Human worth

"Now: We Get Our Lives Back"

Andrew explains why I was so tired and unproductive last week after the election:

As I find myself barely able to function this weekend, I did manage to go for a bike ride, walk the dogs, and catch up on a few Netflix projects (finishing off John Adams, "The Savages", the rest of Season 11 of The Simpsons). What is this I'm feeling? Yes, it's clouded with Prop 8 grief. But it isn't euphoria. I haven't felt that since O-Day. It isn't redemption: I don't expect that from politics. I realize what I'm feeling is relief.

What I wrote last Monday was not meant casually. Knowing that the Bush-Cheney-Addington axis will be forced out of power is an immense, slackening relief. I've felt compelled by politics these past few years in ways I don't like or enjoy. With men and women finally back in power I can trust to act reasonably and ethically and within the rule of law, I feel less hesitation in getting on with life. A reader makes the point as well as I can:

One, mildly Oakeshottian, point I don't think is being made enough: one of the pleasures of the week is that it holds out the promise of not having to be obsessed with politics. It is unnatural, it seems to me, to have to care passionately every day about the workings of the central government: only in totalitarian societies, where a knock on the door may come at any time, or in authoritarian ones, where each sneeze of the King has to be analyzed for its potential consequence, does there exist a need to keep the government of the country forever in the forefront of your mind.

One of the blessings of liberal democracy, in theory, is that we delegate the common fate to the most able, intelligent and motivated people among us, and, though we keep an eye on them and make them subject to recall and revision, we can cede our trust to them to do a more or less decent and able job most of the time. We trust them. For the first time in years, we can say now: the government is in the hands of skillful people with a sense of the real; we can live the live sin front of our eyes without worrying that some horror is happening behind our backs. It would be a mistake, I think, for us all to carry on past the election and into the New Year with the same level of obsessive attention that this year, and the years before, have forced on us. Good government gives us back our lives.

Another word for this is freedom. And as the constitution is quietly restored, and torture finally relinquished, it grows.

Photos from NH

Ethan took some photos in NH. From left: our GOTV HQ, Ethan and me, our op center, Michael Ansara training poll watchers.

YES WE CAN

"We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can."
- Barack Obama, January 8th, 2008, after the New Hampshire Primary.



Yes we can.
Yes we can.
Yes we can.

Tomorrow, we will.

One Word: Tomorrow

It's been another long day in Rochester, NH, we just finished printing the first round of GOTV turfs for tomorrow and we'll hopefully get a few hours of sleep soon before returning early in the morning. The logistics that go into even a small city's campaign operation are incredible; I'm sure I'll write more about this later. It's been truly inspiring to be part of this small office, a small piece of a huge movement that began two years ago and culminates in a collective decision tomorrow. Every drop will count: Kerry beat Bush by 14 votes in Rochester in '04, and 7000 more NH votes for Gore in 2000 would have kept Bush out of office.

This afternoon, a handful of Republicans (whose HQ followed the Dems across the street) went out on the street to do "visibility," holding signs for passing cars. (Like so much in the campaign, this doesn't seem to be particularly effective in itself, but would hurt if it were lacking, if only because the other side does it.) So to their three or four sign holders, a dozen or more of our volunteers, mostly women, went across the street from them with Obama/Shaheen/Porter/etc signs. The Republicans started shouting all kinds of filth: calling the Dems communists, telling them they didn't have jobs, baby-killers, etc. Our volunteers returned after an hour ago, surprised but not shaken. Those minutes said so much about the state of our politics today, and why Barack Obama needs to win tomorrow.

Reporting from Rochester, NH

I've been here with my colleague Ethan since Friday in Rochester, NH working the tech side of the Rochester Get Out The Vote operation. We'll be here through election day supporting the existing operation which is doing amazing work. We set up an operations center in the community center next to the campaign office - half a dozen laptops, several laser printers, a wifi network, phones, office supplies - which is the new headquarters for all the GOTV (Get Out The Vote) operations. From the administrative side of the operation, the lack of clear information on what's going on, the seemingly bizarre orders coming from the state office, and general exhaustion create a lot of chaos at times. Yet we're still getting out hundreds of volunteers every day to canvass and call thousands of voters, package literature, enter data, serve food, keep the place organized, etc - so despite the chaos the campaign at all levels still seems to be extremely effective. Tuesday will be the real test, of course, and I still don't understand what we'll be doing then.

