bmagnus

John Edwards and Joe Average

So now we know that yes, Elizabeth Edwards is battling cancer again, but that John Edwards will continue to work and campaign to be our next President. I wish I could find a transcript of the press conference, because he said something to the effect of “If I can’t handle both these things at the same time, then I can’t handle being President.”

Sad but true, this puts Mr. Edwards more in line with Joe Average. Over 240,000 women per year are diagnosed with breast cancer alone in the United States, and it’s a good bet that many of them have husbands or other long-term partners.

Joe Average can’t quit work to take care of a sick wife. If nothing else, he would lose his health insurance benefits, which means paying for all her care out-of-pocket. He can’t get private insurance that will cover the expenses, because her illness will be considered a “pre-existing condition.” In fact, woe to Joe if he is self-employed or an independant contractor, since his insurance rates are about to go through the roof at the very time he can least afford it. It is worth noting that the Edwards health reform plan does very little for Joe unless he has an employer. Which reminds me — Mrs. Edwards’s previous bout with cancer was fairly well publicized; is her current problem covered at all?

Nor can Joe Average afford to take a lot of time off work to accompany his ailing wife to doctor’s appointments and hospital visits. Joe is expected to keep his private life to himself. That means no whining, and getting the job done. If Joe gets an hourly wage, he can’t afford to lose the hours as much as he wants to be there for her; if Joe is salaried, chances are he is expected to give 110% and pitch in with unpaid overtime at the boss’s whim. Mr. Edwards, on the other hand, despite his gruelling schedule can still manage to “be there” for important appointments. He’s clearly a stand-up guy in this respect.

If Joe Average has kids, that throws an additional wrinkle into things. Chances are his wife has been the primary provider for the kids, even if she has been working full time. Her illness makes it unlikely that she can continue to do everything that she has done around the house. Joe’s time is already stretched very thin for the reasons described above. If Joe is very, very lucky, he might have a (female) relative who can come help around the house for a few months. It is worth noting that he would never consider asking a male relative for such assistance. If there are no female relatives, either there’s a lot of pizza and canned soup in the Average Family’s future, or he’s going to need to hire some help he can barely afford to pay. Probably both. By way of contrast, the Edwards Family probably already have household staff on at least a part time basis, and they certainly have the money to hire quality in-home assistance if necessary. They also have a grown daughter who can pitch in if needed.

It will be interesting to see how Mr. Edwards’s political stances evolve with his circumstances.

In closing: “fame, narcissism, and MySpace”; yet another state considering a wait and see stance on Real ID; the Heinlein Society; clearing the way to using (what’s left of) our troops at home; Amnesty International thinks our treatment of certain prisoners leaves a lot to be desired, like say, trials; and finally hmm, yeah conservatism is expensive.

House of Cards

Ok, so in ring one of this circus we have Al Gonzales dancing as fast as he can. He has to put on a good show, lest someone notice that only the President can fire federal attorneys. Which means that either the President knew what was going on, has no clue (maybe he thought he was cancelling a delivery of broccoli to the White House), or that the attorneys were fired illegally. None of these is good. As distasteful as it is that after all the things Mr. Gonzales has said and done, it turns out that 8 politically motivated terminations are the one unnacceptable thing in the bipartisan eyes of the Senate. But wait, it gets better! It turns out that this may be a puppet show, with none other than everyone’s favorite crony, Karl Rove pulling the strings from a remote email account. Why is that important? Because if he’d used a whitehouse.gov email account, it would be archived and available on subpoena. So now, everybody wants to get to the bottom of this situation. And that means somebody *cough cough that would be you, Mr. Rove* has to testify before Congress. Not just the Senate. The House of Representatives too. Needless to say the White House doesn’t like that idea one bit. They may have very little bargaining room, as now it seems Mr. Gonzales may have lied to Congress.

