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This started out as a comment on Thingy’s blog, but for some reason, I couldn’t get it to accept it. Apparently, I fail the robot test.

I’m sorry, Blogger, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Anyway, a guy named Robert Krulwich says that the color pink doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion in our minds. My understanding was that this was the case with all colors–they are just how our brains interpret light reflected at different wavelengths. And the scientist they quote in this Time magazine article says something similar.

When they say pink is made up color, I guess they mean that only the human eye is capable of perceiving it; that other eyes might not have blend the wavelengths the same way. Whereas, red wavelengths are still being reflected no matter what is looking at it. (That doesn’t mean they appear “red” to some non-human entity, but they are consistently seen as that wavelength.) If I’m reading this right.

Ok, I just confused myself. If anyone with actual knowledge reads this, please enlighten me. In the meantime, I’ll be re-reading Ambrose Bierce’s The Damned Thing for a crash course on why this matters.

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Lefty Parent has a good post on liberals who homeschool. It’s a response to an article in Slate by Dana Goldstein, which argues against the practice.

Personally, I believe people should be free to homeschool their children if they so choose. Despite Goldstein’s claim that homeschooling is “illiberal”, this is by circumstance only, and need not always be true. If you are a liberal, ask yourself: would you rather your children be educated by you or by, for instance, the employees of the Texas School Board–the body that two years ago made changes to its curriculum

[A]imed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution

as the New York Times put it.

Conservatives like Rick Santorum say they oppose public education. Maybe, but I’ll bet anything what he really means is “I oppose the people who are currently in charge of public education, because they are liberals.” A lot of the Conservatives I know don’t want to abolish the public schools; they want to take them over and use them to teach their own beliefs. For that reason alone, it’s worth reserving the right to homeschool.

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I don’t have HBO, so I won’t be seeing the movie Game Change anytime soon. it sounds mildly interesting to me from what I have read, if only because of this one line:

“‘Now it takes a movie star charisma to get elected president. Obama and Palin, that’s what they are, stars,’ one strategist concludes at the film’s end.”

Well, I don’t dispute that. In the age of television and especially of the internet, charisma itself is a “game changer” Visual media loves a charismatic individual.

Perhaps that’s why they couldn’t resist making a movie about something that happened only three-and-a-half years ago, and was not exactly undocumented. Personally, if I wanted to relive The Sarah Palin Experience 2008, I’d just go watch some of the many news shows about her. It’s not like her debate performance or her acceptance speech are lost forever. The Couric and Gibson interviews are readily accessible.

I know, supposedly this movie gives us the “behind the scenes” look at Palin and the McCain campaign, but I frankly have my doubts as to whether it is accurate. The only evidence it has for its accuracy is that Palin says it is inaccurate. That counts for something, but on the other hand its truth is vouched for by McCain’s Chief Strategist Steve Schmidt. Forgive me if I don’t trust the words of a political strategist.

No one except the actual participants knows what really went on, and, being all currently living people in the field of politics, are likely to tell the story that is most flattering to their own interests. The only way to really do it right would have been to make some sort of Rashomon-like film. And even that wouldn’t get you any closer to the truth.

This doesn’t mean that it’s utterly impossible to know what happened on the campaign trail, but it’s going to be years before a really clear picture emerges. That’s often the way with history. Right now, there are too many currently politically active people portrayed in the movie to really have much confidence in it.

So, why did they make this movie? Why didn’t they make a movie of an election we don’t have footage of, like, for instance, the 1824 election? That would be a good one; full of drama and intrigue. And it had Andrew Jackson, who is quite a fascinating personality. That would be very interesting to watch.

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Steve Rushin has an article on SI.com complaining about the military terminology that’s used to describe football–e.g. “bounty”.

I sort of agree with his sentiment, but the fact is: football–and most sports–are proxies for war. That’s why they exist and why they appeal to people. On the whole, this is a good thing; since football is much less deadly and has many more rules than war, it is really a better activity that quenches the same desires. But it’s still “our” side, decked out in “our” colors, going out to uphold “our” honor by defeating the enemy.

It’s too bad, but as I see it, take away the war analogies from football and you’re left with nothing.

What say you?

 

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British conservative Peter Hitchens on his grudging admiration for Vladimir Putin:

[Putin] stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders.

Hitchens goes on for a long time, making his case trying to justify–I think partially to himself–how he can manage to like someone like Putin. But really this one sentence says it all: Putin is a nationalist. So is Peter Hitchens. The rest follows from this.

Putin is exactly the sort of person nationalists love to have running their country. For starters, he strikes all the right macho poses. (Hunting shirtless, rigging himself out in jet pilot apparel before it was all the rage.) But Peter Hitchens is a tasteful, intelligent sort of nationalist, and so it requires more than that to take him and his fellows in.

What he likes about Putin is his policies. As Hitchens says:

After all, how many of us are as keen as we used to be on the supposed cure-alls and blessings of human rights, privatisation, the United Nations, the European Union, open borders, political correctness and free trade?Mr Putin’s Russia is refreshingly free of these things.

Emphasis mine.

It makes perfect sense that Hitchens would admire Putin for all these things. I expect most nationalists in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere, will come to be more and more enamored of Putin and perhaps seek candidates for office who emulate him.

