Month: January 2011

The Tea Party And The Neocons

Sean Scallon wants to heighten the contradictions:

One of the main theses of the Ron Paul 2008 Presidential campaign, where the genesis of the Tea Party movement lies, is the fact one cannot have a large military, national security and intelligence establishments and a small government at the same time. It doesn’t work that way contrary to what the politicians will have you believe. If Tea Partiers are serious … then they have to call for not just cuts in the Pentagon budget, but fundamental changes in the way the U.S. conducts foreign and military policy, in line with current budget, economic and resource realities. This is the challenge that must be presented to the Tea Partiers and must pushed upon them to meet. If they do so, then the Tea Parties can have a transformative effect on U.S. policy and politics and broaden itself to being a larger movement. If not, they simply pass into history as just another faction, another protest group…

The question is how to engage the Tea Party in this debate. They certainly can’t be reached via National Review, or the Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal all of which tread very gingerly around the anti-interventionist impulse that still runs through parts of the rank and file. Nor is Fox News willing to cede the cudgel of national security politics, having become so adept at wielding it. The same goes for talk radio. Breaking into the information cocoon is hard to do. But it’s what the Internet is there for.

The Birds, Ctd

Angry-Birds-in-Game-Play-1

A reader writes:

I'm sure Angry Birds is just as addictive and entertaining as everyone says. But am I alone in feeling queasy about a game in which the grudge-bearing heroes kill themselves by flying destructively into the buildings of their greedy oppressors?

I can't possibly be the first to ask this question. Maybe it's too obvious to comment on, but if so, I don't think everyone gets it. I haven't played the game. Is there a level in which the birds aim at twin towers, or a 5-sided bunker?

Basically, yes. But the angry birds do not seem in any way devout. Their madcap glee seems to bubble up from non-fundamentalist sources. There's a shallowness to them that somehow reassures.

If Limbaugh Replaced Madison

David Cole has penned the Conservative Constitution of the United States of Real America. A sample:

Article II. No person except a natural born Citizen who can produce video, photographic or eyewitness evidence of birth in a non-island American State shall be eligible to the Office of President.

The President shall faithfully execute the laws, except when, as Commander in Chief, he decides he'd really rather not.

A Journey, Not An Escape, Ctd

Roseedge

A reader writes:

The previous contributor wrote:

There isn't any doubt that psychedelics seem to bestow insights on those who take them. Almost everyone who trips says that they got a lot out of it. What I'm questioning is how real that is. I'm saying that as a person who has tripped many many times, and who has done so in the company of a great many people.

I think the real benefit of psychedelic experience is not the actual content of any particular "insights" provided to the user, but rather the visceral realization that our existence is by definition subjective.

Through the distortion of inputs to our brain from our five senses and the intellectual and emotional filters through which we normally process the world around us, the psychedelic experience points out in a deeply profound and thorough way that our normal perception of the world is always colored by context, our history, and our corporeal nature.  It forces the tripper to acknowledge and understand that there are many – perhaps an infinite number – of perspectives that can be brought to bear on the same objective reality, and makes us realize that objective reality is one which we can never really know.

Of course, it only really takes one or two trips to come to that realization, which is why I think I found myself getting less and less from subsequent psychedelic experiences back in my college days.

Another writes:

I've taken acid exactly once and count it as one of three absolute highlights of my life (the other two are getting married and seeing the birth of my son). That experience ranks so highly because it did change my life. I took a small dose so my experience wasn't psychedelic (with hallucinations and all that), but it was truly powerful.

We were on a secluded beach on Baya. A gorgeous day. We dosed at around noon and from then until dusk, I experienced joy and *awe* of a kind that still, to this day, 20 years on, makes me shiver. I felt connection with and absolute astonishment at nature, people, the ineffable … in short, life. Like another reader, I have not taken acid again because I see that experience as (poseur alert watch!) a lamp on my path. No exaggeration.

Psychedelics are no substitute for prayer and meditation, which I, too, see as the true path to enlightenment. Yes, you "come down." Yes, reality hits you squarely in the jaw after an experience like that. I'm very sure I don't give off any special good vibe. But I had a glimpse of what living a fully, more joyfully can mean. That gift feeds me still, in all that I do.

