Another Post on Media Bias

I just finished this survey from YourMorals.org. (My personal results are in green.)


One of the things that stand out here is that conservatives tend to place a higher value on loyalty, while liberals tend to place a higher value on fairness. I find that significant, because--unlike the other values on this chart--fairness and loyalty are inherently at odds. Fairness, or impartiality, means treating everyone the same—without favor, while loyalty means treating your favored person, group or organization better—with favor. Showing one means sacrificing the other.

Tying this back to media bias: a chart of these values, as they relate to journalism, would look very much like the chart of a liberal. It would probably be even more exaggerated—with fairness having an even higher premium, and loyalty, authority and purity being even lower. Fairness, balance, impartiality... these are supposed to be the guiding principles of journalism. “Without fear or favor” is not just The New York Times' motto, but the motto of journalism itself. Journalism also places some premium on harm, specifically on reporting harm and not causing harm, with significantly less emphasis on purity, authority and especially loyalty. Again, loyalty is the antithesis of impartiality. It is impossible to show loyalty without showing bias.

Respect for authority is also at odds with journalistic ethics—that “without fear” portion refers to not fearing the people in power and authority. And of course purity is a very difficult area for journalists. What does it mean? And who's idea of purity should they adopt, when some of the most contentious issues of our time center on opposing views of purity? So the “unbiased” media is stuck in a catch 22. In order to be unbiased, they must adopt the liberal viewpoint—always asking: “is this fair?” and often “is it harmful?”, but eschewing the questions: “is this pure?”, “is it loyal?” and “is it respectful?”

But here's the rub. This moral profile of journalism may appear liberal, and it may even be a liberal quality of journalism, but it must not be mistaken for a pro-liberal bias. Being unbiased may imply being liberal, but it should be obvious that being unbiased does not imply being biased. Ironically, even a medium with a pro-conservative bias may appear liberal if it strives for, or even gives lip service to, these journalistic ideals. Compounding the irony is that both liberal and conservative values, in the media, tend to benefit conservatives. Conservatives in the media (and in Congress, for that matter) prove their virtue by showing how loyal they are. Liberals prove their virtue by showing how unbiased they are—often by sticking it to their own side. This is why liberals have no counterpart to Rush Limbaugh; their consciences won't let them.

A case in point is the recent “General Betray Us” controversy. Democrats felt compelled to vote for a resolution condemning the Move On ad: “See how fair we are. We condemn our own allies, when they misbehave.” But Rush Limbaugh (and a host of other conservatives) use that kind of language all the time, without a peep of condemnation from the Republicans—much less a congressional resolution. In fact, he used the exact same language—calling senator Haggle “Senator Betray Us,” shortly before the Move On ad. Far from condemning his rhetoric, Republicans praise it—at least as long as it's directed at liberals. In 1994, congressional Republicans even named him an honorary member of Congress! Of course, in those days he was aiming his vitriol at “FemiNazis” and “Hitlery Clinton”--a smear he continues to use today.

Permalink 6:37 PM

Iran Looms on the Horizon: (Speaking of Smokers)

Not that Scott Ritter has any special insight into Bush's brain, but in a speech in Durham, North Carolina, the former UN weapons inspector says that the President is already planning for another war. From Chris Outcalt in the Portsmouth Herald:

The United States is going to war with Iran, according to Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector for the United Nations.

"He says all options are on the table," said Ritter, "but the president has already made up his mind."...

According to Ritter, President Bush's use of weapons of mass destruction as a reason to invade Iraq is now happening with Iran.

"We're doing it all over again," he said. "The policy in regard to Iran is regime change; a nuclear weapons program is simply an excuse to rally support around the confrontation of Iran."

Ritter again stressed the importance of education at the end of his talk.

"We are collectively grasping for solutions in Iraq when we haven't the foggiest idea what we're doing in Iraq," he said. "Don't believe the BS that you get out of Washington. Be good citizens; a good citizen thinks for his or herself."

