My Liberal Economic Philosophy, Sans Vitriol

I promised myself that I wouldn't spew political opinion in this World Wide Web log any more. Now that I'm breaking that promise, I'm at least resolved to do it in a calm, sane way. Restore sanity, as they say.

So I've been reading a lot about economics lately. It's obviously a big issue, as the economy continues to languish and the unemployment rate refuses to budge. I've come up with a lot of conclusions, but they're always subject to further changes as I learn more. It's complicated stuff.

Let's just start with the problem right now. It's not that the government is spending too much, or regulating too much, or whatever. It's that there's not enough spending, a.k.a. demand. An economy is fundamentally about spending. People buy stuff, and that money goes to someone who buys something else, and it keeps circulating through the system.

In the last decade, whatever you want to call it (the Aughts is still the only name I've found that's halfway decent), American consumers were superstars of spending. American spending was essentially keeping the world economy afloat. The national savings rate was in the negative numbers, meaning Americans were spending well beyond their means.

That's unfortunately not very sustainable. Now Americans' savings rate is at about 5%. That's great in a way, as it means more stability for individuals. But it also sucks in a way, because it means that the world economy isn't artificially propped up by profligate Americans.

The housing collapse was the spark that caused the meltdown, as it caused middle-class people's wealth to collapse. That spark then lit up everything else -- industries dependent on housing collapsed, people started spending less, etc. And of course, there was the banking industry, which made such complicated securities out of these mortgages that even they couldn't untangle them when their values plummeted. That just added fuel to the fire.

So when you have a chain reaction like this, what do you do, if you're a government? You of course try to stop the chain reaction. You can't let the banks collapse -- to extend the metaphor, that would be like letting a forest fire reach an oil well. Like it or don't, banks are at the heart of the whole economic system. I've gone through this part in a previous post, so I won't rehash it here.

And the other thing you can do is infuse cash into the system. That means stimulus spending. When there's not enough demand, there's not enough money circulating. If the government puts more money into the system, it can get more money circulating through the economy. This can at the very least forestall the freefall.

Basically, bad times are not the time to worry about budget deficits. Budget deficits are definitely not good things in the long run. Pile up too much debt and the whole system could collapse, as you might not have the money to pay off your debts. But when the economy is in freefall, you kinda have to worry about the short term, get things stabilized, and then concern yourself with the long term.

A good time to balance budgets is when the economy is doing great. Then, the government doesn't need to infuse cash into the system. That's what happened in the 1990s, and what should have happened in the Aughts. It's not what we should be doing now. Balancing the federal budget would mean removing a lot of demand, that provided by the government, out of the economy at a time when demand is most needed. Deficit spending (Keynesian economics, if you want to get technical) is the approach that we took in the 1930s, and it kept us afloat until the boom times returned.

The key phrase used then was "the government must be the spender of last resort." Note the "last" part. The government needs to step in when no one else is able to. Then, when the economy can run on its own, the government can step out. Essentially, the government has to do the opposite of what people are doing. It has to balance the rest of the economy.

If you don't the have the government smoothing things out, you end up with lots of huge booms and busts that cause a lot of destruction and make for a weaker economy overall. That's how the American economy was in the 1800s -- every ten years or so, a major panic would occur that wiped out all the previous gains. We learned our lesson, though: After the reforms during the Great Depression, we had a record 60+ straight years with lots of booms and only minor recessions until recently.

The recent Great Recession occurred because we abandoned those principles, during the Aughts in particular. The government should have balanced budgets in the Aughts, as I mentioned. And the Fed should have kept interest rates higher. By keeping interest rates low, they encouraged more and more people to buy houses, inflating the housing bubble. They didn't balance things out by doing the opposite of what the private economy was doing.

The mistake people make is to think of government spending like they think of household spending. "We're having to live within our means," they say, "and so should the government." But it's not a valid comparison, because you spend money on yourselves, while the government spends money on all of us. Only a small fraction of the money the government spends is on itself, and even most of that is to pay people who figure out how to spend money on us. Depriving the government of money means depriving our economy of demand.

That said, not all government spending provides the necessary bang for the buck. You don't want the government just randomly buying up businesses and property -- that would just provide a whole wad of cash to the owners of those businesses, who would likely just stash the money or sit on thrones made of million-dollar bills. And moreover, the government will be less motivated by profit in running those businesses, and thus will probably not create the best products.

Since I opened that can of worms, I should expand on it. Most businesses work best as private operations. The Soviet Union was a good test case for the opposite approach, that of having government run the economy, and it was a miserable failure. In an emergency, the government can and should step in and make sure a major, important company doesn't collapse, as it did with GM. As with the banks, a collapse of such a large company would have added much more fuel to the fire. But after the business is on its feet again, the government needs to sell it off. And the Obama administration is currently doing exactly that with GM.

This doesn't mean every single human endeavor is best left to private enterprise, however. You have to judge them on a case-by-case basis. Police are not best left to private enterprise. Only the people who could afford to pay the police bill would get protection. It would suddenly become a much more dangerous nation.

This will open yet another large can of worms, but it's my view that health insurance doesn't work as a private enterprise. You have to look at where the business incentives lie. If you're selling apples, your incentive is to provide good apples at a reasonable cost, so that people will come back and buy more apples. With apples, the business's incentives work for the benefit of the consumer.

But if you're a health insurance company, your incentive is to become the one choice they can choose at a reasonable cost, i.e., the one offered at work. So that's a virtual monopoly right there. Granted, if enough people complain, the workplace might ditch you and go for some other plan. But it's difficult to make that happen -- it's not like just choosing a better apple at the store.

And then your further incentive, as a private health insurance company, is to not pay claims. You make more money when you pay claimants less. The unofficial motto of health insurance companies has long been "Delay, Deny, Defend": First you delay payment of the claims, hoping that the people will give up and pay out of their own pockets. Then you deny the claim, using whatever fine print you can as cover. Usually, people will give up at this point. If they sue, then you defend yourself in court. It works, and makes the health insurance companies loads of money.

Granted, insurance companies aren't this bad about every claim. They provide some payments without a struggle. But their incentive lies in providing just enough so that people don't revolt and charge your headquarters with torches and pitchforks. To me, that's not a system that best serves the consumer. A government-run insurance plan wouldn't do this. It might have other faults, but it wouldn't have perverse, anti-consumer incentives.

Anyway, before I derailed myself, I was going to go into the "bang for the buck" argument. The question of how best to help an economy gets down to talking about bang for the buck. Most anything you can do can help somewhat. You can throw a twenty on the ground and that could possibly help -- someone could pick it up and use it. But it's just as possible that it will be eaten by a dog. That's not a very good bang for the buck, as that money likely will not circulate through anything but the dog's digestive track.

Meanwhile, if you spend that $20 buying dog treats, that money will go partially to the dog-treat purveyor, partially to the dog-treat manufacturer, and they will all spend that money on Pixie Sticks or outboard motors or catheter delivery services or whatever else, and a-circulating we go!

The "bang for the buck" test is esecially relevant when you start talking about taxes. Any tax cut will keep some money circulating through the economy. The question is which will give you the most bang for the buck. Will a tax cut to the middle class keep the most money circulating? Or will a tax cut to the wealthy?

For the most part, the tax cut to the middle class will provide more bang for the buck. A middle-class person will more likely spend that money on a product or service. A wealthy person will more likely just let that money sit in the bank, because they're less in need of a product or service. The bank could possibly use that money on something that will help the economy. Or it could just leave it in there as cash reserves. Or it could use it for credit default swaps or one of these other complicated financial instruments that are really just bets among rich people, no more helpful for the economy than if Bill Gates bet Steve Wozniak a billion dollars that he could recite pi to a hundred digits.

But, you say, because you're a conservative congressman, tax cuts to the wealthy will spur investment in new businesses! Well, maybe. I'm willing to bet that a very small percentage of tax cuts to the wealthy actually goes to business investment. But regardless, business investment is not what the economy most needs right now. It needs demand. Businesses often need investment, of couse. But what what they need even more is customers. Without more customers, there's no point in investing in increasing capacity, which would mean increasing supply.

Sure, there are some businesses that need cash so they can grow and thus help the overall economy grow. And some great new businesses could be fostered. But we're talking bang for the buck here. You could give money to the middle class, which would almost assuredly increase demand, because they need to buy stuff. Or you could send that money to the rich, who might maybe invest it in a business that might maybe be able to expand a bit, which might maybe increase supply in a time when there's already too much supply and not enough demand. You see the difference? The percentage of money that ends up circulating through the economy is much higher when you just give the same money to a middle-class person.

This also gets at why it's important to have a strong middle class. If you concentrate all the money among a small group of indviduals, you end up with fewer consumers, and thus less demand. You see this in third-world nations. They don't have much of an economy at all, because only a few people can afford to buy stuff, and those few people can only buy so many of the basic staples that are the fundament of any economy. One person can only so many steaks, as my 10th-grade history teacher used to say.

You may have heard that the United States currently has a huge and rapidly widening gulf between the rich and everyone else. Unlike with third-world nations, this gap isn't because of corruption and oppression. It's more a case of capitalism working too well. I'll explain.

Capitalism is a marvelous thing, no doubt. But it's not perfect. Some people would have you believe that if everything were just left to the free market, everything would work out perfectly. If only life were that simple!

Capitalism channels people's self-interest into economic production in a marvelous way. But left unchecked, it overrewards the winners at the expense of everyone else, and sows the seeds of its own destruction. It gives all the spoils to those who own things -- businesses, property, what have you -- and almost nothing to those who just work hard but don't own anything. Ownership is valued above hard work.

In the early days of industrialization, this is exactly what you saw. You saw the owners of companies making billions upon billions and establishing trusts, a.k.a. monopolies. And they paid their laborers starvation wages, literally -- just enough to keep them alive so that they could come back and work the next day. These folks would live in company towns, make just enough to barely feed their families, and if they got sick, their families didn't eat that day.

