Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Have you ever tried to make the physical universe less real?

Justin Cooley is Vice President of Research and Development for Federalcheese and he does a damn fine job. Recently I put Justin to task developing a criteria for building the Federalcheese Nation. Turns out the Church of Scientology already had exactly what we were looking for. Sure, they use these questions to determine if your body is inhabited by the alien gods that came to earth 75 million years ago, but they work for us too. Are you up to Federalcheese's (or Scientology's) standards?

  • Have you ever enslaved a population?
  • Have you ever debased a nation's currency?
  • Have you ever killed the wrong person?
  • Have you ever torn out someone's tongue?
  • Have you ever been a professional critic?
  • Have you ever wiped out a family?
  • Have you ever tried to give sanity a bad name?
  • Have you ever consistently practiced sex in some
    unnatural fashion?
  • Have you ever made a planet, or nation,
    radioactive?
  • Have you ever made love to a dead body?
  • Have you ever engaged in piracy?
  • Have you ever been a pimp?
  • Have you ever eaten a human body?
  • Have you ever disfigured a beautiful thing?
  • Have you ever exterminated a species?
  • Have you ever been a professional executioner?
  • Have you given robots a bad name?
  • Have you ever set a booby trap?
  • Have you ever failed to rescue your leader?
  • Have you driven anyone insane?
  • Have you ever killed the wrong person?
  • Is anybody looking for you?
  • Have you ever set a poor example?
  • Did you come to Earth for evil purposes?
  • Are you in hiding?
  • Have you systematically set up mysteries?
  • Have you ever made a practice of confusing
    people?
  • Have you ever philosophized when you should have
   acted instead?
  • Have you ever gone crazy?
  • Have you ever sought to persuade someone of your
    insanity?
  • Have you ever deserted, or betrayed, a great
   leader?
  • Have you ever smothered a baby?
  • Do you deserve to have any friends?
  • Have you ever castrated anyone?
  • Do you deserve to be enslaved?
  • Is there any question on this list I had better
   not ask you again?
  • Have you ever tried to make the physical
    universe less real?
  • Have you ever zapped anyone?
  • Have you ever had a body with a venereal
    disease? If so, did you
    spread it?

posted by Bill Eseltine at Tuesday, January 22, 2008

6 Comments:

Blogger Justin Cooley said...

Bill,

Thank you for posting this and making it nicely formatted.

I feel uncomfortable answering the following questions and I am not sure I can do so honestly:

• Have you ever been a professional critic?

• Have you ever consistently practiced sex in some unnatural fashion?

• Have you ever disfigured a beautiful thing?

• Have you ever set a booby trap?

• Have you driven anyone insane?

• Is anybody looking for you?

• Have you ever set a poor example?

• Are you in hiding?

• Have you systematically set up mysteries?

• Have you ever made a practice of confusing people?



Although, this is the one that really resonates for me:

• Have you systematically set up mysteries?


Bill, do you watch a lot of CNBC in the morning? I have become completely addicted. It's like sports, but with deeper consequences (debatable, I know). Also, the female anchors are hot in this reassuring way. Erin Burnett is on all the time and is super sassy. However, my heart belongs to Margaret Brennan.

Take care.

11:01 AM  
Blogger Housman said...

Justin,

You just told me that you don't ever wake up before noon.

-Justin

1:00 AM  
Blogger Justin Cooley said...

Housman,

That was a bit of an exaggeration. Sort of like when you describe most films as "the worst movie I have ever seen" or a given burrito as "the best burrito in the world."

As proof I would offer that it is currently 6:34AM as I post this.

Regards,

Justin

6:34 AM  
Blogger Justin Cooley said...

Posting this here because I think that Federal Cheese's page rank clout could really help the New York Times get noticed on the internet. Also, I noticed that Adam Wujick is not on our email politics discussion list. Do you want on it, Adam?


Short version of the following article: Obama is wrong about Reagan because the Reagan years were fundamentally, at least in an economic sense, a failure.



January 21, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Debunking the Reagan Myth

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Historical narratives matter. That's why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.

And it's also why the furor over Barack Obama's praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. "The Reagan-Bush years," he declared, "have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect."

Contrast that with Mr. Obama's recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Maybe Mr. Obama was, as his supporters insist, simply praising Reagan's political skills. (I think he was trying to curry favor with a conservative editorial board, which did in fact endorse him.) But where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.

Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan's watch.

For example, I'm not sure what "dynamism" means, but if it means productivity growth, there wasn't any resurgence in the Reagan years. Eventually productivity did take off — but even the Bush administration's own Council of Economic Advisers dates the beginning of that takeoff to 1995.

Similarly, if a sense of entrepreneurship means having confidence in the talents of American business leaders, that didn't happen in the 1980s, when all the business books seemed to have samurai warriors on their covers. Like productivity, American business prestige didn't stage a comeback until the mid-1990s, when the U.S. began to reassert its technological and economic leadership.

I understand why conservatives want to rewrite history and pretend that these good things happened while a Republican was in office — or claim, implausibly, that the 1981 Reagan tax cut somehow deserves credit for positive economic developments that didn't happen until 14 or more years had passed. (Does Richard Nixon get credit for "Morning in America"?)

But why would a self-proclaimed progressive say anything that lends credibility to this rewriting of history — particularly right now, when Reaganomics has just failed all over again?

Like Ronald Reagan, President Bush began his term in office with big tax cuts for the rich and promises that the benefits would trickle down to the middle class. Like Reagan, he also began his term with an economic slump, then claimed that the recovery from that slump proved the success of his policies.

And like Reaganomics — but more quickly — Bushonomics has ended in grief. The public mood today is as grim as it was in 1992. Wages are lagging behind inflation. Employment growth in the Bush years has been pathetic compared with job creation in the Clinton era. Even if we don't have a formal recession — and the odds now are that we will — the optimism of the 1990s has evaporated.

This is, in short, a time when progressives ought to be driving home the idea that the right's ideas don't work, and never have.

It's not just a matter of what happens in the next election. Mr. Clinton won his elections, but — as Mr. Obama correctly pointed out — he didn't change America's trajectory the way Reagan did. Why?

Well, I'd say that the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn't change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan.

Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won't be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.

9:50 AM  
Blogger Wuj said...

Please add me to the list. I myself am voting Holmgren in 2008.

11:21 PM  
Blogger Housman said...

Bill, we are going to spring training this year goddamnit. I have the last week of march off for spring break--we're there. Cooley's coming, bring the Wuj if he wants to go, I mean, fucking spring training is so great.

1:02 AM  

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