The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

Bill Bradley wrote an op-ed in the New York Times today about why the Democratic Party is losing ground to the Republicans. His basic thesis was that the Republicans have a solid base built around large donors, think tanks, and strategists. Each of these represents a higher level of a pyramid that is topped by the president. Since their values are firmly thought out and consistently dealt to the folks out there, come election time, they don't need to create them from scratch.

In contrast, here's what he says about Democrats:

"There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan."

He says we can't rely on a charismatic leader to ensure success for the Democrats either. Clinton was good, but didn't benefit the party as a whole, since there isn't a core philosophy:

"A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure."

I think that's a fair assessment of the issue for Democrats. His ultimate conclusion is that Democrats need a long term plan that will require funding and base building.

I assume he is right about the grand scale argument, and I know for certain he is right about this last election. John Kerry did not have an identity coming out of the primary. The fact that he won it and not one of the other previously unknown guys was somewhat random.

I don't agree with Bush, but I know what he stands for. Can we say the same about the top Democrats out there today? To take it a step further, can we even name the top Democrats out there today?

I love Bill Bradley. When he was running for President in 1999 I saw him speak on my campus and it was great. His ideas made so much sense. He was all about reforming the tax code and licensing firearms. I hope he stays politically active. Maybe he can run for president again at some point. I'd certainly vote for him. He's one of the best things to ever come out of New Jersey, and that's saying a lot.

This was last year toward the end of the fall term.

Student X: "Mista, you're my favorite teacher because I never understood math before."
Student Y: "Yeah, me too mista, you're my favorite. I can't believe I get this now."

(right about now I was feeling pretty good about myself.)

Student Z: "Mista, you're my favorite teacher too, but I don't learn nothing in no classes. That's why I'm failing everything."

There were a couple of years between I'd say 2000 and 2003 or so when I stopped watching ER and would really only watch sporadically. At about the half way mark of last season I started to watch again and I got hooked...again.

When I was in high school and into college I would rarely miss an episode. I was a bit of a nerd in high school (still am, truth be told) and the only thing that would keep me up past 10pm was ER every Thursday.

The last two original episodes where Neela and Gallant are writing letters back and forth and what not were just great. The whole season so far has been really entertaining. They've dealt with all sorts of issues, even the euthanasia craze that swept the country with Million Dollar Baby, without much fanfare. I think a lot of people have rediscovered the show because the ratings today are just as high as their highest level. They consistently win their time slot every Thursday.

I remember when ER was first syndicated onto TNT. Their commercials had the original cast running down the hall in slow motion towards some emergency and the voiceover said, "The best...show...ever. Coming to TNT." I was watching with Brian at the time and we both had the same reaction, which was to laugh at the fools advertising for TNT.

On the McLaughlin Group today Eleanor Clift made an interesting statement. Something to the effect of, "The Republicans try to get involved in our lives before we are born, and after we are dead, and don't really do much for us in between." Whether that's truly poignant or not, I don't know, but I did get a chuckle out of it.

Eleanor has been much more forceful recently on the McLaughlin Group. She used to get pushed around a lot by Tony Blankley and often times she wouldn't really finish her points. Now, though, she doesn't take it from him any more and she'll talk right over him if necessary. She always finishes her points now.

I was at Staples the other day and they had a enormous size container of gummy bears and I thought it would be nice to have so I bought it. I figured I could eat a few a day and Kathy could eat a few a day and we'd go through them eventually. I love gummy bears.

Why are they bears, incidentally? Seems pretty arbitrary. Also why are the bears the best gummy candy? Gummies in other forms aren't as good for some reason.

Anyhow, there are 16 servings of gummy bears in this container and I'm eating them like there's no tomorrow. It's nearly embarrassing the rate at which I'm eating these things and I know it's doing me no good. I don't generally eat sweets and even if we have them in the house I just let them sit there and Kathy gets mad that I don't eat them ever. For whatever reason, the gummy bears are different.

One time I was walking on 5th avenue and I hadn't eaten lunch. Fifth ave is fairly pretentious so there aren't any street vendors or places to just stop and eat, so I was kindof screwed. I went into FAO Schwarz to the candy section and I bought and ate a shitload of gummy bears for lunch, thinking it would make me not hungry any more. As great as those gummy bears were, they did nothing for my hunger and they actually just made me sick since I was walking and was hungry and had nothing but pure sugar and red 40 in my system.

The moral of the story is that I'm not to be trusted with gummy bears and I won't ever buy the enormo-pack again. I guess it's better than cocaine.

Ok, Barry Bonds is going to miss a significant portion of the season, possibly the whole thing. There seems to be a lot of buzz that this is just a precursor to his retirement. I mean, taking an entire season off at 42 to return to the league at 43 would be a gargantuan feat in itself. Granted, Barry is the best in the game, but it's safe to say that those were some wind-aided years. Assuming he's ceased any performance enhancing drugs he's not going to return to form at his age given the injuries he has.

