Fore!

I am going to play golf tomorrow. I recently had a birthday and this is how I am going to celebrate, since I am unable to rent a limousine full of booze and hookers and go to Disney World, principally because my wife won’t give me any money. My wife doesn’t like Disney World. Anyway, golf is a reasonable substitute for me since my golf game is generally rated NC-17 for pervasive vulgar and abusive language, crude humor, sci-fi violence, intense peril, frequent urination and disturbing images. PETA has filed for an injunction in Federal Court against me playing golf, but the matter remains unresolved. My contention is that those animals were engaging in an inherently dangerous activity by sitting there in the woods minding their own business. If you’ve never seen a spotted curlew struck by a golf ball traveling 176 miles per hour, you don’t really understand how tenuous our grasp on life is.

Golf is great relaxation for me. I work in local government, so I am constantly being berated by various elements of the community for both my successes and failures, real or imagined. The tax-paying citizens believe their contributions merit a combination of Jesus Christ and Einstein, while all they get is a cross between Mr. Bean and Darth Vader. You can imagine how stressful that is. In addition, I have two teenage sons, which is perhaps self-explanatory, and a wife who has been unemployed for almost a year now. While I love them all dearly (most of the time), my unregulated resting blood pressure in the domestic environment tends to be about 463 over 186, unless there is a broken appliance at home, in which case it is usually out of the range measurable by the sphygmomanometer. Golf provides me the opportunity to be at peace with an indifferent universe and accept my intellectual and physical shortcomings without harsh self-judgment, and drink beer.

To further illustrate the metaphysical benefits of golf, picture this; a golf ball is 1.68 inches in diameter. An average golf course is about 6500 yards in total length from tee to pin. This makes the average hole approximately 361 yards in length. This distance is 7738 times the diameter of the ball. The hole is approximately 4.25 inches in width. This would be like whacking the Earth with an enormous club and sending it 61 million miles through space (two-thirds the distance to the Sun, just inside the orbit of Mercury) and passing it through a hoop only 20,000 miles wide. Perhaps God will ultimately choose to do this to relieve his stress level, but it involves such a complicated calculus of force and motion that Newton would most certainly have turned to haberdashery.

I am actually the proud owner of a book entitled “The Physics of Golf” by Theodore P. Jorgensen. This lengthy tome is a must for any golf enthusiast who is also autistic and suffering from OCD. I ordered the book from Amazon, sight unseen, thinking it might improve my game to have some understanding of the physical forces at work in golf, but the only revelation was no damn wonder I can’t hit the ball worth a crap. In Mr. Jorgensen’s defense, he probably didn’t anticipate that anyone with so little grasp of advanced mathematics would waste the $19.95, and he has undoubtedly done a great service to legions of Ph.D. candidates in Physics who will be able to reference his work in their dissertations. I still proudly display it on my bookshelf with the idea that the more gullible members of society will actually think I was able to read it. I did take golf lessons for a while, but when the primary feedback you get from the coaching pro is “interesting”, “oh shit” and “are you retarded?”, you pretty quickly lose your enthusiasm for the eighty dollar an hour payments. It seems that my mind and body are not on sufficiently good terms with each other to properly coordinate the sequence of complex motions necessary to strike the ball appropriately, and my predilection for brute force over finesse appears to somehow exacerbate this failure.

There was a time in human history when the ability of individuals to hurl projectiles in an accurate manner over distances or speedily navigate obstacles would often mean the difference between eating lunch and being lunch. We developed games to reinforce these necessary survival skills and have handed them down in evolved forms from generation to generation. Golf, however, is not one of them, unless decapitating paralyzed moles was at some point necessary to human survival. Golf exists purely for me to visualize the hard, round heads of my enemies and detractors and to strike brutally without regard for the direction of the splatter, which suits me just fine.

