Liberals: Stop Rebutting the Healthcare Lies

Today I received an email from Obama’s Organizing America about a new site to fight the opposition’s lies about the health care reform bill. This is the wrong approach. Completely.

There are times when a rebuttal is bad strategy. If you allow your opponent to control the debate, you forfeit your chance to tell your story. That is exactly what President Obama, the Democratic Party, and cheerleaders like MSNBC are actively doing.

I already know that the US Health Care system is broken. You don’t need to convince me that there is a problem. But aren’t there great, compelling, positive reasons for the Reform bill? A well-articulated vision of the future should make the idea of Death Panels universally laughable. Win the PR war by selling what we’re going to do/get/have.

If you are not sure what I mean by controlling the debate, please see “Excerpt from Debate 101″ below.

My Reply to Mitch Stewart & Barack Obama’s Email

Please stop rebutting and start leading.

Frame the bill as an Apollo Project, its goal is to make us #1 in the world.

This is worth another 1/2 hour commercial:

• Appeal to pride: make it unpatriotic to oppose the bill
• Explain how the top health ranked countries in the world run their public plans…
• Then show how ours will be better than theirs…
• Tell how new medical innovation will stimulate our economy and increase our status as world leaders

We cannot win by rebutting the lies. That yields control of the conversation to our opponents.

Don’t think of an elephant.

Excerpt from Debate 101

Watch from 20:40-22:50 as Reagan discards an indictment against him and goes on the attack, landsliding Mondale with several allegations. Mondale falls for it, attempting to respond to one of the several allegations, leaving all the others still in question.

It doesn’t even matter whether Reagan’s allegations were accurate: Reagan controlled the debate.

Of Zombies and Zambonis

In my dream, I was being held against my will in the basement of a building. It was something like a clinic with various quasi medical apparatuses in a few different rooms. I was concerned about a middle-aged woman who was not there at the time. She dressed similarly to a nurse, but I perceived she was much more like a warden. I remembered having tried to escape, but somehow I had not succeeded, perhaps because of her or one of the unseen attendants.

In one dimly-lit room, there were about 9 people standing in a few rows. They were vacant, almost inanimate zombies. Their androgynous, naked bodies were slick with blood diluted by sweat and who knows what else. Every few minutes a tone sounded, and they would all adjust a limb or change their stance into a new pose so that their muscles would not grow rigid. I feared that I was to be made one of them very soon.

Then I was showering. Sensing that I was momentarily unattended, I made for the way out, still wet and unclothed. I went up a  stairwell that was painted in white enamel. The stairs came to a glass-enclosed landing. I pushed through the door into a government office with a long service counter behind which stood many gaping public workers. I told them that I am being held captive and need help. They just stared at me uncertain of what to do. I was naked. They could do nothing to help to me. What little compassion or ethical obligation they may have had was not enough to motivate them to action. I exited the same door into the parking garage, then–no longer naked–out through the traffic of a busy New York City street.

A small park was across the street, and there was a stand of neatly-planted  shrubs that formed a canopy of dense red foliage, knee-high above the grainy, dry soil. I momentarily took cover there, and then moved on.

At the park’s far end I met the street that ran perpendicular to the one I had crossed. A slow moving service vehicle crawled down the street toward me. It was made of heavy diamond plate patterned metal with worn yellow paint, an atop were two men operating it. I went between parallel-parked cars into the street and thumbed a ride, climbing aboard as it lumbered past. When I got on, there was only the driver. He wore old jeans and a coat, both of faded denim, and a red and black flannel shirt. He was poorly shaven and had a thick mustache of course blond whiskers that looked very blue collar.

Moments later we were in a parking garage that was painted in glossy white enamel, with railings painted with glossy yellow that accentuated them. It was very clean. I then knew that it was the same building from which I had just fled.

He parked not far from a clear glass door that apparently went into a residential area. He told me about how he was going to have a procedure performed that shrinks the brain to 1/4 its size. As he explained this, I watched a diagram showing an overhead view of the silhouette of a normal-sized brain, and a 25% scale silhouette aligned to the upper left of  the larger image for comparison. It had the appearance of high quality medical marketing material. Very slick and technical.

“Once done, you don’t have to think ever again. They got a TV channel with ultimate wrestling championships 24 hours a day. You can just watch,”  he said.

I then understood the zombies.

I asked him if I could take the Zamboni back out. It wasn’t a real Zamboni. I just called it that, tribute to Schultz’ strange Zamboni period in Peanuts.

