The Grich

Richard Saul Wurman's 19.20.21

2010-07-15T15:27:00.000-07:00

Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED conference, gave the keynote speech at the ESRI International Users conference in San Diego this year.

His address focused on his 19.20.21 campaign, which highlights the increasing urbanization of our planet, with 19 cities of 20 million or more people in the 20th century. He is working on a series of television programs called Cities: Understanding the Way We Live, to highlight the move toward greater urbanization around the globe.
...
As part of the 19.20.21 project, which includes Wurman, Jon Kamen and Jack Dangermond as partners, the group is using comparative analysis to understand the urban patterns. Interesting patterns emerge when analyzing the metrics of a city where divisions of geography such as hills or neighborhoods provide distinct patterns of citizens that also affect transportation, and other elements that all affect the quality of life.
Part of the vision of 19.20.21 is the idea of an urban observatory where the information will be organized centrally so that we can all realize that we’re not a planet of countries, but a planet of cities. The creation of a common metric and a means to view each city and compare them in a standard template will help people understand issues of sustainability.

I found this last part fascinating. Recall if you will that most of the history of many can be described geographically in terms of city-states. It's a modern phenomenon that we have fixed boundaries for countries and nations. Even empires, like the Romans, Greeks, Persians, and even later European dynasties, existed as collections of cities with the intervening rural lands protected by armies. But boundaries were not definite.

So what will the world look like in the future with our population continuing to amass in highly populated central cities? Will we revert to a more city-centric political model?
I highly doubt it, considering the information technology that exists to keep track of said boundaries, and the growing international morality that you shouldn't mess with those said boundaries.

Using geography to find Osama bin Laden

2009-02-18T13:48:00.001-08:00

Geographers at UCLA have been busy using GIS analysis to narrow down where bin Laden might be hiding.
Here's the analytic synopsis:

Essentially, the study generates hiding-place location probabilities. It starts with "distance decay theory," which holds that the odds are greater that the person will be found close to where he or she was last seen.

Then the researchers add the "island biographic theory," which maintains that locales with more resources — palm trees for tropical birds and electricity for wealthy fugitives — are likelier to draw creatures of interest.

"Island biographic theory suggests bin Laden would end up in the biggest and least isolated city of the region," Gillespie says, one among about 26 towns within a 20-mile distance of Tora Bora.

That's according to the AP article. Of course this isn't definitive. One of the things that makes distance decay theory, used in wildlife habitat studies, not as easy when trying to find people is that this is a single person, and people tend to be able to hide in non-ideal environments. But it's an interesting exercise.
Hat tip to DirectionsMag for the link.

Sealand

2009-02-18T13:40:00.000-08:00

All I know is, when is the movie about this guy going to come out.

In 1967, Paddy Roy Bates was just another run-of-the-mill Army major-cum-fisherman-cum-pirate radio operator, minding his own business and blithely disregarding British broadcasting law. But the British - sticklers for things like laws (especially British ones) - were none too keen on Bates' activites, and they convicted him on a charge of radio piracy. Now, it's common knowledge that getting tried and convicted in a court of law leaves a man with two clear options: 1) go to jail; or 2) abscond to an abandoned WWII-era naval defense platform in international waters, claim you've founded a new nation and declare yourself royal prince. It takes a certain sort of person to determine that, of these two options, the latter is clearly superior. And Bates was that sort of person.

The great part about that teaser paragraph is that the article, and the story, only gets better from there.

Living the Map

2008-10-24T15:45:00.001-07:00

Check this cool website out. This guy’s site is called “Living the Map.” He’s on task to take a job in each of the 50 states of our great nation. And he’s learning very interesting things about the various people’s who live around the country. He’s going to get a broader prospective on what living in the USA is like than anyone out there (perhaps the current run of candidates should phone this guy up and ask a few vital questions).

Election maps 2008

2008-10-24T15:40:00.001-07:00

Usually I look in vain for good maps of the election cycle, but with the proliferation of on-line mapping these days, you knew we’d run into some. There’s a litany of KML regarding the election this year, but what I wanted was some nice maps showing distributions that you don’t normally see.

What a welcome post Aaron over at GIS Dev Café has produced, looking for the same thing I am.

His post today is about a site called Patchwork Nation (CS Monitor) that has a real nice map of different demographic groups around the country. As simplified as it is, I’m intrigued by the categories and their distribution. Take a look, and then take a look at the maps on Voting Machine Technology, Advertisement Spending, and Campaign Finance.

The ad spending maps were very interesting. Looks like both party’s candidates are spending the bulk of their money in the industrial lake states. My first reaction was that we out here in the wee west have been left out and forgotten, but then remembering what heavy spending on TV ads and mailings looks like, perhaps we’re better off.

Big Brother Tech

2008-10-02T16:40:00.001-07:00

Lately I’ve been seeing many articles and blog posts talking about more and more technology being used to track and pinpoint you and aspects of your life. I work in an industry that when the technology is being applied to businesses and government, the thought pattern is that the more detail you can get, the better you can understand, research and track the people you serve, the better and more efficient your business or government entity can be.

However, like all things technological, we have to be careful with what we invent. Often times the human tendency is to get all excited about what we CAN do, and we ignore the question of whether we SHOULD do it.

Take for instance this story in the Wall Street Journal (hat tip to Slash Geo) on using web technology to better pinpoint your IP address. Now, for the time being they can only narrow your location down to the city you are connecting from, but I notice that there’s interest in narrowing that field.

Or perhaps think about how location technology is used in transportation. Failing to get popular support for a national ID program, Australia is mulling the creation of a nationwide automatic number plate recognition system. “In addition to being able to recognize plates, the system would also collect images of drivers and passengers with high enough resolution for identification purposes.” How scary does that sound?

Think about it. At the moment you have honorable government workers and police investigators dreaming of the ease of locating people when they need to, like criminals. At the back end you have a system where the powers that be can find YOU any time your driving around and track your movements. Am I being paranoid?

Aerial photography is now being used to help tax assessors review your property and make adjustments to the value of your home and land. On it’s surface this isn’t a big deal. Housing prices are in great flux right now, with the mortgage crisis we’ve been dealing with (and will continue to deal with). However, the more our private property (as well as ourselves) can be scrutinized and tallied by those who wish to extract whatever taxes they can, the harder it’s going to be to function.

Take Atlantic City, New Jersey. They recently implemented a system where the tax assessor’s department reviews photos that can spot a new porch on someone’s house that they didn’t take out a permit on, and subsequently fine the home owner. I understand the permit process, and why home construction is coded. However I’ve made small improvements on my home, for which I’ve been told I should have had a permit for. The permit and code process was supposed to be designed for safer houses, not to help fund the government.

And yet that’s what I’m seeing here.

At stake is an untold amount of tax revenue. Cape May County appears to be ground zero on the issue as it was one of the first in the nation to buy into the system, purchasing its first pictures in 2003.

While Van Drew ponders writing a law to limit the uses of Pictometry, Cape May County Tax Administrator George R. Brown III is already using it to adjust assessments on farms. He doesn't consider it a Big Brother tactic. He calls it "a great assessment tool," one of many to make sure people pay their fair share of taxes.

So is the permit process about managing safety and construction codes, or is it about money?
In one of the first real disputes to this system, a farmer noted that when informed by the county that they found she wasn’t farming enough of her land, and therefore would have to pay more taxes (farmers have to farm enough of a percentage of their land to get the tax break), and “Brown disputed the number of acres of pumpkins growing when the pictures were taken in March.

‘We don't grow pumpkins in March,’ Rea said.”

This, of course, reminded me of the current use of red-light cameras starting to proliferate around the country. Despite the growing evidence that they actually are increasing accidents at intersections (although they differ in kind), and that they are subject to wide abuse (adjusting the yellow timing to catch more offenders) they still continue to grow in number. The only conclusion we are left with is that municipalities that implement red-light camera systems do so for the money they generate, not because of actual safety.

All these technologies are neat, and can lead to much benefit to our society. However, their implementation and general acceptance by the powers that be concerns me. Where’s the oversight? Where are the checks and balances? This isn’t a Bush thing. No one person or group of people sets out to create Orwell’s Big Brother. I didn’t get the impression when reading that book that the society he created was the work of one person. The closest thing to that was the Soviet Union and it’s satellites. That wasn’t the work of one person either (although there were a few strong personalities involved). It’s the little steps forward, that ordinary people don’t detect, that you have to watch out for and think carefully about before just implementing them outright.

Paul Newman, enabling GIS for disadvantaged communities

2008-10-02T10:20:00.001-07:00

I had heard that Paul Newman had died this last weekend, and was reflecting on his vast career as an actor. Many of you know how active he was as a philanthropist and an entrepreneur (Newman’s Own brand of whatever). However this one surprised me because his generosity enabled those in my industry to help others around the world.

Like drew Stephens, Director, The GIS Institute, Service at Sea I was also saddened this past week-end to hear about the passing of Paul Newman. What I wasn't aware of was how Newman reached so many people through his generosity, including the GIS Community. In a touching letter, Stephens described how in 2006, Newman's funding for The GIS Institute provided the seed capital to run our first proof-of-concept trip "Service for Africa", a six week project that delivered GIS training for over 100 people from 20 different conservation organizations in five African countries.

I didn’t always agree with what Paul Newman was about, but he stands as an example of what people in advantageous positions should be doing with their wealth.

Google road network change

2008-09-25T11:11:00.001-07:00

Beware the road network on Google Maps! So says Jonathan Crowe, who lives in Canada and has noticed that since Google has switched it’s contract for road network data from Navteq to Tele-Atlas, the road network has gotten a little more inaccurate.

But there’s a problem: Chad complains that the change has added a heavy dose of wrong to Google Maps. Based on my experience, I agree with him; since the changeover, I’ve noticed a number of changes that actually introduced error in a place where the mapping data was previously correct. (Presumably this was well known among users of the mobile and API products, but now it’s on the main site.)

He provides snapshots of some of the errors he’s already found. Perhaps you can find some too. So beware when using Google for the time being.

Badger Creek Wilderness

2008-09-15T22:26:00.000-07:00

No, that other Badger Creek. Yes there are many creeks and rivers in the United States with that name. In researching our hike this summer I had to remember to insert "Oregon" or Mt Hood National Forest" in my query or I would get some po-dunk creek in the south or something. Actually most of the time I was taken to the beautiful Badger Creek basin in the San Juan mountains of Colorado. Must go there sometime.
But anyway.

Before we got to the trailhead, which was on the east side of the Cascades in the dry high desert, we found this cool pioneer cemetery. Drive down highway 397 from the Dalles toward Dufer and you might see it on a bare hill. It's still being used, as we saw some new additions. But it was the old additions that were really cool. Check the photo at left.

The Badger Creek basin is in a designated wilderness on the east side of the Mt. Hood National Forest. Which means it's on the far side from Portland. Which means less people. Well, I thought that anyway. We were alone for most of the first day. I took this trip a bit differently than most, I suspect, because my plan was to start from the east side, walk up the creek to the lake which is it's source, Badger Lake. We saw no one on the trail all day. I was all set to enjoy some pristine lake tucked nicely inside a wilderness. All alone. Well, except for all the local yokels who know that there's a road easement into the lake. Yes, there were lots of people. People staying up for all hours cackling at some joke that was lost on us. Because we were trying to sleep.

Badger Creek at the trail head

So here's the lake at the right. Very nice. I'm sure there's some nice fishing. I enjoyed its refreshing coolness before we left on the 2nd day. It was brisk, but the footing was sandy instead of that muck you get in many alpine lakes. Turns out this lake isn't quite natural. Earthen dam keeps most of it in.

The object of the 2nd day was to climb to Lookout Peak (lots of imagination was wasted on naming features in this area). By far the highest peak east of Mt. Hood in this area, on a good day you'll get fantastic views of Mt. Hood, the high desert, and if the air is clear you'll get Mt. Jefferson and the Sisters to the south, Mt Adams and Mt. Rainier to the north.

To the left is the view of Mt. Hood from the top of Lookout Peak. It looks much bigger in person.

Just in front of Mt. Hood you can see a ridge running left to right. It looks a bit brown, and indeed was the site of a big fire more than a year ago. Perhaps two, I don't recall. I do recall that we didn't know that when we set out to hike that ridge and the valley behind it last September. It's hard to find your way sometimes when you're stepping through 6 inches of ash.

Let's forget about last year now, shall we.

To the right is a view back down to our campsite, Badger Lake. Again from Lookout.
There were so many wonderful views, and these fantastic spires on the ridgeline that we got to walk along and then underneath. Needless to say I didn't get any really good shots of them.

I'll just leave you with a shot I took of Badger creek and a tributary joining it near where we camped on the 2nd and final night in this lesser known area on the far side of Mt. Hood. Well worth the effort, though.

Coda: You can drive pretty close to Lookout Mountain's peak and then hike in a short 2 or 3 mile road to the top. Consult your Forest Service map or Green Trails map (Mt. Hood and Flag Point maps should do ya).
Check out some of the other wildernesses I've posted on. Indian Heaven in Washington. Columbia (Hatfield) Wilderness, Bull of the Woods Wilderness, Mt Hood Wilderness.

Hurricane coverage

2008-09-02T13:22:00.000-07:00

The Map Room has some links to sites that are following the hurricanes using mapping technology. On the tail end of Gustav is the tropical storm Hanna, which could be a hurricane by as early as tomorrow.

Of interest is whether or not the RNC convention will be adversely affected by this. Sorry, I know that people are having to deal with the effects of the hurricane down in Texas, Louisiana and Florida, but comparatively these aren’t as strong as some in the last few years. Gustav has missed any major population centers and Hanna probably will too (Jacksonville is a likely target though). The damage is relatively low and yet all the major networks and news stations have been non-stop in the coverage of this, completely avoiding the RNC. Are they purposefully avoiding political coverage this week?

Invade Canada!

2008-08-29T15:33:00.001-07:00

Many people are aware that the border between the U.S. and Canada is the longest unprotected border between two nations in the world. In politics and foreign policy, trade and the like, Canada and the U.S. are viewed as friends and partners (for the most part, there are squabbles as in any friendship).

Yet, how many of you know about all the small wars waged between the U.S. and Canada over the past 2 centuries. I wasn’t aware of all of them, and Catholicgauze takes a short page to list them out. Seems there were battles during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, where some Americans thought that taking Canada away from the British was a moral imperative.

However, in that time, most of the fighting men were militia, and wouldn’t fight outside their home state.

There were some other less known “wars,” such as the Lower Canada Rebellion, Patriot war, Aroostook war (Canada took part of Maine), and the San Juan Island War, which had to be settled by arbitration with Kaiser Wilhelm.

But the one that caught my funny bone was the Fenian Raids:

The United States was upset at the British tact support for the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. There was one way the Americans could strike back without risk of major backlash: terrorism. The Fenian Brotherhood was an Irish republican/terrorist organization based in the United States. A Brotherhood song ending with "And we'll go and capture Canada, for we've nothing else to do" sums up the mood of Irish who just wanted to kill some British.

How did that strike me as funny, you ask?

Gus: Canadians are always dreaming up a lotta ways to ruin our lives. The metric system, for the love of God! Celsius! Neil Young!

Edwin S. Simon, NBS News Anchor: The Canadians. They walk among us. William Shatner. Michael J. Fox. Monty Hall. Mike Meyers. Alex Trebek. All of them Canadians. All of them here.

Edwin S. Simon, NBS News Anchor: It is the height of six American football fields, or five Canadian football fields. As if Canadian football really counts.

Edwin S. Simon, NBS News Anchor: Think of your children pledging allegiance to the maple leaf. Mayonnaise on everything. Winter 11 months of the year. Anne Murray - all day, every day.

Smiley: When have you ever heard anyone say, "Honey, lets stay in and order Canadian food"?

U.S. President: I want to say to Prime Minister MacDonald: Surrender her pronto, or we'll level Toronto.

U.S. President: You sold control of American missiles to a foreign country?
R.J. Hacker, President of Hacker Dynamics: If you can call Canada foreign.
Smiley: Or a country.

Boomer: There's a time to think, and a time to act. And this, gentlemen, is no time to think.

RCMP Officer at Headquarters: I don't know what you're talking aboot, eh?
Kabral: Aboot! It's ABOUT! And what's with this 'eh' business?
Roy Boy: [pointing a gun] We have ways of making you pronounce the letter O, pal.

Solzhenitsyn is dead

2008-08-18T16:01:00.001-07:00

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian dissident and author. 1918-2008. Stalin couldn't kill him. The Russian Gulags didn't end him. Cancer had no hold on him. But time finally caught up with him.

I remember reading the Gulag Archipelago in my early 20s. It was a daunting book (and that was just volume 1) but I couldn’t put it down at times. The sheer disregard for humanity and justice during the Stalin years is just breathtaking. Comparisons to things like Guantanamo as the American "gulag" fall about as short as trying to compare Bush to Hitler or Stalin. You may not like his policies, but you're belittling what Hitler was and what he tried to do. It's like comparing the kid who stole a pack of bubble gum to the guy who broke down the door, shot the store keeper and emptied the cash register. If you need some perspective, read the book.

Repose on political economics

2008-08-13T11:43:00.001-07:00

I’ve been busy at work and home over the past week, but I thought it was time I responded to a commenter last week on this post about Obama and the politics of change (or not so much change).

The comment is in response to this part of my post:

But should you announce to the world that you’re an economist while endorsing and campaigning for a guy who’s proposing to increase the size of government by hundreds of billions of dollars? And with all the tax cuts he's proposing, is anything he says on the issue even realistic? What are they teaching economists these days?

Here’s his response to that:

So economics is a solved field then? There's only one valid viewpoint and strict adherence to it is the only means by which to proceed in the field.

Look, the Chicago school (and rational choice theory in general) is as dominant today as it was at any other period - but that doesn't mean it's the sole "logical" stricture within the discipline.

Furthermore, that's variance within chosen theory. In terms of application you essentially assume that anyone who does not embrace libertarian viewpoints is "wrong" or doesn't know what s/he's talking about; and that's just flat out wrong.
It's a bogus assumption and either you know it and enjoy basking in the comfort of solipsism as justification or you simply have no understanding of the issue you are actually addressing.

Ok. He’s got me on a good point. I’m not an expert in economics, but I do know a little about it. I do realize that there are many different theories regarding economics, and that none of them operate in the real world. Theories are theoretical systems mean to try and explain what’s happening in the real world. Sometimes you come closer than others, but most of the time you can’t completely explain how the world works with just a theoretical explanation.

The commenter guesses, because of my disdain for government intervention in the economy and dissing of Republicans on that point, that I’m a libertarian, which is only sort of true. Like most Democrats and Republicans (and Libertarians) my roundish peg doesn’t quite fit into that square hole. Nor does my belief in the Chicago or neoclassical economic theory. Like Keynesians who believe that there’s a balance between government and the market, I believe there’s a roll for government in the economy, and it’s an important one, but a very limited one (unlike Keynesians).

To me, it seems that most Democrat and Republican politicians subscribe to the Keynesian schools of economics in varying amounts. Daily they call for government action regarding some economic arena, but mostly this is just political self-serving behavior. Politicians believe that the public likes to see them doing something about people’s economic woes, even if that action is detrimental to the system as a whole.

Economists, whatever you might say about them, are generally not short term thinkers. Each action within an economic system has far reaching implications over the long term. Politicians are by nature short-term thinkers, and therefore, regardless of whatever economic theory they claim to hold to, they will instead act in accordance to political gain, and will easily leave good economic theory in the dumpster like an abandoned infant.

Which is why I think it’s unfair of the commenter to complain about why I scoffed at the guy on the street. It’s not that I feel an economist is foolish to vote for one candidate or another, it’s that I think it’s foolish for an economist to promote any Democrats, or Republicans, because his education and experience tells him that any one candidates economic goals are more reasonable. At this point I don’t find either Obama’s or McCain’s platforms reasonable in their entirety, and am not all that confident that the reasonable portions of their platforms will ever be implemented.

I need to respond to another part of the comment:

I read your blog because geography is cool, but if you are going to talk about a specific field as if you hold expert knowledge in it - actually do.

I hear you there, and I’ve been a bit more political in my posts than in the past. It’s way past time for me to talk about some of the places I’ve visited recently and geographic issues I’ve been reading about.

But dude, this isn’t a geography magazine. This is my blog. I do think geography is cool, but sometimes I don’t have anything geographic to say, but have some very political things to say, and I’m going to say them. Free country and all.

Ossetia, Georgia and Russia

2008-08-11T13:54:00.001-07:00

If you haven’t been watching the Olympics or the news you might not be aware that the spirit of international cooperation and brotherly love hasn’t caught on in some parts of the world. Specifically the area of Southern Ossetia in the country of Georgia.

Georgia has had trouble from that region for some time. There are Ossetians who would like to kick off the yoke of those harsh democratic masters and prefer their friends over in Russia. Not all the Ossetians fell that way.

Georgian President Saakashvili recently tried to engineer a cease fire, but Russia decided that they needed to intervene anyway and sent troops and tanks into a sovereign country. We can just leave the talk about how Russia is just there as a peace keeping force, they’ve acted more like an occupying force.

Russian forces seized several towns and a military base deep in western Georgia on Monday, opening a second front in the fighting. Georgia's president said his country had been effectively cut in half with the capture of the main east-west highway near Gori.

Catholicguaze has a good set of Google maps/earth data for us. Check out where all this is happening.
Also, check out what Google did with the map related to the story. I didn’t hear anything about Russian tanks outside of Atlanta. (Update: checked the Google story, and they haven’t improved it much. Now it points to Vienna, Austria).

Imus map of Oregon

2008-08-11T13:16:00.001-07:00

If you are into maps, as I am, and you live in Oregon (or Alaska by the way) you need to know this guy’s name.

Imus' original Oregon map, which has sold 45,000 copies, won "best of show" in an American Congress on Surveying & Mapping contest. The revised version was nearly two years in the making.

That’s David Imus, not the radio talk show guy. I have an Imus of the Bull of the Woods wilderness map he made, and it’s very pretty. I probably wouldn’t take one of these on a backpacking trip, but might mount it on the wall.

His Alaska map also won some acclaim I’m told. Like the blurb above, he just revised his Oregon map that won all those awards. Suitable for mounting.

Gas and hot air

2008-08-06T17:35:00.001-07:00

Are gasoline prices too high? Certainly oil and gas have risen in price quite a bit over the past few years, and politicians waste no time pointing fingers for personal advantage. However there isn’t much our government can do without making life worse for us, and even less the President can do.

Not that they won’t spend time talking about how they’ll all make life better for us.

That smell on the nation's highways isn't just car exhaust. It's also the rank odor of political populism, as John McCain and Barack Obama both try to score points with dubious energy ideas.

The unfortunate end result of this is that people believe them, and so they’ll keep talking this way. They might even act on it, and that wouldn’t be good. So here’s my proposition, and I hope that this gets out, so pass it on. Let’s do nothing. Really. Don’t drive everywhere. Don’t buy stupid items made from petroleum products that you don’t really need (and since oil is used in most plastics, that’s pretty much everything). And most of all don’t push your congressmen to do anything about it.

This isn’t a partisan message. Republicans are certainly rabid puppies when it comes to public attention and they want to get elected as much as the next politician, and so fall into the trap of assuming that the government should do something whenever the people whine about their lifestyles taking a hit.

A House Republican leader is lambasting President Bush on his decision not to call Congress back into session to deal with the energy crisis.
In a legislative update sent to GOP members and staff on Tuesday, Republican House Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) accused "Beijing George" Bush of throwing House Republicans "under the bone-dry bus" on his way to the Olympics in China.

In truth Bush did what he needed to do, or rather all he really has the power to do without creating more wasteful bureaucracy, and that’s remove administrative roadblocks to more domestic oil extraction and production. The ball is in Congress’ court, and that seems to make them uncomfortable.

Perhaps we could stick it to the oil companies. After all they’re just charging us more because they’re making huge profits, not because, you know, oil actually costs more right now. Oh, wait, I guess Obama is already proposing that.

