Vivid, critical insomnolence

I hope this article is a hoax, but I fear it isn’t:

Two environmentally-conscious loons down in Argentina killed their two-year-old son, shot their seven-month-old daughter, and then relieved themselves of the burdens of their failed and useless lives. According to the suicide note, they were afraid of global warming–which is ironic considering their likely eternal disposition.

The only silver lining is that the unnamed (after seven months!) daughter survived being shot in the chest, undiscovered for three days, and is now “out of danger.” Hopefully she stays that way. May God bless this little girl with a sane, loving foster family and a beautiful name.

(Nothing exciting, inspiring or salacious in this one, folks. Sorry.)

In recent weeks there’s been talk of using a procedure called “reconciliation” to pass health-care reform in the Senate. It’s controversial because reconciliation is not subject to a filibuster, which effectively means that it only takes 51 votes to pass a bill instead of 60. Because the Democrats are currently in power, the Republicans are complaining about the potential use of reconciliation. Back when the Republicans were in power, the Democrats complained about the potential use of reconciliation. And so on.

Here’s a bit from the Senate’s online history of itself, oft-quoted by opponents of reconciliation (whichever party that happens to be at the moment):

In selecting an appropriate visual symbol of the Senate in its founding period, one might consider an anchor, a fence, or a saucer. Writing to Thomas Jefferson, who had been out of the country during the Constitutional Convention, James Madison explained that the Constitution’s framers considered the Senate to be the great “anchor” of the government. To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to “cool” House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea.

In short, the Senate was meant to slow things down and cool things off, lest you drink hot legislation too quickly and scorch your throat.

The Senate was supposed to temper the democratic impulses of the House, to slow down the legislative process and make it more deliberative. But nowadays, whenever the majority party whines about the minority using the filibuster, it seems that they simply want to ram legislation through without careful deliberation–and that’s fine with me, if we’re talking about a bill I like. At the same time, whenever the minority party whines about the majority using reconciliation and subverting the deliberative nature of the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” it seems that they simply want to stop the bill–and that’s fine with me, if we’re talking about a bill I don’t like.

There is something about the modern Senate that certainly isn’t what the Framers intended, something that does, in my humble but probably correct opinion, damage the deliberative nature of the Senate. It’s the 17th Amendment, which requires that Senators be elected by the people of a state instead of by that state’s legislature. Usta be that Senators, because they represented the state governments, tried to protect the power and interests of the state governments from the intrusion of the national government. Not that the state governments were somehow more pure, noble or enlightened than federal legislators–there’s no reason to suspect that at all. But it probably did a better job of pitting egomaniacal power against egomaniacal power (in this case, state power against federal power), thereby slowing the process down. That right there’d be plenty of deliberation.

Deliberative or not, there’s absolutely no law or constitutional provision stopping a simple majority of Senators from changing the rules of that chamber, including the “obstructionist” filibuster and the “nuclear option” reconciliation rules. I would love to see a Senate majority simply say, “We know it’ll cost us the next election, but we’re getting rid of the filibuster and we’re going to pass laws with 51 votes instead of 60. We’re going to be a majority-rules chamber, just like the House is, just like the Senate once was.” There just aren’t any Senators, much less 51 of them, with the testicular fortitude to do it.
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Nope, nothing interesting under here, either. I think I’ll have a good work-related topic soon, but I have to see how things play out this week.

In my “Resolutions for 2010,” #10 was “I shall make a 10th resolution before February 28th, 2010.” I now have one. It will require effort. It will require planning.  It will require, as all good resolutions should (which I suppose means some of mine aren’t good resolutions), resolve. I hereby resolve that:

10. When I leave my classroom at the end of each day, my desktop will be clean, organized, and ready for the next day’s work.

Let me be a little more specific: by “my desktop,” I mean the top of the moveable piece of furniture called “my desk.” This does not apply to the computer desk built into the wall that runs alongside my desk. I’ll do what I can to keep the computer desk cleaner and better organized, but I’m making no promises. The idea came from a former coworker whose desktop was always clean at the end of the day, except for the items he had to work on the next day. Eventually I’d like to get to the point where my desk is completely clean and clear at the end and beginning of every day, but let’s start with baby steps here.

Quick update on my other resolutions: so far I’ve kept #1 (drink less sweet stuff), #2 (exerbike), #5, #7, and #8. I’ll visit Chicagoland in July (#9), I’ve started working on a garlic chicken dish (#4), and I need to get crackin’ on the others.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all! Today’s topic is decidedly non-romantic, for my own sweet patootie is out of town visiting her dying multi-billionaire parents at the Tuscan villa she bought them with her supermodeling money, next to her quantum fluctuation research lab.