The Age of Anger

As the Great Communicator would say “here I go again”. Most everyone knows I am no fan of religious and political ideologues and I am highly skeptical of much of our national political leadership and their cynical, manipulative and self-interested approach to policy making. On the other hand, being completely fair and balanced, I know it is far too easy to criticize and that one really must travel a while in someone else’s shoes to know the complexity and contradictions that govern our individual circumstances and judgments, so we may sometimes imagine betrayal and failure because of our own ignorance, or arrogance, and not as the result of rational and objective assessment. On the other, other hand, some things are as obvious as an infected eye, and I’m not the only one in America, apparently, who feels that way.

Anyone who has ever taken an inferential statistics class probably still has a headache and blurred vision from it, unless you actually understood what the hell was going on, in which case it is likely you are a soulless cyborg bent on the destruction of humanity; nonetheless, statistical analysis of opinion polling data, while suspiciously beyond the comprehension of the average American, may actually yield some insight into fundamental truths about, well, opinions. Right now, the truth is that many Americans are pretty dissatisfied with the performance of their government and the general state of the nation. RealClear Politics is a website (RealClearPolitics.com) which, among other things, compiles polling data from a wide variety of sources from all points on the political compass with the stated purpose of allowing the reader to sort it all out for themselves. A brief perusal of the data on the site reveals we don’t much like the people we voted into public office.

For the most recent polling period analyzed, the average approval rating for the President is 51.9 percent, with 43.6 percent disapproving of the job he is doing. The other 5.5 percent presumably didn’t understand the question or didn’t give a rat’s ass. A 52 percent approval rating may be enough to win an election, but it probably won’t get you a Noble Prize; however, under present circumstances, 52 percent approval might be viewed as outstanding, especially since 56.1 percent of Americans simultaneously think the country is on the wrong track. Apparently 22.3 percent of those holding that opinion don’t hold the President responsible for any of it (do the math).

Congress, conversely, appears to be only slightly more popular than vaginal itch with an average 25 percent approval rating, and an outstanding 66 percent of Americans surveyed disapprove of the job Congress is doing. But still, one in four adult Americans think Congress is actually doing a good job, which is not so bizarre when you consider that (according CBS News Polls) 48 percent of Americans believe in ghosts and (according to Reuters News polling) 35 percent believe in Bigfoot. A CNN poll tells us that 64 percent of adult Americans believe humans have been contacted by alien beings and 50 percent think aliens have abducted people (unfortunately none from Congress), so maybe a 66 percent disapproval rating isn’t as impressive as it sounds. While the Democratically controlled Congress gets the stamp of approval from only one in four, only one in five identify themselves as Republican (Pollster.com), so I guess that a lot of people who actually voted for the useless dung-buckets in Congress are no longer satisfied with their own judgment just eight months down the line.

Which brings me to where I was meandering to begin with; we Americans are just a tad bit conflicted when it comes to governance of the last, best hope of humankind. We started this experiment in democracy with a deep mistrust of authority and the attitude that we classless outcasts could do better than a bunch of wig-wearing, out-of-touch fancy-pants five time zones away. In that respect, we were probably correct, but our first swipe at national management was too tepid and sucked worse than King George’s haughty bureaucracy. We finally hit upon this wonderfully balanced compromise that allowed for both efficacious government and individual liberty, and which in my mind still ranks as one of the all time great products of human wisdom.

Unfortunately, this compromise is based upon a few problematic preconditions, foremost among them being the notion that the individual citizen will actively participate in the process of self-governance, up to and including actually making some personal effort to educate one’s self with respect to significant public policy issues. It then logically follows that we will select our representatives based upon the extent to which we believe they are properly informed and disposed with respect to such issues. I know I’m repeating what I’ve written here previously, but it is repetition for emphasis; if the Congress sucks and the President is ineffective and the economy blows and the environment is collapsing, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

We have everything backwards if we are looking to L'Enfant’s swamp in northern Virginia. for answers. We currently have access to more information from more sources about any and everything in the world than ever before and we are more educated as a nation than we have ever been. We have more leisure time to devote to self-improvement, if we choose, than any generation in history, but we spend most of our time looking at Internet porn, getting facelifts, Facebooking, tweeting, twittering and twatting while we leave the management of our hard won empire of justice and reason to professional narcissists and sociopathic ideologues. And then we whine about how unfair it all is.

