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California Ballot Initiatives, 2008

A surprising amount of information and linkage is to be had at the Wikipedia.

CA Ballot Initiatives:

  1. (1A) Bond for high speed rail: UNDECIDED (requires federal matching funds, probably will run far over budget because it was priced years ago when commodities were cheaper, won’t be functional for many years, now is a crappy time to take out a loan, but it sure would be nice to have a high speed train between LA and SF… would tickets cost more or less than Southwest?)
  2. Revised CAFO standards (more space for chickens, pigs, veal): YES? (Seems petty – unclear how slightly more space for chickens will result in fewer antibiotics being used, and better water quality near CAFO facilities… it’s still a hundred million chickens, isn’t it? but it’s a step in the right direction – similar to legislation in the EU, doesn’t fully take effect until 2015… dunno)
  3. Children’s Hospital Bond: NO (Provides public subsidies for private for-profit hospitals, without also giving public sector a share of the profits, or any control over the organizations they are funding, nearly identical bond measure passed in 2004 – and they’ve only spent half *that* money!)
  4. Require parental notification and waiting period for abortions: NO
  5. Reduction in non-violent drug offense penalties, treatment in lieu of incarceration: YES
  6. Capital expenditure for more prisons: NO (we have enough prisons already!  Just let out the non-violent drug offenders if there’s not enough space)
  7. Renewable energy portfolio standards: NO (based on UCS analysis)
  8. Outlaw Gay Marriage: NO
  9. Victims rights and harsher parole requirements: UNDECIDED
  10. Subsidies for some fuels (esp. natural gas): NO (based on UCS analysis)
  11. Non-partisan congressional districts for CA: YES

Local Measures:

  • Measure R (transportation sales tax in LA County): UNDECIDED No bike/ped call outs (does complete streets apply to this?), way too much focus on highway projects.
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Obama and McCain in their own Wordles

The first debate, in Wordle format. Not too hard to tell who’s who:

A Wordle of Obama in the First Debate
Obama
An Wordle of McCain in the first debate
McCain

It might be better if Wordle would pick up on phrases. It would be interesting to see if one could extract a candidate’s talking points from this kind of stream-of-consciousness format, or even identify talking points they didn’t know they had. Not clear if it will be worthwhile running the VP debate through this… some of Palin’s comments seem to be pre-wordled!

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Financial Negativeland

Today I joined the erstwhile Masters of the Universe, and entered the red.  My investments are now worth fewer dollars than I put into them.  Am I freaking out?  No.  Not yet anyway.  Another 25% down and we’ll see.  I thank Bill Bernstein, Jack Bogle, and Burton Malkiel for this calm.  Am I even surprised?  No, and the thanks for that has to go to neo-Popperian Nicholas Nassim Taleb.

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Why not a godless angel band?

It’s not too often that I play a song on infinite repeat, but yesterday I left Angel Band, the last song on the O Brother, Where Art Thou sound track, going for more than an hour. It’s based on an American hymn written and set to music in 1860 by Jefferson Hascall and William Bradbury, (who also wrote Jesus Loves Me).

My latest sun is sinking fast,
My race is nearly run,
My strongest trials now are past,
My triumph has begun.

O, come, angel band,
Come and around me stand,
O bear me away on your snow white wings,
To my immortal home.
O bear me away on your snow white wings
To my immortal home.

O bear my longing heart to him
Who bled and died for me
Whose blood now cleanses from all sin
And gives me victory

O, come angel band
Come and around me stand
O bear me away on your snow white wings,
To my immortal home.
O bear me away on your snow white wings,
To my immortal home.

The Stanley Brothers performed the version in O Brother, Where Art Thou. It’s almost a capella, with four part harmony, and some guitar and mandolin in the background. It’s a simple song. A comforting deathbed song. I disagree entirely with every sentiment expressed in it, but it’s still moving, almost to the point of tears.

