MarkDrago.com » Politics

The Sugary Smell of Spring Time

Mark — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 03:57:52 +0000

Judging from the title you might think that this post is going to be about how it’s spring time and the flowers are blooming and the birds are chirping. I guess that could be what this post is about, but it’s not. This post is going to be about abstinence only sex education. Now, you’ve probably already heard (or can quickly figure out) all of the arguments for and against abstinence sexual education. But, I think I have something else to bring to the table.

The basic idea behind abstinence only sex ed is that kids should wait until marriage to have sex. By doing that you don’t have to worry about a lot of things like getting STDs, getting pregnant, or any of a number of other nasties. The sane side of the argument basically wants to give kids the most information possible so that they can make informed decisions about their lives. They argue that you basically have to assume that some kids are going to have sex and that it would be better to have them informed enough to protect themselves.

I was thinking about why conservatives are so upset that kids are having sex. I really haven’t quite figured it out yet. It’s pretty clear that it’s not entirely about protecting them from disease and pregnancy. There’s something that makes parents want their children to not have sex. If it was possible to absolutely guarantee that sex would not cause STDs and not induce pregnancy, I believe that parents would still not want their children to have sex until they were married (or at least well into their 20s). Maybe they’re just jealous. Lord knows they have something to be jealous of.

This brings me to what I’ve been thinking about recently. I really can’t think of anything more pure than being a teenager under the sheets with a beautiful girl. I’m sure it goes the same way for girls also. I know that the nights that I spent figuring things out as a 16 year old will probably be the most real moments of my life. Thinking back now, I don’t know that you can be more alive than that. Now, I don’t know why you would want your kid to miss out on something like that. I know it’s hard to see your kid like they’re a real person (hell, it can be hard to see anyone else as a real person), but they are. Clearly they deserve to have the opportunity to make memories like this. I just don’t know what it is that makes a parent so afraid of their child having sex. I think STDs and pregnancy are definitely part of it, but I think there is something else. If anyone can think of a real reason why, please let me know. Maybe it’s just that the bible says it’s naughty. But, even non-religious parents seem to feel the same way. Maybe I’m missing something obvious – feel free to comment.

Create like it’s 1790

Mark — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 22:00:42 +0000

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford University. He chairs the Creative Commons Project and is on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for the Public Domain. He has also written three books about culture, technology, and the laws that tend to mess them up. In short, he has done many things to try and keep our culture from being owned by giant media companies. There is a flash movie/presentation thing available that I think everyone who is interested in the creation of culture and technology should see. The audio of the flash movie is Lessig giving a talk at the 2002 O’Reilly Open Source Convention. The video of the flash movie is a recreation of the slides that he showed during the talk. The state of patents and over-zealous copyrights is something that I am very concerned about. Really, I think it is something that everyone has a vested interest in (it is our culture after all). So, take ten minutes and watch the flash movie. Some more information and material relating to the talk is also available.

So, instead of just telling people how much I like the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and what they’re doing, I decided I should actually do something to help. So, I just donated $100 to the EFF. Now I actually feel like I’m part of the solution. It’s not enough to just sit around and rely on other people to take care of things that are important to you.

