Brian is Full of Stars!

I’ve disliked how few fonts are bundled with Mac OS X for a long time now. This seriously limited my design options in creating the 2005 Occidental Geology t-shirt, “There’s No Crying in Mineralogy”, as well as my overruled 2006 entry, co-created with Justin, entitled “Taconite Taco Night.” Particularly annoying was how OS X tried to do fonts the right way, meaning that it would only allow you to italicize a font if a separate italic typeface was installed for that font family. If default OS X fonts came without separate italic versions of themselves, and they often did, then you’re out of luck if you want to make that font italic.

The apparent Microsoft Word feature of forcing a font to become italic by just slanting it, or bolding letters by thickening them, was something I actually appreciated. Like SCHIP, it’s an imperfect solution, but at least it gives you the option of going italic or bold where no options would exist otherwise. If I wanted to use a nice layout application like Pages, and I always did, I was stuck with Times and a few other meager offerings.

So I read in Daring Fireball that one of Jon Gruber’s articles had been published in a book, in the “handsome” 16th-century typesetting Granjon. Upon seeing his picture of the typeface I immediately agreed it was very handsome. Perfect for resumes or cover letters I might want to send out next February.

I know good fonts cost money, so I sought out a legitimate download site. To my astonishment, each setting in the Granjon family cost $24 each. That’s $24 for Roman, $24 for italic, etc. What am I, a book publisher planning to recoup the costs in sales? I asked Xtorrent if it had ever heard of Granjon, and it came up with a collection called “Nifty Fonts.” 600 MB seemed like a lot for fonts, but I haven’t messed with fonts in years so who knows.

The torrent-downloaded folder contained a zip file entitled “Font-tastic.” Cute. It wasn’t until I told Font Book to load all my new fonts that I realized just how many I’d downloaded. The zip file had expanded to 900 MB, and it contained 5,000 fonts. Before this, my computer had 118, and that includes the foreign-language and Microsoft Word ones. Beyond my new fondness for Granjon, I have no idea how to start picking fonts. I bet I will never know what most of those fonts look like. Though it is strangely appealing to have more fonts than any person could ever need, it all adds up to needless complication. As I’m fond of saying, a man with a watch knows the time, but a man with two watches is never sure.

Iowa blogging will come soon. For now, I will say that I plan to shake our next President’s hand tomorrow afternoon.

Presently in the United States of America, there is about a 5-6% unemployment rate. At the same time, about 1 in 6 Americans lives without health insurance. I know that the unemployment rate is a percentage of people who desire a job, but let’s make an overestimate and say that every American desires employment. This would leave a rough estimate of 10% of Americans who are employed full-time but do not get health coverage from their employers. I’d look up the exact numbers but we get the idea. There’s millions of them, and they’re called “the working poor.”

Free market competition for labor has never forced every employer in this country to provide health insurance. With the multi-thousand-dollar cost of doctor visits, prescription drugs and surgeries, the cost of providing private health insurance to every worker adds up to a higher wage than employers are willing to pay. The current influx of cheap Mexican workers tells me this state of affairs is unlikely to change. Therefore, we can expect the labor market to deny health coverage to the cheapest 10% of workers in this country (and their children) for the foreseeable future.

The SCHIP bill that recently (and overwhelmingly) passed in Congress would expand Government health coverage for the children of the working poor to an additional few million children. President Bush has said he will veto the bill because it violates some principle of economic efficiency and supposedly removes worker incentives, thus promoting laziness and an eventual welfare state. I disagree.

I believe it is immoral, and disconcertingly cold-hearted, to consider the denial of medical care to children to be an economic incentive for their parents. If a kid accidentally breaks his arm while playing on a playground at school, he did not choose his parents’ profession so he ethically deserves to get a cast for that arm just as much as the child of the working rich who is playing across the playground from him. Under the current system, the poor kid will not see a doctor, and he may have to live his whole life with a bad arm. The working poor already have jobs, which likely pay low wages and require long hours, and therefore they don’t need any extra incentive to work hard, make as much money as possible and save what little they can. They also likely don’t have the time or energy to work or train more than they do despite the incentive of getting health coverage with a better, higher-skilled job. They are tracked into their profession, and currently that means their family is stuck without medical coverage. Furthermore, it’s not like the removal of childrens’ healthcare as an incentive will remove all incentives for workers to learn new skills and find better jobs, because there will always be the incentives of seeking greater work satisfaction and fulfillment, higher pay, more convenient hours, etc. Conversely, I don’t believe that the promise of guaranteed medical care will embolden poor children or their parents to take unreasonable health risks any more than it does for more affluent families. Pain and illness have served as effective risk deterrents since time immemorial. Instead, guaranteed care will spare those parents from the oppressive fear of allowing their children to take any physical risks at all.