In case you haven’t noticed, humans can be a real rational and moral contradiction. Whether you ascribe this to original sin or evolutionary randomness, our imperfection is a pervasive fact of our existence and blaming stuff on the devil or soulless corporations or the Trilateral Commission or the Media just constitutes further moral and intellectual failure when, in fact, all of these things are really just us. Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying "The qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training." In other words, if you want the benefits of liberty for yourself and your posterity, then get off your ass and be the “self” in self-governance. We probably do need to storm City Hall in an angry mob, but instead of torches and pitchforks, we need to bring bricks and mortar and trowels and maybe a book or two, because we can’t do shit until we liberate ourselves from the shackles of self-indulgence and the tyranny of ignorance.

You Lookin' At Me?

And now, the blobfish. The blobfish has become something of an Internet sensation due to its oddly human visage (see below) and its generally indolent lifestyle, but very little is really known about its daily activities or its genetic lineage. Being a creature of the deep, it seldom graces us with its presence and when it does it is so wholly out of its natural circumstances that it surely doesn’t make its best impression; sort of like a Texan at a Mensa meeting.

The blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus) is a resident of the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of southern Australia and Tasmania. That part of the world is generally a pretty weird neighborhood, including bird-eating sharks, coconut eating crabs and meat eating caterpillars, but the blobfish is not so much known for what it eats as for how it eats. The blobfish, as its name might imply, is sort of the Homer Simpson of the marine world and feeds by floating around with its mouth open, hoping something tasty will blunder in. This is very similar to my feeding habits during football season wherein I position myself strategically upon the couch and pirate pizza, chicken wings and egg rolls as they are transported through my territory by unsuspecting family members.

The blobfish’s indolence extends to its method of locomotion which is essentially floating wherever the current may lead. Given its minimal musculature, the blobfish is generally unable to get up much steam, like most of Newt Gingrich’s ideas. The good news for the blobfish, which, after all, didn’t ask for this life, is that most of its body is composed of a low density goo which is both unappetizing and slightly less dense than sea water, allowing the blobfish to mostly avoid predation as well as preventing it from becoming mired in the layer of fish dung and beer cans which coats the undersea landscape off the Australian coast.

The reproductive life of the blobfish is poorly understood by marine biologists, who are puzzled that anything so homely could get any action, but anyone who has ever been really drunk at 3:00 in the morning will probably regrettably testify that aesthetics are not always the primary issue in mating behavior. In any event, the female blobfish squirt out their embryonic progeny upon rocks on the ocean floor and the eggs are then fertilized by their amorous suitors in an indifferent blobish sort of way. For you ladies who find something familiar in this description, please visit Match.com. The females (who else) then hang around guarding the developing eggs in an equally idle fashion until the small fry hatch and float indifferently away.

So this is the story, to the extent we are able to discern; the blobfish is birthed by an inattentive mother and then floats away with its mouth open and continues to do this for mostly the rest of its life, breaking this routine only intermittently when the urge to for some reason restart this boring cycle strikes it. One might suspect that it is likely there is much more to the blobfish than I have reported, but you wouldn’t know it by searching the web. The blobfish does, however, reside generally about half a mile down, so it doesn’t get much press. Most of the blobfish that are observed are inadvertently hauled up in fishermen’s nets, no doubt a rude surprise to both parties.

