Just another perk for residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It would be great if other states weren’t so benighted but for the time being it is good to know there are places where citizens want to give each other more rights, not fewer.
I have mentioned Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas before. Well it seems to be breaking down. The problem of course with ignoring the economic priorities of a political party when hijacking it with values based prerogatives is that there is a Constitutional (read: fundamental political) separation between church and state but not between business and state. Workers don’t want illegal immigrants and business cannot increase earnings without them. Sounds like two different parties to me - regardless of their take on abortion and pornography (both still legal).
I do not trust our President. If you do, you probably will not agree with this next statement: I don’t trust our Military either. Listening to General George Casey on Meet the Press (transcript), it might as well have been the President answer Tim Russert’s questions. Nearly everything that our government has done with regards to Iraq since Bush took office has been a mistake (first two weeks of the war were stellar militarily). If our President cannot say that he made a mistake, I do not trust him to make fewer mistakes going forward. If our Military commanders cannot say that they made mistakes, I do not trust them to make fewer mistakes going forward.
Senator Murtha is right, if the people calling the shots cannot admit their mistakes, fire them and move on. Unfortunately half of the country did not believe in 2004 that we should fire the President and they missed their chance.
Quick follow-up thought on the previous post: if a company owns a patent on a virus, can I sue them if I catch it?
Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution empowers congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” - the beginning of a tumultuous history for copyright and patent legislation in the U.S.
There is a growing community of people who believe that sharing is a perfectly reasonable thing to do with something that they create. Furthermore they are more excited by the unrestricted possibilities that their creativity inspires in others than by the potential for direct financial gain. These movements are powerful, grassroots efforts to promote the the progress of science and useful arts without explicitly securing to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings an discoveries.
The only major risk to sharing, as far as I can tell, is that authors and inventors might not have full control of their writings and discoveries. Since the Constitution only grants Congress the power to secure these writings and discoveries for a limited time, authors and inventors are going to lose control of their writings and discoveries at some point in time anyways (Congress assumes after they are dead).
The largest risk to securing exclusive rights is that we fail to promote the progress of science and useful arts or even, dare I suggest it, hinder their progress. How can giving someone the right to their own writing or discovery hinder progress? Witness this insightful op-ed written by Michael Crichton for the New York Times:
For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you. The entire genome of the hepatitis C virus is owned by a biotech company. Royalty costs now influence the direction of research in basic diseases, and often even the testing for diseases. Such barriers to medical testing and research are not in the public interest. Do you want to be told by your doctor, “Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?”
Why do we enact legislation that has the potential to criminalize an original essay?
Here’s my standard trailer: write your Congressmen, call your Senator, “wake up and do something or I’m voting you out!”
Our President wants to protect workers pensions so he tells Congress to work with industry and come up with sensible legislation. Big surprise, Congress comes up with a law that reduces corporate contributions. What happens when pensions are underfunded and people are expecting to have something to fill the social security gap? Instead of the most competitive companies attracting good workers, offering better products and helping their workers retire, we will have government supported companies deceiving workers and then the government is going to have to take care of the workers one way or another. The argument that this helps companies remain competitive is joke. Of course companies “remain competitive” when they start cutting benefits that they can’t afford. If I could promise benefits and then have a get out of jail free card from the government I’d be much more competitive!
Where in “by the people, for the people” do companies get to self regulate? Here’s a big fat wake-up call to those who would call themselves the proponents of free markets: they’re not really free. All markets have rules and either we set them or companies will set them. If the companies set them then the rules will benefit the major shareholders (note, that this doesn’t include Joe Family and his 401k because he was banking on his pension). If we want a free and just society (that second part is key), then we need to set the rules. If an American citizen takes a job and part of the contract they sign includes a pension as part of their benefits, how can we possibly justify allowing shareholders a get out of jail free card? Either don’t offer a pension (that or a 401k and guess what, your employees are going to work for someone else) or pay for it if you do. I’m sure that if the company goes bust the worker will lose their job, but without a pension we’re going to have to work at that job until we die anyways (so who needs a pension?).
The problem isn’t big government; it’s big corporate government.
