David Ernst Chats with the World

http://inatheistbus.org/2009/04/14/campaign-officially-launches/

I heard about this at the Hemant “Friendly Atheist” Mehta’s talk, but they seem more organized than I’d realized.  Great!  I love the message!  I’m On The Bus!

Quick review: “Friendly atheist”: I cannot imagine a better name than that for this man.

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Dear Mr. President,

I know, you said you weren’t going to, but… go ahead, Veto that bill.

Sorry that I’m writing you so late, but what can I say, there wasn’t much time.  And there still isn’t, so I’ll be really quick:

• You ran against politics as usual, and the bill is totally politics as usual.  The party in power (it’s not just Dems, it’s whoever’s in power) throws in earmarks.  Nobody likes it.  You don’t like it.  So, just send it back, and say “pass me a bill without these earmarks”.
• The congressional Dems are not going to have a standoff over this.  They are not going to turn to their constituents and say “we crafted a great bill and the President vetoed it, but we know that something needs to pass, so we’re just going to keep sending it to him as is.”  They’ll follow your lead, and they’ll follow it quickly.  They’d get a much better bill back to you before the end of the week.
• Congressional Republicans will think “Wow, maybe Obama’s bipartisan rhetoric ISN’T just all talk.”  They’ll be thrilled, at least publicly.  In private, they might worry that you’re stealing a bit of their thunder, because it’ll be MUCH easier for them to pick up congressional seats in 2010 by pointing to a bloated “tax and spend” Democratic spending bill.
• Democratic citizens will be shocked, but who cares, they love you deeply, and once they get over the surprise that we don’t just have 100% Harmony amongst the powers in Washington, they’ll easily say “well, it’s not like I really *liked* all of those earmarks…
• Centrist and GOP citizens will cite the veto as a sign that you really are different, you’re not just a partisan, you are going to emphasize fiscal responsibility, Democrat does not just mean “spender”.
• The press will say things like “unlike his predecessor, President Obama today sent a clear message that he’s willing to Veto bills that are passed by his own party.”

In short, politically, you’ll spend a small bit of political captial with the people who love you the most, and in return you’ll score huge points with everyone else, including the people who are most skeptical of you.  And you don’t even have to look like you’re making deals or compromising your values to do it.  Indeed, by signing it you WOULD be compromising your stated values somewhat.  A clear winner.

But really, you should veto it because you actually *do* *care* about fiscal responsibility, and while I no very little about the details of the bill, the fact that it’s going by the name “Earmark-Laden” in all the press is certainly not an indicator that it has anything to do with fiscal responsibility.  The stimulus bill was where you had justification for big spending, and whether or not everyone agrees, everyone does know that that’s not going to happen every year.  This bill is different, this bill represents the long-term for Federal spending.  And it’s not the path you want us to head down.

So, in my humble opinion, sir, Veto that bill.

It’s been over a year now and Pri and I knew where we’d be moving into, and that whole time I’ve been imagining a certain bike route.  When I worked downtown and lived on the west side, I had a route in my mind that was sort of the “long way home” route, about 12 miles, takes about an hour, and a nice way to get some exercise spontaneously.  Then I had a couple of other “after work” routes that I’d sometimes do, again about an hour, and focused on exercise.

I work at home now, so forget about the “long way home”.  But the “after work”, roughly-one-hour route should still be part of my repertoire.  And since the new house is on the south east side, there’s new side-streets to explore!  And although we only moved in last May, I never got around to this kind of thing last year.  :(  I mean, I was busy, but of course I wasn’t busy every single hour.  It should have happened.

But today, it did!  After a nicely productive afternoon and whiltling my inbox down to an amazingly small FIVE messages, I felt like doing something different before I dug back into more hopefully productive stuff this evening.  Well, remarkably, after some rather scary rainstorms this afternoon, the sun came out and it wasn’t even very windy…  It was 6:44, as I recall, but it still seemed light out.  “Oh right!!  Daylight Saving Time!”  So, I decided to celebrate the extra hour of evening sunlight with a spontaneous bike ride.  Finally!

