More Aussie Musical Brilliance

Check out this video for "Walking on a Dream," which we have been watching on "Rage" for the past two months. The duo, known as Empire of the Sun, released their first album on Oct. 4th and were featured in an article in The Weekend Australian. The shirtless guy will look familiar to those of you who know PNAU's "Baby."

Schadenfreude

schadenfreude |ˈ sh ädənˌfroidə| (also Schadenfreude)
noun.  pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.

We like to believe that the world is just.  Good things happen to good people, and bad things, eventually, will happen to bad people.  This belief, known as the just world hypothesis in social psychology, even guides our attributions about why some people are homeless, for example, and others successful.  We tend to believe that people deserve what happens to them because the world is just.

Well, in contrast to most people, I tend to find disconfirmation of the just world hypothesis all the time.  It seems like just the opposite is true:  good things happen to bad people--they rarely seem to get caught or face any negative consequences for their actions.  Therefore, the news yesterday that O.J. Simpson was found guilty of armed robbery was a complete shock.  Then there was the NY Times article titled "Top Psychiatrist Didn't Report Drug Makers's Pay" that really surprised me.  Charlie Nemeroff, a prominent research psychiatrist at Emory University, appears to be guilty of quite a few violations of federal and ethical guidelines regarding conflict of interest:

In one telling example, Dr. Nemeroff signed a letter dated July 15, 2004, promising Emory administrators that he would earn less than $10,000 a year from GlaxoSmithKline to comply with federal rules. But on that day, he was at the Four Seasons Resort in Jackson Hole, Wyo., earning $3,000 of what would become $170,000 in income that year from that company — 17 times the figure he had agreed on.

I have never met Nemeroff personally, but I have known many people over the past decade who have.  For several years he has bragged about his consulting relationships with the major drug companies while supposedly conducting bias-free research on various treatments for mental illness.  He has told audiences that he didn't have any real conflicts of interest because he accepted consulting fees from all the major companies.  The problem, of course, is that it would be difficult for any normal human being to ignore the luxurious perks and the hefty consulting fees that such companies provide.  This is exactly why the federal government wants institutions like Emory to insure that their investigators are not unduly influenced by private companies while supposedly doing research for the public at large.

Everyone who is been in Nemeroff's sphere of influence has known for years that he received a lot of drug company money, and, as I said, he also publicly acknowledged it.  There was an arrogance about the way he believed that he was above it all.  In the Times article,  an except of a 2000 letter shows how he vaguely threatened Emory when they started to question his activities:

“Surely you remember that Smith-Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals donated an endowed chair to the department and that there is some reasonable likelihood that Janssen Pharmaceuticals will do so as well,” he wrote.

“In addition, Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals has funded a Research Career Development Award program in the department, and I have asked both AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Meyers [sic] Squibb to do the same. Part of the rationale for their funding our faculty in such a manner would be my service on these boards.”

It's clear that Emory's School of Medicine and its Department of Psychiatry have benefitted enormously from Nemeroff's dubious activities, and it probably explains why they tolerated what he was doing for as long as they did.  I guess that Emory's officials had long known that Nemeroff was receiving more than $10,000 a year from GSK, but chose to look the other way because of their own conflict of interest.  Really, the Emory community is small enough to find these things out with just a few questions. 

But what gave me particular pleasure in this case was the fact that this arrogant academic bully has finally been caught.  He (with help from his cronies, who I hope are next on the list) has run his area of psychiatry like a mafia drug lord.  His 850 publications include many in which he had absolutely no role but being the chair of the department.  Stories of his interactions with students, colleagues, and training fellows that I have heard over the years have always been laced with instances of bullying, arrogance, and sexism.  Simply put, he has been an enormous jerk whose influence over other people's careers has been unchecked. 

In an update to the Times article, I see that Emory has announced that Nemeroff has “voluntarily step[ped] down as chairman of the department, effective immediately, pending resolution of these issues.” My guess is that Emory will eventually receive some sort of sanction from this, and Nemeroff will have to leave the university for good. And on that day I'll have a private toast to the fact that there is one less a*hole in academia to make our lives miserable.

