Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/21/the-war-on-ambiguity/
From a note I jotted to myself, titled “Argument Against Empire”
In a world without borders our power can always go somewhere else:
Offshore tax havens
The Silicon Valley of Bangalore
And it comes from somewhere else:
Our mobility comes from foreign oil
Our military superiority comes from advanced research and technology and our intellectual freedom.
Our riches come from the self-interest of capital, which is driven by pragmatic opportunism before national allegiance.
We have no monopoly on these.
In the end we are left with our constitutional traditions
Our republican system of distributed political power
Democracy is an insurance policy against the excesses of abusive government
We can feed our nation without difficulty
And we are secured by two great oceans and two great friendly neighbors
But in a mobile world we are vulnerable to airplanes and anthrax.
We are vulnerable to pandemics and poor public health and food safety systems.
We die more commonly in car crashes, of obesity and diabetes.
We die of cancers from cigarettes.
We die of consumerism.
What I was thinking here, is that the “War on Terror” is misplaced. Terrorism is just one threat of many against which we must remain vigilant. I don’t think that George Bush is a vigilant man. He was caught unprepared on September 11, 2001, and he has been trying to answer for that ever since. I’d rather vote for somebody who is more on the ball, and has a more holistic understanding of what our nation needs. But we get the leaders we deserve. Each of us needs to keep an eye on the world around ourselves, and do what we can to push things in the right directions.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/20/three-quick-links/
Three quick links regarding the upcoming presidential election:
- This Land — A truly hilarious cartoon explaining the contrasts between George Bush and John Kerry.
- It’s Over, Ralph — An entertaining “Dear John” letter from Barbara Ehrenreich to Ralph Nader … basically, while we all find the man charming, he is starting to get annoying in his ever more marginalized crusade for the White House.
- JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyway.com
— Honorable mention just because the domain name is so silly.
Damn, I spelled Ehrenreich correctly the first time through. I must be getting smart.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/19/i-like-my-coffee/
We watched “Malcolm X” recently, and at one point, Malcolm opined that “the only thing I like integrated … is my coffee.”
Which makes me think of my father, who, like me, is a white man. “I like my coffee like I like my women: strong and black!” His wife, from whose womb I did not personally emerge, matches that description, but as he says this, you’ll see him putting cream in his coffee. So, I’m not sure that he actually says that — it might be Uncle Bill, quoting Shaft, or Marcus Garvey, for all I know. Anyway, I think it comes back to integration — strong and black, but all the more satisfying with the injection of some white creaminess.
I got thinking about this topic this morning because I was reading through The Week and I came upon an item from Leonard Pitts, regarding Bill Cosby:
I am sick of worrying what white people think, said Leonard Pitts, in The Miami Herald. So, apparently, is Bill Cosby. At a Rainbow Coalition conference in Chicago, Cosby responded to those who said he’d been airing the African-American community’s dirty laundry. “Let me tell you something,” Cosby said. “Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s calling each other nigger… They can’t read. They can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.” Many blacks have been saying as much for years–just not in earshot of white people. Our fear has always been that if we admit to problems, especially serious problems, “bigots will use it to bolster their bigotry.” But Cosby, I think, is right: Standing silent is no longer an option, no matter what white people think.
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/15/usda-mad-cows/
Japan is a country lamentably deficient in delicious cows. And while they may console themselves with delicious morsels of raw fish on rice, there is a sizeable demand for beef, and they are willing to pay top yen for imports.
But for such money, the Japanese want to be damn certain they are importing beef that will not melt their brains. Since Mad Cow disease was detected in the USA’s cattle supply, they have required that any American imports be tested. Does this not seem prudent?
And so, in order to re-gain access to a valuable export market, Creekstone Farms, in the Red State of Kansas, built a laboratory next to their slaughterhouse, and trained employees to conduct tests.
You can read the story here, but the upshot is that the USDA will not allow Creekstone to test their beef. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/12/yay-india/
Back in the boom, there were so many ideas. Some were great, some were crap. But for every idea that got seed funding, there were a dozen or possibly a hundred more, that might have been good ideas, that went nowhere. And it wasn’t for lack of money or ambition – there wasn’t enough talent to go around. Salaries and rent and the traffic on 101 skyrocketed, and then it turned out that actually, there just wasn’t enough money to be made off these six-figure salaries in the short-term, and the whole thing skiddered.
