Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda by Richard Dawkins.

Are you an Obama supporter suddenly feeling down about the future in light of his recent remarks?
Or are you a Hillary supporter who's down because she's been getting raked for months?
Maybe you're a McCain supporter.... aw, how much does our next president even really matter?
You take this in good light or bad light, depending on who you want to win and who does.
Here's one reason why the "president doesn't matter that much" might make you feel good.

"I used to think Ben Stein was cool, now he's let me down. It's the same feeling I get when I find out someone I looked up to is a Scientologist."

I haven't really dug deeply into this issue, but as this news story from last year points out, I suspect George W. Bush is doing more to promote Canadian citizenry than any president in recent memory.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The truth hurts. It hurts to say it and it hurts to hear it.

Fighting for food.

Following up on my good neighbor post, here's the study, with policy recommendations, in a pdf format. Breakdown:

1. For relief and recovery efforts and ensure that its role [the private sector] is officially recognized as part of disaster protocols.

2. Decentralize government relief to local governments and non-governmental organizations and provide that relief in the form of cash or broadly defined vouchers.

3. Move the Coast Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) out of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

4. Reform “Good Samaritan” laws so that private-sector actors are clearly protected when they make good faith efforts to help.

Numbers 2 (decentralization) and 4 (enable people to act on their own to help) are the ones I immediately like.

Wal-Mart has decided not to commit public relations suicide: Debbie Shank, the former Wal-Mart employee who suffered severe brain damage in a traffic accident, won't have to pay the company back for the cost of her medical care.

Good job, internet, for showing Wal-Mart the asshole-ness of its ways. (via Digg)

Now, internet, how's that Scientology attack going?

Wow, just noticed the Wal-Mart posts below on the day I see this story, something I've heard about for a couple years but now has been fulled studied. The opposite of corporate policies preventing employees from doing the right thing, it's what happens when a company empowers employees to act as they see fit, as the Wal-Mart CEO did on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005:

This extraordinary delegation of authority ... saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital.

Empowered, decentralized actors - people on the local level given the authority to act - and the resulting response was leagues ahead of what FEMA was doing. This isn't testimony to Wal-Mart per se, but to the power of local, community actors as being in the best position to respond to disaster - look how well they did it!
Of course these managers would do everything they could to help these people - it's their freakin' home town(s)! Contrast this urgency with the disinterest of a remote FEMA bureaucrat in Washington who's never been to Gulf Coast... is the resulting difference any surprise?
(Note: The article I linked to takes this to a certain anti-federalization level, which you may or may not agree with. Personally, I'm always shocked at how many people who railed against FEMA in the case of Katrina support the same disinterested and distant federal government in rebuilding the Gulf Coast, and many other projects of this nature.)

The modern world, which prides itself on being a repudiation of the irrationalities of a culture that could give rise to an Inquisition, was in fact forged in the fires of those irrationalities, and we can still feel their heat.

This sentence from James Carroll's Constantine's Sword is extraordinarily insightful and can be generalized to many problems of modern life: Racism, the fight against scientific rationality, cultural hegemony, religious conflict, the list goes on... In fact, with a slight re-wording I think it becomes even more relevant:

The modern world, which prides itself on being a repudiation of the 'irrationalities of culture', was in fact forged in the fires of those irrationalities.

How long before rational thought runs the world?

The case of Deborah Shank vs. Wal-Mart.

Alternet: "Wal-Mart Sues Brain-Damaged Employee".

Wall Street Journal: "Wal-Mart Prevails in Case to Recover Health Costs".

However you spin it, it's tragic when 'policies' prevent corporate drones from doing the right thing. You can only alienate so many people... You can only bankrupt so many suppliers... You can only shutter so many competing stores... Before the general tide of public opinion turns against you. (Thanks, Rose.)

A star architect is not always the best architect for the job.

Iraq: 97 percent of US death toll came after 'Mission Accomplished'. Original story of the blessed event here.