This is what led many people to think that communism or even anarchism was a better idea. More reasonable solutions came in the form of laws and regulations: ending child labor, 40-hour work weeks, minimum wage, unions, etc. All these things cut into company profits and stifled growth -- exactly the things that business organizations always decry when the government proposes anything having to do with any business. But they were the right things to do, and our country is stronger for it.

But I'm verging into a moral argument, and I'm trying to avoid those. I'm trying to focus instead on pragmatics -- what actually makes for a robust economy. Pragmatically speaking, having a few people own everything means having too few consumers, as you have in the third-world countries. John Rockeller can only buy so many steaks.

So in creating an ideal economic structure, you have to create a balance: Use capitalism in some arenas and regulations and/or socialism in others. I know, I said the "s" word. Socialism these days is being conflated with communism, fascism, Zoroastrianism -- basically everything that Americans think they don't like. But socialism is selectively placed throughout our system, and that's good thing.

Social Security, for example, is socialism. It's forced redistribution of wealth, from those who are working hard to create wealth (i.e., workers) to those who aren't doing anything but consuming (i.e., fogies). And it works beautifully. Before Social Security, half of the elderly population in the United States was basically starving to death. Now, elderly people are thriving so well that they can yell things like "Keep the government out of my Medicare!" at rallies that contradict the very principles that are keeping them alive! Hooray!

OK, I promised I wouldn't get all mean, sorry about that one. The point remains that if we had a perfectly free-market system, there would be no Social Security. There would be no Medicare either, and old folks would have to pay exorbitant rates just to have health insurance (another problem with private insurers -- they sure as hell don't want old people on the rolls) and a huge majority would go without it. Then they'd only come in to the emergency rooms, run up huge tabs, and those costs would then be passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher premiums, and so on.

Basically everything the government does is socialism. Roads are socialism. Everyone pays, the government does it, everyone benefits. Imagine if it were done by a private company. Everything would be a tollroad. If you didn't have the money, you don't get to go places. One company could buy up all your routes to work and charge you $100 per day. You'd have less incentive to even go to work, and your productivity would plummet. The road companies would make massive profits and the rest of us would be a lot poorer.

Adam Smith would agree with me on all this, by the way. I've read "The Wealth of Nations," (OK, I've read parts of it) and found a few very interesting passages. In one he says that there are many things that shouldn't be left to private industry -- parks are the example he gives. He also has disdain for people who own things but don't work to produce anything, saying they just leech from the system (I'm paraphrasing here). He would not like many of the investment class that think they're living according to his philosophies.

Of course, he was a strong advocate of the profit motive in many arenas, as am I. The trick is figuring out which arenas should be socialist and which should be capitalist. As I stated before, I think health insurance should be socialist. It works for Medicare and Medicaid, which both cover the most difficult people to insure (the poor and the elderly) and does a reasonable, if imperfect, job. If it can manage the most problematic customers, imagine what it could do for the rest of us. While private health insurance companies pay 15-20% overhead, Medicare and Medicaid have an overhead of about 3%, because it's not paying legions of claims adjusters and marketing consultants and lawyers. That could mean your premiums are 12-17% higher with private health insurance than it would be with public health insurance.

Anyway, I'm getting off-track again -- but I hope this illustrates the kinds of calculations that should go on when determining whether something should be publicly or privately controlled. Both sides should leave moral arguments and idelogical dogma out of it, because those just don't go anywhere. You might say that government control of anything is bad, because the government stinks. I might say that the government is awesome, and should control everything. When two different ideologies butt heads, nothing constructive results.

What should happen instead is to decide on a common goal and then evaluate each option in terms of how it meets that goal. In the case of the health insurance debate, it should be "What is best for the consumer?" Public health insurance would have its problems, to be sure. Governments don't tend to adapt very nimbly to changing circumstances, for example, and can be awfully bureaucratic. But I'd argue those are minor concerns compared to the fundamentally flawed private health insurance system, in which incentives work against the consumer.

If only public discourse could be like this. But this kind of thing bores too many people. They need fire, anger, emotion to keep interested. They need to be a good guy fighting against a bad guy. We all like to blame politicians for everything that's wrong with this country. But the politicians are only a reflection of their constituents. If we responded well to sane, reasonable people who make sound, measured judgements, we would be better off. But look at the Republicans: They spent two years refusing to compromise, filibustering everything, and demonizing Democrats at every opportunity. And they were rewarded for it. We say we want politicians who will work together, and then we elect people who refuse to.

It's not the politicans that are wrong with this country. It's the people. No one can say it, because the politicians have to suck up to us, and we have this mythology about ourselves that we are the best and most brilliant people in the world. But all that hubris is doing us in, as we do crazy things and then blame our minions, the politicians who grovel to our every demand.

OK, now I'm not only getting on a major sidetrack, I'm also spouting some major vitriol. Time to bring this one to a close. I'm sure I'm leaving some things out, because that's how it is with economic issues. It's extremely complicated stuff, and it requires that people be willing to embrace and explore complexities. Maybe some day.

Things I Love: My Beautiful Wootiful Baby

My baby has been doing pretty darn well in her first week of life. Her poop is now a lovely mustard green that the pediatrician says is a great sign, but makes me less than entirely willing to eat mustard. She sleeps for long stretches, doesn't fuss much, knows her times tables cold, raps at an eight-grade level, and came this close to qualifying for Olympic trials in tetherball (and would have gotten in if not for those cheating Swedes -- I'm on to you, Jan Svankmeyer!)

Plus she's a cutey beauty pooty wootie woo. Booty Hootie Flutie schmoo. But it wasn't all cuteness and roses. The first few moments of her life were more anxious schmanxious wanxious terror schmerror werror of maternal death schmeath weath. My wife was bleeding profusely right after the little bean popped out, and had to be rushed to the operating room to save her life.

I was then shuttled off to the special care nursery, a dreary place where one very premature baby cried and cried and I sat in a rocking chair, my new baby in my arms, staring into her open eyes for the first time, thinking, "You know what baby, it might just be you and me. Hey, it might not be so bad! It could be like that show 'My Two Dads,' except with one fewer dad. Remember that show? Remember the '80s? Wasn't it a blast? Rubik's Cube, Pac-Man, crack cocaine, urban blight brought forth by a short-sighted Republican administration more interested in giving the rich a little more money to gamble with than making sure people have homes to live in ..." Then tears would start falling, less about homeless people in the '80s and more about the absolutely horrific thought that I could lose my wife.

But my wife is still here, a little worse for wear, but already being a wonderful mother. I get a little weepy in a good way at the sight of my little family. See, I've never been a particularly ambitious person. At times I thought I should become a famous screenwriter, and then a famous psychology researcher (because there are tons of those -- not one of my best plan there, I admit) and such and such, but all of those dreams were more means to an end, that of showing off so I can attract a woman whom I love and who will bear my children. Now I have that, and I feel a lot more fulfilled than I have ever been in my entire life.

And instead of worrying about myself quite so much, I do feel a new sense of purpose. I have to do all I can to protect this little kid. So I've already started treatments to strip her of the thetans that are polluting her soul:

What It's Like to Be a Twins Fan

Let's say all you really wanted in life was to be in love. After years and years of trying and coming up empty, you finally meet someone you really like. You start dating. It's going well. You start to think this person might be "The One." You're giddy -- you've never felt this way about anyone before. So this is what all those love songs are about!

You propose marriage and this person says yes. Hooray! Excitement mounts as the big day approaches. It's a beautiful Saturday in August, and all of the people you love are there. This is your moment.

You stand at the altar with the love of your life. Joy, hope and love envelop you in a warm embrace. The minister asks for the rings.

Suddenly, Derek Jeter bursts into the church, smirks, and starts making love to your fiancee, in front of everyone. You are of course shocked, heartbroken and disgusted. Everyone else, though, begins shoveling praise onto Jeter for his amazing grasp of fundamentals, for his grace under pressure, and for generally being the most wonderful human being to ever walk the planet.

Now let's say this exact same thing happens every goddamn year. That's what it's like to be a Twins fan.

Lessons from the '80s

Last night I watched "Adventures in Babysitting" at a party. I didn't see it when it originally came out, but I might as well have, because it contained just about everything I learned from TV and movies in the '80s. To wit:

1. Punching someone in the face is a perfect solution to any problem. When someone says something really terrible about a woman, you're supposed to punch him in the face. Or if he's threatening someone, and there seems to no way out -- one punch and problem solved! The great thing about punches to the face is that the guy immediately falls into deep unconsciousness. And you know that, given a reasonable amount of time, he'll get up again, no permanent damage done, and will never bother you or say such terrible things again. He knows he has been defeated.

I actually tried this once. In eighth grade I had a friend named Nathan whom I couldn't stand. I was a passive and overly polite kid, so I tended to attract the kind of people who got on everyone else's nerves. They got on mine too, of course, but I was too nice/timid to tell them to go away.

So Nathan was always annoying me, and I secretly resolved to punch him in the face next time he did. Sure enough, the next day, he was being a jerk, and I punched. But it was a light, ineffectual little punch that just glanced off his chin and didn't hurt him at all. He was more like "Uh, what was that?" I tried to pass it off as a little joke. He seemed to accept that.

2. Cities are horrific, lawless wastelands filled with gangs, hookers, homeless schizophrenics, and gangs of homeless hooker schizophrenics. Suburbs are the the place for normal, safe life, in which you biggest worry is acne. As soon as you cross the border into a city, you will immediately be attacked by screaming lunatics and street gangs that, by the way, happen to be very multicultural. That was another interesting part about the '80s: Each street gang had a good mix of white people, Latinos and black folk. I understand that it was due to the hiring quotas mandated by the affirmative action laws of the time.

3. Black people are always scary at first, but usually turn out to be super cool. If you're going to have a character who is just some guy, you'd make him white, of course! If you're going to make him black, he needs to start out with some level of menace to him. That menace is usually contradicted by him doing something awesome to help you out.