Making Exxon surrender money that is now falling into its lap would not necessarily affect its longer-term plans or incentives. Indeed, some of Big Oil's "windfall" already will go to the government: The more profit the companies earn, the more corporate income tax they pay. But to add a five-year tax increase on top of that to pay for a one-year gift to voters would, indeed, increase the cost of doing business. That cost would be passed along in forgone investment in new production, lower dividends for pension funds and other shareholders, and higher prices at the pump -- thus socking it to the consumers whom the plan is supposed to help. If oil prices fall, there might be no windfall profits to tax. Then the Obama rebate would have to be paid for through spending cuts, taxes on something else or borrowing.

All and all, like the first article above talks about, is $4 per gallon gas really a bad thing? It certainly is reversing the American trend of frivolous driving and gas guzzling car purchases, and driving innovation in oil alternatives.

But legislators' knee-jerk tendencies to want to “fix” everything only makes government bigger and increasing the scope of government power over any sector of the economy will only hurt the economy in the long run.

I note that one of the driving issues of the campaign is how dissatisfied people are with the way Bush is handling the economy (read the article I’m linking to, it has a good overview of the positions of both candidates).

One thing is clear: Americans are worried about the economy and aren't pleased with Bush. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found 73 percent disapprove of the president's performance on the economy. That includes 41 percent of Republicans.

So are Republicans angry at Bush because he hasn’t set the government loose on the American economy so that everyone has a government allocated Ford pickup and Toyota Prius in the driveway and artificially set the price of gas down to $1.50 per gallon? No, of course not. Republicans are upset with Bush because he’s as spend-happy as any Republican of his generation (that’s what compassionate conservative mean back in 2000). Despite all the good levers he pulled to pick the economy back up after 9-11, he made it worse by championing large government programs and withholding the veto pen at every turn. I’m upset with Bush’s roll in the economy not because he’s not doing anything, but primarily because of what he DID do in increasing the government’s roll in people’s life.

So how is McCain, Obama, McCotter or anyone else calling for government action going to make our lives any better?

Who is Obama anyway?

2008-08-05T16:31:00.001-07:00

American election for President of this great country, episode number 44, seems to be underway, and I find myself actually thinking of, yes, voting for someone.

Anyone who has read this blog in the past will no doubt assume that I’m voting Republican based on my viewpoints. And you’re probably right, although I maintain that nothing is written in stone, and I’ve been known to vote Democrat or 3^rd party from time to time.

However, it’s not state secret that I’m leaning McCain. Sometimes it’s not about issues (although he’s worlds closer to my views on most major issues than Obama is), but character and consistency of position over long periods of time.

I’ve read articles about how he’s adopted poor children from south Asia, and I’ve noted that he doesn’t trumpet this fact. If for no other reason, I’d like the guy.

However, while I don’t think the world is going to end if the country elected a Democrat, I find it difficult to determine just what Obama believes and what he’ll be about if elected. Apparently I’m not the only one, as people on the left are having a tough time with it as well.

To earn the Democratic nomination, as Fred Thompson points out, Obama ran as George McGovern without the experience, a left-of-center politician who would meet unconditionally with Iran, pull us precipitously out of Iraq, prohibit new drilling for oil, and grow big government in Washington by all but a trillion dollars. In his general election TV ad debut, however, Obama pirouetted like Baryshnikov. With a commercial Mike Huckabee could have run in a Republican primary, Obama now emphasizes his commitment to strong families and heartland values, "Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses." In this yet unwritten chapter of his next autobiography, Obama tells us he is the candidate of "welfare to work" who supports our troops and "cut taxes for working families." The shift in his political personae has been startling. Obama has moved right so far and so fast, he could end up McCain's Vice-Presidential pick.

General-election Obama now billboards his doubts about affirmative action. He has embraced the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption saying, "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon...everything." He tells his party "Democrats are not for a bigger government." Oil drilling is a consideration. His FISA vote and abandonment of public campaign finance introduce us to an Obama of recent invention. And as he abandons his old identity for the new, breeding disenchantment among his formerly passionate left-of-center supporters and, equally, doubts among the center he courts, he risks becoming nothing at all, a candidate who is everything and nothing in the same moment. In one of the most powerful marketing books of the past few years, Authenticity, an exploration of our demand for what's real in an increasingly contrived world, authors Gilmore and Pine quote philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell about Al Gore. "Every attempt to regain authenticity," Crispin says, "only casts a new, infinitely repeated image through the hall of mirrors that is his political life and our media experience of that life." Those reflections set the authenticity of John McCain in high-relief. McCain has revealed himself to his core.

In the defining moment of his life, McCain was willing to give everything for one thing, and that one thing was his country. Contrast that with Obama, who has told America that he is "a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world." Obama is the talented salesman who seduced one state after another saying "Iowa, this is our moment," "Virginia, this is our moment," "Texas, this is our moment," and then tells Europe, "people of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment." How many times can Barack Obama sell the same moment to everyone, before he becomes Mel Brooks in "The Producers"? Who is Barack Obama? His campaign, as it reupholsters him before our eyes, says we can never know -- perhaps because Barack Obama does not know himself.

Dreams from My Father is a staggeringly beautiful book, lyrical, powerful and poetic. It is also the story of a man who has been many men, all named Barack Obama. In his own eyes, he is one race, but also another. He is an American, but also a Kenyan. He is from Hawaii and also the Kansas heartland. He is Harvard elite, then the Chicago streets. At times he decries the very clay from which he was made, only to remake himself again.

At each place and stage, as Barack Obama chronicles the chapters of his life, he tells us how he has re-invented himself, becoming the role he inhabits, though not falsely or in-authentically, like Bill Clinton. He actually seems to transform himself, becoming what must be next. He has been called distant, aloof and somewhat unapproachable, perhaps because we cannot approach what he does not have, a solid core. His soul seems to be molten and made up of dreams, which is at once breathtakingly inspiring and forbiddingly indeterminate. When this young man with the flowing, passionate core, when this candidate without the solid-center changes positions and transforms himself as we watch, it leaves Americans much more in doubt about who he is and how he would lead us. It also reveals an Obama of unapproachable arrogance and inestimable self-regard: He appears confident voters will appreciate his superiority regardless of where he journeys or what he becomes to meet his political ambitions.

So who is this guy. I tire of hearing about his Chicago days, and readers (all 2 of you) of this journal know that I usually just go through candidates platforms and try to pick out what they’re saying as opposed to where they’ve been. Unfortunately, I’m not sure in Obama’s case I can even do that and expect that he’ll follow the course he sets for himself in the campaign.

Side note. I was in San Francisco this weekend, and the Obama machine is in full tilt there, no surprise. We were walking on the Embarcadero and passed some people carrying signs and buttons and stuff and attempting to engage people. One guy saw us approaching with the kids and said something vague about how it was change for the kids or something. I must have looked at him funny, said something brush-offy like “sure, sure”, because he mentioned that he was an economist.

I audibly snorted. My wife made mention to me to just leave it alone, so I did. But should you announce to the world that you’re an economist while endorsing and campaigning for a guy who’s proposing to increase the size of government by hundreds of billions of dollars? And with all the tax cuts he's proposing, is anything he says on the issue even realistic? What are they teaching economists these days?

Not that Republican’s are rosy when you’re talking about economic sense, and if you’re voting for Obama because you want the government to do everything for you, or if you’re scared the Republicans are going to lock homosexuals up or invade Canada, that’s great. But don’t claim that it makes economic sense.

Although it was San Francisco, and it was Jerry Garcia’s birthday. The air did smell kinda herbal. Perhaps that explains it.

Brazilian, the language

2008-05-20T15:45:00.001-07:00

How about this, folks.

Portugal may have to recognise the inevitable by bowing to the economic and cultural predominance of Brazil, its former colony. The once proud imperial power is considering reforming its language to accommodate recent linguistic developments in the South American economic powerhouse, with which it shares a language.

There are some languages that are much more formalized and standardized than others. The French for instance have a standardizing body for all the Francophone nations of the world.

English, of course, doesn’t have that. You even get differences within countries like the US, much less the vast differences between countries that cause things like the spelling of “recognize” above (article is from the UK).

The proposal to be put before parliament on 15 May would standardise Portuguese around the world and change the spellings of hundreds of words in favour of the Brazilian versions. The measure is largely a response to commercial interests. But for the once proud imperial power, whose language is spoken by 230 million people worldwide, it is a blow to national pride comparable to Britons adopting American spellings and writing, say, "traveler" instead of "traveller".

There are several advantages for Portugal (or rather for Portuguese speaking people). One is that communication and marketing will be easier, as industries like publishing will be able to market more broadly. Internet searches will be easier, and Portugal hopes that the measure will “advance an old ambition of getting Portuguese adopted as an official language at the UN.”

Hat tip to Catholicgauze.

Reading the Post is torture

2008-05-20T14:05:00.001-07:00

What can I say about coercive interrogation techniques that hasn’t already been said a million times. I could tell you that I’m not sure about military detainee torture and it’s value in war-time. I’m sure there are studies out there, and some will say that it’s necessary to save lives, others will say that the techniques aren’t necessary and don’t work anyway.

But no one seems to really want to know whether they work or not. One side will say it’s OK because they don’t play by the rules anyway and the other says that as decent human beings we shouldn’t stoop to the level of the extremists we’re in conflict with. I’m of the opinion that we need to know the facts and have a national discussion on this that doesn’t include political partisan bickering.

However, the press never helps with this. Exactly what are various agencies doing in the battle with extremists? Well, you might get two different stories from these two sources.

Washington Post:

Interrogation practices -- including the use of dogs, sleep deprivation and simulated drowning or water-boarding -- repeatedly created friction between FBI agents and military leaders.

Bloomberg:

Fine's audit doesn't assess the conduct of CIA or military interrogators and says FBI agents never witnessed the use of simulated drowning, or water-boarding.

So the Post seems to want you to believe that water-boarding is and has been going on, when actual official reports and statements by the administration admit that it hasn’t been used in many years. The report from the FBI seems to confirm that, but if you read the Post

Also, I again note that both use the excuse of Abu Ghraib as the reason for the FBI’s new rules that require agents to report when they witness abuse. Even though what happened there wasn’t sanctioned, nor was it for the purpose of interrogation.

And what is the FBI doing in all these countries anyway? I thought the FBI was a domestic investigation force?

All and all, to get back to the point, physical coercion has been a part of military interrogation in times of war for as long as there’s been war. The stuff they’re talking about here – snarling dogs and sleep deprivation – is pretty tame compared to what was done to Americans in the Vietnam war, or what Islamic extremists do to those they don’t like. So shouldn’t this about having a national discussion, not about trying to nail the administration for something else? What’s acceptable? Is anything?

Violence in South Africa

2008-05-20T14:04:00.001-07:00

There’s been a rash of Xenophobia in South Africa.

The spate of violent attacks targeting foreigners in South Africa has caused an estimated 13,000 people to flee from their homes to police stations and other havens, local Red Cross officials said.

At least 22 people have been killed in the week-long spree of violence, police have said. The attacks and looting has drawn condemnation from South African officials and other African leaders.

I take it that the leaders are condemning racism, but this doesn’t seem like ideological racism. I wonder if this is more vast uncomfortableness with the mix of people who are not trying to assimilate. I mean sure, there’s probably some racism going on, but when you get mass violence and protesting from ordinary citizens, you have to ask, “what started the big bang?”

Many of the foreigners are from other countries, most prominently Zimbabwe, because they are fleeing from massive violence or oppression. They don’t want to be there, but kinda have to right now. What kind of resentment do you think that’s causing?

I’m looking forward to more perspectives from people who understand that region more.

Perspective on economics

2008-05-19T15:59:00.001-07:00

Here’s an interesting statement about economics.

There is nothing complicated about finance. It is based on old people lending to young people. Young people invest in homes and businesses; aging people save to acquire assets on which to retire. The new generation supports the old one, and retirement systems simply apportion rights to income between the generations. Never before in human history, though, has a new generation simply failed to appear.

This is a response to some complaining by the German President about the present economic downturn (some would call it a crisis). However the author wanted to point out that the larger elephant in the room isn’t how western capitalism functions and how corrupt it must be, but how unbalanced Europe has gotten demographically, how that stress on supporting the aging population makes the economic downturn worse, and how that’s going to lead to an even worse crisis.

Early Gaelic discovery of America

2008-05-19T15:17:00.001-07:00

Hi. Me again.
If you’ve read stuff I’ve put here before, you know that I have some affinity toward geography. And as such, the study of explorers is particularly interesting, although I admit I haven’t sailed that westerly much in my academic or private life.

Sometime in the past I told of a possible alternate theory regarding the naming of America. It was the British trader Richard Amerike, Dutch by birth, but English nevertheless. It is now thought that he possibly traded across the North Atlantic and even had a trading post or two along the harsh northern coasts of what’s now Canada.

So I went out and bought a book on Amerike, so I’ll let you all know how that turns out.
But, you say, does that mean that we should look to the Brits as the discoverers of America? Well, depends on what you mean. There are many stories and legends of peoples finding lands that are now thought to be parts of the Americas, including this story of St. Brendan of Ireland in the 6^th century returning from many sea voyages beyond the known world at the time.

The Voyage is often ignored by historians of exploration because it is considered a folk-tale. However, the Voyage has far fewer fantastic details than a standard Irish legend and many of these are best read as confused accounts of real events: a crystal tower (an iceberg); the gates of hell (an Icelandic volcano); the ocean where you could see into the depths (a coral sea); the sluggish ocean (the Sargasso Sea).

Giving the Voyage the benefit of the doubt, and using the information about the islands Brendan visits, it is possible to draw a series of itineraries that take the saint around the northern two thirds of the Atlantic: the first, St Kilda, the Faeroes, Madeira, the Azores, the Faeroes; the second, the Faeroes, Greenland; the third, the Caribbean, Madeira; the fourth, an iceberg, Iceland, Jan Mayen Island, Iceland, Rockall, the Faeroes; the fifth, the Faeroes and America. The distances given in the text - the Voyage’s author describes the journey in terms of days - approximately fit these itineraries.

Apparently, once Christianity was brought to Ireland, monks got inspired by tales of solitary worship of monks in other parts of the world, such as in deserts and mountains. Well, since in Ireland it’s pretty hard to get away from people, the monks turned to the one wilderness that the emerald island has in abundance: the Atlantic ocean.

Seems the monks were not very good navigators, but instead put themselves out to sea, raised a sail and let God take over. There are stories of Irish monks landing on shores all over the Atlantic that was known at the time, but it stands to reason that some would end up visiting Iceland, Greenland and the like.

Truly there are many stories and histories of peoples who might have visited this continent well before Columbus. The Vikings, Carthaginians, Egyptians, Arabs, Jewish Diaspora and even Pics are thought to have had the ability of getting boats over to the Western Hemisphere. There’s even some archeological evidence in South America that some of these cultures might have made it prior to the Roman Empire (although they didn’t get back).

As for Columbus and the title of discoverer of the Americas, you can make the charge that Columbus' voyage opened the doors to general knowledge of the new world, and therefore is the "official" discoverer, even if he wasn't the first one from Europe or Asia to land on our shores.

Truly, there’s so much we don’t know about history. With an ever changing knowledge of our past do we ever get to say with definitive authority that we truly know what happened at any time in the distant past?

PDOT bike commuter month

2008-04-25T08:46:00.001-07:00

The Portland Dept of Transportation is having an entire month of events in May for bike commuters or potential bike commuters. Suck it up and get on that pedal machine. Portland is commonly known as one of, if not the, most bike-friendly cities in the nation. I’ve been riding my bike to work for years (off and on) and can attest to that.

Photos of galaxies

2008-04-24T11:49:00.001-07:00

As if yesterday’s photo gallery of cities at night weren’t enough, check out the largest gallery of Hubble telescope photos I’ve seen in a while. Galaxies Gone Wild!

Cities at night

2008-04-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

For your viewing pleasure. Cities at night from space.

McCain, the fighter pilot

2008-04-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

Another perspective on John McCain.

Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do--voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's.

John McCain might not square with all of your conservative (or liberal) viewpoints, but he knows something about honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self discipline, responsibility and respect for our national institutions. I don't think the Democrats can attack his service record like they did with Bush in 96. And note that now that neither Dem candidate has a military history it won't seem as important this time around. Will they even try and downplay it?

Riots in Egypt

2008-04-08T17:19:00.001-07:00

There’s rioting in the streets. In Egypt in a town called Mahalla, but it’s starting to reach out to other parts of the country.

It all started two days ago, when a nationwide strike was called by a number of political parties and worker movements to protest their low income, the skyrocketing cost of living, and the open corruption and blatant nepotism of the Egyptian government. All eyes that day were on Mahalla, which was supposed to kick-start the strike by having its 30,000 textile factory workers go to the factory and stage a sit-in. The security forces in charge immediately rounded up the strike leaders, pressuring some of the weaker ones to accept a compromise. They also arrested and isolated every other strike organizer who wouldn’t budge. The government forced the workers to work at the point of a gun, and announced that the strike was canceled. This rang true until the workers got off work and found their union leaders detained and arrested. They then started confronting the security forces, which lead to clashes that lasted till midnight that day and led to two casualties and some 95 arrests.

The following day, yesterday, around 2,000 demonstrators demonstrated peacefully in front of the police station, demanding the release of their detained co-workers, relatives, and friends. The Egyptian police responded by shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at the demonstrators, and attacking them physically. When word of this reached the demonstrators’ family members and friends, they responded by taking to the streets and attacking the security forces wherever they could find them. The people threw rocks at the security forces, destroyed their cars, and tore down the pictures of Mubarak all over the city. The security forces continued shooting and arresting people, all the while sending plain-clothed police thugs to destroy stores and ransack schools. This was done in order to make it look like as if the people were destroying everything in their path and had to be cracked down on and stopped. The death toll rose to 5 the second night (including a 12 year-old and a 15 year-old), while the arrest total rose to 195. Countless people were injured.

The government is trying to clamp down, and has a 24 hour curfew and no journalists allowed. I’ll paint this one simple for you. Long ruling tyrannical despot vs. people tired of living in squalid conditions. Keep your eyes on this and don’t forget the people of Egypt.

Political Power

2008-04-07T15:04:00.001-07:00

I’ve often thought about this as the source of real problems in our political/social system in this country. There’s a general sense that we need to solve the problem of special interests using money to improperly influence the government, or at least the legislative process. At the same time, there’s a feeling among those of certain economic classes that people who make a lot of money (I mean like hundreds of millions) for some reason don’t deserve that kind of money.

Arnold Kling in TCG Daily:

It is misleading to compare legislative budgets with the wealth of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, because legislators are spending money on all of us. They are not spending money on themselves.

However, America's wealthiest people do not spend their money on themselves, either. They could not possibly do so. As smart as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are, they cannot figure out how to spend all of their money. They will end up giving most of it away.

What the super-wealthy have that the merely wealthy do not have is more financial power. When it comes to deciding which causes are going to receive money, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have more power than other people. Which is exactly the power that politicians have.

The problem, as the article points out, is that politicians have far more of this type of “power” than any wealthy person, to orders of magnitude. The sums of money that politicians, especially federal politicians, have control over is too tempting for players on the national and local scene.

The monetary comparisons only scratch the surface of the inequality and excesses of political power in the United States. Bill Gates might be said to control as much money as a member of the County Council where I live. But he does not have the power to, say, tell the people of the County where they can and cannot smoke, or to tell local businesses what wages they must pay their workers, or to decide whether a local concert venue will be devoted to folk music or to rock.

Wealthy people do not control the curriculum in our children's schools. Politicians do. Wealthy people do not set licensing requirements for everything from doctors to interior designers to hair stylists to manicurists. Politicians do.

Inequality and excess political power is getting worse at a faster rate than inequality and excess in monetary income. As I pointed out in We Need 250 states, political power is far more concentrated and insulated from the voters than was the case 200 years ago.

I feel awkward and defensive when the subject of economic inequality comes up. The fact is that I cannot say that I feel comfortable with the levels of inequality and excess that exist in our society.

However, I am loathe to call inequality a problem that requires a government solution. I do not see how it solves the problem to take power away from wealthy people who have a lot of it in order to increase the power of politicians who have far more of it.

What the American people really should feel awkward and defensive about is the level of inequality and excess of political power. Instead of asking ourselves what we can do about Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, we should be asking ourselves about what we can do about the Clintons and the Spitzers. Those who want more and more power should be our biggest concern.

And a concern it should be. We’ve learned, by way of laws like McCain-Feingold, that you can’t take the money out of politics. It will find a way in. My belief is that the only way to rid our life of politically tainted money thrown around by special interests is to reduce the power that politicians wield. That would, of course, mean that the size and scope of government must decrease, and that means that functions such as health care, education and the like, would have to disappear, and I fear that ain’t happening anytime soon.

Truthfully, though I might favor one candidate for President or Congress over another for his/her economic sanity, neither party has an abundance of members who understand that we all suffer when government grows in it’s scope and power.

When’s the revolt? Anyone?

McCain, Hillary and the economy

2008-04-03T16:54:00.001-07:00

Here’s an interesting piece on the stability of Switzerland. I’ll quote the same section that Instapundit did.

They have one of the world’s most stable economies, a skilled workforce, internationally recognized export companies, a sound currency, and renowned banking and financial services. All this is combined with remarkable social harmony, given that Switzerland has four national languages and great religious diversity.

While I appreciate it’s success, something I noted from the article was that while there might be much we can learn from the system they have in place, much of their success is due to foreign actors. Wealth generated in places like the US and Germany feeds the economy there. They haven’t really had to defend themselves (although they do have an army) without help from vaster allies like the US, and indeed during the world wars they declared themselves neutral to avoid large expenditures for military.

The article spends time on their harmonious political environment, but one has to wonder how that type of government would work in a country of 300 million rather than 7.5 million, smaller than New York City (not the metro area, just the city).

Hillary talks about tax incentives designed to create jobs inside the US. Quote from TaxProf:
· Increase the R&D credit by 50% (from 20% to 30%) and increase the Alternative Simplified Credit by 67% (from 12% to 20%).

1       Create a 40% Basic Research Credit.
2       Create a 10% Start Up Research Jobs Credit.
3       Create a new $5 billion Insourcing Markets Tax Credit.
4       Close loopholes that encourage companies to ship jobs overseas:
·       Eliminate deferral provision that allows U.S. companies to defer paying U.S. taxes on income earned by their foreign subsidiaries until that income is repatriated to the U.S.

1 Close tax loopholes to ensure that companies cannot continue receiving tax benefits for locating abroad. She will disallow companies from engaging in transfer-pricing arrangements where companies avoid taxes by shifting income or assets to low-tax jurisdictions. She will eliminate incentives in the tax code (like the ability to “cross-credit”) that encourage U.S. companies to shift operations or at least profits to low-tax jurisdictions. And she will eliminate the unfair advantage that foreign insurers located in tax havens have against U.S. insurers competing for U.S. business.

Tax credits aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Government and political types are constantly thinking of ways to modify the behavior of the American public and American business. One way is create law that restricts and imposes that behavior. However, this has the unfortunate side effect of political resistance from large portions of society.

Another way is to modify tax code so that the behavior is not mandatory, but changing that behavior leads to benefits, i.e. your taxes are reduced if you comply. I certainly have less of a problem with this, although it has it’s own drawbacks.

Notice in the last couple of items regarding closing loopholes though. Clinton says that she’ll eliminate deferral provisions that allow companies to defer paying U.S. taxes on income earned by their foreign subsidiaries. Think about that for a second. If your foreign office creates income, even if the income never touches American soil you’d get taxed. Right now that doesn’t happen, and companies usually use the money to invest further in the foreign operation (better salaries for employees, update equipment, R&D).

Note here a common resistance to the notion that companies are not necessarily tied to nations any more. One of the tenants of globalization is that companies are international entities, without national allegiance. One of the reasons that companies outsource in the first place is because the corporate taxes in the US are among the highest in the world. But instead of trying to solve that problem, people like Clinton instead attempt to force companies to pay the taxes regardless. Which in the end will compound the problem, causing some companies to move their corporate offices overseas (which is already happening).

It’s no wonder that businesses, foreign and domestic, freak out about this sort of thing. The American economy drives economic expansion all over the world, and having a candidate for the highest office in the largest economic market in the world act all protectionist isn’t exactly making people around the world all warm and fuzzy. Note this article by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek that insists that instead of improving our reputation around the world, as they are so often telling is they’ll do, Clinton and Obama might actually cause some further damage because of their tendency to be economically protectionist.