Another:

Needless to say the only people who dismiss psilocybin have never tried it, and in many cases, for those people I do not recommend it anyway. Not because I'm a medicine man and I know better, but because the entire experience is about focusing on trust and comfort. Perhaps it's an overgeneralization to say that people who are scared, who do not trust others, do not fare well with mushrooms… but it's not far off.

It's a personal experience, that is not to say private. You take it with those you trust and love. Because your insight is extremely keyed in while tripping, it's unwise to do it without some form of ritual. But for all the caution, I can say that my mind has never, of its own accord, gone where it has on mushrooms.

The best experience was three years ago with my girlfriend, now my wife, on new year's eve. We stayed in, ate them around 9, and started to come down sometime after midnight. It doesn't get spoken about very often in the same way the high does, but the come-down is also extremely impacting. You've just spent hours opening every door your mind could choose, and during the come down you have the very sober realization of the real world, and you have to deal with it. What did I see, why can't I have it always, etc. Having my wife there was incredible, because during the come-down our fear was just as synchronized as our joy and amazement only a few hours earlier – but we had each other. We didn't need to say a word. Just pure, complete nonverbal understanding and trust, and it saw us through.

It takes a lot out of you, all the more reason to avoid abuse. But something just happens in your mind, it clicks on and slowly dissipates, allowing you to relive the very real emotion and connection. You come out of it with a repository of trust that can't be shaken, and allows you to locate yourself in a way quite nearly impossible given the amount of neuroses pumped into you in your daily social and professional life.

That's the best I can do to relate the spiritual quality of it. You are confirmed, allowed to exist without fear or doubt for a short time, and it doesn't leave you. That's why I haven't done it in three years; I still have that experience.

Why Is Paying Taxes So Hard?

A report by Nina Olsen claims that the ““most serious problem facing taxpayers—and the IRS—is the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code.” Howard Gleckman summarizes:

Olsen estimates that individuals and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours preparing their returns. That equal to a year’s labor by three million full-time workers. Individual taxpayers are so befuddled by the Code that she reports 89 percent either pay a preparer or buy commercial software to help with the paperwork. The total cost of compliance in 2008, Olsen estimates, was $163 billion, or more than 11 percent of total income tax collections. The average out-of-pocket cost per taxpayer: $258. Something is very wrong when we have to pay a vendor $258 just to perform the most basic of civic duties.

“One Thing The Neocons Get Right”

Morton Halperin defends democracy:

As I argue in The Democracy Advantage, democratic governments are more likely than autocratic regimes to engage in conduct that advances U.S. interests and avoids situations that pose a threat to peace and security. Democratic states are more likely to develop and to avoid famines and economic collapse. They are also less likely to become failed states or suffer a civil war. Democratic states are also more likely to cooperate in dealing with security issues, such as terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

As the bloody aftermath of the Iraq invasion painfully shows, democracy cannot be imposed from the outside by force or coercion. It must come from the people of a nation working to get on the path of democracy and then adopting the policies necessary to remain on that path. But we should be careful about overlearning the lessons of Iraq.

Funny Doesn’t Travel Well

Lynda Obst says "the overseas markets more and more drive what is getting made in America" cinema and that American comedies can't bring in international dollars the same way action flicks can:

For years now our domestic comedy stars haven't been able to open a movie overseas. Sandler has been carefully building his overseas market, doing his foreign junkets, and it's possible that his physical comedy translates better, a la Jerry Lewis, than more dialogue-dependent comics. Stars know their power is in building their numbers overseas, and today more and more this drives our reality. But our comedy auteurs, our Apatows, Stillers, Andersons, have found to be inscrutable, if you will, to the Asian fan boy action clique. Nuance doesn't dub well in Filipino.

Pull The Plug, Ctd

Jeffrey Leonard wants to get rid of all energy subsidies. Dave Roberts counters that "energy subsidy" has no clear definition and that government and energy can't be de-linked : 

[T]here is no disentangling governments from energy markets. The best way to think of the relationship is as coevolutionary: Governments evolve in symbiosis with energy sources, technologies, and markets. Energy is too central to modern life for it to be otherwise.