How amazing are these high school and middle school students? It's great to see them organizing and protesting. Of course it's easy to support people when you support their cause.
Contrast this to the French, where they're just being stupid.
Score: Mexicans: 1, French: nil
Someone should explain the point of the US Nuclear Arsenal to me. Why are we spending billions of dollars maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal? Who are we deterring with it?
The countries in the world with nuclear weapons (I might miss a few) are: The US, UK, China, Israel, France, Germany, Russia (sort of), North Korea, India and Pakistan. Of all of these, the only one we could be deterring is China. The rest of them are either our allies, or too small to pose the kind of threat that requires a massive nuclear arsenal.
The United States is afraid of proliferation. We should unilaterally disarm. Bush should get up and say, "by 2015 the US will dismantle all of it's nuclear weapons. (and only 2015 because it will take us that long to dismantle all the weapons)" Seriously, what do we have to loose? We aren't going to use them first, and we aren't going to use them in a retaliatory strike. In fact, we should go to NATO and get all NATO countries to disarm, I bet it would be easier to talk them into joining us if we committed to doing it first.
Look, it's a good position to take when trying to convince other countries that they don't need nuclear weapons. When we go to India and Iran and say they should give up their weapons, aren't we in a stronger position if we've already given up ours?
On a related note, I went to a panel discussion on Nuclear Energy last night. Basically, it proved everything I've said before plus some. I was worried about reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel because of the proliferation problem. Previous reprocessing solutions yielded pure plutonium, so called PUREX reprocessing. This is bad because we can't let "unstable" countries have plutonium. The new process, "UREX" only produces Uranium, which is much less or a risk. Still, we'd want to do the reprocessing in safe/stable countries, but it's a lot safer.
There's a lot more to write about Nuclear Energy, but I'm going to leave it there for tonight.
I'd like to start a PAC called 4-Blocks. The purpose of this organization is to force the SF Muni to fix what I see as it's biggest problem. It stops too damn often. Would someone please explain why the busses need to stop on every corner? This is absurd. I believe that no bus should stop more frequently than once per 4 linear blocks. People can walk. Actually from judging from most of the people on the Muni, people should walk. That, and there should be more express busses, and they should stop even less frequently, at the very least, they should skip every other stop, preferably they should skip even more than that.
The only place where there's even a question about this is in the downtown core. There's a valid argument to be made that since there are so many intersections/transfer points in the downtown area that maybe the busses should stop at "transfer points". There's also the density argument. There are so many people downtown that it makes sense to stop more often. Fine, so maybe we make an exception for downtown. Still that means 2 blocks, not every block.
An added upside to this is an increase in the amount of parking. Has anyone noticed how many spaces those bus stops take up?
On a related side note. City council needs to define several streets in the city as "through streets." These are streets that are used to get from one side of the city to the other. Good examples include Van Ness, Geary, Mission, Market, Oak and Fell. These streets need to have almost obsessive enforcement of double parking laws. One car/truck/van double parked on one of these streets causes major havoc on traffic patterns. It should be something like a $2k fine for double parking at all times of day on these streets and this should apply to delivery trucks, UPS Vans, everything.
On a second related side note. Muni should punish the hell out of drivers that drive down the middle of two lanes. This is particularly a problem on Mission St. It also messes with traffic in a god awful way and there's no point to it.
So, Zacarias Maussaoui took the stand today in his sentencing trial. Since he's already plead guilty, the jury is just deciding whether or not to give him the death penalty. Now, I'm universally against the death penalty, mostly because it's impossible to prove anyone 100% guilty, but this is a case where I'm against it for another reason. It's pretty clear that killing him will only make him a martyr, where as letting him live will cause him to fade into obscurity.
It's pretty clear from his testimony today that he much prefers the death penalty to life in prison. I don't think he deserves to be granted his wish. It would be better to put him in a cell and force him to listen to (recordings of) family members tell stories about the people who died on 9/11, over and over again until he dies from natural causes.
So the god-fearing have come to the city of the godless.
The price paragraph from the article is this one:
On one side of the barricade was girl carrying a sign that said, "Instead of porn, show us Godly relationships." On the other, a woman held one that said, "I moved here to get away from people like you."
Yes, I moved to this city to get away from people like them too. These people honestly scare me. I love that the city actually passed an "official condemnation." I wonder how Bill O'Reilly feels about that one? More reason for the terrorists to strike Coit Tower?
So, I'm not a fan of Archbishops in general, but I was somewhat surprised by the insight offered by the Archbishop of Canterbury in this sfgate.com article.
Basically he states that if you teach "creationism" as an alternate theory in school it reduces it to "just another theory." It actually reduces creationism and by proxy the whole of the christian faith to just being "another theory."
