?Program Lost — Sorry?

While tripping through the The Carnival of Elitist Bastards post, I happened upon Mr. O’Risal’s refutation of Berg The Creationist. Mr. Berg comments that the poor cockroach may have had the intelligence to last a million years. “Whoa there!” Mr. O’Risal says:

By the way, insects have been around for a lot more than a million years, and the nobody is handing out MacArthur grants for the ability to reproduce. Instinct is not intelligence; it involves, by definition, no analytical ability nor even a faculty for relating phenomena. Instinct, taxis and reflex are the necessities of life; intelligence is a luxury in terms of the continuation of life. It’s a luxury that allows a select few living things to exercise their will upon their environments and to collectivize experience in ways that organisms that do not possess it cannot do. My writing this entry is an example of what this luxury makes possible (at least I hope so). We humans can give our knowledge to one another; cockroaches cannot.

Actually, I believe it was Piaget who suggested that intelligence really isn’t the luxury that Mr. O’Risal suggests it is, but is, in fact, an adaptive mechanism, an outcome of evolution, that allowed homo sapiens to survive. When you consider that, as a species, we’re not particularly strong, can’t run especially fast, are not possessed of sharp claws, need weeks of work to just bench press our own weight, and have teeth so dull we’ve got to put flame to our food to chew it efficiently, we have to have something that puts us above the average (ravenous) Big Cat. Enter The Big Brain, endowed with pattern matching and predictive modeling engines so powerful and complex that to date we have yet to be able to fully understand how they work, much less replicate it with our technology. It’s really not instinct at work here, its the ability to observe, correlate and predict.

Now I think this makes for a much stronger argument than Mr. O’Risal’s “Intelligence is a luxury” argument. For one thing, Nature really isn’t in the habit of creating frivolous indulgences; things happen for very good reasons. He does go on and talk about how we are able to contemplate objects and “…dissect them in our minds and compare them to things similar and dissimilar to them”. But he doesn’t quite seem to make the leap as to why that would be a Good Thing for the Species as opposed to something that simply allows us to gaze at the Universe and contemplate the way stars work.

After all, I doubt that the whole point of intelligence is to provide a mechanism to turn a quarter section of prairie into a shopping mall.

In comment 3 to this post about Denver’s red-light cameras, Dr. Gridlock wrote: “In a community in the state of Washington, in response to red light camera system system proposed by city council, some local citizens started a ballot initiative that would divert the proceeds to funding a congestion and traffic safety program. Suddenly, there was no guarantee that the city would get the cash, so the council dropped the proposed system.

And theres at least a half dozen studies in the US, England, and Australia that show that accident rates at camera intersections go UP because motorists are paying more attention to the cameras than the road.”

The actual initiative is the state-wide Initiative-985, which will open HOV lanes to all traffic during non-peak hours, require that the various DOT’s synchronize their red-lights so traffic flows, increase funding for emergency roadside assistance, and divert money from the cameras and “Art” to a “Reduce Traffic Congestion” account.

Now this gem was authored by Tim Eyman, whose initiative writing proclivities here in Washington are as prolific as Isaac Asimov and as well-reasoned as Jesse Ventura, Eyman’s motivations being about the same as Jesse’s. Though he claims this initiative is to fix our traffic situation, his real motivation is to remove the cameras because they are, effectively, a tax. “Once you take away the profit motive, desire for them drops like a rock,” Eyman was quoted in the Yakima Herald Republic. “The true motivation is a revenue source. It’s got nothing to do with safety.” Eyman has never seen a government revenue stream that he hadn’t wanted to dam — he’s probably the biggest reason why we have four ferries laid up in drydock because their hulls are so cracked that they could sink at any moment.
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Back 1971, we were living in Newton Highlands, one of the 13 villages that make up Newton, Massachusetts and that also happens to sit on the MBTA Green Line, the light rail line that runs from downtown Boston to the western edge of Newton (basically route 128). My father worked at MIT Draper Labs, and he often rode the subway to and from work — I remember picking him up at the old station in the village center.

In the spring of that year, I turned ten and adventure was the order of the day. Our school district had an odd schedule that let me out at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays; often on those afternoons David Jacobs and I would venture out all the way to Waban where there was a little news stand that sold odd books and candy. But we really didn’t venture far off of Beacon Street, that being the main drag that ran by both our houses. Well, once we ended up the golf course.

