Romney-Ryan hat is not made in China

Hm... I decided to write this because I'm starting to see independent repostings of this picture, suggesting it's viral:

Does the Romney-Ryan campaign use hats made in China?

No.

The campaign store website shows two models of hat, neither of which is featured here. Also, the page clearly says, "All products are Made in the USA."

So where are they coming from?

Apparently, there's someone on Zazzle.com making hats with the Romney-Ryan campaign logo. I doubt there's a financial relationship between the two, and if there is, it's almost certainly negligible.

Note that the hats tend to be almost as expensive as the Romney-Ryan campaign hats. I don't know if this is because of economies of scale for the official campaign hats, or fattened profit margins, or if it reflects increasing labor and shipping costs for textiles made in China. (Spoiler: it's probably the first one.)

So it's not obvious if this picture is a crappy and misguided attempt to tip Ohio voters by a liberal organization, or a clever Republican plant orchestrated by O'Keefe et al. Maybe it's an effort by domestic textile companies to ratchet up anti-China sentiment further. But I'm guessing it's an individual, and not a broader conspiracy involving white or black propaganda.

According to one source, as of the first Presidential debate, the Romney-Ryan campaign has not trademarked their logo. The Obama team has.

Without a trademark, I wonder whether the campaign could shut down these nonofficial hats. That is, assuming they'd want to -- perhaps they don't. But I could just as easily create a Romney-Ryan cat litter liner, or Kotex pad. Surely they'd object in those cases.

Any lawyers want to comment?

West Dorm, and why I'm owed around $17.

Update: It has been brought to my attention that the Class of 2004 would have graduated by the time I allegedly -- allegedly, mind you -- partook of these activities. Evidently, I was so shitfaced I failed to remember what year it happened.

Evan Cohick, humanitarian, human teddy bear, and general All-Round Good Guy, highlighted this article for me:

Huffpo: The Least Beautiful Campuses: Princeton Review List

The picture at the top of the story is of West dorm at Harvey Mudd College, my alma mater.

It looks pretty bad - and I wish I could say this was a particularly bad day. But, if anything, it is cleaner than I remember.

Story time kids! (Actual kids and young adults - this story is in no ways an endorsement of alcohol consumption or associated lapses in judgment/memory.)

West dorm is an interesting place. It single-handedly makes the correlation of alcohol/drug consumption and GPA positive, even counterbalancing North's contribution. (For those who don't know, four of our dorms are referred to by the names of a cardinal direction, roughly - very roughly - corresponding to their actual orientation. I feel slightly sorry to the people who donated real money for their names to appear on the side.)

During my time there, there was a party called 101, in which participants shoot a shot (1 oz.) of beer once a minute for 101 minutes. For those with rudimentary math skills - and even a drunk Mudder could divide by 12 - this is about 8 1/2 cans of beer. That's quite a lot, and not everyone goes the full way. For what it's worth, I believe Mudd has the fewest cases of alcohol poisoning, per capita, of the Claremont Colleges -- though this might also be a falsehood repeated to rationalize consumption.

Anyway, shortly before my graduation, I partook. I may or may not have been finished with my thesis, or a lengthy EU space policy paper I was working on, but I ended up getting both done before graduation thanks to Mountain Dew.

Whatever my academic state of affairs, I balked somewhat at the expense, per unit alcohol, of beer. I also hated most beers. So I hit upon the idea of buying a fifth of relatively cheap charcoal filtered vodka (Smirnoff, I think). Naturally, I wouldn't drink 101 shots of the stuff.

Needless to say, I started with a couple shots, and at some point abandoned the use of the paper cups altogether. My friend Jake may or may not have taken a swig off the bottle either. At some point I had a megaphone. I also may have kissed an almost certainly female classmate who was ridiculously out of my league -- though I may have dreamed that.

Anyway, I was absolutely shocked to find that my bottle of vodka was neither present in my room in Atwood (another dorm), nor in the courtyard next to the slightly singed, molding couch where I had started the evening.

I am willing to accept a pro-rated compensation for my lost spirits, and believe I am entitled to $17. I'm even correcting for inflation there. If it goes to arbitration, I would be willing to be compensated with a half-drunken bottle of vodka of comparable or superior quantity, as long as it was also accompanied by a messy make-out with someone substantially out of my league.

It is my hope we can reach an amicable settlement. Hopefully, a member of the class of 2004 will contact me in a timely manner.

Memories of a gay stepfather and mentor

There is a news story out about how Romney has been pretty rotten/tone-deaf to gay people. Yes, they do have children.

I don't want to focus on that. Instead, let me tell you a story.

By my second year of grad school, I was pretty depressed for a lot of reasons. It made it difficult to plan at any level, and I found myself desperately casting about for housing when my previous residence was sold. Fortunately, I had a friend who lived in a remarkably beautiful house near downtown Ithaca. My room was a 10x10 coffin, but that's all I really needed. Rent was very cheap.

The dining room gives an impression of the overall house. There was a table for eight, with wonderful wooden chairs that were comfortable and stylish. The tablecloth was white - always white - some sort of synthetic, with doilies beneath a candle centerpiece. Above, there was a small glass chandelier. The windows looked out to a yard with modern stone sculptures. An antique credenza housed the plates and cutlery. Most remarkably, the flooring had bits of a composition painted on the borders -- I can't remember which piece -- with phrasings in German.