I almost think that the reason I'm an athiest is that I was taught from an early age that the biblical account of things is one theory, and the scientific account is another and you can choose one or the other. Now, since the biblical account is so absurdly far fetched, I of course, chose the scientific one.
Brilliant!
Er, well the Mayor at least.
-- Supervisors failed to overturn Mayor Gavin Newsom's veto of legislation to restrict new parking downtown. The vote to override was 7-4 -- one shy of the minimum required. When he vetoed the proposal, Newsom said he agreed with the intent, which was to tackle traffic congestion by limiting new parking, but disagreed with some of the fine points. He proposed an alternative, which Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who carried the original legislation, introduced Tuesday.
For people not following the story. The San Francisco board of supervisors is trying to make parking really expensive downtown (read restrict supply) in an effort to convince people not to own cars. Which is of course, patently stupid, but whatever. It got vetoed. I'm curious to see the alternate legislation that was introduced Tuesday.
Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others." [Ambrose Bierce, "Devil's Dictionary," 1911]
My governmental philosophy is basically this: stay out of my life. I believe the government should basically make laws that protect people from one another. Government should not protect people from themselves. This basically means if I want to endanger my own life, so be it. Quite honestly, if lots of people want to endanger their own lives, that's really not the government's problem.
To this end the government should not regulate abortion, prostitution, homosexuals, polygamists, seat-belts, helmets, drugs or child-rearing.
I'm going to take these bullets as representative of the larger theme. First lets talk about sex. Abortion, prostitution, sexual preference and well, let's throw polygamy and polyamory in there while we're at it. Sex basically happens behind closed doors, we'll ignore the exhibitionists for the moment. I really don't care who or how many people sleep with as long as I don't have to watch and I also don't care if there is money involved. Now some people will bring up fringe groups like people who have sex with children, dead people or animals, but they miss the point. Children need the protection of the law from pedophiles and the like because sex is harmful to them which goes to my earlier point, I want the government to protect me from other people. I want the government to protect children from other people. Dead people and animals can't give consent therefore we should protect them as well.
Now, abortion and polygamy basically fall in the same basket. A woman's choice to have or not have a baby is hers. If she wants to include other people in that discussion she is completely free to do so. Many women choose to involve their friends, their spouse, the father, their church, their deity or their parents in that decision, but ultimately it is their decision. Until the child is actually born, it is basically just a biological function of the mother. Polygamy is also basically personal choice. As long as everyone involved is old enough to make the choice freely, who are we to judge. If people want to marry more than one person, why should I care? It has no bearing on my life whatsoever. Same goes for homosexual marriage while we're at it.
Basically, as it says on the bumper sticker: "Against abortion? Don't have one."
Helmets and seat belt laws are another stupid example of mommy-ing by the government. Look, if people don't want to wear seat belts then fine, as long as their not wearing a seat-belt doesn't affect my safety (and there might be an argument there, but I've never seen statistics to back that up) then they should be free not to wear them. We might "protect the children" by mandating that parents put seat-belts on them, but quite honestly if you and your children aren't wearing a seat-belt and you get into a horrible crash and your hole family dies, I call that natural selection.
Finally, lets talk about drugs. See, the "war on drugs" is a miserable failure. No sane person could argue otherwise. I think that unless the widespread use of a drug threatens the health of the general population, then they should be legal. This basically means that any drug manufacturer would have to put a drug that they wanted to bring to market through clinical trials and then clearly disclose the risks and let the people decide. The only real exception to this is antibiotics and similar drugs. Over prescription of antibiotics leads to diseases that are resistant to the antibiotics. This affects my personal health, so, the government should protect me from that. On the other hand, if you want to shoot heroin into your veins 3 times a day, go for it, just don't go driving afterwards, because then you've put my life at risk, and I don't appreciate that. This would lead to good things. One, is tax revenue. Americans spent hundreds of billions of dollars on illegal drugs last year, just think about what a tax similar to what we charge on cigarettes could do there? Ka-ching!
A few links:
Public Financing for Universities is stupid.
I'm not talking about grade/high school. I'm talking about colleges and universities. A few months ago I read a brilliant piece on this by someone from Miami University. The idea really resonates with me. I believe a market-based approach is the way to go in financing college. Remove all direct aid from the state and particularly the federal government.
Give all the aid directly to the students as grants that they can take to any university they choose. Perhaps federal grants could be used anywhere (I think including overseas), while states might want to restrict grants to universities in their state. This would have several effects. For instance students could know exactly how much aid they would qualify for before they decided on which schools to apply for. It would also allow for more transparency in educational costs. Beyond that it would allow aid to go only to the students that needed as opposed to subsidizing every student at a university. If done right it would reduce tuition costs for the most needy students. Finally, it would force universities to compete on a more level playing field and this should force the universities to be more efficient.
