Proper Disrespect for False Authority
There are four kinds of tyrannies:
One of my colleagues sent me the link to a New Yawk Times article [Link] detailing some research done a U Fribourg dealing with how animals learn. What struck me about this were the implications of the findings for humans, and in particular humans in the Yankee republic.
The dismal prospect is that our current educational system, where individual competition is abolished in favor of the “everyone who enters the race gets a prize” philosophy of Political Correctness, and replacing it by a standardized shul level pseudo-competition - the Every Child Left Behind oppression of the Yankee government - is making our children less intelligent, less able to learn and compete successfully. In terms that would be used by traditional media were it not also constrained by political correctness, genocide by education.
Reinforcing this is an article on research from London Metropolitan and Cardiff U that young people today are anti-nerd. [Link] In effect they are opting out of maths, science, and engineering because they see maths as useless number crunching and the practitioners of those disciplines as “old, white, middle-class men”, people who are not normal, lack social skills, and are obsessive.
Guilty as charged! But it is somehow difficult to a generation who treasures individuality to see how becoming a member of a herd or hive and surrendering self determination and creativity is a life worth living? Normality is banal, social skills are for peasants and dweebs, and one person’s obsessiveness is another’s concentration, which is a capacity I see all too seldom in contemporary youth - unless they are playing a video game.
The sad thing here is that the social barriers in the maths and sciences are generally lower than in most disciplines and activities. The amount of yammering I hear in maths and science professional meetings about diversity is vastly greater than I hear in management and business professional meetings.
This herd mentality does not bode well for the species; after all, it was herd depredations that desertified the Sahara.
I don’t mean to harp on the “too many people” theme but it is a fact that tends to dominate a lot of this consideration.
High Cost of Transportation + Really Bad Weather = Lots of Casualties. The lesson we can draw from Katrina where you had lots of folks with no personal transportation in high concentration and with limited avenues of travel extrapolated into an era when this lack of transportation is more widespread than today is that evacuation will become so problematic as to be discarded. Result: a harsher, more brutal environment where those who are the beneficiaries of adverse weather will suffer and die from it. Or extrapolating what we are seeing in China and Myamar (Burma) right NOW, the dividing line on life altering bad weather - a Tornado takes your home but leaves you safe in a storm shelter - and life stopping bad weather - the weather takes your home and you - is lowered substantially.
The Death (?) of Tourism: If folks aren’t going to go off on automobile vacations then the places that depend on that kind of tourism are going to dry up. Florida may go back to being a sleepy backwater like it was before the Great Patriotic War. But we may expect to see a lot more organized vacations similar to the bus tours sold to senior citizens who can’t/won’t drive but targeted to families with shul age children. One has to wonder how teenagers can sulk about being seen in public with parents on a tour bus.
Telecommuting: One of the obvious things is that the material pace of life is going to decrease. People cannot go as much, as fast, as far given the same amount of money. This may mean that we really get serious about information workplace as something more than Blackberry addicts.
Suburbs: The death knell? Bedroom communities are either going to have to find a way to be internally productive, either with small factories and businesses that produce necessary products or as telecommuting centers, or they are going to become modern day ghost towns. I can easily see Greater Metropolitan Arab as being nothing but a senior citizen retirement community in ten years if it doesn’t find some existence mode other than as a bedroom community for Huntsville.
I was listening to the Guardian’s Weekly Science Podcast this morning in gym - Tuesdays have evolved into listening to podcasts with Science names - and a question was raised about why so many people are in denial about global climate change. The answer that came forth was highly unsatisfactory, it reduced down to an existential people are that way, but the question gave rise to some consideration on my part.
I have observed over the years that people are somewhat tolerant of change that they impose on themselves, and rather less tolerant of change imposed from without. I have also noted that there are two modes in which external change is fairly readily adopted: when the adopter can rationalize the change as of self origin; and when they can become fanatical about the change. The latter manifests in the behavior of folks like quitted smokers and the born-again religious. The term fanatics is striking appropriate to these people and hence to what occurs.
At root however, I have come to the hypothesis that humans have to have a feeling of rightness to be comfortable with their existence. As a result they tend to be highly resistant of any inclination that they are not right in their behavior, their lives, …. So if you tell someone that they are not right about something, they will feel threatened at the core of their being and respond negatively.
This probably explains why so many scientists are so moody because they live in an environment where they are continually proven to not be right and are continually searching for that right.