Here's a conspiracy theory for you. I think it's highly possible that Barry may be in the midst of being forced out of the league by the commissioner and others who have a vested interest in the game. What has been going on in baseball over the last year or so has been an black eye to the league and Barry is at the top of that list.

Not only does all evidence point to him having taken steroids, but he's an ornery guy who has no one looking out for him in the media. What Barry has represented to baseball since the season ended is nothing short of an embarrassment. Now that he's on the verge of surpassing two of the best respected numbers in the books, I think the league is just up in arms. Barry passing Babe Ruth's 714 HR mark would be met with indifference and his eventual passing of Hank Aaron's 755 would be met with a good deal of ire in my opinion. I think the last thing baseball wants to see is Barry passing either of those guys, especially Aaron.

As the record stands right now, no one is questioning its merit or the monumental achievement it represents. If Barry broke it, there would be only doubters and I think a good number of people would lose some faith in the game.

As this is such, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the league has played some part in this hiatus of Barry's, and they are lobbying hard to keep him off the field. I don't know that they can threaten him with anything for returning, nor am I sure that they want to threaten him outright, but I just know that they are hoping he doesn't return.

In response to Max's comment about my biracial post. I decided that I had a bit more to say than I thought, so I made a whole new post, rather than just re-comment.

I am asked at least once a day by those without tact (generally my students, but sometimes not) what my nationality is.

Since most of them thnk I'm hispanic they ask me "Where are you from?" I always say New Jersey, and then they say, "No. Well, where are your parents from?" And then I say South Carolina and New York. Then they'll ask "Fine. What's your nationality?" At which point I tell them I'm half black and half white and at least half the people I tell don't believe me right away.

The response at many people never having met someone that fits my description engenders a certain solitude. I suppose the word solitude implies sadness and that's not what I'm trying to say. Maybe uniqueness would be a better word since I'm certainly proud of being a "person of indeterminate racial makeup" as a friend of mine once put it.

I think at the end of the day it helps me to make an impression simply as a person without any sort of pre-judging that may go on when you can be certain of a person's race. Not that everyone pre-judges, but if you can't be ceratin about me, then it would preclude one who might pre-judge from pre-judging.

This was something I didn't even think about until I was 16. I started thinking about it through a situation that had an enormous negative impact on me for a day or so. My parents essentially preached at me when I was young to ignore race in everyone and especially in myself because it's not what makes people good or bad and you genuinely cannot tell anything about a person from their race.

Growing up I was not only in contact with people of all races, but related to people as disparate as could possibly be. Only in retrospect do I see this disparity and it has nothing to do with race. At the time I honestly saw people as simply people and not only was I taught that race was not an issue, I believed it.

Incidentally, I still believe it, and I have since applied the same view to people of different ages with interesting results. I have learned quite a bit from people much younger than me simply by listening and applying the same credence to their remarks as I would to a peer or mentor.

Anyhow, here's the incident that altered my idealism. I never even considered race when I would come in contact with people and so this took me by surprise. I dated this girl in high school for a couple of months and one day after school I went to her house. Her father was there and she introduced me and I said hi and he was perfectly cordial. A couple of minutes later this girl's father calls up the stairs that her mother is on the phone and wants to speak with her.

She get on the phone and talks for a minute or two and then hangs up. She says to me, "My parents are mad at me." I asked why and she said, "Because I brought a black person home." It took a couple seconds for me to realize she was talking about me.

So that's about when I started thinking about race. For about a day I felt really small and then a short while later I realized that they were small and I was much more enlightened. In fact, my mere existence represented light years more enlightenment than this girl's parents could even fathom. After that I felt much better about myself. Though now I think about race from time to time.

I decided a while back that I really enjoy being not white. I'm not trying to eschew my whiteness, but I appreciate the perspective of one who's not necessarily in the majority. At the same time I really enjoy opportunities to connect with my blackness. I was in the black students organization in both high school and college, (I didn't have much of a choice in high school since my father was the founder and coordinator of the group), and I feel like I learned a lot about myself at those times.

An interesting thing that I've noticed as well and that also makes my enjoy my not whiteness is that black people make me feel much more accepted than I otherwise would. There's a lot to be said for the shared black mentality and I never fail to be amazed at how black people seem to yearn to be associated together despite the seemingly negative stereotypes and treatment. Nine out of ten black people don't deserve to be labelled in the way that they are, yet those nine will not turn their backs on the one who does. I have never, ever felt anything short of total acceptance by black people and I cannot say that is true of any other group as a whole.

