ThomStratton.com

Because this is so much better a way to end the week than my other post.

The dog has skills! He’s actually driving that thing, not just hoping to point in a straight line long enough. More importantly, he looks like he’s having a blast! Go Otto!

I’m probably going to step in something by bringing this up, but sometimes the logic of people just leaves me speechless. Take this example, in which a student is proposing free college tuition, student loan forgiveness and $15/hour minimum wage on campuses:

CAVUTO: Well, you want all that stuff. Someone has to pick up the tab. Who would that be?

MULLEN: Ummm, the one-percent of people in society that are hoarding the wealth and kind of causing the catastrophe students are facing…

CAVUTO: So where do they go? Let’s say if you tax these folks — they’re smart people, these one-percent hoarders — so if they leave here, who’s going to pay for all this stuff that you want?

MULLEN: If they leave?

CAVUTO: The country.

MULLEN: Oh. Ummm, I mean there’s always going to be a one-percent in the U.S.

She’s irrefutably correct, and yet so apparently clueless at the same time. I realize this is perhaps an example of “gotcha journalism”, but on the other hand, it’s a fair question to ask anyone who is proposing sweeping changes for how our country works: how do we pay for it? It’s just as likely she might have come back with an amazingly lucid, well-conceived answer. Heaven knows if there’s someone out there who really does have an anwer to these sort of problems we should give them a chance to speak.

Now as I said, she’s absolutely correct that there will always be a top one-percent in the U.S. You could throw out everyone who earns above the poverty line and there would still be a top one-percent in the U.S. But even with the current makeup of earners we have now, if we were to raise their income 10-20% does anyone know just how much taxes that would generate? Remember, we’re not taxing their net worth, just their income, so we wouldn’t be getting another $8-16 Billion from Bill Gates, but whatever he currently makes in a year (usual ROI in average years is 10-12%), so Gates’ income would be maybe $8-9 Billion, resulting in taxes of maybe $1 Billion.

That sounds like a lot. But we have 18 Million college students (as of 2012) in the U.S., so that divides out to $55 per student. That’s not even going to buy one book. Most of the 1% don’t make anywhere close to what Bill Gates makes. According to Business Insider, in Utah where I live you need to make only $340,000 a year to be in the 1%. So clearly, good ol’ Bill is the exception even among the 1%. In fact, according to the New York Times, there are about 1.35 million families in the 1%, with an average income of $717,000. That’s $968 Billion dollars of income per year, currently taxed at 39.6%, or about $383.4 Billion. Upping their taxes another 10% would mean around $97 Billion to fund our free college.

That comes to $5389 per year. That won’t even pay for my alma mater, Idaho State University, at $6,784 per year (for residents). If you think you’re going to get free tuition to Harvard, guess again. Salt Lake Community College costs $3568 a year for tuition only. To make things worse, the added influx of students is going to severely tax colleges to keep up with the demand. They would need more teachers, more administrators, more support staff and more buildings. If we’re passing this expense along to the government, and not based simply on how many students the university can realistically expect, do you think that cost is going to hold steady or increase? (Hint: college costs are already increasing rapidly, even without passing the bill along to the government– 79% from 2003 to 2013.) And as we’ve seen with healthcare, even when the government takes control of things to keep costs from rising they are unable to keep costs from rising.

Bear in mind, this is only one third of Mullen’s proposal. Take it from someone who knows how easy it is to stay in college indefinitely, her proposals would make it very easy for “perpetual students” to never leave college and face the real world–the very thing college is intended for. But whether her proposals are right or wrong, it’s certainly not wrong to ask how we would pay for these changes. It hardly bolsters her arguments to not have a well-considered answer, but to fall back on oft-spewed platitudes. We need to expect more of our college students, especially if we’re all going to be picking up their tab.

Well, this is depressing:

Of parents with children younger than 18, 17 percent said they’d lie to other shoppers, compared to 7 percent of parents with no children under 18. Sixteen percent of parents with under 18 children said they’d be willing to cut in line, while a troubling eight percent said they’d knock down an adult. An even more troubling eight percent of the same group admitted they’d push a child over if it meant walking out with the last coveted toy.

Why? Why would people be so terrible to others at a time celebrating peace and joy?

If there really is a holiday gift shortage, what would the likely fallout look like?

