Elections get me obsessive.
The Internet — with its perpetual incoming tide of news and commentary — is my crack pipe.
But there are way too many important things going on in my world to waste a lot of energy and focus and time on an election I can do nothing to influence.
So, yeah, my plan is to read, and be aware, but don’t be obsessive.
Let’s see how I do.
It will be hard.
Good luck, but I see fail coming.
Well, one thing has been cleared up this week. Global warming must be real because Michael Mann has been cleared by some panel looking into something. Apparently the hockey stick is back and we are going to boil in our own fluids.
Just ask the Atlantic. Who knew that Jimmy Carter had scientists as speech writers?
Lexington – you don’t believe everything you read on the Internet do you? (or for that matter the newspapers or magazines)
If so I have some well meaning but misguided friends who feel they have to send me 20+ daily emails of unvarnished truth! I can refer them to you ;-)
Dan, you are a realist. But, I need your support in my struggle, and dude, I am just not feeling that from you right now.
Michael: how can we make money off of people who believe in the Hockey Stick?
Bill, uh, no thanks!
Michael: how can we make money off of people who believe in the Hockey Stick?
Pyramidal aluminum hats. There’s a fortune there for someone with marketing expertise.
I’ve been studying people like the Atlantic editor who thinks Michael Mann is vindicated. Of course my opinion means nothing. I was an engineer, then a doctor but never a “climate scientist.” The principle critic, who has demolished many of the pretensions of the alarmists, is also an amateur. Others, who have demolished the postulates of the alarmists are similarly science and mathematics oriented amateurs.
Th errors of the alarmists have been documented thoroughly but it has not gotten into the main stream media. It has, however, gotten into the common sense section of opinion and is demolishing the elites’ certainty.
They hate that.
Lex – I am an enabler, I will just admit it. Plus I enjoy your well thought out posts so I have some skin in the game by encouraging you to blog your arse off.
You *should* be obsessive, but only about stuff that you can personally do that would actually have an effect. Such things exist.
TML — such activities would be outside of my definition of “obsess”. But I agree with the substance of what you say.
I think Al Gore has cornered the market on making money from AGW. It is just amazing to watch this phenomenon. If it wasn’t destroying our economy, it would be amusing.
I have an excuse for my political-junkie addiction. I was born, raised, educated and worked in the “District of Confusion” for half a lifetime, so I have congenital low-grade Potomac Fever, which occurrence was occasional more like an attack of malaria, but now the mal aria indeed pervades our social atmosphere and changed the global climate. So, “Potomac Fever” is more like a a constant suffocating asthma than a controllable, seasonal allergy.
As government everywhere has grown from big to gargantuan, with the news-cycle propagating it politics to minute levels , one’s thinking is subject to incessant interference, confusing one’s own thought and stifling analysis of the facts of life, not withstanding the good will of one’s discernment and discrimination.
Although the abundance of news and commentary is seen as a blessed cornucopia of free speech, it floods the synapses, and indeed confines freedom of speech by monopolizing the thought with a cacophonous echoes of distracting commentary – and like the ear ringing of tinnitus it is inescapable and an unrelenting.
This is not to say that there are not illuminating, prescient and penetrating commentaries, but truly original political commentary is as likely to arise in today’s perusal as finding something of precious value while sorting through a trash dumpster. Meanwhile, one must endure the infectious links to the putrid refuse of the mass media and the blogosphere , and the inane chattering of the rats’ nest of stupidities.
I refuse to subject myself to the distinctly foreseeable horrors of this election cycle, which will be a plague of rage that could threaten social cohesion, and make resolution of the faults that shake the footings of our society unavoidable.