Hunting The Muse

Joe Schmoe For President!

Adam Safran for President

This guy's running!

Update: And he noticed my post, came to my website, found a bug, and emailed me.

Sweet! I just had a presidential candidate help me debug my website!

Chomsky And Zinn On Tolkien

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer, 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring Platinum Series Extended Edition DVD, Part One

This is great. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn's audio commentary for Fellowship Of The Ring.

I love Tolkien. I rather like Zinn's history books, and I honestly can't get through one of Chomsky's run-on sniping self-confirming sentences without wanting to slam my head into a wall...

IRV contradiction

Election Selection: Science News Online, Nov. 2, 2002

I'm sure I've blogged about this before, but I just wanted to hilight the scenario of Instant Runoff Voting where someone who would normally come in first can convince more people to vote for him, leading to him coming in last.

Whatever its potential benefits, instant-runoff voting is prone to one of voting theory's most bewildering paradoxes. If a candidate is in the lead during an election season, making a great speech that attracts even more supporters to his cause shouldn't make him lose. But in the instant-runoff system, it can. Suppose, for example, that 35 percent of voters prefer A first, B second, and C third; 33 percent prefer B first, C second, and A third; and 32 percent prefer C first, A second, and B third. In an instant runoff, C will be eliminated, leaving A and B to face each other. A scoops up C's first-place votes, winning a resounding 67 percent to 33 percent victory over B. But suppose A makes such an inspiring speech that some voters who liked B best move A into first place, so now 37 percent rank the candidates as A-B-C, 31 percent as B-C-A, and 32 percent as C-A-B. Now, A faces C in the runoff, not B. The votes that ranked B first become votes for C, and C beats A, 63 percent to 37 percent.

Music Licensing

It's 12:20 AM, 4/28/03, and I'm about to actually do something I've put off for about ten years. I'm signing up for a music licensing organization.

There are two in the states, BMI and ASCAP. I always have been (the application is printing right now) drawn towards BMI just because it seemed a bit more internet-friendly, but I never felt quite right about it.

Sometime over the years I started asking for (the printer is out of paper, restocking... done) comparisons between BMI and ASCAP just because I feel like I have to do some comparison shopping, and I never got any at all. They all say they're about the same. I kept putting it off.

At one point I learned a lesson from a manager at work about how one lesson he learned about being a good manager was to make arbitrary choices when you felt frozen by equal alternatives. At some point you just have to take action.

I did find one comparison online finally, tonight. It sounds like it's from someone ASCAP-centric but dammit, it's enough for me. Sometimes you only need a little push, you know? I think the clincher is that the board of directors is writers and publishers elected by members, while BMI is broadcast industry executives. Good enough for me.

I don't know what these licensing organizations mean in terms of reconciling them with releasing works under Creative Commons licenses, but I'll research that AFTER I apply.

(It's finished printing, I'm going to the other room to study it, fill it out, and stuff it in an envelope.) ... (Shoot, I marked up one copy that I didn't realize I had to mail... reprinting a couple of pages.)

(I'm waiting for it to print.) One thing that's kind of hard is that it asked me for one piece that was commercially recorded or performed. I have a couple, but it asks for the publishing company of the cd, and the cd we made didn't actually have a publishing company. So I had to remember the date of performance and venue of an ASCAP-licensed venue, and it mentioned universities in parenthesis.... so I picked the date of a concert that my old group put on where one of my compositions was debuted. I hope that counts. (It's finished printing, so off I go...)

Okay, it's 1:06, materials are put away, application is in the mailbox. I applied as a writer. Later I will also apply as a publisher (after I think of a good name for a publication company), but this was the big one. I had to fill out an application, membership agreement, and tax form. All done.

TipJar Novel Experiment

kuro5hin.org || The Tip Jar as Revenue Model: A Real-World Experiment

Interesting article about tipping for a novel.

I started a novel once. Might be interested in continuing it if I could set up a Street Performer Protocol scheme for it. Maybe set up a pledge fund for each upcoming chapter.

SARS Fear In Media

Graph of the SARS Epidemic

You've probably all noticed the increase in media coverage about SARS. It's got the front-page headlines on msnbc.com for the last three days straight, and newsweek has an awful cover of a masked woman with eyes widened in fear, devoted to SARS.

Meanwhile, the graphs don't show any increase in exponential growth. The first graph above makes scary predictions of 10 million deaths at some date, but it is making the point that that would only happen if the growth is exponential. The graph shows that the growth is less than exponential, though, so it is not a true epidemic.

Also the Canada graph makes an excellent point about cumulative versus active cases, and shows that the active cases in Canada are actually going down.

Approval Strategy

Here's a good quote I found from an old article over at kuro5hin.org. It clearly describes a strategy problem with Approval Voting.

Let's say your preference is Green over Democrat and Democrat over Republican. Under approval voting, I should vote for Nader and Gore. But what if the Green Party slowly turns into a major party while the Republicans decline? Voting for both Democrat and Green makes sense only if the Republican has a chance of winning. Once the Republican slips in popularity, then you are faced with dilemma of, "When should I stop voting for the Democrat?" Wait too long, you might help Gore beat Nader. If you commit too soon to Nader, you might help Bush beat Gore.

