What I kinda wish was true...

that Obama's tax deal flops and the Bush tax cuts expire. It would be against
our immediate self-interest (not to mention the unemployed), but as Krugman and
others have pointed out (in Daily Kos and elsewhere), the Democrats will be
exchanging present hostages to the Republicans in return for giving up still
more hostages down the line. The Republican plan is to make the tax cuts
permanent in 2012 (and campaign on the issue) and if they secure the tax cuts,
they will then start hollering about the necessity of cutting social security
and other so-called entitlements out of their immense faux concern for the
deficit.

(BTW, as grateful as I am for Krugman's insightful columns, at one point I
believe he supported a payroll social security tax holiday as part of a stimulus
package & for me & that's the real sticking point for me in the Obama tax
deal--now I guess it's one of the sticking points for him too. Back in the
day, Krugman was also a free trade proponent although he now considers such
discussions an academic luxury of sorts. But Krugman is okay. For one thing he
likes my favorite sci fi guy, Charles Stross)

So one partially hopes that Bernie Sanders takes it upon himself to block the
bill until the clock runs out on the tax deal--individual Republican Senators do
it all the time so I don't see why he can't. And the bill is hardly revenue
neutral so it can be filibustered. In the foregoing dream scenario, Bernie
blocks the bill even though he may be risking his Senate career and the
Republicans take the heat from Obama and the other Dems for refusing a
middle-class tax cut, attempting to monkey with social security, and laying
waste to the millions of unemployed. Meanwhile, the economy continues to
improve to the point that the public perception is that things are getting
better and the Republicans are battered again at the polls in 2012. But above
all, it would be nice if the Left in the Democratic Party could demonstrate (for
once) that they cannot be taken for granted by the party leadership. Sometimes
I believe the position of the Left with the Democrats is rather like that of the
anti-abortionists and family values crowd vis a vis the Republicans--useful at
the polls but ignored in practice otherwise.

But, as the Marines say, hope is not a plan. I have finally to believe that
Obama's deal will go through because the unemployed desperately need for it to
go through.

R.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

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Why arsenic in the news made me happy

NASA's announcement of the discovery of a microorganism that can substitute
arsenic for phosphorus in the amino acids that make up DNA thrilled me no end.

There are also extremophiles in the ocean depths that can, for example, harvest
the energy from naturally occurring background radiation from uranium compounds.

Wiki has a extensive article on speculations about the possibility of life based
on elements other than carbon, including, as a matter of fact, certain forms of
uranium and lead, not to mention the old sci fi standby, silicon-based life
forms.

As I have mentioned, I frequently check an astrobiology blog called "What's New
in Cosmic Ancestry"

I betcha that some time during my life they are in fact going to find some
indication--if not outright proof--that there are non-carbon-based life forms.

To paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, the Universe is not only more fecund than we
imagine, it is more fecund than we *can* imagine.

R.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Dammit...

Robert Charles Wilson in his novel, Bios, has anticipated most (though not all)
of my vision of cosmic biogenesis as depicted in MY (perpetually) forthcoming
novel, provisionally titled, SUMMA.
In mine, I posit that there are planets in the cosmos where all life forms are
symbiotic with one another and no life form is obliged to prey upon another.
And in many instances all apparently different species are all different stages
of the same life form. Also, consciousness and life are all coeval with one
another--although the forms of consciousness are so radically different
sometimes that they cannot communicate or even recognize one another. That's
Mr. R.C. Wilson's vision.

Of course, MY vision is even more inclusive than Mr. R.C. Wilson's. I posit
also that there are not only stars and planets that are alive and conscious, but
a spectrum of objects between those two that are also alive and conscious
(Pluto, Jupiter, brown dwarfs, etc.), and not only that, but there are living
beings that consist purely of magnetic fields and other forces on the surfaces
of stars, and also in cloulds of interstellar dust and gases and in
intergalactic space, and the nous of all finite entities that subsist after
their endings in something like the Akashic records. After a while, you see, I
think the cosmos gets kind of complicated.

