Sarah Palin has got to be a sick joke, right?
I'm watching her acceptance speech. I guess ending the divisive politics in Washington isn't really on her agenda. "A whole new kind of culture war," CNN says. Great. Just what we need. "Hey, forget about Bush. Look at this crazy lady bitching everyone out. Cool." It's so "Commander in Chief."
She used the Democratic majority leader's dislike of McCain as evidence he's the right choice for president. So as long as "they" hate him he must be good? I guess we got the wrong man with Obama cause he said he thought Mrs. Palin was a fine person.
So Obama said he's going to lower taxes on 95% of working families, and she talked for 5 minutes about all the people he was going to raise taxes on. Same old BS, we'll lower taxes, they'll raise them, government = bad (except if we run it, which we are, but nevermind that). We'll kill every government program just to save you $50/yr. Vote for us.
The Republican energy policy sounds identical to the Democrats, they only change the order of all the things they are going to do so that clean coal and nuclear comes before solar and wind. Whatever. Who do I think's going to get it done? Not her. She seems like the type not to agree to anything she didn't personally author, like she's never had to compromise to get things done.
The thought of her becoming president is seriously frightening. Possibly enough to motivate me to donate more money to Obama. The thought of her being in charge of the military is so beyond ridiculous. To her, foreign countries are just the place where they keep our oil.
Oh, and I found out she used to go to and Assemblies of God church. Dear God help us. Ever seen "Hellhouse?"
Please dear God don't let it happen.
Gore’s Bold, Unrealistic Plan to Save the Planet
Gore's Bold, Unrealistic Plan to Save the Planet - TIME
But doing it in 10 years? If the earlier, personal solutions to global warming -- drive a hybrid, put in better insulation -- were far too little, Gore's goal seems far too much. Less than 28% of our power currently comes from carbon-free sources, and the vast majority of that is hydroelectric and nuclear. High-tech renewables account for less than 3%. Wind and solar are growing far faster than fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas, but considering that we don't even know if economical carbon capture and storage will ever be possible, it's hard to see how Gore's target is remotely attainable. This isn't negative thinking, or fiction put out by the oil industry. This is reality.
I'm confused. Gore wasn't talking about economical carbon capture, he was talking about using existing renewable energy technologies. And the science doesn't care if it's achievable. You don't get to adjust the facts to fit what we think we can do.
He's right. A number of scientists, though not all, warn that the world has a decade at most to reverse the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, or risk catastrophic climate change. But here's the fact that keeps me up at night: Gore and his allies could be right. We may simply be technologically and politically incapable of doing anything about it. Maybe we've already run out of time, and we just don't know it.
First, in no area of scientific theory will all scientist agree about anything. Second, the fact that they disagree does not avoid the fact that one side is right and one side is wrong. There is an objective reality out there that's happening now regardless of our opinion of it. We use evidence, observable data, to decipher who's right and who's wrong.
I watched Larry King where they had a full panel of commenters saying how ridiculous it would be to produce 100% of our electricity from renewable resources in 10 years. None of them were scientists. Geraldo Rivera was one of the commenters if that tells you anything.
Here's a few things we need to realize.
Your opinion does not matter. Climate change is happening or it's not happening independent of your opinion. This is not religion, you do not get to pick what you want to believe based on what you're comfortable with. The wind does not care what you think of it and not believing in it just means your picnic is over sooner than you thought. Or, if it's a tornado, your house is destroyed and the wind is neither happy nor sad about it. It is completely self-less, without purpose or meaning of any kind, and your opinion of it has no effect on wether it happens or not.
The economy is not part of the climate change equation. There is no constant in the equations governing climate change theory that represents the economy or money. Climate change does not give a crap what Wall Street thinks is economically possible/comfortable.
It would be way more convenient if climate change were not happening, not our fault, or if we could do nothing about it.
People are offended when you tell them their lifestyle is killing the planet. The planet doesn't care if you're offended.
Nobody talks about the science, the facts, the observables when people talk about climate change on TV. Everyone talks about what they believe or hope or think is possible, but never what we know. What you believe is irrelevant.
Fact: Global CO2 levels are rising.
Fact: Humans today produce billions of tons of CO2 annually.
Fact: The CO2 we produce does not go away to never never land.
Fact: Historically, CO2 levels and temperatures are linked.
Fact: Global temperatures are increasing.
Fact: Burning fossil fuels for energy is not sustainable indefinitely.
That's what we know. These are each undisputed facts.
I think it turns out that we are the posterity we have left this problem for. Sticking your head in the sand and humming won't work on this one.
Sign the Move On petition to show your support for Gore's call to action.