Loving The Klan

Jacob Holdt: Ku Klux Klan - Romeo and Julie in Klan hoods

This has got to be some of the most challenging writing I've ever come across. I read a lot about love versus guilt, how guilt can lead to false love. And on the surface, this goes too far and seems like it just has to be guilt. But actually reading the whole thing... it's touching in ways I absolutely did not expect. It blows my mind.

Bush, Iraq, WMD

Salon.com News | Bush says Iraqi weapons may be destroyed

"One thing's for certain, Saddam Hussein no longer threatens America with weapons of mass destruction." - George Bush

Um, what? Since when did Iraq ever threaten America with weapons of mass destruction?

GeoBlogging

GeoURL ICBM Address Server So I geoblogged today. Neato.

Flight Risk

"...she's a flight risk."

I don't know what the deal is with this, but it's well-written and some sources seem to believe that she's for real.

Emotions And Psychotherapy

Still Crazy After All These Years

This is a great article on the history of Loren Mosher's efforts to challenge the contention that schizophrenia is solely a biological disease.

Powell And France

I stayed up last night and watched Charlie Rose interview Colin Powell. At some point in there he asked the question about whether there would be "consequences" for France opposing the United States about Iraq.

Powell gave the standard response you would expect, along the lines of, "We have a long history with France, and we've compared it to a marriage that has lasted 225 years, and of course after a situation like this there are things about the relationship that you just want to take a look at; they had made it known that there was no resolution that they would not veto, as you know, Charlie, and so of course there was a bit of relationship strain there, and now we're ready to move forward and look at the relationship and see how to deal with the strain and --"

And this is interesting, this is where Charlie interrupted, stuttered a couple of times, leaned in and said, "But will there be consequences?"

"Yes."

It was an immediate reply, not emphatic, almost like a murmur. Just a flat-out "Yes." The contrast between that response and the normal talking points you hear from politicians and diplomats was pretty intimidating and not a little bit creepy.

Todo Groupings

tantek/log/2003/04

grow, restore, maintain, prune, close. I had something similar for my own todo list. For a real todo list application it's another reason to have the capability for multiple categories.

Senator Santorum Is An Idiot

Santorum on homosexuality

So Santorum said that if the Supreme Court rules that anti-gay-sex laws are unconstitutional, then that would mean they'd be saying polygamy, adultery, and incest are okay too.

People got mad, and Santorum is hitting back by saying that he's extremely disappointed that the AP is choosing to misrepresent his views from the interview he gave them.

The link is to the interview. This is one half of Pennsylvania being represented here.

The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. - Rick Santorum

Gary Hart Blogs

Blog :: Gary Hart :: Restoring the American Republic

I've got to say, it is refreshing to see a weblog from a presidential candidate, but even more refreshing to see the candidate actually use it to post his thoughts and solicit comments. Compare this with Dean's weblog which appears to be mostly press releases.

My own tastes are changing a bit - Dean's made a lot of noise, but he's not as progressive as he might seem, and it's actually a bit more difficult to get a handle on where he is, as compared to Hart. Hart is clearly a foreign policy expert and a thoughtful leader. I just hope he can overcome what torpedoed his last run.

Money

It's been a money day. I'm looking at my account to see if I can manage buying a house. One friend is looking at job cutbacks and what that does to the budget. Another is looking at the emergency fund and how to generate multiple income streams.

On top of that I've stumbled across a lot of messages lately about money versus dreams. I've been paying attention for a while now about listening to random messages from life. Sometimes they appear distinctive, sometimes they happen multiple times from different sources. Spiritually, it might be the universe trying to tell me something. Or rationally, it might mean I am more open to learning a particular lesson than I have been in the past. The general gist of the messages I've been getting lately is that earning money should not be seen as a prerequisite to doing what you want to do. Figure out a way to do what you want to do now, and figure out how to make the money work for it.

So here's what I think about money. The basic very important goal about money is to make it as unimportant as possible. That doesn't mean trying to amass power over money. It just means to keep it from having power over you.

The number one way money has power over people is through debt. The basic formula for getting rid of debt is to consolidate your lifestyle as much as possible and keep your bad expenses low. Some people go overboard by limiting themselves even from spending money on ways to improve themselves, and that's bad.

I reduced my debt by consolidating my student loans, and by rotating credit card balances through various introductory rates. This kept the interest payments lower.

