Dammit

Books and Covers....

2010-03-25T09:15:00.002-05:00

The Chicago Police held a community meeting last night to discuss the murder that took place last weekend. The person who was killed was indeed a targeted gang member who lived in a different neighborhood and was murdered by someone involved in La Familia. That's what it looked like to me from the beginning.

I suppose I've become desensitized to people who throw their lives away. I can't care about you more than you care about you. In fact I only care about someone wasting their life to the extent to which their choices impede or threaten other people who are making something of themselves.

A Guy Was Murdered In My Neighborhood Pt. 2

2010-03-21T08:02:00.003-05:00

There is a story about a renowned Russian statistics professor who refused to go into the bomb shelters during the raids of WW ll. "There are 7 million people in Moscow and the odds I will die are miniscule", he would say. One night however he shows up in a bomb shelter and his neighbors demand an explanation. "There are 7 million people in Moscow and one elephant at the zoo, and last night they bombed the elephant".

This is how we process danger, or more precisely the appearance of danger. We reach and overreach to form a narrative that supports its existence rather than entertain the possibility that danger appears in ways that can be purely random. That impulse is going to understandably be on display in my neighborhood in the next few days as a result of a murder at Central and Irving Park.

Towards the end of this news clip a neighborhood guy demonstrates pretty well how an event like this gets shaped into a larger story whether there is any evidence to support that story or not. The notion that we seemed to be wired to accept is that everything is getting progressively worse and that event spikes like this crime are the empirical evidence of that decline. But in reality that is exactly wrong.

In 2009 there were 453 murders in Chicago which was down from 509 in 2008 and while that may not be cause for rejoicing it is a vast improvement over 1992 when there were 943 murders in the city. Clearly the trend represents an almost unimaginable improvement in not only the number of murders but all crime statistics, yet people do not feel proportionally safer.

Indeed they feel progressively less safe.

One can understand an evolutionary advantage in over valuing negative information but it also

has a downside in that sometimes we do an exceedingly poor job of responding to things as they actually are. I think the case of McDonald v. Chicago currently before the Supreme Court is an example of exactly that. This is the case concerning the Chicago handgun ban and while Im not interested in discussing the 2nd amendment particulars here, which I agree with in principle, I am interested in trying to understand why a city with a crime rate that drops like a stone is populated by people who feel that instead crime is out of control and their only hope for survival is to own a gun. It can only be the entirely mistaken notion that the streets are out of control that feeds this and I think we arrive at that notion by placing entirely too much emphasis on the one spectacular event while completely de-valuing the overwhelming number of days where nothing happens at all.

A Guy Was Murdered In My Neighborhood Last Night Pt. 1

2010-03-20T14:12:00.006-05:00

Early last night someone walked into a barber shop in my neighborhood and clearly, with purpose, shot and killed a young man sitting in a chair. As I came home from the show last night the police had the street blocked off and crime scene tape was stretched around the storefront. I had heard nothing about it as of yet but to see it was to know that someone had died there that night.

My thoughts and feelings about this are complicated, diffuse, and don't make a lot of sense but here they are:

"Barber Shop"? Nawww This place is a hangout for young guys who don't give the impression that they think much about their hair. Lots of smoking out front, spinning rims, and dudes who are consumed with the relative degree of their flex. Feels out of place in this neighborhood and while I've never had the least problem with anybody walking past it, as I've done many many times, Im not at all surprised something like this happened there. It has always seemed like a front for something other than guys looking to touch up their fades.

Honestly I can't say that I feel badly for the person shot or the waste who killed him. Events may prove me wrong and make me look like an asshole but at this point the circumstances of the murder strongly suggest to me that this was an event involving people who have aggressively chosen to live a life that any reasonable person could conclude involved this kind of risk. When the stupid choices of your life finally catch up to you it really isn't my tragedy. I am sympathetic to the families left behind but again I'd guess that to one degree or another this has been enabled by people close to the participants.

But Im also thinking of how, just steps away from the murder scene is the entrance to Portage Park where my son has played football for years. Youth sports make an easy target. Overzealous coaches and parents are a reality and they can be a nightmarish experience for some kids. But in this case I think of the men and women who volunteer an enormous amount of time to provide positive examples and direction to kids who might otherwise not be aware of the choices they have. These are boys and girls often from single family homes that frequently don't have an overabundance of positive male role models in their lives and who are clearly starving for a man's attention and a sense of belonging. You can scoff all you like but I've seen kids grow and mature well beyond what they thought possible ,and this only happens because good people have chosen to put positive energy into the community.

Im not saying that if only the men involved in this incident had played football at Portage Park this wouldn't have happened, but I am saying that there was another potential life path availabe for these men just steps away from where both of their lives ended essentially and the people who work to make that potential available deserve a bigger thank you than they get. Lots of people will look at this and think the neighborhood has gotten more dangerous or they should perhaps move, ( more on that later ) but right now Im looking at this and thinking the neighborhood is lucky that people like Ebony and Dexter , Coach Flipper, Lupe, Omar, Charlie, and a host of other people feel moved to work towards making this kind of senselessness even less common than it is.

How Responsible Are Religious Moderates?

2010-03-14T09:39:00.002-05:00

If the Catholic church were a private business or indeed anything other than a church it would be viewed as one of the most sinister conspiracies in history. As more information comes out globally about child abuse it is clear that the knowledge of that abuse and the concerted effort to cover it up reaches all the way to the papacy.

And yet today the church down the street is full of people giving their time and money to an organization that hides, enables, and protects pedophiles.

I know a good many of the people who attend the church down the street. They're good and decent people who would never support a secular organization with the same record but attend church because it appeals to a sense of moral nostalgia or to "give the kids a moral foundation".

Fine. But at some point these same people have to take some responsibility for their support. Their tithe, however small in real numbers, goes to pay the insurance premiums that pay off victims of Catholic pedophilia and supports the work of the countless Christian bureaucrats who have hidden these criminals from discovery. It isn't okay because its a church

For Better And Worse And Everything In Between.

2010-02-24T11:23:00.003-06:00

Ran into a friend the other day who was going thru a parenting related crisis of self confidence that I easily related to.

Seems that for whatever reason we can lose ourselves in our work or whatever else we may be passionate about to the extent that we are defined entirely by our level of interest and people hate to see us coming because it means there'll be another long goddamn self absorbed discussion about our thing. But it doesn't reveal itself in the same way it does when we become so wrapped up in the raising of our children that it seems like that's all we are. That is easy to see in the mirror.

Before we had kids I had a lot of anxiety about how it would change my life and what those changes would cost. I was absolutely right about almost all of them and the ones I got wrong were underestimates. But I don't care in the same way. Life eventually comes back to you in a way that is different but far better.

Gettin' my geek on..

2010-02-22T08:17:00.004-06:00

I've been reading Wealth Of Nations by Adam Smith for what is unfortunately the first time and it has set me to pondering how and why advances in technology have not lowered the bar for easier distribution in the making of films. Other creative endeavors; books, magazines, music, have obviously experienced a serious demonetizing due to vastly lower costs of production and distribution. Not so with film and in fact Im wondering if it'll ever happen.

Technological advances in film making have tended to increase the overall costs of production rather than lower them. So while Smith argues that a greater increase in the division of labor within an industry tends to make that industry more efficient and thus produce cheaper products the reverse would be true here. It seems that increased specialization in film production is leading to increased costs and is substantially raising the bar for entry into the market. Evidently advances in technology are not blurring the line between small and large budget films but in fact are making the distinctions all the more clear, to such an extent that its almost as if they are two separate genres.

Can we infer that what applies to the production of widgets does not apply to the business of creativity? Im sure Im not smart enough to know but it strikes me that this is exactly the opposite of what economists would predict.

3rd Party Nonsense

2010-01-27T13:10:00.002-06:00

From Bull Moose to Ross Perot to Teabaggers the allure of a third party in America is an easy sell to some. The idea goes that the two party system encourages government to bog down in partisan trenches and accomplish nothing but a third party would break the deadlock and force politicians to become more responsive to "the people"

Its bullshit.

From where does one get the idea that a politician elected with oh say... a 36% plurality will be able to govern effectively with an opposition of %64? Further balkanizing our political process will not interject more efficiency into the system. Things wont get better, they'll get substantially worse.

Its an idea whose main appeal frankly is to the yahoos who would get some charge out of seeing someone in office who thinks and talks exactly as they do. Only problem is that person would get absolutely nothing done.

Defending Pat Robertson

2010-01-16T12:30:00.005-06:00

Why isn't he right? I've been having this conversation with several Christians this week and its been very interesting. The bible is full of examples of God using natural events to pass judgement on our earthly actions and of course as Christians believe God is the Ultimate Watchmaker He either causes or refuses to prevent catastrophes like the Haitian earthquake, so it is hardly insane to assume then that He would choose to cause or allow events that were in accordance with His plan. But where's the love for Grandpa Robertson?

Dispensationalist Christians will tell you that since the crucifixion we're in a separate state of grace and God does not express His will in the same way He did in the Old Testament so that's why we should not interpret these natural events as expressions of God's Will and I find it kind of surprising that this tends to be a fundamentalists' view. However they seem not to also consider that even if God has been toning down the thunderbolts of late He clearly used to smite folks left and right so this kind of thing is very much part of His nature and should sound more old fashioned than crazy.

Well okay...but if disasters are not expressions of God's judgement then neither can good fortune be a sign of His favor or blessing. Right? Well not exactly. Insofar as I can tell ALL Christians believe that God blesses us on earth even if He isn't passing out disfavor. In fact I'd go so far as to say that fundamentalist dispensationalists are especially inclined to see God's favor expressed explicitly. This is finally what American Exceptionalism is all about, but it really can't run both ways AND be serious.

But even non dispensationalists, like Catholics, do not see the hand of God at work here even though they tend to be more comfortable with the idea of God's judgement in our time. All of which brings us back to Robertson's bat shit crazy comments.

I find that believers in general struggle mightily with the notion that their active God might behave in a way that offends their sympathy. For instance I think most Christians are somewhat comfortable with the idea that AIDS is God's judgement on gays. Ostracizing gays is part of their socio-political agenda but watching children suffer the consequences of a natural disaster is not and I don't think it is an accident then that almost no Christians see the hand of God in Haitian suffering.

Why Don't Conservatives Make Blockbuster Movies?

2010-01-09T10:44:00.007-06:00

I think the conservative critics of Avatar are dead on correct. Even Jonah Golderberg, and while I don't anticipate his making another cogent point this decade he is spot on to observe that if the redemptive entity in the movie had been Jesus Christ rather than some pantheistic organic mainframe computer Avatar absolutely would not be raking in The Big Money. It is clearly an "apologia for pantheism" and a disappointingly simple minded one at that, and I say that as someone who generally agrees that corporations tend to fuck over the world and that our values are out of whack with our natural selves. Im just not entertained by watching severely dumbed down versions of ideas I agree with.

So score one for the other side in this culture war dust up.

But it has me thinking. Why aren't there more major blockbuster releases with conservative themes? Part of it is cultural sure, Hollywood is a liberal bastion populated with fewer conservatives, but why should that be so? On some level big business is big business so why wouldn't Big Hollywood attract conservatives in the same way Big Oil does? And why is it then that with all the complaining conservatives do ( often correctly) that our pop culture is deeply skewed with a liberal bias that conservatives are not able to offer popular alternatives that advance their biases? I mean if conservatives believe markets in all things, then its fair to ask why aren't people buying their product in the cultural marketplace.

Im thinking that perhaps it has to do with something intrinsic in the creative impulse.

Liberalism as a world view lends itself to spectacle and fantasy and I think packs a bigger creative punch than conservatism and is just more likely to produce a big fat popcorn movie hit. Furthermore I think almost any sort of creative endeavor that calls people to entertain the possibility of uplifting change on a grand scale is more likely to organize itself along liberal principles as change on a grand scale isn't generally a conservative theme except when associated with religious constrictions.

None of which is to say conservatives can't create very good movies. Say what you will but in my opinion The Passion Of The Christ is a masterpiece but having seen it once I can't imagine feeling the need to see it again. But I think there is something to the suggestion that the range of stories that are both conservative and likely to connect with a wide audience is severely limited.

The Wisdom of Bumper Stickers

2009-12-30T11:39:00.003-06:00

In her column today Maureen Dowd fairly asks if we can't catch a Nigerian whose own father contacted the CIA with concerns about his increasingly bat-shit crazy son then who can we catch? I suspect we're doing a better job catching crazies than this incident might suggest but the huff and puff about whether or not the system worked or failed in this case misses the larger point I think we're losing.

The government's job is to protect the security of the nation, that's not the same thing as being responsible for ensuring that no harm befall each of us individually. The bad guys are going to get some of us, guaranteed. Things that are feasibly preventable will happen and lots of people who shouldn't will die and suffer. This is not a defense of shoddy security or poor forethought, its just reality. Its why no one needs to have the "Shit Happens" bumper sticker explained to them.

The responsibility for our safety lies with us and when people like Jasper Schuringa stop taking primary responsibility for their own well being and expect government to do all the heavy lifting of survival then we're screwed well beyond the point that any terrorist threat can muster.

I know it when I see it and I saw it in The Wrestler

2009-12-28T15:32:00.010-06:00

Finally got around to watching The Wrestler over the holidays and of course I loved it as I love anything that's honest enough to acknowledge that our dreams are slowly killing us at least as much as our faults are. Also loved the casting throughout but was at first a little surprised to see Marisa Tomei doing a turn as the frequently topless stripper, I guess Im still naive enough to believe that an Oscar, even a questionable one, automatically insulates you from pandering nudity.

While that may or may not be true there is no denying that no matter how big your career in Hollywood if you're playing a stripper/hooker you will have a heart of gold beating just underneath your ta-tas. And with this movie in particular you have to call bullshit.

Rourke's character, while immensely compelling, struck me as really something of a pornographic figure. He portrays a man who will endure almost limitless physical humiliation and pain for money, he sells his body for the fleeting pleasure of strangers. Im thinking particularly of the scene with the staple gun and the aftermath as medics pull embedded staples out of his flesh in a makeshift locker room, but just about any scene will do. Now perhaps that isn't prurient in an erotic sense but that kind of entertainment hardly appeals to our better natures and has in common with pornography a physical and spiritual debasement. So what do we want to call it instead?

