Never regret anything that made you smile.

"The world is not respectable;
it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever;

but it is shot through with beauty, with love,
with glints of courage and laughter;

and in these, the spirit blooms timidly,
and struggles to the light amid the thorns."

George Santayana

Honesty

I can't resist posting this. He's got a point.



"A friend of mine knows a guy from the Pashtun region of Afghanistan. The guy told my friend that if he wanted to send money home, he would do it by giving cash to someone from the same culture who was traveling back. “What?” asked my friend. “Someone you know, or just anyone?”

“Anyone”, said the Pashtun guy. “He will take the money as far as he can, and then he will give it to someone else, and that person will take it as far as he can, and then he will give it to someone, who will give it to my family.”

Wow.

I relayed this tale to a friend who lives in Istanbul. “Oh yes,” she said. “I regularly take a bus route through the center of the city. The bus is so crowded you have to squash on. There’ll be about 200 people on there.

“The bus has three doors, and you’re supposed to get on in front, but you can’t, because it’s so full, so people get on through all three doors. You need to stamp your bus-pass, or buy a ticket, at the front, but you can’t move. So people pass their bus-pass up the bus, hand to hand.

“I’ve seen twenty lira notes go up the bus, hand to hand, and I’ve seen the change come back the same way. Imagine that in England–that money wouldn’t go further than two hands before some guy pocketed it.”

Indeed.

When did we, in the US and UK, lose our honesty? Or rather, as I’d like to ask the person who ripped off MY stuff from the trunk of my car this summer, when did we start assuming that because you CAN take something, you have the RIGHT to?

Of course there are problems with the shadow side of honor in Islam–I’m not idealising that culture either. But there is something fine in a culture where not only do people insist on paying for their bus-ride, and thereby supporting the public transport infrastructure that makes their city bearable, but also pass each other’s hard-earned cash without stealing it.

When the common people rip each other off, there’s something nasty in the air. It’s not just about a few coins, it’s about solidarity, community, mutual respect of the hard work of someone just like you, trying to make an honest living. There’s something fine in those values."

About that pension plan...

This article on the Huffington Post made me angry. It seems that "Big Business", particularly their executives are always getting themselves into trouble. This time, it's by hiding their own pensions in with average workers', allowing them to get tax breaks and weedle money out of the system for their own (and their friends') benefits.

I know, I know... I'm sure they were well intentioned. After all, saving taxes means more money to shareholders, which surely helps the common American somehow .... wait, that money never does get filtered back down. Tax payers have to make up the difference with more national debt - and that tax savings gets directly passed on to those already making million-dollar salaries.

From the reporting, it doesn't sound like it was technically illegal. Just of questionable moral integrity. So what does that mean? Means that our Senators need to close a loop-hole, before more executives retire and drain pension funds intended to help those who really need it.

the next Green Revolution

The first Green Revolution was a movement that started with the Mexican Government deciding that enough was enough - they were going to do something about their food supply (or lack thereof). Their incredible success with breeding a better wheat seed began a world-wide agricultural revolution that held off mass famine, most famously in India.

What happened?

The governments of poor and developing countries decided that they were tired of waiting for their richer neighbors to solve a global problem - and took matters into their own hands. The result? Lives were saved and a new industry was born.

The same thing is happening again, except this time it's our global environmental crisis - and it is China stepping up. With the world's largest population, massive industrial infrastructure, and a little political will, the Chinese government has been quietly positioning itself to become the leader in cleaning up our environment.

I know, I know... the Chinese are terrible polluters, right? Their cities are so polluted that citizens wear breathing masks, and they've imposed driving restrictions and other policies before the Olympics just to clean things up a bit. Well, that's true.

But they also are on the front lines, developing new renewable technologies, installing filters on their coal plants (which we can't seem to do), and creating mass-marketable products that are not only going to revolutionize the industry but also create thousands of new "green collar" jobs.

China is tired of waiting for their richer neighbors to solve a global environmental problem - and is taking matters into their own hands. The result? Lives will be saved and a new industry is being born. The next Green Revolution has begun.

The Trouble is...

A good quote:

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

- HL Mencken

Dick Cheney - he was right!

Wow. This is incredible footage from C-SPAN from back in 1994. Back then, Cheney was a part of the Project for the New American Century, a controversial neo-conservative think tank that promoted the first Gulf War and American oil interests in the region - and even then he got it right on Iraq.

In this footage, he explains that we had made the right choice to NOT PURSUE sending troops into BAGHDAD to go after Saddam Hussein. Why? Because if we had gone into Baghdad....

.... "we would have been all alone"

...."none of the Arab forces ... would have been willing to invade Iraq"

...."if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could easily see pieces fly off"

...."IT'S A QUAGMIRE"

So remind me again, why was it a good idea less than ten years later????

