May 31, 2003
Shamless Slashdot rip-off of FCC links
/. poster Michael deserves credit for these. If you haven't read anything about this yet, take 20 minutes and read this stuff. It's relevant.
Really.
William Safire at the International Herald Tribune
Everyone loves what the Register says.
AP, one of the generic news orgs
Washington Post has a hat in the ring.
And a bit perhaps brighter news, the telcoms have publicly announced a commitment to running phat phiber to the home in the US, although there is no longer mandatory sharing, so it may not end up being as great as it seems. Nevertheless, a serious competitor to cable internet is a good thing, as the damn cable companies are poised to really begin to muck things up.
Wow, a week without words
Sorry faithful readers, for the lack of content. I've been on the road a bit lately, with a seminar in Kobe and a few days at the in-laws. I contemplated giving up this space because, even though it doesn't take up so much time, it does take some, and time is something I have little of these days. I figure if I can't do something consistent enough to build and maintain a readership, it isn't worth doing.
But then I realized that I do enjoy doing this, its a nice distraction. So I'm going to keep at it, and perhaps some of the rest of you would be tempted to try your hand at it. If you even have the slightest hint of a twinge of a possible desire to try it out, go for it. Don't even think about if what you say is worth reading. If its worth your thoughts, it worth publishing here. Can't be any worse than what I put up.
While I'm going on like this, I want to lay out a bit about how busy my life is, maybe we can have a competition or something. The big thing going on right now is my PhD dissertation, final copy due first week of December or so. I need to get a general introduction with outline done by the end of June for my prof to okay, and then give her a working draft by September so she can read and comment by October so I can revise and edit for the final draft.
Her involvement is complicated by the fact that she is a Slavic language linguist and I ended up as her student only because my original advisor abandoned his position at the university here while on sabbatical in the US (presumably for another job but he may have died, no one knows for sure) and left me floating. I washed up in her lab, which is a mixed bag. I have total freedom, the flip side of which is I don't really have any support and work in an intellectual vacuum. Sometimes I really wonder if the work I'm doing is worthwhile, because I don't have a sounding board to bounce ideas off of and get criticism and stimulation from.
So that is why I'm also involved in these seminars and conferences. The seminar last weekend in Kobe was actually a pragmatics seminar, not really my bag, but it was an opportunity to rub elbows with other researchers and get some socializing in on the side. I also have a presentation next week in the lab at school (the outline of which is due Friday but won't get turned in until Monday) and then a major conference presentation the following weekend at the Asian Studies-Pacific regional conference at the University of Hawaii. The weekend after that is another conference in Tokyo.
The beauty of all this writing and conferencing is that my field studies aren't complete and only half of my data is translated. To add icing to the cake of Nute, I start teaching 3 days a week on Tuesday. That actually may turn into a benefit though as it adds structure to my life which hopefully translates to productivity.
I still make time to browse the news and contemplate life so I should be able to find stuff to drone on about here (hey, did you know that the FCC is going to permit massive media conglomerates to take control of the flow of information on Monday?!), but if you come to notice a lack of activity, its just that I'm busy. If you do happen to enjoy what I write about, please don't give up on me, as I will continue to post, always aiming for consistency, but settling for blasts of multiple posts on days when I find time.
And with that, I'm back to work. Cheers!
Public surveillance of public surveillance.
The United Kingdom has over a million public surveillance cameras trained on its society, and the United States, while far behind in terms of density, is racing to catch up. The purpose of the cameras is straightforward: surveillance helps to prevent crimes from occurring in the first place and helps to prosecute them when it does. To accomplish this, the cameras are fed into a centralized criminal bureau that monitors the activity, basically TV bobbies gazing at our lives.
Imagine now for a moment that these camera feeds were public available. There is no reason why the feeds shouldn't be viewable by the general public since they are of the general public. Anything on the film would be observable by anyone who happened to be on site in a public space; it isn't as though these cameras are violating privacy at all.
What would be the pros and cons of this situation? I immediately see lots of pros: parents able to keep track of kids, lovers keeping track of each other, the obvious voyeuristic thrill associated with so-called reality TV, and most importantly it helps to keep the authorities honest. Beyond keeping films of the public accessible to the public, this kind of system could presumably help the authorities monitor what is going on. Imagine how many cops you need to have on shift 24/7 to watch a million video feeds! If the public was browsing these lines, there would be more eyeballs watching what would happen at the other end.