Anyhow, since we’re up against Washington’s Birthday (Observed) tomorrow, various websites have various rankings of the Presidents. The lists of the greatest usually have Washington, Lincoln, or FDR at the top. The lists of the “most badass” usually have Teddy Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson at the top. The lists of the “most handsome” or “sexiest” usually have JFK, Pierce, or Jefferson at the top.

I find the rankings of the “most libertarian” Presidents to be most interesting, partly because they’re so much different from the typical list of greats. You probably won’t see Washington, either of the Roosevelts, Wilson, or Reagan ranked high on libertarian lists, but you will see such luminaries as Coolidge, Van Buren, and Cleveland near the top.

Lincoln, who would’ve turned 201 years old Friday if he hadn’t been shot or died from anything else, is typically ranked low on the libertarian lists. For instance, “davidbier” listed Lincoln as the worst President of them all, with the following rationale:

Caused the Civil War, Burned the South, Started the First Draft Ever, Huge Protection Tariffs, Income Tax, Corporate Welfare, Cotton Trade Takeover, Huge Deficits, US Bank/Ended the Gold Standard with the Greenback, Censorship of the Press, Imprisonment/Deportation of Political Opponents, Deported African-Americas to Liberia

On another website, Xavier Cromartie listed Lincoln second-worst based on a point system:

Good: Did not finish second term.
Bad: Started catastrophic war (-10) in order to prevent freedom to secede (-10), murdered 350,000 Americans (-10), white supremacist who did not care about slaves and tried to deport all blacks to Liberia (-9), destroyed 10th Amendment (-9), suspended habeas corpus (-9), Union blockade (-5), imprisoned 15,000 political opponents without a trial (-9), shut down newspapers (-8), restricted firearm ownership (-8), rigged elections (-4), started draft (-10) and murdered its protesters (-10), divided Virginia for electoral advantage (-6), ordered destruction (-9), plundering (-9), rape (-9), and murder (-10) of Southern civilian towns,^[273] used European mercenaries (-6),^[274] Chicago machine “pay to play” politician (-2),^[275]nationalized railroads (-7), anti-capitalist (mercantilist) policies:Morrill Tariff (-7), National Banking Act (-9), greenbacks (-9), and deficits (-7), genocidal policy toward Sioux (-10),^[276] Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act (-3), created temporary income tax in order to fund Civil War (-9),^[277] made medicine contraband during war (-10),^[278] attempted assassination of Jefferson Davis (Dahlgren Affair) (-10),^[279] used water torture on Northern civilians (-9),^[280] cotton industry takeover/cronyism (-9).^[281]
Score: -261

[NOTE: Lincoln's -261 was better only than George W. Bush's -332.]

I get why these guys would rank Lincoln so low; he expanded federal power far beyond anything yet seen. Heck, I might even agree with their rankings, as awful as they made Lincoln seem, but for one minor detail. Do you notice anything missing from both descriptions of Lincoln’s administration? Anything that might normally jump out at you, anything that might normally be considered his greatest accomplishment, anything that might normally be considered one of the biggest steps towards liberty in American history?

If you guessed “freeing the slaves,” good for you. At least you remember that much from history class. Cromartie, in spite of all the internet research indicated by his citations, seems to have missed it.

One might think that these two bloggers are racist and therefore they don’t care about freeing the slaves, but that certainly isn’t the case. For instance, davidbier credits Fillmore with abolishing the slave trade in D.C., criticizes Washington for signing the first Fugitive Slave Act, and applauds Grant for supporting black voting rights and promoting the passage of the 15th Amendment. Cromartie gives Grant 4 points for supporting equal rights for blacks, gives Jefferson 7 points for banning slavery in the Northwest Territory (before he was President), and deducts 2 points from Buchanan for supporting the Dred Scott decision. Both bloggers even criticized Lincoln for attempting to deport slaves to Liberia. These bloggers aren’t racist.

It is true that the Lincoln-as-Great-Emancipator meme has many flaws–Lincoln was a bit racist; he once made a joke about hanging an abolitionist; he initially opposed black suffrage; he was willing to preserve the Union without freeing any slaves; he supported the “Corwin Amendment,” which would have protected slavery from Congressional interference; he initially opposed the Confiscation Acts; his Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply throughout the United States; he wasn’t alive when the 13th Amendment was passed; blacks were denied equal rights for a century after abolition; et cetera.

But I think these two bloggers have missed the forest for the trees. Shouldn’t davidbier at least mention that Lincoln vaguely-kinda-sorta had something to do with freeing four million slaves? Shouldn’t Cromartie give the man at least one point, no matter how many reservations he has?