How can that be? And how can it be that I don’t know any naturalistic hymns that are similarly moving? Do they exist, but not get played? Is it a failure of community? Or do they not even exist? Have we not yet had enough time to phrase our understanding of the natural world in emotionally captivating ways? Does it take a thousand years to do that? Or do they not exist because we don’t have naturalistic communities? Or because those naturalistic communities that do exist don’t actually value the fact that they are a community – because they’re not willing or able to do the work required to cultivate and maintain themselves as a community?

I wish there were a similarly moving song about exponential population growth, and the subsequent collapse. Something that might come to mind when someone came across a growth rate stated as a percentage. They’d say “Oh, I know how this story ends – all exponential growth is unsustainable.” We need a kind of pre-emptive post-apocalyptic lament. Stories in verse, set to music, about the ways in which we will have failed. They’d hardly be any more distant from our everyday experience than songs about Passover. Or a set of garden hymns… songs in praise of the organisms that make the nutrients in our composted waste available, the sunshine that distills seawater into rain, the hungry ladybugs, the earthworms aerating our soil, chlorophyll, and the plants that have cooperated in their own domestication. The last song could be like Angel Band, but with our bodies being returned to the garden that nourished us, to nourish our remaining family.

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Is Contraception the New Abortion?

I ran across this article at Science Progress, about efforts to aggressively enforce the Weldon (or “church”) amendments, which make it illegal to compel a health care worker to provide a service they find morally objectionable.  The author focuses on the possibility that the new rules would change the definition of conception from the time of embryo implantation, to the time of conception – but really, what they do (if you read the PDF) is give broad freedom to all medical personnel to decide for themselves what exactly they do and don’t find conscionable.  Which sounds fine of course, from a libertarian point of view.  But it also sucks if you happen to have accidentally gotten pregnant in Montgomery, AL, or some rural town in North Dakota.  It seems like the rules are so broad as to allow a doctor to refuse to prescribe birth control to an unmarried woman.  Additionally annoying is that this is just another example of the Feds bullying the states with money they took from the state’s citizens – the rule only applies to institutions that take federal money… like just about every public hospital (if there are any left that is…), and it will have the effect of shifting federal funding to conservative institutions, insofar as liberal ones are willing to refuse the federal funding in order to be able to require their personnel to perform all legal and medically advisable procedures.

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Luther Burbank’s Children

On the way out to Bodega Bay yesterday we stopped in Sebastopol at the Luther Burbank Experimental Farm, or what’s left of it anyway – all but three acres of an original 18 have been sold off. It is disheveled, and there are no guided tours, just a few acres of numbered plants, mostly fruit and nut trees, that you can look up on a brochure and map in a box by the barn. That didn’t matter at all. It’s a wonderful place.

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Who do I hate?

I hate the phone companies, but I need a new phone. I hate having to pay the same rate that someone getting a subsidized phone pays, even if I buy an unlocked phone. I hate that there are locked phones. I hate the obligatory contracts. I hate the ignorant, conniving, pushy salespeople in the phone stores. I hate calling customer support. My phone hasn’t worked for weeks. I haven’t gotten a new one because I hate AT&T. I wish they would go bankrupt, or be regulated out of existence in any meaningful way. I wish we had an open, competitive mobile communications marketplace, with low barriers to entry for new carriers, and an open platform encouraging new hardware manufacturers to make innovative handsets, and encouraging writers of software to create innovative mobile applications. But we don’t. Mobile phones suck. The industry sucks. The FCC sucks. Mobile computing sucks. It’s horribly broken, and they all want to keep it that way.

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Virtue, Beauty, and Function

Michael Pollan talks about American gardeners (including himself) being unable to bring themselves to cultivate beauty, or to see that as their purpose.  Instead, he says they cultivate virtue.  Sometimes I wonder if American liberals also suffer from this affliction, except instead of seeking virtue at the expense of beauty, they seek it to the detriment of functionality.  It doesn’t matter if this works, only that it’s right.  And maybe American conservatives do this too.