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Tuesday, September 28 2004

In voter disenfranchisement news...

Once again, Florida is using felon lists to purge African-American voters from the list of eligible voters. (In 2000, Florida faultily removed black voters who were not felons. This year, they attempted to use a system that would've knocked black felons off the eligible voters list, but left Hispanics (who tend to vote more for Republicans in Florida) on. The company that built the list says they told the state of Florida how to keep the mistake from occuring, but Florida disregarded their expertise.)
And in Ohio, the Republican secretary of state is telling counties not to accept voter registration forms that are not printed on the right card stock. His order appears to be a violation of the 1971 Federal Voting Rights Act.

Daily Show Viewers More Educated, More Informed Than O'Reilly Factor Viewers

(And better informed than TV news viewers and newspaper readers.)
Bill O'Reilly to Jon Stewart:

"You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary, but it's true. You've got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night and they can vote."

"Viewers of Jon Stewart's show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch 'The O'Reilly Factor.'"

"Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly...
"In fact, Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers -- even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration."

You've Still Got a First Chance to Make a Second Impression

More social interaction research from Stanford University:

"... In most organizations, for example, men tend to socialize with other men in bars or on golf courses. By getting to know one another better, they have the opportunity to change an incorrect negative opinion as they learn about that person's other qualities and strengths. But because men don't usually interact in this way with women coworkers, they don't have the same opportunity to alter false negative evaluations. The same phenomenon similarly affects people who are members of minorities or perceived to be in any sort of 'out' group in an organization.
"Such a dynamic can have serious consequences for people's careers. Individuals who actually possess similar skill levels may be evaluated differently simply because they have different social ties. People who come across badly early on ­ whether due to real errors or biased perceptions on the part of their evaluators­ can be disadvantaged when it comes to promotions because they don't have the same opportunity as others to interact with their evaluators and correct the poor image."

"Companies may want to establish more formal mechanisms that promote interaction among different groups of people."

Saturday, September 25 2004

Power and Money Shifts in the Music Industry

In the LA Weekly, Alec Hanley Bemis says music-sharing technology (among other factors) is helping good, small(er) bands reach out to more people who'd appreciate their music, and evening out the playing field:

"These are but a few of the signs that the record business is coming to grips with a small new future. That doesn’t mean the industry’s overall revenues will shrink, nor that record sales will go down. Right now, record sales are plainly rising (see '3 Myths About Today’s Record Business Debunked'). They’re just not rising in the ways we’ve become accustomed to — the biggest, most famous artists are no longer posting ever more impressive sales figures. Suddenly, there are more and more records selling 10,000 to 500,000 copies each year, and less and less selling 1 million to 10 million. To put it simply, the patterns that used to govern sales no longer work. The industry’s biggest successes are now small ones."

Friday, September 24 2004

If You Look at Actual Quotes, John Kerry's not a Flip-Flopper

Marc Sandalow looks at what John Kerry's been saying about Iraq for the past few years, and finds he's been consistent in his views and message:

"...Kerry clung to a nuanced, middle-of-the road - yet largely consistent - approach to Iraq. Over and over, Kerry enthusiastically supported a confrontation with Saddam Hussein even as he aggressively criticized Bush for the manner in which he did so.
"Kerry repeatedly described Hussein as a dangerous menace who must be disarmed or eliminated, demanded that the U.S. build broad international support for any action in Iraq and insisted that the nation had better plan for the post-war peace."

Special deal on MCI

From dealmac:

"CNNmoney reports that MCI Inc. is available for $5,600,000,000. It's the lowest no-rebate price we've seen. Shipping is free."

Supreme Court Clerks Speak Out on Bush v Gore

Links to a long piece on the Supreme Court of the United States' decision in Bush v Gore, over at SCOTUS blog. Vanity Fair managed to get a number of the folks who were law clerks at the SCOTUS to (anonymously) discuss the political maneuverings on the court. Impression received: the ruling had nothing to do with legal arguments, and everything to do with politics.
Come to think of it, that's what I thought 4 years ago, too. But I would've been happy to be shown I was wrong.
Concerned for democracy in your country? Register to vote right now. And volunteer with Election Protection, an organization that hopes to ensure voters are not unjustly turned away from the polls come November.

