In the chapter on Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann, Sailer writes:

It was in Indonesia, strangely enough, that his white mother, as a stratagem in her passive-aggressive war on Lolo, her unsatisfactory Asian second husband, painstakingly instilled in little Barry Soetoro the black racialism that pervades all 460 pages of Dreams from My Father. [Half-Blood Prince p.52]

Sailer identifies the correct time and place in which Obama’s obsession with race took root, but he overestimates Stanley Ann’s influence. Fortunately, Sailer includes a short sketch of the background of Indonesia during Obama’s stay:

After the horrific events of 1965-1966 in which a Communist Party uprising led to a bloody crackdown by the army, and the leftist blowhard President Sukarno was pushed out by the rightist General Suharto…

Horrific is a perhaps an understatement for what was going on in Indonesia at the time. Political and racial violence had been raging for nearly twenty years. Ethnic cleansing and racial violence resulted in the exodus of hundreds of thousands of “Indo-Europeans” (in Indonesia this means people of mixed European and Indonesian blood), and untold thousands of Chinese were butchered in the streets and in their homes.

It is telling that Obama’s mother tells her son she “hadn’t heard about the scenes of mass slaughter in Indonesia during the putsch” [Half-Blood Prince p.54]. Given Stanley Ann’s education and intelligence, not to mention interest in Indonesia, she must not have been telling her son the truth. Perhaps she meant to deflect her responsibility for what her son went through in this political climate:

Obama was routinely subjected to racist violence by local lads: “All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood—primarily because he was so different in appearance.” He was frequently attacked by three Indonesian kids at once, and one time they threw him in a swamp. “Luckily, he could swim.” [Half-Blood Prince p. 54]

Sailer posits that Obama, who clearly has a great deal of ambivalence about his mother, was indoctrinated into Black Nationalism as a part of a passive-aggressive war his mother was waging against her second, Indonesian husband Lolo Soetero. I don’t think Stanley Ann ultimately had that kind of influence on Obama, but the daily ridicule and frequent beatings from Indonesian kids certainly did. The anti-colonialist struggle in Indonesia was largely a racial nationalist effort. Obama, a mixed-race boy of half-European heritage, probably fell into a classification approximating that of the hated Indo-Europeans, who were seen as the mestizo elite that collaborated with Dutch overlords.

Innocent little Obama couldn’t escape racial abuse, and certainly often wished he could look just like the Indonesian kids who taunted him. Over time Obama likely internalized some of the resentment toward Europeans that characterize Indonesia. He probably resented his white mother for taking him there; she may have regretted doing so. Perhaps this explains why he was left with his grandparents in Hawaii. Obama may not have written much about this experience because, as is often the case with children of flawed parents, it is the deepest regrets and most painful memories that are most carefully hidden.

Ultimately, it was the trauma of his experience in Indonesia that left Obama with a deep need for a racial identity despite spending his adolescence in tolerant, multiracial Hawaii. Per America’s racial rules, Obama’s default identity was black, and he embraced it with a passion. Obama’s racialism, rather than being an outgrowth of his mother’s troubled marriage with Lolo Soetero, was forged in the seething cauldron of post-colonial Southeast Asia. One should never underestimate the effect abuse and alienation can have on a little boy.

This is relevant to the Chimera Hypothesis due to evidence for homosexuality - particularly male homosexuality - in sheep. The chimerism studied here is purely sex-chromosome chimerism, which only measures chimerism from opposite sex cell lines, almost certainly from opposite sex siblings. The opposite sex cells were found to have the ability to migrate to tissues other than blood and become transcriptionally active. In rams, they were found in white blood cells, which have been observed transforming into nerve cells in the presence of nerve growth factor. This suggests that chimerism in brain tissue could result from chimeric macrophage transformation into transcriptionally active nerve cells.

