Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Today, my workplace sent me this article about the impact of the economy on the services that we offer.

At first I was excited because my work actually contributed to the article. It was a real manifestation of “letting the data tell the story,” my self-proclaimed mission in my fourth job title at the organization. I had gotten a frantic call from one of the interviewees shortly before the interview asking for clarification on some of the numbers. Direct contribution of my work! And numbers!

And then… the one distinctive sound number that appears in the piece is wrong. By 25%.

It’s a relatively innocent mistake, since the number quoted (56,851) is the in-house meals number, a far cry from total meals served (69,904). And the first number does appear on the report I created, though clearly labeled as distinct from total meals. But still. The article goes on to mix apples and oranges all over the place, and it’s hard to say how much of that is on the interviewee and how much on the interviewer.

It doesn’t really matter. I was bugged for a bit, but I’ve gotten over it. The essence of the article and its message got through. And insane Internet commentary (redundant) notwithstanding, it’s all good.

The problem is that it almost immediately occurred to me that this always happens with newspaper articles. I can’t remember the last time a newspaper article got everything right. A key standout in memory from earlier this decade is this article (p. 2 under “People in the News”) in which, in May 2002, the Brandeis Reporter labeled both Drew Tirrell and I as recent successes from the class of 2001 in the recent 2002 college national championships.

It’s like news media exists, at its very centrifugal function, to get facts wrong. Sometimes the facts are essential (sufficiently to warrant a correction), but this is almost never the case. They are usually the second or fourth or sixth most important facet of a longish article about many things. Never critical enough to bother correcting or bringing up; just off enough to spoil the whole experience for the subject of the article without being changed for any of the readers.

In isolation, any given instance of this wouldn’t be such a big deal. The problem enters the picture when seemingly every single report can be assured to have at least one key fact incorrect. The whole fabric of the presentation on the world thus takes on an aspect of fabrication… and readers (or viewers or other consumers of media) are then absorbing the misleading presentation whole cloth. It’s like a pseudo-reality is being spun, through neglect and oversight, out of thin air.

I would say “no wonder the newspapers are dying”, but that would of course overlook the fact that the link is online and may recorded in the ether longer than any shred of the original paper it was printed on may last. For all I know, mistaken numbers about our meals program are being beamed into space as part of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence as we speak. Aliens will soon land, wearily stretching, disembarking, and expecting a set of facts wholly inconsistent with the reality they witness.

Of course I’m exaggerating, letting little details get carried away with the whole picture. But a day after Election Day, with my observation of all the problems that come with an unchecked, unvetted system of recording key information, I’m keenly attuned to the problems that can result from constant misrepresentation. And maybe it’s not the misrepresentation I care about so much as the casual carelessness of it, leading to an inevitable acceptance of such. It’s surely better than some sort of malignant intentional deception (and there’s plenty of that to be upset about), but the carelessness strikes me tonight as nearly as damning.

I grew up on my father’s retellings of one of his father’s pivotal stories, that of the horseshoe-nail that lost the kingdom. I didn’t grow up with horses and their shoes and their shoes’ nails like my Dad did in Carson City; the story was initially foreign and strange to me. The story is one of these classic snowball-type stories, where one small issue becomes cataclysmic… a careless stable boy forgets one horseshoe-nail, because of which the horse loses its shoes, resulting in the person riding it being unable to reach the castle, resulting in the message not get through to the king about an invading force, resulting in the king not readying the force that would defend the kingdom. The kingdom is lost because of the horseshoe-nail – attention to detail is key. There were small variations, I’m sure, but this is the version I remember. Ironically, of course, the details of the precise twists in the story matter very little.

And maybe that’s the point. People don’t have time for detail and nuance when they’re busy watching the big stuff (and perhaps creating their own realities anyway). People wanted desperately to be unabashedly happy today – even though Prop 8 wasn’t defeated, most of my co-workers refused to show anything but jubilation in the wake of Obama’s election. There was no time for muted response, little demonstration of the sobering reality that Obama will be facing massive challenges and is likely to start making decisions that will alienate many of his starry-eyed supporters. There was only that victory-lap kind of swagger. And I admit – it will be nice to not have to automatically cringe when the President of the United States speaks. So far, this is by far my favorite President of my conscious lifetime (Carter’s still probably winning for my technical lifetime, until Obama proves otherwise). But favorites amongst a terrible crowd are a far cry from euphoria.

