ThomStratton.com

I posted the original a few days ago. Here’s a fun cover that stays largely true to the source. Just ’cause:

I know it’s early on, and I know a lot of other candidates are getting most of the press right now, but based on this foreign policy speech, I’m going to have to take a closer look at Carly Fiorina.

Tyrants know that our patriotism, our principles, and our policies enable us to be a leader on the global stage. Today, Americans sense danger at home and abroad. People all over the world know the fundamentals of freedom and human dignity are threatened. And when we abandon an ally or embolden an adversary, it reverberates throughout the world, and as we tragically know, those ripples can too easily land on our shores.

We need a President who will see and speak and act on the truth. We need a President who knows that some things are black and white and who will be a clear-eyed advocate for policies formed by principles, not by polls and politics. We need a President who will reassure our allies that we are a friend who can be trusted and who will show our adversaries that we will not be bullied or intimidated.

We must nominate and elect a president who proudly accepts the mantel of leadership that a weary world is eager for us to wear.

We’ve tried not leading for nearly eight years now. I see nothing that suggests the world is a safer place for it. I think it’s time we changed direction.

I could use a little good news and positive vibes today, and perhaps you can, too, so I’ve searched the interwebs for a few things praiseworthy or of good report:

A teenager from Northport, New York, who has been struggling with bullying may now be a local hero after her video entry in the Playstation Road to Greatness competition won, and will be bringing a Playstation mobile gaming center to her town to demo the latest and pre-release games.

The NFL has hired their first female coach. Jenn Welter will be added to the Arizona Cardinals staff for the pre-season.

The band Imagine Dragons is coming to Salt Lake, and will be meeting with three young cancer survivors before the concert.

California is getting lots of rain. They need it!

Could an unusual electromagnetic propulsion drive thought to be capable of propelling a space craft to Mars in only 70 days really work? An increasing number of scientists think so!

Sarcasm may make you more creative! And heaven knows we need more creative people!

We’re getting closer to a malaria vaccine.

And if that doesn’t work, how about a cheerful music video!

I recently stumbled across a sales pitch on a website that made me do a double-take. Someone was promoting artwork celebrating the US Women’s Soccer Team, who just won the World Cup. Buying this artwork, they claimed, was a great way to show my feminist credentials.

Say what? I can only be supportive of women’s soccer if I’m a feminist? (It’s possible they printed this tongue-in-cheek, of course.)

Can’t I just be proud of their accomplishment? Women’s soccer in the US, as I understand it, is much farther along than Men’s soccer, and that’s even with a professional soccer league helping develop male talent. So…go US women! You rock! If I was inclined to watch soccer at all, I’d be happy to watch you!

But why on earth would I have to identify as a feminist in order to support them? It makes no sense. Or am I getting it backward? Does my supporting them make me a feminist? If that’s the case, I guess I’m a feminist. I’ve not particularly cared whether it’s male or female atheletes I’m watching–on those rare occasions I watch any sports at all. When I watch the Olympics I’ll watch whichever event they’re showing, and I’ll cheer just as hard for the women as for the men. So if that makes me a feminist, I guess I’m okay with that.

Or do I have to buy artwork celebrating women’s teams’ success to be a feminist?

If that’s the case, I’m not a feminist. Sorry about that. But at least I believe in equal opportunity. I don’t buy artwork celebrating male sports success, either. So I’m not a masculinist, either.

What I probably am is someone who doesn’t care that much about sports, male OR female. What would that be, a non-athleticist?

Is that okay, or am I adopting a risky label here?

Occasionally life yields a pun so wonderful you just have to tell people, even if they’ll be convinced you’re making it up. This is one such case:

Our dog has been having some health problems lately, so we’ve been giving her medication numerous times per day. She’s generally pretty good about it. We just have to wrap the pills in bread and peanut butter and she’ll wolf them down.

But otherwise he appetite has remained poor, and it’s been a cause of concern. My wife called the vet yesterday to ask about it and only then found out we’d been giving her one of her medications wrong. It’s designed to coat our dog’s stomach and give is some protection against food and stomach acid. If you just give it to her in pill form it doesn’t have time to do its job.

No one told us originally, but evidently the pills should be ground up in some water to make a “slurry“. My wife asked if we can just soak it up in bread or something to give it to her and was told that wouldn’t work. The stuff tastes disgusting, so no dog would eat it. We’d have to hold our dog down and squirt it down her throat with a syringe.

Mind you our dog has zero tolerance for any medical process that involves touching her. And she just had surgery, so we’re supposed to be keeping her quiet and not stressing the sutured area. My wife was not too sure about the idea of holding her down and squirting stuff in her mouth. And sure enough, Sofie saw the syringe and immediately backed away. My wife couldn’t even catch her long enough to even try to pry her mouth open.

Finally she tried soaking it into a pancake and giving it to Sofie as she’d originally thought. Sofie ate it without any trouble at all.

So what did we learn? Give it to her in bread, ’cause that slimy, bitter slurry with a syringe is a flop.

My apologies to Mssrs. Rogers and Hammerstein.

This is cool and informative and cool…

My twelve-year-old son entered a local Pokemon tournament this week. The last one he entered didn’t go so well, and though he kept a positive outlook, he was clearly disappointed. Undaunted, he has been working hard since then to build a better deck and improve his playing. At our weekly Pokemon club he’s even gone so far as to befriend an older player who has been to the National Championships and challenge him to a few games.