Granted, in "Adventures in Babysitting," there is one black guy chasing our heroes around the hellscape of Chicago who's pretty mean. But even he's really more of a middle-management guy, taking orders from the truly evil person, a white dude.

Every other black person scares our heroes at first, but later becomes awesome. One is a car thief that inadvertedly gets our heroes in trouble. But he always wants to help, and in the end he gets the chance by (spoiler alert) punching the evil white dude in the face.

The other prominent black guy is a blues musician -- our heroes wander onto his stage and are frightened of him and the crowd (all black people). But the bluesman says "you don't leave here until you play the blues," and of course they do so. And the crowd quickly turns from hard-eyed disdain to launching an overwhelming ovation. That's a great thing about performing in the '80s -- all you have to do is be on a stage and try really hard and the crowd will explode with joy. It doesn't matter if you're white as all hell and can't sing (this was the founding principle of The House of Blues, by the way).

4. When you raise your voice in a fancy place, every other patron immediately stops talking and all music stops on a dime. At one point, our heroes barge into a fancy French restaurant to confront Elizabeth Shue's two-timing boyfriend. As soon as things get heated, everyone else in the restaurant suddenly stops talking and stares at them like toddlers watching Elmo. And the violinist in the corner had to cut himself short at the exact same time, so as to not drown out the show. It's really out of consideration -- fancy people LOVE gawping at confrontations. Of course, no restaurant employee intervenes -- hey buddy, down in front! We're trying to watch two kids fighting here! Anyway, the scene ends with (spoiler alert) actually not a punch in the face, but a kick in the butt that pushes the mean guy onto a table. Problem solved. Next scene.

5. Quicksand is everywhere. OK, this wasn't in "Adventures in Babysitting." But it is a very prominent lesson I learned by watching TV in the '80s. I don't know if it was mainly old reruns or what, but somewhere I got the impression that falling into quicksand is a very common occurrence, and it's a good idea to lay out a contingency plan now. I know that after you fall in you have to stay still -- the more that you move, the faster you will sink. You have to hope you can grab onto someone's arm ... but uh-oh, you might pull them in too! Great! Now what?!?! Wait, there's a long vine over here that we can use to pull ourselves out! And it's a vine strong enough to withstand the downward pressure of an entire human being's weight plus the suction of quicksand! Phew!

If I Ruled the World ...

... I would feed the children and fix global warming and kill all Republicans and blah blah blah. But then I'd get to the real work, which would be:

Making Public Restrooms Less Ambiguous: If there's one thing I hate about public restrooms, it's ambiguity. Ya know? If it's a one-person restroom, I try the knob. It seems to be locked. So I stand and wait. But wait, maybe I didn't try hard enough? I mean, I encountered a little resistance, but maybe it needs a bit more? I really gotta use the restroom here -- this is no time for half-measures!

So maybe I should try again. But then, I don't want to be that jackass who yanks at a locked door furiously, incredulous that a public restroom could be occupied with another human being. So I stifle the growing urgency in my bowels and wait a bit more.

Has this happened to you? Probably. I don't know, who gives a shit about you? This is me we're talking about. And I don't like not knowing for sure whether or not a bathroom is occupied. So that's why, if I ruled the world, all bathrooms would be like the ones on planes.

Except, not in almost every way. Bathrooms on planes are tiny and harsh, and like all things on planes, they transform what should be a glorious adventure (We're flying, goddamn it! A thousand million feet the air!) into a horrorscape of cramped, sanitized, polite agony.

But the one and only thing they do right on planes is the little light on the very top of the bathroom door that indicates whether or not it's occupied. And there's really no way that thing could lie. You slide the lock firmly into place, and the light goes on. Simple. Unambiguous.

And it spells comfort on the other side of the door as well. There are too many public restroom locking systems that are way too unreliable. I'm at the point where, if I encounter one of those locks where you press button inside the knob, I assume it's broken. It scoff at locks in knobs. I spit on them and curse them to El Diablo Chupacabra Hombre, the twisted demon child of Satan and the Chupacabra who is also a hombre, whatever that is exactly.

But a nice latch -- that's a different story. A big, solid latch that fits firmly into place, that is. Not one of these puny-ass little pencil-sized rods that casually slide into a shaky latch that hangs onto a door frame for dear life. I once went to the bathroom at Robert Frost's ancestral home in Vermont, "locked" one of those pathetic little wangles, and then had two people, in quick succession, burst through that flimsy facade straight into the bathroom. Each time I shouted "Someone's in here, SOMEONE'S IN HERE, SOMEONE'S IN HERE!!!!" until the fucking morons realized that someone indeed might be in here. This is the kind of emotionally scarring personal tragedy that I'm trying to avoid, people. To this day I still can't read Robert Frost without wanting to shit on his head. (I don't know if that's exactly related. Something about Robert Frost's head seems very shit-on-able. Maybe that's just me.)

Anyway, point is -- when I rule the world, all public bathrooms meant for one person will have massive deadbolts. And closing the deadbolt will trigger a massive light taking up the entire door that flashes the words "SOMEONE'S IN HERE!!!!!" If it breaks, you better fix it immediately, or I throw you in the pit of lava with the Republicans.

Banning the "Two Words: Blah Blah" Thing: You know this. People think they're hilarious and sassy when they say, "OK, two words: Less makeup" or "Three words: Shit on Robert Frost's head." I don't know why, but I hate it. So it's out.

OK, that one wasn't that great. So I'm going to switch tracks and talk about the English language. It's awesome, you know that? Through thousands of years of evolution, this marvelous language's glorious history of artistic achievement has culminated into a blog post about shitting on Robert Frost's head! Isn't that marvelous? And Awesome?

But it really is a very unique language. It's a language made up of a whole bunch of other languages smooshed together, like a turtle in a vat of peanut butter. That made no sense at all, but I'm going with it. Not sure why.

So we start our story with the Saxons. They were minding their own business up there in England, worshiping Baal, eating mint chutney, and playing the mezuzah, a traditional Jewish fife that is very small and is attached to doors. Then along came the Romans, who conquered them for no reason besides that they just liked to do that sort of thing.

The Romans eventually went away, and ended up not having a lot of lasting effect on the language. So I'm not sure why I mentioned them. But I'm on a roll, so here we go.

Then just dumb stuff happened until England was conquered by the Normans in 1066. The Normans were French, and they brought over a whole bunch of Frenchies to rule everything. And of course, because they were French, they preferred to continue to speak French and to be real dicks about it. Their words eventually got smooshed into the turtle/peanut butter pie like so much mayonnaise. Words like "rapport" and "pistol" and another 30% of all English words, according to this Wikipedia article I just found, are of French origin.

So now you have Saxon and French words living in the same language. But wait, there's still the Catholic Church. It was really into speaking Latin, because Jesus spoke Latin, seeing as how He was such a fan of the Roman Empire and all. Latin became the language of all written texts. And even though the few cognoscenti who could read Latin also spoke English, they couldn't bear to utter many of those low-class, insufficiently syllabled Saxon words. So they had to shift Latin words into English, words like "cognoscenti."

They ended up creating loads of synonyms. They would say "feline" instead of "cat." They would say "timorous" instead of "weak." They coined thousands of words that meant exactly the same thing as existing words, but you know what, those Latin-based words just sounded better, more sophisticated, more ... what's the word I'm looking for ... elitist. No other language has this sort of parallel construction, in which there's a "high" and "low" way to say almost everything.

Hence, business-speak. Listen to a businessperson talk and all those ten-dollar words where a one-dollar one would do are of Latin origin. That "professional" air he/she's trying to cultivate is just the elitism of the medieval nobility in a modern guise. It's a time-honored way of saying "Hey, I'm a one of you superior types. Not one of THOSE people. We will now get along famously and wear polo shirts and play golf and laugh loudly and shit on Robert Frost's head!"

Oh, I'm sorry. I meant to say "defecate on Robert Frost's cranium." Now you're with me, right, fellow elite! A-shitting we go!

Things I Love: Lawns

Lawns rock! Here’s why:

1. Kids. A visit to a public park with a wobbling toddler often involves one or more of the following:

a. Repeated, but ignored admonitions to your child to leave the stinking, fly-infested trash can alone
b. Repeated, but ignored admonitions to your child to leave the stinking, fly-infested pile of dog shit alone
c. Repeated, but ignored admonitions to that damn dog to leave your terrified child alone
d. Repeated, but ignored admonitions to your child to leave that other kid’s half-eaten and discarded Glutino cracker alone
e. Repeated, but ignored admonitions to your child to please stop wobbling over to the busy road and just stay in the grass for chrissake

All of that can be avoided on your own, quiet, peaceful, fenced-in lawn.

2. They’re soothing. The uniform greenscape is a much-needed respite from the busy jumble that has become the modern world. People in cities are overwhelmed and assaulted by visual stimuli, from billboards to overly-complicated and asymmetrical architecture to the 35 signs necessary to explain a single neighborhood traffic circle. A nice, green lawn, preferably without any curving mulch borders or mounds of wispy ornamental grasses, is a reminder that simple is beautiful.

3. They’re a heckuva lot easier to take care of than the ugly licheny rock-ridden xeric landscapes that enviro-yuppies spend a fortune on creating and then never maintain. In my artificially-watered little town, the properties that have created little native plant havens usually end up with prickly messes overgrown with bindweed, cactus, and dandelions. Nothing’s easier than firing up the ol’ mower once a week and trimming everything into a nice carpet.

Now I realize I should address the things that certain lawn haters like to claim as part of their anti-lawn agenda. And I realize that these are indeed embarrassing little problems with lawns. But they’re not insurmountable!

1. The pollution argument: Ha ha! The enviro-yuppies are totally all over this one. There’s no reason why you can’t have a lawn and use one of those little whirling blade push mowers. Those little whirling blade mowers actually kind of suck for all but a very small, perfectly flat, square lawn with wispy grass, but they make electric and battery-powered mowers that are just as good as the old gas-powered ones, provided you don’t mow over the cord or get too ticked when the battery starts losing its charge after 3.5 minutes of mowing. Someday maybe I’ll get one of those awesome mowers.

