Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has apparently reversed course on Stem Cell research:

Mr. Frist, a heart-lung transplant surgeon who said last month that he did not back expanding financing "at this juncture," is expected to announce his decision Friday morning in a lengthy Senate speech. In it, he says that while he has reservations about altering Mr. Bush's four-year-old policy, which placed strict limits on taxpayer financing for the work, he supports the bill nonetheless.

"While human embryonic stem cell research is still at a very early stage, the limitations put in place in 2001 will, over time, slow our ability to bring potential new treatments for certain diseases," Mr. Frist says, according to a text of the speech provided by his office Thursday evening. "Therefore, I believe the president's policy should be modified."

Mr. Frist's move will undoubtedly change the political landscape in the debate over embryonic stem cell research, one of the thorniest moral issues to come before Congress. The chief House sponsor of the bill, Representative Michael N. Castle, Republican of Delaware, said, "His support is of huge significance."

The stem cell bill has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate, where competing measures are also under consideration. Because Mr. Frist's colleagues look to him for advice on medical matters, his support for the bill could break the Senate logjam. It could also give undecided Republicans political license to back the legislation, which is already close to having the votes it needs to pass the Senate.

Funding for Stem Cell research is a complicated issue, morally speaking. A distressing many the right and the left have their moral authority all sewn up and believe that those who disagree are troglodytes or Death Culture cultists. But for those of us not married to the notion that science-in-the-name-of-anything-is-good or to the notion that an embryo is a human life, it's tough.

So in that vein, I don't have a problem with Frist changing his views on the subject. The big question is "Why?" and, believe it or not, crass political bean-counting is not what I'm afraid of.

Though I voted for him twice and approve of the job he's done, I have my problems with President Bush. I have a lot of problems with some of the policies he's enacted, but politics is about compromise. But one thing that I have always respected about the President, and the one thing that I'm going to be on the lookout in the 2008 primaries, is that President Bush does not care what the editorial board of the New York Times thinks about him.

That is not a small thing. Politics is about ego and part of ego is being loved. Watergate aside, President Nixon nearly ran this country into the ground to please the elite opinionmakers. My main issue with John McCain is that he cares what they think. Though President Bush's obstinance can be a bad thing, it has prevented him from ever caving in before the fight has even begun so as not to be considered too "right wing" and "dogmatic" by The Really Important People.

This is what I'm looking at in 2008. If Bill Frist starts to seem like the kind of guy who is worried about Opinions From On High, he will be really difficult to please. Not only because it will lead to policy decisions that I don't like, but because it will be unsuccessful. It is difficult for me to imagine a distance leftward where the New York Times Editorial Board will be satisfied just as no Democrat can move enough to the right to win James Dobson's support. Secondly, and more importantly, the Upper East Side is no more America than is Wichita, Kansas. Both parties are closer to the electoral mainstream than they are.

I have to agree with James Joyner that it's looking increasingly less like Frist will be the nominee. He hasn't the personality, nor the base. But he has been a good party-builder and did the GOP well in the 2002 elections. And I am generally very comfortable with him. But I'm growing slightly less so.

Last I'd heard, we stopped taking in cattle from Canada cause of the whole Mad Cow thing. I'm guessing that's changed. Actually, I'm not guessing at that because there is evidence every single day on my drive home that it's changed. One stinky cattle truck after another. I can smell it in my car with my windows closed and air conditioner off.

I am really starting to question my "free trade" beliefs.

Maybe I'm free trade for everything except cattle now.

I suppose it's been too long since I had a tire burst on the road. I equally suppose that taking into account that 80% of my driving is done on an unpopulated freeway, it would happen in BFE.

One of the things that I did not realize is how difficult it is to drive slowly on an open freeway. Donuts are not supposed to go above a certain speed (40mph, from what I understand) and I tried to honor that. But my cruise control wasn't working and it was quite tough. Without constant dilligence, I found myself creeping up to 70. Way too fast, though naturally too slow for my fellow driver. My usual speed, and the flow of traffic, is about 80mph.

When I got off the freeway I drove down a self-declared highway with speed limits ranging from 25-55mph. I consistently found myself creeping up to about ten below my usual level (except at 25mph, where I went 25mph).

I hadn't realized, I guess, how hardwired I was to go a certain speed in certain areas. I have no difficulty going 55mph on the self-declared highway, but going even 60 on the freeway was almost painful.

I learned to drive on a 55mph cap on Interstates. The federal law was repealed my first year behind the wheel. I remember what a glorious feeling that was. Once it sank in, which wasn't immediate.

I was driving Anna down to Galveston one evening when a Galveston County Sheriff's vehicle, which had been waiting on the shoulder, demonstrated the accelerating power of a Camaro and pulled up behind me. Even before he flipped on his lights I looked down and realized that I was going 70. I was about to get my first speeding ticket. As any guilty-as-sin driver does, I slowed down to the speed limit, thinking that he might not have looked at his own spedometer.