Now one could hardly be blamed for seeing the parallel between Tomei the stripper and Rourke the wrestler as the fact that they essentially have the same job is just one of the many reasons they were meant to be together forever, except that the movie goes to a lot of trouble to make certain we know that one of them doesn't really have their soul in their work. Wanna guess which one?

"Im not a stripper" Tomei is obliged to announce. Hell, she's got a kid, a life, maybe a glimmer of a better future funded by tips from back room lap dances, so its not that she likes being naked for strangers there's a laudable reason for it, and like magic we have her tits without judgment. Rourke on the other hand offers no such excuse for his equally debauched employment. He likes it, a lot, and that's why we find the story so compelling but the upshot is Tomei has to apologize for her boobs but Rourke isn't troubled to explain why he is drawn to slowly killing himself and yet there is no judgment there either. And maybe there should be. Does a person like that really deserve our sympathy? That character isn't a victim yet I experienced him as one in the story and whose fault is that?

Who is letting who off the hook here, us or the movie? Men can be physically defiled AND heroic, women cannot. Im not smart enough to know why that is but I can't help but think that nobody is particularly well served by it.

The Cost Of Doubling Down, Or Why Im Not A Conservative.

2009-12-22T11:58:00.007-06:00

This article in TNR is a kind of greatest hits for errors in conservative judgement, begrudging women the vote, supporting child labor... that kind of thing. Its an easy lampoon of course but it gets to the core of why Im a liberal and how time erodes the impact of fear and turns it into foolishness.

My conservative friends would state the case for their beliefs on a point we'd both agree with; given that human understanding is limited it is not possible for us to address every inequity in society. We immediately part company however in how we value the attempt to address the inequities we can and what the costs of doing nothing are. For conservatives disparate social outcomes are an ipso facto affirmation of what they believe to be the best possible scenario in an imperfect world. It has always struck me as a circular kind of logic that justifies our supposed inability to address social ills based merely on their existence. Conservatives move forward in the belief that what can be known about humankind is known and life is essentially the business of balancing our competing interests in a way that benefits the most people possible. Those things that fall thru the cracks are evidence of human imperfection and the ultimate reality lies in accepting our inability to engineer social fixes on a large scale.

I think history tells us something entirely different. I think the world clearly spins forward and in time we always come to treat one another with more fairness and humanity and the only way we come to that new understanding is in the attempt to make sweeping change. The worst possible justification for refusing to remediate a social inbalance is to appeal to a long history of not having done so previously. In the short term we will fail in some things and even make matters worse in the attempt, but long term we fail much more miserably by refusing to make the effort. We expose our values as situational and fleeting if we do not challenge ourselves to extend them to everyone. Everyone. In every circumstance.

Either we hold certain truths to be self evident or we do not. There isn't a middle ground.

Which Is It?

2009-12-20T09:41:00.002-06:00

After watching and listening to many fellow liberals criticize the health bill I can't help but wonder if many of them don't have more passion for smacking down insurance companies and big-pharma than they do helping people.

They make the same bargain with the devil that conservatives do in that they are willing to let people suffer because they don't think the benefits the bill provides outweigh its shortcomings.

Its far less than I'd like to see, far less, but its also entirely reflective of reality and if we want to live in a world ( and I would like to) where medicine is socialized entirely and insurance is largely de-profitized then we'll have to change a great deal about the culture of the entire country and can't expect that to happen in a bill, even one of this scope.

When Democracy Sucks... And You Have To Like It

2009-12-15T18:41:00.007-06:00

Healthcare reform went to a place I could not have imagined when goddamn fucking Joe Lieberman sunk the the Medicare Buy-In and the public option in one fell swoop. Its like your girlfriend leaving you for the biggest douche bag you know. A scant three months ago Lieberman was touting the very sort of buy-in he now opposes and it appears that his opposition comes from the worst, most craven, and spiteful place you can imagine. This is an awful awful human being.

As much as I believe anything I believe that free markets cannot deliver equitable healthcare and to oppose reform is to favor profits over people. It is undeniable that people will die needlessly because some in our country cannot think outside of their dogmatic boxes and they're perfectly content to have that happen rather than expand their notion of what is possible. Now is when I have to be careful not become one of them....

There are any number of good reasons to dig in and oppose the Senate bill. It doesn't go nearly far enough, it is full of loopholes that will line the pockets of mutherfucking insurance companies who profit from misery, Obama didn't do enough, Reid didn't do enough, it sells out progressives who gave Obama his initial grass roots support, it empowers cocks like Lieberman, it wont cover everyone.... what have I left out?

But Im going to support it anyway. As per usual Ezra Klein makes a much better case for supporting the bill than I can but it comes down finally to values. What is more important, that my sense of social equity be indulged or 30 million people who couldn't previously afford insurance can? Imperfections and all this is a significant improvement and to oppose it solely on ideological grounds is a kind of immaturity I think.

If this bill dies we wont get a better one, AND we wont get cap and trade, finance reform, or a more progressive president any time soon. Those sort zero sum ideological litmus tests are the stuff of the right wing and we should carefully take note of where its gotten them. If we want to lead we have to be willing to accept less than everything we want and not think it a sign of weakness.

NY, Maine, Prop 8, And The Long Arc of Justice....

2009-12-03T08:21:00.006-06:00

In the midst of these not too happy days I think its worth remembering how far the issue of gay rights has come in the span of relatively little time. My personal flashpoint on this entire issue was in 1986 when the Supreme Court released its decision in Bower v. Hardwick which concerned an anti sodomy statute in Georgia that two men had been imprisoned under.

Not only did the Supreme Court uphold the law but I really think you should read this bit of the opinion and wrap your mind around the fact that within our lifetimes this was a perfectly acceptable intellectual position...

In the majority opinion Justice White wrote." a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy...to claim that right to engage in such conduct is implicit in the concept of ordered liberty... is FACETIOUS AT BEST" Fuckin' what? Couldn't believe it then and I still can't now.

That wasn't written in 1874, though it could've been. A scant 23 years ago society was perfectly comfortable with a sitting justice spouting the notion that it was facetious AT BEST for gays to assert that what they chose to do in the privacy of their homes was in fact private. Roughly 17 years later the Supreme Court explicitly overturned Bower in the Lawrence v. Summer which involved an anti sodomy statute in Texas.... why are all of these cases from the south... in which even Clarence Thomas called the Texas statute silly.

It may be cold comfort but that is undeniable progress. In a little over a generation we've gone from the notion that gays have no legal right to their sexuality to losing votes over gay marriage by competitive margins. Don't pretend like you saw that coming 23 years ago because you didn't. I had hoped we were further along. We aren't and its frustrating, but there is no denying the direction this thing is running in and I suspect that 23 years hence our children will have no idea why this was an issue in the first place.

To Broadway or not to Broadway....

2009-11-28T13:33:00.008-06:00

Maybe not the question exactly at this point but a very real consideration and one that has elicited some surprising feelings on my part. There is not an actor in this world who at some point would not drink all of your blood and step over their mother for the opportunity to open a big hot show on Broadway, me included, but Im not so sure that's the point Im at in my life right now. As I type this there are no offers out to anyone so its a bit of an abstraction but they'll be coming soon and one can't help but think about how it all might play out.

If I were in the producer's meetings I think I'd be lobbying for a couple of different scenarios. My first option would be to offer my role to a star. Who? No idea. I have no feeling for that kind of thing but I'd put a casting director on that tout suite. A name sufficiently large would of course be a draw in and of itself but it would also insulate the show from some nagging unevenness that likely wont escape critical New York eyes and perhaps sell enough tickets to offset the potential of less than raving reviews. As major script changes don't seem to be in the offing I'd be pushing this option hard.

But lets assume nobody else wants to dig down and start cutting weekly checks to a star or risk upsetting the balance of music and story we've arrived at.

In that case I'd hire a local NY actor and pocket the per diem and housing that would be part and parcel of offering the role to....well...me. Now, Im not poor mouthing myself here. I think I do one helluva good job and I don't think I flatter myself unduly in feeling that the work I've done has gone a long way towards helping shore this thing up as a viable Broadway commodity. I think Im a real asset to the production but even so there is no way around the fact that Im saying that if my own money were at risk here I would strongly consider not offering myself the role.

What. The. Fuck. Is up with that?

Its a strange place to say the least. Its like Im at the intersection of Contentment and Sour Grapes and to be honest Im not entirely certain I know which road Im on but I guess its the perfect illustration of how things change with age.

If I'd been in this spot ten years ago and were not offered this part in New York I would have been crushed. Well fuck, beyond crushed, there is no word for that kind of rejection. It would have been one of those devastating kicks to the scrotum that this business doles out every so often and would have sent me shivering under the covers for an unknowable period of time. But ten years hence I see the larger picture somewhat and more importantly don't feel that my personal worth is nearly as bound up with my career to the same extent I used to. Which is not to say that I care less but is to say I don't care as much. Can't explain it any better than that.

In fairness this isn't strictly pass/fail. Regardless Im likely to continue to stay with the production in Chicago as long as I care to and it suits the producer's needs so its not like Im out on the street. If the fall back position is that I get to stay regularly employed in a show that I genuinely love to do, pays well, AND get to wake up next to my wife and take my kids to school everyday that's a better gig than lots of actors have so any disappointment I'd feel would be a tad unseemly.

I've likely jumped the rambling shark by now but this is a little like walking on the moon. Acting is premised on a completely unhealthy level of self absorption, don't let anybody bullshit you otherwise. Perspective is rare in this business and I'll probably lose it at some point, but its nice to have worn it around for awhile.

Welcome Gentlemen...

2009-11-28T13:32:00.001-06:00

Ordinary or otherwise.....

How does everyone else afford universal health care?

2009-11-25T08:35:00.003-06:00

Because we subsidize most of the world's military. Now this paints with a broad brush but there is no small measure of truth in it. Western Europe and much of Asia has lived under the umbrella of our military strength since WW II with countries like Germany and Japan notably growing their economies in that time without having to seriously consider the costs of defending themselves which has freed them to spend lavishly on butter without having to also bear the cost of guns.

If the right wing has a viable opportunity to rebrand itself it is here. There is little political will to bear the costs of our military over extension and while the American Exceptionalism of the neo con right is largely responsible for the our projection of power abroad there is a growing movement in the hard populist right wing to just stay home. Currently the problem is that this point of view is most often associated with the more unfortunate element of the right like Ron Paul and Patrick Buchanan but there is an argument here for the right to make and return to their non interventionist roots.

So Im a big stinkin' atheist. Why am I such a nice guy?

2009-11-22T11:00:00.010-06:00

So.... yeah... don't believe in God. Now, I have to say that I've come by my apostasy honestly, I spent the first 20 odd years of my life deeply immersed in the Southern Baptist church. If the church was open we were generally there and I took my time there seriously. Im no casual disbeliever but disbelieve I do..

The reasons for my disbelief are many but one of the first things that made me start thinking about the status of my supposed salvation was the notion of morality and evil writ large.

Christians will tell you that without their God there is no possibility for morality but I aint buyin' it and frankly never have. First of all to say as much is to essentially announce that you're a psychopath on a short leash which of course they are not but it goes beyond that.

The fundamental problem for those who conflate God and morality is that civilizations with vastly different conceptions of God, or scarcely any perception of God at all, have very similar moral codes and behaviors as believers. Its a small point and an easy observation but its a significant issue for anyone who insists that the Bible or other book is the source of all morality in the world. Wildly different inputs should not have observably similar outcomes, but they do all the time.

But lets get personal. As I observe the lives of the many Christians I know I can perceive no difference in the choices they make for themselves and the choices I make for me. In fact I would say that you would not be able to point to any facet of my moral life and infer my atheism from my behavior or choices. Now Im no better than them but Im certainly no worse and that shouldn't be. I don't believe in heaven or providential judgement of any kind, so why aren't I killing, lying, cheating, and coveting more than the religious folks? I should be....

For me the answer is readily apparent. Morality is a human conception, I'll even call it an evolved trait. What do we want? Well excluding the sociopaths and nutjobs its fair to say that most homosapien types want to live in relative peace and comfort. Now is continued violence against ones fellows the best way to achieve that end? Sometimes it is ( in which case we handily enlist God on the side of our violence ) but most often bashing the heads of your neighbors against a wall because you covet their ass isn't going to make your life less complicated and will invite pain and violence which doesn't serve the interests of our existence over the long term.

Out on the savannah I think we learned very quickly that codifying fundamental respect for one another made the wheels of our nascent civilization turn much more easily for its members and thus was morality "invented".

Now here comes the ironic part....

While its abundantly clear that one God is in no way necessary to the formation of morality it is also clear that myth, symbolism, and belief in the idea of A god are entirely necessary to the CONTINUED existence of morality in a pluralistic world. We are meaning makers. We have an endless capacity to organize ourselves around stories and I think that's a terribly important point in our survival but to acknowledge the equal power of our stories costs us much of their specific organizational impact and that's where it gets dicey. God does not exist. We continually invent him. But we cannot acknowledge as much without radically reorganizing our societal structures and that just aint going to happen quickly. If ever.

This is why Im not an angry atheist.... well I am angry but just not about this. Usually. I don't know if we have the capacity to move toward complete rationality or if that would even be a good thing but I do know through observation that we have the capacity to move away from singular conceptions of the transcendent without an injurious affect on society or individuals and the more we move away from spiritual tribalism the better. How far? I wouldn't pretend to know, just don't start teaching your goddamn creationism to my kids.....

Tell me again what we're sending people to die for?

2009-11-20T12:35:00.007-06:00

In the grand scheme of things this KSM trial dust up makes me more sad than angry but either way its yet another point of conservatism that I truly cannot process.

The talking points are basically covered here in Krauthammer's latest column. The underlying assumptions are two: that the court system is unable/unlikely/unwilling to handle the job and to avail KSM access to this shoddy unworkable system then conveys rights to him that he otherwise wouldn't have and in fact shouldn't have....

*sigh*

Let me take the last one first. This notion that the American government has the capacity to bequeath rights to individuals is one helluva statement for someone like Krauthammer to make, because unless Im mistaken the American Ideal is expressed in the belief that "We hold these truths be self evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...". Including the Bad Guys.

To my mind this is the great achievement of America. Its why it exists, and its why its not just a lump of land we happen to have been born in but a noble and uplifting concept worth asking people to sacrifice their lives for, and to reassert that belief when faced with the worst of the worst, as this man undeniably is, strikes me as the strongest possible statement of confidence in our beliefs and the institutions we've built to embody those beliefs. To lack that confidence to this extent invites the question what do these people think America is.

