increase the taxes on tobacco. While acknowledging that the Treasury would dismiss the proposal out of hand, since the revenue from tobacco taxes are about £4 billion a year, he nevertheless made Sir Humphrey believe he’s going forward with the proposal.

Sir Humphrey counter-reasoned as follows (Wikipedia):

If those who die of smoking were to live to an advanced age, then it has been proven that they would cost the Treasury more in terms of pensions and benefit payments than it currently pays out in medical expenses. So in financial terms, he argues, it makes sense that they “continue to die at about the present rate.”

For the audience watching the show in 1986, all this talk was a moot point. Everyone knew that if you went after the tobacco interests, you were committing political suicide. Neither the government nor the people wanted to stop smoking. To do so was to halt the flow of billions of pounds (or dollars).

You can opt for short term increases in revenue by taxing smokers into oblivions until they stop puffing away, or you can let smokers continue to smoke and collect the revenue.

As we sit here in 2007 and with events playing out in reality remarkably like the proposals in this show, it seems the government never made a clear choice between the two options above. Our government crusaded against the “immortality of smoking” (the argument’s dubious at best) while fully expecting to receive large revenues from smokers.

The argument declaring the “immorality of smoking” is so trite as to be embarrassing.

“You are killing yourself,” they declared, even as many people douse their innards with poison every chance they get (it’s called alcohol).

“You’re killing others with second-hand smoke,” even if standing behind a car with the engine running is many times worse, and if the welfare of others is really your concern, then perhaps you should drive the speed limit and stop “aborting” babies.

“You’re making the tax payers pay for you when you get cancer and die!” even as people consume unhealthy amounts of sugar, making them a diabetic down the line; even as people dosy-do with many sexual partners heedless of the STD’s floating about— if we live long enough, there’s a cozy tax-paid hospital bed waiting for us all, that is unless you’re affluent or dirt poor.

So, I think the honest reason for imploring people to quit smoking is that doing so would make them feel better physically over the long haul (I quit just last year for this reason.). And the other honest reason for wanting people to quit is that anti-smokers hate the way it smells. Most arguments beyond this are people wanting to vent they bigotries on others, since neither race, sex nor sexual orientation is popular anymore as acceptable reasons for bashing someone.

Yahoo News reported this week that states have twisted themselves into a bind regarding their anti-smoking laws.

On the one hand state governments are pressured to outlaw smoking in everything but name by anti-smoking lobbies, other other hand state governments are being squeezed financially by the steady decrease in revenue by people quitting. Minnesota expects a drop of 1 percent in revenue a year, roughly $4-5 million a year– “and that is does not even take into account the potential effect of a statewide smoking ban.”

According to Yahoo News, “in 2005, tobacco taxes contributed $13 billion to state budgets,” and this doesn’t take into account the federal taxes levied.

Now as the gravy train starts to dry up for state and federal governments vis-a-vis tobacco, I have long speculated with friends what would be the next target, what else are they going to taxed into blithering submission? From recent legislation in New York regarding trans-fats, it increasingly looks like greasy foods are next on the menu.

This debased depravity in reasoning that allows people to indulge their intolerances against socially unacceptable behaviors such as smoking and eating MacDonald’s makes me wonder: Who’s on next? Who will the collective next turn against?

Or as Sir Humphrey Appleby said:

Sir Humphrey: Notwithstanding the fact that your proposal could conceivably encompass certain concomitant benefits of a marginal and peripheral relevance, there is a countervailing consideration of infinitely superior magnitude involving your personal complicity and corroborative malfeasance, with a consequence that the taint and stigma of your former associations and diversions could irredeemably and irretrievably invalidate your position and culminate in public revelations and recriminations of a profoundly embarrassing and ultimately indefensible character.

Hacker: Perhaps I can have a précis of that.
Sir Humphrey: There’s nicotine on your hands.

Related Posts:

Protein Wisdom: Colorado: from Cowboy individualism to Aunt Bea hyper-solicitiousnes

I once watched an interview of a German man, now in his high elderly years, remarking that when he lived in Nazi Germany, he remembered how the propaganda drenched every node, every corner of of their world. The relentless bombardment of Joseph Goebbels and his propaganda machine pierced down every street and stained every publication to where, when they called him to join the battlefront, he found it a welcome relief.

The strange thing about living in today’s hyper-linked world is that it seems we cannot escape the incessant politics of our times. It seems that nothing can be apolitical. If a minutiae of thought is uttered by a conservative, henceforth, all people who ascribe to that thought is a conservative. Likewise with all things liberal.

D’you believe that?

You a bleedin’ heart commie?

I think we left something back there when the counter-cultural revolution began that’s now almost lost to us. Civility and manners aren’t virtues we generate from thin air, nor can we suddenly resume and expect the kind of refinement we’ve seen from our past. They accumulate over time and with much practice.

