Fiat Lux

The Goddess Echinde points this out:

Gilead, the wingnut world of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, is also the name of a company which owns the rights to Tamiflu.

I read that book back in college & have no idea where my copy went. Might be worth re-reading again.

This caught my eye on the CNN scroll while getting ready to head to campus:

The winners of an annual violin competition in Moscow have a new prize -- a chance to play for a year on a million-dollar violin once owned by famed 17th century virtuoso Nicolo Paganini.

That's a really neat way of making your competition stand out from the crowd -- offer a prize that literally nobody else can offer.

One year ago today was the Presidential election. That was a disappointment, to say the least.

Six years ago today, Scott & I boarded a Tower Air flight with one-way tickets to San Francisco. Frankly I never thought we'd stay here so long. It's been one hell of a roller coaster ride so far. We've switched jobs more, suffered more financial setbacks, moved to new apartments more, and generally undergone more change in the last 6 years here than I either expected or wanted. And many of those changes have not been positives.

This time next year? The Congressional elections and I'll be just about ready to graduate from b-school. Both, I sincerely hope, will be significant changes for the better.

One of the things I didn't get to blog about last week was the whole Wal-Mart / health care / evil memo leak. Nathan Newman has a nice piece at the TPM Cafe about why we need to keep holding companies like Wal-Mart's feet to the fire about health care. Here's a snippet:

The more large corporations like Wal-Mart are attacked by the public for their health care policies, the more those companies will have an incentive to push for national health care to relieve the pressure on them. But bash government, and those companies are happy to see attention diverted from them.

More fundamentally, such an approach assumes that better government bureaucrats are all that are needed to get a better policy, but the reality is that better health care in other countries is dependent on both better policies and stronger worker power to hold their companies accountable. Yes, some of the irrational incentives in the system can be eliminated, but unless the employer role is completely eliminated -- which hasn't happened except in a few countries -- then holding companies accoutable will always be critical.

He is very right.

I've seen firsthand how small employers will not hire employees or resort to contractors becasue of the difficulty and cost of offering decent health insurance. Other companies turn to employee leasing -- which is not a bad solution but doesn't address the root problem. The way things work these days it's going to take the clout of major employers like GM, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, etc to lean hard on the government before we'll get (dare I say it?) a real single-payer, non-employer based healthcare system for Americans.

So bright and early this morning I had to head over to Fremont for a plant tour of NUMMI, a GM/Toyota joint venture. They build mostly Corollas and Tacomas, with some Pontiac Vibes thrown in for good measure.

Going to NUMMI was a required field trip for my Systems class, and I was pretty psyched because I had never seen cars made before. The place was huge and impressive. We watched a short film and then got driven around the plant; frankly I wish the tour had been longer. Still, you see most major areas of the plant except for the paint shops (I suppose they're on another floor). The robot welding machines were a standout for me; I'm amazed that robots can do all that detailed work without 'eyes'. But then, I know very little about either welding or robotics, so maybe robot welders are small potatoes to those in the know.

I wish I could have taken some photos but that's strictly forbidden. The plant photos on the website don't do the place justice.

I did find myself wondering as we drove past racks of car and truck doors -- why do we need so many new cars?

I haven't had the chance to do much cat blogging these past few weeks. Here's a shot of all 3 of the boys together on the futon couch:

You may notice that Bear's coloring is changing. He's developped a grey ruff around his neck. Originally he had some hints of orange, but no grey. It will be interesting to see how much more his coat will change as he grows.

Winemakers with a sense of humor. I like it.

One of the first things you learn in statistics class is this: CORRLEATION IS NOT CAUSATION. Yet time and again you see the scare of the week meme going around because some scientist has found a correlation between X and Y.

Here's this week's and it's a doozy:

Dr. Fuller Torrey is studying whether a parasite in Fluffy's droppings causes schizophrenia, a mental illness that strikes 2.2 million Americans and is characterized by hallucinations, delusions and trouble regulating emotions.

The Washington-area psychiatrist has found that people with schizophrenia were more likely to have had pet cats as young children, or their mothers kept the animals during their pregnancies. Torrey is now testing antibiotics against the feline parasite Toxoplasma gondii to treat schizophrenia.