But let us not snicker too arrogantly at our ugly vertebrate cousin; for he is as much a supreme achievement of nature as are we. Perfectly suited for the inhospitable conditions of enormous pressure and scarce sustenance, he expends virtually no effort, but boasts a evolutionary success record far more ancient than our own. There is no empirical data which give any indication that he lies, murders or uses credit irresponsibly. He lives in balance and harmony with his environment and sustains successive generations without diminishing the wealth or diversity of life on Earth. For all his repellent splendor, he is completely incapable of the depth or scale of ugliness that humans casually take for granted.

Down the Rabbit Hole

They’re getting ready to crank up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) again next month following more than a year of repairs after the 4.5 billion dollar science experiment popped a cork less than a month after beginning operation in September of last year (for more on the topic see http://toomuchfuzzylogic.blogspot.com/2009/04/boson-buddies.html). Scientists from around the world are waiting anxiously 570 feet below the Swiss countryside for the resumption of atom smashing so that they can resolve their petty academic disputes over things like the origin and fate of the Universe and the fundamental composition of everything in our world.

There has been a great deal of less-than-scientific hysteria over the potentially disastrous consequences of ramming protons into each other at nearly the speed of light, with dire predictions of world-swallowing black holes and Star Trek like rips in the fabric of space-time which would presumably let something unpleasant in or something important out, but all reputable physicists (who get paid to discover stuff that can destroy the world) agree that the probability of widespread destruction is relatively small. There is still litigation pending in various jurisdictions throughout the world over the alleged safety concerns of the LHC, but anyone waiting for the planet’s various legal systems to save the Earth from destruction has probably never actually been in a courtroom.

Most of you (both of you?) reading this know that I am a big fan of science and a firm believer that humanity’s destiny does not involve sitting here in ignorance waiting for the Universe to find some creative way to obliterate us. Our fate, whatever it may be, rests in our understanding of the basis of reality and the ability to protect ourselves against the randomness of life, whether it be amoebas or asteroids. There are others who very reasonably point out that we are ourselves rather unreliable and that the power of advanced knowledge may be misused to our detriment. They point to things like atom bombs, nerve gas and Facebook as examples of how technology run amuck can destroy civilization, or even lead to our extinction.

These are certainly valid fears and our track record as a species does make one wonder if experiments like the LHC are really advisable, but for those worried about letting the Genie out of the bottle, I would argue that the Genie escaped the moment humanity attained sentience and any idea that we can be anything but curious to the point of recklessness simply denies our history and the substance of what we are. Scientific inquiry is inevitable, but fortunately literally the smartest people in the world are down in that tunnel near Geneva and they know that they can’t be praised by our progeny for centuries to come if they allow the Earth to be sucked into a closed, time-like curve, never to be seen again.

Of course, it has never been the scientists that we have had to worry about; it has been the politicians, corporations, deranged fanatics and ignorant masses that have taken scientific discovery and done really stupid things with it. Knowledge is like a stick; you can use it as a tool, burn it for warmth or whack a fellow human in the head with it, but it has no practical or moral context until we chose to employ it. Humanity will not be destroyed by scientific inquiry, but only by the ubiquitous threat of human failure. To paraphrase a great American, we have nothing to fear but us ourselves.

There Goes the Neighborhood

I remember reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land what is now decades ago and while I’m not completely clear on the plot anymore, the Earth was being studied by a sort of accidental emissary from the planet Mars, home to an ancient and advanced civilization, with the aim of determining the relative merit of the human race. The Martians had previously studied the inhabitants of the rocky fifth planet in our solar system and, having found them somewhat wanting, turned their home into the asteroid belt. I can’t remember how Heinlein explained away planetary genocide as characteristic of an advanced and enlightened race or why all the other less sentient occupants of Planet Five had to perish as well, but I suppose it was all a sort of religious allegory and shouldn’t be too overly analyzed. Religion tends to make the most sense when you don’t think too hard.

