Rap

On a lighter, non-political note, I’ve come across two great things on hilarious blogs, both of them related to rap music.

The first appears to be some sort of application form for a singing group, composed by someone lacking in sharpness. (Besides the highlighted question, note that the next one begins, “If yes or no…”)

Equally as inappropriate is this coloring book, purportedly from Japan.

McCain-Palin

I once had a history teacher remark that what set Nazism and Fascism apart from most other ideologies was that they weren’t necessarily for a cause, as much as against an existing cause. And I’ve never really liked that style of politics.

In 2004, I voted for Kerry. I thought he was a pretty good guy, but I admit, my vote wasn’t so much “I emphatically support John Kerry” as much as, “I vehemently oppose the notion of George W. Bush being elected again.” So I was excited in 2007 about 2008. In the summer of 2007, I couldn’t make up my mind whether I’d support Obama or Richardson, two superb candidates. But there were lots of other good candidates. Sure, I didn’t really care for all the candidates, but I was emphatically for Obama. (After being emphatically for Richardson for a while.) I wasn’t against anyone. And when I watched the Republicans, I liked John McCain. Compared to some of the others, he seemed like a level-headed guy. I was happy when he won the primaries, though admittedly a bit apprehensive, because he was the one Republican I could see moderates and undecideds getting behind.

Even with the race Obama vs. McCain, I was emphatically for Obama. It wasn’t the “cake or ice cream” dilemma with Obama vs. Richardson, but it was perhaps “ice cream or fresh French bread.” I like one more than the other, but the other’s still good. And until a month ago, I still felt that way. But then the French bread turned stale, and eventually, it started to grow some mold. And nowadays, it’s crawling with worms, while the delicious bowl of ice cream is as good as ever. It sometimes aggravates me that Obama doesn’t fight back as hard against McCain as he ought to, but lately, I’ve been viewing it as McCain slinging mud at Obama. Obama wipes the mud off, and keeps talking about how to solve the issues facing America. And McCain just keeps flinging mud.

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, remarks in a recent Washington Post piece,

“Twice last week alone, speakers at McCain-Palin rallies have referred to Sen. Barack Obama, with unveiled scorn, as Barack Hussein Obama.

Never mind that this evokes — and brazenly tries to resurrect — the unsavory, cruel days of our past that we thought we had left behind. Never mind that such jeers are deeply offensive to millions of peaceful, law-abiding Muslim Americans who must bear the unveiled charge, made by some supporters of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin, that Obama’s middle name makes him someone to distrust — and, judging by some of the crowd reactions at these rallies, someone to persecute or even kill.”

I’m really not sure if it’s any accident that, as conservatives push McCain to “take off the gloves,” the repeated use of Obama’s middle name—Hussein—comes back right as Palin repeatedly tries to link Obama to William Ayers. (Never mind that Obama was 8 at the time, that he has denounced Ayers’ actions, and that his “ties” to the former domestic terrorist are in the form of Obama and Ayers volunteering on the board of a charity to help failing schools. It’s not about the facts, it’s about the montage of “Obama” and “terrorist” enough to make it seem believable.)

I’m sure that, when these people get called out for repeating “Hussein” over and over again, they’ll claim that they meant nothing by it: they were merely calling Obama by his name, and it’s the Democrats that seem to have a problem with it. But that’d be a bald-faced lie. He is Barack Hussein Obama, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the “unveiled scorn” that Hosseini mentions that is objectionable. He’s not “Barack Hussein Obama,” a proud American senator, he’s “Barack Hussein Osama, I mean Obama,” who cavorts with terrorists and went to school at a terrorist training camp. The “Hussein,” at least on several occasions in the past, is very clearly being injected to evoke imagery of Saddam, Iraq, and Islam, all the things that patriotic Americans should hate. “Hussein” is un-American and can’t be trusted.

