the 941

Obama’s recent pick made a town hall-style appearance at the school last night. Pictures courtesy of CL intern Kerem Ozkan. Look out for his commentary in an upcoming post.

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It’s always important to do what you think is right. Unless you can predict that doing what you think is wrong will bring about an event that is more right than your initial wrong was wrong. And, uh, consult a psychologist beforehand. A team of psychologists, and a panel of ethical philosophers.

Let me start over.

I cringe whenever someone’s personal life is brought into the political arena. I don’t think Obama’s pastor, Clinton’s blow job, or George Bush’s history with alcoholism/cocaine should have anything to do with their electability. My feelings on the subject are expressed nicely by Noam Chomsky:

 ”If we had a free market of the kind economists discuss, in which informed consumers make rational choices, General Motors would post on television the characteristics of the cars they’re selling. They don’t do that. What they do is try to create illusions, using complicated graphics, a famous actress driving up to heaven, or something like that. The point is to delude and marginalize the public, so that uninformed consumers will make irrational choices. When you market candidates, it’s the same thing – keep away from the issues, that’s too dangerous because the public doesn’t agree with you on the issues. So what you have is character, trivialities, personal issues – somebody’s pastor says something, Clinton made a mistake when she talked about Bosnia.”

So part of me wants to spraypaint “Who cares?” over every headline about Bristol Palin’s extramarital pregnancy. That’s what I think is right. Sure, it exposes some hypocrisy when it comes to ultra-conservative issues, but we should hope Sarah Palin doesn’t have absolute control over her daughter. Besides, we’re not electing kings or gods, idols of perfection who will bring us into the next decade like Jason leading the Argonauts. We’re hiring people to do the things we asked of them on election day — servants, basically. If I run an Apple store and I hire someone to sell Apple computers, I don’t care if she uses a PC at home as long as she knows her stuff.

So I don’t think the pregnancy should matter. But, I do want McCain to lose, and I know that the (specious and irrelevant) appearance of hypocrisy could alienate conservative voters. So when I see those headlines, I feel that they’re wrong but I still want them to succeed in their missions. It’s like hiring brutal mercenaries to help you overthrow a brutal tyrant. Or stealing from the rich to help the poor. Or pulling out a terrorist’s fingernails. No wait, I’m actually against that. Goddamn, ethics are hard.

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Vern Buchanan wasn’t in his downtown Sarasota office today, but Greenpeace activists symbolically picketed outside his office, directing their attention toward passing drivers.

Afterward, they left the republican congressman a banner made with 369 postcards from Sarasota County constituents demanding Buchanan’s support for clean energy. The previous day, they had presented a similar banner to his Bradenton office, with 369 messages from Manatee County residents.

Greenpeace global warming organizer Joe Smyth, pictured below with his hands clasped as he addresses the activists, said he’s collected thousands of similar postcards. He displays them in increments of 369 because that’s the number that decided Buchanan’s victory over democrat Christine Jennings in the 2006 election.

See below for a photo gallery. (more…)

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Most of the races in this local primary pitted republican against republican, since democrats are a struggling species on the suncoast. In many of those races, the republican was running unopposed, so he or she won an early victory. Here’s a quick rundown of the results.

•  Tom Knight took the republican nomination for county sheriff. He made a pretty convincing case for himself in our interviews last month, though a survey of the police discussion boards shows that officers are skeptical of his outsider status (He comes from the Florida Highway Patrol.)

According to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, “a flurry of glossy mailers and TV spots apparently gave voters a comfort level with [him].” Nothing like glossy mailers to bring that personal touch, I guess. He won almost triple the votes of runner-up David Gustafson. Knight will face pro-rehabilitation democrat Curt Lavarello in November.

• Both charter amendments were shot down.
• Assistant public defender Larry Eger beat out attorney Ron “end the revolving door system” Filipkowski. Eyebrows were raised, here at the CL office, over this slogan. Was he campaigning to be a good public defender, or a bad one? Eger will face Democrat Adam Tebrugge in the general election.
• Venice politician Nancy Detert won the Republican nomination for District 23 of the State Senate. She’ll go up against Democrat Morgan Bentley.
• State Rep. Ron Reagan, R-Bradenton, will face democrat Richard Jackson.
• Ken Roberson won the republican nomination for the District 71 State House seat.
• Democrat *gasp!* Darryl Rouson will move on to vie for the District 55 seat in the State House.
• Bill Furst won the race for county appraiser.
• Shannon Staub holds her seat in Sarasota County Commission District 3.
• Former Sarasota Mayor Carolyn Mason will face Democrat Jono Miller for the District 1 seat.
• Caroline Zucker retained her District 2 seat on the Sarasota County School Board.
• Bradenton attorney Gilbert Smith won a judge’s seat in the 12th Judicial Circuit.

Edit: Democrat Adam Tebrugge will be facing Larry Eger in the November. Any implication that the race was already decided was a slight on my part.

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Tomorrow, Aug. 26, is the primary election for local candidates, which means it’s time to pick your party representatives for offices like hospital and school board members, county commissioner, local congressperson, and, if you’re a republican, county sheriff. There is only one democratic candidate for that office, and in Florida only voters registered as members of a particular party can vote for candidates in that party.

Voting locations are described here.