The cop lights went on and I slowed down even further to gravitate towards the right. I got to about 40 and he started flashing me and honking his horn. When I finally made my way over, he darted into the distance at 90mph to catch, I would guess, the car in front of me. About that time I saw a speed limit sign tell me that I had never actually been speeding at all.

Felt like I was. Going 70mph was adventerous in those days because I was not used to legally being able to go it (US highways allowed it, but around Houston there are few opportunities for it to get that high). When the speed limit was lowered to 55mph for Harris and the eight surrounding counties, it sucked doubly. Not just because it took so much longer to get there, but because 55 was slower than it had been before.

On my way to Idaho, the first taste of freedom was Colorado, which has an 80mph cap. I, naturally, went 90. What a thrill! When I got to 75mph Wyoming, it was a bit of a let down.

Of course, if the speed limits around here were 90mph, it would take 100 to feel adventurous. If they were 30, then 40 wouldn't be so bad.

But 25 miles an hour is bad regardless of the norm, and the guardians of language transperency ought to prohibit anything so limited from calling itself a "Freeway.""Highway." [corrected]

Berkeley economics professor Robert Frank is worried about consumption. He's written a book called Luxury Fever, which addresses the topic. I've also addressed his arguments here.

It's not common that a left-of-center economist endorses nixing the income tax in favor of a consumption tax, but that's sort ofwhat Frank does (.DOC). He wants to see a graduated consumption tax:

Our problem, in short, is the incentives that guide individual spending decisions are much like those that generate military arms races. Spending less would be better, but only if everyone did it. [...]

We can do this in a powerful yet unintrusive way by scrapping our current income tax in favor of a more steeply progressive consumption tax. Such a tax would be straightforward to administer: Each family would pay tax not on its income, but on its total spending--as measured by the simple difference between its annual income and its annual savings.

Because the rich are able to save and invest so much more than the poor, fairness would require that tax rates on the highest spenders be significantly higher than the current top tax rates on incomes. But even if tax rates were set to raise no more total revenue than under the current system, a consumption tax would have a profound effect on specific purchase decisions.

Consider the choice between a Porsche 911 Turbo ($105,000) and a Ferrari 456 GT ($207,000). The Ferrari buyer is currently willing to spend $102,000 more for his top-of-the-line purchase. But with a top rate on taxable consumption of, say, 70 percent, the effective premium to buy the Ferrari would be more than $173,000.

Because the consumption tax offers an exemption for savings, the Ferrari buyer would have a strong incentive to invest a little more in the stock market and a little less on his car. If he buys the Porsche, his outlay--including the tax--will be $178,000. In return, he gets a car that performs just as well as the Ferrari and, assuming others have responded similarly, just as rare. The tax preserves the aficionado's ability to indulge his passion for sports cars while increasing his savings.

It's a really interesting concept, though I have two problems with it:

1. The trouble with sin taxes is that the government profits off what people shouldn't do. The cigarette tax, for instance, had the somewhat mutual exclusive goals of raising money and discouraging smokers. The problem is that if smokers are discouraged, less funds are raised. This has the same problem. If it leads people to purchase less luxury goods, then we face budget shortages. Eventually you might have to raise these taxes so high that few can afford to spend their own money on anything but the necessities, which would deter innovation. That brings me to the second problem.
2. As agitated as I get with overconsumption and as much as I can see where Frank is coming from, the wealthy's extravagant conspicuous consumption on things technological (for instance) have a positive affect as well as the negative ones that Frank describes. New technology tends to work itself down the economic ladder. They pay outrageously high prices for not-yet-commonplace technology (say HDTV five years ago). That gives the manufacturers a profit, which allows them to produce more and lower the price and make money on volume. Once upon a time computers cost $3,000. The people indulging in luxury purchases back then were instrumental in getting to the point that computers cost a fifth of that. Penalizing the early purchasers would have slowed down growth of the industry, I'd think.

METRO busses declared safety hazard, may be replaced by rail
Jerry Wahls, Houston Comical

HOUSTON - After yesterday's bus accident, Houston METRO Authorities, Houston Mayor Bill White, and all right-thinking people are re-thinking public transportation.

"The first problem," METRO Police Cheif Tom Lambert told reporters, "is that we're hiring Houston drivers. Unlike drivers in other areas, Houston drivers never make mistakes. METRO's longstanding policy, of course, is never to compensate for regular driver error. As such, we're going to start replacing our drivers with those from a population that doesn't make mistakes."

When asked further where drivers might be imported from, Lambert declined further comment.

Most METRO authorities did agree, however, that one obvious problem was too many bus routes. "Frankly," said one METRO insider, "We have so many busses going that they're practically running in to each other. Well, literally running in to one another, in fact."

While he said that nothing was definitive, using the funds freed up by cutting bus lines to create a more aggressive light rail system was "not out of the question."

When asked to comment, all right-thinking Houstonians agreed.