The jobs that the working poor do will likely always need to be done (I imagine examples like janitoring and simple laboring for construction, etc.). If certain Americans are working hard at necessary jobs, and the free market will not provide them or their children with health coverage that this country has the doctors, equipment, and general wealth to provide, then it is the duty of the government to step in and provide them with it. Children’s health should be considered a non-excludable public good. Like interstate highways, healthcare for the children of the working poor is essential for the well-being of our people, and it must be funded by the government because it is apparently not profitable for the private sector to do it themselves.

Also, I find the religious conservative principles against birth control and sex education to be rather incongruous with their approval of the denial-of-childrens’-healthcare incentive. They believe that couples should be restricted in their ability to avoid having children, but when they do have children (perhaps accidentally), those children’s medical needs will be used as bargaining chips to force them to work harder. That may be a digression, but it’s worth considering. To me, it sounds like extortion.

There are certain practices which have historically increased the efficiency of economic production, but have been restricted by the government because they are immoral or unsafe for the people of this country. I can think of a few examples off the top of my head: willful negligence of employee safety, obscene hours (it used to be that a significant fraction of workers never got evenings or weekends off), child labor, and the most extreme form of these practices, slavery. All of these are monitored, regulated or banned by the government so that our people can live better lives than they’d be provided by the single-minded dictates of production. I believe that the denial of healthcare to the children of those who are already employed should be added to this list. Almost no one today argues that child labor should be re-introduced to increase econonomic efficiency, and I hope that someday no one will argue that children should be told they can’t go to the doctor and they can’t get needed medicine because it would decrease economic efficiency.

Who will pay for this? The taxpayers will, and thanks to the progressive income tax, the wealthier people will pay for it by and large. Childless adults would have to contribute to the medical check-ups of children who are not theirs. Unfair? I don’t think so. I think it’s a matter of having more than enough money to provide an absolute necessity for others, and making the choice to help out rather than telling them they’re not worth it. Taxpayers already have to contribute to the military defense of everyone else in our country, and they have to contribute to public schools that they do not attend. I think freedom from illness, injury, and medical debt is every bit as worthwhile as expenditures on education and defense, if not more so. Ideally, I think the government is morally obligated to provide a certain basic level of care to everyone, and then people can pay out of pocket or be covered by premium employer health insurance if they want the most elaborate or elective drugs and procedures. SCHIP expansion does not nearly do all that, but it is a step in the right direction, and it serves the people who are most in need of help. A small fraction of a millionaire’s salary could pay for the healthcare costs of multiple families each year, and it should.

Finally, the cost of the SCHIP expansion that George Bush wants to veto is I believe $7 billion per year. If we can spend $125 billion a year to send humvees and soldiers to Iraq so they can be blown to bits, surely we can find a twentieth of that money to send millions of children to doctors that they would otherwise be unable to see.

I am about as big an Apple fan as they come… but I’d definitely go to Amazon MP3 before iTunes for my legal online music from now on. Non-DRM trumps DRM every time (DRM stands for “Digital Rights Management” distribution-limiting software), and Amazon has done a great job of making the customer experience just as smooth as it is on iTunes, for Windows and Mac users alike. If the record companies are in trouble, it’s because they give the customer two flawed buying options: entire physical CDs for obscenely high prices ($17 is crazy for 40 minutes of music), or the online indvidual tracks and sub-$10 album prices that customers want, except you’ll always have to ask permission if you want to use it. I believe that most people are law-abiding and they’d pay for albums online if they were priced reasonably and lacked the condescending, oppressive DRM that assumes the customer is a criminal. Amazon does this.

It comes at a cost because only 2 of the 4 largest record labels are willing to sell their tracks without DRM so Amazon’s catalog is 1/3 the size of iTunes. However, it’s a great next step for online music sales because successful competition against DRMed iTunes and a profitable non-DRM operation might help push all the record labels towards selling their music without DRM. Buying music from Amazon MP3 is a vote against the paranoid, backwards and insulting DRM-favoring record companies, and it’s a vote in favor of a reasonable future in which we can actually own our legally downloaded music.