Can a N***a Get a Job?

Over at The Boondocks, a story line that's just so wrong.

"Jiggling flesh has a way of distracting me from the shame I feel for the race."

Friday, September 17 2004

Critique Magazine's On Writing Issue

Critique Magazine's annual On Writing issue, with interviews from a variety of authors on their craft. From David Baldacci to Chris Onstad of Achewood.

41% of Americans and a Majority of Iraqis Agree

They agree that the U.S. should pull out of Iraq as soon as possible. Chris Bowers at MyDD discusses how public discussion ignores this large minority of U.S. citizens who want an immediate withdrawal, and labels their view as not being sane. And FAIR, back at the end of June (before violence in Iraq got even worse), cited two polls showing that a majority of Iraqis want U.S. troops out immediately.
Chris Bowers:

"The entire public debate on Iraq has grown to painfully remind me of the public debate on Iraq before the war took place...Before the war, opposition to invasion was virtually non-existent on United States national network television. The same thing is now taking place when it comes to the position of withdrawal (which, I might add, represents a higher percentage of the population than 'don't invade Iraq even with a UN resolution' ever did before the war)."

Thursday, September 16 2004

Fantagraphics Comics

A good article on Fantagraphics Comics, publisher of the Comics Journal, Love & Rockets, Eightball, Hate, and other titles. When I used to hang out on comics-oriented newsgroups in the early 90s, half the people there seemed to think the Fantagraphics folks were just a bunch of asses; the other half thought they were smart, incisive assholes. (The third half just bought multiple copies of X-Men Unreadable and Spawn and secreted them away in vaults, hoping to recoup their "investments" later.)
(Impetus for the article: Fantagraphics will be republishing the full run of Charles Schultz's Peanuts over the next 12 and a half years.)

Crack Babies

Being a crack baby isn't great, but it's not a sentence of certain failure, either:

"Lester has also found that the IQs of cocaine-exposed 7-year-olds are four and a half points lower on average, and some researchers have documented other subtle problems. Perhaps more damaging than being exposed to cocaine itself is growing up with addicts, who are often incapable of providing a stable, nurturing home. But so-called crack babies are by no means ruined. Most fare far better, in fact, than children whose mothers drink heavily while pregnant."

"The worst damage that drugs may do is to the world a child inhabits after birth. Coles has a collection of horror stories about children growing up neglected, especially by cocaine addicts. One 'crack kid' who couldn't concentrate in class was in fact hungry. Another poorly developed 'crack baby' was being 'raised' by a 5-year-old sister.
"The myth of the 'crack baby' became a media hit, Coles believes, because 'crack is exotic and happening mostly in 'marginal' populations among 'bad people' who are not like 'us.'' It is easier to think about crack than alcohol or tobacco. There is more than a touch of racism in the attention.'"

"That the president's address was built on a lie – the cocaine was not seized across the street from the White House in a random drug buy but in a carefully engineered DEA sting – was revealed two weeks later by the Washington Post's Michael Isikoff."

Walking from Stanford to San Francisco

It's just 34 miles, so Matt Bell and Sandra decided to try the walk from Stanford to San Francisco, taking El Camino Real most of the way. 11 and a half hours by foot.
I seriously considered biking the route back in college. It's not that long - 3-4 hours at a moderate pace?

Monday, September 13 2004

SLUG Workers Illegally Coerced Into Working and Voting for Mayor Gavin Newsom

During San Francisco's 2003 mayoral election, managers at the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners illegally forced their workers to turn in absentee ballots for Gavin Newsom at City Hall, then walk the streets working for the Newsom campaign.

"[The investigation] concludes that the group, run at the time by Jonathan Gomwalk, directed employees to conduct more than 200 hours of political work last fall -- and then billed the city for it.
"[Former SLUG worker] Perkins says that when she should have been cleaning streets, her SLUG managers took her to City Hall to vote, told her whom to vote for and then took her out to neighborhoods to hang campaign flyers on doors. 'I didn't want to vote for Gavin Newsom. I wanted to vote for another person, Matt Gonzalez. But I wanted to get paid for that day.'"

