| Dexter |
[11 Feb 2008|02:46pm] |
Too much time on my hands...
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[02 Dec 2006|01:14am] |
Liberal Leadership Prediction.
Current standings:
29.3 - Ignatieff
20.2 - Rae
17.8 - Dion
17.8 - Kennedy
04.9 - Dryden
04.0 - Brison
03.2 - Volpe
02.7 - Hall-Findlay
Here is my prediction. Fast-forward to the final four. MHF, Volpe, and Dryden go to Rae. Brison goes to Iggy. These are of course trends, not exact additions. And so some stray votes will get allocated differently--the only difference of importance is who will pick up more between Kennedy and Dion, who are virtually tied. And I'm calling Kennedy to pull ahead.
So final four:
33 - Ignatieff
30 - Rae
19 - Kennedy
18 - Dion
Then Dion drops off and supports Kennedy.
37 - Kennedy
33 - Ignatieff
30 - Rae
And now Rae drops off. Which way will he go? Its tough. Kennedy is closer to him in ideology and has more experience, but Ignatieff is his friend (old roommate) and is more intellectual. Kennedy is also fairly young, but Ignatieff and Rae crossed swords a lot through the convention. And so I'm calling Rae endorsing Kennedy. Ignatieff still picks up some of the Rae votes, but ultimately Kennedy wins.
Wildcards: There are three major wildcards in this prediction. The first is, of course, that Rae endorses Kennedy over Ignatieff. The second is that Kennedy pulls ahead of Dion--if not, then just replace Kennedy with Dion in the final three and I'm less sure of what Rae will do. The final wildcard is Brison endorsing Ignatieff. If he endorses Kennedy instead (which is possible--they are both young and future-oriented candidates), then Iggy will be in last on the final three and be the king-maker, and will endorse Rae.
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[11 Nov 2006|08:19pm] |
Why Boston Legal is the best show on television.
1) You know those shows that have that one character you just love? And you would watch the show, no matter how much it sucked, just for that one character? Well Boston Legal has 5 characters like that. And the show doesn't suck.
2) You don't know whether its a drama or a comedy. It is absolutely hilarious yet completely straight-faced.
3) The cinematography is interesting. The rapid cuts that segregate scenes are most excellent.
4) Alan Shore.
5) Its clever. They know their audience is smart and so they nod to that fact by breaking the forth wall. ("I have hardly seen you this episode"; "Is there somewhere you'd rather be?" "I'd like to be on cable. That is where the best work is being done."; "Do you think we win so much that we lose all suspense?"; et cetera).
6) Its one of the only shows centred on a true friendship. Most shows only bond characters through relationships. The friendship between Denny Crane and Alan Shore is central to the show.
7) Unlike most legal dramas, the climax of the show is not when the jury returns with the verdict. The climax is the closing argument. The flashy and frantic cinematography slows down and a lawyer delivers a long, intelligent and utterly satisfying closing.
8) It doesn't shy away from being political. In fact, it embraces it.
9) All the Star Trek references.
10) Let alone the great cast, they have great guest stars: Tom Selleck (Magnum PI), Micheal J. Fox, Shelley Berman (Larry David's dad on Curb), Peter MacNicol, Rev Al Sharpton, Larry King. Oh and not so great ones too: Freddie Prinze Jr.
And the top 5 clips:
1) Alan Shore closing on Freedom in America
2) Denny Crane to the Rescue
3) Alan Shore takes on a Good Ol' Boy
4) Poopy Cock (Part I) (Part II)
5) Cue the music!
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[30 Oct 2006|02:30am] |
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After two weeks of self-reflection on a lot of aspects of my life, one angle I've given a lot of attention to is my religious beliefs. As a result, my interest was piqued by the cover story in the current issue of Wired on atheism. Its basically a profile of Dawkins, Dennett and someone named Sam Harris, who I have to admit I was previously unfamiliar with.
Before getting into it, I should add that Dawkins produced a fantastic two-part series on BBC called "Religion: The Source of All Evil?" which you can watch on youtube (I have stitched the parts into a playlist here). Its worth watching just to see him take on Pastor Ted, whose church was featured in Harpers last year (and I blogged about it previously).