I also came up with a system of priorities for what to pay first:

1. Stop Increasing Debt If I was paying out more than I was earning, ultra first priority was to change my lifestyle so this wasn't happening anymore. Sometimes this meant curtailing my discretionary spending, but other times it meant recognizing that I was in a situation that was costing me too much and needed to get out of the situation (like a lease). I really do not like the approach of curtailing my discretionary spending because that just means that my lifestyle does not support my personality as expressed through my daily choices. Rather than disciplining myself, it's better to get out of decisions I've made in the past that are limiting the resources I need in order to have day-to-day freedom of choice.
2. Bills and Minimum Monthly Debt Payments
3. Consolidate Debt and find low interest rates for it all
4. Retirement Accounts including Roth IRA If I were eligible for a 401k, I would also max this out first, unless it were a stupid 401k that didn't let me choose where to invest. Then I would only contribute the % that was matched because that's like free money. I would also try to max out the Roth IRA. Most retirement accounts are actually a better deal than paying off low-interest debt because the money works better for you in the long run.
5. Highest Interest Debt, excluding student loans The reason I excluded student loans is because they are eligible for deferment if you run into financial difficulties. All extra money would go towards early payment of the debt with the highest interest rate until it was gone.
6. Student Loans - High interest student loans first.
7. Emergency Fund If I didn't have empty credit cards with solid credit limits, I might choose to aim for the Emergency Fund before the Student Loan.

This is basically the most mental way to look at it all, but there are times where you might want to adjust things. For instance, there are times where you come upon a sum of money that could be applied toward retirement, or applied toward getting rid of a debt entirely, and at those times the psychological benefit and relief of paying off the damn debt is worth a lot more, emotionally speaking, than locking it up in your retirement account.

I was lucky because once I was about 80% done with paying off my debts, I received some inheritance money that allowed me to take care of the rest very quickly.

What's different with my situation right now is that I'm still a bit scarred from all the debt, which means that I'm very reluctant to go purchase big-ticket items. It just feels so good to have No Debt; to have bills that are only attached to what I am doing Right Now, and to know they would all disappear if I decided to change my lifestyle. There are a lot of reasons why buying a house would make sense for me, except that I'm so freaked out about getting a mortgage. I have to consciously remind myself that it's okay to make large purchases when the money is invested towards improving myself.

In general, money is bad when it leads to a restriction and good when it leads to freedom. That is why I try to ask myself, would spending this money lead to me having more options or less? Would I feel more freedom of movement and action or less?

Finally, I'm trying to get away from the thought of delaying my dreams until I have the money for them. Contrary to what people might think, when you later actually have a bit of money, it doesn't mean it's all of a sudden a lot easier to start pursuing that delayed dream. When you invest yourself in something to amass money to afford your delayed dreams, what you forget is that that investment changes you as a person, and perhaps over time makes you less compatible with it. So the better question is if you are okay with how your current projects might be changing you. I am trying to think more along those lines, to move toward paths where the paths themselves might change me in a way that I'd actually be proud of, and then just figure out how to adjust my lifestyle to fit the money that it would bring me.

What I haven't done is signed on to a particular path that would lead to some serious wealth-buildling. I haven't yet figured out how to reconcile that with my other personal priorities. I had a great plan for how to get out of debt, but this second part seems a bit more difficult to create for myself. I know there are a lot of books, but I've read a few and it's just so easy for the wrong kind of selfishness to seep in - not the kind that is merely about protecting one's self-interest, but the kind that does so by keeping others from protecting theirs.

So, money. It's a lousy way to keep score of how helpful one is to society. Right now I'm content with the goal of keeping it from having power over me. Not real sure what's next.

Innocent Death Penalty Victims

The Daily Princetonian - Hundredth exonerated speaks on death penalty

Have there been any found cases of people that have been executed that were later proven to be innocent? I haven't heard about that.

Voter Registration And Blogging

What we need is a web utility that:

1. Displays a form of street address and zip code (it would work with just the zip code)
2. Pops up a map from the input address to the nearest place where they can register to vote, along with information on what hours it is open and what they need to bring
3. Have the form be publishable on any web page merely by typing in a one-line javascript command (like with the many blog utilities).

So a person with a web page could publish the one-liner, and then be one of thousands of sites that would offer a valuable utility to anyone that hasn't registered to vote yet and just needs to be told the easiest way to do it.

Neo Vs Paleo Conservatives

Among the Neocons

This is a really fascinating article from a conservative publication that explores the split among the conservatives between neoconservatives and "paleoconservatives".

It's the first article I've read that clearly makes the point that neoconservatives are just as active in the Democratic party, usually pushed through the DLC.

It also brings up the possibility of there being a new alliance in politics, between non-neo Democrats and Republicans aligning against the neoconservatives.

But before that happens we could very easily have a neoconservative Democrat running against the Bush administration for 2004.

Tangent: I still don't understand all the arguments for and against immigration, and more relevantly, which parties tend to align with which sides. I feel pretty uninformed about the whole thing. In the absence of learning anything about it, I guess I just believe we should allow in whoever the hell wants to come in. Although I think it should go both ways.

Iraq and WMD (Again)

Report: Iraqi discloses WMD details

The Iraqi scientist, who was not named for fear he might be harmed, also said Iraq has secretly sent stockpiles of deadly agents and weapons technology to Syria in the mid-1990s, and more recently was cooperating with Osama bin Laden?s al-Qaida terror network.

It says that Iraq destroyed/buried all their WMD just days before the war.

There's that credibility problem, of course... this makes my bullshit meter rev up. Just seems so convenient, as justification for the war, for the link to 9/11, for Syria...

