Archive - Apr 2008

New ad by Obama in NC and IN

He nearly lost me at "price gouging" but I hung in for the good policy response. Funny how fast we forget the laws of supply and demand when it comes to gas and fall to bullshit calls of price gouging.

I'm disappointed to see Obama pander in his anti-pandering ad but his policy response is far better than any other choice we have currently.

Occasionally, I still throw up a post on Energista even though it has mostly gone dormant. Just put up a post about some good Newsweek reporting on climate change issues.

The conference is ending, I spoke this morning. Once again, I did an okay job on my prepared comments and cleaned up in the Q&A period, where it was more of a targeted, one on one response.

I was part of a panel and we were well received, considering that most folks had already left to catch plans. Mental note: Push to appear on panels that occur in the middle of a conference, not at the beginning or end!

Tomorrow, I'll be getting up early and heading over to rent a car. Then I'll be driving for 6 hours to get to Lafayette, LA, in time for lunch and a number of discussions about the network they are building there. Lafayette will be the largest muni fiber build in the country when it launches later this year.

Then I'll be driving another 4 hours back into Texas to spend a few days with Klink and Klinkette. I'm starting to appreciate the size of Texas. Looking forward to some Texas food with Eric and Chanda as well as some Louisiana food when I meet with folks down thar.

Flying back to MN on Sunday - hoping it will be spring.

Hanging in Texas at the Hyatt Regency at the Dallas airport. Great showers here! And they have these nice LG LCD HD monitors - but I'm still stuck watching NHL in standard def. It looks wretched. Hockey was meant to be in HD.

The conference was good today again - quickly learning a lot and getting ideas for future publications and projects. Some of these people have said they "track my work." How's that for hot shit? Look out world!

Tonight, I should actually have time to relax. Yesterday was brutal. Up early to travel, then a full day of conference, 2 hours of discussion after so I didn't "stop working" until I grabbed dinner with a friend. We talked for maybe 2 hours and then I got back to work, writing up the days events. Finally fell asleep late - with a horrible headache still. Middle of the night, felt like puking, so I took a few Excedrin Migraine and turned on ESPN to distract me while I tried to fall back asleep.

Woke up a few hours later feeling great and ready for the day. The rest of the day has gone swimmingly. Woohooo! With luck, I may have some time to read something for fun tonight after I prep for my talk tomorrow afternoon.

I'm down in Texas. Haven't seen much yet, I'm in a hotel close enough to the air control tower of the DFW airport that, if it fell, I would run away to avoid gettin' squished.

Stuck in the hotel because I don't have a car and there is nothing nearby but highways. The food at the Hyatt Regency sucks. I just had the worst plate of Texas Nachos I have ever had, followed by the worst Caesar salad ever. Just awful.

I have to pay $10 per 24 hours for Internet access. Ridiculous.

But the conference is going well. I've been learning a lot and having lots of great conversations. No complaints there. But I'm tired and sore. My shoulders are really sore and tight - my head has ached for 10 hours (from fatigue, I think) and I'm blogging rather than sleeping ... hmmmm.

I speak on Wed, so I'll put off coming up with a presentation for another night.

Michelle and I attempted the 100 mile Lakeville Ironman bike ride today. Michelle has a roundup of her experience. It was cold and eventually snowy/rainy. Breezy out of the Southwest, which sucked as the first 40 miles went right into it on rolling hills.

We could have tried a shorter route and stuck with Kris Scheid, but we felt ambitious and went for the full bodega. Started a bit after 7:00. Rest stops at 23 miles and 33 or so. At 35 miles, Michelle was really struggling (this was as we faced a tough wind, doing some 7mph up hills). So she decided to hit the sag wagon, which was disappointing but she clearly needed to rest.

I pushed on and barely picked up the pace as the wind got more brutal. Finally, around mile 40, the course headed west and we got the wind at our back. At mile 54 we got the next rest stop. I wasn't feeling great, but decided to push ahead for the next one which was only 11 miles down the road.