As at least a deist, if not a theist, if not a very liberal Christian (who has become much more liberal in the past two weeks), I suppose its natural that I have my points of contention with Dawkins. But the real source of our difference comes from a discipline that is perhaps equally profane and sacrilegious as atheism: the economics of religion. The economics of religion isn't what it sounds like. Its not about money or finances. A recent EconTalk podcast offers a good introduction. But in summary, the underlining assumption of economics is that people respond to incentives (financial, moral, social, et cetera) and they rationally choose among various options according to these incentives.
Thus an economical view of religion basically says there are incentives acting on people that decide to join religious groups--its not based purely on belief. And this is where I think Dawkins gets it wrong. He sees religion as inherently dangerous because people have committed their lives to irrational and unfalsifiable beliefs. But I think he's giving religious believers the benefit of the doubt. Sure they (we) may claim that they act in certain ways because a religious text tells them to or because they believe it is the will of God, but I don't think that this is the entire story. For example, if religious people were truly cognisant of an all-powerful God being individually angry with them because of sinful actions (as some religions posit), they would not be so easily tempted. The fact is, that when competing incentives come into play, they often easily overpower religious incentives.
Religion should be the most powerful incentive. If believers truly believed what they profess, the incentive of religion would never be trumped. But of course this is plainly not true. So what then of religious extremists? Well I believe if you carefully consider acts of religious extremism, you would find other incentives at play. They could be perverse mind-control type of stuff or they could be political incentives or they could even be "moral" incentives like revenge against an enemy for their past atrocities. No one responds solely to religious incentives. As so eradicating religion will not stop the problems of the world (even those we so desperately tie to religion). In fact, to think so is almost as naive as it is utopian.
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[14 Oct 2006|08:56pm] |
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This journal is going friends only for a good while.
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[10 Sep 2006|11:44pm] |
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I let my Green Party membership expire because I did not like the frontrunner for the leadership nomination--who has subsequently won. I wrote a bit about that here but this post is going to be more about where this leaves me: shopping around for a new party.
I am currently leaning towards embracing my inner Ontarian and do what Ontario has traditionally done: vote Liberal federally and vote Conservative provincially. I want to focus on the former but a few quick words on the latter: this is contingent on John Tory living up to his reputation as a Red Tory (Canada speech for liberal conservative) and it is also a very situational decision. I foresee a looming fiscal crisis within the coming decade specifically at the provincial level: the impact of the aging baby boomers on the health-care system. Normally I wouldn't be opposed to spending our way out of the current strains on the health-care system (Per capita, we only spend 2/3 of what Americans spend on healthcare--and their government is only covering the health-care costs of the elderly and the impoverished while we are paying for everyone!) but its not a sustainable solution. We need infrastructure change, to save up money, and get tax levels down... so we can hike them when the crisis hits (muhahaha).
My switch to the Liberal party is contingent on who assumes leadership of the party. If Ignatieff wins, I will likely vote Liberal but be somewhat discontent and rather vocal on where he doesn't line-up with my political ideology. If Bob Rae wins, I'll probably bite the bullet and vote Green; not because I'm really voting Green, more that I'm voting "none of the above." If Scott Brison, Stephen Dion, Ken Dryden, or Gerard Kennedy wins, I might actually find myself somewhat content. But of course, the devil is in the details. These are just leanings not absolutions: I'll reserve final judgement until I have all the platforms in front of me.
So anyways, I'm going through a bit of quarter-life crisis in converting to the Liberals. Mostly everyone reading this either knows me, listens to my podcast, or has seen my "liberal" rants on message boards, so exemplifying the areas in which I lean liberal is likely redundant. I am admittedly a pretty liberal guy. But I am also a pretty conservative guy. And so I want to highlight three areas in which I am staunchly conservative. Now this comes with a disclaimer: by labeling these views as conservative, I mean they are likely to be held by conservatives not that conservatives are likely to hold them. Its an unfortunate distinction to have to make, but a necessary one for reasons you will see.
Fiscal Responsibility
Except in times of severe recession, I believe the government should always balance the budget and contribute the surplus to debt reduction. Ethically, I take issue with borrowing money from future generations. And I also have practical economic concerns with running a deficit. A deficit is ultimately paid for in one of two ways (not mutually exclusive): printing more money which (with an excessive monetary expansion) lowers the value of the currency, or borrowing from private investors which crowds out the investment markets, takes money that would have been invested into business instead (hurting the GDP), and since the government has to undercut other businesses vying for investment, it reduces confidence in the market and can raise interest rates.