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“What can change the nature of a man?” is the central question in Planescape: Torment, Black Isle’s philosophical 1999 RPG. Well, among other things, playing video games. Studies indicate that video games can be good for players, reports a WSJ article:

A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.

Interesting. The research also finds that there are negative effects to playing violent games, as well. That doesn’t surprise me, but you have to weigh the pros and cons, which I think ultimately is something only the individual players can do.

However, I’m kind of disappointed at the kind of benefits they’re looking for in games. It’s well and good that they find they support better hand/eye coordination and such, but my contention has always been that the best games carry intellectual benefits; similar to great literature, there can be a very sophisticated emotional response to games that improves the player’s mind.

Still, it’s a bit of good news.

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When the Don Imus controversy happened five years ago, Leonard Pitts had a great column explaining why it was so offensive, which you can read in full here. Here’s an excerpt that shows the crux of his point:

While a coarse and irreverent people will tolerate and even celebrate breaches of decorum and the slaughter of sacred cows, one thing folks won’t put up with, one thing that riles something deep in human nature, is somebody who picks on someone smaller.

This is exactly the mistake Limbaugh made. And this what the people who complain that Limbaugh is being punished more than Ed Schultz was for calling Laura Ingraham the same thing, or why Bill Maher has never been punished for his various insults to Sarah Palin, don’t understand. Limbaugh is a successful radio host, and Sandra Fluke is a student. Limbaugh is the more powerful one in the equation, whereas Bill Maher is a successful comedian attacking a successful politician, and Ingraham and Schultz are both pundits.

I haven’t seen anyone else say this in so many words ever since Pitts did, but I think it’s a very important point.

UPDATE: Thought of another example. President Obama’s comments on the Henry Louis Gates arrest and the subsequent “Beer Summit”. That was basically the same deal. Although he might not have meant to, what it looked like was the President of the United States saying on national TV that some regular guy is “stupid”. That’s why Obama had to make amends.

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Via Private Buffoon, a very thought-provoking website that gives you some sense of the size of the Universe.

It might depress you or it might cheer you up. It can depend what kind of day you’re having, I guess.

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In the course of a long and sometimes incoherent explanation of why he “apologized” to Sandra Fluke, Rush Limbaugh said something I hadn’t heard about before:

What this was all about was the president of the United States acting extra-constitutionally, mandating that Catholic churches and their schools provide contraceptives, abortifacients.  He doesn’t have that power constitutionally.  He cannot mandate these things…

That was the original purpose of the hearing.  [Darrell Issa] was to get facts into the record that otherwise would not be aired, but [Issa’s] committee is made up of Republicans and Democrats and there are rules and procedures that are followed in calling witnesses.  So the Democrats tried to play a game with Darrell Issa and his committee, and he rejected it.  What they did was, they requested a witness for his hearing, a man named Barry Lynn to make their points for them…

At literally the last minute the Democrats decided they want Sandra Fluke… not because she had any special knowledge or credentials like Barry Lynn has, but because her optics as a woman and a college student, a 30-year-old college student and an activist on Democrat issues, by the way.

Limbaugh’s source for this information is this article in The Washington Examiner. I have to say, this is an interesting point, and if true, it does indeed paint the Democrats in a bad light, though not at all for the reasons Limbaugh thinks.

Barry Lynn is the head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It would have been idiotic for the Democrats to have an expert on that issue–even one sympathetic to their side–testify on this issue because it is allowing the Republicans to draw them into their type of battle. The Republicans wanted it to be “separation of Church and State” issue, not a public health issue. And the Democrats, by the sound of things, were very nearly stupid enough to go along with them.

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Breitbart.com has published its late namesake’s final piece. The statement on the site claims it is the first step in their quest to fulfill Breitbart’s desire to “vet” President Obama.

His last column concerns a play about the community organizer Saul Alinsky that was staged in Chicago in 1998. Of note, in Breitbart’s opinion, is that then-State Senator Obama appeared on a panel discussing the play after its conclusion. This panel also included various individuals who Breitbart alleges had ties to communism. This, he determines, casts much suspicion on Obama. Then there is the fact that the promotional materials for the event misspell Obama’s name, which, the article seems to imply, is more evidence of his sinister designs.

Then Breitbart, having apparently reasoned

The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the President.

goes on to provide us with a synopsis of it. It is rather a disjointed account, but then, I have not seen the play. Perhaps the fault here is not Breitbart’s, but the dramatist’s. And I don’t quite see the part where I am supposed to be horrified at the idea of the Commander-in-Chief to be watching such a play.

The fact that Obama showed up to talk about some play is not terribly damning, in my eyes. It is true that other people, perhaps quite bad people, showed up as well, but when you are State Senator your job is to curry favor within your district, and you cannot help it if it is the one populated by communist sympathizers. Not that I wish to imply I trust Breitbart’s accusations of communism, but I mean that even if he is entirely right, he has still proven nothing about the character of the President.

He fails to provide any information concerning what Obama said on the panel. He gives a plausible account of his whereabouts, but you can only determine so much about someone from that. Especially a politician, who will go anywhere where they have persuadable voters. If this is what their “vetting” of the President is going to be like, I would say that he does not have much to worry about.