McCain 08

I was wrong. I really thought Obama was going to be the next president. Watching the Saddleback Forum last Friday I knew it was, if not over, at least going to be very difficult for Obama to win. The reason basically, is that Americans are a simplistic people. Certainly not simple, but a people for whom thinking is not really a priority and in some contexts something to be quite proud of avoiding. Watching the forum last week, as McCain rattled off (actually quite impressive) little sound-bites to fierce applause, and then Obama ground out complex, convoluted, responses (to what really were complex convoluted questions), you could almost hear the grinding of gears in the heads of the participants, accompanied (was off-screen but I'm sure of it) by expressions of mild discomfort (you know like, when you've got constipation), oh yeah, and a few spatterings of applause. That was when I realized it's over. It's not that Americans are bad at thinking, it's just that they *really* don't like doing it. This isn't always a bad thing - one of the reasons America does so well is that, come a point, further analysis is a matter of diminishing returns, and by the time a, say, European has finished mulling things over, an American is half-way finished building something, but it does make them extraordinarily bad at choosing leaders. They vote out the boringly competent George HW Bush (commander in chief of the most flawless victories in modern military history) and yet vote back in his blustering buffoon of a son, who has to exhibit a modicum of ability at any aspect of his job (actually I'll give him the Surge - no idea how it worked, but seemingly it has). 'W' was simply easier to understand. Now, it looks like McCain is going to be voted in for the same reason. Don't get me wrong, I think he's a strong candidate, and it's an interesting fantasy imagining he'd been elected in 2000, and while his age is a real concern, I think he'll make a good president (possibly better than Obama). It's just the *reason* for his probable election that's so depressing.

the wire

"I think people are going to be watching The Wire in fifty years the way they're reading Dickens 150 years later. This is a document, a historical document, about what it's like to live in our era."

Jacob Weisberg, Editor, Slate.com

synchronicity

Trinity was set off at 5:29:45 am (local time - 11:29:45 GMT). Couldn't they have waited 15 seconds? I'd have thought there were all sorts of advantages to having it occur precisely at a nice round time. It's not like a nuclear test is an instantaneous event - the initial radiation release occurs over seconds, the pressure wave lasts minutes, the mushroom cloud hangs around for a while and fallout rains down for days and weeks. In such a controlled environment, accumulating so much data, surely it would have been much nicer to not have to add those extra 15 seconds. Shockwave reaches pressure sensor XYZ at 5:30:14 - okay 14 + 15 = 29, no problem, but for god knows how many zillion sensors they had sprinkled out all over the place, before computers, surely that same +15 second calculation is going to get really tedious. I guess the alternative is to set up an independent timing system but given the effort society has gone to in synchronising time across the globe and sorting out all the time zones and everything, it seems a waste not to take advantage of it.

What's interesting is that precisely 24 years (and 2 hours, 2 minutes and 15 seconds later), another of the more siginificant technical events of the century, the Apollo 11 launch, occurred. Launch time was 13:32:00 GMT - they *did* make sure that launch time at least lined up on the minute, although they still couldn't hit the 13:30. The proximity makes me wonder though whether that was the goal and somebody forgot at the last moment to flip some switch and set everything back by two minutes.

things that confuse me (still) about America

* how can you have a proper civil war where the capital of one of the belligerents is on the front line?
* why are Americans so patriotic about the Revolutionary War when it had so blatantly no moral justification whatsoever (discounting tax dodging and indian land theft)?
* why are Americans so patriotic about the Revolutionary War when so few of them are descended from those who took part?
* how do Americans combine a fervent patriotism with an intense consciousness of their 'home' countries?

There are many more but these are paticularly bothering me right now