Okay, fine, some of you say, those are nice ideas, but come on! Do I really think its a good idea to turn us into spies on each other? I don't think that it would be pathological in the least. Remember, these aren't hidden cameras but just video feeds from public spaces. Millions of people see the activities being recorded when they are in the same physical vicinity, so there is no violation there.
I think it would be cool. In the end though, given that the cameras exist, the choice is basically would you prefer the authorities to have exclusive access to monitor the public or would you prefer that the public have access to it as well? I don't see how permitting the public to view this stuff would in any way limit police efforts to prevent and prosecute crimes. I suppose there are perhaps some abuses possible by the general populace, but they couldn't be any worse than potential abuses by the authorities could they?
We pay for it, we should at least get to watch it, eh?
WMD in Iraq, nigga what?
In case you missed, alpha-primate Wolfowitz confirmed that the government was lying to us in order to get us to support the invasion and subsequent occupation of a sovereign nation. I found a link here but don't know of links to the VanityFair article or Pentagon transcript that is referenced. I did read a good column in Time magazine that, although mainly pointing out Bush's word games with regard to ownership of taxes (don't be fooled!), does remind us that Rumsfeld and company created a special department in the Pentagon that provided a large amount of the info that was fed to us about WMD.
Meh, as if anyone believed it...(did you know that a pre-war poll indicated that over 50% of Americans thought that Iraq had something to do with the events of 9/11? Say it loud enough and long enough and they'll believe anything!)
May 25, 2003
Have you heard anyone on TV talking about the upcoming FCC changes?
The changes will radically alter the restrictions on how much control any single company can have of the media in any market, including cross-ownership of TV, radio, and newspapers (see this comic.)
Yet none of them are discussing it. If these changes were really as good for the public as they claim, wouldn't it be reasonable to think that they would be patting themselves on the back and strutting around as champions of the public interest, at least on their own stations?
Their choice to keep this issue off the airwaves is exactly the issue. I don't begrudge them the choice not to cover it. It's a free country, right? But once the rules change, they'll control everything, and those who DO want to cover news that doesn't get covered by the big guys just won't be able to, which means that the general public never finds out about it. I know about it because I make an effort to follow news at the intersection of politics and technology, but most people don't, and likely never will.
What will we (well, you. I'm in Japan) be missing once these changes go into effect?
May 22, 2003
Is AI research "brain dead?"
Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, seems to think so. He lashes out at the focus on robots and laments the lack of vision and grand directive towards true intelligence, sacrificied in favor of smaller bits of working knowledge and robotics.
But it seems to me that this criticism is likely to be misplaced. Correction, it's probably a great criticism to have been made, as it keeps people focused and prevents drifting too far in one direction or the other, and I suspect that if the research trends had been solely in the direction of processing at the expense of robotics, Minsky probably would be complaining that we have all this intelligent capacity but no way for it to interact with the world.
But two things in the article stand out to me. The lesser of the two is at the end of the article when a fellow AI researcher points out that once we solve a particiular problem, it ceases to be seen as intelligence and gets relegated to just part of the standard repertoire of stuff that computers do. The whole definition of what is intelligent behavior by a computer tends to shift, often unintentionally.
The other thing was more important, or at least more substantial. Neuroscience has shown our minds are highly dependent on feedback from our physical bodies. I'm not just talking about the conscious senses, but also the unconscious senses. Our brains are constantly monitoring the state of our physiology and our minds are constituted, in part, from the information provided by this constant feedback.
Imagine if you were to be transplanted into someone else's body. If you close your eyes and relax, you can bring your sense of awareness about the rest of your body to the conscious forefront. But even when you aren't aware of, say, the weight of a shirt on your shoulders or the pressure from an elastic waistband, your brain is nevertheless monitoring it and sending reports to your mind. When something happens that it outside of some learned or conditioned range of 'normal,' our brains then prioritize this information and our minds bring it to the front, and we respon accordingly.
What this means is that building robots may not only be useful for creating artificial intelligence but that it may actually be necessary. I don't know if AI can be formally programmed or only prepped via programming, but either way, its going to need a physiological matrix of self to define its entity-ness from which to percieve and interact with the outside world.
So I guess I'm saying I don't think that the future of AI is as bleak as Minsky fears (but I pray to god its better than movie of the same initials).
