alternative hippopotamus

It’s been a long time since I’ve reported on an experiment I began over 2 years ago, raising tropical fish in a 10 gallon tank. I apologize for not saying something sooner. I’ve learned a good deal about how fish interact, in terms that are not so terribly different from the grand ten gallon tank we live in.

Most recently, I’ve learned one of the hardest lessons: that any ecosystem is delicately balanced. When, something foreign is introduced, everything may be brought to its knees. Somehow a parasite, a worm, got into the tank and killed all but two fish. I was watching the tank closely, and caught the worm in a net, and scooped it out. I keep the worm in a bucket with bilge water from the aquarium. I’ve nicknamed him: MC Rove.

Since this incident, an entirely new ecosystem has developed. I’m not sure if it’s in balance, exactly, but at least it’s functioning. The old balance included a few things that weren’t entirely appetizing, but clearly the fish thought it was just dandy.

The old balance: the lyre-tailed mollies in the aquarium ate the snails for protein. The un-named cichlids (that’s how I got them from the local fish store) ate the occasional children of the lyre-tailed mollies. The regular diet of the tank was tropical fish flakes with a weekly treat of brine shrimp.

There was no doubt in my mind that all the fish in the tank preferred the live kill over a prepared treat, no matter how delicious the non-live variety was. When either a new snail or molly was born the entire dynamic of the tank changed. It’s the difference between watching a Ken Burn’s documentary and “Kill Bill, Volume 1.”

The new balance: All of the lyre-tailed mollies are gone, killed by the parasite. It’s too bad, as they were the smart ones. They would teach other fish how to swim up to the top of the tank to grab the best parts of the tropical fish flakes. The remaining fish, the un-named cichilids are not too bright. My nickname for them is Douglas and Feith if that paints the picture. The snail population has grown huge. I’d estimate about 20 snails of various age are in the tank right now. Their voracious mating habits are not something I want to dwell on, but the big snail, and I hope the Clinton campaign forgives me for this, his nickname is “Bubba.”

Mine is “Happy Go Lucky.” What do ya know, I’m a freakin’ optimist. The glass isn’t half empty. It’s half abandoned.

You can find your candy personality here.

Above is a pic of Montgomery College, Rockville MD campus taken this afternoon. I understand if it doesn’t seem particularly auspicious. Let’s see if I can make it more interesting.

There is a minor piece of trivia about this campus: this was the fictitious home base of the mock-documentary/horror flick “The Blair Witch Project.” But that’s not why I’m bring it up. It’s the best location for longboarding I’ve found anywhere in DC.

The wide berth of the parking lot allows me to get fairly impressive speed on my longboard without bailing out. Instead I can carve uphill and regain control. Then I can pick up speed on a successive run without worrying about going so fast that my brain explodes.

Roughly speaking, my brain explodes around 10 mph. That’s the point that I start to panic, wave my arms around and start swearing. On a narrow downhill run I’d try to jump off the board. At ten mph it’s pretty tough to hit the ground running, which means that you’ll scrape the pavement with your kneepads for a few yards. Assuming you were wearing knee pads. Again, that’s the beauty of lots like this, you turn uphill, regain composure and take it up a notch.

It’s like snowboarding without the price of a lift ticket. At some point I hope to get proficient enough that my brain will explode at 15 mph, 20 mph, etc. I have no doubt that the lot allows for speeds in that neighborhood.

I wanted to take a moment and review how I got here. I wasn’t trying to take up a new hobby, or live out some middle-aged fantasy. I just thought it would be funny. And maybe something I could make a documentary about.

Next: How I got here.

Conservative attorney James Bopp on his opposition to Hillary Clinton, and why he’d vote for Giuliani despite Giuliani’s position(s) on abortion : (Election Central)

“I’m not prepared to surrender in the war on terror and have terror attacks on major cities in the U.S.,” Bopp said. “Surrendering in the war on terror means the destruction of American civilation. Between the two of them I’m going to support the nominee of the Republican party.” He added, however, that he was still working hard for Romney “to prevent us from having that difficult choice.”

Bob Altemeyer describing a prototype right-wing authoritarian: (”The Authoritarians”)

Hugh was taught that the world is a dangerous place, full of people who will hurt him or lead him astray. Powerful evil forces could lie in ambush anywhere. But he would be safe if he stuck with his own kind. He identifies strongly with his family, his religion, and America, which his parents often say is the greatest nation in the world. His parents may at the same time find a lot wrong with the way America is changing day by day, but they believe everyone should obey the government and honor its leaders in almost all circumstances.

I keep thinking about that poll question that comes up along the lines of “cares about people like me.” What if “me” is a lunatic? Wouldn’t that be a case where it makes sense to avoid “people like me”?

Take for example, the Family Security Matters people. If you’re like me, you picture the Brady Bunch dressed up like commandos. Already, the kind of folks I’d stay away from.

