[Forever young: Here’s Dylan getting his Medal of Freedom from Obama.]

I’m trying to get my head back into Campaign 2012, but am suffering from aversions. The campaign feels static, the story-of-the-day trivial. The things people talk about aren’t even “issues,” really. Like Obama’s birthplace. He was born in Hawaii. This has been settled. To discuss further is to descend into madness and lunacy. And so I’m with Cillizza on Romney and Trump: What’s Mitt thinking? Is there a secret strategy memo that says that the way to 270 electoral votes is to play the Trump card and flirt with fringe conspiracy theories?
Good hair meets bad hair. A Feb. 2, 2012 file photo. (Julie Jacobson - AP)

As I wrote last summer when Obama released his birth certificate:

“... it is the nature of a conspiracy theory that all information must pass through a very discerning, yet simple, filter. Information that is confirmational is accepted; that which is contradictory is rejected.

“Conspiracy theories have the self-sustaining gift of ramification: They sprout new tendrils, like a mad vine that has invaded from another continent. For the committed conspiracy theorist, there is always another angle to explore, another anomaly to scrutinize.”

So the birther thing can’t and won’t go away, because that’s simply the nature of conspiracy theories. But I’m not sure there are a lot of votes there — as opposed to votes among middle-of-the-road folks who are concerned about fiscal policy and government regulations, etc.

[A quick post just to clear out some of the cobwebs around here after a long holiday weekend....]

This morning I finished the Bill Bryson book, “At Home,” a warehouse of delights and fun facts, much of it about life in 19th century England, when Bryson’s home was built by a country clergyman. Bryson concludes that, superficially, the world hasn’t changed that much in all these years, that his clergyman would see a fairly familiar landscape, but for the odd car or helicopter. But culture, the reader surmises, changes so dramatically. Our sense of what is normal, healthy, appropriate, is radically different. We have witnessed cultural, political, scientific, medical revolutions. They had all these codes back then, all these compulsions and assumptions. And it makes me wonder what it is that we do today that will, a century from now, seem strange, antiquated, ridiculous.

Eating meat?

Eating????

Sleeping? Aging? Getting old and gray and pudgy rather than remaining youthful forever?

Living within our meat-bodies rather than in the comfortable digital confines of a server farm?

The other book getting a workout this weekend was Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. It’s astonishing to think that the personal computer was invented in the mid-1970s, that it was coincident with the rise of disco and the bad hangovers of the 1960s. Jerry Ford was asking people to wear Whip Inflation Now (WIN) buttons. To younger readers, that may sound like ancient times, but for many of us here it was not so long ago.

The last few days I’ve been running around Pennsylvania, interviewing people, from big-shots to ordinary Shmoes, taking notes and asking a million questions, and am putting together what I hope will be a good story about real people in a real place. But in the back of my mind these days I always wonder if this go-there reporting concept makes any sense. Does it pencil out? Salary…two nights at the strangely expensive Hampton Inn … meals … snacks … pinball … the spa … driver … interpreter … fixer … fresh fruit and champagne delivered to the room ... the usual reporter-on-the-road costs, in other words. Is the cost worth it when the end result is just a little ol’ story in the paper?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to stay home and just, you know, Google it? Surely there’s a poll out there, online, and we could just tell you what people think based on that. Make a couple of phone calls. Done, and cheaply.

Said it before: You can’t Google your way to great journalism.

The numbers worry me. And this latest story about the New Orleans Times-Picayune worries me. The Times-Pic is famous for its Pulitzer-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina, but it also did outstanding work on the BP oil spill two years ago. Staff writer David Hammer’s reporting was particularly essential to the rest of us following the story. Now we learn that the paper’s corporate owners have decided to cut back print publication to three days a week. We’re assured that the Times-Pic will still publish 24 hours a day online, but an analyst predicts a major cut in staffing, from about 150 to 100 employees in the newsroom. Several other company papers in the Deep South are also cutting back to three days a week.

There’s no simple solution to the collapse of the traditional newspaper business model. Everyone’s got to figure this thing out in their own way. But let’s not pretend that this isn’t a sad moment for New Orleans.

The Facebook IPO is starting to look like a fiasco, not only because of mechanical glitches the first day of trading but because of alleged sneaky insider shenanigans that may have tipped off a favored few that that FB’s revenues weren’t going to be quite as robust as hoped. Morgan Stanley, the chief underwriter, is under scrutiny. Facebook shares went down in price rather than up, and the wizards of Wall Street know how to make money in either direction. So if certain favored clients had info that the unwashed masses weren’t privy to, that might not pass the smell test. Here’s the Reuters report. Here’s the AP account.

What strikes me about this is that it echoes cranky, snarly, surly things written in this space in recent days. I was partly kidding, but now I’m thinking that I should be every bit as cynical as I often pretend to be.

Of course no one has actually been charged with a crime and, when and if such charges are filed, they will be presumed innocent – just not here on my blog, where we will default to invective and rage and presumptions of guilt. Why do people use the term “class warfare” as if it were something bad?

Mazel tov to Mark Zuckerberg and his lovely bride! Now let’s talk about that Facebook IPO again. Your blogger, as previously noted in this space, will not be purchasing any Facebook stock, because of the lack of clarity about its value. Yeah, I guess I could do some research, but my assumption is that most of the information available to someone like me — an outsider, and a confirmed doofus with a history of losing money in the market — will have the net effect of making me less, rather than more, likely to reach a sensible decision. It’ll be a trap. It’ll just sucker me. We have a saying around here: If you don’t know who the pigeon is at the table, it’s you.

The tech world befuddles me, as does anything involving money, so the Facebook IPO was, for me, marked with skull and crossbones. Question:Will Facebook even exist in 10 or 20 years? I had a Compuserve email account back in the day, and also MCI mail, and I still have an AOL email account, which for many people is laughable, a fact necessitating mockery and outrage, followed by derisive comments about my sad, scuzzy cell phone. My cell phone is so primitive it’s hidden in the heel of my shoe.

I come from backward people: When I was growing up we were in a Hobbesian state of nature and had barely mastered the technology of fire. We would sit around the dinner table chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing hunks of stringy meat, desperately trying to swallow it, and then someone would say, “This might be easier to eat if we cooked it.”

I heard on the radio this morning that Facebook shares were trading below the original IPO price. Let’s check again: Ouch, it’s down 11 percent at the moment from the previous close. See how smart I was to stick my money in the mattress instead?

The Copernican Principle worries me a bit here. As you may recall from many previous Achenblog items, the Copernican Principle goes beyond the whole earth-revolves-around-sun concept. It states, broadly, that we should not presume to find ourselves in a special position in time or space.

The principle tells us we will rarely find ourselves right at the beginning or right at the end of something that has a long duration. This is not deterministic. It’s just a guide, a general truism — a playing of the odds. The astrophysicist J. Richard Gott of Princeton has extended the principle to cover a great deal of social and political phenomena. He goes so far as to use it to craft a general range of future human population. Bottom line: We're probably not living on the home planet of a future galactic civilization because that would put us in a privileged position. (COULD be, but you wouldn’t want to bet on it — or invest in Galactic Empire, Inc.)