Unsurprisingly, Mississippi is Different. Here's a few ways.

This is a partial list, put together in limited time since I'm on my lunch break. Hopefully I'll get to do another post later tonight that'll have some more information about my travel plans. For now, enjoy!

-Weird thing #1: Rain. Yeah, Wisconsin gets its fair share, but we're in the middle of a drought right now and have been for months. When it rains in WI these days it is a big honking deal. When it rains in Mississippi it's the fourth time in a week. The rain here will sidle up to you and casually drizzle, it'll fall steadily for hours, it'll dump a cloudburst on your head like your hair was on fire. It's insane. It's like this state has never heard of what we so quaintly call 'droughts'.

-Dampness. Related to that (and concurrently to humidity), nothing wet ever gets dry, nothing. Towels, swimsuits, washcloths, shoes, shirts, I don't care. You can hang them up for as long as you feel like it, but they will never actually be dry. They'll just linger indefinitely in a state of perpetual clamminess. Putting on one of those swimsuits or towels is like getting a big hug from a kelp forest. This applies somewhat to paper, too; when it's particularly humid in your room, regular paper will feel thick, rough and slightly damp to the touch. It's not my hand, as far as I can tell, but the paper collecting moisture. Unless there's a heater going in your room, that's what you're stuck with (and what kind of nut would have that?)

-Vines. Speaking of forests, Mississippi has climbing vines absolutely EVERYWHERE. Our campus is in the neighborhood of forty acres, around 1/3 to 1/2 of which is forest by my unscientific speculations, and I have yet to see a tree that is completely free of vines. They go up a hundred feet and look like they've been there for years. And this isn't just ivy, either; these bastids have woody stems. I guess a lot of it is kudzu, which is apparently a huge problem down here. According to one of the staff members, some idiot introduced it to get rid of rats, because there's some chemical that kudzu produces that drives away rats. Well, now the South is short on rats but long on kudzu. Good job. (EDIT UPDATE: There are a few kudzu-free trees; well, more than a few. The kudzu-ridden ones tend to be the bigger, older trees; younger ones, especially ones that stand on their own and aren't near a grove or forest, generally escape. Ditto foreign-looking trees. But it's still extremely pervasive.)

-The casinos are a huge letdown. I mean, yes, they are incredibly impressive; the Ameristar casino downtown (no relation to Americorps) has an enormous complex on-shore and off, its own hotel across the road and its own miniature town that people can wander through and spend bucketloads of money in. There are three other casinos that I've seen so far with similar layouts, although none of them are quite as impressive. It's just that I was kind of expecting the Romantic image of the casino-boat actually sailing up and down the river and having a grand party every weekend. The Ameristar looks like it hasn't moved from the dock in years, and most of the others look more like buildings than boats.

-The bugs. We have truckloads of weird bugs that I've never seen before; the campus is infested with fire ants, for example, so none but a fool or madman goes with bare feet into the grass. (Said grass is also sharp and looks like crabgrass across most of the fields, so there's another reason.) We have these big black beetles, maybe 1 1/2 inches long, that are actually pretty friendly; one of them put up with being lifted up by a stick and examined before being returned to its home. We have roaches, of course, and there are plenty of ticks and chiggers in the woods. (Who named those things, anyway?) For the capper, I have no idea what species it is or even a clear image of what it looks like, but there's some sort of giant red wasp that's buzzed me a couple times. I would love to know who that is, what it's about and how we can come to some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement where I don't get murdered in my bed.

Week Two, 6 AM: The (Deferred) Baseline Test

Today's morning routine, running through a park for a mile and a half, surrounded by fellow Americorps members. One minute's worth of push-ups, one of sit-ups, counted by a partner and timed by a Unit Leader. There are no goals except what you set for yourself, no limits except to surpass last time. Go.

This is Baseline, the NCCC's physical fitness exam. We were supposed to do it Friday morning at 6 AM (which means waking up at 5 AM), but as we were piling into the vans, a Vicksburg thunderstorm dumped on us and the exercise was cancelled. Today, we did it for real.

There's just something so unbelievably righteous about exercising early in the morning. For the entire rest of the day you have this glow, this knowledge that "I am virtuous, I exercised [albeit under duress], I am a go-getter, I am physically fit". Walking back to the vans after everyone had finished the run, I was practically jumping with glee.