Meanwhile in ring two we have the Iraq War. The darn thing is getting ready to have a 4th anniversary, sad as that is to say, and it’s not quite as popular as it was when it was younger. The President is having to spend time and energy defending it, “plead[ing] for patience” and giving us dire, dire warnings about what might happen if we were to stop pouring money down that bottomless pit and support our troops by bringing them home. Be afraid! Be very afraid! I fear that our capacity for fear was drained by years of Department of Homeland Security look out oh wait it’s nothing warnings. It is no coincidence that suddenly reports are coming out of our professional torture chambers that the enemy combatants we have in custody have confessed to everything short of funding John Wilkes Booth (yes folks, that last link is satire). If this isn’t enough to discredit the practice of torture, what more do we need? War is hell, we have lost a lot of lives on both sides, and we have lost a lot of money.

It’s hard to tell what’s going on in the third ring of this circus. It’s totally dark. And even though it’s hard to tell in the dark, it may be covered by a big tarp. And in fact to be perfectly honest, all the things that we are pretty sure we know happened there happened years ago now. But it sure looks like certain people in the administration are doing everything they can to keep the War on Terra rolling. For example, The Taliban offered to send Osama Bin Laden to a neutral country presumably for trial back in October of 2001. If we really wanted justice, the international courts are the place. Seriously, you won’t find an impartial jury here in the United States. Surely the Hague could have helped us out on this one. And then we have the Vice President. It seems that various parties may have been working out of Mr. Cheney’s office to “us[e] stolen funds from Iraq to arm al Qaeda-tied groups and foment a larger Sunni-Shia war…” It was specifically done this way — the author alleges — to avoid the problems of CIA involvement that brought the Iran-Contra scandal to public attention.

If nothing here rises to the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, what does it take?

In closing: compare and contrast; credit card tricks; credit card tips (hey, I can be fair and balanced too!); a car that’s supposed to be a little fishy; when it comes to TV, “[T]orture is the new sex”; and finally, a big plane we don’t need.

Watashi wa Nihonjin ni Naru to Omoimasu.

or, “I think I’m turning Japanese.”

Those of you who know me personally realize that I’ve been studying Japanese for about 3 years now. And not one of those classes where they teach you how to pronounce things from the Berlitz phase dictionary. Nope, we’ve actually been learning to read and write, listen and speak, vocabulary and grammar.

Frankly, many sushi chefs are impressed by any hakujin (that’s “white person”) who can successfully say that the meal was delicious. The grammar is complicated. Verbs and adjectives conjugate but there is no future tense. Nouns rarely appear in the plural; if you want to express more than one you can say how many, or just say “a lot of”. And then there are particles; put the wrong one in the wrong spot, and instead of eating dinner with a friend, you have eaten your friend for dinner.

Reading in Japanese is complicated by the fact that they have three basic writing systems which are all used at the same time. Hiragana — a system of 46 lovely curved figures, each of which represents a syllable — is learned first, both in Japan and here. Learning Hiragana is like being in Kindergarten all over again, scratching your head and trying to remember which squiggly bit makes an “ah” sound, and worse yet, not really being able to read anything substantive even when you have figured it out. After one learns Hiragana, the next set of symbols is Katakana — the 46 angular figures you might see on package labels or signage — which are used for “foriegn” words and sometimes for emphasis. Great, now the reader can tell that the sign over the bananas says “banana”! To make sense of Japanese writing, one still needs Kanji, a set of (*gulp*) 1945 Chinese characters which impart meaning and one of several pronunciations. For the record, I’m currently about a sixth of the way to that figure.

Actually, Kanji are very interesting. For example, the kanji for “sun” can also mean “day.” It can be pronouced ni, hi, bi, nichi, ka, or jitsu, in addition to other ways one finds while reading. It combines with the Asian “elements” to make the days of the week: Friday is literally “Money Day”. Pair it with the kanji for “now” and you have “now-day,” or “today” (pronounced kyoo, using none of the pronunciations I listed earlier). Pair it with the kanji for “bright” (which is a sun and moon kanji together) and “bright day” is “tomorrow” (pronounced “ashita”, the sun will come out tomorrow). Some pairings are not so esoteric; “sky” plus “harbor” turn unsurprisingly into “airport.”