2. The pain in the ass argument: Mowing a lawn is waaaaaaaaaay less of a pain in the ass than pulling weeds. It’s also waaaaaaaaay less of a pain in the ass than always keeping your kids inside because your beautiful nature is also a habitat for cougars.

3. The toxic chemical argument: A thick, healthy lawn doesn’t need herbicides because the herbs can’t take root. OK, it may take a few rounds of Weed-n-Feed to get that nice, thick, healthy lawn, but really, once you have that good grass, all you need to do is fertilize (which can be organic or whatever) and pull out the few weeds that wiggle their way in there.

4. The water argument: Oh, OK. Lawns take a lot of water. Fine. You can have that one.

5. The weird huge lawn argument: Some of those rural Midwestern lawns really are weirdly huge. And they’re even mowing their ditches. I hear it’s in part to control the mosquitoes, but I really think it’s just a way for a fat man with a riding lawnmower to avoid his family for five or six hours and call it exercise. So OK, you can have this one too.

I should also mention that I do not in any way support the giant industrial lawns around office buildings that aren’t even used for dull office parties. What a waste those are. And in some towns in Colorado, really nice lawns are maintained (and watered!) in the No Man’s Land by freeway on and off ramps and that’s just ridiculous. But, in sum, nice home lawns are pretty awesome. There’s no reason why we all can’t responsibly enjoy a nice green lawn and still feel like good decent, Capitalists. Because I vaguely remember that Commies are somehow responsible for lawns and dammit, let it be known that I am no Commie!

Things I Hate: Lightning Round!

Because if you say "lightning" it sounds exciting! Rather than, say, a tedious list of minor annoyances! Excitement, dammit!

Jeans pockets: Man, I hate jeans pockets. See, I'm an adult. That means I have to put more in my pockets than, say, a single paper clip. Ergo, I need more room in my pockets than the amount required for a single paper clip. And a need to access those paper-clip-plus materials through an opening large enough to accommodate a human-sized hand.

I understand that jeans pockets are supposed to be tiny, with a miniscule opening, because your typical jeans-wearer undergoes innumerable rough-and-tumble activities daily, such as riding buckin' broncos, fightin' gators, revisin' spreadsheets, and so forth. Facing such a square-jawed, two-fisted, penis-pumpin' existence, you need your goods tightly ensconsed in hard, unpliable fabric with no access except via extremely long and nimble fingernails, which of course all self-respectin' cowboys own. I know that whenever I wear jeans, I'm in my preposterously gigantic American truck hauling large blocks of something in slow motion as Bob Seger yells in the background. Then later I sit around a campfire with my closest entirely male compadres drinkin' some flavorless American beer and laughing deep, throaty guffaws. Then the gay sex. AmericCUHH!!! Eatin' from a SINgle BOWL!

But between you and me and that disgusting thing on the wall, there are times (shudder) when I wear jeans (shudder, shudder) and am not doing anything remotely physical (Shame! Dishonor! Hari-kari right now! I'm dead!). I would survive, believe it or don't, if my jeans pockets could hold objects large enough to conform to the principles of Newtonian mechanics. And I would prefer to be able to access them without taking the jaws of life to my crotch.

Pockets inside pockets: A related issue, obviously. Especially in right-side front pockets in jeans, you often get a pocket within a pocket, pressed against the skin, which is designed to help you lose spare change and then launder it. The idea, I suppose, is that without these, you would have a chaotic, sloshing soup of objects flying around your capacious jeans pockets, and only by collecting the change in the even-smaller pockets within pockets can you ensure that each attempt to reach for your wallet doesn't explode into a dangerous buckshot of small coins that then impales passersby.

I honestly don't know why they stop there. They need pockets within pockets within pockets, so that the few spare molecules that naturally shear off of coins as part of the immutable process of entropy can be neatly inserted into pockets^-2 and then lost and laundered.

You know, maybe this is all a conspiracy by foreign governments, to keep our loose change lost and unspent, thereby pulling cash from the money supply and dragging down the American economy. I think that this insane theory I just made up is absolutely, uncontrovertibly true, and it is now clear that pockets within pockets are a socialist conspiracy enacted by President Obama to make Glenn Beck cry. Where's my blackboard?

White things: Why do we have things that are white? What are we trying to prove? That we have so much money that we can waste it on things that can easily get dirty and ruined? That we enjoy spending half our lives cleaning? Anything white attracts dirt and stains within a few seconds and then immediately looks awful. Everything white should be banned, from clothing, to walls, to people.

Food noise: This one's not so rational, I admit. My sister can attest to the terror of living with someone with this particular affliction. I can't stand the sound of people eating. Even the smallest smack will drive me into a rage. It's not a good trait.

As for why I am this way, it's probably because of a deep and torturous resentment of my father, who ate like a pig on speed. Or maybe it's sexual. Both, maybe. Whatever. Regardless, there's no very good explanation of the unholy sickness I feel upon hearing people eat. But there is no doubt in my mind that my irrational and out-of-proportion emotional reactions are entirely someone else's fault, and that I am in no way responsible. That's just how it works.

It's at the point where I'm wondering why exactly human beings need to eat amongst each other. I should probably add that one to this list.

Eating with other people: I know, eating with people is supposed to be awesome. We get to listen to each other chew, and uh ... I suppose we can talk, when we get the chance. But think about it: When else in life is your mouth less conducive to conversation than when you're eating? In our day-to-day lives, it's the only time our mouths are fully occupied, and yet we expect to be able to launch a chatting bonanza during dinner. It makes as much sense as having a party at the dentist's office.

I'm all for spending time with people and talking. But I would prefer each dinner party to consist of people coming over and having drinks (which do require occupation of the mouth, but for shorter durations, with just a few inoffensive swallows instead of a chew-chew-chew-smack-gulp ... ooh, I feel sick), and then each person can move into a different room and silently consume food with the lights off and Leonard Cohen playing mournfully in the background. Then everyone can reconvene in a bright and cheerful living room, compare notes on the dinner, drink some more, and play Wii Rock Band (that's how all my dinner parties end nowadays).

Gum chewing: Gum chewing was specifically designed to make me kill myself. It's a socialist conspiracy to make me cry. It's chewing that never, ever stops, just keeps chomping and smacking and chomping and smacking like a brain-dead cow until I grab the person's face, reach in to his smelly, gaping maw, take the gum out, shove it in his eyes, and then rip out his tongue for good measure and eat it. Noisily, with lots of smacking.

Snorts, but not farts, sneezes or burps: Again, I recognize that this is completely irrational, but I can't stand it when people snort in public. It just makes me thing of festering yellow-green mucous yearning to be released from the body and be thrown away and burned and stomped on, but instead being cordially and noisily invited to return to the body and fester, converting the viscera into an inchoate swamp of bubbling, putrid sickness.

But farts don't bother me. Farts are funny. Seriously! This one time? I was at this party? And this dude farted, like, real loud? It was awesome!

It's true, you know, farts are actually very funny. I actually took a course in American Indian literature that confirmed that farts are universally and verifiably funny, and that was in college, where knowledge is true, so there. The first story we read in the class, in fact, was a story meant to be passed down through the oral tradition, so writing it down was stupid, but whatever: It involved the trickster coyote, and he was farting a lot, and it was supposed to cause the kids in the crowd to giggle, so there.

Burps are the same thing. The louder the funnier. And they release the sickness into the atmosphere instead of allowing them to collect inside and poison the bodily humors into an imbalance of phlegmatic disposition. And the same for sneezes, which is why I hate ...

Sneeze stiflers: These are the people who try to do a cute little "pfft!" and hold their sneezes in. They think it's cute and dainty, but to me it says "I don't want to let these poisonous allergens go! I love them lots and lots! I actually want them to grow inside me and sprout little boughs of diseased, dripping coagulations of germs, which will then turn my viscera into an inchoate swamp of putrid sickness! Word!"

Instead, you must let your sneezes out with a powerful and manly KACHOOOO! That proves that the toxins have been forcibly expelled! You have thus rid them from your chest, discharging them with the force of Thor's mighty hammer cleaving the skulls of the unworthy! Now you must go on to drive trucks full of large heavy things in slow motion whil Bob Seger screams about America! RARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR(etc.)!!!!!!

People who laugh loudly at their own jokes: Granted, you can laugh a wee bit at your own jokes. I don't, but many do, and that's fine. It's the people that explode into uproarious laughter immediately after telling their own jokes that bother me. It's pushy and forceful; it's like saying "premise premise premise punchline and now LAUGH DAMMIT!!!!!!" You pretty much have to laugh when people do that because it's too awkward to leave that person going into hysterics by themselves. So you give a polite ho ho ho and get on with life, but you leave feeling a bit manipulated.

Words on walls: Because I'm a married man and I'm whipped like a dead donkey, I end up watching more than a few interior design shows on TV. In a lot of them, they write things on the walls in ostensibly pleasing light purple fonts, things like "peace" and "live life out loud" and "fuck y'all bitches" and stuff like that.

It's extremely tacky, in my book. If you want to create a mood with a room's decor, it might be a wee bit obvious to plaster the sentiment you're going for on the wall in big block letters. If that were how it worked, you could just create an art installation that was a piece of paper tacked on a wall that said "HOLY COW THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT PIECE OF ART RIGHT HERE. MAN OH MAN, IT'S DEEP IN A WAY THAT ORDINARY PEOPLE CAN'T COMPREHEND. BUT YOU, AS PART OF THE SOPHISTICATED URBAN ELITE, CAN FULLY APPRECIATE IT AS BEING A NEW STEP FORWARD IN ARTISTIC EXPRESSION AND SHIT LIKE THAT. NOW THAT YOU'VE SPENT A RESPECTABLE AMOUNT OF TIME STARING AT THIS WITH A SERIOUS LOOK ON YOUR FACE, YOU CAN GO TALK TO THAT ARTSY CHICK AND TRY TO GET LAID."

