Tom Ridge and the Terror Alert of Doom

I have always tried to avoid the worst of anti-Bush hysteria, mainly because I thought well-intentioned, ideologically-driven incompetence was a much better explanation for what went on during that administration than cackling Evil Villainery. Besides, I've always thought that ranting on about the evilness of the principals and their imagined acts distracted from the evilness of the things they actually did do, which were no less evil just because they were motivated by negligence and stupidity. Banality of evil and all that.

And now we have this.

I never put any stock in the idea that anyone in the Bush administration would actually purposefully manipulate this country's national security apparatus to win an election, both because I discounted the whole cackling hand-rubbing image, and because while I knew they were dumb, I never thought anyone could be that dumb.

Well, almost no one.

As is the usual way of these things, we're hearing about it third or fourth hand from the second cousin of someone who read a draft of a book that looks an awful lot like a grindstone, by someone who has plenty of axes lined up and ready to go. So I don't think we can say what really happened yet.

For example:

"[Ridge says he was] pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over."

Key phrase there, and you don't know what to make of it until you read the book. Suffice to say we don't have all the facts yet.

Also,

"We went over backwards repeatedly and with great discipline to make sure politics did not influence any national security and homeland security decisions," -- former WH CoS Andy Card

Which I buy, actually.

But that doesn't mean it didn't happen anyway. That's the kind of thing Cheney's office would have done just because someone told them not to.

"Of course we'll hit our own troops. But appearances must be maintained. Fire at will."

Still, grain of salt firmly in place, I'm tempted to give Ridge the benefit of the doubt. He always struck me as a good guy stuck with one of the most poorly-thought-out job descriptions in all of Washington, and that's saying something.

"Could you take responsibility for the security of the entire nation without any real authority? Knew you could. 'Preesh."

So I buy it, at least on the face of it. All that remains is to see who said what when, and exactly how bad it really was.

This never-ending stream of revelations about the Bush administration, each one confirming that not only as bad as we thought, but it was actually worse, does nothing to shake my faith in humanity. I didn't have that much to begin with. Humanity is capable of far worse; despite what some lulubirds shriek, we've never even scratched the surface of the Nazi or Stalinist kind of evil. But it has shaken my faith in this country. That we could have ever let things get so bad, that we're so slow to face what actually happened, and that we'll probably never hold anyone truly accountable... at least the Constitution held, and we changed governments. But it took so little for us to get scared out of our most basic principles, and to betray our better natures as a people.

-- The Prolix Wag
My faith in myself, of course, remains profoundly unshaken.

D&D Will Eat Your Children

Sweet Jesus, here we go again.

And in Cedar City, no less. The city where I spent three lovely summers Shakespearifying and Dungeon Mastering. Hell, the year after that I was flown in for the express purpose of running a D&D game. And making out with my girlfriend at the time. Who I suspect was in it mainly for the D&D anyway.

We'll start with Penny Arcade's take, because it's brilliant:

It got me thinking about D&D's storied history of causing insanity in people who never actually play it. Although the game-blame isn't nearly as blatant and hysterical as its been in the past, there's something in the reporting that makes one's head twitch to the left in quizzical annoyance:

"Testimony Monday suggested a motive for the attacks may have grown from the trio playing the fantasy role-playing game "Dungeons and Dragons" and jealousy over a girl who King and Bryson knew."

It just doesn't scan right if you substitute "the live-action sports game 'football'". One could have a disagreement/motive for manslaughter that started over a game of football, started at a game of football, maybe even was a direct result of events that took place during a game of football, but "the motive for the attacks may have grown from the trio playing football"? Not so much.

Setting aside the fact that they chose gaming as the lead over the girl -- and as any fool knows, the hoohah is much stronger than the dice -- there's a nasty little insinuation there about the origin of the hammer-beating motive.

Combining the power of the hoohah with the power of the dice, of course, is the most powerful force in the universe.

Because to imply that a game like football might have directly caused someone to beat someone else with a hammer by its very existence and intrinsic nature would be ridiculous, right?

But you can do that with D&D. Still. I honestly thought we were past this. Well, I thought we should be past it. I guess there's a reason I felt it necessary to address the stupidity of the James Dallas Egbert Steam Tunnel Incident in my play Of Dice and Men. In my heart of hearts, I knew there was more educating to do. People still want scapegoats. And my chosen hobby is just weird enough to be a perennial favorite.

All while this bastard still walks the streets, free as a bird.

-- The Prolix Wag
Marcie, get out of here. YOU'RE DEAD! You don't exist any more.