Japanese textbooks are also kind of interesting. They seem to invariably follow the adventures of an English speaker visiting the country with good but limited language skills. This allows us to learn from the mistakes of our fictional travelers. In Japanese for Busy People, for example, Mr. Smith is a lawyer spending some months in Japan on business. Since he doesn’t read Japanese, he ends up asking people to read him business cards. In one case, he asks someone what the department store hours are, while standing in front of a sign listing the store hours. This book is great for people who must cram enough working phrases into their brain to function without worrying about grammar. It is worth noting that you learn in chapter one how to say “Pardon me, where is the American Embassy?” Since it is aimed at the potential business traveler, there is much more formal, humble, and polite language earlier. There is a separate workbook for hiragana/katakana, but no kanji.

By contrast, in Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese, we follow the adventures of Mary, and exchange student from the University of Arizona, her Japanese boyfriend Takeshi, and their friends. Mary gets to ask silly questions like “Pork loin? What kind of fish is that?” and “You mean all those Kabuki actors were men??” Because this course is aimed at college students, a lot of time is spent on college and young-adults-coming-of-age sorts of language issues. Chapter one, for example, focuses on “What is your major” and “What year student are you?” As the text proceeds, we learn about studying, part time jobs, seeing a doctor, going to a party, and other things. Grammar is taught early and often. Each chapter has a parallel chapter on the written language. If you have the time, this is really a better book than “Japanese for Busy People.”

Even books like Teach Yourself Beginner’s Japanese focus on a foriegner, this time a high school exchange student. This book addresses the written language only in passing; it’s fine for those who need something a step above a phrasebook, but it’s only a stepping stone for those who want to really learn the language.

This discussion would not be complete without some of my favorite Japan-oriented websites. You may already know Pureland Mountain and Gaijin Smash from my link list. A couple of more news-oriented sites are Japundit and Japan Probe. If you’re looking for help learning the language, there’s flash card generator (as a word of warning, if you use 3×5 cards, they will eventually take up a bit of space), online dictionary, and a leve 4 proficiency exam study page.

In closing: War on Terror == War On You; something that should really terrify you, China may sell some of it’s US Bonds (like oh, maybe a few hundred million dollars worth); if that doesn’t scare you how about climate change; even some evangelicals are worried about the environment; on a related note, the real decline of the American family; even Gretchen Morgenson thinks a “Crisis Looms in Mortgages”; I am very sorry, no papers, no medical care (real sorry about that fire that burned up your kid’s birth certificates; even bigger shame they’re gonna die of something we can fix!); could it be that drunk driving is not quite as big a problem as certain people want us to think?; “Even Republicans Hate Our Health Care System”; Orwell at the Office (please ignore that many of the “Orwellian” intrusions cited in this piece are merely a continuation of school rules); the 10 most important video games of all time?; custom clothes on the internet; and finally, I may be the only person not calling for Halliburton’s blood this morning (CNBC’s caption was that they were Un-American!), but as I read the actual story, I am noting that “The company will maintain its existing corporate office here as well as its legal incorporation in the United States, meaning that it will still be subject to domestic laws and regulations.” Only the big boss and his cronies are leaving for Dubai. Let him go! The bright spot is that this is bringing scrutiny to their contracts with the United States government.

Hey, Ho, Gonzales Must Go!

Or, Bring Me the Head of Alberto Gonzales.
Back in January I said to write your Senators and tell them to demand the resignation of United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Bad enough he has called the Geneva Conventions and their prohibition on torture “quaint.”

Bad enough he authored the opionions that allow terror suspects to be held without charges until the end of the War on Terror — a war which Discovery and Ted Koppel are calling “Our Children’s Children’s War”.

Bad enough he thinks it’s just fine for Vice President Dick Cheney to have secret meetings with energy company executives before coming up with an “energy plan”.

