“…They don’t think tolerance is a virtue,” [Howard] Dean said, adding: “I’m not going to have these right-wingers throw away our right to be tolerant.”

Atta boy, Dean-o. Focus on abortion and gay marriage. Those are the solid planks of the platform. Those are the issues that’ll win majority votes, especially when you’re so good at making anyone who disagrees feel like a big meanie!

“…I don’t think ‘tolerance’ is the highest virtue,” I say, adding: “I’m not going to have these left-wingers throw away my right to not be a dumbass.” But then, it doesn’t sound like I’ll have to worry about that any time in the near future.

Thanks, DNC!

Everyone does. Whether you’re a homeless drug fiend or a philanthropic billionaire, we all need God. Otherwise you will live, and you will die, and fifty years later it will be as though you never had. If you’re ok with nihilism and happy (or unhappy, I guess) to live a pointless life, I probably don’t have to tell you you’re reading something you’ll disagree with. For the rest of us humans, our need for God is universal regardless of how religious or independent we would consider ourselves.

All that separates the faithful from the faithless is acceptance of this need. Not temperament, not IQ, not criminal record or social status. Only by being acutely aware of our hopeless state can we escape it. “Good” or “bad” doesn’t mean a lot in light of the fact that we’re mostly driven by selfishness and entirely unable to prevent ourselves or anyone else from dying at the end. Without God, life is sandcastles too close to the shore and energy wasted fighting the waves. Sure, we can all build something on our own… but not well, and not for long.

Enough with generalization; what about me specifically? I am, after all, the only person I know well enough to write very much about. Am I a better person for seeing my need and giving God control of my life? While I think so, it’s not my doing. And it wasn’t much of a choice, really. I’d consider myself a ‘good’ person, for whatever that is worth, somewhere on the world’s scale between the homeless guy and the billionaire. I’m usually smart, mostly honest, almost always responsible. Why, then, do I need God so much? Because, among other reasons: without him, I’d be crazy.

We’re not talking “boy, that guy’s a little crazy” crazy. I mean more like “have a nervous breakdown, drop out of school and move to Montana to hunt bison” crazy. Seriously. I am insightful, so I’m used to knowing how things - my computer, every electronic device my parents own, gravity, government, communication - work. Fortunately, I’m also intelligent enough to know that this has limits, and that even if I tried (and were a whole lot smarter) I would never understand everything. This tidbit of knowledge serves as an equalizer, with one fatal exception.

Girls. Yes, girls… real original, eh? Not girls in general, because that would just be stupid. Specifically, attractive girls who are nice enough to talk to me and popular enough to usually be talking to someone else. At least since tag on the kindergarten playground, it seems like I’ve usually got one girl or another stuck in my head. By 5th or 6th grade when I’d begun to decide cooties might not be such a bad thing to catch, I’d also realized I was smaller and less talkative than many of the other guys. In a classroom of 30 kids there might be 5 cute girls and 10 boys more popular than me; you do the math. I started thinking about girls more and talking to girls less.

I might go deep into nature vs. nurture, considering whether my character or early experiences were more responsible for making me self-conscious and intimidated. But nature vs. nurture has always bored the crap out of me, so let’s not do that. Fact is, I was shy in general and especially frightened of conversations with cute girls. What does an overly introspective boy do in a situation like this? Why, analyze to death and freak out, of course! To varying degrees, that’s what I’ve been doing since I was 12, and I can’t think of a single time when it’s served me well.

The “varying degrees” part is where God comes in. As I’ve mentioned probably enough to sound like a hugely arrogant nerd, I’m pretty smart. I got good grades in high school without much work. I get decent grades in college with only slightly more work. Given my blessedly encouraging family and friends, and assuming my B.S. snags me a career, what else do I need? I can get an apartment, then a house, then a new car every three years from this chapter until the conclusion, like your average Miami business graduate. By every worldly standard, I’m one good job interview away from being set.

Except for the way I bend myself to breaking over girls. Everything else I’ve needed has fallen into place: college acceptance, test scores, scholarships, summer work, housing, money from my parents for school and from my grandparents for a car. Were it not for girls, these self-centered things would probably be enough for me. I’m smart enough to know how dumb I am, but I don’t know whether I’m humble enough to admit it without extra pressure.

And talk about pressure! From junior high through high school, there was always a handful of girls I thought were really cool, really hot, and really scary. Although this unofficial group’s roll was in a fairly constant state of change, there always was someone I had to prep myself before running into again. At every school or church event, there was someone to whom talking required thorough preparation. I was ever thinking of lines in my head, ever cooking up scenarios that would get me a smile or a laugh or, dare I say it, a date.