Syria Veto

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush vetoes Syria war plan

So this is what Tommy was talking about! :-)

More Voting Ideas

The voting thing has stuck with me and now I think I've got a path again. For those of you who have been reading for a while, I had been spending a lot of energy to research various voting methods, and then I finally reached a point where I felt stuck.

I felt stuck because I realized that if we reached a point where we were able to interpret society's desires exactly... would we really want to? I mean, when you've got 49.9% of the people out there with below average intelligence.... that's kind of depressing. :-)

But then, I kept it cooking in the back of my head. And I found a few more things that slowly started to get me unstuck, and one of them was Deliberative Polling. When you can educate the voting population, their votes start to change. And if we make the assumption that an informed voting population is a better voting population, then those changes in voting are good changes.

So then it becomes a matter of combining the voting process with the education process. And how do you do that?

Well in my mind, it's combining full representation with the ability of the representatives to present all the varying views, and then working to reach consensus.

So, stirring that together with some other ideas I've come across, here's the sketch of the latest solution I have in mind, along with a couple of sticking points.

First, I'm a big fan of direct representation. One of the things I've always loved about the internet is that it allows you to find people that might share very distinctive interests with you, from all around the country. It always felt wrong that if some of these interests might be political, that they might be able to be represented if all these people happened to live in one county, but if they didn't, they couldn't be represented. I feel there has to be a nongeographical element in our government if we're going to be represented; otherwise interests that are nonregional in nature are in danger of being swallowed up by regional interests.

Direct representation works by a voter being able to pick any candidate to represent themselves. Everyone picks a representative, and then the votes are held, and if there are 100 slots in the legislative body, then the 100 most popular reps are elected. Usually this is implemented so that each rep is given proportional power, but that wouldn't be true in this case.

There are sticking points in that controls would have to be introduced so that different candidates would be ensured to be materially different in belief from each other. Otherwise a bunch of very similar yet popular candidates could run and squeeze out other less popular but more representative candidates.

But through using a similar process, it should be possible to put together a decision-making group that more accurately represents the voting population.

Second, the decision-making group then only passes initiatives that have unanimous approval, using a very aggressive process that combines structured discussions, education, and isolation of key points. Initiatives are broken apart into component sections that are individually passed to find consensus, and any dissenting point of view that is expressed is brought into the process in an attempt to be reconciled.

So the representative's votes may change than that of his or her voting population's, but this would be because of the education and discussion. Reports would be sent back to the voters so the voters could decide whether to stay with their representative or move on to someone else.

Emotional Trickery

There's been something bugging me for a while about various societal behaviors and I think I've reduced it down to one sentence.

Just believe you can prove yourself right doesn't mean you're right.

I've been experiencing this vague frustration in a variety of spheres lately. The most obvious one is the war. For an already boiled-down example: Say we go over the to middle east to deal with a problem by invading some country that has a lot of extremists, so we can reduce the anti-American hatred. Say that then in reaction Islamic fundamentalism manifests a huge increase in violent activity against America. Well then, it sure is a good thing that we're over there dealing with the problem! Proves us right!

Drugs are a huge problem and are getting more and more violent. We have to eradicate the drug population. When they get back out, they are committing even more violent drug crimes, which proves our point.

Mental illness is another one that often fits this pattern. Being diagnosed bipolar is a subjective affair. The symptoms can also disappear for long periods of time. And once you're diagnosed bipolar, you can never go off the meds, because if you believe you are cured and go off the meds, you are opening yourself up to the risk of "kindling", where the symptoms return again, much more harshly, doing permanent damage. That should not be risked so someone diagnosed bipolar should never go off the meds. Finally, the symptoms of bipolar can also occur if one is not bipolar. So, if someone goes off the meds, and experiences symptoms that can be associated with being bipolar, then it further proves that the person was bipolar and should never have gone off the meds.

Then, there's police-like forces. An authoritarian force asserts itself into a population, declaring it is needed due to all the chaos and damage that will undoubtedly occur without their presence. If there is no resistance, they start policing. If there is resistance, the police force uses the existence of this resistance against the police force as proof that they are needed.

In every case, the force has proven itself right. But in every case, it's not settled that they were actually right.

Every case can unfortunately also use its own presence as proof for why it should not go back to the way it was. Reaction against a force does not immediately disappear if the force itself does - it reapplies itself elsewhere. Even with improperly applied medication, there are withdrawal symptoms. The reacting forces may not choose to manipulate their way into greater violence like their original oppressors did, but they won't just disappear overnight.

Gorgeous Political Map

I just found a really great political map of the world that is in the public domain. Since it is in pdf format, it means you can zoom in and still have gorgeous scaled fonts and boundaries even on the individual country level. Here's a great image of the middle east, but you can also generate similar images from anywhere else in the world.

Plenty of other maps can be found here.

Denials Only On Surface

The Observer | International | Syria could be next, warns Washington

I read a lot of articles the last two days saying that the administration had no military designs on Syria. Then I read this.

