a few days late but Happy 4th of July

While going over my RSS feeds from this past long weekend I ran across this post by normboyd40 from the Left in Alabama blog. It pretty much sums up my feelings regarding our country’s political and moral future. I love the idea of “my country, right or fix it” as opposed to “my country, right or wrong.” Dear Lord, I hope the tide is turning…

“Well, I woke up Friday mornin’ with no way to look at America that doesn’t hurt….” apologies to Johnny Cash.

Obama is backtracking on FISA and gives us pathetic, carefully nuanced reasons why. 

The media – that great defender of America’s values, and provider of truth- has become Rupert Murdoch’s plaything and truth is no longer available.  “Sorry, fresh out.  Check Comedy Central on the ‘truthiness’ aisle” 

The Bush/Cheney administration has proven long since that there truly is nothing they will not do to consolidate more and more power in the White House.  The United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the laws and structures of this great nation, have never been in such peril.  Never! Not at Pearl Harbor, not at the hands of Hitler, not when planes crashed into the World Trade Center, not even when the nation was rent asunder by Civil War. 
So, I awoke this morning and walked out into my front yard, stood on the porch, directly under the flag flying in the breeze, and felt my eyes fill up with tears.  A little history may be in order.  Personal history. 

The flag that flies from my front porch once saw duty as a drape over my father’s coffin.  Dad was a patriot – a different kind than his son, but a patriot of the highest order.  A simple man, he believed in “my country, right or wrong” and could never get his mind around “My country, right or fix it”.  And I realize that the blind acceptance of “my country” for so many of our parents’ generation and indeed even today’s generation, has been largely to blame for where we are.  I do not fault them.  They had no reason to believe that our greatest danger lay in the very halls of the government  they had elected. 

The idea was unthinkable.  But here we are.  The current administration has harnessed Congress like an old well-broken team of mules.  They have re-constituted the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for the executive branch on all but the most bizarre cases.  The president actually believes he has a right to change laws as written by the Legislature before signing them, with no one’s approval but his own. He is, after all, “The Decider”.

He can order anyone who ever worked for him or his corrupt administration to refuse to testify before the United States Congress.  Now, think about that! There are three co-equal branches of Government established by the United States Constitution.  Not “A Decider” and his lackeys. And the Supremes, the only check on his powers, simply nod sagely and refuse to hear cases that would curtail his excesses.

In the past, no administration could have presumed to usurp the power of the Congress and the courts.  That great defender of truth and honesty, the Fourth Estate, the American press and broadcast media, would have exposed this usurpation in a minute. Who can imagine Edward R. Murrow, Lowell Thomas, Cronkite, parroting the President’s lies, just because he is “a good ole boy” and “fun to drink a beer with”.  Who can envision  these reporters pretending that distorted claims of national security really carry weight, or that “temporary” suspensions of Constitutional and Civil Rights are sometimes necessary evils in this dangerous world.

It has been said that once there were giants. Churchill, DeGaulle, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler were, in fact just men, thrust into the spotlight of history- a spotlight so bright that their silhouettes appeared as giants  Where are the giants today? What will the spotlight of history expose?

Where are the historians today?  Have they – like the honest and fearless news correspondents- become an endangered or even extinct species? One of the truest of all maxims is that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

Returning to my premise, it is a day to be sad for what America is no more.  It is a day to be aware of what she can be again.  It is a day to remember the words of Jesus, and of Mohammed, and of Confucius,  Dr. King, Schweitzer, Zoroaster, Gandhi, all the great moral leaders in our history. Unanimously they stood for the responsibility of every person to have concern for every other person. “Whatsoever you do for the least of these…you do for me”. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” .

This is why I have a garden.  My neighbor likes cucumbers and lacks money, so I grow the abominable things and take them to her. That is why I am a substitute teacher, even though it interferes with my retirement activities (sitting and occasionally rocking). That is why I care about our poor pathetic political system and lose sleep over it, even deluding myself into believing that Alabama will eventually decide to join the 21st Century.

So, I wish you all a Happy Interdependence Day.  I have no desire to be independent of you.  I will not permit you to be independent of me.  When I see you in need or in distress, I will be there  When you are thirsty, I have water.  Hungry?  i have,,..uh.. cucunmbers.  Desolate, I have a word of cheer and a prayer for tomorrow.  And I know that you have the same for me. 

