Why beat up the middleman?

So a few days ago at work, while I was pulling state wire stories, I came across one about an administrative ruling approving Enbridge to expand a pipeline across Northern MN and into Wisconsin. This MJS story is not the exact story I was looking at, but is on the same approximate topic and will serve to give readers an idea what's going on.

These WI/MN pipelines have been at a low burn for months or years; they make regular if unspectacular appearances on the AP wire, and I'm sure they are widely ignored by all readers save those already emotionally invested in the issue of pipelines. And even those readers likely give the issue short shrift when compared with the granddaddy of all pipeline issues: Keystone XL.

Keystone XL, of course, has been all over the news for years, and is hotly opposed by environmentalists and conservationalists across the country. Here is just one of the many articles, op-eds and treatises written to express that opposition. And I will admit that for a long time, I reflexively agreed with them, on the general assumption that oil is bad, oil companies are bad, we should fight them on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets. I've been thinking more about it, a process catalyzed by the AP story I came across at work, and I'm no longer sure that's the case.

Why Google will eventually take over the world

No, this is not a paranoid conspiracy theory. This is just a thought experiment at taking current trends to their logical extremes. I quite like the results, however.

One thing I quite enjoy about watching large tech companies is their rather straightforward approach to problem solving.  Having trouble breaking into a certain industry?  Just reinvent the industry.  Is one company causing you problems with their chokehold on the market?  Invent their competition and push them out of the way.  Consider how many industries Apple has essentially invented in the last decade.  This is a very different approach from large corporations in other industries.  GM, Ford, Honda, Chrysler, all the automakers, all expanded until they could expand no more, and then settled down to compete for incrementally larger slices of the existing market share.  (Unless you're talking about Tesla, which is as much a tech company as a car company, and acts like it.)

Recently, I was discussing this with my brother in relation to the video game company Valve.  Over the last decade, through the incremental growth and development of their Steam platform, Valve has managed to snap up something like 75% of the total PC video game distribution market.  As a consumer, I will admit that I think the last time I bought a hard copy of a PC game was Halo 2; everything else I could desire is either on Steam or can be downloaded directly from the developer.  And given the choice, I'll go with Steam.  They have an extremely well-integrated social and stat-tracking front-end, and more to the point, they have a ridiculous economic engine in the form of TF2 Hats, Dota 2 cosmetic items, trading cards, and all the other games that provide market items to feed the growing Steam economy.

How can we fix this?

I'm going to start by establishing a pair of basic premises, which I hold so staggeringly self-evident as to need no defense or articulation: the current government shutdown is bad, and the current government shutdown is the Republican Party's fault.  If you disagree with either of these foundation arguments, you're not going to get a lot out of what comes after. You have been warned.

Of course, I could get a lot more specific about the second argument.  Instead of blaming the Republican Party, I could blame those 80ish Republican representatives that signed the infamous letter supporting the shutdown ploy, who seem most in tune with the Tea Party zeitgeist.  I could blame Sen. Ted Cruz, who whipped them into a frenzy and seems to be the source of their initial deadlock-breaking strategy (fund only those parts of govt. that we like and then look surprised when the Senate laughs in our faces).  I could blame John Boehner, who makes the decisions about what gets a vote in the House and therefore has the power at any moment to permit a vote on a 'clean' budget resolution.  He has not, either (charitably) to avoid a civil war in the party going into the debt limit hike, or (cynically) to prevent them from booting him from the Speaker's chair.  But what all 3 of those options have in common is that they act under the aegis and with the apparent blessing of the Republican party, so that's where the blame can most reasonably be stuck.

When Congress last shut down the government, the Republican party suffered for it.  The next two election cycles eroded their ranks and bumped Bill Clinton handily to a second term.  If one looks at opinion polls today, one might expect the same outcome: Republicans shellacked, House leadership rebuked, Obama and the Democrats strengthened.  And maybe this will happen.  One certainly may hope.  But the funny thing is, House Republicans can see all the same national polling data that the rest of us can, and they aren't budging.  Why?

Find out ... after the jump!

Thoughts on fitness

There was a very short period in my life, probably no more than a few months, that I could touch my toes.

It was right at the end of my senior year of high school.  By that time, I had long since dropped away from any sort of organized sports, and the only semi-consistent form of exercise I got was going on walks with my mom.  Around this time, for reasons I could not hope to reconstruct today, I started working out a little bit before bed.  Nothing fancy - some push-ups, some sit-ups, and some stretching - but it was something, and unlike so many other little initiatives, I stuck with it.  I kept it up nightly or nearly so for several months, and was quite surprised when one evening, while performing the venerable sit-and-reach stretch, I was able to snag my fingers on my toes.