I'm also half Jewish and Jewish people (this is a bit of an over-generalization) are willing to accept me, but many of them seem to want me to be more Jewish before they do. I cannot tell you how many Jewish people have tried to recruit me upon finding out that my mother was Jewish. (Quick Judaism lesson: The requirement for being a Jewish person is that your mother is Jewish. The father has essentially nothing to do with it.) I'm always a bit taken aback by this. I don't feel a need to be more or less Jewish. I enjoy being literally "half Jewish".

On a somewhat related note, I find Judaism to be the most palatable religion. I'm not particularly religious and I don't ascribe to any particular religion, though if I were forced to choose, I would certainly choose to be Jewish. For whatever reason Judiasm seems to make sense to me in ways that no form of Christianity does. I think Judaism is rooted in wanting to truly understand, whereas Christianity is rooted in something on the opposite end of the spectrum. Not all interpretations of Judaism are great, but I feel like I can appreciate where Judaism comes from, while I don't understand Christianity at all.

Generally I think about race in a bubble. It's really more of a philosophical exercise than anything that affects my day to day life. A bit like Socrates or perhaps Voltaire or one of those guys in that I generally think about abstract scenarios related to race and never act on them or even attempt or intend to. It's a bit like Rousseau's Social Contract in that my thinking about race is like trying to retrofit a philosophy to something that was running on it's own without it.

Hmm...that's an interesting notion about philosophy. I'm gonna let that one marinate. Perhaps more on that in a bit.

I will give $100 to someone who can even begin to solve this 4-D Rubik's Cube type game.

It took me like 5 minutes just to figure out all the different ways you can manipulate the figure. If you click on each individual cube, you can move the thing in a different way. Also if you hold down different numbers when you click, then different levels of the thing move. There must be thousands of possible ways to simply rotate the damn thing on one move.

A cool thing to do is to hit capital 'S' to scramble it up and then lowercase 's' to watch the computer solve it.

Who even thought of this, let alone decided that someone might be able to solve it? I'd bet that it would take a computer a while to solve this, let alone a person.

I know you're thinking that the program solves itself relatively easily, but I'm excluding that computer because it's tracking it's own moves and can simply reverse them. A computer that was trained to play this game but without an 'inside' knowledge of the moves already made I'd bet would take a while to solve it.

I've said before that being biracial generally neither accentuates nor hinders my existence. I think that's true, though there are some exceptions.

There are times when you just have no one to identify with, as is true of all people at some point. When it comes to issues of race, however, there are not many places to turn. It is a situation that even the parents of a biracial child cannot identify with. Ceratinly they can sympathize, but they cannot offer first hand advice. In that respect, being biracial can be moderately confusing.

I don't think I personally ever had a crisis involving my race and deciding who or what I wanted to be, but there is a certain solitude involved in it. In particular since I don't see my sister on a daily basis any more, or many or even any biracial people hanging around in a given day.

Everyone wants to be unique, I think, so I got that going for me.

Don't even get me started on being adopted.

I know you've probably seen this video before, but if you haven't seen Aicha, Aicha, you must watch it right now. It is the absolute funniest thing ever. You've seen the Star Wars kid with the broom handle light saber, and you've seen the fat guy lip synching in Romanian, but this trumps all of them.

In a post a while back I talked about how it's not cool to call things or people gay, so I don't want to do that to this video. The problem is that I don't know that my vocabulary is vast enough to come up with a suitable replacement for the word "gay" in this particular case. I think the only word that comes close is "emasculating".

Anyhow, I don't know what the most emasculating part of this video is. Most people would say that it's the N'Sync like dance moves and you may be right. I want to put my vote down, however, for the sheets on the kid's bed. Look at those damn sheets. How old is this kid? He's got to be 13 at the very least. Based on his acne, I would say he's probably 15.

The point is, I have seen this video many times over the last couple of months and I laugh every single time without fail.

Possibly the most underrated movie of all time, period, is The Cable Guy. I love, L-O-V-E, this movie. I did not understand when the critics panned it. I do not understand when people who've seen it say they didn't like it. I do not understand any time anyone says anything bad about this movie.

(Don't nobody better say nothing bad about Ms. Jenkins. Uh uh, that's a fine woman right there. Nobody better say nothing bad about her. Her hair's so nappy we lost three combs in there last week. But I ain't one to gossip so you ain't heard that from me.)

Whenever you get Jim Carrey starring, Matthew Broderick co-starring, Ben Stiller directing, and Jack Black in a supporting role, you simply cannot go wrong (and Judd Apatow, of Freaks and Geeks fame, produced it, by the way). It's a can't miss, and this...this wonderfully funny, beautifully dark, brilliantly ironic film, did not miss. It is spot on.

The lisp, the karaoke party, the basketball game, Medieval Times, porno password. Brilliant, all brilliant. If you did not like this movie, you are dumb.

