Herman Cain isn't at all put off by the Apocalyptic insinuations about his "999" plan. In fact the campaign is encouraging supporters to have it tattooed on their foreheads. It'll be called "the mark of Cain."

When trade is outlawed, only outlaws can profit from trade -- a thought I had after a radio discussion of economic sanctions on Iran

God's Gift to Women

That's how I went to the Gate Munch Saturday, the fourth time I've used that costume. As always people loved it. I donated a bag of organic wheat berries from Weaver's Way Co-Op for the food drive they're taking part in, called I <3 It In The Can . On Sunday I had a first date with someone Ive known for several years . We had dinner and saw _The Ides of March _. Good thing we both like political movies -- and that she loves George Clooney.

Great Moments in History

Today's anniversary of the (European) discovery of the Caribbean reminded me of a sketch on one of the comedy/variety shows when I was a kid -- it was either _Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In_ or _The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour_:

Boy Columbus is in school and the teacher is telling the class that the world is flat. Then Columbus stands up dramatically and declares, "No! You're wrong!"

The teacher is taken aback and demands, "What do you mean?"

Columbus goes on, "The Earth IS'NT flat. The Earth is shaped... like a CHICKEN!"

Occupy, so we can all be occupied

I'm getting sick and tired of letters to the editor perpetuating hoary old stereotypes about protesters. So I've submitted this letter to Metro:

I'm employed, so I can't take part in the Occupy movement full time. But if I could I would. Capitalism by its nature can't give everyone a job -- only fear of unemployment can force people to work for less money than their labor creates, with the difference going to non-working owners -- so I'm glad that after fifty years I'm finally seeing a movement broad enough to begin building an alternative to this system, one that could guarantee everyone decent work at a living wage and an equal vote in how profits are reinvested.

In one of my dreams last night I read about "take," the practice (according to the article) of geeky people going around without their shirts. It quoted one of them explaining how it helps him deal with his emotional issues, then described his wife making a supportive comment while giving his back an affectionate rub.

Quote of the Year

"The beginning is near." -- slogan on one of the countless handmade signs at Occupy Philly, seen 7 October 2011

Chamber of Commerce Can't Balance Its Own Books

Some people like to say only capitalists know how to run government efficiently. This story from the Public Record might appear to refute that claim: http://www.phillyrecord.com/?p=1866

Take the Offensive Against Gerrymandering

I just sent an email under that header to both my state legislators, as follows:

I hope you will do more than simply oppose the politically motivated attempt to change the way Pennsylvania chooses its presidential Electors. Democrats should take this opportunity to push for reforms that could end gerrymandering altogether.

The key is to point to the hypocrisy of the rhetoric about "making every vote count." Right now, inasmuch as this is a "purple" state, every voter has a modest chance to affect the outcome by coming out and voting, no matter what part of PA te lives in. By contrast, if the Corbett/Pileggi "reform" is adopted, only voters in the "purple districts" — basically the Philly suburbs  — will still have any chance of affecting the outcome. Urban and rural voters alike will no longer have any motive for getting to the polls. That's because this legislation wouldn't abolish "winner-take-all" — it would only shift the operation of that principle from the state to district level.

The real alternative is proportional representation on the state level. This is the type of system whereby 10% of PA voters can choose 10% of the state's Electors, no matter how they're distributed throughout the state. Various forms of PR exist, such as cumulative voting and the ranked-list system; they're all described at the web site of the Center for Voting and Democracy.

Adopting PR for the Electoral College would make every vote count even more than it does now, since it would no longer be necessary for the election to look "close" to give each vote the sense that te has a significant chance of affecting the outcome. Further, there's no reason to limit this principle to presidential elections; we can advocate it for the state legislature as well, and roll it all up into one bill. (We could also include PA's congressional delegation, but this part would likely be struck down until US Code Title I is amended to no longer require single-seat districts.) Proposing to "amend" the present bill by substituting PR for single-Elector districts would put Pileggi & Co. on the defensive by showing that only our plan actually advances the goal that his only pretends to serve; at the same time, by applying PR to other state elections simultaneously, it would completely eliminate any possibility of gerrymandering, since districts themselves would become passe. And if any currently "red" states followed PA's example, that would tend to cancel out any loss of Democratic Electors owing to Pennsylvania.