Work Shifts

I've had too main complaints about being a freelancer lately. One is that I haven't been feeling very disciplined or productive, at least not as much as I'd like. (Note this doesn't necessarily mean I'm not disciplined or productive; just that I can be hard on myself.) The other is that with all this free time, the massive traffic on Highway 26 in the afternoons is a complete bummer, getting in the way of going to the woods or the park, grocery shopping, downtown, anything.

So in an effort to combat both, I've given myself a work schedule of 3-7 every day. If I want to go to the park, I just make it back by 3:00. And I tell you, I feel so much better about myself when I actually do it. I had 45 minutes of meetings earlier today so I gave myself a credit and started at 3:45, and I just wrapped it up, and I feel great. Nothing weighing on me for the rest of the night. I'm gonna go clean the apartment.

iConquer Addiction

I've been playing iConquer lately (just google it, I'm too lazy to paste the link). I had a really fast 36-hour addiction. I still like it and might spend the $13 bucks. Basically it's a Cocoa Risk clone that makes it really easy to play. You can play against AI or other players over the network. I haven't really tried playing against humans yet.

It's not super-fun with the size of the countries as they are - about 40-45 total in the world. The basic problem is that it doesn't feel like there's very much strategy. If I get good, I should be able to win consistently, but there are some games where I beat everyone, and others where I just never seem to have a shot. Feels a little bit too random.

Still might be fun to play with friends though, I'm waiting for Damon to fire it up and challenge me to a match before our trial periods expire.

Peace Tax

I've seen this proposal floating around (I guess it happens every year) where a group of people tries to get Congress to pass a Peace Tax proposal, meaning a fund where people's tax payments can go to, knowing that that particular fund would not be directed toward the military at all in the government's budget.

It seems kind of silly to me. It's not like we have two governments, the military government and the government-of-the-rest-of-the-stuff. It all gets mixed together. If it ends up that 30% of our federal budget is for the military, and there's this chunk of revenue that is not for the military, then they'd just up the percentage of the rest of the contributors to make it add up to 30%.

They've probably thought all that through, but I honestly don't see how such a measure could have teeth. If it gets passed so that if there isn't enough money left over, then the budget committee would actually have to curtail its military spending, then Congress would probably just vote some emergency something or other to get around it.

Seems like a waste of time to me.

Troops Shooting Protesters?

NEWS.com.au | Troops fire on protesters: report (April 15, 2003)

Not sure if it's true, but I should at least blog it to help with the daypop stats.

Memory, Pointers

When I declare a variable, I am allocating memory space for its value. When I declare "j", it's pointing to an empty space:

j -> ______

Now, if I say "j = 7", it just so happens that that empty space that j points to is occupied by the value 7:

j -> 7

Now, if I say "k = j", the system looks up the value for j by seeing what value is in j's memory space, and then assigns it to k's memory space by copying it.

k -> 7

But if I wanted a variable "ptr" to point to the same memory space as k, I'd have to do something different: ptr = &k;

ptr now refers to the memory address of k, so if I were to try to print out ptr itself, it would print out some sort of crazy hexadecimal address location. *ptr is what looks up the value in that address.

ptr = &k;
(*ptr == k;)

The asterisk (*) "dereferences" the pointer. Note that you can also find the address location of ptr by doing &ptr!

SO, in review:

1. var = 2
2. var2 = &var;
3. var3 = *var2;
4. var4 = &var2;

var2 is the address of the memory where "2" is stored. var3 looks up that address and finds its value, currently "2". var4 is the address of var3, which is different than the address of var!

This is why I didn't learn C. It struck me as stupid. Which I guess is partly right, given that so many other languages have been written that didn't even try to deal with this crap.

Variables and Pointers

I've been a professional programmer for a while now. I blazed through a couple of high-level C courses, never intending to program in C, and proceeded to become relatively expert level in perl. After that I became intermediate-to-senior in Java, and quite comfortable with PHP.

The result of all that though is that I never got very schooled in low-level programming. Well, I did actually take an assembly language course once and actually find it quite fun. But I never really paid much attention to C. None of my other languages have ever forced me to actually pay attention to memory locations.

Which means that I've never had much reason to pay attention to pointers. I know the concepts of passing by reference versus passing by value, but pointers are something different.

I'm learning some Objective-C right now, so I'm having to review this. I know I've learned all this before so it should be quick review.

Notes upcoming in another entry. You can just ignore the next entry entirely if you want. I'll come back to writing English soon.

Cocoa And Jelly Donuts

So, I'm trucking along in Cocoa. I've got some C experience, I definitely have object-oriented experience, and I'm finding their tutorial delightful. I've finished their sample interface and have started hooking the interface up to classes, feeling pretty confident about everything, and then I come across their explanation of outlets:

WTF? This still confuses me, even after I've already had some experience with outlets and actions from learning WebObjects. (It also ticks me off enough that I find myself sulking a bit, and learning slower than I otherwise would. Just because it pisses me off.)

Warlock Pinchers

Jason DeFillippo's Weblog: Pagan Alchoholiday

Funny to see someone make passing reference to The Warlock Pinchers. My brother-in-law started that group. I wrote a report about "Who's Afraid Of Crispin Glover!" for my undergraduate World Musics course at CU-Boulder.