The thing with global climate change however, is that if it is caused by human activity then the message is that humans have done things that are wrong. [1] Hence, I suspect, the denial. And as much as I hate to say seemingly nice things about politicians, and this really isn’t very nice, organizations almost never care about human feelings and behavior - only when the survival of the organization is at risk, but politicians who are dependent on the votes of humans do, and this is probably why the politicians are doing everything they can not to admit that humans likely are at fault here. Of course, by doing this they prolong the denial and assure that any solution, if it hasn’t already slipped away will be harder and longer to achieve.
1. I am told by educators that they never tell students they are “wrong”, just not right enough. This practice strikes me as ill preparing those young folks for dealing with those of us who don’t have this political correctness and use the “w” word.
The news has been largely concerned with the price of gasoline these days, [Link] [Link] even to the point that the chronic irritation that the presidential race has become has receded to a level controllable with over the counter medications. I have been giving this some consideration and herein assay a few initial considerations.
Alternate Fuels: I have serious doubts that we are going to be able to seriously ameliorate the depletion of petroleum resources with ethanol. At its simplest this comes down to a matter of having too many people. This is not to say that we cannot switch the Yankee republic over to operating with ethanol as its transportation energy fluid, but in the process we are going to have to let something on order of 0.75 of the national population starve to death. I’m not sure what that number is today but it is in excess of 150 millions of people. Or simply put, get with three other people and agree on which three of the four are going to die so the fourth can drive around.
We also cannot efficiently burn ethanol in an internal combustion engine, and particularly not the ones we have now. In particular ethanol is hideously hygroscopic and an effective ethanol burning internal combustion engine may have to be made of stainless steel or even platinum.
The best way to burn ethanol, and maybe hydrogen is with external combustion. Now the technology of external combustion has a good historical base - like the Stanley Steamer - but it will mean we have to change how we structure our highways. In particular we’re going to have to figure out how to get rid of stop lights and signs, and people stopping to turn left. External combustion motor cars do not accelerate and decelerate well.
A hybrid electric/hydrogen car could be feasible if we can get fuel cell technology to work, but it isn’t going to be cheap nor easily made safe.
So if we do get to alternate fuels, we are going have vastly changed driving conditions. If we go with external combustion cars then we are going to have to radically change our roads and the laws governing them. No more stopping for shul buses unless you want a real mess. And no more turning left unless its from a left turn lane.
And if we go with hydrogen and/or electric cars then expect much slower speeds, about half of what we get now in order to get a reasonable range on a “tank” of fuel. And that reasonable range will be about half of what it is now, which again means no traffic jams unless its a technology that sits and “idles” efficiently.
But regardless of this, these cars are probably going to cost a lot more than cars do today. The Indians can make a gasoline automobile for $2.5K but one of these alternate fuel cars is probably going to run more like $50K.
Near Term: In the near term we’re going to have to live with high gas prices, probably in the $6-10 per gallon range for the next year or so. To put this in context, consider that right now the average driver buys about 2K gallons of gasoline a year and works a bit more than 2K hours per year. That works out to an hour of work per gallon of gasoline. Now ask yourself how much gas you can buy expressing gasoline as a fraction of your take home hourly rate. And if you get much over 0.25, step back and think about how you are kidding yourself.
If you are earning minimum wage right now, then your take home piece of an hour’s work is about the same as a gallon of gas last week. That is effectively a fraction of 1.0. To get to an effective value of 0.25, that means you are going to have to get by on about 500 gallons of gas a year. Or about ten gallons a week.
That means big changes in your life style. If your commute to work is more than a gallon’s milage, then you;re already in the hole, even if you don’t go anywhere else but work and you do all your shopping to and from work. No other driving!
Taking the kids to shul, or after shul activities? Forget it. Visiting your momma, or your significant other? Get a bike or walk or do without.
But you don’t have to worry about your social life, because most of the places of entertainment are going to be going out of business. Ditto restaurants, especially fast food ones, and even some of the big box stores. The reason for the latter is that while transporting raw materials is pretty efficient, transporting shrink wrapped product isn’t. So the high cost of transportation will tend to favor local, small factories and businesses, and maybe even Mom and Pop enterprises.
If you want to be really brutal, and maybe even overcorrecting, take nineteenth century life and overlay sewers, electricity, and the internet, and you may be close to the way things are.
Once we get through the shock of half of everyone out of work and stuck in place.
