Category: Quick Hits

A few weekends ago I went to a minor league hockey game for lack of other entertainment options. Minor league sports are an interesting animal, because the teams are an awkward combination of two very different types of player.
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Some of them are in the 18-22 age range, and they're playing in the minors to get a little experience and (hopefully) work their way up to the big leagues.
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They get labels like "prospect" to indicate untapped talent. They have Potential. The rest of the players are considerably older – maybe 26 to 30-something – and they are no longer called prospects. They're the prospects from 5-10 years ago who never made it. They're minor league Lifers. They're here because they weren't good enough to make the jump, and now that they're old (in athletic terms) the odds are high that they're never going to get any better.

I watched these kids – and really, many of them look quite literally like kids – and older guys mixing together awkwardly on the ice, and I thought about how difficult and sad it must be to make the transition from Prospect to Lifer. Is there some singular moment at which it hits you that you're never going to accomplish your goal? Do you wake up one morning at age 24 and suddenly realize, "Oh crap, this is as far as I'm ever going to get"? Or is it a slower process full of denial and bargaining before you ultimately accept that you're never going to make it because you're not good enough? Either way it must be remarkably unpleasant. Most of these guys have been training for this since they were old enough to walk.
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It must be a tremendous blow to their psyche to realize, or perhaps be told explicitly, that they've failed.

The older I get, the more I realize that the crappy part of aging is not the weird physical pains, the wrinkles, or the receding hairlines but the slow process of realizing that none of the things you wanted to do with your life are actually going to happen. It's that moment when you look at your surroundings and realize, This is it for me. This is as far as I'm going to get. You look at the goals you had and the things you wanted to do and you realize that not only are they unlikely to happen, but they're unlikely to happen because you aren't good enough to accomplish them.

That's what getting old is, I think.
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It's the point at which you're forced to accept that you can't make happen any of the things that the young version of you wanted to do. After you reach this point, the statement you will hear a lot in your thirties and forties – "Oh, you're still young!" – is true only in the physical sense.

The highlight of the State of the Union happened as Obama said:

We must all do our part to make sure our God-given rights are protected here at home. That includes our most fundamental right as citizens: the right to vote. When any Americans – no matter where they live or what their party – are denied that right simply because they can't wait for five, six, seven hours just to cast their ballot, we are betraying our ideals.
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That's why, tonight, I'm announcing a non-partisan commission to improve the voting experience in America. And I'm asking two long-time experts in the field, who've recently served as the top attorneys for my campaign and for Governor Romney's campaign, to lead it. We can fix this, and we will. The American people demand it. And so does our democracy.

Over his left shoulder, John Boehner sat motionless while a perfunctory applause break followed. Of course we know by now that making it harder to vote is the core of what can only generously be called the "strategy" of the modern Republican Party.

For the past few weeks, Republican-controlled state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, and Michigan have been making noise about trying to change the distribution of Electoral College votes to a congressional district system, as is used in Maine and Nebraska. A congressional district plan favors the GOP, of course, because the districts were heavily rigged by Republican state legislatures in the wake of their strong year in 2010. That's how your party manages to win a majority in the House while losing the congressional popular vote nationwide by a healthy margin. In other words, they have the power to rig the system thanks to previous instances of rigging the system.

It's clear with these proposals – regardless of whether they succeed – that the GOP is going "all in" on rigging the system in their favor, having apparently come to grips with the reality that it might be the only way they can win elections anymore. They have nothing else. Their lack of appeal was displayed in high relief on Tuesday night as even one of their charismatic members turned in an awkward, incoherent mess of a performance in responding to the SOTU.

I can only imagine how much of this shit we're going to see in the next decade or two. Having comfortably gerrymandered themselves into control of the legislatures in states that reliably vote Democratic in presidential elections, the near future of electoral politics in this country is going to be one pathetic scheme after another. The only other option would be to stand for something that isn't abhorrent to everyone except 60% of white men.

