The Life and Times of Elliot Pike

There’s an interesting adage I’ve heard from time to time. It goes something like this: If you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water he will jump out, but if he sits in a pan of cool water and you turn up the heat slowly, he will remain until he cooks to death. Obviously it’s intended to describe human behavior—that we tend to ignore dire threats if they’ve been growing slowly and we’ve been getting used to them.

One example of this is the Avian Flu situation that I blogged about a couple days ago. Another is the Bush Administration and its policies toward Iran.
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I’m ambivalent about the upcoming Presidential race, torn between whether February 2007 is way too early for campaigns to start up or if it’ll provide a needed dialog of ideas.

I remember just a couple months ago thinking that I couldn’t wait for the 2008 campaign to start up. I wanted anything that could distract me from the depressing hopelessness of the current Bush administration. Yes, we’re stuck with him, and even as unpopular as he is, there’s little that can be done to stop him.

(It’s interesting in a way: if a “lame-duck” president has no military engagements, he or she is restricted to domestic policies which can be completely choked-off by a hostile Congress; almost everything depends on proposing bills and getting them passed, even if they’re just spending bills. But as we see with the Senate unable to do much more than pass “Non-binding resolutions condemning the President, there’s little more they can do to stop his management of a war short of impeachment. Hence, Bush has nothing to fear from the Democratic majority.)

There’s something profound about this upcoming election, and I’m certainly not alone in pointing it out: this is the first time in 80 years that there will be no incumbent candidate. Neither the President or the Vice President will be running, so political dialogue will take place in both political parties.

There’s more to this than simply having twice as many candidates—twice as many “talking heads” in the fray. This time you’ll see commonality between moderates of both sides. I will argue that this creates a significant shift of power between moderates and fundamentalists.
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There’s a short-but-good article on The New Republic Online (You can read this article without a paid subscription, but you have to register.) about the Avian Flu. Essentially it points out that while the Bird Flu was a huge headliner for all news sources last year, its danger has only increased over time while its media coverage has dropped to almost nothing.

Idiocy over the Bird Flu isn’t restricted to the media, however. I am a member of a large organization’s committee on Health Care. Last year there was a lot of talk about the bird flu, but ironically whenever my fellow committee members opened their mouths (including a member who is a practicing doctor) it was obvious that none of them had the most fundamental understanding of the issue. I had made a point of reading articles from Newsweek to Wired to the official White House strategic publications, and I’ve got to say almost all of my fellow committee members would have failed a basic factual quiz on the topic.

One example question, the most basic, would be “True or False: The current strain of the Bird Flu is deadly because it is very contagious between humans.” Hopefully all of you readers would immediately say “false”, and then follow-up with the observation that the concern is with the possibility of a mutated strain developing that make it easily contagious to humans. It’s probabilistic time bomb.
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With a title like this I’ll bet you’re expecting some rapid evangelical Apple-activist rant on one of the many themes you’ve heard time and time again. You know, Macs having fewer viruses, having a superior UI, etc. And granted, I do very much love working in my Apple world. Whenever I have to “slum” in Windows, and especially if I have to work on someone else’s computer where a zillion little apps and utilities have been installed (willing or not) by the owner’s ISP or Real Player or some anti-virus software, and where the IE toolbar has been polluted with half a dozen ROWS of little controls by Google or Microsoft or whatever… ack! I want to pull my hair out.

But all that notwithstanding, I wanted to blog about something that few people—even few Mac users—are aware of: the magic that’s “under the hood”.
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My last marathon-lengthed post about Federalism was spawned by my watching of a new PBS 4-part series on “The Supreme Court”. I’ve got to say, this documentary is absolutely brilliant and gives me a great new understanding of the nuances of both the Supreme Court and the Constitution. (The segment “A New Kind of Justice” helped me to finally understand what the 14th Amendment was all about, and how it was used to ultimately give rights to corporations.)

Like most PBS programming, they rerun and rerun these things all the time, so go find your local listings, program your Tivo or VCR, and watch it. Only the first two parts, One Nation Under Law and A New Kind of Justice have come out. The next one first airs this Wednesday, so it’s not too late to start watching. There are also interviews with our new Chief Justice Roberts.