apologies

Apologies for the absence. I am heading up north for a ski trip to WI/MI so hopefully I'll be able to bang out some posts on the long drive to and fro.

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Engagement

Just watched a very good film, Lions for Lambs. Good themes, civic engagement, duty, honor. It's interesting because for as good of a movie as it is, and for as good as the cast was, I really hadn't heard anything about it.

The idea of civic engagement is a good one. One interesting thing about the movie was that it was very Greek themed. Not Greek like I was Greek, but I'm talking about ideas of the polis, the idea of being a citizen. Not in the passive sense that so many of us seem to enjoy that concept, of having rights bestowed on us in exchange for taxes and stopping at stop signs. But being an active citizen, engaging, debating, acting and all the good, active parts of culture that people seem so happy to shy away from.

There was another movie (based on a book of course) that also addressed ideas like this, 'Starship Troopers.' Yes believe it or not, 'Starship Trooper' was based on political theory, and a uniquely Greek Political Theory as well. 'ST' was about voting, and in that world, voting was only a right bestowed upon those who had served.

It's interesting how these Greek theories of the Polis, and the Demos still emerge, how they are still so rooted in our culture and heretiage, a heritage not of physical ancestry, but of moral, political and ethical ancestry. All valuable ideas. Maybe like another Greek was famous for saying, "there's nothing new under the Sun"


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Declaring Reader Bankruptcy

I love my Google Reader.  Love it almost too much.  I have somewhere north of 60 active RSS feeds that it pulls from everyday. I've never been really good about managing these feeds however, the posts pile up, thousands of them at a time. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but it does clutter up my reading experience.  I've taken to reading the New York Times on my Kindle every morning, but still my Google reader feeds still serve as a primary source of news, especially on some more specialized interests like tech/gadgets and the legal world, but it's also my best and main source for taking in commentary. What I want to do is to use this source of news, knowledge and information better, I want to immerse myself more in the topics and writers who I really care about, and drop the ones who just add noise. I trust myself to innately make decisions about what's important for me, but it's hard to monitor those decisions when each feed has hundreds of unread posts, and each category has thousands. So as of last night I have declared Reader Bankruptcy ( concept stole from Fred Wilson's Email Bankruptcy, who's blog never goes unread)I'm going to monitor my reading for the next week or two.  At the end of that period, I'm going to cull the feeds that have the highest percent of their material unread. This is of course an on-going process, I hopefully will be adding and deleting feeds most constantly now. The quantitative goal i am setting for myself is to never have more than 100-200 unread articles on the Reader.  I plan on posting my trends data as this goes on to hopefully track this progress. In the same vein, I also want to begin expanding some of my feed selections so, if anyone out there has any feed recommendations, I would love to hear them.


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Honesty and the public sphere

I have to be honest, originally, I thought that the Tim Geithner tax situation was no big deal. From what I understood at first, he was working for an organization that didn't withhold tax for the US gov't and given how complicated our tax code can be, it didn't surprise me that there were errors, sure 30-40K seems like a lot, but when you are operating at the income levels that a lot of senior public officials operate at, not unsurprising.

But as more information has come out, much of it condemning to Geithner, and painting him more as a tax evader or at the very least an opportunist, I have begun to re-think my position.

Where the defense previously was "well it was a human error!" I could buy that, but if the reason for confirming him now is that "it in our national interest to look the other way on this..." I just can't get in line behind that.

How quickly some people seem to forget that it is the lack of transparency, and opportunistic greed that got us into the economic mess we are in now. Not only does appointing Geithner send the wrong message about the important steps towards transparency and reconciliation that we need to take, but I also question his fundamental strength of character to help lead this country out of our dark hour.

I have given Obama a lot of leeway in appointing people whom I feel represent a bit of a betrayal on ideological ground, but I'm ok with that, there is nothing wrong with a lefty president appointing left-center advisors. But I do have a problem if he betrays the trust I and so many others have put in him to be a more honorable and just leader, Geithner's tax evasion represents an old, and a wrong way of doing things, and no amount of smarts or connections can make that right.

I sincerely hope that BHO withdraws the Geithner nomination. Otherwise I've found my first great disappointment a lot sooner than I have hoped or expected.