But the real problem McCain has is that he isn’t even a real conservative. He is an open borders, warmongering neocon hack who supported the laissez faire economic policies that have just sucker-punched the American middle class. Why the Republican party thought a guy like that could win the election given our current state of affairs is beyond me. Just about the only thing he brings to the table is support from Vietnam vets, who don’t have quite the clout they used to. Despite McCain’s attempts to portray himself as someone who will “shake things up” and end the war and our economic problems, he is intimately tied to all the failed policies of the Bush administration, and people instinctively know it. The three failures in which McCain played a big role are the immigration fiasco, the war and the mortgage crisis. These are all huge issues that that have provoked a great deal of anger, and McCain is on the wrong side on each and every one.

My prediction is that in this election Obama will soundly defeat McCain, but not by winning over much - if any - Republican support. In fact, he will win because so many Republicans just won’t be able to bring themselves to check the box next to McCain’s name. I’d be willing to bet that middle and working class white men - the traditional Republican support base - will turn out in lower numbers than they have in a long time, and that will all but guarantee an Obama win.

Generation X is just starting to show its political side, and it does not look much like the boomers’ at all. The two candidates that excited GenXers the most were Ron Paul on the right and Barack Obama on the left. Neocons and boomer liberals like the Clintons are generally disliked, if not outright detested by adults under the age of 45 or so. The surprisingly resilient campaign of Ron Paul was a direct result of younger adults’ disenchantment with the prevailing norms, but Paul was denigrated and rejected as a fringe cadidate by his own party, whereas Obama, who is a bit more of an insider, was shielded to a degree by a political correctness that demanded he be treated respectfully and taken seriously. So Obama has emerged as the first GenX candidate.

The characteristics of the GenX political animal have emerged in the campaign, and they are a far cry from boomer political activism. Except for a few sappy, weird stunts pulled by boomer grandparents with their grandkids, Obama’s campaign pays only lip service to the universalism that so beguiles the boomer psyche. In fact, it has taken on a downright nasty form as the final week approaches, hitting McCain and Palin in their pressure points with one focused blow after another. McCain is portrayed as a psychotic warmonger in cahoots with the same gang of crooks who fooled us into a war with Iraq. Palin, for her part, is cast as that vapid bitch of a prom queen we all hated back in the 1980s.

Generation X grew up in a cold, dark place, under the overwhelming shadow of the massive baby boom. We were spoon-fed platitudes about love, harmony and equality, and then came of age during a time of unprecedented violence, as cities across the nation became gangland war zones. It was a strange, conflicting message we received, as we tried to digest counterculture 1960s utopianism even as apocalyptic paranoia crept into the public’s consciousness. This left us with little sense of purpose and a deep cynicism about the causes our parents enthusiastically supported in their free, idealistic youth. Also, relatively speaking, we have been poorer than the boomers ever were. College costs skyrocketed and wages stagnated as we entered adulthood. Our options were reduced to following the repeated economic surges created by boomer speculation, which has finally, it seems, culminated in the massive financial failure of recent months.

Now GenXers are emerging from the shadow. And it is no coincidence that this is happening as the edifice of boomer greed and selfishness is crumbling before our eyes into ruin. We’ve learned to speak the language of the boomers, and with Obama Generation X has found their achilles’ heel. Deep in the hearts of people of my generation, there is a hope that Obama really will engage in redistribution and punish the old gang that created the mess America finds itself in. It isn’t just right vs. left; think of the attacks that sank Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This is undeclared generational warfare — undeclared because GenXers do not broadcast their intentions and take the center stage like boomers. We’ve always despised boomers’ self-righteous grandstanding. Most GenXers work from hidden places, never grabbing the spotlight, supporting their candidate through merciless surprise attacks on the opponent. McCain doesn’t know how to deal with this, and this is largely because his campaign lacks real support from younger adults. It must be his worst nightmare, kind of like flying a plane and facing not just one formidable opponent, but a swarm of missiles coming from all directions.

This is the new kind of politics we’ll see for some time: hidden intentions, contempt for chivalry, and calculated appeals and attacks rather than genuine universalist sappiness. The goal for the next four years will be the disenfranchisement of the aging boomers, and if Obama is elected and doesn’t follow through on that, he will find his current supporters turning on him with the same hard tactics that beat down his opponents. We are witnessing a paradigm shift in American politics and society as boomers, who will never willingly pass on the reins, are suddenly finding them pried out from their fingers by a determined, pissed-off, and surprisingly strong younger demographic.