But these are just preliminary thoughts.
Last night was rather punctuated. A front of thunder storms and the occasional rotational cell giving rise to a tornado moved through with considerable pomp and circumstance. The punctuation however was the product of the Greater Metropolitan Arab Emergency Management people.
I should perhaps comment that like many medium to large small Alibam towns, Greater Metropolitan Arab has these telephone poles festooned with loudspeakers in odd places apparently selected on the basis of enriching the local gentry and cleaning up their odds and sods of property that is not worth the tax burden but which cannot be abandoned without losing face.
These towers are rather what one would expect. They are quite loud and obey Bill Cosby’s rule that was originally postulated for bus terminals but has since been extended to any public address system that the announcements must be as incomprehensible as possible. Those made from these towers obey that rule with a catholicism otherwise absent in the town.
Twice last night I was vibrated from my slumber by the emergency management apparat of Greater Metropolitan Arab warning me - probably - of the storm. In both instances I stumbled to the television to check radar coverage and discovered in both instances that there were indeed potential tornadic conditions. And in both instances the tornadic conditions were at least! 15 miles away and moving on an azimuth that would preclude their ever entering the police jurisdiction of Greater Metropolitan Arab.
In the cool light of day this morning, after contemplating the nature of Blue Laws (see previous blot), I then came to reflect on this matter. A bit of cogitation brought me to a conundrum. Either the emergency management apparat is staffed and directed by sadists whose particular fetish is yanking the citizenry about with generally “true” but specifically “false” alarms, or their system of determining the area of risk has a resolution that is pitifully archaic.
A moment of reflection on the basic ethical composition of non-politician Southrons and the state of the government of Greater Metropolitan Arab induces me to attribute the greater, almost overwhelming, probability to the latter. In all likelihood the disruption of my slumber, over and above that already incurred from the general noise level of the storm, is the direct result of the ineptitude, inefficiency, antiquity, and general incompetence of the town’s government.
And the sad thing is that even with a eminent town election these conditions will not be changed. Indeed, the only good news I can find in this is the continuing inflation of the cost of petrol which will at least reduce this inept governance to immobility.
While searching for merchants open this morning for a couple of necessities, I had occasion to reflect on the nature of small Alibam towns. Now while Greater Metropolitan Arab would contest vehemently that it is a small town, it is, despite a population of over 6K humans and no telling how many other animals.
The topic I came to focus on was the matter of Sunday Blue Laws, which are ostensibly an expression of protection of Shabbat, which if it is so is a blatant manifestation of the religious chauvinism - perversion? - of the Sowth. If the Blue Laws were really about observing Shabbat then stores would be closed more days than they would be open, but definitely closed from Friday afternoon through Monday morning.
Of course, the Sowth has always been rather elitist and autocratic for a democracy, and only the rights of the in-crowd are of any consequence, a practice and philosophy that has repeatedly given rise to disquietude between the Yankee government and the Southron establishment over whether those who are not members of the in-crowd have any rights other than permission of existence so long as they don’t get “uppity”.
From this we readily see that the Shabbat in question is that of the in-crowd which is Christian, Protestant, Fundamentalist, ….. and the Shabbat in question is the one written down by Joshua ben Joseph himself in the bible in his own words of Natural Southron English.
I have come to suspect however that the Blue Laws are actually a conspiracy of the merchants themselves to provide themselves with a day of relaxation away from their business establishments and those ultimate of pests - customers, with their demands of quality product for a fair, minimal price - and legal avoidance of having to hire someone to keep the store on Shabbat in their place.
The data supporting this hypothesis is epitomized by the strangeness of the Greater Metropolitan Arab rush hour. Exactly at 1700 hours, a rush of cars departs the central business district of Greater Metropolitan Arab. The occupants of these cars are the folks who run the businesses downtown. Yes, if one goes downtown in Greater Metropolitan Arab at 1701, one can find no stores open.
Gives really strong insight into MalWart doesn’t it? Shows why MalWart can be so successful in the hinterland of small towns and villages, and so dismally fail in the big cities.
Dirt as a word holds rather a special pride of place in the Sowth. Despite its dictionary definition,
Dirt 1. Any foul of filthy substance, as excrement, mud, dust, etc.; whatever, adhering to anything, renders it foul or unclean; earth; as, a wagonload of dirt. [1913 Webster]
dirt may more simply be thought of down here in the old Confederacy as what most folks call soil, ground that plants are grown in, ground where agriculture is practiced.