Simply put, if John Wilkes Booth blamed Lincoln for freeing the slaves and seeking voting rights for blacks, shouldn’t davidbier and Cromartie–lovers of liberty that they are–give him some credit for it?

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A quick internet search reveals that today, the Iraqi Communist Party celebrates “Communist Martyr’s Day.” I will celebrate with them, though probably not for the same reason.

I didn’t care who won, but as the final seconds ticked away, it occurred to me that the Saints are Ditka’s other team and that Sean Payton was a QB for the Bears in 1987. I even wore my Bears “C-shirt” during the game. It seems the Saints had to win. It could happen no other way.

Last week, whilst reminding my students that they need to study a subject every night leading up to an exam (instead of cramming in the five minute passing period before the exam begins), I told them that the human brain is like a dry, hard sponge.

You have a dry sponge in the sink. You have a cup of water. If you dump the water on the sponge all at once, then the sponge will only get a little bit wet because a lot of the water is going to splash right off the sponge and down the sink. It’s wasted. Like most cramming.

But if you very slowly pour the water onto the sponge, the sponge will absorb the water more efficiently, there’ll be minimal splashing, and you stand a better chance of getting the entire cup of water into the sponge. It’s efficient. It works. Like studying the way I said to in the first place. The end.

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It’s two weeks late, but the best thing about Brett Fav-ruh’s humiliating defeat in the NFC Championship is the fact that he still hasn’t won a Super Bowl without Jim McMahon on his team. In fact, when the Packers went to the White House that year, McMahon wore his #9 Bears jersey–which hopefully pissed off as many of the Packers and their fans as possible–because the 1985 Bears never got to visit the White House.

Why not, you might ask? According to noted historian Bob Swerski, it was feared that having the 1985 Bears and President Reagan within 100 yards of each other would have generated so much testosterone-laden awesomeness that the Soviet early-detection systems would have read it as an all-out attack, and in “retaliation” they would have launched all their ICBMs at us. Swerski notes that even though either Reagan or a drunk and blindfolded mini-Ditka would have easily swiped all the Soviet nukes out of the sky, policy was policy.

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I don’t yet care who wins this Super Bowl, but that might change during the game. I just want to see a ridiculously high-scoring game that’s won an a safety in overtime. 54-52.

I have to credit a friend from college with pointing this out:

Here’s President Obama on the stimulus, from his 2010 State of the Union Address:

The plan that has made all of this possible, from the tax cuts to the jobs, is the Recovery Act. That’s right -– the Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus bill. Economists on the left and the right say this bill has helped save jobs and avert disaster. But you don’t have to take their word for it. Talk to the small business in Phoenix that will triple its workforce because of the Recovery Act. Talk to the window manufacturer in Philadelphia who said he used to be skeptical about the Recovery Act, until he had to add two more work shifts just because of the business it created. [Emphasis added.]

Why add the emphasis?

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a French legislator and economist named Frédéric Bastiat wrote a book called That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen. In it he describes the “broken window fallacy,” which goes something like this:

The town shopkeeper’s son breaks a window at the shop. The shopkeeper pays ten bucks to a glazier to fix it. The glazier now has ten bucks that he wants to spend on a shirt. So he buys a ten dollar shirt form a haberdasher. Now the haberdasher has ten bucks he wants to spend on food. And so on and so forth. All kinds of economic activity was triggered by a little boy breaking some glass, which turns out to have been a good thing for the town.

This fallacy is very well known in economics circles. The problem lies in forgetting that if the window hadn’t been broken, the shopkeeper would’ve had an intact window and ten dollars to spend as he pleased. Whatever economic activity might follow the breaking of the window (which Bastiat called “the seen”), the value is ten dollars lower than that of the economic activity that would have occurred if the window hadn’t been broken (which Bastiat called “the unseen”).

To generalize, the broken window fallacy is the failure to recognize that there is a cost to diverting resources away from their most productive and/or desired uses.

(There is a far more rock-solid defense of Bastiat’s argument, but I’m trying to keep this blog-length. For a longer explanation, here’s a Wikipedia entry, and Bastiat’s book is linked above. For an even better understanding of why Bastiat’s argument holds, take a really, really good econ course.)

Politicians often commit a form of the broken window fallacy when they claim that their tax-funded projects and programs are good for the economy, but they ignore the costs of those programs. I don’t mean the dollar costs of those programs, I mean the opportunity costs of those programs–how would people have spent their money if it hadn’t been taxed away? That forgone spending is the true cost of any tax-funded project or program.

