Dear Michelle Bachmann

When you jump on Obama for "going back to the 1967 borders," you jump on Netanyahu, who agrees to the same thing. This is the dumbest criticism, I swear...

Interesting distinctions on foreign policy, HPV, and the mandate though. Much more in substance than between Obama and Clinton.

From PostSecret. Not cool.

In Which I Actually Enjoy A Reality Show

Screencap from So You Think You Can Dance

Edit: She won!

I'm not much for most competition/reality shows - I can name a of the American Idol finalists from the groundbreaking early seasons, but The Daily Show has always been my first love when it comes to TV.

However, a few weeks ago, I found myself watching Dancing With the Stars, with a great set of performers and reasonably entertaining judges, One of them, Melanie Moore, is from Atlanta (Lassiter High), and we almost certainly have mutual friends. Something about her (besides the breath-taking backless dress that was my first impression) has a dominating quality on camera - the eye is drawn to her, even though her partner is also amazing.

The reason, I think, is a cacophony of little things that are barely noticeable individually, but add up. One example is in this screencap, at this point in the performance. Notice her finger - it points for about half a second, but in the context of the piece, it adds something to her dance. Moore does this in every move that she makes, and while we can't always identify why we like her, or what she's doing, the end result is success.

The same is true, I think, of any field of professional success. For the end-user, the audience, the client, the aspects of one's job that lead to true success aren't always noticeable - we don't see performers practice, or the years of training that go into a single performance. We can't identify the little pointed finger on the first go-around. But in time, these things reveal themselves, and so Melanie Moore is unsurprisingly a finalist in Season 8 of the show.

The problem is that we also see a wide variety of a person that don't contribute to their success - their off-camera demeanor, their charisma, and more, which also inform us. Thus, those people who are practicing the fundamentals can be outstripped by people who present a better "whole picture" it's very easy to forgive someone a few errors if you like them. To be able to do both - all of the little invisible things that "matter" and the various other Carnegie traits, is what leads to the truest success. I know which set I need to work most on.

2 Months

Two months ago, I graduated from Williams. One month ago, I started at my job in Wisconsin.

Whoa.

I have car payments now, and rent. Health insurance premiums are deducted from my paycheck, and if I want to eat something at home, it has to be something that I personally selected from the store. If something that I own breaks, I have to fix it. None of these are really landmark issues or problems, but en masse, they take up time and energy: only in having them do I understand how much I enjoyed in going without, whether at home in GA where my parents never charged rent, or in my house at college where we bought many groceries collectively, and shared food copiously.

The struggle that I realize is that I've now been bumped out of those environments of extreme tolerance and free-expressionism. If I want to try to clone StoryTime at Epic, I'll have to do it by myself. If I want to volunteer, I'll have to call up a non-profit and sign up. I am no longer part of a population that groups are trying to access, with rare exceptions like the Red Cross folks that took two units of red cells from me today.

It's my life, and this is the time to set habits and patterns that will shape my future. I know that a lot of what I do, especially when its not fun, is based on identity - that I, as a person with characteristic X, am obligated or required to do something, for fear of losing X. I derive that willpower from within, not based solely on the approval of others (though others influence my own self-image). This is all a bit rambly, and influenced by my blood-less mental state, but I suppose my overall point is this:

I am a long way from where I was two months ago, and I hope I don't stop changing and improving my conditions over the next two months.

Debt Crisis

This is going to get worse before it gets better. The House GOP was NOT supposed to be in this position, and now we enter a period of real danger. Boehner has to go back to the drawing board on a new bill, and Harry Reid will be fully entitled to stop it.

But he won't. Instead, he'll amend the bill with tax hikes (probably mostly symbolic) and send it back to the House, where Boehner is going to have to take his own poison pill by passing the bill with democratic support. The GOP will be depowered, Obama will get his way while staying out of the way, and then Democrats will own the debt problem and the resulting cuts, which Republicans won't be able to protest over because THEY weren't able to get their own act together.

But the long game matters more, and I don't have confidence in anything but this: the GOP is now composed of four interests: Neocons, Business leaders, Social Cons, and Libertarians, and things between them aren't going to get any prettier. Democrats have got to grow a spine and start behaving with some pragmatism.

Home News

Awwwww, thanks Williams (click link for multimedia):

Slack (who hails from Decatur, Ga.) played pieces by Talcott Banks, George Alfred Grant-Shaefer, George Harrison, Robert Wadsworth Lowry, Richard Rodgers, and Howard Shore, as well as some of his own original compositions. Students, staff, and faculty enjoyed the concert from picnic tables, dorms, and offices across campus.

During his years at Williams, Slack had served as a leading figure for the Guild of Carilloneurs, a campus organization that ensures the chapel’s bells are played three times a day and on relevant special occasions. Slack and the other ringers use the Thompson bells to play everything from “The Mountains” to the Harry Potter theme music.

While the Thompson Memorial Chapel tower is one of the most recognizable figures of the Williams campus landscape, its bells are undoubtedly a staple in its soundtrack. To see a section of Slack’s performance and an inside look at the chapel’s chimes, watch the video below. To learn more about Williams bells and their ringers, read this 2005 Alumni Review article.