Bush Doctors

The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia provides "services to improve the health of people living in the bush."  On our honeymoon in 2003, our train journey across Australia included a stop at Broken Hill, NSW, where we visited the Broken Hill Flying Doctors Base.  My wife, V., watched The Flying Doctors TV series back in the UK when she was younger, so she was quite excited about seeing an actual base where specially-equipped planes departed several times a day to fly to remote places in the Australian outback to conduct clinics and provide emergency health services.  At the souvenir shop she bought a rain slicker with the Royal Flying Doctors logo, but, ironically, we have yet to find that jacket since moving to Oz.

Anyway, as you might know, V. is a child psychiatrist working in one of the Brisbane hospitals.  She was recently asked to provide occasional video consultation services to mental health workers out in the Queensland bush. One of her first consults was with a clinician in a remote town in Queensland (over a 10-hour drive from Brisbane), whose patient had to travel 100 miles across the bush to go to the nearest town for services. Because there are just a handful of psychiatrists available to serve a region about the size of Alaska, these videoconferences are vital for the delivery of mental health services. We're not sure whether the Royal Flying Doctors ever fly psychiatrists out to the bush, but I'm pretty sure V. would volunteer to do it without hesitation, if the opportunity arises.

Robot Love

I spent a large part of yesterday at the local Indooroopilly Shopping Centre...by myself.  I desperately needed to expand my summer wardrobe.  After spending way too much at Myer, I headed over to Target (which isn't the same as the American store) to find some really cheap clothes.  I found a nice display of $25 denim jeans that were sorted by metric size.  My iPhone's unit converter rescued me here, but I was then horrified to see that these jeans didn't independently vary in length.  That is, they are designed for some "average" man's body where the waist and length perfectly correlate.  I happen to be an outlier on this little regression line, so I had to go for a slightly smaller waist in order to get some pants that were slightly too long.  Everything was fine in the changing booth, but I discovered this morning that I couldn't put anything in my pockets because the jeans were too tight! (Wasn't there a "Seinfeld" episode like this?) Awwwww!

So, after several hours of agony in this rather limited 

Australian retail scene, I was really missing all those huge stores back in America.  Do you know the kind--where you have to drive across a giant parking lot just to get to the next store over? And then you have to consult a map near the store's entrance to locate the specific items you're seeking?  And everything always seems to be on sale.  Well, due to the melancholy brought on by these memories of gluttony, I decided to take a break and watch "WALL-E," which opened up in Australia just a few weeks ago.  I spend a lot of time watching Pixar films (over and over) with Will, so it was a pleasure to get the chance to see a new one.  I think it's another masterpiece.  And, interestingly, it really is another example of the speculative fiction genre that I wrote about earlier.  Briefly, the future of the Earth depicted here is one in which there has been so much pollution that the population has had to leave the planet (around 2100) while robots are left behind to clean up the mess.  The story in the movie begins 700 years later, in which WALL-E appears to be the only robot still working on the mess.  The descendants of the original humans who left the planet on a gigantic cruise ship are now all rolly-polly and incapable of getting out of their floating lounge chairs.  They just eat and drink and lay about all day long.  Meanwhile, back on Earth, we see many shots of enormous mountains of trash interspersed with views of vacant humongous box retailers where the trash was originally purchased.  Yes, exactly the same stores that I was missing back in the States just moments before I went into the theatre were now shown as one of the causes of an apocalyptic future.  The message about rampant consumerism leading to our eventual demise is abundantly clear in this movie, and I soon felt guilty about my own wasteful ways.

What is also interesting about the movie, however, is how America-centric it is.  That is, the film suggests that Americans single-handedly destroyed the Earth with their pollution, and it was only Americans who fled in their cruise ships.  Moreover, it's an American captain 700 years later who comes to realise that "the humans" need to go back and take care of the planet. In fact, the later re-habitation of the planet starts in New York with a bunch of Americans.  Not one other nationality is ever mentioned in the film.  Now that I live abroad, I am particularly sensitive to this American-centrism, so maybe I am over-analysing things here.  Indeed, another blog I found talks about the gender, racial, and anti-fat aspects of the film, but neither the original post nor the comments that follow it mention anything about the Americanism of this film. But, perhaps it is intentional.  Maybe the film's creators were trying to speak directly to Americans because they are such huge polluters compared to everyone else.  Then again, it does seem like the future of our planet shouldn't be determined by one country in particular, although many films, including "Independence Day," have depicted America saving the day.  Often we Americans get to play both the villain and the hero in these narcissistic fantasies.  It's pretty easy then to understand why some people elsewhere in the world might resent us--they only get to play the extras. 

