My Body of Evidence

I have reached my goal weight of 160 lb. (72.5 kg). This is the most I have ever weighed. In collece I was like 145, and last year I was 150 or so. One summer in high school I got really depressed and didn’t eat much, and then got pneumonia, and I was down at 135. Not pretty. New goal: bodyfat drop to around nine percent (was 11ish before gaining weight, probably a little more now). Shaquille O’Neal is around 16%, Lance Armstrong about 5%, and anything much below that gets seriously unhealthy.

Lance Armstrong impresses me so much. Partly, because he’s a freak of nature– he was good enough to be pro before he got sick, when he was too lazy to train properly. But he’s convinced me that the limiting factor in most endeavors is not innate ability but sheer will. I like the fact that he’s so good everyone else thinks he’s cheating. If he is, he’s gotten away with it better than anyone else. And I guess you can call me a gullible, star-struck optimist– not usually the first label you’d think of.

A lot of the coverage of his career has discussed the fact that everyone thinks he’s doping. There are over 2000 matches for the search “Lance Armstrong conspiracy.” He did a spot for Nike where he said “Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?”

Me, I’m on the goddamn interweb, googling for conspiracy theories.

Everybody loves a conspiracy theory, but really, it’s not that complicated. Check the seven signs of quackery, then read an indymedia piece on oil, war, and monetary reserves, and tell me why it’s full of shit.

Start with the author, who doesn’t give a full name and has an AOL email address. Everybody who wants to be credible ought to know better than to use an ISP that’s renowned for the stupidity of its users. Not to mention the fact that they’re attacking a media conspiracy by giving money to AOL/Time-Warner.

Then the essay begins: “Although completely suppressed in the U.S. media…” Did you see the problem there? Anonymous author alleging suppression of story by Powers that Be. Can you find this story in the European media, who would love to hear about any weakness in US finances? Can you find any good arguments for it in academic journals? Have you checked World Oil, Oil-industry.ru and Gulf Industry Worldwide?

No, but you’ve read Gore Vidal. I’m sorry.

Also, get an editor, and use a spell-checker. It’s “excerpt,” and if you don’t have a way to work a quotation into your essay, you refer to it in the bibliography, and don’t just tack it on to the end, hoping that someone else will organize your primary documents and your thinking for you.

Now, for the merits of the argument: that the US is attacking to prevent Iraq from selling its reserve dollars and switching its oil transactions to Euros, thereby flooding the market with dollars and weakening the US economy.

I suppose that it’s imaginable that Iraq and the rest of OPEC would try to destroy the value of the dollar, even if it came at a great cost to them. However, they haven’t got the cash to do that. Iraq is nearly bankrupt– them switching to Euros would have about as much effect on the currency market as a vacationer cashing a traveler’s check. Remember: the US economy is larger than the next three combined, and Iraq is nearly bankrupt. Most of those great oil fields won’t get drilled for 10-20 years, and if they were active now, sanctions would have choked them off.

Even if several major countries were to try and weaken the dollar by switching en masse to euros, the US and its financial allies would be able to buy excess dollars and maintain the stability of the currency. In fact, one of the reasons countries keep foreign reserves is to prevent radical fluctuations in currency value. Other countries could be expected to help out here because exporters, including the EU and especially Japan and the rest of Asia, want a strong dollar to make their exports more attractive. A weak dollar is worse for them than it is for the US!

Not only that, but switching to Euros would be doing it the hard way, given the obvious ability to just jack up the oil prices. Doing it via currency transaction details is just too complicated. Sure, high oil prices hurt OPEC too, but so does crushing the dollar, given that they have lots of their money in dollars.

So, why is Bush really intent on attacking Iraq? Because he’s really convinced that Saddam is evil and dangerous and that the US should get him out of there and install a friendly democratic regime. He’s isolated from reasonable argument and thinks that disagreement is a sure sign of treachery.

In other words, he’s a conspiracy theorist.

Rummy Capone

MSNBC/Newsweek says “Donald Rumsfeld often quotes a line from Al Capone: ‘You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.’” It’s a good point, really. But the problem is, we’ve been skimping on the “kind words” part…

Has anyone seen a credible critique of the Bush policy from the right? My feeling is that those who fail to line up 100% behind the prez are exiled and have their conservative credentials stripped, and that therefore, by definition, you can’t find one. But I’d like to see it. There’s a lot of people now who regard themselves as “balking hawks:” anti-Saddam, uncomfortable with unilateralism, distrustful of Bush, in favor of war only with UN backing, etc.