In reference to the original story above, Switzerland has one of the most robust economies in the world, but they do so because of their very open market and reliance on foreign investment. We can’t go down the road in the other direction and think that we’re going to truly improve the lives of ordinary Americans in the long run. Further protectionism is the road of economic stagnation and a people over-burdened by taxes.

So let’s look at McCain on the economic front. What he’s saying at this point makes sense from a Republican stand point. Tax cuts for the middle class. Cut corporate taxes. Ban internet/ cell phone taxes. Reform Health care and Medicare (and SS). Eliminate wasteful spending. Reform the budgeting process. More free trade. This might all seem pat from the red side of the fence, but it’s miles different from what the Democrats propose, so to all my right leaning friends who think that McCain represents some leftward angle here, I implore you to compare what we would get otherwise.

He hits all the high points, and I don’t think you can argue that he’s been solid on the wasteful-spending issue for many years. One thing that bugs me is that, while he would continue the Bush tax cuts, he was initially against them because he thought they benefited the rich primarily, and authored a bill with Tom Daschle to curtail the reduction in the capital gains and dividend taxes (never mind that some economists will tell you that this is double taxation anyway). I’m not sure where he’s at here. He’s mostly about open capitalism, but has a streak of populist anti-wealth type thinking. While he is generally for tax cuts, one wonders how much he’s really willing to cut in the budget enough to make up for it all.

I’m encouraged in other areas, though. He seems a bit antagonistic toward the current mood regarding the mortgage crisis. Many on both sides of the aisle, including the President, seem inclined to bail out those caught in over their heads after signing sub-prime mortgages (including the weird tax rebate we all are supposed to get). McCain says that people need to be responsible for their own mistakes, a sentiment that I concur on. He’s likely to get hammered on this in the general election, but I agree with him there. I read lately from noted columnists decrying the complicated world of mortgage financing and how the consumer is left helpless in the face of uncontrollably tempting 2% loan rates. However I disagree, as I’ve seen all these rates (as a home owner you drown in offers like that), and knowing that anything below 6% is certainly variable interest they all end up in my garbage. Needless to say that I would expect that I would be paying for my own mistake if I went down that road without taking the time to research a rate on probably the largest and most important bit of financing I’ll ever do.

Sorry. Rant over.

McCain is noted, on this issue, of proclaiming a certain amount of ignorance. Is this worrisome or refreshing? You could make an argument either way, and the Democratic candidates of course argue worrisome. That doesn’t bother me, as their positions are worrisome and they think they know how the economy works. It’s not quite refreshing either, though, and it really is going to depend on who McCain ultimately pins down for Secretary of the Treasury and who he appoints as advisors. I’m not sure his recent advice people, like Phil Gramm, are helping ease my conscience on this point.

All and all he’s got some issues, and for the most part I have a difficult time supporting a Senator for an administrative office like this one. However, in the area of finance, especially government finance, McCain is heads above the Democratic candidates at this point. He’ll probably not be able to stop over spending entirely or free up markets as he says he does, but I’d rather have him in there being the Maverick on the economy.

Here’s some more reading on where McCain is at on the issue if the economy. Enjoy.

The McCain factor

2008-03-08T01:30:00.001-08:00

OK. A while back I promised that I would take a look at John McCain as a Presidential candidate. I've been paying some attention, and it's truly been entertaining to watch him work while the two Democratic candidates go at each other, but other things have been bothering me.

It's not his age, like some people are complaining about (and I mean serious pundits are freaking out about the guy's age). Seriously, he is up there in years, but he seems very vibrant for a man who would be the oldest President in US history. There's been nothing to indicate that mentally he's not on his game, and as long as he picks a really good VP running mate (just in case) I don't see a downside there. He will certainly use it to his advantage in the general election. With all the silly "My opponent isn't ready to face the big crisis" tennis match between Hillary and Barack, McCain makes them look like 2nd graders talking about their first home mortgage. Really, it's pathetic.

It's not his social issues. Some friends of mine, who's integrity I don't challenge, vote pretty healthily along a morality/family values line. Usually things like abortion are at the top of the list of items to gage a candidate by, and they don't like McCain at all. Which doesn't make sense if you go by what he's been saying while on the campaign trail. And it appears like, with a few minor exceptions (historically he's made noises that while he's against abortion in general, he's not necessarily against using fetal tissue experimentally. Unravel that pretzel), that he's been pretty much on the anti-abortion side of the debate.
This is not to say that I agree entirely with where he's at. It's hard, especially when someone's running for office, to really know where they stand on an issue. Reading a list of quotes on the subject over the years is to overdose on sound bite madness. Politician sound bites are designed to inform, but also to pander. Of all the candidates, do you think he panders more or less than the other two? I would guess less, but who's to know where he stands. As of 9 years ago he stated that he wouldn't overturn Roe, and now he's all over eradicating that decision from the books.
Which in both cases really isn't for him to decide. He would have the power to appoint judges to the SCOTUS who see eye to eye with him, but I'll get into that later.

Really that's mostly rhetoric. For the most part, and you all know what I think, candidates will be held to, and often act in accordance with, their campaign slogans and promises. So in this case I would guess that McCain would be a generally anti-abortion President. Can he do anything about abortion anyway? Hard to say. Bush hasn't really been able to make a scratch, so why would we think McCain would be different. Thankfully he hasn't made any talk about amending the Constitution or anything.
Nor on gay marriage. On many issues you'll find that McCain would extend policies that Bush has been carrying along, but I noted in that section of his website, he talks eloquently regarding the benefits of a society built around the family unit consisting of male-female relationships, but he doesn't really call for any action either way.
In the past he's even taken a state's rights view, and opposed the Bush maneuver for a Constitutional amendment. But even for a conservative that should be a feature, not a bug. He has voted in the past for prohibiting same sex marriage (recall that during the Clinton administration, the somewhat lame Defense of Marriage act was passed with Clinton's blessing), and has voted against adding gays to hate crime legislation.

It's certainly not his positions on the war or on the economy. I'll get to them later, but I've been OK with what I've seen. So what's bugging me? Well, you mean besides that he's a career Senator?
Immigration is one issue. Of all the complaints that the conservatives have been throwing at McCain over the last few months, this is the one that I think has some teeth. However, they're more like molars, not canines. McCain has a record of treading lightly on the "amnesty" issue, but he's been pretty solidly pro-security in others. Many of his speeches include rhetoric about needing to secure the borders first before dealing with the problem of illegals running around. And even then I don't hear anything that suggests that he's going to go after them after the border is secure (will it every really be, oh save us from the government that wouldn't do anything). No, really. I don't like many of his votes on this issue, and the kinds of things he votes to give undocumented workers that only citizens/tax payers are supposed to get. However, he also understands that part of the reason we have to deal with all this is because the economies and governments of neighboring countries aren't doing their job allowing their own people to prosper (quite the opposite in fact). So there's some plus there.

The other thing I worry about is the usual. Size of government. There are some things that McCain has been pretty good at lately. One is not getting caught up in any scandals (nothing paramount anyway) and the other is being a vocal and voting opponent of earmarks and wasteful spending. Now while no candidate is going to be all perfect on this point, McCain doesn't have an earmark to his name in the near past. And by near I'm referring to years.
He's in favor of a balanced budget amendment and in his speeches insists that he would stop the uncontrolled spending (even criticizes Republicans for being complicit in the over-spending, which is speaking truth).
However, he's been in the Senate too long, and while he's good on earmarks, I worry that he'll be just one more in the long line of Presidents presiding over an increase in government power. Whether by large government programs, or reform that is promised to make life easier and less expensive, but in actuality will place more controls on industry and local government. Check out his page on Health Care system reforms.

-Controlling health care costs will take fundamental change - nothing short of a complete reform of the culture of our health system and the way we pay for it will suffice. Reforms to federal policy and programs should focus on enhancing quality while controlling costs
- Facilitate the development of national standards for measuring and recording treatments and outcomes.

There are more, but color me raising my left eyebrow at all this. Now his plan isn't nearly as obtrusive, controlling and tax burdeny as the two Democrat's plans, but the march of federal government control over your life and mine just slows down with Republican leadership. It doesn't stop, and in Bush's case it surged forward pretty regularly.

So what is it about McCain that conservatives don't like? Please if you know, comment. Down below, you know. There's a link. Use it. Tell me what you don't like about this guy, because after sifting through the rubble of conscious though leveled by the bickering of conservative talk show hosts, I don't see why they really should have a problem with this guy. He's not Ron Paul or Huckabee, who had their own problems.
And he's certainly the polar opposite of what's being offered on the Democrat side.

And there are some other issues that they have with him, such as his campaign finance bill and irregular votes against Bush-sponsored tax cuts. I'm a little worried about that, but I'll have to get to it later.

Settle down on the playground

2008-02-27T16:44:00.001-08:00

I know I’m supposed to get livid over things like this, but I find myself strangely philosophical about it. I’ve heard of kids shows in Palestine approaching on the bizarre when it comes to indoctrinating kids to hate other people. If you don’t think there’s something screwed up about that culture, then perhaps we just need to take a closer look at their children’s entertainment.

Gateway pundit points to this dialog regarding a guy in a bunny suit on a children’s show (Assud is the rabbit):

Saraa: Did you see the West's attack against the Messenger [Muhammad]? What do you have to say about this?

Amaani, (10 year old girl by phone): I say to the cowardly infidels...

Assud: Criminals.

Amaani: Criminals.

Assud: Do you boycott Israeli and Danish products?

Amaani: Yes

Assud: You don't eat them at all?

Amaan: I don't eat them at all.

Assud: Great! Keep it up!

Saraa: We will all boycott Danish products, and Israeli products first.

* * * * *

Saraa: What can we do for the Messenger?

Inaas, (10 year old girl by phone): We can fight them because they cursed Allah's Messenger.

Saraa: 'Tomorrow's Pioneers' army will redeem the Messenger, with their possessions and their blood, Assud, and will not let them repeat this attack.

Assud: If they repeat it we will kill them, by Allah.

Saraa: In His will.

Assud: I will bite them and eat them!

Nice. Those Danes might look tasty, but…
So we can argue all day about how its all Israel’s fault for the mental state these people are in, and that they wouldn’t be this foundational hatred if Israel had never existed, but you can also argue convincingly that there are some cultural issues at the heart of this, and Israel is just a scapegoat. There are many groups of people who are suffering far worse at the hands of their own government, and they aren’t screaming death to anyone.

Regarding the tendency for many fundamental Muslims to rage against the machine every time they feel the least bit of disrespect toward them or their religion (think specifically of the cartoons published in many places, but notably Denmark) they cry bloody murder, literally. Death to Denmark. Death to Israel. And while we’re at it, death to America. Can’t leave them out.

This behavior is strikingly similar to pre-adolescent maturity striking out when pride has been injured.
Basically there are a few ways that a person can react when someone takes a shot at their pride. One is to ignore it, which is what we try to teach our kids to do. Sometimes you can’t ignore it, and you takes steps to either remove yourself from the scene or appeal to a higher authority. In the kid’s case this would be a teacher or parent, right? We would prefer that these responses be the ones our own children would use. However…

Another possible approach is to defend yourself intellectually. And by that, when I think of a 10 year old I’m thinking of ways you can jab back verbally, making it a war of words until you come up with the quip that will ensure legendary status in your lunchroom (“I know you are, but what am I”). Either way, getting verbal jabs in gives you an outlet for your emotional stress. Defending yourself verbally is they way many arguments SHOULD happen.

Now, here come the complaints from moms everywhere. No, I don’t really advocate this in the extreme. Abusive comments and cursing are also something I don’t encourage in my own children. But if you can’t verbally defend yourself to the neighborhood bully it eventually might lead down this next path.

And that’s physical violence. We often think about the adult who gets goaded into starting a bar fight because someone insulted his mullet as “infantile” and seriously lacking in self-respect. If your only response to insult or demeaning comments is to attack the accuser physically, then perhaps you never really graduated from 3^rd grade, emotionally anyway.

Now I must admit that whenever I see Muslim responses to criticism or insult, no matter how slight (or in some cases how misunderstood) I see the group acting like the 8 year old down the block who’s mother probably didn’t love him enough. Unfortunately, like the mullet-sporting bar fighter above, you can’t go back home and regain that respect from your mother’s love. At least not entirely. And the Arab/Muslim community isn’t going to get over this by concessions from the west, nor is Israel rolling over and moving to Palm Springs going to repair the damage. That must come from within.

There’s actually a better Christian answer for this, but that’s for the individual, and I’m talking about a group and a culture. Christian individuals, according to the faith, are supposed to expect insult and oppression. We’re also supposed to take it, because if you can’t get someone to become a Christian by demonstrating it faithfully and defending it logically, then you’ve got nothing. Muslims probably have a better response to critical statements about their religion than “Death to infidels,” but unless they use it they appear every bit the tike on the playground who lashes out at kids calling him fat. Is it any wonder that we don’t take them seriously?

Power grab by the DEA

2008-02-27T16:29:00.001-08:00

I’ve been interested lately in the way that government agencies attempt to grab power for themselves above and beyond what their actual mandate accounts for. For instance an agency who attempts to get power from Congress over an arena that traditionally belongs to another agency.

This just whisked across the wire:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120407467410795235.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Innovative new drugs such as OxyContin that have been developed in the last two decades provide targeted relief for intractable pain. While they have helped innumerable patients, they have also been abused. The DEA response?

One was to try and get the power (now exclusively vested in the FDA) to have a final say over whether new narcotic medications should come to the market. Legislation to do so was temporarily passed in 2004 and the DEA sought its reauthorization in 2005 -- as a "rider" attached to its appropriations bill, without Congressional debate. At one time, the DEA even sent out solicitations to hire clinicians to review new drug applications for narcotics, a role reserved for the FDA. The DEA has stepped back from that effort -- at least for now.

It's often the case that measures that increase federal power are hidden inside larger bills and don't get adequate congressional scrutiny. So now you have another case. For your information this type of thing happens all the time, and is just another of the plethora of reasons to outlaw unrelated riders on Federal bills before Congress. If you didn't already believe that.

It's interesting how, when looking back at the age where the Fed really started to acquire power in the early 20th century, much of the control that government has over society was inserted and enacted without popular support. Social Security was generally unpopular in the 30s and 40s, as it went across the traditional American value of self-reliance. But it ended up being sold as something it wasn't, and in the end many of it's measure have been passed as riders on larger omnibus bills which are difficult for legislators to vote against (usually because of something else that's in there).

Here's another example. This is what Barack Obama says about a bill he introduced last year:

American Jobs: Barack Obama introduced the Patriot Employer Act of 2007 to provide a tax credit to companies that maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in America relative to those outside the US; maintain their corporate headquarters in America; pay decent wages; prepare workers for retirement; provide health insurance; and support employees who serve in the military.

And this is what it does:

The legislation, called the 'Patriot Employer Act', defines patriotic businesses as those that

"Pay at least 60 percent of each employee's health care premiums,"
Have a position of "neutrality in employee [union] organizing drives,"
"Maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in the United States relative to the number of full-time workers outside of the United States,"
Pay a salary to each employee "not less than an amount equal to the federal poverty level," and
Provide a pension plan.

So your patriotic if you obey, or fall into line with what certain members of government want you to do. That's an interesting definition of the word "patriot" if you ask me. And by the way, the tax credit is miniscule.

But this type of stuff happens all the time. Make the name of the bill sound good enough and it doesn't matter what it's called.

I'm getting behind

2008-02-20T14:59:00.001-08:00

For the past few months I’ve been absent from this blog much of the time. I’ve been busy, or in many cases I’ve been doing lots of reading and unsure what I wanted to write on. Lately, I started briefly with the intention of scrutinizing the platforms of the candidates for President of the United States. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been slow enough to have candidates drop out before I was done with them, such as Romney and Thompson. Now I have a decision to make as far as candidates who appear done, such as Hillary.

Yes, for those of you who know me and my inclinations politically, I will be looking hard at the Democrat and not dismissing them out right. However, it’s not likely that I’m going to like what I see overall.

As for Hillary, some pundits (not insignificant ones) are starting to declare her candidacy all but Casper. She hasn’t won a state in a while, and momentum seems to have finally taken hold of the Obama campaign, so much so that even states where Clinton was supposed to win are now looking like they might tilt. There’s some concern that Hillary will use the Clinton machine to influence the decisions of the delegates and super-delegates, regardless of how the states voted. It’s legally possible, but doing so would tear the Democrat party apart and they’d have a much less likely hope in November.

So, in subsequent posts I’m going to start looking at McCain and Obama. Our primary here isn’t until May, but the races will be over by then, so why wait? We might even see some third party candidates entering the general election by then.

I'm from the government…
…and I'm here to help you (bwaa hahahahaaa!).
In other political news, The Armed Liberal over at Winds reminds us that using government control as a way to try and influence the economy and peoples choices is a bi-partisan psychosis:

January 31st, 2008 - WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., today joined Senator Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., in offering legislation to provide a tax credit for anyone purchasing a newly constructed home, a foreclosed home or a home where foreclosure is pending.

“Providing Americans with this $15,000 tax credit over three years would provide a much-needed boost to the housing market and the economy,” Alexander said. “This incentive will restore confidence in the housing market while preventing a housing disaster by reducing the number of unsold and foreclosed homes on the market that threaten to lessen home values and reduce homeowner equity.”

And here’s what AL said:

So the senator and his co-sponsor want to use the power of the US Treasury to punish private home sellers by making the federal government fund their competitors. Under this legislation, the government will be actively harming the financial interests of millions of private sellers in order to boost the fortunes of a few thousand other sellers.

I often criticize Democrats for making populist decisions designed to give the impression of help, and yet not really understanding how the economy works or really care what government control does to personal freedom over time. However it seems that many Republicans don’t get this either.

That’s one of the things I’ll be looking for with the candidates this year. How well do they understand the economy and how likely are they to impose populist measures designed to look good but actually increase government power to the detriment of us all.

Stay tuned.

Alas, the Republican is gone

2008-02-03T00:19:00.000-08:00

I made a quick reference in that last Romney post about Fred Thompson, and how the last real conservative had departed the race, leaving us with Romney and McCain, both of which have been accuse of being Republican in Name Only. Before you start drenching me in comments extolling either one's conservative credentials, read this article, and then recall that most of Thompson's responses to questions regarding his stances on social issues and domestic economics amounted to: it's not the government's job. In a nutshell anyway. That's what traditional conservatism is about, not this passionate government-centered morality we see today.

In the end, the American political machine, and it's subjects the American people, couldn't digest the message Thompson was trying to get across. The biggest worry among Republicans was that he didn't have "fire in the belly."

Fire in the belly: For those of us who suffer from acid reflux, this is a phrase full of meaning. In the world of politics, however, the meaning is vaguer. William Safire's New Political Dictionary defines "fire in the belly" as "an unquenchable thirst for power or glory; the burning drive to win a race or achieve a goal." It's bad, apparently, not having fire in the belly. The premise seems to be that vein-popping ambition, unrestrained avidity, is a necessary if not sufficient quality for someone who wants to hold the highest political position in a democratic country.

So in our day and age, unquenchable ambition is what we want in our candidates. The desire, above all else, to rise to the top and grasp the reigns of power. This is a good thing?
Read the entire article. Then come back.

I got a little hot in my last post because of the one-liner, poster-board thinking that has become the right's social policy for any given candidate that wants to be seen as a card-carrying member of the Republican right. It's the nations inability to see beyond the headline that causes this, and perhaps we're wrong to look back and envision that 100 years ago, without the sound-bite medium of television, the only way you could get to know a candidate for national office was to spend time reading about them, and more Americans had the time and attention span to get beyond the headline.

Anyway, it's with great displeasure that I lament the dropping of the only candidate who understood that it's not about who's got the power, it's that the government has a roll in the life of a healthy democracy. And ours has over reached that roll in a way that Mt. Everest towers over the pile of sugar I put at the bottom of my coffee cup every morning. His ilk is unacceptable not just to the Democrats (who lost that tendency a long time ago) but alas, now also to the Republicans.

Mit Romney: Social issues

2008-02-02T22:46:00.000-08:00

I always start these posts with a bit of ambivalence. It's hard to start, knowing that you want to do a good and thorough job and knowing that it's going to have to take a bit of research and a bit of writing. Which takes a bit out of your evening. However, I yearn to know a bit more about this candidate before I make some sort of decision this coming May, and then this coming November.

Since the last weekend, it seems that Rudy Giuliani has vacated the race, leaving only Romney, McCain and a few other lingering afterthoughts. I'm sorry to all those who were seriously thinking about voting for Huckabee, Paul and the like. But they really never had much of a shot, Huckabee's Iowa victory aside, and voting for them always seemed to me to be a Kucinich type vote. I.E. you're doing it because you want to affect policy, not because you though your guy had a real shot.

Up until this point in my investigation of Mit Romney, I've looked a bit at his stances on foreign policy and economics. In this arena, he and McCain aren't really that far off. McCain has some disturbing idea about campaign finance, but otherwise is strong in other areas. He also is pretty strong against some of the more intense interrogation techniques that the Bush administration has been in favor of, but that's understandable considering his past, and he's otherwise tough against terror.
But these candidates start to find some separation here in the social arena. But this is about Romney. More on McCain later.

Romney has one document on his site regarding conservatives culture and values ideas. These of course include things like right to life (abortion issues), marriage issues, children's entertainment and exposure to drugs and violence (in TV or reality), and second amendment issues, which he stylizes as basic rights issues.
Funny how both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, can talk about how our rights and freedoms are being eroded, but talking about two totally different ways in which they want us to believe they're being eroded. Anyway...
This is a pretty general bunch of statements, and reading this page on his site, I just get that "he's delivering this to conservatives because he wants them to think he feels like them on these issues." But what's he really about here. He's been accused of treating these things much differently as the governor of Massachusettes, but the conundrum is this: does he really hold conservative values in the social arena and just lightened them up for his state, or does he hold fairly liberal values, which is how he became governor, and is molding them to conservatives to run for President?

Now I've said before that I feel like Presidents tend to hold themselves to what they say in campaign speeches more than how they've acted as officials in the past. So here's what Romney says:

He's against Roe v. Wade and would see it overturned, however defers the issue to the states (entirely?) while there is division of opinion in this country.
Supports a Federal Marriage Amendment to the constitution.
Advocates conservatives judges (says nothing about constructionists, just conservative. What does that mean?).
Proposes tougher laws and enforcement of child abuse, online porn and one-strike and your out for folks who prey on children through the internet (including lifetime tracking with GPS after they get out of jail).
Support volunteer efforts (specifically talks about supporting faith-based groups here).

The document then spends considerable time criticizing McCain-Feingold as an erosion of our first amendment rights, and then supports the second amendment without really saying anything else about it. He certainly hits all the hot buttons for conservatives. However, I don't see anything original here. No original thoughts or ideas. Why do I get the feeling this is just a placeholder in a platform of issues that appears just because people expect it to?

First of all, I'm not sure the "we're such a great nation because of our values" statement, coubled with naming those values as "life" and "marriage" is necessarily helpful. Those are part of our values, but the values this country has that propels us to super economic and cultural prominence in the world are so much more than that, and I think focusing on those like a laser is part of the problem.
Let me state first of all that I'm not saying that those things aren't important, and that the loss of those values will in fact take us down a dark path toward decline. But it's always been the social structures of our society that held those value in place. The values that created the most economically powerful and influential nation on earth are centered around the freedoms we have, and the protections that each and every citizen in this country enjoys. They come from some very smart guys who lived over 200 years ago, who decided that people would function better inside a framework of trust and autonomy, free from government intrusion.
And so when Republicans talk about social values, I get the same feeling sometimes that I get when Democrats talk about just about anything else. This is the government telling us what's right and wrong.