Thursday, September 9 2004

History of the Republican Propaganda Machine

Not to call it a vast right-wing conspiracy, but:

"...Stein didn't begrudge the manufacturers of corporatist agitprop the successful distribution of their product in the national markets for the portentous catch-phrase and the camera-ready slogan. Having devoted several months to his search through the available documents, he was content to let the facts speak for themselves - fifty funding agencies of different dimensions and varying degrees of ideological fervor, nominally philanthropic but zealous in their common hatred of the liberal enemy, disbursing the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years for the fabrication of 'irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.'"

Diebold Voting Machine Backdoor

So Bev Harris (who was one of the first investigators to find and publicize the problems with electronic voting systems) reports on more voting machine shenanigans - this time not with the touch-screen machines you'll see at the polls, but with the machines that count the votes in the end:

"By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks."

"Attorney General Bill Lockyer said Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Elections Systems for allegedly making fraudulent claims to Alameda County and the state about the security and reliability of voting machines the company sold the county."

Wednesday, September 8 2004

Election Protection vs. Voter Suppression

Concerned about potential voter intimidation at the polls? Check out Election Protection - a group that sends folks out to monitor U.S. polling places, and inform voters of their rights if they're turned away from their polling places or intimidated into not voting.

Yoga Doesn't Help Weight Loss (they say)

"Practicing yoga can enhance a workout but it is an inadequate substitute for vigorous exercise such as aerobics, according to a recent study."

Truth Matters

Opinion piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the importance of truth, and the recognition that there can be an objective truth, to political discourse:

"That is the first reason truth has political value. Just having the concept of objective truth opens up a certain possibility: It allows us to think that something might be correct even if those in power disagree...
"The second reason truth is politically important is that one of our society's most basic political concepts -- that of a fundamental right -- presupposes the idea of objective truth... They [fundamental rights] aren't justified because they are a means to valuable social goals; fundamental rights are justified because they are a necessary component of basic respect due to all people.
"[Third...] It is vital that a government tell its citizens the truth -- whether it be about Iraq's capacities for producing weapons of mass destruction or high-ranking officials' ties to corporate interests. That is because governmental transparency and freedom of information are the first defenses against tyranny. The less a government feels the need to be truthful, the more prone it is to try and get away with doing what wouldn't be approved by its citizens in the light of day, whether that means breaking into the Watergate Hotel, bombing Cambodia, or authorizing the use of torture on prisoners."

Sunday, September 5 2004

Paul Krugman tells it like it is (again)

From Paul Krugman's speech last week at NYU. On catching politicians (mostly the Bush administration) in lying vs. misleading people:

"...I don't think anybody has found a statement in which Bush said that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, but you can find hundreds of elusive sentences where 9/11, Saddam, are all blurred together which shows that he and his speechwriters knew that it wasn't true and were trying to -- trying to plant the idea in people's minds. That's the thing that's worse. It's not the 'gotcha' moment. It's not the smoking gun of the sentence where he says something that's falsifiable. It's the sentences that were clearly carefully crafted to convince people of something of something that the administration knew was not true..."

"...it should be, well, okay, here's what people are saying, and we have checked the facts, and here's what the truth is. Instead, it has become here's what one side says, here's what the other side says. We report, you decide.
"...if Bush says that the earth was flat, the headlines on the mainstream media stories is, 'The Shape of the Earth: Views Differ.' I saw that in 2000 over social security."

Friday, September 3 2004

Flip-Flopper Bush

Can't keep track of President Bush's flip-flops? American Progress tracks the flip flops for you.

Old lady given 10 days to live just won't die...

... and that's a good thing.

"Doctors told Carol Connolly in March that she had less than 10 days to live. She went home to die -- and waited. And waited some more.
"Five months later, Carol is back at her part-time job at an Oakland auction house. She's gardening. Attending the opera. Traveling. And enjoying her second lease on life, thanks to a new cancer drug."

About this site

This is the personal web site for Edward (Ed) Piou. Consisting mainly of a blog (operational since 1999) and various photos.

Some online projects I'm working on

Politics

Charity, Non-profits...

A while ago, I decided to put my money where my mind is on a (roughly) monthly basis and give to:

Photos

Public events documented through pictures...