Julia Rietmulder-Stone's blog | ramblings about poetry, politics, & Harrisburg
What do Sun Microsystems and McDonald’s have in common? They both use Way 2 Be to create their corporate apparel and merchandise, of course!
I don’t know if you can purchase Sun stuff, but if you’re looking to update your wardrobe with some new polyester Fry Girl shirts, this is the place for you.
Yesterday was the Pennsylvania primary election. I knew it was, but I didn’t think about it until Mike Daniel IMed me at 7:30 in the evening to remind me that I had half an hour left in which to vote. I didn’t vote.
I’ve never voted, which I guess is not that unusual, especially for someone my age, but it is sometimes a source of guilt for me. I think about politics a lot. Sometimes I go weeks obsessing over a single issue, struggling to find a solution I’ll feel comfortable with. I enjoy arguing politics with people. And, perhaps most relevantly, I can’t stand our current administration and spend a lot of time and energy complaining about it. To then not vote feels hypocritical to me.
The problem is that I don’t know who I’d put in office instead of Bush. Not only isn’t there one politician with whom I agree on most issues, but the vast majority of politicians today stand for things that I am vehemently opposed to. Historically I’ve identified myself as Libertarian, but over the last few months I’ve started to drift away from even that. I worry that one of these days I’ll wake up and find myself ready to vote Green, just out of desperation to believe in someone.
I recently read The Radical Center, which views this as a widespread issue and attempts to address the problem. Written by Ted Halstead and Michael Lind soon after September 11th in 2001, the book cites low voter turnout and recent survey results as evidence that a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with their options and that new solutions to existing problems are necessary. Citizens, they argue, don’t want to have to choose between reproductive choice and school choice, or between a free market and a sustainable environmental policy, just to name a few.
To remedy the situation, the authors propose a shift in our social contract, as well as novel approaches to partial Social Security privatization, school vouchers, universal healthcare, and more. Their aim is to maximize personal responsibility and choice, while still doing their best to insure that all Americans will be able to maintain a basic standard of living.
To my surprise, I found myself moved by their arguments. I believe the Libertarian line that the only innate rights are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness (I’m actually not sure about this one — how is this different from liberty?), but I also hate the idea of living in a society with a huge class division. Even if it’s not wrong on the most basic level that the deprivation of the three aforementioned rights is, isn’t it still morally questionable? And yet, is it the government’s job to determine morals, beyond the protection of those first three?
I keep coming at these questions from every angle I can think of, and all I can come up with is that I don’t know, and I don’t even know how to figure it out, but I do know that every option presented to me feels wrong to an extent that I don’t feel good about casting my vote for any of them. So for now I vote my conscience by not voting at all, and hope that one of these days I’ll figure it all out so that I can run for office myself. In the meantime, I think everyone should read The Radical Center and tell me what they think.
Gmail under attack in California
Well, I guess this is as good a time as any for my Gmail post. They offered beta accounts to Blogger members, so I got one, and am currently having my regular mail forwarded to my new Gmail address. I did this fully aware of the privacy concerns surrounding the service.
To be honest, the privacy concerns seem minimal to me. My father always said that nothing should ever be sent via email that wouldn’t be written on the back of a postcard. While I don’t follow this guideline, I believe in its truth, and I know that I can’t complain if sensitive information that I have emailed is compromised. With any email service, if privacy is what you’re looking for, you should be using PGP or another encryption service.
The article above raises excellent points about the services for which we are willing to compromise our privacy in nearly identical ways, and the things that we may inadvertantly be giving up if we pass legislation like what’s been proposed in California. That said, even if we weren’t giving up services that might be useful, it’s still our job as consumers to decide on an individual basis whether or not our privacy is worth it, and this isn’t the kind of thing for which there is a universal answer that can be mandated by the government.
Anyway, if Gmail is a concern for you, but you’d like to send me email, here’s my PGP key. Actually, if Gmail is a concern for you, I suggest just getting over it. But you can send me email anyway.
This is a very interesting site, but not work safe. It’s erotica/porn/general nudity since the invention of photography. It’s amazing how what we think is beautiful has changed over just 120 years or so. Not only are the body shapes very different, but even many of the faces would be considered ugly by today’s standards.
Other random shots I thought were interesting:
CNN.com – Aboriginal curse put on Howard – Apr 20, 2004
Why on earth is this on the front page of CNN? That’s not a headline! News organizations have some responsibility to only report actual news. If I run up to the president and yell, “Woe unto thee, thou breaker of the commandments, for you will be pursued into the mountains by sex-mad baboons!” it’s NOT NEWS. Neither is this. But you already know that. Right?
I don’t think I’ve mentioned how much I’m enjoying being unemployed. Somehow, my life feels more full than it did when I spent 45 hours each week at work. I have a million things I want to do, none of them are getting done, and yet I’m never bored. If you’re filthy rich and want to support my unemployment indefinitely, please email me, I’m sure we can work something out.
Anyway, while I was randomly surfing tonight, I found this site that will take your words and put them on a church sign. A few months ago, one of the churches near EarthLink had a sign that looked something like this:
I kept meaning to take a picture of it and post it above the caption, “Sticky, yes, but sweet and delicious.” I was too lazy to actually take the picture. Now I can show you how clever I am without leaving my chair.
Would you believe that I took even more pictures? Believe it. These are from Thursday, 4/15. Tim and I went to Sapporo East for sushi, then I let him talk me into heading over to City Island for the Harrisburg Senators’ opening night. They won, something like 8-4, and I hear it was a good game. I was too busy taking pictures and watching the people around me to notice. I promise if I ever go back I’ll take notes so I can tell you all about it.
Anyway, after the game, Tim and I headed downtown to Scott’s to hang out with the folks from Poetry Thursday (see the link in the previous post). We had a good time there, before ending the evening at the old standard, Shady’s.
There are lots of pictures here. I don’t want to add captions for all of them right now, and I absolutely never will for the baseball pictures. As a result, even I think most of these are boring. But since I took them, I feel obligated to put them up, and since I put them up, you should feel obligated to look at them. Especially admire the many faces of Dan Chiavaroli. He’s my new favorite dwarf.
***This has been fixed! Yay!***
Lots of the amazing Marty Esworthy, and even more of the Shady’s crew. It’s a good time. You’ll enjoy it. Really.
This is pretty cool. It’s a graphic representation of the Google News aggregator. Stories are represented on the map based on, among other things, how many related articles are found. It’s a quick way to see what’s important to the media and what’s not. Of course, what it can’t see at all are the things that never make the aggregator.
