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I just posted the following on Lawrence Lessig’s blog. Lessig, a (dare I say) brilliant professor/lawyer who has written prolifically about the intellectual property crisis, has bought into the nonsensical claim that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000. Here is my response:

Professor Lessig,

I am troubled by your buying in to the hype of claiming that “Nader cost Gore the 2000 election.” This claim is nonsense by any scientific or analytical standard. While it is true that Nader received thousands of votes in Florida, and that Bush “won” Florida by 537 votes, your claim suffers from compounded causes.

A few points to consider: first, five third-party or independent candidates each received thousands of votes (Nader, Browne, Buchanan, Phillips, Hagelin), well more than 537, yet Nader alone gets the blame for costing Gore the election. The fact is that nearly every election in America has two candidates getting the vast majority of votes, with the non-duopoly candidates fighting for the few remaining scraps dropped from the table. Nader was firmly in this latter camp in 2000.

Second, your claim does not account for the impact Nader had on the political landscape in 2000. How many people who would not otherwise have voted were inspired to go to the polls in 2000? This group of voters undoubtedly includes voters from across the political spectra: progressive/green candidates disillusioned with the two-party system, right-wingers terrified of what Nader — or Gore, for that matter — stands for, and also disillusioned democrats who went out to vote because they were afraid that Nader would cost Gore votes. Though specific numbers from 2000 are impossible to come by, it is quite possible that Nader inspired MORE people to vote than the number of votes he received. Sadly, the breakdown of these numbers, of where these votes went, is impossible to know.

Third, Gore’s campaign was one of the most poorly run in history. Gore failed to inspire voters, performed terribly at the debates against Bush, and failed to go for the jugular in his campaigns. Gore should have blown Bush out of the water in the debates, but instead he came across as wishy-washy, spineless, and without his own vision. This fact, in my view, was most important as to why the election was even close in the first place.

Fourth, Gore technically did win the election. Bush was in effect appointed by the Supreme Court. But hey, this is America; just because you get the most votes, doesn’t mean you win the election.

I agree that it’s important that Bush is not reelected this year, and that Nader will, no matter what his decision about running this year, influence the election in 2004. But the fact that Bush is the current occupant of the White House cannot be blamed solely on Nader. There were too many factors at work.

This article shows just how mainstream solar energy is becoming. It’s quite interesting:

In one of life’s little ironies, solar power is gaining a toehold in the most unlikely of places – the world of SUVs, big-screen TVs, and two-fridge families – the ‘burbs. And if it can gain acceptance there, some analysts say, the technology is on the cusp of widespread acceptance.

“Even suburbia is starting to go solar,” says Richard Perez, publisher of Home Power magazine, the bible of the home-renewable energy crowd. “Some new houses and subdivisions are being planned this way. It’s not really common yet, but its happening.”

The number of people using solar power in the US can be measured in tens of thousands, so it’s still a small minority. But it’s catching on for a variety of reasons; it’s cheaper in the long run, it’s morally sound, and it enables you to sell electricity back to the grid.

I’ve always imagined using solar energy to heat my home. Of course, this presupposes that I become a homeowner, which hasn’t happened yet. Because we homeschool our daughter, we’re a one-income family for the time being, at least until some of my other projects begin to generate income. But I dream of this quasi-utopian off-the-grid communal living situation, with solar power, yurts, big gardens, etc. etc. The technology for this dream exists now; it’s just a question of resources from here on out.

Well, I’m thinking of reconfiguring my hard drives on my local computer. I still have Windows98 installed on one of the hard drives, which I almost never use these days. The only thing I use Windows for is to run ACID for songwriting, so I can make drum loops. Because at one point I was doing music production on this machine, I gave the faster hard drive to Windows. Now most of that data is just sitting there. I’ll probably keep Windows around for my daughter’s games and for ACID, but the rest is just fluff. I don’t need it. Everything else that I need works far better under Linux.

So what I think I will do is archive most of my Windows data, partition that disk (maybe 7 or 8 gigs for Windows, the rest for Linux), and reinstall Linux to that disk. Then I can take my other hard drive (currently partitioned for Linux) and use it for only storing ogg and mp3 files (this is what most of the drive is now anyway).

So when I reinstall, the question becomes “which Linux”? A month or two ago I installed Fedora Core 1, but the more I use it the less I like it. It’s just too slow, and it needs lots of stroking to get everything I want on it. So I guess I’m officially looking for a new Linux distro. I may give Debian another go, or MEPIS, or PCLinuxOS, or Libranet. Not sure… I need to think about this some more.

Yet another page of commentary on the Mozilla browser situation. This time, it’s from Dave Whitinger, who 4 years ago, in the midst of The Browser Wars Part One (just before MS Internet Explorer became dominant, back in the Netscape 4.x days), wrote The Battle That Could Lose Us The War, where he concluded that “if Microsoft was able to dominate the web on the desktop, it would be a short matter of time before they could extend and dominate the web on the server.”