[Picture swiped from Lonestar Times via PubliusTX, both of whom have more useful things to say on the subject]

It's unusual that I hit random blogs and run across information about my old school district, but it happened yesterday.

Clear Creek alum Miriam gave me all kinds of updates on how the new school construction - or lack thereof - is going. As you may be able to surmise by the 'lack thereof,' it is reportedly not going well:

For the last 15 years, the city government and the Clear Creek ISD school board have been fighting with the city residents to build a high school on land that is already owned by the school district. Indeed, the city’s residents are so opposed to building a new high school that each time it’s voted upon, the vote against is almost 90%. We’ve built over a dozen elementary schools in the last 15 years, two or three junior high schools, and absolutely zero high schools. However, the three high schools that are currently used to house the area’s 50-some-odd-thousand high school students are literally overflowing. Three of the local junior high schools that were adjacent to each of the three high schools were turned into Ninth Grade centers for freshman, while three new Junior high schools were built somewhere else.

She puts forth a pretty seering indictment of Texas being anti-education, but I'm not sure that's the case. But this sort of thing is certainly indicative of something wrong. The high schools are approaching 5,000 students in schools originally built for half that. But only recently did a bond pass to actually get the fourth high school built that they've been talking about since I was about to enter high school, twelve years ago.

I think there are two related problems. The first problem is an assumption that education is automatic. As long as you sit the kids in school for a certain number of hours a week, they'll do just as good as the parents did or better. It doesn't matter so much what kind of facilities the school has or teachers as much as they go to a school with a solid state rating. No effort required on their part. And if anything goes wrong, it can't be their fault or the kids' fault, so they'll duke it out with a teacher. They rely on the school to educate their kids, but then often treat the system as though it is an obstacle to their kids education.

I exaggerate, but a lot of the country does seem to be drinking this kool-aid that convinces us that education is something that someone else takes care of. Part of the reason that there is such a rat-race to get into the posh suburbs is so that they can get into the best schools. It never even occurs to them that a student with more involved parents at run-down Galveston Ball High School has as good a chance or better at getting a good education as a student at posh Deer Park High School. Besides, they're so busy working to pay down the inflated mortgages and property taxes that they don't have time to get involved. Working so hard, ironically, so that their kids can get a better education.

They're surprised when their kid's C average won't get them in to the University of Texas, even though that's where mommy and daddy went.

The second issue is an obnoxious Not-In-My-Back-Yard mentality. They want more access to the city and other parts of town, but everyone's an environmentalist when it comes to expanding roads near where they are. More schools is good, just as long as it doesn't inconvenience them. A better education shouldn't require more schools that require building that inconvenience their lives.

This isn't a Clear Creek ISD thing and it's not a Texas thing, it's a suburban thing. It's one of the main things that I really don't like about suburbanites and even much of the upper middle class in general.

A couple things worth noting that might account from my slightly different perspective from Miriam's:

1. She went to Clear Creek and I went to Clear Lake. While my upper middle class tag would apply to Clear Lake, it may not to Clear Creek. I do think that by-and-large the economic differences between the two are exaggerated (even by myself, at times). Seabrook, where I'm from, is demographically more similar to Clear Creek towns than other Clear Lake ones. But Seabrook and League City are more similar to Clear Lake than they are to the urban Third Ward or rural Texas City. People on the Clear Lake divide are more likely to commute to the city, though most people who live out there also work out there.
2. From what I gather she's moved around more than I have, so she has more compare-and-contrast opportunities than I do. Other than the part of Idaho where I'm living now, I have little experience outside of Texas. But the similarities and differences between Idaho locales and Texas ones suggest that it's dangerous to paint all of either with a single brush.
3. My views on all this neatly dovetail with my more general views on class. Too neatly, really. One should acknowledge one's biases as openly as possible.
4. I lived in the Clear Lake area for sixteen years prior to jetting off to UH, various parts of Houston, and Jersey Village. I probably have more loyalty, disdain, and overall stronger feelings for the old neighborhood than do most. Then again, I don't live there now so this entire subject is more academic to me than it is to a traveller like Miriam.

More on the subject:
Hometown Friends 2004 (2/5/2004)
The New School (2/10/2004)
The Suburbs & Education Stratification (2/15/2005)

Eel and I had the the sorriest waitress last night.

I ordered a potato-and-cheddar soup along with my main course, though Eel did not. The main course came out, but I hadn't been served the soup. That was actually no problem for me, though. In fact, I generally prefer a convergence of meals. If one person gets a soup with their meal but the other a salad, I say "serve'em both at the same time" rather than the soup then the salad (or vice-versa). If one person is getting a soup, don't hold up the other person's meal and then make them watch as the first person downs the soup that the other didn't get. Let the person that finishes first be the one to look on as the other eats, because at least they are not going to be hungry while doing it.

But anyway, the waitress was so apologetic. I've had waiters keep me foodless for forty-five minutes and be less apologetic. I tried to assure her that it was okay, but she just felt so bad.