Safety is Overrated

Mark — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 01:55:44 +0000

Now, give me a minute to defend myself. For some reason I can’t keep myself from using overly bold and inciteful titles. The point I’m trying to make is that we (and when I say we I mean the whole American populace) are all too willing to trade liberty for safety. I’m sure I’ve written about this in past posts, but I’m going to write about it now regardless, and I reserve the right to write about it again.
I was reminded of how little trust I have in the public by a television advertisement for News 12. That’s right. News 12 aired an advertisement for their doppler radar system and it reignited a feeling of worry in me so strong that it is now moving to me write this entry. Now, don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t just an advertisement for their weather report. To the untrained eye, or should I say to a less paranoid eye, that is all it was. But to me it speaks volumes about how frightened we are as a society. News 12 has recently added a second doppler radar to their fleet of weather predicting tools. As evidenced by the commercial this gives them the ability to, I don’t know, read the mind of the sun god and thereby predict the weather six months in advance. Regardless of what it actually does, they claimed that this doppler-duo is a (and I quote) “Umbrella of Safety”. Alright. Now, let that seep in a little bit. The commercial claimed that these meteorological-mates somehow combine to form an “Umbrella of Safety”. Now, the commercial wasn’t just born out of some advertising womb. There was, at some point, a group of people sitting around a table and one of them said something along the lines of, “You know what? The American public is so freaking scared that if we just tell them that we have something that makes them a little bit safer they’ll wet themselves in excitement.” Everyone else at the conference table agreed, either because they really liked the idea or their skull is so empty that it flaps in the wind. The sad part of the story isn’t that this pioneering ad executive probably got a sack full of cash and a BJ behind the copy machine for his brilliant realization. The sad part is that he is right.
Ever since September 11th (and probably for a while before then) we have been comatose with fear. It really isn’t that hard to notice, you just have to pay attention. It’s amazing how it permeates most of culture. You can overhear it in conversations. You can sense it in people’s voices when they talk about the war. Part of me thinks that fear might be what separates doves from hawks. If you fell scared enough, backed far enough into a corner, you can’t help but want to shoot everything that moves. You can sense this fear in our media also. It’s in movies, it’s in books, but most of all it’s on television news shows. We’re so pumped full of fear, it’s amazing that we carry on. It’s amazing that we get out of bed or leave the house.
FDR said it best when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Now I’m sure he was talking about how we shouldn’t be afraid to kill a few dark skinned people in some far off land or something like that. But, it fits well in my argument anyway. The real problem isn’t that we’re afraid, but that we’ll do most anything to get rid of the fear. There are few things that we wouldn’t give up for the chance to feel a little bit safer. Now, there really isn’t anything to be afraid of. If you live in the United States or Europe or some other civilized part of the world and you’re afraid of getting attacked by terrorists, you’ve missed the boat. You should be much more scared of cancer. No really, there is basically no chance that you’ll ever die in a terrorist attack.
But even I’m scared that we’ll see another terrorist attack on our shores in the not so distant future. However, I’m not afraid of losing my life, and my biggest worry isn’t the possible loss of thousands of lives. Now, don’t get me wrong. Any life lost is a horrible thing. However, I don’t think that the loss of life compares to the loss of our freedom. I’m slightly surprised that we retained the amount of freedoms that we did after September 11th. However, I feel that after another terrorist attack, we would be in a much different place. Noam Chomsky came to Stony Brook and gave a talk a few years after September 11th. I heard him say that in his eyes, if another terrorist attack were to occur in the US, that we would likely slip into a police state. He may have been exaggerating a little bit, but not very much. And if that were to come true, we would have no one to blame but ourselves. We wouldn’t even be able to blame the government, ’cause remember, we’re the ones that gives the government its power. That’s what a democracy is after all.
Now, if we really value our freedom so much. I mean, we must, that’s what we’re bringing to Iraq. Pretty soon freedom will be our biggest export. Anyway, if we value it so much, why do we want to throw it away so badly? Maybe I’m just a paranoid bastard, but I think someone has to worry about these things.

Now onto other things:

Lawrence Lessig, a board member over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, made reference to an interesting book in his blog. The book is called Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. It seems to be a refreshing look at patents, trademarks, the DMCA and a bunch of other well-intentioned ideas gone awry. I read the introduction and its both informative, hilarious, and sad. The book is available under a creative commons license as a PDF.

I really like the shows that NOVA puts on PBS every now and then. They recently aired a series called “The Elegant Universe”. It’s all about string theory and how the universe works. I missed it when it was aired on real TV, but I found out that NOVA has most of their shows available for streaming. I watched all three hours of the series this morning. It was very informative and I like to think that I understood most of it. I strongly recommend it.

Today was the first day that I sent a patch in to Coaster. I fixed bug #166788. It basically adds drag and drop support to Coaster. So now it’s possible to create a CD by dragging the files from your desktop or a nautilus window into the Coaster window. I spoke with the maintainer of Coaster, Bryan Forbes, on IRC about the patch and he said it’ll likely get into the next release of Coaster. Awesome! Now I won’t feel as much like a loser at Guadec. I want to try and do as much work as possible on Coaster over the coming months. I would really like to get it into Gnome 2.12. We need a good CD burning program. We’ll see.

This post was much longer than it probably should have been. My apologies. I just had so much to say. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re a real friend. Here we go, for fun, if you’ve gotten down this far, leave a comment that includes the word “fuzzy”. That’ll be our password. If you put it in a comment I’ll know that you really read the whole post and that you’re not just a poser. If anyone leaves a comment without the word “fuzzy” we’ll know that they didn’t read the whole post and that they’re a poser and we can laugh at them together. It’ll be fun I promise.