Turning Beacon Street into our version of the Silk Road just meant that we felt completely grown up and independent — we could navigate our way down a mile and a half of road into a strange village that wasn’t ours, risking run-ins with the local townies. We were quite certain that Wabanites were not Bruins or Red Sox fans, we weren’t quite sure who they supported. But we also knew that hardly any of the other kids at school went there. I remember one kid in my class, Neil, razzed me quite a bit about going to Waban: “They’re Yankees fans there, you know”; David and I found out otherwise. But the trips to Waban only whet my appetite for longer, more extensive and perhaps even more perilous adventures, such as taking the Green Line all the way to downtown Boston.

That spring also saw the premier of Blue Water White Death, the documentary that captured the Great White Shark on film for the very first time. I cannot for the life of me remember why I wanted to see that movie, but it must have been a big deal. Lo! and Behold, it was playing in Downtown Boston. Wouldn’t it be cool to go down and see? Surprisingly, my parents actually agreed.

So on the appointed afternoon, David and I walked to the Green Line station in Waban and I got on the trolly and headed downtown. I’d ridden the line before, but I’d always been with older relatives, but this was different being on my own. It was fun watching Newton fly by, getting into the rhythm of the ebb and flow of passengers getting on and off — more on than off. Suddenly the car was crowded, and we dropped into the dark of the tunnel, which was my favorite part of the trip. There was actually a lot to see if you knew what to look for: abandoned stations, darkened branch lines that snaked off into the gloom, pillars that suddenly leapt out at you. Signal light boxes. But soon it we arrived at Park Street where I met my father as he came off the Red Line from Cambridge. We ascended to the streets, to dinner and an evening of vicious sharks.

Taking that trip in 1971 meant I had no fear when we moved to Denver and we had to ride the RTD. I rode the bus from Green Mountain to Villa Italia, and from Villa Italia to downtown, downtown to Boulder, and I did this all by my self from the time I was ten until I finally got my license when I was 17. I had to plan all my own trips — I became adept at reading schedules, I knew an ungodly number of routes by heart. But its what we did — in fact it was what we were told we had to do. “You want to go to the Mall?” Mom would ask. “Well, get that bus change ready.” Now that was empowerment.

So I was a little taken aback when I read about Lenore Skenazy’s trials and tribulations when she let her son loose in New York to find his way home. “Free Range Kids”, she calls them. Funny, we just called it “a day in the life”.

I spoke in an undergraduate class today. As a friend of mine has said a few times about her students, pretty soon you’re going to have to explain to them what the Lewinsky scandal was. This isn’t a comment on the quality of the students, just that the degree to which 19 year olds have shared cultural and historic experience with me is shrinking fast. Bush v. Gore happened when they were 11. What’s recent history to me is a vague recollection for them. (Duncan ‘Atrios’ Black, 2008-04-12)

A couple weekends back I was at my legislative district convention, and we’d reached the point where all the people who wanted to go on to the congressional district and state conventions as delegates were giving their one-minute speech to convince us they were worthy of a trip to Shoreline and/or Spokane. (Now there’s a choice for you!) There were well over 100 candidates, and they all lined up with their numbers, then one at a time in numeric order they introduced themselves, gave their speech and then closed usually by reminding us of their number. So number 55 came up, gave his speech, and made some comment like “Drive fifty-five” — I don’t remember the exact phrase he used, but it was definitely a reference to the old speed limit (”Stay alive with fifty-five!”). And the early-twentysomething woman sitting next to me repeated the phrase and said “I don’t get it”

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So Roger started watching “John Adams” on HBO, and wrote a review of it here. He noted:

I was never much interested in History. I don’t even remember taking many history classes in school. All I remember is that the past bored me to tears, especially American history. As I get older, I’ve found that my tastes and interests are changing, and that I’m becoming more and more fascinated by world history. And I’m finding there’s tremendous gaps in my knowledge. I don’t think my education was very good.

High school history really isn’t designed to give an in-depth view of past events. The curricula are designed to provide just enough information to operate in the democracy, and perhaps (as my lefty friends would argue) to perpetuate a propagandistic view of US history. But a less ideological explanation might be that there was just a lot of stuff that happened in the past.

For instance, in 1914 there was a major, major labor massacre in Ludlow Colorado; forty-five people died in the spring of 1914 when the Colorado National Guard rode roughshod and with guns blazing through an encampment of striking coal miners just south of Pueblo. This particular incident wasn’t at all mentioned in any of the local and regional history classes I took in high school (I went to high school in Colorado). I didn’t learn about it until I took a labor history class in college. Now I’d argue that this should have been taught in high school but by the same token, there was a lot going on in 1914, and while I feel this is deserving of mention, I can certainly understand why it took a college class in a fairly specialized branch of history to be exposed to that fact.