Ron Paul Makes Fox News Look Like the Fools They Are
I loooove this little clip.
To paraphrase Ron Paul's response, "Are you an idiot? Why are you asking a presidential candidate such a fucking moronic question. Sounds like a better question for your PR team. Who the fuck cares?" Course Ron Paul's answer was much better than mine.
And I love his response to the question about taking the white supremacist's money. "Yes, I took his money and did something better with it than he ever would have. If he gives me more money I'll take that too and do even more good stuff with it. Why would I give the money back to him so he can use it for bad purposes? He gave me money because he believes in my issues, not his." Yea! Thank god someone has said that now. I hope all the candidates start parroting that response so we can we move on from stupid media bait.
Imagine seeing a news anchor grilling a Hillary or Barack about why they gave money back to a white-supremacist instead of using it to do something good. Demonstrates the power our media has over us.
And I LOVE at the end how the slime-ball FOX news anchor tries to get him to stop talking with a bunch of dismissive "All right"'s at the end. Doh! He's onto you bitch. "He's making us look like fools. Get him off the air, quick! He's not playing any of our games and he didn't fall for any of our bait." And Ron Paul gets the last word in too. You go, Ron.
I would absolutely love to see Ron Paul and Barack Obama be our two candidates. How surreal. The press would have no idea how to get them to fight each other. Neither candidate would be accepting money from special interest. There'd be a whole line of lobbyists with millions of dollars and no one to give it to and a press that has to deal with none of the candidates they told us to pick. And I think Ron and Barack would push each other in good directions.
It gets me thinking about a Barack/Paul ticket. I think it's not even possible with our two-party system, but it wouldn't surprise me too much to see Barack being the first to pick someone from the opposing party to be his vice-president. Right now I'd have a harder time seeing Ron Paul do the same.
What I get to be the main point of Ron Paul's campaign reminds me of Regan though. "We can solve all of our problems by just getting the government out of it." Capitalize on mis-trust of government. I don't agree with him on that. I think it's just as mis-guided to inherently mis-trust the government as it is to inherently trust it. I don't think people become any more or less evil because they take a government job. Government is people, us. Some try to spread fear that this isn't the case. To me this is just more of the same fear-based politics. There seems to be an equal amount of fucked-up-ness in the government as anything else, of good and evil, fear and hope; so to me that indicates that it's probably fairly representative of the population, as it must be if we hope to get anywhere.
Ron Paul's answer to everything seems to be to leave it up to the states to decide. Hmm, so if Alabama wants to decide that black people and white people can't marry each other, then we should just let them? Everyone in Alabama that doesn't agree should just move to another state? I disagree. There are some things federal government, yes the "Government" or the infamous and eternally evil "They" who is responsible for everything bad that happens, should impose on states whether they like it or not, in my view. In some ways Ron Paul's position is self-conflicting. By "get the government out of it", he actually means get the federal government out of it. The state government can still fuck with your life as much as they want. For instance, he somewhat round-about-ly came out in support of gay marriage, but what he actually is suggesting, leaving it to the states, would result in discrimination in most of the country. He thinks the states should not be involved in the issue because it's a religious issue, and I agree, but he proposes leaving it to each state to decide if gays deserve equality, which would basically mean they'd wouldn't get equality in the majority of the country.
I prefer Barack's message. It's more about coming together and figuring out what we can all agree on. Ignoring people who disagree with you is not the way to find a solution everyone can live with. Leaving everything up to the states, while it has some advantages, does not make the issues go away.
If Abraham Lincoln had taken Ron Paul's stance we might still have black slaves working on plantations in the south, perhaps in our India-Pakistan style mortal-enemy/neighbor, the Confederate States of America. The world would be a very different place. While I hear what Ron Paul is saying, the devil is in the details and I think I lean towards Abe Lincoln's position on the issue of state's rights.
For me it all comes back to education. If we want our government to be less fucked up, then we need to make ourselves less fucked up. And we do that by educating ourselves. Stupid people make stupid choices. Let's make less stupid people.
And Ron Paul's stand on education seems to be the same as everything else, leave it up to the states to fend for themselves. And if parents wants to teach their kids that the Giant Spaghetti Monster poofed us all into existence with some magical spell and the laws of physic are just made-up nonsense and science is just a big conspiracy of one-world-government Nazi-alien-lizard-people, we should just let them. And give them a tax credit. Ah, here we go with the perennial republican carrot, a tax credit. Mmmmm, sounds tasty doesn't it? You like money don't you? Dude, a tax credit is not going to fix this problem. It is not going to miraculously return our education system into the envy of the world. Neither is leaving it up to the states or "removing the federal subsidies that inflate costs"? So wait, he's saying we'll get a better education system by just paying less? Amazing. Yea, it's all those damn teachers demanding such outrageous salaries and overpriced textbooks full of "Government" propaganda and unproven theories. We should leave it up to each city to decide so that the quality of your education is tied to the quality of the neighborhood your parents can afford to buy a house in. We should focus on saving our factory jobs where these stupid people can work and dream about their tax credit.
iPhone? Revolutionary is not an overstatement
So I don't know why some people were suprised, but I got an iPhone last Friday. No, I did not wait in line.