Perhaps this is the fruition of a lifetime of indulged infantile selfishness from the Baby-Boomers who are now reaching their apex of power. (Who hasn’t heard all the whining on Capitol Hill. The President lied, misled, misled, misled! If it’s not perfect just the way I want it, then it’s rubbish! It’s no accident that most of the anti-war protesters on D.C. the other week were middle-aged former hippies.) Or perhaps this is the result of decades of ideological indoctrination in our schools, coupled to mindless, shouting television. The causes are too varied and too much to enumerate in detail here.

But there is so much hope still. God can snap His fingers and all these negative trends can disappear in a heartbeat if He grants us a revival. Who will tell Him no?

Last month during the manic seasonal Christmas shopping, I dodged in and out of strip malls and palatial indoor affairs, which we also call malls, on the presumption of searching for gifts. What I found instead were rows upon rows of homogenized, repetitious clothing and the dull monotony of stores offering the same thing.

Oh, to be sure, there were some variation. Some clothing logos shifted the alligator (or whatever) two inches to the left rather than to the right; some shoes and jackets had bronze-colored nailheads and they were a bit larger than the silver-colored nailheads; and some shirts had pockets…

Beyond just mere clothing, I also recently watched an old video from the 1980’s and marveled at how human they all look compared to us. The people I saw had dynamic personalities, and seemed possessed of more empathy than most of us. The typical “man on the street” interview evinced an intelligence that’s virtually vacant from much of academia. Heck, even the floozies from the 1980’s had more personality than our politicians (which ain’t saying much).

How we got from there to here? I dunno.

I suppose on some level, by general consensus, everyone decided that people should be predictable, and their behavior should conform to a checklist of personality traits. If you are a fashion dilettante, you would have X characteristics. If you are an artist, you have Y characteristics. If you are an athlete, you would have Z characteristics. Some mutually exclusive, some crossing various categories. That is to say, a businessman would not have the same personality traits as an artiste but would share some with an engineer. And so on.

None of this is real. They’re cartoons we draw for ourselves that fall apart with the least amount of scrutiny. The problem is that we believe these starched fictions. The right presentation, the right gesture and thought at the right time could earn one a good job, a vocal praise, perhaps even a interesting partner for the night– but they’re lies, they’re not real.

We’re like Cookie-cutter men baked and rolled out by the dozens; we’re not individuals, but dough molded by the thoughts of others, and we tend to change our flavors often. To this person we’re this. To another person we’re that.

Without even realizing it, people “short-circuit” when they see someone not conducting themselves according to the cartoon script.

I’ve seen one stranger say to another one, “I know you. You’re like so-and-so on TV.”

When the addressed person protested and said, “No, I’m not like that. I am myself,” the other threw a minor fit.

“Yes, you are. I know you.”

Unpredictability is not a desired characteristic, no matter what other people might say. The eerie part of all this is we find ourselves trying to make ourselves what they say we are… at times even gleefully…

I can make the unqualified statement that we are less human than our forefathers, and I shudder to think where we might go from here.

Far from saying, “it’s all bad,” however, we stand a pretty good chance of received another renewing revival in America. Periods in American history are punctuated by low troughs and sudden surges of Renaissance and Revival.

That low period in 1979 was one such low period. Who could have said in 1979 when it appeared that America had entered her twilight hours, with our embassies burning around the globe, riots erupting all across the nation, that within a decade the Berlin Wall would fall and freedom restored to a billion human beings? No one (except maybe President Reagan) believed it possible without the missiles flying.

I submit that we are in another such moment, and our Revival is entirely dependent on what we do now. It is entirely up to us to choose to pray from our misguided liberals/ Democrats and right-wingers/ Republicans. Do we pray for our enemies or shall our indulged resentments and irritations lead us to the thing we all most fear?

This, I submit, is the question before us.

But… but, what does it mean?

Off and on for two months, I’ve been wondering what is the purpose of all this blogging, aside from being fun. Is it to have people visit your site and coo at your writing? Is it to be influential and be part of the blog-happy citizenry, better known as amateur journalists?

Or is it to impress the folks you know? Hey man, d’ya check out my latest post? Yeah, that’s right. I wrote it myself.

Or do people, including myself, blog to climb the incline of self-importance? King of the mountain, baby. I’m gaining on it!

Perhaps bloggers want to have their own “online presence”. I don’t know what this amounts to, really. If you’re famous, people will look for further information about you and will eventually come across your blog. If you’re a anonymous nobody, like yours truly, why in tar-nation would anyone care what you would have to say to begin with? Then again, if a blogger is patient and makes a concerted effort to write well and “chase the link” till his blog becomes a veritable hub of hyperlinks, perhaps he’d be influential and people will search for his blog.