Bill Clinton was in town for Jeanne Shaheen today. (She's running to replace John Sununu, a longtime Bush supporter, in the U.S. Senate.) The opera house had maybe 700 seats and was packed full; I was helping staff the event, and then watched from the back of the auditorium by the sound engineer, barely 50 feet from the podium. There were two memorable moments in his speech. The first was, "When I was elected, the country was in a ditch. Now the country's in a ditch again and we need to elect Obama. That's what happens - country's in a ditch, gotta call a Democrat!" Second was an absurd story, the kind we hear far too often, of a family in the rural midwest: their child has multiple severe medical conditions; the husband's trucking business went under when gas spiked last year, and he's now a contract trucker without health insurance. They could qualify for Medicaid only if they got divorced. So their options were: 1) Starve and pay for the kid's medical bills, 2) eat and the kid dies, 3) get divorced to save . "These aren't my family values!" she told Clinton, crying... and then laughed from the absurdity of it all.

Change begins in two days. Don't forget to vote.

My Barack O' Lantern

From a stencil at YesWeCarve.com:



(T's)

NPR and eMusic

I subscribed to NPR's All Songs Considered podcast recently, and I love it. It's giving me great stuff to download with my [also recent] eMusic subscription. The latest: David Byrne & Brian Eno's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today; Okkervil River's The Stand Ins; and the compilation Help: A Day In The Life. Loving it. I'm also looking forward to the Kaiser Chief's upcoming album (previewed in the great Fall Music Preview) Off With Their Heads.

Vote for $1 million in charity

One of our clients at EchoDitto is TripAdvisor, and they're giving away $1 million in charity, divided among 5 organizations as determined by the voting public. The candidates for the money are: Conservation International, Doctors Without Borders, National Geographic Society, The Nature Conservancy, and Save The Children. Take ten seconds out of your life to pick which one you think the money should go to! Vote here.

Cafe Wisdom

I saw this in a Harvard Square cafe recently (taken with my phone):

Images of San Francisco

Tristyn and I returned from San Francisco early Tuesday morning. Photos from the trip follow. (Full San Francisco thread here.)

Saturday we took a cable car to the farmer's market at the Ferry Building. Locally grown produce is sold outside, and shops selling housewares and food are inside.


They're very serious about recycling: there are even compost bins. And a political satire of the famous kids' book.


Across the street is an artists' market. Stalls are only allowed to sell their own work. We bought a handmade glass tray similar to the black and white one on the left.


From there we took another cable car to the Cable Car Museum. Until then I did not realize that cable cars have no propulsion of their own - rather they "grip" a steel cable that constantly runs (at 9 1/2 MPH) under the ground. The city-wide cable is driven from these engines in the museum:


I assume this was from after the 1906 earthquake/fire that destroyed the city:


We had lunch at the Gallery Cafe cafe across the street, which offered free wifi and private glass alcoves.


Next we went to Vesuvio's, a bar popular in the 50s with Beats like Kerouac and Ginsberg. It was only fitting to drink a 'Jack Kerouac.'




We stopped by Grace Cathedral. The outside looks like Notre Dame, and the inside is similarly Gothic - except that the ceiling arches don't actually hold up the structure, as in real Gothic structures, but simply add decoration to a steel frame that does. Maybe that makes it more earthquake-proof, but it looked a little redundant.


We had dinner at Mel's Drive-In - not really a drive-in anymore, but still a good diner. Across the street is Tommy's Joynt, where we ate the next night.


On Sunday, we went to Fisherman's Wharf and Alcatraz Island. It was Fleet Week, so the Blue Angels and other squadrons were flying overhead in acrobatic formations all day. Thousands of boats were on the water to see the show.


Tristyn and me at Fisherman's Wharf after a big meal.


From the Wharf, we hiked up steep roads to see the Coit Tower. A statue of Christoper Columbus - fitting for Columbus Day weekend - stands outside the tower.


The view in two different foci from the trail near the tower.


For dinner, we went back to The Stinking Rose: A Garlic Restaurant. I agree with the guidebook that their cuisine isn't particularly exceptional, but I do like garlic and the place is fun. The vanilla-garlic ice cream, however - which I didn't try two years ago but was determined to try this time - was (not surprisingly) pretty awful. The ceiling was adorned with wine bottles decorated like garlic bulbs.


On Monday we spent the day in a park near the Civic Center. I read Yann Martel's wonderful book Life of Pi and T studied for classes the next day. A man there was flying a hopeful kite.

In San Francisco

Tristyn and I are in San Francisco for the extended weekend, two years since we were last here. We got up early and the flight was tiring, so we rested for much of the afternoon after getting in. We have a long day planned for tomorrow. I'll take lots of photos. Stay tuned.