He was a piano professor at Ithaca College -- a liberal arts school often overshadowed by Cornell, but one with an outstanding music program. I heard him play Rhapsody in Blue, which was, as expected, wonderful. Given his hand span, I think it would've been great to see him play a Rachmaninov piano concerto (2 or 3).

Despite my very comfortable living situation, I was pretty depressed out of my mind at this point in grad school. I was lonely. I was lost. My landlord noticed this, and we had a chat. We talked about fathers. He shared about how it was challenging dealing with a very macho Brazilian father, and empathized with my struggle to define my relationship with my dad.

 He, refreshingly, talked openly about therapy, and celebrated it -- "I think everyone should have it!" He isone of the most cheerful, optimistic, kind-hearted individuals I had ever met. He was one part father figure, one part older brother, at a time when I desperately needed it.

He is also gay.

Perhaps a mark of age, or maturity, or just his special type of patience: he wasn't easily angered or bothered by ignorance about homosexuality.

I remember we were discussing it, and I said something expressing confusion how homosexuality would fit in the larger biological picture, and whether it really was a human cultural phenomenon. Instead of getting angry, or expressing shock, he smiled, quietly went to a bookshelf, and handed me Biological Exuberance, documenting homosexuality and bisexuality among many different species. I paged through it, was surprised, and learned something. We talked a bit more. From his admittedly ever-present smile, I think we were both glad that he trusted me to be open-minded and to update my views in the face of new information.

My friend is also a stepfather.

I forget where he met his partner - it could've been in an airport (how Hollywood!), but it was definitely abroad somewhere. He visited Ithaca a couple times, and it was clear that they were serious.

The third or fourth time he visited, he brought his eight-year old son.

I still remember how nervous my friend was about making a good impression when his partner and his son came to visit. The ice was broken via finger-painting -- not the kindergarten variety. He used high-quality paints and a real canvas. I could tell the kid enjoyed it. It wasn't a breakthrough -- but it was the beginning.

Eventually, he left a tenured position at Ithaca College to move to Germany for love. Some probably thought he was crazy, either for leaving a highly prized position, or for moving to Germany, a nation which is culturally and climatically pretty different from Brazil. He probably was -- love makes people crazy. But I think he's still happy there.

So, I know one gay man who is doing a damn fine job of being a father. I know this, in part, because he was a fantastic mentor to me in my hours/months/years of need. Surprisingly, to my American self, he still keeps in touch at least once a year. I know this because I saw how much he worried about making a good impression on his partner's kid.

He's in Germany still, so he can't be an advocate and representative of the human decency of gay fathers. So I suppose it falls to me, and the others whose lives he touched, to be advocates for him. In the unlikely event that he could be seduced from Europe to bring his talent and great heart back to America, I'd like to see him welcomed as a scholar, a gay man, and a father.

My dad taught me a little bit about being poor

The story of my father is long, but interesting. I'm truncating it here - it deserves several posts.

My father worked as a mechanical engineer for about ten years for Hughes aircraft in California. He was grateful for the opportunity - jobs on Maui, where he grew up, were almost nonexistent, even for, and perhaps especially for, a college graduate. (He was an insurance policy salesman for a few months after graduation.) The new job meant $900 a week - about a 400% raise from what he was expected to earn in five more years at his old job.

He was charismatic and competent, and got to work on satellites -- including Marisat and some secret military projects that, bless him, he still feels are secret and won't talk about. (I doubt any of the projects are operational, or classified, but I don't press him about it.)

He fell in love, married, bought a house, a car, a ridiculously expensive fishing boat he rarely used, and occasionally bought classic cars he started to fix, but usually ended up selling for a loss. He hosted dinners, and was well-liked.

He was also bipolar.

He began to have problems in high school and college. But they didn't come to a head until he was around 32. He started missing work. At some point, he began using drugs - a lot of them. He once handed me a list of two pages, double-column, of all the drugs he had used. No doubt some barbiturates probably were repeats under different names - but it included angel dust, cocaine, heroin, and things called yellow jackets and little bennies.

It was during this time that my mom became pregnant. They had tried for nearly ten years, and finally, during this time of crisis, they were successful.

Meanwhile, my dad lost his job. He was admitted to just about every mental health hospital in Southern California. At one facility, he told my mom he met Brian Wilson. She thought it was a schizophrenic delusion, until she stopped by and saw that it was, indeed, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys.

Eventually, my mom decided, reluctantly, to get a divorce. It's kind of tragic -- I think if I hadn't been born, she might've been tempted to stick it out. I think sometimes she still regrets it -- even though I've told her she made the right choice, and even her traditional Japenese parents supported her. Divorce is always at least sort of sad -- but it's quite sad when the parents still love each other.

We moved into my grandparents' house for a few years. He lived with his sister for a while. But it was too much to manage a man with unmanaged bipolar disorder. He lived in his own apartment, but that didn't work out well.

Eventually, he found some stability in a series of board and care facilities, large group homes, sometimes numbering about a hundred mentally disabled adults.

I visited him every other weekend. Sometimes he was a scary nut. Other times, he was lethargic and barely responsive.

Due to frequent visits at these large institutions, I learned patience and tolerance of aberrant behavior, which, oddly enough, served me very well at Havery Mudd College, and, I believe, in life at large.


The rooms were small, with musty air, but they were clean. He always had a roommate - some of whom were really creepy.

I remember Ed, a schizophrenic with a knack for guitar. Once, we walked in, and he had only a hand towel over his genitals, as he giggled having whatever conversation/experience he was having in his own head.

