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Random Election Tidbits to Tide You Till December

NaNoWriMo is upon me, and so I am unlikely to be posting much more until December. And given that I am increasingly convinced that the novel is going to be a worthless piece of crap (hopefully that’s just the perfectionist in me), I probably won’t post excerpts of it here (maybe in my currently unused LiveJournal, but no promises).

I still have a long to-blog queue, so rest assured I’ll be a-blogging a-plenty again in December, so check back then. But before I take my leave, let me say one last word on the election (who am I kidding, a helluva bunch of words). Let me first clarify my stance. Despite my Case Against Bush post, I do live in California, which is not a swing state, and unless the polls get really close here, I am most likely to vote for Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik (although I might still write in Tyler Cowen — or John McCain, as fellow SFBayBlogger and NaNo’er Rich Thomas is planning to do), not John Kerry. So I guess you could consider me in the “Anybody But Bush” camp. So I would vote for Kerry if I lived in a swing state.

Also let me further clarify my case by reprinting a part of one of my comments from Winds of Change:

I Voted For...

As some of you know, my final decision came down to, in alphabetical order:

• Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate and a barking moonbat.
• Tyler Cowen, a GMU economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution and The Volokh Conspiracy.
• Giblets. Giblets is… uh… well, Giblets is a very demanding Giblets, to say the least.
• John Kerry. Uh, I assume you know who he is.
• John McCain. You should know this guy by now, too.

And here’s my long-winded reason why I oppose Bush.

In case anybody was wondering about my final decision, I voted for Tyler Cowen, and here’s a little background as to why.

And you can see my support of Tyler Cowen on Technorati’s Bloggers’ Votes.

Tabarrok on Social Security Reform

Still in the midst of NaNoWriMo, but more on that later (so far, so good). Blogging will continue to be light to nonexistent in November, although I do have some thoughts on the election I’d like to share in the next week or so. In the meantime, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution says a few things about Social Security that I’ve long held. Namely that it’s a pretty sweet deal for past and current retirees. However…

…It’s today’s workers and children for whom social security is a raw deal. Even if the system does not go bankrupt, current workers will receive a very poor return on their “investment.”

In refusing to cut benefits to current and soon-to-be retirees the costs of any reform are forced onto those people for whom the system is already a poor return. It would be fairer to spread the costs to all recipients especially to those who have benefited from social security the most.

Emphasis mine. Perhaps stating the obvious, but it needs to be said. Reforming the system will inevitably involve pain, and we should strive to spread that pain around as broadly as possible instead of just sticking it to the younger generation.

In a similar vein, his co-blogger, Tyler Cowen (who, despite my vote did not win the election and thus I can no longer refer to him as our next president, <sniff>), is also guest-blogging at WSJ.com in a discussion with John Irons of Argmax.com, and they also discuss Social Security. Cowen is actually not fond of privatization and would prefer to make Social Security less like a pension system and more like “a system of welfare for the elderly.”

I’d be perfectly fine completely phasing it out of existence and letting welfare take care of welfare, but that’s a post for another time. Although personally, I myself never liked the term “privatization” for this situation, preferring “individualization” instead. But that probably has a lesser chance of catching on than “tax shift.”

Update 11/15/04

Updated to use a permalink to the WSJ debate. Also, Tyler Cowen elaborates on his opposition to forced savings.

Has It Been That Long?

Whoa. While caught up in NaNoWriMo, I completely missed the fact that it’s now been one year since I started blogging. Note that the Happy Birthday to Winona Ryder post wasn’t really the first post, as I back-dated it (oh, the horror!) to test out my monthly archives (and that was, honestly, the only time I’ve done that), and my next two posts were basically just repostings of some of my message board writings. Meaning that my rather unremarkable PoMoSexuality post back on November 7th of 2003 was really my first blog post.

Such a milestone warrants a bigger post than the one I wrote for my sixth month blogiversary, but unfortunately I don’t really have the time to do it justice. However, while updating my Blogger Code at my About Me page, I realized that the Biography section wasn’t really all that biographical, so I’ve updated it quite a bit. And the more astute among you will have already noticed a couple of weeks ago that I updated my “Favorite Blogs” list again (on the sidebar of the main page, in case you’re reading this from the post’s individual page or from the RSS feed).

As for the novel, well I’ve got 19,000 words, which is about 8,000 words behind pace. I’m otherwise pretty pleased with how it’s going, although I know I have to seriously rework some of the earlier chapters. Besides, I’ve long figured I should just forget about the wordcount and concentrate on finishing the novel before the end of the year. More on that later.