Even in times of recession, I would prefer the government address the situation with monetary policy (a la Milton Friedman) rather than Keynesian injections. I am more lenient, however, with the provincial government which has no control over the money supply.
While this is generally considered a conservative view, there is a huge emphasis on the small-c. It is not the position of the supply-side Bush administration which is running both a massive federal deficit and a massive trade deficit. In fact the only President to balance the budget in recent American history was Clinton--a Democrat. And here in Canada, its was Paul Martin as finance minister--a liberal--who balanced the federal deficit (and this year in Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, also a liberal). So far, it seems Stephen Harper is going to live up to his party's name and thankfully not in follow Bush's steps (or Regan's before him).
Decentralization
I believe that the government should be decentralized and more responsibility should be downloaded to the province and municipal levels. However, by responsibility I mean the power to create local and situation solutions, not the burden of raising the funds. The federal government should provide funding and there should be federal standards to ensure regions meet a minimal level of expectation.
This is commonly referred to as Federalism outside of Canada. In Canada, the term is often used to mean its direct opposite: the centralization of power at the federal level. I should note that some conservatives hold to decentralization because they want government to parallel industry and decentralization was the trendy way to increase efficiency in the 90s. My primary concern is not efficiency but power. I want to spread the power out to prevent it from conjugating in the hands of the few.
Pro-Market
I believe strongly in the ability of free markets to create optimal outcomes, I believe that globalization is ultimately a force for good, and I believe that free trade is good for the global economy. Now a lot of conservatives are what I would call pro-business and its very, very important to realize that being pro-business is not being pro-market. There are two major aims of free market principals: reduce regulation and increase competition. Business are in favor of the first, but no business is in favor of the second. Any self-interested business would do anything within its power to gain a monopoly, or at least an oligopoly or at the very least, monopolistic competition. That is why business interest groups want protection from globalization, from corporate mergers (except their own), and from cheap imports (they want free-trade so they can export their goods without paying tariffs but when a global competitor undercuts their price, they want tariffs put on the import of those goods--hence the softwood lumber dispute). So being pro-business is at times antithetical to being pro-market, and no conservative is less pro-market than the paleoconservatives who believe in trade protectionism / isolationism.
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| Mind Hack #47 |
[10 Sep 2006|11:15pm] |
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The other day I was walking around Ottawa doing a few things I had to do and as I usually do while running errands, I was listening to a Podcast--in this case, a long but interesting talk by Randy Cohen who writes 'The Ethicist' column in the New York Times Magazine. At one location, I walked past a busy bus stop and the street noise drowned out an interesting point he was making. So I paused it until I got past the commotion and then attempted to rewind it. However I accidentally hit the back button on my ipod instead of holding it, taking me to the start of the podcast and losing my spot--a common occurrence I'm sure.
But what is interesting is what followed. The natural strategy for finding where you left off is to fast-forward for a bit, listen for a few seconds, and then fast forward some more, et cetera, until you get back to the right spot. But when I would listen to it for a few seconds, I would remember where I physically was when I heard that particular passage: I was at a certain corner; I was standing in line at the bank machine; I was browsing the economics section at Chapters; and finally, I was walking past the noisy buses. I re-found the spot where I left off far quicker because I knew the physical distances between the reference points of the passages far better than I knew the time differences between the passages themselves.
I don't know why but I find it extremely curious that in the human mind, spacial associations are dominate and temporal associations are subordinate.
So I guess the point is, if you are going to lose your spot in a podcast, its better to be walking around than sitting in the same spot.
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[28 Jun 2006|04:19pm] |
Tagged by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wishthesame
List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LJ along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to.
1) Iron and Wine / Calexico - Red Dust
2) Comets on Fire - Sour Smoke
3) B.B. King - The Thrill is Gone
I'm really into funky/groovy/bluesy songs at the current moment for some reason.
4) Keith Fullerton Whitman - Lisbon
Is it a song, an album, a concert, or a masterpiece? All of the above.
5) Explosions in the Sky - Have You Passed Through This Night?
I just rewatched The Thin Red Line on the weekend which got me thinking about this song and how incredible it is.
6) Earth - Coda Maestoso in F Flat Major (remixed by Autechre)
I like remixes like this. I could add the Shibuyaka remix of Bloc Party's Compliments but I'd rather just use an apophasis to exceed the cap.