My Broken Heart

Mark — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 05:52:01 +0000

Alright. So, it’s 12:30 election day night and I’m not quite sure where things went wrong. It looks like George Bush is going to remain the president of the US for the next four years. I’m fairly disappointed in our country as a whole. I just don’t feel like I’m a part of the process. I don’t feel like I fit in here very well. This election almost makes me feel like we would’ve been better off if the south had seceded during the civil war. Okay – quite honestly, it doesn’t make any sense. I can’t think of one thing that George Bush has done well except apparently marketing. That’s what this whole thing is about anyway I guess. After seeing the result of this election, I really don’t think that our country is capable of making an informed decision as a whole. It makes me think twice about the value of democracy. I mean, democracy in theory is all well and good, but with an electorate that is so misinformed and so willing to be misled, it all just kind of falls apart. George Bush may be the president of the United States, but he’s not my president. I predict that inside of the next four years, we’ll have realized that re-electing Bush was a serious mistake. He is just not a two term president. If we hadn’t been lead into a failing war for false reasons, if we hadn’t lost an impressive number of jobs, if we hadn’t catered to big business at every opportunity, if we hadn’t rolled back many environmental protections, if we hadn’t pissed-off half of the world, if we weren’t in the health-care limbo that we’re in, and if his stance on all of the social issues wasn’t entirely backwards, I might not be complaining so much. I’m not a happy voter and I’m not a happy citizen. But hey, look on the bright side, with Bush in the white house we should be able to continue down the golden road that we’ve been on the last four years. So, expect less taxes on the rich, expect a less healthy environment, expect crappier schools, expect it to be harder to find a job, expect to give up more of your civil liberties, expect fewer americans to have health insurance, expect to continue to send young men and women to die for no legitimate reason, and expect that rich prick to smile at you the whole time. But, that’s how we like it here in America, we won’t have it any other way. Hey, maybe we’ll luck out and Cheney will run for president in 2008. That would be great.

Presidential Debate

Mark — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 02:08:20 +0000

So, there has been some talk about how blogs will be able to let average users report the news from their point of view. This will take a small part of the power away from big media – helping to make us all a little more free. Okay, maybe I have lofty goals for this whole blogging thing, but I’m going to try and do my part by sharing my views on the presidential debates here. I make no promise to be fair and balanced or anything like that, this is my blog and you’re going to get my point of view. Deal with it. Okay, here we go.