Bad enough he has sat in a Senate hearing and said that the Constitution does not actually give us a right to Habeas Corpus.

Now it is clear that he has been instrumental in getting rid of eight U.S. Attorneys — who had recently gotten “glowing performance reviews” — apparently on grounds of not towing the official administration line. The Christian Science Monitor says “At issue is whether the Justice Department’s decision to replace these top federal prosecutors was a political purge and, if so, what Congress can do about it.” Let me tell you what Congress an do about it: Since even “senior” Senate Republicans think this stinks, this is the time for the Senate to act by demanding Gonzales’s resignation. Now.

In closing, Follow-Up Friday is a little early: Pediatricians warn that the kind of insurance policies President Bush and the “free markets fix everything” crowd favor may make kids sicker; Washington Post tells us the bleeding obvious, Health Care is already a huge issue in the 2008 elections; NYT and IHT tell us even more obvious news, the self employed don’t have employers to provide health insurance, and therefore they often must do without; Arnold and Eliot; NYT/IHT are calling it a “home mortgage crisis”; Al Gore says the EU must lead where the USA doesn’t; big diet study says no sugar low carbohydrate diets help people lose weight; and an item I’ve not covered before, internships are so competitive there are companies to help young adults (whose mommies and daddies have money) get them (thus widening the gap between haves and have-nots by expanding the “experiences” and rolodexes of wealthy young adults).

Shorti3s

Come on Hollywood; horror movie titles with more than one word?

To Your Health: I know it isn’t a new article, but start with the nice folks at Alternet telling the truth, Private Health Insurance is Not the Answer. I used to think that letting people be in charge of their own insurance would bring rates to a manageable level and fix the problem, and that might have been true a decade ago. But I’m not sure it’s true now, and I am very sure that the Bush plan — which would as a side effect raise taxes on working Americans by over half a Trillion with a T dollars over the next ten years alone — won’t fix much of anything but insurance company profits. This problem has gotten so bad that Healthcare is the number one domestic concern of Americans according to a recent poll. In fact “Nearly two-thirds said the federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans and half said they would be willing to pay as much as $500 more in taxes a year for universal coverage…” For more data from that poll, try the New York Times, who add that “Only 24 percent said they were satisfied with President Bushâ€™s handling of the health insurance issue, despite his recent initiatives, and 62 percent said the Democrats were more likely to improve the health care system.” Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the wild card in health insurance reform: Eliot Spitzer. Yes, the esteemed Governor Spitzer is taking aim at the Big Health Groups that want to keep taking more and more money from the people and state of New York. So he invited them all to a nice little breakfast, and showed them a little powerpoint presentation, rebutting all their objections to his proposed cuts. I respected Mr. Spitzer — as the AG for New York — for standing up and taking care of the voters who put him in office, and for using whatever tools he had at his disposal. He’s not the sort who whines that he needs new laws to fight injustice; he figures out how to use the ones he has (makes you wonder if he isn’t the basis for this fictional character).

“You probably don’t want to have them in your slippers. They’re kind of spiky,” the Scientist Announced: No, really! Scientists have discovered at least 11 complete fossils of an ocean creature who lived about 505 Million years ago. “Orthrozanclus had no eyes and no limbs and apparently moved along the ocean floor with a muscular foot, like a snail does, while dining on bacterial growths, the researchers said…. It was covered in a shell and had almost three dozen long, pointy, curved spines sticking out from the edge of its body, and many smaller ones, too.”