7) The Cinematic Orchestra - Exit Music
This is supposedly a cover of the Radiohead song but you wouldn't have known it if I didn't just tell you.
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| The past inside the present |
[25 Jun 2006|12:35am] |
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Confession: sometimes I watch interviews with people and I pretend I am the person being interviewed. For example, Robert Wright interviewed a variety of people at a religious conference and asked them: What is God?
If I had to sum up what God is in one statement it would be: a transcendent being. Actually, that itself isn't entirely correct because if God was truly transcendent than God would transcend being itself. And so "transcendent being" is an oxymoron. Let me use Tillich's definition instead: a transcendent source of being.
With that distinction in place, I want to make it clear that I am not using the traditional definition of transcendence that other people here today may use. Often it is used to mean beyond. So God is beyond time. Or God is beyond human comprehension. That to me is problematic because as soon as you say God is beyond X, then you are drawing up a fence along X. And so God is on one side but not the other. And so X takes on an ontological value in defining God. And that clearly cannot be the case in terms of things like human understanding and the universe if God is the source of those things.
Rather I define transcendence as being not bounded by. In other words, things like human understanding or time do not bound God. So God is both inside and outside these boundaries. Its as if these boundaries didn't even exist. And so this leaves with a God that is both transcendent and imminent. And that is essentially the paradox that divides us here today. There are those of us, (fellow) Christians, Jews, and Muslims that tend to over emphasize the transcendence of God. And there are those, Hindus and Buddhists, that over emphasize the imminence of God. In my opinion, a true vision of God is a synthesis between the two.
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| Pet Peeve #439 |
[24 Jun 2006|06:32pm] |
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I am sitting in the auto shop waiting for a little upkeep on my car, pretending to be interested in Auto Times and making micro-shifts in my chair to avoid the numbing of my butt. A chap walks in to inquire about the cost of a certain procedure that I happen to know quite a bit about. I listen with interest, but my interest soon turns to shock when it becomes apparent that this chap is unwittingly going to be taken to the cleaners by the mechanic. After settling on a price three times higher than it should be, the man leaves to consult his wife.
As a moral person, what should I do? Should I follow the man outside and politely insist he try another shop? Or should I mind my own business and let him get ripped off?
The way a lot of politically minded people talk with their simple truisms, it would be an absolute sin for me to interfere. Why? Because they believe that hurting the economy is bad. Apply that logic here: the extra money that the shop gets at the customer's expense directly contributes to the GDP of this fine country, hence my interference would hurt the economy. Now don't get me wrong, most people don't understand the implications of the arguments they make. And most would not make this argument in this specific case. But they sure talk that way when it comes to policy. And so this is my pet peeve: the economy is not a sacred cow that needs to be protected at all costs. If you are going to argue that a policy hurts the economy, be prepared to tell me why hurting the economy is a bad thing. And to be clear, its not that I think hurting the economy is good--its just a little thing called situational ethics.
PS. All events are fiction and not meant to represent real events or real persons, living or dead.
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| EULAs and the Geniuses of Uninformative Dissemination |
[07 May 2006|11:52pm] |
Cross-posted from Blog*on*nymity
“[C]ontrol of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language. Anyone who has worked with language, from the devil on, has been in the business of spreading knowledge. They are not knowledge itself. Novelists, playwrights, philosophers, professors, teachers, journalists have no proprietary right over knowledge. They do not own it. They may have some training or some talent or both. They may have a great deal of both. They will still be no more than the geniuses of dissemination. That knowledge — once passed on as the mirror of creativity or as an intellectual argument or as the mechanisms of a skill or as just plain information — may lead to increased understanding. Or it may not. So be it.”
– John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization
In one unintentional way, Sony’s decision to secure a series of audio CDs with a very nasty piece of digital rights management (DRM) last fall was a partial victory for anti-DRM activists. This misstep on Sony’s part effectively catapulted a niche topic of concern to international attention and into the collective consciousness of the informed public where it lingered for a week or two, and then slipped into the chambers of recent history. The mainstream coverage largely focused, and rightly so, on how Sony’s DRM compromised the security, anonymity, and control of those who unwittingly inserted one of these audio CDs into their Windows machine. The DRM installed as rootkit — a technique that allows software to run invisibly on a system. Worst still, the DRM did not merely install itself as a rootkit; it created an open mechanism to allow itself to run invisibly, and by extension any other piece of properly constructed software. In other words, it left an open security hole for malware to slip through and become invisible to the majority of anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities protecting our systems. Once installed, the DRM will phone home each time the CD is inserted, and no method for uninstalling the DRM was originally offered.