Ted Atkinson at Daily Kos, commenting on the fact the Obama wrote his recent speech on race and America himself:

Here is a chair. Regardless of who you support, or what you think of Obama, I want you to sit here, right here on this chair and consider something wonderful. To wit:

It is possible that we will have a President who not only will speak in full, complete sentences, but who will do so in a manner that is eloquent, and who will also be articulate and eloquent in delivering words he is intelligent enough to know, understand, and use in a speech he is capable of writing himself.

The Mayor of Seattle has signed an executive order that will stop the city from purchasing bottled water, citing its detrimental effect on the environment. Good leadership by example; thank you Seattle.

Yesterday I was ready to post a nasty anti-St. Patrick's Day entry, and then I started thinking about the day's heritage as a binding of Irish community in the face of adversity in the 19th Century United States. Felt bad; couldn't do it.

Then I walked around downtown after our city's parade and saw all the stupid drunken idiots, and I reconsidered. St. Patrick's Day is stupid.

"We stand by our president..." (via Digg)

Could it be? The fulfillment of my career-long dream...the beginning of the end of the McMansion.

Kiss the Gas-Guzzling NASCAR Era Good-Bye.

Slum Visits: Tourism or Voyeurism? (Answer: Voyeurism.)

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.

- Robert Jackson. On Spitzer and prosecutor discretion...

At the beginning of the 21st Century, Americans' primary contribution to global society became clear: shopping. Now what happens when we begin to bumble our special talent?

President Bush used Saddam's alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks. ... An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

Dave McNeely in the Edmond (Oklahoma) Sun:

The Oklahoma House of Representatives Education Committee has just approved House Bill 2211. ... The bill requires public schools to guarantee students the right to express their religious viewpoints in a public forum, in class, in homework and in other ways without being penalized. If a student’s religious beliefs were in conflict with scientific theory, and the student chose to express those beliefs rather than explain the theory in response to an exam question, the student’s incorrect response would be deemed satisfactory, according to this bill.

The school would be required to reward the student with a good grade, or be considered in violation of the law. Even simple, factual information such as the age of the earth (4.65 billion years) would be subject to the student’s belief, and if the student answered 6,000 years based on his or her religious belief, the school would have to credit it as correct.

The apparently inevitable and ugly face of urban growth: The Bridge to Nowhere (Anchorage, Alaska; more here); and, A Stoic Little Town Faces Tomorrow (Los Angeles, California).

The report from the Pew Center on the States, referenced by John on 2/29, says that from 1987 to 2007, average state general fund expenditures on corrections (prisons, etc.) increased 127%, while during the same period expenditures on education rose only 21%.

Bottled water hate.

As an Ohio citizen, today I cast my vote in the primary election, which I am, uh, pretty sure will be counted correctly, and, um, democracy will be served?

Everyone knows that the U.S. imports a massive amount of products from China. But do you know that our highest dollar-value export to China is...trash?

Follow up to my post US prison populations...

The Washington Post highlights the same comparison in the second paragraph of its story about the report, saying "the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second."

The source for the Chinese estimate is the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College in London, which in turn relied on the Chinese government's numbers. I don't think I'm going out on a limb by suggesting that we should be skeptical of anything a totalitarian-cum-authoritarian government says about touchy, potentially embarrassing issues like how many of its citizens it imprisons. The official number at the end of 2005 was 1,565,771, but the King's College report says that does not include "more than 500,000 serving administrative detention in re-education-through-labour camps," according to the Chinese government's own count; "350,000 in a second type of administrative detention...for drug offenders and prostitutes," according to a U.S. State Department estimate; or pre-trial detainees, whose number "is not known but has been estimated at about 100,000." Assuming those numbers are correct (a big assumption), "the total prison population in China is about 2,500,000." That still gives the U.S. a higher incarceration rate, but not a higher total number of prisoners. And if the Chinese government actually had a few million people in re-education camps, instead of the half a million it claims, how would we know?

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