mike's web log

My political beliefs

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 10:53:40 GMT

I belong to the group that has the correct political beliefs. Our side knows the truth, and we're correct about everything, and we're good. The other side is wrong, and they're bad. Our beliefs are true for all circumstances and scenarios. They are valid for all parameters and variables. They apply to all people at all times and for all situations.

Our opponents argue about these beliefs. That's because their morals and thinking are corrupt. They look for weasely ways to rationalize their own unethical behavior. And they hate our beliefs and our nation.

Why is the other side so wrong? Some of them are stupid, or crazy. Many are simple-minded fools who can only parrot the platitudes of their elite. They all are tools of shadowy overlords who manipulate these people's beliefs to thwart the will of all true citizens, probably for financial gain. (Because our opponents are stupid, this is easy.) Some of them hate everything we stand for and are eager to work against their own interests. The important point is that all of them are wrong, always.

History has vindicated us over and over. Our founding fathers all agreed 100% with our beliefs, as we can easily prove by quoting them. These sainted leaders had a unique and inspired vision for our country. But our opponents have co-opted this for their own evil purposes. Sometimes our opponents have temporarily had power, which they gained through deceit and fraud. They then ignored our true and good beliefs and implemented their destructive agenda. Our bitter vindication is that each time they then ran the country straight into the ground.

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Because our cause is just

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:20:53 GMT

The New York Review of Books this week has a review of a series of books about Bosnia and Kosovo, which of course also deal with the shocking brutality of the strife that began there is 1992. The article opens with the following, which doesn't need much comment, I don't think:

What unites many countries in the world, both the ones that don’t give a fig about human rights and the ones that profess they do, is their unwillingness to punish their war criminals. When it comes to accountability, instances of confronting their own guilt are exceedingly rare among nations, especially when the victims are members of some other race, religion, or country. Even international leaders concerned with situations such as the one in Yugoslavia, despite their protest to the contrary , are often reluctant to see the guilty punished since political interests usually take precedence over justice.

In addition, there’s an unwritten understanding that crimes committed by the United States and a few other Western powers go unpunished. When the International Criminal Court was launched in 2003, the Bush administration refused to join, fearing that its military and its leaders could be arbitrarily indicted by some grandstanding foreign prosecutor. But that was just dissembling. The real reason is that the United States considered itself as a country whose exceptional moral standing exempts it from accountability for the war crimes it commits. The trouble with that is that everybody else feels the same way. The belief that one ought to be able to kill one’s enemies and live happily ever after is nearly universal.

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Roundup

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:35:17 GMT

It's the Thursday-technology-and-politics edition. I guess.

Etch-a-sketch clock. Robotically controlled Etch-a-sketch draws the time (once per minute).

[via grow-a-brain]

Challenged ballots: You be the judge. Examine pictures of disputed ballots in the MN congressional race (primarily between Al Franken and Norm Coleman) and render your opinion on how the ballot should be counted.

[via Colleague Molly]

Wii Theremin. From Make magazine: "Ken Moore, a user experience designer at Google, created a very convincing Theremin simulator using a Wiimote and a Roland JV-1080 synth." There are videos, including one of Moore playing the Star Trek theme, which seems appropriate, nu?

[via Laurel at O'Reilly]

Changing elections

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:01:30 GMT

Aaron Swartz writing about the potential to change the election process:

Here's how you get elected to Congress today: First, you make friends with a bunch of wealthy people, being sure to agree with them on all the important issues. Then you take their money and hire a well-connected Washington, D.C. campaign manager. The campaign manager shows you how to ask for more money and then gives it to his partner, who makes some TV and radio ads and runs them in your district. They keep doing this until your money runs out and then, if you're lucky, you get more votes than the other guy.

Because of the netroots, it's now possible to change the first part of this story. Instead of raising your money from conservative or centrist rich people, you can now raise money from progressive people over the Internet. So instead of candidates who all agree that telephone companies shouldn't be punished for spying on Americans, you can have candidates who think every American should have free health care.

What do you think, is this change going to change the face of politics?

Roundup

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:54:03 GMT

If you're reading this, I got the new router to work.

Campaign Gaffe Remix. Good to remember that political campaigns are, above all, theater. Often comedy.

Nuke the Fridge. Jason Kottke discovers, tracks, and grows weary of an Interent meme based on the latest Indiana Jones movie.