This is going to take a while to internalize: Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
Guy Kawasaki continues to knock ‘em out of the ballpark with his blog posts. He’s on my blog roll but I thought deserved a special mention for writing great entries about entrepreneurship.
Listening to Meet the Press from this past Sunday with Senators George Allen and Joe Biden. Allen sound a lot like Kerry. He rattles of facts and figures to support focus group positions on policy, caught between a middle of the road populace and a far right base (far left for Kerry). He raises an interesting issue when asked about South Dakota’s recent legislation banning abortion except to save the life of the mother (on a side note - if the mother is going to spend the rest of her life raising a child she doesn’t want or can’t raise, does aborting that embryo count as saving her life?).
Does the decision to abort a pregnancy (or even to prevent one) belong to the mother, her family, doctor, community, state government or the federal government? Allen says it’s a state issue. Pro-choice groups say it’s the mother’s call. Pro-life supporters seem to think that they get to say what any other mother may do with regards to abortion. That last one is a particularly strange position because their religion (unless the mother is part of their community) isn’t on the list. Quinn posted on Ambiguous on February 15th:
How far is anti-abortion laws from laws against women doing things that might cause miscarriage?
Now ask yourself this, who gets to decide the laws governing what you can and cannot do to your own body? The people of South Dakota? The church-affiliated lobbyists? Or is it between you, your doctor and your family?
Back to the candidates, I’m looking more into Joe Biden. He’s not afraid to call the administration out as not competent to do their job. That’s something more and more people on all sides of the political spectrum are finally coming to realize.
I’ve written about the false sense of security afforded by most of the measures the American government has taken since September 11th, and I am a wholehearted support of Bruce Scheiner ’s many analyses of such measures. The latest trend that the press is unearthing is a disturbing shift towards unprecedented government secrecy in State laws and FOIA responses. This is a good time to remind our elected officials that, aside from the tenet that the only safe type of government is a transparent one, the September 11th hijackers didn’t use the classified reports of hunting accidents to crash plans into buildings and Timothy McVeigh didn’t need a list of how many tickets each office issued when he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma city.
The people of America must speak up: if you keep our government a secret then we’re not going to let you run it!
Rolling Stone’s Jeff Sharlet writes an article about Sam Brownback, “God’s Senator.” For some contextual background, if you haven’t read Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas then you should do so right now.
The most disturbing part of the article (there’s a lot, I know) is dead center:
Over the years, Brownback became increasingly active in the Fellowship. But he wasn’t invited to join a cell until 1994, when he went to Washington. “I had been working with them for a number of years, so when I went into Congress I knew I wanted to get back into that,” he says. “Washington — power — is very difficult to handle. I knew I needed people to keep me accountable in that system.”
I hate to argue with you Mr. Brownback (ok, I don’t, I think it’s fundamental to our democracy that I argue with you) but the people who keep you accountable while you are one of Kansas’s Senators is the House of Representatives, the Executive Branch, the Judicial branch and your constituents - not a fundamentalist cell of your choosing.
This morning I met Senator Ted Kennedy’s potential challenger this year: Mr. Kevin Scott boarded the 8:55 train to Haverhill at Wakefield (his home town) with one staffer in tow, collecting signatures to get his name on the ballot. He didn’t have a sheet for Cambridge residents, but I wholeheartedly support and encourage his effort. We need more of what Mr. Scott is doing. There are a handful of people challenging long standing incumbents. Regardless of stated party or platform, if you aren’t happy with your Senator and he or she is being challenged then vote against them. Give someone else a chance for 6 years.
Do I agree with everything Kevin Scott stands for? No.
Do I think he represents the kind of shake up our government needs? Most definitely.
An article out of MIT (and due to be published in Nature) describes a discovery by Dr. Wilson that rats, after running a maze for 30 seconds subsequently replay their brain activity backwards at a significantly faster rate. The article talks about how this mechanism may play a role in reinforcing learning and lead to explanations of how rats and maybe humans learn from experience. While there could be many different reasons behind this type of instant replay, one has to wonder what exactly it is that the rat is learning? I’ll have to read the article to get the details.