In response to a comment...

In response to a comment from a friend on my Facebook page, I am posting this lightly edited comment here as it is too long for Facebook to handle...

I am more than happy to engage in some political debate as long as you keep in mind that I have a thick skin and I expect the same of my opponents. I love the intellectual exercise of political debate, and though I don’t expect to change many minds, as it’s my belief that in general, only a small percentage of the population is truly “on the fence,” I can always hope.

That being said, I don’t want to get into a point-by-point debate over the substance of the various accusations leveled by either side. Suffice it to say that while many on both sides of the partisan divide are correct in pointing out that neither candidate has been completely objective and both have, at times, stretched the truth, it is fairly clear that if we were to compare apples to apples, McCain and Palin have gone so far off the reservation that even prominent conservative commentators such as David Brooks of the NY Times, Ross Douthat of the Atlantic, and Richard Cohen of the Washington Post (not to mention Fox News, and even Karl Rove, of all people) complaining about the tenor and the conduct of their campaign. The level of obfuscation and deliberate avoidance of the issues has reached a level that a Fox News (!) commentator just today called “unprecedented.” I also feel compelled to point out that the sources you cited/linked to are far from objective; perhaps your energy would be better spent taking the time to cross-check your accusations on a more objective site such as www.factcheck.org , a non-partisan media & political watchdog site rather than reading the poorly researched and unreasonably partisan cheerleading of a few right wing apologists.

I think there are 2 primary issues at stake here… first is your basic political philosophy. In general, it’s been my observation that while both progressive/Democratic and conservative/Republican administrations end up spending lots of money bailing out the corporate interests that keep them in office, the difference comes in their approaches to those corporate interests, and their approaches to the people they claim to serve. However, in general, conservatives want to deregulate business on the premise that doing so will cause economic growth, but seek to regulate human behavior. In contrast, progressives generally seek to shield personal behavior from the regulation of government and attempt to regulate the behavior of big business to protect the average citizen from their collective and focused avarice. For myself, I have never believed in the idea of “trickle down” economics, and will never believe that the government can legislate the right choices for people. However, I strongly believe in a government that acts on behalf of its citizens, providing in times of need, protecting the vulnerable, giving voice to those who would otherwise be drowned out in the river of commerce and trampled by the unfettered rush to profit.

The second issue is, which candidate do you believe represents the government that you want? If you want a government that is beholden to big business, worships commerce and profit above all else, and seeks to enact laws that invade the privacy of the individual, casting aside the very spirit of the living Constitution that is the core of our country’s existence, then John McCain and Sarah Palin are your candidates. Their words and actions have made it more than clear that they are qualified to turn this country into the corporate sponsored theocracy that would be proud to hold its head up along side the likes of Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. I, on the other hand, seek something different, and hope for something more. I don’t necessarily agree with every policy and platform that Barack Obama and Joe Biden espouse. However, within their campaign, I see a genuine goodness, and a real effort to change the course of this country by at least trying to tackle such problems as insuring the 50+ million citizens who languish without healthcare coverage, and curbing the rapacious activities of the financial sector, which have, in the past 10 days (and to the terrible detriment of generations of taxpayers to come), laid bare the bankrupt policies of ultra-free-market capitalist (read conservative) economics.

So there you have it… and I ask you, where do you fall? Are you here to help your fellow man? Or climb over him to turn a profit?

Angry about the Bush bailout proposal...

This line is contained in Section 8 of the proposed bailout legislation: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? We are going to give them $700B in spending authority and have no way to review it? No way to even oversee it? It's a blank check to rape the system (and by extension, every taxpaying citizen in the country) and cover it up as you go along, all in the name of "rescuing the economy." We clearly need to do something to clean up the mess of years of fiscal conservative deregulation, but giving them license to screw us further without any way to hold them responsible is ludicrous. And the Administration that proposed it should be slowly and carefully spit roasted over an open fire (after an long and proper trial that observes every one of their constitutional rights, and bankrupts them and their families).

A Semi-Random Walk Through My Muddled Brain...

So, after nearly 4 years since my last post on deadjournal.com and a myriad of changes in my life and in the world of blogging, I’ve decided to start writing again… writing… now there’s a word to consider for my first posting. It seems to me a strange thing to describe what I/we do any more as writing, since so little of the composing of words into sentences, paragraphs, and larger forms actually takes place with the physical act of placing pen or pencil to paper. So much of what we do now occurs with computers and word processing programs, keyboards or voice recognition software, or even PDA’s and thumbpads, that to call it writing seem so… oh, I don’t know… perhaps “quaint” isn’t exactly the correct word, but something like that.

Yet, in many ways, though we compose pages upon pages of text on our laptops or other devices, stored in little mysterious 1’s and 0’s on some device we don’t understand, it doesn’t seem quite real in some way until we see it reduced to ink and paper. There is a comforting physicality to seeing our words printed out by pigmented chemicals onto a surface of dried, partially digested wood pulp that cannot be matched by any Sony e-book or 30 inch LCD monitor, no matter how safe or secure or redundant that hardened, fireproof 4-disk RAID drive array is. And it is not just in terms of paper and pixels… this divergence in desire also is evident in my quest for a Breitling or a Panerai watch, knowing that I cannot keep time nearly as well as that Timex or Citizen. Or my search (on eBay) for a [reasonably priced] Thorens turntable with a Shure V-15 cartridge to play a vinyl album that would barely take up a few measly megabytes on my uselessly capacious iPod that I wanted so badly.

It’s not that I am some Luddite or some nostalgic, balding, pudgy, middle-aged schmuck pining for the good old days (though I am balding, pudgy, and middle-aged, a topic for another posting in the distant future… and the schmuck part has surely been debated at length). I lust after the latest technology as much as the next geek, dreaming up ways that I can finagle the latest gadget and electronic toy, standing like a drooling idiot in front of that 150 inch 1080i widescreen HD plasma screen playing the latest version of Blade Runner as I caress the programmable universal remote in my hand and try to figure out if I can connect my home and office networks so that I can surf the ‘Net, watch a movie and answer my Bluetooth enabled PDA all at the same time. But I am equally, if not even more so, drawn to the seemingly backward and time-challenged technology of gears and cogs, paper and pen, film and projection booth.

So, the question I present is this: How does one resolve the tension, bridge the chasm, as it were, that results from this dichotomy? Is there a way to explain why the feel of a Parker Centennial flowing thoughts across a 35 lbs. acid free paper is so comforting to me and yet I still lust for a touchscreen surface and handwriting recognition software? Why do I want to get up in the morning and wind my watch by hand but obsessively consult the time.gov website to get the correct time down to the thousandths of a second? Perhaps that’s our limitation as humans… our inability to divorce ourselves completely from our five senses. Though we dream big, we are anchored… no… grounded by what we can feel, see, hear, taste or smell. Perhaps in some small way, it gives us reference and perspective, a means by which to measure ourselves and our experiences.

And what of this new generation and their progeny? What will be their realities? Will they see these limitations as useless and quaint? Growing up in a time when paper has been replaced by displays, and film replaced by CGI; when the food they eat and the smells they emit have been replaced by this homogenized, sterilized, over-analyzed, steroid enhanced mocha-chino sea of products that has been evaluated and test-marketed to the n-th degree… how will they ground themselves? What will be their measuring sticks, their references? Or will they just see this as just another backward thinking tether to the past, a drag-on-my-life anchor they are more than willing to cast off on their journey to the stars?

By the way, you should expect more of these mental ramblings in future posts…