Unfortunately, she felt so bad that she rushed the soup and it came out cold. I almost didn't say anything because I knew it would just make her feel that much worse. I tried to flag her down a couple times, but couldn't. When she came over to tell me that they were taking the soup off our bill I asked if she would mind heating it up. She was, again, very sorry.

Unfortunately again, she was so sorry that she nuked my soup to lavaistic temperatures, far above and beyond what she would have liked.

I was sorry that she was sorry, but appreciative that she was enthusiastic.

"That reminds me of John Lennon's 'Imagine,' the world's stupidest song. 'Someday you will join us / And the world will live as one.' OK, but join you in what, John? Not believing in religion, or country, or possessions, or anything? That isn't how belief systems work. People don't join together to do nothing, and they don't find commaraderie with people who don't believe in anything. In other words, you can't rally people around the flag you haven't got. Once you get rid of one belief, you create a void that something else is going to fill. Radical Islam is filling that void for some people. Something beats nothing." -Les Jones

I'm going to be trying something new, though I've been mulling over it for a while now. I'm going to integrate my old RAW Links, FURL, and my "In Unordered List Form" posts into a miniblog to the left. It's inspired by right right-column of The American Scene, the now-defunct Into the Ether feature at Master of None, and a feature that used to be on PatioPundit before its reboot.

You'll notice that two of the three inspirations didn't stand the test of time, so we'll see how it goes. One of the cool things about Nucleus is that since I'm doing it within the system, I'll still be able to archive all my newblog posts into the RAWbservations archives.

Comments are enabled, though I haven't done much for the second blog's template, so it won't look all nice or anything. But it will probably be more frequently updated than the blog itself, so keep an eye to that area. It's tentative title is Ten Second News, though that's subject to change. Until I get more done on it, it'll just be the Protoblog.

The FURL headlines have been moved below the Blogrolodexical and archives.

The US wants to extend Daylight Savings:

Currently in Canada and the U.S., daylight time runs from April through October. The exception in Canada is Saskatchewan, which keeps its clocks the same throughout the year.

Congress believes the extension would trim energy costs by cutting the need for artificial light in the evenings.

We've got it all wrong, time of day should be geared towards when the sun comes up, saving us the dredgery of having to wake up to darkness. From what I understand, studies have shown that we (particularly young people) get up too early, not too late. I know that for me, getting up to sunlight is one of the few advantages of the 16-hour days of Idaho summers. Eel even has a light that simulates sunlight (coming on gradually).

Has any celebrity in the history of the planet become a celebrity and fallen to the dark side as quickly as Lindsay Lohan? I read an article at the barber shop less than a year ago and she seemed like a decently well-adjusted girl. Took less than a couple months before she turned in to... that.

There are, of course, all kinds of stereotypes when it comes to young actors and actresses. The phenomenon has really taken hold among young athletes, too. Especially in the NBA where age is slightly less a barrier.

But in some ways, how much does age really matter? Even when the cameras turned off, Hollywood remains a soap opera of addiction, divorce, and so on. A lot of people (including myself, at times) are very unsympathetic when it comes to celebrities complaints about their private lives. In truth, we have reasons to be skeptical. A number of actors seem to stay out of the spotlight just fine, thankyouverymuch.

But at the same time, being an actor requires trips to Vancouver and Sydney for months at a time cause it's a cheaper shoot. The rest of the time it strongly induces one to live in Los Angeles. But mostly - and especially for the big ones - it requires a completely unordinary life.

Thinking about it makes me realize, at least a little, how happy I am that my life is not too unordinary. I wouldn't want to be the biggest star in Hollywood or the biggest writer in New York City if it meant that I couldn't have some of the standard things: a wife, some kids, a house with a yard.

In the DC superhero universe, about a third of the big boys do not have a secret identity and the rest do. I've always been attracted to the latter. I love the idea of doing amazing things and then being able to return to a normal life. Part of that, I guess, is my desire to live a normal life while recognizing how nice it would be to leave a mark on the world. Secret identities allow for both.

But if you take a character with a public identity, you strip that person of any sense of normalcy. There is only one mode, which is that of a celebrity. Though DC only explores this selectively, it's enough to make them less relateable to me.

That's probably why I don't generally care so much about what's going on in People magazine. What do I have in common with Vince Vaughn? I guess I am an egotistical being. If I can't relate to someone, and I do not know them, can I truly feel empathetic? Sympathetic? Vicariously happy? And without the drive to be in their shoes - to be a superstar - I don't have the envy factor, either. Even if I could get paid $20m a movie, I don't think it would be worth the cost.

As I was eating ramen for breakfast today, the thought crossed my mind: a ten-cent meal would have to be pretty bad to still be bad when you consider that it only cost ten cents.

In the mentality of some, I guess, something only tastes better if more time or money is put in to it. But ten cent pasta is ten cent pasta.

And better for me than the McDonald's fare I was getting into the habit of eating!