In nearly unrelated news, Michael Gruber has written a sort of "wisdom" book
based on his interpretation of Nietzche, Heidigger and Rudolf Steiner. Nietzche
and Heidigger are my two least favorite thinkers. Heidigger was a fucking Nazi.
Nietzche probably would not have liked them, but much of his writing works to
give them aid and comfort. Steiner is a tolerably sophisticated thinker who
gave some aspects of theosophy a certain veneer of intellectual respectability
with his "anthroposophy" & he is something of a gnostic Christian as well. He
was decent enough to be persecuted by the Nazis. But some of his teachings
promote (see also Alice Bailey) a sort of racism and some are just plain...odd.
Like his belief that children should not be taught to read until they have
acquired their permanent teeth. Anyway, there are people whom I admire who look
to Nietzche and Heidigger, but those folks' interpretations of Nietzche and
Heidigger seem to make them out as being the very opposite of the impressions
that I have of those two thinkers.

I don't understand Gruber's book very well on first reading. I have the sense
from reading his novels that he speaks from a certain degree of first hand
experience, so I'm inclined to think he has something really important to say.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

It could have been worse...

Well, it could have been worse.  If Christine O'Donnell had won in Maryland, I think I would have had real doubts about the viability of representative democracy.  But I would have gotten over them.  

I was saddened that Russ Feingold lost in Wisconsin.   That's pretty mysterious to me.  What did Russ Feingold ever do to betray the interests of Wisconsites?  The media are saying that Feingold took some maverick positions against the party--like refusing to support the Iraq War when it was all the rage--& so he didn't get much support from the Democratic Party establishment.  It seems like there's a price to pay about being prematurely right.  Feingold was outspent 4-1 but that still doesn't quite explain it.  So was Jerry Brown.  

Here's hoping Bennet and Murphy hang on in Colorado and Washington.  

And I think of Ma and Pa Ferguson & Pappy Lee O'Daniel, governors of Texas back in the day, who were Tea Party types before their time.  (Blago of Illinois is the only current analog of theirs I can think of...)  (In *O Brother Where Art Thou?* the incumbent Gov. of Mississippi was modeled on Pappy Lee--can't recall if the Coen brothers actually used his name). During the reign of the Fergusons, if you had a relative in the pen you wanted to get pardoned, it was pretty simple.  Just buy some expensive bull semen from the Ferguson's breeding operation...) 

Representative democracy is like an unspecialized amoeba-like organism that lurches through its environment, sending out a pseudopod here and getting burned, another over there and finding good stuff to ingest, far more adaptable than say, koalas, who can only eat eucalpytus and have to rely on an unchanging environment--even though they are a lot cuter. 

I think it will be interesting to see how the presence of the Tea Party folks in the House of Representatives affect Republican Caucus discipline.  Not that much I'm guessing, but I still hope they screw it up.  I know that among the Tea Party types there are  some who genuinely believe in limited government, fiscal conservatism, reining in Wall Street and the big corporations.  My guess is they will be corrupted in the twinkling of an eye.  But I could be wrong.  Some have said that I've been wrong before.  

R. 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The old days

Yesterday, Allen H., locomotive on the A-train group, posted a handy guide to various Texas geographical & other (Texas) oddities.  It threw me into a state of unregenerate nostalgia.  

http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasGhostTowns/Whiteflat-Texas.htm

I lived in White Flat, TX from the ages of 6 to 7 YO.  I went to school in Matador, Texas, 10 miles to the south.  They are places of primal beauty.  Well, in their own way.  

Oh.  Nearly forgot.  I *started* first grade in Flomot, TX.  

http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasPanhandleTowns/FlomotTexas/FlomotTexas.htm

I remember my first day of school.  What I noticed was that there were Other People there and all the noise bothered me.  I was upset that I was going to have go back the next day.  I threatened to burn the school down.  

I may be possessed of a disposition as sweet, agreeable & generally compliant as a body might ever want to meet, but do not test me.  I had a childhood in the Texas Panhandle. 

Yaaahooo!

R. 
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Process philosophy is good for you...

Alfred North Whitehead lived until the age of 86.  Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, his two students who became major philosphers in Whitehead's own tradition, lived to 103 and 101 respectively. 

 

Paul Weiss won an age discrimination suit at the age of 91 when his university tried to forcibly retire him. 

 

I am deeply influenced by the process tradition--and I take vitamins. 

 

R.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/