Author: Aaron Weber

Political Rant, Avoid if Sensitive

Hey you stupid fuck, why don’t you wake up and notice that your leader supports none of his supposed principles? Are you too in love with your SUV to care? Would it be too much to ask that you check the facts? Well, you’re going to get your ass kicked anyway.

Conventional wisdom has it that Massachussets can’t possibly vote any way other than Democratic, except for a Governor’s election, and I don’t doubt it. So what can I do, aside from vote, to convince people that Bush is a loony nutbag kleptocrat?

Also, where the hell are those stamps I had just a couple days ago?

Sleepless Everywhere

Provigil is in the news again. I looked at buying some Cephalon stock a few months back. But Provigil goes off patent in three years, and it’s their only really exciting drug. Their sales are good, for now, but they’re mostly from off-label uses, which are legal but which they can’t promote.

Besides, long-term side effects could appear at any moment. Or somebody could have a psychotic break and kill people after abusing it, and destroy the drug’s reputation. Even if it’s not the drug’s fault, the reputational risk is huge for the company– one underhanded campaign by a rival firm or pressure group, and the stock price is in the toilet.

But it really is an exciting, if troubling, drug: the first really mass-appeal cosmetic psychopharmaceutical. Sure, Prozac and so forth improve our personalities, but they have enough side effects that you only end up with them when you have at least moderately serious behavior problems. This has an obviously unneeded application with scary revolutionary potential. Who wouldn’t find it appealing? Just think of the money you’d save on crank! Think of the economic benefits of three full-time jobs! Suddenly, minimum wage is a living wage! Suddenly, you can take up painting, spend time with the kids! The trains will have to run all night, of course. That’ll be the day.

Motocicleta Revolucionaria

Finally, a pic of me on the damn scooter. I feel ambivalent about the Che shirt. It’s a great image, and I like that it’s not the standard version of that picture. On the other hand, Che is neither a role model for me nor a new, fresh, or shocking person to put on a shirt. Even the shirts featuring the same treatment of Doctor Zaius, Kramer, and so forth, have gotten a little old.

Krugman had a great article in the NYT last week about the tax-decrease ploy, and he’s pretty scared about the long-term stability of the US government. You look at where Bush is leading us, and it’s to the kind of place where a revolution begins to make sense: where the poor really have nothing to lose. I feel like I’m going to be fine– good skills, no debt, no responsibilities, parents to fall back on. But I don’t want to live in a country that screws the poor the way the right is trying to.

You want to talk entitlement reform? First off, the retirement age is rising to 70, and we’re going to means-test Social Security and medical benefits (Medicare? Medicaid? I can’t remember which is which). That’s obvious to me– I don’t care how unpalatable it is, we’re going to see it happen in the next fifteen years, even if we also raise taxes to avoid defaulting on debts.

If I meet another Libertarian in the street I swear I’m going to kick them in the nuts and then ask them if they want the government to protect them from violent crime.

People, in the People Category

I go on and on about Brad DeLong but he’s great. He ruminates on things that he doesn’t know, reviews his past mispredictions, constantly reviews models. And I agree with a lot of what he has to say. Plus he intersperses his economics lectures with cute stories about his kids.

Chris Lydon has a blog. I’m looking for a transcript or audio encoding of his talk with Krugman at the First United Church this past Friday. He’s pretty neat too.

Requisite Political Blather

Politics have been making me physically ill recently. I can only stand about twenty or thirty minutes of looking at this before I cringe and want to stop. So I’ve been reading the victorian-style novel Tipping the Velvet and the non-political contemporary nonfiction Kitchen Confidential instead. Good stuff.

But here’s the politics: The cover story in The Nation is titled “Blood in the Water,” about how the Dems are now on the attack. So, yeah, they’re attacking. Dean’s stumping madly, and everyone who sees him speak seems to be impressed with his candor and control– this is not sputtering, red-faced, clinton-conspiracy anger.

And of course Paul Krugman, celebrity economist is certainly making some carefully-documented, well-reasoned, statements that we’re being lied to. I’ll be seeing him speak at a Harvard Bookstore event this week.

Lies lies lies: Slate has an article about Condi’s misstatements on post-WWII history. And of course Brad DeLong has been keeping track of all the people keeping track of Bush’s lies. My favorite, however, is that even the
WSJ Editorial Page is questioning Bush’s integrity. When the avowedly rightist, pro-wealthy, pro-big-business WSJ editorial page is questioning you, you know you’re tainted. Jeff Skilling, Kenny Lay, Trent Lott, meet Dubya, Perle, and Cheney: the new recipients of the ostrakon.

Talk like a pirate day is coming up. Of course, nobody specified what kind of pirate that was.

Almost everybody has already seen this Popular Science article on the worst jobs in science. Of the worst jobs in computer science, I would have to say user interface design is one of them: everybody has an opinion about it, and most of them are wrong, but they’ll argue with you and criticize you and hate whatever you do anyway. At least, that’s what it feels like. It’s a fine line between listening to customer feedback and just ignoring the whingers, because there always are some whingers, who will like the new UI once they get used to it.