We Won in Iraq, a long time ago

The following was too good to summarize

"I know this goes without saying, but it keeps coming up.

Remember when our troops marched into Baghdad, took the place over, drove Saddam into a hole and arrested or killed the government. Then we disbanded their army.

When you go to war that's what victory looks like.

Then came the occupation. There is no such thing as winning an occupation. You either continue to occupy or withdraw. It's semantic nonsense to apply the verb "win" to the noun "occupation."

Winning in war or sport is not vague or ill-defined. When the clock runs out in football the team that's ahead wins. When two runners are in a race the first to cross the finish line wins. When you fight a war, when you take the other guys' capital and disband their government and army, that's winning.

As I said it goes without saying, but it keeps coming up in the news, this weird idea that there is such a thing as winning an occuption, when there isn't."

-Dave Winer, The Huffington Post

The world is too dangerous - right?

- Our economy is declining.
- AIDS, Malaria, and other pandemics abound.
- The climate is changing in ways that threaten our way of life.
- We are facing nuclear proliferation and WMD's falling into the hands of our enemies.
- And worst of all, terrorists are everywhere - ready to attack any moment we let our guard down.

Thankfully, we have a government that is standing strong and defending us against all of these pending disasters, especially against terrorism from abroad. And hey, even if the executive branch is overstepping its powers, even if our legislative branch is passing laws that limit our civil liberties, even if the judicial branch is upholding these unconstitutional laws - that's okay, because the world is too dangerous - right?

Wrong.

Do we really think the world is any more dangerous than it has been before? Is our country really facing more threats than we have in the past? It is an insult to those who have come before us to even think such as thing.

We have survived the Depression.
We have conquered Small Pox and Polio with vaccines.
We defended our newly formed country against the British army.
We have fought and won two world wars at the same time.
We have even faced a nuclear war before.

And through all of it, we have retained our civil liberties. Never have we given our own government the right to tap our telephones or go through our credit card bills or our library records.

It is unacceptable and it needs to stop. NOW.

More on the irony Flip-flopping

As a follow-up on McCain, a friend recently forwarded me this link, which documents in detail many of his position reversals. It's a worthwhile read.

Wind Power - take two

This is another ingenious idea of how to do wind power effectively. The design uses flutter - you know, the kind of movement that collapsed the Tacoma Bridge when it resonated with the wind? Anyway, it's inexpensive, has few moving parts, and works on a micro-scale - all of which make it ideal for the developing world.

I don't know how I got lucky enough to stumble across this design, but boy am I glad I did!

Check out the two-minute video here.

Counterintuitive Innovation

This is super-cool. The rules of aerodynamics says that you should have a smooth edge, to maximize lift and reduce rough air flow. Maybe not always. An entrepreneur has started a company called WhalePower that is building primarily wind turbines that are shaped like whale fins which - oddly enough - actually have small bumps on the edge that reduce stall.

It's pretty sweet. I want in.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/07/11/wind-turbine-whale-02.html

Science v. Bush Administration

So it appears the Bush Administration has been having fun lately, what with the whole illegal-wiretapping-thing and the stay-the-course-thing and the threatening-Iran-with-war-thing. And now it seems we can add one more to the Bush legacy:

Censorship.

More specifically, censorship of scientific information and reports with conclusions that appear to have been deemed "unproven" - aka. uncomfortable. Like global warming's negative effects on human health, the state of our environment, and endangered species, among other things.

This is preposterous and I wonder how they have been getting away with it for so long. It appears Cheney (or at least his office) has been instrumental in all this, but really it comes down to a systemic problem. How have we allowed censorship - real live censorship - of one of the last fields that is supposed to be immune from politics?

Science is based on facts, based on data and analysis, and the scientific method. At least that's what we teach in schools. Call me crazy, call me innocent but I believed that nothing could be called science except conclusions drawn on experiments and rigorous testing and review.

Censorship is absurd and unacceptable. It should not happen in a free and open society. It does not happen in the America I choose to believe in.


Thanks to Erik for bringing this to my attention.

Wall-E for President

I couldn't resist - going to see the movie last week (the trailers did me in) or posting this editorial that compares Wall-E to our current presidential candidates.

The movie was awesome - I never knew you could make a movie that is cute and romantic, simple enough for children and complex enough to address social issues, nearly-silent for a good portion of the movie, and with main characters that are - amazingly enough - two robots! I highly recommend the movie to anyone and everyone who has a few bucks and two hours to spare.