So, good for that Philadelphian window manufacturer whose business has picked up due to the stimulus. But those stimulus dollars came from somewhere, and one way or another the taxpayers are picking up the cost. Who knows how, given the choice, they would have spent their money? I don’t know, but I’m pretty certain it wouldn’t be making windows in Philly.

This is not to suggest that President Obama is unique in making this mistake. He isn’t–he just happens to be the one who committed the broken window fallacy by actually referring to a window manufacturer. And with a post-stimulus unemployment rate higher than the President’s budgeteers predicted in a worst-case, non-stimulus scenario, one must wonder if taxpayers would spend their money more efficiently and productively on their own.

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I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t catch the irony the first time I heard the speech.

This past Monday, I stayed after school for a meeting of the creative writing club I sponsor, except that apparently there was no meeting. One girl showed up. I told her to have a seat and we’d wait, but if no one else showed up in the next half hour, I’d have to take her to the “safe room” until her parents picked her up. So I started doing some work on the computer.

She must have interpreted the intent look on my face as I tried to focus on recording grades in my gradebook and on the computer as a signal to begin telling me about her stories. As God is my witness, I can’t remember what any of her stories were about. The little bit that I picked up, it sounded like they belonged to the fantasy genre, maybe sci-fi. She had already planned out a four-novel epic, but was conflicted about the motivation for killing off a main character at the end of the first book.

She said that she had picked out the titles of her books, but couldn’t figure out how her story would fit the title of the fourth and final book, so she was thinking about changing the name. I told her that the title should be the last thing she came up with–after all, publishers and editors will often change the names of books for marketing reasons. Besides, I was going to say, it’d be easier to write a title that matches your book than write a book to match a title. I say “going to” because I decided to dress up the lesson a little bit.

ME [in the "Ah, the young are adorable when they're foolish, but I'm here to help them" voice]: How long is the average book title?

HER: I don’t know.

ME: Guess.

HER: Three words.

ME: Okay, three words. And how long is the average book?

HER: I don’t know.

ME: You said you’ve written one already, how long is it?

HER: I’ve written three.

ME: Um…  okay, how long are they, would you say?

HER: Seven hundred pages.

ME: Okay, well is it easier to–did you say seven hundred pages?

HER: Yes sir.

ME [paying real attention now]: Um. Okay. Well, is it easier to come up with 700 pages that fit a three word title, or easier to come up with a three word title that fits 700 pages?

HER: Come up with a three word title to fit 700 pages.

ME: Probably. Use a working title, but–did you say you wrote three books?

HER: Yes sir. But I threw them out.

ME: Why?

HER: They weren’t good.

ME [serious voice now]: Listen: Never throw anything you write out. Never. It’s yours. Don’t trash it just because others don’t like it, or you think they won’t like it. It’s yours. It isn’t theirs. Right?

HER: Okay.

ME: You can’t throw that stuff out. Maybe later on you can come back to it and tweak it, find what you liked and keep it…

HER: Well, I deleted them from the computer, but they’re in the computer recycle bin.

ME: That’s good, that means you can recover them.

HER: I guess so.

ME: Get them out of the recycle bin, save several copies of them, print out copies of them. Make sure you never lose them.

Hopefully she listened. It may turn out that every word she wrote is crap, but it’s still hers, and it’s still her.

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The very next day, I had to attend another day of the “N.A.T. Seminar.” It was generally unproductive, but there were a few interesting moments. The presenter identified four types of assessment: short answer (multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, true/false, etc.), extended response (fancy term for “essay”), skill/performance, and project/product. She then asked us to recall positive and negative experiences that we had had with those types of assessment. The catch was that she meant experiences from when we were students.

One of my coworkers shared a story about a writing course she took in college. She signed up for this course because the professor was a Nobel Laureate. One of the assignments in this course was to keep a daily journal, which my coworker loved. She’d pour her heart, mind and soul into lavish entries that were longer than anything her classmates were writing, even though it was for practice and would only receive a completion grade. I think she said that by the end of the semester, she had used up multiple composition books while none of her classmates had used up even one.

So at the end of the semester, Mr. Nobel Laureate, who had been reading these journals as they progressed, wrote down some commentary and distributed it to the students. His comment to my coworker was, in essence, “I can tell that you love to write. It’s good that you’re a science major and I wish you lots of luck in that because you can’t write.”

She finished her story with a wistful smile on her face. I don’t know exactly how long ago this happened–she has a daughter older than me, so work from there–but it was plain that that “you can’t write” still stung. She then kicked herself around some more for not pursuing it further and mentioned that she had two unfinished novels stashed away at home.