Musical guests on "Saturday Night Live": I just finished watching "Saturday Night Live," something I haven't done for years, and you know what? It was pretty funny. Except for the part where it all fell flat for 15 minutes because of the stupid musical guest. Wow, a guy yelling into a mic and playing a guitar. Never seen that before.

It wasn't fun when I was young and actually sort of kind of hip (not really). I would watch "Saturday Night Live" every Saturday night (alone, always, but that's a different and much more boring and sad story), and it those days it would even be musicians I had heard of. And even then, the musical guest's appearance was the time to flip over to "Star Search" and hope that it was time for the spokesmodel competition.

You know what? It's not that much fun to watch people play music. In person, it can be fun, because it's loud and there are girls there. At home, on TV, it's really not that great.

Listening to music while doing something else: Whoo, that's fun. Playing music, especially in Wii Rock Band: oodles upon shitloads upon metric tons of fun. But watching other people play music on TV? There's a reason MTV doesn't actually play videos, and hasn't for about 15 years now. They quickly realized that watching people play music isn't that great. If you get a Lady Gaga, who lards her mediocre synth-pop with buckets of weirdo conteporary-art bullshit, that can be OK. Or a rap video in which the music serves as a forgettable backdrop for watching asses shake -- that again can serve some purpose. But a bunch of white guys, on a stage in New York, screaming songs that sound much better on studio versions that I can get on demand from iTunes for $.99 ... yeah, you know what, I have 200 channels. I'm betting that somewhere in there there's something more engaging than that.

That now completes the list of all of the things that I hate. All my future posts will be glowing explorations of things that are great, like cute kitties and pie and the love of a good woman. The end.

Things I Hate: Lawns

Lawns are awful, awful things. Think about how much destruction lawns cause. No, wait, don't think of it, because I'm going to tell you:

1. Pollution: Supposedly, lawn mowers are some of the worst polluters around. I heard once that mowing one acre puts as many greenhouse gases in the air as taking a cross-country trip in a hybrid. Now while that's probably not true, it does make you think about exactly how much global warming has been caused by this completely unnecessary activity. No one has ever been fed by a mown lawn. No one has ever died because their lawn wasn't mown. It's pointless.

Why exactly do we need lawns? Because our neighbors will complain if we don't maintain them. Why will they complain? Because it supposedly doesn't look nice to have an unmown lawn. By that logic, if everyone decided that chopping off your pinkie fingers looks great, I would have to do that too. Fuck y'all. I don't depend on your opinion of me to maintain my self-worth.

And personally, I think well-mown lawns look revolting. I look at a sea of uniform grass and think about how many toxic chemicals went into the groundwater to create the same look you could achieve by painting a blacktop green.

Lawns look like what happens when anal retentive serial plant beheaders go wild. Why do people think they look nice? It's the same plant, over and over, at exactly the same length. What could be more dull to look at? Why not just install Astroturf while you're at it?

You know what's nice to look at? Nature. People even go hiking in it just to look at it. Imagine that, walking in circle for hours just to look at stuff. And here's the thing about the nature they tend to look at: It doesn't tend to be large swathes of monoculture, like lawns are. It instead tends to be intricate tapestries of colors and textures, comprising the wide range of plants that live in harmony. It's a thing called ecological diversity, and it's kind of vital for the survival of life as we know it on this planet. If nature just produced rows and rows of identical, artifically stunted grasses, we never would have come about in the first place.

I honestly think there's some control-freakiness going on in the minds of those lunatics who care about their lawns. It's like, "This is the land I OWN! I must CONTROL every INCH OF IT, or the COMMUNISTS WIN!" Of course, what could be more communist than a world in which one species fills every inch at exactly the same size and length ...

2. Pain in the ass: Mowing lawns sucks. It's dirty, sweaty work that results in shards of severed plants sticking to every inch of your skin. Guys who enjoy mowing lawns really should channel that energy into something constructive, something that helps people instead of hurting the planet. If they have to be alone with a machine as they do it, they could maybe build something. They could maybe do anything a little less mindless than pushing a pollution-spewing cart back and forth across a scrap of land.

The worst, though, are the people with riding lawn mowers. So wait, you're so lazy and/or feeble that you can't even push a cart back and forth for a few hours. So your solution is to strap some blades to an especially toxic engine and drive around? It puts me in mind of a person who is too fat too walk driving through a buffet in a Rascal. It's gluttony at an epic, Caligula-type level, where you're so spoiled that you're killing yourself through self-indulgence.

OK, maybe that was a bit of a reach. And maybe you have a large property, and need a riding lawn mower to mow it all. That then begs the question: Do you really need to mow it all? If you get a big boner from looking at long rows of identical short green stalks, fine, do that in part of the area. But why not the let the rest of it go to nature? Then maybe a wide range of plants could live there. And maybe animals! And maybe that patch of earth could support life instead of destroying it! Just a thought.

Natural Childbirth: How Morally Superior Does It Make You?

I is done had some young ‘uns and now that Ed is havin’ a young ‘un, I now feel as though I’ve been invited, albeit indirectly, to share my feelings about natural childbirth. And just so you know, I stole the title from The Onion.

Childbirth...a natural process, as old as our species itself! Can anyone imagine anything more wholesome and earth-friendly than birthing at home, in one’s bed (or on a bed of straw in, say, a stable), perhaps with the assistance of a wizened matron or two? Maybe the straining mother-to-be is practicing hypno-birthing, reaching deep within her consciousness to find the inner peace that will sweep her away from the pain and into a euphoric mental meadow of birthing bliss. Maybe, after a reasonable period of howls and pants, a tired smile spreads across the happy mother’s face as the healthy baby cries for the first time and is placed upon her welcoming breast to suckle its first drink of life. Or maybe everyone dies. Oh, wait...that can’t happen, right? I mean, not if it’s natural...

I live in a place where you’re considered a total failure of a mother if you did not manage to birth your baby without any painkilling drugs or medical intervention. Well, OK, maybe “total failure” is a bit strong, but without a doubt, there is an unspoken sentiment of “you must not really care about your child if you poisoned your body with all those drugs” that radiates from what I think is actually a minority of loud, womb-thumping women. These are the women who start “ban the bags” campaigns to try to pass laws prohibiting formula companies from giving out free samples. They’re mothers who will spend $24.95 for 4 ounces of all-natural, food-grade sun block for their children and who use slings, for heaven’s sake, and not bjorns for their 24-hour-a-day baby-wearing. And, as long as I’ve pushed the stereotype this far, I might as well throw in that they probably assume their baby is gifted. Anyway, these are the women who make the uncertain, expecting, first-time mothers feel guilty for wanting an epidural and dammit, that’s just not right.

Part of it is the term, “natural,” that gets me, as though “natural” is inherently superior. Let’s think of a few natural things...carrots (not bad) and bees (they’re cool) and ticks (well, hm, ticks must be valuable as food for something), and malaria and rabbits eating their babies when they feel threatened and mother cats inbreeding with their son cats (happened in my own house!) and hot lava that’s no longer in our molten core and leprosy...certainly, they’re all facets of nature, but are they all preferable to a human-made alternative? Of course not. Why should childbirth be any different?

And let’s think of other things that can be done “naturally.” Like amputation – haven’t we all seen some movie where a Civil War soldier takes a messy swig of whiskey and pops a branch in his mouth before the doc saws off the leg? Our how about a double mastectomy? John Adams’s poor daughter had a “natural” double mastectomy to slice away the cancer that would eventually kill her. I’d like to see a womb-thumper choose that option.

The point is that there’s no shame in pain relief. There is no badge of merit handed out to those of us who endured the most pain while pushing out a baby. Millions of healthy babies have been born to happily numb mothers and have gone on to do great things in life. And, frankly, the birth is about the tiniest, least significant part of having a kid, so go ahead and have that young ‘un, Ed, even “naturally,” if the pain really floats your boat. But for chrissakes, if you want the epidural, just say so, and with relish. Because you, yes, you! have the power to stop the pain! And then take your Vicodin for your recovery pain. And drink your stout beer to enhance your milk supply. And then drink some wine to make the baby sleep all night. Happy parenting!

I Am Royalty

We are having a child. And the child's name will of course reflect its status as a member of the English royal family. We have decided she shall be christened "Eleanor I, by the Grace of God, Queen of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lady of Ireland and the Church of England in Earth Supreme Head, Dykhuizen." Amongst playmates she may affectionately be referred to as "E.I.G.G.Q.E.F.D.F.L.I.C.E.E.S.H." She may not be referred to with the vulgar appellation "Ellie." Such calumny shall be considered an affront against God's representative upon Earth, and justice shall swiftly be brought upon the guilty party.

The nature of said punishment will depend upon the progress of my newly engaged effort to restore Eleanor to the throne as the rightful heir to Henry III. As you all are of course aware, I am the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King Henry III. I am one of only ten million or so people to be able to make such a claim.

My task is then simple: Gather an army, hie myself to England, and kill everyone with a better claim to the throne. While such a task may have appeared Herculean in the days of my vaunted forefather, advances in modern weaponry make this a relatively easy task. For too long, the House of Minnesota has been ignored in affairs of state! Once more unto the breach, my good men (and women, because my marauding horde is an Equal Opportunity Employer)!

However, in my extensive studies of my illustrious ancestors (I read two books), I must say I've gained new appreciation for democracy. We may occasionally elect an idiot, but hell, at least we don't have wars to decide it. And even George W. Bush looks like a Rhodes scholar compared to some of England's past rulers. To wit:

Henry VI, who ruled England for about half of the 1400s, was pretty clearly what we would call nowadays "developmentally disabled." He was the immediate successor to Henry V, who was the one played by Kenneth Branagh and says "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers ... come upon this field of glory to kick ass and drink beer, and we're all out of beer ... we must protect this hoooouuuse!" Then he went on to win the Battle of Agincourt, defeating Mothra in ten rounds. I think that was how it went, anyway. I was reading all this as I was watching late-night TV, so I'm not sure I got it all right.