Really random thought. Not really spurred on by anything other than thinking back to a college philosophy class. To really understand the ontological proof of God as stated by Descartes and Anselm most notable, you should probably Google it.

The basic idea is this, written from Descartes' perspective:
I exist (cogito ergo sum). I can imagine a perfect being. Since I am an imperfect being, I could not have created these perfect thoughts. A higher power must have created these thoughts. Part of being a perfect being is to exist. Therefore, a higher, perfect being (God) must exist.

This has always bothered me because it seems so easy to refute. The idea behind the argument is a two sided coin. On one hand, if a being is perfect then it exists. Even given that weak logical argument, let's accect it as true. On the other hand, if a being is imperfect, then existence is not a necessary attribute. If God does not exist, then, perfection is not required.

I was on some site where they show weird pictures and such and came across this one. Click on the picture to look at the full size version.

I had to post it because I think that's the most daring thing ever done in the adverstising industry. They must have some ill confidence in their product to do something like that. I wonder if it's real money and how much it is and how much the insurance cost them to put up this ad.

If you can't see it, I'll try to explain it. Instead of a wall with a billboard at this bus stop, there is security glass with a shitload of money in it. It's essentially daring someone to try and breach the glass. I can guarantee that thing ain't in New York, though. Give a crackhead an hour and a toothpick and I'd bet anything he'd crack that bitch.

The recent Supreme Court decision about killing kids was determined to fall under the "cruel and unusual" umbrella. It got me thinking that the semantic make up of that term is pretty misleading.

In order for a punishment to be unjust it must be both cruel and unusual. It follows, therefore, that a punishment that is recognized as cruel, yet is not deemed unusual is an acceptable punishment.

For example, clearly capital punishment is cruel. Killing someone is probably the least nice thing one can do. Yet it is not considered unusual to kill someone for committing a murder. It is, for what ever reason, considered unusual to kill a mentally deficient murderer. I guess the idea is that they don't understand that you shouldn't kill people. I suppose the same is true of 17 year old murderers.

There are tons of acceptable punishments that are cruel and usual. Solitary confinement. mandatory drug sentences, the Patriot Act. I think the whole thing was designed to leave room for debate, but in the end it just adds to the beaurocracy.

They should just design a spectrum of punishments according to heinoussness, like the terror alert level, and put any and all viable punishments somewhere on the scale. Then we would know how mean we can be to people. And of course by "we" I mean enforecement agents.

The recent Supreme Court decision regarding not killing minors got me thinking about something. First of all, I think it was a good decision. To imply that 17 year olds somehow don't know what they're doing when they kill people is pretty silly, but the general rule in this country is to strip rights of those under 18. If 18 years olds can't vote or drink or join the army or rent cars, then it's only one or two logical steps away to say that they cannot be killed by the government. To put someone that young to death seems to me to be rather vindictive. While the crime was most likely pretty heinous to warrant execution, the general wisdom says that kids only become self actualized at about 18-20, so you could make a pretty valid argument for not killing kids.

As for the death penalty in general, I don't have a problem with it. Most liberals say they're against the death penalty almost across the board, but at the same time aren't really bothered when people like Tim McVeigh and John Malvo are sentenced to execution. I personally think that if one goes to the extent to kill people who he has never met and who have never done anything to him, then that person does not value any human life. To lose the killer's life then from the killer's standpoint is negligible, since he doesn't value life, and at the same time it is perfectly justified from a societal standpoint. People who kill people they know are a different ball of wax, though you could argue that anyone who murders someone and isn't in a life threatening situation themselves does not value human life.

That being said, I don't believe that people should be executed. I think, much like socialism and religion, capital punishment works in theory but not in practice. Once it is put into the hands of the people it is bastardized and ineffective. There is ample opportunity to misplace or misread evidence or otherwise screw up the process. The worst crime a government can commit would be to execute an innocent person.

Also, from a nuts and bolts standpoint capital punishment is a waste. There's always going to be a moral argument against it, all of the evidence points toward the fact that it does not deter violent crimes or murders, and between all of the necessary appeals processes, executing a prisoner costs something on the order of 5 times more to the taxpayer than simply jailing him for life. At the end of the day if a killer is off the streets and isn't killing anyone, and can't hope to be parolled, then that is just as effective as them being dead. Except maybe for the jailhouse interviews and opportunity to continue to spread some sort of message of hatred or murderousness, like Charles Manson.

I think I've probably contradicted myself within this post. At the end of the day, I personally am not bothered by executing people who've killed other people, providing it is absolutely justified. I think the problem comes in most of the time in being absolutely justified. Justified in the sense that there is no doubt that the person committed the crime and also that it won't be a huge waste of money just to get someone killed when they could just as easily rot in jail.