One hundred.

Ok, I lasted about ten minutes. I'm really not grasping for the hundredth post though...for one thing, I probably should have tried to hit one hundred yesterday if I wanted to be technical about it. At this point, I can only have a hundred posts in a year and a day, which is pretty meaningless.

I'm really just posting because the world will be a more interesting and nuanced place the more people who have read this:

Rebel Discovers Qaddafi Passport, Real Spelling of Leader's Name

I'd known that the spelling of Qaddafi was kind of especially fluid compared to other foreign names and words, I had not known that that was part of an intentional anti-western statement on his part. That's kind of cool. I mean, the man is a bastard by all accounts...but I can respect that.

Also, I don't know if I'll ever have the time to go back and watch all of the West Wing again, or if it would be the same if I did. But that was a pretty awesome show.

One Year.

Anything I wrote now would seem like I was just doing it to hit the 100 mark. Clearly I'm above that, so I'll just leave this at 98 (or 99, if you count this one) and accept my imperfection.

Left Coast

I need three more posts in the next two days to meet my goal of 100 in the first year I've had this blog.

That means the bar is now very, very low.

There was an earthquake on the East Coast! Did you know?! Ok yeah, probably everybody knew that by now.

You might not have known about this article at the Atlantic though, which gets into some of the reasons that different earthquakes are different. I have fond memories of being a kid listening to the radio after an earthquake and one of the hosts on KGO out of San Francisco who always wanted callers to call in and diagnose the type of shaking. Was it a quick jolt? Wave like? Rumbley? It almost made you feel like an Eskimo with all the different words for snow.

The article is a little disconcerting though, because it suggests that the East Coast might get to have a type of earthquake that we Californians couldn't be familiar with:

...East Coast crust is 'older and colder,' which makes it a more efficient transmitter of seismic energy. 

That sounds like a direct threat to our right to scoff at the Easterners for overreacting to me. And that right is very important. Mostly though, I appreciate the article for this line:

At first, I had the West Coast-native thought that perhaps it wasn't actually that far from Richmond to New York and it was just the weird perception of East Coast distances that made it seem a long way.

I guess it's to be expected...the magazine is called "The Atlantic" after all...but I'm always kind of amazed how little the western states figure into the world view of so many of the political writers I read. It's nice to hear from someone like me for whom all those tiny-ass eastern seaboard states all kind of look the same. I mean, they are all kind of the same, right?

(Totally kidding about them all looking the same. I am very interested in all states and would love to have an opportunity to become more familiar with any or all of them. Plus, I think I might actually have some reasonable guesses about what makes North Carolina different from South Carolina, and I'm kind of proud about that.)

Limited Engagement

Looks like Qaddafi is out, or at least almost out, in Libya. If my earlier theories were right (which I make no promises about), what should come next is some serious consideration of possible cuts to our military spending. Realistically, I think this may end up depending on how the Republican primary evolves. Ron Paul obviously still has a strong following, even if we aren't supposed to look directly at it, which is a pretty good sign that isolationism is not dead in the Republican party. I don't get the feeling that defense spending is something that Mitt Romney is particularly passionate about, either. His grandfather, George Romney, seems to have been fairly moderate on defense and got into trouble during his 1968 presidential campaign for skeptical things he said about the Vietnam War. With any luck, there'll be a serious debate between hawks and doves in the GOP primary. Of course, if the doves win, and Obama then positions himself to the right of them, my brain will explode.

Eighty Thousand People

Merced got rated America's 3rd Most Miserable City by Forbes Magazine earlier this year, and then again the worst place to do business a few months ago. Mostly, this leads me to believe that the people at Forbes Magazine are very likely dicks, and are penalizing Merced heavily for being a poor & somewhat high crime area in a relatively liberal state. Finally! Proof that left wing politics is the enemy of prosperity and innovation. Never mind that the Silicon Valley shares all the same taxes and regulations.

That, or there are no truly miserable places to live in the United States. Why not take the optimistic view?

I'm still figuring Merced out. One thing I haven't quite gotten my bearings on yet is what it means to be living in a place that isn't a world-class city, but isn't a suburb either. The first thing I noticed coming into town was that there seemed to be two whole streets worth of downtown. I've heard people complain here about how little there is to do, but in the town I went to high school the only entertainment type businesses in town were a movie theater and a bowling alley, and both closed by my senior year. The only place open past eleven was the 24 hour Safeway. I suppose there were also bars, but being in high school those weren't really on my radar. And I can't really promise there are a lot of great late night restaurants in town here, because I am old now and past eleven is no longer on my radar, but I'm pretty sure there's at least a Denny's. Maybe it's just a case of the grass being always greener, but I'm pretty sure I'd rather live here.

It's kind of surreal how much is going on here in Merced actually. There's a playhouse downtown and free Shakespeare in the park (we went last night, it was quite decent), plus the theater programs at the high schools and community college, and then live music and other cultural events going on besides. And this is all before UC Merced develops any kind of meaningful arts program. Our new chancellor is featured in Downtown Life Magazine (Merced has a magazine about downtown life!), and apparently one of her accomplishments at her last institution was locating a campus theater building in the heart of downtown. I hope they consider doing something similar here. I loved going to plays and art performances at UCSD, but the isolation of a college campus at night just can't compete with the atmosphere that downtown theaters have. Not to mention the advantages for downtown businesses.

(For an angrier, but kind of awesome, defense of life in miserable Merced, go here: http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2011/08/20/2011267/jonah-owen-lamb-a-land-of-fierce.html)

Maternal Instinct, Part II

Silent Majority

Matt Yglesias has a new post up trying to use abortion as an example of how the United States political system is full of veto points that make dramatic change unlikely. I guess his points about the political system are fairly valid, but I think he misses something important about abortion specifically. Treating abortion like some relic kept alive by the inertia of our political system, like the electoral college, ignores the fact that abortion is also legal because legal abortion is popular. Not popular like Justin Bieber or wanting to cure cancer maybe, but of the 800,000 abortions per year in the United States that Yglesias mentions, I'm going to guess that the vast majority are undertaken by women who either can vote or will be able to vote someday. The fact that one of Texas' senators right now is a pro-choice Republican woman isn't just some kind of crazy fluke, it's reflective of the views of a lot of people in Texas (where people have more than 80,000 abortions per year), and of no small number of Republicans. Pro-life bumper stickers may be more popular than pro-choice ones, but that doesn't mean we're living in an anti-abortion country.