Category: Politics

A good trend for Democracy in America

I’m really quite pleased by the trend of politicians posting on blogs; I realize that those on the right will also be doing it, but the ones I’ve seen so far from the center-liberal side of things are refreshing — although I hesitate to use the term “left,” even for such worthies as Senator Feingold.

Case in point: today, Congressman Jim McDermott (D-Washington) posted to the diaries on MyDD a very good discussion of our military situation, and the relation between weak recruiting and a little-publicized but odious provision of the “No Child LeftBehind” Act:

Section 9528, an Orwellian provision that takes money away from any school that denies military recruiters equal status with colleges and prospective employers, plus access to students’ home phone numbers. “Go after the unsuspecting and innocent and those easily impressed” — that seems to be the plan.

Charlie Rangel faced a Korean wartime draft and saw combat. I faced a Vietnam wartime draft and served as a military psychiatrist — deciding which trauma cases got returned to duty status. In the debate leading to this war, we introduced H.R. 163, a bill authorizing a military draft.

I am the last person who wants to see Americans drafted. (We both voted against H.R. 163 later that year.) The whole point was to raise awareness and force the Administation to face this war’s open-ended cost.

It wasn’t until I saw his later points that I realized who he was. Kudos to Congressman McDermott for embracing the new medium, and I sincerely hope that other politicians will follow.

Gas price watch…

(This was a comment I placed on Eschaton, responding to a question about how much people spend on gasoline… thought it would be of interest here, if nothing else for me to get a laugh at in a few years)

My round trip commute is around 90 miles (SF – Cupertino for those who know the Bay Area), and at 30 actual miles per gallon that means I’m paying almost $7 per working day on gas at Bay Area prices ($2.21-$2.39/gallon for regular 87-octane this morning)

I plan to be looking for jobs closer to home at some point.

I’ve got a relatively fuel-efficient small car (Acura RSX), which gets about twice the actual MPG of my old SUV (it got only 15mpg, and it was non-4WD with the smaller V8) and about a 20% improvement over both of my prior small cars (a Chevy Cavalier and a Pontiac Fiero, both 4-cylinder models, both of which got around 25mpg in practice.)

The big name blogs are just FUNNY today…

From DailyKOS – Friday Night Snark: Focus on Your Own Damn Family

Through his parents, I have been granted access to the following excerpts from a log prepared by an individual I will identify only as “Todd”. Todd’s diary entries consist in large part of a series of reports intended for Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and tells the tragic story of… well, you shall see. I print this here so that others may be warned from Todd’s tragic fate. — Hunter

Go. Read it. Now.
Continue reading “The big name blogs are just FUNNY today…”

There are still some good guys left in Washington…

OK, I realize this is not his main point in the piece, but I this bit from a new diary of Senator Feingold’s on MyDD really impresed me:

At a time in the country when we need free and open discourse, when the Senate is rubber stamping a bankruptcy bill which hurts those who have no power, when the country is involved in a war with no timetable for an exit strategy, we must be able to speak our minds without fear of recrimination from the government.

The main point, on the relationship of the blogosphere to the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance act (BCRA) is worth reading too.

Link via the MyDD front page

As if we needed more reason to believe Wal-Mart was evil…

How does the number-one retailer maintain an image of low prices? First, by actually making sure its prices are lower than its competitors, at least on key items. These items are called “price-sensitive” items in the industry, and it is commonly believed that the average consumer knows the “going price” of fewer than 100 items. These tend to be commodities that are purchased frequently.
A mid-size Wal-Mart supercenter may offer for sale 100,000 separate items, or stock-keeping units (skus). Wal-Mart and other major retailers believe that the general public knows the going price of only 1 to 2 percent of these items. Therefore, each Wal-Mart store shops for the prices of only about 1,500 items in their competitors’ stores. If it is ever found that a competitor has a lower price on one of these items than Wal-Mart, the store manager will immediately lower his or her price to be the lowest in the area.

