The Blog of Harald

Quotation of the Day for December 23, 2007

bq. “Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government.”

– Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in a December 10th speech commemorating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(via the Quotation of the Day Mailing List)

from WWdN: In Exile: Seriously. What would Jesus do?

bq. if I were a Christian, I would be profoundly upset that this huge organization, with such a loud voice at the table and such a significant presence in public life, is declaring that stopping gay marriage and telling women whether or not they can make a deeply personal decision are more important issues — and more specifically more important Christian issues — than helping the people among us who have the least and need the most

“I’m tired of September 11th”:http://www.easterwood.org/hmmn/?p=88 – me too.

I’m going to (briefly) break a “long standing trend”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/01/16/blogging-politics/.

I find myself completely apathetic about the events of Tuesday. In fact, I didn’t even know what was going on until Wednesday morning when I arrived at work and my cow-orkers were chatting. But I know several people who are majorly bummed about the results. Is this simply part of my whole “If there’s nothing I can do, there’s no point getting worked up” philosophy, or am I missing something fundamental about what it means to have “W” back in power for another four years?

I think the coming crisis for the US (and therefore world) economies has little to do with which president is in power; it has more to do with greedy multinational corporations and lax regulation (which isn’t going to change anytime soon), and with the impending energy crisis; neither of which is going to be affected by any US president…

I don’t know if it was TV or radio, but a recent ad stated essentially:

bq. On June 28th, you have a choice. On June 29th, you don’t.

I’ve marked mine; have you?

The latest meme traversing the blogosphere is The Political Compass, which calculates out a two-dimensional political orientation that is supposed to be more useful than the uni-dimensional “Left/Right” measure. My results:

Economic Left/Right: -7.38
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.18

Which came out a little more Libertarian than I think of myself. Either the test is slightly off, or my self-image is slightly off. Some introspection is in order :-)

Orion → Orion Magazine → Mark Dowie – In Law We Trust: Can environmental legislation still protect the commons?

An interesting essay. The concept of “the public trust”, and especially preserving public natural resources, has been under assault up here in Ontario as well as in the US. Our beloved Mike Harris has turned Ontario into a profitable toxic waste dump for American business; He’s been busy selling off all sorts of public assets to private interests; and so on.

Where does one draw the line between the legitimate exercise of a free market, and the State’s sovereign duty to protect public assets from abuse? It’s a hard question, but I’m positive the Ontario Conservatives have the wrong answer :-)

[ via Philip Greenspun; see also his entry Why the stock market keeps going up. ]

I tripped over an interesting rant, written by John Lichfield and quoted by Kasia. In a nut-shell, he observes that:

The US has produced more than 50 kinds of peanut butter. They all taste the same but they have radically different labels. France has somehow managed to create 176 (or 258 or 1,000) different kinds of cheese, all of which are subtly different from one another.

If we are being offered a choice between a cheese-eating civilisation and a peanut-butter-eating civilisation, I am with the cheese-eaters. Post-September 11, US politics — and even US journalism — seems to be going the way of peanut butter. There is room for endless freedom of choice between labels. The contents of the ideas are not allowed to vary.

Go read Kasia’s excerpt, or the original column…

We’re All Above Average

Tidbits:

The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.

Why do so many people believe this, when it’s simply not true? The top 1% of Americans make more than $300,000 (or $400,000 depending on who you ask) per year. The top 5%: $128,336. Top 10%: $92,114.

If you look at wealth it’s even more skewed; the top 1% of Americans own 40% – 50% of the total, and more than the bottom 95% combined.

Let’s look at these figures the other way around, though. This means that one out of every hundred Americans earns more than $300,000 per year. That’s pretty impressive; I’d have expected more like one in five hundred or one in a thousand…

It would be interesting to find Canadian versions of these statistics.

Blah blah DRM. I liked this quote, though:

“Hollywood leaders … would have organized the monks to burn down Gutenberg’s printing press, if they were alive during that period of rapid change and innovation,” ITAA President Harris N. Miller said.

From New Lobbying Group Takes on Digital Fight; the IT Association of America has taken a stand against current hollywood-style DRM.

One of my co-workers thinks that none of this will matter, since by 2005 Microsoft will have redefined copyright :-)

Perverse Access Memory: January 22

That the article is a discussion about unequal access ot abortions before Roe vs. Wade is irrelevant. This quote, in our out of context, is wonderful:

Laws should be made for everybody, not just for the people who haven’t the wherewithal to get around them. That may be an unpopular ideology in some quarters, but its lack of popularity makes it no less American and no less right.