(Editor's note: Astute readers may notice that the last two entries today both ended with references to shitty movies. We apologize for this inconvenience; It was solely a coincidence and we assure you we are doing everything we can to avoid future expressions such as this. This was not an editorial decision for the future tenor of this webspace. Respectively, ---The Editor.)
"Economics" of political truth?
Dr. Glen Newey from some obscure British university has recently published a report that suggests lying by politicians is a natural consequence of democracy. No, no, this isn't yet another case of social scientists discovering truths that we all hold to be self-evident; he actually has an interesting take on the issue.
Basically he claims that
Demands for openness and accountability create a culture of suspicion which makes it even more likely that politicians will resort to evasion and misrepresentation. These demands often arise because of increasing alienation by voters from the political process that they democratically control. Yet the greater the demands for truthfulness, the less autonomy we give to our democratic institutions and the harder it is for democracy to function effectively.
He goes on to argue that there are times and circumstances when, in order to achieve a particular public benefit, deception must occur in order to bring about the public good. It boils down to a tightening noose of sorts, where we demand more openess but that openess makes it more difficult for the government to do its job.
Now I don't know if this analysis is really all that accurate. Politicians are self-serving as well, which is a fine motivator for mendacity (that's a new word I learned from that article!). But I actually didn't want to talk about this article per se (his final conclusion is basically we are damned if we do, damned if we don't, so its really not that valuable of a finding).
I was stricken by the economic language employed to describe the lying and deception of politicians. Case in point:
But the more the electorate expects from the politicians they elect, the more likely it is that politicians will be economical with the truth [this means lie about stuff --Nute]," says Dr Newey. "Such deception where it is in the public interest may be the price of a healthy democracy.
For some reason, when I first read the press release, this language of economics with regard to truth, deception, and democracy just struck me as odd and a bit sickening. I'm not breaking new ground by pointing out how money and economics has radically changed our world and how everything we think and do is aligned with economics (to a detrimental and entirely undesirable degree, in my opinion), but now we are using economic lingo to discuss dishonesty in democracy? It just didn't sit right.
But I admit that as I wrote this up, it didn't seem to have quite the impact that I originally thought. Maybe I was just in an emotionally tender state after having been scarred after watching that lame American Beauty knock-off Monster's Ball. What a joke that movie was.
May 20, 2003
Security Choices
This week's Cringely is kind of scary. He talks about specific technologies that exist and are in place (or being put there) that essentially link surveillance cameras into a single network that not only keeps records of everything it sees (most/many security cameras don't have permanent backups) but is also capable of iris identification through sunglasses.
I've heard so much about the wonders of automated biometric identification that have inevitably fallen flat that I'm skeptical about the claims that he makes, but even if Cringely is overestimating what the tech is capable of today, there is a very good chance that it will be able to do what he says and more by tomorrow.
Fortunately for us Cringely is a smart man and avoids overreacting to this stuff. He points out that it isn't a recipe for a "Minority Report" future (yet...) but that this stuff is likely going to be here to stay. What is more chilling to me though is not the security tech so much as the database integration WITH GOVERNMENT. It's one thing for an airport, bank, corporate research center, or even convenience store chain, to have a high tech security system with all the bells and whistles he describes, but did you know that the FBI has increased its use of private sector databases in intelligence gathering by 9,200% since 1992?
We all know that the government is falling over itself trying to integrate its departments' information services, say between the CIA, FBI, and IRS. But they are also sticking their thumbs into every private database they can get their hands on. Considering the recent pro-corporation swing of American political climate, its unlikely that the corporations are going to bite the hand that feeds (or is it the government that is being fed? Hard to tell these days.)
All of this sounds a bit paranoid, and I admit it is. But we are a lot closer to living in Will Smith's Enemy of the State world that than we realize. Not that the actual expression of that world is an absolute, but the conditions that make it possible (likely?) are quickly falling into place.
May 19, 2003
More implications of Media Consolidation
I've railed against the proposed changes in regulations of media ownership before the FCC (voting in a few weeks). I've tried to argue that media consolidation is inherently bad, since it means that more and more of what we see, read, and hear are controlled by smaller and smaller numbers of people.
But there is another incredibly important implication of increased control by cable companies. Cable internet is the most popular way to get high-speed internet (DSL, satellite, and fiberoptic are the the others). If a cable company is able to consolidate ownership, they essentially consolidate ownership of the pipes for connecting to the internet.
