"We are what we say we are not."
Whenever a Democrat tells the public what his party "is not" he's revealing to them what it is. John Kerry fell into this habit often, saying the Democratic Party "was not" weak on national defense which only succeeded in reminding voters of the party's historic uselessness on security issues.
On Meet the Press last Sunday, Howard Dean returned to this poisoned well, protesting a little too much at what the "party was not." He said, "We're not the party of abortion," and "We're not the party of gay marriage." An appropriate response from moderator Tim Russert would have been a loud and sustained chuckle.
Who declared it President's Day?
Today we celebrate Washington's Birthday. Yet on every calendar I own, today is noted as President's Day, where we supposedly honor both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the latter of whom's birthday was the 12th. (Another notable President, Ronald Reagan, would have been 94 on the 6th.) Per Matthew Spaulding, a Heritage Foundation scholar, in today's Federalist Brief (No. 05-08):
"Although it was celebrated as early as 1778, and by the early 19th Century was second only to the Fourth of July as a patriotic holiday, Congress did not officially recognize Washington's Birthday as a national holiday until 1870. The Monday Holiday Law in 1968--applied to executive branch departments and agencies by Richard Nixon's Executive Order 11582 in 1971--moved the holiday from February 22 to the third Monday in February. Section 6103 of Title 5, United States Code, currently designates that legal federal holiday as 'Washington's Birthday.' Contrary to popular opinion, no action by Congress or order by any President has changed 'Washington's Birthday' to 'President's Day'." So how did this come to be known popularly as "President's Day"?
Summer hockey?
Should there ever be another NHL season, Darryl Reaugh, color man for the Dallas Stars, may have hit a motherload of an idea on moving the time of the season, with the help of Tony Fireoved, Stars Executive V.P. of Corporate Sales:
Envision this.
It's June 19th, there's a little less than a month remaining in the regular season. The Sharks are in town. The temperature is 85 at game time. Outside of American Airlines Center, fans have been enjoying the festival atmosphere complete with bbq grilling and a live band. Inside, first place in the West is on the line.
Crazy? The gist of the the column is that NHL seasons would be contained with a single calendar year, starting some time after the Super Bowl and ending in August. No NFL to compete with, only half of the year is spent competing with the NBA (not only for eyeballs and fans' wallets, but for space in venues), and by the time the NHL season ends, MLB still has half a season to go. I'm intrigued. Too bad Gary Bettman continues to show his inability to vault the NHL higher in the collective minds' eye of sports fans in the U.S. He's allowed ESPN/ABC to slide on their television contracts (at least Fox was willing to put NHL games on the same weekend as NFL games). He's shown an inability to get the trade dispute resolved, and was forced to cancel the 2004-05 season. There's no way he would ever consider something like what Reaugh and Fireoved propose.
The usurping judiciary
It truly is quite amazing how prescient our Founding Fathers were:
"It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression...that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary;...working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped." --Thomas Jefferson
Congratulations to the NHL and NHLPA
The Stanley Cup is the oldest professional sports trophy in North America, a fact proudly touted in the sports world by the NHL. Now professional hockey can lay claim to another famous first in North American professional sports: it is the first to cancel an entire season. I was raised on LSU football, and later, during the Dale Brown glory years, LSU basketball. When I was a student at LSU, the Tigers began their dominance of the College World Series in the 1990s. Growing up in Baton Rouge, we had no professional sports teams, only the New Orleans Saints, an hour's drive away. Doesn't sound like much, but that hour's drive may as well have been an ocean. I didn't pay attention to the Saints until I was a resident of the New Orleans metroplex, and while I attended a few games, most were at someone else's expense. I got in to hockey my last year in college, when I had my own place and cable television. ESPN's National Hockey Night brought me at least a game a week, and I grew addicted. Maybe it was all the attention Pavel Bure received, but I found myself following the Vancouver Canucks, and thrilled to their Stanley Cup bid in 1994. Taking the Rangers to seven games, it was probably the greatest Stanley Cup series I've watched since I began to love the game. My first NHL game was in 1996, when my spouse and I ventured from New Orleans to Dallas to see the Stars play the Canucks. It was a memorable weekend for several reasons: it was my first time in Dallas; Dallas saw a big snow storm the night of our arrival, leaving us "trapped" in our hotel most of the next day; we saw our some friends we hadn't seen in three years; and the Canucks walloped the Stars. My wife was recruited by a Dallas law firm, and in July 1998, we made the move from New Orleans. I was at the first home game of the 1998-99 season for the Stars, and I watched or listened to every game that year. I stayed up all night long to see Brett Hull score the third-overtime goal (and sorry, Buffalo, it was a goal) to deliver the