Point is, his son Henry VI had quite a legacy to live up to. And boy, did he ever not. He was not only born into the Hundred Years' War against France; he was also heir to the Wars of the Roses, in which different branches of the royal family, those of York and Lancaster, killed each other regularly and traded the throne back and forth. Meanwhile, Henry VI was terrified by war, which is a problem when you're the commander-in-chief of two of them. He was reportedly very meek and gentle, in a way that would be cute if he were a greeter at Wal-Mart, but extremely dangerous for someone trying to lead England. He would blush whenever anyone mentioned sex and sincerely believed his son was created by the Holy Spirit. His solution to the Wars of the Roses was to stage what he called a "loveday," in which members of the York and Lacanster clans would all have a public ceremony together. Mind you, these were people who killed each other's children, a lot. Their beefs are not likely to be smoothed over by a public smooch-fest. Henry thought they would.

The end result of Henry VI's incompetence was that England lost all the gains in France made by Henry V, with Joan of Arc being the symbol of the reconquest. Meanwhile, for the most part, the Wars of the Roses only killed of the members of the nobility, leaving peasants and middle-class folks out of it -- that is, until King Henry's forces looted and pillaged a bunch of towns of Southern England. Imagine that for a second -- imagine if the Republicans and Democrats were killing each other over who would be in power. I think our first reaction would be "Yeah! Cool! Is it on TV?" But then imagine if the Republicans, under their retarded leader George W. Bush, decided to just raze and burn Iowa for no good reason. I think even Fox News would have to turn against them then.

King Henry VI came along for all this countryside brutality, but was likely oblivious, allegedly laughing and singing in his private camp during the carnage. The people of London reacted to the spree by literally shutting the door on Henry and the Lancastrians (they had real doors to cities then, with real keys -- hence the term "the key to the city") and declaring a new king, Edward IV.

Normally things weren't as bad as all this -- normally it would just take one civil war to figure out who the next leader would be. Just a few hundred lives lost over a year or two, something like that. In general, though, we see the danger of letting someone be king just because his father was. Well, we see it, but the English didn't. They kept on with the tradition, because they didn't know anything else.

So imagine what a huge step forward it was to try democracy instead. These days, it's old hat, but then democracy was revolutionary in a way that is hard for us to fathom. It was radical. It was a intellectual, long-shot idea based on cutting-edge theory that turned out to be extremely right.

So that's what I hope we all celebrated over Independence Day: radical solutions to longstanding problems, solutions based on the latest in intellectual thought. That's our true legacy, that willingness to try something that's very new and is based on the creativity of the most probing minds. Innovation, in business-speak. Let's try to keep that in mind before we hate on Obama and the Democrats for trying an innovative solution on health care, or before we reflexively crap on other new ideas in immigration, energy policy, etc. The country is seeming a little afraid of change lately, and fear of change is not what we were founded on.

Ethnicity is a Vegetable, Part One: The Vegetable Part of It

Ed is havin' a young 'un. This is now how posts on this blog start, I see. And instead of investigating/whining about some part of society that bugs us for inscrutable reasons, we now have the noble duty to warn Ed's young foetus about parts of society that bug us for inscrutable reasons. Warning is much nobler than whining, right?

So, let's begin, shall we? Why don't you hop up on Uncle Joe's lap, young foetus, and listen to a tale filled with dread, wonder, and, ultimately, actually, neither of those two.

Today's exercise in edification will attempt to answer this question: What is ethnicity? As an analogy/delay tactic, I will put off that question, and ask another: What is a vegetable? By way of contrast, and in order to completely lose my entire audience before the end of the third paragraph, I will first ask one more question: What is a fruit?

What Is a Fruit?

This one's the easy one. A fruit, saith Merriam-Webster, is a ripened ovary of a seed plant and its contents. Done. QED. Cogito ergo sum. We all know dozens of examples: apples, oranges, bananas. Weirder ones like kiwifruit, pomegranates, and starfruit are nonetheless easily recognizable as fruit: hard outside, fleshy/juicy inside, and seeds. So, there you go - that's fruit.

Next, we move on to....wait, what's that, little foetus? Isn't a tomato really a fruit? Oh, little one - you have so much to learn about this wonderful world! A tomato's a vegetable, of course. Which leads me to my next question:

What Is a.....hmm? little one? You say a tomato is hard outside, juicy inside, with seeds? Well, sure, but it's still a vegetable, which as you might have guessed was my next ques.... Say what? You brought your personal botanist over? My, but you are an impertinent little foetus! And your botanist says that a tomato is a ripened ovary of the tomato plant? Well, if that's true, then that would make a tomato a fruit, and....what's that botanist? It is? Well, if you go by that definition, then so are cucumbers, green peppers, green peas, and...and...wow. Okay. So lots of things we call vegetables are biologically fruits. Interesting. That now leads me, much more tentatively than before, to my next question:

What Is a Vegetable?

This one, it turns out, is actually easier to answer. A vegetable is something green that we eat as a side dish at dinner. Ha ha, right? But not really - that is almost exactly what our dictionary friends say. M-W calls it a usually herbaceous plant grown for an edible part that is usually eaten as part of a meal.

But that's just the dictionary; let's see what our botanist friend has to say. Oh, dear botanist friend, can you tell me what a vegetable is? You know, scientifically? Now, don't be shy - I may not be a trained scientist, but I'm sure you can put it in layman's terms, right? So, go ahead. Please. I'm not....hey! Where are you going? Little foetus, your friend just ran away! I guess it's up to me. And I say that in the end, a vegetable is a plant that people call, or use as, a vegetable. So a tomato is a vegetable after all. And a cucumber. And lettuce, and carrots, and mushrooms. That makes me feel much better.

Now we can move on to the actual question of the blog, which is....now what? Mushrooms aren't plants, they're funguses? So what? Oh - I said that vegetables were plants. Fine. Vegetables are plants and funguses that we call veg....yes? Yes, I've had sushi wrapped in seaweed. Yes, I'd call seaweed a vegetable. But seaweed isn't a plant, it's algae? Wonderful. Next you'll tell me there are bacteria and animals that are vegetables, too! Ha! (please don't tell me there are bacteria and animals that are vegetables, too....)

Oh boy, I'm feeling a little woozy. I think I have to make this a two-part post. Off my lap, tiny proto-half-Ed, and back in utero for you!

Cursewords I Can't Live Without

I is havin' a young 'un. And as part of my newfound responsibility, I'll need to clean up my act. No more having three beers in a single night. No more staying up until midnight playing Scrabble online. No more injecting heroin into my eyeball. Yup, my hedonistic lifestyle's gotta change.

But I don't know if I can give up cursing. As a kid I was defiantly anti-cursing, and said a prayer of apology every time I even thought of a curseword. Nowadays I realize that there is a rainbow of self-expression in those naughty words, and I'm not sure I can live without some of them.

Some can go. "Fuckin'" is usually unnecessary. It adds little more than emphasis, as in "That was fuckin' ridiculous!" You don't lose much meaning by just saying "That was completely ridiculous!" I'm not going to miss that one.

But there are some naughty or slightly naughty terms that are downright irreplacable. For example:

Half-assed: I challenge you to give me a term that conveys the same spirit of obligatory, apathetic endeavor as does "half-assed." "Low-effort"? That doesn't really communicate the requisite disdain for the person in question. "Half-baked"? Again, not enough disdain.

Like most cursewords or terms, it makes no sense when taken literally. Why would something low-effort require just half of your ass, and a full effort require all of it? Are that many pursuits so dependent on the entire use of the ass? (Keep it clean, people.)

But that's sort of the beauty of it. I personally love it when a term is able to communicate something so well despite its literal meaning -- in this case, "concerning a section of the gluteus maximus" -- having so little to do with the meaning that it has taken on in our culture.

This is actually one of the few words involving "ass" that I find to be useful. Americans apparently have an ass fetish, because we affix "ass" onto every word we can come up with: dumb-ass, smart-ass, weird-ass, crazy-ass, etc. As with "fuckin'", little is typically added besides emphasis. (Well, "smart-ass" is kind of useful. I suppose you could say "smart alec" instead. But that smells like one of these lame-ass cleaned-up versions of regular curses, like "Gosh!" or "Geez!" instead of "God!" It's kind of a "letter of the law but no the spirit" thing, you know? It's like, do you really think God's going to be like, "Well, since you didn't quite say the entire word, you get by on a technicality." No, He's going to smite you either way. Everyone gets smoten eventually. So live it up while you can, motherfuckers!)

Bullshit: There are many ways to talk about half-truths, but none really communicates anything similar to what "bullshit" so poetically expresses. "Bullshit" is not just a lie -- it's a whole world of lies, a rich tapestry of falsehood, intended to make the speaker look brilliant and wonderful. In fact, this one professor dude once came on "The Daily Show" hawking his book, called "Bullshit," which explored the rich veins of connotation and denotation captured in this wonderful word. So smart people recognize the value of "bullshit" too. So there.

Again, the literal meaning (bovine waste product) has little or nothing to do with the meaning that it has taken on. And again, a big part the word's utility it wrapped up in the disdain it communicates. I would assume that that's true of every curseword or term. And maybe that's why they're so popular -- we don't have enough clean words in the English language that convey sufficient hatred.

Nigga, please: OK, I never actually say this one. Nor should I. "Nigga" is a word that has a different meaning depending on the race of the speaker. My particular race (white) has such a long and brutal history of using the word as a weapon that I don't know if we should ever be allowed to use it, regardless of our intentions. From our mouths it will always have at least a partial meaning of "you are not even human." That's powerful stuff, and not to be played around with.

But, man, I still secretly wish I could say "nigga, please." It has nothing to do with black people, really. When this phrase is used properly, it's just poetry. It's such a perfect way to tell someone "Look, you're not fooling anyone." But there's more than that. "Nigga, please" has in it the wisdom of someone who's seen it all -- most of it unpleasant -- and has come out the other side not only strong, but strong enough to call out everyone who is obviously full of crap, very publicly, and very rightfully. After you say "nigga, please," everyone is kinda like, "Yeah, you're right! Thank God you said that."