What's especially ironic about this is a line that Mort Zuckerman used to praise Bush before the war with Iraq:

We are fortunate to have in George W. Bush a president who recognizes the forces of darkness for what they are. For him, the war on terrorism is an intrinsically moral cause. As he put it, "Evil is real, and it must be opposed." This is the only tolerable response in a world where the enemy is not merely unrestrained by civilized values but glories in their debasement...
The first target in the war's next phase, clearly, will be Iraq. The West's lackluster efforts at nonproliferation have done little more than delay the inevitable-a Baghdad with nuclear weapons. So Bush and his team are determined to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. This, after all, is a man who uses poison gas on his own people, invades his neighbors, and dabbles with weapons of mass destruction. He is as close to a psychopath as we have ruling any country in the world today. The late Hafez Assad of Syria, no slouch of a dictator himself, once compared the tyrant of Baghdad to a chain smoker: "He cannot help lighting another one before he has finished the first. Only with Saddam, it is wars, not cigarettes."

Let's see...Bush started the war with Afghanistan, and before that was over, he started a war with Iraq, and before that is over, he's thinking about war with Iran. So who's the chain-smoker here?

Permalink 7:17 PM

Anti-smoking ads directed at parents of teens backfire (guess who sponsored them?)

From WebMD:

Oct. 31, 2006 -- What's the best way to convince a teenager that smoking is a great idea? Tell him his parents want him to stop.

That's the rather disturbing suggestion of a study of teens who had watched tobacco-industry-funded television ads urging parents to talk to their children about smoking. The study shows that these teens were more likely to have smoked in the past month and more likely to say that they planned to smoke in the future.

There are three important points to get clear about the ads:

• These ads were not ostensibly aimed at teenagers, instead they were aimed at parents of teenagers, encouraging them to talk to their kids about smoking. (Ads directly aimed at teenagers apparently have no effect on teen smoking.)
• Teenagers who saw the ads were more likely to smoke afterwards. (Presumably on the theory that anything your parent's are against must be cool...)
• These "unfortunately" counterproductive ads were paid for by the tobacco industry.

Joseph Califano, former secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and the current director of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse says that these results are pretty predictable:

Califano urges tobacco firms to resume funding the National Public Education Fund, which sponsors the "truth" campaign of antismoking ads. Those hard-hitting ads portray teenagers confronting the tobacco industry for marketing a deadly product and lying about its effects. In one well-known "truth" ad, kids piled body bags outside of a tobacco company's headquarters as part of a protest.

Studies show that it's the most rebellious teens who are most at risk of smoking, says Joseph Martyak, marketing chief for the American Legacy Foundation, makers of the "truth" ads. The "truth" ads "speak to that rebellion" by encouraging rebelliousness toward the tobacco companies, Martyak tells WebMD.

By contrast, the "Talk, They'll Listen" ads, "by telling parents to tell the child not to smoke, draw a line in the sand for kids who are looking for a way to rebel."

This is a big issue for me at the moment because my teenager smokes and I really don't know what to do about it.

Permalink 9:27 AM

What I Don't Like About Christianity

This post is sort of a followup on my post about atheism ("Christmas Sermon for the Heathens").

I have no interest whatsoever in scientific or logical arguments about the truth of religious beliefs. I don't care what people believe about the ultimate nature of reality EXCEPT when those beliefs affect how they behave towards the world. Along those lines, I thought I would share a bunch of things that I don't like about Christianity. [Click Permalink for the rest...]

1. Emphasis on souls: I don't like the Christian emphasis on immortal immaterial souls. This emphasis puts an artificial separation between humans and other animals (who presumably don't have souls). It also leads to shrugging off the physical body as insignifant, or even a nuisance. To think of bodies as just a shell into which we stuff a pre-existing soul is to miss out on what's miraculous and wonderful about life. To me, the miracle of human life is that our natural, material bodies can give rise to love and science and art.


2. Emphasis on life after death: This bugs me tremendously, for similar reasons as the above. It encourages people to be dismissive of this precious Earthly life. This was a remark made by Penn Jillette on his atheism: "I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me."


3. Miscellaneous ridiculous moral rules: Some of the greatest mischief done by Christianity (as well as other religions) has been to punish and shame those who do no harm to anyone. I'm talking particularly about sexual morality. Why should God give a damn whether someone is homosexual, or masturbates? Doesn't He have more important things to worry about?


4. Intolerance of dissenting thoughts: Surely the most harmful effect of Christianity has been the often violent oppression of those who believe differently, be they Jewish, or atheist, or Pagan.