I went down to the Apple store at around 3pm on Friday and there was a line around the block. I went back at 9pm and there was no line, but there was a strange mist of post-shopping-orgy energy in the air. People looked like they needed a cigarette. The store was oddly vacant except for this localized swarm of people around the iPhone display tables. I tried jumping up and down a bit to see if I could actually see an iPhone inside the swarm of droolers but I couldn't so I just went to the counter and bought my own.
You activate the iPhone with iTunes. It was really easy. You just use your apple id and associated credit card. My activation took forever though, it didn't get activated until like 2pm on Saturday. Friday night it just said "Please activate" and all I could do was lock and unlock the keyboard, which I did many times. The animation is really detailed and nice. It was a night of torture. I woke up at 6am wondering if it had been activated yet. (It hadn't).
So having used it for a whole 2 days now, I'm still amazed. I had high expections coming from Apple and it has exceeded all of them by far. It really is revolutionary from a user interface perspective. In one weekend it has made every other PDA out there obsolete. I see people with their Treos poking away with their little stylus and they look at me with this sad look in their eye. Once you use an iPhone, you're going to have a whole lot less patience for the other interfaces out there. Even a mouse seems a little outdated to me now.
That's why I don't think "revolutionary" is an overstatement. Apple has started a whole new language we can use to talk to computers. Yea, we can get notebook computers with a touch screen, but the interface was still designed for a mouse. A touch-based interface requires a complete reworking of the basic interface concepts. Apple has done it, and in ways that are so natural and intuitive and undeniably better than anything that preceded it, that it really is going to affect everything that comes after it. It's like central air conditioning or something.
The camera takes great photos and does well in low light.
The screen clarity is amazing. It looks almost like printed paper. It's twice as clear and legible as my laptop screen. It's easier to read my mail on my phone than my computer now.
The web browser is great. No Flash support and no SVG support, but javascript seems to work well. I tried using a javascript pop-up date selection from travelocity and it worked, but was kinda hard to hit the right date with my finger. The browser has excellent touch-based controls for standard HTML form controls though. Sometimes sites with a lot of javascript can be a little slow. Connection speeds are fast when connected with WiFi but AT&T's data speeds are a little slow. Still usable, but not really at mid-conversation-googling speeds.
You can run nextbus in the browser but a widget would be really nice. Links to quicktime video files from the web browser stream and play really well.
The microphone on the headphones it came with works great. I think the sound quality of calls I've had on the headset are the best I've gotten out of any phone ever. It's weird hearing people's voice in stereo. No straining to hear anything, that's for sure. It's like they're inside your head, it's kinda weird. It sounds like your own voice sounds when you talk, except it's someone else's voice. I could see it driving some to madness. Probably doesn't mix well with LSD.
The battery seems pretty decent. Both of the last two days it's seen pretty heavy use and the battery has lasted all day. When I got home on Saturday night it was almost dead.
My only complaints so far: You can rotate the phone and get a horizontal format keyboard in the web browser, but not in the chat or mail applications. Also since a lot of video sights use Flash to show their video, Flash support in the safari app would be nice. I'm sure it'll probably come with an update.
And of course I can't wait for the video iChat version of the iPhone, but that'll be on different hardware.
After three weeks of brutal counseling, I’m proud to say I am now, at long last, a sad gay Republican. Praise Jesus!
Gawd I love Mark Morford.
The Rev. Ted Haggard has been "cured" of his meth-lovin' homosexuality, all from three weeks of intensive therapy by way of a gaggle of ministers who, presumably, beat him with garden hoses and removed a large chunk of his soul with God's own chainsaw all while tattooing his eyeballs with giant pie charts delineating the plummeting profits of the New Life Church, ordering him to declare his love of the vagina immediately lest each of these ministers lose his ability to make his upcoming Lexus payment. And lo, Ted has done it.
His ability to pinpoint the ludicrous, the unspoken but commonly assumed motivations behind these stories, to express the thing we have all been trying to find words for and reveal our absolute repulsion with, using the snide and sarcastic wit that such ridiculous lies are deserving of, .. I'm in awe. Thank the Lord Zeus and all of his invisible friends for Mark Morford.