Colds Suck

Sometimes I feel like my body is just trying to get in the way of the rest of me, like telling me that I should not be able to physically sense things as much as I would normally be able to do.

Two weeks ago my good ear started to go downhill, as it tends to do every year or so, so I made an ear appointment which was last Monday. I was not hearing well out of that ear at all by the time I got in.

Turns an infection had progressed; not a big deal because they can just clean you up right in the office. He did so, my hearing returned. He had to use this vacuum cleaner thing in my left ear which was quite loud and had lots of airflow, so I got very dizzy. Also not a big deal since I've been through that countless times before (I've had bunches of ear surgeries in my past, so these things are nothing new), except that this time it made me feel pretty sick.

He let me sit there for a while... I was happy because my hearing was as good as it had been in months.

So the next day I come down with a massive cold.

I'm thinking it was probably either because the infection had blocked part of the infection from making its way up my eustachian tubes, so now that the infection was cleared up, then boom! Free pass to the throat! Cold city! That's where it started. The other theory is that clearing out the infection led the rest of my body to go through a major detox when it wasn't quite ready. Or simply that there were cold germs floating around at the ear doctor's.

So three days afterward my eustachian tubes close down again and I've had the auditory equivalent of tunnel vision since then.

Two weeks of not having my senses turned on and I'm sick of it. I want my senses back.

Baseball And Politics

Salon.com News | The tyrant of Cooperstown

I wrote King Kaufman once and told him that if he were to ever write a book, he'd be the only sports columnist whose book I would buy. He appreciated that. I wonder about the conservatism in sports, too. When do we get the first openly gay baseball player? He'd have to know by now that he's have a lot of people sticking up for him.

Peace Tax

National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund

If you had the ability to require your taxes to not go to the armed forces, would you?

Media And War

Kevin Sites Blog

Kevin Sites was captured and released today by Iraqi Fedayeen, and was evidently almost killed.

Also, CNN comes clean about all the Iraqi stories CNN didn't report from Baghdad. Was this a journalistic failure?

There are also various reports of Cuba stepping up arrests of dissidents during the war, implying it is because they know there's less likelihood of it being covered by the media. Today they executed three people who attempted to hijack a ferry.

9/11 Conspiracy

The World Trade Center Demolition and the So-Called War on Terrorism

This appears to be the mother of all 9/11 conspiracy sites! I actually skimmed the whole page and had a couple of moments of "...Huh. Good point." and then a couple of sinking-feeling "Oh my GAWD." moments, like his conclusion near the bottom that aliens might be behind it all.

I'll post a summary of "Huh. Good point." links shortly.

Oh, and here's a rebuttal about all that crazy conspiracy theory stuff. :-)

Update: The same author that wrote the rebuttal writes an expanded article where he backpedals a bit here.

Also, I've heard a lot of reference to the essay that Gore Vidal wrote in the days after the attack, but had never found an online copy... but here it is.

Iraqi Celebrations

I just had a thought. You know how all the Iraqi people are celebrating and shouting "We love George Bush!"?

Well, they're so happy that Saddam is gone.

But they would also act so happy about Saddam when he was in power.

Were they really happy about Saddam?

Are they really happy about Bush and America? What about in six months?

Russian Military Reports Of Iraq

Russian military intel update: War in Iraq

This was at least the most interesting information source about the war, but it looks like they are disbanding now.

Pogue Strikes Again

The Carburettor Of Pogue

Back when I was writing Detective Pogue with my friends, we had a contest to take new material that had even a tenuous connection and weave it into the narrative. It turned into a verb; we'd Pogue something. This article is a very worthy reason to bring Detective Pogue back to life.

SCOTUS And Cross Burning

Salon.com News | Supreme Court upholds cross burning ban

This is one of those cases that teaches me how much I don't know about the Supreme Court. It was a 5-4 ruling, but it was Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor, Breyer, and Stevens concurring, with Thomas, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Souter dissenting.

For a complete explanation that I don't understand at all, read more at SCOTUSBlog.

SARS Tracking

Graph of the SARS Epidemic

Here's a morbid look at dynamic web services and data analysis. It's a web page that automatically loads the latest SARS data, graphs it, and predicts trends. I think all the text at the bottom is dynamically generated, too.

Also an example of how math isn't necessarily connected to reality. It's pretty well-expected that this "epidemic" will start to burn itself out just like any other virus, after peaking. This doesn't make an attempt to predict that curve, though; it only predicts trends off of the data it has. Therefore it's predicting 10 million SARS deaths by October.

But there's plenty of other data - like the percent of people that catch it that die. Evidently it's lower than influenza (both in terms of mortality and communicability) and there's no worldwide flu panic every year. Outside of school boards, that is.

Chinese Fortune #214

I got the strangest fortune last night:

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Not sure what to make of that. I mean, the philsophy itself isn't so strange, but in my fortune cookie?

Prison Growth

2 million-plus inmates in U.S. prisons

This is a clear example of something that needs to be subjected to Rule #1.

