Matthew "Gallon of Strawberries" Sachs

12:11 am: Barack the Vote
roguesylph and I are heading down to Providence to canvas for Obama on Saturday if anyone wants to join us.

I haven't quite managed to get around to writing up an endorsement for Zevils, but Liz has a thorough one up on her blog. RI may not be delegate-rich, but its polls close before OH and TX's, so a strong win there would be an important signal to voters in those states.

Tags: politics

10:40 am: Vote
It's primary day in Massachusetts. WhereDoIVoteMA is an excellent resource for finding out where you can do that and who you can do it for (it was so useful and well-designed, I'd assumed it was an unofficial [I was going to write third-party, but that has a different meaning here] resource, but no, go SEC.) You don't need to be registered as a {Democrat, Republican} to vote in the MA primary.

Gallon of Strawberries will not be endorsing any Democratic candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, or Middlesex clerk of courts, they're all reasonable choices (although our editor does have a gubernatorial preference). However, there's one race on the ticket that many of our readers should know about and probably don't.

John Bonifaz is running against the incumbent William Francis Galvin for Secretary of State. Galvin has refused to debate (and doesn't appear to have a campaign website, but here's his Wikipedia entry.) John Bonifaz founded the National Voting Rights Institute and is a strong supporter of Open Document Format and transparent voting (including paper trails and access to voting machine source code.) Open access to information and honest voting are cornerstones of the democratic process, and it is refreshing to see a candidate so committed to those ideals. Gallon of Strawberries endorses John Bonifaz for the Democratic nomination for Massachusetts Secretary of State.

Tags: politics

02:01 pm: John Roberts
I've started reviewing Roberts's judicial record, and based on the one case I've read so far, he seems like a good choice for the Court.

In my mind, the fundamental criterion for a Supreme Court justice shouldn't be whether they're politically liberal, or conservative, or whether or not they're personally in favor of abortions. In fact, if any of those factors would affect a particular nominee's judgements, then that nominee is not someone who belongs on the Court. In Hedgepath v. WMATA, Roberts showed that he rules based on the law, not on his political, moral, or public policy beliefs. In that case, a little girl was arrested for eating a french fry in the DC Metro. Roberts affirmed the district court ruling that said arrest was not a violation of Hedgepath's fourth amendment rights.

A little girl getting arrested for eating a french fry? Obviously wrong and stupid, and Roberts takes some space in his decision to bash the policy that led to the arrest and the arrest itself. But whether he likes it or not, the arrest was constitutional. That's what a judge, especially one presiding over the land's highest court, should do.

For more primary source material on Roberts, take a look at the NY Times special section, especially the "Related Documents" bit right under his picture on the right side.

Tags: news, politics

04:13 am: Plug, and Freakin' Mongolia
If you can spare anything, you should donate to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. The current death toll over there is 57,000, and there's a staggering risk that many more could be affected by disease. You should also see if any of you employers do matching contributions (mine don't, but my dad's does, so I put it in his name. ^_^)

ETA: Textile processing may abandon Mongolia because their wages are too high. Freakin' Mongolia. Does anyone know any good resources explaining the factors behind cost-of-living/cost-of-labor discrepencies? I can understand it being more expensive to live in the U.S. than in, say, Kazakhstan, because we're all like decadent and materialistic and Western capitalist pigs and stuff and we have silly things like unions and OSHA, but what's behind the Mongolian/Chinese difference?

I dunno, maybe I'm just ignorant and Mongolians insist on a car in every yurt and an OSHA inspector in every factory. Hell, even in the US there's a pretty wide range, although my understanding is that most of that is from real estate costs and the rest is things like electricity which get more expensive if you have a high population density and no convenient natural power source nearby.

Tags: news, politics

10:06 am: Journalism

Both CNN and The New York Times are running prominent stories reporting on polls about the Bush administration.

• CNN: Poll: Majority give Bush good job approval mark
• NYTimes: Americans Show Clear Concerns on Bush Agenda

To be fair, they're reporting on two different polls.

Oh yes, and then there's the stunning lack of knowledge that Bush voters had of their candidates' actions and positions.

Tags: news, politics

10:22 pm: Civil Liberties in an Age of Surveillance
I attended a talk at Brandeis today, "Civil Liberties in an Age of Surveillance. Very interesting talk, they had some very notable speakers. I took notes, which I'll organize and clean up later, but for now, here they are in raw form.