In other words, he's forund a correlation and now he's testing for causation. There's no real proof of his theory. Except the article goes on to say this:

Torrey advises parents not to buy pet cats for young children.

Now I have an issue. If this meme catches on, a lot of animal shelters are going to get a wave of abandoned cats and have problems adopting out cats to people with kids. And at this point, all you have is a correlation, NOT proof of causation.

I don't necessarily agree with the characterization of Venezuela's leader but other than that this NY Times editorial is spot-on.

After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.

In Argentina, Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his ability to relate to world leaders face to face, could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly to the United States under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like the president of Venezuela to steal the show.

It's amazing to remember that when Mr. Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military.

Tristero has a nice roundup of the election results here.

Shorter version: We didn't win it all but we won quite a lot. I'm particuarly pleased by the Pennsylvania voters who threw out all 8 of the foolish school board members that had tried to get ID into the school curriculum.

It's a good day to be a Democrat. But let's not get cocky. The 2006 and 2008 elections will be much more important.

Not good at all.

What does it mean? Too soon to tell. But I have a feeling that somebody is trying to force countries like Jordan, which have been more or less on the sidelines of recent conflicts and relatively pro-West, into a more active stance.

People For the American Way has it, by way of the ASZ:

On today’s 700 Club, Rev. Pat Robertson took the opportunity to strongly rebuke voters in Dover, PA who removed from office school board members who supported teaching faith-based "intelligent design" and instead elected Democrats who opposed bringing up the possibility of a Creator in the school system’s science curriculum.

Rev. Robertson warned the people of Dover that God might forsake the town because of the vote.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there."

It seems to me that petty, vindictive, and spiteful are generally not words one would use to describe God no matter what your beliefs. Yet that's the picture Robertson is painting here. He makes God sound more like a 5 year old who's been told 'no' than the all-powerful Creator of the universe.

I think it says much more about Robertson than anything else.

Haven't done this in a while ... here's my totally random 10 from iTunes today:

I Like It Like That - Tito Puente
Bon Voyage - Vangelis
Hear the Voices - The Manhattan Transfer
The Safety Dance - Men Without Hats
Zanzibar - Billy Joel
With Every Breath I Take - City of Angels (Original Broadway Cast)
Land Of Confusion - Phil Collins
I Guess I'll Miss The Man - Pippin (Original Broadway Cast)
H.M.S. Pinafore - My Gallant Crew, Good Morning - Gilbert & Sullivan
Everyday - Phil Collins

by way of KRON-4:

O'Reilly reacted to San Franciscans approval of Proposition I, which discourages military recruiters on public high school and college campuses.

He advised President George W. Bush to react by withdrawing any military protection for the city. "...If al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead," O'Reilly said.

On the one hand, jerky people are going to make jerky statements, and calling them out can make the jerks seem more important than they are.

On the other hand, it is important to call jerky people on their jerkiness, because silence can equal assent. And saying that it's OK to bomb San Francisco is not OK.

Coit Tower, for those unfamiliar with it, is a memorial honoring San Francisco firefighters.

.

Shir l'Shalom still makes me cry.

Busy week; exam tomorrow, case study & presentation Wednesday, another exam next week, other projects due on the horizon.

In the meantime, Digby's got a few good ones -- taking on habeas corpus, Wal-Mart and Target, not to mention the lies of GW Bush.

Plus of course all the usual suspects in the blogroll.

And if you're a cat person, head on over to NTodd's place; one of his kitties is dying & I think he'd appreciate some well-wishers.

Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has posted a handy list of things to do if protecting your personal information is important to you. It's worth checking out.

Thanks Kevin, well put:

Torture should be flatly illegal because that's the message we want to send both to our own people and to the rest of the world. Legal torture should be reserved for regimes like Cuba and North Korea, not the United States of America.

However, in the fantastically unlikely 24-esque event that we capture a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking atomic bomb, he's going to get tortured regardless. The torturer will immediately get pardoned by the president for doing so, and would be unanimously acquitted by a jury even if he weren't. And I'm fine with that.

So please. Enough with the idiotic ticking time bomb already. If we're going to talk about torture, let's talk about how it's used in the real world.