Marijuana, the wonder drug
If marijuana were a new discovery rather than a well-known substance carrying cultural and political baggage, it would be hailed as a wonder drug.
...
Hopefully the UCSF study will add to the pressure on the U.S. government to rethink its irrational ban on the medicinal use of marijuana — and its destructive attacks on patients and caregivers in states that have chosen to allow such use.
Yes on Prop 89, A Covert Takeover of the Government by the People
There are not many things that absolutely everyone can agree on and the appropriate responsibilities of a democratic government is no exception. But I believe one of those responsibilities that we all can agree on is making the machinery of democracy work, in other words supporting the fundamental processes and logistics that allow a democracy to function.
Yet today there is a crucial element of our democratic process not supported by our democratic government; election campaigns. Election campaigns are funded by the wealthy; large corporations, wealthy individuals, or special-interest organizations.
We see our government faithfully advocate for the wishes of these entities, frequently in preference to own wishes. And actually, we're smart enough not to wonder why. Our elected representatives are chosen and put in place by those funders, and we are not those funders. Logic dictates that they will more faithfully represent their funders, those whom without whose support they could not even ask for their voter's support.
Prop 89 fixes this, while still deriving its funding from the corporations that support it now.
I think Prop 98 is worth going to the polls for, and even worth trying to get other people to go to the polls for, so I thought it was worth passing along some information.
h2. About Prop89
Prop 89 is a California Ballot Proposition on the November 2006 ballot. It establishes a format for public-funding of election campaigns. It's paid for by an increase in the corporate tax from 8.9% to 9.1%. It costs 0.02% of the state's budget.
Candidates who chose to qualify agree to limit their spending and reject contributions from private sources. Candidates will qualify as "Clean Money Candidates," or "participating" candidates, and receive a public grant for the primary and general elections, if they are successful in raising a required number of $5 contributions and signatures of support from residents within the district they hope to represent.
Candidates who qualify for Clean Money funding will get the average dollar amount spent by those seeking that office in recent elections. One great advantage to the system is that participating candidates will no longer have fundraising expenses, no selling tickets to $1000/plate dinners. So, Clean Money candidates can focus on discovering and fullfilling their voters wishes intead of their campaign-funders.
It empowers candidates with no personal wealth or access to big financial contributors - but who have a proven base of public support - the means to compete for office with the "usual suspects."
So I see Prop 89 as a sort of a covert takeover of the government by the people at a ground-root level, because that's where it's broken. Once "we the people" are the ones paying for people to get in office and represent us, they will start doing that. And if we're not paying for it, we can't expect to be well represented out of corporate good-will for its consumers.
So if you don't vote for anything else on the ballot go out and vote yes on Prop 89. It's a no-brainer that could fundamentally improve our democracy, imo.
California Clean Money Campaign
Update:
PBS is airing this special on Clean Elections.
Update: Prop 89 was sorely defeated, like 75% against. I'm confused. Any insight would be appreciated.
Clean Elections is on California’s November Ballot
California is on it's way to becoming the third state to enact Clean Money/Clean Elections campaign finance reform. Prop 89 qualified for the November ballot. I'm excited. It seems everyone is pretty much in agreement that our current method of financing public campaigns gives corporations and those with money a much bigger voice than your average citizen. Prop 89 creates and alternative for candidates, allowing them to focus on the issues instead of worrying about how many $1000/plate dinners they can hold.
It's got my vote, and my money actually. Religious fundamentalists regularly give, or tithe, 10% of their income to the church. I think that's a good idea and secularists should start tithing to the issues they think are important. I decided this one was important enough to fork over some cash.
So if you're sick of politicians begging for money, here's the chance to put that money to a better purpose. Go on over to California Clean Money Action Fund and show your support.
Jews No Longer God’s Chosen People
I just wanted to let you all know that God came to me in a vision last night and told me that Jews are no longer His chosen people.
It has been over 2000 years since He last spoke to us, so He said the time had come for some revisions. The "Eternal Deed on the Holy Land" now includes everyone, not just the Jews (except of course first-generation Ammonite's or Moabite's). He still loves the Jews just as much as everyone, but He said He was really just joking around about the "chosen people" bit. People shouldn't take him so literally, He likes to joke around (dinasour fossils anyone?).
He asked me to let everyone know. He said that once people learn of this, the world will be a much more peaceful place, so let's spread the word as quickly as we can.
And, as you all know, He can't really enforce these things Himself so He again relies on us all to enforce His commands and deal a quick death to anyone who disobeys. Hell is waiting.