SAM by Cree. Dang, I want one of these. All-electric two-seater made of recyclable materials.

[via GOOD blog]

The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 From the American Library Association. See also: Uncle Bobby's Wedding, in which librarian Jamie Larue responds thoughtfully to a patron who wants a children's book about gay marriage removed. [book list via jeff atwood; Larue's letter, I forget.]

Roundup

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:27:52 GMT

A science and technology episode, sort of.

Worst Car of the Millenium. As voted by fans of NPR's "Car Talk." Sample comment (Renault Dauphine): "Truly unencumbered by the engineering process."

The Jetpack: From Comics to a Liftoff in the Yard. Someone might finally have cracked the elusive personal jetpack. (Not counting Yves Rossi.) [via Sarah]

FiveThirtyEight. A site/blog that applies statistics to politics, apparently (?) non-partisan. What makes this seem credible is that it's run by a fellow who built his reputation among the most insatiable and the least-forgiving consumers of statistics: baseball fans. [via Colleague Michael. No, not that one ... the other Michael. No, not that one either.]

Anyone Can Make a Font. FontStruct: Flash-based tool for creating your own font. Unbelievably clever. Tedious, tho (hey, a font has lotsa letterforms). And it turns out that having Flash-based tools does not make one a more talented font designer than having a chisel, say. Alas. Perhaps you'll produce something less lame than I did. In fact, I pretty much guarantee it. [via ... I forget, sorry.]

The Golden 50s

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:27:46 GMT

The nostalgic spot that the good ol' 50s have in American culture has some economic justification. In some ways, it was indeed a golden age. Charles Morris, writing in The Trillion Dollar Meltdown:

Birth rates dropped sharply during the Depression years, so the generation of men entering the labor market in the 1950s was an unusually small one and was much in demand. The pay gap between young workers and older workers therefore became unusually narrow, facilitating early marriage and family formation. All measures of social disruption, like crime rates, dropped like a stone. Earlier marriage and greater economic security also made couples more willing to have children.

Thus, the 50s of "Leave it To Beaver" and the great explosion of the American suburbs, so fondly remembered, were the result of unique social conditions. These circumstances were not (and are not) the norm.[1]

Moreover, the very benefits that the 50s brought to the US carried with them the seeds of their own destruction:

When the boomers reached school age, elementary schools everywhere were forced onto double and triple sessions; it was even worse in the suburbs, where schools had to be built from scratch. As they hit their teens, juvenile delinquency moved to the top of the social agenda. Struggling to cope, police forces became more selective about the behaviors that elicited an intervention, a process that Daniel Patrick Moynihan later called "defining deviancy down."

And so on.

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Political truths

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:32:07 GMT

A funny, and I'm sure quite intentional, juxtaposition just now on iGoogle:

On prevarication

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:03:10 GMT

The political season is, if nothing else, a rich source for the honing of one's cynicism about the integrity of politicians. And I don't just mean those who are clearly the dregs of humanity, the spawn of the devil, and who are determined to lead the country straight into disaster -- ie, the Other Guys, haha, whatever your political leanings happen to be. There are those who believe, of course, that Our Guy is upstanding and honest, and who is selflessly sacrificing himself in the cesspool of politics to Lead America to a Bright Future.

Uh-huh. Those guys don't get elected. I doubt they exist.

Anyway, last night's Democratic debate, Now Featuring Questions From Our Audience, provided an amusingly educational moment in the notoriously slippery language of politics. As many know, Hillary Clinton has been chastised for exaggerating the drama, let's call it, associated with her world travels, including especially the now-famous trip to Bosnia. A question posed to her via video asked about this. Her response found both of us chortling with amusement. Here's a transcrpition I made, leaving out the boring parts:

You're right. On a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case and that I'd written about in my book, and, you know, I'm embarrassed by it, I've apologized for it, I've said it's a mistake, and it is, I hope, something that you can look over[1].

[...]

I know that it is something that some people have said "Wait a minute, what happened here?" But I have talked about this, written about it, and then, unfortunately, on a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past.

[...]

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Caucus

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:33:43 GMT

We went to our local Democratic caucus today. It was at the elementary school up the street, so we left the house just a few minutes before the 1:00 PM start time. As we approached, tho, we realized that people were thronging to the school, and we ended up parking quite a ways away. There was a long, long line to get into the school (everyone was quite happy that it wasn't raining) -- we estimated that in all there might been, dunno, 500 people. I found out later that people had come some distance to get to the caucus, so were just lucky that the location was close to our home.