If you’ve had to give a presentation or a speech in front of people, you’ve got some idea what this is like. The only thing worse than going in blind and completely unprepared is trying to memorize verbatim what you want to say; speeches don’t have multiple takes. Forget a sentence… a phrase… a word, and you’ve got an instant breakdown with no delay on the camera and everybody watching. This is sort of the way I’ve always felt about girls I’m interested in dating.

Under the weight of stress, stretched expectations, and emotional letdown (let’s just say I regularly forget my lines), I found myself at the end of high school beginning to understand the reasons my parents had always taken me to church. No matter how much better I got at talking to girls, and even if I were to find the right one, romance - this supposed peak of human existence, this glamorized salve for every cut - would be a challenge for me. Analysis is something my brain is always doing, whether I throw myself into it or not, and logic is one persistent beast.

Even the rare girl who is cool and approachable provides feelings that only hint at a more perfect Love. Even sweet girls who are a little too crazy or a little too trendy or a little too sold on the college culture leave me fumbling for words and planning my next moves. Thank God for these feelings. Sometimes I think they are the only stupid things keeping me from giving up on romance altogether. More importantly, I know rejection and broken expectations stab hard enough to make me feel more frequently my need for God.

Am I wrong in seeing this as blatantly amazing? God takes my most vulnerable point, a perpetually unstable aspect of who I am, and forces me to see him through it. I think there’s a reason people often “find” God at their worst, tend to grow closest to Him during the hardest parts of their lives. At any other time, we can get a new car or a new job or a new whatever, slough off/take pills for the depression, pick ourselves up and go on alone. There are certain things, though, we simply cannot get around: these turn us either numb, crazy, or Christian.

I’m not a conspiracy theory type of guy, and today is no exception… but let’s just consider something for a moment. I realize the average person is not too familiar with the gory details of web design, so I’ll try extra hard to tone the nerdage down enough that the typical reader (I say ‘reader’ in the singular because I know I’ve got only one, and that’s assuming mom figures out how to turn on the computer) can relate.

Ok, so… Microsoft. Whoa! See what I did, I used up around 90% of my allotted nerdiness just by mentioning the big M-word. Ah well. Anyway, we’re all familiar with Mr. Softy and the fact that, as a whole, the company sucks. Graphical, icon based operating system? Apple. Mouse? Apple. Web browser? Netscape. These are not three little things. If you have used a computer any time since 1985, it’s likely that these three things are the aspects of the PC which you are most familiar with. Microsoft, despite controlling a gigantic share of the operating system and browser markets, pioneered none of the most basic components of the home computer.

I should point out that I’m a Windows XP user. It is stable. It is smart enough that my camera, mouse, etc. work the way they are supposed to as soon as I plug them in. And until Service Pack 2, it didn’t even try to do too many things behind my back. In other words, no, I am not a disgruntled Mac user. Just a disgruntled web designer.

Obviously not all Microsoft products are horrible. Regardless of what anyone says, you don’t get into an industry dominating position without some degree of quality in whatever it is you’re selling. Internet Explorer, though, is pretty thoroughly horrible. See, following several years of “browser wars” (this is an actual term, I promise I’m not that much of a loser) between Netscape and Microsoft, several organizations came together and decided what we needed were concrete standards for anything meant for the Internet. This way, programmers could be confident they would not have to design 17 different versions of each thing they built, and Joe User could see content the way it was meant to be seen.

How do you think Microsoft felt about this? Having won the browser wars mostly on account of packaging Internet Explorer with new computers, it’s fair to say Microsoft saw little reason to comply with standards. Why allow for new competition when you control 85% of the market? This, apparently, was Microsoft’s reaction. Now, years later, Firefox is finished. And it’s free. And it’s faster, more secure, simpler to use, has better features. Now you can see where I’m going with this.

Firefox is better from the Internet user’s standpoint, and it’s nice to people who build websites. If you design a page, and your design is good, and you put it together the way you’re supposed to, that should be it. End of story, ship it out, open for business. Nope! Because Internet Explorer breaks or at the very least briskly jostles numerous attributes of even relatively simple designs, it’s not uncommon to spend twice as much time fixing IE errors as you spent designing the page from scratch.

“Woops,” Microsoft might say. “Couldn’t fix that whole not-working-the-way-it’s-supposed to thing. We’ll try and get that straightened out by version 8 billion.” In older versions, there was actually a weird sequence of commands that you could use in order to trick IE into doing what the other browsers were doing already. In the latest editions - this is it, this is the conspiracy, this is my evidence that this post is not completely out of left field - Microsoft fixed the workaround. The errors caused by their crappy program are still there. One of few options that web designers had for fixing them: GONE.