This was unprecedented for me.  When we did the sit-and-reach tests in elementary school P.E., I couldn't even reach the end of the board.  To be sure, I have some natural disadvantages at play - long, long legs and not a lot of torso to go with it - but I also just flat-out wasn't flexible. And yet now I could touch my toes. It wasn't easy, and it wasn't fun, but I could do it. And over the ensuing weeks, it got easier and easier.

It couldn't last, of course.  Shortly after that, I shipped off to college for the first time.  I was far too self-conscious to perform my nightly routine in front of my roommates, or out in the lounge where anyone might walk past (although I did once pass another girl doing some stretches, which I remember only because of my vague sense of 'oh, I guess it isn't that weird after all' that failed to translate into any actions).  Our dorm was far from the campus athletic facilities, and I think I would have avoided them anyway out of a misplaced disdain for athletics and the meatheads that practice them.  So I just stopped.

I mention this because this stands out in my memory as my peak of physical fitness.  I doubt it actually was, since I had very little since of dietary self-control and was not likely getting such an enormous payoff from those walks, but it was the one time I can remember setting out to accomplish something relating to my physical fitness and then seeing actual results.  I feel proud of that little nightly routine and the small but measurable gains that I accomplished thereby.  After that, aside from occasional walks with my ladyfriend and, during the summers, playing racquetball and reading on the exercise bikes at the YMCA, I allowed my physical fitness to languish.

At several points during my not-very-pleasant year teaching in Iowa (more to come on that), my mom suggested that I find a local gym or the YMCA, and even offered to pay for my membership.  At one point, a mental health professional I was consulting recommended the same.  I didn't, largely because I felt too much guilt about all the other things I was supposed to be doing to add something else to feel guilty about not doing to the list.  Perhaps if I had, some things would have turned out differently.  Perhaps it just would have added to my stress. Who knows. It wasn't until mid-August, when I finally squared away my last responsibilities for my former employer, and made the decision that I would not be moving away from home again until I had some form of employment lined up, that the pressure of things I was supposed to be doing finally relaxed and I experienced a spurt of the highest productivity I'd had in years, sorting and catching up on paperwork, tying up loose ends, plotting out my finances - and signing up for a Y membership.  (And giving thought to blogging once again, as it so happens.)

I'm still struggling a bit with what exactly my fitness goals are.  Do I want to lose weight?  Well, probably; I'm well within the healthy range for my bmi, but I definitely have some mass on the front of my torso that doesn't need to be there.  Oh, so it's about looking better?  Well, probably; I certainly wouldn't object to being a little bit more alpha-masculine. At the same time, though, I have a deep and abiding contempt for the sort of institutionalized vanity that characterizes America, and am much more interested in health for the sake of health than for looking healthy.  Oh, so it's about overall fitness?  Strength?  Endurance?  Flexibility?  Well, probably ...

This has led to a rather scattershot routine; when I go to the Y, which is averaging 2-3 times per week, I start with some stretching (in which I fall at least 5 inches short of my toes), followed by some time on the various weight machines (chest press, seated row, leg press, bicep curl, and some weird thing that involves twisting your lower body with the sides of your abs, mostly ), followed by 20-30 minutes on one of the bikes, where I set it to cardio (not fat-burning) and generally run it at ~120 RPM.  (When I first started in August, I was lucky to break 90; this is another case where I think I can see measurable results from a self-motivated fitness effort.)  I'm still experimenting with different things, figuring out what looks useful and what doesn't.  I worry that without a particular goal(s) to work toward, I'll lose interest and fade out over time, but so far it seems to be working, and eventually I'll probably find something to work toward.

There are other ways to exercise than at a YMCA, and exercise is only a part of fitness, of course.  I don't think I eat a terrible diet (although they really should have built that Culver's further away from my home, dammit), but neither do I eat a particularly healthy one - lots of pasta and other carbohydrates and relatively lean meats, but not a huge amount of fruits or veggies.  Something to work on, I suppose.

I have been blessed by nature and happenstance with an ectomorphic physique that does not go out of its way to entrap calories, a marked lack of defects or early predispositions to non-communicable diseases, and a household that has never normalized the consumption of overprocessed snack food as a substitute for actual meals (although it's getting a little extreme; if Mom actually follows through on her plan to make chocolate chip zucchini cake, I may be forced to drastic measures).  And these factors have prevented years of benign neglect from causing dire or permanent consequences, like diabetes.  I also don't necessarily think I have a physique particularly disposed towards athleticism - not a body builder, not a soccer or football standout, not even particularly a runner - and I don't feel a competitive urge to become more so.

But I know that come 40 or 45, some of those natural factors will stop working for me and start working against me.  And more than that (because 'do this so it will help you when you're 40' is a pretty crappy motivational speech to a 24-yr-old), I miss being able to touch my fully extended toes.  I miss the feeling of accomplishment that comes from making a change to one's own body and seeing it take shape.  What those changes will or should be, I have not yet determined, but after a year characterized mostly by feeling a distinct lack of control over my own life, it's nice to start to see some concrete evidence that there are still things within my control, and that it benefits me more to invest in the things I can change than to fret about the things I can't.  So that's cool.