Stars franchise its first-ever Stanley Cup. I've been to a few games each year since then, mostly thanks to recruiting and client development efforts on the part of my wife's now-former firm. But I've also paid my own way on more than one occasion to see the Stars play. I've rooted for Mo, and Eddie the Eagle, Turk and Nieuwey. And now the players of the NHLPA have thrown away all of the good will they have built up over the years, not only with myself, but with millions of other hockey fans. Yes, I lay the bulk of the blame for this cancellation at the feet of the players and their union. If they were willing to concede to a salary cap at the eleventh hour, why were they not willing to do so earlier in the lost season, when there was still a season to be salvaged? Why are they letting this season go away because of 6.5 million dollars per team. That's right. That is the difference in the total salary-cap figures the teams want to impose, and the players are willing to accept. Six-point-five million. That's about a couple hundred thousand per player on each team. That's pathetic. As I've noted before, these guys get paid to play a game. They get to do as their profession in life something millions of people wish they could do as well for just one afternoon. We made you. Sure, you have great talent and skill. No one denies that. But where would you be without hockey fans? Playing pick-up games on the town's frozen pond in between gutting fish or delivering packages? Professional sports run on fans. Professional sports gain television contracts to reach more fans because advertisers are willing to spend money to reach those fans in an attempt to sell products. No fans means no professional sport. I'm not saying the team owners and the league get a pass, please don't misunderstand. I'm a good little capitalist, and believe both the owners and the players should try to make as much money as possible. But everyone negotiates their salary; first, when you gain employment, then thereafter based on your performance and later experience. It's the same whether you're working at McDonald's, coding for a Fortune 100 company, or playing a professional sport. And sometimes, the business just doesn't have enough money in the bag to pay you what you want--and believe you deserve--to get paid. Maybe the answer isn't a salary cap. Maybe some of these smaller market teams in the NHL should be allowed to shrivel and die, even in the birthplace of hockey, O Canada. That would be good capitalism. It would also mean a smaller marketplace in the NHL for players, so maybe the players and their union should think twice before embarking on a course of action which would lead to that outcome, as fewer of them would be employed. When the Stars began play in Dallas in 1993, many people thought they'd never see the NHL below the Mason-Dixon line. Today, you have five NHL teams in the old South: Dallas, the Florida Panthers, the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Nashville Predators, and the Carolina Hurricanes. Two of those teams have won the Stanley Cup. Those people who thought "What is hockey doing in Texas?" must be out of their minds wondering "What is hockey doing in Tampa Bay?" Never mind the fact that the Lightning now have their name on the Cup. Three years ago, however, Tampa Bay would have been a poster child for the NHL chopping block. The Ottawa Senators have always been so (in my mind, at least). After a wildly successful inaugural season, attendance has been disappointing at Nashville games. I'm not hearing much from the Columbus Blue Jackets, and I can't imagine that market supporting a NHL team in the long run, unless they can consistently begin making long playoff runs. Maybe some of these teams should never have been allowed to be. Maybe some of them should be allowed to fold. None of that really matters now. There will be no 2004-05 season for the National Hockey League. A suitable compromise could not be reached by the two sides. Both sides have gotten rich at the expense of the one thing they cannot afford to lose: fans. It will take years for the NHL/NHLPA to win back the fans it is going to lose with this utter nonsense. I don't particularly care for basketball, other than to actually play it. The NBA holds no appeal to me, even less so now that I've actually attended a NBA game. While I'll watch the NFL, I don't follow a specific team, and I much prefer the college game. I think Mark Cuban and Jerry Jones are both incredible egomaniacs, and could care less about the Mavericks or Cowboys while either is running his respective show. That leaves me with hockey and baseball. My winter, as far as sports are concerned, is shot. I think MLB (talk about a league needing a salary cap) spring season starts next month...
iScrolling
I just installed the temporary version of Daniel Becker's iScroll2 on my 12-inch PowerBook G4 1 GHz. I'm loving it. Provided it proves stable, I'll load the permanent version. It's certainly worth checking out for pre-2005 PowerBook owners.
MT-TypeKey dual login?
So I just left a comment, in reply to one left by Raena, and a thought occurred to me: If I'm logged in to my Movable Type installation already, why can't I already be logged in to my TypeKey account as well? It just seems silly to have to go through a separate login procedure to leave comments on my own blog. Speaking of Movable Type, the web site has undergone somewhat of a makeover, and the old .org domain redirects to the link just noted. The new menu across the top left reflects all of Six Apart's products, including the newly-purchased LiveJournal.
