Books Lying Open
¤ Dark Tower VII, Stephen King
¤ The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Belated birthdays.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because 8 hours is like, almost a whole third of the day!

Curse of the Day:
¤ May panicked vet's office behavior instill bad habits in your formerly ground-bound feline.

lthough today's QotD directly applies to my current state of mind, (this is a very rare occasion), I shall attempt to pull my thoughts out of the distracted musing they've been engaged in during most of the past few days and focus them long enough to turn out a blog. After that I will go right to bed, since I have not gotten more than 5 hours of sleep (per night) in at least a week, and am coming off a mere 3.5 hours Sunday night when I wasn't tired, didn't want to go to bed, and finally got into bed at 8:30, just as Malaya was getting up. At least the covers were warm, and that's not an insignificant bonus, as cold as it's been here the past week or two.

I couldn't get to sleep even then, dozing with my mind all a whirl until 9:30ish. That's the last time I remember seeing on the clock, until I next saw it at around 12:45pm when Malaya returned home from a meeting and woke me up since we were due at her parents' house ASAP for lunch and socialization. I'll blog about that and other events of the weekend a bit more on Wednesday, since there was another 99% Filipino party on Saturday night (Myself and one black lady seemed to make up 100% of the 1%.) and that and lunch Sunday were the most I'd ever seen of Malaya's dad. I see her mom all the time, and we get along fine, on about the level I got along with my grandmother -- I'm young and quirky, she's sweet and old, and I moderate my behavior to not offend and enjoy her sincerity. It was a surprise to me how much her dad reminded me of my grandfather (before my granny died and he got old and crazy, at least) though, in a couple of key ways. They're both like most older men; they worked hard all their lives, they're now retired, and what they most want is to not be bothered with nonsense. They want to do what they want to do, they don't like change, they're set in their ways, and if you respect that and modulate your expectations accordingly, you'll get along fine.

I understood that about Malaya's dad almost immediately, mostly based on hearing Malaya talk about him so often, and my initial expectations were reinforced almost immediately. Her mom, unfortunately, has yet to realize this, and continues to realize disappointment when expecting things of her husband that her husband is not about to give her.  Romance, emotional intimacy, and a whirl on the dance floor chief among them.  I'm not trying to criticize either of them, or even their situation; it's formed over decades of marriage, and my own grandparents were much the same; Malaya's parents certainly get along far better than my grandparents ever did (On my mom's side at least. My dad's parents were much older and died when I was too young to get any adult impressions of their life together.) and they're happy enough together; they just have far fewer overlapping interests than Malaya's mom would like them to have.  She keeps trying nevertheless, dooming herself to disappointment, her husband to annoyance, her daughter to exasperation, and her future son in law to relief at the complete lack of Inquisitional-esque father-in-law interest in him.

But as I said, more on that Wednesday, perhaps. More on the physical events and facts I mean, since I'm not about to spend any more time engaging in psychological evaluation of my future in-laws, even if I were qualified to do so.

And now here are a couple of potentially-amusing links, followed by some political/public perception discussion below.

The entry about the giant and ultimately meaningless "member of ________ ethnic group" tattoo on Marcus Camby's arm made me laugh too, I must admit.

¤ Elsewhere, there's a new 7th event in the Yeti Sports World Tour. Unfortunately, #6 follows closely in the "action over strategy" style set by event #6. The new one is snowboarding, and while I got some amusement out of event #6, #7 is terrible. The vantage point is confusing, the action is pointless, the mid air behavior off of the jumps have no relation to physics on earth, and the sound effects and graphics are very lacking. I played it once, was dismayed, returned a day later and played it a second time, and I doubt there will be a third trial. I can't believe this one is out of beta, since it just sucks.

My Yeti Sports fun is Flamingo Drive, the 5th game, which is the only one that's given me any lasting enjoyment, come to think of it. My best is still 6128, set a couple of months ago, and that was just a small improvement over my 5886 previous best. I don't play it very often anymore, and only the downloaded offline version (faster game speed and no lag beats online high score possibilities), but I did manage a 5532 and 5583 within the past couple of weeks, and I can routinely get at least one 4500+ in any cluster of ten games.

So if you've tried your hand at pengu-whacking and grown frustrated, trust me, you'll eventually get a lot better as you learn the layout of the land and know which snakes to hit it hard off of, where the next giraffe or tree is sitting, how fast and at what angle to hit a snake to get the proper height, etc.  The downside is that even when you're good you'll still hardly ever even beat 4000, and more than 4500 will forever remain cause for celebration. It's well-designed in that way; you always think you're going to have a huge game, but there is such a tiny margin for error and you need such luck to bust a high score that it forever slips through your fingers.

Whether that makes your eventual great game all the more rewarding, or merely makes you angrier at all of those other games that could have been great will probably determine if you continue playing it or delete it with such anger that you go after your tacky neighbor's lawn decorations with a baseball bat.

So a strong majority of Bush supporters believe that WMDs were found in Iraq, and they also believe that Saddam was providing substantial support to Al Quida. Despite the literally thousands of news articles and several major bipartisan government reports disproving both of these assertions. How does this sort of ignorance persist?

There's much, much more:

This one really amazes me. The WMDs and Saddam helping Al Quida stuff I could sort of understand, since Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and virtually everyone else in the Bush Administration have been flogging those lies for years. But it would never have occurred to me to question the common knowledge that virtually everyone else on earth hates Bush and that they also opposed the US invasion of Iraq. I mean really, how can anyone not know that? I've never even heard Bush supporters try to argue the point, other than in their pathetically-transparent "we have a coalition!" comments; the type both typified and lampooned by Bush's own, "You forgot Poland." retort from the 2nd(?) debate. 

