"We Vow to Wash the Streets of Baghdad with the Voters' Blood"

So... would you vote?

Background on threats to Iraqi voters from yesterday's New York Times.

I mean the question seriously. If you were an Iraqi, would you vote, given the threats of violence at polling places and retribution for those who participate? Remember that the insurgents are already identifying people who work for Americans or the new government, and killing them and their families.

I think we'd all like to think we'd vote. But realistically? Would you? Why or why not?

Good News, Bad News

Sixty large companies are joining forces to offer group health coverage for the uninsured, the New York Times reports. The idea is simple: by putting all of these people into a risk pool together, it becomes possible to offer more affordable insurance than they could buy on their own.

The logic of the idea is quite simple. Individual health coverage is expensive and unreliable because the insurer is looking at you as a single individual with certain risk factors. Should you do anything crazy like, say, get sick, you're likely to get your policy canceled or see your costs go up. By spreading the individual risks over a large pool of people, the plans can remain less expensive on an individual basis.

The 3 million people who will be eligible for this plan are about 7% of the 45 million uninsured people in the United States. Of course, the plans won't be affordable to all of these people... but they will bring health care coverage within reach of some of them.

I don't want to criticize the employers in question for taking this step - it is movement in the right direction - but what I kept wondering as I read the article was, "wouldn't it make sense to offer something like this to everyone without insurance?" Now, who would do that? The government is the most likely candidate, simply because the government is pretty well equipped to manage this and sign up insurers.

Of course, that sounds a little bit like national health care (though it's not) and would lead to the predictable complaints that the government is going to "control" our health care - robbing us all of the freedom of belonging to an employer-sponsored plan in which we can only see certain doctors on an ever-changing list that is never provided to us in an accurate form, with co-payments that randomly change and requirements for pre-approvals by the insurer that, if not completed precisely according to that month's procedure, result in denial of coverage. I mean, it would be onerous to move to a system where every doctor participated in a state or federal plan to which everyone belonged, ensuring that everything was covered, even if you went to hospital A instead of hospital B.

I realize that it is against the fashion of the times to suggest that there are some things that the government is well equipped to do - that, in fact, the reason we have governments is to do some of those things - but so it goes.

Homo-Lovin' Bunnies

By now I'm sure you've seen some of the nonsense about Buster the Rabbit and his TV show on PBS, in which the cartoon rabbit visits kids around the country and shows the audience how they live. In a new episode, Buster visits kids with two moms. The show is not about that - it is about the kids going out to collect maple syrup from trees in Vermont - but no matter, the depiction (even as a background item) of lesbian moms has the right wing up in arms. (Read the NY Times article from today's paper here.)

Education Secretary Margaret Spelling has gotten in on the grandstanding, complaining that this is not what the federal grant that helped fund the program was for. So let's look at the grant:

The grant specifies the programs "should be designed to appeal to all of America's children by providing them with content and characters with which they can identify." In addition, the grant says, "Diversity will be incorporated into the fabric of the series to help children understand and respect differences and learn to live in a multicultural society."

"All" of America's children. Reuters has reported that somewhere between 1 and 9 million American children have at least one gay parent, and the American Psychiatric Association says that estimates of the number of children with lesbian mothers range from 6 to 14 million.

That's obviously not the majority of children, but it certainly is a healthy slice of the "all" in the grant language, isn't it? The idea that this program violates the grant - silly on its face, since the grant doesn't say "only mixed-gender parents" or "no lesbian parents" - becomes siller when you look at the grant language. Note that it specifies that the show should provide characters with whom children can identify. So, given that there are a ton of kids out there being raised by same-gender parents, wouldn't having one episode with two moms as parents be a step toward fulfilling the requirements of the grant?

Forget gay rights. Forget same sex parents' rights. Take a very narrow view of this: the Department of Education's grants are supposed to be serving all American children, including those raised by same-gender couples. The money for those grants comes from tax dollars, including those paid by same-gender couples. So unless the Department of Education is going to start specifying that they only provide programs to help children who live with two mixed-gender parents, Secretary Spelling needs to learn to shut up until she's gone back and looked at the grants her department is giving out, rather than criticizing grant recipients for doing exactly what her department told them too.

Tell her how you feel. HRC has created a nifty form form for it - very important since DoE has one of those citizen-proof web sites that provides no way to contact the Secretary. You can edit the letter to personalize it; I did so to raise the issue above and ask Secretary Spelling to clarify whether her department exists for all of America's children, or just a selected subset.

Riding the Rails

Staring at me from the front page of the Chronicle this morning, an only-in-Texas story about Metro's ban on guns on the transit system. (Short version: it's going away.)