In my right mind
So I've been thinking about Daniel Pink's article, "Revenge of the Right Brain", over the past couple of days, and it's amazing how much my own feelings toward a future career mirror his piece. One would have to consult my parents as to when I may have first exhibited artistic sensibilities, but as I grew up, I was very fond of writing, drawing, and music. I was always doodling, tracing, sketching. Making up stories, or just bits of stories. In seventh grade, I started playing the clarinet in band, was quickly moved to the bass clarinet by Mr. Dawson, our fantastic teacher-director, and continued all the way through high school. I did not attempt to gain a music scholarship to LSU; I had a partial academic scholarship, and the Air Force wanted to pay the rest of my way, so long as I was willing to be an electrical engineer. By the end of my freshman year, my Air Force scholarship was gone. My grades tanked, and they yanked it. I was not a party animal, I did not go hog-wild upon becoming a college student. I simply goofed off. Looking back, maybe there was a subconscious effort on my part to sabotage my academic and future professional careers. I was a right-brain person, suddenly thrust in to a left-brain world. No longer burdened with studies related to engineering, I remained in Air Force ROTC, and switched majors: criminal justice. When LSU's Criminal Justice department was terminated as a separate division the following year, swallowed by the larger Sociology department, I was forced to change majors again. Not particularly interested in a sociology degree, I opted instead for political science, a decidedly more right-brained course of study. I minored in history. I excelled in English classes, testing out of Freshman English 101, or whatever it's technically called. The large part of my professional career since college, however, once again led me in to left-brain land. I have been involved with computer technology, troubleshooting, and support, for over a dozen years. When I was laid off in October of 2003, I was both devastated and optimistic. My son was only two months old, and I was looking forward to spending a lot of time with him, which has been great. Perhaps this was the opportunity to move in to a new field as well. I have not kept completely out of the right-brain sphere these past twelve years, however. I began volunteering as a copy editor with ATPM in the summer of 1998, and began writing the occasional review or opinion piece shorly thereafter. Today, I'm the Managing Editor, and quite happy to work with the fine staff of our little publication, all of whom do what they do because we enjoy the Macintosh platform. I also believe a goodly number of the staffers are like myself, and enjoy having this right-brain outlet, compared with the left-brain professions they may be involved with. This blog, like its predecessor, is nothing more than an outlet for those right-brain skills yearning for exercise. Which brings us back to Pink's article, in which he hypothesizes that the coming "age" will be devoted to more right-brain activities, as opposed to where we currently are now, and have been, where more left-brain occupations have reigned supreme. I'm all for it. I feel as though I have a couple of books in me, and I love the editing thing. Just ask some of my online friends and acquaintances how many times I've annoyed them over misspellings and other grammatical gaffes on their blogs. Likewise, they are quick to point out my own brain burps, in large part because they know I care about such things. (Though with Lawson, I suspect it's just out of spite.) There is a part of me which has enjoyed my past dozen years in the tech field, and I would heartily welcome another job in that arena. Yet another part of me yearns for something different, something more right-brained, and this is reflected in some of my Monster search agents. In the mean time, I'll concentrate on editing, writing, digital photography, and most of all, being a dad.
Cause a ruckus
Are those Vespa scooters a tad too girly for you? Get a Big Ruckus, courtesy of Honda. [Via Wired.]
New archives
Thanks to inspiration from Lee, and code from Chris, I have the master archive index page I've been wanting. You will note there is no longer a monthly archive list in the sidebar. You can always get to the site archives by clicking on that "Archives" button in the navigation menu at the top right of each page.
About your Social Security "account"
You don't have to be a financial wizard to know that Social Security is a lousy investment. Unlike the money you deposit in a bank or salt away in an IRA, you don't own the money you pay into Social Security. You have no legal right to get those dollars back, and when you die you can't pass them on to your heirs. Nor can you use your Social Security account before you retire -- you can't borrow against it and you can't cash it in. You aren't allowed to put the money into a balanced portfolio. You can't even watch as the interest accumulates, since your Social Security nest egg doesn't earn any interest.
Your nest egg, in fact, doesn't even exist. Because Social Security is financed on a pay-as-you-go system, the dollars withheld from your paycheck today aren't being saved in an account with your name. They are immediately paid out to retirees. The benefits you receive when you retire will be funded by the payroll taxes then being collected. But because the ratio of workers paying in to retirees taking out is steadily shrinking -- it has plummeted from 16 to 1 in 1940 to 3 to 1 today -- Social Security is headed for a crisis.