Of course, the exercise itself was an adventure. I managed 42 push-ups (maybe closer to 45, I think the count was off), 34 sit-ups and finished the 1.5 miles in 10:23. I think I'm proudest of the fact that my second .75 miles was faster than my first; I got to the halfway point in 5:30 and made it back in 4:53. (The fact that most of the return journey included a sizable downhill had NOTHING to do with it.) And I'm proud to say I gave it my everything, using my last energies to sprint into the finish line and then promptly attempting to send my breakfast into orbit. I did have the presence of mind, when I actually threw up, to make it over to the bushes. I believe that's the first time that ever happened after a run. It's hard to put that feeling into words without resorting to a sports equipment company line, but I really did Leave Nothing (TM).

After cleaning up, I told the Team Leader my time, jogged over to the finish line and commenced cheering on everybody I saw coming. (Apparently I would make a terrible drill sergeant. I yelled really loud but just managed to crack people up. Adam blames me for killing his sit-up numbers; I was holding his feet, and just before he started, I told him at high volume "Every time you come up here I want you to HIT me in the FACE!" Needless to say, he was paralyzed with laughter.) After ten minutes of cheering people on, I lost the connection between 'things I say' and 'things that motivate' and just started yelling "CON FUOCO! CON FUEGO!" When my fellow cheerers looked askance at me, I followed it up with "TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN A WOOD! AND I, I TOOK THE ONE LESS TRAVELED BY, AND THAT HAS MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE!"

After the last person crossed the finish line, cheered on by a convoy of previous finishers, we heard a short speech from my Unit Leader and then hit the road. Goals for next time: 50 push-ups, under 10:00 running time, 40 sit-ups or better, even more amusing quips. More to follow shortly.

First Days in Vicksburg

Green, rolling hills, vast canopies of trees, huge white columns in front of an old red-brick building, winding country lanes and signs commemorating an important Civil War battlefield? From my Yankee perspective, you can hardly get more classically Southern than that.

That lovely building is Green Hall, FEMA Corps's administrative center and one of our dorms. (It doubles as a computer lab, which is where I am now--wi-fi is supposedly here someplace, but I'm beginning to think it's just a myth.) It's also the centerpiece of the entire campus on which we'll reside for the next month, which is absolutely beautiful. It has huge, steep, grassy hills that you can run up and down on, and flatlands that are perfect for Ultimate Frisbee. There are all kinds of attractions on-campus, including a pool that I sampled earlier today, a gym, basketball courts and a great musty chapel with fantastic stained-glass windows (labeled on our map as "Auditorium"). There are also fire ants and at least one enormous red wasp, which buzzed me on my way back from assembly this morning, but you gotta take the bad with the good.

I do mean morning, by the way. Wakeup yesterday was 6:20; I drew the short straw. Right now we're in twenty-one temporary teams, organized into three master units: Summit, Ocean and Bayou. (Bayou has a sort of modified Gator Chomp as its distinctive hand signal, while we Summiters make a pyramid above our heads. Ocean has yet to come up with a hand gesture.) I'm in Summit III, which I've dubbed "Crater Lake", and we eat at 7 AM with the rest of the Summiters. (At least according to me, Summit I is "Pike's Peak", II is "Mt. Ranier", IV "Mt. St. Helens" and then I ran out of American mountains I know offhand. Maybe "Yellowstone"; it counts.) It's surprisingly not horrendous, because we go to bed so early. Weekday curfew is 11 PM, which means being in your rooms, lights out. It's certainly something to be surrounded by people with a work ethic--my roommate Dustin was up and running, literally, at six A.M. sharp.

Today was a day of tests. I got a drug test, a shot for tetanus, a TB test, various paperwork-related indignities and played every game in the team-building handbook. If anyone divines the secret of "You can bring apples, but not oranges" and "watermelons, but not carrots" and "not strawberries", let me know. I still haven't figured the bastard out. Speaking of cussing, you're not allowed to; it is verboten when you're in uniform, so the team leaders have cracked down on it now. Various creative outlets for indignation have resulted, including "Curses!" "Dash it all!" "Son of a!" and the use of 'Americorps', 'Corps' and 'FEMA' in place of your regularly scheduled expletives. So that's happening.

What else can I tell you? Physical Training (PT) starts on Friday at 6 AM, so there's that. We'll do as many push-ups and sit-ups as we can in a minute, then run 1.5 miles. You can't fail the test because there's no objective baseline; the point is more to establish a personal baseline so that you can improve over time. I'm already in pretty decent shape body-wise, my jeans feel loose and I've been doing nightly push-ups, but there's no getting around my lack of cardiovascular fitness. I can only hope that sporadic biking will be enough; at least the test will be early tomorrow, before the Vicksburg heat and mugginess hits.