But it is not terribly surprising that the conservative populists would be so disrespectful of our courts because they generally do not find them to be legitimate. In what is irony so deep that it makes me dizzy the one institution that exist EXPLICITLY to ensure that the government respects our "unalienable rights" is the very same institution conservatives disdain most. "Activist judges". "Discovered rights". These are smears leveled by people who actually don't believe in natural rights but in majoritarianism. So if you accept the notion, as conservatives do, that the courts are inherently at odds with the will of the people and that will is the final arbiter of all things then of course a criminal court is the wrong place to do this. Its just that this is a terribly unfortunate belief for an American to hold because in that respect it wastes his birthright.

Now this would just be another in an endless string of political arguments were it not for the fact that we have people fighting and dying right now to protect the freedoms that some among us do not have the courage to trust in times of hardship. But they are... and given that I think its fair to ask conservatives if they believe our soldiers are dying for America the plot of land or America the idea?

Another Empty Argument Against Gay Marriage...

2009-11-10T15:41:00.003-06:00

The Christian right has put a good deal of time and energy into the argument that making gay marriage legal would force them to deny their beliefs or face governmental backlash. This is wrong of course, Christians will retain their right to hold onto their bigoted beliefs and promote them in their churches thanks to a little thing called equal protection before the law. Now, they will lose the right to appeal to the government to be a tool of their bigotry just like racists did after the Civil Rights Act but that hardly squares with the victimology they are embracing.

This is a little remembered point but the Mormon Church was, until 1978, structured in a way that was clearly intended to deny blacks equal footing with whites within in the church. And its worth noting that it was a handy revelation from God and not governmental pressure of any kind that allowed blacks to become fully Mormon and indeed many fundamentalist Mormon offshoots still disallow blacks full membership. Clearly racist and clearly wrong... but clearly legal.

Its only a matter of time?

2009-11-09T08:47:00.004-06:00

As one could've guessed its becoming clearer that the Ft. Hood shootings were the work of a Muslim fundamentalist, and that's going to get very awkward. And while I think there is merit to the argument that Sam Harris and Hitchens make that violence is especially endemic to Islam I don't think that captures the full picture.

Violence is endemic to fundamentalism period. Fundamentalism is not a spiritual stance, its a retreat from the world as it exists and a yearning for an imaginary world. It absolutely refuses to reconcile the two in any way...

So while it is not true that every fundamentalist is a potential terrorist it is true that violence against the "lesser" world (reality) is the logical extension of any sort of fundamentalism.

We're in a time in America when the future is coming fast. An old order of conservatism is falling away, having been discredited, and its leaving a lot of people with no viable political voice. Its going to further stoke resentment, fear, and isolation. People were killed at Ft. Hood by a Muslim who had checked out of this world and had bought fully into what his Magic Book told him the world should be like. Im afraid its only a matter of time before some Christians start doing the same.....

Jesus, Save Me From Your Followers....

2009-11-05T08:20:00.003-06:00

If this was just the ramblings of one wing nut then it'd be easy to dismiss, but it aint. Dreher represents the best intellectual argument that religious conservatives can summon when it comes to their support for legal bigotry and its so stunningly stupid that you have to read it several times before you really grasp how shallow it is.....

Read the whole post if you can but this is the money quote:

"...every single time its been put to a popular vote gay marriage has been a loser...unless you're prepared to call more than half the country bigots, and I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, gay marriage supporters are, and let that self serving explanation suffice, maybe, just maybe, you ought to ask yourself if there's something else going on here"

Brilliant. Put the onus of responsibility for my bigotry on the person who is being discriminated against. What is it about you gay person that makes me want to deprive you of your full rights? Maybe you should think about that before you go and call me a bigot because Im not a bad person, must be something else going on here. Sometimes other people's sheer idiocy makes me wanna beat my head against a wall, and this is one of those times.

Well let me go on record as saying that Im perfectly willing to say more than half the country is bigoted and if you honestly don't recognize that almost everyone is prejudiced against something then Im really not sure what world you're living in. Certainly not the one that me and my computer are in right now.

So how can we know finally that this is a bigoted position? Well, look at their own words. Conservatives howl to hell and back about the potential harm gay marriage is going to do to us all but when they're pressed to articulate specifically what that harm is well.... shit gets dicey for them.

They talk about "something else" other than bigotry going on here but what that something is not even God in heaven knows because they can't tell you what that "thing" is. They talk vaguely about concerns over undoing traditional norms but they can't tell you how that's going to hurt you or yours. They cannot articulate any harm to society beyond their own ick factor and that just aint gonna do it.

Look. Laws protect people against harm. Absent harm then there is no need for that law. End. Of. Story. Now of course conservatives have every right to hold whatever prejudices they like, raise their children in that prejudice, worship with people who are like minded, in fact they are perfectly free to organize every aspect of their life around it. But they are not free to petition the government to enshrine their prejudice in law for no other reason than it suits them.

This will end one day. Sadly it looks like it'll be later rather than sooner. But when it does and the sky does not fall and we go on living our lives just as we always have the children and grandchildren of these people will look at them and have no idea what the hell they were doing or why.

Should A Hearing Actor Be Cast in The Miracle Worker?

2009-10-30T12:28:00.005-05:00

There is a minor tempest in a tea cup brewing over whether or not it is inappropriate to cast a hearing actor in the role of Helen Keller in an upcoming production of The Miracle Worker in NY with several deaf advocacy groups taking a predictable stand. They should let it pass.

Im sympathetic to the challenges faced by people with any physical issues that choose acting as a profession, but when they or their advocates claim that someone without their issue should not play characters with that condition they are wrong, very wrong. The point of acting, hell the point of art, is that it speaks to us universally. If a hearing actor cannot possibly portray a deaf character then where does it stop? How could an actor who was not a victim of child abuse play a character who was, or gay, or a Jew? The list goes on. This kind of thinking, however well intentioned, would inevitably lead to a complete artistic balkanization with swaths of actors only eligible to play the roles to which they were born. It is entirely antithetic to what draws us to art in the first place.

Why do we have tax exempt status in the first place

2009-10-30T12:07:00.003-05:00

Volokh makes a good point that tax exemptions for churches would be impossible to eliminate as long as other organizations retain theirs. Which raises the obvious question as to why do tax exemptions exist at all and why isn't this a bigger issue for conservatives?

Obviously there are any number of tax exempt non profits that do all kinds of good work that I support, just as there are a good number that do work that I think we'd be better off without.

But either way their tax exempt status amounts to a subsidy that we're required to dole out regardless of what we think of them or their work. I'd really rather not be paying higher taxes because the two Catholic churches in neighborhood that sit on prime real estate pay none. But I do, and so do you...

I'd support a complete dissolution of tax exempt status but retain deductions for giving. If we're to involve the tax code at all that strikes me as far more equitable and it strikes me further that this should be an abiding issue for conservatives, but having been largely co-opted by fundamentalist Christians this is a point no politician would ever attempt to make. However its difficult for me to process the status an anything other than a governmental preference for certain activities over others with the contribution to the common good being difficult if not impossible to quantify.

The 2nd Amendment Kinda Blows..

2009-10-29T12:37:00.004-05:00

I like to deer hunt and would probably also like to go turkey hunting though I've never been and so accordingly Im sort of in the market for a scoped deer rifle and perhaps a .12 gauge. When I've gone hunting in the past its just been much easier and cheaper to borrow something from my brother in law's arsenal.

I say that for context.....

The 2nd amendment is I think easily the most problematic of the first 10. As we interpret it now it amounts to a golden guarantee that many people will die as a result of gun violence.

Im going to say something else that's crazy. The NRA aint all bad. I'll grant you every whacked out hysterical conspiracy and gun nut rant if you'll grant me that they do in fact do more than any other organization to promote responsible gun use. Now I'd like it much better if they didn't at the same time enable so much irresponsible gun use but our culture is such that we can't currently separate one from the other and I j'accuse the 2nd amendment.

As a wanna-be Constitutional scholar these are the issues as I see them...

First of all I don't think we're readin' the damn thing right. This question is finally going to get some SC love in this term I believe but the amendment says this:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

A little different from the bumper stickers you see from the Cold Dead Hands crowd isn't it? It strikes me as clear as clear can be that the amendment was written to address gun ownership in the service of a larger point, namely national security at a time when standing armies weren't terribly popular. Had the framers simply wanted to say that gun ownership was a universal right subject to no conditions they certainly would have. They didn't. They made it contingent and in doing so I think clearly left the door open for reasonable restrictions. To read the amendment otherwise seems to me to be an obvious case of conservative judicial activism or reading the Constitution with a social bias.

A blanket interpretation is anachronistic. Clearly guns mean different things in different locations I think its impossible to take a responsible approach to guns that does not take that into consideration.

As I type this in Chicago there is no good reason for me to hear gunfire outside my house. It can only be bad. If I were in rural Missouri or Oklahoma where I've gone hunting and I were to hear gunfire it really wouldn't mean much at all regardless of whether it was hunting season or not. So why do we tolerate laws that assumes gun shots are the same every where? Doesn't it strike you as the height of common sense that gun laws in heavily populated areas would be different from gun laws in sparsely populated areas? Of course it does and of course local governance is a cornerstone of conservative politics. But not here. And children are dead and more will die because of it.

The Ongoing Myth of Conservative Patriotism

2009-10-22T11:07:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago I posted an article that argued that for all their lapel pin wearing blather conservatives don't actually love America the country so much as they love America the mirror that reflects their social values. But hey, you don't have to take my word for it, Pat Buchanan makes my point beautifully here as he asserts that "Traditional Americans" are losing their country.

The point here isn't that Buchanan is fear-mongering necessarily or inventing concerns because he elucidates some legitimate problems but he gives himself away in imagining that these problems would only worry "Traditional Americans" or those folks who by insinuation have more of a stake in things going to hell. If Pat and his ilk don't see your reflection in their mirror well then its impossible for them to imagine that you'd share their interests.

MDQ Shut Out. Really??

2009-10-20T15:12:00.016-05:00

Im treading dangerously into sour grapes territory here so I have to lay out a brief defense of the whine Im about to go on and accordingly this would probably be a good time to go lawyer and mention that these are my opinions alone and almost certainly don't reflect anyone else's involved with the show in anyway shape or form.

Our show got shut out at the Jeff's last night. Now the little shred of integrity Im struggling to stand on here is that I was not a part of the cast when it was nominated and so my work really was not a part of that recognition. I didn't identify with that honor in this case because I didn't earn it. In fact I offered to let the previous actor go in my place since he had more to do with it than I did and had we won I wouldn't have felt like I had a helluva lot to do with it in any event. So Im claiming at least some objectivity, but whether you buy it or not here comes a bitch storm....

What a load of bullshit that was.

Look, I can understand how it might be hard for the matronly Jeff Committee to measure this show against a more traditional musical because that is one thing we are not. MDQ is more of an unstoppable ass kicking machine than it is your standard musical theatre fare, and thank god for it because that sappy shit makes me want to puke more often than not. So we're the square peg knocking against the round hole and really that's where we'd rather be if I can speak for the group.

But.

When Levi Kreis, who clearly has more talent in the space between the first and second knuckle of the lesser of his two little fingers than most of the other barking hacks out there combined, is passed over by the Jeff Committee in favor of some entirely over earnest simp, well then kids something is desperately awry. Desperately. Same can be said for the fact that his was the only performance singled out for a nomination. These guys don't grow on trees like, oh say, fey tenors aspiring to butched up gravitas do. It was a particularly conspicuous Jeff FAIL because the list of other shows that received more awards AND are also going to Broadway AND have comparably enormous futures ahead of them is as follows:

So why no MDQ love?

We're the NY Yankees of Chicago theatre. Seriously.

The story Chicago Theatre likes to tell itself is that this a plucky little hard scrabble kind of place to come to that probably wont make you rich but will offer the humble and pure of heart the chance to take big risks that couldn't happen in NY or LA and so informs and shapes the subsequent big successful careers you go have some place else. Chicago aint about easy money its about heart and commitment, or so we say. And its kind of true to a point. But its also true then that this becomes a self fulfilling prophesy and so we end up celebrating the performances that fit that paradigm instead of performances that just are plain better than everything else out there.

Think Im full of shit? Well indulge me....

Imagine MDQ the show exactly as it is now, performance wise, but with different hometowns for most of the cast. If it were directed by someone with a local pedigree like Gary Griffin or the like, and if Rob Lyons, Eddie Clendening, and Kelly Lamont were long time Chicago actors who also just so happened to be kick ass ( or even merely competent) musicians and singers as well, then hell, there wouldn't be enough space on anyone's shelf to hold all the little statuettes we would have carried home last night.

But the MDQ back story isn't about wholesome hometown heroes making good so its easier to ignore how goddamn excellent it actually is. It doesn't reinforce the Chicago narrative because its big, for profit, and just employs the best people period instead of the best local people. We're a big noisy example of what Chicago doesn't do very well. We aren't "One of the Ones" locally anyway, to borrow a phrase, so everybody else gets graded on the curve. So the upshot is that the Jeff Committee doesn't really present an award show so much as they stage a hometown circle jerk.

There. I said it.

The Best Possible Argument For Government Health Care

2009-10-12T21:23:00.004-05:00

The insurance industry pushes back. Not unexpected of course but they're clearly the authors of their own doom in this. Their point is a simple one and it articulates precisely why for profit insurance doesn't work. It comes down to this: If insurance companies cannot deny coverage to high risk customers, also known as very sick people, then they'll have to raise your premiums because they can't possibly be expected to cut into their profit margins.

We sell insurance companies our risk, period. We don't buy access to health care. So when the price of our risk gets too high they have every reason to limit their exposure to our risk. That's how market driven insurance works. The system we have now isn't broken, it works exactly like it should because it is motivated by profit for shareholders and not levels of care for sick people. If you like profits more than you like sick people being taken care of then you should oppose reform.

The reason health insurance is different from every other kind of insurance is that when it comes to our health there is no fixed cost of replacement. The worst thing that can possibly happen to your car insurance company is that they will have to replace your car and we know pretty much how much that costs. Same for your home insurance company springing for a new roof. Their risk exposure is bracketed so they can set premiums relative to known costs.

Health care though? Who knows what the level of risk might be. I've been to the doctor once this decade but if I get hit by a bus tomorrow I might run up God only knows how much in medical bills. The sky is literally the limit and insurance companies can't both insure you to the stratosphere AND make money so they drop people and limit coverage whenever they can.

