Been a while since I indulged myself and talked about American politics and such here on this blog, and I just happen to have come across a couple of pretty interesting political articles lately, so I figured, what the heck!

First, there is this fairly interesting article from The Week about why Ron Paul’s winning so many of these straw polls taken after GOP events despite being way behind on the national polls.

The article runs down the four main theories people are touting, which I shall summarize thusly :

1. He cheats. His supporters flood the straw polls, skewing the results.
2. The national polls are biased and meaningless. The mainstream media, included the conservative side of it, hates Ron Paul and is trying to keep him down, but the straw polls tell the real story.
3. He only wins when the real contenders aren’t there. The straw polls that Paul supporters tout as proof of their guy’s awesomeness are ones where people like Romney, Pawlenty, and Rick Perry decided to opt out.
4. Libertarianism is increasingly big in the GOP. Ron Paul has unimpeachable (so to speak) credits as a true dyed in the wool Libertarian, and the Libertarians are rapidly becoming the intellectual power to look out for in the GOP.

All these arguments have some validity, but even taken together, they fail to get the real picture. I think they show the media’s political myopia generated by their relentless reduction of everything into bullet points and sound bites.

For one thing, they completely ignore the actual person and his assets as a candidate, and Ron Paul has come considerable assets that give him more appeal than you would think.

For example, he is idealogically consistent. He is a Libertarian from toenails to eyebrows, his positions are consistent with one another in a way the Johnny-come-lately Tea Party fake Libertarians cannot compete with, and it gives him a solidity and an integrity that the highly artificial mainstream candidates, with their focus grouped “messaging” and media massaged “positions”, simply cannot compete with.

Relatedly, he truly believes everything he is saying. These are the same positions he has held for decades and he gives all indications of believing them with his whole being. This means that he is speaking from the heart, and politicians speaking from genuine conviction have always had an advantage in seeming both honest and visionary, which is especially important in this highly fake political age. A great deal of Barack Obama’s appeal has been his ability to convey conviction and not seem “like a politician”.

Unfortunately for him and his supporters, that’s where it ends. Being a true Libertarian, his policies are a bewildering mishmash of palatable populism, radical reforms of things most people have not even heard of (most people don’t even know what The Fed is, Doctor Paul), and things that strike most people as simply loonie. He is far too socially liberal for most Republicans (who despite the new fashion for Libertarianism, are still social conservatives at heart) and far too anti-government for most liberals. He has his cadre of supporters, and he could maybe double it if he was really lucky and really scored some points off the other GOP candidates off their platform vulnerabilities from his position, but that is it.

The other article I wanted to share was this rare and wonderful piece of glorious sanity from a writer at Time who talks about “How conservatives lost touch with reality”.

From what I can tell from the article, the author is a moderate conservative who, like me, pines for an era when conservatives were the practical, realistic, pragmatic, sober adults who acted out of genuine knowledge of the world and never spoke in the sort of ideological garblefarb completely without intellectual integrity that marked the rise of leaders like Mao and Castro.

Such people are simply not to be found any more. The Baby Boom generation simply did not produce any. That is how the political madness that is a world where it’s the conservatives want to tear down the system and are shouting Anarchy! and the liberals who are the guardians at the gate, keeping the Revolution mobs from burning down the grainhouse, has come to pass.

I feel strongly that in another era, I would have been a moderate conservative. In a previous era, they would have seemed like the voice of sanity versus the idealistic but impractical liberals.

But there is no voice of sanity in modern politics. Only lunatics and cowards.

And that’s how someone like Ron Paul can start looking good to people.

I had like a million different ideas for something more interesting to write about that just whatever random shit I have kicking about in my web browser, but I neglected to write them down, and they were consequently blown out of my brain when my hay fever kicked in with a vengeance today and made me sneeze so hard that I, for real, saw stars.

So hello there Summer. I know you don’t officially start for another 16 hours or so, but apparently you decided to send a huge whack of allergens my way as tiny demonic heralds, just to remind me of how complicated my relationship to you has become over the years.

Basically, I like the summer, but it does not not like me back at all. It’s a highly abusive relationship, really.

I have a number of factors that make summer a trial for me. First off would be the aforementioned hay fever. It has varied in intensity over the years, and for the most part it has gotten weaker over the years that have passed since that one terrible year, when I was in grade 11, where my hay fever become so severe that I would start sneezing in the middle of a sneeze.

That shit shouldn’t even be possible.

But it happened. Instead of “a-choo!” I was sneezing “a-CHRK-ah-ah-ah-CHK-CHT-CHRK” and so on. And it didn’t even have the courtesy to wait until summer proper so that I would at least be out of school and able to doctor myself properly. Oh no. It attacked in late May, not long after my birthday on the 19th, and had me as its bitch from then till after the end of school for the year.

So I don’t know how many times I had these massive sneezing fits where it sounded like I was gonna die on the spot when my whole reddened face popped like a massive, angry zit. So not only was I in histamine horror hell, but I was acutely embarrassed by suddenly becoming the highly unflattering center of attention in my high school classes.

A number of times I had to leave class because class could honestly not continue with me sneezing my head in half so loudly that it caused other nearby classes to come to an abrupt halt.

Fun bonus fact, it’s very hard to negotiate the relatively short distance between your classroom and the boy’s bathroom when your eyes are half swollen shut and awash in tears (another part of the response) and you are seeing spots in front of your eyes from how hard you are sneezing.

Thank goodness, it’s never been nearly that bad again. If I had to go through that every year, it would have driven me right round.

Since then, it’s faded over the years. That, combined with getting into a position where I could get enough antihistamines to last me through the worst of it, has made it way less of a problem than it was that terrible month or so way back when.

The other major factor that makes summer so hard for me is the heat. Heat is bad for all fat people. You see, the heat generated by the human body goes up as a cube function as mass goes up. Every cell of your body generates a certain amount of heat simply as part of its metabolism. That is what it means to be a warm blooded animal. We are self-heating.

The problem is that we get rid of excess heat by radiating it into the world via our skin, and that is a function of how much surface area for skin our bodies have, and that only goes up via a square function as your mass increases.

In other words, you don’t get more skin at the same rate as you get more heat-producing volume.

So the fatter, the hotter. That’s why us fat people are sweaty. Our bodies are frantically trying to get rid of all that heat and just can’t keep up.

But I have another factor that makes heat bad for me : an inherited predilection towards heatstroke. My Dad has it, and so do I. So heat does not just make me feel too hot, it makes me physically ill. Headache, ringing in my ears, nausea, dizziness, sometimes confusion.

I can usually keep it in check by aggressive hydration, but it’s still always there.

So summer is a difficult time for me because of my health.

And yet, I still love it. Sunshine and blue skies always make me feel good, even when I am only seeing them out of my bedroom window while I type. I love the more relaxed attitudes during the summer, and the move to the beaches (I love beaches!), and of course, ever since childhood, summer has meant fun.

And even though I have been unable to participate in much of that in recent years (something I plan to try to try to change, by golly), I still love the summer.

I guess it’s true… when you love something, you love it forever, even when it’s not even smart to do so any more. I love the summer, even though it hasn’t loved me back in a long time.

Maybe I can change that.