The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. — J.D. Salinger

For some reason, this quote has been coming to my mind when I read about the rantings of the far right. And, to be clear, by “far right” in this case, I’m not talking about those who merely have policy differences with President Obama and the Democrats. I’m talking about the ones who seem to be constructing an alternate reality in response to his election: those who need to believe he was born in Kenya; those who need to believe that that he is proposing to create government mandated death panels.

And, I suppose the reason I think of that quote is because the deathers and birthers remind me of the Branch Davidians (and others with Apocalyptic religious views) and Timothy McVeigh – people who were willing, in some cases apparently eager, to die “nobly” based on delusional anti-government beliefs. And I think people get to this place because anger is a very seductive emotion. (That’s almost the whole point of the Star Wars series, right?) And “the government” is real, yet abstract, enough that it’s an entity upon which you can conveniently project all sorts of antipathy.

I remember, when I was a younger man, the sort of rush I got from arguing with a heated outrage about the evil of government action at Ruby Ridge and Waco. I had only a smattering of facts, but it didn’t matter. It was enjoyable to argue about how the government had brutally wronged citizens who had done no wrong. (And when it was pointed out that the citizens hadn’t, in fact, been on the straight and narrow, my tendency was to brush those facts away — that wasn’t, after all, the point of the exercise.) For me, my late teens/early twenties was when I seemed to be most primed for these kinds of beliefs. It was during this period I was introduced to the Salinger quote above. It made me surprisingly indignant; I suppose because it belittled as immature things that I supposed to be heroism — going out in a blaze of glory, and all of that. Oddly, I felt like something was being taken away from me even though I had no immediate plans in that direction. In retrospect, I was (as Krusty said of Sideshow Raheem) an angry, angry young man.

The peak of my own personal wingnuttery was probably when a buddy of mine showed me a news letter with poor production values talking about the tracking chips they put in pets and talking about how there was a plan afoot to put these in prisoners and soldiers and, eventually, in all citizens. I didn’t panic, but I can remember being open to the idea that something like this was maybe in the works. After that, I pulled back from the edge. The fires of late adolescence cooled, the Clinton impeachment was a severe enough jolt to my deeply held Constitutional views to make me reconsider my affinities, and the expanding Internet provided me with a greater ability to double check “facts.”

The combination of a tribal, “my team versus your team” mentality coupled with the endorphins and empowerment of anger coupled with half-known or half-understood facts and an indifference to the complete story can be powerful. The mind is a wonderful thing. Mainly, it just wants you to be happy, and it has a way of viewing reality through a filter that makes you happy — even if that happiness comes through being angry. So, you get birthers and deathers and Branch Davidians and, at the most extreme, a Timothy McVeigh or 9/11 jihadist. The maturing process involves increasing dominance of the mind over emotion. When the tendency is for one’s reality to be altered by emotion instead of the other way around, the train starts coming off the track.

Luke Kenley is one of the legislators that I respect most, but this (and this) feels like unfair micromanaging. My take on it is that the General Assembly cut state funding for the universities, so the universities responded by raising tuition — in a manner that is in line with other Big 10 universities. If Kenley and/or the General Assembly wanted to dictate the manner in which the universities responded to the budget cuts, they should have put it in the legislation.

Work has been kicking me up one side and down the other recently. So, if there is anything we ought to be talking about, feel free to chime in.

Brian Zimmerman has an article on continued anger over the Richmond Community Schools dress code. The code appears to be fairly draconian, forbidding logos (except Satanic Richmond Red Devil logos!) and even stripes, floral prints, and other patterns. Anything more revealing than a crew neck is frowned upon. I didn’t see any word on the school corporation’s position on burqas.

Now it looks like the various sides are in the silly season. Both are dug in and neither can probably back down without looking silly. My suspicion is that the school corporation was being overly strict initially with an eye toward backing off later when it appeared everyone was more or less toeing the line. As long as people are putting up a fuss, they can’t back off without damaging their authority.

Obviously the school is in a bit of a tough position — partially of is own making, but not entirely. There are some kinds of dress which are unduly distracting or a problem. The least burdensome thing for everyone would probably be to go with an “I know it when I see it” approach. But, this leads to arbitrary enforcement and, more importantly, accusations of arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement. They’d probably like to avoid these line drawing problems by just going with uniforms. But, there was apparently push back on that idea. So, they went with a series of arbitrary rules about dress that they are strictly imposing on everyone. Good luck with that.

The Indiana Chamber of Commerce is trying to get word out about their upcoming Conference on Energy Management. Their keynote speaker is Jim Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy. The conference will take place on September 2, 2009 at the Hyatt in Indianapolis.

Rogers is apparently one of the few coal men who acknowledge the problems of coal emission and the need to reduce our carbon footprint. The Indiana Chamber doesn’t share his position on many of these issues, so this might be an interesting event that isn’t all about preaching to the choir.