Its what markets do.

If you like the idea of calling 911 to summon the police or fire department then you agree with me in principle that universal, or "socialized" healthcare, is the best option. We may disagree about how to get there but unless you've got a private security firm protecting your life and property you can't really argue the point on substance. You can't.

And The Nobel For Scorched Earth Politics Goes To....

2009-10-09T14:05:00.003-05:00

Not too suspenseful is it?

Im not unsympathetic to the plight of my conservative friends, Im really not, but I don't feel badly enough for them to not notice how this Nobel Prize episode reveals what a struggle it is for them to assert policy narratives that can stand up to more than 15 seconds of pondering.

First the low hanging fruit.....

Conservatives of course will tell you that things like Nobel Prizes don't really matter, until of course they do matter for reasons that are entirely of their own expedient making. As a point of legitimacy I don't think there is anything wrong necessarily in poo-pooing the import of stuff like this, except of course they need to remember that things they find trivial should always be trivial and this they cannot do. I like to call this "Make Up A Story And Stick With It"

Now the story line struggling to take hold here is that this is yet another example of how Obama has been awarded for having done nothing and apparently disproves the adage that you can't fool all the people all the time. In fairness I don't think there is anything untoward in suggesting that we're hardly in Mother Teresa territory here.... but ... nothing? Really? Lets look closer shall we....

We're talking about a President who has committed the most powerful nation on earth to ending a war that is completely indefensible and unneeded. A President who has stated categorically that we will no longer rationalize torture or the illegal rendition of detainees,

a President committed to closing Guatanamo, a President who has taken our case for individual liberty directly to the Muslim world, and on the domestic front a President who has injected a degree of thoughtfulness, honesty, and depth into our national discussion on race that I thought I would never see.

Now, fish and loaves maybe it aint. But nothing?? Your dogmatic slip is showing.

So why doesn't the Right see this? Again, we know the answer. Their myopia is reflective of nothing more than the extent to which they have invested themselves in scorched earth politics. They cannot see how Obama's tack on foreign affairs might play in the rest of the world because they've tried, and obviously failed, to frame these as failures on his part. They are still struggling to accept that the last 8 years of Neo-Con babbling has been a horrid episode for America, or if they do accept it they try to pretend like it doesn't matter, and neither point holds.

And finally....

The deep personal disdain they hold Obama in is revealed in this nugget. Regardless of what you think about the Nobel Committee or their stinkin' prize or Obama for that matter Im struggling to grasp how anyone could not look at this and see how it works for the national good. Are we really worse off now that the world is more optimistic about our policy goals?

Does this really make it harder for us to deal with Iran, North Korea, Israel/Palestine? Of course not, but they have to feel as though it does somehow or just ignore that it doesn't because not to would mean they have to deal with the truth. And they don't want that.

Why you should run a marathon.

2009-10-07T11:16:00.006-05:00

When I was in my 30's I was kind of a work out fanatic. For a period of four or five years I ran several triathalons, 5k's, and finally a marathon and when I wasn't actually competing I was spending more time and mental energy than I should have worrying about how to shave 3 minutes off my swim time. So that really hot set of abs I had was bought with a fair amount of self absorption, but then nothing in life is free, and while I still like to think Im easing into my mid 40's in better shape than most Im not doing anything like the mileage I used to and I've conceded that the six pack is gone, never to come again. I blame beer.

But I don't think I'll ever come to understand the hint of glee so many non athletes take in finding any suggestion that perhaps the whole boom in marathons and other distance events might be over stated with regards to subsequent health benefits. Today its the Wall St. Journal that apparently has nothing better to do than wonder if the running a marathon is really "worth it" or not.

Look, the boom in marathons have obviously drawn in a lot of people who are seduced by the event itself rather than the lifestyle. They make the attempt hoping that it will change them into the better selves they want to be and that's asking the wrong question. There is no special transformative magic in marathons in and of themselves anymore so than there is in saying you're going to quit smoking. The benefit lies ultimately in the commitment and not the singular event so if you can't keep it up then of course nothing much is going to happen. Don't we already know this?

So no, Im not running 45 miles a week anymore and probably never will. But I learned something in the effort that I don't think I could possibly have learned otherwise and I refer to it frequently. I learned that more often than not it is not the pain you are in that makes you quit.

Its that pain combined with the fear of what's coming that makes you quit. In the moment you are in, you are almost always okay. Stay in your moment and you can take the pain.

How the Olympic bid reminds me of the health care debate.

2009-10-03T11:15:00.006-05:00

The similarity struck me long ago but now that the bid has failed and failed miserably I think its worth considering more deeply how very much alike the two are.

Most obvious of course is that the opposition in both cases is rooted in personality politics with a deep antipathy toward the organizing politician and the supposed elitist class the the nay sayers imagine he works for. In both cases the opposition feels like something much larger is at stake which tends to increases the level of confirmation bias in their thinking and dissuades them from seriously considering any information which suggests that they may be wrong even though it is abundant. And in both cases the supposed alternatives the opposition suggests are woefully unrealistic and the overall view expressed is one of surprising skepticism and frankly a casual sort of spite that refuses to consider the full ramifications of failure.

The cherry on top here though is that, anecdotally at least, the people I've come across who opposed the Olympic bid are the same people who are politically very much in the tank for Obama and his policies. Evidently they don't hear Eric Cantor or Michelle Bachmann echoing through their own words. You can't coach irony......

Before I go on I should say that obviously I supported the bid very strongly but not because I wanted the Olympics necessarily. I support any event along these lines that has the capacity to be a long term economic engine for the city. I find it stunningly self evident that not only is it perfectly legitimate to use large triggering events like the Games to focus public policy on larger issues it is good governance as well.

But its the last two similarities that I think are the most pyrrhic for the opposition and the ones I want to focus on more closely.

I've heard it expressed often that money spent on the preparations for the Games would be put to far better use if it were just spent instead on non-Games related infrastructure. Its a struggle to respond to something so unbelievably fatuous but Im going to try.

Let me put it simply. That wont be happening. Now many in the anti Games crowd take that as some justification that this was a simple issue of stadiums over people, as if either could exist in a clean vacuum. I like to call this kind of thinking Hippie-Dippie. So why wont it be happening? Two reasons.

First of all human nature. Like it or not reality is such that people are far far far more likely to organize their energy and money around specific events, the bigger the better. Its why non profits hold events like galas and other seemingly frivolous things. They are focusers, points around which people can gather and identify with so while its nice to imagine that we will now simply take that same spirit that was put into the bid and turn it towards rebuilding the school down the street that isn't in any way reflective of reality. Its Hippie-Dippie. Now you can bitch about the shortcomings of our species or you can work within its limitations. Score one here for Team Bitch.

Secondly the economics simply are not there. At all. Heading into this year the city was facing a deficit of roughly $420 million and many against the bid have used that as a reason to oppose spending on the Olympics. Well okay... If the argument is that we're too broke to spend money on the Olympics, which would have the long term capacity to increase the tax base well beyond the point it would have been absent the Games, then how suddenly can we afford more deficit spending on infrastructure without both the short and long term influx of tax revenue from the Games and related spending? We can't. At all. Its like they're saying 0 + -420= 1 million. It is obvious, achingly obvious, that excepting some major external event there will be no massive capital expenditure in the city because in that context it only increases debt and subsequently raises your taxes. Its Dues ex machina economics minus the Dues.

So instead we get nothing at all which should strike you as very GOP-ey in its spite.

But suppose you take issue with my economics. It doesn't matter because it gets even worse the deeper you dig into this.

The most common complaint I've heard however is that Chicago simply isn't able to pull the games off, which makes my eyes want to roll out of my head when you consider the other international venues that have successfully hosted the games, but there it is. Now no one would deny the short comings the city has, crime corruption, poverty etc. But if your position is that these make the Olympics impossible then you aren't actually making an anti Olympic argument,

you're arguing that Chicago doesn't have the capacity to do anything, ever. Even the thing you

support.

If corruption and cronyism make it impossible for the Games to benefit anyone but the most well connected then wont the same issues plague some Hippie-Dippie plan for subsequent capital improvements at the expense of the improvement? Of course it will. You can't make an argument of selective incompetence and expect to be taken seriously but this kind of incomplete thinking has turned a significant number of Chicagoans inward instead of outward. By constructing the false equation that Olympics=more problems while no Olympics=no problems Chicagoans have inexplicably chosen a deeply flawed status quo over the possibility of a better day. And they're happy about it.

And this kind of thing should bother the fuck out of everyone because this sort of cheap cynicism is likely to crowd any future efforts to improve our collective lots as well

I really don't want to make this a "love it or leave it" point but I think its fair to ask those of such little faith in the city what do you think the city CAN do? If the city can't handle the logistical run up to a two week event then how is it that you arrive at the decisions that this is a reasonable place to pursue your career, start a business, raise a family, own a home? The list goes on. And again I think these questions are more than fair because the thinking behind this particular point of opposition is so ill formed.

Would Theatre Companies Make More Money If Tickets Were Free?

2009-09-30T09:32:00.006-05:00

Indulge me. This started rattlin' around in my brain late last night after I put away "Free. The Future Of A Radical Price" by Chris Anderson and it's still not fully formed but Im wondering aloud now if free as a marketing model isn't a viable alternative to the one most non-profit theatres employ now. What the hell could I be talking about? Well its a little like the old bar adage about giving away salty peanuts to sell more beer.

But first of all I think the number of theatres that could benefit from free ticketing is fairly limited and even among those theatres free would have to be selectively used. For instance free would never work for the ( shameless plug alert ) big, hot, for-profit, Broadway bound show Im doing right now but that gets to the larger issue in that non-profits seem too often to market along the for-profit model when they really have entirely different goals. One is a sprint and the other is a marathon.

So enough talky-talk, lets get down to the nuts and bolts. What Im proposing pertains mostly to the types of theatre that Chicago is knee deep in, small to mid range non-profits that program a full season and are endlessly seeking to expand their subscription base and single ticket sales, which would likely also describe any number of theatres elsewhere as well I suppose.

Lets assume we're talking about a six to eight week run per show in a given season with four or five performances a week from Thurs-Sun. If a theatre regularly dropped the price of tickets on say Thursday nights to zero for everyone at the door then this is what I think might happen.

At that price point obviously the demand for seats goes thru the roof on what is otherwise a notoriously slow night for sales. If a show is decently reviewed then the likelihood is that you'll be turning people away, probably lots of people, which is good because you are now a hot, hip, unique, cultural destination which we'll talk about monetizing in a minute. Conversely if free doesn't increase demand for your product your company sucks and will probably be folding soon anyway.

Now the obvious retort is that free Thursdays would cannibalize not free Friday and Saturday. nights, why pay on Friday for something you're gladly giving away Thursday? Two reasons. First of all I think the person who attends a show on Thursday night is less likely to be demographically similar to the people the rest of the weekend. Thursday night's crowd is less likely to be made up of folks who are going to be getting up at 6:00 AM the next morning and riding the train downtown to work. Weekends audiences are older and more likely to be suburban. Thursday is different, its probably going to be a younger, more connected, urban, viral kind of crowd on that night. In other words an audience full of people who are more likely to create buzz. Buzz is good because there is money in buzz. And free notwithstanding I think more theatres should fully embrace the concept of premium pricing.

And secondly the extent to which free tickets would cannibalize sales the rest of the week is physically limited to the number of seats available. If the demand is genuine then some people are just going to have to pay for it by virtue of scheduling. Think Lady's Nights at cheezy bars.

Okay so how in the hell does this pay off?

Lets look at what theatre marketing really is for non profits. Its a hybrid of a three-party market, which means what exactly? Well lets think websites. The average website out there with content that is entirely free is making a buck off of delivering your eyes to advertisers, so they are creating content both with an eye towards the consumer and the entity that will monetize the site. Fine. So in our theater model who is the third party? Foundations.

So who are the Big Gifters out there looking to fund? Oh... I dunno... maybe theatres that have branded themselves as unique cultural destinations? Grant writing just got a lot easier and it got easier because free has made your company hip, hot, and relevant in a way it never could be with the current model. And when we're talking about being a relevant and successful producing company unique branding is really the issue isn't it?

Steppenwolf and Goodman aren't selling subscriptions and getting grants at the rates they do because their work is always exponentially better than everyone else in town, they're

like every other company in that they have hits and clunkers along the way. But they are insulated from the clunkers in a way smaller non profits are not because Steppenwolf and Goodman can market themselves as cultural franchises both to potential subscribers and foundations. The bad news for everyone else however is that the rungs on the institutional ladder get narrower the higher up the ladder you go, which is why the Chicago theatre scene is littered with the corpses of Wisdom Bridge, Remain, and Famous Door. You aren't going to beat Steppenwolf at their own game over the long haul, you need a different tack all together and just maybe that approach is based in loss-leader marketing.

The Myth of Conservative Patriotism.

2009-09-14T13:02:00.006-05:00

In 1949 Truman's Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal committed suicide after a long struggle with depression. It didn't take long for the McCarthy-ites and Birchers to invent the story that Forrestal must not have taken his own life but rather was driven to his death by "secret Communists" in Truman's administration which must certainly exist since Truman opposed McCarthy's loyalty oaths. How could there be any other explanation?

Sounds depressingly familiar doesn't it?

I think that what often seems just plain crazy is actually a reflexive response among conservatives. An angry response to a country they claim to love but which in reality they are frequently deeply frustrated by and almost always unable to embrace fully. Conservatives love their country, their country, which is the country that looks, sounds, worships, celebrates, and votes like they do. EXACTLY like they do. America is a free country they say but in reality they mean we're free to choose as they choose and think as they think. Any deviation is subversion and not an exercise in freedom.

And once circumstances begin to suggest to conservatives that they might not be the representatives our national culture they turn viciously and viscerally on the people and institutions that exist precisely because of our unique set of freedoms. They turn on any representation of an America that isn't in hegemonic lock step with their dogmas and despise the people and institutions that actually manifest the freedoms they claim to love so dearly , and despise isn't an overstatement.

Because of their fundamentalist religious roots conservatives cannot abide multiple possibilities or plural notions of common goods. To suggest that there may be other perfectly legitimate world views or alternatives is not a point of consideration for conservatives but rather a repudiation, an affront, a slap in the face. They hear, "here is another option" as "YOU'RE WRONG" and they always will because their politics are an expression of how they experience the world.

