Peter Levine’s comments on Libertarianism ring true for me, out here in California, land of the Homeowners’ Association and little boxes made of ticky tacky. I mentioned an example in my last post, but let me spell it out a little more. In some metropolitan areas, there’s a stark contrast between neat, safe, prosperous private [...]
New York Ish on the international show of support for one Michael Jackson of Santa Barbara, California: Waving a flag in support of Jacko is sort of like inadvertent flag burning: you’re putting your country down but you don’t even realize you’re doing it.
In Sergio Arau’s satire A Day Without a Mexican, the state of California is plunged into crisis when an unknown agency raptures the state’s Latino population away, leaving the world’s fifth largest economy short a third of its population, and forcing anti-immigrant politicos and talk show hosts to don leaf blowers. A billboard in LA [...]
People taking the ACE from the San Joaquin Valley to San Jose will continue to have free wireless internet access. The University of Phoenix will pay for the cost of the service in hopes of attracting potential students to take classes online during the two hour commute. Hopefully they’ll get training for jobs that will [...]
[ via Electrolite ] SciFi.com interviews Kim Stanley Robinson. The focus is on his new novel on the politics of climate change, Fourty Signs of Rain, [ thanks, PNH ] which will be called The Capital Code in the States.
This quake was 200 miles south of us, but we felt it here as a series of slow, rolling waves. Hope everyone’s okay down there. Update: Doc reports. Power and phones are down, but no major damage or casualties. Update 2: Spoke too soon. Reports of deaths in Paseo Robles.
Photos from Wednesday’s big wave surfing at Mavericks. Looks like people were able to paddle into the waves instead of being towed-in on a jet-ski. Still, these were big waves. Set one Set two Set three
I wanted to pay my car’s registration fee online. That is if the amount shown reflected the change in fees per the Gropenfürer’s executive order. Before I could determine if my invoice had been updated, I was stopped. Safari thinks that the DMV’s certificate is dodgy. There’s no email to send a report to, so [...]
[ via Doc Searls ] This is King Canute and all that, but let us read it into the record: News should be what affects the most people. Celebs have no impact on my life or the lives of anybody but their friends, families and co-workers. If Michael Jackson’s arrest hurts record sales, it’s a [...]
A nice visualization of the by-county vote in the 2003 California recall election, done by the same person responsible for the analysis of the airspeed of an unladen swallow. Here, the state map is re-calibrated by votes instead of land area, which shows the importance of small, but densely populated areas relative to large, sparsely [...]
Mark Davis, author of City of Quartz, on the Southern California wildfires: Fire, as a result, is politically ironic. Right now, as I watch San Diego’s wealthiest new suburb, Scripps Ranch, in flames, I recall the Schwarzenegger fund-raising parties hosted there a few weeks ago. This was an epicenter of the recent recall and gilded [...]
[ via BoingBoing ] Eileen Gunn asked a few professional science fiction writers for their reactions to the 2003 California Recall election. Read Pat Cadigan’s response, in which she realizes that Philip K. Dick has been scripting this all along. But there is a script. It’s based on things taken from many different books and [...]
When you look at the by-county patterns in the 2003 California recall, they are similar to the 2002 election for Governor. The urban counties, except for San Diego and Orange, voted against the recall and for Davis. However, in the counties which went for the recall, the percentage of the yes-on-recall vote was even greater [...]
Download and read it. We will be doing this again in six months. [ PDF ]
My state is about to elect an Austrian movie star into the Governorship. Even if he was the right person for the office, this should still give you pause. I blame celebrity culture. And it won’t surprise you that I’m voting against the recall, as well as both of the propositions on the ballot, and [...]