As long as the U.S. government is telling the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government what to do (like when they can take vacations, like they’re the Parliament’s direct superiors), as long as our soldiers are in a foreign country and searching people’s houses, taking people’s property, imprisoning their young men without charge or evidence, all without any kind of locally-granted authority, then the power dynamic between our two peoples is one of domination, not cooperation. The Iraqis have been blowing up our soldiers for four years not because they’re barbarous, or fanatical, or “freedom-hating” (wtf is that anyway?), but because they want an end to domination. Plain and simple. Even if the best country in the world conquered America, let’s say the Swiss, or Finland… we’d all be bombing Swiss humvees, shouting fuck you this is my country.

That’s what they’re saying to us with all the violence. I guess the Shias and the Sunnis are also saying it to each other. They’ll be fighting that battle forever, and it’ll be full-scale war between them the day we leave, whether we leave today or in ten years.

The only reason our soldiers stay in Iraq is because our “leaders” are worried the Iraqis will want vengeance on us if we leave them to their own devices. Of course many Iraqis will want vengeance after what we’ve done to them, for all the reasons I’ve previously explained. If American troops are there, we can keep the dangerous towelheads tied down on a short leash, so the thinking goes. But of course the dog wants to get in the house and maul your babies after you’ve been beating the shit out of it for years! Somehow these people think that the solution is to keep tying down and beating up the dog forever. It’s a treatment, not a cure.

Four million displaced, hundreds of thousands killed. Our war of liberation is Katrina x 200, except people who live in Washington, D.C. made this one happen.

The Bush administration has been preaching freedom for the Iraqis for half a decade, hell the whole project is called Iraqi Freedom, but they are genuinely afraid of how a free people can choose their enemies. I am reminded of an exchange from the movie Easy Rider:

Hanson: “They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to them.”

Billy: “Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.”

Hanson: “Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.”

Billy: “What the hell is wrong with freedom? That’s what it’s all about.”

Hanson: “That’s what it’s all about, alright. But talking about it and being it, that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace… Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, because then they’re gonna get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em.”

Billy: “Well, it don’t make ‘em run scared.”

Hanson: “No, it makes them dangerous.”

What do these men and Iraqis have in common? Conservatives fear their freedom.

So the powers-that-somehow-continue-to-be want to occupy Iraq for the next hundred years because they know what they’ve done to these people, and they want to delay the Iraqis’ inevitable terrorist revenge. The facts are out there, I don’t even need to link it. Sec. Def. Robert Gates said he expected American troops would be in Iraq for the next fifty years on the “Korean Model.” In Draper’s biography, Bush wants people to understand that it’s so important we keep our troops there after he’s gone. It’s to keep a firm grip on the people whose freedom now “reigns”, as he cheesily wrote on a napkin when fake sovereignty was handed to Iraq three years ago. How twisted.

Let’s leave now and let the Iraqis fight it out for who will be in charge. It will probably be violent, though if we consider the neocons’ track record, it will likely be less than the bloodbath they predict. And if it is a bloodbath, whose fault is that? This was inevitable the day we dissolved every last vestige of Saddam’s government. Saddam held a fractious nation together with very specific organizations, and we dismissed those organizations. Now, Bush and Bremer are pointing at each other about whose fault that was, but the important point is that the people of Iraq are divided into three groups that want to annihilate each other. A democratic government chosen by the grassroots of this nation will want to do the same. What jingoist, short-sighted idiots Cheney and Bush were, thinking that American democracy is some kind of miraculous panacea. I bet they were cursing democracy when they lost the election last fall.

So now we have this nonviable, self-hating “Iraqi government.” After everything the Iraqis have been through, any U.S.-backed government there will be hated, will be considered to be puppet collaborators, and will fail without our military support. The surge will never achieve its goals, because you can’t force people to support a government, and you can’t force Shias and Sunnis to reconcile… You can point a gun at somebody’s head and tell them to say whatever you want, but it is impossible to make them believe it too. What do our leaders plan to do, brainwash a whole country? Bush could put ten million G.I. boots on the ground and enslave the Iraqi people, but no amount of American effort can ever make the Iraqis like it.

We’ve done them a grave wrong, and we need to repent. Whoever wins control of the nation, even if it’s Tehran-backed Shiite fundamentalists, we need to offer them money, equipment, and anything they like. Tell them we’ll pay for their bridges, we’ll pay for their schools, we’ll make your country as nice as you want it to be. And maybe in a generation or two, they might finally forgive us. That’s the only hope for an end to the vicious cycle of violence we started over there. Personally, I believe that’s what Jesus would do. “Love your enemies as yourselves.” It’s a fantastic and powerful idea. I wish someone on the religious right would actually read the bible.