Call a spade a spade

This is one that has sat, nearly finished, in my posts for a while, and it says things I think need to be said, so I'm polishing it off and sending it out the door.  How long I've sat on it, you can determine by the age of the links at the bottom.

One of my pet peeves about conservatives in general and the tea party in particular is the inconsistency with which they fuss about the national deficit.  President Bush inherited a government budget that was actually recording surpluses and proceeded to drive it straight into the ground, not only by cutting taxes on all and sundry but by starting two wars and making expensive changes to Medicare.  Did conservatives utter a peep about deficit spending and passing our debt on to our children and all that jazz?  Not so much.  They may not have liked it all that much, but so long as their guy was in charge, they sucked it up and pretended not to notice, or that a little fiscal irresponsibility was a worthy price for all the other good stuff he was doing.  It was only when President Obama took office, and started spending money on things that they weren't happy about, that the federal deficit became a big issue to conservatives.

The unfortunate thing, if we're operating under Keynsian economics here, is that right now - during and immediately after a crippling recession, when the economy is depressed and taxable revenues are low - is exactly when we should be using deficit spending to keep our heads above water.  The flip side, of course, is that during times of prosperity - like, I don't know, the early 2000's - is when you're supposed to pay off your debts, balance your books and establish a position of strength so that you can go into debt during times of need.  We, of course, bombed that, so now instead of spending the surpluses of plenty in our time of want, we're piling debt upon debt.  And I definitely agree that this is bad.  But the proper time to raise a ruckus about this was during the Bush years.  And yet, because the people who worry about deficit spending tended to agree with him on most other things, they held their peace.

All of this is very sad and cranky-making, of course, but this isn't a blog post to rant about the failings of conservative punditry.  That was just background and context.  What I need to say is that I think I, and the rest of the confirmed liberals who make up Obama's base, are guilty of the same double standard when it comes to the handling of civil liberties in the war on terror.

Blogger being a pain

As much as I like my tasteful black background with white text, it makes things a pain when Blogger decides to make the background for half of my text white and doesn't give me an option to set the background to transparent. This has happened on the last two posts I have worked on. C'mon, Google.  Stop wallowing in freakishly large piles of money and make the UI make sense.

Political blogging and the proper scrutiny of police

I think my problem with blogging is the same as my problem with writing in general: it's not that I don't have great ideas (or at least, ideas that I think are great), but that I have difficulty making the transition from 'diversion' to 'habit' that is necessary to produce writing on a consistent basis. Weeks will go by in which I either don't think of blogging, or think, 'oh yeah, I should do that sometime' and then do something else. And yet I want to stick with it. I finally figured out how to delete an old blog, and removed the class blog I had to produce sophomore year, and might yet delete this one, but only after backing up my posts, and only if I am confident that I will be more successful at sticking to my next one. In the meantime, I have posts from April and May in various states of completion (and that's another problem; starting ideas and then trailing off and leaving them in stasis for months), so hopefully I'll get to those shortly; I'm also mulling over a future post on the gradual dehipsterization of my taste in music.

In the meantime, more and more often when I think about political topics, I find myself framing it in terms of what I would say were I an elected official dealing with such a thing. Which is an interesting train of thought my mind has been following these last few months, I think. I'm not sure it's a realistic ambition, or even an actual ambition; while I might be ok at the actual law-making part of the job, I'm not sure how someone as introverted as I would fare on the campaign trail, especial when just starting out, when meet-n-greet takes precedence over out-of-state attack ads. But it's a fun thought experiment, and who knows? Maybe if teaching jobs continue not to be found, I can start over with a law or poli-sci degree? In any case, I've already written one such post, and I rather expect I'll be writing more, and leaving them up here for future political foes to dig up and use against me. Good times.

So.

As a diligent reader of the internets, I was of course aware of the recent and hilarious legal kerfluffle involving The Oatmeal, in which a scrubby joke-compiler website hired a scrubby lawyer to make scrubby and unsubstantiated threats to extort money from the writer of the Oatmeal.  Who promptly and amusingly retaliated with massive and public scorn, backed by the full force of his large and loyal fanbase and the not-inconsiderable legions among the wider internet community who enjoy making fun of scrubs.  Things got much, much funnier when the scrubby lawyer in question, one Charles Carreon, got his undies in a wad and decided to take on Oatmeal, IndieGoGo, The National Wildlife Federation, The American Cancer Society, and pretty much everyone who made fun of him. He later backed down, although not without finding a few new ways to wallow in fail on the way out the door; the matter might or might not rest at that.

But this isn't the topic of this post; this is just background.