Dispatches from Life

I would like to feel thankful more often. I think thankfulness is a quick route to happiness (because if you’re truly thankful, how can you avoid feeling happy?), and thus I really enjoyed seeing this quote on The Happiness Project:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”
–Epicurus

May we all remember that today.

I feel the need to write my thoughts on the “scandal” being referred to as “Climategate.” In case you’ve missed it, here’s a summary from Brad Johnson of Think Progress’s Wonk Room:

Two weeks ago, thousands of illegally hacked emails from a British climate research center were dumped on a Russian webserver, timed to influence the politics of of the international climate negotiations commencing next week in Copenhagen, Denmark. Beginning Thanksgiving week, conservative media and Republican politicians have compared the climate scientists whose private emails were hacked to Hitler, Stalin, and eugenicists, saying they are involved in a global conspiracy to defraud and possibly take over the world. The Climategate “scandal” — a swiftboating intimidation and smear campaign against science — is the right-wing rage from Stephen Dubner to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck to Lou Dobbs. Like the original Watergate scandal involving right-wing operatives who burglarized the offices of their political opponents, the real crime is the original break-in.

Now, I haven’t been reading that much about this, because after determining that it wasn’t a big deal, I was not interested in hearing more right-wing hysteria. But as I understand it, the scientists in question were merely sexifying their data in order to make trends clearer. Furthermore, they weren’t doing so arbitrarily like so many of us would be prone to do, but instead were applying specific algorithms.
Also, as Jeff Masters of Weather Underground is quoted on Climate Progress, “Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change—which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines—is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists.”

Frankly, I’m pretty frustrated with our country’s traditional media for not asserting this point more into their conversations. David Roberts puts it really well (as he always does):

[The right-wing noise machine] is an industry that uses dishonesty to defend corporations. Plain and simple. Everyone ought to know that by now and it ought to frame media coverage of these dreary “skeptic” controversies. Yet the press seems to think that every new claim or contrived controversy from the industry deserves to be met with the same furrowed brow, the same quote and counter-quote presentation of “sides,” the same chin-scratching atmospherics of doubt. It’s always the world’s scientists and scientific institutions being asked to defend their integrity, not the professional dissemblers and character assassins.

We just need to keep these points in mind when we watch, read, or listen to the news these days, I guess.

I have been pursuing a radical course in the past few months, related to my aesthetic preference for minimalism, my upbringing with values of voluntary simplicity, and my philosophical interest in happiness. I have been Getting Rid Of Things. This sortie has been inspired by several assumptions/understandings:

• Material objects do not bring happiness. In fact, they sometimes impede it.
• The most aesthetically pleasing interiors for me are those with smooth, bare surfaces. Hard to have those when you have clutter.
• I would like to spend a significant junk of my young adulthood being itinerant. Heaps of possessions don’t do you much good when you need to pack up and move frequently.
• Waste sucks, and having things you never use is wasteful, of space, of your energy, and of manufacturing to create those things.
• It’s easier to clean your space when you have less stuff!
• To survive, we need little in the way of material objects. Beyond what’s necessary, stuff takes up mental energy.
• Less stuff allows you to focus on things that make you happy! Like food, and friends, and games, and music!

So! After several months of rejecting objects bit by bit, I finally got to the point where I felt I could inventory all of my belongings. I did this several years ago, perhaps before going abroad. It’s really interesting seeing how much stuff you really have.

Now, the majority of my clothes are out on the line drying, and I grouped some items together (socks, pens, contents of file folders), however:

I have roughly 260 things.

Does having so few things make me happy? No. But it does feel liberating. And liberty feels pretty darn good.

Have you had similar experiences with flushing unnecessary junk out of your life? Are you shocked from disagreement? Do you have other thoughts on this matter? I’d love to hear them!

I just made some minor changes to the site design, noticeable mainly in the menu. It’s bigger now, easier to read, no longer has the old drop-down (which didn’t work in IE anyway), and is generally more aesthetically pleasing. Also, see my new bio here.

In cleaning out my room, I’ve encountered a number of thoughts I wrote down in the past. Here’s one:

“All the (events, experiences, information) that shape what/how people think/do, they all come in order. But when a person is going through their life, having experiences, learning, all this stuff comes in in a different order than it does for other people. So if I’m reading a book, and there’s this movie I haven’t seen, and the author saw the movie and was influenced by it, I come out of the book getting something different than if I’d seen the movie.” 6/8/04 11:40pm

I think what I was getting at was that there’s no way that two people can perceive the same thing in precisely the same way, due to this mere difference in the order of our experiences.