For those who don't know: Texas has a "concealed carry" law, which means you are allowed to carry a handgun around as long as it is concealed. Metro (like many other transit systems in the state) had a ban on guns on the trains and buses. Of course, it's been under fire (so to speak) by gun folks.

In reality, I'm sure people have been carrying guns on Metro for some time, because really, there is no way to enforce the ban. So as insane as I think the whole thing is, I think this is probably the right call for Metro: if people in Texas want to be able to carry guns everywhere, it's not a great use of Metro resources to fight to keep an unenforceable and possibly illegal ban in place.

But as I read the comment from James and Mary Ann Knouse, who stopped riding Metro because they couldn't take along their guns to protect themselves, I got the distinct feeling I was hearing a voice from someone who lives on a different planet than I do.

Meanwhile, the gun crowd is going to turn their attention to other places with gun bans - like the Houston City Hall.

As a side note, this is one of those issues where my viewpoint has changed a bit over time. I think the idea that people toting guns makes us safer is just plain silly. Statistics show that having your own gun around can lead to it being used against you as easily as it can lead to you protecting yourself. And given the general tensions that pop up in daily life, arming the populace seems a bit risky. On the other hand, I don't think guns themselves are the root cause of violence; for that we need to turn to poverty and social inequality. (This was a point Michael Moore made in "Bowling for Columbine," where he took a look at Canada, a nation with high rates of gun ownership but low rates of violent crime - he suggested that this might be because of Canada's vastly superior social safety net that. It's impossible to tell if this is true from anecdotal evidence but it is worth thinking about. Gun advocates like to point out that "guns don't kill people, people kill people," and they have a point, but they never want to seem to move on to thinking about why people kill people, and what we might do to change that. The solution I guess, in these folks' eyes, is "... so we'd better shoot them first.")

It's In the Air

Last week, the Houston Chronicle ran a series of articles about the lax control of chemicals emitted by Houston's cluster of petrochemical facilities in the eastern part of the city around the Houston Ship Channel. (You can read it here. It was a pretty solid set of articles; I didn't think there was a trace of "chemical companies bad, people and puppies good" in it. It raised reasonable questions about how Texas sets the allowable levels of pollutants (randomly, it seems), the state of knowledge about the actual effects of chemical pollutants, and whether any regulations really get enforced.

It's been interesting to watch some of the reaction in the Chronicle's letters to the editor section. There were, of course, many people who wrote in saying that the appreciated the series and calling on state lawmakers to address the issue. But there were also a surprising number who wrote in accusing the paper of being anti-business and generally commenting that since the petrochemical industry was an important part of the local economy, we should just all shut up, and the Chronicle shouldn't write stories like the series in question.

Which is, frankly, bizarre. It's reasonable to question their methodology, their interpretation of the results, or the way the information was presented. It's even reasonable to argue that the Texas standards for the chemical pollutants in question (generally allowing 10-50 times the levels of other states) are the right ones (not easy to argue, but you could). But I think it's just bizarre to argue that since this industry provides a lot of jobs to the area, we should not complain if they're giving their neighbors cancer or violating the law.

My personal interpretation is that it's that old free market fetish - business will save us all, so stop asking questions. It's become part of middle America to an extent that it's not hard to get individual citizens to stand up for the poor, beleaguered corporations of the world to protect them from nasty regulators. Okay, sarcasm aside: it is not logical to support people who are dumping chemicals into the environment because they help the economy. (Neither is it reasonable to run them out of business: reasonable, in this case, is setting scientifically defensible standards for their activities and enforcing the rules.)

Another thought: when I talked about this with a friend on the phone, he responded with a comment along the lines of "Ugh.. Houston... chemicals... yuck." The implication, of course, is that this is just an examle of why Houston is a crappy place.

Which is an absurd response. Those chemical plants aren't there because Houstonians just love the smell of chemicals in the morning. They are there to satisfy a worldwide demand for what they make. They are there so that someone in San Francisco can have a computer, so that someone in the Candian Rockies can get high-tech outdoor gear for their adventures, to make the trim in your car or the bus seat you sat in this morning, and to make the grocery bag you brought your organic produce home in. They ended up here; but they wouldn't be here without a world eager for their products. And one of the pressures that makes them cut corners is that to keep the rest of the world happy, they have to make those goods as cheaply as possible.

If keeping someone who lives downwind of the plant from getting sick means those things are going to cost a bit more, that should be a cost everyone is willing to absorb.