The No. 1 response? Temper tantrums. Forty four percent of parents with young children predicted massive fits over missing toys and goods, 43 percent felt a gift shortage would result in tears, 31 percent felt Christmas Day would be ruined and 10 percent predicted their kids would threaten to run away.

The Daily Beast, itself known for provocative articles for the sake of clicks is crying foul on the movement toward the incredible (in its original meaning, ie. un-credible) in search of clicks. Read the whole thing here.

At some level, you’ve got to admire the guts: this guy had to have known that no person with real problems on this Earth shared this thought, and yet he spent hours of his human life writing about it before disseminating it on a big media platform with his face next to it.

But it’s still profoundly stupid. And he knows it. And he printed it anyway.

It’s not his fault, though.

 If you think you’ve seen more of these recently—stories with no grounding in reality that 99 percent of the planet would never agree with and exist solely to get you to click and see if you’re not having a very swift stroke—well, you have. If you think standards for what is an acceptable story in respected news publications on the web have gotten lower in a chase for clicks, you’re right.

The Internet has quietly cemented its economy on saying the most extreme thing imaginable as loud as possible, and that economy is seeping into the dialogue of life and politics.

Let me tell you, it feels very weird in my mouth to put the words “political” and “hero” together, especially lately. But if it’s even possible for such a person to exist in my world, I think Ben Sasse may be one. A freshman senator from Nebraska, he just finished his first year in the Senate, during which he claims to have kept silent on purpose. Outside the senate he has been engaging with all of his fellow senators to discuss what they think is wrong with things as they stand. After a year of that and observing how things run, he took the floor for the first time recently to present his ideas on what’s wrong and how to fix it.

What he has to say is not the usual boilerplate we’re used to hearing. He’s not calling for greater civility and an end to conflict in the Senate’s deliberations, but for more substance. He’s not asking them to shy away from conflict, but rather use debate for its best purposes of sifting, vetting, and developing ideas to address the real problems America faces.  I found it interesting that of the three former senators he holds up as examples of the type of leadership and deliberation he believes will restore the effectiveness of the Senate, two of them were Democrats.

Sasse is a Republican, but what he has to say has nothing to do with partisanship, but about the Senate’s vision for itself, of its purpose, and its processes. It’s nearly a half-hour speech, but if you’re among the 90% of Americans that think our Congress is doing a terrible job, it’s worth the time to see what he has to say. If we had a Senate that actually did what he recommends I think we’d have a different country today.

Admittedly I know nothing about his politics outside this single speech. I’m weighing it in a vacuum, on it’s merits alone. I didn’t even know he was a Republican until after I listened and looked him up. My impressions are formed from this single speech on this narrow topic.

It’s been announced that Mythbusters’ fourteenth season will be its last. To be honest, I’ve only see a few segments of the show online. I don’t watch TV. I have too much to do, and perhaps in this case, that’s my mistake. Perhaps I should have been watching the show religiously with my kids beside me. But even I have felt the impact of Mythbusters. And I’m clearly not alone. The New York Times is giving out some high plaudits for the show:

Too often, science is presented as a body of established facts to be handed down to obedient students. But “MythBusters” isn’t about facts, it’s about process: For every myth, the team has to figure out how to test the claim, then construct an experiment, carry out the tests and analyze the results. (Penny: false. Poppy seeds: true.) Every episode is an object lesson in the scientific method. Scientists had often been depicted in entertainment, but rarely had audiences seen people actually doing science.

Obviously, experiments staged for television can’t have the rigor of peer-reviewed lab work. But “MythBusters” captures the underlying mind-set of science. At a time when “skepticism” too often means rejecting any ideas one finds politically unpalatable, “MythBusters” provides a compelling example of real scientific skepticism, the notion that nothing can be held true until it is confirmed by experimentation.

It’s also good television. “MythBusters” is relentlessly entertaining partly because it channels the underlying suspense of science itself: The hosts don’t know how an experiment is going to turn out any more than the audience does.

I think we in America need more good STEM role-models and less politicization of science. We need more frank, open discussion about what research and studies really mean and don’t mean. We need more honesty in science, and especially in science journalism. If Mythbusters started us toward that end, then its passing from the cable-waves is indeed a loss.