5. The emphasis on duty to God: To me it seems that God is a big guy, he can take care of himself. Morality seems to me to be much more about how we treat the little guys---children, the poor, the downtrodden.


6. The emphasis on what's in your "heart": Christianity has this idea that if a person is evil his entire life, but then sincerely repents on his deathbed, then all is forgiven. I think that's completely backwards. Who cares what's really going on in your heart? Why isn't how you treat others the ultimate criterion for goodness?

I guess what it boils down to is that I'm actually emotionally a pagan, rather than a Christian. I care about the things of this world---the wind, the rain, animals, bodies, food---and not so much about otherworldly things (souls, heaven, etc.) I agree with Penn that the natural world is plenty, and we should appreciate it, instead of pining away for the oh-so-much-more-wonderful world to come.

Permalink 12:16 PM

Miscellaneous Post-Christmas Thoughts

• Dommiss received an electric scooter (top speed: 8 mph). I don't know what Santa was thinking. When I saw him riding it indoors, I hit the roof, and yelled at him for scratching our nice hardwood floors. But then he completely cracked me up by calmly patting my shoulder and saying "Dad, this is all just a big misunderstanding..."


• The little kids gave out their own Christmas presents this year (since finding out about Santa's reckless non-existence, they felt that they had to take up some of the slack). They all purchased their presents at the local dollar store (no present cost more than $1). My favorite was Bridget's present for me: a very handsome Day Planner, dated 1998.


• I noticed that a number of Christmas movies ("The Santa Clause" and "Elf" come immediately to mind) indulge the theme that Santa Claus exists, but that only children believe in him. Now, I have no problem with suspension of disbelief---if a movie wants to posit that there really is a Santa Claus, that's fine with me. But, assuming that he exists, how in the world is it possible that parents wouldn't know? I mean, on Christmas morning the Dad comes downstairs and there is a ridiculous present such as an electric scooter. For damn sure, Dad didn't buy it! Isn't the existence of Santa the only logical conclusion?


• My brother Kyle suggested this resolution to the paradox: In the world of the movies, Santa exists, and leaves presents for kids on Christmas morning. However, he implants into the minds of parents fake memories of trudging miserably down the aisles of Walmart and staying up until 3 wrapping presents.


• The tradition in my family holds that the Christmas season is not over until the last Christmas card arrives. If you haven't received one from me, then it's still Christmastime (to be precise, Christmas 1999 hasn't ended yet...)

Permalink 10:39 PM

Why Does Squinting Help?

Via CognitiveDaily , LiveScience has a discussion of how squinting appears to help us see better. The gist of it is, according to the article, that

Squinting reduces the amount of peripheral light coming into the eye so that a greater percentage of light comes from the center of the visual field.

I don't find that explanation particularly illuminating. Why should blocking peripheral light make the image sharper?

[Click permalink to read more...]

When I have investigated this myself, it seemed clear to me that the key point of squinting is that it blocks all light except for that coming from a tiny hole. If you are nearsighted, then you can verify this for yourself by taking a sheet of paper, and poking a tiny pinhole through it. Images through the pinhole are much sharper. But why is that? I suppose that one could think of the pinhole as somehow like a lens, but it has one big difference from glass lenses: In the case of lenses, a lens that will help nearsightedness will make farsightedness worse, and vice-versa. In contrast, a pinhole seems to help both nearsightedness and farsightedness.

Well, here's my attempt at a simple explanation. Instead of dealing with eyeballs and retinas, I'm going to switch to the problem of how to take a picture. You want a sharp image of a point on the object you are photographing (I've chosen an arrowhead in the pictures below) to appear at a precise spot on the photographic plate or film.

Figure 1 below shows what happens if you just hold up a photographic plate next to the object. Light from your object shows up everywhere on the plate, and so you just get a smear of many, many images.

Figure 2 shows how a lens helps things. Light passing through the lens is bent, so that light rays directed at the top of the photographic plate are bent downwards, and light rays directed at the bottom of the photographic plate are bent upwards. This effect (with the right lens and the right distances between object, lens and plate) causes all the rays from the arrowhead to land at the same spot on the photographic plate. So you get a sharp image.