And if this happens, there is nothing stopping them from interfering with your access to the internet. The internet as we know it depends on private hardware, neutral software, and specialized content, but the key element was that anyone could use it and no one could control it. But once someone, say, a cable company, has a monopoly on access, they can control your use of it. They can filter sites, and indeed have already begun limiting costumer's ability to use the outgoing pipe freely. 200K down and 15K out? Hello!
The Internet as a network will likely always be around, but the freedom of the internet is withering and dying. Soon the internet will be controlled by media companies. This is not Chicken Little talking, this is an entirely plausible and highly likely development. Once the Microsoft-led consortium for so-called "trustworthy computing" get their hardware controlled systems on the market, you will no longer have the ability to access information the way you would like to.
They will control the hardware in your house, the pipes, and the content. Enjoy.
Rugby, the day after
We won our game yesterday, around 36 to 5. We had been on a long losing streak but have really turned things around this tournament and are in the championship game now. A big factor is Nagaoka, a long-time rugby player with great skills, who both makes great plays and inspires the team, but rugby is most definitely a team sport and we've been winning. It's more fun that way, for sure.
For the second game in a row though, I got hit in the eye and lost a contact early on. I can play the game with one contact, not much of a problem, but yesterday I was forced to wear just the one contact for about 3 hours after the game. By the time I finally got home and could put on my glasses (usually I take my glasses to the game and take out my contacts immediately, but didn't yesterday), I knew I was in for pain. I showered and crashed on the couch for a bit and then BAM! the migraine kicked in. Whoa momma, it was nasty.
So I didn't get anything done yesterday, beyond the game. Instead of my usual edge-of-your-seat excitement with politics and spectrum, I offer you this, a great photo essay about the Panawave Research Group cult that wraps everything in white sheets to protect them from communist radiation attack.. Wacky folks indeed.
A big thanks to the anonymous reader who posted the URL. Enjoy.
May 16, 2003
You are what you think
I found the following quote online the other day:
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."
-- Samuel P. Huntington
At first I thought this was a great quote. It had a nice lefty ring to it that tries to demonize our agressiveness and drop-kick our moral arrogance into the dirt.
Then I realized it was a bunch of shit.
First of all, its rather rediculous to try to separate "ideas, values, and religion" from the behavior that these beliefs induce (in this case "organized violence"). The West's (Europe's) ability to apply organized violence is a direct outcome of the beliefs held in Industrial Age/ Imperial Europe. The success of the econo-military campaigns that brought European ideals to the rest of the world (a process still in progress, of course) is a direct result of the ideas and values of the people.
And organized violence is just a mean-spirited word for human behavior. Our species, for better or worse, naturally falls prey to a cognition that defines the world and our place in it via violence. Combined with our innate social proclivities, and there you go: instant organized violence.
It's no coincidence that our greatest technological advances are byproducts of organized violence; it's what we do best. The West won precisely because of our ideas and values. Of course it wasn't a democratic consideration of those values and they weren't accepted/ didn't come to dominate because they were inherently more attractive to the people of the world, but make no mistake: Europe dominates the world because of the way that Europeans and their ilk from the last 500 years think.
Organized violence isn't the exclusive domain of Europeans and their decendants. There was plenty of violence throughout the world prior to the colonial exodus of the Europeans. It was just that, due to the patchwork network of countries and monarchs in 16th Century Europe who were constantly at war with each other, the Europeans are the best at fighting. Remember how warfare drive technological advancement? Constant warfare among the Europeans (along with a few fortuitous inventions and discovers and a nice geographic hand to play) led to them developing highly organized and technologically advanced armies and techniques of warfare, economics, and social advances.
A glance at the status of the world leading states 500 years ago would suggest that the Chinese should rule the world today, with Europe at the bottom. China had all the technology and knowledge, from ships to maps to astronomy to explosives. Europe was a bunch of backward illiterate yoinks going nowhere fast. The Americas had larger empires than Europe, but they never got into the whole metal thing. Africa had bad geography, a north-south orientation that spans latitudes. This made it harder to export technology and methods to different climates. Even travel was difficult with the desert in the way.
Then the Europeans started fighting and getting better at it. Population and economic growth drove them from their homelands in search of new places to export people to and markets to exploit.
And that is why the West won. It didn't have anything to do with an inherent attractiveness of their ways of thinking and believing, but it sure as hell had everything to do with what they thought and believed (and knew, for that matter).