Hosseini continues,

The real affront is the lack of firm response from either McCain or Palin. Neither has had the moral courage, when taking the stage, to grasp the microphone, turn to the presenter and, right then and there, denounce the use of Obama’s middle name as an insult. Instead, they have simply delivered their stump speeches, lacing into Obama as if nothing out-of-bounds had just happened. The McCain-Palin ticket has given toxic speeches accusing Obama of being a friend of terrorists, then released short, meek repudiations of some of the rough stuff, including McCain’s call Friday to “be respectful.” Back in February, the Arizona senator apologized for the “disparaging remarks” from a talk-radio host who sneered repeatedly about “Barack Hussein Obama” before a McCain rally. “We will have a respectful debate,” McCain insisted afterward. But pretending to douse flames that you are busy fanning does not qualify as straight talk.

What I find most unconscionable is the refusal of the McCain-Palin tandem to publicly condemn the cries of “traitor,” “liar,” “terrorist” and (worst of all) “kill him!” that could be heard at recent rallies. McCain is perfectly capable of telling hecklers off. But not once did he or his running mate bother to admonish the people yelling these obscene — and potentially dangerous — words… Is inaction tantamount to consent? The McCain campaign certainly thinks so when it comes to Obama and incendiary remarks from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

This Daily Show clip includes a segment near the beginning in which you can hear the jeers of the crowd when Obama’s name is mentioned, and someone, pretty clearly, screams “Kill Him!” I could see that being tolerated in a wartorn third-world nation where it’s an honest reformer running against a racist warlord dictator, but in America, between two US Senators? We seriously think it’s okay to chant “Kill him” to refer to an American presidential candidate? I’m not a big fan of the “calling for an apology” thing (to me, it makes no sense to ask for an apology, much less demand one), and really, I’m still not holding out for an apology from McCain/Palin. They have an election to win. But for the love of God, don’t let people at your crowds scream “Kill Him!” about Obama, or allow people speaking on your behalf to repeatedly interject “Hussein” in the middle of his name with a sort of sneer.

McCain and Palin keep trying to bring up his ties to Ayers to question Obama’s judgment. And now that the legislative ethics panel in Alaska has concluded that Sarah Palin abused her power as governor, I expect the Obama-Ayers thing to get repeated louder and louder.

At the risk of blockquoting too much of Hosseini’s excellent article, his conclusion is perfect:

I — and, I suspect, millions of Americans like me, Republicans and Democrats alike — couldn’t care less about Obama’s middle name or the ridiculous six-degrees-of-separation game that is the William Ayers non-issue. The Taliban are clawing their way back in Afghanistan, the country that I hope many of my fellow Americans have come to understand better through my novels. People are losing their homes and their jobs and are watching the future slip away from them. But instead of addressing these problems, the McCain-Palin ticket is doing its best to distract Americans by provoking fear, anxiety and hatred. Country first? Hardly.

Why Computer Literacy Matters

I just got this e-mail. I laughed.

Good day.

You have received an eCard
To pick up your eCard, choose from any of the following options:
Click on the following link (or copy & paste it into your web browser):

http://example.com/e-card.exe

Your card will be aviailable for pick-up beginning for the next 30 days.
Please be sure to view your eCard before the days are up!
We hope you enjoy you eCard.
Thank You!

An eCard from a domain I’ve never heard of, with a .exe attachment? I don’t think so. (Note that the actual domain wasn’t example.com, but I wanted to ensure that my blog post about a virus didn’t result in someone visiting it…)

But there are probably a lot of people who would have gotten that e-mail and merrily visited it to see their eCard, without thinking, “I shouldn’t visit links from strangers,” much less, “I shouldn’t visit links that end in .exe.”

Though presumably, at least some of the people who blindly followed it would catch on when trying to view their eCard prompted them to download a file. But I think this shows why user education is so important. To me, and probably to most readers here, it’s almost comically obvious that that link would be a virus. And yet, since they keep sending out e-mails like this, I have to think that they’re getting a decent number of people with them.

Absurdities

My Diet

Some might say it’s weird to go on a walk during lunch, though I assume that they mean lunch break, as opposed to eating while walking. (Which, if it’s anything like jogging after eating, I highly recommend you not do. Trust me.)

But why bother? Just like going for a walk, sitting back and sipping a nice cold Diet Coke is also energizing and relaxing.

