Calm before the storm:
Tehran, Iran, 9 am, June 19, 2009.
For a short while, the Dish is going to take a moment to focus again on the astonishing days of June 2009, when Iran's people pioneered a Persian Spring only to be cast into darkest winter by what can only be called an evil regime. We will remember. And rededicate to the liberation of a great nation from theocratic hell.
David Frum feels that Jon Huntsman's endorsement of the Ryan plan is a mistake:
The Ryan plan answers a narrow Republican concern: how do we push taxes even lower in the face of the impending retirement of the baby boom). It disregards the broader national concern: how can we sustain and enhance the standard of living of the American middle class against the downward trend in middle-class incomes of the past dozen years? The Ryan plan tragically abdicates this question.
Romney, meanwhile, is aping Pawlenty's tax plan.
A reader writes:
Sarah Palin repeatedly tells the media to stay away from her children and attack her. That's fair for a politician. But then her daughter writes a memoir, including a tawdry expose about how she drunkenly lost her virginity to the father of her child. This is a disgusting mixture of celebrity and hypocrisy.
Another writes:
The new narrative is now that Bristol was a virgin and that Levi raped her. And yet she chose to have the baby. Are you not seeing how this will play out on the trail and will be catnip for her base?
Reporter: Do you believe abortion should be allowed in cases of rape?
Palin: No. In fact, my daughter was a victim of a date rape, but after much prayer we decided that the life of that precious angel she was carrying was most important. We even found it in our heart to forgive Levi, but he was too wicked and we had to cast him out.
Another lays out a long pattern of Palin behavior:
You ask if that isn't pretty serious charge to level at the father of her child? Sure. And yet isn't it also in total keeping with the sexual predator meme that she apparently has learned at her mother's knee? What all do we have so far in the ongoing saga of alleged slobbering males who can't keep their nefarious dirty minds and mitts off the Palin women?
-Sarah moved her family from Juneau back to Wasilla because supposedly her daughters were under threat of gang rape. (Even though Palin did not inform the school, the local police and downsized her security detail at the same time.)
-The Tennessee hacker had supposedly compromised their security resulting in Bristol getting threats of boys who were going to crash in the door of their home to attack her, in her isolated home in the woods where she hunkered with her little baby. (In spite of the fact that the Palin's had Secret Service detail right outside the door of their "isolated" home on a major Alaskan road and no one ever saw the threatening messages.)
– David Letterman was a pervert who wanted to molest Willow
– Joe McGinnis was a pervert who wanted to crawl through Piper's window and have his wicked way with her
And so on and so on. It's getting to be grotesque. Now we have Bristol losing her innocence to and impregnated in the woods by a redneck date rapist. (A redneck rapist she later walked around a stage with hand in hand as an announcement of their engagement, and later made thousands of dollars with by appearing in People magazine announcing their 2nd engagement. With their baby there for the charm factor.)
At some point, allegations of sexual perversion and victimization have just become a reflex political tool/money maker for Sarah Palin. And her daughter is just franchising out the family marketing strategy. And lest you think I'm being harsh, ask yourself this: How is it we never heard this story from Bristol before? Could it possibly be because it never happened? Could it possibly be because she has a book to sell?
Politicalgates recently added another example to the reader's list. In response to Alaska Representative Jay Ramras publicly complaining that then-governor Palin didn't attend a committee to explain her plan to raise taxes, Palin emailed the following to her aide:
Sheeesh… He's basically just announced I'm not around HIM enough! Doesn't he know why? I have two teenaged daughters, everyone knows gotta' keep the young 'uns away from the likes of Jay.
In another email, she wrote:
Maybe Jay's missing his little lady and feels frustrated lately. I'll have to keep him away from Bristol.
Now that's a headline I've waited a lifetime to tap into a laptop. A reader writes:
Your reader's email about his "inter-racial, inter-height" marriage reminded me of this clip from the end of the Dr Who episode "The Day of the Moon".
It's part of Mitt Romney's talking points. And when one hears that if only Obama had let the banking system collapse entirely, the auto industry melt down, and slashed spending rather than offering a stimulus … all would be better, one is right to dismiss it as lunacy. Even if one believes that these would have been better policies, can anyone actually argue that if Obama had followed them, unemployment would now be lower than where it is? Or growth higher? Maybe you could argue that growth would be better in the future without the moral hazard of bailouts and stimuli, but now? Give me a break.
The next option is to claim that the threat of higher business costs for healthcare and of re-regulating Wall Street is suppressing private investment and weakening profits. That's Gary Becker's line. But corporate profits are in record territory, and Yglesias hauls out the following graph:
Case closed, I think. How am I wrong?
A reader writes:
This is why rationality is ultimately irreconcilable with faith. Scientists can now pinpoint the exact spots in your brain that light up during spiritual moments and you have found a mushroom that reproduces the effect. But instead of acknowledging this as an interesting yet completely natural sensation, you instead conclude that it’s a mushroom-shaped window into the divine. Your mind is playing tricks on you, much in the same way that your eyes play tricks on you when items move into your blind spot. (However, the effect sounds interesting; I might have to try it.)
Another elaborates on that view:
I find it fascinating how someone of faith (you) and someone who has no faith (me) can look at the exact same study and come to diametrically opposed conclusions.