• The Maxx was never released to DVD. Does anyone know why? It was popular enough, I'd think. There must be some copyright issues? I wanted to get it on Netflix, but couldn't. I may have to buy it.
• Speaking of Netflix, I've got the new Batman cartoon on queue. I don't think it's at all possible to measure up to the outstanding 90's cartoon and its successors. I've never understood how DC could get television so right (Batman: The Animated Series, Lois & Clark, The Flash) and screw up their movie properties so royally until recently. Other than Ninjajoker, the visuals of the new cartoon look pretty cool, though. Prior to this, there was another animated movie I missed: Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman. I doubt it can be as good as Mask of the Phantasm, but it couldn't be worse than Sub Zero if it tried. Or unless it included Panzer-level bad CGI.
• I'm kinda disappointed that they're not rebooting Superman entirely when Superman Returns. Not that I think all of the first set need to be redone, but it opens up a lot more possibilities for charting a new direction. Batman Begins may have "undone" Batman 1989, but I think it had to in order to have room to breathe for an entire franchise.
• Then again, I still have not actually seen the original Superman movie. I am still baffled by this.

• Somewhere along the way it seems that they made a fourth Crow movie. It looks better than the dereadful second one was. Not sure it could measure up to the first. Never saw the third. For those of you that never saw it, though, the TV series was not bad at all. It's a bit hard to get around the fact that they all necessarily have the same plot, though.
• Anyone actually seen the Fantastic Four movie? I've heard nothing but negative things about it and I'm not even an FFan, but there's something oddly attractive about the cheesiness of it. "Come on, Susan, let's not fight." "No. Let's!"... that supremely bad fight dialogue could be interesting. They made one not long ago. The fact that I was unaware of this until today suggests that I may not have missed much. Besides, it doesn't have The Commish in it.
• DC actually has a knock-off of the Fantastic Four called Challengers of the Unknown. A miniseries was written several years back that would make a pretty good movie. It even had a song in it for the soundtrack! The writer of that series, Jeph Loeb, came from film. He wrote Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too, but we shan't hold that against him.
• And the more that people seem to heap on The Hulk, the more interesting it sounds to me. Sounds more up my alley than the big green guy usually is.
• I saw that they are making another Captain America movie. The last one, made in 1991, was dreadful. Though I have to say that I thought Matt Salinger made a good Cap. In fact, his demeanor defines who the otherwise bland character should be. If Superman is The Last Son of Krypton, Cap would have to be The Last Son of The Forties. A symbol of a country he doesn't entirely understand. I don't know if that's what Salinger was going for. His bewilderment may have had more to do with trying to figure out what to do with the otherwise awful script.
• Oversaturation seems inevitable. Silver Surfer? Aquaman? Black Panther? Some of these characters shouldn't even exist at all, much less be brought to the Silver Screen.
• They still totally need to do a Blue and Gold movie, though. It'd be awesome.
• Here's a bunch of gay guys dressed up as superheroes.

Why Marx is man of the moment - He had globalisation sussed 150 years ago

Even the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, eager cheerleaders for turbo-capitalism, acknowledge the debt. 'As a prophet of socialism Marx may be kaput,' they wrote in A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation (2000), 'but as a prophet of the "universal interdependence of nations" as he called globalisation, he can still seem startlingly relevant.' Their greatest fear was that 'the more successful globalisation becomes the more it seems to whip up its own backlash' - or, as Marx himself said, that modern industry produces its own gravediggers.

The bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. 'Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,' he wrote in The Communist Manifesto.

There is something uniquely irritating about this article. When I was in high school and stepping knee-deep is the aspirational counterculture, I had the idea that most embattled young men and ladies have that maybe there was something wrong with this system (democracy & markets) that had produced a society that wasn't to keen on me and that, by extention, perhaps its cheif adversary and the opposing system (Communism) might be right. There were certainly enough Soviet-Union-wasn't-really-Communism arguments floating around for the reds to save face and get young people like me to think that maybe - maybe - they had a point.

But I never truly bought in to it and mostly it was just the desire to agitate. The desire to feel a bit different and to have views that separated me from others. But while I rejected Communism the system, I did hold on to the notion that the Soviet Union wasn't Communism and that, in theory, it could work, and besides it's not like our system was perfect and one imperfect system is truly equal to every other imperfect system. Then I got to college and met some Communists and determined that people in that mind set would inevitably screw things up. And, along the way, I grew out of the adolescent state of rebellion that seemed to fuel so many of the true-believing Communists.

The February following 9/11 I got into a conversation with an Austin artist. The subject of bin Laden came up and he suggested that bin Laden wasn't out to get America but rather the imperial America and its capitalist system. Though he looked both ways before saying it, I could tell that he someone prided himself on his courage to speak up. Almost as if the courage to say something unpopular alone made his view both more courageous and more correct. Having only been a few months removed from college, I found such ideas considerably less groundbreaking. I even found his giddiness more off-putting than the idea that inspired it.