I’m a little worried that India may bring down the salaries of technology professionals like me. It may cause short-term unemployment in the United States, but it has so far brought a lot of highly competitive, highly-talented people to the industry. They can work for even lower costs from India, and if their government sees any “IT Dividend” the taxes these people are paying can take a very short trip to the aid of hundreds of millions of some of the poorest people on this planet.
And the next time we get the fever of good ideas, we may find that the talent pool for exploring these great ideas has expanded three-fold, five-fold or more. More great ideas will be brought to us, at more competitive cost, that will be of value to more people, and it will be a global phenomenon. The triumphs of the next technology boom will be enjoyed in places far more exotic than San Jose, California. I say, huzzah!
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https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/22/can-he-handle-presidentwhitehousecov/
I noticed that e-mails from the Kerry campaign are consistently quarantined to my Spam folder. So I forwarded them a sample and gave them some suggestions for being less spammy. They responded promptly:
Dear Friend,
Thank you for attempting to send a message to the John Kerry Campaign. To better handle and manage our email volume, everyone must now use the new web form reached by clicking the link below: http://www.johnkerry.com/contact/contact.php
This does not inspire confidence …
… but I’m already in for $100, so I went to the web site and suggested they spend some of it on better IT.
Hrmmm, no auto-response from BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com. I’ll let ya know if I get anything back from the pachyderms.
And, I’m sorry to report, that Ralph Nader’s website has only a form, and no e-mail link that I can find. You’d think a populist …
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/12/obligatory-abu-ghraib-rant/
I was looking at those pictures yesterday from Abu Ghraib … they are terrible. And while I believe that we have to root out whatever elements of the chain of command are responsible for what happened, I have a hard time accepting the excuses of those little guys … you weren’t schooled in the Geneva Convention? You were forced to smile while doing depraved things to naked men? I like a bit I read somewhere about one guy in the prisons wasn’t willing to do anything the least bit shady unless the party ordering it filed appropriate paperwork.
Ginmar, who is stationed in Iraq, and whose blog is totally worth reading, put it well:
Maybe it’s the idea that these soldiers just weren’t the scary-looking weirdos in the alley we’d like to believe they are. It’s so easy to look at the mob and hang their savagery on their religion, their country, whatever. But when the mob is one of our own, I think it’s important to claim them and confront whatever it was that made them do it.
I’ve heard that Iraqis are sickened by the video of that guy beheading an American. You know, I don’t want people to die, but if the guy is killed for a particular nefarious purpose, and it backfires … I think that guy who lost his head, if it reminds the Iraqis that their partisans are at least as sick and depraved as our confused kids from West Virginia … there is plenty of evil to go around, hopefully a lot of folks can keep it in mind that America is less evil.
We are, aren’t we? I’ve heard as much from Americans and from Arabs.
What is really disgusting … I saw some Republican Congressman saying that the controversy is worse than the act itself, because, after all, these were a bunch of bad guys who may have had blood on their hands. This at the same time that I hear about 80% of Iraqis who are picked up are picked up by accident. Pandering. It is dishonest, it is cheap, it is without honor. The honor lies with Senator John McCain, who said something along the lines of “and I have some personal experience with this, but torturing prisoners never works, they’ll just tell you whatever you want to hear.”
The ruthlessness of our enemies can never excuse our reciprocal depravity, since the reason we are fighting is because we hold ourselves to a higher level of moral expectations than our enemy. Right? I wouldn’t have us win by becoming indistinguishable from that which we sought to replace. Torturing Iraqi’s in Saddam Hussein’s prison … that should have ceased when the statue got pulled down.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/07/limbaugh-torturing-prisoners-is-an-acceptable-good-time-torelieve-stress/
Apparently, if you are a political conservative, being a dumb-ass who undermines your nation’s war effort by torturing other human beings is all in a day’s work, or so Rush Limbaugh would have you believe:
“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?”
To prove that he just doesn’t get it, he goes on to state:
“This is a pure, media-generated story. I’m not saying it didn’t happen or that the pictures aren’t there, but this is being given more life than the Waco investigation got. It’s almost become an Oklahoma City-type thing.”