On the contrary, I thought the Bush ring wing types enjoyed telling each other they were the only people on earth with the nerve and will to directly oppose terrorism, to avenge 9/11, etc.  (I of course think their strategy is fundamentally flawed and counter-productive, but that's another issue; I'm just talking about what they believe, not what's true.) Yet according to this survey, most Bush supporters actually think the world supports the Iraqi war and support Bush.

It gets worse, and funnier. It turns out most Bush supporters really have no idea what he thinks about major issues.  Check out the graph that came with the survey results, though be warned, it's one of those painfully slow-loading Adobe reader PDF documents, and the graph is on page 12.  I've got an excerpt of it here, or you can see a larger version in this blog post on Washington Monthly.

If you can believe it, only:

If you're wondering and you didn't check the survey result links above, the vast majority of Kerry supporters know where he stands on almost every issue the survey covered. The exact figures are in parenthesis after each of the above bullet points. 

However you feel about these issues, you've got to admit that it's fairly amazing that hardly any Bush supporters actually know what their candidate feels about these issues. And worse yet, this isn't some hypothetical... Bush has been president for 4 years, and he's acted on all of these issues on numerous occasions.

I suppose that in the end this is just more evidence of the woefully-ignorant state of the average US voter, and it brings up two questions in my mind.

1) Why don't people pay attention to important political issues instead of watching CSI and Jerry Springer and celebrity news shows?

Actually that's not my first question, since it's a pointless one and would result in 90% of the people reading this immediately scrolling down very rapidly.  I understand that, since I've had times in my life that I didn't give a damn about politics either.

I've been very interested in and aware of national and global politics for the past half decade or so, but prior to that my interest waxed and waned a great deal. I knew very little and made no effort to learn more when I was a kid and a teen. Plus there was no internet then to provide quick and easy and entertaining information about such things. In my early college days I got political and started educating myself about this sort of thing, but as often happens with young people, I lost interest and got lazy about anything not directly relating to me once I was out of school and working for a living.  That phase lasted for a few years, until it ran into my current "I want to know a lot about everything." phase. How long this one will last I can't say, but I do know it would be of great benefit to my career and personal life if I could cut back my surfing/gaming/TV-watching by about 90%, and devote that time to writing fiction, spending time with Malaya, practicing Kali, and other things of much more personal benefit. So no, I'm not saying I'm better for spending so much time and mental attention on national and international news, and in fact it's bad that I do, in many ways.  Being informed does nothing to pay the bills, when you get right down to it.

Digression aside, picking up my thought from above (if I can; my fatigue and the glass of very strong Chardonnay I've been sipping for the past half hour is starting to kick in) my 2 immediate observations about the survey results are:

1) Umm... can't remember. It was a good point though, I swear.

2) How are Republicans able to keep their bait and switch tactics going so successfully?

Regarding #1, D'oh!

Regarding #2, as this survey shows, not only do most people not know what Bush stands for, but most of them disagree with his positions on most international issues. (People almost always think a candidate they support agrees with them on issues if they don't know his position for sure.) This is true for national and social issues as well; most people support separation of church and state, support raising the minimum wage, support abortion rights, support guaranteed social security and government action to force lower drug prices, etc.

Republicans (for the most part) oppose all of these things, and yet they do very well (as evidenced by their current hold on the presidency and both houses of congress) in the elections anyway. I suppose this shows the power of misleading and negative ad campaigns and campaigning on character and personal issues, since numerous candidates (Reps as well as Dems, in various areas of the country.) get elected despite opposing lots of things their home voters support. Just taking the last presidential campaign as an example; Gore killed Bush on the facts and issues, had infinitely more national and international experience, was the very active VP for the most popular president of the modern era (Clinton ended his second term with higher approval ratings than Reagan, though you'd never know it from how the media fawningly covered the Gipper's death.), could articulate his beliefs in great detail, etc. But Gore ran a misguided "I'm not Clinton." campaign, huffed and appeared overly-intellectual in the debates, allowed Bush to keep the campaign focused on Clinton's penis issues, was unable to stop the media from spending almost all of their time obsessing over his stiff public persona, let Bush move the debate away from 8 years of peace and prosperity, and let Bush steal an election no one gave him a chance in when the campaigns began.

It was a clever campaign of misdirection and emotion over facts/reason, and with the aid of his handlers and the galvanizing events of 9/11 Bush has kept it up for the past four years, and kept it up very successfully, as demonstrated by the facts that most of his supporters 1) disagree with him on most issues, 2) agree with Kerry on most issues, and 3) are not aware of 1 and 2.  Hell, Bush is hanging in there this campaign even with much more of the debate about issues and facts, thanks to his remarkable ability to allow voters to project their own goals and desires on him, even when he actively opposes the issues his supporters support.

Oh, I just remembered #1!

What responsibility does the media bear for this state of affairs? Do they have a responsibility to doggedly try and inform and educate their viewers, or need they merely report the facts once or twice, before returning to ratings-grabbing special reports on the latest celebrity sex crime or missing white woman/child crisis?

If you pointed out, correctly, that most of Bush's supporters had no real idea where he stood on the most important issues of the day, what would the media's response be? They could certainly defend themselves by saying that they reported the facts, and that they told everyone that the Bush Administration were lying about Issue A, Issue B, etc. And they could ask, is it our fault that people don't listen, or don't want to believe the truth when it's uncomfortable? Should the media hammer home the same controversial truths over and over again until they begin to sink in? Does the media have an obligation to the public trust to correct errors in the public's perception?

Or are they just another form of entertainment, and obligated to their investors and stock holders to maintain ratings. After all, if they just harped endlessly on the latest thing most Americans were uninformed about, most Americans would be no more educated, since most Americans would watch another channel.

I don't have a clever answer for this one, but I think it's a good one to ponder.