[...]
This of course is the background to President Bush's campaign to create personal investment accounts, which for the first time would allow workers to own and invest -- really own, really invest -- part of the Social Security tax taken from their paychecks. With personal accounts many of the features that make Social Security such a crummy deal for today's workers would be transformed into a package most of them could support. A social-welfare program created in the age of gramophones and the Model A would be updated for a world of iPods and superhighways.
But to many Democrats, such talk is heresy. Letting Americans own some of their Social Security would be too risky, they argue - another way of saying that Americans are too dumb to be entrusted with their own money. Much better to continue entrusting it to Washington, which has managed Social Security so skillfully that workers younger than 50 know they will never get back in benefits what they are paying into the system now. (Perhaps that explains why 58 percent of Americans under 50 support personal accounts, according to a new poll by Zogby International.) I've said it before, and I'll say it again: can we get politicans brave enough to just kill Social Security once and for all? Pick a year, grandfather in everyone born prior to that year, and those born after are on their own for retirement. Year after year, as those in the program die off, the amount required to sustain Social Security will dwindle, and ultimately, two or three generations from now, no longer exist. Why is this such a hard concept to grasp? Forget partial privatization of this government-run Ponzi scheme, just kill it!
On being the opposition
Republican control of the White House, both houses of Congress, and state houses gives the GOP its strongest national position since the Eisenhower period of the 1950s. As Democrats ponder their role in opposition, they might consider how their predecessors conducted themselves during that time.
Democratic congressional leaders Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson pursued a strategy in opposition which, down the road, paid long-term dividends for their party. They supported the Eisenhower administration on national security issues during a dangerous time -- intervening with the White House when necessary to stop mistakes such as Vice President Richard Nixon's proposal to use nuclear weapons to bail out French forces at Dienbienphu. They observed the general rule that a president deserved to have the nominees he wanted for key administration and judicial appointments and questioned them only selectively.
Congressional Democrats of that period did, however, use their investigative authority to highlight episodes of public/private corruption. Most importantly, they began preparing the ground for landmark domestic legislation -- which ultimately became the Great Society -- even though they lacked majorities at the time to pass it. In 1965, after President Johnson's huge victory over Barry Goldwater, Democrats promptly passed the agenda they had nurtured during the Eisenhower years.
The party's visible leaders and voices are pursuing an entirely different strategy today. It generally amounts to angry opposition on all issues all the time. President Bush's Iraq intervention was problematic. But had Mr. Kerry been elected president, he would be following essentially the same path today in Iraq as Bush -- that is, to build an elected Iraqi government's capacity to maintain sufficient security that American forces could leave. Yet most Democrats' reaction to the first essential step in that strategy, the successful completion of elections, has been to dismiss the elections' importance, to charge Mr. Bush with "having no exit strategy," or to demand he set a hard timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal.
For many years Democrats, more than Republicans, pointed to the need to reform Social Security for the long term. Social Security, after all, was a Democratic invention and a cornerstone of the party's commitment to economic security. Yet, in the face of the Bush reform initiative, many senior Democrats have chosen simply to deny the need for change. That is not a viable policy or political position. Democrats are quite right to challenge the notion of partial privatization of the system. But they have an equal obligation to offer an alternative reform plan, the components of which are self-evident and which would require little public sacrifice. Why not seize the opportunity the Bush initiative presents and move public opinion toward a Democratic alternative on Social Security? [Emphasis added. This article may required a paid subscription after 2/17/05. --R]
Long distance record in Iraq
The Toad reports on a new long-distance sniping record in Iraq, by a U.S. Marine sniper. I like Brian's thought:
I wonder what goes through the minds of terrorist scum...when their fellow thugs are being systematically plucked out of the gene pool from that distance. Indeed, snipers are extremely effective psychological weapons of war. Not to mention, the most cost-effective weapon available on the battlefield, even with their expensive training. A well-trained sniper with a few missions under his belt is worth his weight in gold, silver, platinum, and any other precious metal. Combined. For the math-impaired reading the story linked above, a thousand yards is more than half a mile.
Bayesian Logic intro
Computerworld has an article on "Bayesian Logic and Filters" in their QuickStudy section this week. This is the sort of logic behind many of the spam-killing applications out there, such as SpamSieve. If you're using an anti-spam program that utilizes Bayesian logic, this article may help you understand a bit more how it works. Don't miss the sidebar on the Reverend Thomas Bayes.