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A few days ago, I wondered just where Hillary was going with her 3AM ad — just how she was going to dig her self out of that rhetorical hole she put herself in after Denver. Turns out there was a possibility that I never even considered, probably because, well, I just assumed that a Democratic candidate would never align herself with a Republican candidate against another Democrat:

I have a lifetime of experience. Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience. Senator Obama’s campaign is about one speech he made in 2002

And to think that I once called myself a political sciences major…

Now, if Clinton had just left it at the very plausible “He hasn’t been around the block”, I think I could have lived with that. In fact, I wonder myself if he isn’t a bit young. Obama is only in his mid-forties, and there certainly is an argument that he’s only been on the national scene for a few short years. We’ve just witnessed what happens when you put some mere enthusiast in charge.

I wrote those words yesterday. Today I discovered this: the list of youngest presidents. Want to guess who is number three on the list coming in at a year younger than Barack Obama is now?

Tonight, on Bill Maher, when Bill tried to pin him on this very point, Terry McAuliffe tried to convince the planet that we are in a post-9/11 world Unfortunately the video feed died before he could explain how the first Clinton administration existed in any less dangerous environment than we are in now.

Incidentally, number two on that list, just above The Clenis? John Fitzgerald Kennedy. After Kennedy’s little Cuban fiasco, he then went on to handle what was probably the most serious threat to US national security — an actual real live existential threat — the Cuban Missile Crisis. You know what? We studied the way he handled that affair in one of my political sciences classes. It was an example of how to do things right. Kennedy’s age at the time? Fourty-seven. (See Richard Nuestadt and Ernest May, Thinking In Time for a wonderful chapter on the missile crisis and how Kennedy had matured after the Bay of Pigs.)

UPDATED: James Fallows writes my post much more effectively here.

Well, it had to happen — someone had to go negative, and it makes sense that it was Hillary Rodham Clinton. Even without Bill’s foreshadowing earlier this winter, I had this feeling it would be Hillary that would start the Flame Wars.

The kickoff to this war really was fairly mild — a thirty second spot, cue audio of phone ringing and then voiceover asking who you would really, really want to answer the phone at 0300.

I really hate fearmongering. I think the current administration has done far too much of that since 9/11, and I’m really tired of it. To be sure, Clinton’s ad wasn’t quite the same as BushCo’s Stage of Frights in Technicolor (funny how we haven’t heard much about the alert color in recent years), where some dolt from DHS or the Intelligence Community stands up to tell us how we are all about to snuffit at the hands of some maniac Islamic Fundamentalist. But it was still national security FUD. I was hoping that we’d be above that.

Now, if Clinton had just left it at the very plausible “He hasn’t been around the block”, I think I could have lived with that. In fact, I wonder myself if he isn’t a bit young. Obama is only in his mid-forties, and there certainly is an argument that he’s only been on the national scene for a few short years. We’ve just witnessed what happens when you put some mere enthusiast in charge.

Yep, I’d have been fine if that’s as far as she went. But no. Instead I’m treated to Hillary speaking in Ohio, ram-rod straight at the podium, proclaiming that she’s not only better than Obama, but she’s the only person with enough experience to defeat McCain. “Who is tested and ready to be commander-in-chief on day one?” she asked in her victory speech that evening.

That indeed is a real good question — is it you Hillary? So tell me, where are you going with this? What happens after Denver?

See, the real problem here is that any way it goes, someone is going to run against John S. McCain III, Captain, United States Navy (ret.), son of John S. McCain Jr., Admiral, USN, grandson of John S. McCain, Admiral, USN. In that world, the three AM phone call doesn’t ring, it booms over the 1MC: “General Quarters!”. And when you get on station in less than ninety seconds, as a senior officer, you’d better be able to process information. McCain is a lot of things, a lot of things that I don’t like, but unready and incapable of commanding after being rousted out of the rack by a ringing phone at 0300 on day one of his (hypothetical) presidency I really suspect isn’t one of them.

And now Hillary has a problem, she now has to explain command to an ex-senior naval officer. And if that isn’t fun enough for her, if Barack wins she’s going to have a very embarrassing “ha ha just kidding” moment as she tries to explain how Obama really is capable of handling that call after all.