So that quote is full of shit, no matter how attractive it may seem to some at this point in history. The site I got the quote from is kind of intriguing. Apparently a blog written by someone inside Iraq. After skimming through it, I'm skeptical, but I don't know why. I guess I just feel that Iraq is too destitute to support a blogger like that.
We are number one, yeah!
The Gusalmighty blog has been up and running for almost 10 weeks now, and we are already establishing our site as a numero uno authority on a variety of topics, at least according to some of the search engines.
Observe:
#1 on Lycos for "Proof there is no god"
#1 on Google for google daily traffic terrabyes
#1 on Google for Lexmark monopoly
and not just #1 but the ONLY result on Yahoo! for "Japanese police fashion".
If only I had had this information before Mother's Day, I could have made her proud.
May 15, 2003
Vonnegut on Twain
I haven't read much Vonnegut (The book about Ice 9 and an excerpt from Timequake in Playboy is about all), but here is an interesting little piece wherein he talks about Mark Twain. Twain was a cool guy, and I need to read some more of his stuff too. I had always just considered Twain to be Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but after a good friend of mine lent me his copy of Letters from Earth I realized he had a lot more going on that I realized.
Have your heard? FCC to change the rules!
No more football on broadcast TV
The radio is programmed for money revenue, not listener interest
The NYTimes covers the story here
and Paul Krugman has some great analysis here.
Take time to read some of these articles. The flow of information, more specifically, the choices of the types of information that get flowed, are likely to be drastically reduced in the near future. Good bye to independent content and creative outlets, hello to programming guided solely by its ability to sell advertising.
Please pardon me while I puke.
On the brighter side though, they are also considering freeing parts of the spectrum to the public domain. Click here and here to read up on why this is a good thing.
On Communication
(I had a great entry last night get gobbled up when my browser crashed, but since I was a bit loopy from a long day with little sleep and a couple beers from dinner, its probably for the best. Still, it sucks when you write something and it disappears into the ether like that. Anyways....)
Here is a neat little article that Edward Tufte wrote up analyzing a PowerPoint presentation given by underling engineers at Boeing regarding the issue of insulation foam impacting the shuttle wing. It's interesting for its implications regarding the shuttle, but I found the analysis regarding the actual use of PowerPoint even more intriguing.
On a different page, Tufts writes:
In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation isto talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years,overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mmslides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early inthe 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning outtrillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
The Boeing shuttle analysis piece convincingly shows hows this works. He takes them apart, point by uh, powerpoint (sorry, couldn't resist). When a presentation so misleads the audience, I have to wonder if it was intentional or an unanticipated result of thinking in PowerPoint? Of course there are cases of both happening, but in general, I suspect that thinking and planning in terms of presenting in PowerPoint has dulled us to the consequences and thus we end up acting unaware of it all. Are we becoming servants of the software?
Regardless, its obvious to me that PowerPoint makes you dumb. That's why I use Keynote now.
May 13, 2003
Echoes of importance.
I've talked about this recently but it bears mentioning again (and again and again). I found another good article about the upcoming changes to FCC regulations against media consolidation. If the changes proposed by the industry are accepted, you'll be getting your news and entertainment from even fewer sources, and new sources will have a harder time getting entry.
Here are some examples of who own what right now (and expect these lists to grow substantially if the FCC changes the law):
(complete lists are available at the Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, www.cjr.org/owners):
-- AOL Time Warner: The largest Internet service provider (37 million customers), the second largest cable company, HBO, CNN, TNT, TBS, the WB Network, Warner Bros. Studios, Castle Rock Entertainment, New Line Cinema, music labels Atlantic, Rhino, Elektra and Warner Bros., book publishers Little Brown & Co., Time Life, and Book of the Month Club, and the largest U.S. magazine company, publisher of Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Money, Entertainment Weekly, and many others, and the Atlanta Braves, Hawks and Thrashers sports teams.
-- Viacom: CBS and UPN networks, MTV, VH1, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET; Infinity, the second largest radio network (including KCBS, KLLC and KITS in the Bay Area); 34 television stations (including KPIX-TV, Channel 5 in the Bay Area); Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster book publisher, Spelling Entertainment, and other entertainment and publishing holdings.
-- News Corp.: The Fox network and Fox News Channel, 22 television stations, 20th Century Fox film and television studios, TV Guide, the Weekly Standard, the New York Post (and other newspapers in England and Australia), book publishers Harper Collins and William Morrow, the Los Angeles Dodgers, with stakes in the Los Angeles Kings and Lakers and New York Knicks and Rangers sports teams.