Other tidbits: we're moving to Anniston, Alabama in a month for ten straight days of intensive FEMA training... we'll get a personal computer and a Blackberry for on-the-job use, because it's the federal government and Blackberries are mandatory... when getting uniforms today, the equipment guy didn't believe I wore a "Small-Small" (waist, length) pant size and made me try on the "Small, Regular", which went down to the balls of my feet. What kind of giants do they normally get, I'd like to know... also got a pair of steel-toed boots today, which I will get to keep after FEMA. Thanks to Mythbusters, I now know they won't sever my toes... the team-building game where everyone tries to fit on one increasingly small piece of tarpaulin is devilishly hard; my team made it down to about three square feet and then couldn't manage it for more than 12 seconds with eight people... a surprising number of people have tattoos. At least half of the people here are inked up in some way, it feels like... this week's food is catered, but starting Saturday we're fending for ourselves. I'm attaching myself to a chef and trading him my cooking duties in return for his cleanup duties, because I would probably poison everyone.

It being 10:24, I'm going to sign off here, read a little more of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and head to bed. 6:20 tomorrow, hello world!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more stuff. I'll be posting every day or two while it's possible; the links will appear on Tisdel's Tirades' Facebook page, and you can also become a Google subscriber or try the RSS feed (if I set it up correctly, which odds are I did not.)

Both Presidential Campaigns are Lying to America, and I'm Sick of It

I’m tired, guys. I’m tired of the lying.

I’m tired of the negative ads, of the scare tactics, of the stupid labels, of the total falsehoods that both sides have been peddling throughout the 2012 presidential campaign.

Here’s the most recent case: Mitt Romney’s newest advertisement alleges that Barack Obama plans to “gut welfare reform” by bypassing legislation that requires welfare recipients to work for their government check. As Politifact said earlier in the week, this is flat-out false. It’s untrue. It got a “Pants on Fire!” rating because it is just wrong.

Obama fired back through press secretary Jay Carney, who retorted that Romney “supported policies that would have eliminated the time requirements in the welfare reform law”. This is also false. Both sides took a tiny ambiguity and leveraged it into a massive, sweeping attack on the opposition. What is that except telling blatant lies?

Where is the outrage over this? In November, we’re going to pick one of these men to lead our country. Through their surrogates, they have both lied to the public, or at the very least massively distorted the facts, in just the last week. What’s the matter with us? Don’t we care?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that Romney didn’t pay income taxes at any time in the last ten years, but refuses to provide any evidence for it. Romney took Obama’s “You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” remarks out of context and used them as a talking point. A recent ad by Priorities USA Action, an Obama-aligned Super PAC, tried to smear Romney by blaming a woman’s death on him and Romney retaliated by attacking the Obama campaign for the Super PAC’s misdeeds. Romney has insinuated that recent leaks of classified information were masterminded by the White House for political gain, again without proof. Another Obama ad says that Romney backed a bill eliminating all abortions, including those in cases of rape and incest, when he just did not. Romney gave a speech saying that “sequestration” is Obama’s fault, when the truth is far more complex.

All of these claims are from just the last few weeks. There are plenty of others there, and I encourage readers to look them up through Politifact or elsewhere. These are not fringe figures looking for attention or cable channels trying to boost their ratings. These are some of the most important and influential people in the country who are completely fine with being flat-out wrong. Who is holding them accountable?

The answer, truthfully, is no one. There are plenty of nonpartisan fact-checking organizations, like Politifact or the Washington Post or FactCheck.org, and these claims certainly don’t go unnoticed. Every time there’s a new ad or a new intentional error by one of the candidates, the other side goes nuts with online ads and press releases and scathing quotes.

But then the wounded side tells the world they’re in sole possession of the high ground, and their credibility goes flying out the window like a flock of angry ducks. There’s plenty of awareness that our presidential candidates are lying all the time, but there’s no popular awareness that both sides are equally guilty! There are no consequences, political or otherwise, for lying! The other side is doing it, the campaigns say, so why shouldn’t we?

I find this disgusting. I cannot believe that American politics, as an entity, has sunk to this catcalling, mud-slinging, lie-peddling level. And what makes it even more frustrating is that we, the people, are letting them do it. There is no true accountability for either side because we’re apparently just fine with this flood of uncontrolled chicanery all around us.

There’s only one way to make them stop, and it’s the oldest one in the book. Just… say… no. When you’re asked to donate money, tell them you don’t want to support a candidate who plays fast and loose with the truth. When you’re asked to volunteer, tell them the same. When they send out fundraising emails, when your friends try to convince you that one of these guys isn’t as horribly bad at telling the truth as the other, just say no. Maybe if enough people tell Obama and Romney that this is unacceptable and has to stop, they’ll start to change their behavior. Tell them you want to see an honest man in the White House, and maybe—just maybe—we’ll get one.