But now, after plenty of (somewhat tumultuous) history in Mozilla, he is saying that The Tide Has Turned. An excerpt:

So much progress has been made, in fact, that today, more than four years since my gloomy outlook was keyed, with unspeakable pleasure I am now in a position to report that this tide has finally turned. The Gecko layout engine seems unbreakable and is reportedly more standards compliant than Internet Explorer. The Firefox browser is fast and stable, and supports the plugins out there that the users want and need, and, for the first time in several years, my wife is actually excited about her Linux desktop again. For the first time since Internet Explorer 3.0 was released, I am seeing people switching browsers in droves.

Definitely evidence that the browser wars indeed are NOT over. Mozilla is now clearly better technology than IE. However, inertia is on Microsoft’s side. We’ll see what happens….

A very flattering review has come out. See “Firefox 0.8 is the release that won me over”. A couple of interesting points. First:

My rule of thumb is this: the computer should try to be faster than I am. If I find myself waiting for the computer to do something, then I need to find out what’s the bottleneck. My view is this: the bottleneck should always be the human.

Interesting point. I wonder if this phenomenon is the motivation for Moore’s Law? I mean, why do computers always have to be faster and faster?

The conclusion of the review, by the way:

All told, this browser is an excellent piece of engineering and the Mozilla team must be very satisfied with the work that they are contributing to the internet community. It takes a lot to get me to switch software packages, but after over 2 years I have finally found my new web browser.

When I create some more hard drive space I plan to install it.

I just saw The Counter-Revolution Has Been Televised, a column by
John Perry Barlow,
about the apparent demise of Howard Dean’s campaign. It’s very insightful, more in its general cultural critique — namely in the title — than in the analysis of Dean’s campaign. It’s main point in this regard is that television is the voice of the counter-revolution, and those of us in the revolution need to recognize it as such. A lot of power is wielded there; what has happened to Dean’s campaign is evidence to this:

I have seen the past, and it still works.

Politics as usual was working like God’s wristwatch in Iowa, where the RNC and various Republican PAC’s outspent many of the Democratic candidates on negative TV ads aimed exclusively at Dean. But more damaging, in my opinion, was the remarkably open bias that the traditional media seemed to display against Howard Dean in their presentation of the news itself. I don’t watch much television, but what little I’ve seen in the last month indicated to me that Dean was being systematically slimed.

I witnessed, for example, an astonishing are-you-still-beating-your-wife interview of Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi by CNN’s Paula Zahn. Zahn persisted in drilling in on Dean’s having said in an NPR interview that the notion the Bush administration had known in advance about 911 in advance was “an interesting theory,” refusing, despite Trippi’s protests, to read a bit further in the transcript to Dean’s unequivocal statement that it was a theory he didn’t share.

Dean was taken to severe task for having murmured something on Canadian television four years ago about flaws in the Iowa caucus system. Fox spent an entire day calling him a liar without ever being specific, in my hearing anyway, about what lies he had purportedly told. CNN repeatedly reported that some Iowa voters were referring to Dean volunteers as “Perfect Storm troopers.” Indeed, in my extremely random sampling of TV reporting before the Iowa caucuses, I never heard a single reference to Dean that wasn’t at least mildly derisive.

So Dean’s defeat by the mass media demonstrates the power they have, and more importantly, whose side they are on.

There are many ways to describe what I saw tonight. One of them is that there was excessive moisture in the air, causing the solar photons bouncing off of the moon’s surface to refract in interesting patterns, all of which can be described mathematically. But a description like this misses something. Though it contains a lot of Truth, there is not much in the way of meaning or inspiration. Very little feeling or intensity is evoked in the reader who hears this description.

On the other hand, I could say that I saw the moon, radiant in the same way that pregnant women are radiant, its round belly shining pure, warm light down upon me like an overpouring of love from the mother. This sentence probably contains less Truth than the previous description. But I would say it has more meaning. Though I hardly claim to be a poet, this description has a chance at evoking some sort of feeling in the reader. It is more memorable, it’s not just a recipe of reality.

Why do I talk about this? Tonight I saw a really amazing movie, Tim Burton’s

Big Fish. This distinction between Truth and Meaning is the central theme of the story. In the movie, Billy Crudup plays Will Bloom, son of Ed Bloom played by Albert Finney (and by Ewan MacGregor in flashbacks). Ed Bloom is storyteller to the extreme; full of charm, a big smile, and a teller of tall tales. As the movie says repeatedly, “he’s nothing if not a social man.” And in the movie, he’s dying.