As it turns out they’ve given their top 10 most dangerous groups award for 2007. Al Queda is not on the list. Think Progress is, however. Here’s their explanation of what makes Think Progress so dangerous:

When you and I think about progress, we think about securing our borders, fighting terrorism, and making the Bush tax cuts permanent. The progressive organization Think Progress, however, has something different in mind – the unrelenting bashing of everything Right is the way to progress in America. Think Progress is comprised of your standard progressive hypocrites who follow the mantra “state falsities enough until people think they’re facts.”

They believe in “vast Right wing conspiracies”. According to Think Progress, the Right is engaged in a massive “disinformation campaign” on the “manmade” global warming issue, and is upset that the Right has criticized Al Gore’s Nobel Prize win. Ironically, it’s Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” that has been accused by the scientific community of being misleading, incorrect and pushing disinformation. But, like many issues the Left holds near and dear, if you point out the falsities in Gore’s phony research, you hate the environment.

It’s not that Think Progress, or the left in general enjoys bashing groups like Family Security Matters. The left thinks you’re bat doo-doo crazy, and shakes their heads in bewilderment at everything you say. And that those of you how aren’t on the payroll of the RNC are blind followers of the cult of Bush.

Anyway, I’m slightly miffed that no one finds Drinking Liberally threatening enough to get one of these awards.

The Authoritarians (pdf) is a book made available by Bob Altemeyer, associate professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba. It explains a lot about how the Bushies and Cheneyites are behaving towards Iran.

Take the outcome of one experiment. In the following, RWA (Right-Wing Authoritarians) refers to the degree that one tends to submit to authority figures.

High RWAs tend to feel more endangered in a potentially threatening situation
than most people do, and often respond aggressively. In 1987 my colleague Gerry
Sande and I had five-man teams of male introductory psychology students role-play
NATO in an “international simulation” involving (they thought) another team of
students playing as the Warsaw Pact. Some of the NATO teams were composed
entirely of low RWA students, and other NATO teams were stocked entirely with
highs. (We experimenters secretly played the Warsaw Pact.) The simulation began
with a couple of ambiguous moves by the Warsaw Pact, such as holding military
exercises earlier than anticipated, and withdrawing divisions to rear areas (possibly for
rest, or –as Dr. Strangelove might argue–possibly for redeployment for an attack).
The NATO teams could respond with nonthreatening or threatening moves of varying
magnitudes. But if they made threats, the Warsaw pact responded with twice as much
threat in return, and the NATO team would reap what it had sown as an escalation of
aggressive moves would likely result.

The low RWA teams did not interpret the ambiguous moves at the beginning
of the game as serious threats and thus seldom made threatening moves. The high
RWAs on the other hand usually reacted to the opening Warsaw Pact moves
aggressively, and sowed a whirlwind. Over the course of the simulation, the high
RWA teams made ten times as much threat as the low teams did, and usually brought
the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Sound familiar?

I’ve been following Current TV since it began broadcast on August 1, 2005. I had more than casual interest. I was trying to put together a weekly program using shorts from the Cambridge Fringe Festival, interviews with comics, and flash animations I’d produced under the banner of FringeTV around the same time frame.

The first time I checked out the Current TV website, I knew they were doing what I had wanted to do. In other circumstances I would probably have been jealous, but this was Al Gore after all, and we were all still coping with a post Bush v. Gore world.

I watched short documentaries of people sharing their experiences of what it meant to get hassled for wearing an ipod on the streets of New York, or protests for affordable housing in Paris, or why an olympic gymnast took up skateboarding. It was all well done, without being slick.

Unlike YouTube, I could watch it, and not be turned off. Was it edgy at the beginning? Yes, in the sense that the content came from their viewers, but no, they avoided controversial political topics. That was 2 years ago, though, which is like dog years in internet time. Or the time between Red Sox world series victories to a Red Sox fan.

Eventually, I started to watch the Current TV cable broadcast. At first it was to waste time between doing other things. Then the Joe Hanson shorts really caught on with me. I started to look forward to the next time he’d bring up obscure literary allusions to red necks. The coverage overseas was very good. I never thought about fashion in Hong Kong before, but it made me realize more than ever before that DC doesn’t actually have fashion in the conventional sense of that word. And, Laura Ling’s coverage of the situation vis a vis Turkey and Iraq has been very informative. If Judy Woodruff ever watches Laura Ling’s mega pods, I’m concerned that she may retire. Okay, that wasn’t a concern so much as a sincere wish.

Tonight was the first time I realized that given a choice between PBS and Current TV, I go with the latter. With the notable exception of Bill Moyers and Frontline. And make no mistake, Moyers and Frontline are the crown jewels in non-fiction television right now. But, they’re not 24 hours a day.

One of the reasons that the fascist piglets at places like NRO hate Hollywood so much is that it has the power to look at… what do you call them? Ideas.

And Rendition, the movie, is enough of a blockbuster (bookbluster?) to raise some visibility to the notion of extraordinary rendition by allegedly democratic republics. Which may raise questions like: is this something we can be proud of?