It’s not going to happen, and the cycle won’t end. Perhaps our only hope is to leave as soon as possible, and make the cycle a little less violent by ending our role as the instigators. If time heals all wounds, then the more time we can put between us and this disaster, the sooner the wounds we’ve inflicted might heal.

Inspired by the tragic story of Lauren Caitlin Upton, an organization called Maps For Us has stepped up to bring maps to the people in our country who have been living without them for too long.

Along with my counterparts in South Africa and the Iraq, I have found almost all of the maps educational and even entertaining. This site makes learning fun! My favorite is entitled 3D Map of the U.S. It is a map displayed on naked women. It’s apparent our nation’s attractive, scantily-clad pageant contestants have suffered the most during our years of cartographic deficit, and not only do these women now have a map, they have it right on their skin. South Carolina, where the U.S. American map shortage is apparently worst, is featured on the edge of a right buttock.

…If you’re a terrorist.

Two people were arrested in Connecticut for sprinkling flour in an Ikea parking lot, apparently to mark a trail for their running club. Many people in the Ikea were evacuated. I think it was an overreaction for the cops involved to call in their bio-terrorism backup (shades of the Boston Mooninite invasion, anyone?), but sure, fine, I understand they need to cover their bases.

What I don’t understand is how these two are still facing felony charges, and how the mayor wants restitution for the use of public services to check out the “threat.” The defendants obviously had no malicious intent, and were not in possession of any dangerous substances. How can you commit a crime if you have neither the motive nor the means to do harm? I don’t believe that innocent people can be responsible for the suspicions that other people have about them, or for the efforts made to investigate them. It’s like wiretapping an innocent man, and then after verifying his innocence, sending him the bill for the bugs you placed in his phones.

I believe the mayor is trying to appear tough on terror, or maybe finances, by persecuting this pair of siblings who are actually innocent. The ill-considered effect is to make everyone afraid of appearing to be a terrorist, as if the burden of proof is upon them, lest their local authority overlords come down on them. This means the terrorists have succeeded in sowing fear in the local government, and in turning law-abiding Americans against each other. The terrorists are simpleton thugs who live in caves on the other side of the world and a kook who mailed a handful of anthrax six years ago, how pathetic to let them win without a second thought!

What the mayor should say is “Sorry for the inconvenience everyone, we were just doing our jobs to keep everyone safe” and let the matter rest.

Here’s my favorite comment about it on Digg:

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” LOL are they planning out the fucking blast radius or something? Shit we don’t even need terrorists anymore we can do it all ourselves”

And another clever pair:

“We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

Yup, it’s quite expensive nowadays to ask questions.

Think of all the gas they wasted getting from the Krispy Kream to Ikea to investigate the baking ingredients of mass destruction.

It looks like our terrorism-conflict movies are moving beyond the touching Iraq documentaries that only the already-well-informed watch, and beyond cerebral explorations of issues like Syriana. I just saw the trailer for Rendition, and its directness is exactly what we need.

This country is in a constitutional crisis instigated by its royalist Vice President, and nobody seems to realize just how bad it actually is. Observing the problem and wanting to fix it is why I have these crazy ideas to get a job in Washington, DC, but maybe the most effective way to rescue America’s darkening soul is to take the message out of the court rooms and into the movie theaters.

People need to go out to a movie on the weekend and get beaten over the head (err, figuratively) with the glaring immorality of capturing people without due process and then torturing them without any oversight. There are now American government officials who are among the worst goons in the entire world, and they need to be portrayed that way by Hollywood.

For several years it’s just been Jack Bauer torture porn in which the bad guy always has the info you need, and he’ll tell it to you if you break his hands while he’s already restrained. In that situation Jack was torturing a human rights lawyer like the one I want to be so I’m pretty sympathetic to the victim’s plight, but I think most people watch 24 because they imagine being the badass rule-breaking hero Jack. People who’ve watched the whole show stuck it out through several seasons bereft of character development and dialogue, replaced instead by 40 minutes of actors pretending to be in horrible pain plus commercial breaks. In the end, the actors say a few lines that are the key to saving the world. I bet 24’s dedicated fans came to believe that this is the way the world works… after all, even the bright kids at West Point did.

As for me, I gave up on the show after Season 2 because I know that in the real world torture is the wrong strategy for two reasons. First, it’s totally ineffective because it convinces people to say whatever they think their tormenters want to hear, and you have no idea what’s actually true. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have admitted to flying a plane into the twin towers, and in fact maybe he did, just to end the waterboarding. To be sure, KSM is one of the worst people in the world and he deserves joyless incarceration, but to paraphrase MLK, a subversion of anyone’s human rights is a threat to everyone’s human rights. This is the second reason torture is wrong: if they can torture KSM, they can torture innocent Canadian software engineer Maher Arar, and since they already tortured Mr. Arar, they could torture me. I’m a red-blooded American patriot so what kind of barbarian would torture me?