It's Not What We Don't Know...

I just sent this letter to the Public Record in response to an article in their "You Need to Care About Your Healthcare" section.

The title of your article, "What You Don't Know Can Kill You," is rather ironic, in that its very first statement, "[H]eart attacks are [the] #1 cause of death for Americans," is something we don't actually know.

Why do I say this? Because eight years ago, after my mother died, I was dismayed to discover that doctors are expected to pronounce a cause of death even if they're not really sure, and that my mother's doctor declared her death as being due to heart attack without having physically examined her — based solely on a telephonic communication that was significantly incomplete as to the circumstances in which she was found. She decided to give heart attack as the cause of death simply because, she said, this often strikes people of my mother's age (78) without any prior warning.

This may well be, and it may well be that this is what my mother died from — but if doctors are often making guesses like this, they could often be getting it wrong, and we would really have no way of knowing. In fact, this sort of error would tend to feed on itself in a snowball effect: the more doctors guess heart attack as a cause of death, the higher the statistic for deaths caused by heart attack without prior warning, and so the more likely doctors are to pronounce this cause of death based simply on a guess — and so on.

In no way do I want to minimize the importance of everyone's looking after their heart health. But neither do we want to overlook other possible causes of death because of a possibly exaggerated figure for the number of deaths due to heart attack. Nor would we, in individual cases, wish to close an inquiry prematurely due to an ill-founded assumption that the cause of death is already known. By doing so, we might miss out on important information that would help us forestall our own deaths.

As a general moral principle, it is horrendous that the law actually compels doctors to pretend to a certainty that in many cases they don't really have. Pretended certainties are one of the biggest sources of mischief in our world. Stephen Hawking put it this way: "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It is the illusion of knowledge." Or as Mark Twain said, "What gets me in trouble isn't what I don't know, it's the things I know that just ain't so." We should urge our lawmakers to repeal this unwarranted mandate of an artificial, pretended certainty. Let's get used to openly acknowledging our ignorance, when ignorant is what we are.

I will be sending copies of this letter to my state legislators now.

Double Standard?

I read this quote in today's Metro concerning the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind:

“I loved them. I think they were just a great rock band. They had all the sort of great elements that a rock band has. They had that rebellious stance and a clandestine appeal. They were great-looking and rough and messy. [Emphasis added.] And great songs. The whole package was there.”
— Blondie singer Debbie Harry

Seems only a few weeks ago that I read an interview in which someone was complaining about how she can't play without people's commenting on how good she looks, a complaint that was represented as being common among female rockers. Is what's sauce for the gander not sauce for the goose?

My Book Review Soon to Be Published

The other day I learned that my review of Ranger's Apprentice 8: Kings of Clonmel, will appear in the next issue of ICSA Today, magazine of the International Cultic Studies Association. You can read it here:

http://stripey7.blogspot.com/2011/01/review-kings-of-clonmel.html

Doing It Off the Cuff

After arriving for the bimonthly BiUnity meeting this evening, I discovered it had been canceled on account of flooding in the region. But since two others had also shown up, including one person new to the group -- and since William Way Community Center still had the room reserved for us -- I decided to go ahead with an unofficial meeting so the newbie could get some of his questions answered. It went well.

From "A Man Harassed with Sound" to "Philly Coverup"

Someone handed me a flier about this a couple weeks ago:

www.phillycoverup.com

It may be that she was fired for political reasons, but the rest seems like pure paranoia. Chances are she just had the misfortune that someone who held a grudge was looking on, unbeknownst to her, when she volunteered for the "wrong" candidate, and decided to tell her boss. It's not likely that a conspiracy was stalking her.

This kind of delusion is apparently shared by many, however. A couple years ago someone rose to speak about it during the Q&A portion of the local ACLU annual meeting. He called it "gangstalking" and a Web search revealed there are thousands of sites concerned with it (though many are just reproductions of the same article). None of them seem to provide any solid evidence, however. Indeed, some will claim that the gangstalkers intentionally avoid leaving any hard evidence of their actions, just so other people will think you're crazy!

Many, though not all, of these people seem to have a world-view suggestive of the "kook right." I asked the publisher of The Skeptic's Dictionary if he knew anything about it, but he'd never heard of "gangstalking" and noted the improbability of such an apparently huge conspiracy so successfully hiding itself from the public at large.