But there is also a little bit of warmth in "nigga, please." Maybe that's the true genius in it. There's a hint of letting the other person in on it, leaving them just enough room to burst out laughing and say "OK, yeah. You're right. I'm full of crap, I'm sorry." Then we can all get on with life.

So where does that leave us? I don't know. I suppose just that cursewords can often capture things that legitimate language just can't, and it's a shame that we can't say them whenever we like. But then, maybe if we did, the words would lose those unique meanings. Maybe they need to be saved for those times when we need to break taboos to get our points across. Hmm.

Stuff I'm Going to Teach My Kid

I is havin' a young 'un. Well, my wife is, actually. I'm little more than a bystander and occasional advisor. I'm a fan, I suppose. I'm a big-time fan of my wife and her baby, and I spend a lot of my free time rooting for them.

The baby is currently called Figgy Plumbum, because for a while, he/she was between the size of a fig and a plum, according to the baby books. Actually, he/she/it is more the size of an apple right now, so I suppose we should change his/her/its/their name to Figgy Applebum. My plan is to have a different name for him/her/it/them/whose every time he/she/it/they/we/how gets larger. So be the time he/she/it/they/wheretofore/inasmuch gets to be the size of a breadbox, we'll be telling Breadbox to get the hell over here. When he/she/it/why/tired-of-this gets to be a teenager, we'll call him/her Leopard on Its Hind Legs. You get the idea.

I've been very excited about having a kid as long as I can remember. Mainly because I want a person to control. Apparently, slavery is no longer legal (thank you, federal government, for controlling our lives!), so a baby is the best route for human domination. And I've got a lot of lessons to brand into lil' Figgy's fertile brain.

Lesson No. 1. Get a credit card in college. I was a headstrong and defiant young adult. Not in the sense of actually doing anything revolutionary, of course. I was more in the vein of not doing things that normal people just do. I didn't like insurance, for example. Still don't. It seems pansy-ass to me. "Oh, what if my house burns down? Better get fire insurance. Oh, what if my ears fall off? Better get ear insurance." You spend all your life and money hedging yourself against terrible things -- that's the life of a paranoid little weiner, not a grown adult who realizes that risk is a part of life. And you know you always come out badly in the deal, because look at the crazy profits insurance companies make. And look how hard it is to get them to actually pay when you need them to, to actually do the only service that you're paying them so much money to do. Why not just put that money in a savings account instead? Then that money could cover you for any number of disasters, not just one type. And you'll have more money, because you're not paying so much to the insurance company to cover their "taking people's money" costs. Moreover, the chance that you're going to have a fire in which your ears fall off before that savings account builds up sufficiently is vanishingly small. And that's the thing -- any disaster is possible. It's a matter of how probable it is. Life is about playing the percentages, and there is a very small-percentage chance that an ear-severing fire will overtake my condo, so I refuse to worry about it.

Anyway. Got off track there. That's not a lesson I'm going to teach my kid. Yes, you do need auto insurance and health insurance and life insurance, sigh. Just don't go into the insurance industry or I will kill you and then disown you and then kill you again for good measure.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, credit cards. Listen up, kid, I got a story here. Go get me another beer first. And in a glass this time, dipshit!

OK, gimme that beer. Now listen up! Credit cards. Get one in college. When you're in college, the credit card companies are falling all over themselves to get the chance to get in line to purchase a ticket to be considered to be allowed to give you a credit card. But as soon as you're out of college and don't have a very good job (because no one does straight out of college), they suddenly become Entertainment Tonight to your former boy band full of 40-year-olds. That is, you've suddenly gone from flavor of the month to begging for change outside of Baskin Robbins. You're old news, hotshot! Fizzo! Floparoonie! Plummetini! Collapsiogo! Not-doing-terribly-well-aroski-meier!

Me, I was all righteously indignant about credit cards (see: insurance). I thought credit cards were a plot to get me to spend beyond my means. And then I'd have to pay extra money to the credit card company each month, and that money would compound indefinitely until I end up paying twice for everything. And they'd jigger the rules whenever they felt like it to keep me paying.

And all of this is true, of course. But, like insurance, they're a necessary evil. As long as you're smart about it, you can win against the credit card companies. Ditto for insurance, sort of.

So get a credit card in college. Don't use it unless you need to. I ain't going to be there to bail you out when you overspend. Hell, look at this shitty apartment -- you think I got the scratch to bail out your skinny little ass? Ever since your mother left me and I lost my job and my ears fell off in that fire, I ... OK, cancel that vision of the future; it's too depressing.

Lesson Number 2. Never, ever, ever, ever room with an attractive person of a complementary sexual persuasion. Even if they're of the opposite sexual persuasion you should think twice. In fact, best to not room with anyone. Avoid people altogether. Live as a hermit in the woods. Make sure you have a good internet connection, though, so I can email you funny jokes. Here's one: What do you call a lawyer who is eaten an alligator? A: I don't know, but it's probably something bad! Ha!

But most of all, don't room with a friend who you could conceivably in some universe have a romantic attachment to. It's one of the most painful things in the world. Especially when you fall for that person big-time, he/she/it rejects you, and you have to go home each night and greet that rejection with a smile. And you get to watch he/she/it go on dates/go into a back room with far inferior mates. And you have to pretend to continue to be the person's friend, while simultaneously and covertly trying to convince that person of how awesome you are, and how he/she should change his/her mind. But of course they don't, because you're "a friend." That is, you're nice but unattractive. And your convincing imitation of a good, caring person will only get your love object to value your friendship even more. So then you spend more agonizing hours with that person as a friend. You end up anxious all the time, especially when you're around the person. But you think you're in love with the person, so you have to keep trying.

In short, it's absolute torture. The first time it happened to me, after college, it was awful. Then I immediately moved into another place with another attractive woman. Of course the exact same thing happened. But this time, my body started to reject my behavior. I was so anxious all the time that I developed a bad stomach condition. I'd get up each morning and puke bile into the toilet. I went through a bunch of tests and ended up on some prescription antacids. But I was still anxious all the time and couldn't eat anything that wasn't very bland, or my stomach would just hurt worse. (It's a good diet plan, by the way. I lost a lot of weight. My stomach almost ate itself, but hey, I looked slightly thinner temporarily!)

That's enough lessons for now. Daddy's tired. Now you can go eatch Elmo.

EARTHQUAKE!!....!!

We used to have earthquakes fairly often when I was growing up. For some reason, they almost always seemed to happen at night, which meant that they woke you up. I distinctly remember being woken up several times by a gentle rocking of my bed. The first thing that happens with a night earthquake is that you have no idea what's going on - you just woke up, remember. After a second or so, though, you suddenly realize with a thrill that it's an earthquake. If it wasn't too big, you could just lie there and feel the rocking slowly subside. It was always a combination of excitement and comfort to me, somehow.

Then for some reason, they seemed to happen a lot less frequently. There were only a couple that I recall over the last ten years or so that are even worth mentioning. The biggest disappointment with fewer earthquakes, by the way, is you don't get to see the "earthquake guy" - this seismologist who ALWAYS came on tv to tell people what just happened. Here's a couple pictures of him:





Check out that moustache! That's his signature. Seriously. When he signs checks or something, he just dips his moustache in some ink and presses it on the paper.

Anyhow.... Over the last year or so, there'd been a few quakes out in the desert that were big enough to feel out here, but only because I work in a highrise - extra swaying, I guess. Alison had never felt one, so I kept asking her if she felt them, and she kept saying no. In fact, she said that she didn't believe in earthquakes - they were a myth created by Californians to keep people away. The last time she told me that was the day before the big Easter quake we had this year. Talk about a jinx! Of course, that was the biggest one that I've ever felt, so it was a rude introduction.

Now that she's experienced one, she hates them. She doesn't think that the ground (or a house) is supposed to just start moving like that. She has a point, but I have to say that I love 'em! They're my favorite natural disaster to experience in person by far.

My love of earthquakes coupled with Alison's visceral antipathy towards them led me to conduct an informal survey of my aquaintances to find out which one of us held the majority view. Interestingly, I found out that there is a HUGE correlation between one's attitude towards earthquakes and where one grew up. Nearly all of the native Californians enjoyed quakes, or at least were neutral. Nearly everyone from someplace else, though, hated them - often, even so that the mere thought of one gave them the willies.

To the loyal readers out there, I'd like to continue the survey - what do you think of earthquakes? Have you felt one?

And, more broadly, what's your favorite natural disaster? Does it matter where you're from or grew up? Shouldn't a tornado or an earthquake be just as terrifying (or exciting) whether you're from Oklahoma or California (or vice versa)?

The Nerdiness Scale

Nerd culture is thriving like never before. There was a time when, if you were a nerd, you only had physics experiments or "Lord of the Rings" to keep you entertained. Now there are dozens of TV channels containing nothing but nerd-friendly content. It is truly a golden age for Nerdish-Americans.

I've posted before about the differences between nerds, geeks, and dorks, so I won't go into that debate, hotly contested as it is within Nerdic America. Here I'm more interested in the degrees of nerdiness of various things. There is a spectrum, you see, from 1 (not at all nerdy) to 10 (holy cow, your comic book collection is about to topple over and bury you alive).

Let's take an example. I think we can all agree that "Star Trek" is pretty nerdy. Indeed, it's a sort of standard-bearer for Nerd culture, a touchstone by which people of other social strata are first exposed to the rich diversity of nerdania. But is it nerdier than "Babylon 5"? Ha ha (snort) ha ha -- yeah right, and Captain Pike had no ill effects from delta ray radiation on that J-class training ship! Ha ha (snort) ha ha ... gasp ... oh dear ... I need my inhaler ...

Basically, "Star Trek" is less nerdy than "Babylon 5" because non-nerds can watch and enjoy "Star Trek." It has considerably more crossover appeal than other fields of nerdology. At the same time, nerds can indeed get extremely over-nerdulated about "Star Trek," as we all know. The immense strength of its Nerdic following has to keep its score pretty high.