"The prospect of prison, more than any other sanction, is feared by white-collar criminals and has a powerful deterrent effect"

Let's be clear. Is it prison? Or is it some of the things that are widely accepted as being a part of prison life, like rape? What's really being defended as an effective deterrent here?

So, come up with a statement of intent for what prisons are, and what they are for, and pass it in Congress. Then show that the current reality of prisons aligns with that statement of intent. That shouldn't be too much to ask, should it? To have them both?

Map Game

Rethinking Schools - Just For Fun Map Game

Scary how much I don't know about middle east geography.

It would be interesting to map oil pipelines over this.

Perl Subroutine References

Cool, I found a good reason to use a perl subroutine reference tonight. To pass into another function as a callback. Sweet. That little technique just removed about 10% of the length in a script I'm writing for a client right now.

Torture Justifying War

The Village Voice: Nation: Nat Hentoff: Why I Didn't March This Time by Nat Hentoff

He says that the protesters shouldn't attempt to speak for the Iraqi people. Well, neither should he. This is so simplistic. All the people that think about the torture seem to be hardcoded to think that the anti-war folks are incapable of holding their anti-war views and the torture stuff in their minds at the same time. They make the flaw that being anti-torture means being pro-war. What they aren't getting is that it seems there are a lot of anti-Saddam Iraqis that would actually choose risking Saddam's rule over an occupation by the U.S.

Legislatures and Sessions

Well, it looks like the basic nut is that Oregon State Law doesn't specifically disallow preference voting, but that state election officials are unwilling to say these voting methods are allowed because state law doesn't explicitly allow them.

There was a lot of work done on this in 2001 and 2002 with a recommendation that a law be passed in the 2003 session, but no one got around to lobbying the legislature. My rep says it is too late to introduce in the 2003 session, which convened in January. Sessions last about six months and are biennial.

Which is a bummer because while I don't know much about it yet, it looks like the next chance to clarify this would be in 2005, for passage on 1/1/2006. I don't see the point; by then Saddam Hussein will be president and IRV will be the last thing on our minds. ;-)

Vote Reform Status

So I had some email activity about vote reform today. Evidently there were two efforts to pass IRV in Oregon recently, one statewide through an initiative process, and another in Eugene for city council.

The initiative process bogged down for unclear reasons. I wrote some leaders at the Center For Voting And Democracy and they said that after some bad experiences they think that lobbying is a much more constructive approach than the initiative process. That aligns with a gut impression I had. I also found information on Vancouver WA's recent success in passing their IRV measure - while it merely allowed IRV as an option, didn't require anything, and didn't cost any funds, it still only passed 52-48. There's just a lot of lazy distrust out there.

The rest of the clues so far are coming from details emerging on the Eugene effort. I was forwarded part of OR's constitution that specifically details majority voting but also allows preference voting given the passage of laws allowing them. That's how I read it anyway - it's not against the constitution, but would require further law. Complicating this is the murmuring that the Secretary Of State plays a hand in this in terms of deciding whether or not to allow different voting methods. I don't know what that's all about yet.

Finally, there's been some chatter about superior voting methods. Right now I'm leaning towards Approval. I think Condorcet is better, but Approval is simpler, easier to explain, easier to implement. I'm getting feedback from others about how Approval is harder to sell than IRV. Here's a quote from a member of CVD:

It has one major flaw that comes up in the real world of elections: your second choice candidate can defeat your first choice candidate if you decide to approve of both of them. The end result is a whole lot of bullet voting and voter perceptions of something fishy going on. Politcally, it can be hard to defend it when something who could have more than 50% in our current plurality system, but lose under approval voting.

Good points. I personally believe they fall apart given that I believe a consensus candidate should beat out a 51% candidate, but that's a philosophical issue that people don't usually even think about.

More as it happens...

Oregonian Status

Blah, Blah, Blogs

Well, it looks like the "Oregon Blogs" angle was edited out of the article that the local reporter was writing. Here's the result. This blog isn't mentioned after all.

Taking Action

I've been asked a few times how to translate emotion into action, in the context of my War Position.

Some of it is my personal beliefs. I believe that physically expressing your emotions "until you are done" (and not just until you feel silly) is part of it, and that going through the workout can open you up to insights you might not have had before.

But on a more systematic level, I believe it's basically a matter of questioning your accepted reality until you no longer feel you are compromising yourself. If I'm asked how long I think the UN inspections should go before we're entitled to go to war, I know just from how I feel that it's a false question. So I take it a step backwards. "Who says failed inspections should lead to war?" Okay, then what should failed inspections lead to? The question still feels off, feels like answering the question on its own terms would be accepting something that I don't actually agree with. Step back. "But, the criteria for whether UN inspections are effective don't make any sense in the first place." Okay, then how would you judge whether UN inspections are effective? Still feels crappy. Step back. "How the hell do UN inspections even bring us closer to our objectives anyway? I don't believe they do." Well, then what do you think should happen to bring us closer to our objectives? Wait a second, still crappy: "What the hell are our objectives, anyway? They're not even consistent!" What do you need to feel like our objectives are consistent? And then we're getting somewhere.

See, it's a big snarl. We lose the battle because we get exhausted and give in before we untangle it.