Update: I didn’t know that the topic for the debate was ‘foreign affairs’. So, I made a few comments about the lack of discussion about domestic issues. When you see one of these comments, know that I am double stupid. Thank You.
Update2: Look at the length of this post before you go ahead and try to read it. Are you sure you want to do this to yourself?
Okay – first off, President Bush seems to have a problem forming sentences. And, he definitely just made up a word. I’m not sure what he said, but I know it wasn’t English. John Kerry just called George Bush on some of the reasons for going to war. He said that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11 and that we didn’t go to war to remove Saddam, but to remove WMDs. The president does keep changing his tune on the reason for war and I’m glad to see senator Kerry call him on it.
John Kerry has a few things that he things the President totally borked. He started by saying that the President didn’t get broad international support for the war. He then said that GW didn’t use going to war as a last resort. He’s now listing things that the war money could’ve helped like prescription drugs and education. He then stated that things in Afghanistan are not as rosey as they seem. There are 10x more troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden is. Bush responded by saying that he did try to go to the UN for international support and that they pussed out by allowing Saddam to pull the wool over their eyes. He is insisting that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein. I don’t think anyone disagrees with him here and it doesn’t seem to be a good rebuttal to Kerry’s response. He said that the worst disaster would be if we didn’t succeed in Iraq. He’s still talking about Iraq when that wasn’t really what the question was about. The moderator directly asked him about Saddam vs. Osama and he dodged it. Kerry just called Bush out by saying, “Iraq was not the center of the war on terror until the President invaded it.”
George Bush is going into flip-flop mode now. He’s talking about how Kerry voted for the use of force but is now talking about how Iraq was a mistake.
Kerry was asked about how he would help secure the homeland. He went into this laundry list of things that he thinks were mishandled during the President’s term. Some of the things he talked about were money going to Iraq for firefighting and police forces while we have shortages in those areas here and securing our nuclear power plants. George Bush stated that he is spending $30 billion on homeland security this year. He says that the FBI has been changed to have homeland security at its heart. He then stated that the patriot act must continue to allow our law enforcement to interrupt terrorist cells. He failed to mention that we need the patriot act in order to slowly pull freedoms out from underneath our citizenry.
At parts of this debate, in my opinion, George Bush has looked scared. He just seems nervous. I think he knows that this is going to be a close election and that his friends won’t be happy if he loses.
Bush just made a good point as he said that Kerry is telling our troops that ‘help is on the way’ and also saying that the Iraq war was the ‘wrong war at the wrong time.’ Kerry handled it well by saying that he fought in Vietnam and later on decided that it was wrong. He fought as hard as he could in Vietnam and also felt that it wasn’t the right thing to do. He used this as his rationale for changing his stance on the use of force in Iraq.
Kerry is talking about holding a ‘statesman-like summit’ on the war in Iraq. Kerry also just mentioned Haliburton. He said that disallowing companies who aren’t in one of the ‘nations of the willing’ to bid on rebuilding contracts isn’t the way to make countries want to help us.
This whole debate has been about Iraq. We’re 35 minutes in and we haven’t heard anything about domestic concerns. I understand that terrorism and homeland security is a big deal for the majority of this country, but I couldn’t give a crap about the conditions in Iraq. I think we need to fix up what has gone wrong, get out of there and be very concerned about ourselves and our domestic concerns.
Kerry was asked about how he thinks the President lied during his time in office. He mentioned nuclear material in Iraq, UN assistance in Iraq, careful planning in Iraq, and using war as a last resort. Bush went into flip-flop mode again. I want him to talk about how he didn’t really lie about anything. I want him to talk about nuclear material in Iraq. I want him to talk about his planning in Iraq. I don’t care about Kerry’s flip-flopping as much as I care about the reasons why we have over 1000 dead US troops in Iraq.
We’re 43 minutes into the debate and still no discussion about domestic issues. Maybe they decided to leave the United States out of this debate?
Kerry is going into his plan for Iraq. He thinks that if we follow the plan that he has laid out and we’re successful, we’ll be able to start pulling troops out in 6 months. I think that’s a pretty aggressive estimate. I’m not sure that that is possible, but I think he’ll do a better job than Bush will. Bush is talking about freeing the Iraqi people. It’s a shame that he had to fall back on that as a reason for being in the war. If he said to the American people, “Hey, we want to go into Iraq so we can free people,” he never would’ve gotten support from the American citizens. Never. It’s a real shame that all of the other reasons fell through.
When asked if he would ever take troops into another preemptive action Bush said, “I hope I never have to.” Well good. You still haven’t proven that you absolutely had to take our troops into Iraq. Kerry responded to Bush very firmly. He called President Bush on his confusion between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Bush stated that, “The enemy attacked us,” in reference to Iraq and Kerry made it very clear that Iraq has never attacked us. He also spoke about Bush’s inability to actually capture the real enemy, Osama bin Laden.
The first hour of this debate is now over. There was not one mention of domestic issues. Maybe that is what the second hour will be about? We’ll see. As a kind of intermission, I just want to say that I don’t think anyone is ever going to read this. Heck, I don’t think I’m going to read the damned thing. This has turned into a beast. I’m going to slow down in this second hour of the debate because I just don’t think I care enough to be this dilligent about this. Okay.
There was a bit of a flare up regarding North Korea. I think Kerry made a few good points during this exchange. He was direct and firm in his words that were directed at the president and his inability to keep North Korea from creating nuclear weapons while he was president.
The closing comments were both pretty good. I think senator Kerry did a very good job in this debate. I don’t know if the polls will show that, but I think he did a very good job.
If you read this far, you’re insane. Stop reading my lame ass blog and do something creative with your time. That’s all.

