Sarah Davies

Mark Kleiman and Andrew Sullivan are discussing who in America has moral authority. My immediate reaction on reading the headline was the Dalai Lama. He fills cheering stadiums to capacity in Seattle, while most Seattlites, I imagine, would as soon spit on the pope as look at him. However, Kleiman clarifies:

I took this to mean both “moral authority you are prepared to accept” and “enough public standing to be an actual force.” Tom Schelling, for example, has the intellectual force, the moral clarity, and the nerve, but not the notoriety, nor the impulse to seek it out.

That seems to square with the Dalai Lama more or less, but in reading some of the candidates I saw that “in America” is meant to mean “live in America” not “have influence in America.”

A few of the nominees so far:

• Barack Obama
• Bob Dylan
• John Lewis
• Jimmy Carter
• Ralph Nader
• Bill Clinton
• Colin Powell
• Jon Stewart
• Oprah Winfrey
• Al Gore
• Elie Wiesel
• Tom Brokaw
• Bill Gates
• Warren Buffett

(I linked two of them because I had never heard of them, and assuming my audience is roughly the same age/education level as I, you probably haven’t either)

I’m loathe to accept the moral authority of politicians or the richest people in the world. Of those listed, Jon Stewart would be the closest to having moral authority for me. Personally, I’d also include Dan Savage, Andrew Sullivan, and Cornell West, though none of them fulfill the public standing requirement, and obviously much of the country would disagree. I don’t think there is any one person who would fit the bill for such a divided country.

Thoughts?

Barry’s New Posse – Rigoberta Menchu Tum, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Betty Williams, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Jody Williams

I was shocked to find out this morning that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Like some “unnamed white house aides,” my initial reaction was to check the date and make sure it wasn’t April 1st. Nominations closed only two weeks after he was sworn into office.

Last I checked, we’re mired in two wars that have no chance of success because we have no clue what success looks like, we have the highest military spending in the history of the world (over seven times as much as the next highest spender in 2008), and we’re refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama because we luuuurv China. Peace? Not so much.

However, if the intent of the award is not, in fact, to award achievement, but rather to advance the cause of global peace, then the question before the committee becomes “who has the most influence? who can do the most good with the blessing of the well-regarded Nobel name?”. And I don’t think that any of you, dear readers, don’t know the answer to that question.

Twitscoop scans twitter in real time for words that are suddenly becoming popular. This screenshot was taken 90 minutes after the ruling. I think it tells its own story, but I would like to add my appreciation that the first three readable words in the cloud are “ban bigots bullshit”. A rallying cry if I’ve ever heard one!

Since when has due process been a “legal tradition“? I’m sorry, Mr. Glaberson, but this isn’t like dancing around a Maypole, or saying “trick or treat.” Using a gavel in courtrooms is a tradition. Locking up humans indefinitely without any hope of a trial is a gross violation of the very foundations on which our country has rested for the last 232 years.

Lawrence Lessig is trying to rebuild trust in congress. Wikipedia and Lonely Planet don’t accept advertising money because it would breed mistrust. Parents don’t trust the health system that tells them to vaccinate their children because the health system has conflicts of interest, with many of their directors receiving yearly payments from drug companies. Think about the phrase “classic tobacco science” – corrupted science.

The point isn’t that money is evil or politicians are corrupt, the point is that dependence on money breeds mistrust.

So what if politicians and scientists argue that even though it might breed mistrust, it really doesn’t change the way they behave? Well, congress has had common sense public policy questions that they just get wrong. Think copyright, think recommended sugar intake, think global warming. Are they idiots? Or are they guided by dependency on money?

Bribery wasn’t even a crime in congress until 1853. Is today the same? We do have a corruption today, but it’s a corruption of a different kind. We have legislators of integrity. Their actions are legal and do not constitute ethics violations. But the consequence of being dependent on money from the institutions you regulate breeds mistrust. It breeds the common view that money buys results in congress. Congress members become addicts. They are always thinking about how to get more contributions. The lobbyists are the pushers, and they are increasingly productive at buying results.

The problem is not big government or regulation. The problem is mistrust. There were probably more people who believed in the British crown during the revolution than believe in congress now, but congress continually claims that it’s not because of the money.

