moraulf

( <b>Block African witchcraft curses against McCain and Palin NOW!</b> )

My kids have been reading this book called "Twilight" that is alternately terrible and wonderful. it's great because it's a fully-formed, 3,000-page plus vampire story, and I like vampires. It's terrible because the writing is frequently atrocious and overly-detailed. But reading it did make me want to write about vampires. I don't really have a story about vampires to tell, but I ended up writing this goofy thing. It's kind of a cross between noir and me being a dork:

( Read on if you wanna... )

In Massachusetts, there's a ballot initiative out there that's seeking to end all income taxes - about 40% of the state budget, or 27% of all state spending.  The argument for doing this, which on its face seemed sort of reasonable, was that the relatively unchecked Democratic Party Rulership out here wastes a lot of money...and in fact, there is some waste.  The high profile examples include:

• "Double Dip" Pensions, in which retired public officials take a second job after retiring, continue to collect a pension, then take a second pension when they retire from the second job.

• Police "Details" in which cops stand around next to construction sites doing little to nothing while collecting overtime pay.

• Employee theft at the MBTA and from a copy machine in the State Capitol.

•  
• The Big Dig, which pretty obviously was riddled with corruption and incompetence, the clearest example being the piece of it that crushed a woman to death.  The company responsible, Bechtel, had to pay the state $428 Million to avoid criminal charges (another company is facing those charges, despite their being significantly less responsible but also less wealthy)

The other thing advocates of the referendum like to mention is that they've been trying to lower income taxes - and taxes in general - for 20 years with no appreciable effect, and that 41% of all money spent in the state is "wasted".  They also like to talk about the average of $3,700 every Massachusetts home would receive under the plan.

But the referendum is a terrible idea.  Here's the problem with the Libertarian (anti-tax) argument.

#1) The new rule would cut the state budget by $12 Billion.  That would cut 65 - 90% of state aid to schools, fire departments, police, etc. throughout the state, which is a disaster by itself. 

#2) The 41% figure is a statistic garnered from a partisan poll and does not reflect any sort of account of actual spending practices.  It's the best guess of people who support eliminating the tax, not an actual relevant piece of information.

#3) The "waste" cited by proponents of the referendum is in fact upsetting, but doesn't add up to $1 Billion, let alone $12 Billion

#4) The fact that Massachusetts spends so much money is due to a couple of factors - first, Massachusetts government provides many useful services that are expensive, and second, Towns and Cities in Massachusetts keep passing property tax overrides to pay for improvements to schools and infrastructure they want.  The important thing to bear in mind there is that Property Taxes are actually regressive - they hit the poor harder than they hit the rich, because they go after fixed assets.  Sales taxes, the other way the state makes money, are also regressive - and both would have to increase to make up for a $12 Billion shortfall, so the result of the measure would be that it would be expensive to live in Massachusetts and expensive to shop here, driving away both residents and business.  I'm pretty sure that's a bad thing.

#5) Income tax is progressive.  It hits the rich harder than the poor, as all good taxes should.  But that also means that eliminating income taxes would give the wealthiest (those making over $100K/year) of residents an average of $16,000, while the the average for the bottom 2/3 (who make less than $50K/year) would be around $850.  So the deal is: for most people in the state, a Yes vote would mean 1 free month of rent, a rent hike, fewer cops, crippled schools, un-affordable public transportation, broken roads, and a 10% sales tax.  For the rich, it would mean all that plus a new boat.

If you live in Massachusetts, it's a very good idea to remember to vote against this nonsense.

politsk.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah_13.html

The Republican National Convention worried me, like it did lots of my friends.  There was a ton of nasty, mean-spirited attacking of basic civic impulses, a lot of chanting "Drill, Baby Drill", and a basic resurgence of what I think of as the Republican Hate Machine. 

I really do wish it would go away.

I get particularly creeped out by this in part because of the spooky zombie-ness of the conventioneers (although I have admit that the "Yes We Can" chants might look the same way from another perspective), by the casual intolerance, mindless flag waving, and fundamental hatred of government on display.  And I find that what always really worries me is that Democrats tend to be too polite to respond with the kind of indignance they ought to feel when the Governor of the Earmark Capital of America goes on a tear against waste, or when McCain (whose income derives from being married to old money) and his cronies call Democrats and the media "elite".  Republicans, we were told, are people from small towns who always love America, even if they do happen to hate most of the people living in it.  Ugh.

And to Rudy Giuliani, a special "ugh" for your surprisingly naked fascism.   

Anyway, it was nice to find these responses on the web this morning.  It's always nice when your candidates say it as plainly as it needs to be said:

Biden: "McCain's campaign manager says this campaign isn't about issues.  What else do you say when you can't explain the last eight years of failure?" 

Obama: "They must think you're stupid."

Well said, guys. 

Ok, Obama's kids are cute.  Really cute.  I'd vote for them, too. 

Time for work again!  ::sigh::

This is a recent study on the effects of pre-school education on kids.  Basically, the idea is that the gap we see in achievement in this country is due mostly to increasingly difficult home environments.  There are some scary graphs and charts you can look at, the creepiest being the one that predicts education level by the mother's education level (and it's a straight line).  The conclusion is that we should probably pay for universal day-care/preschool for everybody or at least everyone who has some risk factors.  The study says that the return on investment would be about 10% in terms of GDP, so that sounds ok.