Which one of these is NOT a liar?

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

No wonder they didn't want to be under oath in front of Congress.

One of the straps tore off my school knapsack today. Considering how heavy my laptop is, I'm not too surprised; it was bound to happen sooner or later. But I'm bummed because it was my PalmSource knapsack, and it'll be a long time before I see nice schwag like that again.

Today is Howard Dean's birthday.

There's a birthday wishes thread over at dKos, if you feel inclided to leave the good doctor some birthday greetings.

"I'm from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party'' is still one of my favorite political quotes ever.

I know a lot of people are extremely fond of Craig's List, but I've found Freecycle to be as good as, or even better than, CL when it comes to finding a new home for stuff. The 'catch' is, you can't get cash for your stuff. You have to give it away. I suppose it's deeply "hippie dippy Californian" but it works.

Goodwill is excellent for rehoming many things (plus you get a nice tax deduction), but there's some stuff they don't take. Moving boxes, for example. I hate throwing perfectly good (and not inexpensive) boxes away when a move is done. Twice now I've tried posting ads on CL to get rid of our boxes after a move, and didn't get any takers. Today, in less than three hours, I found a willing taker for all our extra boxes on Freecycle. And the nice guy who took them promised to Freecycle the boxes in his turn after his move was done. So, the boxes get reused, I feel good and get some space in my living room back. All is well.

If you've got some stuff you don't want to just throw away, and can't find a new home for it on your own, take a look at Freecycle.

You never know what you're going to find in a morning's click through a chain of links. Today's unexpected find was Vassar Blogs.

Looking at the list of fellow Vassar bloggers, I realized I vaguely remember a guy named Taegan in my class, but until today I had no clue he was THE Taegan Goddard of Political Wire.

The list is highly skewed to the Class of 2000 and younger, but it's still a neat little resource for us Vassar folk. I hope the list continues to grow.

I don't often agree with Dick Morris, but he's entirely right here:

Special-interest legislation doesn’t get much more obnoxious than the bill now making its way though Congress to clamp down on students and former students who want to refinance their loans at lower interest rates. They are about to be severely punished for seeking not only an education but a debt-free life afterwards.

While homeowners can refinance their mortgages as often as they want and relieve themselves of high-interest debt when rates cycle downward, student and former-student debtors are only permitted to refinance once for the lifetime of the loan! And now the House is considering legislation that would stop students who are in school from keeping their current interest rate of 4.75 percent and would instead force them to pay 7.9 percent, creating a lifetime burden entirely unjustified by the lending market.

Of course, since I'm dependent on student loans to finance my grad school education right now, you could call me biased, and you'd be right. But even so, it's ridiculous that you can't refinance student loans the same way you can any other loan.

Hat tip: Kevin Drum (whose trackbacks still seem to be broken).

I managed to miss most of the House debate last night due to a cable box that seems to be flaking out (Comcast is coming Tuesday). But I did catch the last hour or so. I'm not exactly a CSPAN junkie, but it seems to me to be quite the piece of political theater. I had no idea who John Murtha was before 48 hours ago, but his gravitas and sincereity is fantastic. I wish we'd seen more of him in the past. All last night needed was some better scriptwriters, a few cute young House interns for jiggles, and a happy ending, and Hollywood would have loved it.

Seriously, though, what did it all mean? I don't know. Supposedly the Republicans introduced the 'get out now' resolution to embarrass the Democrats. True, now everyone can go into the 06 election cycle and say 'See, 400+ members of the House voted against getting out, so we must Stay The CourseTM'. Whether that's really worth anything is questionable.

NTodd has a good take on things, but I suspect we will not see Murtha's resolution coming to the floor anytime soon. The House leadership won't see any benefit in allowing debate over a proposal that's acutally reasonable, now that they've had their chance to make a calculated political gesture.

I saw the documentary 'The War Room' when it first came out. It was a fascinating look at how Presidential elections work. But ultimately, it was about politics, not policy. When the election was won, the war room disbanded.

Contrast that with this:

A war-room defense was "something we did well during the campaign," said Nicolle Wallace, Bush's communications director. "Maybe incorrectly, we had hoped or presumed that wouldn't be necessary after the election."