Phrases That Need to Be Retired: "All Natural"

Today The Wag tackles one of the dumbest phrases of all time, "All Natural".

Hippies and Takoma Park residents with fragile constitutions may want to avert their eyes.

Actually, on second thought, stick around. You probably need this more than anyone. Your fragile constitutions are no doubt due to a lack of preservatives in your diet.

The phrase "All Natural" is meaningless on two levels, one philosophical, and the other practical. Let's start with the philosophical one:

There's no such thing as "natural".

Or, rather, there's no such thing as "not natural", which makes it a meaningless distinction.

Webster's relevant definition of "nature" is: "the external world in its entirety", which is to say, "everything but you". The only things that are not in "nature" and are therefore "natural" are:

a) You.

b) Stuff that doesn't exist.

We call anything in the "b" category "supernatural", which is another way of saying "pretend".

Therefore, to say that something is "all-natural" is to say that it exists entirely. Since I've never seen anything that only existed a little bit, that's a really dumb thing to say.

But let's say we take the more common usage of the word, that is to say "that which was not made by a human being from component parts", or "that which is not synthetic".

There's a problem with this, of course, in that synthesizing things is what humans do. Naturally. Plenty of other animals do it to, of course. Chimps fashion tools to get at termites and to brain each other with. Elephants do crazy-cool things with bark. Bower birds... make bowers.

Rare picture of the rapacious Bower Bird making nature his bitch.

We are, of course, better at it, by an order of magnitude or six. So we can make a distinction there, but it's really more quantitative than qualitative. We change our environment - and ourselves - because doing so has been very good to us in evolutionary terms. Put a human in any natural environment, and he'll start making tools and building stuff. Naturally. So in that sense, anything that human beings make is natural. Which leaves us with a meaningless distinction again.

But let's set philosophy aside, and go with the commonly accepted notion of what "natural" means, because what the heck, I'm feeling generous. We're still left with a practical issue, which is that the connotative definition of "natural" is jut flat-out wrong. This is because we usually equate "natural" with "good".

Which it most decidedly is not.

A couple brief lists:

Stuff That Is Natural

Hurricanes
Typhoid
Mental Illness
Pooping in the Woods
Deadly Nightshade
Big Things With Claws That Eat You, Like Bears
Dying In Childbirth
Dying From A Minor, But Infected, Laceration
Dying a Lot More Than We Generally Do Today
Being Very, Very Bored

Stuff That Is Not Natural

Houses
Vaccines
Wellbutrin
Indoor Plumbing
Not Eating Poisonous Flowers
Not Having To Live In The Woods With Big Things With Claws That Eat You, Like Bears
Cesarian Sections. Also, Pain Meds
Neosporin
Retirement Homes
Mad Men

Look, I understand the value of respecting and learning from complex natural systems, but there's nothing more inherently moral about that which is "natural". Sure, we screw up the synthetic all the time, but I'll take it over rampant dysentery any day of the week.

Of course, despite all this, people slap the "all-natural" label on just about anything. Because people keep buying it.

Don't believe me? Do a Google search for "all natural salt". Then marvel at the fact that you come up with ANY GODDAMN RESULTS AT ALL, never mind the twelve million or so I got.

Here's what all-natural salt looks like:


Now here's evil, corporate-controlled, genetically modified salt looks like:


Here's pure salt:


And here's plain old salt:


Notice anything? Oh, yeah: they're all exactly the same. BECAUSE IT'S ALL SALT. It's sodium chloride, maybe with a little dirt thrown in. You cannot improve on it. There is no way in which you can make salt fundamentally saltier. SALT DOES NOT CARE IF IT WAS GROWN ORGANICALLY.

Okay, you can make it Kosher by leaving the iodide out. But then you've still got the sodium ferrocyanide. And if you take THAT out, you're missing out on valuable, all-natural iodide and sodium ferrocyanide.

Now Google "all natural water" and take a gander at the hundred and twenty-six million results you get.

Don't worry. I'll still be here when you get done banging your head against the keyboard.

-- The Prolix Wag
If anyone manages to find an All-Supernatural breakfast cereal, I'm there with bells on.

Phrases That Need to Be Retired: "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time"

This should be a relatively short post, because I can make my case for retiring the phrase "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time" in one sentence. I shall invalidate all future use of the phrase as an excuse for thievery, philandering, drunk driving, manslaughter, shelling one's own troops, hitting things with hammers that should not be hit with hammers, Eighties Hair, and poorly-thought-out land wars in the Middle East with one simple phrase.

One, single sentence.

Ready? Okay. Here goes:

No one, in the history of EVER, ever did ANYTHING that didn't seem like a good idea at the time.