Not surprisingly, I’m having a hard time distilling my message down to a succinct point. This post feels disjointed and rambly, maybe in part because the television has been competing with my brain in the background (someone else is watching, so I’m not just being an idiot for failing to shut it off). The TV is talking about sustaining the momentum of Obama’s euphoric supporters. The TV is also drawing comparison’s between Obama’s election in ‘08 to Nixon’s election in ‘68.

Who says the media can’t reconcile subtlety and nuance? They crash discordant things that make no sense together with blunt force! That’s almost the same thing.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Ever since the American political disaster known as the year 2000 (who knew the real Y2K glitch would be in a voting booth at the end of the year instead of everywhere at the beginning?), I’ve been a staunch advocate for public-record balloting. I’m not really a believer in democracy and I’m certainly no fan of the plutocratic republic we’ve assembled in modern America. But if the experiment is to have any value or worth, it absolutely demands public-record balloting at this juncture in history.

What 2000 taught us is that the only time any given individual vote may actually count (because things are close enough to be decided by a handful of votes) is the only time that we can be absolutely certain that randomly selected votes will not count or be counted at all. Thus the absolutely fundamental foundational principle of the most avidly cherished right in American society is bunk. Every vote counts? More like “only landslides count” or “if you’re beating the margin of error, your majority vote counts”.

Somehow this wasn’t as disheartening to the rest of the country as it was to me – and I didn’t even vote in 2000! (I didn’t vote until the seven-year statute of limitations on prosecution for my non-registration for the Selective Service [SS] had lapsed, being an actual believer in social contract theory… I really wanted to vote for Nader, but being moral is often about suspending one’s wants for what’s right.) The rest of the country got really upset about Supreme Court decisions and started casting aspersions on computers and all sorts of efficient technology. But no one had a plan to, y’know, do something to fix the problem. So much for the power of politics to change the world.

The problem with every method of “fixing” the voting process in America is that they are all still subject to fixing. As in, the fix is in. No matter what system you use to vote today, be it carving into stone tablet, the absolutely obnoxious Alameda County “fill in the arrow”, a butterfly ballot, hanging chads, computer, or other, you get to leave the polling station with absolutely 0% confidence that your vote counted. It could be lost, stolen, or damaged, and the country is not responsible. It could be miscounted, double-counted, not counted. Why so many people trust an overtired biased individual volunteer who is probably pushing 75 more than a computer is beyond me. But both of these systems are flawed flawed flawed. There is only one foolproof solution: public-record ballot.

Here’s how it would work:
1. You go to your polling place and vote on a computer.
2. The computer auto-submits your vote to the main database, attached to your personal information.
3. The computer prints out an official and detailed voting card with all of your selections.
4. Before you leave the polling place, you double-check every single one of your selections on the printed card.
5. If there is an error (or you have changed your mind at the last second), you go see a polling station attendant who takes your card, calls up your record in the database on a voting computer, and shreds your old card.
6. You make whatever changes you like.
7. You get a new card.
8. Repeat steps 4-7 as necessary (though you might want to cap the number of re-do’s at 5 or something, just to prevent deliberate fraud-clogging of the system to lengthen lines and deter turnout).
9. Upon leaving the polling place with your accurate, actual card of selections, you get the card stamped by the person at the exit, indicating that this is an official, final ballot that counts.
10. You go home and watch election returns with newly buoyed confidence.
11. When polls report, records of the vote, line by line, with name of voter and selections, are published online. They are also printed in the next day’s newspaper and available at the library.
12. Through any of these public media, you go double-check that your vote was accurately counted.
13. If there is any discrepancy between the vote printed and your actual vote (on your official card), you have 60 days to go to one of several public offices and indicate this problem. If the vote doesn’t match what’s on your card, they are legally obligated to change it and update the record.
14. 60 days after the election, final results are certified and republished.

The only reasons we don’t enact the 14 steps above are (a) tradition and (b) arguments about reprisal and punishment for votes.

