Decrepit Old Fool

Our top story is the Chicago Tribune endorsing Obama.  So what, you say?  Just this: in 163 years, this is the first time they’ve endorsed a Democrat.  You’d have to be a regular Trib reader to understand what a big deal this is:

…Many Americans say they’re uneasy about Obama. He’s pretty new to them. We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready…

The Trib hasn’t gone all flaky-liberal, believe me. Go read their whole post. The last paragraph, in particular, is amazing.

Updates:

• And now Colin Powell, too! (HT Webs05)

• My photos of the Planetarium at Illinois State University

Last week I wrote about a presidential candidate’s disparagement of the projector at the famous Adler Planetarium in Chicago as “an overhead projector” – as if it were a piece of office equipment.  Many communities have planetariums of varying sizes and complexity, and Tuesday I received a wonderful tour of the our little planetarium at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois:

Director Thomas Willmich described the history and mission of the planetarium, and its role in science education for the area:

• 200 shows each year for ten thousand school children
• Public shows for three to five thousand community visitors each year
• Resource for the physics and astronomy community at the University
• Built in 1964, is a ‘naming opportunity’ for a donor who would like to see the facility modernized with new equipment and seating
• “The most common causes of planetarium closures are electrical fires and state governors”

Think about what that means for science education in the community.  This ain’t something you can do in a regular classroom, folks.  And the facility often sees cross-generational visits: a grandparent who visited when it was new, and parent and child.  It isn’t the Adler but it’s ours and facilities like it make a real contribution to science education across the country.

The same presidential candidate had another debate night ‘fore last, and again he mentioned the Adler planetarium,  and again dismissed funding for what he disparaged as an ‘overhead projector’.  How he thinks our country can succeed without doing everything we can to inspire science education is beyond me. 

Updates:

• Vote For Science: An open letter to John McCain regarding planetaria and science education

McCain protests that he’s “not Bush” and says to Obama, “If you wanted to run against Bush, you should have run four years ago!”

Hey, great little zinger, Senator.  Think that up your own self without help?  Yeah, you are a true maverick, your own man:

And Obama’s new ad on your protest:

For those having difficulty telling Senator McCain from George Bush, I can help: McCain is the really, really old one with epic anger-management problems.

The National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, is supposed to be an intellectual Conservative magazine.  Until this week his son, Christopher Buckley, wrote the influential back-page column.  He also writes a blog, on which he endorsed Barack Obama last week.  And the magazine received so much outraged hate mail that he was forced to resign. As he put it,

“Within hours, poor NR was being swamped with furious mail, ‘Cancel my subscription, this is betrayal, Judas, Benedict Arnold,’ ” Buckley, 56, said in an interview. “I thought the decent thing to do would be to offer to resign the column. Well, they accepted it.”

Buckley owns a large chunk of the magazine, though, and is on the board.  Extraordinary he didn’t just pull rank.  I respected his father and I respect him, but the magazine got it wrong.  Buckley’s father sometimes endorsed liberal candidates “if they met his standards” and things went on as before.  In the intervening years, the Republican party has morphed into an angry mob.  (Credit the loss of leaders like William F. Buckley and the ascendancy of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly)  The magazine would be well rid of those readers.

American Experience: It’s difficult to imagine a more emotional piece of music only 43 seconds long…

Tonight’s episode is about Richard Nixon.  The episodes I’ve seen so far have been just stunningly excellent.  The whole Presidents series Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Bush is available as a set.  I hope they also do Eisenhower, Kennedy, Clinton, Bush II and someday… Obama.

While I was taking the picture, the homeowner rode up to say hello.  He said that in the last election, his Kerry sign was stolen a couple times, and now it’s happening with his Obama signs.  So they’re taking the signs in at night.

Googling the phrases ‘Obama sign stolen’ and ‘McCain sign stolen’ each yielded over 1.5 million hits.  Why do people steal campaign signs?  Do they even understand what America is about?  To say nothing of simply respecting someone else’s property…

John McCain’s trying to score political points; I understand that.  But on more than one occasion, he’s done so by showing that, after all, science doesn’t really matter to him.  He’s mocked the bear genetics study and just last week dismissed a planetarium projector as “an overhead projector”.  It’s not just a political fib, it’s a destructive lie.  Here, take a look at an example of what the candidate called “an overhead projector”.

Planetarium projectors are marvels of engineering and science in themselves, and over their approximately 40-year lifespan they can introduce hundreds of thousands of people to scientific wonders of our cosmos.  In our country, slipping as we are in so many areas of education, we need to let children know that something lies over the horizon.  And since most of our nation’s children live in brightly-lit urban areas, they may never truly see the night sky in its immensity, any other way.

“Never before was an instrument created which is so instructive as this; never before one so bewitching; and never before did an instrument speak so directly to the beholder. The machine itself is precious and aristocratic… The planetarium is school, theater, and cinema in one classroom under the eternal dome of the sky.”
- Elis Stromgren

Kids won’t be driven to stick to the toughest science and mathematics studies by the prospect of some unimaginable and unimaginably distant job in industry.  They need serious inspiration – the kind that lifts the soul above today’s discomfort and tomorrow’s obstacles.  They need museums and planetariums and chemistry classes and science programming and nature field trips.  And we need them to have those things. 

Obama gets it: he has been endorsed by 63 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences.  If we’re ever going to dig ourselves out of the economic hole in which we find ourselves, it won’t happen by plodding along with our eyes on the sidewalk.  We need to look farther ahead than that.