Conservatives fear the future and over value the present which makes it tough on them because America is the epicenter of the future. The American Idea is one that says the risks of a better future are more than worth the price of an imperfect present and that's a national bet conservatives will not take. The devil they know is always better than the possible good they don't know.

Every time, every single time America has sought to expand the promise of our values to more and more of our citizens conservatives have resisted. Its who they are. From Forrestal to Vince Foster. McCarthy to Palin and Alan Keyes. From the birthers and "You Lie!", none of this should come as a surprise. We've seen it over and over again and will many many more times Im afraid.

My faboo new gig.

2009-08-31T14:53:00.003-05:00

Swear to God I sit on stage every night and just look at what's going on around me, music, dancing, jumpin' around, hollerin', clapping, laughing, every other expression of happiness you can think of....

And I make a special effort to freeze it in my mind and appreciate it. Im not just in the room with it but I am part of why it happens. Plus they pay me. Its hard not to think that this is some kind of cosmic payback for the long bitter road of shit you slog through in this business.

Why you should be against the death penalty.

2009-08-26T07:25:00.005-05:00

This isn't new information. Texas executed a man who was innocent and there were compelling reasons to believe he was at the time but Gov. Perry took the path of least political resistance and ignored them. In doing so he fell into the unavoidable political trap here that confuses fundamental human decency with being "soft on crime".

The irony in much of the public's attitude towards the death penalty is that it has strong support among conservatives who generally assert the government isn't capable of doing anything effectively, but they evidently never pause to consider the implications of granting the state the right to take its own citizen's lives. These are the kinds of intellectual contradictions conservatives can't work thru because the concepts are mutually exclusive and they're unwilling to concede either position.

These kinds of errors in prosecution are unavoidable, humans make mistakes. So we can count as a certainty that this has happened in the past and it will happen again. Are we really willing to run that risk? Isn't our legal system predicated on the assumption that it is better for a guilty man to go free than an innocent man be prosecuted without merit? It is, until we start executing people. You can let a wrongly accused man go free, until you kill him.

That cinches the deal to my mind but even beyond that it seems to be a poor kind of punishment. Texas has been executing people in blase bunches for decades now you can be sure that people aren't breathing any easier or feeling less afraid because the state is constantly killing people. It's sheer vindictive retribution and it doesn't even do a particularly good job in that respect either.

It seems to me that if you're interested in making someone suffer it is the knowledge of what they are losing that generates the most emotional pain. Yes death row inmates know they are going to die and that's enormously stressful but I think that's a relatively easy out compared to the crimes we're talking about. Death frees them from the implications of their actions but the surviving victims live with their loss the rest of their lives. That is not equitable justice, its a political posture.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people and gave up his life for it. He got off easy. I would much rather he had ticked off every second of the rest of his life in an isolated cell with full and constant knowledge of the autonomy he had lost. If capital punishment were overturned I think someone like McVeigh would suffer more slowly rotting away than spending a few moments strapped to a gurney and being released from his confinement. And the state wouldn't be killing innocent people either.

Things about Michael Vick I don't understand...

2009-08-15T07:47:00.004-05:00

As I write this Im fully confident that I will be misunderstood by at least a few people who will then get pissed off. So here goes....

Im not in favor of dog fighting. Never been to one, wouldn't go if I could, don't understand why anybody does it, likely don't know anyone who has ever gone to one, thinks they shouldn't, assumes people who do it are dumbasses compensating for little penises. But I don't understand why the state asserts an interest in prohibiting it.

Stay with me now.

As things stand currently I can go to jail if I fight dogs. But if I raise chickens say and kill them in huge factories designed for that purpose I likely qualify for a government subsidy. Somethin' aint right. I don't get why the government feels like it has a moral interest in the case of one species but not another, or why it just doesn't assert the same interest in the case of both species.

Dog fighting is undeniably cruel the argument might go, and while I don't want to demonize ag producers its fairly obvious that many aspects of factory farming are cruel as well. I suppose then one might say that dogs that fight suffer a great deal of pain but cows slaughtered for beef are killed instantly. True enough, but while I wouldn't be qualified to speculate on the mental state of bovines I've read many accounts of the animals beginning to wail and exhibit extreme stress as they smell the blood of their recently slaughtered comrades. And before they are even lead to their doom they spend the last several weeks of their lives crowded into feeding lots and fed corn which their bodies cannot digest properly which requires massive amounts of antibiotics to ward off the attendant infections. Is that cruelty? I think most people would say it was or at least be hard pressed to explain why it wasn't, but I cannot then parse why we have no issue with that but then cannot abide dog fighting.

It gets worse. Consider that Im perfectly within my rights as a hunter to go out and shoot an animal in a way that might just wound it. The animal will likely then run off and take hours to find before I can deliver a kill shot or I may never find it and the animal will lie in extreme pain for many hours as it slowly bleeds to death. Suffering? Uh, yeah, but its perfectly legal and the state takes an active interest in promoting hunting and fishing. What's the deal?

Well, I've heard people say that since animal slaughter is utilitarian whatever degree of harm or suffering is outweighed by the benefit and the cruelty inherent in dog fighting produces no legitimate benefit. Okay, good point. In fact its why Im not a vegetarian. But lets consider some other wholly frivolous activities that frequently work against the long term welfare of the animals involved. Not every greyhound or horse that races spends their golden years frolicking

in some kind farmers alfalfa field. Im not aware of any retirement plans for circus animals either. The analogy isn't perfect here, horses aren't raced for the purpose of killing them, but to the extent that any of these animals suffer pain or cruelty they do so to advance nothing more than our leisure so clearly we're willing to tolerate, legitimize, and promote a certain degree of suffering for pursuits that are entirely non-utilitarian.

It seems to me that we have some decisions to make here culturally because the contradictions are massive. Either we step up and expand our conceptualization of animal welfare or we step way back and tolerate some very stupid behavior. Im not sure which direction is the right one but I don't think we should continue to tolerate a system that legally vilifies Mick Vick but passes out a license to bow hunt.

Why Fox News is destroying the Right.

2009-08-09T11:19:00.003-05:00

This isn't really a surprise, Limbaugh et al got rich off the Clinton presidency, but it points to a much larger problem for the Right. The Right Wing Entertainment Industry completely dominates the conservative landscape and they do so by either directly pandering to, or obliquely fanning the flames of, the lowest common denominator in their ranks. If a conservative should dare to speak against the dangers of a hype machine that is beholden to nothing more than last night's ratings then they soon find themselves having to do an "awe shucks I wuz mizundastood" soft shoe. To the extent that there is truly an intellectual base in the Right Wing they have lost completely the ability to influence policy on the ground. Conservatism today can be defined as the ultimate victory of volume over content. And I say let 'em yell as much as they want.

We're being treated to the death rattles of what used to be known as Movement Conservatism, a political force that got its passion from Goldwater but was balanced by the intellect of Buckley. That has morphed into a truly impotent rabble of tantrum throwers who get their passion from Palin and brains from Glen Beck. It aint the same, by a long shot. Once upon a time the GOP purged the wacko John Birchers from its ranks but today there isn't a conservative alive with the courage to stand up publicly and call out the lunatic fringe. Its an empty philosophy without the tools to address the issues we're dealing with today and lacking the courage or leadership to articulate a positive course for the future and Fox News along with talk radio make it increasingly more difficult to alter that course. As long as numbers are good they'll keep programming to the screamers at the expense of good policy. And I for one am enjoying watching the implosion.

The Dogs Bark...

2009-08-07T08:31:00.002-05:00

But the caravan roles on by. While conservatives get dumber and angrier with each passing day they have precious little to show for it. Meanwhile the party of responsible governance goes about the quiet business of getting real things done. But hey, that Kenyan birth certificate is sure to show up any day now and meanwhile there are all kinds of shiny things out there for conservatives to fiddle with when they aren't holding their breath and stamping their feet.

More conservative debate.

2009-08-05T21:42:00.002-05:00

That well known liberal rag the Napa Valley Register wonders why those opposing healthcare reform don't express their point more constructively. Because they can't. They have no answers, just tantrums

How conservatives debate ctd.

2009-08-05T21:40:00.001-05:00

Anybody wanna throw out some more of those false equivalencies?

Took 'em awhile.

2009-08-05T15:26:00.002-05:00

But the DNC starts to get its mind wrapped around a response to the screaming me-mees that are showing up ( at there own expense doncha know!) at Town Hall meetings whether they live in that congressional district or not. Its fun political theatre but I don't know how much one needs to worry about people who have nothing more than volume to offer the discussion.

In any event. The response:

There's been a lot of media coverage about organized mobs intimidating lawmakers, disrupting town halls, and silencing real discussion about the need for real health insurance reform.

The truth is, it's a sham. These "grassroots protests" are being organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies who are desperate to block reform. They're trying to use lies and fear to break the President and his agenda for change.

Health insurance reform is about our lives, our jobs, and our families -- we can't let distortions and intimidation get in the way. We need to expose these outrageous tactics, and we're counting on you to help. Can you read these "5 facts about the anti-reform mobs," then pass them along to your friends and family?

5 facts about the anti-reform mobs

These disruptions are being funded and organized by out-of-district special-interest groups and insurance companies

John Kerry

insurance company

People are scared because they are being fed frightening lies.

health care choices

American people

Their actions are getting more extreme.

Texas

Rep. Lloyd Doggett

Maryland Rep. Frank Kratovil was hanged in effigy outside his district office.

Rep. Tim Bishop

New York

health insurance reform plans

Presidency

Their goal is to disrupt and shut down legitimate conversation.

Republican leadership is irresponsibly cheering on the thuggish crowds.

House Minority Leader John Boehner

It's time to expose this charade, before it gets more dangerous. Please send these facts to everyone you know. You can also post them on your website, blog, or Facebook page.

Now, more than ever, we need to stand strong together and defend the truth.

The problem simply put.

2009-08-05T08:35:00.003-05:00

Cyncial C Blog sheds an awful lot of light on exactly what's wrong with our current system of healthcare coverage by simply asking readers where they get their insurance. The comments tell the whole story and as long as conservatives are unable or unwilling to eschew talking points and actually get down in the weeds and deal with these problems in an intellectually honest way by suggesting actual policies then Im not sure we need take anything they say, or yell, seriously at all.

Its tough all over

2009-08-05T08:17:00.002-05:00

Im fascinated by the raw behind the scenes diplomatic machinations that must have certainly gone on before Clinton headed to Pyongyang but it makes me wonder what is Jesse Jackson going to do now?

Seems to me he used to be the go to guy for this kind of thing but I suppose his brand is fading. Hard times.

How conservatives debate. This is who they are.

2009-08-04T11:11:00.004-05:00

Its probably not for nothing that they're chanting "Just Say No" in this vid of a townhall meeting being disrupted as that articulates the sum total of the Right's intellectual and tactical position when it comes to the future. This is what fear looks like, when people have no rational basis upon which to move forward they will throw tantrums trying to stay still, they will confuse volume with content.

And like any good fit it feels good in the middle of it but I shudder to think how the GOP will be able to construct any sort of firewall between these screaming mimmies and the rest of the more temperate electorate. I wish the '12 GOP nominee luck with these folks.

...And F.A. Hayek even better still.

2009-08-04T10:30:00.002-05:00

One of the intellectual giants of the conservative movement, on why he isn't a conservative.

He puts it out on Waveland here:

"Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments"

"This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such,[5] while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead. There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed strong. But the conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension"

Andrew Sullivan. Better at this than me.

2009-08-04T10:24:00.002-05:00

In this post he's giving an eloquent dressing down to yet another bigot wrapping himself in the cloth of natural law viz-a-viz gay marriage but he echoes my frustration with conservatives on health care and a host of other issues. He knocks it outta the park right here:

"I repeat to conservatives: we know what you're against, in healthcare, energy, counter-terrorism, taxation, gay rights, abortion. What are you actually for? How do you intend to actually address the questions of our time and place? And if conservatism cannot do that, what use is it?"

At least he's honest.

2009-08-04T07:50:00.008-05:00

It's hard to say exactly how much higher my blood pressure is as a direct result of conservative's naivete and dissembling but I think "somewhat" would be a good bet. So imagine my relief when somebody at the National Review of all places actually fesses up and admits to thinking that, yes, it would be better if the tail wagged the dog.

Mark Steyn actually posts a fairly reasoned argument for an awful awful position and at the same time gives you a pretty good sense of the faux tough-guy, this-man-is-an-island-by-god, fantasy world that far too many of my middle aged white male peers like to imagine they swagger around in or used to in some long lost less complicated and freer time.

As I've noted too many times there is no conservative position on health care reform beyond "No". Doesn't exist. Look for it. Oh sure there is some reflexive vague babble about vouchers and the like which may or may not be a worthwhile bit of tweaking but does exactly nothing in terms of addressing the real issues of costs, uninsured, and market failures. Exactly nothing.

Its sort of a "we don't need no stinkin' ideas" approach to problem solving.

And Steyn nails it right under the title:

"Government healthcare would be wrong even if it controlled costs"

That's who they are. Even if it is right, its wrong. Even if it helps, it hurts. That's dogma for ya, which is handy because it fills in all the pesky blanks without troubling the adherent to consider the conflicting tensions of reality.

And the great irony here is that these big bad rugged individualists are too lost in their simplistic fantasies to realize they are intellectually beholden to the same basic utopian impulse that informs socialism and communism. The idea that we can be lead to our better and more noble natures by strict adherence to an economic system is a deeply dysfunctional world view that appeals to weak minds and fearful hearts. But like I say, that's who they are and its nice to see them own up to it every now and again.

This is bullshit...

2009-07-29T16:58:00.008-05:00

Everyone involved in the Gates-breaking-into-his-own home episode has had a turn playing victim and now the woman who made the 911 call is taking hers. I don't believe her. Lets go over the facts again. She observed two men, one of whom is in his 50's walking with a cane, dressed in a sports jacket, with a suitcase pressing on a door. When asked she identified at least on of them as possibly hispanic. The officer later writes in his report that she claims to have seen two black men, so one of them is lying. Whatever.

Look. I don't claim to read minds and I don't know this woman from Eve, but I do know this. If she had seen a bearded, bespeckled, gimpy, older, sport jacket wearing, white man pushing on a door in or around Harvard I'd bet my life that her life experience would suggest a plausible scenario for that behavior that would not have included calling the police. This is racism. When you jump to a conclusion about someone's behavior that is informed entirely by the color of their skin then there is no other word for that in the English language.