Believe it or not, I liked Ed overall, even if I was reluctant to shake his hand after that.

He was better than Tom, who was always drunk and/or angry.


He was always broke, and dependent on Social Security Disability payments for rent, and Medicare-Medicaid for treatment/medication.

Dad spent what spending money he got from his sister and my mom on cigarettes. Everyone smoked there - I probably inhaled tons of secondhand smoke, but I was honestly more worried about my dad busting out his (fake, but I didn't know at the time) kung fu during his manic episodes. He'd buy the cheapest, nastiest cigarettes available. He quit periodically -- sometimes because he ran out, and sometimes because he promised me. It's from him that I learned about clove cigarettes, that extremely rare luxury -- they were expensive, incredibly bad for your health, and wonderfully aromatic.

He outlived three girlfriends, all of whom died of lung cancer. Two were in their mid-fifties, and one was in her late-thirties.

For a man who loved food, I was surprised how he adjusted to the kind of boring food. When he moved from one of these large facilities to a smaller halfway house, he was treated to home cooking. He still didn't have any money, but he was happier. We would go to Taco Bell, or Winchell's, where he would relish unlimited refills and enjoy a beef Meximelt, or a glazed donut, courtesy of Mom.

Those who know me may be surprised to know that my dad is an eternal optimist. Every time he moved, he said, "This is the best place! The FOOD is amazing!" Every time. He was either a liar, delusional, or an optimist. Over the last decade, his medication balance got reasonably good, and so I'm willing to conclude that it was optimism. He was definitely not a liar, at least not a habitual one.

He is currently living in a larger facility in Long Beach, an odd mix of mental institution and retirement home.

Through the years, he'd been hospitalized many, many times -- and not just for mental health reasons. There were many of those -- unpleasant rants, either in person or over the phone, were something that was painful, but eventually expected. I was surprised -- after many years of relative calm, he called in October 2008 to tell me I was a horrible son, that he was a four-star general Aztec emperor, etc. Even at the age of 26, I admit, I cried, but I managed to keep my voice calm, and tell myself that this was not my father talking, this was The Disease.

He almost died many times. But because it happened so frequently, I eventually got used to visiting him in a hospital. Apparently he has a very strong heart, one which has saved his life multiple times.

There were good times, too. He taught me gin rummy. He had an interesting (read: vulgar) sense of humor. I'm lucky -- many sons can't poke fun at their fathers like I can.

We almost lost him last year from kidney failure. My relationship with him, even as death approached, has always been a conflicting set of emotions.

But it was only today, as I was picking up a hot-n-ready $5 pizza for our lunch, that I realized he taught me about poverty.

***

As long as I can remember, he was always poor. He didn't have money for gifts; his sister would send me a bit of birthday and Christmas money. I don't know when or how I understood this, but I did, and didn't ask him for stuff, even as I was spoiled rotten by my maternal grandfather. Mom never asked him to help with anything, including college -- and how would he have helped anyway? Asked his sister?

I think it was hard for him to take bits of spending money from my mom, and, for many reasons, hard for my mom to give it.

He'd borrow money. He'd borrow from Peter to pay Paul. A couple times, he borrowed money from me; much later, his sister would find out and yell at him. He'd apologize, and give me the money that his sister gave him to pay  me back.

My mom and I remember only one time when my dad was scared. We were at Winchell's, and he approached a tough-looking guy. He told him that he would return his $20 as soon as he could. Later, he asked my mom for that money. At the time, he lived in a neighborhood where getting beat up, badly, over $20 was pretty likely.

He wasn't a saint, and, even in his poverty, would sometimes use what he had recklessly. At one point, he got admitted to the hospital for a ridiculously high blood pressure - it was something like 220/180. I'm not joking. He claimed it was caffeine -- later on, I found out he had bought meth from a dealer somewhere in the neighborhood.

He never wanted to walk in the park down the block. I don't remember if he had been jumped, or harassed. We'd go by car from Norwalk to Cerritos to nice parks.

Meanwhile, I lived a relatively comfortable middle-class life. My mom was a public school teacher, and therefore not at all rich, but it was just the two of us. I never went hungry; I always had clothes to wear; I always had shoes. It wasn't extravagant, but it was comfortable. Hell, I even had a NES and, a couple years after it came out, a SNES. We never owned a computer until some time in high school, and to my everlasting shame and regret, it was a Macintosh Performa.

So I wasn't poor.

My dad was.

But he didn't starve. He had adequate medical care. He was able to live with some dignity - once he accepted he was never going to be an aerospace engineer ever again. He had fantasies of going back, even after Hughes got absorbed and resold and redundancied and everything else during the passing decades.

He was dependent on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (in California, Medi-Cal).

He's a flawed man, even ignoring his bipolar disorder. And, to be honest, I don't know if he's an example of what's wrong with the social safety net in this country, or what's right.

The only thing I do know for certain is that, without exaggeration, he would've been homeless, and ultimately dead, without those programs.

It's not because his family didn't love him enough to house him -- his sister, a schizophrenic, lived with my grandparents her entire adult life.

I believe that because, without the luck we had with treatment and facilities, he would've found some way to disappear and die.

Had he continued to live in his apartment, he would've had an overdose, or done something that would've gotten him shot by a drug dealer, or a cop. Even at his sister's house, he was unsupervised during the day; I don't know if he did run off during that time, but he definitely engaged in self-destructive behavior including drugs, alcohol, and reckless driving. (He once zig-zagged on the freeway with toddler me in the backseat. Perhaps fortunately, I thought it was a game at the time.)