Figure 3 shows the effects of using a pinhole. Unlike a lens, the pinhole doesn't do any focusing. Instead, it blocks most of the rays coming from the arrowhead. Only those rays pointing in roughly the same direction make it to the photographic plate. So a sharp image is made on the plate.
Note: Figure 3 has one glaring inaccuracy about it. What is it?

Figure 1: Image is blurred on film, because light from arrowhead is spread throughout the photographic plate.


Figure 2: Inserting a lens bends some light rays up and some light rays down, so that light from arrowhead is focused at one spot on the plate.

Figure 3: Inserting a screen with a pinhole removes all images of the arrowhead except those that fall in one small region of the photographic plate.

Permalink 10:47 AM

The Effects of Sticky Tape on Cats

This video seems like it a joke (a cruel joke on the poor kitty), but I found it fascinating. What does this tell us about cat navigation?

Permalink 10:43 PM

John McCain Beaten by a Girl

Via Atrios, we see that the most recent Newsweek poll shows Hilary Clinton beating John McCain 50%-43%. And yet Newsweek (and everyone else) is ignoring this. American journalism is a paradigm example of bad science---you start with your conclusion (in this case, McCain has the inside track for 2008). Then you go about hunting for evidence to back up your conclusion, and burying evidence to the contrary.

Permalink 9:48 PM

Gandhi's Nonviolence: Can it really work?

From The Harvard Gazette: (via 3Quarks Daily)

The nonviolent principles of Mohandas Gandhi may be the only way to bring peace to the world, Gandhi's granddaughter said. Human rights activist and former South African member of parliament Ela Gandhi told about 160 people gathered in Harvard Law School's Pound Hall that violent victory sows the seeds of its own destruction. It is only through nonviolent resistance and dispute resolution, the focus of Mohandas Gandhi's Satyagraha philosophy, that the world can become a peaceful place, she said.

I've been thinking about Gandhi recently in response to the news of relentless violence in Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya and elsewhere. On the one hand, where ethnic hatred runs so high, one is led to assume the worst for nonviolent resistance: that the nonviolent will just be slaughtered like lambs. On the other hand, the slaughter is happening anyway. How could it possibly be any worse?

I have no idea whether any of the bloody conflicts in the world today could be turned around by a modern-day Gandhi. But we are seeing in Iraq that even the most powerful army in the history of the world is unable to bring peace through sheer military force.

Permalink 9:15 PM

Christmas Sermon for Heathens

Religion has been a force in American politics for years now. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, James Dobson's Focus on the Family have all had enormous influence on the Republican Party and thereby the country. For better or for worse. (Okay, it's for worse, actually). In comparison, nonbelievers (and politically liberal believers) have typically kept a low profile (so low that there is not a single prominent atheist politician).

However, there seems to be a trend in the last year or so for atheists to become more outspoken about religion. Biologist and blogger PZ Meyers (his blog is Pharyngula) has been especially scathing in his denunciation of religious belief, which he dismisses as superstition. Other famous atheists that have been in the news recently include biologist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), philosopher Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), comedian Julia Sweeney (Letting Go of God), Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), and Brian Flemming (The God Who Wasn't There). Are we heading for a showdown between atheists and believers? Believers have the advantage when it comes to numbers (less than 10 percent of the population of the US identify themselves as atheists), but atheists have the advantage when it comes to brainpower (among top scientists, believers are in the minority).

One thing that both religious conservatives and the New Atheists agree on is the role of belief in religion. To be a Christian means at a minimum that one accepts the following factual claims:

• God exists, and He created the universe and watches over all its creatures.
• There is a second life waiting for us after death, that will either be a reward or a punishment.
  
• Jesus was the son of God. He performed miracles, was put to death, and arose from the dead.

In contrast, though, my mother never thought that religion had anything really to do with belief in such factual claims. My mother is as good a Christian as I have met, and she doesn't believe in any of that. She doesn't literally believe that there is a personal God who created the world. She doesn't literally believe that Jesus performed miracles, or that he arose from the dead. She doesn't literally believe that good people spend eternity in Heaven or that bad people spend eternity in Hell. In spite of these heresies, she has for her whole life attended church regularly, participated in the choir, taught Sunday school, and raised her children and grandchildren to be Christian. What does that make her?