I lived through the Cold War. What I took from that era is that we would never condone things like secretly taking people off the streets and sending them to invisible prisons to torture them. That’s what made us the good guys and the folks who ran the Kremlin the bad guys.

I like the way Atrios puts it:

As Glenn Greenwald keeps saying over and over again, the Washington conventional wisdom is that spying on Americans without warrants and locking them up indefinitely without charges are the Very Serious Positions. This is a deeply sick political culture in a deeply corrupt and deeply sick city, composed of people who have turned their backs on everything most of us grew imagining this country stood for, and it’s important to support and be inspired by those who “dare” to stand up for what we all thought were American values.

I’ll add that in a WaPo Opinion piece Daniel Benjamin debunks the 5 Myths About Renditions. Kinda sorta, but not really: (emphasis mine)

4. Rendition is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

Well, not historically. The guidelines for Clinton-era renditions required that subjects could be sent only to countries where they were not likely to be tortured — countries that gave assurances to that effect and whose compliance was monitored by the State Department and the intelligence community. It’s impossible to be certain that those standards were upheld every time, but serious efforts were made to see that they were. At a minimum, countries with indisputably lousy human rights records (say, Syria) were off-limits. Another key difference: Renditions before Bush were carried out to disrupt terrorist activity, not to gather intelligence or interrogate individuals.

Now, though, the Bush team seems to have dramatically eroded such safeguards. The administration has apparently sent someone to Syria, and Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, was evidently boosted in Macedonia and interrogated in Afghanistan in a manner that sure sounds like torture. In light of this and other revelations, the criticism that the administration has “defined down” torture looks pretty persuasive. It’s probably a good bet that Congress or the next administration will reform the program, or abolish it outright.

Rick Perlstein points out that the failure to over-ride the S-CHIP veto is both a vote against our children and our military:

The consequences of the conservative strategy of obstructing every piece of popular legislation that would improve the lot of ordinary Americans spread like kudzu. The Military Times points to one that escaped most of our notice. Did you know that the House attached to its reauthorization and expansion of SCHIP an amendment to “expand family leave rights for people caring for wounded service members”? That it “was endorsed by a bipartisan presidential commission”?

Here’s how it works:

Under the approved legislation, which lawmakers are calling the Support for Injured Servicemembers Act, spouses, parents, children or next of kin of service members who suffered serious injury or illness while on active duty could get up to six months of unpaid leave, in addition to vacation, personal or sick leave, to help with the care of the injured service member. Employers could require certification of how the time off was used.

Current law provides only 12 weeks of unpaid leave and does not extend the time off to parents, siblings or other relatives who could end up being the closest living kin of a severely wounded service member.

While I type this the gang at NRO are high-fiving themselves. K-Lo has just put up this quote from Roger Hickey. It’s safe to assume that it’s been using derisively (the K-Lobster labels it “Also for the Starkly Outrageous File”):

One hundred and fifty-six House Members declared themselves enemies of children and families with this vote. Ignoring the will of the people, a conservative minority in the House sustained the president’s veto and denied nearly 5 million children access to health insurance. Upholding the president’s veto is only the latest obstruction to progress by Washington conservatives.

An overwhelming majority of Americans support populist reforms, but conservatives have repeatedly used filibusters and vetoes to block this progress and then they hypocritically blame others for a lack of congressional action. The record is clear. Congressional conservatives and the president are the culprits who have stood in the way of a new progressive direction for our nation. Our children will pay a steep price for their cruel politics.

Ken Roth (executive director of Human Rights Watch) asks at a WaPo blog:

“What is the best way to foster democracy in Iran?”

Some skeptics might note that, technically, Iran is older than the US (wikipedia):

Iran is one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilizations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to 4000 BCE, making it a possible candidate for the earliest human civilization.[7][8][9] Throughout history Iran has been of geostrategic importance because of its central location in Eurasia. Iran is a founding member of the UN, NAM, OIC, OPEC, ECO, and seeks to join the SCO.

This makes some pointy-headed skeptics question whether we should be imposing our will on Iran, or even giving them advice. Pish tush! Where does an 800 pound gorilla sleep? Well, technically, they sleep in nests they build in trees, but that’s not the point. They’d sleep in the White House, if they wanted to. For all I know, they do sleep in the White House.

The point is that we need to remake Iran in our own image, now that the surge has succeeded in Iraq.

Here’s some specific things we should try right away:

• Take away the vote from people who live in Iraq’s capital, Tehran. Just like here in DC.
• Currently, the Iranian president is elected by universal suffrage with everyone 15 or older allowed to vote. I think you’ll agree that our electoral college system is much simpler. Florida and Ohio have simplified it to the point where you can predict the result based on the party of the Secretary of State.
• Iran currently separates the president and commander-in-chief roles. That’s got to change. What self-respecting country would prevent their president from bombing the crap out of other countries? Without the God-like power of life and death over others, being president would lack dignity.