Southrons are, in relatively large representation, throwbacks. We have a large aspect of neandertalensis, even habilis, in us. Despite everything we have done with and by science, we still have an aspect of primordialness in us, as ably demonstrated by the nature of our religion, exemplified by rituals that are almost orgasmic in their intimacy and adoration not of the deity but of his Jewish lieutenant, harkening back to the beginnings of civilization with religious prostitution and the ritual sacrifice of an earthly incarnation of the godhead. Not for us the table of the elements and Newon’s Laws in our inner lives, instead we still cling to the ancient taxonomy of earth, air, fire, and water, and dirt is the embodiment of the uneasy cooperation of the four.
This in turn may be traced to our entry onto this continent, fleeing from what we thought was the ultimate tyrrany of the church of England and its pope, the king. Such an evil cannot be eradicated by relieving the king of his head, it can only be starved to death by abandonment and shunning. And in a new land survival is also a matter of food and hence regardless of what one is educated to do and be, tilling the land and bringing forth sustenance is both a necessity and a glorification. Hence the idea that a man who does not own land is not qualified for citizenship but is little more than the property of an evil government. Hence the form of Southron politics where men who own land but are too inept to make good use of it are bundled off to run that evilness that has the doubtful benefits of being not only ineffectual but far away. “Those who can, farm; those who cannot, teach; and those who cannot teach are sent off as politicians.” This gives us great insight into both George Wallace (and his ilk) and Martin Luther King (and his ilk.)
But a price comes with this frontier wedding, some would even say welding, to the land. Explorers like Daniel Boone and David Crockett are recalled more here as failed farmers than as men of accomplishment. Their fame is more the invention of modern society than folkways. But this can be too intense. Hence the term in the Sowth “dirt poor”, referring to people so wedded to their land that they are impoverished by it.
There are people and pieces of ground not ten miles from where I sit in Greater Metropolitan Arab where a family huddles in a shack of a house lacking plumbing, whose piped water is limited to a single tap in the kitchen, and whose electricity is limited to a couple of light fixtures with bare bulbs exchanged at times by screw-in sockets to run television or radios. The land is theirs’ so long as they can scrape up the money each year to pay the tax gestapo of the not distant enough evil government.
There is neither Every Child Left Behind nor Social Security here. The children do not attend shul regularly out of a mixture of pride in their poverty distancing them from the rich town children and a need for them to add to waste their stoop labor on gardens in their ground, ground that has been effectively destroyed by ignorance and dirt poverty. Adults work hard for wages less than minimum because they are off the map of taxation and reporting and hence open to exploitation. Influxes of Mexican peons have intensified the competitiveness of their lives. These are not people of the twentieth century, of the information revolution; rather these are people who dwell in a Malthusian jungle of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Hence our use of the term “dirty” is also a bit different from the norm. Again, the dictionary tells us that
Dirty 1. Defiled with dirt; foul; nasty; filthy; not clean or pure; serving to defile; as, dirty hands; dirty water; a dirty white. –Spenser. [1913 Webster]
but we really mean by dirty that dirt has become part of their composition and hence they have aspects or characteristics of dirt. Quite obviously this may be meant either as positive or negative. In the latter it refers to a person who has the good aspects of soil and Southron existence, of providing for family and community, a term indicating one who is honorable and productive. The negative side implies one who has descended into dirt poverty, who is a burden on himself and others who will neither change nor die, one who is actually evil in their perversity and depravity.
It is thus with some interest that I found the subject of dirty in the news feeds this week. Some of this was amusing in that I got to see how distorted the views of the traditional media are towards this subject as compared to we righteous Southrons. But a fair amount of it was disgusting in what it implied.
I find [Link] that women have dirtier desks than men. Dirtier in this case seems to be measured by the presence of microbes in/on the desk. This is blamed on women loading their desks with frilly decorations, and cosmetics and foodstuffs, all breeding grounds for microbes. My first thought is the mania people have that in a Shermanesque way “the only good microbes are dead microbes”, quite ignoring that microbes are mostly neutral or beneficial, only a few are detrimental, and an environment lacking them is dead. This is the same insanity that gives rise to hand sanitizers, manic exercise cleansers, and epidemics of killer infections.