Debate remix

I will be watching the debate tonight (it's on after all!) at the ICA, with a live remix by Sosolimited:

Performance and visual arts collective Sosolimited presents a live remix of the first presidential debate, morphing words and images into a nonpartisan spectacle of light and sound. Analyze the candidates’ emotion, track their body language, and count the blinks of their eyes—all in real time. Experiment will also feature additional DJs including Soul Clap, Baltimoroder, Ptvn and Etan, dancing in the lobby, outdoor projections (weather permitting), food and drinks by the Water Café, and a voter registration table.

Technical Problems

Hi readers,
As you may have noticed if you tried to access my site the normal way, I've been having some technical problems recently, related to my switch from Comcast to RCN as my cable provider. Despite assurances from them that my server would work, they block port 80 (the standard website port), demanding $20/month for a static IP to turn it on. That's outrageous, and no longer worth the price.

So as a short-term fix (until I can either get Comcast back up or port 80 turned on for free with RCN), I have routed my domain to home.benbuck.net on port 4000. I apologize for the inconvenience. Things should be back to normal soon.

Update 9/25: I'll be back to Comcast on Saturday. They're expensive but their customer service is much better than RCN's, and they don't absurdly block standard ports.

Update: 9/28: The Comcast guy came yesterday, didn't ring the door bell, and left a message on a [Comcast] land line that hasn't been in service for a year. Cable companies all suck.

Update: 9/30: I'm back with Comcast. Boycott RCN!

Google Chrome

I'm eagerly awaiting the launch of Chrome, Google's new web browser / web application platform. The philosophy behind Chrome is described in this comic book, and it's pretty awesome. It's built almost as an operating system more than a browser, with its own process handling. CNet predicts,

Imagine, in the not too distant future, a Linux-based machine with Chrome and lots of Chrome apps. Hmm...That's starting to sound like a pretty big threat to Microsoft indeed.

That would be awesome. I'm currently a Firefox user, but I've been disappointed with FF3 - it's buggy, it hogs memory, it often doesn't work well with Flash video. (It's still a thousand times better than Internet Explorer, however, which [in version 7] has to be one of the worst-designed applications ever.)

Google is literally the first company to truly "live on the web," in the sense that their goal is not using their browser per se, but using any browser to use their applications, or just use the web in general, which drives their ad revenue. So they could continue to fund Mozilla indefinitely, even though it competes with Chrome; and they've made Chrome open-source, something Microsoft would never do. This is about more than the browser wars: it's a new stage of capitalism, in which the old style of proprietary knowledge is a competitive disadvantage, and openness (and openly inviting competition) is the key to success.

On the other hand, Google is keeping a pretty tight lid on Chrome today, the day it's supposed to launch... the apparent homepage redirects to the Google homepage, and I can't find any information (or video webcast) on the press briefing supposed to take place shortly to announce the launch.

From my perspective as a web developer, also, there's also a downside to any additional browser in the market, namely, the need to make sure sites are compatible with yet another company's particular interpretation of web standards. So hopefully they'll make the rendering engine work closely enough to Firefox's that it won't be a problem.

I plan to keep Firefox as my default browser for the time being, since I have it decked out with dozens of custom extensions, but I'd be happy to switch to Chrome as soon as it's able to share bookmarks seamlessly with Firefox (which it may be able to do in the first beta, I'll soon find out).

Update: First impressions: sweetness. It even has a DOM inspector built-in. And it's fast. And smooth. I think I'll be switching pretty fast.

Moving ahead

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time. Something about watching the DNC convention made me finally get down to it. More on that in a moment.

First some personal notes. I've been working at a small Irish newspaper in South Boston as a web developer for 3 1/2 years. After graduating from BU in May, I started working there full time on a new spinoff company. It's literally a mom and pop operation, and it was great for college, when I could work on a flexible schedule and learn a lot, but lately the job started to reach the limits of its potential. I had previously been working in ASP, a now-obsolete Microsoft language, and the more I started to branch out into PHP and open-source technologies, the more I realized how much I was missing. So I started looking for new work in the web development field. I was fortunate to receive two offers from great IT/consulting firms in Boston, and I accepted a job with EchoDitto, an IT/strategy firm that specializes in progressive, "social mission," and non-profit clients. I'll be starting there on September 8th, and I'm pretty psyched.