The Plague

A lead story on today's Courier-Mail web page:

Plague of Yobs Hit Schools

AN alarming spike in student suspensions for being aggressive, disobedient, taking drugs and wagging school is plaguing the state's classrooms.

A few translations for my non-Aussie readers:

yob is short for yobbo, "an uncouth person"
wagging school means playing truant

And plague and plaguing are favourite words of the Aussie tabloid 'journo,' indicating "panicky sensationalism of an ordinary social problem."

Self-Promotion

I recently received a group email invitation from a professor that he sent to a discussion list, announcing his plans to publish an edited volume in an area of psychology in which I work.  The email (sent to several hundred people) stated "Your area of research will fit well in this edited volume." Of course, despite the fact that this flattery was entirely anonymous, I took the bait and explored the invitation more fully.  It turned out that, if my chapter were accepted for this book, it would be published by this professor's small university press in his small European country.  That means that it would probably not appear on anyone's radar nor in any major library.  What's more, I discovered that this professor (who apparently works in my area, but was previously unknown to me) engages in a type of self-promotion that I found rather curious.  For example, going to his web page, a pop-up window announced that he received the 2007 Professor of the Year Award from "Cambridge, UK."  That sounds prestigious until you learn that this award comes from one of those Who's Who-type ego-scams, which begins with an announcement that "You have been selected for a prestigious award," but which requires $475 to pay for the award to be sent to you, and another $500 to attend the awards ceremony.  How foolish I was to believe that any award that I received should actually involve me receiving something at no cost!  In addition, my would-be editor also has his own Wikipedia entry that touts his many contributions to my field.  Again, I never knew he even existed before he sent that email, so I am impressed by his rather bold pronouncements about his contributions to psychology.  

Perhaps this professor's actions should serve as a model of how I could raise my own visibility.  I could start by sending $500 to Cambridge, UK to get one of those prestigious awards and then writing a glowing Wikipedia entry about myself that mentions my receiving the Cambridge award.  Maybe I could host a conference in my name ("The Eric Vanman Symposium on All Things Important") or start a charitable organisation named for my son.  Maybe I could even commission The Veronicas to write a song about me.  There are so many possibilities...

An Old Dollar Bill

Several years ago I regularly registered U.S. dollar bills at the Where's George? website. The idea was (is) that I would stamp the bill with special instructions about the website, where the next owner could enter the serial number of the bill and thereby update its whereabouts. I did this for thousands of bills, but then stopped doing it in 2004 or so.  At one time I was one of the top Where's George users, and  I even attended a 'meeting' of Atlanta-area Where's George? users (yes, I am that exciting!). It turns out that most paper bills in the U.S. are removed from circulation after just a few years, so the chances of a bill still being out there after 3-4 years is quite small.

Well, today I received an email from Where's George? notifying me that one of my old bills was recently entered. Here's the link to the actual record, but I've also posted a screen shot of the information below. If you look at the bottom entry, you'll see that I entered this bill in Atlanta back in 2000, but the bill is still out there eight years later. It's been to Aruba and Puerto Rico according to the notes. And now it's stuck in New Jersey, where's it been sitting for three years.
Since 1984 Australia has used $1 and $2 gold coins instead of paper bills, so I won't be tracking money here. There are $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills. Each is a different colour, which means there is little confusion when I go digging for money in my wallet. Still, I wonder what the chances are that one of my Aussie dollars will end up in Mendham, NJ some day.

Straight Lines

I have only recently realised the greatness of Silverchair, an Australian band. Here's a video clip and the lyrics of their 2007 hit to help you start off the weekend right. I don't quite understand the full meaning of the song, but I'll get back to you on that...