Smorgasbord

Mark — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 05:26:34 +0000

My blogging is following a similar pattern to all of the other times that I have tried to keep a blog. I have a few days where I’m really into it and I’m writing a lot. Then, I get to the point where I have a whole bunch of things to write about, but I never find the time to actually go ahead and write it out. This is the phase I’m in now. After this I’ll have a small resurgence in the frequency of my posts, and then it’ll all die out for a few months. It’s pretty sad actually. You’d think that I’d be able to write on some kind of a consistent basis.
I’m entirely addicted to the olympics. I’ll watch freaking anything. My favorite events are indoor volleyball, ping pong, long jump, high jump, and gymnastics in general. There’s something about volleyball that is really special. I played volleyball throughout most of high school. I think there are few sports that require as much teamwork as volleyball. It’s really impossible to get much of anything done by yourself in a volleyball game. Basketball, hockey, baseball, and soccer all make it atleast marginally possible to do something amazing entirely on your own. The only thing in volleyball that doesn’t depend on teamwork is the serve. Weight-lifting is on the olympics right now. These guys are lifting something like 530 pounds up over their heads. That’s just disturbing.
This post is only going to get longer. Now that I’m writing, I feel like I should write everything that I’ve been meaning to write. There are some people at work who have different political views than I do. That is to be expected. And, for the most part I can understand where they’re coming from. I just tend to disagree. One idea that I find it really hard to relate to is that the United States can’t do wrong. Now, in orer to make a judgement on anything, it is very important to maintain an air of impartiality. That is to say that you have to try and not see what it is your judging from any one side of the argument. If you can’t think about an action from an unbiased position, you should be wise enough to not draw any conclusions regarding its justness. Now, all of this is well and good, but it isn’t human nature. It’s in our nature to say, “Hey, whatever we do is good by virtue of us having done it.” In other words, “We wouldn’t do anything that isn’t right and just.” I think we all know that this isn’t the truth, but we’re only good at deciding that way after the fact. We can look back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and think, “Maybe we shouldn’t have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens while they were on their way to work and otherwise going about their daily lives. Maybe that wasn’t entirely necessary. And, even if it was what was required to stop the second world war, was stopping the second world war worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens?” We find it very hard to criticize actions that we take as a country while they are happening. I guess what I’m getting at here is that the situation that we find ourselves in right now is a whole lot more complicated than ‘good guys vs. bad guys’. I don’t want to come off as sympathizing with terrorists or anything like that. I want terrorists to be brought to justice just as much as the next guy, but I don’t think we should be entirely haphazard about actions that we take in the middle east. Going over there and waging wars could do more harm than good. I also don’t think we should be comparing our actions to the actions taken by our enemies. Do I think that the American citizens who were beheaded by terrorists would have much rather worn panties on their heads than been beheaded? Yeah. But, that doesn’t mean that we should be putting panties on people’s heads.
I really wish I started writing these things earlier in the night, or could just stick to one topic and finish it coherently without running into rants. It’s 1:30 and I have to get up at 7:00. I’m done writing for now.

What if the Iraqis aren’t terrorists?

Mark — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 03:51:51 +0000

So, I’ve been thinking a little bit about that whole war thing. Oh yeah – we’re in a war. That means that our soldiers are getting killed and killing other people as you’re reading this. War. So, I was thinking about it, and I started thinking about the Iraqi people. I started thinking about the Iraqi people and what it would be like to be one of them. Now, I’ll have to give some background information so that everyone (anyone?) reading this will be able to understand where I’m coming from. We have yet to find any link between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and any major terrorist organization. Even if we did, I doubt the link would be any stronger than our link to Iraq in the late 1980s … or our link to Al-Qaeda in the late 1980s for that matter. We have yet to find any ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, and we haven’t been able to prove that they were removed at the last minute or anything like that either. Iraq has never attacked the United States. Iraq has never threatened to attack the United States. So, with all of that settled, I find our war against Iraq to be entirely unprovoked. I’ll have to ask you to try and ignore your patriotism, your American-view, your fox news propanda, and your fear of thinking for yourself for a minute. The only way to understand your enemy is through empathy. If you can’t feel the way your enemy feels, if you can fear what your enemy fears, if you can’t understand where your enemy is coming from, you won’t be able to understand your enemy’s actions. The Iraqi insurgents, whom I will refer to as the Iraqi people, are fighting our soldiers because they don’t want us to be there. But, what if these people aren’t terrorists? That’s right – people can dislike the United States and even try and kill our troops and not be terrorists. What if these people are just trying to protect their land? I really think that if I was an Iraqi citizen, I would be fighting the American troops that were trying to conquer my land. Hell, I know I would do the same if people were trying to take over America. What if the European Union decided to come over here and stop us from fighting unjust wars? They decided that they wanted to end the regime of George W. Bush and put a stop to the war crimes that our leader has been committing. Well, even after they remove George W. Bush, I would be fighting for my country. I love my country. I love my country and I hate my government for turning my country into something that it was never meant to be. Well, to put an end to a long post that I didn’t want to be so long, I think it would be really great if we thought about the Iraqi people as if they were ‘people’ and not just ‘insurgents’. The Iraqis are real people with real emotions and real motives. They’re not just fighting our troops because they hate the American way of life, it’s much simpler than that.