But what I find irritating is the cocky tone and "I'm-so-naughty" tone of those saying that Marx has been vindicated. That Marx may have been right about globalization is collossally beside the point. As a system, Communism (and I'm talking about capital-C Communism, not socialism) has been a miserable failure both economically and humanitarily in every place that it has been tried. The system either causes or so fails to safeguard against brute totalitarianism that the two are unavoidably intertwined. Even if Marx's prediction of globalism didn't remind me of reading Nostradamus's tea-leaves, who cares if he was right about a particular aspect of the market? I personally think that Marx's insights in the alienation of man from his labor were enlightening, but the sheer magnitude of what was mistaken surely outstrips what was gotten right.

It's akin to arguing that the Confederacy had a point about interstate law enforcement. Even if true, utterly irrelevent. What philosophical differences the Confederacy had with Washington were primarily dealing with a highly immoral institution. But God knows there are enough that will make the same "naughty" arguments in favor of the Confederacy that others make for Communism.

[via Orrin Judd]

Posting has kinda slowed down in the last couple of days.

A day or two back there was an attack on the system and a substantial number of posts were almost lost. Due to sheer luck, nothing was. However, the attack was deliberate in an attempt to take over the site and put up a link farm. Trackbacks have become useless thanks to spammers and comments require logins again because Captcha kept breaking down in the fact of constant spammers slamming up against it. But this wasn't just about pollution, this was about causing actual damage. And it would be foolish to believe that this will not continue. Mike has put forth considerable investment to protect this site (and the others under his watch), but the entire situation and the knowledge that there are people trying to disable my site solely to put up a bunch of links for online gambling has made me less enthusiastic about blogging than I was last week.

Should be better by Monday?

Used to be that Anime came in dubbed and subtitled form on different tapes. DVDs, in their majesty, give everyone the option of both. I have, over the years, taken quite a bit of flack for my preference for dubbed features. One of the biggest arguments that pro-subtitle gave was how much more the subtitles conveyed than the dubbed because they weren't limited by the constraints of mouth movements. The other big argument was that the subtitled tend to be more faithful to the original. But even the second argument relied partially on the first - they could be more loyal because they could put more out there because they weren't constrained.

Which brings me back to DVDs. I prefer DVDs to tapes for several reasons. They're more enjoyable, but more than that, they're gratifying because it completely blows the myth of the elaborate subtitles out of the water. Anyone who watches something dubbed and subtitled at the same time can see that (a) the translations are actually not very different, most of the time, and (b) the dubbed almost always transmits more words than the subtitles. Whether A is a big deal or not is subjective, but the subtitled folks have almost completely lost their "objective" reason B.

And that's a beautiful thing. Because while the whole debate gives anime geeks that have little reason to feel better than anyone else ever, it's annoying as all heck for those of us that have a different preference.

Of course, I can hold out the olive branch as well as the next guy. With the advent of DVDs it doesn't matter. I can have them my way and they can have theirs. And unlike VHS, it's not a zero-sum one-or-the-other situation.

I mentioned this at my last anime convention. I was told I was wrong because... well... I was wrong. And because subtitles are more elaborate. And accurate. So there. Tis a shame that I couldn't make Ushicon or A-kon this year and tis not a shame at the same time.

Now that I am moved in and living in my nice, awesome, great apartment, it's time to whine about it.

I love 99% of this Apartment, I really do. It's better than I imagined my next apartment complex could possibly be. Except one thing.

Next time you see a rat terrior peeing in the park, you are seeing as much water pressure as my shower's got. Crude, but true. It's so bad that I have purchased a bucket for the soul purpose of washing my hair. I have seen a lot of weak showers in my life, but I have never seen one this weak. Ever.

I'm trying to determine whether it's the showerhead or the pipes and am coming to the conclusion that it's a little bit of each. The sink comes out with maybe great dane force. But that would be improvement and the toilet has a decent, unapologetic flush. When I was down in Louisiana I got a showerhead from Eel's Dad. Going to try that and see if it works.

But, to be honest, this apartment is so great that I don't mind my little bucket showers too much.

I'm a little late in mentioning this, and hopefully it will not come in to play at any point in the future, but I just got caught up on a number of blogs tonight and found a surprisingly number of people saying some variation of the following two statements after the London attacks:

"Let's see how long it takes for Bush and his crew to politicize this and turn it into a rallying cry for the War on Terrorism."

or

"Let's see how long it takes for the lefties to politicize this and turn it into a rallying cry against the War in Iraq."

I found these statements amazing in their galling and concise ... well... hypocrisy. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm not supposed to use that word since it's meaningless from overuse, but I'll be danged if I can't think of a better word to use. It is simultaneously accusing the other side of politicizing tragedy and then politicizing it yourself. In the same post, paragraph, or even sentence.

Don't get me wrong, there are political implications in all this. The most likely result being the wonderful validation of everyone's pre-existing beliefs.