I will not detail each twist and turn of the subsequent events that eventually provoked a recall on the CDs, and a series of lawsuits. I refer those interested to the blog of Mark Russinovich who originally discovered the rootkit and to the Wikipedia article. I have denoted this specific case as a partial victory for those who oppose DRM because while it temporarily caught mainstream attention and hopefully left an impression, it did not do much to impede the relentless movement of content creators towards DRM — it only caused them to adopt subtler albeit equally restrictive technologies.
However there is another side to the Sony debacle that I want to focus on: user consent. Like most pieces of software, Sony’s DRM included an end-user licence agreement (EULA); that daunting piece of legalese that ends with an “I Agree” button. In this case, not only did Sony’s EULA not disclose the rootkit, phoning home, or uninstallability, the DRM installed itself before even displaying the EULA. These issues were subject to an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit, which was eventually settled out of court. While I fully applaud the efforts of EFF, I also have to make an uneasy confession to make. Even if companies like Sony did fully disclose and detail all the undesirable behaviours of their software in a proper EULA, I would never know because I never read them. And I know I am not alone.
As these events transpired, I recalled an opinion piece I read a few years ago in Wired by Mark Rasch. Rasch begins with an anecdote: “I have a recurring nightmare. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shows up on my doorstep demanding my left kidney, claiming that I agreed to this in some "clickwrap" contract” [link mine]. While an attorney and security guru himself, Rasch flatly admits to never reading online privacy policies despite writing them for clients. This confession appears to be part of a widely held consensus. According to internet legend, the software vendor PC Pitstop once buried a potential monetary reward in one of its EULAs for any claimant who responded through a given email address. 4 months and 3000 downloads later, the first person finally wrote in and their diligence was rewarded with a $1000 cheque.
Companies can be surprisingly candid in their EULAs, shamelessly detailing in plain language their intention of installing bundled tracking software, displaying all forms of pop-up ads, or phoning home with user information that can be sold to third parties. However other companies purposely obfuscate the pertinent information with impervious legalese, and many EULAs run to multiple pages inside a tiny window that cannot be resized or copied to the clipboard. As along as we the consumers are complicate with this system, and continue to unintentionally consent to terms of service we make no effort to understand, we are empowering the software vendors to the status of geniuses of uninformative dissemination. The information that is communicated through EULAs falls squarely in the latter half of John Ralston Saul’s distinction — knowledge that does not increase understanding.
In Mark Rasch’s op-ed, he turns to technology to aid in consumer understanding. Specifically he calls for a law robot that can be programmed with user preferences and process a licence or policy on a user’s behalf. Now suppress any visions of an artificially intelligent bot capable of comprehending a legal document for moment, because that technology is still far in our future. Other options exist. One is to pressure vendors into offering a machine-readable summary of their contracts and policies. And ground has already been broken on this front by the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P).
P3P was initiated in 1997 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with the objective of developing a standardized syntax for encoding machine-readable privacy policies for web services. P3P use a versatile mark-up language called XML. Any of you reading this blog entry through an RSS feed is already making use of XML. A P3P policy has a set of predefined disclosures and a company must make all that are applicable to its policy. The absence of any disclosure presumes the action is never taken. This transforms the nature of the policy from being a one-way broadcast into being a response to predetermined questions. This disempowers the vendors from being geniuses of dissemination who push their carefully constructed terms of services onto consumers, and empowers the user to pull understandable information from the vendor.
From a technological perspective, a P3P policy is very elegant. It uses a hierarchical tree of assertions that require the web service to disclose its identity, the methods that are open for resolving disputes concerning the policy, and what gathered information can be later accessed by the user. It then requires the web service to explicitly detail every type of information that is retained (from a comprehensive and predefined list), what purpose the information will be used for, whom the information can be disclosed to, and how long it will be retained. A user may then specify her preferences to a mediating agent such as Privacy Bird or use a P3P-enabled search engine which will analyze the privacy policies of each website she visits before she actually connects to the service itself, and report any discrepancies between the site and her preferences (or if the site does not have a P3P policy at all).