I asked if she still had them. She did. I asked if she’d ever thought about digging them out and finishing them? She said that from time to time she did. I told her that she should finish them. So what if they never got published? People complete and keep their own paintings, sculptures, and crafts even if no one else wants to buy them–why not their own writings?

That was the end of the discussion because we had to move on. I should introduce this coworker to the little girl in my club.

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The most fun I ever had writing something was back in ‘97, ‘98. It was a complete but unpolished story about growing up, about lamenting the one who got away, about endangering a lot of important friendships and ruining lives along the way. After those talks this week, it’s time to finish that story. It may not end up on a bestseller list, or a freshman literature syllabus, but I’ll be perfectly happy if Captain Tnecniv Olleiracsiv Versus the Space Ninjas inspires even one aspiring writer to put pen to paper.

A friend of mine, “Ted,” posted the following as his status on Facebook a few days before the New Year:

TED: 2010 is NOT the start of the a new decade! Decades run 1-10, centuries 1-100, and millenniums 1-1000. Remember there was no year 0000. Happy New Year to all.

We’ll just chalk the semantically confusing “the a new decade” up as a typo. He and I had had a similar conversation before, and I’d pointed out that– heck, here are my comments and his rebuttals:

VDV: 2010 is not the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, but it is the beginning of a decade–the 2010s. Look at the 1990s–they began on 1/1/90, not 1/1/91. Or do the 90s not count as a decade? If not, what do we call them? Time periods that just happen to share a tens-digit and just happen to last ten years?

TED: Dom, the decade of the 1990’s was 1991-2000. Therefore the 21st century did not start until January 1, 2001.

[NOTE: VDV added the boldface to Ted's ridiculous statement.]

Here I am trying to explain that there are two different and perfectly valid ways to count decades, centuries, and millennia, and that these two ways are always going to be offset by exactly one year, and then he claims that the 1990s ran from ‘91 to 2000. I was having trouble telling whether (A) he really didn’t understand what I meant, or (B) he saw that he was wrong and was trying to save face because he’d been bringing up this issue so much in recent weeks. My smart-aleck response:

VDV: So 1990 wasn’t in the 1990s? Awesome. When I turn 40, I’ll tell everyone I’m still in my thirties.

TED: When you are 40, you are finishing your third decade. Feel better?

VDV: When I am 40, I will be finishing my fourth decade.

Normally, when arguing with someone who is so clearly incorrect, I’ll just give up and let them suffer the consequences of spouting utter nonsense. However, I couldn’t let that happen to this particular friend—I have far too much respect for him. So, in hopes of preventing him from making foolish-sounding statements like “the decade of the 1990’s was 1991-2000,” I sent the following e-mail:

At risk of beating a dead horse…

First, please note that you are correct in suggesting that 1/1/2010 is not the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, just like 1/1/2000 was not the beginning of the third millennium, or of the 21st century, or of the first decade of the 21st century.

However, 1/1/2010 is the beginning of the decade that we will call the “teens” or the “tens,” just like 1/1/2000 was the beginning of the decade that we call the “zeroes,” or the “aughts,” or the “double-o’s,” or whatever, and was the beginning of the century that we call the “two thousands.”

I tried to point out that 1/1/1990 was the beginning of the decade we call the “nineties,” but it was not the beginning of the final decade of the 20th century. You said, and I quote, “Dom, the decade of the 1990’s was 1991-2000. Therefore the 21st century did not start until January 1, 2001.” Your statement is a non sequitir, because you’ve conflated two things:

1. an ordinal counting of years (the first decade was A.D. 1-10, the first century was A.D. 1-100, the first millennium was A.D. 1-1000), and

2. a nominal sorting of years (the “nineties” were 1990-1999, the “nineteen hundreds” were 1900-1999, etc.).

The ordinal groups of time do not correspond perfectly to the nominal groups. The 21st century (ordinal) is not the same as the 2000s (nominal), but there’s a ninety-nine year overlap. The last decade of the 20th century is not the same as the 1990s, but there’s a nine year overlap.

Therefore:

1/1/2010 is the beginning of a new decade in the sense that we nominally sort decades.

1/1/2011 is the beginning of a new decade in the sense that we ordinally count decades, with 1/1/0001 as the first day of the first ordinal decade, century, and millennium.

If that doesn’t clear it up, I don’t know what will. Happy New Decade anyways!

(I have to thank my friend DFJ3 for offering what I think is a perfectly logical explanation for the difference between the two counting methods.)

Ted’s response:

We’ve had this conversation before.

I tried. Happy New Decade!