Uhm, hello? The bigger point is that it is a big media thing! Not only is fucking with prisoners wrong, not only is it a big deal for us, but it is an even bigger deal on Al Jazeera. The whole point is that we have to win “hearts and minds” and you do it by not being a complete bonehead who takes pictures of your colleagues acting like inhumane jackasses, humiliating subjects of the population you are trying to dissuade from rising up and trying to kill you.
A fraternity prank? Torturing and sexually humiliating Arab men is not the same as cow-tipping! If we refuse to see Arabs as the human beings that they are, then why should they see us as something other than sexually depraved monsters with no moral decency who might as well be destroyed?
There’s a lot of fucking retards in this country.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/03/30/who-wants-to-trust-richard-clarke/
For two long days last week, Lorie Van Auken sat in a stiff, armless chair in the 9/11 commission hearing room, right behind the witness table, listening as one government official after another tried to explain how things had gone so wrong. As the hours wore on, Auken, whose husband, Kenneth, was killed in the World Trade Center, was becoming irritated. “We had been sitting here listening to all these people tell us what a great job they had done,” she says. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief, pulled up to the microphone. Turning around to face the family members who had died, Clarke issued a blunt apology. “Those entrusted with protecting you failed you,” he said. “And I failed you.” Clarke asked their forgiveness. Van Auken, like many of the family members in the gallery, began to cry. “I cried hysterically, and I couldn’t stop. Here was somebody, at last, telling the truth.”
Pat Wingert
_Bonds of Steel_
Newsweek
April 5, 2004
Go ahead, Bush administration, rebut Clarke’s accusations by going after his credibility. I watched his hour-long “Meet the Press” interview Sunday, and I was really impressed with the guy. I trust him more in the White House than Bush, Kerry, or Clinton. It is reassuring to know that he has been there as a public servant so long, and it is sad to see him chased out by the Iraq-obsessed ideologues in the White House.
Errr, what I mean to say, is Bravo, Pat Wingert, for writing such a gripping lead paragraph. It rocked!
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/03/29/amen-mr-newdow/
Okay, so as mentioned previously, I was pretty excited at the prospect of Michael Newdow arguing over the Constitutionality of “under God” before the Supreme Court, which happened Wednesday. He’s a Doctor with a law degree, though he is not a practicing lawyer. He did the ballsy thing of representing his case himself, and by all accounts, he represented himself, and the rest of us Atheists, quite well. I have a new hero.
The New York Times published excerpts from Wednesdays hearing which are an invigorating read. I’ll excerpt a few excerpts here:
JUSTICE DAVID H. SOUTER: What do you make of this argument? I will assume that if you read the pledge carefully, the reference to under God means something more than a mere description of how somebody else once thought. We’re pledging allegiance to the flag and to the republic. The republic is then described as being under God, and I think a fair reading of that would — would be I think that’s the way the republic ought to be conceived, as under God. So I think — I think there’s some affirmation there. I will grant you that.
What do you make of the argument that in actual practice the affirmation in the midst of this civic exercise as a religious affirmation is so tepid, so diluted then so far, let’s say, from a compulsory prayer that in fact it should be, in effect, beneath the constitutional radar. It’s sometimes, you know the phrase, the Rostow phrase, the ceremonial deism.
What do you make of that argument, even assuming that, as I do, that there is some affirmation involved when the child says this as a technical matter?
MR. NEWDOW: I think that that whole concept goes completely against the ideals underlying the Establishment Clause. We saw in Minersville v. Gobitis and West Virginia v. Barnette something that most people don’t consider to be religious at all to be of essential religious value to those Jehovah’s Witnesses who objected. And for the Government to come in and say, we’ve decided for you this is inconsequential or unimportant is an arrogant pretension, said James Madison. He said in his memorial —
JUSTICE SOUTER: Well, I think the argument is not that the Government is saying, we are defining this as inconsequential for you. I think the argument is that simply the way we live and think and work in schools and in civic society in which the pledge is made, that the — that whatever is distinctively religious as an affirmation is simply lost. It — it’s not that the — that the Government is saying, you’ve got to pretend that it’s lost. The argument is that it is lost, that the religious, as distinct from a civic content, is close to disappearing here.