It is. The war room now is back, staffed with many of the same people who ran it in 2004, led by the Boy Genius himself, Karl Rove.

Campaigns are about selling a candidate. That's fine. After the election, especially after the re-election, is it too much to ask that the focus be on actually governing the country?

The problem facing Bush is not that he didn't sell well enough. It's that his policy on Iraq stinks and needs to be deep-sixed immediately. No matter how much the new "War Room" tries to spin and smear, it's not going to change the essential problem here.

Wow, I go out to study for a few hours and all sorts of stuff hits the fan in Israel.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will quit his ruling Likud ahead of snap elections and form a new centrist party.

[snip]

Sharon will tear apart the movement he helped found to break from the far-right Likud "rebels" who opposed his withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip and potentially free him to give up more land that Palestinians seek for a state.

But the 77-year-old's gamble is possibly the biggest of a military and political career built on risk-taking and polls indicate it is uncertain he can turn the popularity of the Gaza pullout into electoral victory.

Dumping the hardliners and moving towards the center. Good move. I hope it succeeds.

It will be interesting to see how the tinfoil hat crew responds. So many of them are convinced that Sharon is some kind of evil puppet master; I wonder how they'll spin this?

On the weekend before Thanksgiving six years ago, I bought my first-ever car: a Saturn SL2. It's a great car that has taken me safely through two nasty accidents, still gets 30+ MPGs on the highway, and is very reliable. I will probably drive it until it falls apart.

So to wake up to the news that the Spring Hill, TN plant where my Saturn was made is slated to be closed was a little sad. It's been years since Saturn was the "different kind of car company" it started out as. These days, Saturns are made in a number of GM plants, have reverted to steel frames, and are generally Just Another GM Brand. When the day finally comes that I do get another car, it's not likely it will be a Saturn.

I wish I'd been able to get to see the Spring Hill plant in its heyday.

RIP JFK.

Don't let it be forgot
that once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot

Jacqueline Kennedy (as she was then called) said it best in the Life Magazine interview of her, the week after JFK was assassinated:

There'll be great presidents again ... but there'll never be another Camelot again. Once, the more I read of history, the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes.

Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the book and lyrics to Camelot and in whose autobiography I found the quote above, said that he was never able to watch a production of Camelot again afterwards.

This will be the first holiday season since 2001 that I'm NOT working retail. For that, among many other things, I am extremely thankful.

I'm not so thankful for the Economics exam that I have in a few hours, though. More later.

UPDATE: Exam over. Typos in blog post corrected. Time to relax & enjoy myself for a hour or so. After that, I need to start cooking for tomorrow!

Well, we've been here a month already and the place is still not fully set up. But the living dining room are fit to be shown. So here's a partial tour of the place (click through to Flickr for full sized pix if you really care).

Half of the living / dining room.

The other half. Tommy's up on the table, wondering where all the yummy food we had yesterday went to.

This room's 4th wall is all window & sliding doors, taking you out onto our terace. The terrace itself only has a bike and a storage crate on it currently, but here's the view looking more or less west:

And looking east, you see this:

There's little things about the place that I'm not thrilled with, like how small the kitchen is and the lack of water pressure in some faucets, but overall we're quite happy here.

As I was adding the photos for the blog post below to Flickr today, I realized I was bumping up against some of the limits on my free account. So I've upgraded to a Flickr Pro account. For less than $25 a year, it's quite the bargain.

Now I have to decide if I'll move everything that's currently in the on-site Gallery over to Flickr. The main issue would be having to retype all the photo titles and descriptions; with a few hundred pix involved, that would be quite a drag.

I did put some shots online that never made it into the current gallery, like the photos of my trip to Utah in 2002.

Right in front of the office window is one of Bear's favorite spots in the new place.

Currently making its way around the blogosphere:

Jews too were justifiably, though unnecessarily, persecuted for their beliefs and inability to conform to social norms. The great injustice was the persecution of the conversos in Spain, who were sincere converts to Christianity.