I was, in case you couldn't tell, pretty silent on the whole thing. There wasn't much that I could say that wasn't being said elsewhere. Up to and including the vapid, insulting partisan thoughts. But there is a time to speak (or post) your mind. I guess I'm just constantly amazed that some people consider the shield of the Internet justification to believe that there isn't a time not to.

In case you ever find yourself wondering "Can I eat lukewarm canned turkey chili straight out of its can using only a knife?" I can officially tell you:

It is possible.

It is not advisable.

Toyota recently announced that it was building a new plant in Canada instead of the South:

"The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States," said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant.

I'm not sure, but I think he's calling us stupid.

Well no, not stupid, but uneducated. And not "us" but the types down there that would find themselves working in a non-union auto plant. Not to demean those that do, of course, but rather to assume that most people who take such jobs would make more money and may get more job satisfaction doing something else.

My first instinct is to sarcastically comment about how this is another victory for our public education system. But even my prefered solutions - such as vouchers, charter schools, and so on - are of limited utility in the rural South (or the rural anywhere, for that matter). And besides that, things like this are a black eye on us all (though they're saving millions in subsidies!), just as when we come up short on national studies on education.

And even if we have a lackluster education system, no matter where you go to school you can get enough education to work at an auto plant. At some point a number of the employees that Toyota is dissatisfied with made a choice to remain uneducated. And it is a choice that is unfortunately not too difficult to make, for some people.

Bill Cosby's critiques on urban black culture is reasonably well known. We have a large segment of our population that eschews education as something that 'other people' pursue. Much of Chris Rock's humor falls along similar lines. But there is a similar strain of thought in their cultural adversaries: uneducated, rural whites. Rednecks and Gangstas, united at last.

I don't consider anti-intellectualism a negative thing in and of itself. Indeed, there is a lot to disdain about know-it-alls who are neither as open-minded as they believe nor as enlightened as they pretend to be. That being said, an education is an education and the lack of an education is a lack of an education. I believe there to be a point of diminishing returns when it comes to formal education, but I believe it falls well after the point of being functionally illiterate and would have to be after the point where some critical thinking abilities are obtained.

What's most frustrating is that this is something that no government program can fix. Very few of these students did not have the tools available to them to learn. They may have been failed by our education system because they weren't given adequate attention and reinforcement, but it comes back to leading the horse to water.

And as much as I would like to think that vouchers would fix this, and as much as others may believe that flooding the system with more money, I have real doubts.

I'm still not sure if the movie is going to be any good, but even if it completely bites this poster may be worth having for its own sake:



Beautiful.

Paul Muller is surprised and agitated that The Simpsons had a disclaimer on a show about gay marriage.

Is little Johnny going to be sitting there watching the show and then decide he has to go experiment with Stevie down the street?

I can actually understand why it would be there and I don't think it's about making tots gay. Rather, I think it's about framing ideas in a certain context so that they are not absorbed through alternative, less desirable ones.

Take, for instance, religious texts being passed out by school busses. To pick a religion we can all bash on freely, Scientology. Let's say that Scientologists are passing out books about Dianetics on school grounds. They have a permit and everything (the school, in the name of the marketplace of ideas and in effort to avoid establishment, lets any religious group present materials to their students).

I don't care if they're allowed to do it, but I certainly want to know about it. Intro-to-Scientology books present a - ahem - slanted view of the religion. It keeps out the creepier stuff and presents it as a harmless new agey type faith. I strongly disagree with that interpretation. But I do respect their freedom of speech and whatnot, so I won't restrict their right to give their side of the story. What I would be concerned about is the way this slanted view is unchallenged unless they explicitly talk to me about it. Or, if I am informed, I talk to them about it.

Now, in the case of The Simpsons, presumably a Simpsons show about gay marriage is likely to mock particular views. If I hold those views, and I would not like my children to be given a hostile outlook on those views because of what some TV writer thinks, then I would want to be on the lookout. Or if we weren't ready to have that discussion yet because of their age, we can turn it to something else. I don't see giving parents that kind of notification (and therefore discression) as some sort of evil, even despite my affirmative view of homosexuality and gay marriage.

As for whether or not gay marriage ought to be such a big issue, that doesn't really matter because it is. Besides, it's only a big issue because the gay marriage lobby made it one by way of the Massachusetts Court and the mayor of San Francisco. It's not particularly fair discourse to argue that something is worth fighting for and then suggest it unimportant or uncontroversial when your ideological opponents fight back.

If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it, post this exact same sentence in your weblog.

[via CGH]

I finally have an Internet connection at my new apartment. Unfortunately, my ethernet cable decided to up and die some time during the movie, so it took me a little while to isolate the problem. But it's working now.

The Internet was glad to have me back, too. I could tell. In the ten minutes I had to use Internet Explorer to register, The little Internet welcome wagon brought me a bug/adware/spam that popped up every five minutes trying to convince me that there was a problem with my registry and that I just had to go to this website to download their free registry program.

Yeah, like I'm going to trust these people with my registry.