But that’s being “famous” after a certain fashion, ain’t it, if only for a microcosm of online commentating enthusiasts?

Some people begin their blogging sojourn into the cyberverse, and after a month or so, get bored from the non-attention his blog receives; then his blog recedes into the nameless, ephemeral electrons from whence it came. The internet abyss…

Others muddle along (like myself) who would like to be noticed but don’t; who goes on blogging anyway because… well, it’s pretty fun writing and posting things up.

At times I feel like my blog is a high-tech bulletin board, and I’m slapping a whole crap-load of canary post-its on the cork. Thumb tacks and ideas not included. Every once in a while, some stray person feels compelled to respond, and pin up some post-its of his own.

Maybe one day I’ll tire or run out of post-its, and sadly the bulletin board would have to go into the janitorial closet never to be seen by friendly eyes evermore (Will someone give me a handkerchief?) Who knows? Maybe this bulletin board might one day be part of a syndicated newspaper. Hey, it’s possible.

Until then, I’ll be tossing up thumb tacks and post-its or whatever suits my fancy. It’s my bulletin board. So for all you avid readers of my blog, sit back, don’t touch that mouse, and enjoy reading.

It’s only a blog after all.

Related Posts:

La Shawn Barber: Black.Woman.Mediocre.
And another La Shawn Barber:The Long Tail of the Blogosphere in Action

He sits comfortably in an armchair facing an interviewer. His fingers lightly press together in the form a triangle, and his legs cross at the knee. Calm, confident. He tilts into a slight recline and smiles a gleaming white smile as if in a kind of repose for avid cameras.

He is the Everyman. He is the prototypical American politician.

He is you. He is me.

The interviewer wants to be fair and asks a soft question. He smiles and discusses the sad, sordid state of our fair country. How the poor are downtrodden and disenfranchised, while the rich and famous receives caviar from caravans of golden sanitized spoons. FDA approved.

A genuine tear escapes and darkens a spot on his immaculate, sharply pressed suit.

The interviewer, lost in the vision of an America gone astray, chokes back the glistening in his eyes, already forgetting he asked about his position on military intervention.

He is the smooth, sincere Bill Clinton; the confident charismatic Barack Obama; the elegant Mitt Romney; the plebeian Rudy Giuliani; the aristocratic, un-centered John F. Kerry; the wide-eyed, business-like Hillary Clinton…

Evading faster than a speeding question, we can dodge honest (even harmless) inquiries with the ease that would make Superman seems as slow as a moving locomotive. We speak in vague generalities and enigmatic intentions.

When everything is political, the stuff that makes up relationships gets elbowed through the nearest exit. The magic and the manners (the WD-40 that smooths the rough edges of our ego), disappear and leave the cold calculation of self-advancement in its wake. People aren’t to be enjoyed but to be used as a means to further our careers, our societal standing, our blinding sense of self.

We are Noncommittalists, waiting to barter one person for another another– if the price is right. We are never for something. Never against. We hang idly by the rear, so if anything unravels at the front, we could always stand to welcome the other side.

We are terribly practical and terribly equivalent in our judgments. One is no better than the other. Who can say? Let us eat our food, watch our football, drink our beer and drive our cars. Pizza! Hey, who wants pizza?

We are cool calculating men, aren’t we? We, Noncommittalists.

It’s been an eerie New Years around my side of Southern California. I first noticed that something was out of place last night around nightfall. It was a clear sky with the air was crisp as a new sheet of paper, unfolded. In distant orange glow of the sun fall behind the houses, noticed that something was not quite right. Something that should have been there but wasn’t. Then it hit me.

No fireworks.

For the Fourth of July, last New Year’s Eve, and all the preceding celebrations that call for fireworks, my neighborhood was choked full of gunpowdered smoke and the sound of kids blazing away their sparklies. It’s common on those celebrations to hear the cracking of firecrackers tumbling along at all hours of the night until your eyes get red for want of sleep. We’d eventually resign and go outside to see the commotion. I’d light a cigarette (I just quit in October, by the way.) and watch the kids giggle and the parents laugh and barking at their kids to be careful. And as far as the eye can see, between the buildings all the way toward the foot of the mountains, you can see rockets shooting majestically into the deep, charcoal sky and set it ablaze. Explosions would ring across the whole LA basin.

Well, not last night. Nor this night.

No traffic. No loud stereos. No parties. Nothing.

If it was just my neighborhood, it wouldn’t be so queer, but as I drove around in the early afternoon today, there was barely a car on the road. With streets and major thoroughfares this empty, it was hard to imagine that we lived in a city of 13 million people.

Weird…