Archive for December 2007
i was watching a tivo-ed meet the press today where they interviewed mitt romney. my general impression is that is one slippery dude. his positions are nuanced to say the least. also i loved this one quote (could be slightly off) towards the beginning when he was asked to explain a comment he made in a speech about how democracy required religion: “If we’re all children of the same god, that we have a duty to one another, to care for one another; americans first, people of the world second. I found that amusing, but it didn’t even phase russert.
Also I think I have told everyone I know about this video, but if I haven’t, you must watch it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw
3 Comments for romney
Li | December 19, 2007 at 10:19 am
nhi! | December 21, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Slippery eel. Romney claimed that he “saw his Dad march with Martin Luther King”. He later clarified it to mean that he “didn’t literally see his Dad march with MLK”, but that he “meant in a ideological sense”.
Jose | December 27, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Not sure if democracy requires religion but politics definitely does.
If you look at polls, most Americans do not like the importance that religion is getting in current politics and yet Huckabee has emerged from nowhere as the contender. Maybe that has more to do to with the other candidates being simply useless, but still.
This stoking of religion for political gains is nothing new in Indian politics, which is as advanced as US politics if you believe me. It has emerged big time in the recent years I think because the United States has become much more multicultural and multi-ethnic. In such a scenario, my man or my god versus their man or their god thing works great. Indian politics has exploited this through their great use of caste and religious divides over decades. I would hate to see this country go down that.
As Cheney wisely put it, democracy is 50 + 1. So, let the other 49 go to hell. No one understands that better than republicans. Thanks to the laws of the land, it is also possible to rule the country with a 25% favorable rating and a minority in both houses of the legislature. And the spineless dems have no idea. I am pretty sure that status quo will remain in 2008. A republican president with a hung legislature
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As it’s been getting dark early lately, I thought it would be a worthwhile investment to shell out 20 bucks for a bike light. Drivers get close enough when they can see me, I didn’t want to think about what would happen if they couldn’t! Anyways, I just went to Target and picked up the first one that seemed reasonable. But when I got home I found out that the headlight has 4 different modes and the backlight has 5 modes. Since at night I have 2 legs of biking (office to train, train to home), that means I need to hit the front light button a total of 10 times and the back light a total of 12 times. So I am hitting a bike light button 22 times a day. Pretty ridiculous.
As an engineer, I can just see how this played out while the lights were being developed. First the engineer presented a model with 2 modes for the front and back light, solid and flashing. Seems sufficient. Some business guys probably looked at the design and decided they needed a “differentiator”. So they come up with the crazy idea of 9 light modes. The engineer says ok and then builds a design where each light has 2 buttons, on/off and mode. Seems great. But then the business guys say the extra production cost will totally eliminate any value add of the additional modes. So go back to the original design right? It would be crazy to build something where a person might be put into a position of being forced to hit light buttons 22 times a day. Right?
Right?
Right!?!?
Either that or there was some really dumb-ass engineer behind the thing.
1 Comment for over-engineering
nhi! | December 13, 2007 at 11:53 pm
right
I saw this interview on Sunday but was half asleep so I can’t engage in any interesting dialogue. However, I do have to admit that that part of the interview really struck me as interesting in that I didn’t feel like he really said anything in his response.
What really got to me is that both GOP and Dems believe that bringing religion into the question somehow makes them legitimate “Americans” when the first amendment clearly calls for a separation of church and state. WTF???
I don’t think democracy requires religion; I think that it’s really the other way around: Religion requires democracy. If people want to be free to worship, then a democratic state is needed. There are tons of examples of how a heavily-influenced religious society takes away any real sense of democracy: Middle East, Northern Ireland, Bible belt in the US, to name a few.