What's particularly disturbing is that (a) it looked very much like a system message (it was Windows Messenger Spam, if you're familiar with that) and (b) it very strongly implied that Microsoft endorsed their product. While it was pretty apparent to me that it was not on the up-and-up, this is a strikingly dishonest way of advertising.

And with gaul, too. If I were Microsoft, I'd sue their brains out.

Of course, if I was Microsoft, I'd be disinclined to let people send messages over the system messenger.

So what do I know?

This has got to stop.

I stopped by a convenience store on the way home to get a bite to eat and a Mountain Dew. The prices went as follows:

Can (12 fl oz): $0.79
Bottle (20 fl oz): $1.19
1-Liter Bottle (34 fl oz): $0.79

What's wrong with this picture? Why is PepsiCo giving out such deals on the 1-liter bottles? I know it isn't this particular convenience store and I know it isn't a fluke because I've been seeing this coming incrementally for some time now. For a long while the 20oz were $1.09 and the 1-liter $1.15. Occasionally you could get 2-for-1 deals on the liter. But almost never on the convenient 20oz bottles.

While the utilitarian in me says that I should just get the 1-liter bottle, there are two problems with this: First, I don't want that much, but if I buy it I'll drink it and that is to be avoided. Second, the 1-liter bottle doesn't fit in my car cup-holster-dealie-bob.

Ah-ha! So in actuallity I'm paying extra for the ability to put that bottle in my cup-holster-dealie-bob. It's a convenience thing. I suppose so. But the fact that they are willing to sell more for less is just rubbing their profit margins in my face ("Dude, this stuff is so cheap that we can make a solid profit by selling you 175% as much for 75% the price, but we're not gonna cause you're such a loser that you'll pay more and more for the 20oz bottle.")

Of course this has always been the case with the cola fountains, but that's never bothered me.

This, for some reason, I find the slightest bit frustrating.

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1. The biggest myth in American politics is that people are more sympathetic to economically conservative arguments and socially liberal ones. In fact, the opposite is true.

2. If it were up to me, we would blow up our public school system and start completely over, building a new one.

3. The government ought to withhold housing loans in overpopulated areas to encourage people to move inland.

4. Different majors at public universities ought to come with different price tags. No way should the state should not chip in the same amount for an art history major as they do for an engineering major.

5. Any time I see myself consenting to government control or regulation, I have a vision in my head of the Devil and myself making a deal with it. Giving up consistent libertarianism may be even harder than giving up smoking.

6. I believe that "In God We Trust" ought to removed from our currency just as I believe the Confederate emblem ought to be removed from the flags of southern states. To the greatest extent possible, out official emblems ought not be things that alienate folks. And in the case of currency it is, even while perhaps Constitutionally permissable, Constitutionally dubious.

7. I'm a bit more cynical than I was a year ago, which is funny because it's usually worse in election years.

8. There are areas in which I am more sympathetic to the European view than the American view. Vacation/leisure is one of them.

9. Some days I wonder if I'm politically conservative to compensate for my frequent inability in my personal life to come to a conclusion and back it up with conviction. I believe that we all have political views that actually have nothing to do with the issues at hand. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out which ones mine are.

10. I think "hypocrisy" barely edges out "(un)patriotic" as the most pointless, empty, and misused word in any political discussion. Both are designed to silence their opponents without actually addressing their arguments. Internally, I honestly rank them with Nazi/Hitler references.

Not since American Kaiser have I seen a blog as well-considered, thought-provoking, and intelligent overlooked blog as Sammler's Stone City. Sammler unfortunately doesn't have the time to keep a blog going full-time, so he's looking to join forces with another blogger. Anyone interested in having a thoughtful, intelligent conservative co-blogger that can contribute 2-3 meaty posts a week, please contact him. If not, spreading the word would itself be helpful. More info here.

Hon. Gov. Rick Perry, of the Great State of Texas:

As it happens, my fiance and I were moving quickly down I-10 from Louisiana in order to get to the airport in time to catch a flight. We were running a bit behind and, as happens sometimes, my bladder was not living up to its full potential. Somewhere at around the state line I told my fiance that I needed to take a pit-stop. She said that she was just waiting for an X-miles-to-Houston sign, and so I, in increasing anguish, waited for same.

I'm not sure if you realize this, Mr. Governor, but there are no X-miles-to-Houston signs for at least an hour inside Texas. In fact, by the time you see one, you are closer to Houston than you are to the state border. There is, of course, the 857 Miles to El Paso sign that brings attention to the geographic length of the state. I think it's cool, but a Houston one might be a little more useful. Or even better yet, the 2 Miles to Vidor sign that appears a mile or so after the Welcome to Vidor sign. I think it can be assumed that you are reasonably close to Vidor at that point and while that may be intuitive, how many miles away from Houston you are is less so.

The Vidor or El Paso real estate on their respective signs could easily contain the geographical information that would have set my bladder free. I strongly urge you to consider, Mr. Governor, putting those signs to better use for future travellers.

Thank you,

Author of the Blog You Do Not Read