What am I doing to stay fit? I’m downing Diet Coke.

Bill Ayers

Palin’s been instructed to keep bringing up Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers, and the McCain campaign released a video on the web “exposing” them.

I think Obama put it well when Hillary tried to use it against him: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense.” And yet that’s exactly what John McCain’s strategy is.

How do they know each other? They served on the board of a charity to help failing schools in Chicago. Ayers, a domestic terrorist forty years ago, turned himself in and has since been a strong advocate for education. The articles I’ve read suggest that even conservatives have given him accolades for his work. (And as for the articles that came out, quite ironically, on September 10 and 11, 2001 about Ayers not regretting what he did? Well, if you believe Ayers (who, after all, had just the interview: it’s not like he had much of a reason to lie the next day?), that’s actually not what he said: he meant that he regretted that the war wasn’t stopped, not that he didn’t regret the violence.)

I can’t help but view these as desperate actions. McCain is trailing in the polls, probably because of a surge of interest in the economy, something McCain has admitted is a weak area of his. Ironically, in 1989, McCain would come under fire for “improperly intervening” in a bank collapse, ultimately costing the government $2 billion. Of course, that was almost 20 years ago, and no one’s really been bringing it up because, well, there’s much more important stuff to talk about.

Again, it’s no great secret that I’m pretty biased against McCain. But I can’t help but think that what he’s been doing lately drives home exactly why he shouldn’t be President: he’s corrupting the truth and attacking others to distract us from the issues that really matter to us. And after the past eight years, I think we’ve had enough of that.

Polls

I’m fond of the Electoral-Vote.com site; it’s run by an American expat with a Ph.D. in statistics, and a keen passion for following politics and polls. He’s slanted to the left, surely, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Err, I meant to say, he doesn’t let his political persuasions influence poll results.

I’ve just put a little graphic on the right corner of the main page, just below the table of contents, showing his most recent count. He’s not generating those graphics for every Senate race, but you can view a page of Senate poll results here. I have to wonder if the plummet in Shaheen’s poll numbers was the result of the massive conservative attacks accusing her of implementing sales and income taxes… Though I’m not sure what’s behind Sununu’s, when he fell to 35% in polls. It predated my blog post about him, so it can’t be that. 😉 What’s interesting about the Sununu-Shaheen Senate race, besides the number of capital S’s, is that, until about a month ago, Shaheen seemed a shoe-in. Now I’d dare say that all bets are off: she’s still ahead on average, but they’re close and it’s rocky.

North Carolina’s an interesting state, too. Their Senate race graph is weird, with incubment Republican Elizabeth Dole (in answer to the inevitable question, yes, she’s married to Bob) initially soaring some 15 points ahead of the Democratic contender, Kay Hagan. But Dole has slowly dropped in polls, until they were tied in August. And then the graph started taking some pretty wild drugs, and they’re now basically in a tie, surging and plummeting at the same time, which doesn’t make an awful lot of sense.

North Carolina is also the only state that “the Votemaster” is calling a tie right now, with John McCain enjoying a sizeable lead until mid-September, when things got close and intense. Now they’re pretty much tied; the regression lines since September show Obama gaining and McCain losing, but realistically, they’re tied, and staying tied.

It’s a certain battleground state, with a lot of electoral votes (15) and a close race. Florida, too, is awfully close with its 27 votes, but leaning towards Obama. (However, that shouldn’t mean a lot when it comes to Floridians going to the polls?). Ohio, with 20 votes, is also really close, leaning blue. Indiana has 11 votes, and is slightly leaning McCain‘s way; he seems to be gaining in polls there as well, though Obama’s still around 45%.

Texas, with its 34 electoral votes, is almost certainly for McCain, but what interests me is that, even in places like Texas, Obama’s got almost 45% of the vote. (And 40% in Kansas.)

Meanwhile, the NH House races look blue, too. An October poll has Shea-Porter at 50%, to Bradley’s 41%, and Hodes (District 2) towering over Jennifer Horn, 47% to 34%.