Mortgage A-GoGo: AFP tells us that “Those exotic, high-risk mortgages that fueled the US real estate boom are now showing high rates of failure, prompting concerns that the housing market may come crashing down faster than expected,” (duh) and “[M]any people who got subprime loans in 2005 are now seeing their monthly payments jump by 30 to 50 percent. And with payments due, fears are rising about widespread defaults and that a general collapse in the subprime lending sector could spill over to the broader housing sector, and perhaps to the broader economy.” Subprime delinquencies are up to 12.8% (ARM delinquencies 13.2%) compared with a national average of 2.44% mortgage delinquency. Freddie Mac — Fannie’s little brother — is headed into the fray, announcing that “it would no longer buy those high-risk home mortgages that it deems to be the most vulnerable to foreclosure,” and “it was developing new fixed-rate and hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages to provide lenders with more choices for subprime borrowers.” Ironically, as sensible as this move is, it may cause an even bigger headache for certain homeowners as mortgage companies that collapse may result in homes being lost through no fault of the “homeowner”. Oh, and I should not neglect this article from the Washington Post entitled “A Growning Chorus on Risky Mortgages.” Some European economists are concerned that this may ultimate result in massive economic disaster. You have to love a serious economic article willing to refer in bold type to “Subprime Idiots.” It is worth reading the whole thing, including the section titled “US Steps Towards Banana Republic.”

Fashion Police: Can anybody corroborate this story? This is the only version I can find, and something in the back of my head is quoting Carl Sagan… something about extraordinary claims and extraordinary proof. Boston Police allegedly blew up a man in a bulky coat for loitering by a lamppost for more than 10 minutes. After all he might have had a bomb. His girlfriend said “There was a long line at Starbucks, and Evan wanted to smoke so he waited outside for me. Next thing I know I look up and I see police blowing him up. I always told him that down jacket made him look puffy.” Officer Charlie O’Hara of the bomb squad says “I’d blow up a hundred innocent people if I can prevent another 9/11.” Yeah, I’m not sure the citizens are with him on that. You don’t suppose he’s related to Gotham City’s Police Chief O’Hara, do you?

Yoink! UPS decides it doesn’t need no French airplanes when we make perfectly good jumbo cargo jets here in the United States.

It’s the Economy, Stupid! Poverty is getting worse. Not only are more people poor, they are poorer. One out of every 6 Americans depends on some program for the poor. It’s bad enough that some people are starting to correctly think “Too many people – including those who live in the suburbs and in the rural areas – are descending into it too fast for that to be the sole explanation. All of those people aren’t lazy or stupid.” Gee, do you think?

Good job reading those books, Johnny. Now you get to drag your parents out for pizza: Critics are just now catching on to a program called Book It, which rewards kids who read a target number of books with food that manages to be both fatty and starchy (i.e., fattening no matter whose paradigm you like). Now, leaving aside for a moment that this is a slap in the face for families that are vegan or deal with several major common food allergies, “The program is now under attack by child-development experts who say it promotes bad eating habits and turns teachers into corporate promoters.” It also takes control away from parents, who now have the choice of negating little Johnny’s award, or eating food they don’t want from a company they have not chosen to support. Of course some critics say that a major purpose of public schools is to take away parental control…..

You may not like him, but he has a point: Guess who said this? “The prevailing powers today are in the hands of those who have economic and military power which puts fear in others. They can make you starve. They can close the doors for your exports of raw materials such as coffee or oil.” How about this? “Those who threaten you with military power or with the (U.N.) Security Council are the people who are controlling the world and if you go against the tide you might be destroyed.” And this, about strings attached to international aid? “This is an international dictatorship that is being practiced against people, especially poor people.” Give up? Muammar Gaddafi.

Reality, Real ID, and You: The ACLU calls it a Real Nightmare. Wired calls it an internal passport. The good news is that the deadline for states to implement a Even better, the actual implementation rules have been released, so we can all quote chapter and verse on what it really says.

And finally, on a related note: Ron Paul’s essay, “It Can’t Happen Here”.

That sound you heard was my head exploding.

This morning whilst reading the news I came across this CNN item entitledWoman Allegedly Advised by Geese Not Guilty in Tot Death.

Yes, you read that correctly. Granny has apparently been in the mental hospital before, and one fine day she killed her grandchild with a chef’s knife. “Authorities said Pappas had told her son she had been receiving spiritual advice from geese flying over his house, where she was living,” according to the article.

Yes, Geese.