Of course, I think the UI designers say that the QA people have the worse job, and the QA people make fun of the support techs… I mean, we all chose these jobs. I’d take any job in science or software over most of the others, any day of the week.

But not DBA. You have to be crazy to be a DBA.

UNIX Review Reviews Linux in a Nutshell

UNIX Review reviews Linux in a Nutshell:

If you’re a Linux administrator and you’re not familiar with O’Reilly’s best selling Linux book, Linux in a Nutshell, or if you just don’t own a copy, you need to buy one. Although it costs about $40, its content is equally weighty and probably provides the most information on Linux per dollar of any book in print. It’s now in its fourth edition, and it’s still a must-own book for Linux administrators.

Amazon Rank: 1,108! Go go go!

Money, Money, Math

The collapse of the Doha round of trade talks should convince anyone who still doubted that Dubya has no actual dedication to free or fair trade. But of course, as he says, “Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” Right. Public servant number one. Great.

I’ve always liked to tell a story from when Dubya was in Texas politics and a reporter asked him what he and his poppy talked about when they weren’t talking politics. And Dubya replied without a pause, “Pussy.” That’s our man.

On the plus side, FoxTrot was funny this weekend, as was the Conan O’Brien 10th anniversary special.

Jargon, Blather, Hot Air

I’ve been reading Big Lies. It angers me. I tried to get a friend to read it, but she said I’d have to read Treason first. And let’s be honest here: Conason is a political hack, and “Big Lies” is obviously, clearly, and totally partisan. But Coulter is bullshit. Conason says, in effect, “I don’t mean to imply that all Democrats have served their country honorably. I am pointing out that the stereotype of the unpatriotic left is complete hogwash; at least as many Democrats as Republicans have served in the military, and much of the right was as afraid as the left to actually go to war in Vietnam: Dubya, Limbaugh, and Lott all bailed.” Coulter, on the other hand, says things like “There are no good Democrats” and “Liberals hate America.”

I am a liberal and I love America, OK? Maybe we’re going to have to start calling it progressive, but let’s think for just a minute about what it means to be liberal: not breathing coal-dust, not having your arms cut off by machinery, not working 80 hours a week for pennies a day, going to an emergency room and knowing you’ll be treated even if you don’t have proof of insurance. Promoting those values abroad. Promoting international diplomacy over international bloodshed. You can thank liberals, progressives, and pinkos for that kind of thing. The New Deal. Voting rights. Public education.

Media bias? My ass. Look at the real stats. CNN is moderate, everyone else is right, and the only radio that’s left of center is Pacifica, which is carried by three or four college stations in California and maybe Athens Georgia.

Yeah, unions get ossified, yeah, the academic theorists are absurd. Chomsky needs to shut the fuck up. But don’t say “liberal” means “traitor.” Don’t say “you hate America, freedom, and humanity” just because I try to put myself in my enemy’s shoes, try to understand where they come from and why they do the things they do, just because I acknowledge that my nation is not perfect.

Do you love your parents? Do you recognize that maybe they were wrong once or twice? Do you think maybe you could stand to acknowledge the faults in yourself and your nation before you begin tearing down others?

I acknowledge the role of the US government in destabilizing and toppling the Chilean government on 9/11/73. I acknowledge the role of the US government in the deaths of thousands of innocent or guilty civilians across the globe. I am aware that the US sponsored the Taliban, promoted jihad and fundamentalist rage at the Communist infidels. The US has, in the name of freedom, imprisoned many, just as churches have, in the name of the prince of peace, killed. That doesn’t mean that the US, or the churches, are bad things– merely that they have failed at one time or another.

Failures on the part of the US don’t make Allende a good president, or the Sandinistas saints. Intransigence on the part of the IDF doesn’t make the PLO right, either. US manipulation in the civil wars in Afghanistan during the 70s doesn’t mean that when Al Quada attacked, anyone deserved it. Nobody deserves that.

No, it’s not fair to say “they had it coming.” But then again, neither did Nicaragua. Neither did Chile. Saddam had it coming. Even then, after a certain point, that’s not what matters. We knew something was coming, whether we ‘had it coming’ or not. The Sandinistas knew, Allende knew, we all knew, when we did what we did, that we were playing with something we couldn’t control. And the US diplomats and spies and development agencies, when they fiddled with the geopolitical morass of the Middle East, knew that they were fiddling with a system too complex for anyone to control. They did what they thought was best at the time they did it, and that’s all that anyone can do.

Lileks accuses people like me of disliking ‘moral clarity,’ and there, I guess he may be right: moral clarity is often a sign that you have made a gross simplification, rash judgement, or transparent justification for something that isn’t nearly as simple as all that.

Look at your gallery of bizarre foods, James. Listen to the political tapes of Thurmond weighing in against the negro race in his swimming pools. Fifty years from now, how much of what we have said and done will be completely incomprehensible?