Selecting Palin as VP was a stunt that appears to have gone horribly wrong for McCain. The bounce from Palin’s nomination is starting to look like a dead cat as people find that trash is not in fact a good substitute for class. At this point, many are beginning to question whether McCain actually wants to win. It doesn’t look like it to me, but who knows what goes on in the mind of a maverick?

There are those who don the armor of righteousness and sally forth to save marriage as though they were knights who storm a castle to save a fair princess, but all they find is a cackling old crone in their arms. Attempts are made to give the institution a facelift, but no amount of perfume can cover the foul vapors that hang around the old witch, nor can any effort succeed in banishing the vicious minions that inhabit her menagerie.

We have to face the truth about marriage: it has metastasized into a beast that frequently consumes men’s lives and rewards women for grievous sins, doing great, usually irreparable, damage to families and society. Furthermore, in today’s wold it has become largely meaningless: illegitimacy no longer carries any stigma, gay marriage has extinguished its biological basis, and instead of the implicit assurance of steadfastness and fidelity, it now carries the explicit threat of divorce. Because of divorce, marriage constitutes an existential threat to many men, and for women it is loaded with so much temptation to do wrong that their risk of permanently destroying their reputation and family is unacceptably high.

It is time to cast these notions of saving marriage aside. The damage has already been done, and the systemic corruption of its corpus is too catastrophic to repair. The contemporary incarnation of marriage should be viewed and handled like high-level radioactive waste; highly toxic material to be sealed and entombed in vaults deep underground.

On first thought, this may seem like a radical solution. Why not simply try to fix the laws, tinker with the norms a bit and add some cultural prodding to get people to behave better? Unfortunately, that cannot work, and not only because of what a liability marriage has become. Western marriage was built on the Christian principles that created Western civilization, which is clearly done for. Western civilization is as dead as the old Confucian order that fell with a thud during the collapse of the Qing dynasty. This is not to say that nothing will remain of it, but just as classical Roman civilization was supplanted by Western Christianity, something different will come along to build upon the slowly crumbling ruins of Western civilization.

Western Christianity clearly borrowed a great deal from the civilization it replaced, and monogamous marriage is a good example of cultural continuity. However, the Christian marriage contract differed significantly from the pagan Roman. The most crucial difference was the irrevocable nature of marriage in Christian theology. The New Testament set the bar very high for separation from one’s spouse, whereas divorce was a relatively easy matter in Roman law. Today, we have an impossible amalgamation of the two systems, where culturally and ideally we still carry a vestigial Christian concept of matrimony, but legally and practically we are closer to the Roman norm. Therefore we still view the marital union as “one flesh,” and so apply Solomon’s solution to its dissolution, i.e. cut that baby in two.

It is tempting at this point to explore solutions, but the primary goal of this post is to open people’s minds to the idea that marriage, as it exists today, can be done away with. Of course, it will have to be replaced with something better, and I will explore that concept in my next post, but one of the preconditions for reform is the abolition of marriage as we know it. It is of the utmost importance that people begin to realize that marriage in its current form is damaged beyond hope of salvation, and that getting rid of it is not only possible, but desirable as well.

(This clip was produced by a boy as a present to his father — very touching)

The sustainability movement has a serious image problem, but to grasp this requires a shift in perspective. When one thinks of an ecologically-friendly and progressive society, what comes to mind are smart cars and Toyota hybrids gliding around hip urban enclaves from one ethnic restaurant to another, passing stylish hipsters sipping lattes outside streetside cafés. At the local city park, dreadlocked hippies sell organic produce to young couples with small dogs and designer grocery bags. The cars are tiny and quiet, wine bars abound, and immaculate specialty shops enliven the streets with art-deco facades. All is pleasant and everyone is happy, right? Not everyone, not by a longshot…

The above scenario fills most red-blooded American men with dread and disgust. They get the feeling I remember when my mother, grandmother and sister would drag me to the mall as a little boy and force me to try on saddle shoes. To this day, I occasionally experience waves of nausea in shopping malls. But so what if beer-drinking, closet pyromaniacs don’t want to get with it? They’re obviously not “progressive” and are doomed to the fate of other maladapted species of humanity. In fact, they deserve to be supplanted by scooter-riding, metrosexual yogis. Or so goes the conventional urban wisdom.