So I can say, with a measure of confidence, that my dad would've died decades ago without that safety net.

***

I'm writing this mostly because I want to. He's an interesting person, and, quite frankly, it helps me to process my emotions and thoughts in written form.

There's a part that's also writing this because I've seen many criticize welfare, Medicaid, and other programs designed to help the poor. Most do not cite any numbers, and some cite numbers without context, e.g., the number of people on food stamps does go up during a recession. It's designed to do that: that shows the program is doing its job, regardless of whether you think it should be doing it or not.

He's not a "welfare queen". But he's as close as it comes in my personal experience. And so, it's tough for me to disentangle conversation about the poor, and about welfare, from these thoughts about my dad.

In my volunteering in college, I've met homeless people who would drink chunks of their Social Security checks and buy electronics. I met homeless kids for whom homelessness was, at least part, an ideology -- quasi-hippies/anarchists, sharing and creating cheaply made magazines containing their literature. I cleaned human shit out of a food pantry, which means someone -- assuming it was a client, not a volunteer -- decided taking a shit in the storeroom was a good idea. I met two guys who were, in retrospect, probably doing a drug deal, whom I cluelessly interrupted, offered sandwiches to, and left alone to their meal, realizing at some point that one held an almost-but-not-quite-concealed blade in his hand the whole time.

I know poor people who seem so helpless and hapless that I sometimes want to scream at them and hit them and tell them to get their shit together, because they have kids and grandkids who depend upon them. I know friends whose parents worked in sweatshops, in the United States, and never forgot it as they went off to college, got good jobs, and participated actively in public service. I met illegal immigrant, the occasional homeless woman, and a de facto leader in the group at Pomona that showed up at the HMC graduation in an old, but clean, suit -- not for me, but perhaps just to wish the graduates well.

Being poor is simple and complicated.

It restricts opportunity, which can be simplifying. It's complicated, because there are multiple stories, multiple reasons, and multiple outcomes.

Anecdotes don't lend themselves well to analysis, even as they reveal things about the people we meet, and ourselves. But they do inform our values.

I admit -- my support of these programs are a product of the distillation of these experiences, and not based upon statistics of efficiency, fraud rates, longitudinal progress, or anything that's really needed to analyze poverty programs objectively.

But that's not how we decide whether we think something is good or not. We don't start from the statistics -we start from principles, formed by our experiences, our learning, and our environment. I think its the same for the critics of these programs.

It comes down to a moral assumption about certain things:

Do the poor deserve it?

Does it lend itself to abuse or dependence?

Can the country afford it?

I think that anyone claiming, one way or another, that their views on these programs don't rest upon some assumptions on these questions, based on our personal feelings, is not being completely honest. Objective metrics inform whether something works or doesn't - but our values determine the definition of "works" or "doesn't".

Maybe in the coming days, I'll investigate the statistics of these programs - how much they cost; the detected rate of fraud; the specific conditions that must be met; the proportion of funds, if any, that go to illegal immigrants. I suppose these are things I should know, as someone who has, in the past, advocated for the poor, and who continues to believe that the measure of our nation is in part based on how we care for the most vulnerable of our people.

For those who care, I do ask that you consider that, in my case, there is a real person who I care about in these figures.

Based on what I've said, maybe he's part of the problem. Maybe I should feel guilty for having had help taking care of my dad.

If it makes you feel better, I do have guilt.

But I'm also glad that they, and he, continue.

Forbes: Ohio Voting Machines and Romney -- waiteveryonecalmthefuckdown

Forbes Op-Ed: Romney Family Investments Ties to Voting Machine Company That Could Decide the Election Causing Concern

Seriously, wait everyone. Calm the fuck down.

The op-ed is NOT accusing Tagg Romney of owning the voting machines. The op-ed is NOT accusing the Romney camp of intending to, or even considering, manipulating the vote.

The article IS saying that the connection stinks just badly enough to make people nervous, and that's a bad thing for the integrity of the vote, EVEN IF NO ONE DOES ANYTHING BAD.

I'm writing this here because comments might be closed on the Forbes article. And I want to get ahead of this before it starts getting (mis)reported all over my Facebook feed.

Did you read the whole thing?

Seriously?

Ah, fuck it.

This is my tl;dr version of what I got from the article.

1. Voting is sacred.

2. Voting machines have problems.

3. It's dumb for companies involved in the voting machine business to have even a hint of preference for one candidate over another. Even if there's no actual malfeasance, it helps the conspiracy theorizing and degrades the integrity of the process.

4. Voting machines should belong to the people.


If I missed something, I'm sorry. This is what I got from the article.


Some meta-comments on the critiques:


1. On replying to comments/questions about the form

Look - the author is an adult and a professional, and therefore has a thick enough skin to deal with all the criticism heaped at him. He also hopefully has a thick enough skin to deal with the fact that a lot of people don't read articles before they comment on them.

The fact that he has commented on a lot of posts -- I have the dubious distinction of claiming to have read the article AND 14 pages of comments of varying quality and relevance -- shows that he at least enjoys the back-and-forth, and, like any writer, cares about what he has written, and will defend its scope and its content against misappropriation.

I could speculate whether a more creative approach means that the author feels more attached to it than a more boring news piece, or even an opinion article, but I probably would (rightly) get my head bit off for speculating without info and projecting my own attitudes toward writing.

