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It's too bad Mitt Romney is running for President. He'd be the perfect candidate to run the World Bank.

OK, there are other reasons why it's too bad he's running for President. And I can think of people I'd rather have running the World Bank, too. But it is a political appointment, after all.

Forbes has called the defeat of the Arizona anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative.

It's been a long time since I voted in California, but I still find this fascinating: Cindy Sheehan is considering a challenge to Dianne Feinstein in the 2006 Democratic senatorial primary.

Dianne Feinstein was first elected to a 2-year Senate term to fill a vacancy in 1992. This was the same year that Barbara Boxer was elected to a full Senate term. Feinstein proceeded to vote for and in some cases sponsor every civil-liberties-eroding piece of legislation in Congress. Her Republican opposition in 1994 was Michael Huffington, who promised to be even worse, so I voted for the Trotskyist, Elizabeth Cervantes Barron. Barron got a little over 2% of the vote, denying Feinstein a majority and nearly denying her the seat. I figured this was the best anyone could do to send a message about Feinstein's positions, but maybe a Sheehan candidacy will be more effective. Hell, she might even win.

Manned spaceflight is a boondoggle. During the cold war, boondoggles were the weapon of choice: the objective was to get the "enemy" to spend more money on the {space, arms, whatever} race than you. Kennedy may not have understood this explicitly, but Reagan (or someone in his administration) did, and furthermore understood that we were losing the manned spaceflight boondoggle war as the Russians were (and still are) just plain better at making rockets than we¹. I don't think Bush gets this, but after a long hiatus through the '90s, we seem to be in a boondoggle war with China now.

If we're going to be doing it anyway, it seems like maybe we should try to do it right.

NASA has just revealed a $100000000000.00² plan to go to back to the moon³. This is five thousand times as much money as Dick Rutan spent to win the Ansari X prize. Sure, the moon is a lot more than 100km away. But we've been to the moon before, for a lot less money, starting from a much smaller technological base. What's going on here?

Part of it, I think, is what I call the US "culture of life". By this I mean that it has become unacceptable for certain kinds of endeavors to result in fatalities, ever. In the 60's, dead astronauts were heroes. Now they're victims. I say let's make them heroes again. And this is where I think the private sector comes in: heroes are people who took on the risks themselves. And that, these days, means a private sector adventurer, not a government employee⁴.

If we competed against China by announcing (hefty) prizes for private orbiters and moon shots and so on, I think that'd give us an added PR victory as a defeat of centrally planned economic activity, as well. And it seems to me both cheaper and more likely to succeed.

1. Oh, how archaic of me to use grammatical rather than positional declension.
2. Commas intentionally omitted to emphasize the sheer enormity of the number.
3. And Mars too, but that will cost extra.
4. Of course, astronauts (and firefighters, and so on) took their jobs knowing about the risks, and in many cases in order to become heroes. They're just being thwarted by public misconception that the government could keep any of them from dying ever if only it cared enough.

All three incumbent state legislators who were defeated in today's primary voted to ban gay marriage. And Angus McQuilken made it in his primary; I think he has a decent shot in November.

Much has been written about today's victory in the ongoing struggle for civil rights. But I think what makes me happiest is the reclamation, by a community known for reclaiming symbols, of America.

It's nice to be on the side that gets to wave the flag instead of feeling oppressed by it.

Reading the news, I see a lot of fuss over how Howard Dean is turning the net into a fundraising juggernaut. Sometimes the articles mention the campaign organizing tools that organizers can download to start new cells (and I think that's really the right term), or the sense of belonging that supporters get from reading the rather compelling campaign blog. But all of this is made possible by a deeper, GNU-style integration of unseen volunteers in a technical capacity. There are periodic postings calling for particular bits of Web expertise from his vast support base, and the underlying infrastructure is, as a result of this labor, incredibly robust.

Case in point: Dean has a petition up to stop the Victory Act (the new name for Patriot II now that it has actually been introduced). If you've filled out a petition or donated money on his site before, the petition comes up with your contact info automagically filled out; all you need to do is click a button to submit it. This instantly transmogrifies the poll from a useless Internet toy to paper-petition equivalency, all the while retaining the ease of finding the folks who want to sign it and getting them to do so. It's this kind of structural integration of net.random labor into the campaign that shows Dean's real advantage in this campaign.

Went down to Copley for a peace rally last night. I don't think I'm alone in caring very much about this war but not wanting to immerse myself in details. Someone near me described feeling this way to his companion, and then asked her if there was anything important he should know. "They're killing people", she replied in an anguished tone.

No, honey, we're killing people. Get it right. You and I and two hundred million other Americans are collectively responsible for this mess, and the only way to stop it is to stop thinking of it as someone else.

today is the 25th anniversary of the death of Stephen Biko.