Standing in line gave us a chance to talk to people around us. People were excited. The woman behind us had gone to Key Arena yesterday morning to hear Obama speak to an overflow crowd (18,000+) and conveyed her excitement and that of other people who'd attended. So many young people, she noted.

Several people said it was the first time they'd attended a caucus, which was true for us as well. As I say, people were fired up about the elections this time. The caucus this year is also earlier than in years past, per the same tendency that states have had to move their primaries up. So this time it actually matters; in the past, the Washington vote has not been particularly influential in candidate selection.

Inside it was a zoo. It seemed pretty clear that the local party had been caught flat-footed by the sheer number of voters who turned out. They had initially planned to use the cafeteria/auditorium for all precincts, but had overflowed pretty quickly into the gym. Even then, both rooms were packed full.

In addition to not anticipating the numbers, the party had not been super-organized about how people were supposed to find their precinct's assembly area (or even find out what their precinct actually is). So there was a lot of milling around. But people seemed to take both the crowd and the disorganization in pretty good humor.

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Roundup

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:53:17 GMT

For those who can't master Getting Things Done, someone should devise a system called Getting Things Written Down. And for those who can't do that, a program called Getting Your Hands On A Pencil. As they say, focus on the next physical action that's required. Look for a seminar coming to your town soon. Assuming you remember to write this down. After you find a pencil.

World's Smallest Political Quiz. Given the paucity of choices on which to vote, it would seem to be For Amusement Value only, dunno. Anyway, it pegged me right, fwiw. [via grow-a-brain]

How and Why to Power Nap. Don't even get me started on how screwed up the American attitude is toward naps. Even this article refers to "the lazy man's nap."

21 Critical Life Lessons You Didn’t Learn in School. This is always an interesting topic to think about. We were talking recently about how in high school curricula of yore, Home Economics actually taught you (well, in those days, only girls) some fundamentals about running a household. Whatever passes for HomeEc these days seems not to deal with anything as useful as that. Blah, blah, I blather. [via grow-a-brain]

Hack Attack: More on mouseless navigation. Mouser, a script that lets you mouse around from the keyboard. Haven't tried it yet.

Roundup

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:22:09 GMT

I'm not even going to bother to post the spectacular video of the Demolition Derby that was Portland (OR) during a recent freezing spell.

You Say Tomato. Matthew Baldwin recounts a little intergenerational misunderstanding about working with routers.

The Complete Guide to the Guitar for the Beginner to Intermediate to Advanced Player. An early post from the inimitable Leon Bambrick. "The first Riff I am going to teach you is from the Cream classic 'Sunshine Of Your Love'. This riff requires a great deal of patience and you shouldn't expect to master it for at least a few years yet. In the tradition of over six million guitarists world wide this should be the first riff you learn, closely followed by smoke on the water. If however your guitar teacher/guru is born after 1980, then he or she will force you to start with a Kurt Cobaine tune or some Jeff Buckley nonsense." Note that this is followed by "Part 5 - How to Tune Your Guitar."

pork, porcelain, porcupine, porpoise, aardvark. Bradshaw (of the future) occasionally writes posts that explain the etymological relationships of a handful of (now) seemingly unrelated words. A few more: foot and pajamas, grime and Christ, crimson and worm.

Patching OFFLINE Systems with Windows Update [more]

Tyranny of the parties

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:30:15 GMT

I can't help but think that there are a number of candidates tonight who are cursing the two-party system that seems entrenched in our political system. Here in Washington, our senate race was enlivened a bit by the plucky Libertarian candidate Bruce Guthrie. Guthrie essentially bought his way into the senatorial debate, whose entry criteria were heavily weighted toward the big parties. About those criteria, he had this press-release-y thing to say on his blog:

Two others, Green Party candidate Aaron Dixon and Independent Robin Adair, are not expected to meet the criteria. Nevertheless, Guthrie believes they should also be included in the debates. “Our Democracy can only be strengthened by having a diversity of ideas in the political arena,” he states. “The voters would be better served by open and inclusive debates, not publicity events limited to those with access to money.”