This week there was another local tournament. He didn’t feel his deck was quite ready, but he wanted to enter anyway for the experience. I don’t know if he was nervous, but I was plenty nervous for him, especially when they began matching him up with older players (next higher division). Sure enough, he lost his first two games to upper-division players. But he seemed fine with it. Then his last three games were against players in his own and the lower division, and he won those. (It was the younger player that gave him the most trouble, to her credit. She took him right to the wire, which was probably the single most important experience of the night for him.)

It turns out that, while they didn’t have enough entrants to arrange matches within each division, they still awarded rankings within each division. He took first place in his age group.

Meanwhile I got to watch some of the matches and most of the players. My one experience with card game tournaments at games stores was not a positive one. But this group seems like a good bunch of people. The older players are generous and kind to the younger players, and even amongst themselves the older players seemed to take it well. Granted, it was an early-season tournament and not part of the “road to World”, so the stakes weren’t as high, but still. I’ve seen plenty of people take even friendly games way too seriously.

Anyway, my son handled himself well, and has a lot more courage and endurance for such things than I did at his age. Perhaps even now. And, as a parent, I’m glad to find a supportive player base that welcomes him in. I hope the future holds many more such experiences for him.

I had just turned off onto the ramp taking me from one freeway to another on my way to work this morning when another car came zipping across two lanes of traffic and the paved zone between the diverging lanes to crowd into the space between me and the car ahead. I’m sure the driver congratulated himself on his ninja driving skillz. I was much less complimentary. It’d be much easier on everyone if he’d just remember his turn-off in time and not rely on everyone else to not do something unexpected in response to his doing something stupidly unexpected.

We rely significantly–even stake our lives–on the protection of the social contract, the notion that we will all cooperate and obey the same code of laws, written or otherwise, in how we behave each day. Yes, there is law enforcement, but let’s face it: there’s never a cop around when the other guy deserves to get caught. We depend largely on the idea that if I obey the law everyone else will, too. I won’t stick my nose in the way of your fist if you promise not to wave your fist in unexpected places.

Increasingly, though, I see people who break that contract, assuming that everyone else will still keep their end of the bargain. The learn to do whatever they want, relying on everyone else to act predictably.

But what if I’d been as reckless with that social contract? What if I’d see the idiot coming and floored it to cut him off? It wouldn’t have been difficult. He was trying to insert himself into a space only 1.5 car lengths long. I could have run him into a barrier had I been just as callous about his breaking the law as he was in breaking it. Or he might still have bashed into the side of my car, sending me into the next lane over and into someone else.

Yeah, it would have been his fault, but I’m not willing to risk the potential injury to myself and others. It’s not worth it to me to risk my neck, or anyone else’s, just to punish him. And so I continue to drive predictably, enabling this jerk to continue to break the social contract and pat himself on the back for his successful manipulation of the system.

But I wonder how long this can last.

There is an old joke that illustrates this point. A tourist arrives in Italy and hires a taxi to take him to his hotel across the city from the airport. The driver agrees, and off they go. Pretty soon they come to a red light, but the driver just speeds up and zips through the intersection, narrowly avoiding a collision.

“Hey!” the tourist yells, “what what you’re doing.”

The driver just waves dismissively. “Don’t-a worry, Senore! My brother Giuseppi, he does this all the time.”

Soon they come up to another red light, and again the driver just guns it and zips on through. The tourist complains again, but again he receives the reply, “No, is okay. My brother Giuseppi, he does this all the time.”

After a while longer they approach a light that just turned green. The driver slams on the brakes, laying a trail of smoking rubber all the way up to the intersection and plastering the tourist against the back of the seat. Completely livid now, the tourist yells, “What the (bleep) are you doing?! That light was green! Are you trying to kill me?!”

The driver just shrugs, “No, Senore, quite the contrary. My brother Giuseppi, he also driving taxi today, and you know how he is with red lights.”

It’s not just traffic laws. We rely on one another to act in a socially acceptable manner in all aspects of our lives. Often there are laws to punish those who transgress that social contract, but I think it’s safe to assume we’d all prefer the infraction not occur at all rather than hope the punishment can satisfactorily restore the status quo after the fact. In most cases the law does not restore the status quo. It merely acts as a deterrent by promising an unpleasant outcome for the perpetrator. Both parties usually end up losing.

But increasingly it seems the threat of negative outcomes is not sufficient to deter some people from taking advantage of the social contract. They’ll wave their figurative fist around recklessly, assuming everyone else will do their best to keep their nose out of the way. The rest of us bend over backward to accommodate them because having them go to jail for breaking my nose won’t fix my broken nose.

If they get away with it long enough, these social contract opportunists may even come to think they deserve to act this way. Even if they do eventually break a nose with their erratic fist they’ll simply convince themselves they’re being treated unfairly because “the idiot didn’t keep their nose out of the way.” Because the effects of not moving your nose is unpleasant, the rest of us continue to watch out for fists, alleviating the need for any responsibility by the fist-swinger, all while muttering to ourselves about the unfairness of it all and how someone ought to teach them a lesson.

When someone finally snaps and decides they are the ones to teach them a lesson it, more often than not, doesn’t end well for the one who snaps, while the initial violator usually gets off free as a bird.

I don’t know the answer, other than to make sure we are not the ones taking advantage of others. I just hope this trend does not grow. When the social contract breaks down entirely, heaven help us all.