Is the US Constitution a game of Nomic?
Hint: How you answer should say a lot about your political leanings, but actually, anymore, doesn’t.
Category: Obsessions
If intellectual property bores you, you should probably stop reading now
Impressively, Matt Stoller of IPac noticed my pet issues entry through somebody’s incoming referrer link or something, and wrote me personally about IPac’s goals and methods. Because I’m egotistical, it totally worked; because his email was a well-written statement, I’m reprinting it here:
Brendan,
Thanks for your comments on your blog about IPac. We love Downhill Battle and the EFF, and we are ideologically aligned with what they are doing. The reason we are designated as a political action committee is because that is the only legal designation that allows a group to give to political candidates. I suspect, though, your concerns run a bit deeper, hitting the general unseemly nature of the political, electoral, and lobbying process.
Part of IPac’s goal is to demystify the legislative process and get politicians to openly deliberate on the web about what they are doing so that we can reengage and get rid of this system of quasi-bribery. Right now, Congressmen put these bills through voice votes, so the public can’t even track who voted for what.
In the short-term, what IPac is doing is trying to get politicians to realize that there is a cost to cutting off innovation. I would hope that you consider joining our mailing list at www.ipaction.org, just for a few months, as I suspect there’s value in acquainting yourself a bit with the political world on the issues you care about.
Anyway, let me know if you have any questions, and once again, thanks for the feedback.
best,
Matt Stoller
IPac
Like I said, it worked. I’m not pulling out the credit card quite yet, but I’m watching with interest now, and I am on the list.
Kentucky is entering about Year 18 of an ever-cascading educational disaster. The current horrible mistake is the proposed health plan for teachers, which (under a typical family plan) would have employees pay the highest state-insurance premium in the country, with the state making the next-to-lowest contribution. The idea was that a 3% raise would help cover the cost, but that means $1050 before taxes for the average teacher. The premiums alone for that family health plan would exhaust that in two months.
I’ve been half-following the story as it develops, because I went to a Kentucky public high school and I’m interested by the state’s boundless inventiveness as it races to achieve the worst school quality in the country (right behind you, Alabama!). There will very likely be a statewide (and illegal) educator strike on October 27th. Tonight I saw some TV news coverage of a teachers’ union protest at Waterfront Park; after a couple of crowd shots, they pulled in close on one woman, who held a posterboard sign stating that
KENTUCKY IS
BECOMING
EMBARRASING!
Some truths are self-evident.
blah blah Brendan’s pet issues
I shouldn’t do things like reading this list of banned books, because it just makes me hate everything and accomplishes nothing. But still. My favorites are the parents who challenged the curriculum inclusion of books by Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis for promoting “witchcraft and demons” and “mysticism,” respectively. I don’t need to tell you how thoroughly Christian their books are, because you already know. See? Accomplishing nothing!
In other nonaccomplishment news, I’m going to wait and see about IPac. On the one hand, their statement of principles aligns with a lot of what’s important to me, politically. On the other hand, this is also true of the ACLU, and there are reasons I don’t belong to the ACLU. I know it’s only a word, but I just don’t like the designation of “political action committee.” For some reason I’m comfortable supporting the EFF and Downhill Battle in a way that I don’t associate with any PAC.
Okay, there is one thing I’ve been meaning to write about. The place where the EFF and Downhill Battle intersect is Save Betamax, a combined effort to stop S. 2560 (which used to be called the INDUCE Act) from taking away your iPod, TiVo, CD burner, Kazaa, VCR, scanner, tape deck or whatever else the RIAA and MPAA decide is “inducing” people to violate their own definition of copyright. I don’t much like political blogging, but 2560 is bad. I’m unfortunately writing too late to tell you to sign up for the call-in days (as I did), but I’m sure there will be more opportunities to help stop the bill from becoming law. There’s an enormous effort by a huge coalition of companies, groups and individual humans to keep veto power over media innovation out of Hollywood’s hands. I hope you’ll join it, and I hope it works.
I just described (in my last post) a state of consumer gluttony as “getting all American,” which is really inaccurate because most of America is not, in fact, part of the United States. I mean, I’m sure there are poor-yet-rich fat people in Canadia too, but you see the point.
There is no good word in English for “of / from / relating to the United States,” which is why we use “American,” and that’s dumb. I seem to remember that Spanish has “Estadounidense,” which is great but comes from a whole other language, and English-speakers should be able to do better than that.
Here’s a list of alternatives I’ve come up with.
- United State-ian
- United Station
- United Static (currently my favorite, and the most accurate)
- Unish
- State-Uniter
- New! State-Unit
- New! Statoid
- Ämerïkaans
- USch
IT BOOTS
MY CREATION BOOTS!
Maria helped
I took the unofficial Penny Arcade trivia test. I scored higher than the real Gabe. I did not make use of the archive.
I probably read Penny Arcade too much.
I was surprised not to be disappointed
Garden State is the kind of movie that makes me want to write a movie.
Yesterday I received two things in the mail for which I’ve been waiting all summer: my first student loan residual check, so I can pay my roommate for back rent, and my new credit card. My new credit card is interest-free until May, and its credit limit is three times as high as my previous credit card.
You know what that means? After nearly six years of life with my beloved, battered P2-450, it is time. I’m going to buy a new computer. It’s going to have two monitors. It’s going to dual-boot XP and some distro of Linux (any recommendations, by the way?). It’s going to have some insane beastly muscle under the hood. And I’ve finally decided–I’m going to build the whole thing from the ground up, or processor out, or whatever. I am going to purchase thermal grease.