Two points there. Anyone who's spent any time at this blog knows that I have very complicated thoughts about abortion and marriage in a federal context. I understand the abortion crowd (apart from the deep seeded left) and here's something that might cause you to choke on your Thomas Kemper Orange Cream soda: I don't think Roe v. Wade needs to be overturned. At least at this moment I don't.
It's not because I'm pro-abortion. I firmly believe that life starts at the moment the cell formerly known as an egg becomes zygote. The DNA fundamentally becomes something the mother and father don't own any more. I've been willing to be pragmatic to the point that medical science has determined that infants in-utero feel pain, and generally start behaving human about halfway through the pregnancy, and so while there is a segment of society that feels that they need to have abortions for whatever reason and will fight to have that right, we can limit them to that point.
However, and this is key, I don't think that Roe means what 99% of the country thinks it means. The circumstances behind the decision were much more limited. At the time the entire argument AGAINST abortion was that medical practice was poor to the point that it was highly likely that performing an abortion would harm or kill the mother. By the time of Roe, medical science had improved to the point that most to almost all abortions could be performed safely (again, for the mother) and that argument no longer carried any weight.
But there was no discussion in the Supreme Justices arguments about the fetus and whether it had rights at all. That's the issue with what I see as a completely deluded debate. Roe can stand on it's own merits while coming to a conclusion that while there's no need to outlaw abortion in order to save the mother, the logic behind Roe, we need to come to a conclusion regarding the status of the baby growing inside. But until we put Roe aside and let it be, promising that it can stand without challenge, we'll never get the left dialogging.
OK. Rant over. Sorry, I just get peeved when I see this type of statement from a politician. It's not very well thought out and just panders to a conservative element in order to get elected.

This type of thinking permeates the rest of his points. Marriage Amendments and support for faith based groups will play well with social conservatives, but they never did well for Bush and could really nail his coffin in the general election. I could go on all day about how ill though out any idea along these lines is bound to be coming from a candidate for President, and creating amendments for social causes and funding religious groups is not really a conservative idea (in the classical sense of conservative).

Lastly, ripping on McCain for his landmark campaign finance bill is pretty disingenuous. Give McCain some credit for pushing something every citizen at the time thought would reform politics in this country, and got considerable resistance from career politicians. Heck, at the time I thought it was a good thing, and the real conservative in this Presidential race (alas, who is now gone) Thompson also voted for it before he realized what the true effect would be on politics.
True, McCain needs to be called to the carpet for not backing down and admitting that his great idea fell flat on his face, and ended up making our lives worse rather than better. But give the guy some credit.

The Washington Post took a look at some of what Romney was saying to try to get him away from any image he might have gained in Massachusettes as a liberal on the abortion issue. This is the thing that he gets a lot of criticism about, the possibility that he changed his stance because of where he was running.

Alas, it was too good to end there. The National Review article, by John J. Miller, also noted that Romneysaid during his gubernatorial campaign that he would "fully protect a woman's right to choose" abortion but now says his "political philosophy is pro-life." And it quoted Romney adviser Michael Murphy as saying: "He's been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly."

Now he's not as shifty as a Clinton, but you can't have it both ways.

Romney: Domestic/Economy

2008-01-28T00:25:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney, in the area of government administration and finance, sounds like a typical conservative in many ways. I found little in the way of truly new ideas, although in his case it sounds like he actually accomplished some of this on a state level. Romney puts a lot of stock into the fact that he was able to get so much done while working with a Democratic state legislature. My response to that would be that Bush made that same claim about his governorship in Texas while campaigning for President in 2000. It just doesn’t work that way on a Federal level. At least he’ll get significant opposition from a partisan body in a permanent limelight.

Will this make it impossible to promote and execute the types of policies he’s talking about? No, as Bush has proven, sometimes it’s possible to work past the public vitrol and come to your goals anyway. Bush has been particularly successful with the current congress, despite its antagonistic nature.

In all, most of the issues he presents have familiar solutions. Make the Bush tax cuts permanent, kill the Death tax, institute a middle class savings plan and middle class tax cut on capital gains. Then there’s limiting excessive tort claims and limiting regulation and tax burden on free enterprise to spur growth and keep up with Asia.

Some of his ideas are actually government growers. Investing in more infrastructure (roads, internet backbone, etc…) , worker re-training, reorganize education to emphasize math and science. These all require more government money. As does his call for more money for research and development in energy to try and ween us off foreign oil.

His energy policy, by the way, also looks familiar. More offshore drilling, nuclear power, liquified coal, ethanol, etc… All things designed to make us more self sufficient in our energy needs.

I think in most of these areas, Republicans agree and there’s not going to be much difference among candidates. Bush has most of these same ideas, but still doesn’t get much back from conservatives, but I think that’s just a communication thing. Romney is much more eloquent, and might have more success with the right.

Deficit spending:

Romney states the obvious for a conservative, that we spend and tax too much. Does this disagree with areas where he intends to spend more himself? Unsure, considering the balance of what he says on his site among all his issue statements. Wants to take the government “apart” in order to rebuild more efficient. “Every business does that or goes bankrupt.” This will be easier said that done. I’m sure there are lots of conservatives and classical libertarians that want to do this very thing, but you’re going up against the machine here. It’s not a Democrat or Republican thing, it’s a bureaucracy thing, and the system itself is going to resist big time. However, he’s in my corner on this issue, so more power to him.

Wants the line-item veto. Wants to impose spending limits and reform entitlements. Given a Democratic congress, the former is going to be easier (but not “easy”).

Health insurance:

He’d want to make health insurance more affordable and accessible to every American. How? Paints some picture of using all the money in health care programs and money being used to support hospital treatment of those w/o health insurance to help people get private insurance . For those who want it, noting that personal responsibility comes into play here. Notes that 45 million people don’t have “health insurance, not health care.” People w/o insurance get emergency care w/o having to pay for it. Nice on paper, but noting that there is a significant population that won’t get insurance (even when it’s offered for free, as we learned here in Oregon), you’re going to get criticism unless you talk about how your going to care for the mentally unbalanced.

Notes that there is a fear of losing insurance coverage as well as the problem of not having any. Says that this is not a Democrat issue, health care is an American issue, but Democrats solution is bigger government. Also promotes a combination of releasing state regulation on health care, making all health care activity tax deductible, and caps on punitive damage awards to reduce overall costs of health care.

Education: Some good and some bad here. Romney says that he would give more control to the local school districts (or states, as the fed would have to concede). But then he wants to expand and improve NCLB. I would prefer to hear a candidate that would get the fed out of education, but then Thompson dropped out of the race.

I do like that he offers a tax credit for home schoolers. Home schoolers often feel taken by the government, having to pay for services they may never use. You can argue that there are lots of services that you and I pay for that we’ll never use, but not many take as large a bite out of our income as education, at least on a state level.

I can find some places to criticize Romney’s policies in the area of Domestic economics and government action, however, overall he’s painted himself as a good conservative on most issues he covers. I wouldn’t have a problem electing him on this score. When we voted Bush in, there was a general sense of his “Compassionate Conservatism” but we really didn’t know what he meant until the gigantic federal programs began to mount. I don’t see any of that flowery language here that would suggest that we can look forward to more of that, but there are areas of concern. Fortunately this isn’t a top 2 or 3 issue for me, so on I go to other issues.

Another well known conservative blogger has put his hat in the Romney camp.

I want to have someone who supports conservative values. In this, we have no perfect candidates. Fred Thompson came closest, but he quit, and I'm not going to cast my vote for someone who has already dropped out. Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain all have some claim to a portion of the conservative mandate based on their accomplishments. Of the four, I trust Romney and Giuliani most to continue supporting conservative principles in the face of opposition.

Goes on to note that Giuliani stands a far smaller chance of coming out ahead at the end of this, and thus he’s backing Romney.

After all I’ve said on this score, and much of what you’ll hear from those who are endorsing him, Senator McCain thinks that things are not hunky dory in Massachusetts economically. However he tries to argue that experience promoting economic policy trumps Romney’s business and investment experience, and that’s not going to fly considering people aren’t all that hot on congress’ effectiveness right now. And as it happens, Romney’s got plenty to criticize right back.

This article in the Washington Post tells more of the story, and so you can see a mixed bag there. But I’ve noted in the past that the economy works on many different levels and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what effect the government has on how many jobs are created or how the export deficit goes. Since Romney was governor during the recession and subsequent recovery, any losses or gains in the economy of Massachusetts or the state tax rolls has to be weighed against the overall national economic ups and downs. One thing that comes through is that he did in fact raise taxes, in the form of raising fees and closing some tax loopholes, which is not “raising” taxes per say, but…

Romney: Foreign Policy

2008-01-27T00:41:00.001-08:00

What can we say about Mit Romney that hasn’t been said a thousand times in the press. He’s a Mormon, which is a first for a serious Presidential candidate (at least in my memory, which isn’t that good). He’s a Republican governor of a very liberal leaning state. This, the state of Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry. But as the B-52s so eloquently said, “get out of the state, get out of the state you’re in.”

I know little about the time he spent in office as the governor of Massachusetts. He was a Republican, but I would imagine that he ran on a pretty moderate platform to get elected statewide there. Despite what we hear in his campaign, it sounds like his position on certain social issues was fairly flexible.

Above and beyond all this, Romney is now the only serious non-Senator candidate left in the running. Huckabee is still hanging around, but I don’t know if he can pull out another state like he did Iowa. If that’s the case, I wonder if my theory, which I’ve stated here before, that no sitting Senator has beaten a Governor for the office of President in over 100 years. Kennedy was our last sitting Senator to become President, and he beat Nixon, who was Vice President at the time.

Foreign Policy

Romney’s site indicates that he’s for increasing the military by about 100k persons and wants the military budget to be 4% of the national gross domestic product. That’s not the percentage of the federal budget, but how much the country produces. I’m wondering why we need to consider the military budget based on the gross domestic product instead of the budget itself, but perhaps he’s trying to stay away from the “how ya going to pay for that” questions.

Romney wants more money to update the military infrastructure too. That might not be a problem for him, considering that Congress likes to spend. However, he has a few paragraphs in the document on homeland security that say stuff like this:

…we need to ensure that our civilian instruments of national power have the ability to build joint efforts among our civilian agencies and empower Regional Deputies with clear lines of authority, sufficient budgets and the responsibility to develop and execute regional plans and strategies.

What does that mean? He has other stuff in there that uses the “empowers” keyword regarding National Security staff, and I wonder if he’s not going to find that empowering people in his staff isn’t going to be easy. Considering the opposition to the strengthening of federal powers in the name of the war on terror, you might wonder if the nation elects another Republican following an unpopular Republican if that helps Romney or hurts him in this area.

I generally like his flowery talk about how he’s going to reduce bureaucracy and create more interagency and civilian communication and partnerships, but there’s no specifics there.

As for the threat of Radical Islam and Jihadism, Romney gives lip service to what we’ve been hearing from Bush for several years. This is in general, not in specifics, but he does seem to understand the threat as Bush does, and also underlines that the ultimate victory will be when we’ve got the people, the Muslim moderates, on the side of freedom and democracy. He’s proposing some sort of over-arching entity, the Special Partnership Force (SPF, no relation to sun tan lotion), which will have this authority to mobilize “mobilize all elements of national power, including humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.” Interesting, but what are the odds that the feds can get that organized. And what would it look like?

Romney hints that the United Nations is failing in its desire to be that one multilateral body that solves everyone’s problems. In his snap quotes on the site he even mentions creating a new international body, but doesn’t give any indication of who would be in it or what its purpose would be. This gives hints of a proposal I saw a few years ago to dump the UN and start over with a League of Democracies, where the members would actually be held to standards. I’m not sure what to make of his leadership in this direction, but he’s definitely playing on conservatives mistrust of the UN, and takes the time to infer that the U.S.’s failure at creating a more multi-lateral unity isn’t necessarily the U.S.’s fault.

Romney’s got a short paper on nuclear terrorism as well. Here we’re talking about dangerous countries that have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon of some sort, which could be a number of countries, but Romney focuses on Iran here. Again, he’s with Bush for the most part, but takes it a step further than where Bush has gone (which is back to the UN) and calls for political isolation. Which is fine, but I wonder about his proposal for some Ambassador at Large who’s primary focus is to “prevent nuclear terrorism.” Not a job for the meek.

I find it interesting that the sole other document on Romney’s site regarding foreign policy issues is one that talks solely and specifically about Latin America. He talks clearly about being tough with difficult national leaders like Castro and Chavez, while maintaining that we need to make a better effort to support nations that are on our side, who have more stable democracies. He mentions trade agreements, and specifically we need to keep an eye on the current trade agreement possibility with Columbia which is going to suffer from a congress that’s antagonistic toward it for some reason.

Again it’s interesting that he talks about our hemispherical neighbors instead of other parts of the world (minus the middle east, which he covers elsewhere). I wonder if a Romney administration pays as much attention to this part of the world that Bush has with other parts of the world, including Africa.

I listened to some of his speech clips that he has available on his site regarding the issues listed above and to me it sounds like Bush, but better. What I mean by that is that the issues aren’t all that different, but Romney is a much better speaker and communicator. One of the problems that Bush has faced over the last 8 years is that he stinks behind the podium. He’s not the best speaker in the field, and his public relations department needs to take a vacation. I’ve often felt like Bush had very well reasoned and correct thinking in his actions over the course of his presidency, but you’d never know it from the words emanating from his lips. The rise of talk radio and blogging has been cleaning up after dinner for him. This wouldn’t be a problem with Romney.

In conclusion, in all of his policy statements, it seems that defeating “jihadism” and competing economically with Asia are his two biggest priorities. In the light of the current state of affairs I would agree with those two statements, although I’ll handle the competition with Asia thing later when I look at his economic policy.

Here’s a portion of an interview with Romney on his foreign policy and difference between a Romney administration and the Bush administration. And here’s an article he wrote for Foreign Policy Magazine.

While his ideas and issues conform with many conservatives and with the current administration, where he suffers in the primaries is in the area of experience. John McCain is giving him what-for regarding his vast experience in the foreign policy realm. Of course, one could argue that some of the Democrat candidates have more foreign policy experience that Mit, but considering the vast differences in stated policy, I think that what the candidate stands for has more to do with whether he should get the nod and not just experience. Most Senators would say they had more experience with national and international issues that a Governor who’s never held a federal office, but that doesn’t mean anything to me, and according to history (my theory on governors getting elected over Senators to the Presidency) I think most Americans lean that way to.

One of the members of the PowerLine blog thinks that Romney is becoming the candidate of the more conservative element of the Republican Party, even with the perceived flip flopping on social issues. He’s got a strong message on foreign policy and was recently endorsed by National Review, which is going to carry some weight with conservatives. From the Review:

Romney is an intelligent, articulate, and accomplished former businessman and governor. At a time when voters yearn for competence and have soured on Washington because too often the Bush administration has not demonstrated it, Romney offers proven executive skill. He has demonstrated it in everything he has done in his professional life, and his tightly organized, disciplined campaign is no exception. He himself has shown impressive focus and energy.

It is true that he has less foreign-policy experience than Thompson and (especially) McCain, but he has more executive experience than both. Since almost all of the candidates have the same foreign-policy principles, what matters most is which candidate has the skills to execute that vision.

So for the most part, I’m on board with his foreign policy. This is a big one for me too. I was in Thompson’s camp earlier this year, and Fred was very articulate and specific in his ideas and policy statements. He was the only pseudo-libertarian in the race, as far as I was concerned, and with him dropping out, I’m forced to look hard at the more conservative of the rest of the field. In this I mean conservative in its modern sense, not classical. Free trade, free market, tough foreign policy and small government.

Next post I’ll look at some of these other issues for Romney.

The issues

2008-01-26T22:43:00.000-08:00

For the next few posts I’ll be looking over a few of the top candidates for the office of President from both parties. I have a few areas that I’d like to focus on, and I’m mostly going to contain myself from going off about how dirty they’re playing in the campaign front. I’d like to say that I’m considering all the candidates from a purely issues-point-of-view, but I’d be lying. How a candidate conducts him or herself on the campaign trail, in my mind, reflects on what type of person they are. In the end, it’s only a part of my evaluation of the candidate. There are probably many things that go on during a campaign, and not all of them are under the direct control of the candidate themselves.

Take for instance an article I read about the primary in Florida. Both Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton have taken jabs for campaigning there when there was a general agreement between the two parties not to do so because the Democratic Party is trying to punish states that selfishly pushed their primary up to elevate its own self-importance. The reality there is that the campaigning on both sides is being driven by the local groups in charge of both campaigns, and the candidates haven’t been able to reign that in (or perhaps they could but are looking the other way purposefully).

I’ll divide this post into 5 categories, Foreign policy, which includes the current conflict, domestic economics, immigration, since it’s such a hotbed issue, social stuff and Constitutional issues. Foreign policy is anything that has an outward looking focus. The war on terror, or rather national security is part of that, as well as international trade, foreign aid, treaties and our participation in international bodies.

Domestic economics includes all this economic, including the budget in general. It includes things like social security, health care, education, facilities and infrastructure and a whole host of other things the government probably shouldn’t be doing. In this I also want to see what candidates say in regards to stimulating the economy. There’s not a lot that our government can and should do to manage the economy. This is as pure a capitalist system as there ever was one, and our economy, the number of jobs available and the flow of capital keeping things moving, growth and the like, is mostly driven by market forces. As we all know, market forces are driven be perception. And so the market sways this way and that with the political tides because the federal government is too powerful a force not to affect it. Truly, the economy should largely be left alone. For instance the latest tumble and scare on Wall Street happened because of the mania surrounding the housing market. The forces there should have taken care of themselves, and today largely are. However, you’d never know it from the candidates for President and the national news.

Immigration is this election cycle’s big hot potato. Many of us were not alive the last time we had this serious an issue in immigration. Earlier in the 20^th century we still had immigration issues that surrounded racism and melting pot fear. It encompassed many decades and several ethnic groups (Poles, Slavs, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, etc…). Right now the issue is Mexicans. And really it’s not about Mexicans, it’s about people who are here without passing through the border in an official capacity. They’re here illegally, and that applies to any ethnic group really, but the media focuses on the Latin American contingent as it’s the largest, making it seem like an ethnic issue, and the powers that be just allow that rhetoric to breed unabated.

Social issues are how the government deals with things like marriage, abortion, euthanasia, personal privacy and the like. Constitutional issues are those that have to do with how the government is structured and run and most importantly the naming and function of Supreme Court justices.

So here we go. Are you ready?

Super Ruby Tuesday '08

2008-01-26T22:00:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while, but the wait should not be taken as a sign that I have fallen off the earth. Nor should the reader assume that I have given up on politics, world events, science and religion just because I have not put fingers to the keys for a while. It’s been a very hustle and bustle holiday season, and for a change I was very involved in other areas of my life. Suffice to say that this is a moment in that life that I’ll probably be getting back to soon.

I continue my attempt to make this an essay only blog. And by that I mean that I don’t want to have short comments to a link that I found. I can voice my short opinions to friends and family, but you all have the entirety of the net at your disposal, and you can read stuff for yourself. This space is for lengthier ruminations.

Which leads me to the purpose of this one. It’s Presidential election time again. I’ve been paying attention to the constant campaigning, much to my detriment, for the last few months, and I have to say that I’m disappointed that many of the states decided that they were going to seek some quasai elevation of their self importance by dragging out our election cycle a few more months. In addition to that politicians and parties seem to think that the American public enjoys politics so much that they’d better get going nearly a full 2 years before the next President puts his tush in the Oval Office.

But far from what the press is informing all of us about, I thought I would take a look at what the candidates (who are left) are all about. What are their policy platforms? Who’s been saying what about what this country needs and what the issues are, as opposed to what they’re saying about each other?

I’m taking the Republicans first. I find myself more attracted (if only just) to the general platform of the Republican Party these days, and many of my friends also lean in that direction, so in the interest of our upcoming primary (and in case I don’t get to the other party until May), that’s where I’m starting. I’ll then saunter over to the Democrats, which should be fun considering how close this race is so far.

Let me take this opportunity to say how disappointed I am that Fred Thompson has dropped out. No, I guess he didn’t have much of a shot considering how far behind he’s been in some of these primaries and caucuses. I’m going to miss the opportunity to vote for someone who’s as close to my political values as anyone has been in a while. While I’m still pretty socially conservative, personally, politically I yearn for the federalism that the founders intended and a smaller and less corruptible government in DC. I don’t see that in the policy articles or speeches by the other candidates. And so I’m in that spot of picking from the lesser of many weevils. The big question is going to be, who is going to be left for us in lonely Oregon to vote for come May?

Lots of love.

Gullible Warping

2007-12-14T14:04:00.001-08:00

This seems extraordinary. 10 years ago a bunch of bureaucrats, led by Al Gore, met in the Japanese city of Kyoto and dreamed up a “solution” to the apparent problem of global warming by drafting up a bunch of rules around limiting emissions.

These limits were inherently unfair to already developed countries and would have had the effect of grinding the world’s economy, if not to a halt, at least would have damaged it irreparably. Accordingly, the United States decided not to ratify it with a unanimous vote in the Senate, where all such ratifications occur.

Now, this is not to say that the agreement wasn’t signed by a representative of the United States. Al Gore did get behind this thing, but he couldn’t even get the support of his President, who quickly realized that the people weren’t going to like it one bit. That, of course, doesn’t stop the NY Times from making statements like this (note: this isn’t a commentary column, it’s a “news article”):

There appears to be broad consensus that this should be ready by 2009, in time to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the current agreement that limits emissions by all wealthy countries except the United States, which signed the Kyoto agreement but has refused to adopt it.

Interesting statement, considering what I just said above, isn’t it? Makes it sound like we’re supposed to be following this agreement, and the bias of the reporter is exposed. However, they do note later, although without the importance that I would put on it, that Russia, India and China also have not agreed to Kyoto and don’t look like they’re going to ante up to the new agreement drafted in the remote island nation of Bali. Considering that China is just now taking over as the world’s top emissions leader you would think that environmental advocates would start going after them and not the U.S., which, despite not agreeing to the UN’s blackmail, has far tougher federal incentives and regulations regarding pollution than most of the countries attending the event, and certainly more than the three mentioned above.

No mention is made of the agreement among southeastern Asian and Pacific region nations, brokered by the US a couple of years ago, that contained ideas and agreements that actually have a realistic shot at reducing global warming related emissions. That story was lost almost as fast as it was issued. Try to find it on Google. You’ll be digging.

Separately, the governments at the conference were close to agreement Friday on a system that would compensate developing countries for protecting their rainforests, a plan that environmentalists described as an innovative effort to mitigate global warming.

The precise ways that countries with large rainforests, like Indonesia and Brazil, would be compensated have not been fully worked out.

Here again we see how bureaucrats think. Instead of helping these countries get to a place where they’re economy is not based on ruining their own environment, we get economic blackmail. Or environmental welfare, if you like. We’ll just take money from those “rich” countries (capitalists) to help out the less fortunate so they won’t feel the need to cut down their forests (rob mini-marts).

This thinking is just futile, and the U.S. Senate is no more likely to ratify than the last time. The presence of Gore in Bali isn’t helping the cause.

The ridicule these people are getting by flying (some in private jets) to a remote island to discuss reducing emissions isn’t helping their cause either. Glenn Reynolds, one of the most read bloggers in the world, continually repeats the mantra that he’ll start taking global warming seriously when the people who are telling us it is start acting like it is.

And along with news of re-forming ice sheets in the Antarctic and evidence of solar effects on the atmosphere muddying up the global warming arguments, there’s a new possible cause of melting ice in Greenland. And it’s not humankind.

Geography links

2007-11-02T16:59:00.001-07:00

Pretty keen blog devoted to the geography of elections, particularly this election. Some neat maps and links to other sites regarding maps and tools that others have done regarding the political and cultural landscape. Worth a look-see.

Also, if you’re inclined, check this one out too. Common Census is a site that invites citizens to enter information about themselves regarding their regional perspective and then maps the results. Some of the maps are just for fun, like the professional sporting team loyalty maps, but others show the extent of influence of major urban areas. Some neat stuff there.

Happy Halloween

2007-10-31T13:39:00.001-07:00

A short history of the Vampire, as a figure of legend and religious mysticism, from one of my favorite geographers.

The modern vampire is a product of myths evolved through both space and time. There is no one single origin for bloodsucking beasts but one can see a progression from ancient Mesopotamia, to Judaism, to Eastern Christianity, to Protestantism, to the secular today. Each stage offered its own perspective on vampires for its own reasons.

One note: Catholicgauze notes that there’s a passage in Isaiah that speaks of Lilith (as the early Jewish mystical origin of the vampire), but is translated as “night creature.” This isn’t a mistranslation necessarily, as the Mesopotamian figure of what would be known as Lilith was associated with owls in some cases, and storm and night demons in others. And so the Jewish there might be a reference to something other than the Lilith character associated with the Jewish legend that there was an evil 1^st wife of Adam.