What the hipsters chatting over the brims of their recycled starbucks cups don’t know is that the guys working the pits at the Indy 500 are at the forefront of a potential revolution in sustainable energy. Every time they fill up a race car’s tank they are using a clean, renewable energy source — alcohol. Indy cars will be using ethanol fuel this year, but have been using alcohol, mainly methanol, since the 1970s. Drag racing hobbyists and semi-pros race alcohol dragsters and alcohol funny cars fueled with methanol. While methanol doesn’t have the explosive power of nitromethane - used in top fuel dragsters - the above top-alcohol funny car video demonstrates its impressive power and performance.

In what should be an encouraging development for speed and power-obsessed men around the world, methanol is emerging as a very attractive substitute for gasoline. Not only is it a versatile fuel, it can also integrate well into existing infrastructure, and some brilliant scientists are promoting it as the basis of a new, renewable energy economy. George Olah, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994, believes that methanol can replace fossil fuels as our primary energy source, and along with some other prominent scientists is working on making this feasible.

Methanol’s versatility gives the fuel great potential. It can be used directly in internal combustion engines, it is readily convertible to dimethyl ether - a high cetane diesel fuel - and it can even be used as a feedstock for synthetic gasoline. However, what really makes methanol special is its chemical simplicity and the ease with which it is produced. Today, most methanol is produced from natural gas, but Olah has demonstrated that simple fuel cells with certain catalysts can produce methanol directly from atmospheric CO2 and water. This takes only electricity, which is readily produced in renewable and nuclear powerplants that emit no CO2.

Methanol burns clean and has a high octane rating, making it attractive for use in cars. Although toxic, it is water soluble and readily biodregadable, so any large scale spills would be one-off events rather than ongoing disasters like the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Its drawbacks include increased corrosion of metals and plastics and a lower energy content by volume, but the technology required to deal with these problems is already well-understood, and the effort men will put into getting the most out of the fuel guarantees that vehicles running on methanol will perform just as well as the cars we have now.

One of the beautiful things about the prospect of a methanol economy is that it can fit right in with the same facilities and men who produce our energy today. Refineries, pipelines and supertankers can all be retrofitted to work with methanol and its derivatives. Nuclear and hydroelectric plants can provide the electric power to produce methanol from air and water. From pipeline workers to nuclear physicists, men can come together to do what they really like: make fuel to burn in machines. As they do so, they will be forging a renewable, sustainable economy that your typical Prius driver could never imagine.

Sustainability will look far different from how it is imagined today. It will be implemented by the very same people who are cast as demons in today’s environmentalist movement. Truckers will still cross the country in big, shiny diesel trucks, supertankers sloshing with a full load of fuel will still cross the open ocean, and large refineries will pump tons of fuel into giant pipes. Yes, there will be some changes, but we’ll still have our machines, and ultimately it will be industry and material progress that pull us through the rough times ahead.

It is tempting to attribute doom-hysteria to a subliminal millenialism that reached its peak right around the turn of the century, and indeed it may be that an atavistic numerology was the invisible force, running like a deep current under society, that darkened the collective mood. Mass psychology, after all, is poorly understood and works in ways that individuals do not well understand. One of the better ways to tap into it (or so I’ve heard) is through the ingestion of a large dose of hallucinogens, and perhaps there we have a hint of what was really going on in the last few decades of the 20th century, but that’s speculation and probably ought to be saved for a future discussion.

Recently, I have found a couple of old die-hard optimists, who in the strange positive-negativism of a culture that sancitifies doom-saying come off as a couple of contrarian curmodgeons. Needless to say, curmudgeonry can be interesting, especially when it concerns matters of global survivability and sustainability. The two men, one a computer scientist and the other a nuclear physicist, are both extraordinarily intelligent and possessed of esoteric scientific knowledge, yet they present their case with lucid, comprehensible prose and a delightfully sardonic wit (which I find particularly enjoyable, although that may be an idiosyncracy).