MR. NEWDOW: And again, I — I don’t mean to go back, but it seems to me that is a view that you may choose to take and the majority of Americans may choose to take, but it doesn’t — it’s not the view I take, and when I see the flag and I think of pledging allegiance, I — it’s like I’m getting slapped in the face every time, bam, you — you know, this is a nation under God, your religious belief system is wrong.
And here, I want to be able to tell my child that I have a very valid religious belief system. Go to church with your mother, go see Buddhists, do anything you want, I love that — the idea that she’s being exposed to other things, but I want my religious belief system to be given the same weight as everybody else’s. And the Government comes in here and says, no, Newdow, your religious belief system is wrong and the mother’s is right and anyone else who believes in God is right, and this Court —
JUSTICE GINSBURG: If you had her here in this courtroom and she stood up when the Justices entered and she heard the words, God save the United States and this honorable Court, wouldn’t the injury that you’re complaining about be exactly the same, so you would have equal standing on your account of things to challenge that as you do to challenge what the school district does here?
MR. NEWDOW: I don’t think the injury would be even close to the same. She’s not being asked to stand up, place her hand on her heart, and say, I affirm this belief, and I think that can easily distinguish this case from all those other situations. Here she is being asked to stand and say that there exists a God. Government can’t ever impose that —
JUSTICE GINSBURG: If she’s asked to repeat or to sing, as the Chief Justice suggested, God Bless America, then she is speaking those words.
MR. NEWDOW: Again, if it were a situation where we said, let’s only do nothing else in this classroom, all right, we’ll say God bless America and let’s just say those words or something, I think that would violate the Constitution as well. If it’s just, let’s sing one song a day and once a month we get God Bless America, no, that would be certainly fine. We don’t want to be hostile to religion.
But here we’re not — it’s not a question of being hostile to religion. It’s indoctrinating children and Congress said that was the purpose.
Amen, Mr. Newdow. On the one hand, if you argue that the phrase “under God” is “ceremonial deism” there are some hard-core pious folk that would take offense at you uttering the name of the Lord without due reverence. To take the Lord’s name without reverence is blashpemy. No good. You can not say that “under God” doesn’t really mean anything, especially when uttering the phrase is anti-thetical to us Atheists.
When I was a child we would stand every morning, place out hands over our hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In the ears of every American is a chorus of young schoolchildren drilling on a core belief system every morning. Before it became a bad word, we viewed the pledge as “indoctrination” … repeat these words, and you will come to live by them.
I’ve never been a “religious” person, and the more I thought about it, the less this “under God” business made any sense to me. For years, I’d utter the Pledge of Allegiance, every last word. Every word means something to me … except those two words. I have not come to know God, so who am I to bring it into my pledge of national allegiance? Isn’t that sort of dishonest?
In my youth I was also a Boy Scout. Ostensibly the Boy Scouts of America do not allow Atheists, but none of us really cared so much. One of the Scout Laws that I did stumble on was that a Scout is Reverent. What is Reverence? Well, the “Boy Scout Handbook” explained that Reverence is respect for God, and respect for the belief systems of others. Well, what do I know about God? Nothing. I do know that other people make a very big deal out of their professed knowledge of God. I concluded that, for these purposes, I was an Atheist. I could respect God by not making false pronouncements about it, and I could respect others by not giving them a hard time about their beliefs. Reverence achieved.
Eventually I’d drop that phrase, those two words, from my daily recitations. It wasn’t that I was rejecting God so much as I could not profess — I could not make a false claim — to its nature and its relationship with my nation. To do so would be impious, irreverent, and dishonest with regards to my own belief system.
To see the mentality … the theocratic bigotry, if you will, from out nations leaders, we can turn to Justice Breyer:
JUSTICE BREYER: So it’s not perfect, it’s not perfect, but it serves a purpose of unification at the price of offending a small number of people like you. So tell me from ground one why — why the country cannot do that?
MR. NEWDOW: Well, first of all, for 62 years this pledge did serve the purpose of unification and it did do it perfectly. It didn’t include some religious dogma that separated out some —
… Again, the Pledge of Allegiance did absolutely fine and with — got us through two world wars, got us through the Depression, got us through everything without God, and Congress stuck God in there for that particular reason, and the idea that it’s not divisive I think is somewhat, you know, shown to be questionable at least by what happened in the result of the Ninth Circuit’s opinion. The country went berserk because people were so upset that God was going to be taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Now, I’m really proud of Michael Newdow here for not losing his cool in the face of … well, whatever that was. He pulled us right to the point — we got along perfectly well without those words, without alienating “a small number of people” like me. So, if someone points out, however politely, that this imposition is … well .. kind of rude, right? Does Religion teach us to be rude? To belittle the beliefs of others? If so, then that might explain why a few of us avoid religion.