And so, I present my first draft of the first south-east-side “after work” loop.  Only 8.5 miles, so I’ll probably try to have a “longer option” to go for a full hour, especially once I get used to where I’m going.  Today there was a heavy exploration factor, but I was still home about an hour after I had the original idea and got out the GPS, and all the other bike gear…

… and the new Heart Monitor that Pri and I purchased (thanks for the recommendation, Fiona! We love it!). According to it, I burned 627 Calories on the ride.  Based on that and another recent experiment, I’m starting to use 70 Calories per mile as my estimated fuel efficiency. I don’t know how that compares with other bikers, nor do I have extreme confidence in the data that the heart monitor puts out… But still, I’m sure it’s not completely crazy, certainly in the right order of magnitude…  And yeah, I had to pause and thing that when I do serious bike rides like the Hilly Hundred or the big bike ride to Indy I did with Erik years ago, I’m burning multiple thousands of calories. Multiple days of normal eating.  Wow.  No wonder I feel tired.

Not too tired after today’s run.  I should finish this up though so that I can still feel like the whole experience took less than 2 hours.  :)

For each of the first few years that I lived in Bloomington, I told myself that I should go to neighboring Brown County for the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival and see Bill Monroe perform while he was still alive. But I didn’t.  I was there once, saw some great music, but as I recall, he was too ill to make it, and a few months later he died.

Well, when I read that Ralph Stanley was scheduled to play at downtown Bloomington’s Buskirk Chumley Theater, I felt pretty strongly that I should make sure I went.  Not that this would make up for it, but if it’s that easy to see a living legend of an art form you feel a connection to… come on.

I was a bit concerned that the show might really just be a ruse… get some random musicians to play and just set Ralph in front of them and watch the money pour in, just cashing in on a legendary name.  There may have even been a small number of people at the show who felt like that was what happened.  But, if so, I’d say to them that they’re missing the difference between a legendary name and an actual legend.

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It’s not officially a State Of The Union™ address, but you can read the prepared remarks or watch a video of the delivery thereof all from whitehouse.gov.  I don’t know if that’s an Obama administration original or not, but I LOVE that the Whitehouse is making information directly available to people like that.  Anyway, here are some reactions to the speech, in “bullet list” style to try to keep me from being too verbose:

• Obama is smoothly referring to the deficit as something “we’ve inherited”.  I’ve long said that the Dems should take the GOP to task for spending so much for the 6 years they were in total power in Washington.  This isn’t exactly it.  And, since the Dems control congress, they can’t really blame it all on Bush. Indeed, I thought Bobby Jindal speech was actually more direct about calling the Republicans failures on fiscal discipline. (In general I found Jindal’s speech to be intelligent, but not very inspiring.)
• When he says he wants to cut the deficit in half, is he talking about the ~$400 Billion deficit of the budget or the +$trillion deficit of reality?  If it’s the latter, he could cut it in half and still have the second largest deficit in history after the current year.  That is, prior to this year, we never had a trillion dollar deficit, I believe the record was in the $400 billions… so if he cuts it down to $500 billion….?  I may have my numbers wrong, but it seems like there may be a rather unimpressive way to technically meet that goal.
• He sure is talking about a lot of spending, and even lowering a lot of people’s taxes.  But at the same time cutting the deficit.  How can it be?  Well, one thing is letting the “Bush tax cuts” expire, but that’s not going to make the difference.  What I’m hoping is that he really will go through the budget “line by line” and eliminate programs that aren’t working.  Take, for instance, the war on drugs.  Can anyone say that it’s working?  And it certainly costs a lot of money.
• I really like his focus on responsibility and accountability in government.  I hope he can carry through on that.  A lot of politicians talk about that kind of thing, but I do feel like he is really more serious about it than most.  I hope I’m right.
• I also like his focus on accountability and responsibility outside of government.  Republicans have got to love that too… except that they might think that he is stealing their lines… except that they might actually have some effect when he says them.
• I really don’t think it’s fair to say that the United States is the nation that invented the automobile.  He could have said that we were the nation to turn it from a rich person’s hobby to a near necessity for everyone.
• Energy, Health Care, and Education.  Democrats are definitely in charge.  I’m skeptical that they’ll be able to succeed at these goals.  But I hope they do.
• “dropping out of high school is no longer an option.  It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American.”  This is a great example of the kind of thing that I feel like Obama can say in a way that seems like it would actually resonate with an actual young person considering dropping out.  I hope I’m right.  If he could inspire our nation’s under-ambitious youth, he could transform our society in ways that no law ever could.
• A really dense section of quite specific and often remarkable claims about his upcoming budget:
  • “end education programs that don’t work.”  That could be a lot of programs
  • “end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them”. I had to cheer at hearing this.  I sure hope he accomplishes that, although I don’t know how he can given that the Farm Bill just passed with huge Democratic support.
  • “eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq”, more cheers!
  • “reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use”.  Talk about a place to save money!! Maybe he will be able to spend all that money and still cut the deficit in half.
  • “We will root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier.” I don’t know much about this, but I can definitely imagine that there could be a lot of fat to trim there.
  • “we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.”  The Dems must love this, although I have to wonder if it’s more symbolic than anything.  Companies aren’t exporting jobs for tax breaks, and I doubt that the tax breaks add up to much.  It’ll still be cheaper to hire people in China or India than in the US, companies will keep doing it.  Having said all that, I do agree with the spirit of the statement that the companies shouldn’t get a tax break for doing it.  But… what exactly is this tax break?  anyone know?