Breathing from a hole in my lung
I had no one
But faces in front of me
Racing through the void in my head
To find traces of a good luck academy

Sparks ignite and trade them for thought
About no one
And nothing in particular
Washed the sickened socket and drove
Resent nothing
There's good will inside of me

Wake me up low with a fever
Walking in a straight line
Set me on fire in the evening
Everything will be fine
Waking up strong in the morning
Walking in a straight line
Lately I'm a desperate believer
But walking in a straight line

Something I will never forget
I felt desperate
And stuck to the marrow
Invisible to everyone else
I'm a sex change
And a damsel with no heroine

Wake me up low with a fever
Walking in a straight line
Set me on fire in the evening
Everything will be fine
Waking up strong in the morning
Walking in a straight line
Lately I'm a desperate believer
But walking in a straight line

I don't need no time to say
There's no changing yesterday
If we keep talking and
I keep walking in straight lines

Wake me up low with a fever
Walking in a straight line
Set me on fire in the evening
Everything will be fine
Waking up strong in the morning
Walking in a straight line
Lately I'm a desperate believer
But walking in a straight line

Global Changes

V. and I attended special public lectures last night delivered by two of the University of Queensland's most eminent professors, Paul Burn from the School of Molecular and Microbial Sciences, and John Quiggin from the School of Economics and Political Science.  They both conduct research on issues related to climate change.  Burn is developing cheap plastic solar panels and light displays, and one of his messages was that we need to set aside some of our non-renewable energy sources (e.g., oil) now to develop renewable energy ones.  Quiggin is focused on the impact of global warning on the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia's most significant agricultural area, which is quickly drying up.  One of his messages was that, although there's a lot of uncertainty about the future of the basin, it's no excuse for inaction now.

Since arriving in this country I have been repeatedly confronted with Australians' concerns about global warming.  Early last year the Howard government passed legislation to ban incandescent lightbulbs, which Quiggin referred to in his talk as a stupid purchase for a consumer to make, as their efficiency is woefully smaller than nearly all the alternatives.  Thank goodness, he implied, that the government decided to take away this decision from the consumer.  A great majority of grocery shoppers bring their own 'green' reusable bags to the stores here, rather than using plastic bags, and there's still a lot of discussion about whether plastic bags should just be banned outright.  At first V. and I were skeptical about reusable bags because we liked to use the plastic ones for nappies (diapers), but we have now changed our ways.  Recycling is much more extensive in Australia as well.   In Atlanta we sorted just our cans, bottles, and newspapers from the rest of the garbage, although most of our neighbors didn't even do that.  Here one can also recycle cardboard, jars, junk mail, and packaging, which really starts to add up.  As a final example, there are widespread public campaigns here to get people to reduce their energy and water consumption that I rarely, if ever, saw in the United States.

It might seem 'cute' that such a small country with a relatively tiny footprint on the world's greenhouse gas emissions is much more obsessed with global warming than the U.S., which is a much larger contributor by far.  My guess is that the typical Australian would in fact be shocked if they spent a week in an American home and saw how comparatively little concern there is for the environment there.  Not surprising, Australians are highly concerned about the American elections.  There are several reasons they should be, including the impact of the current financial crisis on their own markets, but Aussies are also watching what the next administration is going to do about developing renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gases.  A few sensible changes in America's energy policy, for example, would have a far greater impact on the future than if Queensland decides to ban plastic bags at the grocery store.

I believe that Australians are 'ahead' of the game on all this because they live in a place that is terribly susceptible to changes in the environment.  I think this entry from Wikipedia says it best:

By far the largest part of Australia is desert or semi-arid lands commonly known as the outback. Australia is the flattest continent, with the oldest and least fertile soils, and is the driest inhabited continent. Only the southeast and southwest corners of the continent have a temperate climate. Most of the population lives along the temperate southeastern coastline. The landscapes of the northern part of the country, with a tropical climate, consist of rainforest, woodland, grassland, mangrove swamps, and desert. The climate is significantly influenced by ocean currents, including the El Niño southern oscillation, which is correlated with periodic drought, and the seasonal tropical low pressure system that produces cyclones in northern Australia.[29] In June 2008 it became known that an expert panel had warned of long term, maybe irreversible, severe ecological damage for the whole Murray-Darling basin if it does not receive sufficient water by October.[30] Water restrictions are currently in place in many regions and cities of Australia in response to chronic shortages resulting from drought.[31] The Australian of the Year 2007, environmentalist Tim Flannery, predicted that unless it made drastic changes, Perth in Western Australia could become the world’s first ghost metropolis, an abandoned city with no more water to sustain its population.[32]

Of course, global warming is going to adversely affect everyone, but American politicians have been slow to realise this.  Here's hoping that they don't become too distracted by the screams of Wall Street so that they can begin to make a real difference sooner rather than later.

Watch Out for the Pergola

The weather news on www.weatherzone.com.au is so much more entertaining than my old standby back in the U.S., weather.com.  I have made other references to this web site before, but I found a story today that forced me to do a little research to understand its full meaning. The story itself was about a severe thunderstorm that hit Alice Springs yesterday.  Alice Springs is a small town nearly in the dead centre of Australia, hundreds of miles from nowhere.  We went there on our honeymoon in 2003, and loved it.   It's hot and dry for most of the year, although I noticed that it can be much colder there at night than in Brisbane during the winter.  Anyway, this freak thunderstorm yesterday caused some damage and widespread power outages in Alice Springs.  Although all of the "Todd river causeways are open," there was this warning:

Motorists are being asked to avoid Larapinta Drive between the Stuart Highway and Millner Road, where a pergola has blown onto the westbound lane.

Now, I'm growing used to the strangeness of the animals and plants here, so I assumed that a pergola was yet another strange living thing that I knew nothing about.  Those more cultured readers out there, however, are probably laughing at me now because you know that a pergola is just a structure commonly found in gardens.  I guess it must have caused quite a traffic jam there in Alice.

And now I know.

What Lies Beneath

We took a quick trip west to Rocks Riverside Park (in Seventeen Mile Rocks) late this afternoon, just before a thunderstorm rolled through at sunset. This is the largest and newest city park in Brisbane. Because it is set on the former site of the Queensland Cement quarry, it's full of unusual attractions. Will finds the various quarry structures fascinating, including this one that V. is telling him about. The old train tracks, massive drills, and rusty gears make the park feel a bit like an industrial ghost town of some long ago alien civilization. It is one of my favourites.

The Common Thread

When I was in junior high I owned an anthology of short stories in speculative fiction titled "Possibilities," which I just loved.  It included weird, twisted tales like those that appeared on "The Twilight Zone" and "Night Gallery."  One of my favourites was called "Button, Button." It's about a couple who find a box at their doorstep.  Inside is a mounted push button and a note explaining that the couple will receive $50,000 if they press the button.  The catch is that if they press it, someone in the world will die.  The rest of the story is about the couple's decision.  I hadn't thought about this for many years until I read that a new film, "The Box," starring Cameron Diaz, will be released next year based on this very story.  That led me to finding out the name of the author of "Button, Button," which turned out to be Richard Matheson (the guy in the picture above).  And that led me to reading more about his other contributions.  Oh my!  It turns out that many of my favourite stories, TV shows, and movies from the '70s and early '80s were written by Matheson, but I had no idea that he was the common thread among all these works.  Among his many accomplishments:

• he was one of the original writers for "Twilight Zone" and he wrote two episodes of "Night Gallery"
  
• he wrote the story and screenplay for "Duel," Steven Spielberg's first major work, which featured motorist Dennis Weaver being terrorised by an unknown trucker for the entire movie
  
• he wrote the novel and screenplay for "Somewhere in Time," starring Christopher Reeve (definitely a sentimental favourite of mine)
  
• he wrote one of the first teleplays that led to the eerie TV show "The Night Stalker," starring Darren McGavin, which was sort of the "X-files" of the early '70s
  
• he wrote the episode for the original "Star Trek" that introduced Spock's "Vulcan grip"
  
• he wrote "I am Legend," which has been filmed in various forms over the years
  

Here's a fuller summary of his life and work (he's now 82).  It's amazing that all of this stuff I loved during my adolescence were all products of the same mind.  Now I want to reread "Button, Button" and some of Matheson's other works, but I'll probably have to wait until I go back to the States in November to find his books, as I haven't been able to locate more than one of two of them here.