This is further supported by the fact that the context of the Isaiah passage is that of multiple creatures finding a nice place of refuge in Edom once God has taken care of the sinful people there.

Self-deluded idealism

2007-10-29T16:36:00.001-07:00

Read this interesting post on Political Correctness in the Roman Empire. Then come back.
…
OK, welcome back. The Roman historian Tacitus might have been waxing idealistic, and might have just been disgruntled with the breakdown of Roman society, when he reported that Germanic tribes where hippie communes, but the author’s comparisons with the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau are what caught my eye.

Rousseau went further, however. Instead of being content to think that eighteenth-century French society and its institutions were corrupt and corrupting, and to imagine another people that was morally superior because their natural goodness had remained intact, Rousseau generalized: man in his natural state was naturally good, and all corruptness sprang from society and its institutions. His Noble Savage was not just a particular group of Germanic tribesmen but simply man in his naturally good state before the degradation brought by the institutions of society--any society.

The interesting thing is that these guys act like they’ve never seen the societies they’ve envisioned (and in fact they hadn’t). Whereas they would have noted in all cultures the strict structures needed if you are to avoid a western-style legal system. In and of themselves the moral codes of primitive societies probably acted like a legal system.

Holding the believe that it’s the institutions that bring us down and not our own imperfection, that by our nature we’re good and decent people, will always lead you down the wrong path to enlightenment regarding human behavior. Think about it; if people were generally good, how could their institutions be inherently bad (being created by, you know, people)?

Every time some institution, or program or agency, gets created in this country or elsewhere, the motives for doing so are typically benign and good. We’re doing it to make better worlds. All of them better worlds…

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes.
However, those well meant institutions inevitably get populated by people, who far from being inherently good, tend to abuse the system they’ve been presented with. Why do you think we get so worked up over things like “loopholes?” It’s because if everyone in this country took every law and statute they were presented with and followed them under the “Spirit” of the law instead of it’s actual legal text (to the letter!) don’t you think we’d be a bit better off? If people were inherently that decent, would we need laws in the first place?

Far from that happy place is where we’re at. There’s a reason that nations with rule-of-law social structures in place are the safest and most liberal in the world (although being far from perfect themselves), and that’s because people are decidedly NOT good by nature. Romans 3:23 (“ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”)

Interesting that in our rampage away from God even relatively smart people will grasp upon delusions they create even for themselves. This post above was noting that the tendency to create idealized societies as examples of how evil or corrupt the west is (or the U.S. is) is alive and well in the 21^st century, as we appear to learn nothing over the millennia. And alive in our own hearts, as I’m sure you and I could find similar self-delusions about a great many things in our own lives, much less the international stage.

Actually, as a final note, I think that it requires a strong cultural moral system in addition to a legal code. It’s disturbing to think that the increasingly flexible moral system in our country is giving way to a much more flexible legal system. One definitely supports the other.

Events in Burma and the Coalition of Peace.

2007-09-28T16:39:00.001-07:00

Haven’t been blogging on world events much, or at all, but I think that, just in case someone is reading this from a cave somewhere, you should be aware that there is a small country called Myanmar, which was formerly known as Burma, that is going through some birthing pains right now.

What I mean by that is that while they are ruled by a pretty oppressive military oligarchy (or junta as the press records it), they are protesting against that government. Thousands of civilians have massed in the streets every day for the last week or so, in protest of higher gas prices set by the government, but truly its pent up frustration of living under the thumb of the military for 20 years now.

In 1990, Burma had a fairly democratic movement, electing a president (a female no less), Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been more or less under house arrest for 18 years.

The interesting thing about the latest protests is that they’ve been led by Buddhist monks, and the monks are taking the brunt of the casualties up to now.

This regime is supported by China, who is hardly on the side of the worldwide call for the regime to stand down and stop brutally suppressing the protests. Although they’ve made some weak noise lately for Myanmar to soften their actions.

The neat thing about the article that I linked to above is it’s focus on how the news is getting out of the country. With a forced moratorium on journalists during this crisis by the government, the only outlet for news is by citizen journalists using their cell phones to take video and text messaging eye-witnessed events. Refugee Burmese media outlets in places like Thailand and Sweden have been getting information from citizens on the street and relaying that information worldwide.

So what I don’t understand is how dictators like those in Burma, and those listed below, think that the rest of the world has no idea just how cruel and vicious they really are. There’s like this mental disconnect between what they’re telling us and what our press is telling us is really going on. And we know this because of technology. Take satellite imaging for instance:

The American Association for the Advancement of Science said the high-resolution photographs taken by commercial satellites document a growing military presence at 25 sites across eastern Myanmar, matching eyewitness reports. We found evidence of 18 villages that essentially disappeared," AAAS researcher Lars Bromley said in an interview.

As Instapundit says (who I got this last link from), “You can crack down, but you can’t hide.”

In related news (and I mean related only in the sense of vicious dictators), Iran and Zimbabwe announced that they are starting a Coalition of Peace. Hmmm. Considering who these characters are snuggling up to in the past couple of years, I imagine that the members of this “coalition” will be countries like Iran, Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, North Korea, China, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. Notice a trend? Gateway Pundit says: “The first act by the Coalition of Peace will be to wipe Israel off the map.”

I’ve been thinking about all these countries forming ties and acting like close buddies. What’s the common denominator here, I mean besides oppressive oligarchy type governments? Is it Soviet style communism? You could say that for all the countries except for the African ones, really. I’m not sure how much Sudan is socialist as much as it is theocratic/Arabic. They are surly cozy with the Chinese money flooding in for their oil surplus.

Seriously, what does folk like Hugo Chavez see in a long term relationship with Iran and Syria? Does Ahmadinejad tell Hugo in private that his rhetoric about world domination for Islam is just to whip the Muslims into an Anti-American frenzy, and that they really aren’t serious?

Perhaps there’s some sick need for fascist dictators to unite against the universal threat of Democracy.

Sim God

2007-09-11T23:44:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever played a “Sim” game, you know how fun it is to try and manage and control the holistic worlds that are created within. Keep an entire city running. There’s even one of the entire earth, sort of. And as computer power continues to increase, the limits of how detailed those tiny universes are continues to expand.

My son has a Sim Zoo, which is the only one I’ve seen in full play mode in a long time. The fun in playing is that you don’t really know how to make everything work to your advantage, and you don’t know how it’ll all work out. In the mind of a 11 year old, though, sometimes the fun is in causing chaos. Like letting the lions out of their cages and seeing what they’ll do (turns out they run around and your sim-visitors scatter and give off tiny electronic screams).

About a month ago, in the NY Times, John Tierney, explored the recent philosophical musings of an Englishman named Nick Bostrom (linked by Instapundit). Bostrom theorizes that perhaps we are the product of some hyper-advanced computer simulation created by some race so far advanced that they can produce computers powerful enough to simulate the reality we live in.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

It would seem to not matter that we would all be just bits and bites, because for us everything we touched would feel like the real thing. Its interesting to think about, but fairly nihilist in that since we’re all just bits and bytes there’s no real soul and no afterlife (although he points out that if we’re interesting enough perhaps the great simulation creator will use us again in his next simulation).

Whatever, I must say. I can’t really get the enthusiasm with which the author and Bostrom carry themselves.

In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

Really. A you can mathematically predict whether or not there’s another more advanced race of people with computers powerful enough, and the spare time on their hands, and the inclination to baby-sit such a complex simulation as this one? Really.

That was the author of the article, and the assumption is that computing power will in fact get there. His only qualm is that the advanced race might not want to create the simulation. Here’s Bostrom:

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

It’s neat how we can pretend to be scientific by throwing out hypothetical numbers. In truth, this is the more fanciful side of philosophy, and, if you want my opinion, which I just know you do, one of the less useful ones.

Because you really have to accept that there’s just as good a chance (better in fact) that there’s a God and that he created this world, and that he’s so beyond our understanding and power that he has the ability to control every aspect of his big and quite real existence.

I’d say that given there’s a 20 percent chance this might all be some computer sim game, there’s a 75 percent chance that it’s actually real and God created it (I give the other 5 percent to those who don’t believe in God). Go ahead. Dispute my figures.

Having said all that, the article is interesting, and there’s even links to Bostrom’s work and some other musings on the subject. Bostrom’s article (at Simulation-Argument.com no less) is all full of equations that mean nothing really, if you look at the ridiculous things they represent.

However, if you don’t believe in God, and/or are a computer geek, this article might change your life. Have a go.

In the mean time, I’d like to take this in another direction. This article got me thinking. At one point in the article, Tierney takes the mental thread that perhaps we’re a simulation inside a simulation, ad infinitum. But at some point there would have to be an original creator of all these simulations. A Prime Designer, if you will. I think most religious and mono-theistic persons in this world can identify with that.

However, far from the limitations of a computer simulation, the universe is something far more amazing than that. It comes from something I see when I’m reading my Bible.

1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. Gen 1:1-5

You’ll notice, if you read the entire chapter this was extracted from, that God said let there be light/expanse/dark/water/etc. It’s almost like God just starts talking and the universe starts falling into place. Here’s another place in scripture that reads like that. Psalm 33:6

By the word of the LORD were the heavens made,
their starry host by the breath of his mouth.

So again, the universe was created by the words spoken by a being we can’t even begin to get our heads around. So I’m thinking about this in the context of the article I’ve just read and I get this thought. According to the Bible, and thereby according to God, we are a part of a story that God is telling. Now, the story is long and complex, and when God tells it, it becomes real. God is telling our story, and He wants us to know that He is the author, and He can relate to the participants in the story.
The thing about God is, thought, that he’s omnipotent. He knows how the story will end, and not just like an author who pretty much knows how the story will end, but has to work out the details. God knew the beginning, the details, and how it would end before he started. Unlike simulations, God isn’t wondering how it’s all going to turn out. He’s not telling the story for the excitement of controlling the action, but because it gives him glory.

Now, I’m just traveling on a train of thought here. You might think that I’m not correct or in line with other parts of the Bible. You might think that my train of thought is just as loony as Bostrom’s. Perhaps. Understand that even though having God creating a story makes it seem like each person’s life is pre-written out and they really have no choice in how their lives end up, there are parts of the Bible that say things very similar, and there is considerable debate in the Christian community regarding pre-destination vs. free will and how we’re supposed to get our heads around what God is trying to tell us in these verses.

Also, please realize that I’m not saying that God is creating a piece of fiction, which would be no more real than the simulations discussed above. Like I said a couple of paragraphs above, the power of God is that his stories become reality when spoken. It forces me to comprehend a God that is far bigger and unfathomable than I previously considered. But it also causes me to wonder at the beauty of the mind of God. That instead of the universe being something as crude as bits and bytes, or even that the uncountable molecules that make it up, that at it’s whole it’s all in the mind of God. And each one of us has the ability to shadow that power by the stories we tell and the ideas we dream up. We are in the image of God.

Post to remind us

2007-09-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to post anything today, specifically to remember 9/11. There are plenty of people doing that, and I did my own remembering, and talked with some people about it. However, I just saw this article that Dave Barry (yes, the humor columnist) did on that very day. It's thoughtful, and this bit caught me.

The truth is that most Americans, until Tuesday, were only dimly aware of their existence, and posed no threat to them. But that doesn't matter to them; all that matters is that we're Americans. And so they used our own planes to kill us.

And then their supporters celebrated in the streets.
I'm not naive about my country. My country is definitely not always right;
my country has at times been terribly wrong. But I know this about
Americans: We don't set out to kill innocent people. We don't cheer when
innocent people die.

And it becomes more and more obvious to the people of Iraq that we aren't like the killers who Al Qaida or Saddam (when he was alive) paint us out to be. The longer our troops are over there, the more Americans like the one's Dave knows succeed in proving to the Iraqis that we're there to help, not occupy.
I'm proud to live in this country and call it home.

The vara

2007-09-05T16:24:00.001-07:00

Fun fact for the day. I came across a very bizarre unit of measurement today while considering land surveys in Texas. It seems that while surveyors in most parts of the country rely on feet or chains (go figure), in Texas, and indeed in some other southern states, you might run into the vara.

Example of what it would look like on a survey: “thence N 23 ½ W 232 vrs.”

It turns out the vara is an old Spanish and Portuguese base of measurement imported over to the Americas. When the Spanish system came in contact with the English system during the days of independent Texas, the modern vara was adjusted to make more sense to people who were more used to measuring things in feet.

Although, why they didn’t use the English chain, which was much more integrated with feet and miles, is beyond me.

Here’s a history of the Spanish vara:

The vara, a Spanish unit of distance, was used in the Spanish and Mexican surveys and land grants^qv in Texas. One vara equals approximately thirty-three and one-third inches; 5,645.4 square varas equal one acre; 1,906.1 varas equal one mile; and 1,000,000 square varas, which is one labor,qv equal approximately 177.1 acres. The word vara entered the Spanish language from vulgate Latin and originally meant a long, thin, clean branch of any tree or plant. It later came to be used for any straight stick and then for a lance. Next it came to mean a badge of office carried by mayors and judges and such officials and probably achieved a more uniform dimension. As a judge's lance, the vara assumed a position of official importance in the eyes of the people, began to be used as a measuring stick, and eventually became a unit of measurement.

The vara is also thought to be the typical length of stride of a Spanish soldier.
In Texas, one vara is equal to 33 1/3 inches, or just less than a yard. 1 million square vara equal one square Labor. The Spanish vara was set at 835.9mm in 1801 (that’s about 32.9 inches). The Colorado and California vara are 33 inches and the Florida vara is 33.372.

In truth, it seems that everywhere in the Spanish world the vara could have been anywhere from 32 to 35 inches in length, causing all kinds of problems.

Indian Heaven Wilderness

2007-09-02T23:03:00.001-07:00

Admittedly, my posts about hiking in Oregon and Washington have fallen short this year. We did get out a bit this last couple of weeks, so I’ll tell you about a wilderness that’s worth taking a leisurely stroll in.

The Indian Heaven Wilderness, in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington, is probably one of the lesser known natural preserves in the Cascades. It’s situated in between Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Adams, but a bit to the south. The easiest way to get there is to take highway 141 north from White Salmon (across the bridge from Hood River, Oregon) to the town of Trout Lake and visit the ranger station there, right on the highway. Get yourself one of their wilderness maps, which are very detailed and far more updated than the USGS quads.

The wilderness is a paradise of huckleberry bushes, which have been picked by native Americans for thousands of years. Tribes from as far away as Montana and Wyoming, as well as across Washington and Oregon, would gather there for Summer festivities in the early 20^th century. They would dry game, fish, race horses, play games, and of course pick berries.

The area is now inundated with locals and not-so-locals picking berries from July (if you can stand the mosquitoes, some call this Mosquito Heaven) through most of August. Some sell them in Trout Lake or other localities. If you stop at the small diner attached to the gas station at the cross roads as you enter town you can get Huckleberry shakes, pies, cobblers and just about everything else you can force the little tart berries into.

The roads are pretty good coming in from Trout Lake. The mainlines are really well maintained, even the gravel ones. I would have no trouble at all getting our Nissan on FR 60 or FR 24. I think that FR65 coming from Carson to the south is paved all along the Wilderness’ western flanks, but I haven’t driven that way, so check first.

We took a side road, FR6035, to the Crater Lake trail, and I recommend that anyone using this road have higher clearance. It’s not really bad, but there area couple of spots where the drainage has done some damage.

We took the Crater trail up 2.5 miles to Junction Lake, which is right on the PCT, and set up camp. It was a gentle climb, and our 6 year old and 11 year old did it without much fuss at all. My impression is that, except for a trail or two, the entire wilderness is quite gentle in terrain. The trees are big and the forest is shady and sometimes downright cool and dark. There are lots of lakes. Junction was nice, but we took a walk down the PCT to Blue lake, which was much more spectacular.

While on the PCT we met some lovely people named Charlie Brown and Cardinal Bird who were hiking the entire PCT from Mexico to Canada. They looked pretty clean for having hiked over 2000 miles, but they were awfully nice, and provided encouragement for us, as we hope to take on that trail someday.

The thing, again, to note about this area is that the undergrowth is almost entirely huckleberry, except for the occasional rhododendron and baby conifer. If you are there in season you’ll never go hungry.

There are a few peaks with views of the surrounding forest, with the major volcanoes all around. However, we didn’t see that much, and you probably won’t either. But the peace and solitude of this wilderness is enough. It’s pretty without all the spectacular views you get elsewhere.

And, as we were constantly reminded, this is sasquatch country. Watch out! (no, really, I expected to see at least bears with all the berries around, but there were enough people I think that they were way off trail enjoying the goodies).

Picture 1: Crater trail almost to the PCT junction. Picture 2: Juction Lake. Picture 3: Charlie Brown and Cardinal Bird. Picture 4: Blue Lake. Picture 5: Huckleberries!!

Melt down of modern news

2007-09-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

My wife and I were talking about the state of logical debate in our fine country and society at large today, she because she had heard an interview with a man named Lee Harris, who is apparently liberal and gay, who wrote a book describing how the left has forsaken reason in their debate, if it can be called that. The book, and I assume the interview, was about the danger that radical Islam poses to western society and the myopia that occurs among liberals who assume that western values of civilization will prevail in the culture of the middle east and all we have to do is nurture that with a little dialog.

I fell into the discussion because of this article that I read a while back (via Instapundit). It was more how the current media, the press, does not aid in logical discussion of world affairs, politics and values, but actually hurts them because of the personalities behind the pages and business nature of modern media. Here is a bit of the article I was reading.
James Lewis spoke of the discussion about Carl Rove's departure because of something he said regarding the press.

When Karl Rove resigned from his White House job last week, to a chorus of yowling cat-calls from furious news writers around the country, some scribblers were particularly offended by a word Mr. Rove used for his good friends in the media: The word "mob."

Not the organized criminal type mob, but the screaming charging mass of crazed lunatics holding torches and pitchforks. Then he continues, using the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings as fuel for his argument.

The Big Media are a mob. That should be Politics 101. They are a tiny, unchecked power elite, locked into life-long careers in the remnant of a crumbling monopoly over America's national conversation. Like other unaccountable elites, they are monumentally fickle, self-indulgent, snobbish, vain, vulgar, entitled, incestuous, arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, hysterical, and demagogic. They sound like a unified chorus for the same reasons that street mobs run as a group -- because by and large, they don't dare to stand alone. Media snobs are always looking over their shoulders to see if they are still singing from the same hymnal as The New York Times. The US media have been one-sidedly Leftist, while piously proclaiming their devotion to impartiality. Thus, they are also institutionally mendacious. Telling the truth is hardly their job. They're just not qualified.

This doesn’t go for all the newspapers you’ll read. The local ones still try to have a voice of their own sometimes. Here in Portland we have a pretty good local weekly called Willamette Week. They cover local issues with a penetration that you don’t often find in this sound bite society. Even they, however, once they step out of the bounds of purely local issues and try to make some statement on national or international issues, they recite the party line without deviation. Sad.

Basically, the importance of what gets put on the front page is what’s important to the journalists and editors. It’s only coincidence if that same subject is actually important to the rest of us as well. Again Lewis drives through several examples of that, notably that the media spends considerable time and pandering effort over presidential candidates and Hollywood celebrities but took virtually no time for probably the greatest human contribution to human welfare in the world in the last century: Norman Borlaug.

Mass killers make up the most famous names in history: Attila the Hun, Caligula, Hitler, Napoleon. But few of the famous can claim to have saved lives. Perhaps Louis Pasteur, and of course many unknown scientists and inventors in medicine, agriculture and engineering. But who is celebrated by the Media Mob? Paris Hilton. Dan Rather. Hillary Clinton. The next Democrat for president. None of them have real achievements to their credit. None of them come within miles of Norman Borlaug.

The Big Media just aren't interested in stories of profound human significance. Life-saving scientists are boring, and besides, don't we have too many people walking on the planet already? That's the vaunted "editorial judgment." It reflects the snobbish values of the vulgar Media Mob, and it's utterly subjective and selfish. Mobs don't think. They just hyperventilate at pseudo-scientific superstitions, like Global Warming.

He then goes into a description of where we started as a nation, with a collection of some of the most extraordinary intellectuals we have ever known, such as Jefferson and Hamilton and Franklin, and how the debate and news was carried in this country by free thinkers who’s ideas and values were shaped by their own studies and lives instead of the constant force fed side show we get now.

There was no centralized intellectual monopoly. Political arguments were often heated, with news sheets flaming each other like the best of the blogs. The newspapers produced geniuses like Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken, both self-taught news writers. Twain may be the foremost American novelist of the 19th century, and Mencken is one of the greatest essayists in the English language. That was before anybody had a degree in journalism.

Things have not improved. The decline of quality media in America can be traced to two things, (1) professionalization of the news business, and (2) a former technological monopoly in electronic and print media. With industrialized technology it became possible for a single ideology to exercise control. Colleges were accredited by bureaucracies, which enforced liberal uniformity where diversity used to flourish. Journalists became careerists, like teachers and other bureaucrats.

And then, he concludes:

But journalism doesn't thrive on a forced consensus. News conformity is always artificial, a matter of ideological indoctrination, not fact. Indeed, the average newswriter today is a shallow and gullible BA in English, with no knowledge of (or interest in) science, technology, history, economics, international affairs, or politics, nor any practical experience of real human nature. That is why we now have just one single national story line, repeated hundreds of times a day in all the major dailies. It is mental Coca Cola --without the nourishment sugar provides.

It's all very effective; with a more truthful media the Democrats wouldn't stand a chance in electoral politics. The entire American Left owes its existence and power to the Media Mob. And our national dialogue would be saner, better-informed, and more rational. We would have a much healthier world. Until then, a vigorous New Media provide our best hope.

Now, that last paragraph is a big OUCH. Not that I fully agree with this in light of the mental garbage that some Republicans put forth. It’s not like they’re much better, but they are on the right side of many issues from where I sit, if only by accident.

But his point about how we get our news and information has teeth, I think. I’ve talked about this before in the context of what happened to the news media since about Watergate, when the news went from capturing life to turning a buck. When every journalists turned from wanting to report to wanting to be the next big thing, at the heart of the next big break. Sensationalist reporting became rampant, and news media began a slow descent into madness by cutting corners and eliminating “beat” reporting. Now virtually the only true beat reporters are sports analysts.

Many journalists who got their BA or MA in writing and journalism are probably very upset about me and Mr. Lewis spreading this type of thinking around. But I see this type of journalism all the time. Stories are put forth without much real understanding or context. How many times have the NY Times or the AP gone on about some tragedy or military screw up in Iraq, only to have military people come back and explain that the news was completely backwards because they didn’t understand what they were reporting.

I could bring out other bits and pieces, but this one occurred in the news today as well. Tom Blumer noticed that the NY Times has to work pretty hard to twist economic data to make believe that the economy and job incomes are not doing well.

What will the future of news media be like? It does no good anymore for folks to disregard the blog world as non informational and patently inferior to traditional media news. People are going there anyway, knowing that they aren’t getting the full picture from the morning paper or the nightly news. I had a friend a couple of years back who used the pap statement when I used a blog post to back up something I was arguing: “I suppose you believe everything you read on the internet.”

Well, I suppose that we shouldn’t, but that goes equally for anything and everything. Know where it’s coming from. Use your own knowledge and experience. Get out from behind the TV and read a bit. Don’t think for a second that any journalist or writer (or blogger) is completely unbiased. Assume that politicians are corrupt, as power ultimately will do, and stop giving them more access to power. Assume that people are generally OK (if not good in a Godly sense) and that government’s and organizations don’t always speak for them accurately. Know that while Democracy and Capitalism have their flaws, there is no other governmental/economic system that has produced more freedom for people in the history of man.

Let’s get back to logical argument, can we now?

Portland's Pearl

2007-08-24T11:24:00.001-07:00

For those with Portland pride, the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) in New York put the Pearl District in NW Portland in it’s top 60 great public spaces in the world!

Portland is probably going to hang this from their highest banner for some time to come, but they can’t let it get to their head, as all planning project aren’t nearly as successful as this one was.

Of course just the presence of Powell’s Bookstore makes this the best urban Neighborhood in North America hands down. Not to mention a brewery.