The syntax of P3P could easily be modified to handle EULAs. As a rough sketch, consider anchoring the assertions in two categories: monitor and install. Because spyware monitors user traffic, the monitor category would essentially inherit all the P3P assertions specifying the information retained. It could also specify, with an action assertion, how the data is obtained (keystrokes, data scrapping, packet sniffing, data interception, et cetera) and how often the information is being obtained (only when the program runs, as long as the operating system is running, one-time only, et cetera). The install category would disclose any third party software that is bundled with the principal software and reference this software’s EULA. It would also include assertions concerning the actions taken by the software (rootkit, displays pop-ups, url redirects, et cetera) and an assertion of how uninstallable it is.
Logistically, porting P3P to handle EULAs is not as simple. The legal status of EULAs is ambiguous, and the enforceability of a machine-readable version is something I am not qualified to speculate on. There was also a need to enforce the accuracy of P3P and natural language privacy policies, resulting in a group of non-profit seal programs that audit and certify web services' privacy practices. Expanding the progress made with privacy policies to EULAs would require similiar programs, and the process demands a massive collaboration between computer scientists and lawyers and other disciplines. ID Trail represents a rare occasion when all the right people are sitting at the same table, and as a result I look forward to feedback concerning this problem from all angles: implementation ideas, critiques concerning its viability, opinions on its legality, and speculation on vendor's incentives to comply. Would an undertaking be in the public interest? Is it needed? Could it be effective?
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| The thrill is gone |
[26 Feb 2006|11:35pm] |
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I haven't written in this in so long. But tonight I need to clear my head. I have this problem in that I come up with some argument, idea, or position on a given topic and I obsess over it. I keep repeating it over and over again in my mind, ever-adapting the articulation of it. And I can't get any work done until I release it in some form. I have a folder on my computer full of notepad files with my crazy ideas about everything imaginable. But I think I really need to start blogging again.
There is a television show called Numb3rs. Its kind of cheesy but its about a mathematician who uses math to solve criminal cases that his FBI brother is working on. And I relate well to the character. At one point he bemoans in self deprecating fashion to his father about how easily distracted he is. And his father replies that a more accurate description is: easily fascinated. That is me in a nutshell. Easily fascinated. I'm easily fascinated with new areas. I resent that I didn't receive a true liberal education: to know something about everything, and everything about something. In university I got the latter, but I've spent my spare time desperately trying to catch up on the former. In high school, I was fascinated with music. So I became a music snob. Then I turned to indie and arthouse films. And then at some point in my undergraduate, I stopped buying music and started buying books. It started with theology and then widen into philosophy as a whole. After that, by coincidence of an election, I got bit with the politics bug. Now that I have a venue for my political thoughts, I've been fascinated with economics, game theory, cognitive science, network theory, and one thing I was deprived of in my evangelical Christian childhood: the theory of evolution.
A lot of famous thinkers who lived in centuries past have an anthology of their collected letters. I got thinking about the modern equivalent of this. What if someone, say, printed an anthology of my best posts on message boards, for example. Not that I'm planning on being famous or conceited enough to think I might be. The though just occurred to me. And its a thought that depresses me because so much of online discussion involves crossing swords over issues that may be relevant today, but in a decade or even a couple years, they will have absolutely no currency. We spend so much time perfecting our opinions of the Bush administration or digital rights management or some trendy school-of-thought. I want to start writing about transcendent issues. Issues that will have some resonance in a decade or two. Big Think ideas.
But for tonight, I just need to revert my mind to a tabula rasa so I can concentrate on my school work.
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| Dreams bigger than memories |
[25 Jul 2005|02:24pm] |
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Within mere days of becoming an official, card-carrying member of the Green Party, the rumour mill is threatening my loyality and devotion. According to Liberal party gossip, Michael Ignatieff is speculated to make a run for leadership when Paul Martin steps down. Ignatieff is essentially Canada's leading political intellectual (next to my beloved John Ralston Saul): faculty at the Kennedy School at Harvard, Human Rights guru, accomplished author, brilliant lecturer, et cetera. In fact, I was in the middle of listening to his astutely brilliant Massey Lecture--The Rights Revolution--when I caught wind of this interesting gossip item. Apparently, he spoke at the Liberal convention this year. I found his speech online here and I've read it three times. I wish every Canadian would read it at least once.