Will Bloom, on the other hand, is a reporter. He is interested in facts, and grew tired of his father’s tall tales. He goes to visit his father and tells him, basically, I don’t know you, I just know your amusing little lies. When Will was still a child, he discovered that some of his father’s tales were impossible, and lost all trust in his dad.
This is the central conflict in the story. Fact vs. story. Teller of tales vs. speaker of Truth. It’s a great movie; in the end, it is clear that we are our stories, no matter how we choose to tell them.

It made me cry on a couple of levels. One of them is that my grandfather is currently in the hospital, perhaps for the last time. He’s 93 years old and physically very weak; he’s also undergoing radiation treatment for skin cancer. A few days ago he had basically a heart attack; he has, in addition to his skin cancer, congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema. When (or if) he is released from the hospital, it is quite likely he will go on to Hospice.

I will always remember my grandfather in stories. One of my favorites: as a child, we used to “go to the lake” where my grandparents had a cottage. There was decent fishing at Boone Lake, actually; I remember fishing for bluegill and largemouth bass primarily, though there were also crappie to be found. Anyway, once I managed to get my fishing line hopelessly tangled into a large ball of monofilament plastic. I did this often; usually my father would untangle the line for me. Well at this moment, dad wasn’t around, he must have been off fishing or something. But Grandpa was there, and he went to untangle the line for me. I was in an “annoying kid moment”; I remember saying over and over to my grandfather: “that’s not how daddy does it.” Grandpa endured this for a few minutes and finally stopped, turned and looked at me half-glaring and half-smiling with his pipe clenched between his teeth, and said four words that utterly shut me up. “Who taught your father?”

In Big Fish, Will Bloom finally realizes that though his father exaggerated some of the details of his stories for effect, the essence of the stories was usually accurate. The Chinese Singing Twins weren’t actually siamese twins; the giant wasn’t 20 feet tall but 7 and a half. More importantly, Will Bloom realizes that our stories are our lives, and that we can only relate to other people through the stories.

It makes me wish I had listened to more of my grandfather’s stories.

According to this article, there are 1.1 million software developers in North America working on open-source software. Wow. Many of them are doing enterprise stuff, like keeping clusters going and coding for 64-bit architectures, but still. That’s an impressive number.

Well, what used to be called Mozilla Firebird, the browser I’ve been raving about here, is now called Mozilla Firefox. This is because there is apparently an open-source database project called Firebird. Note also, that Firefox released version 0.8 today, getting ever closer to that 1.0 release.

Also, the Mozilla Thunderbird email client released version 0.5 today.

Both of these programs, just to clarify, are previews of the next-generation of Mozilla. The developers took regular Mozilla 1.5 (which has everything, the browser, email, etc. wrapped up in one program) and split it into its component parts. I believe that when Firefox and Thunderbird (and possibly nVu) are at version 1.0, they’ll together be packaged as Mozilla 2.0. But I’m not sure. They may just keep them separate.

Anyway, both of these programs look really sweet. I want to install them asap, but I’m having a disk space issue on my /usr partition at the moment. :-(

Well, according to this article I should. It claims:

You were around a year ago — you remember how hopeless it seemed, how many people were saying that Bush could not be beaten. You were looking into Canadian real estate, and Howard Dean was deciding to run for president. See what I’m saying?

Now people believe that Bush can be beaten. His popularity rating has dipped below 50 percent for the first time since the election (when it was also below 50 percent but, hey, let’s not go there again). Now people are voting for John Kerry on the interesting thesis that he has the best chance of beating Bush. Imagine that.

Interesting point, to be sure. Yes, many people are organizing under Kerry’s banner because they believe he has the best chance to beat Bush. OK, maybe. Why? He’s “most electable.” Not sure what this means. Does it mean, “least frightening to the status-quo?” Perhaps.

And Kerry probably will beat Bush. The pattern of the election could well be that of Clinton’s victory in ’92, though I wonder about the “Ross Perot” factor. If one can argue that Nader cost Gore the election in ’00 (this is nonsense, by the way), then one can also argue that Perot cost Bush the election in ’92. I remember at the time, I didn’t think it possible that Clinton could win. Then Perot came and took more than 10% of the vote, as I recall, many of whom “would have voted for Bush.”

But even if Kerry wins, even if he is re-elected for a second term, and some semblance of sane sameness is restored to the American government, what of the future? Bush has done so much in 3 years to damage the working class and the poor and the environment and he’s done so much to benefit the energy industry, the corporate elite, and the power establishment. How bad will the next Republican president after Kerry look?

Scary to contemplate.

This is why someone like Kucinich is so important. But in this election, he’s the “token progressive.” He’s not even as progressive as he should be, yet he represents the stance so far to the left that it’s “not electable.”

The political spectrum in this country is so narrow and right-shifted. I’ve intuited this for a long time, but Eric Alterman‘s (of Altercation fame) book What Liberal Media? is articulating this problem eloquently and elegantly for me.