And there’s something else just as important as innovation and economic development.  Bill Clinton put it this way: “People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”  It’s one thing not to put your light under a bushel, but you need to keep it burning, too.

Updates:

• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy describes what a planetarium projector is and does

• Our university has a small planetarium: I’ll try to contact the director tomorrow and see if he’ll let me in to get a picture of the projector for you.  It isn’t as fancy as the one linked above but it has the same soul. 
• One point in favor of planetarium projectors is that you cannot show PowerPoint presentations on them.  They’re only good for showing the universe.
• Humor: Obama’s been practicing that look into the future!
• Vote For Science: An open letter to John McCain regarding planetaria and science education

Saw this resident of our campus on the way to work this morning:

No time to get my big camera out of the backpack, just grabbed the little one with the dusty lens out of my pocket.  In this picture, she’s trying to figure out where to go – there were three people with cameras less than 20 feet away from her.

There have been rumors of a fox on campus for months, and no wonder.  It’s a safe place to live, unless you’re a rabbit… “Nature’s snack-pack”.

I read a lot of print magazines – seven regularly and two or three others every other subscription cycle.  But if I had to take only one magazine, it would be The Economist.  Although considerably to the right of me politically, it is a solid news magazine with very high editorial standards; something I cannot say about Time, Newsweek, or US News & World Report.

The Economist is consistently conservative, pro free-market, pro-Republican, pro-business.  I’m telling you so you’ll understand how deeply, painfully betrayed they must feel to finally print this;

PLENTY of people can be blamed for the calamity on Capitol Hill on September 29th. Two-hundred and twenty-eight congressmen decided they were ready to risk another Great Depression. Nancy Pelosi made an idiotic speech damning the Republicans. Sheriff McCain claimed that he was going to ride into town to sort out the mess—and promptly fell off his horse. But there is no doubt where the lion’s share of the blame belongs: with George Bush. The dismal handling of the financial crisis over the past fortnight is not only a comment on Mr Bush’s personal shortcomings as a leader. It is a comment on the failure of his leadership style over the past eight years…

The Economist: Reaping The Whirlwind, Bush’s sad finale

There’s more, and it gets kind of nasty.  It’s not what you expect to see on the pages of. The. Economist.

What good did it do, early on, for Molly Ivins (who knew Mr. Bush better than anyone else in media) to report on his gubernatorial fecklessness?  Did anyone pay attention?  When watchdog groups brought up his toxic environmental record, the sorry state of Texas’ finances after his administration, the wreckage in the Texas educational system, or the fact that he couldn’t make money in Texas even with a football team or an oil company?

Remember the scene in the movie, I, Robot, where the robots had all gone crazy and taken over the world, and Will Smith says to Bridget Moynahan;

Y’know, somehow “I told you so” just doesn’t quite say it.

There’s a large chunk of the body politic that is so insecure that they fall for anyone who talks tough, no matter how empty (or even hypocritical) their rhetoric.  They want someone to promise them safety, no matter how absurd the terms. They’ll stand behind anyone who refuses to acknowledge the limitations of raw power.  They’re scared to death of nuance, of complexity, and suspicious of letting human intellect pull ahead of ideology.  Listening and understanding seem like weakness to them, and most of all they’re terrified of the feminine in anything.  They’re the hangers-on around the schoolyard bully, volunteering a cheer when he breaks the smart kid’s glasses and pushes him in the mud.

And after their old champion sits broken and discredited, amid the Pyrrhic legacy of his arrogance and gut instincts, they disavow him and choose a new champion.  A man who makes snap decisions, leads with his gut, who is scarcely distinguishable from their old champion.  And the new guy says he will be an agent of change, because he sold his soul for a running mate who was hand-picked by the kingmakers of the religious right.

It’s been said the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.  “Change” from abysmal to infernal is still travel in the same wrong direction.  But that’s what we’ll get with McCain in the White House.  He’s a make-believe Maverick, and our country is in no condition for another one of those. 

RESOURCES:

• Inside the angry, angry brain of John McCain

• Best campaign ad to date
• Rolling Stone: Make-Believe Maverick
• (of little relevance but included because it totally cracks me up) The funniest thing ever written about The Economist (scroll down)

I spent the weekend painting, or rather repairing and and painting just one sun-blasted section of the house.  Home ownership is not something from which I derive a great deal of joy and pleasure.

• I pressure-washed the siding which removed unsound, degraded surface leaving only solid wood (though somewhat more textured than I like) Some of the siding was cracked, so I wedged open the cracks with a chisel and forced in waterproof Gorilla Glue.
• They don’t make the kind of siding on my house anymore, unless I wanted to special-order a “square” of it.  So I manufactured a single piece of siding, or something that looks like it from a distance anyway, to replace a section that was beyond repair.
• For grafting in a new piece, you can make a laser-precise cut in siding with a square and 20 swipes of a box knife.
• My house is not a stunning example of fine workmanship.  In three to five years, I’m going to (have someone) pull all the siding off and install a proper vapor barrier, plus vinyl siding.
• A “Paint pad” beats a brush or roller hands down.  Of course you still need a brush for the fussy touch-up stuff. I used Valspar Ultimate self-priming paint; it smelled like ammonia.  Will let you know in a couple years if “self-priming” has any real meaning.  It is damned hard to wash off your hands though.
• If you use caulk the same color as your paint it saves a lot of time.  One advantage of off-the-shelf colors.

My hip is killing me and my shoulder isn’t real happy either. Next up: rebuilding the back steps.  And the house needs a new roof.  The furnace is pushing 20yrs.  Water heater questionable…