I think it would help white Americans relate to the innocent victims of U.S. torture if we portray these men as rich, upstanding and married to Reese Witherspoon (America’s sweetheart). I’m glad there’s finally a movie that’s freaking doing it.

While we’re at it, let’s have a movie about black site inmates rising up against their cruel American oppressors, led by The Rock in first-person-shooter perspective. He is The People’s Champion. Someone with that stature needs to be on our movie screens representing the victims who are denied the opportunity to defend themselves, not glamorizing the savage, criminal torturers who are in fact doing more harm than good to their victims, their country, and themselves.

This first film is what I thought was happening when I woke up last night: the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Notice how the guy picks up his head at the very beginning because he notices the P-wave (Primary wave or Pressure wave, it’s like the whole world is a cell phone on vibrate), and then a couple seconds later comes the wham wham wham of the S-wave (Secondary wave or Shear wave, it makes the ground ripple like when a pebble is dropped in water). Fortunately, Lyssa’s furniture did not move very much.

And here is how I said it in my head when I declared “We must protect this pregnant Lyssa!” The fault lines are trying to knock us over.

I woke up and every object in the apartment was shaking and rattling, thwackety thwack. I was being pushed around on my air mattress on the floor, and I was worried about S-waves throwing furniture into me (as I’d seen in a video in geology classes) so I bolted up to standing. I had several simultaneous thoughts, confused by my drowsiness:

“Is this an earthquake, a bomb blast, or did a truck hit the building?”

“If this is an earthquake, it sure feels like a big one.”

“Argh I don’t have my contacts in so I can’t see anything.”

“Do we need to run outside so that the building won’t fall on us? Will these rattling windows break?”

“We must protect the pregnant Lyssa!”

And then the shaking stopped. It was only a few seconds, ten at the most. How exciting! Nothing fell over, so it couldn’t have been very strong (just very loud), and it turned out to be a lame 4.2 that only felt dramatic because we were basically right at the epicenter. 2 miles ENE of Oakland, CA indeed. “Did you feel any P-waves first?” I asked Lyssa. We were disappointed that neither of us had, but that should have told us we were very close to the source (the greater the distance from the focus, the greater the gap between arrival of P-waves and S-waves). Lyssa assured me that their heavy furniture was tied to the walls so I’d been safe all along.

Good thing I stayed with native Californians who take precautions, and act like calm, grizzled veterans of such quakes. And good thing Kerri suggested I come visit the bay! What are the chances? I was only staying in the Bay Area for 18 hours.

I’m driving east to Colorado, starting today.

I have been inspired by a blog post entitled “Dusting off ‘Inherent Contempt’” to ask that you keep in mind the Congressional power to instruct the House Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest persons who are found in “inherent contempt” of the House. This kind of resolution can circumvent the need for the long drawn-out court process of prosecuting statutory Contempt of Congress.

The Bush-Cheney administration is being more resistant to oversight than any administration in history, even Nixon, and I believe that inherent contempt is the only power that Congress can use to compel White House officials to testify in a timely manner. Statutory contempt proceedings could last beyond the end of the President’s term. They also rely on the cooperation of many officials in the Justice Department, and I don’t think Congress can rely on their cooperation anymore. The White House Counsel, Fred Fielding, and the apparently corrupt Justice Dept. Office of Legal Counsel have encouraged Harriet Miers, former White House Counsel, to completely ignore a Congressional subpoena and not even show up to the House Judiciary Committee. My understanding is that their advice to evade a subpoena is, in itself, a felony under these statutes:

18 U.S.C. Sec. 1505

and

18 U.S.C. Sec. 1515(b)

The actual evasion of the subpoena by Miers would be blatant Contempt of Congress on her part. If she follows this course of action, I hope that as a coequal branch of the United States Government, the House of Representatives will use the inherent contempt power to imprison Miers until she agrees to the Judiciary Committee’s legally binding demands. I hope that you will cast all necessary votes to move such a proceeding forward.

I write to you because you are my representative in Congress. I trust that you will do whatever you can to represent the American people’s interests and shed light on the Administration’s wrongdoing. Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.

Mahalo nui loa,

Brian McGrane

Sidenote: I should probably go become a congressional staffer so that I can mention things to congresspeople personally, instead of just playing with text-entry boxes on www.house.gov and hoping somebody reads it.