Finally, you’ve got to be impressed by Ruth Bader Ginsberg showing up for work yesterday and staying up to attend tonight’s speech.  She looked kind of dazed to me, though.  I hope she’s doing well.

So apparently some of my friends (traditional English-language definition) coordinated some kind of a campaign to become my friends (modern social-networking definition) on facebook.  I received some 15 friend requests in the 11am hour this morning, without having a facebook account.  I actually had to wonder if somehow someone had managed to make an account for me on facebook without my consent, although if they had it was pretty clearly good hearted.

They didn’t.  Or at least, I don’t think they did.  I don’t really know.  But I did go ahead and create an account. There?  Happy?

So far, it’s overwhelming… which I guess it to expected.  Within an hour of signing up, my inbox had basically only facebook notifications visible in it.  Two full screens of messages, about 35 facebook notifications, and two normal legitimate emails.  Most of these are friend confirmations, so presumably those will die down soon once the initial rush is over.  Let’s hope…

Meanwhile, I find the facebook interface easy enough to use (very impressive how quickly it identified all of these “friends” for me) but… overwhelming.  Right now it feels like 30 of my friends are having a party in the room while I’m trying to work.  Not that I can’t see the attraction, but, at the risk of seeming a 21st century high-tech grumpy old man, I’m closing the window for now.

Ok, it’s really cold.  I wanted to express my respect and good wishes to everyone who braved the cold on their bicycles today… most particularly, my Brazilian wife!  Very impressive!

The walk from my bedroom to my office was far less harrowing.  I did have to walk to the mailbox to send in my estimated tax payments though - Due today, don’t forget all you self-employed people out there!

So, a week ago, we welcomed my new “co-workers” to our home.  The drywall replacement that we’d been planning on since shortly after the water issue (you want to say “flood”, but that might not be technically accurate) of June 2008 has officially begun, and the contractors are quite happy to be working inside somewhere.  It seems to be going very well, faster than we expected so far.  Hopefully that will continue to be the case.

Anyway, in the meantime, we moved both of our offices into the guest room.  This has actually worked remarkably well… if I had my filing cabinets and some more civilized wiring (note the 50-foot ethernet cable unapologetically lying in the middle of the hallway) I could probably just keep it this way indefinitely.  But, of course, I don’t have to, in another week or two, I should be able to return to my office, which should be looking better than it has since I started working there.  We’ll see…

My family latched on to these battery testers a few years ago, clever little things that gauge the size of your battery and use that to figure out how much power to expect from them, so that they can compare that to how much power they are putting out, thus giving you a reading on how much “juice” is left in them.  Lots of batteries seem to have the same kind of thing built into them these days.  Whatever.

I’ve been noticing something recently: lots of products use multiple batteries (2, 4, whatever).  When the device starts to complain about its batteries being low, I take them out and test them.  Often - usually, I’d say - I find that only one of them is actually low.  Take out four batteries, three of them test perfectly fine, and the fourth is totally dead.  I have to suspect that this isn’t just because the one battery is failing, I think it’s something to do with the physics of batteries.  But, I don’t know what.  And, I could just be wrong.  But, anyone else experience this?

Whatever the case, you might think about checking all of your batteries instead of just throwing them all away when the device they are in says they are low.  Curious to hear if others experience this as well.