Consider....

2009-07-28T14:19:00.002-05:00

When you look back on all the things to have disliked about George Bush's presidency it is clear to my mind anyway that his approach to immigration reform was not among them. It was poor politics on his part to not have appeased the zealots in his party first by focusing on enhanced enforcement and then tacked on the path to citizenship as an etc. but we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory.

In any event the wingnuts shot him down and instead seem to be happy with.... the same intolerable shit we've always had. So the official whack job right wing position is " I'd Rather It Suck Like It Does Now Forever Than Compromise"

It must be endemic to the conservative mindset because we see that all the time. All or nothing. Either we close the borders and build a damn fence by-god or we do nothing at all. Same with healthcare. They are not troubled one wit by the fact that they do not have an alternative approach or feel even moderately compelled to offer one so by default they endorse the status quo. Sometimes these people just have to be drug kicking and screaming into the future. And scream the do.

Makin' me crazy...

2009-07-23T05:39:00.005-05:00

Can't turn off my brain to sleep so here we go......

I don't love Obama's healthcare plan. Single payer, universal coverage, or "socialized medicine" is clearly clearly clearly the better option but Im not going to piss and whine and let perfect be the enemy of vast improvement because single payer is a non-starter and that's just reality. This is the difference between being dogmatically liberal and a pragmatist.

But that's not what keeps me awake nights, this does.

What makes my head wanna explode is that when conservatives oppose reform they aren't then offering a better option, or even a worse option. They aren't bothering to engage the issue period. So lets look at what conservatives are working for when they work against reform.

TOO EXPENSIVE?

Will it cost a lot of money to change the current system? Why yes, yes it will. CBO estimates put the tab at something like $1.5 trillion and conservatives would like you to believe, or at least fear, that our grandchildren will have to eat dirt three times a week for 20 years to pay for that. Not so. Im not going to claim that it is revenue neutral but its hardly a budget buster in the way that things like wars of choice are or unfunded Medicare Drug plans, for instance.

So where's the dough? About 1/3 comes from savings from Medicare/Medicaid and the most of the rest comes from a modest tax increase on people who have money coming out of their asses, otherwise known as the top 1.5% of earners. But even after that increase those people will still be paying less in taxes overall than they were when Reagan (conservative Jesus) cut their taxes almost 30 years ago. To review... paying less, getting more.... reallllly struggling to see the suck in that.

On the other hand the conservative do-nothing approach supports a system that is already the most expensive in the world by a wide margin and is getting more costly by the day. The GOP supports a system that is doubling in cost every decade as of now and that's before most of the baby-boomers have really begun to stress the system further.. If your Congressman or Senator is against healthcare reform then they are choosing for you to pay 300-400% more for your healthcare when you retire in name of not taxing 1.5% of the population at a rate lower than it was 30 years ago. That's their deal.

Do that math. Sit down with your 401K statement and then extrapolate your current healthcare expenditures at a 300% increase and try to imagine how that's going to work out for you and yours. It doesn't work out at all but that's what conservatives stand for in this. They want you to pay a lot now, and then pay a helluva lot more later because it is easier for them politically.

SOCIALISM!!!!!

Everytime I hear someone who is ostensibly educated call Obama a socialist it makes me wanna smack em in the fuckin' head with their college diploma, twice ,and then burn it because it clearly is doing them no good.

This is not socialized medicine. Im in favor of socialized medicine because its a much better idea. Im not getting my better idea but Im taking the next best thing. So what the hell is this?

Its the government incentivizing the market. Yes. It is a program that injects free market forces into a system and then letting that competition lower prices. Doesn't that sound kinda like a conservative idea? Why yes, yes it does. So why aren't they are board? Because they're too invested in the notion that taxes are always evil to get anything done and it blinds them to the possibility of common good, except of course when we're talking about bombing the shit out of some brown people cause that's a bargain at any price. So to be clear, taxes=bad. Out of control cost structures=good.

But you don't have to believe me. If you're afraid of socialized medicine do this little experiment.

Call your doctor and ask what he/she charges you for a specific procedure and then call your favorite hospital and do the same. Assuming they'll even tell you then take those figures and try to negotiate a better deal for yourself with another doctor or hospital. Ill wait....

Naw I wont wait either cause we both know what will happen. You will get nowhere. How can this be? In a non-Socialistic free market you should be able to shop around for the best price. There is no such thing as shopping around now for two reasons. First of all in many states insurance companies have effective monopolies and don't have to listen to your shit. Secondly the business of risk management is not about lowering *your* costs its about lowering *theirs* which means insurance companies are all about denying coverage when they can and charging as much as possible when they can't. A for-profit health system has no incentive to keep patient costs lower. Absent some redress it will never get any better than it is right now and will only get much much worse. This is what conservatives are in favor of.

RATIONED CARE

When my dad was dying of cancer he couldn't get certain palliative medications because his insurance wouldn't pay for it. So instead he wretched and threw up his putrified stomach tissue till the day he died and those are among the last memories my mother has of him. Someone, not a doctor, made that choice for us because to have paid for his medication would have decreased the potential payout to their investors. When conservatives work against health care reform they are by default endorsing what my dad went through to preserve massive corporate profits. No way around that.

Now this is dicey territory I'll admit because there are horror stories in every system and one can't really know what's the exception and what's the rule. But really isn't that the point?

If our current system is so much better than the proposed alternative, or Europe , or Canada or anyplace else, why can we point to similar systemic failures? Shouldn't our delivery system be vastly better if the underlying principles are superior? Why yes, yes they should. But our delivery system isn't vastly better. It is marginally better in some instances and clearly worse in others but it costs more than twice as much and is bankrupting business and government, but even so conservatives would rather have us pay more for less because they lack the political courage to really address the issue. This is who they are. This is what they're in favor of.

If you support Obama's plan call your Senators and Congressman and tell them. If you don't support Obama's plan call your Senators and Congressman and ask them to offer a better idea.

But if you like having money and health you simply cannot sit this one out. Something has to happen.

This acting thing may work out yet.

2009-07-22T07:52:00.004-05:00

At the risk of sounding prick-ish sometimes I absolutely know if Im going to get a job or not. If a role is particularly in my strike zone and I nail the audition then I have a pretty good track record of predicting whether or not that call is going to come, and my agents can totally vouch for that.

So it was back in April when I auditioned for a role in this big commercial production that has been running in town for awhile now and has "Next Stop New York" written all over it. Nailed it, nailed it, nailed it, and called my agent and said "this is happening". And I sat and sat and sat until just last week when the call finally came offering a 26 week contract for pretty sweet money considering we're talking about Chicago theatre.

I've never done a big commercial production like this and so far Im really enjoying not worrying about money when Im wide awake at 2am. Im sure I'll start to stress soon enough that I'll never work again after this but for now Im content to just have some vague anxieties about getting old and fat. That I can deal with.

The only problem is that this opportunity for me is coming at someone else's expense. The guy currently doing this role is not going to have his contract renewed for reasons I know nothing about. I feel badly for him, I know him but not particularly well. But I also kind of feel like the slightly less sickly water buffalo watching the lions take down a more unfortunate comrade. Its been me before, and it'll be me again in the future Im sure but this time it wasn't. So Im just gonna get back to this grazing I have to do and worry about the lions sometime later on.

Somebody should have said something

2009-07-18T13:06:00.005-05:00

It wasn't for lack of a plan that this happened. No. Pipelaya, X2C, Satisfaktion and the crew had a clear vision. They had a specific issue that needed addressing, they formulated a course of action, and they have an expectation of results. Sometimes things don't work out though, we've all had that happen. If I had to put my finger on it I'd say that this went from the planning phase to the execution phase much much too quickly. They should sat on this one for a little while. If they had probably someone would've said "wait.... what?" Didn't happen.

Instead I imagine it went something like this:

"hey, you know we outta hump the shit out of that ottoman and put it on You Tube"

"Yes, Yes. Im liking this idea very much but wont it be repetitive if we all hump the ottoman?"

"No, no, no. We'll break it up by humping the air and stuff too and it'll all flow together"

"This is very good. Very good. I think its important not to overthink this"

"It'll be some of our best work"

"Indeed"

I'd like to say no ottoman were harmed in the filming of this video but I cannot in good faith make that claim. And remember; in no way should this be construed as gay or even sexually confused behavior.

Why the Iranian regime will fall.

2009-07-15T12:45:00.001-05:00

Achmedinejad, this woman is coming for you. Good luck.

"Real Bitches"

2009-07-15T10:49:00.004-05:00

I don't know if this is really real or letters to Penthouse real but either way its my new guilty pleasure.

Never go here

2009-07-12T16:50:00.004-05:00

Medieval Times. Good Christ.

Where does one begin? Its hard to know what's worse. Is it worse for me to have been there at all or is cosmically worse that a couple chose to celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary there with a joint knighting? That's pretty bad but as in all things I gonna say its worse for me. By a lot.

But worst of all I think are the people who work there. It seems to me they fall into two distinct camps; those that would rather be anywhere else and those who would not be anywhere else for anything. They both cause me lots of pain but for very different reasons.

When the serving wench comes by with the tip tray after having asked, "will you be needing a take home bag for your roast dragon my lord?" I want to give her all my money and just hope she takes off running as fucking fast and far as she possibly can. I want to liberate her. She prays every night that the Hooters by the airport will be hiring soon and Im going to start praying for her too.

But when the Green Knight (our knight) comes galloping by I can't help but notice how much time and effort has gone into cultivating his sweet jerri-curl mullet, in fact alllllll the knights have a sweet jerri-curl mullet. The King too, and it doesn't flatter a man his age. Not only that but the young squire knights-in-waiting are starting to grow out their hair in the same Harlequin Romance cover model style, pining for the day they get called up to the Bigs. This isn't a summer job, these people are making a fucking career choice and I can't decide if it would be more awful to be trapped at a social function next to a Professional Knight or an aspiring Professional Knight.

Im hoping these people keep mostly to themselves.

Where the hell are all the people?

2009-07-08T16:59:00.003-05:00

Here's another in long list of reasons Im not a rich man:

In as much as I think about these things I just assumed that when the bottom fell out of the housing market it would be a sweet time to be a landlord sitting on some rental housing property. It aint so , in fact it sucks to be a landlord right now as vacancies are high and rents are dropping.

So where did everyone go? I mean the logic follows that when someone gets kicked out of their foreclosed home with the adjustable rate jumbo mortgage they gotta live somewhere and rented apartments looked like a nice hedge against housing gloom.

And I'll bet here's why I was wrong. You know all those condos that got built the last ten years? They didn't sell of course and now they're, you guessed it, rental units which means overcapacity in the rental market must be extreme which sounds like a very bad thing to me because unless we start tearing down lots of condos that are only at 1/3 capacity there is going to be an excessive supply for a good long while which is going to depress new housing construction even if things turn around in the short term. The list of things that can be classified as "lagging indicators" is getting longer by the day.

When conservatives fight.

2009-07-03T14:19:00.002-05:00

The hardcore intellectual right is finally starting to see Palin in the same light the rest of us did the very first time we ever heard her try to talk in her grown up voice. She is and was a deeply cynical political play pushed on the GOP and the electorate at large by people like Rove and Kristol who don't really care what happens to the country long term if they can control the next election cycle.

That said the gloves are coming off on the right as they can't distance themselves from her fast enough. First Krauthammer calls her out on the Palin Network of all places and now Goldberg displays his talents for windsock-ery and informs us in NRO that she's "blowing it". This is only new information for folks who have been waiting for Obama to cause chunks of sky fall on them. The fan boys however are outraged.

In each case though its telling that even her detractors are willing to overlook her vast intellectual shortcomings for the sake of her "charisma". Its as though they think the path back to legitimacy is just a "youbetcha" and a wink away.

And Israelis will be welcomed as liberators

2009-07-02T12:02:00.002-05:00

Sheesh, these neo-cons never quit but you can say that they aren't simply wrong, they are consistently wrong. Never one to pass up an opportunity to blow some shit up and kill some people former UN ambassador John Bolton opines in a WaPo editorial today that the unrest in Iran offers the perfect opportunity to explain to the people that an Israeli air strike is meant only for the regime's nuclear program and not intended to give offense in any way to Iran in general.

That sounds plausible because of course these guys did such a good job of pulling that off in Iraq. Its like cake.

Dangerously dumb is what these people are.

Does that corn field make my ass look fat?

2009-07-01T09:30:00.005-05:00

While Im very much in favor of expanding health coverage anyway we can I believe its only one leg of the stool when it comes to containing health costs. Our on going policy of farm welfare creates surpluses in some of the least healthy food by-products like high fructose corn syrup but leaves growers of fresh fruits and vegetables out in the cold when it comes to government hand outs and that adds significant costs to our health care system on the back end, as it were.

Farm welfare recipients and their lobby go to no end of trouble in pointing out that there is yet no definitive link between increased use of corn syrup and higher rates of obesity and they're correct, but it would take a fool to ignore the import of this kind of correlation.

Neurotic parenting. The Upside.

2009-07-01T08:42:00.005-05:00

Maybe I don't have a fancy working paper or a doctorate in economics or even a mathematical acumen beyond high school algebra but this study strikes me as entirely correct except that the competition for educational placement starts welllllll before college. I'll pat myself on the back that we didn't stress at all about our kids getting into "the right" preschool but I will admit that though our son is years away from high school we are certainly making implicit, if not explicit, choices that we think will enhance the likelihood of his getting into "the right" high school. And we are hardly alone in that respect or crazy.

The sweetest slice of the pie grows ever thinner and as more and more people belly up to the table it clearly incentivizes parents spending more one on one time with the kidoos. None of which is to say that I was abandoned as a kid but I recall much more "family time" than I do direct one on one time.

Health Care vs. Property Rights. Do Police and Fire Depts. make us socialists?

2009-06-29T08:03:00.012-05:00

Opponents are mounting their predictable arguments against real health care reform and if you listen to conservative talk radio ( I do so you don't have to) or read their blogs it quickly becomes obvious that something more visceral than a simple policy disagreement is going on. To be honest Im not sure why but for the right health care has seemingly become the economic tipping point beyond which we start dissolving individual property rights, much in the same way social conservatives think gay marriage will cause the sky to fall. Neither makes much sense.

In the interest of full disclosure I should say I don't love Obama's plan but politics are the art of what is possible, not what is best. That said it seems strikingly clear to me that to the extent we believe in morality and common goods we should not have such arguments about disengaging health care from profit motives. It should be the obvious thing to do.