Happy Interdependence Day, America! And a better tomorrow for us all.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-Ohio) Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush

Everything I could or would say about Kucinich’s Articles of Impeachment against W is said here. On that page you can also find a link to the Articles themselves as well as a way to email Rep. Kucinich to let him know how you feel about his Articles.

Will W. be impeached? Of course not. Should he be? Of course he should.

By the way, if you’re in Alabama and consider yourself left-of-center, progressive, Democrat, etc., you should really add the Left in Alabama site to your list of favorites.

Cory Doctorow on our ignorance of statistics

I’m a big fan of Cory Doctorow. Not only is the author of some of my favorite books (especially Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) he’s also been a formidable blogger for like ever. Bottom line: he’s a damn smart dude. The article below is from yesterday’s Guardian. The title is “The Odds Are Stacked Against Us.”

The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity’s natural
tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We’re just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.

I’ll prove it. If we were good at understanding statistics, then here’s what would happen when you flew to Las Vegas. You’d step out of McCarran airport, stare down the Strip at all those glittering, palatial casinos and say to yourself, “Holy crap – think of all the suckers who must have lost everything to finance this place!” Instead, our foolish minds are filled with thoughts like, “Man, look at all the money in this town – I’m going to win big!” And another casino is built.

The rare – and the lurid – loom large in our imagination, and it’s to our great detriment when it comes to our safety and security. As a new father, I’m understandably worried about the idea of my child falling victim to some nefarious predator Out There, waiting to break in and take my child away. There’s a part of me who understands the panicked parent who rings 999 when he sees some street photographer aiming a lens at a kids’ playground.

But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative (most likely a parent). If not a relative, then a close family friend. If not a close family friend, then a trusted authority figure.

And yet we continue to focus our attention on the meteor-strike-rare paedophile attack instead of protecting our children from the real, everyday dangers they face from the familiar. This has the twin effects of making our children less safe, and of making adults less free, because we are all subjected to scrutiny on the grounds that we may be hunting children.

This is the same calculus that allows the fear of terrorism to take away our liberty: the statistically super-rare terrorist attacks present, on average, a much lower risk to our health, safety and person than, say, depriving us of our liquid medications, or of requiring us to leave our bags unlocked in flight so that sticky-fingered handlers can make off with our laptops and financial data and valuables.

The everyday threat of having our goods stolen, our ability to travel and earn our livings curtailed, and our personal information harvested by every junior terrorist fighter who wants to see your ID before letting you do anything is overshadowed by the one-in-a-billion confluence of someone with terrorist goals, the means to accomplish them, and the intelligence to bring them off (hint: you can’t really blow up an airplane with hair-gel and iPods).

Paradox of the false positive

Our innumeracy means that our fight against these super-rarities is likewise ineffective. Statisticians speak of something called the Paradox of the False Positive. Here’s how that works: imagine that you’ve got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that’s 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them – because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that’s what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there’s only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your “99% accurate” test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000!

Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated “tests” for terrorism – data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc – are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.

In other words, in the effort to find the terrorist needles in our haystacks, we’re just making much bigger haystacks.

You don’t get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It’s something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction. If there’s one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it’s this: teach us how statistics works. They should drill it into us with the same vigor with which they approached convincing us that property values would rise forever, make it the subject of reality TV shows and infuse every corner of our news and politics with it. Without an adequate grasp of these concepts, no one can ever tell for sure if he or she is safe.

Some posters from Northland Poster Collective

Nortland Poster Collective

John Scalzi’s “Being Poor” Essay

I started John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War this past weekend (it’s really really good) and tonight I decided to check out his website. He has a really great blog called “Whatever.” The following was posted by Scalzi on September 3, 2005.

Being Poor

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is living next to the freeway.

Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

Being poor is off-brand toys.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt.

Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is your kid’s school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is not talking to that girl because she’ll probably just laugh at your clothes.

Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.

Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.

Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is your kid’s teacher assuming you don’t have any books in your home.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.

Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.

Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won’t listen to you beg them against doing so.

Being poor is a cough that doesn’t go away.

Being poor is making sure you don’t spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.

Being poor is a lumpy futon bed.

Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.