Dr. Carl Sagan was not fond of these flights of objectification fancy because he felt that by imagining that flying saucer from Ceti Alpha Six flying by and its occupants shaking their head(s) in dismay at the foolishness of Earth’s residents we were in denial about the very real possibility that the human race constituted the only sentient beings in the almost infinite vastness of space. He felt that we had an obligation to preserve ourselves as a unique, singular and special representation of the universe’s self-expression. That is not to say that being special translates to essential goodness, but I believe that perhaps Dr. Sagan felt that we were a link in an evolutionary chain that might ultimately result in some fundamental realization of purpose or meaning and that our self-destructive idiocy threatened to cheat all creation of a chance at some ultimate completion, an almost theological idea.

Part of our human problem is that we all tend to think of humanity as an end result rather than a point on a continuum. Since God made us on the last day, we are the final product, the pinnacle of divine achievement. Our penchant for monotheistic constructs reinforces our natural predilection to arrogance by making practically the whole moral structure of creation revolve around us, and what we do with our genitalia. Since we generally see ourselves as distinct and apart from nature, we don’t consider the possibility of evolutionary change as a fundamental aspect of humanity, The implications of this include, among many other failures, the resulting denial that the degradation of the natural environment that supports our existence is a suicidally irrational course of action and the fallacy that we can always count on being around no matter how irresponsible, selfish and short-sighted our behavior is.

But what then would our hypothetical alien tourists make of the eclectic, contradictory and convoluted mess of human civilization? Perhaps, if they lacked a talent for religious allegory, they would forego the concept of angels and demons fighting for control of the human soul and speculate that a relatively intellectually unsophisticated species which had spent all of its evolutionary history simply meeting the demands of survival had, by chance, experienced a rapid change in brain capacity and function and begun to exert adequate control over its environment to meet the requirements for survival in well less than the waking time available. The consequences of this, they might speculate, will have been the misapplication of previously essential survival skills such as intuition and inference, aggression, reproductive urge, fear, greed and gluttony to other, non-essential pursuits, creating a myriad new potential psychological states and intellectual failures to plague the hairless, big-brained apes as they infested their planet in ever increasing numbers.

The curious aliens might further note that this seems to pretty much be the evolutionary pattern that all sentient species followed, and that it was really the only way that a transition from a survival based existence to a meaning based existence could occur. They might also remind one another that their species had also travelled this path and speak analytically about the other species known to have attempted and failed to navigate this transition. Their judgment on the human race would, at this particular juncture, probably be reserved. Of course, Relativity pretty much precludes such recreational visits by possible stellar neighbors, and we can say nearly for sure that there aren’t any competing technological civilizations in our neck of the woods, so for the time being we will just have to judge ourselves, perhaps the harshest judgment of all. Maybe the curious aliens and the angry and jealous God are after all just two different manifestations of our own severe self-judgment and perhaps the fact that we are able to conceive judgment of ourselves at all is a new and unbreakable pier in that evolutionary bridge spanning the void of uncertainty to our shining future.

Perhaps, but though I love my children as much as my genetically-coded urge to self-preservation will allow, I know that they are bequeathed the same birthright as every stranger in this strange land since the advent of primordial ooze, the freedom and responsibility to change or die. What we leave to them will be a legacy equal parts fear and ignorance and progress and hope, but they can no longer depend on past judgment and evolution by natural selection to correct the course; they must now evolve by self-direction, and soon, because the grim countenance of Mars hangs low in the west and waxes angry red, and the ominous rumblings of inevitability accompany the dying embers of some other world’s fractured dreams as they burn incandescent streaks across our darkening sky.

We'll Always Have Kabul

The news media, ever reliable ally of truth, are reporting that the Obama Administration is considering a change in their approach to the interminable mess in Afghanistan. Apparently as a nation we can only deal with one interminable mess at a time, although it appears to me we have quite few before us, and not just of the foreign kind. Anyway, I seem to recall that other stalwart world powers like the Soviet Union and the British Empire eventually came to reassess their approaches to Afghanistan at one point or another. In fact, if the conventional wisdom on the matter is accepted, Alexander the Great was the last tyrant bent on world domination who successfully subdued the various Afghan tribes, although how completely subdued they were is a matter of some debate. In any event, Alexander’s successor to the problem of Afghanistan, the Seleucid Empire, had almost totally lost control of what is now Afghanistan less than 150 years after Alexander’s death. It is, after all, hard to keep a good man down.

