Wednesday Politics & Other things

Dear James, Daniel and Emily,

Politics

The big news today is the Anniversary of the Recovery Act. The Administration is ciruclating and playing up this chart as a way to demonstrate what the Recovery Act actually did. Unfortunately, as this article points out, the problem is that people don't think: "wow life could have been so much worse, that's a good point." Instead, when there is still near 10% unemployment, and that unemployment is affecting the working classes of the population hardest their thought is: "why didn't that Stimulus affect me?" And that is very understandable, and very hard to argue with. And we can't say we weren't warned, There were a lot of people who argued that the Stimulus needed to be much bigger. And this was exactly what was predicted: a jobless recovery. Funny how that worked. I guess some of those people probably did know what they were talking about.

There are lots of fingers pointing in all kinds of driections on this. But I think the answer is simple: the Senate, the Senate is where good bills go to die. The Senate is ruled by a minority of powerful Senior Senators whose biggest concerns are re-election, lining their pockets, future after Senate, their legacy, and somewhere after all that their responsibility to their electorate. When every good Progressive idea that hits the Senate gets watered down it is clear the system is broken. I am all for Senators stepping down, regardless of the reasons. We need to break up the Seniority in both houses as far as I am concerned. My biggest hope for this election is that all of the incumbents, on both sides, feel the pain.

Sonic Boom

So I finished the book yesterday, and I was even more impressed with what I read in the second half than I was with the beginning part. There are some very good points, and some interesting slants.

One of my favorites was how he took the 10 Tenets of the Communist Manifesto and basically said that all but 1 of them had come true. And yet we did not have to adopt the tenets of Lenin & Stalin to do so. His point here is that while Marx predicted a downfall of Capitalism, it was only the way the so-called Free Market of his time that fell. And this was the author's way of reiterating one of his central tenets: Social and Political Freedom are what make Free Market Capitalism work. In Marx's time the majority of the world was not free politically, and looking around today at how political freedom has become the norm, that is what is solving the basic conundrum of thinkers like Marx.

And in the last chapter he breaks down the main points of what he thinks need to be done to survive the new Sonic Boom culture and Economy. And the one that impressed me most was that he presented an excellent argument for improving, changing and advancing Education.

I highly recommend this book for anyone, on either side of the political spectrum. It is a balanced analysis of what is really happening around us and what is likely to happen as time goes by.

Social Media

So I am beginning to really like Google Buzz. The only problem, the single biggest obstacle, is that not that may people are adopters of GMail. And until it is open to people regardless of their choice of mail it will be limited.

However, for the first time I have come across a Facebook style change that has really irked me. In the past these changes were just a matter of adapting, and it usually made sense. But this one has made things considerably harder to navigate. And now I have found that some of my applications aren't working, garr! Facebook had better wake up and smell the coffee that changes like this are what will cause them to fade away. The reason I left MySpace was because it became more annoying than anything else. Well FB is becoming that annoying with all of it's little time wasters etc. So the FB tab is getting that much easier to push to the back, behind Twitter and GMail.