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telling

I thought this was a pretty telling photo from the "Youth Ball" at the Inauguration. It's a Digital Youth...

New Commenting System

Student Nerds, my other blog, recently switched over to Disqus to host their commenting. Since I want to try to keep stuff as simple as possible to manage and inegrate, I have done so as well. I tried to preserve old comments but that was a bit tricky so we will see if it works. I hope you guys find the new commenting equal to or greater than Intensedebate. If people feel a preference however, let me know and I will certainly consider switching back.

A Moment

A lot is going to be written and has been written about the inauguration tomorrow. Some people are already cynical. But I'm not one of them. I came home after watching Che in the theaters last night, a movie that will warrant a blog post later, and I turned on a replay of the concert at the Lincoln Memorial. It was Bruce Springsteen playing his (awesome) song "The Rising" a song about 9/11 nonetheless for the President-Elect. And I thought about Lincoln, and about the Blood, the gallons and gallons of American blood that was spilled in the civil war, I thought about broken necks and burnt crosses and opportunities denied and about fire hoses and German Sheppard and jim crow and brown and the Topeka board and so many things that happened before me, but so many things that are bigger than any of us ever will be on our own.

This is an inauguration, and the peaceful transfer of power is always a cause for celebration. But it's more than that, it's the culmination, or at least a waypoint on the journey that all those events above lead to.

Tomorrow will be historic, and tomorrow will be world changing.
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Red v Blue

This is from an old story on 538.com (which if you're interested in politics and NOT reading 538, that needs to change) http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/12/red-states-gaining-ground-but-migration.htmlThe analysis basically outlines what has been a growing trend in the past decade, or historically blue states losing population and historically red states gaining. I think on the surface that might be something that a progressive would be worried about, putting their control of Congress at risk but I don't think that's the whole story. The states gaining seats are almost universally Southern or Western states, and they include many states who Nate Silver is classifying as Red, but who went for Obama in '08 or at least where Obama had a significant and surprising showing, AZ, FL, GA, NC, OR, WA, SC. Really the only states who are gaining seats that are truly Red are TX and UT. I think it's important to keep in mind that gaining a seat is a backwards looking event. These States already have the population that is going to give them the additional representation. So if that holds, maybe the fact that Obama won is not inspite of the growth of these states, but because of it. If Latino immigrants (a voting bloc that the Republicans squandered and lots) are swelling the population of the Sun Belt, it's more and more likely that this last bastion of Republican strength is eroding. I think that this, more than anything should be the clarion call to the GOP that they need to reinvent themselves and reconsider those issues that keep them from being winner these voters. The conservative and republican message can be very compelling if presented the right way, this is a classic need for re-branding and realigning to meet the changing times. The Obama election is just one data point, and certainly his success does not exist in a vacuum, a product of demographics alone, but it revolutionary impact cannot and should not be dismissed. The country as always is changing and it's important that both parties work to change with it, otherwise they will increasingly find themselves irrelevant.

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Super Diamond

Went to the Neil Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond last night at House of Blues Chicago. It was a lot of Fun.

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Is Slow Growth Always Worse?

One of the underlying themes that has played a central role in the debate about stimulus, tax cuts, and reviving the economy in general is that advocates of the free market seem apolcolytpically opposed to any systemic changes that they feel will lead to slower growth once the economy gets back on it's feet.  The idea that even though the rapid growth of the financial and housing sectors (which coupled with the decline of our industrial base formed a increasingly larger part of the mid-2000's economy) is a major, major fundamental cause of the sever recession that we are in, that this should be the benchmark of our return to "normal" seems insane to me? Would a slightly lower normal rate of growth, measured by GDP or per capita consumption or whatever, necessarily be a bad thing?I'm not suggesting that people start sacrificing their quality of life here, or that we retreat into austerity as some sort of penance for our sinful ways, merely that we check the previously insatiable demand for more and more consumption.  Rather than bigger boats, bigger houses, and bigger debt. What if people read more, or saw more AAA baseball games or grabbed a beer rather than a vacation down Mexico way.  Downsized the house a bit. 10,000sq ft is a lot,  a lot more than a couple needs.  I think that though the GDP might take a hit, the growth that we do experience will be fundamentally stronger, and if you ignore GDP as the only measure of quality of life, then we might be living better lives as well.
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