Alexander’s approach to Afghanistan, or any place on his list, for that matter, was generally to completely annihilate anyone who opposed him and reduce their cities to rubble. Throughout history, many national leaders have found this to be an effective short-term solution to strident opposition. The Soviet Union tried to utilize this strategy in their effort to bring world socialism to the Afghan people, but they were not completely committed to the effort and just couldn’t go the extra mile necessary to kill every last man woman and child. The second part to Alexander’s strategy was to seek out those tribes he had not already obliterated and offer them a reasonable accommodation for their cooperation. He would let them live, give them a reasonable amount of local autonomy and let them keep some of their money if they promised not to cause trouble or support his enemies, and if they would send an appropriate number of young men to feed his war machine. Not a bad deal, all things considered.

The British spent a lot of time and effort in the 19th Century trying to frustrate Russian aims in Afghanistan, taking quite an embarrassing beating from the Afghans in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and even though they ultimately achieved most of their political and territorial aims, they came at great cost and were largely ephemeral. The lesson that Alexander, the British Empire and the Soviet Union learned and that America will ultimately have to face is that you never really “win” in Afghanistan; territory which is pacified only remains so as long as the soldiers remain. The Afghan people apparently are largely disinterested in being part of a geopolitical “solution” and attempting to graft new institutions onto the abbreviated social framework of a largely feudal system is not likely to be a long-term success.

I thought the reason we went to Afghanistan was to kill the people that had planned and executed dastardly attacks upon our national interests and our nation itself. Somehow the mission evolved into correcting 3,000 years of screwed up history. I acknowledge the argument that Afghanistan as a failed state presents a threat to the United States by being a haven for miscreants, but there are a number of such places on earth and we really can’t afford financially, socially or morally to occupy every place which might sprout a terrorist movement at some point. One might even argue that attempting to do so simply facilitates the resentment which makes us targets of the unfocused frustration and anger of the world’s poor and ignorant. I was all for eviscerating the douche-bags that killed so many innocent people for such ridiculous reasons, but I may have been like a lot of people who failed to distinguish between justice and revenge in my haste to blame disaster on everybody in the world who failed to support America enthusiastically enough.

I understand that our involvement in Afghanistan is a complicated issue. We have legitimate strategic interests in that part of the world and we have friends who have accepted a great deal of risk to support us. We are at least partially responsible for the mess that Afghanistan found itself in after the Soviets left because of the manner in which we intervened in the conflict and a destabilized Afghanistan could easily be an invitation to all sorts of evil, much of which could haunt us again. I’m not saying there is an easy answer, but we will inevitably find that indefinite escalation will be socially and financially disastrous. Afghanistan will not be subdued by force, and we have neither the patience nor the wisdom to transform the ass-end of God’s creation into anything approximating a stable, peaceful nation.

I have never been to Afghanistan, but I understand that it is a contradiction of lush, verdant valleys and arid, inhospitable mountains. The people are known for their inordinate hospitality as well as their fiercely independent pride in their ragged, backward land. You can marry at the age of nine, and be stoned to death for adultery. A large part of the economy relies on opium and hashish production, but a mini-skirt will get you 40 lashes with an unhygienic whip, if not worse. The Afghans have traditionally been pretty well content to kill each other over petty grievances and real or imagined slights and seldom messed with anyone who didn’t come looking for trouble. Thrusting these simple and quarrelsome people to the center of the world stage and using them as some sort of barometer of the progress of 21st Century American idealism is a goofy proposition. The sooner we realize this, the less names will have to be inscribed on that future wall of stone and the less solemn tears will have to be shed to the accompaniment of our retrospective self-recrimination.