The paranoia of the speaker from the floor at the ACLU meeting was suggested by the fact that in the course of his remarks, he asked those running the meeting to get a certain man standing near him to "stop touching me." Note that the publisher of the above site also complains of strange women touching her on public transit, as if it were part of a conspiracy to make her crazy.

This is reminiscent of ads I used to see in the Daily Pennsylvanian back in the Eighties. They would ask if anyone knew about "a man harassed with sound," evidently referring to the ads' author. He claimed that various noises were being produced near his home for the purpose of disturbing him, intentionally leaving no hard evidence so others wouldn't believe him. Now that the Web exists, it's easy for paranoiacs like him to find one another and reinforce each other's delusions.

Check Out This Graphic with an Inspirational Message!

"Redistricting Just Doesn't Add Up"

That was the title of an article by municipal reform activist Brett Mandel, published in the latest Public Record. In it, he complains of how the process is fundamentally about "dividing, not uniting" people, and is inherently "disrespectful" because "inevitably one must choose to split some neighborhood, fragment some population, or carve up some community."

This looked to me like a good opportunity to point out an alternative. Here's what I wrote:

Dear editor,

Brett Mandel is more right than he seems to know when he says this. And that's because he isn't right when he says, "One has to draw the lines somewhere." Or at least he doesn't have to be right.

There's an alternative to single-seat, first-past-the-post elections. Already in use in many jurisdictions, it's called cumulative voting. A body — such as a city council — is elected on an at-large basis, but voters have the option of casting more than one vote for a candidate. For instance, suppose we were to have 17 members of Philadelphia City Council, all elected at-large. Each voter would have 17 votes to cast, but te wouldn't have to divide these votes between 17 different candidates. Te could give all 17 votes to one candidate, 10 to one and 7 for another, or however te liked.

A minority — be it political, ethnic, or of any other sort — that knew it represented, say, about 3/17 of the electorate, could choose to give all its votes to just 3 candidates. The members of this group would still be able to cast just as many votes as anyone else, and could thereby guarantee that they'd get as much representation as any other part of the population, instead of being diluted into invisibility.

Another advantage to this procedure is that it would render partisan primaries clearly unnecessary. No one would be pressured to pigeonhole themselves ahead of the general election, and the annual cost of elections to the public would be cut in half.

 

Setting the Record Straight on Firsts

I've been visiting the websites of the various candidates, and found an inaccurate statement on Karen Brown's (R). I wrote them this correction:

Your statement that Karen Brown is the first female nominee for Mayor of Philadelphia is inaccurate. I turned 18 in 1979, and my first vote was for Nora Danielson, mayoral nominee of the Socialist Workers Party.

I had an amusing experience yesterday. I couldn't access one of my customers the usual way, and when I got to the alternate floor I wasn't sure how to gain access. While weighing whether to try the phone at one end of the elevator lobby or the buzzer at the other, I heard a deep voice say, "This is your conscience, stripey7," and then repeat itself. After a split second of spookiness I realized I was being pranked. Laughing, I asked, "OK, who is it?" Then, through one of the glass doors, I saw someone rise, and knew that was the way to enter. As I got in I recognized him -- he was someone I often see on the usual floor, and is taken to playing around. Sometimes his joking gets annoyingly repetitive, but in this case it was fun.

Stop Facebook's Collective Punishment!

The other day I saw a news item about Facebook's closing the accounts of California prisoners after one accessed his victim's profile. I'm sending them the following letter:

I am angered to read that, in response to one convict's passively viewing his victim's profile, you are now undertaking to identify and close all accounts held by prisoners in California.

You are not a police agency and should not be doing the work of a police agency -- least of all in a way that amounts to collective punishment of all incarcerated Facebook users because of the actions of one.

This policy harms society by making it more difficult for prisoners to reintegrate into the outside world. I urge you to end it immediately.

If you wish to write Facebook about this, their address is:
Facebook, Inc
PO Box 10005
Palo Alto, CA 94303

Quote of the Day

"The consortium's presentations to federal government officials [on a scheme for intelligent rather than random assignment to prescription drug plans] were met politely but coolly. Perhaps its advocates should have called it 'intelligent design.'" -- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (hardcover edition) page 172