The reality is that governments in fact do a very good job of providing tax funded single payer services that protect private property, we call them police and firemen and as far as I can tell nobody is arguing that you should only get the police or fire response that you can pay for. That would be an obvious moral failing. The point we should be asking conservatives to expand on then is why they believe society should value personal property above personal health.

If it is unthinkable for us to allow a house to burn or be burglarized if the owner cannot afford protection how is it any more reasonable to allow people to suffer or die needlessly if they cannot afford adequate health care? No matter what my income conservatives see my property rights as sacrosanct but for some reason they believe my health should be contingent on how much money I have.

They should have to explain why.

Judge Fleming Needs Some Grief Over This

2009-06-24T12:46:00.008-05:00

This decision by Judge John Fleming is ridiculous regardless of whether the man involved was a cop or not. Judge Fleming is an employee of Cook Co. meaning he sets his table and buys his clothes with our tax dollars so its only fitting that when he gives a slap on the wrist to a man who beats an unarmed woman with no provocation at all and expresses no remorse for his actions he needs to hear about it.

Here's what you do:

Judges can't be contacted directly but there are several numbers for the Circuit Court of Cook Co. that you can call and politely express your disappointment.

Clerk of Circuit Court

1-312-603-5031

Executive Clerk for Court Operations

1-312-603-5400

And secondly be sure to file this away come election time and make absolutely certain that you find Judge John Fleming on the butterfly ballot and vote his ass out.

Thank you, that is all.

Burqua Free France

2009-06-22T10:11:00.002-05:00

Appropriate sentiment I think but I would not support governmental proscription. As I have said before I do not find it credible to view burquas as just another in a series of otherwise morally neutral choices. The line between the patriarchy that enforces the practice and the men beating and killing people on the street in Iran is necessarily direct.

Where are the tanks?

2009-06-21T13:17:00.004-05:00

While this has certainly been horrible the carnage hasn't reached the level of Tiananmen yet and there must be a reason for it. China '89 didn't produce these kinds of images of riot police throwing stones and running away in fear from mobs of people.

The mullahs have more than enough firepower at their disposal to crush this in a day and clearly they have no qualms about murdering people in the street so it must be something else. Could it mean that the military will not participate? If the best they can do is send helmeted police into the street to swing sticks at thousands of people willing to die then it is already over and the only remaining issue is how soon will they be out of power.

The moral arc.

2009-06-21T12:17:00.009-05:00

Its hasn't been entirely clear to me why matters in Iran have become so visceral to me but they have. Trying to stay on top of events amounts to most of what I've accomplished these last nine days or so and I don't think I've even done that particularly well. Things reached a crescendo yesterday afternoon when I saw the tweeted video of that young women bleeding out in the street and for the second night this week I didn't sleep much because I couldn't turn my head off.

Why the hell do I think this is so important?

I feel like we're watching Paris 1788 and a large swath of the world will be forever changed as a result. It seems that when viewed in context with Obama's win and the recent election in Lebanon a very cool and unexpected thing is happening in a troubling part of the world. The fuckers are losing, or at very least getting pushed back. The old fear and hate-mongering looks exposed and weak, and slowly slowly slowly the bulk of humanity is turning towards its better self. Or that's what I hope.

In Clash Of Civilizations Samuel Huntington offered that the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War would not lead to a less dangerous world but rather a more dangerous one. Global tensions might fall away but they would be replaced by ancient and festering localized and tribal conflicts that were likely to be more passionate and far more vicious than the proxy hot-spot wars waged between the US and Russia since WW II. Think Sarajevo.

In particular Huntington painted a bleak demographic picture for the West as future Eastern and Muslim worlds in particular grew younger and increasingly polarized around traditional orthodoxies that would necessarily be in conflict with us. For the better part of the last 20 years there has been scant reason to think he might be wrong and I've often thought that my kids or grandchildren could likely have that clash passed on to them tenfold.

Until Iran.

In his statement yesterday Obama referenced MLK in saying that he believed that the moral arc of the universe may be long but that it always bends towards justice. I don't know that I can or should believe that. Ideas like justice can be relative and are often zero sum. But its no small thing to be reminded that things do get better.

Reference Points.

2009-06-20T19:34:00.007-05:00

Certain moments of recent history will always have the capacity to both choke me up and give drastic perspective to the fact that beyond raising my children I have done virtually nothing of consequence with my life as of yet. Taken no risk on behalf of a greater cause. Sacrificed no safety. Never put someone else's interests substantially above my own.

The man who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen. Pat Tillaman's sacrifice.

And now this woman's murder on the street in Tehran. As her eyes go blank they catch the camera, and the stare is penetrating.

Why daddy has no friends.

2009-06-18T08:08:00.003-05:00

I've long been aware that I don't do "other people talking" very well so this how-to win friends and influence people post from Volohk is advice I'd do well to take.

But lets not hold our breath.

Fortunately Im married to a socially gifted woman who is loved by all, probably because she doesn't struggle to remember people's names or birthdays and really seems interested in most of what they have to say. Thats just not me. Im no more likely to stop being a socially isolated dick than she is to start being one. Its hardwiring. Im not aware that Im making a series of dick choices. Im just experiencing things as they come. Lots of people really seem kind of boring or facile in their interests and its not at all clear to me how being friendly with them would be a boon to either of us.

Pass it along

2009-06-15T20:15:00.002-05:00

GOPers not grasping the social aspect of social networking.

2009-06-15T18:01:00.003-05:00

For whatever reason the sudden rush among the right wing to counter the on line networking skill of the Obama campaign and subsequent administration just makes them seem more and more like our fathers mowing the lawn in black socks and wing tips. Its like they don't realize that other people might actually be reading their posts, as in people who aren't racist and ignorant hayseeds. I realize there aren't many conservatives left out there but this is getting ridiculous.

First we're treated to this boob who evidently couldn't foresee that comparing an escaped gorilla to Michelle Obama's ancestors might lead to trouble so he tops it all off by claiming she started it (?!?) and then we get another deep thinker on the right who cant resist mining comedy gold in another racist joke about Obama and aspirin being white.

Could it be a coincidence that both these guys were from South Carolina? I think not. When you are reduced to a southern rural party these are exactly the kinds of dogs you'll lie with. Its one thing to be racist but its another thing entirely to be so inept that you cannot help but reveal yourself to be a racist. This is your GOP.

They're killing protestors now

2009-06-14T19:21:00.004-05:00

This is what is happening to students and young people protesting the election. The Twitter feed is one of many reports that the muscle for this crack down is not coming from Iranian secret police but Hezbollah Hessians shipped in from Syria.

"Fuck You!!!!!" In Farsi

2009-06-14T16:50:00.003-05:00

People shouting from the rooftops of Tehran at night. Possibly the coolest thing I've ever seen.

Surprising Grace.

2009-06-14T08:56:00.006-05:00

A riot policemen is overwhelmed and beaten by a crowd of Iranians until he is saved by the rioters themselves.

Facebook and Twitter have hundreds of real time posts telling of long and wild street battles between Iranian riot police and protestors in Tehran. These three are particularly striking I think because I don't believe it would be possible in similar circumstances for Americans on the these same opposite sides to show one another this kind of basic respect. Many are also reporting that the protestors are chanting for their "brother policemen" to join the protests.

Taking a large leap yes, but if the "culture wars" were ever to take to the streets here I think it would be virtually impossible for people involved to think of their shared citizenhood before their mutual disagreements. The narrative of them v. us is too well developed to put aside and allow for a gesture of kindness no matter how small.

Al Jazeera smells something rotten.

2009-06-13T14:40:00.001-05:00

After 3am [22:30 GMT], the interior ministry went quiet for the night. Out on the streets, some groups of youths were driving the streets in celebration. But not 69 per cent of them.

The revolution will not be texted.

2009-06-13T09:50:00.002-05:00

Several places are reporting that the Iranian government is arresting student leaders and shutting down cellular networks in an effort to prevent the clashes that have broken out in Tehran from developing into a more organized movement. While a massive reactionary push back from the government is still possible its hard to see how this kind of public fissure is a bad thing for the world long term. Clearly there can be no legitimacy for this government among a wide swath of its people and its worth remembering that it was massive protests by the young and educated that ultimately displaced the Shah in the late 70's. The revolution is over.

Well of course they do....

2009-06-12T08:30:00.003-05:00

Its not news that insurance companies invest significantly in big tobacco but its worth keeping in mind that this is the kind of blatant conflict of interests that becomes possible only when health care is commodified in a "free market".

Note that one insurer refuses to disclose its investment profile so potential consumers are at their customary disadvantage in making reasonable choices about their providers. Its a rigged deal. I'd put down money that most insurers also invest in brewers/distillers and gun manufacturers as well.

Those damn lying virgins.

2009-06-11T20:31:00.003-05:00

This study claims that adult virginity is more likely among the college educated who also regularly attend church than it is among the ignorant heathen masses. Okay. Im not sure why that's important or why I care other than two observations:

The urologist team in question found that 13.9% or the men studied and 8.9% of women claimed carnal ignorance. Now whenever sundry studies find that sort of statistical disconnect between the sexes when the issues at hand deal with matters of prowess the wink-wink assumption is the men are lying. If 25% of men report having sex eight times a week and only 12% of women report the same number then of course the men are presumed to be pitiful liars, which probably they are. Try as I might though I can't really determine who has the greater motive to dissemble here.

And secondly the Futurepundit here relays the complaint from his church going girlfriend that too many of the guys at church were "basically pussies". This is so true. The largely broke-dick Promise Keepers notwithstanding muscular Christianity just has never really taken hold. There has always seemed something basically feminine in it to me especially when compared to Islam or Judaism.

As a teenager I began to struggle with Christianity in a way that eventually lead me to be the happy atheist I am today but I can remember thinking at the time that it would be probably be easier to get into the spirit of things if I was a girl.

It would be oversimplifying matters to say that was what a substantial issue in my apostasy but I vividly remember being in Sunday School wondering if I was the only one who thought the Gospels just sounded terribly gay. Probably I was not.

Marine Sniper. Thing # 312354 I Could Never Be.

2009-06-11T15:10:00.004-05:00

You know that scene from "A Few Good Men"? I think Nicholson was hollerin' about this kind of thing.

Alan Greenspan and my underwear.

2009-06-10T09:07:00.006-05:00

Words I never thought I'd be grouping together. This is what I hate about behavirorial economics

of the Freakonomics and Nudge sort that has become the stuff of popular non fiction lately. How anyone can continue to argue that we're rational market actors leaving an economic bread crumb trail behind us is beyond me at this point. Maybe Im missing a lesson here but didn't we just endure a news cycle that judged another +300K jobs loss as a sign that our latest bubble bust recession might be bottoming out? I think we did. But fear not, underwear sales are up and that has to be good news.

For the record I think I was almost certainly at least 25 years old before I bought my own underwear and I'd guess most straight men my age would say the same.

It works this way; Mom buys you underwear till you're off to college and of course you wear that high school underwear all through college assuming you wear any at all. After that some girlfriend or other will get tired of shaking her head at the underwear Mom bought and buy you some more to her liking. Of course those underwear last longer than the relationship usually so you wear those out into the big wide world. Finally you wake up one day and realize the underwear dole has come to an end and you'll have to buy your own which feels gay but actually isn't. Either way I'll never be convinced that anything of import can be divined.

Sane abortion discussion.

2009-06-05T17:09:00.002-05:00

This is an excellent collection of reader experiences and reactions from Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish. It beautifully illustrates how Roe is hardly the extent of the issue.

This is what market fundamentalism looks like

2009-06-03T17:33:00.002-05:00

At Freakonomics Gary Becker offers his market based vision for poverty relief, and it sounds pretty good. Problem is that it rarely works the way its disciples imagine. The irony here is that this is the same utopian mechanism that underpins socialism, the belief that we can be called to our better natures by economic dogmas. Know the system and the system will set us free.

Neither works perfectly. I believe in free markets but if we're going to be honest about the history of market economies we should own up to the fact that they don't simply create winners and losers in the short term they enshrine them. Raising tides of wealth float most boats but inequities in resources and inefficiencies in allocation necessarily create permanent losers which may well be the worst system ever invented expect for all the rest but we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

The fall doesn't kill you

2009-05-30T14:25:00.004-05:00

The sudden stop at the bottom does.

Sometime around dawn Sunday we'll finally wrap this shoot. I'll say my goodbyes and get in my truck and drive straight home to Chicago and kiss my kids for two days straight.

But at some point I know it'll get quiet enough for the fucker in my head to be audible again.

Twenty years since Tiananmen.

2009-05-28T22:18:00.002-05:00

In terms of emotional memory its hard to believe that its been that long. In retrospect my reaction to the massacre was inversely proportioned to my inability to process the possibility that a government would openly murder its own civilians in those kinds of numbers. I was furious both because of what happened and because I knew there would be no justice. There was a protest or sit in or "come show your support" event in Grant Park a few days afterward and I remember sitting there seething over how pointless and futile all the speeches were and a guy walked by selling copies of the Daily Worker and I could not believe it. I started yelling at him for having the fucking gall and of course what followed didn't flatter either of us. Thank god I was in diapers when Kent St. happened.

I don't mean to be flip but I it seems to me that the change the student protesters forced can be measured by the extent to which excess Chinese capital financed our recent housing bubble. I don't think that's what they had in mind.

Bush v. Gore lawyers team up for gay marriage. Now shit is weird.

2009-05-28T00:42:00.007-05:00

This feels like a bid for a book deal or a reality show pitch. And its a mistake. Lets keep in mind one member of this super lawyer duo was the Solicitor General for Bush and argued on his behalf in the what may be the worst Supreme Court decision since Plessey v. Ferguson which handed conservative bigots another 8 years of power to disenfranchise gays. Nevertheless this Batman and Robin of the bar seem to think that they can leverage their relative celebrity to right the wrongs at least one of them have enabled. Okay, but I wish they'd both stop.

Im on record saying I don't want to see gay marriage recognized only through the courts. Very few Americans are willing to be raging bigots and as more and more of us realize that this is what continued opposition to gay marriage requires fewer and fewer of us will do it. We're winning. Slowly. But we are.

Now I get the point of opposition to that approach. But the problem with conservatives is they claim to believe in natural rights, but at the same time they're quite comfortable denying some access to those natural rights until they are forced to by the ballot. So they don't believe in natural rights as much as they believe in majorities because they are bullies. Fine. Wrong. But I can get over it.

