My Uncle Marty is an endless source of funny aphorisms. I will be posting some of his and other choice Mormonisms.
Keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down.
If you can translate I will give you a prize.
November 2005 Archives
In response to Bob Fancher at Xanga.
>It is disappointing to hear you say that you want more division among our elected officials. The requirement that a politician’s beliefs be easily discernible from his or her party affiliation is exactly why our representatives in Washington are filled with such rancor, bitterness, and devoid of any remnants of statesmanship or true bipartisan cooperation. Instead of making up one’s own mind regarding an issue, you ask that a politician merely consult his party’s platform, which if you look at either major party’s platform you will find two complete heaps of trash. The Republican party has degenerated into a party of moralizing, controlling old biddies who can’t find there way to shut the purse. On the other hand you have the democrats who are falling all over themselves to attack and whine about any policy or program a Republican might have even considered proposing.
> During post-primary election periods our political landscape does seem to blur, but that is because the 60% of the country that makes up the middle of the political spectrum doesn’t buy the need to protect the flag in the constitution or keep the retirement age artificially low.
> We need more John McCains (although fewer Zell Millers — he’s just crazy), more sensible pragmatists, willing to play fair, talk straight (relatively), and do what’s right for the country regarding any given policy, not call up Howard Dean for a pep talk on the wonders of overweening unions.
My feel is that the public’s desire for clear cut, black and white answers from government is one of the many reasons we get unreasonable, ineffectual solutions from Congress and the rest of them. Finding answers becomes more about politics and ideology than about fixing problems and improving the lives of citizens. Most questions in government are complex and nuanced (I know many conservatives fear that word, but it’s true) and the answers our representatives develop should be likewise nuanced, if not too complex.
Texas has one of the longest and oldest constitutions in the Union, and it also has the most frequently amended one. The Constitution of the State of Texas has been amended over 400 times since it was ratified in 1876. Today the people of Texas voted on 9 more amendments, including one dealing with land titles in just two of Texas’s 254 counties (also a record). One of my favorites is this one:
> The constitutional amendment providing that marriage in this state consists only of the union of one man and one woman and prohibiting this state or a political subdivision of this state from creating or recognizing any legal status identical or similar to marriage.
Way to go Texas. You are really making progress. At least you didn’t waste the people’s time amending the Constitution, everyone else was getting something, why not the bigoted idiots, too?
Now not only are gay couples treated a second class citizens, but they are assured that even forward looking municipalities are forbidden of recognizing them in any capacity, even the innocuous civil union. I am proud the call myself a Texan today.
On Sunday night The West Wing featured a live debate episode, where the two candidates in the fictive election threw out the traditional timed question-answer-rebut format in favor of an actual debate. They moved around, they interrupted, they argued, they pontificated. It was —albeit completely contrived — wonderful. It was obviously a rating stunt and possibly an effort to prepare the audience for a end-of-season online vote for the winner of the on-screen election. However, a clichéd idealist (or a clichéd cynic like myself), might also see an attempt to show Americans something that hasn’t happened in a long time — what an actual debate between presidential candidates might look like and how much more enlightening it could be.
Read a New York Times piece about the episode
That’s a word I don’t get to use very much — scathing. But it described precisely an Editorial in the New York Times today that essentially labels Bush administration completely incompetent, and largely due to the incompetence of the President himself.
I haven’t been a fan of the President’s for a long time and the piece makes some good points about his apparent lack of effective leadership, the disastrous role of a VP run amok, and the prospect of three more years.
Sony Music caught a lot of flak this week when a programmer discovered that some of its CDs were responsible for installing a program called a rootkit on his computer. Basically, a rootkit is a form of spyware designed specifically to be invisible to antivirus and anti-spyware detection programs. The software was designed to prevent the unauthorized copying of the disc or ripping the music off the CD onto the computer’s hard drive. It is a form of anti-copying protection.
This was a big story in the tech world and the music world for a lot of reasons:
- the rootkit software was installed without the knowledge of the consumer (which is against the law in California and possibly several other states)
- removing the rootkit causes damage to your computer and may be against the law (violation of the the DMCA, which says that “circumventing” copy protection schemes is illegal)
- it treats consumers like criminals who are assumed to be violating the terms of fair use, even when they are not doing so by doing many of the things the software prevents, i.e. copying the songs their computer or to a digital music player like the iPod
I duly wrote a letter to Sony
> I would like you to know that I am strongly opposed to Sony’s use of anti-copying technology on it’s music releases. Especially offensive is Sony’s use of rootkits to hide the copy protection software.
> Consumers own the discs after purchase, not Sony. There are fair use rights that accompany that purchase and Sony has exhibited a complete disregard for those rights and by extension a disregard for it’s customers. Sony treats the people who support it as if they should be forever beholden to a corporation just to listen to some music.
> Sony Music is not in danger of going out of business or even losing any large numbers of sales from people using their CDs in a legitimate way. Those who are pirating music on a large scale will always find a way around protection schemes. You only end up making it harder, and in this case dangerous, for consumers to enjoy the products they have purchased.
> How can you expect consumers to continue to purchase from you when you treat them like criminals? It is disgraceful.
> Until you end this ridiculous practice of copy protecting CDs you will receive no business from me and I will encourage my friends and family and anyone else who will listen to boycott your products as well.
So I do encourage everyone not to purchase music from Sony or it’s labels until they end this insane, controlling business practice.
After Will & Grace premiered on NBC I remember a lot of talk about the power of portraying gay people on television to improve the “public’s” perception and tolerance of homosexuals. In the period since there have been complaints about the number of minorities on television — asians, hispanics, blacks, etc. It is right to ask that studios not avoid portraying minorities, but I never thought that seeing gays of blacks on television would actually change people’s perceptions. People, though sometimes simple, aren’t that simple; the mindsets and the beliefs surrounding intolerance are more complicated than that. To some degree it sounds like I was wrong.
In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes a test that Harvard developed to test people’s unconscious feelings about and associations with minorities. In short the test reveals that people more easily associate “good” words with caucasian people and “bad” words with black people. It doesn’t matter the subject’s conscious inclinations toward black people, almost everyone tests with some degree of negative associations over 50%.
According to Gladwell, however, subjects who spent time reading about positive black institutions and figures tested much more positively toward blacks. Meaning that the only way to truly ensure that your mind isn’t unconsciously distancing itself from minorities is to expose yourself to more positive examples of minorities.
I was surprised to find that the simple act of watching positive examples of blacks, gays, or minorities could so powerfully influence our subconscious mind. I guess it should have.
The Senate Democrats seem to have relocated their backbone, at least for long enough to call a closed session of the Senate to investigate the justifications behind the Iraq war. It’s about time guys. I agree with the war, but the president should have been straight with us about why he was going to do what he did and — big surprise — he wasn’t. It’s time to pay the piper. But don’t worry if you disagree, he won’t have to because this will come to nothing.
The Republicans in the Senate are in quite the kerfluffle about the dastardly Dems. My favorite quip about the session comes from Trent Lott, R-Miss. He says the Dems are making “some sort of stink about Scooter Libby and the CIA leak.” Which isn’t really what they said they were making a “stink” about at all. But could he possibly be more dismissive?