We must have citizen funded elections. Lessig started Change Congress and called for a strike for change. They asked for people to pledge to stop contributing to congressional candidates who are not committed to citizen funded elections.

We must not only have good behavior in our daily lives, we must be good citizens and demand good behavior from our government. We have lost faith in congress. We have lost trust in congress. We have a democracy crisis. It’s not that this is the most important problem, it’s that this is the root of the most important problems we have. We must solve this problem first.

How can we survive the near term influence of K Street? Obama says you can’t work for his administration and then go work for the people you were regulating during his administration, but you can as soon as he leaves office. Our ethics aren’t strong enough.

Baratunde Thurston is asking about Conyers. The numbers could be interpreted a different way. Lessig says he is a supporter of Conyers. There are two kinds of problems out there. There is actual corruption, which does not apply to Conyers. Then there is the good souls problem. There is the problem that the money he accepted breeds doubt and mistrust. Lessig holds Conyers to a very high standard, and because of his respect for the man, he holds him to a higher standard that gets rid of doubt, that doesn’t create the skepticism.

What is the difference between the amount corporations give and the amount people give? Even if everyone went on strike, would we make a difference? Yes, we will make a difference, because the republican party is in trouble, and the democrats know that, and the 2010 elections will be a fierce battle for cash.

Could it be that the solution to corruption is civil disobedience? The only way this happens is if non-politicians are behind us. The only way we can reform this is from the outside. We want to inspire hackers to help us, to build the pressure we need to change it.

Then and only then are you allowed to run around town picking up your free coffee, ice cream, and vibrator.

She doesn’t believe in the American government. As a great American once said, “Change doesn’t come from Washington, it comes to Washington”. We as Americans would be remiss to elect a person who believed in our political system as it exists now. We need dramatic change, and Sarah Palin has demonstrated time and again that she supported Alaska’s secession from the United States. This qualifies her to take the United States in a new direction.

During her tenure as a governor she has learned how to avoid being corrupted by executive power. Anyone who has held a position of executive status knows how easily it can be abused. One learns very quickly how easy it would be to get people fired, particularly those who have custody disputes with people in your family. Good people, people with small town values would never abuse power they hold over others as elected officials, and would never support those who do.

She has a son in Iraq. No one with their own child being sent to an area full of Sunni insurgents and littered with IEDs could possibly deny that we need a responsible plan to end the war Iraq. Having a son in harm’s way must mean that she sees the Iraq “war” as the occupation and the war crime that it is.

She has a pregnant daughter. Good parents are deeply in touch with their children. They would never be ignorant of their child’s accidental pregnancy. Since they know about the pregnancy, they would never thrust their child onto a national stage to be eaten alive by tabloids. They would know the horrors that abstinence only education causes, and be strongly in support of comprehensive sex education. Palin let her daughter choose whether or not to keep the child, so she must support that choice for others. She must understand the difficulties young mothers face, and would always help them get the care they need.

She has a special needs baby. She must understand how important it is for the birth of a special needs baby to be overseen by doctors. She would immediately go to a hospital if she started leaking amniotic fluid, because that baby’s life hangs in the balance. She would never give a speech, drive to the airport, fly to Seattle, fly to Alaska, and then drive an hour into rural Alaska before seeking help from a doctor. That would be irresponsible and possibly deadly. She understands how much attention and care babies need from their mothers. She would support extended maternity leave, because no one would be so cruel as to go back to work three days after giving birth.

Mothers are compassionate and wise. Many have said that if all world leaders had experience as mothers, war and poverty would not exist. Mothers support peace. Mothers support choice. Mothers care for the people of their country instead of abusing them for profit. Mothers support a social safety net, so that no mother’s child goes hungry.

We need a mother in the White House for many reasons, but Sarah Palin is a warped and corrupted shell of what a mother should be. I’ve never been a Hillary supporter, but I can tell you that she learned her life lessons. Hillary took her experience as a mother, and factored it in to making her decision to be pro-choice, anti-war, and support health care for every American. I can tell you that Sarah Palin is a god damn insult to everything Hillary stood for, everything women have worked so long and so hard to achieve. Sarah Palin has experienced many things in her life. Most women base their political stances on their personal experiences. If that was the case with Sarah Palin, she would be exceptionally qualified, and I may in the future support someone with exactly her qualifications. But the fact is that despite mountains of personal experience that would cause any person without a blackened withered stone where their heart should be to become compassionate, wise, and peaceful, Sarah Palin is a bitter, sarcastic, self-serving puppet of corporations and religious zealots.