In my own Google Reader:

http://josephshoer.com/blog - A Williams grad with great nerdy posts.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/ - awesome historic letters

http://thisisindexed.com/ - webcomic published each morning, 3 second of whimsical humor
http://ephdetour.com/ - Chris, JJ, and Tony baking across Amurika. Chris's writing is great.

http://xkcd.com/ - duh

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ and http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/ -awesome news picture blogs (look at them, you'll understand)

http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/index.html - A pilot talks about the idiocy in his industry. Useful and entertaining.

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/ - Ethan is a Williams '93 with awesome big ideas.

Online Questionaires

I just signed up at Americans Elect, but managed to botch one of the questions they asked when I misread the answer. The site is going to have no clue what to do with my views now....

The Debt Ceiling

The House GOP is right. This government's fiscal policies and willingness to foist costs on future generations is irresponsible, and the worst kind of short-sightedness.

The House GOP is wrong. Tax rates must be simplified, and yes, raised, in order to avoid future calamity. We had high maximum individual rates in the 50s and we need them now. It's not fair to the rich, let's not lie, but one can also look at it this way - they profit more from the government's actions that protect and secure wealth. But it's not fair, and we shouldn't forget that.

So should we avoid those high taxes? Sure - if you think getting rid of social security, medicare, and medicaid is a good idea. That's a valid point of view, which reverberates for me, a bit - until I think about the inevitable problems if we take them away.

But that's how all social programs work - they become crutches. I know this might make me sound like a reactionary (which nicely balances my liberalism on taxes), but I don't think that anything I've said justifies getting rid of them, not with the generational contract that they created with those people who expect fair payouts.

I just wonder if anyone is thinking - really thinking - about the fiscal train headed for Japan, and soon after, us.

An Annotated RedState Posting

Original here: http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/07/23/god-and-oslo/

With Al Jazeera, international news networks, and domestic networks all raising the link to an Islamic radical Norway was deporting, I put on twitter that the odds were it wasn’t an angry Lutheran doing the bombing and shooting and noted on the radio the possible links to Islamic radicals.
Turns out, the now captured shooter, who I think we can probably say is connected to the bombing, lists himself as a conservative Christian on a Facebook page.
I was wrong. But the reaction to me and others being wrong and to how the news is handling this event is quite instructive.
In the Arkansas army shootings and the Ft. Hood shooting and a host of others, the media and the left have sought to downplay any possible connection to Islam the attackers or would be attackers have had. I don't know if "downplay" is the right word, unless you mean they specifically did not report the person's faith. And when those of us on the right have pointed it out, we’ve been accused of racism and those on the left have demanded to know why it even mattered.
Contrast that with the coverage of the Oslo shooter and already the New York Times is making sure in its first few paragraphs everyone knows the guy described himself on Facebook as a “conservative Christian.”

And the NYT did not do that with other terrorist acts?

It reminds me of the left-wingers who always point out that Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh were Christians. They ignore the fact that McVeigh himself described himself as at best an agnostic, though more clearly an atheist, and Rudolph’s FBI file showed he belonged to an extremist cult more Aryan than Christian.

Note that. An extremist cult more Aryan than Christian? Sounds JUST LIKE Al-Qaeda. Exactly what many of us have said for years.

But why all the angst from the left on this.
There are a few instructive points.
First, those of us on the right who point out the now fairly common ties between terrorists and Islam Except not: http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005/terror02_05#terror_05sum (scroll to the bottom) do so largely because the secular left has become willfully naive. The fact of the matter is violence and Islam may not be very common among American muslims, but internationally it is extremely common and can fairly well be considered mainstream within much of Islam. Read Andy McCarthy if you suffer on the delusion that it is not mainstream.

With Christians, it is rather rare to see a self-described Christian engage in heinous terrorist acts. In fact, in as much as there is an Arab Street filled with muslims more often than not cheering on the latest terrorist act of radical Islamists, you will be very hard pressed to find a Christian who does not condemn the act regardless of the faith of the person doing the killing.
But then why is the left so gleeful that the Norwegian is a “conservative Christian” and why do they feel it so necessary to rub it in when they’re downright apathetic and hostile to the notion of radical Islam being rather mainstream within Islam when terrorist Christianity is largely nonexistent except among a few crazies?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Bible is quite on point about this.
Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

The left doesn't embrace "activist Muslims" who kill people in the GLBT community. False comparison.

All of them can pile on and condemn the Christian because the Christian is just passing through, a stranger in a strange land.
Over the next week, assuming the budget fight in Washington doesn’t over shadow it, you can expect lots more gloating that the guy in Norway described himself as a conservative Christian. Never mind that a conservative Christian would not do what the guy did. The left, however, will not be persuaded otherwise. They are of this world and this world is all that matters until the last day.

Never mind that a true Muslim would ever do that, either. Ever.

Mashup

This Song = The Harry Potter Books

Sorry, John Williams. Start at :50 to skip the ominous thumps that can only be heard with strong bass speakers.