In fact, no one, in the history of EVER, has ever done anything that didn't seem like the absolute BEST thing to do at the time.

Because if something else had seemed like a better thing to do at the time, THEY WOULD HAVE DONE THAT.

Sure, they may have realized it was the worst thing they'd ever done in their entire lives the very next moment, but in the split-second the actual decision was made, that was the best their brains could come up with. No matter how hard that may be to believe.

Which is sometimes very hard indeed.

It's a tautology, folks. Universally true, and therefore universally useless as a qualifier.

So, from here on out, whenever you feel tempted to say "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time" with "Boy, Was That a Dumb Thing to Do".

Or I will punch you.

That is all.

-- The Prolix Wag
Because all of my ideas ARE good ideas, all the time.

Molecules Do Not Have Memories

In the wake of Salon laying the smackdown on the Huffington Post for its ludicrous pro-crackpot "health and wellness reporting", I'd like to take a moment to gangpile on one of my favorite Stupid Things People Actually Believe: Homeopathy.

Now, there is a great deal of (understandable) misunderstanding about what homeopathy actually is, and what it means to call something "homeopathic". When you say the words "homeopathic medicine" to someone, they often think of "holistic medicine", which is not nearly as stupid an idea.

Homeopathy is stupid in two ways, one understandable and the other oh-my-god-where-do-people-come-up-with-these-things whacktacular. We'll get to the latter in a second. In order to understand the former, we have to start with a little history.

Once upon a time, some peasant somewhere in Western Europe got stabbed in the foot. It hurt. A lot. So the peasant started to hobble home, only he tripped and fell, and banged his head on a rock. It hurt. A lot. But the peasant suddenly noticed his foot didn't hurt any more.

Thus the peasant discovered the principle of counterstimulation: the idea that you can treat pain in one part of the body by introducing a different sensation, even other pain. It actually works quite well, because the body can only process one sensation at a time. Tiger Balm does nothing but make your sore muscles tingly, but since your brain can't process tingly and sore at the same time, you feel only the tingly, and thus the sore "goes away". Of course, the muscles are still injured, but what do you care? You can't feel it! You can get a similar effect by pinching the nerve in your hand in the muscle between your thumb and forefinger if you have a headache: it will hurt, but you won't have a headache as long as you pinch it hard enough.

Useful principle to know, right? Problem is, the peasant thought he'd discovered a cure for stabbed foot. And then started telling people he was a doctor, and hitting them in the head with rocks. And thus was born the concept of heroic medicine, which is essentially the idea that the way to treat any injury or illness simply has to involve inflicting a further injury or illness on the patient, or else it simply can't be "good for you". This is where we get bloodletting, purging, and cutting off peoples' limbs just because they have the sniffles.

"See? Just like I told you: you can barely feel that hangnail now!"

This was the medical tradition in Western Europe for centuries. (Ironic side note for the people who value alternative medicine as "ancient wisdom from the Orient": doctors from the Middle East and Asia who visited Western Europe at this time were horrified by this barbaric crap). Then someone invented the scientific method, and this brought to peoples' attention the fact that people are a lot less likely to survive their illnesses when you stick leeches on them than if you just leave them alone in a field somewhere to die.

Science marched on, but a seed was planted: the idea that you could cure something by causing more of the initial symptoms with something else. This came to be called the "Law of Similars". It's the basis of all homeopathy: the active ingredient in each homeopathic remedy is something that causes similar symptoms to what it's trying to cure. Say, onions to cure hay fever, because both give you red, watery, irritated eyes.

Stupid? Yes. But understandable. Alleviating symptoms (through, say, counterstimulation) can look an awful lot like a cure, and we tend to extrapolate larger patterns from impactful experiences.

The other stupidity of homeopathy, though? I have no idea where it came from, or how people can possibly believe it. No friggin' clue. I'm still in total "Aroo?" territory over this one.

Quizzical dog is quizzical.

See, it would be one thing if they took that counterstimulative/heroic/just plain worthless active ingredient, mixed it in some water, and slapped a "Cures Cancer!" sticker on it. But they don't: they take the mixture and dilute it. Not just once, twice, or ten times, but a LOT. Enough times that there's none of the active ingredient left. Not a single molecule. By, like, a factor of ten, or a hundred.

Now, what do you get when you take orange juice, mix it in with water, and dilute it that much?

Water.

What about plutonium?

Water.

How about the hopes and dreams of a little girl that someday her parents may get back together if she's good enough, oh and by the way can she have a flying rainbow sprinkles unicorn?

Still water.