The reality is that if these two are able to bring a gay marriage case to THIS court it will lose. It will lose by a lot. Where would we be right now if Brown v. Board of Education had gone the other way?? That's what we're looking at. These two should shut up and just donate lots of their lawyer money to gay rights' groups instead.

Silver Lining in Prop 8 Decision Today

2009-05-26T20:17:00.003-05:00

First of all I think its important that the state just recognized 18,000 more marriages than they did before the decision. Is it far far far short of equality? Of course it is but considering that having those unions rendered null and void was one possible outcome I think it is important to note that this decision creates a very important fissure in the state's position, one which will likely have to be revisited electorally and soon. Its a rather substantial constitutional dichotomy.

Secondly, and this is tough, had the state Supreme Court overturned the decision the backlash would have been enormous and strengthened the bigoted and reactionary forces that oppose equal rights in the first place. One might say that this is an easy position for me to take as a married hetero and Im sympathetic to that argument but I would rather have gay marriage from the ballet box than the majority decision. I'd rather have the Christian/Mormon bigots have to deal with how marginal they are rather than whine about how a court usurped supposedly the will of the people. The tide is turning our way but I do think the way it turns is important.

Government providing credit? A good argument why they should.

2009-05-25T18:18:00.003-05:00

I don't know that I agree with this but I've never thought in terms of transactional credit being a public good and as such potentially facilitated by governments. In any event this is a deeply wonky concept at this point and I really look forward to the discussion coming into the mainstream.

Dispatch from Indie Movie-ville

2009-05-20T21:02:00.009-05:00

Today was supposed to be a movie star day. Today was supposed to be the day that I had to work at flipping all the relatively easy drama and tears of last week and suddenly invest some charisma and charm into making my character "likable". Is there a more hateful word? Clearly there is not.

Well thank god the generator blew and I got to pretend like this "likable" thing is never going to happen. So I found myself instead on location in someone's beautiful house in my underwear, in their bedroom, getting ready to shoot my character saying a prayer, (which is another thing I don't do easily) and waiting and waiting and waiting for lights/camera/props/

to get ready to shoot.

Now this is where Im supposed to say that I realize all the other people on set have important jobs too and I guess I did just say that but we all know how insincere that sounds. Of course they are artists who have visions as well but I honestly will never be convinced that there is any tangible benefit in hurumhping for interminable periods over the question of whether the light should fall 1/2" or 1/8" to the left of my right eyebrow. And really Im unspeakably vain.

On a any movie the crew is far and away the single biggest entity on set. The sheer number of people and gadgets it takes to competently produce even the cheapest movie is utterly astounding. This movie alone easily comes with a crew of 20 or more and it seems like all of them wield some kind of hand held contraption with flashing lights and read outs that obviously justify the vast amounts of time it takes to get the lights to flash differently.

And then you've got the solo actor in his underwear with no gadget, no grips or pa's, no truck full of equipment, no camera or trailer full of costumes. But finally after a long passage of time the actor in his underwear decides, for today anyway, whether movies are about lights and camera stops, or performances. And he opens his mouth. Loudly, so as to be heard. And quickly we shoot. And tomorrow he eats lunch alone.

A new skill Im working on. Keeping my mouth shut.

2009-05-18T10:53:00.003-05:00

Last night the producer of this movie Im doing was kind enough to invite me to dinner at his in-laws along with two other people on the shoot who are long time family friends of theirs. It was a great time but almost got derailed at the outset.

The hosts were Notre Dame alums and so of course they were talking about Obama's speech and since I was the only one there who had seen it I dived right in mistakenly assuming we were all wearing the same uniform in the culture wars. Tactical error.

When I mentioned Obama getting heckled I was asked if Alan Keyes or his group of protesters was involved, which he wasn't as far as I know, but then that oddly segued into comments about how much love there was in the room for Alan Keyes and how at least one person there had voted for him for President.

Alan-fucking-Keyes. This had all the makings of an ugly ugly incident.

I blacked out Im sure but I don't know for how long. When I came to though the first thought that entered my head was that given the circumstances I probably should not inquire as to exactly what the fuck is wrong with these people or explain how they are destroying America with their political views and Perry Ellis nautical theme sweaters. In fact I didn't say a word. I just looked out the window and focused on staying upright in my chair. Before I knew it we were talking about hostas which I also hate but don't care to fight about.

This is progress.

Obama @ Notre Dame ctd.

2009-05-17T14:31:00.002-05:00

"The ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt."

Full text of the speech is here

So why didn't God bless America?

2009-05-17T09:59:00.003-05:00

Turns out that as shock and awe got rolling in Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began including what he thought would be relevant biblical passages on the cover sheets of his top-secret intelligence briefings for Bush. Rummie's calculus, correct in all likelihood, was that his department's intelligence views would carry more weight with the juicy-for-Jesus president if they came with the biblical imprimatur.

I think most people who see the cover sheets will be vaguely creeped out by it and disturbed by the implication that Bush was perceived to be so weak-minded by his own advisors that he could be influenced by this kind of thing. But really, why shouldn't he have been susceptible to biblical influence? He's a self professed Christian who believes he was washed clean of various addictions by the power of the blood so he's walking the walk. The bible is intended to be a guide for Christians in decision making in all aspects of life so I don't think its such a big deal really for him to look for some bible back up.

The question for bible-believers I think is why didn't it turn out better? Here we were with a born again Christian leader looking to the Lord in a war against an army of ostensibly nihilistic non believers. That sounds like a pretty sweet set-up. In that time I think most Americans would have said that God was on our side and certainly all Christian-istas would have said He was. So how did it get so fucked up? Opponents of the war were cast as anti-American and are still characterized as having more tolerance for Islam than Christianity by the Godly right. But the evidence that Bush's Iraq war policy was divinely guided is pretty slim.

Lincoln said " my concern is not that God is on our side, my greatest concern is to be on God's side". Clearly the default presumption among most American Christians is that God is on our side by definition when U.S. policy goals align in a way that accords with their cultural understanding of His will, indeed they are largely incapable of thinking otherwise. And of course this is the great danger when religion allows itself to stand as a cultural placeholder rather than an actual philosophy of the spirit. I doubt that many Christians if any are contemplating whether or not they got crosswise with their savior over this one but I think they should. It would do their religion and nation no end of good.

Yeah, Im a sap for Obama. So what?

2009-05-16T02:34:00.003-05:00

This picture breaks my heart. Its hard to resist the man's humanity.

Torture photos surface anyway.

2009-05-15T14:58:00.004-05:00

Seems we don't necessarily need Obama to get the rest of the torture photos. Here's what I want from Cheney and then I'll shut up about the whole thing. If he's going to continually assert the fear-mongers rationale then he should have to show his hand. Point to each picture Mr. Vice President and explain exactly, E-FUCKING-XACTLY, how many thousands of lives the specific procedures in each picture saved and why. Who were these people, what did they know, and what would have undeniably happened to America absent the torture in these photos? The man says the dots connect, so let him show us. Preferably under oath.

Its breakfast. In Iowa

2009-05-15T11:47:00.004-05:00

I made a bad dietary decision today and this was it.

Breakfast at the Machine Shed. I thought maybe when the waitress brought it out that she was being ironic. She wasn't. Your options for breakfast at the Shed are these; fat or sugar, fat and sugar, with or without gravy and don't bother to ask if the toast is whole grain.

I'd post the after-math but honestly Im too embarrassed. Somewhere a cardiologist is smiling.

Me and Tammy Faye Baker

2009-05-15T01:24:00.003-05:00

Its official. Im a crier. If you need to cast an actor who can sob like a bitch in prison then you should really give my agent a call cause I can blubber like a baby at the drop of a hat and I work cheap.

This is a recent development.

When I was younger I didn't do weepy very well. I did insane explode your head intense anger realllllly well. Circa 1994 I could chew all the scenery you could build 8 times a week nena problema and if that wasn't tough enough for you well....those filterless Lucky Strikes said otherwise.

That was then.

Being a husband and dad. Letting go of dreams for a career. Burying a parent and sister in law much to soon. Im not so tough these days, and I don't have so much to yell about anymore.

How conservatives get their groove back.

2009-05-10T08:22:00.002-05:00

Hurrumphing old white men don't have shwerves of course and neither do hot blonde women who sound just like them except with shorter skirts. Right now the nexus between small government conservatism and outright social bigotry is unbreakable because the old "Christian" white guys just wont exit stage center-left. When more conservatives start sounding like this woman instead purple faced guys like this then we'll again be a two party system but there's going to have to be a lot of arterial blockages before the GOP gets there.

The only thing worse than no work...

2009-05-08T07:47:00.004-05:00

Is work.

When will science identify the strand of DNA floating around my body that is responsible for the voice of negativity in my head?

Hotels make my ass look fat.

Why do I put out so much effort to nail an audition if the subsequent job is so stressful?

Mormons cover Obama's Mother

2009-05-06T09:04:00.004-05:00

It appears that deviating slightly from their guidelines the Mormons have posthumously baptized Obama's Mother. Brew-ha-ha, outrage, scandal. Its an easy, and maybe even cheap, observation to make but I've never understood how any religion can claim the standing to be outraged over the practices of another.

Is posthumous Mormon baptism a tad presumptuous? Why yes, yes it is. But in the general scope of religious practices is it any odder than believing in the rapture,or that God would prefer men not have a foreskin, or that He has an underwear preference for you? Once you start telling people that your ritual has the power to turn bread and wine (grape juice for Baptists) into the flesh and blood of Jesus, and that you should then eat it, you've forfeited the right to discernment. The factual basis for "...let there be light" is no stronger than the argument that creation sits on the back of a giant invisible turtle so it seems to me that the best thing to do is believe whatever gets you up in the morning and otherwise tread lightly lest you blaspheme the Turtle.

Unbelievably timely quote from Scalia...

2009-05-01T14:05:00.002-05:00

In a bit of I think fiendishly clever legal tweaking a law professor at Fordham has assigned his students the task of tracking down public details of Scalia's life that the oddly private Justice would rather not be widely known since he occupies a sphere entirely of his own creation.

Its his rationale for keeping his public life private in this respect that just drops the jaw though given his most recently released opinion. The man apparently wakes up in a new world every morning:

"It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg's exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any."

Waterboarders for Christ.

2009-04-30T18:10:00.002-05:00

The results of a recent Pew poll finds quizzically that the strongest supporters of torture outside the Cheney household are most likely to be found among the same folks you'll find in church most often. The contradiction is obvious of course but it speaks to a larger truth about what passes for religion in America these days.

"Christian" is frankly quite often an entirely false designation among those self identifying. What's really important about the classification is not that it identifies a large group of people who actually emulate the life of Jesus but rather its a cultural marker for people who are in fact merely traditionalists or conservatives in the smallest sense of the word.

Scalia don't like talk about poo, boning, or empirical data

2009-04-29T11:18:00.010-05:00

I've already pulled several muscles in my neck shaking my head over this but in case it passed your notice the Supreme Court upheld the FCC's authority to regulate naughty words aired over broadcast television. Irony abounds....

First of all Im an unlikely ally of the Fox Network in this. Clearly they are on the side of God here, but this would be the same Fox Network whose "news" division employs legions of windbag assholes who would use the facts of this case to evidence that liberal elites are debasing our culture with their potty-mouthed disregard for wholesome American values. So just to tie up loose ends, one side of Fox's mouth is suing the government for the protection to broadcast Cher saying "fuck" while the other side of its mouth points to Cher saying "fuck" as a sign of the unravelling of society. Fuck. Clear contradictions in behavior just don't embarrass some people so what can you do.

Small beans however when compared to Scalia's majority opinion. For the sake of review the man is one of the most aggressively conservative Justices in decades who claims to wash his ideological hands clean on the altar of original intent and strict construction. Perish the thought that he might ever allow his thinking to be muddled by personal biases or passing fads of society that could tempt him into (gasp) judicial activism. Lets cut to the opinion shall we.....?

This sworn enemy of constitutional creep has somehow discovered in that very same eternal document that the government has the right to limit free speech in the interest of protecting children from the "first blow" of bad language, Im assuming no pun there. Scalia opines:

"Programming replete with one word expletives will tend to produce children who use (at least) one word indecent expletives. Congress has made the determination that indecent material is harmful to children and has left enforcement of the ban to the Commission"

So this man who finds no explicit right to privacy in the Constitution can find justification for the government to proactively determine what language is harmful for your children to hear and limit free speech accordingly at its discretion. That's right, small government hero Scalia has no problem with allowing some unelected agency lifer to decide what warrants governmental smack down and what doesn't.

"...the agency's decision to consider the patent offensiveness of isolated expletives on a case by case basis is not arbitrary or capricious"

Im not making this up. Lest you think Scalia has summarily changed the definition of arbitrary or capricious he goes on to justify that a prime time recitation of Chaucer's The Miller's Tale would not likely fall under the scope of the FCC's concerns because it "would not be likely to command the attention of many children who are both old enough to understand and young enough to be adversely affected". Cher however is one of those glittery Hollywood types that kids can't resist I guess....

Just to keep score now. Scalia's government can: make determinations about what your kid should hear, judge the relative level of societal harm by guess-timating audience size, and peg exactly how old a kid has to be to occupy this "fist-blow" danger zone.

It gets even better.

How, you might ask, does Scalia justify all this?? Turns out that's a goddamn good question because he does admit that "There are some propositions for which scant empirical evidence can be marshaled and the harmful effects of broadcast profanity is one of them." Meaning of course that I have no idea if this is even bad in the first place but Im going to support its ban anyway. See, that doesn't feel original intent-ey to me at all....

Clearly though he's foresees the corner he paints himself into:

"If enforcement has to be supported by empirical data, the ban effectively would be a nullity" Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!!!!!!! Don't ask me for evidence, Im a Supreme-fucking-Court Justice here. You may kiss my ring now.

If you know me you know I cannot get through the day without saying fuck repeatedly and obviously my children know this too. I've chosen to deal with that by telling them what curse words mean and allowing them to use them around me and only me if they choose and mostly they choose not to. When they do curse around me they don't do it very well. I want to teach discretion here without making certain words seem "grown up" and more alluring to them. Like most of my parenting I probably have this exactly wrong but the point is that its my choice to make and not some appointed douchebag who has made a career out of pretending like he's purged of personal bias and guided by the purity of his intellect alone.