In September I am starting my masters at University of Ottawa. I am very excited to work with my advisor, Dr. Carlisle Adams, who is basically a perfect match for my interests. I also cannot wait to soak in the political atmosphere of the capital city.
There is also a fantastic two-part series in a recent issue of Harpers about what has to be the scariest church in America, albiet the most powerful one: Part 1, Part 2. Its written by Jeff Sharlet of Killing the Buddha and The Revealer fame. I hate what Evangelical Christianity has become--or perhaps its been this way all along.
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| As old glory maintains your consciousness... |
[27 Apr 2005|11:08am] |
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Bring on the election already. As Martin flip-flops (thank you Mr. Kerry for bringing the term into the public parlour) over the issues, so does my desire for an election. Initially, I was all for it. I really want to get involved this time. If the prevailing issue is going to be AdScam, then the Green Party's open society planks are going to resonate. And people, like me a year ago, who think the Canadian Greens are a one-issue party out in left field need to hear them.
Then Martin and Layton formed a backroom deal to divert a proposed $4.6 Billion in corperate tax cuts into things, oh, a little more practical. When most coperations are downsizing and cutting costs, the tax cuts are not likely to translate into employment or to lower inflation. Memo to the INCs: if you are strapped for cash, why don't you axe your uber-annoying television commericals? Anyways, I was pleased enough with this decision. In general, I like the NDP's direction of spending, I just don't like the amount they want to spend. So with the NDP directing the funds, and a fiscally-responsible* Liberal party limiting the funds, I'm optimistic they can accomplish something.
But no, Martin has to get wishy-washy under Harper's scowling at his actions. So now he wants, get this, both! He wants to give the NDP their $4.6 Billion AND he wants to give the Tories their $4.6 Billion, effectively doubling that portion of the budget. Its starting to look a lot like he's trying to buy his way out of an election. This is a man with no direction and no vision, just impulses. He is exactly what The Economist dubbed him: Mr Dithers.
In other news: Save the filibuster! Keep taking it to the diaper!
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*By "fiscally responsible," I mean their Rubinomics of balanced budgets. Of course, in other more obvious fiscal ways, they were one of the most irresponsible parties in Canadian history.
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| I ain’t saying much I just think |
[15 Apr 2005|10:03pm] |
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My blog moves slower than trickle-down Reaganomics. Two weeks ago, Neha and I presented at a Religion and Cultural Studies conference at Wilfred Laurier Univerisity on "Evil." It was, uh, interesting. I was the only non-Arts presentor, so I decided to do a trippy combination of computer science and religious philosophy:
( A Digital Deistic View of Evil )
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| A programmed, computer bio-grafted Herbie Hancock |
[26 Feb 2005|09:55pm] |
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Neha is in Mexico and to keep my mind off how much I miss her, I've naturally been thinking a lot about copyright law.
(Its a good thing my blog isn't copyrighted¹ otherwise I may have violated it with that sentence's resemblance to the one that started this post. Perhaps I could sue myself like FOX contemplated... ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself!)
Actually I've been reading Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression. You can download the entire book for free (click moi), under a Creative Commons license. I actually got hooked on copyright issues through Mr. Creative Commons himself—Lawrence Lessig—and his monthly column in Wired. And this book came recommended through Lessig's blog.
Now I know, I know, copyright law doesn't sound like a thrilling subject for a book but Freedom of Expression is brilliant! Its smart and witty and probably the only single place you'll hear about Fox threatening to sue itself over a Simpsons episode, a cease-and-desist to the Girl Scouts over singing Happy Birthday and other classics around a campfire, MLK's non-speech: "I have a dream that one day... my heirs will shill my image in cell-phone ads and charge scholars fifty dollars a sentence to reprint this speech," hiphop sampling, your very own DNA† (†Patent Pending by Omnicorp), genetic seeds that terminate after a year forcing the dependency of farmers in developing countries on US corporations, and I'm only in the first chapter!
Seriously did you know, pour exemple, that Myriad Genetics has a monopoly on two genes (BRCA-1 and BRCA-2) that are linked to breast cancer, and they charge a stiff 4K royalty every time a woman is tested for them!? And if a therapy is discovered for these genetic mutations, a license must first be obtained from Myriad—a power they've exploited to quench research on the topic. And that is just one company in an industry full of biotech startups greedily grabbing every genetic sequence they can get their money-grubbing hands on, while treatment research grinds to a halt and people face the mounting costs of genetic tests.