John McCarthy, the computer scientist who is currently Professor Emeritus at Stanford, has created a comprehensive, informative website making the case for “Progress and its Sustainability.” The site, although graphically sparse (why do brilliant scientists often have such lousy-looking websites?), has a wealth of facts that rarely see the light of day in the popular press, and is peppered with amusing quotes such as: “Because of journalism, humanity is readily annoyed, but we are capable of surviving any of the catastrophes to life that have occurred in past, and science is very likely to give us plenty of warning for most of them.”

Dr. McCarthy takes environmentalist prophets of doom such as Paul Ehrlich to task, putting together an impressive list of ridiculous quotes (including some that are downright psychotic) predicting imminent catastrophe or otherwise bashing the human species. I spent a good deal of time going through every page, finding something new and informative on each one.

The second curmudgeon, Dr. Bernard Cohen, another Professor Emeritus (of Physics at the University of Pittsburg), has published “The Nuclear Energy Option“, an online book about nuclear power that makes the case that nuclear energy is essentially inexhaustible. A staunch proponent of nuclear energy, Dr. Cohen sets about smashing myths about the dangers of radiation, putting it in perspective in comparison to coal and other energy sources. He has more of a flair for self-promotion than Dr. McCarthy, having challenged Ralph Nader to a plutonium eating contest — in the service of human progress, of course. The book examines the risks of nuclear power and radiation in exhaustive detail, and attacks anti-nuclear activists with a mountain of facts and calculations. I found the section on reactor meltdown risks - which he readily admits are quite real - and the safeguards to prevent them to be the most fascinating and informative section, although the discussion of nuclear waste storage came in a close second.

The fight these two old scientists have put up to make the case for optimism about the future gives me hope that the collective mood will lighten and my own children can grow up with a sunny eagerness for days to come, unencumbered by the shadow of doom that darkened depictions of the future during my childhood. Rather than a world filled with homicidal androids, mass starvation or nuclear holocaust, they may imagine a city on the moon and trips to see the rings of Saturn. Maybe things have already begun to change, and the dreaded horsemen of the apocalypse are riding off into the sunset. One can hope.

The day after the phone conversation, I saw a mobile detention unit pull up in front of my house, out of which stepped a large man in uniform, shod in heavy boots and sporting a shiny silver badge. Although I knew why he was there, I still couldn’t really believe it was happening. Clipboard in hand, industrial strength can of mace and taser gun hanging from either side of his hip, the animal control officer approached my door. Worried about the impending arrest of my cat, I stepped outside to meet him halfway, hoping Nelson would stay out of sight. The officer, who turned out to be a friendly, jovial guy, broke the news I expected to hear, telling me what he had heard about the incident, and why he had to respond. Evidently, Nelson would have to be booked on suspicion of aggravated mangling and simple assault. The alleged mangling had resulted in the hospitalization of Nelson’s enemy, so his veterinary records would be impounded as well.

Fearing he would be incarcerated at the local animal jail, I was reluctant to surrender Nelson, but the officer assured me that he could be booked and released to my custody. So I went to fetch my cat, upon which he was scanned for his digital fingerprint and photographed for a mug shot. The officer stated that he didn’t think the matter would be pursued any further, since the most serious charge - the mangling - was not directly witnessed and there was no evidence that he had actually assaulted my neighbor. I suggested that the mangling may have been the result of raccoon activity in the neighborhood, and he seemed to accept that explanation as a possibility.

After booking Nelson, the officer left to pick up his veterinary records, and I haven’t heard from animal control or my neighbor since. To me, the entire episode simply confirmed the strange nature of our tightly-controlled society. When even disputes between cats are referred to authorities, one wonders where it will stop. Could someone get a visit from an officer for letting dandelions grow in his lawn? How about letting little kids run around naked in the sun? It’s about time society started letting up on the control impulse and just let things be.

Here’s the article in the Seattle PI:

Police investigate woman’s complaint about Adult Web site impersonator

Unfortunately, the very sensitive nature of his job is placed at the very end of the article, when it clearly belongs in the lead. Typical…

New scandals relating to the family court system seem to pop up weekly in King County. Seems there might be a bit of a transparency issue that needs to be addressed.