Anyway, the sad part of all this is that the suggestion made by the study is that intervention after age 5, and especially by High School, isn't particularly important unless you spend a truly wacky amount of time and money.  So maybe if I really want to make a big difference I need to change careers.  I mean, little kids are cute...

Firefly is an arts festival/camping experience that happens every year in Vermont.  It's a good place for hippies and ravers and also people like me who are just hoping to do something novel with their summer.  Here's what happened:

• A Steam-Bath
• A Pizza Kitchen
• A Beer Brewery
• Multiple Buddhist Shrines
• A Mechanical, Life-Sized Version of Duck Hunt
• A Henna Station
• A Tuttu-Making Station
• A Dance Party that Depended on Two People Always Peddling Stationary Bicycles for power
• A 3-D Slide Show
• Fire-Spinning Lessons
• An acoustic instrument/bongo station
• A giant monster called the "Woodland Spirit", which they burned down Friday Night

• I got a really bad sunburn
• I discovered that the combination of paper mache, paint, and sweat creates a surprisingly horrible smell in your average t-shirt
• I learned to wear a hat when working in places that have biting flies.  Yes, my head was hot, but my ears were safe.
• I met a girl who I really liked: she clearly didn't think I was competent to build a dragon on my own and was trying with only partial success not to take the whole project over herself
• A nice guy named Bill lent us his leatherman and brought us cold drinks.  It turned out he was the guy who built the Duck Hunt, which totally ruled.

Keri Russell is Wonder Woman! Felicity is an Amazon!. At least Mal Reynolds is in the movie with her.

The implications of this technology are profound, aren't they? This is a video game, but it's clear you can do things with this sort of device that wouldn't be a game at all. Neat..

Today was the last day of regular classes after my 3rd year of teaching at Parker. I've been poring over my livejournal. And what have I discovered?

I think I was smarter and cooler before I had this job. But that might be the exhaustion speaking. Anyway, I'm going to re-do a meme from way back, because it was kind of neat and I want to see how it's changed.

( Read more... )

A bunch of my students put on a student-directed-one-act-play-festival. It was truly, truly awesome.

I love, love, love my job.

That is all.

Now that is how you end a TV show.

Damn.

And the winner...Michel Gondry:

Note the almost sentence-finishing lockstep of McCain and Hillary here...

A little while ago, I got an e-mail from a student asking about a forward he'd recieved, which essentially suggested that since all Muslims are fundamentally disloyal, its a bad idea to support Obama. Here's my ( response. )

Yesterday I had a neat lucky moment when I went to the Somerville Theater to see PT Anderson's "There Will Be Blood"; it turned out that the Magnetic Fields were playing at the theater, and that there were last-minute tickets available. Awesome!

If you're not a fan, you should know that Stephin Merritt, who writes their songs, is bafflingly talented and clever; the songs range from whimsical to heartbreaking to bizarre, but they all bear listening to. One of the best parts of seeing them in concert is the fact that you get to hear the songs stripped bare: on their albums, the 'Fields tend to put a lot of electric effects and distortion into their music. Live, it's all acoustic, which makes songs like "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" unironically haunting. Also, the opening act was a radio-show version of a story about two brothers who save a planet from imaginary monsters. More awesome.

There were, however, a couple of ways in which the concert veered into unfortunate territory.

1) A drunk guy kept yelling at the band. They told him to shut up, but then later came on stage and admitted that actually he was an old friend of theirs. Which, really, is embarrassing for all concerned.

2) The 19-year-old girl sitting behind me was apparently worried that her boyfriend wouldn't think she liked the band. Before the show, she asked a number of questions, like:

"They made an album called 69 love songs? That's a lot of songs."

"Does that mean they're going to play all love songs?"

Then DURING the show, in the same tone of voice and without apparent concern for those around her, she took it upon herself to narrate. Some samples of observations made DURING songs:

"This song is funny."

"This song is really ironic, because the tune is sweet and the lyrics are harsh."

"This song is funny because he's pretending to be a girl - oh, no, he's gay!"

"I really like this!"

"This is so weird (giggle)!"

One time, I read a book about little gnomes who put poop in the shoes of people who are insufferably boring - the kind of person who starts a conversation with something like "You know, babies have really small heads." I would not be surprised if this girl found something in her boots one day soon.

Anyway, the other problem was that the Somerville Theater makes some interesting assumptions about people's butts. Specifically, the size of the chairs seem to imply that everyone's butt is about 11 inches across, which means some careful maneuvering if you want to sit down comfortably. This was not so bad for me, but the guy in front of me hadn't got his belt on tightly enough, so every time he stood up...well...I'll quote the girl behind me:

"Um, wow. That's a butt. I really don't want to look at that. I'm just going to pretend I don't see the huge butt. It's like, a head, another head, and then a butt. Wow."

Words to live by.

A solid argument for Obama here.

( Here's an exerpt )

this makes me sad.

Apparantly it does, basically, come down to sexism.