-- Walt Disney Corp.: ABC television network, 10 television stations and 53 radio stations (including KGO TV and radio in the Bay Area, and KSFO-AM); Disney Channel and stakes in A&E, ESPN, the History Channel, Lifetime and other cable channels; Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Miramax Films; Buena Vista Music Group; Hyperion and Miramax books; theme parks and a cruise line.
-- Hearst Corp., the owner of The Chronicle, is among the companies that have asked the FCC to ease restrictions. Privately held Hearst owns 12 daily newspapers, 17 U.S. magazines, 27 television stations, and stakes in A&E, ESPN, the History Channel, Lifetime and other cable channels, among other media holdings.
If you care to offer your input on trying to prevent this, check the links I provided in the first article or check out MoveOn.org, another grassroots effort to mobilize people to action calling for the FCC to fulfill its mandate to set policy that benefits the public interest.
Why don 't we just buy off Kim Jung Il?
What to do about North Korea? We can't fight them without writing off the millions of people living in Seoul, a city an hour's drive from the DMZ that will be annhilated within minutes of the commencement of war. But we can't negotiate with them because we can't trust them nor can we submit to blackmail. But if we don't do something, they are likely to sell off some nukes or the material needed to build them, which isn't really a cool thing.
Why not just buy him off? Kim Jung Il surely would capitulate to a kind of clemency or absolution that gives him freedom from persecution to go along with, say, 10 billion dollars and an island to live on somewhere. Hell, we could even offer to sell him arms so he can train and run a private army (albeit no one to fight with, as we'd preclude a navy and long-range missiles). We'd recoup most of the money we give him in arms sales.
Stock the island with old movies and nubile whores and let him play god. Sure beats the alternatives.
May 11, 2003
Time-lapse air travel
Click the pic to download a 14 MB time-lapse video of 24 hours of air-traffic in the continential US. Neat stuff. You think it's Bruce Willis's jet parked in North Idaho until the early afternoon?
May 10, 2003
Pay for the war!
Microsoft facing potential fines of $2,200,000,000.00 (2.2 trillion) for having shitty software.
We need to have laws that hold software companies liable for shitty products. Not necessarily all software, of course not, but if someone wants to sell a product that doesn't work as advertised and ends up propagating virii or spilling private information out to the world or just plain sucks, they should be held liable. We use that standard for anything but software.
And while we are at it, we need to get rid of patents on software, genes, and business practices. Stupid shit, that.
May 09, 2003
Two takes on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
While what follows here appears incredibly partisan, it isn't intended to be a political discussion as much as a philosophical one. But I guess that's what politics is though, philosophy in action (and sometimes inaction).
I happened to stumble across a nice little synopsis of the differences between Democrats and Republicans the other day that was so elegant, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Since the two parties are considerably more complex than the following characterization permits and I suppose its even arguable about whether the generalization applies, let's not get caught up in arguing how accurate these two ideologies are. Since there are undoubtedly people somewhere that fit these categories, let's restrict our discussions to them. I'll try to keep it abstract so we can avoid muddying the waters more than needed.
The distinction was thus: Repubs generally want the government to stay out of regulating business and administering programs (ie smaller government) with the exception of the military. They prefer lower taxes over government provided services, again with the exception of the military, which they basically want to be buffed up and pimped out as much as possible. They aren't much interested in social programs like Social Security and Medicare, nor are they much wont to spend on education or absorb business expenses stemming from say, environmental regulations and labor laws. The government wastes money and thus taxes should be kept as low as possible to force efficiency from the federal budgetary monster.
For the sake of a clear-cut example, Dems are just the opposite. They consider the government a plausible agent for providing services for the population. In terms of productive services that aid the populace in life, liberty, and their pursuits of happiness, the military doesn't offer much and hence military spending is seen as undesirable. The higher taxes required to fund the health, education, and other socially beneficial programs come primarily from the highest earners, ie those who can afford it.
Put so simply, I found myself rather disgusted with the former position. I wholly support the principles of efficiency espoused by the conservative sector of society and generally belief that a freer market is more robust and efficient that one heavily burdened by regulations or central planning. But the narrow-minded accounting of so-called free market conservatives who oppose say, environmental regulation and labor laws because of their "negative" impact on profitability illustrates that most evil of human shortcomings, hypocrisy. To truly address the profitability of an enterprise, doesn't it make sense that one consider ALL the costs of the undertaking, including social and environmental factors among others?