Somewhat related to my professional advancement are plans I've had for a while regarding my website and blog. My site is basically static, and this blog is run through Blogger, a decent but very limited platform. So my aim is to move the whole thing into a CMS, probably Drupal (since I'll be working with it anyway at EchoDitto, and I like it). I haven't figured out all the specs yet, but I want it to branch out - not just politics, but also technology, motorcycling, and random projects I'm working on. An experimental first step in this process - one I may reverse, we'll see - is moving the site from an outside hoster to my own desktop server at home. That means the site will go down whenever I reboot my computer (which hopefully will be rarely), but it'll make it easier and more fun to develop.

Watching the convention made me want to write this because a theme the speakers keep talking about is economic decline and despair. I personally don't feel in despair or decline at the moment. I wonder how the pessimism of the convention jibes with the optimism of the campaign. I wonder if millions of people who aren't struggling will listen to all the speeches about troubled times and feel like the Democrats are out of touch.

But then I step back and realize, even if pessimism is the wrong campaign approach, they're absolutely right on the merits. For the first time in years, I can afford decent private-sector health care on my own - but that fact only underscores its absurdity. Being able to afford it now doesn't mean it made sense that I couldn't before, or couldn't if I didn't have a good job; it doesn't make the legal bullshit I had to go through to get insurance companies to respect their policies after my motorcycle accident a few years ago suddenly make sense. I've gotten used to high gas prices - I did my cross-country trip in '06 on $3-3.50 per gallon, I still ride a 50 MPG motorcycle and don't have a car - but that doesn't mean it makes sense that we're 30 years past an energy crisis and still totally dependent on foreign oil.

I may be starting my rise up the tax bracket ladder now, but the fact that huge portions of my taxes will be paying off the insane national debt for decades to come doesn't encourage optimism. I work in IT and grew up with the Internet, but the continuing government-driven erosion of privacy and civil liberties online and off doesn't make me feel safe. My political thinking matured after 9/11, but living in a dangerously overreaching empire doesn't make me feel powerful.

I've come over the last few months and years to the conclusion that a modern, wealthy society ought to make certain luxuries liberties and certain commodities gratuities. Every American should be able to have access to free or cheap broadband Internet. Every American should have basic health care. Every American should have free education through high school and opportunities to go to college. Every American should have clean air and water. We have the money to do all this. Anyone who says otherwise needs to explain how we can spend $3 billion a week on foreign wars, or billions in peacetime on nuclear submarines and weapons. There is no practical reason, in a country of such aggregate wealth, why this can't be done. This contradicts no maxim of economics or nature. On the contrary, universal access to anything offers the potential for the greatest possible efficiencies and economies of scale. Only lack of imagination or ingenuity, or entrenched narrow interests, prevent such progress.

So I may feel, right now, that I'm moving up in the world. And that might make all the talk about decline seem irrelevant to my life. But we're declining if we keep going year after year and haven't figured out how to do this. We're declining by default if our aggregate wealth keeps going up but our society hasn't figured out how to grant universal access to the most basic necessities. This isn't about a Robin Hood scheme of stealing all the hard-working rich people's money and giving it to the lazy downtrodden; it's about an economic order that makes sense. It's about what kind of society we want to live in. I don't want my tax money going to useless wars and weapons and debt and waste. I don't want my government to be able to lock me up without counsel or charges at its whim. I don't want my energy consumption to contribute to the drowning of entire coastal regions. I do want to be a member of a social and economic order that makes sense. I do want part of my earnings to be pooled into a wisely managed pot, to provide a basic safety net of necessities, and a basic package of socially beneficial commodities, and a stake that makes the contribution and citizenship itself worthwhile.

In conclusion: the DNC might be wise to tone down the pessimism a little. They might be wise to stop talking constantly about "change" and talk about progress and results. But when it comes down to it, on almost every single issue, they're spot on. And John McCain and the Republicans are totally wrong. I'm actually looking forward to their convention. I expect the contrast will show who's really out of date and out of touch.