2. On partisanship lenses

Perhaps relevant, perhaps not, but the NYTimes had an interesting report about research in partisanship. Thanks go to Evolutionary Politics FB group for highlighting this.

Again, for the tl;dr crowd:

People actually become more moderate when they are forced to explain a policy - the how of a policy. So, if the goal is to actually have a conversation across ideological divides, then we should focus on how a policy could be good/bad, and not just stick with defending or attacking X.

The Forbes author did this. The author has told a story about what could happen, something that would be very bad for the country, no matter who won. Nevermind the Democratic lean of the youth vote - if elections are perceived as fraudulent, then the alleged disengagement of my generation will get even worse -- and it won't be limited to the young.

I don't know - perhaps the style of the piece caused people to project things into it that weren't there. If it fails on style but succeeds in content, I trust the author to be non-defensive enough to accept constructive criticism.

The whole process has made me, and many I know, a bit frazzled. So let's calm down a bit and think about how even a hint of impropriety is bad. Bill Clinton probably doesn't even walk around in a block radius of a strip club. Why? Because it'd be bad for any prominent politician, but it'd be really bad for Bill Clinton.

Similarly, it's bad enough with the existing problems of voting machines. It gets worse when the optics of donations and connections with Tagg Romney are added. And, intended or not, the back-and-forth about the latter may inhibit the work to fix the former.

If I were really tin-foil inclined, I'd say THIS is the reason they did it - to take the heat off design/implementation problems of their products. ;)


3. Maybe the problem is that this appears in Forbes

I had a subscription to Forbes for a couple years. I ended up not renewing because I assumed, I think correctly, that I was more liberal than the general bent of the magazine.

I was therefore very surprised to see Forbes running with this story, even though the author's claim is NOT - for Pete's sake, read the article folks! - that Tagg Romney owns the voting machines, nor that there is any specific reason to suspect the Romney campaign of manipulating the vote.

If Forbes is right-of-center, or right, then maybe people feel betrayed that their "safe zone" is being violated. Attacks are extra vitriolic because they weren't expected. Maybe I'd feel the same way if I read a Hannity piece in Mother Jones.

Or maybe, people just like to fight and complain.

Epilogue:

I was searching for this story, and yes, this was the first major outlet that carried it in one form or another.

For what it's worth, I thought it was important enough to comment that I bothered registering. When email registration flaked out - not sure why - I signed up using my FB account. I have never (intentionally) used my FB account to sign up for a social reader.

I couldn't post my comment using Chrome. So I had to transfer my comment boot up my creaky IE7. That didn't work. I concluded that comments were closed, or my computer was jacked up, or a divine power just didn't want me to be posting this at 4am.

Anyway, not sure why anyone should care, but I really cared about writing this comment.

Benghazi in context

I have the luxury of being unimportant; therefore, I'll say something probably offensive.

Am I missing something? As I reexamine the foreign policy record of President Obama, I see a number of successes. Failures may depend upon your beliefs about "just wars", and perhaps less visible concerns regarding trade. (It's unclear what the long-term effects will be with fights with China over tires and other issues.)

From what I have read, the assault on the consulate at Benghazi appears to have been an intelligence failure. I don't know, and I may never know, precisely how, or why, additional security was not provided. These intelligence failures have existed before - does anyone remember the attacks against US Embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania in 1998? These attacks killed many more people. September 11 was a tremendous intelligence failure -- but I don't recall people calling for the resignation of the President.

Can we wait for the investigation to conclude? If there was such an egregious miscarriage of justice involving the President and senior officials, I'm certain Congress will be happy to embark upon yet another impeachment hearing.

The Benghazi attack was a tragedy. It also led to the death of four people. These were four good people; but they were four. A sane nation cannot afford to make reckless claims about policy reversals and even war for four citizens. Even a great nation cannot afford to be so reckless.

Some perspective: the US and its allies saved thousands of lives, and, depending on how things go, Libyan democracy. It did so without a single American casualty. It did so with Britain and France exercising, at least in recent memory, unprecedented leadership in resources and risk. It may go down as a textbook case of how American interests, ideals, and capacity align, and how measured commitment can produce better (though not perfect) results.

It took thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, and many years for the majority of Americans to even begin to start questioning the justice of the Iraq War. Now, the intervention in Libya, and the overall approach of measured foreign policy of the last years, is seen as illegitimate because of four deaths in Benghazi?

How is this at all proportional?

I accept judgment that to count American lives reeks of the worst of armchair generalship. I accept that the United States has a responsibility to its citizens, and that its diplomatic corps is especially vulnerable and especially valuable.

But it just isn't computing for me -- unless I consider one possibility.

Benghazi has been amplified and magnified because it's difficult to assail the foreign policy record of this administration. Libertarians that believe in zero military intervention, or Niebuhrians/humanitarian interventionists that believe action was merited in Syria (and perhaps Iran in 2009).

Drone strikes are a more valid critique. But they aren't being criticized and magnified because, quite frankly, the killing of civilians in Pakistan by American drone strikes don't matter to the vast majority of constituents in either party, except in the abstract. At best, they are seen as the necessary price of waging a war against Al-Qaeda and terrorism in a state increasingly incapable of providing security to itself or its neighbors.

And there remain issues in Iran. But I don't see how Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal, and Sarah Shroud would be alive if Tehran had been bombed. Remember them? Was their release after years of incarceration a failure or a success of US diplomacy?