South Park Nails the News Media

Wow, that was one of the best South Park episodes ever, “Quest for Ratings,” where the kids run a news show and are getting clobbered by Craig’s “Close Ups of Animals with a Wide-Angle Lens.” Parker and Stone have totally nailed exactly what’s happened to our media. It’s why I don’t bother getting my news from television anymore, since, as I’ve previously mentioned:

I think television is a truly horrible way to get your news. For one, it is incredibly time-inefficient. Not only can you read much faster than you can listen, you can also pick and choose what topics to read about, whereas a news broadcast walks you through a bunch of topics chosen by somebody else. Also, the amount of time spent wading past advertisements seems higher for television than for newspapers or web browsing…

Not to mention that it is a lot harder to speak about a subject objectively than it is to write about it objectively for the simple reason that it’s much easier to remove emotion and bias from a piece of writing than it is from a human voice or face…. Plus, images tend to be much more emotionally loaded than words and can probably distort your memory of what actually happened.

And that South Park episode shows another obvious reason that I overlooked. Television news is way too sensitive to the number of eyeballs watching any given episode. If there’s a slow news day, they get clobbered. There’s tremendous pressure to just make stuff up or stretch the truth ridiculously, just like the kids ended up doing to try and compete.

Indeed, just as CBS did.

Technical Difficulties

The main page of the site was down most of today. Apologies for any inconvenience. Everything should be working again now, but let me know if you spot something askew.

The MySQL comment database somehow got corrupted, probably due to overzealous comment spammers. Since I had a blog backup from yesterday, as luck would have it, I tried to restore it. Those familiar with Movable Type will, of course, realize that this resulted in a bunch of duplicates. Argh! After trying to fix this for a while, I decided it was easiest to just manually go into MySQL and blow away everything (comments, entries, and trackback pings) and then restore the blog from the backup. Since the permanent links of each blog post is based on the title and not the entry ID number, this shouldn’t impact any of your bookmarks or links.

However, this is not true of the permalinks for comments, whose anchors were unfortunately based on the comment ID. I’ve now fixed them to be based on the comment’s “order number” within the post, which should remain the same the next time I have to restore. But if, for some reason, you had linked to or bookmarked a comment on the blog, you will have to update it. My apologies!

Let this be a reminder to any bloggers out there to back up your blog regularly! And try to design your templates to not rely on any internal database numbers like entry and comment IDs!

In other news, I’ve decided to make use of my LiveJournal account for personal crap (and where I now have an entry bitching about this incident). There’s an option to keep the Google spider and other robots out from LJ pages, so I figure it’s a more appropriate place to put stuff that nobody would ever care about except people who know me. Plus a place to do less edited and less organized — and hopefully more spontaneous — writing.

Everyone Thinks They're a Writer

Well, I’m still writing away at the novel, although I’ve only now hit the halfway point, 25,000 words, with only one week left to go. So I’ll probably not make the wordcount goal. Which means I might as well blog. :)

And while I’m on the topic of writing novels, via Brayden King, I ran across an interesting article in the New York Times about the progress being made on computer programs who can write.

Robert's Snow Auctions Starting

I’ve blogged on Robert’s Snow before. Robert’s Snow (the book) is now available in stores (and makes a great holiday gift!), and I also thought I’d pass on a followup e-mail on the snowflake auction from my sister, Alvina. Apologies for not getting this up sooner, as there were a few other events that have now passed, but I was a little bit preoccupied. Anyway, here’s Alvina:

Hello All!

Many of you already know about “Robert’s Snow for Cancer’s Cure,” but the time has finally come to ACT! For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the quick summary:

Do you love The Polar Express or Olivia or Harry Potter? You could own an original art piece (not a print!) by the illustrators of those books and help the fight against cancer at the same time! How? By participating in Robert’s Snow: for Cancer’s Cure, a unique fundraiser for cancer research. Over 170 illustrators of children’s books have made original works of art — on wooden snowflakes — to be auctioned online from October 31 to December 12.

Children’s book author/illustrator Grace Lin created Robert’s Snow: for Cancer’s Cure after her husband was diagnosed with cancer; she rallied her colleagues to contribute to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in the way she knew best — with art. On wooden snowflakes, illustrators such as Chris Van Allsburg (The Polar Express), Marc Brown (Arthur), and Mary Grand Pre (Harry Potter) have created exclusive works that are now on auction at www.robertssnow.com. Don’t miss the snow!

Many of the auctions are going on right now, so please pass this along to everyone you know!

Also, for those of you in Massachusetts or California, we have some events coming up and opportunities to see the snowflakes in person — believe me, the websites do not do these pieces of art justice. They are absolutely breathtaking in real life, so if you’re able, go see them in person. I’m flying out to Los Angeles for the Storyopolis event, so please join me!

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 125 West Bay Road, Amherst, MA.
Oct 31-Dec 12 Snowflake Exhibit 29: snowflakes selected from the collection will be on display here!

Storyopolis Art Gallery, 116 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA.
Dec 2-12, Snowflake Exhibit Snow on the west coast! Over 70 snowflakes from the collection will be display here.
Dec 2, 7pm Exhibit Opening: meet participating local artists and see the snowflakes.

You’ve voted for president (I hope), so now “vote” for your favorite snowflake by bidding on them. I have the winning bid on one of the snowflakes right now, but believe me, I’ll be thrilled if I end up not being able to afford any of them.

Thanks, everyone. Let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Alvina

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and bid!