Photosynth of Halibut Point State Park

As I wrote earlier, I tested out MS Labs' new Photosynth technology this weekend by taking several hundred photos of a spot by the quarry-turned-lake at MA's Halibut Point State Park. It's only "88% synthy" so there are some gaps, but it's still pretty cool. (You'll need to install the synth program to view it. It might only work on Windoze.) Enjoy:

Rockport

I spent the weekend relaxing in Rockport, MA with Tristyn and her family (now becoming an annual tradition). At night we camped in the back yard by the ocean. Saturday we went to Halibut Point State Park, a former granite quarry turned lake. Sunday we kayaked from Bearskin Neck to an abandoned island across from the house.
The weak cellphone reception drained my battery very quickly on Friday, so I missed the text message announcing the great news about Joe Biden, but I did manage to watch the speeches online. Other than that I was mostly "disconnected" over the weekend, which was definitely a nice break.
In addition to some photos, I decided to test out Photosynth, MS Labs' new (to me at least) app that creates 3D environments from hundreds of photos. The spot I chose was the quarry lake at Halibut Point. It's still compiling now - it takes forever - so I'll update when it's done. In the meantime, enjoy some photos:



Update: The photosynthing is done. It's only "88% synthy," so there are some big gaps, but it's still pretty cool. (I've embedded it in a separate post here.)

Are the gods sleeping...?

...GMail has been down all afternoon.

Job Seeking

I figured it can't hurt to post this here:
I'm looking for a new job, preferably in web development or a fusion of IT, politics, and journalism, but I'm open to any field. I have 5+ years of professional web development experience, as well as various other skills.
My CV is here.
If you know of any leads that might help me, please let me know. Thanks!

Cuil

CNN has a story on Cuil, a new search engine built by former Google employees that aims to one-up the giant. To test it out, I decided to Cuil myself... the first item is my BU page, followed by a bunch of items that have nothing to do with me. My site is towards the end of the 2nd page of results. Contrast that with Googling myself (the pastime of anyone bored at work), where my site is the first item, followed by my facebook profile, LinkedIn profile (after someone else's by the same name), a few irrelevant links, and then some more good ones.
So, day 1 of Cuil's public presence: Google 1, Cuil 0. But competition is always a good thing.

Multitasking

It's a Sunday afternoon and my current state is a good snapshot of my life, so I thought I'd share it. I'm at my living room table with my laptop, a glass of orange juice and a plate that a few minutes ago had two slices of "supreme" pizza. I'm officially working today (from home) because of a server/hosting emergency at work at the end of last week, but the servers at work are all down from a lightning storm, so I've had several hours to unwind.

So: open on my laptop are several work apps (database queries, Dreamweaver, Firefox windows - and by "work" I mean paid work, not stuff I'm doing for myself). Onenote is open with work notes from Friday. A terminal window to my desktop in the other room is open, with two dozen programs running, mostly related to the Apache server I was setting up to learn Drupal. I have nine non-work-related Firefox windows open, each with several tabs. The last four or five are tentacles from the long list of blogs a colleague recommended two weeks ago, that I just had time to go through. (I have two or three Google Reader tabs open with a plethora of information from the last week alone that I could never finish going through in a lifetime.) One FF window has an episode of The Daily Show from last week playing in my headphones. (I've had to pause that a few times to write this.)

I've been meaning to write here about plans I have for this site and blog, related to broader developments in my life in the web development realm. I will get around to it one of these days.

In the meantime, a thought that popped into my head a few weeks ago during a Cantab poetry night in Cambridge, that went something like this:

Modernity means shaving with an ergonomic titanium-handled, six-stainless-steel-bladed, vibrating, aloe-coated Occam's razor.

Enjoy.

George Carlin, RIP

I did a research project a few years ago for a class on George Carlin's impact on free speech in America. The project involved watching many hours of his shows, every minute brilliant and hilarious. His impact was tremendous, and he will be missed.

The Philosopher Kings

A friend showed me this beautiful trailer for The Philosopher Kings, due out next year:

Graduated

I graduated Sunday with a Bachelor of Arts from Boston University, magna cum laude, with a concentration in Philosophy & Political Science and a minor in international relations.
Photos here, here, and here.

All Done.

I had my last college exam ever this morning. Papers and classes ended last week. Wow.

Glass

I want a house like this. But the walls should be made with electric glass. The roof should be partially glass to let in sunlight and the rest solar paneling, which together with a biofuel generator in the back yard, would create a self-sustaining energy supply. Waste water would be recycled to water the grass. Realistic?

Paper: Was the Iraq War Inevitable?

I just completed a research paper about the Iraq War, which asks counterfactually whether different plausible scenarios would have prevented the invasion in March 2003. The scenario I explore in depth starts with Vice President Cheney suffering a fatal heart attack in early 2001, in order to examine the impact of his influence and other variables on the path to war.
Thanks to all those who suggested ideas or source materials.
For anyone interested in reading it, the paper can be read in PDF here:
Exploring the Inevitability of the Iraq War: A Counterfactual Inquiry, by Ben Buckman

Know Hope

Responding to an article about ethanol, the left and state planning, Alex writes something that really hits a nail on the head:

I can only speak for myself, but as a member of the left I have no interest in using "state planning" to "bring about better economic results," nor do I know anyone on the left that does. Those ideas died many, many decades ago. Not that the people on the right bothered to notice.