Share, like, pass this along if you agree.

When Dreams and Life Collide

You know that feeling you get when you wake up from a dream in which you've suffered some terrible physical disfigurement--lost an arm, a chunk of your face, whatever--and you go about your day as usual, scarcely remembering the dream, but then you happen to look into a mirror or something and you are just stunned by the appearance of your normal, healthy face... and it all comes rushing back that it was just a dream, and there's this brief moment where the line between reality and dream gets all blurry as two incongruent life-pictures crash against one another, and then suddenly it's over and you're back to normal like it never happened? There ought to be a word for that moment. It's like déjà vu, but not quite; it doesn't feel like a memory of the present, but like you've just experienced a different timeline colliding with your own and then merging into one reality that you experience. 

I have no idea if this is a thing that other people do, or if it's just me being mildly deranged, so let me try to describe what I'm talking about in more concrete terms.

A couple of months ago, I dreamt that my right arm had been cut off. I was there when it happened. I felt my arm being tied up and held by somebody else, I watched the serrated knife begin to saw at my arm, I saw the glistening red muscle split neatly in two, and I saw the arm, holding on with just a little bit of meat remaining, straight out from the shoulder like a block of wood. It was just above the elbow.

It was one of the most realistic dreams I have ever had, and that’s probably why it stuck with me. It was vivid. I remember there was some reason why the arm had to be amputated, something valid that I agreed with—it had been smashed in a press, or was diseased, or something. But all the same I struggled as the knife went saw, saw, saw back and forth. I saw it from inside my body and from at a distance, a few feet away like a hovering magpie, watching the knife slice away.

Part of it, the greater part, was the details--it felt so accurate, so real! I remember walking around after the crude surgery—there was no blood fountaining out—and being aware of my balance changing because my left side was now heavier than my right. I remember the need to learn to write left-handed. I even recall touches on the face, where my Penfield neural map rearranged itself, corresponding to changes in my phantom arm. It was so viscerally compelling that when I woke up, I was genuinely surprised and disturbed to see my arm still usable and attached to my body. That's what made me think of it like two realities or timelines colliding. There was this moment of dissonance that we don't have a word for, that feeling of two fundamentally opposite realities--I have an arm, I don't have an arm--smashing together and being forced to reconcile themselves.

This dream I'm speaking of was a couple of months ago. I never got around to posting this, although I wrote it down right afterwards, and probably wouldn't have except that a similar thing happened last night. Somehow, in that dream, a chunk of my nose had been ripped or torn off (no pain or blood). When I padded to the bathroom in the morning and saw myself in the mirror over the sink, for a few seconds I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I looked completely normal--unshaven, mussed hair, rings under the eyes and all--but in that picture of normality there was something profoundly wrong. It wasn't that I had been injured, but that I possessed the dream-memory of the injury but no corresponding physical damage. Those two realities were pushing against one another, fighting until the conflict resolved itself.

Has anybody else had this experience? Do you know the feeling I'm trying to describe here? It's not limited to matters of the body, at least not for me; I've had this feeling in conversations, when I reference something that I did with a friend before realizing that it never happened. I've had it walking through my house, where I see that an object has moved or hasn't moved from where I think it was, and it takes awhile before I recognize that one of my memories of that object was actually a dream in disguise. Have you ever realized that something you thought was a memory, something you may not have even consciously classified as a memory, but that just unconsciously entered your picture of the world around you, actually originated in a dream and had no basis in this world? This is a serious question. If it's just me, I'd like to know it.

The End of Society (Every Thirty Years)

