I’ll just take their word for it. (And yes, it does say better then everyone else.)

It’s about damn time. Too bad his replacement will be Bush‘s bitch.

I humbly suggest that Hollywood should immediately cease production on the following upcoming sequels and destroy any evidence of their existence:

• Dumb & Dumberer
• Bad Boys 2
• Shrek 2
• Terminator 3
• X2
• Fast and the Furious 2
• Jungle Book 2
• Seriously Dude, Where’s My Car?
• Final Destination 2

Thanks Dustin and B-don for the last two. Both are very worthy of inclusion.

…this semester is in the bag. For better or worse.

Update [19:15]: I finished the final essay final. Now I’m sitting in our gleaming new 8 dual-G4 Mac OS X video-editing lab, waiting for Jesse and Debbie to finish. I’m typing this with the editing window open on one Sony Trinitron and my Webmail on another. I still think multi-monitor setups are a bit overrated, but it’s fun to drag windows to the middle so they straddle screens.

This morning Pech brought a Ben Stein essay to my attention. The economist and lawyer most famous for saying “Bueller…Bueller…” has several interesting things to say about the country’s direction, despite his position as a conservative and Bush supporter (and yes, we will be holding the latter against him.)

One especially relevant item decries the lax standards and weak penalties for corporate managers. I couldn’t agree more; have you heard anything about Enron indictments lately? (Or ever?)

The timing of the Stein piece is especially interesting given what Andrew Tobias has to say today. The investment guru quotes a forthcoming book when he says that since the 1939 establishment of the SEC [by liberals, natch] the volume of trading has increased to some 200,000% of its original level. Over the same time period, the staff increased by 72%.

Now that’s certainly not to say that we need x investigators for every y stock trades — computers and analysis tools are doing a lot of work. But this is an agency that nets money for the government, to the tune of five times its budget. It’s great to throw money into the general fund, but better still to use that money to do a better job for those who pay it in.

As Tobias rightly notes, the SEC’s budget must be increased, its staff enlarged, and its pay rates hiked. We must take these steps quickly to show that everyone’s investment is treated with equal respect in America’s capital markets lest we, as Stein puts it, “ruin American enterprise.”

I’m a Salon Premium member (have been since the day they started it) but sometimes I visit Salon on one of my browsers that doesn’t have the cookie set. Then I can see Salon with ads, which is always an interesting experience. Sometimes it’s Lexus, sometimes it’s Mercedes, sometimes it’s:

Assuming this is a targeted campaign, I find it fascinating that Behind the Label wants to connect with the same people MB does. Then again, I guess I’m susceptible to both messages…

Anyway, demand-side activism is always tough, so it will be interesting to see how successful they are.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” — Confucius

At a Christmas dinner not so long ago, I dined near a doctor (the neighbor of our hosts.) Following some conversational trail I have long since forgotten, we arrived at the purpose of work. I took the position that it was possible, indeed it was nigh imperative, that one find work that was fulfilling and satisfying.

The good doctor had a different view. “Work,” he told me, “is what you do so that you can do the things you want to do. That’s why you get paid for it.” He mentioned his toys — a Surburban, ski trips, a second house — and said he kept working so he could enjoy them.

I told him I disagreed. We were in Chicago, so I took an example that was both local and universal. “What about Michael Jordan?” I asked. “Doesn’t he love what he does?” The man — whom by now I was quite glad was not my own M.D. — did not budge even on this obvious point.

This memory returned to me after I again viewed The War Room, a behind-the-scenes documentary of the 1992 Clinton race perfect for political junkies like myself. In one scene that some have called the “emotional heart” of the movie, a very moved James Carville rises and says:

There’s a simple doctrine. Outside of a person’s love, the most sacred thing that they can give is their labor. And somehow or another along the way we tend to forget that. Labor is a very precious thing that you have and any time that you can combine labor with love, you’ve made a merger.

It is my hope that I and those I care about can effect such a merger and gain joy from it.

Al Gore‘s recent self-disqualification from the 2004 race has opened up the field, allowing other Democrats to express their unique ideas and vision for the future. I hope those ideas sound half as good as those from George McGovern, from whose Harper‘s essay the following is taken:

Webster’s dictionary defines [liberalism] as “a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of man, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties.” From the beginning, Americans have believed that the conditions of their lives could and would be improved; that is, they have believed in progress. One cannot conceive of a nation dedicated to democracy that does not rest on faith in “the essential goodness of man.” It would seem even more likely that in a democratic society most of the citizenry would accept the importance of personal freedom – “the autonomy of the individual” – as well as the need to protect that freedom.”

As my friend and sometimes debating partner William F. Buckley puts it in his book Up From Liberalism: “Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before.” The business of conservatives is, in other words, to cling tightly to the past, and although such a stance can be admirable, a stale and musty doctrine is of little use at a time when the nation needs not to fear the future but to seek out ways to improve it.