According to Politico, Senate Republicans won’t be engaging in too much badmouthing of Obama’s Supreme Court pick:

GOP officials say they realize the party needs to improve its standing among Hispanic voters in order to have any hope of winning a national election, and they admit that trashing the first Latina nominee to the court could cement stereotypes or further alienate minorities.

This reality limits Republicans’ options dramatically and virtually guarantees they would be called racists if they said anything that smacks of being out of bounds about such a qualified nominee.

The problem is, they (or at least the conservative pundits who fuel their fire) have already said things that “smack of being out of bounds”. Ridiculous and offensive assertions abound in the Right’s treatment of this pick, not just since it was announced, but since Souter announced his retirement. They need to do more than surrender a few fights if they want to repair their image with demographic groups they’ve been disrespecting for years.

Joseph Romm is one of the most respected writers on climate policy. Here is a summary of his thoughts on what is necessary to avert catastrophic warming:

We have to bring down the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to between 350-450 parts per million (ppm) to avoid the hellish worst of climate change. Economically and technologically, this is quite doable. However, it is not plausible in the current political climate. Because the alternative is unacceptable, we will get there, but to do so we must all become familiar with the best solutions, and then loudly push our political leaders toward them.
(more…)

The big news story for the day is of course Bernie Madoff’s trial. I think the anger and vitriol directed at him by his victims is somewhat grotesque. They’re perfectly justified in being upset, of course he deserves the punishment he’s going to get, but the victims should really direct their ire at themselves. It is just plain stupid investing to neglect diversification, no matter how seemingly secure and lucrative. And really, these people made millions of dollars somehow. You would think they would know what to do with it. While it’s sure to be a controversial assertion, I would even suggest that perhaps the victims even deserved to lose their money.

Madoff deserves to go to jail. He blatantly and knowingly stole millions of dollars. But the fact that he acknowledged his crime during testimony today, acknowledged his wrongdoing and laid the truth bare before the agents of justice, that made me respect him a little bit more. He expressed remorse, in what seemed to me to be quite honest language. He gave the reason for his monster Ponzi scheme as a driving desire to meet the expectations of his investors. Is that not something we can all understand? A desire to meet the expectations of those who put trust in us? I feel slightly sorry for him. And yet he deserves the punishment he will get, there is no question.

I don’t really have a point, except that we should avoid thoughtlessly assimillating the victims’ anger, and exercise compassion for all parties involved. Criminals are people too.

I’m sure that I’m not alone among progressives in wringing my hands over the seemingly unshakable power of conservatives in the Senate to block progress. Republicans have been and continue to be pummeled into the ground by public opinion; surely we should be able to get good legislation passed. Yet Democratic gains never seem to be enough; we’re always just a few votes short.

The problem, of course, is those members of the Senate Democratic caucus who are themselves conservative, or “centrist” or “moderate”. I like Markos’ take on this issue:

All this desire for everyone to agree is creepy, and more indicative of the Broderites who want everyone to agree with them, rather than any desire for real consensus that might exclude their own ideas.

I feel like idealogically middle-of-the-road Senators like Pryor, Nelson, and Lincoln simply perceive that they’ll have more power disagreeing with progressives and the President than if they were more amenable to good legislation. The talk about a Senate Blue Dog coalition is just more demonstrative for these senators’ passion for power.

I think a multi-party system, necessitating coalition governments, would be a better form of democracy than the two-party system we currently have. The formation of oppositional groups within the same party is a similar step, but still. It’s nice believing that the majority of members of congress are on your side. Being reminded that large chunks of your party disagree with you for largely overcautious and political reasons is no fun.

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a post about how impressive the new White House blog is. Their RSS feed is stylish, their content is neither too long or too short, their tone is very appropriate to the blog medium, and they even post about 6 times every day.

However, their liveblog today of the President’s trip to Canada was an absolute disgrace to the best practices they’ve been demonstrating. It reappeared on my RSS reader every time they made an update, and the updates were widely spaced out. It was just plain annoying. I hope they don’t continue the “live”blogging any more. I have faith. Their jump from inception to sterling blogging practices was nearly instantaneous, leading me to believe the White House bloggers have no problem with a steep learning curve.

While we’re on the subject of blog quality, I am sorely disappointed in Progressive Future’s blog. Progressive Future is the partisan offshoot of U.S. PIRG, which sounds great. Their blog is presented horrifically. The text is all in a block when it reaches my RSS reader, the articles are too long and in too large chunks, they post extremely infrequently, and the blog title comes in all in capital letters. I wish it were better. Maybe when I’m done with this segment of my life I’ll offer my services to whip them into shape if they haven’t been already.