A Rebuke to Erie Republicans

My wife and I were bad citizens.  We didn’t vote in the most recent primary in Erie. My daughter also didn’t bother to vote for her first time.

Of course, as Republicans, we didn’t have much choice in the primary.  The only contested race was for County Executive, and that race was not as colorful as the Democratic race.  (It didn’t have as much colorful language either.) 

Also, the Republican Party has only been able to come up with one candidate who is willing to run for City Council.  Tim Butler seems like a fine fellow, but why the heck should he have to run alone?  “Two are better than one, and a three-fold cord is not quickly broken” and all that. 

I would have offered myself as a write-in candidate, but I have two jobs already and my wife and children would file a missing person’s report if I took another job.

It’s hard to blame Republicans for not wanting to run for City Council.   Erie is overwhelmingly Democratic, and too many voters here won’t even think of crossing party lines.  If Satan, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold and Buzz Andrezeski could establish residency in Erie and get nominated on the Democratic ticket for the Erie City Council, they would easily be elected over any Republican candidates, because this city is so overwhelmingly Democratic.  (OK, I might be exaggerating about Buzz.)

But it just doesn’t seem right that we let the city be ruled by Democrats, forever, without even putting up a fight.  It is important for the city that elections be competitive, because when one party is in power unchallenged, the result will be corruption and laziness.  If the Democrats knew that they could lose an election if they screwed up too badly, they would be a better party.  Right now, Republicans don’t even get to present any ideas about how the city should be governed.  We just sit back and whine.

How can this trend be reversed?  I think the answer comes in two parts.

The first point is, that for the foreseeable future, we need candidates who don’t care too much whether they win or lose.  Their goal will be to run, to present their ideas to the voters, and to govern well if some miracle happens and they are elected.  They should also care about making the job a little easier for the next person who runs. 

It seems that the best candidates to do this job would young idealists and recent retirees.  Gregg Harris, in his lectures on “The Seasons of Life,” suggests that the 4th season is the “Season of Protection.”  In this stage of life, a person has met his own needs, and may “retire” in a way that focuses on the needs of others.  Political leadership is an appropriate venue for that.

Secondly, since running for office in Erie is probably a losing proposition for a while, it is important to reduce the sacrifice of time in running for office to a manageable amount. 

When the party fails to recruit a full team to run for City Council, Republican voters in Erie should write in candidates during the primary.  It takes 250 write-in votes to get a spot on the ballot, so, by doing a small amount of grass roots organizing, we could ensure a full slate of candidates.

The candidates who got in by write in would not have to gather petition signatures in February to get on the primary ballot in May, and then have a long campaign until November.  They could know that they were running in May, spend the summer fund-raising and getting ready, and then campaign in a short burst from Labor Day to Election Day in November.  The time cost of running would be reduced, and the candidates would have more time to talk about ideas.

One other benefit would be the Republican party leaders would get a good kick in the pants.  If Republican voters write in their favorite business or community leader, teacher, banker, pastor, auto mechanic, or blogger, we might get some interesting results.  The party might have to deal with some unruly candidates who don’t play by the rules.  They might decide that it would be better to work harder and do the recruiting themselves.

Against My Principles?

When a co-worker reported that she was getting together a pool to play Powerball this week, because the jackpot was particularly high, I said no, like I always do.  I have never bought a lottery ticket in my life, and my gambling never goes beyond the occasional contribution to a 50/50 for a good cause.  Heck, I took a trip to Vegas last year, and I didn’t gamble a dime.

I really don’t give a rip about the $99,800,000, before taxes, which, when divided up, amounts to $5.3 million per person after taxes.  I am convinced that that amount of money, by itself, wouldn’t add to my happiness.  And if I did the math I am sure that I would discover that even at that number, the odds would still be in the government’s favor.

But then I realized that if they did win, work could become a really lonely place.  20 or so co-workers, gone like yesterday.  And then 10 people’s work would, within a few weeks, be all piled on me.  [I exaggerate slightly.]

Suddenly, the $2.00 contribution to the lottery seemed a lot less like gambling, and a lot more like some form of sanity insurance…

My Second Job

I have not written much here lately, because life has been very busy.

With a daughter starting college in the fall (at Grove City, yay!), and the economy being in the shape it’s in, I thought it would be good to “diversify my income sources.”  I pondered a few ways to do that, but quickly settled on teaching basic electronics at nights.  There is a local technical school that I have worked with at my day job for years, and they were looking for a part-time electronics instructor, so they were happy to have me work for them. 