The tops of hills were killing me, but I was often hitting 20mph on straightaways and downhills. But the horizon showed dark dark clouds coming from the Southwest. At the next stop, I took a long waited bathroom break and started feeling better. Michelle was nearly back at the start by now (sag wagons make lots of stops).

I started getting back on the bike, and stared at the clouds. I was contemplating it when I overheard another guy say, "Put on your rain gear now or you may regret it." It was cold, my bike was just overhauled and I didn't want to get it all nasty on the first ride back so I decided to abandon. Put my ride in the wagon and talked with some of the other soft folks. 5 minutes later it started raining. 20 minutes later it started snowing. I feel good about the decision.

This was my second structured ride (Mpls was the first) and I hope to do a lot more. I enjoy riding in large groups of people with mechanics on call and food breaks. Riding with Michelle is also lots of fun even though she gets mad at me every time!

Damon Linker's "The Idolatry of America" in the 23 April, 2008 The New Republic stunned me with a revelation I never considered. The rest of the article is interesting, but I have to first emphasize this:

Marsh makes his point with alarming ease, noting in one of his later chapters that although polls in early 2003 showed that an astonishing 87 percent of white evangelical Christians in the United States supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, "Christian leaders around the world--evangelical, orthodox, and liberal" expressed "dismay over the administration's case [for war]." Marsh quotes, to great effect, twenty-five of these critical statements, written by the leaders of Christian organizations from every corner of the globe, most of which the majority of American evangelicals have undoubtedly never seen or read. Regardless of one's position on the war, these pages of Marsh's book make a powerful and important point about the American evangelical difference: either the United States contains the only Christians capable of recognizing the fundamental compatibility between the moral message of Christianity and George W. Bush's foreign policy--or else evangelicalism in America has transformed itself into Republican Party propaganda.

The article is a review of Charles Marsh's Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from the Political Captivity. It raises many points I have considered and occasionally ranted about - one of which is whether the "conservative Christians" are capable of loving the Constitution and placing it first in their lives. Their very religion tells them not to.

Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, warned often against "the idolatry of America"--teach Christians that however much they may love their terrestrial homes, their families as well as their political communities, their true home lies elsewhere, in the next life, in eternal unity with Jesus Christ. They must always remember, in other words, that love for God comes first, conditioning, ordering, and limiting the scope and intensity of their other loves. For a devout Christian, then, patriotism can never be uncomplicated, never wholehearted.

I had never considered using the term "idolatry" though. I think it fits - especially when you consider the way these supposedly Christians prostrate themselves upon patriotic themes. Consider who Robertson was serving when he called for killing Chavez, Venezuela's President. Was he serving his God, or the geopolitical interests of his country? He might claim they coincide nicely, but let's ask some non-U.S. Christians to evaluate that argument.

I'm getting ready to head down to Dallas, Texas, for a conference next week. I'll be speaking about publicly owned networks there on a panel. After that, I'll be driving a ways to Lafayette, Louisiana, to learn more about a network they are building.

On the way back, I'll be stopping by Eric and Chanda's for a few days of catching up and being made fun of. I don't plan on showering to pay them back.

I think Bill Maher is spot on with this rant. He was heavily criticized for saying the Pope was a Nazi because he had taken an oath to Hitler in his teenage years. I thought Maher responded brilliantly by saying he won't call the Pope a Nazi again because it detracts from the larger point - and that larger point is the last paragraph here.

And, finally, New Rule: Whenever you combine a secretive compound, religion and weirdos in pioneer outfits, there's going to be some child-f-ing going on. In fact, whenever a cult leader sets himself up as "God's infallible wing man" here on earth, lock away the kids.

Which is why I'd like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult. Its leader also has a compound. And this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats. [photo of the Pope shown]

That's right. The Pope is coming to America this week, and, ladies, he's single! Now, I know what you're thinking: "Bill, you can't be saying that the Catholic Church is no better than this creepy Texas cult! For one thing, altar boys can't even get pregnant."

But, really, what tripped up the "little cult on the prairie" was that they only abused hundreds of kids, not thousands all over the world. Cults get raided. Religions get parades. How does the Catholic Church get away with all of their buggery? VOLUME, VOLUME, VOLUME!

