Garrett M. Vonk

GREAT speech by London Mayor Ken Livingstone:

Yes, I’m just pasting quotes lately. What can I say? It’s tough to be original.

I’m sure by now you’ve seen the ads that Citibank has plastered across the country with slogans that basically say there’s more to life than money. For instance, one billboard says, “Hugs are at a 52-week high.” I’m sorry, but that’s the very last message I want my bank to be sending. They should run ads that say, “We will kill a man for a nickel.” That’s the kind of bank I’d like to have a checking account with.
-Aaron Karo

In a closely watched case, petitioners from New London, Conn. challenged the government’s use of eminent domain to take and pay for private property and use it for private economic development.

Home and business owners’ contention that economic development doesn’t qualify as public use “is supported by neither precedent nor logic,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and others dissenting.

Government Power to Take Property Backed by Top Court - a more complete article from Bloomberg.

Argh! I don’t get it. People don’t seem to understand that local governments are just people. Ideally, governments shouldn’t have “special” rights that people don’t have, because they’re just other people…

Maybe it’s just because I’m a dork about things like this, but reading this news article makes me physically angry. The highest court in the land has decided that we can only really own property if it’s being used in a sense that pleases the local government’s idea of “economic development”. Haven’t we yet learned that letting the government elite decide who can own what leads to crippling corruption? OH WAIT, IT ALREADY HAS IN AMERICA.

Anybody remember the Walmart in Alabaster, Alabama? They wanted to tear down some homes and put up a Walmart, but several property owners held out and said no to Walmart’s payoffs. The development company building the ‘mart had friends in the local government who decided to condemn the homes and kick out the rightful landowners, because the sales tax revenues from the Walmart would be higher than the measly property taxes the landowners paid. People had their homes STOLEN from them to benefit a CORPORATION, and by extension, the local government. That’s the same thing that’s going on in this case. Pfizer wants to build a plant, but not everybody will sell. The local government is worried that this might mean they wouldn’t get the plant built in their district, or whatever, so they boot the residents out.

Is this America? Isn’t the government supposed to be in place to protect our rights, not subjugate our rights to whoever could benefit from it economically the most? The local government in a Kansas town did the same thing, stealing, under the guise of legitimacy, a car dealership from its owner to replace it with a BMW dealership, because that means more tax revenues. If the government gets to decide what economic activity is the “most appropriate” for privately-owned property, what’s to stop them from taking yours and mine? I’m going to become a property-owner in about 22 days, and it infuriates me even more because of that. If the city government up and decides that my home, the one that my wife and I go to work every day to be able to own, isn’t the most efficient use of the space, isn’t going to provide them adequate tax revenue, they can take a fucking bulldozer, rip it to pieces, and write me a check for whatever they decide, now with the blessing of the Supreme Court.

If that happens, I’d worry about me. I’d be that crazy guy who has to be dragged out of the home at the point of a gun, because I would not consent to this crap… I wouldn’t be a part of this game, because if you allow it to happen, you legitimize these looters with whatever laws they want to wave in your face saying that A is not A, that your home is not your home, and that your life is not your own.

If your life is not your own, they may as well kill you, because if you consent to the looting, you’re giving your life away anyway.

I think I’ll make a donation to the Castle Coalition the next time I have some extra cash.

This sentence in the Bloomberg article caught my eye. (my emphasis)

The ruling is a setback for property-rights advocates angered by what they said is an increasingly common practice, now used thousands of times a year.

The phrase “property-rights advocates” makes me flabbergasted. I thought… I thought there was some organization I heard of once that was made up of property-rights advocates… What was that called, again? Hmm… Oh yeah, it was THE GOVERNMENT. The fact that people who respect property rights are now apparently a fringe activist group blows my mind, it really does.

Steve Jobs is quite often a little wacky in is external persona, but I was really struck by this quote:

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

A few sentences through, I kind of sighed and thought he was just being nihilistic, but as you progress, he really exhibits a reverence for the value of man’s life, and for living it. It’s a very upbeat quote on a very deep level, despite the surface discussion of death. It’s obviously more of a macro-level observation than a micro-level one, because some days are much better than others. But I’d be tremendously proud and wholly satisfied to have been who I am, to have done what I’ve done and to have loved who and what I’ve loved.

And I’ve been, done, and loved exactly who and what I wanted to today.

Regarding the whole runaway bride thing, why must the news media squander what little faith we may have had in them before? And why would they waste it on such a ridiculous non-story? At least Dan Rather’s misstep last year played out during an intensely heated election cycle, where he was poised to make some kind of difference in the polls. This story is nothing.

It’s so transparent that the news-vultures were just waiting for this to become another Scott Peterson or Mark Hacking case.

Fox’s Bill O’Reilly: “Woman goes out for a jog and boom, she’s gone. Do you think there’s an epidemic going on here?” And: “This young woman — it’s almost like Laci Peterson. She just disappears from a place that’s Mainstream, USA.”

Fox’s Sean Hannity: “I agree with the father-in-law-to-be.”

Geraldo Rivera: “That there’s foul play.”

Hannity: “Yes.”

Rivera: “So do I.”

Nancy Grace of Headline News, interviewing Wilbanks’s dad: “Mr. Wilbanks, this sounds completely unlike Jennifer to just disappear. I just don’t believe it`s a case of cold feet.”

Yes, journalists speculate all the time, and yes, they have every right to be as irresponsibly sensationalist as they want. But I can’t really decide if they’re even eroding the public’s trust in them at this point or not. I mean, do people even trust the media anymore? Is it as obvious to everyone else how ridiculous the industry is?

