Saturday 9 March 2013

a new economy please ;)

i believe that the current economic disaster -- the great traumatization (see chart below)  -- is due to the false assumption upon which our current economic system is built.

locke believe that man was inherently greedy, which recently learned is scientifically false.
he was probably doing the best he could do and had his reasons for his worldview.  one might be that man was more selfish back then. possibly, we have evolved to higher and higher degrees of species-wide altruism that we've hit a new tipping point making the species itself altrustic (the majority of the time).  this would only have happened because love was adaptive (check out the video below, i think it shows that love is adaptive): regardless, the good news is that we are inherently altruistic.

i got from NPR, for more info go to: here
without poking fun at the B- system we currently ride,  here are some facts upon which any new economic system might be built:
  1. tabula rasa is false: we are endowed with ancient/instinctual knowledge (and rights)
  2. we are one of the few animals that divide labor
  3. we are mimetic animals: "From childhood men have an instinct for representation, and in this respect, differs from the other animals that hs is far more imitative and learns his first lessons by representing things. And then there is the enjoyment people always get from representations. What happens in actual experience proves this, for we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses. The reason is this: Learning things gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but also in the same way to all other men, though they share this pleasure only to a small degree. The reason why we enjoy seeing likenesses is that, as we look, we learn and infer what each is, for instance, "that is so and so." If we have never happened to see the original, our pleasure is not due to the representation as such but to the technique or the color or some other such cause."  (Arist. Poet. 1448b.1)
  4. rhetoric is not truth
  5. we do better with each other than alone
maybe this is the answer?

Thursday 7 March 2013

NE Armed Carjacking Case Closed

Officers from the Fifth Police District make an arrest this morning in an Armed Carjacking Case that occurred on Monday, March 4, 2013 from the 1500 block of Kenilworth Avenue, NE.

Alert Fifth Police District Officers patrolling the Benning Road Gateway observed a silver colored Nissan Altima bearing Maryland Tags that was taken from a victim in a Armed Carjacking on Monday, March 4, 2013 from the Sixth Police District. The driver(suspect) jumped from the vehicle in the 1300 block of Morse Street NE and attempted to flee on foot. Great communications between 5D Units resulted in the suspect being apprehended without incident in the 1100 block of Holbrook Street, NE. This subject was armed with an edged weapon and narcotics were also recovered.

Fifth District Detectives alerted the Sixth District Detectives of this arrest and this suspect will be looked at in other crimes of violence and those involving similar carjacking's and auto thefts.

I commend the officers of the Fifth Police District for aggressively patrolling their beat, their attention to detail in recognizing this felony vehicle, safely bringing this case to a conclusion and the recovery of items of additional evidence. 

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Petition to end Daylight Savings time


Please go to Eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time

if you'd like to ....  i signed and tweeted and want everyone to join in.

here is the pitch

Daylight Savings Time is an archaic practice in our modern society.
The original reasons for the policies are no longer applicable, and the most cited reason for keeping DST (energy savings) has never been shown to be true.
Some industries still like DST (like sporting equipment retailers), but there are many more who dislike the changed hours (like television).
The real issue, however is not the later hours or extra sunlight. Studies have shown that changing the clocks is responsible for health problems (including increased heart attack and vehicular accident risks) and leads to hundreds of thousands of hours of lost productivity in workplaces across the country. Also: It's really annoying.
We should either eliminate DST or make it the year-round standard time for the whole country.

Tuesday 5 March 2013

New Approach to DC Voting Rights

what if we allowed the citizens of DC to vote in the congressional races of their "home" precinct?

i'm from gilbert AZ (85234). why couldn't senators mccain and flake be my senators and whoever the new guy is be my congressman?  i can prove it with my Gilbert Tiger Marching Pride stuff, year books, birth certificate whatever it would take claim my right to vote there.

for those who don't have an answer to the "where i'm from?" question can use the state that their parent or grandparent moved from to be here.  or whatever place they feel best represents them and where they want to vote ... just let those DC "refugees" vote where ever they want?

Pick a senator ... step right up.

obviously, i haven't figured out all the details ... but isn't there some way i could have a congress person???





D.C. Vote? Not So Fast
I'm well aware of the irony in the header. After all, it's only been 200-plus years that residents of the District of Columbia have been clamoring for the right to have a voting representative in Congress. But Tuesday's vote that cleared the way for the Senate to begin deliberating on the bill — the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act — is only a first step. Or, maybe, a millionth step. Whatever, it's not the final step. (The Senate passed the measure today, 61-37. More on that below.
Congressional passage may be the easy part.
First, how we got to where we are now. From the beginning, when Congress designed the District as the nation's capital, residents could not vote. They got the right to vote for president in 1964 and mayor in 1975, but their representative in Congress — officially, a delegate — cannot vote. (That was partially changed a few years ago when Congress voted to allow the delegate, since 1991 Eleanor Holmes Norton, to vote in committee, though still not on the House floor.)
The current bill would give DC a regular member of the House, with full voting rights like everyone else, and create a new congressional seat for Utah (which just missed out on getting an additional seat after the last census). Theoretically, the approach would make both parties happy, since it is assumed that the Democrats and Republicans would each increase their number in the House by one.
The last time the the Senate took up D.C. voting rights was in 1978, when Congress passed a constitutional amendment giving the District representation in both the House and Senate. The measure failed to win the required three-fourths of the state legislatures.
The last time the current legislation tried to make it to the Senate floor was in 2007, but it got only 57 votes — not enough to cut off debate. With increased Democratic numbers from last year's election, Tuesday's vote was 62-34. That paved the way for today's final vote.
And then there's the House, which is expected to approve the measure next week. But then what?
"Then" is the inevitable challenge in the courts. Most people agree that there should not be, as the D.C. license plate slogan attests, "taxation without representation." But if the District is not a state, why should it get a voting member of Congress?
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), the dean of the Senate who is always quoted with respect when it comes to constitutional issues — his opposition of the war in Iraq, for example — is not a fan of this bill either. As with the war, he questions its constitutionality. He says it should be done by a constitutional amendment. Byrd said, "My quarrel is not with the intent of the legislation, but with the vehicle with which the Congress is seeking to effect or bring about this change."
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School makes the same argument.
I'm not convinced Byrd and Turley are wrong. It would be frustrating for a lot of people for Congress to pass this measure, President Obama to sign it, and then the courts rule sorry, this doesn't pass the smell test.
A sidebar question on this from Janet Warren of Washington, D.C.:
If this is about House seats, why does the Senate have to be involved?
The answer is simple. The full Congress passed a bill in 1929 establishing the total permanent House membership at 435. Since this proposal expands the size by two members — the D.C. seat and one in Utah — both chambers need to pass it.