Secure your Mac the NSA way
If you'd like to secure your Macintosh in the same manner as the National Security Agency, you can download a PDF explaining how here. [Via the March 2005 issue of Macworld, not yet online.]
What a Crock
Pot, that is. Over the past year, we have rediscovered the joys of cooking with a Crock-Pot. Today, I made a Weight Watchers Chili Mac recipe in ours, and it was really good. (A little on the tomato-ey side, but I think I can cut that taste down a bit next time by not draining the red beans as much.) I highly recommend the use of a Crock-Pot, especially for the cooking disadvantaged. In the morning, throw in your ingredients, set your time (4, 6, 8, or 10 hours), and when you get home later in the day, voila!, dinner is served. We've also been making a mean chicken chili dish, though I seriously doubt it's on the new Weight Watcher-friendly menus we're looking through. (Missus Phisch is back on the program, which means I'm back on the program, too, and could use the weight loss myself.) The Crock-Pot is extraordinarily versatile. My sister-in-law has cooked spare ribs in hers, and says the meat is so tender, you can pick it cleanly from the bones with your fingers. As someone who really doesn't like having to tear the meat from the bones with my teeth, this is something I'm going to have to try.
Napster needs to do the math again
See Napster's Super Bowl ads? Think you'll remember them three weeks from now? Right. Ashlee Vance dissects Napster's supposed costs, which do not take in to account the fact that most people's songs on their iPods are not from the iTunes Music Store:
From where we sit, the math doesn't break down terribly well in Napster's favor.
Let's take a look at consumer A. This consumer goes to Amazon.com and does a search for Creative - one of the Napster supported music device makers - and picks up a 20GB player for $249.99. Let's assume he keeps the device for three years, paying Napster all the time. That's $538 for the Napster service, bringing the three-year total to $788.19.
Consumer B types iPod into the Amazon.com search engine and finds a 20GB device for $299. Apple doesn't offer a subscription service, so this customer has to buy songs at the 99 cent rate or at $9.99 per album. Subtracting the price of the iPod from the $788, consumer B would have $489 left over for music. That's roughly worth 489 songs or 49 albums.
We posit that during this three-year period both Consumer A and Consumer B will actually end up with close to the same number of songs on their devices. Customers do not, as Napster suggests, pay $10,000 to fill their iPods with 10,000 songs just because the capacity is there. They take their existing music, CDs and MP3s, and put that onto the device first, then later add iTunes songs as they go along. A Napster customer would have a similar mix of old music and new downloads.
The big difference here is that after the three years are up, Consumer B has something to show for his investment. He still owns the music. If the Napster customer stops paying for the service, his music is all gone. He's paying $179 per year to rent music. This isn't high quality stuff either. It's DRM (digital rights management)-laced, low bitrate slop.
You could once buy a CD and then play that music on your computer or in your car at will. Hell, you still can. You own it. You can burn an extra copy of the disc in case it gets scratched or pass along the disc to a friend to see if they like it - just like you would with a good book. Five years from now, you will still own the CD. No one can tell you where and when you can play it.
This is not the case in the Napster subscription world. After six years, you've tossed away $1,076 for something that barely exists. Forget to pay for a month and watch your music collection disappear. (Not to mention, you're betting on the fact that Napster will even exist two years from now. At least you know that a year's subscription to the Wall Street Journal will still work in 12 months time.) I'm a CD man, myself. I like the versatility of being able to do whatever the heck I want to with the music I purchase. I know it will run aghast of some, but I still use CDs in my Pilot. Most of the time, however, the CD arrives at the phisch bowl, gets opened, ripped to MP3 format in iTunes, and is loaded in to the music library (tunaphisch) and on to the iPod (phischpod). The only tunes I've downloaded from the iTMS are the free ones I occasionally will like. That may change a bit with the new Pepsi-iTunes promo, but other than that, I do not see myself purchasing digital music directly from Apple, much less from Napster. [Via DF.]
Jeep Gladiator
While the Honda Ridgeline remains the practical object of my truck-lust, the concept Jeep Gladiator has vaulted to the top of my "if money and practically were no objects" wish list. As one can see from the photos, there's no getting a baby/toddler car seat in to this thing, and the canvas roof would be impractical in the dry, 100-degree-plus heat of summer in north Texas. Still, I love the simple lines of the interior, as well as the retro-yet-modern utilitarian lines of the exterior. It's a great-looking truck.