As for the editorial (from which I stole the title of this post), it reminisces about what it means to celebrate our Independence Day. It is quickly apparent that Frank Rich of the NYT is not happy:

"Let oil soar above $140 a barrel. Let layoffs and foreclosures proliferate like California’s fires. Let someone else worry about the stock market’s steepest June drop since the Great Depression. In our political culture, only one question mattered: What was Wesley Clark saying about John McCain and how loudly would every politician and bloviator in the land react?"

He goes on to describe Obama as "small-bore" and "defensive", and McCain as simply "out-to-lunch", revisiting the fact that McCain does not know how to use a computer (a topic for a different time).

He comes to the conclusion that we should elect Wall-E our next president. And you know, in some ways, maybe he's right.

Flip-flopping revisited

So... I don't usually get this upset about Political Candidates. But McCain, while better than his Republican predecessor, is really beginning to grate on me. At the beginning of the Republican race, I didn't know much about his actual political stance on many issues but his reputation preceded him. He seemed like a tough guy who spoke his mind, worked independent of party politics, and generally stuck to his guns. I may not always agree with a politician's ideas, but if they can be honest, upfront, and keep their promises, they have my support.

It seems my trust in him was misplaced. He seems to be a bit confused now about what it is he actually stands for. Let me list a few for you:

1. A grassroots financial accountability bill - first for it, then against it
2. The McCain-Feingold bill for campaign reform- voted against it
3. Said he supported and then opposed Gay Marriage - before and after a commercial break on Hardball
4. Wire taps, torture - One of the reasons I respected him was that he opposed them. That is, until Bush became one of his campaign fundraisers.
5. Supporting the troops - except voting against a mandatory rest period between deployments, or voting against health care for the troops when they come home to become veterans.

And don't forget to check out the ENRON loophole. You know, the one that has forced gas prices up. And one of his main advisors basically wrote.

These are just a few examples of why he has lost my trust. As Americans, we can do better than this. For more info, see Olbermann and his voting record.

A reason for Embryonic Stem Cell Research

"As spring turns to summer, fun in the sun becomes the order of the day. However, the danger of skin cancer can also creep into seasonal plans.

Fortunately, researchers at Northwestern University have made an important discovery about the growth and spread of the deadliest skin cancer, melanoma.

They have learned that a protein that regulates the development of human embryonic stem cells also limits the growth of melanoma. This year an estimated 62,480 Americans will be diagnosed with the disease and about 8,420 are expected to die.

The researchers found the protein also prevents the spread of metastatic breast cancer, an especially aggressive form that claimed more than 40,000 lives last year.

This unique protein is secreted only in human embryonic stem cells, the scientists learned. It was not discovered in adult stem cells or in cells obtained from placentas."

-The Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures

Even Oil Tycoons like Renewables

I found this interview with T. Boone Pickens, oil tycoon, a fascinating one. In it, he talks about his investments in wind and other renewable energy projects in Texas. This is exciting because it means that people, smart people, people who are in it for the money, are turning toward renewables not because they have a higher purpose but because it JUST MAKES SENSE. Rock on.

Social Surplus - a background

Well, here we are with the beginnings of a blog. We'll see if anyone out there wants to hear what I have to say. I thought I would start out with an explanation of where the title, Social Surplus, came from. I think it explains a little about what this blog will be about, and tells you a little about me.

My concept of the Social Surplus comes from an article by Clay Shirky (see below for link). He starts out by theorizing that during the industrial revolution, people were at first so shell-shocked by having to live an entirely new environment (aka. moving to the city) that they didn't know what to do and drank themselves silly on gin. Eventually though, people realized that perhaps the vast amount of interaction and discussion they had (the Social Surplus) could be put to better use than getting drunk - and institutions like public libraries, elections, and free education came out of the era.

Clay then says that a second revolution has recently occured with a higher standard of living and longer lives, resulting in another Social Surplus - free time. And what have we done with this free time? For a while now we have spent it on watching TV, just as our ancestors spent it drinking gin.

Enter the promise of Web 2.0.

Not only has the web allowed us to access information with an incredible speed and ease, but we now have the opportunity to use some of our free time to contribute - to give back. Clay gave two numbers in his article that I want to share:

- The entire Wikipedia project has taken on the order of 100 Million hours of effort to develop.
- The US alone spends about 100 Million hours per weekend watching TV ads.

Those are numbers almost beyond my comprehension - to think that Americans spend over 11,000 years of time watching ads every weekend! But think of what could be done with that surplus of time.

It is so easy today to not have enough time, to not read a newspaper, to not stop and help a neighbor. But if these stats are correct, it seems to me that perhaps the real issues is that we don't make the time. Not to say I'm any better - I spent a few hours today setting up this blog for goodness sake.

But I am hopeful. Because perhaps we, as as society, have reached a point where we too can move on from our distractions and use our Social Surplus to improve the world around us.


For the original article: click here