Price-sensitive merchandise is displayed in prominent places such as the kiosk at the entrance to the store, as well as on end caps, in dump bins, and in gondolas down the main aisles. Consequently, when Wal-Mart customers see the items of which they know the price, the ones always priced lower in Wal-Mart, they start assuming that everything else is also priced lower than at competing stores. This assumption is simply not true.

My barber has offered me a simple example. He sells a nonbreakable pocket comb for 25 cents that he procures from his vendor for eight cents. Wal-Mart sells a lower-quality comb for 98 cents, and one would assume that Wal-Mart pays less for it than the barber does. People keep buying Wal-Mart combs, however, because the average person does not know the going price of a pocket comb, and it is automatically assumed that the Wal-Mart price is the lowest.

Via MyDD

Can we call it GannonGate yet?

From AMERICAblog:

Has Jeff Gannon told Peter Fitzgerald all he knows about the Plame affair? If you’d like to “spread the word” on the Gannon story to help encourage the Prosecutor’s office to give Jeff a call, put a link to it on your Web site.

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html

The more links, the more likely Google is to pick it up in their Google News. The more news coverage of this story, the closer we are to getting to the bottom of the Plame crime.

Note also warning regarding the linked article:

WARNING: A number of the links in this story are to x-rated photographs, and some of those might prove shocking to some people. Please exercise your own discretion when clicking. (And, as you read, please forgive the necessary typos – I’m going for rock-solid facts, rather than spelling.)

“I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I’m for it.”

from GOP’s Red Light District at Oliver Willis’s Blog:

The right is investing massive amounts of money in a growth industry. Hardcore porn. How much did Jenna Jameson contribute to the Bush war chest?

linking to the not-quite-so juicy:
Will the “Moral Values” GOP Refund the Money?

The Republican Party likes to call itself the party of “moral values.” So the question is, will it return the tens of thousands of dollars it has pocketed from companies that air pornography?

As reported by the LA Times today, “Adelphia Communications Corp. has quietly become the nation’s only leading cable operator to offer the most explicit category of hard-core porn.”

According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Adelphia gives the overwhelming amount of its financial support to Republicans, the party of “moral values.”

Which in turn links to GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut

Shill time: Quote in subject from patter before “Smut” by Tom Lehrer, a very funny song which can be found on his album That Was the Year That WasThat Was the Year That Was

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter “R”

The word for the day is “reification”

Reification
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Reification, also called hypostatisation, is treating an abstract concept as if it were a real, concrete thing. The term is often used pejoratively by epistemological realists as a criticism of epistemological idealists. Epistemological realists often regard reification as a logical fallacy.

Wikipedia rocks. As a word and as a concept worth knowing, so does “reification”; see for example Stephen Jay Gould‘s discussion of the reification of “intelligence” in The Mismeasure of Man.

What’s the relevance of the word? Well, I’ve been in some arguments on rec.arts.sf.fandom on “intellectual property” and why I think subsuming copyright, patents, and other related rights into a single reified concept of “intellectual property” is a bad thing, and the concept of reification is key to my sense of the argument – although they’re critical to the functioning of modern society and a modern economy, these rights are specific and of limited duration – and granted by society for the mutual benefits of creators and of society as a matter of social contract.

Property rights, on the other hand, are a legal recognition of an existing natural state of material objects (and in some ways, places) insofar as most material objects that we care about can only be in one place at a time, and thus usually only in one person’s physical possession. Or, in the case of space, only one person can occupy a given precise location, although clearly this is not enough to justify the complex legalities of land ownership.

This is not an area I know enough about to really get through the argument fully, but this is kind of a hot button for me and figure it’s better to try to think through it here – on my own soapbox – than to end up in public and all-too-likely vituperative arguments about it on rassf.

A final thought, from the U.S. Constitution:
Article I, Section 8 (enumarating the powers of Congress), clause 8: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”