What can you do? As a designer, you can’t put something together in Firefox and tell Internet Explorer users to piss off. They are, after all, 80-some percent of your audience. Which is why, if you haven’t already, you should download Firefox. And tell all of your friends to do the same. And, while you’re at it, put a copy on your parents’ computer; as long as you import their favorites, they’ll hardly know the difference.

Just got back from a debate on campus. The topic was Social Security and, of course, whether or not said system ought to be reformed. As is usually the case, I had several things to say and did not make the miniscule effort which standing up to share would have required. The moderator - Dr. Voth, faculty advisor for the University debate team - made it clear that the event was centered on audience involvement. As a result, much of the hour was spent with him looking at us and us looking at him and all the cool kids talking to their friends instead of making any attempt to pay attention. It was the people who contributed who made me happier than usual that I go to Miami.

As far as college campuses go, Miami University is a very conservative place. Which means most of our liberals are either mainstream enough to make reasonable arguments, or outnumbered enough to sit quietly. No tirades about King Chimpy’s plans to fill the wallets of his fatcat friends, and surprisingly neutral references to the Iraq war. But that’s enough of an introduction…

The debate team speakers used stage names in addition to their own names, so I’ll use the stage names. “Tennille” argued in favor of Social Security reform, and “Captain” (charming, I know… one of several cheesy jokes lost on us this evening) argued against. Neither gave an overwhelming presentation or crushing counter-arguments, but the underlying themes were basically what you would expect from each side. Tennille provided facts and predictions indicating that Social Security would run out of money by midway through the century and should be overhauled; Captain countered with assertions that Social Security’s predicted lifespan was increasing all the time and should be left alone.

The problem with both sides of this argument - for me, at least - is that economists are one of few groups I trust less than politicians. Both politicians and economists are motivated by agendas which are at least partially hidden from the general public; economists deal in “facts” where a quarter-percentage error can amount to forecasts being off by hundreds of millions of dollars over the period in question. Assuming some of the economists on both sides have erred in one direction or the other, what could we hear behind and in addition to the numbers?

Tennille spoke first, adding some depth to the notes the President played in his most recent State of the Union address. Mainly he attempted to prove that the current Social Security system will eventually go bankrupt unless reformed. On this front he used the aforementioned approach of providing numbers and economist forecasts. The fact that individuals would have more control over a greater percentage of their income was a statement that he mentioned but did not trumpet as loudly as he could have - this would have gone a long way towards covering his lack of explanation as to how a reformed system would not go the way of the dinosaurs, too.

On pure delivery, Captain (a senior member of the debate team) was a bit more impressive. In terms of content, however, Captain warned us of outcomes including: 1) domestic stock market crash which would create disaster internationally, creating an environment similar to that which the Great Depression caused in Germany, leading to the rise of Hitler 2) weaking of the dollar which would lead to increased foreign investment in the Euro and other alternatives 3) decrease in benefits paid by Social Security.

This could be too much simplicity, but don’t (1) and (2) at least partly cancel each other out? If they invest in other countries based on the prediction that Social Security reform will put America dangerously deeper in debt, how could their markets be crushed by America’s predicted tumble? One argument or the other might be supported, but using both left Captain with a pair of hobbled warnings. Not to metion I was pretty sure Germany fell under the Nazi spell mostly due to getting her tail end handed to her in World War I. As to (3), a temporary decrease would probably be necessary during the transition period. Nothing this big is handed off without a little jostling.

The issue, as I see it, boils down to just that: how much jostling should we accept, and how long might we expect the transition to last? I have an understanding of government and economics that is limited at best, but I can see how giving Social Security-paying workers a variety of index funds to choose from would provide greater returns, thus limiting the amount of money we would expect from the traditional Social Security vault. Not to mention I’d like the government to have as little of my money as possible. Assuming the logic behind the impending funding crisis is sound, this is a switch that should be put into motion now and not later.

Tonight’s debate - and the one currently taking place across the country - makes it clear that many people do not share this assumption. However, none of the anti-reform arguments posed by Captain or audience members convinced me to change my mind. The vocalized anti-reform consensus was that Social Security would not go bankrupt for “a long time,” maintenance fees would eat up the benefits from the proposed reforms, and that the federal government needs all the 12% that it currently takes in order to stay afloat. Basically, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. And if it’s in the process of breaking, leave it alone until it actually busts.

The only concession offered (by a guy who also said the problem was too far away for him to care about… a scary truth in a room full of college kids) was that we could fix the current system with very small adjustments - specifically, a slight increase in taxes. Forgive me for being less than excited when fellow students say that we should not worry about problems several decades away, and for being even LESS excited at the mention of tax increases to blow air into an old, stretched out system.