Remember Somali pirates? Remember Osama Bin Laden? Remember the release of hostages in North Korea?

What about the soft power coordination with the European Central Bank to stave off the recession?

Benghazi matters, but not for the reasons so many think.

It matters because it reveals how little effective criticism can be laid against the administration by its GOP opponents, possibly because it is indistinguishable from a realist GOP foreign policy. (It is quite distinguishable from a neoconservative foreign policy; some of the rhetoric suggests a Romney administration would have a chance of exhibiting the former, but the constituency of his foreign policy advisors suggests the latter.)

And it matters especially because it has revealed the tremendous gulf between me and others I know and respect. Their emphasis on Benghazi, ignoring the wider context of Libya, much less four years of foreign policy, makes me question their judgment and objectivity, at least in analyzing these issues.

If someone can explain, reasonably and coherently, how Benghazi invalidates an approach of scaling military responses to a situation and depending upon soft power wherever possible, I will gladly listen, and possibly even change my vote. You can refer me to an article or video, but I'll be far more likely to take your argument seriously if you articulate it yourself.

A note: I'd ask those who feel that military intervention is never justified, or are arguing from a primarily humanitarian interventionist position (esp. re: Syria) to alert me to such in the beginning. I'm not addressing this to you - our assumptions and metrics for acceptable vs. unacceptable intervention may just be too far apart for any fruitful discussion. Just letting you know ahead of time that I may not invest time to deflect those critiques. In all cases, please make sure your assumptions about the ethical nature of the use of force are clearly outlined so I can follow your chain of logic, even if I don't agree with your starting point.

Letter from a father to a son, number three

Son,

Open the window.

Do you see the light dancing on the last leaves of autumn? Do you hear the murmur of a thousand distant cars, threading themselves through a city of steel and concrete? What about the birds in debate, or the sighing of the lilies?

That is the world, my son. It is a world that, while not always welcoming you, needs and deserves you, as you need and deserve it. It is what it is, and also what it will be. Between those two displaced realities exists your potential self. Between what you are, and what you will be, are my hopes and fears, my desperate prayers across darkness.

Many of us have asked you to believe in the good, to embrace it. We have asked you to believe that good things for you are yet possible -- and will always remain possible.

But that is not enough. You know these things. In all your brokenness, you remain intelligent, even wise.

Today I write to tell you that you deserve happiness, you deserve liberty, you deserve a future.

Do you know what we called people who denied those things to those who deserve them (everyone)? History has so many names. Slavers. Tyrants. Despots.

Fathers.

My son, you deserve happiness and joy and confidence and love. I see you, in your pain, and want to tell you that you are unique: you are special.

But most of all, you deserve love just by existing.

It is an axiom of your humanity, and though people have tried to test this, and others have passed judged, I believe you do not forsake that, ever.

Had I the strength to carry you personally, I would. But perhaps that would rob you of the necessary cultivation of that indomitable faith that you will need to pass to others. So I write, my son. I write and pray and would curse and sell my soul, my liberty, my humanity, just to preserve yours. It is the blessing of this world that those are not necessary -- perhaps all I need is to tell you enough times that you will consider believing it, and doing what I can to make sure events confirm possibility into belief.

I'm trying to bias the experiment in your favor. But why not? You deserve it.

Do not be afraid of the word "deserve". It has become a toxic word today -- overused and misunderstood. Though you will not sacrifice your humanity, ever, you do make the road harder when deserving becomes divorced from actions and responsibility. But you know these things; you do not know you are worthy of precious and essential gifts. I will spare the lecture on responsibility until I have the confidence that this more basic lesson sticks.

Please believe. Upon this belief or disbelief rests all future choices.

Love,

Father

Let's Play Adventure!

I have a cousin. He is in kindergarten. He is confident, athletic, and bright. Whenever I saw him, he used to say, "Let's play adventure!" As he's gotten a bit older, he has become slightly more polite: "Uncle Ryan, can we play adventure?"

Let me explain.

At some point, in the not-too-distant past, I decided to entertain my cousin by going on a make-believe adventure in the backyard. It involved some convoluted story involving a sacred sword, evil wizards, monsters, merchants, comedic sidekicks, and magic items.

I didn't realize that I was unintentionally committing myself to a long-term contract. Since then, every time I've met this cousin, we've played "adventure". We must've played it at least 25 times; I've lost count.

The goal of this was to stimulate his imagination. I don't know if it's worked -- sometimes, I try, with mixed success, to get him to come up with the storyline. I'm hopeful that he'll play adventure with his friends at school.

Also with mixed success: crafting stories with enough moral ambiguity that it doesn't boil down to killing the bad guys. At least he knows that not all monsters or witches or ogres are evil.

Most recently, given a particularly intellectually bankrupt day, I ripped off The Oregon Trail and took a group of cousins on a long and dangerous journey through a cul de sac in Monterey Park on the way to the Willamette Valley.

It was unusual, in that the cousins included some older folks - one about eight or nine. Initially, a ten-year old girl was part of the party, but she decided to quit early. In revenge for her rational decision to drop out of a kid's game, she became the first person to die of dysentery.

When asked what dysentery was, I explained that it involved nonstop diarrhea. The eight year old boy was delighted.

I'm not a particularly great storyteller, especially when forced to improvise. I think, when I finally find a Toastmasters club I like, I'll choose the storytelling module once I complete the basic one.

But I do think storytelling, and imagination, are tremendously important.