Silver Star Mountain

2007-08-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

If you are looking to the northeast from most locations in Portland, Oregon, your view of one of the spectacular volcanoes of the Northwest, 12,276 foot Mt Adams, is blocked by some tall hills, or low mountains, just outside of Vancouver, Washington. The tallest peak in that hump is called Silver Star Mountain, so named because it has 5 ridges that radiate from the summit.
The neat thing about Silver Star is that it and it's ridges are mostly bald of trees, and the views are worth every pain and ache it takes to reach it. Which is not much pain and ache actually, if you aren't afraid of a few gravel roads, 2 or 3 miles of hiking and a couple thousand feet in elevation.
Let me tell you, though, that all that is more than worth it. Silver Star is the tallest peak for miles around, which means that your range of views is 360, and on a good day you can see every volcano from Mt. Rainier to Mt. Jefferson, as well as Portland and Vancouver laid out before you to the southwest and the Columbia River entering the magnificent gorge through the Cascades.
Before you think I'm overstating this with flowery words, you need to get up there and see for yourself. There are a couple of ways of getting there. State forest road 1200 runs from just north of Washougal, Washington, towards the valley's around Yacolt. You can approach it from either direction. There is also a US Forest road entry from the north on road 41. You can get decent directions either here or here. It takes about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes to get there from Portland.

Silver Star Mountain is too low to be as bald as it is, at only 4300 feet. Almost all other peaks in this region are forested well beyond that elevation. During 1902, the largest recorded forest fire in Washington's history, the Yacolt burn, which was a series of burns that repeatedly scorched over 250,000 acres of forestland. There have been many landslides in the intervening years due to the geology of the unprotected slopes, and the forest has had a difficult time reclaiming the mountain.

We came in from Washougal on the 1200 for our hike. The roads are windy, so you need to follow the directions pretty closely. It's a fairly beat up mainline, but have no fear of missing the trailhead. There's a good wide area to park, and a big sign with a map of the area. You can't miss it. The trail from here is just over 3 miles, and boy is it straight up. There are two sections where you're nose is pretty close to the ground, you might say, so be prepared for the uphill trudge. Amazingly, all the great views are when you're not going up, there are several flat spots to rest your legs with wide open ridges with great views. But the best views are at the top, of course.
You're walking on very old roads, which I imagine haven't been used in decades. We were trying to imagine what vehicles attempted to use those steep roads, but grateful that they've been reclaimed by feet.
The last time we were up there I was horrified to realize I had forgotten the camera, so the picture preceding this post, alas, was pilfered from another site. (Much appreciation to Gresham High School). There are some other good pictures on the other sites I linked to above, and this one too.
Happy hiking!

Degar of Vietnam

2007-08-03T13:44:00.001-07:00

Just as the U.S. is trying to open relations with Vietnam, it’s good to remember that this isn’t an open and free, capitalistic and democratic society. Far from it, and ever since we abandoned them after the Vietnam war, things haven’t been well for the average citizen of Southeast Asia.

In North Carolina I interviewed some of the Degar Montagnards who had participated in the 2001 demonstration and also others who witnessed the second mass demonstration by Degar Montagnards that occurred on Easter 2004. The 2004 demonstration however, was planned as a week long prayer vigil but this too was brutally crushed by Vietnam’s security forces. The 2004 Easter prayer vigil actually never commenced as security forces ambushed the Degar Montagnards on the first day, using knives, machetes, clubs and other weapons. Human Rights Watch reported 10 killed including a 80 year old blind woman who was dragged off a tractor and beaten to death. The US State Department reported killings in at least "double digit figures" and I personally spoke to survivors who escaped to the United States who saw hundreds, I repeat hundreds of Degar Montagnards lying unconscious or dead, bleeding on the ground. One witness old me explicitly he saw 35 to 40 dead bodies on one street alone in Buonmathuot.

Not that Christians in SE Asia are the average, but Christians are far from the only oppressed group.

The Degar are indigenous peoples of the central highlands of Vietnam. The term Montagnard means “mountain people” in French, so saying “Degar Montagnards” is kind of redundant. Starting in the early 20^th century, missionaries worked hard to convert the Degar, and roughly three quarters of the present population are some denomination, protestant or Catholic. The Degar are to the Vietnamese what the Aborigines are to Australians, although that’s not entirely true, as the Degar share ancestral lineage with the rest of the population, whereas most Australians are ethnically white-European). But culturally it’s not a bad comparison.

The Vietnamese Communists never trusted the Degars, as their Christian beliefs made them much more likely to support the American troops in the war, and they were driven out after the Americans left. Mostly they get driven out now in favor of government use of the fertile land for coffee plantations. Sounds a bit like Darfur, if you ask me.

(background on Degars mostly from Wikipedia).

Bolivian Musical Capitals

2007-07-23T16:34:00.003-07:00

Geographic post of the day.
This is kind of a geopolitical bit of news, but it has some geographic implications that will get geographers worked up, and possibly force poor students to re-memorize the capitals of Latin American countries.

Bolivian Marxist President Evo Morales has decided that he needs to move the administrative capital from La Paz to Sucre. Sucre was once the proper capital of the country, but once the economy shifted from the lowlands to the mining of the highlands of Bolivia, the administrative portion moved to La Paz, leaving the judicial branch in Sucre.

That’s not all he’s doing either. The protests have begun, but does Bolivia have the guts to throw this guy out?

Dysfunctional Politic

2007-07-23T16:34:00.001-07:00

On my continuing theme of disgust at the current political climate in America, which I blame all politicians and other people who refuse to see anything but partisan victory and power of conquest, I noted this great article by Roger Simon, via Instapundit, about the rhetorical battle between the popular left blog Daily Kos and Bill O’Reilly.

A little background for those not familiar with what happened here. Kos was holding a convention that includes lots of Democratic politicians and figureheads speaking, which he’s been doing for the last couple of years. This year the newcomer airline Jet Blue decided to sponsor the event, but that announcement garnered a sea of reaction from the right side of the blog world, as well as not a few conservative columnists and politicians.

And you’re saying: so what? Which is what I said, being that Jet Blue basically has their bottom line in mind here, this was a business decision for them, not a political one, and I imagine that Kos would find the money elsewhere. There’s not shortage of wealthy pockets on the left.

So O’Reilly attacks the airline for agreeing to sponsor the event and Jet Blue rescinded their sponsorship. Kos spent considerable pixel space lambasting O’Reilly and announcing a Jet Blue boycott.

Lost in this is perspective, as it usually is in politics.

What interests me in this brouhaha is not the substance, but the amount of heat generated by both sides over a relatively small matter. We live in a society where large sections of the media - on and off line - are incapable of viewing the world outside their ideological blinders. For them, politics is blood sport. They are essentially like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, endlessly headed off in fits of rage against their enemies.

Of course the unspoken motivation for this behavior - the elephant in this room of monkeys - is money. I don’t know if Markos Zuniga is capable of being a reasonable adult, but if he were, he would probably lose lots of readers and cash. The same is true of Bill O’Reilly. If he stopped shouting people down and got into a dialog with them, I suspect, sadly, fewer viewers would watch.

This economic motive is augmented by ideological loathing of the type practiced broadly by the likes of Kos and O’Reilly and more subtly - but perhaps more lethally - by pseudo-objective outlets like The New York Times. Everyone is playing to his or her audience. But the loser is that audience. It is we the citizens.

With this polarized media atmosphere, it is small wonder that the President and the Congress have the pathetic poll numbers they do. Our leaders present themselves to us through that media and, in a very real sense, are part of it. They are one and the same. The Congress is a media personality. Much of what they do is media defined. It is one big show, much like sports. And we citizens have been reduced to fans, chanting "Our team is red hot, your team’s worth diddley-squat," just as we did in junior high. But the games and the issues are real.

Meanwhile, we are left with a polity that is virtually dysfunctional, lost in their own electoral ambitions and outmoded ideological preachments and not talking to each other. We have a Left with no response to a misogynistic/homophobic religious fascist enemy that abhors separation of church and state and a Right willing to use their religious values to shut down the US Congress over the fate of one woman when they could not possibly have any true medical knowledge of her situation.

Talk about irony. And we’re supposed to be the modern society? Bring back Ancient Greece. Or at least Chairman Deng, who famously said when throwing off the yoke of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung thought, "I don’t care whether a cat is black or white. I only care if it catches mice."

Our own ideological yokes are nowhere near as rigid as China’s, but we could still use a little of Chairman Deng’s advice. In fact, we don’t have to look very deep in our own history to find our own version of it. It’s called pragmatism.

And meanwhile we drown in unimportant minutia as the world experiences the real birth pains of trial and error (Sudan is a true crisis, Venezuela is on the verge of collapse, Roberto Mugabe is destroying his people and his country, Russia’s Putin is trying to recreate the Soviet Empire, China is on it’s way to overtaking us as an economic power. Iraq anyone? Pay attention!)

Wyden's Flat Tax

2007-07-23T16:32:00.001-07:00

I’m always ready to be surprised by a Democrat legislating in the nation’s capital. It’s even more neato when that Senator is from my own home state of Oregon, who’s blue-state credentials usually allow Democratic legislators to tow party line without having to answer to their constituents.

For the past 5 or 6 years, I’ve heard nothing regarding Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 but “It’s the sole reason for the recovery” from Republicans and “It’s a gift to the rich and caused the big deficit” from the Democrats. But this is something new:

Wyden's proposal to replace the 1.4-million-word tax code with a simpler system is the most ambitious bill of his 26-year congressional career. It would fundamentally change the U.S. economy and shake up nearly every special interest in Washington. But Wyden acknowledged that, without Bush's support, his bill doesn't stand a chance until at least the next presidential administration.

The Wyden plan would reduce the six-bracket income tax system to three. And all income -- including wages, capital gains and dividends -- would be taxed at the same rates. The plan would eliminate many tax loopholes, allowing for a one-page 1040 form.

Now, it remains to be seen exactly what the fine print of the bill is about. Some conservatives have some pretty strict ideas about what tax reform should look like, but I’m wondering why more libertarian and conservative types aren’t at least publicly excited to see a Democrat actually bring this out for discussion.

This isn’t a pure flat tax, there would be three taxpayer rates instead of the current 6, and there would still be standard deductions for families. And given that Bush’s tax cuts will end in a couple of years, it’s time for congress to start hashing out what the tax code is going to look like after that.

What Wyden is doing is not only messing with the tax structure, but also politics as usual in Washington. As George Will states:

Conservatives like tax cuts as means for restraining—or so they think—government spending ("starving the beast"). Liberals like tax benefits as ways to spend without seeming to. Therefore tax simplification serves a third objective, one that Wyden is perhaps too polite to stress—reform of Washington's political culture.

Which is a long time in coming. I’ve said before that all the hubub about corruption, spending, earmarks and the like would be rendered less important and damaging to the country as a whole if the federal government was less able to secure funds from the people. Will a flat tax do that? I don’t know. I would imagine that Wyden’s plan is to simplify the tax code without reducing federal tax receipts, but the imposition of a simpler tax code, and perhaps some congressional rules about how this new tax code can be amended (to make it harder) would make raising taxes more politically dangerous.

And then there’s the other affects to our culture as a whole. How much do the deductions that are there to promote small business and charity, home buying and medical care, going to change the economy?

As Michael J. Graetz of the Yale Law School has written, the political class "uses the income tax the way my mother employed chicken soup: as a magic elixir to solve all the nation's economic and social difficulties." Americans, gripped by cognitive dissonance, want tax simplification—and all the current complexities that benefit them.

Certainly I think that we would be better served by a simpler tax system that actually taxed us less as a whole. I don’t pretend to be able to give so much that it affects my taxes all that much, so that kind of thing won’t affect my giving, but it might to that class of society that gives the most. No, not the poor or the middle class, the wealthy. It’s where most of the charity in this country comes from, and how much will they continue to give without tax incentive (I know that sounds cold, are people really that crass, but think about it). And some of those other deductions do come into play in my budget, like the mortgage deduction.

George Will calls Wyden “Sisyphus,” the mythological character who was destined to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity, as Wyden is “determined to roll the boulder of tax reform up Capitol Hill yet again.” Let’s hope that he doesn’t have to keep rolling quite that long.

Update: I’ve read a bit more, and past attempts by Wyden have included other deductions, such as home mortgages, so this is looking less like a “flat tax” and more like severe tax code reform. Which is OK too.

Homer vs. giant

2007-07-20T17:47:00.001-07:00

Homer Simpson joins the Cerne Abbas giant on the landscape of the English countryside, angering pagans who find some ritual significance in the figure carved into the side of a hill. Pagans think it’s of ancient origin, like Stonehenge, but most historians now concede that it was probably done in the 17^th century.

Catholicguaze passes it on noting that Homer was put there recently in advertisement of the new movie.

Obama and Kindergarteners

2007-07-19T16:43:00.001-07:00

There’s a story filtering around the conservative side of things that Barack Obama wants “sex education” for kindergarteners. I saw this here, and from the article, it sounds like this is far less of a big deal than the right makes it out to be.

Obama clarified:

'Nobody's suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it,' Obama said. 'If they ask a teacher 'where do babies come from,' that providing information that the fact is that it's not a stork is probably not an unhealthy thing. Although again, that's going to be determined on a case by case basis by local communities and local school boards.'

Also he mentioned things like teaching about “inappropriate touching” and the like. And so if that’s the type of thing he’s talking about it’s less serious that what you would normally think of when you hear the phrase “sex education.”

However, I don’t see the point here. It’s an unfortunate circumstance that in this day and age kids aren’t getting appropriate answers to their questions and so the school feels like it needs to step in. However I still don’t think this is the schools job. It’s the parents job. I also think that it’s stupid to think that teachers don’t already have the latitude to answer a kindergartener’s questions about where babies come from by telling them that they come from their “mother’s belly.” Teachers should restrict touching in class as well, and discipline the kids when they need to, but a formal education on the subject?

Weather Control

2007-07-19T13:36:00.001-07:00

This is kind of scary: Weather control for political purposes.

Thirty-two thousand people are employed by the People's Republic of China in their weather control program. The operation costs up to ninety-million dollars and members are equipped with everything ranging from rocket launchers to modified anti-aircraft guns.

The small army influences the weather for more reasons than just to alleviate drought. Everything from firefighting to having the perfect conditions for the Olympics are now being influenced by Chinese efforts.

An interesting question for the future is concerns the "right" of countries to make it rain. The moisture that is being prematurely forced into rain could have become rain for South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. A whole slew of problems from water access to denying rain for political purposes to others are just some potential things which may lie in the future.

Not to mention how changing the weather locally affects weather and climate in a more global sense. And there’s the health issue of constantly releasing silver iodide into the air.

The Journey of Man

2007-07-19T13:16:00.001-07:00

Via Catholicgauze, here’s a neat time lapse application that shows a depiction of mankind’s dispersal across the globe from about 150k years ago, from a central origin point in Africa. As with most things archeological, you need to take this as a theory, not fact, but it’s interesting never the less. It includes the time periods that the migrations are thought to have occurred.

Now this doesn’t take into account other theories, like some south Pacific peoples possibly traveling across the ocean to South America, or some European and African peoples doing the same. It also doesn’t capture smaller migrations back and forth on a regional level.

One thing to note, if you hold faith in the Bible as accurate history, is the location of the “origin” and the time periods they’re talking about. I’ve always said that I wouldn’t totally rule out a more literal depiction of the timeline proposed by some that Adam walked the earth only 6000 years ago. However, I’m also into the thought that there’s a disconnect between generations in the book of Genesis, and that it’s possible that God created man at a much earlier time, say hundreds of thousands of years ago. This wouldn’t contradict what archeologists think about human migration necessarily.

Anyway, enjoy the animated journey of man as estimated by the Bradshaw Foundation.

Peace

2007-07-18T17:35:00.001-07:00

If you are anything more than an occasional browser of this blog, or someone who has come here more than a couple of times, you have probably noticed the bleak amount of posting I’ve been doing lately. Fear not. I am still here. Part of it was that I have been on vacation. It’s summer, after all. Part of it is a lack of things to say about the current situations in the world. What is there to say when you begin to doubt the sincerity of almost all the politicians you see and doubt the intention of any world leader to do anything constructive toward the world’s ills.

I don’t mean to sound manic depressive about it all, it’s just a little overwhelming all the content out there on the old and new media, and I’ve been focusing on more personal things. I’m still paying attention, and you should to. Just because I’m losing faith in Republicans (and had little in Democrats to begin with) and political leaders in general doesn’t mean I’m still not interested in politics. Or foreign events. Or local events.

It’s a good thing that my hope is in an eternal king who has perfect wisdom and compassion. Otherwise I would be pretty depressed.

In other news…
When Gregg Easterbrook isn’t writing about football or the environment, he’s trying to get us to notice stuff that most other people ignore. In this case he wants us to take some notice that a man who is only one of the two living Americans to own a Nobel Peace Prize just received the Congressional Gold Medal, our highest civilian award. His name is Norman Borlaug, and he’s the most important person you’ve never heard of. Please read the article.

Happy 4th of July!!!

2007-07-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

Where America got it's name

2007-07-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

Catholicgauze asks the question and ponders some of the possibilities. You've all heard of Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer, however it's thought that the German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemuller, who's map is thought to be the first to name it such, would not have known Vespucci by the given name Amerigo, but by his actual name Albericus.

Other possibilities abound, such as Columbus referring to a mountain range in Nicaragua called Amerique. However, I think this would be unlikely.
One of the more likely ideas these days comes from an Englishman named Rodney Broome. In a book called "Amerike The Briton Who Gave America Its Name", Broome tells the history of a man named Richard Amerike, a wealthy aristocrat and merchant who funded many expeditions for the purpose of finding new fishing grounds. It's thought that many of these new fishing grounds were in the area of Newfoundland.

There had long been a suspicion that fishing ships in search of cod were regularly crossing the Atlantic from Bristol to Newfoundland before Columbus' first voyage. Bristol merchants bought salt cod from Iceland until 1475, when the King of Denmark stopped the trade. In 1479 four Bristol merchants received a royal charter to find another source of fish. Records discovered in 1955 suggest that from 1480, twelve years before Columbus, English fishermen may have established a facility for processing fish on the Newfoundland coast. In 1960 trading records were discovered that indicated that Richard Amerike was involved in this business. A letter from around 1481 suggests that Amerike shipped salt (for salting fish) to these men at a place they had named Brassyle. The letter also states that they had many names for headlands and harbours. Rodney Broome and others suggest that one of these names may have been "America".

It's also known that Amerike funded many of John Cabot's voyages and the thinking here is that John Cabot actually discovered America and not Columbus. It's theorized that Columbus was actually using charts supplied by the English merchants.

Cabot is known to have produced maps of the coast from Maine to Newfoundland, though none have survived. He named an island off Newfoundland St. John's. Copies of these maps were sent to Spain by John Day, where Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci would have seen them. The theory suggests that Cabot may have written the name America (or similar) on his maps, but no extant maps are available to prove this assertion.
Vespucci sailed to South America and the Caribbean with Alonso de Ojeda (Hojeda) in 1499 and Gonçalo Coelho in 1501 and became convinced that these were new lands, not Asia as Columbus believed. Martin Waldseemüller, a German map-maker, published a world map in 1507 using Vespucci's previously published letters. The theory suggests that Waldseemüller assumed that the "America" that Vespucci used was derived from his first name. Waldseemüller provided an explanation of this assumption as an attachment to the map. Vespucci himself never stated that this was the case. There were immediate protests from Columbus' supporters to get the continent renamed for Columbus, but attempts were unsuccessful, since 1,000 copies of the map were already in circulation. On later maps Waldseemüller substituted the words "Terra Incognita," but it was too late; the name America was now firmly associated with the entire northern and southern continent across the Atlantic from Europe.

Kinda makes Columbus day a little more lackluster, no? It's interesting to see the politics of discovery at work. Columbus is the more celebrated, but because he didn't figure out that this was a new continent he was exploring, he never made an effort to rename what he had found until it was too late. Finders keepers, I guess.

What's your state GDP compare to?

2007-07-01T22:04:00.001-07:00

A great blog called Strange Maps had this neat map someone made to show the relative GDP of each state by renaming them to a country in the world with a similar GDP.

U.S. Congress vs. UN Human Rights Council

2007-06-27T14:09:00.001-07:00

Well, I’ve certainly been one to criticize the UN Human Rights commission in the past, and their current manifestation of that group, the Human Rights Council. It’s a shame really that something with the potential to do so much good ends up being as useless, and worse than useless: actually harmful.

Well, it seems that the US House is getting that idea through their skulls as well. They are voting to move UN funding away from the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the Human Rights Council.

Now, this is just re-distributing the cash within the UN, of which benefit I remain skeptical. However, it’s encouraging that many of our leaders in Washington are moving toward getting a spine where the UN is involved. And although it was brought up by a Republican, it seem to have broad bi-partisan support. So kudos to the Democrats here, it’s not often I have praise to offer to them.

Geography - we hardly knew ya

2007-06-26T17:56:00.000-07:00

I had thought to blog on this when I read it, but Catholicguaze got to it first. In the GIS world, I get a newsletter (it’s pretty lengthy, more like a newspaper or a journal) from ESRI concerning their product ArcGIS, which is what I use at work. Most of the time the articles are self aggrandizing, talking about new features of their product (that we heard about at the last couple of conferences) and what neat things people are doing with their products, but without many specifics as to how they did it.

So I usually just browse the journal. This issue, however, had an interesting and lengthy article by Jerome Dobson called Bring Back Geography! It details the decline of the discipline (not including the technical advances of GIS) since the end of World War 2, and how geography gets the short end of the stick at most institutions of learning.

Basically: it’s not all about memorizing your states and capitals.

Geography is more than you think. Geography is to space what history is to time. It is a spatial way of thinking, a science with distinctive methods and tools, a body of knowledge about places, and a set of information technologies that have been around for centuries. Geography is about understanding people and places and how real-world places function in a viscerally organic sense. It's about understanding spatial distributions and interpreting what they mean. It's about using technology to study, in the words of the late professor J. Rowland Illick, "why people do what they do where they do it." Geography is a dimensional science and humanity based on spatial logic in which locations, flows, and spatial associations are considered to be primary evidence of earth processes, both physical and cultural. Its hallmarks are spatial analysis, place-based research (e.g., regional studies, area studies, urban studies), and scientific integration.

There’s an interesting history of geographic thought, as well as the recent history, detailing how geography became prominent in the administrations of Wilson and Roosevelt, and then subsequently purged from universities left and right from 1948 on.

In truth, nobody knows why geography was targeted on such a broad scale. For decades, there have been no geography departments in the Ivy League, except Dartmouth's undergraduate department. Of the top 20 private universities in the United States, only two currently have geography departments, though 15 of the top 20 public universities do.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have helped bring some prominence to the field, but GIS risks being a tool utilized by other disciplines instead of being defined and nurtured by the discipline that birthed it.

In many cases, geography exists in the guise of other departments. Sometimes they’re called “area studies.” Other times it’s “earth systems science.” But geography isn’t mentioned, and geographers seem not to be welcome. And so you ask, how do they propose to study the things they purport without expertise in geography? How indeed.

A laughable event from the past illustrates, in reverse, the state of geographic knowledge today. In 1897, the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana unanimously approved bill no. 246, which inadvertently would have changed the value of pi. Fortunately, the bill died a quiet death and never came before the Senate. The immediate agent of its defeat was Clarence A. Waldo, a professor of mathematics at Purdue University, who happened to visit the legislature; he was shown a copy of the bill and ridiculed its claims. Even if the good professor had not appeared, surely other voices would have materialized from mathematically informed government officials and staffers, journalists, educators, and the public.

Today, however, politicians and pundits can make whatever pronouncements they please about geography, no matter how absurd, and there aren't enough geographically informed people to counter their claims. Geographically smart people exist, of course, in government offices, schools, businesses, and homes across the land, but they are too few. There's no sizable constituency to carry the day. Not even journalists ask the questions that should be asked. Worst of all, geography has slipped so far beneath the public consciousness that no politician or journalist is likely to seek an informed geographic opinion, even on matters of war and peace.

I’m constantly seeing errors in maps in the news and in other places. Mostly little things, but who knows how much world-wide ire we engender when the press gets locations wrong. Catholicguaze notes that CNN labeled Syria as Afghanistan on a map recently.