Small Doses of Hypocrisy Can Always Do You Good

I enjoyed this clip from "The Daily Show" (thanks for sending it, Matthew!):

Sometimes I Just Disappear

One of the more embarrassing aspects of being a researcher is that many of us are obsessed with reading the reference sections of new articles in our field of interest to see whether we are cited.  In my case, possibly because of a drop in my productivity a few years ago, I am quite used to not finding my name listed in articles in my field. I can live with that, and I am now attempting to rectify this omission with greater productivity. However, every once in a while I come across a review article or a particular passage that is directly related to my published work but I am still not cited.  In the past week this has been a frequent experience while I was preparing a lecture on the social neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping.  Amazingly, researchers I know well who have attended my talks at various conferences or were even on the same conference panel as me, simply don't mention anything that I have ever done in the past 10 years in their articles.  It leaves me feeling a bit sad, and it reminds me of the way that Kip Williams describes what it's like when someone ostracises you.  I'm paraphrasing here, but he said that being shunned by others "is similar to what would happen if you were dead. You experience life as if you didn't exist."  When people I respect don't find any of my work relevant to theirs (although I find what they do highly relevant to mine!), it feels like I never existed.  If I don't exist, then it begs the question: What have I been doing these past fifteen years when I was conducting and writing up all this research?  In an occupation that has few rewards, recognition by one's peers becomes that much more important.

Here Comes the Judge

In the social neuroscience course that I am currently teaching, students put on a mock trial last week involving a defendant who supposedly had a brain injury that led him or her to commit a violent crime.  The course is broken into four tutorials ("discussion sections," in American parlance) with 25-30 students each, and I am teaching one of them, in addition to giving all the lectures.  Anyway, during the preceding week's tute, when the students were preparing their mock trial, I started asking them questions about the Australian/Queensland court system.  I was amazed that nearly everyone in the room had little or no knowledge about what actually happens in an Australian courtroom.  One student said, "we only know what happens in an American courtroom because of television."  When I asked, for example, if an Australian defendant has the right to choose whether he or she takes the witness stand (as they do in American courtrooms), my students had no idea.  When deciding on the order of events during the trial, we ended up relying on what they do in an American courtroom out of ignorance of what goes on in an Aussie one.  It was really quite astonishing to me that university students didn't know about their own local legal procedures and rights.  I have since confirmed some of those procedures and rights with my resident jury research expert, who informed me that some jury trials in Queensland will soon no longer require a unanimous verdict.  I am committed to learning more about all of this before I teach the course again.

In a small nation like Australia, it's perhaps not surprising that people can know more about some aspects of American society than their own, simply because of all the movies and television shows that come out of Hollywood.  I still find it unsettling that there are few Australian-produced dramas on television here.  Today's Australian-produced TV shows mainly consists of game/reality shows, sing-a-long and other talent contests, a handful of dramas, and perhaps one or two Aussie sitcoms.  The rest of the airtime is chock full of American sitcoms and crime dramas.  I still can't figure out how they manage to have their own television awards show here.  Thank goodness for the ABC and SBS.  Or, as an alternative, perhaps I should just pick up a good novel about an Australian barrister facing the perils of the High Court.  Do you have any suggestions?  Is there a sort of Aussie version of John Grisham out there, perhaps?

Not So Unique

Thanks to my settings on Google Alerts, I am notified the moment my name newly appears on a web page.  I set this up a few weeks ago, and didn't receive any notices for days.  But then, last week, I was notified that my name had just appeared on Classmates.com.  That's not such a big surprise, as I get messages from that site all the time.  However, it turned out that the Eric Vanman newly appearing on the site was ANOTHER Eric Vanman, who is a high school student in Canada.  Yes, there is another "me" out there and he still has nearly his entire adult life ahead of him!  I've spent my life believing that I was the only person in the world with my name, but it turns out that it was an illusion.  Still, this other Eric Vanman must be a distant relative.  I will have to investigate.

