The Hanover Collaboration

I just voted “no” on the thing. I’m sympathetic to the conspiracy theory that the new constitution was a direct result of the petition candidates success in the trustee election.

The whole thing smells bad to me. First of all, everything I received by the “vote yes” side was all fluff and no meat. They really failed to convince me that a new constitution was necessary:

1. As was pointed out on Volokh you don’t need a new system to address the simple rule of “no campaigning”.
2. As we recently discussed, approval voting does not “split votes”.
3. I don’t see how making a new alumni governing body will do anything but further insulate the establishment from the voting alumni.

The obvious question is “Why a whole new constitution and not a set of amendments?” The only answer I can think of is that people are trying to piggy-back items that would fail as amendments.

Related, the ballot says right on it what you’re supposed to vote for?! That makes it look even more like a power grab. I’ve got to admit that I didn’t read the details on the last couple ammendments and just voted for them because they told me not to.

Chewing up Reuters yesterday seems to have given me a taste for half-baked media. So for today’s lunch, I sampled a little Slate magazine, brazed in a light sauce of urban myopia, and served with a touch of upper-class condescension. Though well-presented, the dish combined flavors that were flatly incompatable, and left me with a decided aftertaste of half-assery.

This past Monday (Oct. 23), Slate magazine announced the Slate Green Challenge, a collaborative effort with eco-friendly ad magnet Trehugger.com, attempting to get Slate readers to realize the size of, and hopefully reduce, their collective impact on the planet’s ecosystem. I thought it a noble enough end, and being the sort who likes to gloat about their eco-friendliness, I eagerly began taking the quiz.

Problems arose immediately. What if your home is heated with something other than natural gas or oil? The quiz offered all sorts of transportation options (“Subway” “Bus in city”, “Bus on highway”, “Motorcycle” or “Taxi”), but plenty of folks live places without cities, highways, subways or a reliable taxi service. Do their carpooling, biking, walking, Segwaying, and scooter-riding miles not count toward reducing impact? The quiz also assumes all its takers own and use a dishwasher and washing machine. To top it all off, the quiz failed to produce a result the first time I took it, and rebuffed my repeated attempts at a retake.

I wasn’t the only one to see these shortcomings. A brief look at The Fray shows plenty of other readers taking up similar issues (not that Slate acknowledged any of this in their Fraywatch section). But I figured, hey, this quiz is just to establish a baseline. What really matters are the improvement suggestions, right? Yes – so long as you don’t realize the magazine’s suggestions suck. Just look at their transportation tips ; it’s all “tire pressures”, “air filters” and “fly less” – no “use mass transit” or “buy a bicycle”.

I can understand living in the city and not being aware of things like pellet stoves. But it’s all of 3 miles from Jersey to the Bronx – does Slate not think that’s manageable on a bike? Or perhaps using the largest subway system in the world? God forbid someone mention a bus. It may just be a touch of rural-bred Bryanism, but why do I get the feeling this article ignored obvious transportation solutions based on the social perceptions of its author and target audience?

Progressivist ranting aside, the real pièce de résistance from these self-indulgent chefs was not served until a few hours later, when the e-zine published this lovely article on the gasification of coal. Yes, on one page, they stressed the importance of reducing carbon emissions and curbing the greenhouse effect, while praising an inescapably inefficient means of producing cheap gas on another. Is this obviously self-defeating juxtaposition reflective of the ineptitude of Slate’s editors – or just their opinion of the readership?

Check out this Reuters news capsule (you might want to pause the accompanying video before it gets past the ad) about burlesque star Dita von Teese. Now check have a look at the corresponding Wikipedia article about Ms. von Teese. If you’re inattentive or pressed for time, these two DeepQuote links cut straight to the chase.

I’m not entirely sure Reuters plagiarism republication of that Wikipedia article fits entirely under “fair use” in the GPL. It’s surprising, frankly, that this problem doesn’t occur more in the opposite direction, with ill-informed netizens copying wholesale onto Wikipedia from existing pages; at any rate, people have been fired for ripping off The Free Encyclopedia before.

Robbie’s mailing address is:

CPT ROB DAPICE
A Co. 4-23 IN, 172nd SBCT
APO, AE 09322

Juliana Dapice writes that her husband, our beloved friend and former teammate Robbie, scheduled to return home from Iraq this fall has instead had his service in the 172nd Stryker Brigade extended indefinitely, and will be redeployed to Baghdad in the near future.

Best wishes Robbie and Juliana.

These little guys might look like fun, but sources say they can be deadly to “smaller children”.

Oh, wait. There’s a correction to that article. Or rather, one has already been made. It seems these “Greenades” would lead to “serious effects” in small children, not death. Apparently, the guys at Narcanon Arrowhead forgot to change the byline. I wonder why an addiction counseling service would overstate the severity of a drug story?