That's basically how the scale works -- you have to look at the balance between crossover appeal and nerditorial fervor. With those two criteria in mind, "Star Trek" gets a 6 out of 10 on the Nerdiness Scale. "Babylon 5" is easily a 9.

So, here are some other judgements:

"Star Wars": 4. As with "Star Trek," you can get extremely nerdified over "Star Wars." But I submit that "Star Wars" has more crossover appeal than "Star Trek," and has a smaller Nerdic subculture. Of course, comparing the "Star Trek" nerdiverse to "Star Wars"'s is a bit like saying Jessica Simpson is dumber than Paris Hilton -- you're talking about the two titans of their field. But "Star Trek" was the groundbreaker, and still the champion.

Now if you start talking about the "Star Wars" sub-subculture, the books and graphic novels and Web sites exploring Greedo's relationship with his mother or Darth Maul's favorite breakfast cereal, well, then you're getting into primo nerditacularity, possibly a 9 or 10.

"Doctor Who": 8. That's the score in the States, that is. In Britain, it gets probably a 5. In the States, you have to be a pretty hard-core Nerdist to watch "Doctor Who." I'm happy to say to say my particular nerdicacity stops at around a 6 or so, so I have never seen "Doctor Who."

"Doctor Who" has many factors pushing it in to top-flight, high-yield, weapons-grade, light sweet crude nerdilocity:

1. It's British. (Nerdites are often Anglophiles.)
2. It's on PBS. (related to no. 1)
3. It's sci-fi.
4. It's laughably cheap-looking sci-fi (as I am led to believe, anyway. I haven't seen it, remember? OK, once. But I only watched it because the Doctor's female hanger-on was real hot, and I was 13, and I would've watched an cat strangling competition if a hot chick was involved.)

"Monty Python": 5. As with "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," there's plenty of crossover appeal here. And it's not sci-fi, which lowers its score considerably.

But it has never really reached the mainstream masses in the States the way the two Star empires have. "Monty Python" crosses over not to Joe Sixpack and Jane Peoplemagazinereader but to Professor Van Nostrand and Chuckles McSlappy (a.k.a. smarties and comedians). That pushes it a bit higher on the scale.

My wife put this one best. She says that post-pubescent unathletic boys tend to go apeshit for "Monty Python" (particularly "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," of course). That's usually a prime sign of Grade-A nerdiciousness. But then many of those boys grow up to be relative non-nerds, maybe 3s or 4s on the scale. And there isn't a huge "Monty Python" nerdastic subculture -- there's not much in the way of fan fiction or action figure trading or sexual fantasies about Carol Cleveland. So that knocks it back a few points. The middle is a good place for it.

"Dungeons and Dragons": 10. I'm sorry, but D&D is really the ne plus ultra of nerdturbation. There's really no aspect that crosses over to legitimate society. There was a TV show once, I think, and some terrible movies that no one but the Nerdeviks saw. Really, the only way you can participate in Dungeons and Dragons is to take out some 20-sided dice, call yourself Mokdur the Impaler, buy some pewter figures of half-orcs, and let the nerdescence burst out of you like a primal scream.

And the nerdalaxy for D&D is massive and fervent. There are entire stores devoted to it, stores that may even be in your neighborhood and you don't even know it. They usually pose as normal storefronts, but if you innocently waltz in seeking out a nice lathe or some liquid aspartame, you will get suspicious and unfriendly looks from the shady, shifty-eyed characters shuffling within. You quickly get the hint, depart quietly, and immediately after you close the door behind you, you get the distinct feeling that a rumbling, growling mob has suddenly re-emerged from the shadows to light upon each other with adamantine battleaxes and Spells of Necrotic Termination.

I admit that I have met a few D&D adherents. I would never, of course, reveal their identities. It is their choice whether or not to come out of the closet and undergo the inevitable repercussions from a world that refuses to accept their lifestyles. I can only support them and hope that some day, somewhere, a society will be born that will permit grown men to freely and openly attack each other's Breastplates of Kaltar with the Orbs of Negative Energy that they have spent ther lives accumulating.

So that's the basic idea of the Nerdiness Scale. What other Nerdiflabiflubilations would you bring up, and where would you put them on the scale?

Why Are Religion and Science at Odds?

I mean, seriously, right? They almost never try to tackle the same questions. It's not like the Bible's all "And then God saith unto him, 'The carbon atom hath 243 electrons. Not six, like those jackass scientists say. I mean, who does those guys think they are? With their "methodical empirical testing" and "rigorous peer review" and "lifetimes devoted to assiduous and dispassionate study of minute concepts"? How could they know more about something than some guy who occasionally reads the Drudge Report?'"

I suppose I just revealed where my sympathies lie here. But I think religion gets unfairly sucked in to the real issue, which is "science vs. crazy paranoid conspiracy theorists." Take global warming, for example. So 99% of all scientists agree that it's a serious problem. And there's a huge percentage of Americans who don't believe in it, because ... why, exactly? Because it sounds scary? Because they read that a couple scientists, out of the thousands doing work on the topic, sweetened their numbers a bit once? So by that logic, if a few people steal office supplies, then no one has ever bought a stapler in the history of the world?

I'm getting off track here. I just get very frustrated with people who don't believe in established scientific principles for no good reason. Look, scientists spend their entire lives studying these things. They go through incredibly rigorous processes to test their theories, from the controls in each study to the aforementioned peer review, by which other scientists gleefully tear apart any weaknesses. This process has worked extremely well to develop the many principles that have since been used to create everything from iPods to McDonald's hamburgers (which are actually sophisticated alloys of magnesium and cat snot -- I'm sorry, did you not know that?)

I'm not suggesting you should believe every study that comes out. Be skeptical about most health-related ones, for example. (Broccoli is bad for you! Now it's good for you! Now it causes cancer! Now it kills cancer! Now it is cancer!) A single study doesn't prove much of anything. But when thousands of studies have been done, and all of them support something like global warming or evolution, you should probably start to think "hmm. There might be something to this. Maybe I don't exactly understand it, but maybe if very smart people who study it for a living all agree on it, well, it could be true!"

The global warming conspiracy theorists especially get to me. It's clearly such a serious problem, and these jackasses are still refusing to face it. I'm very scared, personally. I just read, for example, that photosynthesis decreases dramatically at temperatures above 86 degrees. That means plants can't grow nearly as well when it gets hotter. I think is a more serious problem than whether Obama may at some point raise taxes on the rich.

But the global warming naysayers apparently think it's all some kind of grand conspiracy by scientists. Have these idiots ever met a scientist? Scientists are all arrogant, super-argumentative assholes (present company excepted). They live to tear down other scientists' ideas. Bad concepts would not survive a day in that kind of pressure cooker.

And how exactly would this conspiracy work? Do you think all of the millions of scientists occasionally meet in some underground bunker and go "OK, lets make up something new. How about that the planet is getting hotter? Yeah, that's so crazy it just might work! Now all we have to do is write thousands of papers and keep an incredible internal discipline among the millions of us. All so we can write books that no one reads and Al Gore can make a moderately successful movie! It's pure genius! And besides, without global warming, what would we all do for a living? After all, there are is no other science to study."

This gets at a general distrust that Americans seem to have of experts. I don't get it. We refuse to believe the conclusions of people who are spend all their time studying something that we know nothing about. Wouldn't you think they might come up something more valid than we would?

Why do Americans think that they can have a valid opinion on everything, just by following their own gut feelings? Sometimes, you don't know enough to form an opinion. Sometimes, you have to assume that the experts are not completely insane, that they might have explored the issue in such depth that they might know more than you about it. I know, I'm talking crazy talk. After all, I work hard at the shop and support my family, so don't go telling me that protein kinases add phosphate groups to proteins! I know in my heart that what they really do is help angels fly.

And hopefully that got us back to religion vs. science, which is where I meant to go with all of this. My point was that the Bible doesn't even try to get into science. It gets into history and ethics, but not science. It doesn't say how God did stuff, just that he did. It doesn't say "And God made man, and he did it with a big ZAP and puff of smoke, in like, a second." Why couldn't He have sparked the genetic mutations that led to the formation of humans, etc.? If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. Why can't God work through the physical world to do His thing?

Basically, religion isn't about how things happen. Science explores how. Religion is about why things happen, and by whom. Science doesn't have anything to say about the deeper meaning of our lives, and doesn't pretend to. Science doesn't set forth moral principles, because that's not its job. Religion and science are working on completely different sets of questions.

I suppose this false religion vs. science dichotomy came about because of all the lame explanations that people spun out of religious worldviews and then accepted as holy fact. For instance, they once concluded that the Earth was at the center of the universe, because we're all so wonderfully delightful and God loves us mucho and everything. So when Galileo realized that that wasn't true, the religious authorities came down on him hard. But note that the Bible doesn't say anything about the Earth being at the center of the universe. This was just something people made up before there was science, and then awkwardly tied in to religion.

Or take the creation story, which is at the heart of current religion vs. science talk. Yes, it does actually say that God created everything, including humans, in six days. But c'mon, is that really the most important point here? The point is that God created things. As I said in my last post, people who take the Bible literally would have to also believe that it's OK to beat your slave within an inch of his life.

Do you really think God is up there saying "Yup, six days. If you don't believe that, then go to hell! Literally." I think He's more concerned with people believing in him, and knowing that He loves them. That seems to be more His bag.

Or with global warming - what do you think Jesus would say about it? Seriously. Do you think he would say, "Naw, it ain't true, because I saw this one thing on Fox News that said it was all a lie." I think Jesus would be a lot more interested in the moral dimension of it. That's more His thing. I think Jesus would be more like "You guys really should not be consuming so much that you're threatening to destroy my creation. How about living a bit more simply? It worked for me."

So let's stop assuming that religion and science are somehow at odds. They're not. They're in completely different realms, asking and answering completely different questions.