What protects other disciplines from onslaughts like those that beset geography? You may imagine that public opposition would be fierce, and legions of academic peers would rise up in arms, but that did not happen in our case. You may imagine that your own discipline would not go down without a fight, but geographers accepted their fate far more graciously than they should have. Earlier this year, when I published an op-ed piece questioning how and why the nationwide purge had occurred, all but one of the public replies came from geographers, and several blamed the discipline itself. Yet every reason they offered was characteristic of many other disciplines, none of which were punished as we were.

It’s an interesting study in itself, I’m sure, as to how a discipline falls from grace that quickly. Geography probably isn’t the only academic discipline that’s fallen away, and it probably won’t be the last.

Gerrymander your district

2007-06-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

Check out this great redistricting game online. Normally I won’t talk up online games, but this is a map game. Ah, the power of the cartographer!

The object is to redraw the voting districts for imaginary places based on certain criteria and public reaction so that you can get an idea how redistricting can affect the election process. The most obvious abuse of this is gerrymandering, or the process or redrawing a congressional district so that your candidate or party is guaranteed to win every time.

Have fun.
Hat tip to CatholicGuaze.

The Universe: Feel Small

2007-06-19T16:51:00.001-07:00

A small atlas of the Universe, which is boiled down to 9 pictures at scales ranging from 12.5 light years to 14 billion light years. And you ask yourself, “They can see that far into space?” It does seem like a long way.

The thing that caught my eye was the 14 billion-l.y. map, and the distribution of galaxies. Think about this when you’re viewing it: the conventional wisdom that the universe exploded from a single point and drifted outward seems in err when looking at a universe that’s as evenly distributed as astronomers make it seem in these pictures.

Which also presents a conundrum of it’s own. This is only what we’ve been able to observe. How much farther does the universe extend? How many stars/galaxies are really out there? Makes you feel pretty small, but also makes you feel interestingly cared about by a God who is big enough to call this a backyard project.

Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage

2007-06-18T12:22:00.001-07:00

How to insult someone like Shakespeare.

Popular Constitutional Law and Roe

2007-06-13T16:42:00.001-07:00

OK, so I saw this interesting paper on Democratic Constitutionalism and Backlash, where two gentlemen writing for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review talk about popular constitutional engagement. This article was very long, and full of big words, so I didn’t take the time to read the entire thing. However I read the abstract and an excerpt posted on this site.

After decades of assault on the jurisprudence of the Warren Court, many progressive legal scholars have lost faith in judicial enforcement of constitutional rights. Some have responded by embracing popular constitutionalism and advocating mobilization against the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts; others, chastened, urge a minimalist jurisprudence that will avoid giving any group offense. There is fear of provoking the kind backlash that many associate with Roe, which is often regarded as having caused the rise of the New Right. In this article, we offer a new account of the relationship between adjudication and popular constitutionalism, which we call “democratic constitutionalism.” Democratic constitutionalism affirms both the need for judicially enforced rights and the fundamental significance of popular constitutional engagement.

What that means is people protesting in the streets or putting pressure on their federal politicians via popular movements. The writers seem to think that while our nation is built on the rule of law, that is to say that that we have judicially enforceable rights, but that “constitutional engagement ensures that these values retain democratic legitimacy.” Which is probably the basis for “living Constitution” theorists. So does the Constitution require engagement by the citizenry to retain it’s legitimacy, and taken to an extreme how will that change our country over time? And by “legitimacy” do we mean approval or interpretation?

By the way, I’m going to just step over any discussion about whether the engagement that regularly goes on is representative of the population or just a loud minority. Often it’s the latter.

All good questions. However it was the issue the authors chose to use to illustrate and study the topic that caught my eye. Roe v. Wade. This particular statement jumped out at me and the rest of this post is about abortion politics (sections bolded by me).

Roe symbolizes the fears of those who counsel courts to avoid controversy. Legal scholars and political commentators commonly assert that judicial overreaching produced Roe rage, arguing that legislatures might have liberalized access to abortion if only the Court had stayed its hand. We examine scholarship on Roe's reception, as well as primary sources of the era, which together undermine this conventional account. Backlash to Roe was not just about judicial overreaching. Political mobilization against the decision expressed opposition to abortion's liberalization that began in state legislatures years before Roe was decided. As importantly, backlash to Roe was not just about abortion. Mobilization against Roe evolved during the 1970s into the form we now associate with Roe rage - a broad-based social movement hostile to legal efforts to secure the equality of women and the separation of church and state. Roe rage opposes ideals of individualism and secularism that lie at the foundation of our modern constitutional order. Accommodating resistance to Roe thus presents normative questions analogous to those posed by accommodating resistance to Brown.

What???!!!??? So here in this serious, Harvard Law School publication we have a scholarly discussion that’s going to compare people who oppose Roe with people who opposed Brown. I.E. Roe opponents are the same as racists?

Being one who opposes the broad legalization of Abortion that currently exists, and also being a conservative on many things, I would have to say that these people don’t truly understand the motivations and rationales of the people they are discussing. Think about this: if we are going to have a reasonable discussion on this topic, ever, there needs to be some understanding of the positions and arguments of each side, and this, I feel, is indicative of how the left views the right on this issue. Black and White. Good vs. Evil.

Integrity Magazine Sales reminder

2007-06-05T22:11:00.000-07:00

This seems like a good time to remind people that there are predatory organizations out there that use teens who are out there on their own and have no family support structure to turn to. If some young person comes to your door trying to sell magazines, this might be a cry for help.

I got another response to this post I made in August of last year regarding this detestable practice reminding me that it still goes on. If you didn't read it then, read it now.

Place of the day

2007-06-01T17:20:00.000-07:00

Long ago in this container of Grich I had a regular post called "Country of the Day." That turned into country of the week, and then country of the whenever-I-feel-like-spending-the-time. I'm sorry I let this go, as I enjoyed the process. But at times it took a fair bit of my spare time and I never got around to continuing the process. That's not to say that I won't do it again, it's just not a regular thing.
Well, for my own gratification, and yours to if you so choose, Ben Keene, the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the world (Oxford press), has a regular posting on the Oxford press blog called Ben's Place of the Week. It's usually a short bit about the place, and why he's singling it out, along with a link or two.
This week's place is Castrillo de Murcia, Spain. And the reason he's singling it out is because they, like Pamplona, have an annual tradition. However their's involves baby jumping. You'll just have to go see that post to find out what I'm talking about.

I got this information from one of my current favorite blogs: Catholicgauze. I just can't imagine where he finds all this stuff. Along with that he's been following a series at the Oxford blog about Stalin's gulags.
And then there's this other article from a geologist he reads. It's a great look into the top 5 disasters that could possibly kill millions of people in the United States, and the San Andreas ripping California apart is only number 5! The Pacific Northwest suffering tidal waves dozens of meters high along with sustained 5 minute long 8.0 earthquakes is only number 4, but that one concerns me the most, as I live up here. Fun read, but scary as all heck. And be prepared: it's long.

Marriage and Children

2007-06-01T16:43:00.001-07:00

There have been a couple of great posts lately, starting with Instapundit noting an article in the Economist regarding the success factor of kids raised in an intact family. I won't go too far along that line, as I really don't have much to say beyond what the article says and it's long, so you're going to spend most of your time reading that anyway.

Subsequent to that, this post by Shrink-Wrapped discussing the topic as it relates to the movie Knocked Up, and Sent-West discussing the poor decision making ability of young people who have followed the post-sexual revolution dogma of non-judgementalism.

I’ve come to the belief, from observing my peers, that the societal unwillingness to make value judgments that has prevailed in the last 50 years has affected their ability to make good relationship choices. They are somewhat mired in the idea that it is unbearably uncouth to set a standard of behavior that they find acceptable in others, and more often than not end up with partners who’s behavior they are unhappy with, due to their inability or unwillingness to ask for better. From my peer group I hear a lot of statements such as “but that would be forcing my opinion on them” and “but they’re their own person.” It seems all well and good for casual relationships, but trying to raise a family or secure a marriage with two people who are determined to not attempt to influence each other spells apathy at best, and disaster at worst.

My friends are aghast when they learn that I quit smoking at my husband’s (then fiancée’s) demand. How could he be so controlling? How could I let myself be judged like that? I recognized that smoking was an unhealthy behavior, and though I did not want to quit, the balance of positive things that he brought to our relationship overwhelmed the discomfort of ending a damaging habit. In marriage we try to enhance each other’s positive behaviors, and eliminate or minimize those that cause distress to the relationship. This process necessarily includes value judgments as to what is positive and what is destructive, and the willingness to recognize that not all parts of a person’s character (whether theirs or your own) are desirable.

This would be more of a non-issue if my peers chose someone with opinions and beliefs closer to their own, but, for whatever reason, they do not. In many cases I believe this to be because they have never examined what their opinions and beliefs are in the first place, and so cannot begin to find someone who compliments them. It seems they are throwing darts blind, and tend to marry whichever one gets hit and sticks around long enough. Or worse, in my opinion, the one who gives them the greatest visceral feeling of romantic love.

I've seen this all too often as well, and it transcends this discussion to every level of social and political thought. If you don't evaluate what you believe, you'll fall for anything. Not evaluating that some behaviors and beliefs are absolutely wrong will lead to societal breakdown.

Sporting news

2007-06-01T15:09:00.001-07:00

Some events just passed us by that I didn’t get to watch, but I’m not so caught up in the things of the world that I think it’s monumentally important that I did. But it would have been fun either way.

The national spelling bee is over, and Evan O’Dorney is the winner. The winning word was “serrefine” which describes small forceps.

Notably, my spell checker didn’t like the word.

Also, I enjoy a good performance in any sport, basketball included, so I’m a little disappointed to have missed the show by LeBron James last night. From the articles by all the talking heads over at ESPN I missed something special, and from the description of the game, I would have to say I agree. If you are into basketball at all and wonder how a 22 year old can be compared with (not “has the potential” but actual comparisons) to the best games of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson’s careers, check out the link.

Oxbow Regional Park

2007-05-29T22:42:00.000-07:00

For those of us in the Portland area, we live in a big city that's blessed with natural diversity and beauty that you would be foolish not to experience and enjoy. For those of you who can't seem to get away, or who are reluctant to go very far away from town to enjoy your outdoor activities, I give you Oxbow Regional park.

Seeing as how Metro is a fairly unique governmental body in the United States, I would say this is a fairly unique park. It's a natural area and campground that is not administered by a county, state or federal agency, but by the local regional administrative body that also is responsible for the zoo, transit and growth management.

Boy scout tent city

This park is only a few minutes from Gresham, Oregon, which is the eastern suburb of Portland, and minimarts are just minutes away. However drive a few miles past small suburban farm on Division blvd and the road turns left and dives down into the Sandy River valley and runs right into this park. The campground is similar to any full service campground you'll find on any state or federal forest campground, and it also has group areas, like the one our boy scout troop used.

Group recreation area

All you need is a tent, sleeping bag, and preferably a sleeping pad. If you've always wanted to get out camping, this is a great way to start. Or just visit for the day, hike some of their many trails through natural forests and along the river.

Oh, yeah, and you'll probably see a bit of wildlife there too.

Rooting out evil

2007-05-25T21:39:00.000-07:00

Just a short note to all of you to keep your eye on Lebanon, where things are getting hot again.
There have been bombings and attacks, and Lebanon is getting more and more tired of harboring Palestinian refugees who harbor the same people who incited Israel to attack their country last summer.

The leader of the Shia militant group Hezbollah has urged Lebanon's government not to storm a refugee camp to root out Sunni radicals. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said Lebanon should not become part of the American war against al-Qaeda.

Well, now, you see if Lebanon becomes a hotbed of conflict and the Lebanese invite American aid, and if al-Qaeda is a part of it, there's only yourself to blame here. The Lebanese are certainly not to blame for foreign elements operating against the United States and Israel from their soil. Frankly if I were them I'd have gotten tired of it a long time ago and kindly invited the refugees to leave.
However, that point might not be that far off, as one Lebanese describes his feelings on the matter.

The Lebanese were collectively punished last summer for not being able to control a mad man who thought that kidnapping the cubs of a lioness was a game. As he hid safely like a pussy behind a chastity belt, over 1,000 Lebanese died. And the dreams of millions along with them. I hated the Israelis then. Even though I knew a lot of them personally who did not hate me back each time a missile hit Haifa. And as we collectively punished the Palestinians in their camp for not being able to control mad men who thought that killing the kittens of a declawed house cat would demonstrate their power, I felt no remorse. None. Hypocrite. They should have controlled the madmen, I thought. Then Boom. A bomb in Achrafieh. Again. A dead innocent woman. Again. Boom. Another bomb in another affluent neighborhood. Verdun. Boom. Another bomb in Aley. Here we go. The birthing pangs of our rebirth. While the mad men of Damascus started softly gloating, my numbness turned to rage. And while we exercised power over the powerless, I thought back to July of 2006. And I realized. Realized that I was guilty. Of hypocrisy. The terrorists need to be eliminated.

The U.S. has begun to send aid. Military aid, that is.
Thanks to Michael Totten for the links.

CEO income controversy

2007-05-25T17:04:00.001-07:00

Gateway Pundit looks at CEO pay and notes that the big earners aren’t really making as much as they were in the 90s, contrary to popular notion. There is still a big gap between what executives earn and what the guy sitting in the cubical a few floors below is getting, but whether that’s earned or not is an argument for the stockholders to ponder.

Just so that you are all aware, we’re going to hear more and more about exorbitant salaries and bonuses that CEOs get in the current business world, but it’s more about the rules of reporting income than actual increases in pay.

The perennial battle is about to reach a new level of contentiousness. The proxy season, just getting started, will be the first under new Securities & Exchange Commission reporting rules that force companies to disclose more about executive pay than ever before--from the hundreds of millions some executives stand to gain in severance, pensions, and deferred pay, to any perk worth more than $10,000. Golden parachutes and sybaritic benefits such as club memberships and personal use of company jets won't score many points against a backdrop of the options-backdating scandal and increasingly empowered activist investors.

Later: I was thinking about this a bit more and recalled that in addition to things like this, we hear that the economy is doing well, that the stock market is back on it's feet and hitting records, and that the federal government is topping tax revenue in numbers that are eclipsing figures from 2000 and 2001, when we had a surplus running.
I'll be surprised to see any of the candidates for President this year bring out the economy as a talking or debating point. The Republican's might, but they've been pretty bad in the spending game, so while they can lay claim to a healthy economy, it's only because they've cut taxes and generally given the economy some slack. Despite the record revenue numbers, we're still running a deficit, albeit a smaller one than last year.
If any Democrats try and pick up this issue they risk getting politically buried.
For the rest of us, it's pretty good news. Sit back for a moment. Ignore the puffing windbags and enjoy the recovery.

If you live in Portland

2007-05-23T21:12:00.001-07:00

... then you'll get this blog post.
Not much going on (he says as the world dissolves) so I was reading the Oregonian, which I don't often do, and found some interesting stories.

The legislature never seems to stop making laws and handing out money, so here's some interesting new bills that caught my eye.
A law passed the Senate, and has the governor's OK, that would ban smoking in bars and bowling alleys. The legal space to smoke these days is getting smaller and smaller. Soon it'll be legal only in your home. I'm not crazy about the government telling private businesses what they can do, but I can't say that I'm all that disappointed in the end result. Bowling with my family won't be quite as bad.

Senate bill 384 is moving through the process and is expected to pass. That bill creates limits on golden parachutes for school administrators. The article notes several examples of administrators who were paid lots of money, sometimes 6 figures, when asked to resign. It was written into their contracts. So the Senate is telling the state education districts and departments that they can't include them in the contracts when trying to lure new adminstrators.
I think this is a great idea, but it shouldn't just apply to Oregon school boards. Target any level of government. I'm sure this isn't only a problem in school districts. Perhaps the schools will save some money now, as it seems their buildings are going to need some earthquake upgrades.

PGE, our power company, has been dealing with more and more environmental regulations. In addition to that, they are having to deal with aging infrastructure, including some very old dams on the Sandy River. We those dams are about to come down, freeing the entire reach to it's source free for Salmon and other fish (not that you'll find fish all the way to the glacier on Mt. Hood).
But it isn't because they're being told to do it or they've found some green thumb in the board room.

"It's a business decision that makes sense for the environment," said John Esler, the power company's acting director of hydro licensing and water rights.
...
"Our estimate back then was if we removed the dam, it would cost $20.4 million. If we kept the dam, it would cost $27.2 million," Fryburg said.

Never the less, this is good news.

The Portland Trailblazers, our noble (well sometimes) basketball team just secured the number one pick in the NBA draft. Meaning for the first time since the 70s they get the best player (or at least the first player) coming out of college (or from overseas). The Blazers have some fine young players, so perhaps in a year or two they'll start making the playoffs again.
Who knows, we might see a new wave of Blazer-mania in our town again. Heaven help us.

There was a great article in the paper edition about scientists led by the University of Washington are laying fiber optic cables all over the Juan de Fuca plate off the Oregon and Washington coast to detect and observe movement. As the Juan de Fuca plate tends to cause most of the earth movement around here and is thought to be the reason for the beautiful volcanoes that threaten our city with sudden bursts of energy, ala Mt. Saint Helens, this is probably a really good thing. It would be the worlds largest underwater observatory, and according to the scientists, "It will represent a fundamental shift in environmental sciences and in oceanography that will be roughly equivalent to the arrival of satellites on the scene." Well I don't know about that, but I'm curious to see what this new observatory tells us about the deep crevices of the earth.

It's the spring, and about this time of year the wineries here in Oregon kick it into gear. Many of them, especially in the Yamhill region close to Portland, have open houses and parties during the Memorial weekend (that's this weekend). Here's your all encompassing wine guide from the Oregonian.

The first of 10 eco-arsonists is facing final sentencing this week in Eugene. He received 13 years, almost as much as the feds were asking for. It's the second largest sentence for a crime of this nature in recent history.

Finally, for now, here's a story about how our Republican Senator, Gordon Smith, still doesn't get it on the Iraq thing.

Phoning it in

2007-05-22T11:55:00.001-07:00

The Insta poses an interesting question. In this age of information, is the fine journalistic art of editing an interview to the point where it’s unrecognizable to the person who was interviewed over?

I’ll reprint the same quote he did here.

It is a transaction that clearly favors the person asking the questions. A print reporter writes down someone's answers, then picks and chooses how much, if any, to use, how to frame the quotes and where to put any contrary information. Television correspondents slice and dice taped interviews in similar fashion.

But in the digital age, some executives and commentators are saying they will respond only by e-mail, which allows them to post the entire exchange if they feel they have been misrepresented, truncated or otherwise disrespected. And some go further, saying, You want to know what I think? Read my blog.

It would certainly be the method I’d use if someone actually thought my life were interesting enough to warrant an interview.

I like to think about this in the greater context, though. Where is the information age taking us in the form of all social interaction. There is still a great deal of physical and personal interaction out there in the world, but technology is making it more and more possible to interact with others from a distance. For instance, I can work from home quite as easily as I could from the office, and though that’s because my work involves computers, with the advances in shipping and mailing, more and more businesses are finding that distributing directly and operating from their distributor’s or employees homes reduces overhead and other costs associated with the old economy.

If I want to communicate with friends and family, there is the telephone and Email, and now chat rooms and instant messaging reveal a world of social interaction akin to hanging out at the local club without actually having to see (or smell) the people you’re talking to.

We’re still a long way from the world that Isaac Asimov created in The Naked Sun (people basically lived hermit like lives because technology eliminated all need for interaction). But this stuff reminds me of the people living on that planet. By the way, if you are into science fiction or mystery, the robot series that Asimov wrote is some of his finest work. Check it out.

Catholic-politician abortion policy

2007-05-11T16:54:00.001-07:00

Morality in politics has a special place in the hearts of the conservative. The number one issue among religious conservatives is abortion, and will continue to be for some time. It’s not a pretty subject, but anger and emotions run hot when discussing it, and politicians tend to try and not rock the boat if they can get away with it.

All that to say that the Pope is definitely not a politician by this definition.

Reporters aboard the pope's flight to Mexico City on Wednesday asked if he supported the decision by bishops there to excommunicate politicians who had voted to legalize abortion in the first trimester.

The pope responded that excommunication for those promoting abortion is "nothing new, it's normal, it wasn't arbitrary. It is what is foreseen by the Church's doctrine."

Foreseen by church doctrine? What does that mean?
Anyway, the writer of the article above ponders the plight of the Catholic candidates for President. There are 5, did you know? Four of them are Democrats, could you guess? Giuliani is the only Republican Catholic candidate, and he’s having his own difficulties trying to come up with a stance that will play with the Republican base.

Giuliani comes from a pretty liberal environment (as large urban areas tend to be) and has supported freedom of Abortion politically for years, while claiming to be personally against them. I.E. he wouldn’t sponsor a bill to make them illegal, but would personally council a woman not to have one (if he were ever in that position).

That’s a typical stance for a pro-abortion Catholic, and the question for the day is: is it the wrong stance for a Christian in general.

First of all, let me say that I find the Pope’s need to comment on this interesting. The Pope didn’t say “excommunicate,” he said “denied the right of communion.” There’s not really a difference. Excommunication just sounds more hellfire, and that’s the technical term that the Catholics have used in the past. Basically, it’s removing someone from fellowship because they refuse to be disciplined in the area of some sin they are continuing to engage in without guilt. The original church considered that harmful to the body, and Christ even set the standard in Matthew 18: “If he refuses to listen to them tell it to the church, and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a lawyer.”

Ha ha, sorry. I added that last one. It’s really tax collector, not lawyer.

Anyway, the question is, is supporting freedom to kill little innocent fetuses a religious moral issue, or is it another example of separating how we conduct our lives as individuals and the choices that we make. You see, it’s hard to break through the liberal idea that we’re not just doing this because “God told us to.” Or perhaps you can say that we shouldn’t be legislating or litigating primarily on a moral issue.

So we go along with out lives honoring God in our individual decisions, but how far should we go to tell other people what they can and can’t do. It’s a classical libertarian argument.

Personally, I have a beef in this from a secular policy argument, not a religious one. I believe that it’s wrong, but it’s from the position that all fetuses are not actually part of a woman’s body and therefore the woman’s “choice” to do with her body whatever she wants doesn’t apply to the baby forming inside her. Also, I believe that Roe v. Wade, if you actually read it, allows for regulation, like limiting procedures or when the act can be done. But those are secular arguments.

Discuss.

Tax preparation blues

2007-04-25T16:29:00.001-07:00

I’m not a supporter of John Edwards, being that he’s a Democrat doesn’t help, but I’m always willing to listen when people have a good idea. Even if it doesn’t pan out to be a good idea when all thought out and debated, this tax preparation idea has merit.

The process by which we Americans figure out our federal taxes is ridiculous. So many tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions, of hours spent struggling with those 1040 forms. Maybe a billion dollars in fees paid to tax return preparers and makers of tax software.

And for so many taxpayers, (filling out your tax forms is) an absurd waste of time. The government already has all the information it needs -- from employers, mortgage companies, state governments, and banks -- to have the perfect picture of tens of millions of people's tax situations. Those people struggle to fill out their return forms, but in the end they don't tell the Internal Revenue Service anything that the IRS doesn' t already know.

(John Edwards) thinks the IRS ought to prepare a draft tax return for you every year, at least if you're a person whose taxes have historically been relatively simple. If, let's say, all you ever show on your tax return is wage income, bank interest, a personal exemption for yourself, and a standard deduction, Edwards thinks the government should routinely prepare your tax return and send it to you. I would bet that in the case of 30 or 40 percent of taxpayers, the return so prepared would be completely correct. In that case, the taxpayer could just sign it, and send it back. Everyone else could throw away the IRS's version and do it themselves, the way they do now.

People spend a lot of time criticizing everything coming out of certain politician’s mouths just because of their political bent, but we should still be listening. Not every idea out of the Bush administration is a bad one. And not every idea coming out of the mouth of Edwards contains toxic sludge either.

The one down side I see with this, and in this information age of automated tax preparation it’s a small one, is that the IRS will have to increase staff, i.e. increased IRS budget, in order to create the returns for everyone. But I can’t help agreeing with BoJack that as far as income, and standard deductions that you’ve claimed on your W-2 are already a known. Heck other information, like your mortgage, is downloadable from the bank, as TurboTax downloads it automatically for you when you’re doing taxes on-line.

New Look

2007-04-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

You might notice, if you've been here before, that I've traded in that obnoxious orange for one of Blogger's new templates. Very nice. Enjoy.