Because I CAN Vote

Update: My favourite blogger, Audra, has corrected a huge mistake I made in the original posting of this entry.  It turns out the Oct. 6 is the deadline for registering overseas absentee ballots, and 180 days before the election is when one can begin to apply for the ballot!  I can vote after all!  If any other American ex-pats are interested, check out this site, the Overseas Vote Foundation, where you can get all the (correct) details.

Stupid me.  I waited too long to look into how to register for an absentee ballot to vote in the upcoming U.S. election.  It turns out that the deadline for the application for registration is 180 days (6 months!) before the election, which I clearly missed.  Why so much time is required to process these applications makes little sense to me.  To make amends, however, I will continue to use space in my blog to broadcast sensible information and opinion about the election, in hopes that some of my far-right relatives decide to read it someday.

Today I want to point you to a blog entry that V. forwarded to me from an email from our friend Donna.  It's written by Deepak Chopra, a man I know little about, but I sure do like his blog.  Here's part of what he wrote on Sept. 4 about Sarah Palin, titled "Obama and the Palin Effect:"

I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin’s message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:

–Small town values — a nostaligic return to simpler times disguises a denial of America’s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.

–Ignorance of world affairs — a repudiation of the need to repair America’s image abroad.

–Family values — a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don’t need to be heeded.

–Rigid stands on guns and abortion — a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.

–Patriotism — the usual fallback in a failed war.

–”Reform” — an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn’t fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from “us” pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of “I’m all right, Jack,” and “Why change? Everything’s OK as it is.” The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

I am trying to stay optimistic about the future, but I am afraid that John McCain's crafty choice for VP is going to lead us all down the wrong path.

Another September 11th

As I finished the day in my office at work, I listened to the tracks of "America: A Tribute to Heroes."  These songs were recorded during that mysteriously produced show that appeared on all of the major American TV networks ten days after the 9/11 attacks.  I am not normally a patriotic person, but those weeks in 2001 deeply affected me and watching the concert that night while visiting my brother in Illinois did a lot to reduce the internal chaos I was experiencing at the time.  The album itself starts off with Bruce Springsteen's chilling "My City of Ruin," the lyrics of which were hauntingly appropriate for the moment, although Springsteen had written it months before.  Other highlights include Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind" and U2's "Walk On." In both of those tracks you can clearly hear Joel's and Bono's voices crack with the emotion that tainted everything that night.  The album ends with Willie Nelson leading a bunch of all-stars through a somewhat sad rendition of "America the Beautiful."  Listening to these songs on the seventh anniversary of that horrible day has left me with an overwhelming sense of homesickness.  I do miss the U.S.A.-- from sea to shining sea.

The End

I learned from a colleague today that the world will disappear into a black hole in the next month or two. A giant particle accelerator was switched on today in Switzerland, but it's what will happen next that worries my co-worker.  By November the researchers will begin the actual collisions of their particles in the accelerator, and that's when a black hole might form "accidentally." Today's New York Times article tries to reassure us by pointing out that since the 1840s there have been similar predictions of scientific doomsdays that, of course, didn't live up to their hype.  I really don't think that being sucked into a black hole is such a bad way to go--you and everyone you know (including Sarah Palin and Charlie Sheen) would disappear in less than a second.  We wouldn't even know that we had ever existed, nor would anyone else. In fact, your perception that you are reading this blog might just be the remnants of a dream that is drifting around in the emptiness of the universe forever.  And, isn't the risk of our complete annihilation really worth it, if it means that we may finally get to learn whether the Higgs boson actually exists?

My Electric Feel

Thanks to a recent Saturday morning viewing of "r a g e", I came across "Electric Feel" by MGMT. The trippy video I saw is available here on YouTube, but for some reason Sony BMG has decided to disable embedding. The video posted below is an older version, possibly made by a fan, but the music is the same.  Listening to it makes me start jumping around the office like a bonobo.



I think I like this one because I was called "Eric the Electric Banana Peel" when I was kid...