Tradition is stupid.

Reprisal and punishment arguments are sorely outdated. Do you know what is currently a matter of public record with regards to voting? If you’ve ever donated money to a candidate, that is publicly available and searchable information. These days, trust me, donating $100 to a candidate is a much more powerful and effective support of them than voting for them. Millions of people donate billions of dollars to candidates and there is no documented instance of reprisal for this behavior. Hm.

Also publicly disseminated is information about whether or not you voted (probably more likely to spur reprisal in today’s era than who one voted for), what your party registration is (which is sadly a pretty darn good predictor of who you’ll vote for anyway), and where to knock on your door to talk to you about these things.

And yet, no society of mass-reprisal for donations, voting registration and frequency, etc. Do we really think that people who aren’t intimidated out of donating money to candidates are going to be intimidated out of voting for who they want? (Also, do we really think people could possibly be more sheepy in their voting tendencies in this country anyway?)

It makes you wonder what the real reasons are for us not having public-record balloting.

So, to do my very small part for this cause, I’m going to print my selections below for the whole world to critique, search, and so forth. I doubt anyone will agree with all of them, and I want to hear about it. Putting one’s name behind one’s vote adds a layer of conviction and openness to discussion that we often currently lack in our society as well. It spurs more debate, more discourse, more thought. All things which the same people who want us to privately vote and go quietly home don’t want.

It’s insidious, isn’t it? Our system is most trapped by the very “safeguard” that is seen as the most obvious and important element of the system itself. You can never see the prison from the inside, especially when all the propaganda tells you it’s those bars that are the only thing keeping you safe, secure, happy, well fed.

Anyway, to the ballot. Sadly, while this is what I will fill in with my ridiculous ballpoint ink arrows in about an hour, I have absolutely no confidence that these votes will be counted on anything but this blog. And at least half as much because of chance and human or mechanical error as because of nefarious dealings. Imagine if we did bank deposits this way… no receipts, no double-checking or verifying, no place to ensure that what you intended was what came out. Just trust… and one day, after millions of deposits, your card doesn’t work and you’re broke for no reason. Imagine we did anything the way we handle voting! And this is supposed to be the most important thing we do.

Ha.

Storey Clayton’s 2008 General Election Ballot:

United States of America Offices
President/Vice President: Ralph Nader/Matt Gonzalez (Peace & Freedom)
Representative, CA 9th District: [no vote - protesting Barbara Lee's support of the bailout]

California Offices
State Senator, 9th District: Marsha Feinland (Peace & Freedom)
State Assembly, 14th District: (write-in) Tony Thurmond
Superior Court Judge, Office #9: Dennis Hayashi

California Measures
Prop 1A (High-Speed Rail): Yes
Prop 2 (Farm Animal Rights): Yes
Prop 3 (Children’s Hospital Bond): No
Prop 4 (Parental Notification for Minor Abortion): Yes
Prop 5 (Rehabilitation Instead of Jail for Non-Violent Drug Crimes): Yes
Prop 6 (Increased Law Enforcement for Gang Crimes): No
Prop 7 (Renewable Energy Standards): No
Prop 8 (Banning Gay Marriage): No
Prop 9 (Victim’s Rights): No
Prop 10 (Bonds for Natural Gas Cars): No
Prop 11 (Redistricting): Yes
Prop 12 (Bonds for Veterans): No

District Offices
AC Transit District Director at Large: Joyce Roy
East Bay Regional Park District Director, Ward 1: Norman La Force

District Measures
Prop VV (Expanding Public Transit): Yes
Prop WW (East Bay Regional Parks Bonds): Yes

Berkeley Offices
Mayor: (write-in) Kahlil Jacobs-Fantauzzi
City Council, District 4: Jesse Arreguin
Rent Stabilization Board: Judy E. Shelton, Jack Harrison, Nicole Drake, Igor Tregub, Jesse Townley
School Directors: John T. Selawsky, Beatriz Leyva-Cutler

Berkeley Measures:
Prop FF (Library Bonds): Yes
Prop GG (Fire, EMS, Disaster Response Bonds): Yes
Prop HH (Confirming Spending Over Gann Limit): Yes
Prop II (3 Years After Census to Adjust Districts): Yes
Prop JJ (Medical Marijuana Dispensaries): [no vote]
Prop KK (Requiring Specific Voter Approval Before Expanding Public Transit): No
Prop LL (Repealing Landmark Preservation): No

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

For weeks now, I’ve been one of those people that the media and the Daily Show love to both covet and scorn, demonstrating a clear fascination with their every move. I have been an Undecided Voter.