But perhaps more so than in other elections, even big-party candidates might have some reason to rue the party machines. A number of Republican candidates were defeated, and if the media are to be believed, the overwhelming issue that dogged those candidates was their party's identification with Iraq. For many voters it seems to have been reduced to a simple calculus of Iraq=bad, party in power=responsible, alternative candidate preferred. Various scandals have not helped of course, and thus it is that some Republican candidates are paying for the perceived sins of the party as a whole.

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Roundup

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 23:57:09 GMT

Being Poor. John Scalzi's angry essay on the emotional wretchedness of poverty.

"Boolean or" or "boolean or"? Eric Lippert wonders why some eponyms are capitalized (Dickensian stories) and others are not (diesel engines), and he posits a theory. However: "Expecting that much consistency from English is asking rather too much. "

A natural and familiar style of interaction. I don't actually know what the context is here -- for starters, the page is in Hebrew. But the video shows a prototype (?) of a whiteboard-like display on which you can draw figures and have the computer animate them with (apparently) vectors for gravity, etc. [via my son, who's a physics major]

Getting Water From Thin Air. "In a major logistics breakthrough, a U.S. company, Aqua Sciences, has developed a system that can extract water out of the air, even if the humidity is as low as 14 percent."[1]

Benjamin Franklin's Essay on Daylight Saving. "For the great benefit of this discovery, thus freely communicated and bestowed by me on the public, I demand neither place, pension, exclusive privilege, nor any other reward whatever."

[1] Believe me, I don't spend a lot of time on this site. This is from my friend Steve.

Roundup

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:52:58 GMT

Stuff I've run across.

Why marketing should make the user manuals! The Creating Passionate Users blog muses on jazzy marketing vs. boring manuals. (Also previously discussed here on this blog.)

19 pieces of "advice" for entering 1Ls. The Superannuated1L blog proposes how to get through your first year of law school. (Or, I add, through most of life.)

Revenge on Stingrays. "... concerned that the rays, which are usually docile creatures, were being hunted and killed in retaliation for [Steve] Irwin's death."

I like like. Matthew Baldwin aka defective yeti manages, like, the world's most compact disquisition on like. Excerpt (and summary): "Call it the 'Past Approximate.' If someone tells you they once ate fourteen eggs in one sitting, you recognize that is a boast; if someone says they ate, like, fourteen eggs, you know instinctively that the number was probably closer to five."

Why the _______s Hate the _______s. A non-denominational, trans-national guide to ... uh, pretty much most of human history.

Pluto mnemonic device contest. Actually, the results. Jason Kottke ran a contest to come up with a mnemonic for the order of the planets, now that Pluto no longer counts. One of the runners-up: Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet.

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Rubber, not steel

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 16:54:00 GMT

The Seattle Times today features an opinion piece that supports a view I personally hold -- namely, that the way to create flexible, high-capacity mass transit is not with trains, but with buses:

Bus Rapid Transit is, or should be, the mode of choice for high-capacity transit in the metropolitan Puget Sound region. It has far more capacity than competing systems, supports "walkable" neighborhoods, and provides 60 mph transit mobility to the entire metro region 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Furthermore, if implemented, it would set the stage for an increase of freeway capacity, up to double current rush hours' through-put — with congestion-free auto mobility guaranteed literally forever, should we decide to pursue that sometime in the future.

Bus-based mass transport: cheaper, faster, higher capacity.

Much to read there, with a link to an expanded version of the discussion.

Three election thoughts

Sun, 07 Nov 2004 16:56:27 GMT

Warning, non-nice political thoughts ahead.

It's been an interesting week, all right. I have not done much overt political blogging during the run-up to the election, attempting to remain non-partisan in such political commentary I have posted. This is partly because politics is interesting from an objective POV -- for example, campaigns are excrutiating no matter whom you favor, as I bet we'd all agree -- and because I am not normally disposed to preach my views to people. On the contrary, I'm generally more interested in hearing theirs, however much I might disagree with them. (I suppose my views must be fairly evident from previous postings, but I hope no one has found them overt.)

However, I'm going to break that self-imposed rule this one time only. I suggest that if you feel that the election generally came out in your favor, that you might perhaps just skip this entry. There will be more interesting posts another time.[1]

Along with most of my fellow pinko commie America-hating terrorist-loving wine-sipping elitists friends and acquaintances, I am of course not happy with the outcome of the election. Unlike some of them, I am not in a conciliatory mood, believing that the possibility of conciliatory, bipartisan rule was available four years ago, and that we got precious little of that. To my ears, calls for conciliation from the winners are in fact calls to abandon long-held principles and cave in to beliefs that are not shared by half of America -- an invitation to flip flop. No, thanks.