Virtually every step forward in our history has been a liberal initiative taken over conservative opposition: civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, rural electrification, the establishment of a minimum wage, collective bargaining, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and federal aid to education, including the land-grant colleges, to name just a few. Many of these innovations were eventually embraced by conservatives only after it became clear that they had overwhelming public approval for the simple reason that almost every American benefited from them. Every one of these liberal efforts strengthened our democracy and our quality of life. I challenge my conservative friends to name a single federal initiative now generally approved by both of our major parties that was not first put forward by liberals over the opposition of conservatives.

With all the sturm und drang surrounding Lott‘s birthday wishes to Strom, some have tried to use the Republican Party‘s origins to blunt charges of racism. We’re the party, the story goes, founded by anti-slavery activists with Lincoln as our first elected president.

Indeed, “we are the party of Lincoln” is a favorite refrain of many Republicans seeking honor and legitimacy in one of our greatest presidents. Still, one wonders what Mr. Lincoln would have to say about the Grand Old Party today.

I believe he would find the modern Republican party to be intellectually bankrupt, exclusionary, and greedy beyond comprehension. This is not just conjecture:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” — U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864. (Letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
See p. 40, The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)

Lifted from KMFDM site, which credits Spiegel.de. Tipped by MJG.

In other shocking news, he‘s totally plastic, his suit is nonremovable, and he’s bought and sold.

Update [16:06]: NPR gives us a taste of Strom [0:26 RealAudio stream] from the year Lott boasted his state was one of four to vote Thurmond. Ahh, Republicans…

That’s from Christina Aguilera‘s new video “Beautiful,” brought to my attention by someone who actually has cable. I have no idea what she’s up to, but I like it anyway.

So Marvel’s announced a comic with a gay hero. What a step forward, blah blah… Big deal.

Predictably, there’s some Sally Struthers-lookin’ chick whining it will mess kids up. God, I’m so fucking tired of hearing about the children and how we must protect them. That’s all well and good, but adults — hell, teens — live here too. Let’s get over this unhealthy obsession with using the single-digit-age set as a rhetorical tool to manipulate every little element of our culture.

Also, I don’t know where the wench gets the idea that children will read it, anyway. When’s the last time you saw a kid reading a comic book?

(And yeah, I’m a bit bitchy myself. Maybe I should go back to writing about spectrum.)

In his book Being Digital, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte predicts that those signals traditionally carried over wires (e.g., telephone) would switch with those carried over the air (e.g., television.)

This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. Obviously television is not something you watch on the move, so why does it need to be wireless? It might make sense if we lacked infrastructure, but that’s hardly the case in the US. If one wanted to shut down the TV transmitters, it could be done with an easy transition: the cable industry is now so well developed that one source I consulted had coax “passing” 97% of American homes. (As is, about 60% of households get cable and another 18% have a DBS system.)

At the same time, the cellular market is becoming even bigger each year. Consider the case of Taiwan, which this year became the country with the highest cellular phone penetration. Its usage rate? 100.7% (That compares to 57.7% landline penetration.)

Some people look at those figures and conclude Negroponte is wrong, and all will be wireless in the future. They point to the fact that many developing economies, notably those in Africa, skip the wires altogether in favor of quickly bringing a wireless system online.

Maybe, but I am still profoundly suspicious of wireless infrastructure. I’ve never found a cellular phone that is as reliable as a wired phone, never mind the significant difference in quality. I’ve never seen a fast wireless Internet connection (though my father’s, at ~512Kbps, isn’t bad.) I still have eavesdropping concerns.

I’m unshaken in my belief that only fiber to the home will be able to quench what I expect to be a voracious need for greater bandwidth in the future. Wireless certainly has its place as a mobile technology, but the industry is going to have to do a lot better to sell me on it as a primary communications mode.

Update [13:20]: Interesting. The FCC examines giving some TV spectrum over to wireless. Is this the first step?

Consider for a moment all the devices you use that get some sort of wireless signal: cellular phone, cordless phone, TV, radio, etc. Each of these devices uses a specific swath of the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g., cordless phones operate in the 2.4GHz range.)

Now imagine that all of the special towers for each one (TV towers, radio towers, cell towers…) were replaced, and we just had “Internet towers.” I might use my wireless internet device to listen to the radio on the move, you might use yours to carry on a conversation. Rather than have several different antennas for different functions, we would work to increase speed across a broad range of frequencies.

How would such a system be controlled? By what entities? What would it cost? Could it really be better than the auctioning model (which we’ve seen with wireless phones) whereby we sell the rights to use frequencies to the highest bidder?

I think these are some of the more fascinating questions we face when we look at how we’ll use networks in the future. It’s interesting to me to see the Property or Commons debate continue to play out. My personal hope is that wireless becomes less important than everyone thinks it will be, and sophisticated fiber networks will do most of the data hauling. We’ll see.

[Also, in case you’re curious: I’m up this early because, yes, I had a paper due. Of course I didn’t start until half 4.]