And yet, it’s not really me they’re after. Because John McCain never once entered my consideration as anything other than a worst-case scenario. I am wholly convinced that a McCain administration would make people yearn for the days of George W. Bush… he was the only candidate I was more afraid of in 2000 than Bush. And he’s gotten, if anything, more militant and crazy since then.

No, it’s been between Obama and Nader. After the first debate, as Obama discussed at length how he would kill this person and that person, I was pretty sure I’d made up my mind and set out for a viable third party alternative. I knew I was in trouble already, having voted in the California Green Primary and seen the selection. The choices were so bad that I had to give Bob Barr a look.

This year is a perfect storm for a voter like me (ha! – there probably aren’t any others). An actual major party candidate with a lot of potential combined with the worst imaginable choices from the third parties.

I’m registered Green, but Cynthia McKinney is a joke. She doesn’t even take her own candidacy seriously, much less have the ability to inspire anyone else to join the cause. Maybe some of her thunder was stolen by being up against a Black major party candidate, but she might not have brought it against a woman either. You may recall McKinney from being escorted out of the Capitol as a Democrat. This is the only reason she’s gone Green. Major party cast-offs don’t really inspire change I can believe in.

Then there’s Bob Barr, who was worth exactly one look. I find a lot of Libertarianism kind of abhorrent, even though the society I advocate is kind of a flipped Libertarianism, where the only thing they use government for (violence, war, law enforcement) are the only things I don’t use government for. Yeah, our common ground is being complete opposites. Anyway, Barr’s got a little too much “build a wall around America” in him for me, for this time.

Which leaves me with Nader, someone I desperately hoped wouldn’t run again. He’s transformed himself from a viable voice into Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial candidate who no one takes the slightest bit seriously. I know a lot of people think that ship sailed in 2004, when I ardently supported him, but absolutely no one was else was standing up to provide a good choice against John Freaking Kerry. I mean, seriously. Nader had to run then.

But 2008 is not 2004 and Barack Obama is thankfully not John Kerry. And not just because he has a pulse and can speak. He has not spent the entire election cycle desperately trying to be a Republican, to endorse the Iraq War, to out-hawk the hawks and out-conserve the conservatives. He has actually advocated some small amounts of progression. He shows signs of being capable of having an actually productive administration.

The problem is, as I’ve noted before, that nobody really knows what Obama would do as President. I wrote the last post about this in January, and we don’t know a whole lot more now. He’s focused on his tax policy, which I agree with, and some vague notions of “an army of new teachers” and “line by line budgeting”. He has deliberately kept things to platitudes and grandiose vision… mostly because it’s strategically brilliant. The more one relies on platitudes and universals, the more universal the appeal one has as a candidate (especially if one is already young, attractive, and articulate). When things get specific, people tend to get bored or militantly opposed.

McCain has tried to exploit this fact, but to little avail. Mostly because he wants people to believe such extreme things about Obama that he’s covering up. Maybe he thinks the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one, but things like “palling around with terrorists” are awfully absurd. I think McCain would’ve done well to just nail the low-hanging fruit on this one. Not that it would’ve given him a chance, but it would’ve made things a little interesting.

So this makes an Obama Presidency a vastly unknown quantity, ranging from a Clintonian nothing-fest on one side to a truly historic and groundbreaking Presidency that I mostly agree with on the other side. That’s a huge swing of possibility. There’s all this upside, but just as much potential that Obama doesn’t want to make waves or take risks, or worse, that he never had any substance lurking and held back in the first place, but is just a pretty guy with pretty words. He may actually be more like Bill Clinton than Hillary is.