So here are three quotes from the many, many pieces I've read that spoke to me in particular.

Here's an observation from my friend John:

Those who thought the economy was the most important issue went for Kerry 80%, but this was negated by those who thought moral issues were most important. In other words, those who live in the real world voted for Kerry and those looking for their reward in the next voted for Bush.

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Watching the returns

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:37:48 GMT

This morning I had the idea that I was going to stay late at work today and get a few things done. What the hell was I thinking? I'm going home to watch returns.

Wow

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 08:14:09 GMT

Every blog I read is saying the same thing: go vote!

I think it's early in the day to make predictions about the election, but I'll go out on a limb: this will not be an election remembered for voter apathy.

Doggy politics

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 11:10:05 GMT

If the bumper stickers on the cars at the dog park are a reliable indicator, most dogs appear to be Democrats.

Tele-campaigns

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:36:28 GMT

When I got home tonight, there were five messages on my answering machine. Four of them were from political campaigns urging me to do ... something. They each got in about five words before I hit the delete button. Among them, only Patty Murray got her name into those first few seconds.

It seemed like an appropriate evening to watch The War Room, so I did.

One man, one vote

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 10:33:01 GMT

On the local NPR station this morning they were interviewing Dino Rossi, the Republican candidate for governor, and then they took questions from listeners. I was sort of listening out of the corner of my ear, and caught a few exchanges, which mostly seemed to be about economic policy, taxes, and deregulation. But then I heard this call (paraphrased, since my memory is not audiographic):

Caller: Mr. Rossi, are you born again?
Rossi: Uh ...
Caller: Are you a born-again Christian?
Rossi: Well, my wife and I are Catholic, and we don't consider ourselves born again.
Caller: <click>

All Things Considered ...

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 07:30:33 GMT

... I will be happy when the flippin' election is over so that I can listen to NPR without hearing endless reports on the frickin-frackin campaign. It's not like there's new news about which speech Bush gave or what group Kerry is talking to. Sheesh.

Random questions about nothing

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 10:51:07 GMT

1) This last Sunday the kids and I were at the Alki Bakery for breakfast. When we left, there was a guy outside with a clipboard who asked "Do you want to help get John Kerry elected?" Had I been more awake, I might have asked him this: dude, you're in a blue state in liberal Seattle outside a trendy restaurant in a trendy neighborhood. How hard are you working to get Kerry elected? It's not exactly like being a civil rights activist in Mississippi in 1956.

2) NPR is on their semi-annual pledge drive kick. Here's a question for someone who knows how public radio works from the inside. Every hour they have target revenue goals and they attempt, in their gentle way, to whip their audience into a last-minute pledging frenzy so they can "make their goal!" Ok, I cannot personally remember an instance where they failed to make their goal. Is this just a bunch of hooey, or do they really do this, and when they say they need "just 5 more people to pledge!", is that for real?

Just call us ... uh ... non-conservatives

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 19:39:32 GMT

My colleague Tim raised an interesting point over the weekend, which I can explain best by simply selectively quoting an email he sent me:

I heard another interesting statistic on "This Week", the show hosted by George Stephanopoulos. George Will said (and none of the others challenged this figure, so I assume it's valid) that 75% of Republicans label themselves as conservative, while only 33% of Democrats label themselves as liberal. I thought it interesting that relatively few Democrats accept the liberal label. Several years ago, some leading politician (sorry, the name escapes me, but I really do recall reading this) said he now uses the word liberal only as an adjective. Some conservatives argue that a shift has taken place in the ideological wars, that in some sense they have "won" because now most liberals dodge that label and seek the label of moderate.

[...]

If most Americans in fact view the liberal label negatively (and statistics seem to bear out that they do), then it would make sense for liberals to work very hard at labeling themselves as "moderates" or some other more innocuous sounding label. You can hardly blame them for doing that; I don't see it as fundamental dishonesty, it's just good politics, and doing what's necessary to advance your cause. If the label "conservative" were viewed as negatively as the liberal label, I'm betting conservatives would resort to the same tactics, and would hardly give it a second thought.

It's an interesting development, the abandonment of a particular label by the people who embody it, a kind of PC-ness that avoids certain terms that might offend, but this time out of self-protection.

I have a thought or two on this. First, as I quoted earlier [more]