I thought I would go ahead and plug my wife & sister-in-law’s latest commercial venture: The Winecharm Factory. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept (and therefore probably uninterested in the product, so why am I bothering), a winecharm is a little charm that goes around the stem of your wine glass with the practical value of helping you tell your glass from someone else’s. Presuming, of course, that you’re no longer drinking wine out of the old Pizza Express cup left over from college. It also adds a little flair to your wine glass. [Insert Office Space, “Tchotchkes” anti-flair reference here.]

If you like what you see, feel free to pass the word along to your wine drinking friends.

Senator Kennedy has passed away. There will be the digital equivalent of buckets of inks spilled on this subject by people who know far more about him than me. My earliest memory of him had to do with a Chappaquiddick bumper sticker my parents had put up on the refrigerator. (I told you I grew up Republican). After that, as I began to learn more history, I was struck by the prominence of his family and how awful it would be to lose so many family members to tragedy.

Rosemary – Suffered a failed lobotomy when Edward was 9.
Joe Jr. – killed in the war when Edward was 12.
Kathleen – Died in a plane crash when Edward was 16.
John – Assassinated when Edward was 31.
Robert – Assassinated when Edward was 36.

Edward would eventually come out of the shadow of his siblings — to a large degree, anyway since it would be hard to come entirely out of the shadows of John and Bobby. He was an effective Senator, known as the liberal lion. Health care has been described as his hallmark issue, and he has died on the eve of the best chance of health care overhaul in several generations. If it fails for the lack of one vote in the Senate, that would cap off the litany of epic tragedies for Joe Sr.’s kids.

The Google front page alerted me to the fact that it’s been 400 years since Galileo demonstrated his first telescope – a 8x magnifier that changed the world. More than anyone else, Galileo is responsible for the birth of modern science.

Science is best seen, I think, not as a thing or a discreet body of knowledge, but a particular way of observing reality. And, while we pretty much take it for granted these days, scientific observation was a pretty significant shift from how things had been done before. At its root, scientific observation requires the honest interpretation of experimental results. Galileo saw the relationship between math and the laws of nature. He observed and measured, experimented and repeated.

Observed reality, of course, got in the way of reality as decreed by clergy. In Galileo’s case, it was the inconvenient fact that he observed things which could only be explained in a model where the earth revolved around the sun. This was contrary to church dogma that the sun revolved around the earth. Truth is often not a real match for temporal power, so, for his heretical heliocentric views, Galileo spent the end of his life on house arrest by order of the Pope.

Eventually, the Catholic Church came around. In 1835, it took Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” off the index of forbidden books. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published in 1859. If we figure a 200 year lag time on these things, maybe the evangelicals will come around on evolution in another 50 years or so.

This Krugman column is about two years old, but it just came to my attention, and I doubt much has changed since then. The French and the Japanese have been able to get more people wired to the Internet, and their connections are faster as well.

What most Americans probably don’t know is that over the last few years the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved — in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links — it’s the United States that has fallen behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

The reason for this, according to Krugman, is that the French and Japanese have better regulatory policy in place to govern those who who control the pipes from your house to the larger Internet.

For my part, I’ve generally been fairly content with my Internet service, but that could be because I don’t know any better.

EJ Dionne has a column wherein he mentions something I had noticed:

If governments around the world, including our own, had not acted aggressively — and had not spent piles of money — a very bad economic situation would have become a cataclysm.

But because the cataclysm was avoided, this is an invisible achievement. Many whose bacon was saved, particularly in the banking and corporate sectors, do not want to admit how important the actions of government were. Anti-government ideologues try to pretend that no serious intervention was required.

This reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s comment, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

We’ll continue to get Enrons and World Coms and Lehman Brothers and the Bernie Madoffs and the rest of them so long as the Masters of the Universe type propaganda goes unchecked during the boom times. This is the story line that suggests a certain few individuals have earned untold riches through their unparalleled skill, hard work and intellect. The money flowing to their companies and to them is due, in this story line, to the infallible market giving them their due. Inevitably the boom times end and the mask is, at least briefly, ripped away. We learn that these folks are relatively ordinary human beings after all. Often the wealth flowing their way had as much or more to do with luck, fraud, oddities of our economic environment, bubble making, cronyism, and other variables than with reasonable compensation for the value actually created by these individuals.

There seems to be a powerful need to forget the moments – such as last fall – when the curtain is drawn away and the Great and Powerful Oz is revealed to be a jumped up huckster. Now we’ll see the rise of a narrative where the bail out was unnecessary because the fall out would not have been so bad. (I contrast this with a slightly different narrative where the fall out would have been catastrophic, but we should have let it happen anyway so the proper lessons would get learned.) The Masters of the Universe will get back to being Masterful, the government will get back to being the enemy that never did anyone any good, and the Masters’ dynastic fortunes will return to being viewed as nothing more than proper compensation set by a rational marketplace for a job well done. Rinse. Repeat.