A linguist's wish list

is aptly and humorously presented here. But it's much too short. "Don't get me started."

Talk about your litmus test

The Senate race in Massachusetts -- Warren against Brown -- is too close to call. Check out the numbers in the box halfway down the article. The young and the old like Warren, the middle-aged prefer Brown, and most voters could yet change their mind between now and the election. Both have the money to campaign and Massachusetts is a relatively "liberal" state. If a candidate with Warren's views can't get elected statewide there, we're in deeper poo-poo than even I thought.

Born and raised in Arizona

and, for good reason, lately ashamed to admit it. But this...this outrage...takes the cake.

I give up

Okay, I'll vote for Obama, maybe send him a check, but only because of this.

A perfect motion picture

Wonderful cast, terrific story, exquisite pacing, all with a profound, timely and timeless message. The movie? Wargames.

Well, duh...

My reaction to the findings of this study.

I'm still here

I haven't posted on this blog for quite a while, and, looking back several months I note that my posting has become sporadic and increasingly occasional and, frankly, not very interesting. But (mostly because maintaining this blog is free) I'm not quitting, but also not apologizing (much) because the reason for this isn't torpor. I've become engaged in work of a physical nature -- remodeling this condo I bought in May, doing almost all of the work myself -- and I find it such an absorbing activity that it drains all my interest and energy. Furthermore, it's an action I can take that has consequences and payoffs I can see and touch. Much more satisfying than wailing about the state of the world, the result of which is that nothing changes.

I'll continue to post here, and maybe I'll catch fire again, or from time to time, so stay tuned.

Shame on Lois Capps

Here's a letter to the editor of the SB NewsPress that I'm sending today. I'll update this post if/when it's published.

Update: It was published on January 3, 2012.

To the editor:

Transparency. We’ve been hearing that word a lot from politicians, including our Congressperson, Lois Capps. Indeed, she uses it in almost every speech she gives, at every appearance she makes. And so you’d think that when she casts a vote, such as the vote she cast last month, authorizing the president of the United States to arrest and detain indefinitely, without trial, American citizens whom he deems are supporters of terrorist groups, she’d tell us about it, explain her vote to us.

It’s not like it was an inconsequential vote. By voting to pass the 2011 Defense Authorization Act, Ms. Capps, in direct contravention of the fifth and sixth amendments to the US constitution, vested the federal executive with unreviewable power to determine what constitutes “material support” of terrorists, to decide who has provided such support and to slap them in military prisons for so long as he or she deems proper. No hearing, no lawyer, no court review, nothing. Summary indeterminate imprisonment, imposed by a single person, the president. If that sounds like vesting the Chief Executive with the powers of a dictator, it’s because that’s exactly what it is.

And so, on her website, “applauding” passage of the bill, did she tell us any of this? No. Check it out. What she shared with us—the only facet of the bill she mentioned—was a feature of the bill that provides funding of some small business efforts along the Central Coast. Some transparency.

Breaking...

This just in. Why am I not surprised?

For your reading pleasure

this article about the Republican presidential candidates.

Nader nails it

In this concise essay, Ralph Nader assails a fundamental error in "free trade" as it is practiced globally. It happens that the economist, Paul Samuelson, whose works Nader discusses, wrote the Econ 101 text that I carried to class at Stanford five decades ago, long before Samuelson saw the light, and so I was taught the mutual benefits of free trade. Fortunately, I flunked Econ 101 and so the lessons of Samuelson's text never sank in.

I don't know what it will take for Nader's long-standing critique of free-trade agreements to grab hold. He and, notably, 1992 third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot (he of the "giant sucking sound" bite) have been right about the effects of such treaties for at least thirty years, with no apparent effect on our leaders--including Obama, who recently executed a deal with South Korea.

Look around: Besides retail service-industry jobs such as salesperson and wait-person, the arms industry and the military, where are American jobs going to come from?

Despair, wretchedness, sadness

are words that are woefully weak to describe my reaction to this story about the aftermath of our invasion of Iraq.

No shopping today

Not only did I not buy anything today -- Buy Nothing Day -- I returned to Radio Shack a laptop and accessories (more than $500 worth of merchandise) that I'd bought three weeks before and received a full refund. I didn't need the new computer because my old one hadn't suffered a fatal crash after all, but was simply taking a prolonged rest and woke up last night.

I hate when that happens...

but no problem: An "inquiry" has been instituted.

Occasionally I regret

leaving the old profession. Reading this article from the Guardian is one of those times.

Obama, the Republicans' tool

This essay says it: It's all political theater, and the people aren't the directors.

A psychiatrist analyses Obama

A brief capsule, based on Obama's recent appearance on Leno.

My reaction: "And they pay you for this?"

What's happening?

Today, and several days before today, at the checkout counter at a retail store, when I moved my credit card through the store's counter-mounted implement, I understood I was "swiping" my card. I rather liked that term because it was so precisely expressive of the physical action of moving the card through the machine's slot. However, lately I've been hearing the word "slide" to depict that action, a word that, although not descriptively inapt, seems less precise and, frankly, a word that owes its recent adoption to political correctness. I understand that "swipe" sometimes means "steal" and often refers to an act of wiping up various forms of detritus, as from a countertop or floor, which lead me to ask, Why this change of the word in common parlance?

Support our troops?

Well, not all of them.

I'm still here

I appreciate that it's been quite a while since I last posted on this blog (perhaps the longest gap in my posting since I started this site on August 18, 2003, with a co-blogger, Kyle, who a few months later left this blog to me and maintains his own blogs, Metaphor and Squelch -- see my list of blogs), but the interruption isn't because I've had nothing to say, just that I have nothing to type. I mutter to myself, I mutter to the few others who'll hear me -- and some who won't -- muttering, muttering. I know after eight-plus years of blogging that my posts don't affect anything, and muttering takes less time and is easier. Perhaps if Jobs' successors invent a hand-held device that allows one to create a post on one's blog by muttering into it, I'll be back at it with my earlier frequency. (On the first day of All That Arises, Kyle and I posted eight (8) separate items on various subjects! Oh how young and innocent we were back then.)

Anyhoo, I'm not bowing out, just explaining my recent cyber-silence. Later, gator.