new-age linkin

i just recently read the book The New Influencers by Paul Gilliam (sorry the website looks cheezy, but the book is okay) and learned the wonderful benefits of linking.

He says that linking to other websites and articles are good for growing your blog followers and thought community etc. I think linking to other websites is good to remember where exactly i came up with the crap thoughts i have.

so, from now on you can kind of expect me to link to articles and such that i find interesting. The benefit is only half so you can verify that i'm completely not off my rocker and making stuff up. The other half of the benefit is so that i can do the same.

this blog is now my external hard drive

As you can see from my wide variety of topics in my posts, i think a lot about a lot of things. I have been looking for a way to organize, collect and categorize my thoughts on a wide array of subjects. I have found delicious to be a wonderful way to organize stuff on the web, however, it didn't fit my off-the-cuff thoughts because i couldn't tag books, thoughts and the like. So, what i'll be doing from now on is using my blog as my 'external hard drive' or 'outboard brain' as one Wired writer pontificated.

Obama on civil rights & equality strategy

I got this from Slate, one of my regular rags. i found a real insightful observation (in bold below) about the different attitudes that conservatives and liberals have on the role of the courts. I relate it to what i learned from the book Who Rules America by Domhoff.

begin quote"
In some states, like California, judges instructed the state to take steps to equalize school funding from district to district. In others, like Kansas and Kentucky, and in ongoing litigation in Connecticut, the court decisions are framed in terms of adequacy of funding—making sure each district has enough, rather than the same amount. Either way, it's redistribution of what's become a rather routine sort. This is what Obama was talking about when he said in the radio interview, "Suddenly, a whole bunch of folks start bringing these claims in state court under state constitutions that call for equal educational opportunity, and you see state courts with mixed results being more responsive to it."

What comes through far more clearly in the interview is a tactical point: Obama thinks it's a mistake to rely too much on courts to further any broad agenda. He says, "I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused. I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that." And then he continues, "Maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know … the institution just isn't structured that way."

This is a whole separate, bitter, ongoing fight in legal circles—over when to turn to courts as a means of change and when to turn to the legislature, which is directly accountable to the voters and so perhaps the safer and more stable route. It's a truism that conservatives favor legislative change and see the courts as an undemocratic end run around it. They especially think that about any push for "redistributive change," Obama's subject here. In this interview, Obama comes down on the traditionally conservative side, albeit for presumably different reasons. He thinks the civil rights movement misjudged the courts' utility—they were good for providing for a right to vote and for black people to sit with white people at a lunch counter, to use Obama's examples, but they're not good for deciding who's entitled to what government benefits or property rights. "Obama is with Bork on this," Cass Sunstein, an Obama adviser, told me, referring, of course, to the arch-conservative, famously not-confirmed-to-the-Supreme Court Judge Robert Bork.
copied from this Slate article
"end quote

What i found interesting was that Domhoff outlines how the 'elite' class influences America, but i don't remember any explicit contrast between the legislative and court-based strategies of getting what you want done. I think if more liberals look at passing laws (liberal majority yeah!) instead of waiting for the courts, then America would be a much more balanced society.

oh how we have forgotten

In the past few days, i really get upset for periods of time thinking about how short a memory the media has. It seems that during the bailout blame-game, not many people stop to think about who is the originating culprit of this mess.

I mean sure, wall street messed up. They bought the securities, the seemingly objective rating firms gave the rubber stamp to these securities and then AIG insured them, based on the ratings firms stamp of approval.

So, the blame partly goes on the ratings firms such as Standard & Poors, and Moody's and so forth. They were supposed to be the watchdogs. However, like an article i recently read put it, the watchdogs stopped watching. This led to the quick unraveling of wall street's cohesion, both within individual firms, and across the board.

But, the question begs: who did they buy these securities from? From Countrywide. Haven't heard much about them lately? Because they went belly-up almost first! So, countrywide was pamphletting California with mortgages structured not in the best interest of either the lender nor the borrower. They made their money on the transaction fees! So, their profits came not from the integrity of the deal, but from the transaction of the deal.

For instance, VISA makes money everytime you use your Visa card. So, of course they're going to advocate the use of your credit card, whether you have good credit or not! The same with Countrywide's strategy to make its dough on the transaction, and then get the mortgage, like a hot potato, out of its hands as quickly as possible.

So, the primary blame lies with Countrywide. Secondarily, the blame lies with the ratings bodies such as Standard & Poor's and Moody's who gave their rubber stamp of approval to those shoddy investments.

imagine if the crash-test rating system was flawed and they started giving five-stars to anyone for attempting safety, not for actually creating safe vehicles. Pretty soon the country wouldn't trust them right? There would be a call to overhaul the system. The problem i see is that not many people are asking for oversight for the ratings bureaus, the bureaus that attempt to assure the trust, honesty and integrity of the financial realm. That's who we have to monitor.

Monitor the monitors, then society will start to build trust again.

up and running

I've been tooling around with the website (keybussys) by getting a new template (face) and shoring some stuff up on the backend. My current website is like non-functional. I forgot passwords and all that. The reason it sucks is because i blew my computer away and re-installed everything. But before i got the passwords to the website, i deleted the VPC before i got my passwords and website out of it.

In the last perhaps week or so i've been working on the website again cuz i'm trying to do it big. I was gung-ho about it but i couldn't find a good user interface for it. However, i've found a great template (interface) that fits my needs and i can customize it using some of the thrown-together skills that i've accumulated in the past couple months.

I'll be putting it up in a couple days, soon as i remember my godaddy account info!!!

also, i'm running the backend on joomla in case you were wondering