It isn't as if she has been pretending all this time. She wasn't the type to harangue others with here philosophy, but she would quietly tell you her thoughts if you asked. But mostly to her, being a Christian was not about beliefs at all. It was about an attitude towards the world. Love your enemies. Love your neighbor. Be a Good Samaritan. Seek out the poor, the unloved, the misfits, those who society rejects. Love even those who don't love you back. Her goal was to live as she believed Jesus taught us to live. What is important is how we treat each other in this life. The miracles, the Virgin birth, the resurrection, Heaven and Hell are all just stories whose only purpose is to open our hearts to the possibility of miracles in this life, and to encourage us to become part of the miracle.

I've tried to live up to my mother's religion; to be good without the bribery of Heaven or the threat of Hell. This religion does not divide Christians from Muslims from Jews from Buddhists from atheists. If you love the world and the people in (that word always included animals for her), then you and my mother are on the same team.

Merry Christmas!

Permalink 10:14 PM

Genetically Engineered Proteins Generate Hydrogen from Sunlight

Here's a very exciting scientific development:
Professors Tsuchida and Komatsu from Waseda University, Japan, in collaboration with Imperial College London, have combined two molecules that occur naturally in blood to engineer a molecular complex that uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, says research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

From ScienceDaily

This could potentially lead to a boom for hydrogen-based fuel. Hydrogen is the perfect fuel in many ways, because burning it produces only water. No greenhouse gases, no pollution. Unfortunately, the only way to get hydrogen is to use electrolysis, which requires large amounts of electricity, which is often produced by fossil fuels. This biological alternative to electrolysis promises completely carbon-free energy.

Permalink 5:27 PM

Spinachy Fields Forever

From Rich Magahiz' Frabjous Times

You can blow me down cause I’m Popeye the
Sailor Man
I yam what I yam
And nothing goes down better than
Spinachy Fields forever

Read the rest...

Permalink 6:55 PM

Nanotechnology for Desalinization

Again in ScienceDaily:

Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have announced they have developed a new reverse osmosis (RO) membrane that promises to reduce the cost of seawater desalination and wastewater reclamation.

Reverse osmosis desalination uses extremely high pressure to force saline or polluted waters through the pores of a semi-permeable membrane. Water molecules under pressure pass through these pores, but salt ions and other impurities cannot, resulting in highly purified water.

The new membrane, developed by civil and environmental engineering assistant professor Eric Hoek and his research team, uses a uniquely cross-linked matrix of polymers and engineered nanoparticles designed to draw in water ions but repel nearly all contaminants. These new membranes are structured at the nanoscale (the width of human hair is approximately 100,000 nanometers) to create molecular tunnels through which water flows more easily than contaminants.

...With these improvements, less energy is needed to pump water through the membranes. Because they repel particles that might ordinarily stick to the surface, the new membranes foul more slowly than conventional ones. The result is a water purification process that is just as effective as current methods but more energy efficient and potentially much less expensive. Initial tests suggest the new membranes have up to twice the productivity — or consume 50 percent less energy — reducing the total expense of desalinated water by as much as 25 percent.

Kyle has been interested in cheap desalinization for years. It has tremendous potential for defusing future conflicts over water supplies in places like the Middle East and the American West.

Permalink 6:05 PM

Wireless Energy Transmission

ScienceDaily reports on new technology being studied by Marin Soljacic, an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Physics and Research Laboratory of Electronics:

Soljacic is looking forward to a future when laptops and cell phones might never need any wires at all. Wireless, he said, could also power other household gadgets that are now becoming more common. "At home, I have one of those robotic vacuum cleaners that cleans your floors automatically," he said. "It does a fantastic job but, after it cleans one or two rooms, the battery dies." In addition to consumer electronics, wireless energy could find industrial applications powering, for example, freely roaming robots within a factory pavilion.

I've often thought that wireless energy transmission was potentially a huge field, but I could only think of two ways to make it work:

1. Transmission of the power in the form of microwaves/lasers, which had the drawback of possibly frying anyone passing between the power source and the target.
2. The use of "buzz lines"; a stream of tiny robotic insects that carried a tiny amount of fuel from some source. I don't think that's a serious contender, but it might work in a science-fiction story...

Permalink 5:40 PM

Alternate Universe: Zell Miller Prevents 9/11

Lance Manion has an article explaining how Vice President Miller could have saved the day:

...with Miller on the ticket, Gore becomes President. Which means no 9/11 and no War in Iraq...Incidental to that, Zell Miller doesn't go nuts.