I have no problem with her qualifications, I have a problem with her.

“The US is 9 trillion dollars in debt. That’s 9 teradollars!”

- someone at the belated Giraffe Labs opening party last night

I don’t remember who said that, but once they did, the magnitude of US debt suddenly fit somewhere in my mind. It went from “it’s some really big number that I can’t even conceive of ” to “I can compare that to several different things I actually use”.

My generation (and especially my career) deals with file sizes on a daily basis. I am practically familiar with exactly how different a kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte are. I have no practical experience of the difference between $1,000,000, $1,000,000,000, and $1,000,000,000,000 dollars. I have made one financial transaction in my life over $10,000 (a Prius – totally worth it, btw).

The way we traditionally write large dollar amounts seems to me to be inefficient and confusing. Attempting to subdivide a 13 digit number into chunks I can understand is very difficult, and my guess is that most people don’t even try. So we have a government racking up debt on a scale that we can’t fit into our minds.

From now on, when talking to tech folks, I am going to make a concerted effort to talk about kilodollars, megadollars, gigadollars, and teradollars. It makes more sense, and if we all start using it, perhaps the impact of our financial decisions will be understood more clearly.

Interesting fact: The term “teradollar” currently comes up with 2,740 hits on Google, so clearly some communities have adopted it.

If you’re not getting Harper’s Weekly Review in your inbox each Tuesday, you should be. Here are some gems from today’s:

Obama … claimed victory before a crowd of almost 20,000 people in St. Paul, Minnesota, knocking knuckles with his wife, Michelle, in a gesture known as “dap.” “It thrilled a lot of black folks,” said author Ta-Nehisi Coates. “He wears his cultural blackness all over the place. Barack is like Black Folks 2.0.”

After reading that amusing quote, I googled Ta-Nehisi Coates, and it turns out he’s got a pretty funny blog.

And regarding the McCain speech:

Pundits were surprised by McCain’s clumsy rhetoric, by his lack of teleprompter skills, and by the fact that he stood in front of an ugly green backdrop. “Content better than delivery,” said Karl Rove. “John McCain,” said Mort Kondracke of “Roll Call,” “sounded old.” A messenger delivered a handwritten note from McCain to Obama’s Chicago offices inviting the Democratic presidential nominee to a series of Goldwater-Kennedy-style debates. Bill Burton, an aide to Obama, told the messenger, “You know, you could have just emailed this.”

That’s a pretty decent summary of how I feel dealing with old people in the tech field sometimes…

For the third year in a row, the consumption of oranges in Britain declined because people were too busy to peel the rind off the fruit.

Hmm… I’ve felt that way too.

More than two dozen vandals who hosted a party inside Robert Frost’s former home were ordered to take a class on his poetry, taught by Frost’s biographer. “This is where Frost is relevant,” Jay Parini said to the class, speaking about Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” “You come to a path in the woods where you can say, ‘Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?’ Everything in life is choices.”

It’s like Harper’s is reading my mind!

Haley, an eight-year-old Indiana girl who had emergency surgery after eating more than 10 magnets and 20 steel balls, said she swallowed the pieces because they “looked like candy.” Her parents said they were confused about how she could have done such thing because “she gets A’s and B’s.” Scientists located the part of the brain responsible for understanding sarcasm.

I don’t know about you, but those two pieces of news seem well paired to me.

Also in the realm of comical lefty news reviews, did you know there’s a free podcast of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me? I’m saving them up on my ipod for long car trips this summer. My six-year-old is going to hate me…

Correction: Said six-year-old would like it to be known that she is six and a half.

After pestering me on the streets of downtown Seattle all last summer with their swarms of teenagers with clipboards, Greenpeace has nailed shut the coffin of my erstwhile respect for them by promoting conservative congressional candidate David Reichert.

Several liberal blogs have promoted Reichert’s opponent, Darcy Burner, particularly during her “Burn Bush” campaign, in which Burner attempted to raise money online the same day that Reichert raised money by having GW Bush speak to his constituents in Bellevue. (She succeeded in raising more.) Meanwhile, Greenpeace is promoting the candidate whose record is decidedly not green.