Now, here is perhaps the one highlight you may have heard from the whole exchange:
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Do we know — do we know what the vote was in Congress apropos of divisiveness to adopt the under God phrase?
MR. NEWDOW: In 1954?
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Yes.
MR. NEWDOW: It was apparently unanimous. There was no objection. There’s no count of the vote.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Well, that doesn’t sound divisive.
(Laughter.)
MR. NEWDOW: That’s only because no atheist can get elected to public office.
(Applause.)
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: The courtroom will be cleared if there’s any more clapping. Proceed, Mr. Newdow.
On NPR, Nina Totenberg reported that “those words provoked an amazing reaction from the courtroom — applause from spectators.” I later read in the Chicago Tribune:
When Newdow said the vote was unanimous, the chief justice responded, “That doesn’t sound divisive.” Newdow shot back with a quick rejoinder: “That’s only because no atheist can get elected to public office.” The remark prompted laughter and applause from his supporters in the courtroom.
Now, I cast a wide net on Google News and haven’t been able to corroborate the claim that it was Atheists cheering this assertion. I read that applause the other way, that the religious folk in the audience were cheering against Newdow, though a lot of articles imply that his supporters were cheering a particularly witty, if depressing comeback. I found the Tribune piece re-hashed in the Salt Lake Tribune with a different by-line. I found the following elaboration at law.com:
That triggered applause from the audience, which is almost never heard in the Supreme Court chamber. It was unclear whether the applause was for Newdow’s rejoinder or for the fact that atheists don’t get elected, but in any event Rehnquist angrily admonished the audience that the courtroom would be cleared if any more clapping occurred.
As the courtroom settled down, Newdow resumed his attack, telling the Court that, in fact, eight states still have laws against atheists holding office — another point that an advocate other than Newdow might not have made.
At any rate, the treatment of the outburst triggered a brief missive from my Hiptop to the Chicago Tribune, who have not responded:
Is this accurate? I recall hearing about this on NPR yesterday and interpreting that the Theists in the audience were applauding the assertion that an atheist could not get elected to public office. I don’t see why an Atheist would cheer such a depressing assertion.
If Mr. Neikirk got this detail wrong he might wish to apologise to your Atheist readers, because in his telling of the story it was an audience of rowdy, cynical, smarmy Atheists disrupting the court proceedings. If he was right then I must make amends for assuming that the court was filled with disruptive, Theist bigots cheering at such a dark notion in an effort to crush one brave, lonely dissenting citizen as he stood before our government, asking them to change two little words that trample on his religious freedom.
Heck, let’s just figure it was a few rowdy Atheists and their detractors.
Mr Newdow? A final word?
I’m hoping the Court will uphold this principle so that we can finally go back and have every American want to stand up, face the flag, place their hand over their heart and pledge to one nation, indivisible, not divided by religion, with liberty and justice for all.
Amen, Mr. Newdow.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/03/26/bush-to-terrorists-next-time-let-me-know-before-hand-eh/
From the New York Times:
“Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people,” Mr. Bush said to a burst of applause.
“Of course, since I had no idea what was going on, I didn’t do anything, and blithely allowed 3,000 Americans to die,” I annotate mentally.
In that same article, you read the Condaleeza Rice will be happy to testify before the 9/11 committee, in private, and not under oath. This is fantastic. In order to rebut that guy who has served every whitehouse since Reagan, who has sworn, under oath, that he will not accept a job with John Kerry … they send in Condy Rice to … not swear that she isn’t lying in her testimony …
I hope this means the administration is unravelling and will go down in a massive lump in November. Of course, that doesn’t bode well considering that they have important things to do, like fix the mess in Iraq, fix the mess in Afghanistan, fix the mess of our economy and corporate governance, and keep North Korea from going completely apeshit, while improving our counter-terrorism security …
Okay, I’m a whining liberal.