Permalink 11:15 AM

Cornell Robotic Chair

Permalink 3:41 PM

Cornell University Builds Self-Repairing Robot Chair

Here's a You-tube link to a film of the chair reassembling itself:

Permalink 12:47 PM

Google Opens Up Its Index

Hoping to leave an even bigger imprint on the Internet, Google Inc. is opening up its vast online index so other Web sites can build their own specialty search engines.

The free service, unveiled late Monday, marks Google's latest attempt to expand its lucrative online advertising network and extend its influence on how people navigate the Internet.

"Now people can get the power of Google search even when they're not on Google.com," said Shashi Seth, group product manager for the custom search engine.

Mountain View-based Google already dominates Internet search, with a 45 percent share of the U.S. market through September, according to comScore Media Metrix.

The custom tools will allow other Web sites to limit the range of material that they want to include in their search indexes as well as rank the importance of specific pages.

The concept mirrors the approach of a small startup called Rollyo.com.

Google said it simplified the process so even technological neophytes should be able to tailor their own search engines in 10 minutes or so.

Permalink 12:04 PM

Language and Music

Diana Deutsch, a psychologist who studies the psychology of music, has discovered a very interesting phenomenon connecting language and music. She recorded a lecture that he had given and played it back so that a single phrase looped over and over. After a while, she stopped hearing the phrase as spoken words, and began to hear them as music.

Dr. Deutsch was interviewed on New York Public Radio's "Radio Lab". She also has a web site, where you can hear this effect for yourself:

WAV file
MP3

Permalink 11:50 AM

Teen Controls Video Game with His MIND

From ScienceDaily:

...a St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis.

The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements.

Permalink 11:45 AM

Harry Potter's Cloak: Not Magic, but SCIENCE?

From NewScientist:

An invisibility cloak that works in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum has been unveiled by researchers in the US. The device is the first practical version of a theoretical set-up first suggested in a paper published earlier in 2006.

The cloak works by steering microwave light around an object, making it appear to an observer as if it were not there at all. Materials that bend light in this way do not exist naturally, so have to be engineered with the necessary optical properties.

But Harry Potter's cloak, unfortunately, is a ways off...

So far, the technology works only in the microwave region of the spectrum. The problem with visible light is that it has a much smaller wavelength, meaning an optical metamaterial would have to be built on the nanoscale, which is beyond the limits of current nanotechnology. It, too, would only work at a specific frequency.

(Photo from 3QuarksDaily is for illustrative purposes only.)

Permalink 11:00 AM

Chuck Norris Facts

I was never a fan of Chuck Norris, but I have become a fan of Chuck Norris facts. I don't know who started these things, but I find many of them entertaining. Some of the best:

• When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.


• Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.


• Chuck Norris is the reason why Waldo is hiding.


• Chuck Norris counted to infinity - twice.


• When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.


• Chuck Norris is so fast, he can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head.


• Chuck Norris once at an entire birthday cake before his friends could tell him there was a stripper in it.

It turns out that the real Chuck Norris is a creationist, but I don't know why anyone would want to spoil the fun by actually asking him to give an opinion on anything.

Permalink 10:44 AM

Representing the Great State of Exxon...

I'm sure people have made this suggestion jokingly before, but I'm beginning to think that we would be better off if corporations were given their own Congressmen. The idea would be to allow corporations to just purchase a Congressman of their choice, for oh, maybe $10 million, or whatever the market would bear. The money raised through sale of Congressional seats would be used to provide public campaign financing for the remaining seats. Corporations would then be banned from contributing any money to the campaign of any candidate.

Personally, I think that this would be an improvement for honest government. Corporations currently spend approximately $200 billion a year on Congressional campaigns. Under my plan, that amount of money will buy them 10 Congressmen. These Congressmen would openly be advocates for their corporate sponsors.

Of course, corporations would balk at this change, because it would greatly decrease their influence in Congress.

Permalink 10:37 PM

US Army Changes Slogans

The US Army is abandoning its slogan "An Army of One", (what's that supposed to mean, anyway?) and replacing it by "Army Strong". My suggestion for a recruiting phrase is this You and What Army?.

Permalink 12:22 AM