Your ingestion of magic mushrooms led to a deep spiritual connection and a reaffirmation and deepening of your faith. Therefore, mushrooms are part of our connection to the divine and should not be regulated away from us. To some of us non-believers it suggests the opposite, namely that your brain is lying to you. A similar experiment showed that subjects would “feel the presence of the divine” when an electrode stimulated a specific portion of the brain. Meditation seems to trigger similar functionality by causing neurons to fire in a specific set of patterns, which have electrochemical affects on the same portions of the brain.
I don’t think you’d argue that direct electrical stimulation or a chemical message delivered to a similar spot is some sort of magic God retrieval switch. “Press here to summon God.” It seems that such a useful switch was rather oddly placed.
The brain, as an organ, likes certain types of stimulation and patterns, for the same reason that a song that you hate gets stuck in your head; “you” may not like it, but your brain certainly does. Certain kinds of messages or neuron firing patterns are highly enjoyable to the brain’s neurons – they make them feel good, at peace, interconnected. Your neurons are happy and that filters up into your consciousness to make “you” happy and connected.
If you can’t tell the difference between the presence of God and the presence of psilocybin, maybe there is no difference. No God required.
P.S. The best counter-argument I can think of is that these various techniques somehow suppress “reality’s” overwhelming input and allow you to detect the undercurrent of divinity in the Universe. The best counter-counter-argument to that is Douglas Adam’s Babel Fish: God cannot exist without faith; the Babel Fish is so obviously God’s handiwork that you don’t require faith; therefore God doesn’t exist. Q.E.D. Why create a series of unrelated obtuse methods of hooking into the divine? Why not just make it as natural as breathing?
Ask God. That’s beyond my pay grade. But more seriously, by definition, any divine manifestation in the mortal world will have some physical manifestation. Psilocybin may be a kind of trick that triggers an awareness of God – something that can only be stably achieved by years of meditation, prayer and love. Of course that can be observed scientifically by studying our brains under both shrooms or meditation. But the ultimate source of that feeling of universal beneficence that seems calculated to make humans the happiest and kindest they can be remains a mystery. Perhaps it’s all neurons and chemicals – but if they are part of God too, that argument fails.
But why a mushroom? Beats me. A random part of the physical universe that acts like a key to a specifically human spiritual lock: it does seem bizarre. But humans discovered it aeons ago; and the notion of sacramental faith makes space for it, from a Catholic perspective. We eat and drink the divine – as so many faith traditions have for millennia. As long as we don’t mistake the thing for the Godhead, we are merely offered a chance to glimpse what godliness and mindfulness can be. And it remains with us months and years later – actually helping us to attain the calm and peace that true faith generates. Which makes it less a trick than a sacrament – as, by the way, peyote long has been on this continent.
I believe we are indeed all neurons and chemicals. But when all these fall away, God is still with us; and God is us. It is the falling away, the lifting of the veil, that is hard.
(Photo of Psilocybe Cubensis by Flickr user afgooey74)
I guess my book was a little ahead of its time:
Republicans now openly condemn the bailout programs Bush initiated for banks and auto companies. Members of Congress look on the No Child Left Behind Law with suspicion. Few will defend the Medicare prescription drug benefit; and the only acceptable party line now on immigration reform is “No Amnesty.”…
And in last week’s New Hampshire presidential debate, the Republican field even edged away from the Bush administration’s activist foreign policy, condemning the intervention in Libya and calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan. It adds up to a comprehensive and unmistakable rejection of the Bush legacy – and above all, of Bush’s platform of “compassionate conservatism” that was supposed to give the GOP a permanent electoral majority.
Where I differ, of course, is on the necessity for pragmatism and accountability along with a return to core principles.
Pragmatism means cutting the Grand Bargain of the 21st Century: tax reform, revenue increases, and entitlement and defense cuts. You cannot take away one of these three legs and hope the stool will stay upright. By insisting on new no revenues, the GOP is not taking responsibility for its own role in creating this debt, is ignoring the real dangers of total gridlock, and refusing to play an adult role in resolving it. By never offering anything substantive to restrain healthcare costs or to insure more Americans, the GOP is unserious on healthcare policy. By refusing the only solution to immigration – tighter border controls and a path to citizenship for those already here – they are merely making amnesty a reality while making the lives of many hard-working people and their US-born children more precarious.
They are lurching from a betrayal of conservatism to an embrace of a parody of it. At some point, one hopes, they will achieve more of a balance.
Brian Turner, a veteran, revisits the city as a civilian:
This isn’t the Baghdad I once knew. Just off Abu Nuwas Street near the Tigris River, where sniper fire was once a daily hazard, the sounds of war have been replaced by the sounds of children playing soccer on the grass. They whoop, high-pitched and full throated, like birds calling to each other. On Haifa Street, where bitter sectarian fighting raged from 2006 to 2008, young men pause in the doorway of a local market to finish a conversation as Iraqi pop music blares from a boombox. Near the university several young women laugh as they cradle textbooks and notebooks, their head scarves a splash of color against the drab building facades. Everywhere around Baghdad there is the sound of a city regaining its voice.
A reader writes:
The folks over the The Stranger's Slog seem pretty convinced that "Turd Burgers" is a hoax. And they're chuckling at you for it.
Another writes:
I'm sure I won't be the only one to point this out: the Yes Men got there first.
A meme emerges:
The Dish 