And the issue of taxation has me perplexed as well. No one likes to pay taxes, whether it be a penny on a dollar income or millions from the upper crust income. I understand that the higher percentages the richest members of society are burdened with equate to incredible sums of money, but once the taxes are paid, they still end up with more than most people had to start with before they paid their small tax bills. Given the option of a $500,000 annual salary that pays 50% ($250,000) in taxes, leaving me with $250,000 or a $50,000 annual salary with a 20% tax bite ($10,000) that leave $40,000 behind, no one is going to choose the lower wage because its a smaller percentage or total amount.
Why is it such a problem to pay taxes that benefit society? Where is the pride in taxes? Of course wasteful government puts a sting in the bite, but it is just horrific to me that a person would feel fine being taxed to fun a war machine (and presumably prisons) but objects to taxes that provide public services. Taxes that fund better schools and hospitals contribute to a safer, more stable society. Give the choice between a million dollars for education which will keep 999 of 1000 kids from turning into criminals vs a million dollar jail to lock up the 999 criminals from the 1000 who got shitty education, some people would prefer to build the jail. Or suggest that we buy off the dregs of society to keep them from fucking up their own and others' lives (while simultaneously providing a safety net for upstanding folks fallen on hard times, but that doesn't fit the rant here) for a reasonable price. Oh no! Best to build the jail rather than have dregs on welfare.
Our nation is the richest nation the known universe has ever produced. Richest in terms of dollars, in terms of knowledge, in terms of technology and information. But we squander it. Where is the pride in doing things that make life better for all involved? We claim to be patriots and supporters of our country, but we aren't. We have a nation of petty selfish brats without a glimmer of concern for the welfare of their fellow citizens.
And if that's the best the strongest, richest, most advanced nation on Earth can do for its own, what hope is there that it can actually begin to create a legacy worth caring about?
May 07, 2003
Care to make a difference?
As you probably don't know (since no one knows), the FCC is going to reconsider some of its rules next month. Right now, they are only listen to the big media conglomerates, not because the FCC is corrupt, but because the conglomerates are the only ones talking. As a result, they will likely change the rules preventing high degrees of media concentration with the result that TV media will become highly concentrated in a few companies. The rules prevent companies from owning too much stake in a market or from buying up too many other companies.
This is a bad thing. This will put the control of entertainment and news programming in the hands of a few. Diversity is a good thing. Media concentration is not diverse.
If you wish to have your government work for you instead of business interests, take a few minutes to go to the Media Reform site for some info about why media concentration is a bad thing and what you can do about it. Don't just send email though, but print out the letter and sign, stamp,and send it. Paper mail gets much more attention. Give them a phone call if you have time to burn.
I'm not being paranoid, just pragmatic here. I'm not coming at this issue from a "corporations are evil" or "the government is corrupt" perspective either. Corporations are self-interested and I can't blame them for that. I can fight them and be disgusted with them for that, but its only natural to be self-interested. And the government just does what its told; if the corporations are the only ones who make their voices heard, their opinions shape policy.
Make your opinion heard. This really is an important issue that really will affect your life. You can make a difference.
If you are interested in other ways the government and corporations are shaping the world we live in, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These are the people that successfully defended the P2P networks from corporate assault. Good people. They have an EFF Action page if you want to get involved. Electronic Privacy Information Center is another good place to find out how technology, business, and government are changing our lifes, mostly by restricting what we can do with information.
May 06, 2003
What the hell is wrong with humanity?
It's such a sophomoric question that we've all pondered, usually in high school or the early college years when we are just beginning to pull our heads out of our asses and realize there is more happening "out there" than getting grades, laid, or drugs for the weekend. It's such an obvious question, and surely one worth answering, but it seems like it has just become taken for granted. It's as if you develop a shocked awareness of it as you emerge from the pubescent cocoon brimming with arrogance and belief in your ability to do whatever you want to, but then get sidetracked (usually with work, pussy, and drugs) and just accept the fucked up state of affairs.
I was almost afraid to even bring up the topic because it seems to be such a foregone conclusion. The more cynical could argue that I'm idealist, but that's just a pathetic excuse for not being realistic, or pragmatic at least. It's minimally immoral to not judge humanity harshly for the current state of affairs. Either immoral or humans are just a bunch of amoral hypocrites (in which case my question is answered. But I've got more to say here and now).