And its of course not just genetic sequences but medication as well. As Philip Yancey astutely put it, "Could someone explain to me why the U.S. threatened to break the patent on Cipro after three anthrax deaths, yet vigorously resists “tampering with intellectual property rights” when someone suggests breaking the patent on AIDS drugs for the sake of 25 million infected Africans?"
These issues are enough to pale nearly any other copyright issue but, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension, thousands of films will physically deteriorate before their copyright expires, effectively preventing them from ever being legally transfered to better film and archived.
Or take the American company POD-NERS. The owner buys a bag of beans in Mexico, cross-pollinates all the yellow ones, and patents the "yellow bean" in early 90s. He then proceeds to sue dozens of Mexicans for royalties on exporting yellow beans to the US—something Mexicans have been growing and exporting for centuries!—effectively killing 90% of the income of some 22,000 Mexican farmers.
Copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property issues matter! They are moral issues. Human rights issues. And its something you don't hear about. And something most political parties couldn't be bothered to formulate a policy on. But not my political party, of course: "The [Canadian] Green Party believes that life is not something that humans can take responsibility for inventing. The Green Party will not grant patents on genetic material or life forms of any kind."
Vive La Copyleft Revolution!
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1. My blog is now under a Creative Commons license which means you can take anything I write without asking and use it however you want (zines, websites, other ventures) as long as you cite me. Just FYI.
—The management.
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| Listen through the reed of the saxophone |
[01 Feb 2005|11:55am] |
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Just when I thought there could never be another human being obsessed with the convergence of chaos theory, economics, and religious philosophy, I stumble upon Mark C. Taylor. And so I've enqueued "Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption" and "The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture" in my ever growing list of books to read.
Speaking of books, I read Mandelbrot's "The (mis)behavior of markets" which makes me want to drop out of engineering all together and take up economics. Its exquisitely fascinating! I'm currently reading "A Generous Orthodoxy" by Brian McLaren, which deserves an aside. I've found Christian literature has evolved (or perhaps I've done the evolving) in something quite intolerable. I don't mean theology or the classics, rather the stuff that you could actually walk into a Christian bookstore and pull of the shelf (besides Philip Yancey!). Anyways, strangley, A Generous Orthodoxy is such a book (as is "Blue Like Jazz" by Don Miller, another recent aquisition I haven't started yet). Its strange because it feels like if I ever wrote a Christian book, it would be this exact book. Well not exact because I could never construct such beautiful prose.
If you are curious though what I'd write if I ever wrote something about the Iraqi election, you may find out for yourself at tinydrawings dot org under web content (Electioneering of a Civil War).
I've grown despondant with the job market, and so I applied to grad school. It was a rather last minute decision and so I limited myself to two schools: University of Waterloo and University of Ottawa. Waterloo (aka MS Waterloo) is basically the MIT or Stanford of Canada--a new university with strong technical programs (and, yes Neha, strong arts programs as well!). University of Ottawa is easier to get into and Ottawa is essentially the Silicon Valley of Canada. Or was--a lot of the industry got burned in the second Dot Bomb. But there is another aspect to Ottawa: as the capital of Canada its our political hotbed so I can start making mutually benefitial connections for my 2008 campaign.
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| HAPPY 24th BIRTHDAY PULPSPY!!! |
[20 Jan 2005|11:34am] |
Jeremy's Birthday Resolutions for the Annum:
1. To read all 500+ of Barth's Books
2. To not be jealous of the Purple Monster
3. To fall out of love with Prime Time Television
4. To appreciate Tommy Douglas for his contributions to Canada's Jewel, Universal Healthcare, not the consequence of his sperm (Kieffer Sutherland.
4.5 To finish watching all available and rentable seasons of 24.
5. To become a world class economist
6. To be as passionate about skiing as Neha is.
7. To be as passionate about knitting as Neha is.
8. To have a three track mind instead of tunnel vision.
9. To have a beard.
10. To dance like it's going out of style, sing karaoke like I am Bono, to run with flailing arms, to wear corduroy.
Happy Birthday to Me!
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