Yes, I know, good news doesn’t sell. But seriously, there are days it seems like no one is happy, that no one has anything positive happening in their lives, and everything is conspiring to make human existence as miserable as possible. Everything we say is outrage fodder, and everything we do is viewed in the most damning context we can devise. And if we ever cross someone’s arbitrary line you can bet there’ll be video, edited, posted, and spun, and gone viral before we even have a chance to respond.

And it’s ironic. We claim to be all about privacy. Everyone should keep out of our business. Because clearly our business is being in everyone else’s business. We’ve become the anti-Diogenes, dishonestly looking for a dishonest man. Truth and context are irrelevant; only the snippet of reality, as devoid of context as can be contrived in order to imply the worst interpretation is what matters.

We’ve become a society of blinkered misanthropes.

I sometimes wonder if we’ve decided that tearing everyone else down is less work than actually becoming better ourselves, or that true equality means descending to the lowest common denominator.

The thing is, that’s not the world I actually live in. Yes, there is friction, there are unpleasant people. But on the whole, at least where I live, people are generally decent. My neighbor offered us the apples from their tree. If I need to get over into another lane I usually don’t have to wait long for someone kind enough to let me in. People hold doors for me. People give money to the beggars at the freeway offramp.

People do amazing, generous, kindly things. People invent and create and change our lives for the better. People become doctors and nurses and firefighters and policemen and teachers, and do their jobs well even though they’re tired and underappreciate and even maligned. People get up and go to work and do all the things that hold society together, even though other people are laying in wait to capture them in a moment of weakness and destroy their lives.

Good things don’t get much press, and that’s a pity. We need more headlines like “Nearly 500 people gather to paint homes of the elderly” or “Stranger pays for car repairs for family stranded along freeway” or “Teacher retires, having made a difference in the lives of over 1000 student.”

Yes, bad things happen, and there are some truly bad people out there. And there are a lot of people who make at least one really bad choice in their lives. But the bulk of people are not bad people, and are nowhere as terrible as their fifteen seconds of viral video make them out to be. The ubiquity of camera phones haven’t made us more accountable, only more vulnerable. It’s made us less forgiving, less understanding, less patient. The Perpetual Outrage Gang have made us less willing to stick up for one another, or even to merely point out, “I don’t think this is entirely in context and may be misrepresented.”

My experience with life is that you find what you look for, but that’s not entirely true, obviously. Whenever we engage with media of any kind we are more likely to find what other people think we want to see. Perhaps its time we began looking for better media. Or perhaps it’s time we became better media, focusing more on getting the positive side of life out there.

To quote Rex from Toy Story, “Great! Now I have GUILT!” I’m such a heartless, cruel replacer of busted appliances! (Granted, I probably would have tried to fix a simple handle problem myself first.)

I’ve been listening to The Lord of the Rings on audio for the past few months, and usually in the car during my commute. Regularly I find myself trying to remember the layout of Middle Earth and find I am unable to do so. I resolve as soon as I get where I’m going I’ll look it up–surely there’s a map online somewhere. But invariably I forget by the time I get there.

Today I remembered. I really don’t remember it well at all. Whereas the flow of the story over the land runs mostly northwest to southeast, in my mind it goes more east-west. In reality, The Hobbit runs more east-west. Most of the important events in The Lord of the Rings occur within about four-hundred miles, though they travel two to three times that distance from The Shire to Barad-dur.

While perusing that map, I began wondering how the lands described in The Silmarilion line up with the geography, so I did some more searching. You would think it does, as there are some common land features, like the Blue Mountains, and the place on the map that that claims to be the old witch-realm of Angmar. But though some people have tried to knit the maps together, there is clearly something missing–something Tolkien never committed to paper himself. It’s difficult to say if we’ll ever really know how it all fit together.

But as I continued to study the maps I found my eyes continually drawn to the edges, and I find myself wondering what lies beyond. What would we find if we wandered beyond  Rhûn, or headed east out of Mordor? What lays beyond South Gondor? And what would we find out beyond Harad? There’s always another frontier to explore.

I think, as rich as it was, there was a limit to even Tolkien’s imagination. Though me may have known the answers to some of my questions, I suspect there had to come a point when he’d have to say, “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter to anything else I’ve written.”

And yet something there is, I suspect, innate to the human mind that always wants to know: What lies beyond this edge? As tempting as it might be to call that the curse of our species, I think it’s actually a gift.