What's the difference between a homeopathic remedy -- ANY homeopathic remedy -- and water? Not a damn thing. Except that these people believe that water has a memory.

Water doesn't have a memory you say? Au contraire, says the homeopath. You just have to shake it by hitting it just right between each dilution.

That's right: in direct contradiction to everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, common sense, and the things your mom smacked you upside the head for saying because they were so dumb, people who believe in homeopathy believe you can make water remember things if you slap it hard enough.

Let me say this once, and let it rest there: MOLECULES DO NOT HAVE MEMORIES.

"I beg to differ. All I need is that taste: The taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane."

Sorry if I've ruined anybody's placebo out there, but there are plenty more where that came from. Try putting tic-tacs in an ancient Pueblo medicine bag; it'll do you just as well, and your breath will be minty fresh.

-- The Prolix Wag

Not afraid to make an absinthe molecule quote Proust.

How to Run Counterterrorism Operations Like a 5-Year Old

Okay, so it looks like the Double Secret Probation CIA Op they were hiding from Congress was, in fact Cheney's Super Assassin Hit Squad Go!

Scary part? Not a photoshop.

One of the more infuriating things my eldest daughter has a habit of doing is of taking something she knows she needs permission for, without asking for permission. Especially when it's something that I would have gladly given her - nay, wanted to give her - but now couldn't because she took it without asking. And I have to then punish her.

Why does she do it? Same reason we all did it when we were kids. Because the parent or parents in question might have said "no".

Which is exactly how the Bush Administration chose to run the vast majority of their counterterrorism operations. Hell, it's how they chose to run the country.

Here's the thing: there are conservatives out there who will be howling bloody murder about how this is a perfectly valid program, what's the problem, how can you help our enemies, don't you love Amurr'ka, etc. etc.

To my fine friends on the right: Shut up. That isn't what this is about, at all.

If you can find me one liberal who thinks that hunting down the leadership of Al Quaeda and assassinating them one by one (or dozens by dozens) is a bad idea, I will personally punch them in the face. Twice.

We all knew the CIA was going to be doing this; it's their job. We want the CIA to be doing this. We'd be angry if they weren't. But we live in a constitutional democracy. And that means you have to ask permission.

But Congress might have (not would have - not in a million years - but might have) said no. And like the finest five-year-old minds since time immemorial, Bush/Cheney/Feith/Yoo/et. al. decided that meant they shouldn't ask.

As much as they would love it to be, it is most emphatically not the Executive Branch's job to say what is and is not legal. That's for Congress, in all of its wonderful, dysfunctional glory, to argue about. The Executive Branch then does it, to the best of their ability. This is all for a very good reason: because if you don't do it that way, you get stuff like this.

And if you do stuff like that, you get America, circa 2001-2008.

America, circa 2001-2008.

Bit of advice: if you're some mid-to-top level CIA admin, and Dick Cheney tells you to keep something under your hat? You make damn double sure to tell everyone you legally can about it, because if keeping it secret isn't illegal, then it's immoral, and if it isn't immoral, it's unethical, and any way you slice it, your ass will burn for it some day, not his.

Guaranteed.

-- The Prolix Wag
Why be patronized by anyone else?

Don't Cry for Me, Alaska...

The thing that amazes me about Sarah Palin's rambling, incoherent resignation announcement isn't the fact that she up and resigned out of nowhere, or the fact that she pretty much told everyone that any governor who serves out his term is doing their state a deep disservice (???), or the fact that she is still deeply devoted to her own victimhood, or the fact that she's still falling back on what she excelled at in High School.

No, what amazes me most is the fact that pretty much no one in the media seems interested in pointing out just how little sense she made. I mean, good lord:

My choice is to take a stand and effect change - not hit our heads against the wall and watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain in this new environment. Rather, we know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities - and so we will, for Alaskans and for Americans.

Look, I can understand a little bit of healthy American populist anti-intellectualism, but that MAKES NO DAMN SENSE WHATSOEVER. Many politicians manage to talk a lot and say nothing, but I've never seen one abandon the rules of conventional grammar so completely to do it. And not get called on it.

I dunno, I'm just remembering back to the election, and how it was somehow not okay to point out the fact that this woman is stupid. I mean, not-quite-ready-for-city-council stupid. Dumber-than-Dan-Quayle stupid. And that she was as close as you can get to being the Vice President of this country and not get it.

Of course, we went through eight years of the same thing with our actual President, but let's not get into that. And, to be fair, she is stupider than he is.

-- The Prolix Wag

I’m not an elitist; I just – okay, okay. I’m totally an elitist.