Tags: politics

10:40 am: Yesterday was a day of political catharsis.

I wrote an open letter to Dean Jaffe regarding his plans to phase out the major in linguistics.

Later in the evening, I was talking to my dad and expressing my outrage that voters who considered moral values an important issue considered Bush the superior candidate. He told me the following, which apparently dates from back in the day, with "Vietnam" substituted for "Iraq" and I-forget-who (I think he said it was some general) substituted for "President Bush".

President Bush is holding a press conference (yeah, I guess the joke is a bit dated...) and a reporter asks him a question. "Mr. President, we congratulate you on the success of the campaign in Iraq. However, we've heard some disturbing rumors. According to our sources, one of the insurgents killed in yesterday's firefight was a pregnant woman. Is it true that an abortion has been performed in Iraq?"

Tags: humor, politics

03:16 am: Four down, one to go

Finished my penultimate assignment of the semester, UDRP Wizard. The UDRP is the policy for resolving conflicts between trademarks and domain names, like when some schmoe registers microsoft-online.com — which I swear is a random example I made up, but actually is registered by some schmoe who would lose a UDRP case and get his domain transferred away from him if Microsoft ever bothered to file a complaint.

Reading through past UDRP cases is not a good way to renew one's faith in humanity, there are an awful lot of people doing stupid crap. The UDRP panelists get annoyed, there was one case where the judgement said something like "Since the Respondent did not decide to grace the Panel with a response to the complaint..."

Tags: life, politics, tech

10:39 pm: Lawrence Lessig: On Rebuilding a Free Culture

I went with Danny Silverman to see Lawrence Lessig speak at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Lessig is a law professor who works in the area of copyright, especially as it applies to digital content. My notes on the talk, "On Rebuilding a Free Culture", are here. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you may also like the Cyberlaw community at bJournals.

Finding parking in Cambridge was fun. Harvard charges $2 for a map.

Tags: life, politics

12:20 am: I just posted in Travis's LJ, that's all, I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition! [3 pts]

(The "N pts" in the subject relates to a contest I'm hosting in my LJ; see this journal entry. You could win a batch of the freshly-baked cookies of your choice!)

As per (questions by lordameth):

1. Which nation would you say is currently the greatest threat to world/regional stability? Well, on the one hand, America's the one waging wars and overthrowing governments at the moment. OTOH, our wars are relatively quick, we have enough military supremacy to finish things quickly. On the gripping hand, how's that democracy we established in Afghanistan doing? (No, really, I actually am curious, haven't heard anything about that lately. Or East Timor, remember that? What the hell happened there? I guess those places are out of fashion now, maybe we can pick them up cheaply in the clearance aisle...) I'm going to have to say America; we're the only country powerful enough to destabalize things on a global scale. Regional stability? Uh, the North American region is pretty stable, other regions each have their own boogeyman I suppose.
2. If you could add any game in the world to BSCF's repertoire, what would it be and why? Hmm, how about "Chrononauts LARP (time travel will be simulated by time travel)" ? I've always wanted to re-assassinate Lincoln... As far as games which actually exist are concerned, two of my more satisfying recent game purchases are Monkeys on the Moon and Mamma Mia (the latter of which I actually did buy for BSCF, and then picked up a copy for myself), maybe something that's a cross between the two? A game where monkeys make pizza would rock.
3. What are some cultural/historical sites you'd like to visit? Well, I'm enough of a Weird Al geek to actually want to visit the world's largest twine ball. It'd be neat to see some family-type places, like my grandma's old home in Austria.
4. What do you think about the social & cultural ramifications of DDR? Well, I think it makes some people get some exercise who otherwise wouldn't get much, it's a lot easier for many people to motivate themselves to play a fun game with their friends than to jog a mile.

Here's the deal: If you want me to interview you, post a comment that simply says, "Interview me." I'll respond with questions for you to take back to your own journal and answer as a post. Of course, they'll be different for each person since this is an interview and not a general survey. At the bottom of your post, after answering the Interviewer's questions, you ask if anyone wants to be interviewed. So it becomes your turn--in the comments, you ask them any questions you have for them to take back to their journals and answer. And so it becomes the circle. Who will play? May I interview you? — Originally from anoisblue So, you post a comment here requesting questions, I reply to that comment with the questions, and then you post the answers (with questions, and invitation for people to request questions from you, and this paragraph) in your journal, not as replies to the questions. That way, people who don't follow my journal get to see them, etc.

Tags: politics