Now think about this a minute:

HONK! HONK! HONK!

“Yes! Of course, I see it now! Thanks!”

Make no mistake. This woman is clearly insane, and clearly needs to be in the mental hospital for a good long time; what a shame that she had to kill somebody for that to happen.

But what about charges for the parents who left their toddler in the care of a woman who had been admitted to a mental hostpital 6 weeks previously and gets spiritual advice from geese?

If you are looking to read something with a bit more substance, may I recommend The Nation’s article “The Care Crisis.”

Things are not improving.

It’s time to talk about education again.

The latest data suggests that kids are doing fine in school, as long as you don’t ask them to take any standardized tests that would actually measure what they know against what they actually should know. The fact that kids entering college now know less than they did even ten years ago has now been documented by college professors, who are understandably alarmed. We’ve got junior high school students being forced to memorize pi to 52 digits instead of learning math.
Math isn’t the only problem, either. Clearly there are big problems with understanding English. How else can we explain how the Christian Science Monitor is actually able to print experts claiming:

“The picture is getting brighter,” and if there’s no recession over the next several years “there are going to continue to be some good strides made,” says Mark McMullen, a senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com….

Let me get this straight: things will get better unless they don’t. Brilliant analysis. Furthermore, the nice folks at The Mess That Greenspan Made point out how the “experts” are trying to redefine basic economic terms. Perhaps they hope Joe and Jane Average are too stupid to notice.

Now we have arrived at the point where the basic inability to understand written English is going to be harmful to some people’s health. Ezra Klein points out that the average American is no longer able to read and understand basic information about their medical care. You really ought to go read the Washington Post article he references.

Nor is this problem limited to America. The BBC reports that poorly educated workers are costing their employers money.

Oh, do I have your attention now?

The saddest part of this whole mess is that we do know how to educate children using time tested processes. Effective programs like Direct Instruction and Kumon exist, and have been used successfully for decades. Fine, these programs may be a little dull for the instructor, but school isn’t about entertaining the instructor; it is about educating the student. More importantly, programs like these don’t require lots of extra money. They do, however, require starting with what the student already knows, and accepting the fact that some students will move through the material more quickly than others.

In closing: a man without whom few Japanese folktales would have survived; a unified No Fly List is so important to the Feds that it’s 5 years behind schedule; two items on how things are tough all over, but it turns out that’s because poverty is at a 32 year high; a mandatory health proposal from a hospital group that should know better, this one would cost $115,000 Million in federal dollars to “provide subsidies for individuals to buy insurance from their employer if they cannot afford it, or to buy tax-subsidized coverage in the open market”; some people are saying money spent on health care will double in 10 years, but I disagree and think the whole system will collapse first; must read from NYT on Making Martial Law Easier; you can’t find mad cow if you don’t run a test; and finally, “we don’t need no regulation, passengers don’t need no federal protections.”

Thou Shalt Not Shorties… Except

Gomen Nasai. Success may be Toyota’s worst enemy, as it is getting more difficult to make the way they do things scale. (Not finding a good definition of “scale” online. I am using it as “the ability of a system or practice to serve incrementally more users and or an incrementally larger organization as needs grow.” Put that in your Wikipedia and smoke it.) In case you ever were curious, the History of Toyota. How did Mr. Toyoda’s company become Toyota? A character informally known as a “chong-chong” that looks a bit like a double quote-mark was omitted from the corporate name to separate home life from corporate life, and make the company name “luckier”.

We don’t care where you are from as long as your money is green. On one hand, we have the New York Times asking NAFTA should have stopped illegal immigration, right? This article scratches the surface of how NAFTA in fact shrunk Mexico’s manufacturing base and made it not cost effective for their farmers to stay in business. The latest news confirms that Mexico’s economy is experiencing reduced growth and increased inflation A quick look at stories about “The Tortilla Crisis” suggests that — just like in the United States — the Mexican central economic authority does what it can to under-report inflation. But have no fear; illegal immimgrants who come over the border can apparently get credit cards from Bank of America. Mr. BinLaden, please disregard the previous sentence, mmkay? Thanks.