Clarke is, however, a Republican. Later in that article we read the words of a Republican consultant, on Bush’s accuser:
“I saw the parade of the victim’s families on the morning shows who all applauded him. He was the first person who took any responsibility. What that does is underscore his perception as a truth teller. I think the American people are paying attention to this episode.”
This is a stark contrast to Bush’s words that opened this piece, where he said of course he’d have done something had he known to do anything, whereas Clarke said that we didn’t do enough, that he didn’t do enough, that 9/11 was his fault.
We need more responsible people running our government.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/03/25/innovation-lacking-when-regulators-regulate/
Okay, if you have any interest in Microsoft and/or European anti-trust regulation, check out this New York Times article. It gets good on page two.
The background is that Europe has told Microsoft that they will need to offer a version of Windows that does not include Media Player, so that computer vendors can sell a version of Windows with competing media playing software.
A colleague at Microsoft ranted yesterday that this was a massive imposition, because after removing Media Player, they would have to test Windows, which would take months of time and thousands of employees. This complaint seemed strange to me, as Microsoft is frequently making revisions to its operating system, and distributing these changes via Windows Update, so, it surely has some mechanism for testing Windows? And it is not like this need to change Windows is entirely unanticipated, as they’ve been working towards it for five years.
Anyway, to the first quote:
“Microsoft … said the commission’s ruling would stifle innovation and deprive consumers of choices.”
What charms me about Microsoft is that any threat of government regulation will always deprive them of the ability to innovate. (They don’t really seem to do much “innovation” themselves anyway, they mostly just copy or co-opt the innovations of others.) In this case, they are being compelled to innovate, by changing their software so as to offer consumers more choices.
I wonder if whomever issued their objection stopped to consider whether they needed a more innovative objection? If only there were other consumer software monopolies haunted by the specter of government regulation after which Microsoft could model innovative rebuttals to the specter of government regulation!
Oh, but it gets better. Next quote:
“Once regulators get their bit in their teeth and realize they can regulate, they may not stop with the bad actors,” said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley research firm.
Yes … once regulators figure out that they can regulate, they might start regulating! The implications of this could be spectacularly regulatory!
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/26/gay-marriage-republican-wedge-issue/
I read something on the BBC today that gave me hope. You know how John Kerry and John Edwards are scared to say anything nice about gay marriage because the Republicans would use it as a wedge issue to deny Democrats the bigotry vote? Well, the thing I read made the point that if Bush is going to come out, so to speak, on the Straight Marriage Amendment, then the rumors that he could replace Evil Dick Cheney with Gay-Friendly Hero of 9/11 Rudy Guliani were entirely pointless. And it occurred to me that, in this scenario, Gay Marriage could cost the Republicans the election.
It is hard to hold a big tent up when your specialty is driving wedges.
Yeah, well, I should get back to work. A little bit of reading for those interested:
If anyone is doing some sort of pink pride parade, I’m down with that.
If people want to love each other, I’m down with that.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/18/count-me-in/
He will not be our next President, but he has already helped change our country. Put best by Robert Menendez, House Democratic Caucus chair, via Thomas Ferraro, of Reuters:
“He gave a stiff spine to a lot of Democrats.”
Menendez said he and other members of Congress who had backed Dean had a conference telephone call with him shortly before his speech in Burlington. Dean first disclosed his plans to drop out about an hour earlier in an online message to backers.
Menendez said Dean told him many of his supporters backed consumer advocate Ralph Nader in the 2000 White House race.
Democrats with stiff spines, who oppose George Bush instead of appeasing George Bush. Bringing disaffected liberals who voted Green in the last election. I’d like to think that even though he’s not the candidate, he has already helped his party to win this year’s election.
I’m still disappointed that he didn’t get anywhere.
/danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/02/08/pictures-artastic-adventures-howard-dean-and-fireworks/
Yesterday I dropped Yayoi off at Harold Washington so she could join a ski trip to Wisconsin. Not a big fan of skiing myself, I returned home, and it being a pretty nice day, I struck off in search of adventure, or at least a quiet coffee shop to have a sit and read through my magazines.
I made my way to a coffee shop I like, Filter, in the Flat Iron building at Milwaukee and Damen. The place was crowded, and a poster in the window accounted for it – there was one heckuva artist’s exhibition going on upstairs. I wandered for hours the serpentine hallways of the Flat Iron building, visiting studio after studio, and all along the hallways were artists who didn’t have their studios there, but had brought their art to show and tell and sell as well.