In other words, it's OK to perescute Jews because, silly people, they won't give up their beliefs and traditions. The only thing that might possibly have been inappropriate in terms of what the Jews got was the unpleasantness in Spain in the late 1400s, when Spanish Jews were forced on pain of death or expulsion to convert to Catholicism and then some of the converts were persecuted.

I'd like to come up with some witty but still crushing piece of repartee that simultaneously mocks and totally refutes "Brother" Judd's assertion, but his delusional self-importance is overwhelming. I'm ashamed that this ... person ... is a part of my species.

I'm also not going to link to the originating site, because the last thing he deserves is more web traffic, even the pathetic amount that this site might drive his way. Click through via Atrios or Digby if you absolutely must read the rest.

I've seen posts here and there warning that immigration -- specifically over our southern border -- is going to be a hot-button issue for the next election cycle, and I have to say that I agree. Two stories today point the way.

In the first, I note a rising number of attempts to link not just the Mexican border, but Mexico itself, with terrorism.

For more than a year, the shirts and pants worn by agents and inspectors with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have been made in Mexico, and some complaints were made when they were initially distributed. The uniforms are supplied by VF Solutions of Nashville, Tenn., which subcontracts its work to plants in the United States, Mexico, Canada and the Dominican Republic.

Do people care about the huge amount of technology outflow from America and how that affects security, or our stunning lack of energy independence, or any number of other issues that have a long-term effect on national security? No. They care that the Border Patrol's uniforms are ... gasp ... MADE IN MEXICO. Why is "Made in Mexico" bad but "Made In Canada" or "Made in the Dominican Republic" not bad?

Agents and lawmakers are concerned about the consequences if the uniforms for agents charged with combating illegal immigration fall into the hands of criminals or terrorists.

I don't like pointing fingers and yelling "RACISM!" but more and more, it seems that's what's going on here. A concerted attempt is being made to make Americans scared of the hordes of short, swarthy, non-English speaking masses teeming below our borders.

The second article is actually about disarray in the Bush White House, but what I find notable is this bit:

Not ready to throw in the towel and declare the boss a lame duck, the Bushies are hoping two issues can help firm up their base and perhaps make inroads with centrists who voted for Bush: the anticipated confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and a plan to reinforce the border with Mexico to help stop illegal immigration.

This week Bush will begin to press the border security issue.

It seems to me that this administration is feeling the political tide turning against them, and in their increasingly-desperate attempts to staunch the flow, they are falling back on an old friend, the race card. And sadly, it will probably help shore up support, because although almost nobody will admit it, racism still lurks in many a heart in America.

I'll be thinking more about the issue of immegration and posting some more thoughts on it in the not-too-distant future.

UPDATE: looks like the plan is kicking into action.

President Bush is trying to build support for a comprehensive immigration strategy — and mollify conservatives wary of his guest worker plan for foreigners.

Apparently President Bush gave a speech about his Iraq policy this morning. I slept through it. But here's some salient commentary from one of the visitors to TWN:

The Israelis have pretty much proven for 50+ years they won't take any crap and won't back down in the face of terrorism and aggression. Has their toughness immunized them from car bombers? Has their consistency in not bowing to terrorism made it go away? You have to push back against enemies such as these but it means more than making them die or flee at the barrel of a gun. How you deal with the causes of their violence is beyond my understanding but somebody gets paid a lot of money to think about how to do it and get it done. We could have 250,000 troops in Iraq for the next 25 years and every day of the week, 365 days of every goddamn year there would be attacks and killings inflicted on them. Given that reality WTF is "victory"? What is "winning"? I won't hold my breath waiting for the Right to define either term and how to get there, they don't know the answer.

And speaking of Israel,what's going on over there today?

Veteran statesman Shimon Peres announced on Wednesday he was throwing his support behind Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Israel's March election and ending his own political activity in the Labor Party.

Peres, 82, told a news conference he was making the move in the interests of Middle East peace.

Both Israel and America are caught in some difficult situations and need to make some real changes to get out of them. Notice something different about what's going on in Israel? They're actually shaking up the established order and trying to do things differently. Whether they will succeed is anybody's guess, but I honor the fact that they're trying to break out of the current stasis.

Frankly, I'm starting to think there'll be peace in Jerusalem before there'll be peace in Baghdad.