There are so many ways to look at the problem, but in general it boils down to the fact that we live in a world of shit. Some of us have it pretty good, but for the most part, life utterly sucks for people. Most people alive on Earth right now are worse off than had they been born 10,000 years ago. Sad testament to how far we've fallen and good reasons to be pessimistic about our future. But it isn't the sorry state of existence for people that is so damning, but the fast that it just doesn't have to be that way is the rope we hang ourselves with.
We are such petty creatures, unwilling and unable to rise above blind devotion to the little concepts adopted by our progenitors, worshipping the lines they've drawn and refusing, yea, actively resisting attempts to remove the blinders, refusing to recognize that the concepts and cognitions we define ourselves by are nothing more than mental holdovers of historical circumstance.
What separates people like me, who think it despicable that we squander heritage and use our technological progress to cash in on the future, leaving the interest payments for those who come after us, and those who are doing the check cashing and barrier building? What is so horribly wrong with the idea that working towards meeting a standard of minimal human dignity is worthwhile? Why are we hellbent on living in the now, without even an inkling of foresight or adherence to ideals?
Is the Enlightenment dead?
This isn't just a veiled rant at any particular government or corporation, but humanity as a whole. Of course we have elements of actual intelligence, elements that are able to accomplish a great deal, but they are a minority. Why can't the powers that be actually do something worth being proud of on a grand scale?
Are we too greedy? Too stupid? Too arrogant? Too racist? Too indifferent?
Why doesn't this matter?
May 05, 2003
You think you are tough?
This guy cut off his own arm with a pocketknife to free himself from a boulder that fell on him while climbing.
I have nothing but respect for this person. I honestly don't know if I could make that decision and carry it out. May he recover fully (or as fully as a person can recover, both physically and mentally, after cutting off your own arm with a pocketknife, I suppose).
May 02, 2003
Time Capsule for sale
50 years ago, a grocery store in Montana closed up shop following a death in the family and has never been opened. They are holding an estate action now and selling off all this pristine 50's stuff. They found a speakeasy in the basement as well. Pictures are offered for perusal and they accept silent and over-the-phone bids.
It would have been kind of cool if they offered the property and contents as a package though.
May 01, 2003
Panawave to the rescue!
Last Tuesday brought an extra zesty does of surrealism to the daily trip of living in Japan when a reporter found the Panawave Research Group camped out on a secluded public road in the mountains in the middle of Japan. Apparently one of the members of this wacky group fell ill and they've been forced to set stakes and recuperate for a bit.
But they are a freaky bunch; they believe we are under Communist micro- and radio-wave attack that is destroying the earth and causing global warming. They wear all-white outfits and face masks becuase it protects them. They also wrap trees, bushes, guardrails and streetsigns in white cloths, to protect them too, I guess. The mountainside around their current encampment is shrouded in a white and looks like a freaky BlairWitch toiletpapering party. They have all-white painted cars, trucks, and vans, even a front-end loader that they chased away a group of journalists with. Not quite as good as a killdozer, but it scared the hell out of those reporters.
They effectively control the road, stopping motorists from passing through and shutting out the media. They believe the cameras emit deadly radiation and are thus to be feared. The day after they chased them off with the fron-end loader, the reporters came back enmasse. They were greated by a bunch of guys holding huge uncut plywood sized mirrors who walled off the road with reflective protection. It was push and shove for a bit. The cops showed up and in classic Japanese police fashion urged everyone to "just calm down." No arrests were made.
A local mayor "invited" them to leave but they turned it down for the sake of the ill member, who has cancer I think. I'm rather surprised that the local government doesn't have the will or power to forcibly remove them. If they were acting the way they are on private property, fine, but to take control of a road, bundle up the local flora, and assault the press would bring the pain on my side of the mountain ocean. Try that shit up Pine Crick and see how gets microwaved.
To top it all off, this group was behind an abortive attempt to capture Tama-chan the seal for an unknown reason. Fortunately the attempt to net the community pet seal failed and she will be allowed to stay in the polluted waters until she dies of chemical and heavy metal poisoning. At least she has honorary citizenship in Japan, which is better than 3rd and 4th generation Korean and Chinese folks born, raised, and living in Japan get.
I couldn't find any good pictures of the Panawave group in the mountains. I'll see if I can get some video footage though.