So while I’m excited about the upside possibilities, I have to decide based on what I can be confident Obama will actually do. He will surround himself with people like Joe Biden. Disaster. He will move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and accelerate hostilities there. Disaster. He will attempt to enact tax policy that is exactly right for this time. Good. He will support measures like the $700 billion bailout that passed Congress earlier this month. Disaster. He will increase the amount of healthcare coverage in this country, though he may use mandates to do so. Toss-up. He will talk about hope and change and sacrifice and be aware of the times we are engaging in, as much as most any politician could. Good. He will talk to foreign leaders. Good. He will not commit to ending the war in Iraq. Disaster.

That’s a lot of disaster. I could be accused of being close to a one-issue voter in many ways… war and violence are pretty much the only thing I care about at the end of the day. I think tax policy is somewhat important, and certain social issues here and there (gay marriage, for example). And there’s an increasing issue about who will have the dignity to allow America to step down from its throne of arrogance and superpowerism to gracefully withdraw without pressing red buttons and going nuts. On that last front, Obama clearly beats McCain, though there’s little confidence I have that any American politician can really do that.

Ultimately, I can’t end up supporting someone who has made one of their only concrete policy articulations a description of exactly how many Afghans they want to kill. You can say all you want about him having to say that to get elected and that he’ll actually end both wars, but I need to see that happen before I have any reason to believe it.

You know who I’d really like the opportunity to vote for? The person that John McCain wants you to think Barack Obama is. That’s someone I would’ve devoted the last few weekends to going out and campaigning for. I’d be in Nevada right now. I wish he were a Socialist. I wish he were a Muslim. I wish he did believe what Rev. Jeremiah Wright preaches (speaking of people I’d vote for). I wish he did want to talk and negotiate instead of going to war. I wish he did want to raise taxes.

I know, I know, he wouldn’t have any chance of winning. You know what? Winning is going to get a lot less important to America in the next 25 years. Like Henry Clay, I’d rather be right than President.

So I’m left with Ralph Nader, someone I know I agree with about 95%. And Matt Gonzalez, the person I most want to vote for, a San Francisco Green who should’ve been Mayor and I can actually be enthusiastic about voting for. He’s really the only person of the 10 people on either half of all the tickets that I can demonstrate commitment to. That alone would be good reason to vote for him, and may have more to do with the ultimate vote than anything. If Nader had picked David Cobb as his running mate, I might have to skip the President question altogether on my ballot.

But you know what, Barack? You have four years to earn my vote. Everyone knows you’re going to be President, probably elected by a very wide margin. You’ll have one of the largest friendly majorities in Congressional history, lofting you to a groundswell of support not seen since FDR. They’ll be desperate to prop you up and make you look good, regardless of what they actually feel like doing.

Then, I hope you prove me wrong. I hope you make me eat my words and regret not voting for you. I hope you make sweeping changes that turn the country upside-down for the better. I hope you end wars and don’t start new ones. I hope you get as close to Socialism as the US has seen since FDR. I hope.

If you do that, Barack, even a good chunk of that (a lot will hinge on the wars, of course), then I’ll pre-commit to you in 2012.

Seems like a long way away, huh?

Oh, and Barack. Can you maybe ditch Biden in the re-election campaign?

I have been sick for nigh on a week now. Since first thing this work-week. I went to work Monday, stayed home Tuesday, went to work Wednesday, stayed home Thursday, and went to week Friday. This is probably not atypical for me. Or this little piggie, come to think of it.

I wasn’t really being piggy on Wednesday – I had three crucial meetings scheduled and just couldn’t see how the week would work out without me going. The first meeting was no-show de facto cancelled and the third meeting was cancelled as a statement to me about coming into work when sick. So it goes.

Lesson learned: stay home when sick, no matter the circumstances.

Of course I probably should’ve stayed home Friday, too, with the weather outside being frightful, but my costume (gecko) was too delightful to bung away for a full year. At least the suit was warm, the crazy gecko-head especially, functioning like an all-weather fabric helmet. Lots of people dressed up at work, somewhat surprising and at least partly attributable (maybe) to my clamoring for everyone to join me in the effort. Lots of people no-showed to work, too, or left early. So it goes.

