Even though the framers were pretty bad about race, and they certainly didn’t understand sex equality, the one thing the framers got was class. They understood that the biggest risk was to create an aristocracy. And so they insisted, as Madison said, that ‘the people’ meant ‘not the rich more than the poor.’ We’ve completely betrayed that commitment.
— Lawrence Lessig
Watch Lessig’s entire 12-minute interview with Bill Moyers:
MSNBC ran the startling headline this morning: Man arrested near Capitol faces WMD charge. How intriguing! Was a criminal mastermind skulking through the streets of DC with a nuclear bomb in his trunk?
[The suspect] tried to manufacture a “weapon of mass destruction, that is, an explosive device capable of causing multiple deaths or serious bodily injuries to multiple persons, or massive destruction of property,”
At the height of the Cold War, “weapons of mass destruction” meant nuclear warheads that were capable of eliminating broad swaths of humanity with a single explosion. With the onset of the “war on terror” we expanded WMD to include bio-weapons that could infect the water supply for an entire city or chemicals that could poison the air of a local community. …
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
— Mark Twain
As I watched the latest meltdown from the latest cabinet confirmations I can’t help but think that Mark Twain may have been on to something in his assessment of people who run for political office.
It has been obvious to me for a long time that congress is broken. I couldn’t quite articulate exactly how I thought it was broken but I knew something was wrong. And then I discovered Lawrence Lessig’s latest mission. Partnering with Joe Trippi, he is determined to change congress. He makes a powerful case that lobbying and special interests have eroded the very foundations of the constitution.
In a recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber opens with his brilliant observations on the true secrets of internet success. John says that the secret to fame and fortunate on the internet does not relate to what computer you have or what language you code in. Instead, there are three elements that are common to all successful people on the internet:
Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
— Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky
I have to admit that I am puzzled by people who claim to be easily bored. I can’t recall ever being bored. Granted, I am an introvert, which may explain why I have not lived an over-active life. I have always had a long queue of interests that manage to keep my mind occupied. I grew up in the country. The vast countryside was my backyard and my siblings and I always had something to do. As I grew older I discovered books and the world of ideas. Again, no shortage of things to do on a Sunday afternoon.
On Wednesday, in his NY Times editorial, Nicholas Kristof cited an article by the American Journal of Public Health stating that 45,000 uninsured people die annually as a consequence of not having insurance.
We accept that life is unfair, that some people will live in cramped apartments and others in sprawling mansions. But our existing insurance system is not simply inequitable but also lethal: a very recent, peer-reviewed article in the American Journal of Public Health finds that nearly 45,000 uninsured people die annually as a consequence of not having insurance. That’s one needless death every 12 minutes.
Today Paul Krugman has an editorial on the demise of American education.