It's a lot of work - more work than playing a game with established rules, or watching a TV program. So why do I do it?

Growing up with a busy single mom and non-English speaking grandparents, I found myself alone a lot. (I'm an only child, and the youngest grandchild in my family.) I did watch a lot of TV -- a lot of "crap telly". But I also spent a lot of time wandering around in the backyard, making up things with dirt and bugs.

Whenever my mom went shopping, I would also try picking up random bits of debris and make up an adventure, hiding in the circular racks and assembling equipment.

I never became a LARPer; again, possibly because my isolation never put me in contact with that culture until college, at which point prejudices and the demands of study discouraged it. And I don't know that an obsession with D&D's modern ruleset would be all that helpful in cultivating genuine creativity and imagination among the young -- to the contrary, it might be borrowing someone else's word of fantasy.

Here's the point of the story: when my cousin asks other adults to "play adventure", they don't really know what it means. And when they do, they often make the excuse that they don't know how.

I worry, deeply, that it's not an excuse, but an accurate statement of fact.

Awkward facial expressions post VP debate

Joe Biden wasn't the only one with some interesting facial expressions tonight.

Jonathan Martin of Politico and Sam Youngman of Reuters discussed the VP debate with Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff at the PBS News Hour.

The analysis, as always, was informative. But I was struck by how young and green these guys appeared, even though they seem to have lots of experience covering politics. Were they just excited to be on PBS?

I know, I'm being shallow and petty, but I can't get over the awkwardness. Call it appreciation for kindred spirits.

Again, let me emphasize that I thought they did a great job. But I think there's some irony in the fact that two reporters covering a debate marked by facial awkwardness couldn't help but show some of their own. Honestly, it sometimes looked like a weird prom photo.

The whole video, worth watching is here. This particular segment begins at 9:47.

Memento Romney

How I failed a context clue test on Facebook

Pervy high school teachers

Ok, Tom, you asked for it.

High school was a weird time. You have to deal with your own raging hormones. And, occasionally, teachers would give you a window into what your life will be like if you don't get them under control.

Take Mr. Mayne, for instance. He was the driver's ed teacher at Rosemead, and probably taught some other things. Being a moron, I followed the standard advice for summer school and took driver's ed (known as Safety at the school) in addition to health and sex ed.

Mr. Mayne looked like an aging greaser. He had the heavily-slicked hair, the John Wayne swagger, and, if I recall, a leather jacket. (That last bit might just be my faulty memory making him conform more to type.)

Mr. Mayne would have us read and copy sections of the driver's ed book in complete silence. That's all I did, all summer. I suppose I learned something from it, and not just that yellow fluid coming out of the car is a Bad Thing.

Mr. Mayne also had a reputation - it was said he would be fond of putting girls with short skirts in the front of the class. I don't know if this is true. But I do know what I heard that summer.

We were working, and Mr. Mayne strolled out into the hallway. After a few moments, we heard a girl shout, "Mr. Mayne, stop touching my tits!"

He strolled in with a huge shit-eating grin.

Now, I don't know if he actually did touch her tits. She could've just said it to try to get him into trouble. It all happened outside the room.

But that grin and swagger creeped me out.

Oh, and yes, other teachers lost their jobs for sleeping with students, while others were smart enough to not lose their jobs. Sigh - high school.

PBS and the battle over America's soul

This election has been about many things. It's been about jobs, tax policy, public debt, a sprinkling of foreign policy, and, occasionally, social issues like gay marriage, vaginal ultrasounds, and contraception.

But it's becoming clear that it is about principles in addition to policy. It's subtle, but it comes down to two different visions about the nature of America, its government, and its future.

We must decide, not once and for all, but as often as is necessary, as often as we are in danger of forgetting, what America really represents.

The battle for America's soul is cast as a false choice between equity and individualism. It really comes down to whether we care, and how much we care, about our fellow citizens, even if they are unknown to us.

I think the PBS debate has highlighted this.

***

First, facts about the funding:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives $445 million from the federal government. The 2012 federal budget is $2.469 trillion. This means the CPB represents 0.018 percent of the overall federal budget.

This is important, because, as we've seen from surveys, people often overestimate the share of the budget that goes to things like NASA. One survey suggests Americans think NASA takes up 24 percent of the budget, when it in fact receives around 1 percent.

Obviously, zeroing the federal funding for public television will not, in itself, do much for the deficit. Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it particularly well:

2. Federal money represents about 15 percent of the overall public television budget. The rest is made up by sponsorship from foundations and, as they famously say, "viewers like you". On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a lot. But it's unclear what restrictions are placed on both the public and private funds. Contributions and local sponsorship of specific stations might vary a lot -- KPCC in the greater Los Angeles area probably does better than a number of rural networks. Some organizations might target specific programmatic development, and not fund operations -- or vice versa. Some organizations insist on matching funds. So there is the potential for a 15 percent reduction to affect far more than 15 percent of the operations of PBS.

But the reason this battle is important is not the specific numbers involved with the funding. It has to do with what PBS represents. I'm going to focus just on the children's programming, though a spirited, solid defense can be made for the rest of it -- including the News Hour, which the debate moderator, Jim Lehrer, helped create so many years ago.

***

Younger people might not know much about Mr. Rogers. He was the host of a long-running children's show on PBS called Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. It has been satirized, sometimes acutely, but always from a place of love and respect for the impact it's had on generations of Americans (and Canadians).