And that's just crazy talk.

So what was your favorite moment of the reign of Benedict XVI?
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When he was chosen, I described him as a placeholder – the sorbet of popes. Also, this is pretty much the only thing I can think about every time the pope is mentioned on the news, ever.

OK, I lied. I also think about Space Pope (Crocodylus Pontifex).
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A new pope is always exciting. I'm thinking they'll go with a white guy of advanced age.
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Not that you'd notice from watching the news, but the U.S. has lent a helping hand to French colonialism (It hasn't even advanced to the point of neo-colonialism yet in Niger, the uranium under which is to the French nuclear power industry what Saudi oil is to the American auto industry) in West Africa. Yes, yes, we can throw around tales of Islamist rebels and terrorists-in-training throughout the region, of which there are most certainly plenty.
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However, given the general instability and weakness of the governments in that part of the world and the vast stretches of territory across the Sahel that is "governed" in name only, the logic behind Western intervention is not entirely clear.

Moreover, the U.S. has just reached an agreement to start flying its global ambassadors for democracy – Flying Death Robots – out of Niger due to what is characterized as a complete lack of ground-level intelligence in the region. We are masters of the soft sell, so we'll send in the unarmed surveillance drones first. Any bets on when the Reapers and Predators make an appearance?
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I have July 2013 in the pool.

The truly stunning part of the linked Guardian article is this:

The move would be the latest in a gradual expansion of American surveillance drones in Africa, which have so far been operated from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Djibouti

I tend to pay attention to these things, and I had absolutely no idea that we were already flying these things not only out of the Horn of Africa (USAFRICOM operates out of a US Naval Base, Camp Lemmonier, in Djibouti, so that makes sense) but also out of Burkina Faso in West Africa. You'd think that would be newsworthy.

Is the strategy to cover the entire planet with these things incrementally until…

everyone on Earth realizes how wonderful America is, or something? However real the need for intelligence might be, the idea of attempting to cover the globe with the robotic, all-seeing eye of the Department of Defense seems like folly, a post-Cold War version of the idea that we could build enough bomb shelters to make nuclear war a mild inconvenience at worst.

Burkina Faso is still Upper Volta to me, by the way.

Virginia State Senator Henry Marsh, a 79 year old Democrat and veteran of the civil rights movement, received an invitation to Monday's inauguration ceremony. Of course he went even though the Virginia Senate is currently in session.
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With the chamber perfectly divided – 20 Democrats, 20 Republicans – the GOP decided to do the only sensible thing and cram through a redistricting plan while the Democrats were temporarily outnumbered. The Lt. Governor had previously stated he would not cast a tie-breaking vote in favor of the bill if the Senate was evenly divided.

The GOP used to fancy itself the "Party of Ideas", but for the past decade or two it seems like the only ideas they come up with are ways to sidestep whatever checks and balances are in place to protect the process from their fondness for autocratic rule and curious interpretations of the law.

That's how you can tell they represent the public as a whole – or at least a majority of it – as opposed to a shrinking minority of angry white people; their ideas are so good that they can't bring them to a floor vote.
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Like the widespread (and ultimately laughable) efforts at voter suppression in 2012, this kind of Cheat to Retain Power at All Costs strategy looks like the death throes of a party that no longer has any other way to get what it wants.

A quote has been circulating around the interwebs and underscoring the fact that the Ronald Reagan that modern conservatives worship to a truly unsettling extent bears little resemblance to the one who was president for eight years.

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We already know that he raised taxes, spent like a drunken sailor, and believed in separating church and state. Now apparently he had some doubts about military-style weapons being protected under the 2nd Amendment for public consumption:

I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.
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Like their continuous pining for the Disneyland Americana version of the 1950s – the idealized America that never was – modern Republicans are much more enthusiastic about the Reagan in their imaginations than the real one. It's almost like there's a pattern wherein what they choose to believe trumps facts and reality.