Untie?

“I’m a uniter, not a divider. I refuse to play the politics of putting people into groups and pitting one group against another.”

“You’re either with us or you’re with the enemy.”

“If we are arrogant, they will resent us. If we’re humble, but strong, they’ll welcome us.”

You may argue that I’m quoting him out of context. Not at all. This is quoting out of context (from complete speech transcript here):

“The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East, and it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists… Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course.

We’re obviously dealing with a clash of madmen seeking the end of the world. I figure the best way to do this is to have them both step down, or just have a cowboy-style shootout. Fucking maniacs.

Bad Habits Beginning with J

One time playing Scattergories with some friends, everyone was asked to think of a bad habit beginning with the letter J. Most of the group picked the obivous (and not actually bad) habit. The winner said “jingoism.”

So when you start to say you support that war because it’s in America’s interest, stop and think. First off, America includes more than just the United States. Second, go-it-alone is not in anyone’s interest. And third, consider yourself and your nation in context.

I don’t always think religions have the moral high ground, but most of them are opposed to this war. The WTO, a natural US policy ally if there ever was one, thinks we’re charging off a cliff, economically. Meanwhile, we’re changing the names of food in the congressional cafeterias. Administration experts are joining the chorus of journalists who decry the monomanaical focus on killing Saddam.

This isn’t some fifth column, outside-agitated, dirty longhair hippie crowd. The diminishing, increasingly strident group known as “middle America” needs to wake up and notice that manifest destiny went out with the free-ranging buffalo and the smallpox-laden blanket. They’ll figure it out, eventually. The question is, are you going to think about it, and learn it on your own, or are we all going to be suffer for your self-abuse?

Ready, Steady, Go

More Ready.gov parodies: via email, via mailing lists.

I’m not so much interested in the Department of Homeland Security any more though. I’d rather look into the Department of Cryptogramic Botany, or maybe Invertebrate Zoology. The Senate Department of Urban Development (Berlin) has a wonderful walking-tour page. Maybe I should just go to the Complaints Department.

In the art department, I’m fond of the Dirty Wallpaper site, which has some nifty graffiti and so forth, and Davegraphics. But if you spend too much time in that department, you’ll get an art degree and be poor.

Speaking of poor, my dear friend’s younger sister arrived in town this week, in the company of a gentleman who goes by the name of Dolores. I think it was Dolores, I may have misheard, but it sounded something like that. An odd name for anyone, especially a boy. May be a nome de guerre, or perhaps a mere alias. The two are quite the merry pranksters, though, and their vigor has filled my friend’s week with awkward, silent reproach. You see, the youngsters are youthful swashbucklers for justice and street credibility, and they disapprove of my friend’s lifestyle and line of work as though she were a sodomite. In other words, she’s working for the man and they’re fucking hippies.

Fearmongering Hysteria

“Danger, war, prison disaster, a tide of heartbreak and human misery…”

This past summer there was a nationwide abduction scare. Before that it was sharks. Remember satanic cults and daycare child molestors? This week we’re all about the Elizabeth Smart hubub in the news. (Thought it was Jessica at first…) Before that, the Columbia and Challenger tragedies. Do you remember Heaven’s Gate, the suicidal cult of web developers from the 90s? It’s true that there are very real dangers and very real tragedies, but many of the items that fill the news these days aren’t. And
it’s often hard to tell the difference.

An anonymous reader sent me an essay he wrote shortly after the Heaven’s Gate suicides, addressing differences between real tragedies, from which we can learn, and faux tragedies, which are mere spectacle. It is included, in its entirety, below.
Continue reading “Fearmongering Hysteria”

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

Conspiracies, junk science, and whatnot: ESP research can still get serious coverage in the news, and oh yes, conspiracy theories are very much in vogue. Whether it’s economic illiteracy among today’s leadership or just plain ignorance among tomorrow’s, people really need to get a global perspective and learn to identify bogosity a hell of a lot better. We’re highly evolved primates here, people, let’s use that capacity for rational thought, OK?