There are also two county charter amendments on the ballot. The first, given the punchy name, “Charter amendment providing for timetable for charter amendment referenda, judicial review, petition signature expiration,” was apparently written to obliterate any hope of comprehension by the ordinary voter, so we’ll do our best to translate it. This referendum, as we understand it, would make it harder for citizens to collect signatures and have an issue brought to a public vote in a timely fashion. We don’t support this amendment, and we figure that, unless you vote against it, the only people who will vote on it will be those who already understand it and intend to support it.

The second is more straightforward. It proposes that whenever a charter amendment is brought to the ballot, a financial impact statement for that amendment is first disseminated to the public. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent has also provided us with a handy sample ballot. Just fill in your precinct online and the computer will tell you who you can vote for.

Now get out there and be the decider.

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“The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.”– William H.P. Blandy, a U.S. Navy Admiral who oversaw the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Island.

“Woe to you my Princess. When I come, I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”

– Sigmund Freud

“Four trillion dollars for baked beans? I didn’t know they had Whole Foods in Zimbabwe!”

–Lewis Black

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Hurricane Fay was a resounding disappointment/relief , but it does give us occasion to answer some why-s about hurricanes.  

Why does every hurricane seem to form off the coast of Africa, travel west and then fly up the Gulf of Mexico? It starts with the Bermuda High, a big clockwise-turning wheel of high pressure (dense, cold air that has sunk low in the atmosphere). It’s known as an anticyclone because it rotates in the opposite direction of hurricanes (low-pressure systems.) The Bermuda High forms in the summer and usually remains stationary throughout hurricane season. The closer it forms to the U.S., the higher our risk. What the Bermuda High does is fling low-pressure systems (potential hurricanes) westward, along the African easterly jet, one of few North American wind streams that move east-west.

The storms’ northward motion over Cuba and the Keys can be attributed in part to the Coriolis force. I.e., an object moving across a rotating surface will appear, when viewed by another object (you or me) on that same surface, to bend in its path. Let this handy gif explain it better than my clumsy prose.In the northern (southern) hemisphere, the Coriolis force sends winds to the right (left) of their direction of motion. That means a storm moving to the west will veer north. 

This effect also explains the very existence of hurricanes. Winds are a function of a simple law of physics: fluids move from areas of high pressure, high density to regions of low pressure, low density, as they try to achieve equilibrium. When an area of low pressure forms in the Atlantic Ocean, the surrounding air wants to rush in and fill the space. All else being equal, the air should find equilibrium rather quickly and calm down.

But alas, the winds are sent off course before they can reach their destination. The culprit is, you guessed it, the Coriolis force. All the winds trying to find the storm’s center are sent off to the right. As this happens on all sides, the result is counterclockwise motion. In the southern hemisphere, where moving fluids veer left, the result is clockwise motion. So in a way, hurricanes are spinning, frustrated failures, spreading destruction until they burn out somewhere in Florida.  

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Chuck Klosterman is a very popular writer who, in this reader’s opinion, is not crappy (e.g. Dan Brown) or gimmicky (Chuck Palahniuk) or sickeningly obnoxious (Jonathan Safran Foer). That makes him unique in the world of contemporary letters.

Mostly, he’s famous for turning pop culture inside out in order to show his readers how truly bizarre it is. You wouldn’t expect this to transfer well into a novel. But at the essence of what he does, even in books like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV, is a doggedly pursued curiousness about human feelings and relationships. People like him because he articulates major things that they felt but didn’t understand, that they would have thought inarticulable. And he does so in a remarkably conversational way. His writing is smart, but it’s not trying to prove it.

In this way, his first novel delivers. Since I got my hands on an advance copy of Downtown Owl last night, I’ve been jumping into various chapters of the novel and reading on until the next. It’s relentlessly interesting, even when read this way.

Using a “What she said:/What she meant:” device, he exposes the logical framework under a flirtatious conversation. In another chapter, when a man begins to realize he’s been ruined by a massive con, he gets a feeling in his stomach like “when you reach your hand back to get your wallet and suddenly realize it’s not there. “

Chuck Klosterman fans know the feeling you get when reading his writing, like when you have a psychoanalytic breakthrough. And in this book, the payoff is near-constant. That may cause us to forgive him any flaws as a novelist.

But hey, not everyone who reads his books will take a critical eye to them. Many readers of this novel may very well be non-readers. That’s because Chuck Klosterman is the perfect crossover writer. He’s popular without being any of the nasty things listed above, but he’s also well-liked among elitist literati folks, despite not being confusing, cloying or ironic.

Downtown Owl comes out Sept. 16. If you like Chuck Klosterman, it won’t disappoint. If you’ve never heard of him, you might want to check it out. He’s very accessible.

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According to the Spanish newspaper ABC, Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, will be published September of next year. Nabokov had asked that the book be burned after his death. The decision was left in the hands of his son Dmitri.

Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum, who once called for the book to be published, now regrets his decision. He refers to “a few troubling paragraphs” in the manuscript he read. Hmm.

Personally, I don’t think it should have been published. But haven’t made up my mind on whether I’ll read it. Rosebaum suggested a good compromise: stow the manuscript in a restricted archive rather than publish it as a novel.

What do you think?

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First, Time Out New York explained “Why the hipster must die.”

Then, Adbusters ran “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.”

Mod, hippie, punk, emo, hipster. Has yet another subgroup fallen in the evolution of counterculture? When do we get to the guy who walks upright and leads us into a golden age of perpetual coolness?

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