I wonder also what they mean by serious effects? They say each gumball contained 1g of “high grade” cannabis. Let’s assume that means a ludicrous potency of 25% THC, or roughly five times the average concentration. Taking the LD50 from Wikipedia and applying it to a 30-pound toddler, we find that a reasonable leathal dose would require at least 40 gumballs.

Seeing as the three students charged in connection with this case had only two gumballs on hand, I’d imagine the most serious effects any l’il Hunter-S-in-Oshkosh would encounter is a gnarly case of the munchies. In fact, for any human bigger than a newborn (who wouldn’t have the the teeth to chew them, nor the motor function to bring them to their mouth), two gumballs’ worth is nowhere near a life-threatening dose.

It’s pretty clear Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite. His father was a Holocaust denier, and Gibson has stated that “the man never lied to me”. Though I never saw the film myself, I’m told that even the blind come away from The Passion of the Christ with a diminshed opinion of Jews, and on many occasions, the devoutly-Catholic Gibson has taken issue with the findings of the Second Vatican Council, which officially renounced the doctrine that the Jews killed Jesus. So why has the media reacted with such shock and vitriol at Gibson’s drunken rantings during a recent DUI arrest?

Massachusetts governor and prospective presidential candidate Mitt Romney found himself in something of a sticky situation over the weekend. The Republican, while speaking to a room full of supporters at an Iowa fundraiser, used the phrase “tar baby” in describing the massively over-budget and under-standard Central Artery Tunnel project. Romney isn’t the first high-level official to get snared like this; in May, White House press secretary Tony Snow used the same, apparently offensive term in when he declined to comment on the NSA’s call records database.

Big win for the Supreme Court. No congress, you can’t just take away Court’s authority especially not secretly or accidentally. And Bush, your tribunals are bull shit. Oh and you have to listen to congress.

Jesus Christ, Hamas. Could you pull your head out of your ass for a second? This is fucking ridiculous. You can’t keep acting like this. You’re in charge of the shit now. And you Palestinians, you must have known this would happen if you elected them. What the fuck were you thinking? Things were going pretty well but you just had to push your luck didn’t you? Hopefully you’ll get another try.

Israel’s strategy makes sense and although I usually advocate sitting on your hands (since I think time generally works for the good guys), I think they are playing this one right. What do you guys think?

John Steinbeck’s heirs have sued Penguin Books for the rights to 10 of his works, which Penguin has printed exclusively for over 70 years, and won in Federal Court. NPR claimed that they planned to release the works to the public. Penguin, or course, plans to sue to get the rights back.

Courtney and I are getting married next year. So the obvious thing to do was to set up a webpage. Being as hip as we are, it’s in the .info domain and it’s a wiki. It’s going to be a multi-purpose mess of a page, and that I hope we can have some fun with.

Interesting news from the Moussaoui trial.

(AP) – The judge in Zacarias Moussaoui’s death penalty trial admonished jurors Friday not to looking up words in the dictionary after learning that one went on the Internet to see what “aggravating” means.

Now which is more surprising? 1) that jurors are not allowed to use a dctionary or 2) that they are allowed to use the WWW.

Am I right in concluding that if neither the prosecution nor the defence included a law book as evidence, the jurors wouldn’t even be allowed to read the law on which they are trying to decide? I remember being surprised to hear that the jurors in the OJ simpson case weren’t allowed to take notes. I’m not really sure what the legal system is trying to do here.

In any case, Moussaoui wants to die and we’re better off without him. Let’s suppose for the moment that his execution would deter the same number of people that it incites. Doesn’t this seem like a case where capital punishment might be a good thing? Remember last time I brooded on this one?

I think that if we, by this tortured reading of the law, execute this guy who is probably just an Al Qaeda flunk-out-wannabe, who is obviously insane and we do it after this shit-show of a trial, it will damage our legal system even further than it has already. I imagine that we could had a much more straightforward trial if the government hadn’t taken it too far. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind see a mistrial just to show the government that the rules did not change on 9/11/01. It would be a good reminder to everyone that the legal system has a high standard.

I wonder what Mitch thinks about this trial?

Has anyone heard that the latest round of Scooter Libby fingers pointed the President himself?

I find it bizarre that none of the major news sources are putting much ink into it. I’ve heard that the best time to drop bombshells is right after the newspapers leave for the weekend. The TV, like NPR seem to want to keep it light over the weekend too. We’ll see what monday brings.

I’m guessing that we’re still going to fall for the immigration smokescreen. (The senate will only pass a pro-business bill and the house will only pass a racist bill so obviously no bill will be passed except an empty bill to say “See, we passed something.”). Maybe by Wednesday, the shit will have hit the fan properly.

Massachusetts has made health insurance like car insurance: If you don’t have it, then you’ve got to buy it.

Apple Computers today announced a public beta of Boot Camp , which will allow users to dual boot their Mac into Windows. Apple’s stock closed at 61.17 yesterday, and is at 65.72 (up 7.44%) as of this writing, so investors seem to think this is a good move.