Thinking this morning about the evolution textbook/sticker debate that has raged on in classrooms, board meetings, and courts across the land, I thought it would be funny to see a sticker required on copies of The Bible, with language similar to the stickers the anti-science crowd wants on biology textbooks.

Of course, to avoid duplication of effort, I went ahead and Googled it to see if such a parody sticker exists. Here’s what I found:

WARNING!!!
This bible is made up of stories, not facts. Serious disagreement among biblical scholars has existed for thousands of years about these stories. The stories in this bible should not be taken as literal truth or as facts. There are hundreds of other religious stories throughout the world that contradict and call into question the stories in this bible. This bible should therefore be approached with a spirit of critical consideration.

From http://blogs.lawrence.com/yellowdog/2005/feb/10/mythnotfact/

Pretty good. I am not in a position to, nor do I have the desire to, bring the Bible into question here. I just question the motives of people who selectively argue against teaching science to children correctly.

Why don’t they complain about the theory of electromagnetism, the germ theory of disease, and the theory of gravity? They’re just theories too! Nobody wants a sticker warning kids about other theories because these others don’t conflict with their specific religious beliefs. That’s the only reason, in my opinion, that there’s even an issue. Why? Most of the non-scientists injecting themselves into this debate seem to care very little about other science-related issues, even areas of science about which there is real, scientific debate.

Evolution is the central organizing theory of biology, and has fundamental importance in other sciences as well. It is no more controversial in scientific circles than gravity or electricity is…And, regardless of whether the changes in plants and animals are gradual or sporadic, the facts remain that plants and animals have evolved over time. There is no scientific dispute that evolution has occurred and continues to occur; this is why evolution is regarded as a scientific fact. (State of California, 1989)

This Terri Schiavo thing has gone further than any rational mind could have predicted, but I did appreciate the following quote from Libertarian Outlook:

So, it appears that the conservative Republicans who claim so much respect for the Rule of Law are just as quick to disregard that principle when it suits their purposes.

So, this has been a pretty boring week at home. The reason? On Tuesday, our cable blinked out some time during the day. From my own in-depth analysis of the Tivo, we can tell that it was sometime between the morning rerun of The Daily Show and what would have been Ken Jennings’s forty-somethingth win. I’ve gotta believe the suits at Sony Pictures and King World are at least carriers of the capitalism gene, and thus will produce a DVD set of the incredible (rumored to end at 75 times) championship of Ken Jennings.
Where was I? Oh, the cable.

So, I called up Comcast and explained. Customer service at most big utility companies (perhaps justifiably) treats everyone like an absolute retard. They put you through the rigamarole of attempting to find every single way that you could have screwed up before they’re willing to even consider that they may have done something wrong. I understand this policy. It probably makes them money in the end. But our cable just stopped working. It’s not like I plugged 75 splitters into each outlet and bought 6 black-market cable boxes while trying to electrocute the cat with the batteries from the three dollar universal remote that somehow costs $95 to replace. The cable worked in the morning. It didn’t when I got home. It’s really not any harder to understand than that. But they act as if I made a conscious effort to disable the cable. Yes, Joann from Comcast, just like you want nothing more than to sit at a 20-inch wide mini-cubicle and read a script to housewives who “dusted” their cable boxes with 12 ounces of Armor-All, I have nothing to do all day but sit around and try to get my cable to stop working, so that I can call and beg for the privilege of devoting a third of my weekend to waiting on your technicians.
Ohh, the technicians…
Right after we moved in, we got our cable turned on and scheduled our service call for a Tuesday. (The brilliant and efficient company charges you $50 to drive their van over to your house, and screw one wire into another one, so that you can continue to pay them $50 a month.) The call was for 5-8pm. I got in at 4:50 and there was a note on the door saying “sorry we missed you.” There was an answering machine message left just after noon saying they’d be there a little early. I’m sorry, Comcast. I didn’t know that when you said “be there 5-8″, you forgot to also add “and also be there the whole day in case we call. You know, because we’re really busy plugging these wires in and might have to call you.”

The next time they came, when they were bringing us our digital cable box, we had an appointment from 11-2 on a Saturday. I was out at 10:30 but got in at 10:50 or so to another answering machine message. “Comcast here. I guess you’re not home. Please reschedule the appointment…” was the message left… AT 10:45 AM. If you want me to be at home at a given time, just tell me. I was THERE for my appointment, YOU weren’t. YOU probably called all your calls for the day at a time OUTSIDE the appointment time, so that you could sit in your van all day.

The next appointment we had, I made sure to be home for a period of approximately seventy-five hours preceding the appointment time and just managed to catch the technician, when he showed up, without calling, 2 hours into the appointment. And installed an extra cable box. Which they claimed we ordered. And billed us for. And when the technician was in my house, on his way out the door, I told him that we didn’t order the second cable box and we wouldn’t be paying for it. To which he shrugged: “Call and have someone come pick it up.”
“Yes, I’m looking forward to it”, I replied.

So ANYWAY, the point of all of this is that finally, today, just in time for the Georgia/Tennessee game (more on that in a second), twenty minutes before the scheduled appointment, our fourth cable repairman came. His diagnosis? Comcast just *turned off* our cable. Someone tagged our apartment as not paying for cable, and “auditors” unplugged our cable, just for fun.

I don’t even have the energy to address that insanity. It’s back on now, and I talked Comcast into giving us at least a credit for the downtime.

So now I just finished watching the Presidential Debate from yesterday, and I am reminded of something wise I read, which I will now paraphrase without attribution.

You know things are bad when the (Republican) President is boasting about his prescription drug entitlement plan, and (Democratic) Senator Kerry is complaining about deficit spending.

“The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data.’ ” — Mike Quear, US Congressional staffer