I offer however, some alternate interpretation. The cosmetics and frills are probably accurate, and because women are paid less than men for the same responsibilities they have to work harder and have less time to order their environments in the workplace. They have these thinsg because they are more concerned with their appearance with men, which at least acknowledges that they have appearances that can be improved; most men are lost cases of ugliness. The same goes for food. Women pick at desk food; men are all devouring locusts. Offer a woman a cookie from a package and she will eat half; offer a mana cookie from a package and he will empty it of content.
But I have to admit to being gratified at finding the average desk to have 400 times more microbes than a toilet seat. That is especially important down here in the Sowth where we go thorugh twice as much toilet paper by placing strips on the seat before we descend, serene in out trust of its protecting us from STDs and worse. But what I find amazing is that keyboards have only five times as many microbes as toilet seats? [Link] This makes keyboards islands of sanitariness in the desktop (physical) sea of microbial life. But given that we all eat over out keyboards and they have the greatest density of locations for crumbs to hide, somehow my sense of trust in the reportage is violated.
I note the Yankee government has started two pilot plants to sequester carbon dioxide, the show child of the greenhouse gas aspect of global climate change, underground. [Link] Notably the funds for this come from cancellation of a pilot plant to demonstrate improved ways of burning coal. Although the latter plant is in Illinois, which raises some inkling of partisan politics here, there is a greater aspect of whether this is nothing more than an administration band-aid, in particular the type with some comic character on it to entertain children.
Recent reports of the desequestration of methane have been especially troubling, giving us less than a blue-serge-suit feeling about this one. Given the track record of the (modern) republicans of late with their war on science and the (modern) democrats’ apathy of science, one has to wonder if this is anything more than a consumer placebo?
Meanwhile we have a report [Link] that the XP version of the ASUS Eee is to have a retail price less than that of the box with Linux. Is the Southern Land really that disdainful of MegaHard to warrant such a blatant entrapment move? Or is MegaHard really out to destroy all manufacturers of pre-installed Linux boxes?
Isn’t it amusing on Punday to find conspiracies where they don’t exist? With considerable help, of course, from the traditional media.
If one listens to/reads carefully the verbal/printed works of Garrison Keeler, one hears/reads a couple of vignettes about the people of the town of Lake Woebegone and Lutefisk, the Norwegian preparation of junk fish using lye. The modern consumer proletariat of the Yankee republic, perhaps repulsed by Keeler’s “egg head” elitism, is more familiar with Lutefisk from the various food travel programs on television that seem devoted to ridiculing the other than ordinary and any foodstuff not vended by a national fast food chain restaurant. Few however can lay claim to having sampled, much less made a regular dietary item of, this gelatinous white stuff that has an aroma not normally associated with ingestion.
I got to sample it when I was a graduate student at the campus of the Boneyard, U Illinois. At that time the population was predominantly from places like Illinois, Indiana, Ohio with a scattering of folks from foreign places like Minnesota, Alibam, Maine, and Europe. One of the helpful activities of the administration was an official Foreign Students Association that provided help in dealing with Illinois academic and real society and culture and fostered a strong sense of us versus them among the furrin studints. I especially recall one lecture/demonstration on how to shop for groceries at a supermarket. I especially recall being asked by the lecturer, a female professor from the shul of home economics whether we had supermarkets in Alibam. She was somewhat outraged when I informed her that the first supermarket, a Piggly Wiggly, had opened in Gawgah. To give her credit, she did try to recovery by asking, in a broad plains accent, what a piggly wiggly was.
One of the other activities of the association was to have one of the students host a luncheon once a month when “native” foods would be served. When it was the turn of our representative from Minnesota, a stalwart son of Norway, at least genetically, we were served lutefisk among other delicacies. Happily I had acces to reagent grade ethanol in the laboratory and could gargle the aftertaste away. Still, not all that bad when compared to things like boiled catfish or shad-eel gumbo.
Now, however, I am pleased to read from Concord, New Hampshire of efforts to offer a new form of corpse preparation - Lutehuman. [Link] As one might expect from this the process involves dissolving the soft remains in Lye under conditions of high temperature and pressure, something like Kentucky Fried Chicken without the spices. As one who considers the current practices of internment - adamantine coffins and an aversion to decomposition - suicidal as a species, I am joyful to find an alternative to the almost equally environmentally damaging practice of cremation. And with this alternative one has the option, I expect, of having the bones ground down for use as fertliizer, or being strung as a keepsake. Somehow the idea of my daughter having my skeleton hanging from a hook in a corner, perhaps even planted with a climbing ivy to soften the aspect, has a certain macabre attraction that I will be unable to enjoy.