Viewing Homer from Space

2007-04-24T22:03:00.000-07:00

People generally have this notion that satellite technology is good enough to read license plates, or mostly thanks to movies like Enemy of the State, that geosynchronous satellites run by the government can watch your every move from space. However that's just not so, as even the best and highest most accurate satellites that can just about tell you what model of car you drive (no they can't read your plate) have to be close enough to the Earth that they need to maintain a steady orbit to keep from crashing down the moment they're sent up. Truly geosynchronous satellites (mostly communications and navigational) are too far away for any camera or sensor to pick up anything significant.
And most satellite pictures must be processed before you see them. However, EarthNow is probably as close as we've ever gotten to doing something like that.
It's a java applet that feeds your browser Landsat imagery as the satellite moves along making it's orbits around the earth (250 meter resolution though, wouldn't even be able to see your house) The feeds are basically a few hours old.
Sourced from The Map Room. Go to that Map Room link and check out the funny Simpsons video that makes fun of everyone's natural fascination with zooming in on Google and VE trying to spot our house.

Follow up

2007-04-24T16:12:00.001-07:00

Follow up from the Russian thing. It appears that we might not be just sitting back either.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is in Warsaw for talks with leaders on U.S. plans to deploy a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

OK, the article says that our official reason for this is to have a European defense for Iranian nuclear attack, but you have to look at the location for the missile sites and go, “hmmmm.” Apparently Russia isn’t that happy about it either.

Back in the USSR

2007-04-23T16:11:00.001-07:00

Just in case you were wondering, we’re the enemy again.

The International Herald Tribune reported on Friday that Russian News Service, a radio broadcasting conglomerate recently taken over by state gas monopoly Gazprom, had brought in a new team of a managers and staff had been informed that America is now to be reported as the "enemy" and opposition politicians were persona non grata -- with mostly good news being reported about the nation's rulers -- just as in Soviet times.

Welcome to the new age. And you thought we could never go back to the old one.
This as Russia works to spread discord and division in former satellite countries.
Other nefarious behavior from mother Russia.

French election

2007-04-23T00:17:00.000-07:00

Of course we already have a map of the results. Thank you CatholicGuaze.
There will be a run off election on May 6th between the socialist party Segolene Royal and the more conservative US-friendly Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy got the most votes in the preliminary round, so it's generally thought that it's his election to lose now. However, the French left wing does not have to compromise to beat an extreme right winger like Le Pen, which is why Chirac, who is just right of center, was elected in the first place.

Pope and unborn part 2

2007-04-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

OK, I've been around this with a few people in my church who took my comments about the Pope's declaration that there's hope that unborn and unbaptized children will all get to go to heaven. I was pretty harsh, but what I was attempting to say was that the biblical basis for much of what's being discussed here is thin, and God's sovereign will needs to be examined and not church tradition.
My only attempt to cover this issue directly through scripture was by using 1 Cor 7:14, which states that an unbelieving spouse (and children) may be sanctified through the spouse. However, there is thought that this verse actually means that those unbelieving family members are simply "blessed" by having a believer in the house, and that they merely have the benefit of opportunity to witness a child of God first hand, as well as receive blessings through the person they were intended for. (However, the Catholic's seem to agree with me, see the article I link to) (P.S. that still doesn't mean I'm correct).
However, another train of thought is that while unborn children are conceived with inherent sin, brought forth by Adam, they have not yet had the opportunity to actually take action against God and sin, so they are still without sin, and so God will let them commune with him for eternity. Not a bad thought.
But in the end, we must remember that the decisions that God makes are perfect. Like I said yesterday, God is Love, and God is happiness, and furthermore the actions and decisions that God makes are good, as only God is truly good in the fullest sense of the word. Therefore whatever decision he makes to the ultimate destiny of unborn children, whether to save some or all, it will be the good and right decision.

So indeed, there is hope that unborn children will all be saved. I was wrong to immediately criticize the Pope and his merry men, and actually do honor his guts in taking on a long standing Catholic tenet.
I still haven't seen a link to the actual report that the Vatican put out explaining all this (nothing on the Vatican's site). Even this Catholic News agency doesn't have a link on the article on the subject. However, they do a more thorough job of detailing what the report is about. They also cover the verse in Corinthians I brought up.
In the end, the article, as well as the report, are quick to acknowledge that they don't have all the answers, and indeed none of us really do. I can't say for sure that I know what will become of all the babies of the world who die pre or post childbirth. It's in God's hands for sure.

Part of the angst about all this is the Church's convoluted historical belief about the importance of Baptism, which places a weird philosophical handicap on issues like this. What I mean by this is that Catholics place the saving grace almost entirely on the sacrament of baptism, and the belief propagates until we have this issue of people freaking out about what happens to those poor babies who don't get the holy water trickled over their head. I even saw this on a Catholic blog.

Sounds like nothing has changed in regards to the teaching. Christ said a person must be baptized to enter heaven, so what happens to babies who die without it? Limbo, theologians of old speculated. But since we don't know for sure, we can hope that there is a way they can go to heaven. Sounds like Benedict is stressing the hope part of it, without explicitly rejecting Limbo. Am I right?

(I'm not pressing this as an example of Church teaching, but as one of lay-catholic thought). I dealt with the ridiculousness of Limbo a bit in my last post, and I certainly hope that Benedict is putting that to rest. Many Catholics are taking it that way. But that second sentence is what's killing me. I'm going to assume that he's talking about physical baptism performed by your neighborhood priest, and not the baptism that Christ was talking about when he said, "John baptized you with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit." Other than that, does Jesus say what this person is claiming?

Now, while I'm wondering what the Catholic faithful are thinking on this issue, I'm not sure that the Catholic Church itself believes this at it's core. From the article I talk about above it says the report on unborn children says

In this and other situations, the need for the sacrament of baptism is not absolute and is secondary to God's desire for the salvation of every person, it said. "God can therefore give the grace of baptism without the sacrament being conferred, and this fact should particularly be recalled when the conferring of baptism would be impossible," it said.

I'm sort of with them here. It's important to note that many Catholic scholars point out that baptism is more about the induction into the church of God than it is about salvation. However once again, is God really giving the "grace of baptism" or is he giving us the grace of redemption? It's not the same thing.
Then earlier in the article we get this.

The church continues to teach that, because of original sin, baptism is the ordinary way of salvation for all people and urges parents to baptize infants, the document said.

Which, again, is misleading because it makes it seem like baptism is what saves you, not faith in Christ.
Picking the truths out of the Bible as they apply to all of life's issues isn't always an easy thing to do, but you can see how developing a rigid and dogmatic rule set that relies on the church tradition as much as (or more than) actual Biblical teaching can make explaining God's truth and getting out of tight doctrinal corners exceedingly difficult. I think the Catholics made a good move and here's hoping the good moves keep coming.

Pope and the baby issue

2007-04-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

The Pope and the catholic church have been grappling with the issue of whether babies go to heaven or not before they're baptized. Apparently this is in response to many catholic women who are concerned about all the aborted babies in the world. This isn't a small or unemotional issue, and I feel for all those mothers who worry about that sort of thing. Thinking about a small helpless infant suffering for eternity isn't a happy thought.
But neither is the limp-wristed response from the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI has reversed centuries of traditional Roman Catholic teaching on limbo, approving a Vatican report released Friday that says there were "serious" grounds to hope that children who die without being baptized can go to heaven.

The article never mentions what the "serious grounds" happen to be. I'm wondering if the Pope even said anything to back that statement up.
Let's start with the church's previous position on this matter.

Although Catholics have long believed that children who die without being baptized are with original sin and thus excluded from heaven, the Church has no formal doctrine on the matter. Theologians, however, have long taught that such children enjoy an eternal state of perfect natural happiness, a state commonly called limbo, but without being in communion with God.

For a moment leave aside the concept, unbiblical that it is, that baptism is what gets you into heaven, and focus on that completely idiotic belief that survived for centuries known as "limbo." The main problem with the Catholic church (and all my other criticism of that Christian sect flows out of this) is that they hold too much to church traditions and can't seem to bring themselves to reverse that in the face of actual Biblical truth. Go ahead, try and find some reference to anything that might be construed as "limbo" in the Bible. Anywhere.
The other thing that makes that statement inane is the idea that it's possible to exist in a state of perfect natural happiness without being in communion with God. God IS love. God IS happiness. Being without communion with God is the Biblical definition of hell. The church has long just sugar-coated this issue in an attempt to avoid dealing with the horrible state of man's soul and the truth that some good people (as the world defines good) are going to spend an eternity in a very UNhappy place.

"If there's no limbo and we're not going to revert to St. Augustine's teaching that unbaptized infants go to hell, we're left with only one option, namely, that everyone is born in the state of grace," said the Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. "Baptism does not exist to wipe away the "stain" of original sin, but to initiate one into the Church," he said in an e-mailed response.

A voice of reason within the church. Notably it's from a scholar in the United States, where people are not afraid to disagree with the Vatican. What people should get from this statement, which is basically true for protestants as well, is that baptism is not the thing that guarantees heavenly entrance and therefore has nothing to do with the state of an infant's soul. And he's also right that the Vatican's only other option is grace for all babies, which is also unbiblical.

The document traces centuries of Church views on the fate of unbaptized infants, paying particular attention to the writings of St. Augustine — the 4th century bishop who is particularly dear to Benedict. Augustine wrote that such infants do go to hell, but they suffer only the "mildest condemnation." In the document, the commission said such views are now out of date and there were "serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and enjoy the beatific vision." It stressed, however, that "these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge." No one can know for certain what becomes of unbaptized babies since Scripture is largely silent on the matter, the report said.

Largely silent? Hardly. One needs only a cursory reading to know that faith in Jesus as our Savior is the only thing that really allows heavenly entrance. However, there is one verse that speaks to this issue very directly. 1 Corinthians 7:14.

For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

Paul is saying that your children are sanctified through you if you are a believer. I can't think that it could be any clearer, do you? Now, this does mean that children of non-believers might not be covered. Really, one has to wonder how religious "experts" at the center of one of the worlds largest religious denominations failed to bring this up. Are they actually ignorant bureaucrats or are they purposefully keeping this verse silent for some reason?
I find the Vatican response to this issue disturbing. It's as if they're truly afraid to actually voice Biblical truth in public for fear of driving people away.

Update: OK, I've talked with some friends and members of my church family who wanted me to clarify my points, as they got the impression, not without reason, that I'm saying that most babies are damned or something. I didn't mean that, but the misunderstanding is reasonable. Also, they, including my pastor, put up a significant argument for the hope of salvation for all unborn babies which I can't really ignore. I was a bit hasty in my condemnation of the Pope's position being that I'm generally skeptical of most things that emit from the Vatican. I'll try and follow this up with an additional post.

Update: Follow up post now available.

Virginia Tech

2007-04-20T17:31:00.001-07:00

The shooting that took place at Virginia Tech earlier this week has certainly worked all of us up into a frenzy. I’ve been watching with sorrow in my heart for those who’s life will be affected by this and for those who lost their lives. But more-so I will be sorry for those who lost their lives without fully knowing God before hand. You can’t say enough that the end of your life might come well before you are ready, and why put off preparing yourself. Friends, why put off talking to your friends about Jesus Christ and what the next life holds. Because I guarantee it that many of those young people are not moving on to a better place. You might say that I’m being callous, but I have to speak truth here.

It remains, and will always remain, that man is sinful. It’s not wrong to ask what happened, and what can we do to try and prevent this in the future. But if you think that you’re going to solve this problem, that you can prevent all future school shootings just by changing some policy here and there, well, you’re going to be disappointed.

I’ve been reading around, and I’m not surprised that it got so politicized so fast. I’m basically in the camp, and this is preexisting this incident, that gun control, for the most part, does not work the way that people intend it to work. Virginia Tech had the strictest law you can enact: no guns allowed. Period. And they still had a shooting.

But the numbers for gun-happy America aren’t really all that bad compared with the rest of the world, and in some cases are quite a bit better.

It’s also pretty evident that gun laws typically prevent law abiding and licensed gun owners from carrying their guns around, but the crimes and murders are committed by law-BREAKERS. I have no problem allowing law abiding citizens to carry their guns around. Heck, let them on high school campuses too.

For the most part, the people who have been political about this have been conservatives. It’s not that I don’t agree with them, it’s that the left has been pretty cold on this issue. The national temperature is moving away from gun control and the left has been sensing that for the last 8 years.

Had Gore won his home state of Tennessee, Clinton’s home state of Arkansas or the Democratic state of West Virginia, he would not have needed to win Florida in order to gain the presidency. But he lost them all. And guns had a lot to do with it

Democrats don't want to talk about it, desperately. Republican candidates who were sympathetic to gun control have been changing their tune (just listen to Giuliani, who was very gun-control while mayor of NYC, and Mit Romney joined the NRA just last August). We keep seeing these tragedies, but most people are noting that as restrictions grow, the incidents keep happening anyway. Such is the foul state of men's souls. It really is true: guns don't kill people…

But I disagree with anyone who says that removing gun control laws will protect anyone. There was a big editorial from a student who has a gun license, but still can't bring his gun on campus, and in his words:

Upon exiting the classroom, we were met at the doors leading outside by two armor-clad policemen with fully automatic weapons, plus their side arms. Once outside, there were several more officers with either fully automatic rifles and pump shotguns, and policemen running down the street, pistols drawn.

It was at this time that I realized that I had no viable means of protecting myself.

It was at the moment you were safe behind legions of heavily armed police that you felt the most helpless? More:

I had entrusted my safety, and the safety of others to the police. In light of this, there are a few things I wish to point out.

First, I never want to have my safety fully in the hands of anyone else, including the police.

Second, I considered bringing my gun with me to campus, but did not due to the obvious risk of losing my graduate career, which is ridiculous because had I been shot and killed, there would have been no graduate career for me anyway.

I hate this argument. I think its stupid to make decisions, especially when they mean breaking the regulations, on whether or not you get caught in that one in a million situation where you might actually make some use of it. Interesting to note: this individual was ushered out of the building from another classroom and was well behind police lines before he even knew what was going on. Never saw the gunman. And this guy's licensed gun would have solved what exactly?

He goes on to argue that law abiding citizens who are trained and licensed to carry guns should be able to use them and are a threat to no one. I would agree with that. Look at all the incidents where some loony pulled a gun in a public place and you'll probably find that he wasn't licensed to use it. The kids at Columbine certainly weren't.

But I wonder if anyone can recall the last time someone pulled a gun out in a public place and started shooting, and was cut down by a citizen with a licensed and concealed handgun. Anyone? This also brings up a hornet's nest about citizen vigilantism. I wouldn't mind someone bringing out a gun in this circumstance, but when should you not bring one out? Would even a trained citizen know when to bring it out and when to keep it tucked away?

Overall, I think that the school ordinances were dumb. Obviously they're ineffective. You keep the law abiding gun owner's guns away, but not the whackos. They could have at least armed the security guards.

Needless to say, the numbers on both sides have apparently been dubious.

Voice over IP - 911 challenges

2007-04-20T08:47:00.001-07:00

You might be aware that today’s technology allows 911 emergency services to locate you based on information that your phone is sending back. Traditional land lines have been able to do this for a while, based on the telephone record of where that phone number resides, and cellular technology is mandated by law to include GPS transmitters that will send your location to the 911 service.

But that doesn’t include VoIP telephone lines, like Vonage, where your internet service is your telephone line. Congress is struggling right now to keep up with all the different communication technologies involved with emergency services.

Today, in addition to many more ways of communicating-by voice, e-mail, instant messaging, etc.-we also have a large variety of sensors that could provide additional information to emergency dispatchers-such as digital photos and videos from cell phones, data from automatic crash notification systems, alerts from medical devices, and bio-chemical information from sensors in subways. The current 9-1-1 infrastructure, however, is not able to handle such inputs.

Not only that, but since they’ve mandated that cellular makers install capabilities to pass information to emergency operators. Some people might be wary about this, considering that it’s discomforting to know that when using your phone some clandestine government organization might be able to track your every move, but that’s not as concerning to me as it is the government automatically thinking that mandating anything is comfortably within it’s power.

Anyway, that’s just a small bit about what Congress is trying to work out. Mostly it’s about how 911 services get funded, since in the past it’s been a surcharge on phone service or wireless services within a given service area. How will VoIP be charged? Will other forms of information, like pictures taken with your phone and other types of information, be adequately funded within the existing surcharging framework?

Also, what are the challenges and legalities that need to be addressed concerning access to 911 networks?

"Some 9-1-1 authorities are reluctant, or even refuse, to complete VoIP emergency calls," O'Leary said, "because they lack the legal safeguards that protect them from liability," which exist today for wireline and wireless emergency calls. She called for extending these protections to VoIP, as did Meer.

Access to E9-1-1 infrastructure. "Nomadic VoIP providers, like Vonage, need access to parts of the telephone network to complete a 9-1-1 call," O'Leary said. "Unfortunately, there are areas in the country where Vonage cannot gain access to these vital network elements. By including access provisions in the legislation, you ensure that the 9-1-1 system remains a public trust, not a tool to block competition." Barbour said that NENA supports a provision in Senate bill 428 that requires owners of the E9-1-1 infrastructure to provide access to VoIP providers who require it to provide E9-1-1 service.

And you thought 911 was just another number you can dial up.

Zimbabwe tries to shut down NGOs

2007-04-17T15:07:00.001-07:00

Interesting article from Reuters about Zimbabwe starting to take down all the NGOs there. NGOs include all those organizations who selfishly provide aid and food to people who are starving due to Robert Mugabe’s campaign against everyone in his country.

Mugabe, sole ruler since independence in 1980, has accused NGOs and aid groups of supporting the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and imposed tight restrictions on food aid distribution in the country.

Say it isn’t so! Relief organizations supporting groups trying to overthrow the government? Perhaps it’s part of their plan to help the people. Mugabe’s government is certainly the root cause of all the suffering over there.

Mugabe, widely accused of running Zimbabwe's once-prosperous economy into the ground through policies such as the seizure of white-owned farms, blames the economic problems on sabotage by Western powers who are keen to topple him.

Britain, the United States and other Western nations deny that they have waged economic war against Mugabe and insist that they are merely trying to restore democracy in Zimbabwe.

Yeah, your problems are because we’re trying to topple your government. Denial and paranoia continue to work their magic on third world governments throughout the world.

But I think that Mugabe is right about our countries opposing him and trying to overthrow his government. Because if we’re trying to restore democracy, we’re certainly working against his government.

Google Earth domination

2007-04-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

After reading this article on how Google is doing a great job giving average people the geographic context of any given event on the earth, in this case the situation in Darfur...

Google Earth has added a Global Awareness layer to its maps program that lets you learn about the crisis in Darfur. By selecting the Global Awareness layer (in the lower left-hand corner of Google Earth) you can fly over enhanced satellite images of the war-torn region. Sprinkled over the map are icons that link to photographs, data, videos, and narratives of eyewitnesses to the genocide.

I also noted that people are still discussing the dominance of Google in the area, despite the presence of a great competing product by the evil empire. Why has the normally ubiquitous marketing department of Microsoft's not been able to push their viewer?

Peter Laudati thinks it’s because it’s gone through so many name changes, from Virtual Earth to Windows Live Local to whatever they’re calling it now — he counts at least eight web addresses that resolve to the service. (Dare Obasanjo: “This product has now officially gone through more names than I’ve had ex-girlfriends. … It’s sad that we are intent on screwing one of the coolest products we are shipping these days in this way.”)

Scoble thinks it comes down to ease of use: Google’s typically simple, uncluttered, non-redundant user interface.

Me, I suspect that cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility might play a factor: a lot of the people who write the stories that generate the buzz use Macs. (Live Maps doesn’t work at all on Safari, and it’s apparently not feature-complete on Firefox.)

Plus, I think Microsoft simply doesn’t have much goodwill left: if you say that Microsoft has produced something truly amazing, many of us will simply conclude that you’re a shill on their payroll.

I've seen the same thing in other areas as well. There was an article in Linux Magazine this month about the comparisons between modern releases of Linux and Microsoft's new Vista platform, and the author had to concede that Vista was superior to Linux in many ways (while repeating many times that he wasn't an MS shill).
Also, I've heard many independent reports that refer to the .NET development platform that Microsoft has invested the next couple of decades supporting as being just as good, or in some cases better, than Java for web development. Obviously there are some caveats there (like the dependence on the MS operating systems and servers when using .NET) but so many people are devoted to having all-MS shops that this probably won't be a serious drawback for most of us.
Needless to say, yes MS has gone a long way to improving their platforms and putting out some very good software, so the reputation they have in the industry of resting on their gigantic market share and not innovating at the same time appears to be erroneous.

History of modern geographic thought

2007-04-04T17:27:00.000-07:00

A short guide to the modern history of geographic thought, by Catholicgauze. If any of you are interested, this sums up the last 150 years of geography as a discipline and academic field, which is not quite where it is today. I recall some of this, but most of it happened prior to my birth, so when I say I recall it, it has more to do with my college days while capturing a BS in Geography.

(After reading the summary by CG, you might note that my degree was a Bachelors of Science, not arts. Considering the battle for geography to be classified as a science in the 1950s and it’s divisions since then how, do you ask, did I get a BS and not a BA. That has more to do with my background and the course of study I took (Engineering) before I burnt out and change my major. I had so much science at that point that almost all my electives were science related.)

But it goes further than that. If I may extend CG’s train of thought. Geography is continuing to suffer as a discipline, but it’s because of it’s own successful child, GIS. Geographic Information Systems has it’s origin in the 60s, with the first successful computer models of geographic phenomenon at Harvard, but the true origins probably lie earlier than that as geographers attempted to quantify mathematically what had only been analyzed qualitatively prior.

There are some who worry that geography is getting lost in favor of GIS. Some universities have curtailed their geography departments in favor of geographic information science, which is much more marketable and closer to science.

However, it’s not really science. Geomatics (of which GIS is a part) is not so much a field of study in and of itself, but a tool. You don’t measure geography for it’s own sake, you measure and quantify the spatial aspect of almost every other type of subject on the planet. Sociology, geology, politics, cosmology, weather, transportation, biology all have spatial aspects to them. So if GIS is a tool, what happens to geography?

What will become of geography? The future right now points to more technology like remote sensing and especially GIS. But the geography has been known to switch directions quickly before. Maybe the globalized world at war will led to the rise of regional geography with elements of cultural studies. Maybe the potential of climate change will cause physical/environmental geography to become more popular. What is known; however, is that multidisciplinary studies are becoming more frequent in academia. The big struggle hear is for geography to remain unique and not be absorbed into things like "environmental studies" or "international studies."

I note that nothing is said about cartography, the study of map creation, in this context. What happens to cartography, and will universities abandon it or will it break out into it’s own? GIS practitioners will say that it’s alive and well inside the technical arena of geographic information science. Most GIS systems have fairly sophisticated rendering software to make almost any map you might desire in short order. The combination of GIS systems and image software suites can produce some stunning maps.

However, the existence of fine tools is not enough to produce good quality maps, as much as they make the process far less painful. Maps are designed to communicate something to the reader. The objective is to tell the reader a story, or enlighten the user to the relationships between subjects. Whether it’s a thematic map about the election results or a road map designed to get you from A to B, without map making skills your map may not be able to communicate what the price of tea in China is. There are many principles that cartographers use to make a good map. And I’ve seen some pretty bad maps in my day.

Darfur update

2007-03-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

Darfur. Finally! “A high-level United Nations mission to Darfur said today that the Sudanese government had organized and taken part in human rights crimes against its own population and that international action to stop the killings and rapes had been inadequate.”

Negative U.S. influence

2007-03-14T01:31:00.000-07:00

Why is the U.S. so hated around the world?

In part it is due to the Soviet's propaganda machine which instead of directly trying to influence events created a self-sustaining Marxist subculture which seeks to destroy the establishment (United States and allied institutions) in the West. This subculture continues to live today even after the fall of communism and the fact that Communism killed more people than the Nazis ever dreamed of.

Islamists have taken on the old Soviet propaganda machine, and are working it with skill.
This is a post about a recent BBC poll about negative influences in the world that ranked the U.S. and Israel above just about everyone else (including N. Korea and China). Makes you wonder what life would be life for these same people if the U.S. fell off the face of the earth. Do you think it would be better?