I should clarify that I don't include research grant aid in this. Research grants are a whole different ball of wax and universities already compete for them based on their merit.
The more I think about this, the more I like it. What are your thoughts? You can comment below.
Wow.
I went to go see V for Vendetta last night. Amazing movie. Not subtle. The movie hits you over the head with politics. In many ways it's formulaic and uses conventions that are centuries old in theatre and literature, but still the film has an impact. It resonates so strongly with the general mood of the american left. It's astounding in how it captures that feeling that so many of us have. The feeling that we are descending into 1984. It's also violent without being too violent. The special effects are great, but they're used judiciously, and the movie is not about the special effects. The effects are used as a too to move the story and not the other way around.
I really enjoyed it. I give it a 9 out of 10.
But, wow, that's really, really sad funny.
Choice quote: If the fraudulent phrase, "Frankly I don't think the American people . . . " was banned in Washington, the town would fall mute and long-extinct birds would return.
I agree, I think the prhase "the American people" should be banned in Washington, since they don't represent most of us. Or if they do, well, that's even worse.
On a side note, I'm glad the NYTimes made the op-ed/opinion pages of their paper pay-per-view. It forced me to start reading the equally excellent, and sometimes better, Washington Post.
Overall I really like the local SF paper, the coverage is generally good, the writing legible. I don't have too much to complain about, but occasionally the paper takes on a "cause" and recently it's taken on the cause of Suicide. It ran a seven, yes, seven part series about suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. The basic conclusion of the article: 1800 or so people have killed themselves by jumping off the bridge since 1937. Roughly, that's 20 or so people a year.
Let's put this is perspective.
The only reason it looks like a big number is that it's an accumulation of all the suicides since the bridge opened and it's not compared to any other cause of death or even compared to other types of suicide. There are roughly 200 suicide deaths a year in San Francisco county. There's even more if you include the deaths in the adjacent counties. The Golden Gate bridge should not be the major concern. There are many other ways of saving lives in San Francisco that don't require spending millions of dollars and destroying the aesthetics of a national landmark.
Today the Cronic ran an alarmist article regarding the lack of a suicide barrier on the new Bay Bridge. This is really starting to get annoying.
Ok, so I'm a cold, insensitive bastard. Disagree with me? Leave a comment below.
I have to say I admire Bush for standing on his principles, at least this time. At least he's consistant. I've said it already, but the DP World deal was a good thing.
A lot of pundits in editorial pages are going to give this reason or that reason for why the deal failed today. I think it comes down to the 2004 election. What Bush taught democrats (and everyone else) in that election is that you can't be subtle in an election year. Forget trying to explain that arab country (A) is better than arab country (B) and you're going to loose. Easier just to stand up and say Arab == Terrorist == Bad because the american electorate is too stupid to understand differently.
I don't think the american public is that stupid, but I do understand why the congressmen (and women) wouldn't want to take the chance.
The Washington Post summs up my sentiments quite well.
Senator Boxer replied to my earlier post finally. Her inane reply is below. For some reason I don't think she read my letter.
---
Dear Mr. Horowitz:
Thank you for contacting me regarding foreign control of U.S. ports. I appreciate the opportunity to review your comments on this important issue, and I agree with you.
Dubai Ports World (DP World) is currently set to take over control of operations at some U.S. port facilities on March 2, 2006. DP World is owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a nation that had ties to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In this post-9/11 world, our ports remain major targets for terrorism. I believe that this deal will pose an unacceptable risk to the security of our ports and our nation. I am also disturbed that the Bush Administration conducted its review of DP World and the potential deal in secret, without briefing Congress.
That is why I strongly support the bipartisan effort in Congress to delay this deal until the administration thoroughly reevaluates the security risks and provides Congress with the details of its findings. I am also co-sponsoring legislation that would ban any foreign government from controlling U.S. port operations. In addition, I wrote to the President to ask him to revisit his administration's approval of the deal, given the UAE's past and present connections to terrorists.
Rest assured, I will continue monitoring this situation, and I will keep working to protect the security of our nation's ports.
Again, thank you for writing to me. Please do not hesitate to contact me again about this or any other issue of concern to you.
Finally someone managed to say better than I that Oil is a fungible commodity. I love dilbert.
I figured it out.
He can't say so publicly, but the reason we're giving India the nuclear deal is actually global warming. India has a rapidly growing demand for electricity and one of the world's largest coal reserves.
Wouldn't it make sense if we were worried about them burning all that dirty coal?
Bush obviously can't piss of the American coal industry, and he can't reverse his position on global warming so he's making this deal without really explaining why, but I think he might actually be right.
Wow, that's possibly two things he's done in the past two weeks that I've agreed with.
Weird.