Maybe Regulation Can Be a Good Thing. Apparently it takes leaving Joe Scarborough on a plane for 9 hours to get something going in this country. But now, it looks as though the flying public rights as travellers. If it can get rammed through Congress, if lobbyists don’t kill it, if the airlines don’t try to head it off by offering a non-binding “promise.” If you want to keep up with this topic, don’t forget to stick with Upgrade Travel Better.

The Soft Bigotry of Lowered Expectations. Way to go, Condi. An article entitled “Low expectations ahead of Rice-Olmert-Abbas talks” is this quote from Ms. Rice: “What I would consider a success … is that we have gotten started.” Showing up is worth diplomatic points? Whatever!

It turns out Americans prefer food that won’t kill them. Who knew. The USDA is making some changes in the inspection process to focus on food processing sites where there have been problems in the past, freeing up places where they have in the past done things right to keep working. Both consumer groups and meat packing interests are approaching these changes with skeptical optimism, which means they are probably as close to “on target” as we will ever get. On a related note, how the heck did they manage to get salmonella into peanut butter??

‘Scuse me? Guys? The Center is over here. A bit to the left. Yeah, that’s it. I’ve been reading all darn weekend about how the Democratic Presidential candidates had better be careful not to sound like they don’t support the troops, and not to sound like they are all liberal and stuff. In fact, even relatively conservative Americans are alarmed by the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Some are willing to go so far as to call it a liberal resurgence, pointing out that “Presidential candidates, for instance, can now safely utter “universal health care” without being tarred as supporters of “socialized medicine.” Polls show increasing support for raising the minimum wage, stem-cell research, gay and lesbian civil unions, alternative-energy initiatives and increased financial aid to offset the escalating cost of college.” And yet The Pundits warn against politicians saying that they honestly stand for the things The Voters want. Huh? Isn’t it the voters that put elected officials into office? I can only imagine the ornery comments that the late Molly Ivins would have.

Speaking of voters and the voting machines that (allegedly) record their votes. Researchers at Princeton were able to buy themselves a “secure” voting machine for $82. Experiments are now underway to find out just how “secure” it really is.

From the “It Sounded Like a Good Idea at the Time” Department. Artificial coral reef damaging to the real thing. And content recognition software is supposed to automatically determine whether music or video is copyrighted; one of several problems is that just because there’s a copyright doesn’t mean there is not a permission. I used to work in this industry and it appears that there are still many unaddressed issues.

Three Coins in the Fountain. The Governator’s plan may place a huge burden on (what’s left of) the middle class. It seems that there is a large swath of population who make too much to qualify for assistance but not enough to really afford a healthplan that covers much of anything. Remember, this plan is mandatory health coverage, not universal health coverage. Speaking of universal health coverage, Ezra Klein brings us a nice item on universal health, Medicare, and prescriptions. Whatever we end up with health insurance reform wise, I sure do hope it will cover regrowing fingers.

That’s it for now. Happy Presidents Day. How many of them can you name? Hint: there have been 43, including the younger Mr. Bush.

But I Can’t

Today, I turned on the TiVo to watch something, and noticed that there was a video by MC Lars in the main menu. I like MC Lars, and if you are unfamiliar with him, you really ought to go check him out. While you’re at it, look into Frontalot and Lady Sovereign. These folks and people like them are new voices in [hopefully soon-to-be] popular music.

Anyway, it is a video for MC Lars’s Download This Song. It is a catchy tune about the fundamental shifts taking place in the music industry whether the music industry likes it or not.

The funny part is that at the end, there was no way to — in fact — download that song.

And Iran: Iran so far away….

A few months ago, I read James Clavell’s Whirlwind. The book begins 28 years ago today: February 9, 1979, in the middle of the Iranian Revolution.