Do I believe that government has a role to play in setting energy and environmental policies? Yes, of course. But that makes me no different than Milton Friedman, a man no one would ever describe as anywhere near the left. Both modern liberals and more traditional conservatives agree on this: the question is not if government will get involved, but how.

Markets cannot do everything on their own. Some problem are failures of collective action beyond the reach of the magic of markets to solve. This is why governments exist: to provide us with the institutions and structures necessary to solve problems that we could never solve on our own.

Here is but one hypothetical example. Imagine that tomorrow all of the world's car manufacturers simultaneously announced that they had created a low cost, zero emission, hydrogen powered vehicle. Imagine too that they announced these vehicles were ready to put into immediate production, and that by the end of the decade tens of millions of cars would be ready to be sold.

Sounds great, right? A simple, easy, and quite significant step that would simultaneously reduce our dependence on oil and drastically reduce our carbon footprint. It would be something close to a miracle, right? Yes, but....

All of our infrastructure is based around gasoline. There are hundreds of thousands of gas stations in the United States, and not one of them sells hydrogen. Without gas stations, no one will buy the cars. But unless someone will buy the cars, there is no reason for them to be produced. Chicken, meet egg; egg, meet chicken.

This would be a classic collective action problem. Over time - decades perhaps - it is possible that the market might solve this on its own. But we don't have decades to wait. We need the cars now.

The only solution in this instance would be for government to get directly involved in converting the nation's infrastructure from carbon to hydrogen. There quite literally is no other solution. Would it be inefficient? Yes. Would there be waste, fraud, and abuse? Of course. Might it be immense? Yes. Might there be sensible things we could do to minimize it? Yes. Businesses are inefficient, too, and they are often full of waste, fraud, and abuse. The world is not perfect, but we live our lives nonetheless. We muddle through. It is often the best and only thing we can do.

Government isn't always the solution, but it isn't always the problem, either. It is just like everything else we humans create: imperfect. We over here on the left already know that.

I don't consider myself on the right or left; I call myself independent, for whatever that's worth. There are too many issues for all of politics to be lumped into one dimension. But at the beginning of this whole 2008 presidential campaign (long before 2008), I was having a serious dilemma between Ron Paul and Barack Obama. Paul spoke to the libertarian ideals I had long held; Obama spoke to a better future reality.

In the end I went with Obama. Paul's philosophy just didn't answer the crying problems of our current system. Laissez faire is not a serious answer to global warming, or the health care crisis. Economics courses in college taught me about market failures; Obama's mix of populism and pragmatism seemed to best acknowledge and handle those failures.

The scenario Alex describes with hydrogen cars is exactly what it's about. We need that to happen very soon, and we need a government in place that will seize the opportunity to prudently direct public funds and efforts toward real improvement. McCain's tax breaks should be a part but not the whole thing. Incentives need to be restructured, social costs internalized, social benefits subsidized.

Prudence also demands that the agro-business ethanol subsidies end immediately. American ethanol costs drivers more than gasoline, for less energy, and with more carbon emissions. (If we were really serious about ethanol, incidentally, and serious about free trade, we'd import the cheaper, cleaner, more efficient brand from Brazil. But that would be somehow un-American and undermine the mythical goal of energy "independence.")

I see a lot of reason to hope with my generation's newfound political involvement, which Obama has inspired. We could be the backbone of a new New Deal, learning the lessons of the first one, and the failures of Reaganomics as well. All of my peers want to see marijuana decriminalized. None of us want to die fighting in Iran. We all know America is an imperialist power, and don't particularly like it. We all want to do something about global warming and sustainability. There's a little Ayn Rand, a little Milton Friedman, and a little Noam Chomsky in all of us.
Know hope.

"I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends."

I am cracking up on the floor reading this: How to win arguments, as it were, by Dave Barry...
(h/t: Andrew)

Movie recommendation

I saw the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall last night. From the preview and description it looked pretty dumb, so it wasn't initially on my list to see, but it was really, really good. (And funny.)

Chris Matthews Profile

Mark Leibovich writes an amazing profile of Chris Matthews in the NYT Magazine. I am a former fan of him and Hardball, as I wrote about back in November, and the piece is great.

(h/t: Kathy G.)