I feel like every generation sees all the horrible things that people can do and thinks "This is it, society is crumbling. The crises that we're facing now are the Great Crises Of Our Time." Every presidential election is held in momentous, earth-shattering circumstances; every decision he makes has huge ramifications for the future of our country, because God forbid we screw up once in awhile. Everything anybody in power does is a massive disaster about to happen. A recession, a catastrophe, a job-killer, whatever. You know the lingo.
You know how long the phrase "going to hell in a handbasket" has been around? Like 'Our country is going to hell in a handbasket'? According to phrases.co.uk, it's at least since 1865. "Going to the dogs," 1775. "Going to pot," 1682. Going to "wrack and ruin", 1548. Every generation looks at its crises and thinks they're as bad as anything anybody's ever faced, and they look at this country and see everything good that they've helped to build being supplanted by new, frightening, morally questionable bullshit that the next generation is bringing in. Remember when black men marrying white women was terrifying? Remember when the moral fiber of our country was at stake when school prayer was banned?
But everybody's new and scary is the next generation's normal... and here's the critical thing to understand: it's not a moral failing when the shocking or weird becomes commonplace. Old ways aren't better than new ways just because they're old. And yeah, people game the system and do stupid shit or get addicted to drugs or commit terrible crimes, but there will always be idiots and assholes and criminals and killers. It's part of life in a modern, pluralistic, Western society, where you're free to be stupid and perverted and wrong... and where people are also free to be beautiful and creative and happy and sad and gloriously alive.
If you look only at the bad parts of modern society, as so many people love to do--and which is easy to do because the news, by nature, focuses on the tragedies and political battles and so-called culture wars instead of presenting a truly comprehensive picture of the society that we grew up in and are helping to remake every single day--you miss all the incredible good things that are happening out there. A horrible, unexpected shooting like what happened in Oak Creek earlier today isn't any less tragic because ten thousand people come together in its aftermath, but it brings out our society's strengths as well as its weaknesses. There's so much love and compassion and courage out there that's harder to see because it rarely makes the nine o'clock news. Don't worry about society. We'll keep on trucking like we always have.

For the tl;dr crowd: We're gonna be fine.

Note to Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): The Stuxnet Worm Was Not A Secret

Look, I'm not a reporter and I don't have a security clearance. All I do is read the newspaper and think about what I'm seeing. But even I can tell you--and could have told you, back in June 2010 when the first reports about the Stuxnet computer virus in Iran came out--that the U.S. had its finger in that particular pie. Either the worm was an American creation, or it was produced and distributed by the Israelis with U.S. help. You don't need to be a software expert to figure that out.

Time out for storytime. Around 22 months ago, when I was working on my research project on the state of American nuclear power, I ran across a few news stories about funny things happening to Iran's nuclear power project. They were more funny-weird than funny-haha, mostly because people were dying in unexplained ways; Iranian nuclear scientists were being killed by bombs, and something called the Stuxnet worm was wrecking Iranian nuclear centrifuges by making them spin out of control. Nobody knew who was doing it or why, but when they were asked about these operations, U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials acted suspiciously like the cat that ate the canary.

Fast-forward to June 1st, 2012, when a New York Times story outed the U.S. government as the producers of Stuxnet. Along with several other "security leaks" from around that time, this created a black eye for the Obama administration and spurred Congress into ponderous action. The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), has approved a (problematic) bill that's supposed to halt leaks like the origins of the worm. Why is this important? Because "National Security", capital N, capital S. Disclosing information like the origins of the worm hurts us, because... I don't know, because then everyone knows we did it.

Except that everyone who was paying attention, and probably everyone in the relevant intelligence agencies inside Iran and out, probably already knew about the worm. Even an uninformed layabout like myself knew. When I read those first stories, I thought "Hm. A concerted and sophisticated attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and scientists, with the apparent aim of halting or disabling their nuclear program, without an attack by conventional weapons. Who in the world could possibly have a motive to do such a thing? Oh, right, duh." Other than the U.S. and Israel, who else really has that much of a beef with Iran, an overpowering fear of an Iranian nuke, and the cyberweapons community to pull off a worm like Stuxnet? The U.S.'s involvement was an open secret from the day the worm hit the news.

And let's not forget, at least on a macropolitical level, Iran loathes the U.S. We've dropped economic sanctions on them, accused them of a hundred kinds of malfeasance, overthrew their government back in the '50s (giving them a brutal dictatorship instead for the next 25-ish years) and routinely conduct military exercises off their shores. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Israel and "the West" of being behind the assassinations. Given that the U.S. policy towards Iran since approximately forever has been trying to keep them from developing nuclear weapons, what are the odds that Iran did not suspect or conclude that the U.S. or Israel was behind the attack?

So what's the harm in this particular leak? The Iranians most likely knew, or at least suspected. There's no external mechanism to punish the U.S. for releasing the worm, and it primarily affected a country that the U.S. has no love for anyway, so the harm in the international community would likely be minimized. And as early as September 2010, outside, non-governmental speculation was moving towards the U.S. By the time the leak actually happened, it just confirmed what everyone else was thinking, especially since the bulk of the infected computers were in Iran. I don't think this particular leak deserves to be plugged on national security grounds, because revealing it is not a threat to U.S. national security. We are not any less safe because we now officially know where the Stuxnet virus came from; arguably, we're more safe because we know it was us! The only threat posed by the Stuxnet leak is to domestic politicians' images, and that--I think--is not worth flipping out about.