The funding issue reminds me of Mister (Fred) Rogers' testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, in which he successfully argued against a proposed PBS budget cut by Nixon. He did it by explaining, calmly, clearly, what he did, and why he did it. In short, he created a safe, educational environment for children, explaining calmly and carefully things about the world. He did this because he was worried about commercial programming for children, and what it could do to the emotional development of children.

(For those of you who don't know, Mr. Rogers had a background in child development and music composition, and was an ordained Presbyterian minister.)

Mister Rogers, more than Big Bird, embodied the spirit of PBS, especially its children's programming. It was only later, much later, that I realized he was talking to adults too.

An excerpt from a fantastic article that deserves to be read in full:

He is losing, of course. The revolution he started--a half hour a day, five days a week--it wasn't enough, it didn't spread, and so, forced to fight his battles alone, Mister Rogers is losing, as we all are losing. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electroculture … and yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television--gently, of course--to just shut up for once, and television listened. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy's Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, "All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are ... Ten seconds of silence." And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, "I'll watch the time," and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn't kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked … and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds … and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, "May God be with you" to all his vanquished children.

Seriously, read the whole thing.

***

PBS in general, and its children's programming in particular, serves the needs of educational and emotional development of children without being bombarded by commercial messages.

It is especially important for kids who don't have a fully developed social support network.

I came from a loving family. But I spent a lot of time with grandparents who didn't speak English while my mother was at work. I watched a lot of TV. In retrospect, watching All in the Family when I was three years old was probably not good for me. (I remember writing, "Why is Orchie [sic] Bunker so mad?" on a letter to my grandpa.) But I did watch Mr. Rogers, and Sesame Street, and it helped me with my language development.

So PBS isn't for the kids privileged with wealth and attention and top-notch early childhood education. It's for the rest of us. It's for those of us whose parents, bless their hearts, needed the TV as a babysitter occasionally, but were concerned about the epileptic-inducing nature of Power Rangers and similar shows. It was for those of us who grew up around non-English speakers. It was for those of us who didn't have anyone to talk to us about divorce, or Desert Storm, or about anger -- all of which Mr. Rogers did.

PBS is for the rest of us, for all of us. It's not enough--no television program could replace parenting, in-person education, and hugs. But it helped, especially when it brought kids and adults into the same room, the same emotional space, and helped adults to actually talk with their children.

***

There's a difference between asking for shared sacrifice and cutting a budget completely. If it were about the deficit, then I think Mitt Romney would have used PBS as an example of something we all value, but also something that will need to be cut somewhat in order to ensure a firm financial footing for the children in question.

He didn't do that. He made a joke, a joke to the face of a man employed by that network for decades, a joke at a member of an iconic show, Sesame Street, with twenty different versions around the world. In particular, a version for Palestinian children, Sharaa Simsim, has already been the victim of politics. In early 2012, it was defunded after the US Congress suspended Palestinian aid after Palestine's appeal to the UN for statehood. (The funding was later reinstated by Congress, with restrictions, but the restrictions were overridden by the President.)

It was a joke because he doesn't get how important it is to families not like his -- flawed families, with flawed parents, where TV is on more than it should be, but where it can be a source of learning and even healing. That's what Mr. Rogers saw, and Mr. Romney does not. It's about families that may or may not be like ours, children who may not be ours, but belong to us -- and we to them -- all the same.

Why should I try to say it in words, when Mr. Rogers did it for me?

We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.' Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes."

Sesame Street, you're my hero. Fred Rogers, you're my hero. You have helped me develop into a person who, however imperfectly, believes that liberty and responsibility are partners, not antagonists, in the building of a more perfect union. And it is that partnership, with all its tensions, that is the soul of America.

Calculus memories from Harvey Mudd College

I had a multivariable calculus professor in college who was first-generation Chinese. She's a world expert on differential geometry, and a bit quirky. How much of it is her being Chinese, and how much of it is her quirkiness, I don't know.

Evidently we weren't the brightest class in recent memory, because she decided to review some single-variable calc during a review session. Here's how she helped us remember the derivatives of the exponential and natural logarithmic functions.

"e^x is like a strong child. You hit it [with a derivative] and nothing happens."

"ln x is like a weak child. You hit it and it dies."

I think there was audible consternation. But we remembered.

What happens if Sesame Street gets canceled?

If Sesame Street loses fundin

1. Big Bird will have to move in with his controlling sibling, Big Brother.

2. Cookie Monster will lose his healthcare coverage. Without methadone, he'll spiral back into full-fledged drug addiction.

3. Without a convenient supply of child guest stars, Elmo will start prowling preschools and parks in search of tickles.

4. The Count will return to his previous job as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

5. Without public housing and same-sex partner health benefits, Bert and Ernie will have to struggle in a long-distance relationship. Bert will move in with his father, who, as an evangelical Protestant minister in Indiana, will force him to undergo conversion therapy. Ernie will go back to his job at a gay strip club; however, having put on weight after years of comfortable domesticity, he will be forced to offer "extras", and eventually be busted for prostitution.

6. Mild-mannered Grover will show up to Congress and stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into Congressional representatives and employees. In an extreme case of irony, he will be stopped by Nancy Pelosi with an Uzi, who has long secretly taken advantage of a concealed weapons permit and the expiration of DC's assault weapons ban. Jim DeMint will be on record saying he wish he had been shot instead of having to thank her for saving his life.

7. Snuffleupagus will see his daily routine unchanged: wake up, get high with Tracy Morgan, and eat Doritos in his apartment.