Interestingly, none of the "stop beating up on the poor defenseless chemical industry" letters that I saw were from people who identified themselves as residents of affected communities. Meanwhile, people who earn their livings from those companies were willing to talk to the Chronicle about the flares when chemicals are burned off, the strange dust coating the neighborhood, the smells, and other fun effects of living near chemical plants.

Those Adorable Brits

Today I emailed a letter to the editor of the Economist, which I may or may not comment on later here. Usually when you send a letter to the editor of a publication it's a bit like pissing off a cliff. I immediately got a replay stating:

The Editor wishes to acknowledge your email with thanks.

Which is not a major deal, but they actually bothered to acknowledge it. With thanks. There's something incredibly British about this email. They are just so damn cute over there. I think it's probably why I like the Economist so much. The reporting is very good, they are mercifully free of the liberal/conservative American political dynamic (they'd fit comfortably into neither camp here), they provide a good non-American perspective, they cover parts of the world thoroughly that even our major papers don't bother with... but most of all, it's written as though the editors believe that a magazine should not sound like someone sitting at the coffee shop talking to you, but rather like someone who sat down and carefully thought through their article, wrote it, and edited it, striving to be accurate, concise, and clever.

After reading the Economist, picking up Time or Newsweek feels a bit like talking current events with a household pet.

The Many Moods of iTunes

iTunes has a mind of its own.

My default listening mode is to have it randomly shuffle through my entire library. This is fun because I have nearly 9000 songs, and over 2000 of them have a play count of zero - that is, I popped an old CD into the Mac and imported it but never actually went back and listened. So when I start it up, I usually scroll down to the stuff I've never heard, pick something randomly, and let it shuffle from there.

But here's what I notice - once I pick a song I haven't ever played in iTunes, I can almost guarantee that it will come up again in about a day or two - "randomly." Additionally, I will then start hearing that artist a lot more in the "random" shuffling.

Obviously there's a little gnome that lives inside of iTunes that is paying attention to what I listen to and shaping the "random" shuffle experience for me.

Unusual Household Object Blogging

Meet James the Doorman. James has no doors to hold open in my house, so he is currently vacationing on a shelf.

That Healthy Economy

From the business section of today's New York Times, a report on Silicon Valley that may be a sign of where we are going: venture capital investments are up, profits are healthy, R&D funding is booming, and the job situation still sucks.

Why? Productivity improvements. Companies are doing more with less. That means, no, there are a not a bunch of new jobs to go with all this good news, and life in the San Jose area continues to get tougher for the middle class.

(The article notes offshoring, everyone's favorite demon since it started affecting educated technology workers; we weren't too upset when it was just manufacturing jobs, so now a modest outsourcing trend that affects higher-income people get a lot more attention than a much larger trend at the lower end of the income spectrum.)

It's a sobering report for those who are convinced that keeping businesses healthy means good things for everyone.

The Weather Outside Is Frightful

I know I'm not exactly going to get sympathy from my largely northeastern readers, but damn it was cold today. And it made me simply unable to leave the house. Despite it being brilliantly sunny outside, the temperature never crept above the mid-40s. And yes, I know this should be no big deal to a New England native, but you know what? Mid-40s is very cold.

So I woke up late, putzed around the house, then got sidetracked by technical problems - I changed the batteries in my bluetooth mouse, and it just wouldn't work right afterwards. This gave me an opportunity to try out Apple's new live support chat. They seem to be testing it by rolling it out to iMac owners only, but it worked nicely. Except the resolution was "your mouse is fucked, we'll exchange it for you." So now I'm stuck with a nasty little wired mouse that I got at a Microsoft partner conference.

I finally dragged my butt out at 3:30, went and read for a while at the Montrose Starbucks, and then saw In Good Company. It was quite good; Paul Weitz seemed particuarly tuned in to the little details that make the interactions between characters seem realistic - the small glances, the word here and there. The only really false note was when Dennis Quaid delivered a mostly incoherent series of questions/statements when the Rupert Murdoch-esque corporate boss was in for a visit. I think the point was supposed to be, "isn't it kind of a bad thing when a major corporations sees itself as a political entity above national laws, and fires lots of people? And isn't this whole synergy thing bullshit?" The satire of modern corporate/marketing culture was pretty much dead on for the most part, though.

But I had a thought as I left the theater: isn't interesting that there's a market for movies that suggest that unbridled transnational corporate power is bad, and which play to the experienced of individual Americans who have been on the receiving end of it... and yet we (the big collective we) keep going and voting for people who pledge to bring us even more unbridled transnational corporate power? Are we dumb, deluded, or just a bit schizophrenic on this one?