Desiring Machine

Bush is suppose to leave office on this date but what if he doesn’t? Video raises some interesting questions.

Falling retail numbers this winter? The real reason might lie in the skyrocketing cost of birth control. New federal legislation has removed the ability of local health clinics to buy birth control at discounted rates. The average college student now must spend an average of $50 a month on the pill whereas before they spent $12 a month on average. I know that when I was in college $50 was a significant amount of money. In some cases 25% of my rent. This will account for real economic trade offs people must make. Of course it will mean nothing to the Paris Hiltons of the world but all those students on pell grants might be coming home with a little more than a request for more money help to pay for student loans. When they talk about the unreasonable cost of healthcare this is it. And all because of the cynical machinations of a backwards, imbecile, abstinence only crowd. This crap really pisses me off. I can understand the concerns about teen sex etc. But the narrow, abysmal, and parochial agenda of the pro lifers has gone too far. They offer no reasonable solutions. Their only goal is to erode all the gains society has made in reproductive rights over the last 30 years.

An what of the right to lifer’s perspective on this? Of course they are behind this, but fail to see the consequences of their agenda. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is in favor of less abortions. But this kind of policy shift will only account for increased abortion rates. And I pity the poor souls living in the Dakotas who must travel hundreds of miles to the indian reservations to get their abortions just because they couldn’t afford the 400% increase in birth control that month. And with the price of gas, whooeeee! And who knows perhaps if the price of gas gets high enough the unlucky ones will be forced to drop out of school because they can’t afford an abortion. That is going to suck.

Yet another reason we need a woman in the whitehouse. Go Hillary!

Time to put all the neanderthals in their place.

Kos has a good post about how Bush used his 4th veto as president to veto the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Not surprising that Bush would choose to burn political capital by denying healthcare to children. What is really fascinating is that Dennis Kucinich, maven of the far left, also voted against the bill. Kos is right on when he classifies Kucinich as a “Purity Troll”.

I am tired of that tendency on the left. Shame on you Dennis, shame on you! We all have to work together, even if compromise is required.

Definitiion of Purity Troll from dkosopedia.

“Purity Trolls”. These are trolls from the left. Otherwise known in reallife as drama queens. No matter how pure your position is, their position is more pure. No matter how compassionate or informed or skeptical or vigorous your opinion is, theirs is more of it. These trolls are insistent that they are the true spirit of liberalism, and spend their time being quite put out that the rest of us don’t turn over our resources, our audiences, and our respect to them, regardless of how thin their positions may be on the merits. Drives me nuts, personally.

I have known quite a few purity trolls in my lifetime. You know who you are. Hell I probably used to be one myself. Even had a lost friendship over this behavior once. Interesting phenomena, quite boorish to be around.

Update:

In doing some more reading on the Kucinich vote I came across a juicy Voltaire quote.

“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.”, from Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764)

Literally translated as “The best is the enemy of good.”

Truer words have not been written, and it is this insight that fundamentally defines my personal politics.

This is a test blog post using Firefox and the extension ScribeFire. In a previous incarnation this program used to be called Performancing, but my particular experience of it on a Mac sucked. In particular the cursor had a hard time keeping in sync in the edit window, it would jump around or always be off by a few characters. So far so good, it looks like ScribeFire has overcome some of the previous bugs.

I have decided to make Firefox my mainstream browser. For a longtime I have been a dedicated user of Safari, mostly because I appreciate the little fit and finish details. But lately Safari has become problematic and slow for my browser habits (a gazillion tabs open all the time). Constant interrupts and the pizza wheel of death show up constantly. Maybe it is my browser habits, maybe an immaturity in the OS X/Safari code base, maybe a misconfiguration, I don’t know but I am not pleased with the performance. I feel that I shouldn’t have this kind of user experience on a fairly new Core 2 Duo Mac Book Pro with 2 GB of ram. Overall my impressions of OS X are diminishing. Perhaps the intel transition was rushed, I don’t know. I just don’t remember having these issues on Power PC based hardware. Hopefully Leopard will fix things. But in the meantime I am going to give Firefox more usage and see how it goes.

Also, speaking of plugins for Firefox, if you do any kind of web development I highly recommend Firebug. It makes debugging CSS, Javascript, and HTML sooooo much easier.

Check out the Monkey Chow Diaries by Adam Scott. This is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time. Adam’s deadpan delivery is classic, in the vein of Steven Wright or Michael Richards. If you are confused just watch the videos. I sure hope Adam gets a job out of this, he deserves to be on SNL.

A recent medical study finds that hot pepper kills prostate cancer cells. This is news to celebrate. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I consume large quantities of Tabasco sauce. I always carry a little bottle with me to restaurants. I buy it by the gallon jug. Seriously I do! For a long time I have felt that there is net positive benefit to eating this stuff, even if I couldn’t prove it. I have attributed Tabasco sauce to my overall health and generally robust immune system. Of course I should probably be quiet and not get too confident in my imperviousness to prostrate cancer. I would not want to befall an ironic fate like Jim Fixx, the active runner who collapsed of a heart attack in the mid 80’s after years of heralding the health benefits of running.