So, how do we stop that? We stop fucking around and we work harder to stop compromising ourselves. I am not under the illusions that we all have the same points in ourselves where we feel like we are compromising ourselves. Everyone's process is different. But I firmly believe that way too many of us are being lazy in our integrity and are compromising ourselves all over the place. It's an individual battle. Our emotions give us clues and tell us when we feel like we're compromising ourselves. We need to listen to those emotions, we need to be dogged, and we need to vigilant in recognizing the various forces in life that lull us into ignoring ourselves, so we can get pissed off enough at them to battle them.

You start small, just by telling yourself to notice when you feel like you're compromising. You just challenge it one step further than you did before to isolate the parts that feel good from the parts that don't. You just promise yourself to insist on yourself a little bit more every day. That's how you do it.

They say that politics is the art of compromise. I think that's true, but it has a more insidious meaning to me than it does to most other people.

If you think about what I've been writing about Gore/Nader and the voting problem, you'll see an example of this applied. Asking "Gore or Nader?" is just a question that feels shitty to me. I'm not interested in that question existing in my world, so I work to remove it.

Getting Constructive

How to take back America

I liked this article. There's a whole ton of conspiratorial allegations, but I like the tone of it. There are a lot of brilliant folks that are progressive without being active Democrats. Maybe they can take over the Democratic party.

Voting Reform

Well, it looks like I am starting to enter back into my "voting methods" phase. With election season starting, I of course trace back my own various discomforts to where I feel like the roots are, and my discomfort with voting is that voters are often asked to compromise themselves to protect their preferences. This makes no emotional sense to me, and leads to vote outcomes being determined by the idiosyncracies of a voting system rather than the actual will of the voters.

If you search on my blog, you will find a long thread of entries having to do with various voting methods. I ended up with the conclusion that in our current form of democracy, it's essential that in multi-candidate races we have the ability to communicate preferences or multiple options. There are various voting methods that allow this.

So, last night I wrote my state representative about it. I had found out that there's an Oregon state law that disallows alternative voting systems and had questions about how to overturn it. He wrote me back today and said that he would like to get together between sessions to talk further about it, and that he could potentially help me get the ideas presented to the state House.

So now I feel like I really have to learn a lot about local and state government to know what to actually ask for! It might be enough to ask the state to merely remove the restriction, but on the other hand that might not do any good if it's a requirement on the state level that everyone follow the same voting method. I'm not sure where to look yet... it's probably a question for the Secretary Of State's office.

Kim Jong's Blog

Kim Jong Il (the illmatic)'s LiveJournal

This is brilliantly absurd.

Howard Dean Progress

I've been checking up on Howard Dean lately. This is the only candidate whose team has contacted me personally (from noticing my blog) to give me more information. That impressed me. They emailed today to talk about an FEC deadline, so I went ahead and sent a few bucks their direction.

I honestly don't know much about him yet but I want him to be competitive with Kerry and Edwards so I can have a good idea of who to eventually choose. I've done some investigation. He's got good buzz. Earlier today I found an interview synopsis that serves him faint praise.

Ultimately I'm anticipating that he might not be a very perfect candidate for me, so I imagine I'll get more involved in voting activism so we can all exercise more choice in finding candidates that truly are right for us, without being penalized for it.

Garbage To Oil

Changing World Technologies has opened a prototype power plant that evidently accelerates the earth's process of converting matter to oil. So you give it garbage from a landfill and it makes oil or something. There's got to be a catch.

Tamara's Jokes

"Hey, want to hear a joke?"

"Sure."

"Okay. Um..."

Uh-oh. I get sucked into this every single time. When Tamara is in the mode to tell a joke, she doesn't always quite have one handy. She just feels like telling a joke, so dammit, she's going to tell it whether she has one or not.

"Why did the marmot... um...."

She definitely doesn't plan ahead, either.

"... kiss the squirrel?"

Okay, here's where I'm feeling a bit of relief because this is the part of jokes that I like - where I can try to anticipate what the intended punchline might be. So I give it a quick scan, can't come up with anything.

"I give up. Why?"

"Because... um..."

Oh my God. See what I mean about getting sucked in every time?

"Because... he wanted his nuts. hahahaha ..Because he's a GAY marmot! So wait, Why did the GAY marmot kiss the squirrel?"

Faintly: "Why?"

"Because he wanted his NUTS!"

Later on she told me she had another joke, after she had been quiet for a few moments. I begged her not to tell me. She said I would definitely laugh. I gave in.

"So there is this whale. And it's a male whale, okay? And there's also a female whale. And... they're married. The whales are married. But there's also a dolphin, too... And the male whale started to get jealous... because he was SURE his wife, the female whale? was having an affair. with the dolphin. But the female whale said she WASN'T having an affair, but the male whale was really sure that she was, and he was like, "Why are you having an affair with the dolphin??!" And, so do you want to know why he wanted to know if his wife was having an affair with the dolphin?"

"Okay, why?"

"Because he wanted to know his wife's porpoise."

I swear to god, I laughed harder than I have in weeks, although I honestly wouldn't be able to explain all the reasons why.