If you have a few hundred followers and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you "Pope."

It's like if you can't pay your mortgage, you're a deadbeat, but if you can't pay a million mortgages, you're Bear Stearns, and we bail you out. And that's who the Catholic Church is, the Bear Stearns of organized pedophilia. Too big to fail.

When the - when the current Pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul's Dick Cheney - he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors secret until the statute of limitations ran out. And that's the Church's attitude: "We're here, we're queer, get used to it."

Which is fine. Far be it from me to criticize religion. But, just remember one thing: if the Pope was, instead of a religious figure, merely the CEO of a nationwide chain of daycare centers where thousands of employees had been caught molesting kids and then covering it up, he'd be arrested faster than you can say, "Who wants to touch Mister Wiggle?"

Though the people who have been molested by priests and their families have been outraged, I feel like most of the country just took note of it and moved on ... in a way they never would have done if the molestations happened in schools and the government turned a blind eye or in daycares as suggested by Maher.

Somehow a major religion just gets a free pass on their heinous response to a heinous crime.

I find reading Robert Kagan to be like trying to come up with an analogy - you never know what you are going to get. However, he recently wrote "The End of the End of History" for The New Republic and I found it to be incredibly insightful. It has really changed the way I look at the international landscape - and a large part of me hopes to see someone strongly refute it. But I don't think anyone will.

Kagan challenges the commonly-held notion that the world is moving (inevitably) toward liberal democracy (or at least a recognition that these values are best in theory if not in practice). While we have been cheering democracy's victory over communism (major caveats aside), totalitarians have been figuring out how to build a strong economy without opening political freedoms. China is the obvious first example, and Russia the second.

I have been quietly expecting them to move closer to liberal democracy in the long term, but Kagan points out that there is no reason to expect this. In fact, we may well see many of the third world democracies turn toward that model rather than trying to deal with political freedoms while trying to modernize their economies and deal with crushing debt to the West.

In many ways, I feel that Kagan's article correct's Huntington's bullshit "Clash of Civilizations" thesis. Huntington is too focused on the West v. Islam and it always felt phony to me. In thinking about a clash between the West and the new face of market-friendly totalitarianism, a clash of civilizations seem the appropriate term.

Kagan doesn't think the terrorists can win, and I agree. The only way the terrorists would win is if we "choose to lose" by forfeitting our freedoms and waging stupid macho wars around the world. And we probably won't do that for more than a few decades...

As a historical phenomenon, the struggle between modernization and Islamic radicalism may ultimately have less impact on international affairs than the struggle among the great powers and between the forces of democracy and autocracy. After all, Islamic resistance to westernization is not a new phenomenon, though it has taken on a new and potentially cataclysmic dimension. In the past, when old and less technologically advanced peoples confronted more advanced cultures, their inadequate weapons reflected their backwardness. Today the more radical proponents of Islamic traditionalism, though they abhor the modern world, are using against it not only the ancient methods of assassination and suicidal attacks, but also modern weapons. The forces of modernization and globalization have inflamed the radical Islamist rebellion and also armed them for the fight.

But it is a lonely and ultimately desperate fight, for in the struggle between traditionalism and modernity, tradition cannot win--even though traditional forces armed with modern weapons, technologies, and ideologies can do horrendous damage.

I am not afraid of Islamic terrorists. In the grand scheme of threats to myself and those I love, threats closer to home are considerably more dangerous than the rare terrorist attack. More generally, I'm not afraid of Islamic terrorists threatening our way of life. Politicans and cowards (venn diagram shows they overlap hugely) are a much greater threat to our way of life as they overreact to terrorists.

This leads me to another criticism of Bush. Borrowing from China and our future to fight a worthless war gives the forces of autocracy another giant advantage in this struggle. As we bankrupt ourselves to the benefit of autocracies sitting atop the world's fossil fuels, I cannot help but wonder what developing country would want to follow our example. One of the problems of being an imperial power is that you alienate your way of life from everyone else.

I'm fine with alienating the world from rapacious consumerism, but I hope political rights don't get tossed out with that bathwater.