But there’s also something even more fundamental here — why are we even talking about commanders-in-chief anyway? We’ve had eight years of some dufus wanting to be “The Decider”, the commander-in-chief. What do we have to show for it? Well, a massive military presence overseas. Yeah! C-in-C Rules! Meanwhile I’m watching my retirement fund’s growth dwindle down to negative five percent as the economy tanks. Again.

No, I want a president, not a C-in-C.

And I certainly don’t want to hear a bunch of crap about who has more experience to handle the phone call at three am. Because neither of the two candidates on my side of the fence had to respond to the general alarm gong.

A few weeks back I babbled on as to how Obama’s success wasn’t, as NPR’s Juan Williams was suggesting, all due to traditional race-based Identity Politics, but perhaps maybe it was due to age-based Identity Politics.

Flash forward a few weeks, Obama pretty much buried Clinton in an avalanche of primary victories, and were it not for Ohio and the polling portion of the Texas primary on March 4, he probably could have sewn it up entirely. But then Hillary surged, taking two and two-thirds (as I write) of the states up that day. The effect, as they say, was electric! There she is, on stage in Ohio, vowing to march on to victory! (Not bloody likely, but there is a chance.) And suddenly the narrative changes, a pall descends upon Obamahamans and its All Doom. Then we start hearing things about how particularly Obamahamans will actually vote for McCain if their opponent gets the nod in Denver.

Now this is silly. Its just too stoopid for words. But the first comment to Pam Spaulding’s article makes a good point: it seems as though its the young folk are the most likely to want to leave scorched earth — the older, more sanguine tend to not be that way.

I truly hope, that this isn’t the case, that the younger generation won’t just desert Hillary for John McCain if she wins. I hope its just mis-placed bravado, and come November they will come to their senses. Given my analysis, though, I could certainly see eschewing the Boomer for Grampaw McCain.

But I really do agree with Spaulding: “…they can’t see the long-range implications of such an overwrought, emotional, self-destructive political reaction.”

University Zoka,
originally uploaded by Gregory Sawyer.

Tonight, on KIRO-TV’s Six O’Clock News, they asked a supposedly panic-stricken public just where to go when Starbucks closes tonight? Well, here’s a few suggestions:

Zoka Coffee (Seattle)
Dunn Brothers Coffee (St. Paul, Minneapolis, etc)
Caribou Coffee (St. Paul, Minneapolis, etc)
Cahoots Coffee (St. Paul)

Not to mention the drive-through coffee huts that seem to be about a block apart on Lake City Way — almost as dense as Starbucks.

I think I’ve been in a Starbucks maybe twice since University Zoka opened a few years back, I haven’t been too impressed by Starbucks of recent. It’s now push-button coffee, mechanized just like Burger King, and the coffee just isn’t that good. It didn’t used to be that way — I remember having coffee at the University Villiage Starbucks some 20 years ago and thinking that it was pretty good stuff. Not quite Dunn Brothers, but certainly not Chock Full O’ Nuts. Howard Shultz, Starbucks’ CEO, certainly has this in mind, its why he shut the stores down tonight and why he laid off several hundred a week or so back — he’s loosing money due to lousy service and bad coffee. The question, though: will it be enough?

Starbucks is Shultz’s baby, he opened up the first one in Pike Market somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years ago. When I first went into that location, I was overwhelmed by how strange and un-Starbucks-like it looked, still decked out in its original decor. Here, arguably, is where the specialty coffee market began — sure, there were small coffee shops such as Coffee and Tea Ltd in the Twin Cities, but in 1980 that was the only specialty coffee shop on Grand Avenue in St. Paul. By the mid-1990’s, there were at least eight coffee shops between Dale and Snelling on Grand — and Coffee and Tea, Ltd wasn’t one of them. But where it not for Shultz, in all likelyhood, Coffee and Tea, Ltd would still be the lone coffee shop on Grand, selling mainly bean and paraphernalia. (And in the case of Grand Ave, that’s true in many respects, a related tale for another time.)

But Starbucks went for growth, bringing to the market a Soviet Military philosophy: “Quantity has a quality all of its own”. But its not food quality. Can a single night’s closure for re-orientation change that? Well, its possible. I don’t think its likely, though, given corporate inertia.

So enjoy a different brew tonight — and maybe, if its good enough, stick with it. Perhaps Shultz can force Starbucks back on a more righteous path, one that unlike the Soviet Army, won’t leave scorched earth.