September 28, 2004

Suspended Disbelief and Boyle's Law.

I was listening to the radio, Cross Talk, to a discussion of presidential politics. The GropenFurhrer, Arnold himself, was telling how,when he came to the USA he listened to the presidential debates between Nixon and Humphrey and that debate convinced him to be a Republican. Cool story, huh? Nixon and Humphrey never debated. Following his trouncing by JFK, Nixon refused to debate. Arnold lied. He had a well embellished line about how, not speaking English, he had a friend translate and Nixon's words convinced him that he should be a Republican. He who controls the past controls the future...

I cannot understand why Kerry has not taken the initiative in this campaign and attacked on the grounds of Bush's several equivocations and outright lies to the American people. The term "high crimes and misdemeanors" might be a good campaign line. The Democrats have made themselves emasculated wimps, as if being left leaning is somehow a crime. Allowing the debate to be defined by the opposition is equivalent, in this case, to not debating.

A stupid move from Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) is to amend the constitution to allow foreign-born citizens who have lived in the US for over 20 years to be president. Just in time for Ah-nald.... Zig Heil. Why not make a reform that is fitting: disband the electoral college. No... That would make our candidates have to value each vote equally and would therefore make campaigns much more expensive. As it is, a candidate can campaign in California, Texas and New York, knowing that in these three states she or he can find the lion's share of the votes necessary for election. States like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida are the second share. If the electoral college were disbanded, then Wyoming could become as important as Rhode Island, or as California.

I am not in favor of opening the constitution for radical surgery, especially not with the neo-Nazis that are running the country holding the knife to the heart of our civil liberties.



Boyle's Law comes to mind... Speaking of politics, the realm of hot gases. It can be represented thusly: P1V1 = P2V2 That is to say that there is an inverse relationship of pressure to volume with any gas given that the temperature is constant.Such a Dubious Soul Thus, the greater the pressure, the lesser the volume and visa versa. I was thinking about the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more episodes of Star Trek than I can recall. There is the famous scene when Dave Poole wants to return to the Jupiter spacecraft. He has to open the spaceship from outside, blast himself in while waiting for the room to - wait for it - repressurize. OK... Why didn't the gas in his blood cause him to massively hemorrhage given the sudden drop in air pressure from what is presumably the equivalent of a day by the sea to no air pressure at all (to say nothing of the air in the lungs)? Another law comes to mind, one that is apropos more to literature than science: suspension of disbelief.

The idea of suspending what we know to be true for the sake of a story is as old as myth itself. Nobody really believed that it was turtles all the way down; that was a convenient image to explain what the mind could not yet prove. This makes sense in the realm of metaphor, but not in politics. In the real-world, presented with an absolute vacuum, the lack of pressure would cause a massive hemorrhage owing to the lack of pressure. The cold would have an effect, to be certain, too.

We suspend disbelief when we support the war in Iraq. We suspend disbelief when we believe Ah-nald's bald-faced lies about learning the truth about American politics by listening to a debate that never occurred and was embellished by details that transform an insult to our intelligence into an injury of the truth. "He that violates his oath profanes the divinity of faith itself..." As Cicero had it. But a triviality such as the truth never stood in the way of a good story... Suspend disbelief and trust in an imagined ideal reality that has nothing to do with what actually happened.



I guess Orwell was correct in his assertion that the person who controls the past will also control the future. I do worry about the state of the American Republic. Weapons of Mass destruction did not exist in Iraq, but we went in like Rambo in a jock-strap only to find that there were none, as the message span differently and it was revealed that we never really worried about these, it was the evil Saddam that we sought to depose. After all, we are the bastions of right and good - if not the truth - and have a moral obligation to depose whomever we wish so long as they are not playing according to our rules.

The USA has no moral right to impose "democracy" on another country, especially when its practice so severely limited within our own boarders.

Ah, but I am only a fool...