Now those of you who have read any of Clavell’s books know that they are long historical novels, and full of detail, and have dozens of characters, at least 3 of whom can be argued are the “main” character. Whirlwind is no different. Who is more important: the Mullah who opens and ends the book with prayers; the helicopter pilots who risk their lives; the former World War II POW who must play a careful game of cat and mouse to get his people out of the country safely; the executive’s son who witnesses a brutal mass execution; the Persian Princess; the spoiled daugher of the bazaari; the head of Straun’s aircraft division? Thankfully for the reader, Clavell walks us through a strict timeline; each day is marked; each chaper includes a map to let us know where in the country the characters are; each section has a timestamp.

Now, I was alive in 1979. Admittedly I did not pay a whole lot of attention to the world events of the day, preferring to listen to the Bay City Rollers. But I do remember when the Embassy was taken, and I remember NBC and ABC (probably CBS too) running a big “100 days in captivity” special. In many days, reading this historical novel was an eye-opener.

One of the most striking things is that at least once a day, some character said that “soon things would get back to normal.” Oh the Shah is gone, things will be back to normal in a few days. Oh Khomeni has arrived, surely things will be back to normal soon. Oh the military has stood down, that means things will be ok soon. A cow farted, things will be back to normal. Talking to people who were adults in this era confirms that this kind of thinking was prevalent in real life in the United States, too. This is but one example of the striking naivety that seemed to afflict all Westerners in the book. Non-natives were consistently caught off-guard by the idea that “progressive” reforms could be rolled back, that a theocracy could be erected, that Sharia could be enforced, that assets owned jointly with foriegn entities could be nationalized.

The reason I bring this up today is that we still don’t understand Iran.

More to the point, we don’t understand that they don’t like us. Sure, they have their reasons. A poll this week says Arabs don’t like President Bush. My inner cynic suggests he doesn’t much like them either. It might have something to do with the sabre rattling that keeps going around, set on a backdrop of perfectly innocent ICBM tests.

There is just too darn much we don’t know about what’s really going on there, and since we’ve had effectively no diplomatic presence there in the last 28 years, we are unlikely to make progress on that front. Even Hillary Clinton has gone on record saying there’s too much we don’t know to be idly talking about bombs and invasions and whatnot (WARNING: that link is an MP3 of yesterday’s interview on the Ed Schultz Show). We don’t even know who is really calling the shots, according to Senator Clinton — who is in a much better position to know these things than most people. Do we negotiate with Ayatolla Khamenei? Or President Ahmadinejad? The restless Parliament?

These are not academic questions if we want to avoid having another nuclear power in the region, or sending American soldiers to a third Islamic nation. Pat Buchannan and some liberal thinkers agree, Bush may not in the long run have the authority to start the next war, but frankly I am beginning to wonder if much of anything can stop the President from having something he really wants.

Oh well, the Senate is talking about non-binding resolutions. Surely this means everything will get back to normal soon.

Clearly, too many people are looking forward to Armageddon.

In closing: on children being left behind; someone finally caught on to the fact that people grow pot in the ‘burbs, too (way to have cutting edge reporting, USA Today); law, the rational basis test, and you; it’s a lot easier to say “quality, affordable healthcare for all by 2012” when you don’t have an actual proposal on the table; thoughts on the idea of a flat tax; turning ISPs (Internet Service Providers) into cops will not prevent child abuse, but it would probably drive small ISPs out of business; has anybody considered the idea that the internet might make things tougher for child abusers?; the person in charge of infrastructure at California’s DMV officially doesn’t get it, thinking that somehow RealID is going to allow her to provide more services online (How? How does this prevent Joe Nefarious from entering Joe Average’s driver’s license number at the online prompt? Maybe she wants to issue everyone a USB License Reader to hook to their computer?); and finally, This Day In History 1969, the first 747 takes off. They still make 747s a couple miles from here. It’s a beautiful airplane. Sometimes on hot days they open the factory doors and you can see what they are working on. But let me tell you, the 777 is much quieter.

Follow up: one, two, three, four.