The moustache-man handed me a keyring heavily-laden with keys. Then another that was even heavier. The second was so that I could get inside when I got back. I told him “Okay,” even though I knew that if I managed to get out, there was no way I would be coming back.

____

When I woke up, I told Heidi a brief version of this dream.

Garifuna

My first encounter with the Garifuna people was in 1992 when I stayed in Livingston, Guatemala for a couple nights. My Israeli travel companion Yaron and I hired a small lancha down Rio Dulce, past the warm springs and to Guatemala’s Caribbean coast. Terns glided above, occassionally rolling into a dive and nonchalantly splatting onto the water’s surface. Livingston has Guatemala’s population of people of African descent: the Garifuna.

In two days, I will be in Honduras, on Roatan island. There live Garifuna people there, too. I am eager.

Coyote on Swaner

When I came to Park City, Utah as a prospective home buyer in 2002, I remember looking out from the real estate agent’s car as she explained that the area just southwest of Interstate 80 was a nature preserve. I spotted a coyote loping across the flat expanse, his gray-brown silhoutted against the white snow.

Today, driving the same road in the opposite direction, I saw across the expanse a distant canine figure making its way southward. I saw Sandhill Cranes in a different area of the Swaner Nature Preserve a few days ago. They nest on the ground, braving hungry predators.

I drive to work.

Rejected Cartoons by Don Hertzfeldt

 So, I guess I’m late to the party, but these cartoons crack me up.

I warn you…after the first couple, they go a bit beyond NSFW.

Europeans Know How to Handle Intelligent Design Creationism

Attempts to introduce Intelligent Design in Europe spark backlash

My favorite quote:

…creationism in any of its forms, such as ‘intelligent design,’ is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning and its contents are pathetically inadequate for science classes.

But I also really like the technique of calling ID “Intelligent Design Creationism.”

Liberty Project Aftermath

Life is emergent. It springs from me, a new lease. New goals.

Steps in Peru

I came to Machu Picchu early and on foot. As the cloud forest thinned and gave way to grass on steep slopes, mists shrouded the ruins below. An ancient staircase. A rebuilt Incan wall. I had walked the 14,000 foot pass with their ancient remnants all around, the remains of a once-great New World empire, ravaged by what I would later learn were guns, germs and steel. I descended and the mists began to lift away, presenting the re-discovered city in a clear, yet still eerily mysterious, view. I explored on my own, experiencing a strange concoction of emotions: adventuresome peace and yearning awe. An hour and a helf later, when I rejoined the group tour, I savored the memory my time spent wandering alone.

—

Overhead a gigantic tree towered above the rainforest canopy, looking across wide distance to any other emergents. My feet had left the butressed roots of the tree far below. They plunged into the forest’s thickly-humoused floor some fifty feet below. Each metal step sounded metallic as we climbed them one by one in a tight spiral. Once at the top, a wooden deck provided a panorama, a wide open view of rainforest canopy broken by streams and riverways. It spread endlessly in all directions. Down below we could see occasional birds fly from one treetop to another, and toucans called somewhere near the river. Not far away was Manu National Park–a magnificent asset for the country of Peru, in which they can enjoy great and well-deserved pride–where some 900 species of bird were found. But here, somewhere at the camp below this tree, is the place where the Macaws come to eat clay from the riverbanks.

—-

An Oropendola flies up to a thick bough that a hillside-dewlling tree is cantilevering out over the road. It places the big, mossy green caterpillar in its bill onto the branch, and then catches it with the claw at the tip of one of its toes. I watched through binoculars as it pinned the caterpillar firmly to the bough, and then used its bill to squoosh all of its insides out its backend, almost as if the caterpillar were a tub of toothpaste. The Oropendola slurped up its well-earned prize, and then flew off, it’s yellow-lined tail flashing brightly as the bird flew off. Earlier, one of the assistant guides had touched the same type of caterpillar and had received some really painful shots of poison into the lower part of his thumb. A short while later, a guide found a pair of Peruvian Cock-of-the-Rocs. We could just see them through through the thick cloudforest upperstory foliage that sloped down with the steep grade on the south side of the road. But the stop was altoghether too short, and I soon found myself stepping reluctantly back onto the bus. There had been a lodge a little ways back from where we had stopped. It was newly built as a cloudforest adventure lodge. Someday I will return.

I am not Reverend Ted Haggard

…and it’s a good thing, too.

Truthiness

Dictionary.com’s word of the day today is

verisimilitude \ver-uh-suh-MIL-uh-tood; -tyood\, noun:

1. The appearance of truth; the quality of seeming to be true.
2. Something that has the appearance of being true or real.
3. Truthiness.

Okay, I added the third one.