Regardless, I think I’ve made another stride in detecting the purposeful fabric of the universe. By having a cold. Neat, huh?

The problem of evil is always put out there as the major counterargument to belief in God. Even calling it the “problem of evil” is, well, problematic, because I think it automatically gives it a weight the argument doesn’t deserve. It would be like calling the recent attempted scandal the “Bill Ayers Setback”. Who says it’s a setback? Isn’t the whole thing kind of silly? Can’t we move on already?

But, to humor the uncanny number of people who really do think it’s a problem, the problem of evil asks how a benevolent God can stand idly by while bad things happen. As though the point of life were somehow to have all good outcomes at all times because people learn so much when they are fat and happy. But there I go not giving the argument any weight again. This is a problem.

(Incidentally, it’s downright shocking to me how frequently this problem is depicted as the turning point on the plunge into atheism or desertion from various faiths in people’s lives. Depicted mostly in fictitious accounts, though also a fair bit in history. And it’s normally exacerbated by being an individual’s first direct encounter with a particular form of evil that prior they understood very well happened to other people. I just guess it’s hard to understand how narrow-minded, self-centered, and myopic people are depicted as being and/or are. Wow, am I in an adversarial mindset tonight.)

For some reason, most people tend to be most bothered by the evil that is controlled by the free will decisions of other people. This honestly accounts for something like 80-90% of “problem of evil” claims, which again demonstrates short-sightedness. Without going into the whole rigmarole, free will = meaning. With no free will, no one actually has any decisions, thus their lives, thoughts, and existence have no meaning, thus there are no theological underpinnings that matter anyway. The only way to prevent people from doing harm to each other is to abridge their free will, thus undermining any possible meaning to morality, thus undermining any semblance of meaning. Get it? Got it? Good.

But the stickier (and less utilized) aspect of the problem of evil, almost warranting its label, consists of natural disasters, ranging from weather events (colloquially called “acts of God” – we’ve really got it in for God, don’t we?) to illnesses, plagues, and the like. And frankly, my responses on this one aren’t as crisply satisfying as the need for free will to make the whole “sentient beings experiment” viable.

Mostly, my arguments have boiled down to the need for collective action and societal structure. People do worst in the face of natural disasters alone and the best in well prepared and coordinated groups. Our first clue that life was meant to be lived communally was not being born on our own individual planet, but natural disasters and disease give a good second clue. They also, conveniently, require social banding that has absolutely no violent aspects (and, in fact, requires healing instead). They also ensure that life will remain challenging (and thus provide learning) even when humans have learned to use their free will only for good (and not to commit violence). Eventually, we will get over our baser natures, but there still needs to be struggle and progress.

But this illness, this time around I’ve (re?-)discovered a key reason for illness specifically. And it’s not just the “fragility of life” mortality-awareness mumbo-jumbo, though it is related to that and that’s at least a tolerable argument anyway.

Anyway.

One of the points is that we are meant to realize just how much control and time we do have. This seems more obviously relevant in 2008 than it might’ve in 2008 BC, though we actually have a lot more free time than our ancestors 4,016 years prior – we just appreciate it and understand it less.

Most everyone these days goes around assuming they have no time for just a minute extra of anything – they may have some structured recreational time built in, but their schedule is packed to the gills just as they need it to be. There’s no possible room for variation or alleviation.

And then they get sick and – wham – there has to be time. Unless they’re one of these people who goes around trying to pretend they’re not sick and they can just fight through it… in which case, they get a pre-lesson about humility and how much more suffering they’re causing themselves via this route. (I know, there are also people who, by the economic laws governing this society hopefully not much longer, are forced to choose between toughing it out and facing economic disaster… this is why I support universal healthcare.) Anyway, in the end, one may be frustrated and suffering and discombobulated by the illness that removed one from one’s routine, but one also can suddenly see the cracks in the schedule and rejoin the routine fully understanding exactly how the component time is constructed.

So, next time you’re sick, appreciate the time off you’re being given and use it to evaluate whether your life might not be better structured another way.

Hey, if I preach doom and disaster in so many other walks of my life, why can’t I package theological understandings in chintzy greeting card-sounding lines?

I miss October already.