This little girl is my hero. (NYT; user: opensewer; password: iswatching.)

Remember all those un-democratic hi-jinks that went on during the aftermath of our most recent presidential election? It's not just the State of Florida that produces un-equal representation in our government. Un-democratic features, like the Senate, are built right into our beloved national Constitution. Do you know how the Senators were originally chosen? Do you know who the electoral college is really beholden to? Maybe we need to look our sacred constitution more critically.

Now this article is a little bit interesting, don't you think?

Davis signed the bill on a hot, smoggy day along a park trail. Steps closer to cleaner air.

Black Americans have made substantial progress in nearly every aspect of our culture over the years, but they still do not experience the same level of representation and opportunity that whites do (National Urban League). Even though it's very much reality, I still find the state of racial relations in our country amazing. I'm "white," and I feel ashamed sometimes that I don't have more black friends. If you're white, how many do you have? If you're black, same question? Of course this doesn't really matter (?), but it's an interesting signifier of how little blacks' and whites' spheres of influence cross--intentionally or unintentionally. I look to explanations like this to make myself feel better, but they don't really satisfy me. What can be done, really? Is Hip-Hop still our best hope of bridging this invisible gap--a gap that no one seems very interested in talking about right now?

File this under "cool." (NYT; user name: opensewer; password: iswatching.)

We have a problem here at Opensewer HQ: we don't watch enough television to keep up on current trends in popular entertainment. So today, I was overjoyed when I learned (somewhat late) that this past spring, the wretched "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" was dropped without fanfare from network prime-time because of sagging ratings. This is the kind of thing that makes us very happy. It was a stupid show that insulted our collective intelligence. We despised it, and proudly ridiculed it from the beginning. If you ever watched the show and enjoyed it, you should feel ashamed of yourself (boy, that was harsh, wasn't it?). When a piece of trash like this fades into obscurity, it makes us feel for a moment that there is hope for the American mind. But then, just when we think that the era of "that which is really bad will be called good" in popular entertainment is over, another misguided bomb stays off target and kills a large number of our unwitting mental civilians: Big Brother 3.

We flip out when we hear about people burning a live kitten on the grill, but what about the other millions of animals who are mistreated every single day so that we can have fresh meat at the grocery store? Mark Morford writes about the mass hypocrisy in his latest Notes and Errata.

Keeping the waters safe for all men, but not animals.

The more modern man ravages nature, the more he reveres it. (The paradox is best exemplified in America, of course, by the popularity of SUVs.)

This is significant.

Do you know what your neighbor is doing? Do you care? Are you watching? If you're a good American, you'd best be watching and reporting any suspicious activity to the authorities, before they report you.

“…the continued existence of the European City depends on allowing it to become ‘Americanised’.” Hmmm.

“… Many pre-industrial societies … [saw] time as a circle, not a straight line. From the Mayas to the Buddhists and the Hindus, time was circular and repetitive, history repeating itself endlessly, lives perhaps reliving themselves through reincarnation. … Linear time was a precondition for industrial views of evolution and progress. Linear time made evolution and progress plausible. For if time were circular instead of linelike, if events doubled back on themselves instead of moving in a single direction, it would mean that history repeated itself and that evolution and progress were no more than illusions…” –Second in a series of outtakes from The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler

Something we'll see more of in the future: In early 2003, the City of Louisville, KY and Jefferson County will officially merge to form the 16th largest city in the country.

Quick: Zig Zag Zen; Sierra Club Power Lunch.

Sometimes, you can be an American citizen and get your day in court, even after fighting against the U.S. in a war. Other times, you can be an American citizen, be part of an alleged plot to maybe do something, and not get a trial, but instead hang out in prison for an undetermined amount of time. Guess which one is white?

New artist Kaite Ripple sees the world as honestly as she can. She observes emotion and beauty, and captures it simply--without narrative, pretense or didacticism.

“Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the ‘overt curriculum.’ But beneath it lay an invisible or ‘covert curriculum’ that was far more basic. It consisted—and still does in most industrialized nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time. … It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning.” --Alvin Toffler

Todays headline: United State Vice President Dick Cheney accused of accounting fraud and overstating revenues by $445 million from 1999 through the end of 2001. Sounds very familiar to the Enron scandal that apparently the entire Bush administration was aware of. If we reelect these people, something is very wrong.

Where have I been? A manned mission to Mars by 2015? And the whole thing will only take 440 days. When you look at the planet’s surface, it almost seems livable.

A Simpsons episode has "Marge reminding Homer that he loved the movie Rashomon, which elicits in Homer the rejoinder, "That’s not how I remember it."

Do you get that joke/reference? Maybe you do. Maybe you even get it without even having seen Rashomon. It's the reference game, the frantic cannibalization that keeps pop culture alive. I'm not a serious student of pop phenomena, but here's a good article that discusses what concerns me most with the popular arts (similar to this more alarmist article I blogged some time ago).

Well I never thought I’d see the day, but I’m linking to a USA Today article. (The hotel where we stayed last night provided the paper for free, which is the only way I’d take it.) Anyway, in it there was a nice article about management sage Peter Drucker’s take on the recent corporate scandals. This man has seen the boom-bust cycle in our economy no less than four times in his lifetime. A nice quote: “As to ‘ethical problems’ in business, I have made myself tremendously unpopular by saying, again and again, that there is no such thing as ‘business ethics,’ there is only ethics.”

Predatory Lending is one of my favorite topics. The last time I commented on the issue was back in December '01, so I think it's time for an update. Take a look at the rowdy activist group ACORN, who have placed Predatory Lending at the top of their hit list and are engaged in some wonderfully obnoxious protest-antics. (That's three links to Alternet in one day...good stuff!)

A follow-up to my post on Saturday about school vouchers: ...dollars for vouchers subsidize religious schools, leave the poorest of poor students behind in even poorer and more racially isolated schools which further perpetuate the cycle of educational neglect, and are a scheme by conservatives to torpedo public education.

Across the nation, tonight and tomorrow night, millions of people will watch thousands of fireworks displays. Every year, after the fireworks are over, and the sky is filled with smoke, I always wonder why I continue to come out every year and watch. Of course, people have been setting off fireworks during celebratory events for more than a thousand years. Traditions like that are hard to break. But how often do we consider the environmental repercussions of all these exploding chemicals? Don't we have enough pollution to worry about? AlterNet reporter Gar Smith is asking these same questions: Is 15 minutes of pyrotechnic entertainment worth poisoning the earth?

The history of our country should not be whitewashed by the prejudices of the present day. Remember the tolerance and foresight of our founding fathers and applaud the decision of the Ninth Circuit.

This story on Living On Earth made me feel a bit more hopeful - Ecovillage. It's about a community in the middle of L.A. who have "turned a forty-unit apartment building in LA into a place where neighbors plant vegetables together, create and install solar panels, agree not to own cars, and even use odorless composting toilets." The community is even the focus of international tourists.

Money follows the mongrel. ... The adept handling of diversity is the secret of economic competitiveness and national vitality.

Two days ago, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to uphold Cleveland’s school voucher program, setting an important precedent in this divisive national battle. Proponents of voucher use argue that it enables choice and competition, ultimately strengthening our urban public schools. Of course, as we all know, suburban schools don’t need any help—in fact many suburban voters are against vouchers because they don’t want to empower blacks and other minorities to come from the city into their institutions.

The truth of the matter is that use of vouchers is yet another blow against our urban schools, precisely the ones that need the most help. It is another vote against the city, against a sustainable lifestyle based on dense living patterns. (I’m not even going to touch the church-state issue.) In the same manner that a laissez-faire value system does not work for corporate accounting practices (a la WorldCom, Enron, Rite Aid, etc.), it will not work for America’s public education system. (NYT; user name: opensewer; password: iswatching.)

As citizens, we need to think long-term and be willing to allocate the tax revenue necessary to create an egalitarian and superior (by world standards) public education system serving every American youth. Oh, wait, but that would create a meritocracy…we don’t want that, do we?