I am however able to enjoy an official pronouncement of the Norwalk, Connecticut government that “poop happens” [Link] in response to some female denizen of New Yawk who took exception to the presence of stercus canem on the city’s sidewalks. Apparently the woman’s toddler stepped in the “puppy poop” and thereby ruined the family’s outing. My initial question is whether this consititues some form of negligence on the woman’s part in the raising of her child. Perhaps the appropriate services should take her and the child into custody to determine if she is a fit mother and is not abusing the child. I know that in some circles in the Sowth raising a child in New Yawk City is considered child abuse. Of course, some of us also consider what goes on in the public shuls, especially with Every Child Left Behind, to be such.
The life lesson learned, of course, don;t take your children to Norwalk (or the aquarium?) if you can’t handle befouled shoes. Lock them up in a Skinner box until they are 18 and then throw them, box and all, into a river.
On a note of “the smell of Napalm in the morning”, I note that MalWart has pulled back from Chicago and is making do with opening new cancers stores in the suburbs. [Link] Seems that the city fathers, in particular Daley the Younger does not to want to risk the ire of the unions by permitting the implicitly and egregiously aunion MalWart into the Windy City. The immediate question one wishes to ask the Emperor Daley and his Senators is whether the unions are Red or Green? And is MalWart the opposite? Or is there some other dimensionality here?
Given MalWart’s capacity as the premiere of the (not so) hidden masters of the American Consumerate, one has to hypothesize that they are Red and the unions are (somehow?) Green? This seems especially confusing given MalWart’s recent shift to advertising how “green” some of its house products are. May we also hypothesize that sustainability is the last refuge of a repulsed, possibly decaying, corporate oligarchy? Something akin to patriotism for a scoundrel or religion for a politician? [Link]
On which we note that the former First Lady has now come into open season for criticism by her own party for having played the “race” card. [Link] My first thought here is accompanied by a shake of my head, a natural result of my combination of healthy cynicism and a realist recognition that we all came from Africa, at least insofar as current scientific evidence supports, and thus the whole “race” thing is an invention of basic human insecurities and the “us-them” phenomena. A contributor here is also that insofar as I can tell from reading anthropology texts the taxonomy of race as used in Amerika is as flawed as its predilection for Intelligent Design, which gives rise to a sneaking suspicion that the two are linked.
I should also not be construed as supporting either the former First Lady, or her husband, the behavior of both lending substance to the theory I have heard advanced that the conflict in Arkansas during the Second American Revolution was not a matter of the two sides fighting over which would have control of the state as fighting over which could be rid of the state. I dismiss this theory categorically inasmuch as I had a good friend as an undergraduate at the campus of the Black Warrior, one “Smiling John”, who was a native son of the state of Arkansas. Smiling John was no named because he was never observed in four years of undergraduate attendance of smiling when he was sober, and only occasionally when inebriated, which was a common condition on Friday and Saturday evenings. Since Smiling John was another chemistry major he had the usual access to supplies of reagent grade ethanol, which appropriately diluted with fruit juice or soda was admirably suited to a “serious drunk”. Such potage was dictated by the fact that what beer was available was imported from Mississippi and had an underlying aroma that in subsequent years I found could be compared to that of Lutefisk. Probably some judicious use of Lye in the brewing process that Milwaukee is either ignorant, or reticent, of.
Nor do I wish to support her opponent now apparently evolving into the (modern) democrat candidate for the office of chief executive. What I do note however is that he offers the usual, albeit in this case intensified, aspect of paradox of most politicians. The matter here is that the senator espouses an ambiguous and unspecified program of change whose few revealed aspects have indicated to be destructive and oppressive when the matter is one of the opposite. What the American electorate seems disconcerted with is itself change and thus what the senator seems to be offering is a change from that change. SO the paradox is that he is offering what is not desired but it is attractive to people who wish the particular change they are experiencing to go away and are perhaps thus desirous of conservation or even simplification? One is also taken with the aspects of the candidates ambiguity which rather reminds one of a stercus canem in that it has the visual appearance of being without color but if one measures its spectrum one finds it radically different from that of a black body in the physics sense. Thus we have a uncertain proposal of unknown content that on the surface appears to be unphysical. Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was right in saying that a technology sufficiently advanced was indistinguishable from magic?