There doesn’t appear to be much polling going on for the the NH Legislature, so my curiousity about Sheila Roberge will persist…

Iran

It turns out that, right after 9/11, Iran was a big ally of the US. Let me say that again*: Iran rounded up hundreds of suspected al Qaeda members for us right after 9/11. They notifed the UN and us, and let us come in and interrogate them. And they “sought a broader relationship with the United States.”

But Bush just kept referring to them as the “axis of evil” and refused to work with them.

Iran has rapidly been becoming a menace. But how did they go from an ally looking to strengthen ties with us, to an enemy who hates us and is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons?

Why, exactly, is it a bad thing that Obama has said he’d be willing to meet with Iranian leaders? It sounds like it’s exactly what we need to do: not only might Iran still be willing to work with us, but the article goes on to talk about how a US-Iranian alliance could be useful in the area.

* Thinly-veiled reference to Joe Biden fully intended.

Massachusetts Map

I was pretty annoyed that it seemed impossible to find a map that showed all the towns and cities in Massachusetts. Google Maps or the like don’t cut it for what I was looking for: just the town ‘political boundaries.’ It turns out that Massachusetts has a sizeable GIS repository, appropriately named MassGIS. So I grabbed a couple map sets and used QGIS to make my own map. It doesn’t provide an “Export as PNG” option, so I panned around, saving them as images, and then used Windows Live Photo Gallery to assemble them as a ‘panorama.’ (I was going to use Photoshop, but there was no need!) I let QGIS color the map based on county, though with the data MassGIS provides, I could have just as easily done it based on the population, number of schools, number of police officers, number of lakes, or a *lot *of other variables. At 4431×2893 pixels, it’s “only” 2.26 MB as a PNG. Since all I really did was stitch a couple GIS datasets together and check a few options in QGIS, I’m releasing this map into the public domain. Enjoy!

A giant map of Massachusetts towns

The Bailout

Now that the $700 billion bailout has passed

Did you know that it was initially the “Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008,” and was introducedon March 9, 2007?

The name was later updated, to the “A bill to provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting taxpayers, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, to provide individual income tax relief, and for other purposes.”

That’s the title. Someone failed literature class, I think.

In Theory

A few months ago, I was listening to some sort of talk radio, and they were discussing Cuba’s economy, which was very slowly introducing a few little bits of capitalism, albeit heavily-regulated capitalism. And they managed to get an interview with Fidel Castro’s daughter (I think?), who talked pretty eloquently about the economy. She seemed much more progressive than her father or uncle, albeit still in favor of Cuban Socialism.

The interviewer seemed to try to trick her into admitting that socialism was flawed. And her answer (paraphrased) is the subject of this blog post:

“Of course it’s imperfect. While I believe socialism is perfect in theory, it’s very hard to put that theory into motion accurately. So we’re continually fine-tuning our implementation of it.”

While I’m sure it’s debateable whether socialism is a sound theory or not, the reasoning struck me as interesting. And it so accurately applies to a few other topics.

  • School vouchers. I used to be a gung-ho fan of them. What’s better than bringing the power–if not the magic–of the free market to the school system? But in practice, it seems that, time and time again, school voucher programs have led to the good students getting out of failing schools, leaving the failing schools, and most of the students, even worse off. So vouchers are a great idea, in theory. But at least so far, the implementations of it seem to work about as well as Cuban Socialism.
  • Tasers for cops. They’re meant as a non-lethal alternative, after most other means of force have been exhausted. As a conflict escalates, the police are justified in using more and more force to try to stop it. And tasers are supposed to come right before “baton to the skull” or “strangulation” on that scale of force. In that case, they’re quire effective, saving lives and preventing permanent injury. In practice, they’re consistently misused.
  • Content filters in schools and libraries. It’s far too easy to bump into porn when you’re not looking for it. Ensuring that young children doing research don’t accidentally end up at hard-core porn sites is a good thing. In practice, content filters seem to block myriad legitimate sites and get in the way of legitimate research.

I’m sure the concept applies to ten thousand other things, too, but these are off the top of my head. But I think “a perfect idea–in theory” is a pretty useful concept to have in mind in describing ideas.