It was a great time.
On my way back, I read through a New Yorker article that talks about Howard Dean, and his biography, which he has avoided sharing with us so much. He’s the eldest of four brothers, from a wealthy family, so of course he went to Yale, just like George, where he was also an underachiever, getting a B- average, just a little higher than George. Except, well, Howard’s kind of different. He requested black roommates, because the place was integrating. Those roommates recall that, unlike many white liberal contemporaries, Howard was approachable and open-minded, and not at all uncomfortable with open racial dialogue.
After Yale he went into the stock market business, but he wasn’t really enjoying it. He had this weird notion that maybe he wasn’t put on this Earth to make money. Well, what then? He hadn’t been a big fan of 1960s radical politics, and figured that the way to change things for the better was to help one person at a time. He’d done some volunteering at a hospital. He went to his Dad and said “I want to become a Doctor.” His Dad thought he was crazy, but didn’t say so, and gave Howard the support he needed.
And, well, he met a girl, moved to Vermont, eventually got engaged in politics, almost as a hobby, ended up Lieutenant Governor, which is pretty much a ceremonial position, then the Governor died, and he found himself with a full-time gig and a great big budget deficit. He turned that around by pretty much just being smart and sharp and persistent and listening to the right people.
Hey. I like the man. Whenever I see him talking, I feel like I’m really hearing him, and not John Kerry’s focus-grouped, campaign-managed message. Howard Dean is complicated enough as he is without having other people tell him who he should be. What I dug was his bizarre explanation as to why he isn’t in to dishing his biography out:
“That I don’t talk about my background, I have a feeling, is what makes me as passionate as I am. If I laid out the biography for everyone to kind of ooh and ah, it would be gone. I know this is sort of Zen-like. I don’t really have it down. The fact is, the experiences that are the most intense in my life are the ones that are not readily available to me, so they come out in a different way. I think that has a lot to do with my desire to have social justice, the passion I have about fairness and truthtelling. The two are connected. The fact that I’m the least autobiographical is very much connected with the fact that I’m the most passionate. Experiences that I don’t have access to consciously are what drive me — personal experiences that I can’t tell you about because I haven’t processed them.”
“I know this is kind of Zen-like. I don’t really have it down.”
Folks, the man is in it because trying to make the world a better place is what gets him off. Yeah, he’s prone to get carried away and let loose a war scream, and that’s because he really wants to fix your country bad.
Or, I’m just believing the hype. I’m ascribing what I will to Howard Dean, because, slacker college student kind of drifting through life as I am, I identity most readily with Howard Dean. My friend Jesse, a Marine Corps Veteran, digs Wesley Clark. Southerners dig Edwards, and his syrupy drawl. There are at least a few black folk who dig Sharpton for being an eloquent black man. And, well, there are plenty of squares in our nation that identify with Kerry.
At any rate, I hope Dean pulls through Wisconsin, and at least keeps the primary interesting. I’ve read some analyses that win or loose, he has made a great contribution to invigorating the Democratic party. It is important to get people who might vote excited about the idea of voting. That is what Al Gore failed to do. John Kerry’s riding around on his motorcycle, and dropping his Senatorese, and inviting George to “Bring it On”, where “it” is a debate as to which party is better at national security. So if he is the nominee, he ought to get not only the “Anyone But Bush” crowd, but also the “Damn, I’d like to feel maybe just a little inspired by our leaders” crowd as well.
Anyway, I went an picked up Yayoi at around six. Took forever to get my car out of its slippery, snowed-in spot. But after I picked her up and turned the corner we saw what looked like a big fireworks show inside of the Sun Times building. Huh? Gotta be a reflection in the windows. So, I swung right on to Wacker, and there were fireworks lighting up the scene, and well, Yayoi loves fireworks, and she squealed that this was indeed a very very good day, and I pulled to the curb so we could watch the fireworks.
A cop shooed me away. I left Yayoi on the street to enjoy the show as I slowly navigated the wagon up the road a bit, pulled a u-turn, picked Yayoi back up, and we cruised up the pretty winter lights of Michigan Avenue.
Yes, folks, Chicago is truly the greatest city on Earth.
/danny
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