My students are mostly adults returning to school, and most are taking a course to become Biomedical Technicians.  They will be calibrating, maintaining, and repairing medical equipment.  [You had better hope that I teach them well; badly calibrated medical equipment can cause a lot of worries.]   The others in the group are taking a more general Electronic Technician program.  

My biggest difficulty in teaching these classes is that I have worked in the electronics industry for so long that I assume that there are some things that “everyone knows,” when actually these things need to be taught.  For example, I have used scientific notation since tenth grade, and I initially thought that everyone would remember how to work with scientific notation.  Of course, most people don’t need to use it, so they forgot after a few years.  Using laboratory equipment is also something most people stopped doing in 10th grade, or possibly in their first year of college, so I have to teach it as a new thing.

Brian Lasher for Congress

Today our family got to see Brian Lasher, a teacher at Northwest Pennsylvania Collegiate Academy, declare his candidacy for Congress, representing the 3rd District of Pennsylvania.  The declaration happened just across the street from Collegiate Academy, at the Veteran’s Memorial. 

Mr. Lasher now teaches Advanced Placement World History and International Relations at Collegiate Academy, and is a very popular teacher there.  He has also served for 25 years in the US Navy, and was most recently deployed to Iraq.  My daughter Anna has taken two courses from him.  I have met him once, at a parent-teacher conference, and I am not at all surprised that he decided to run for office. 

There appeared to be about 200 people at the announcement.  Many were students and faculty at Collegiate. 

Here is Mr. Lasher giving his speech.  In the background are Collegiate Academy, and a group of his students.

The Brian Lasher for Congress website is up, and the text of his speech can be found there.  He did quite a good job of explaining his reasons for running, and contrasting his positions with those of his opponent.  If he can raise a reasonable amount of money, he should be a formidable opponent.  He also may be able to mobilize a large group of young volunteers for his cause.

I know that WICU was interviewing him after his speech, so he may be on TV tonight.  Unfortunately, I haven’t bothered to upgrade to HDTV, so I most likely won’t be able to see it.

Erie City Chess Club Speed Championship

On May 1, the Erie City Chess Club had its annual Speed Chess Tournament at Barnes and Noble.  Also, we gave out prizes for the Erie City Championship that was played during March and April.

Here are the winners from the Erie City Championship:

At the left is Luka Glinsky, the overall winner.  He is a homeschooled high school senior and he has been both Junior and overall champion in the past.  In the middle is Noyakh Grinberg, the Senior Champion.  To the right is Ian MacKenzie, the Junior Champion.  He is a homeschooled high school junior.  I was unfortunately not among the winners, but our family contributed to their success:  between Christopher, Joshua, and me, we scored 0 wins and 4 losses against these 3 players.

Here is Christopher playing speed chess against Ian’s younger brother:

In the Speed Chess tournament, each player has 5 minutes to make all of his moves in the game.  That means you get 5-10 seconds per move.  The game has a lot of psychology, because precise calculation is much harder.   Playing with confidence is sometimes as important as playing well, and steering your opponent into a position where he has to think gives you an advantage.  I have been playing at a much slower pace lately (usually 3 days/move on chess.com), so playing quickly did not go well.  I was 2-5 overall in the top section.  Christopher played with the lower rated players, and he also scored 2-6. 

Luka Glinsky won the top section.  Ian Mackenzie played in the lower section and won it.

When I Was Your Age…

OK, so yesterday was my birthday, and it passed without a blog post.  Honestly, my memory isn’t what it used to be, so the day was quite far along before I remembered that it was my special day.

At my not too advanced age, I can’t tell my kids much about the hardships of life when I was young.  These are the best stories I can come up with:

When I was your age…

1)  If you wanted to change the channel on the TV, there were no remotes.  You had to get up off the sofa and walk all the way across the living room (up hill both ways, of course) to the TV, and flip the switch.  Then you had to walk all the way back to the sofa.

2)  If you wanted to make a cup of tea, you couldn’t just stick a cup of water in the microwave for 1.5 minutes.  You actually had to heat the water on the stove.  And they didn’t even have all these herbal teas.

3)  You couldn’t hide in your bedroom to talk with your boyfriend on the phone, because the phone had a cord.  And you couldn’t just push the buttons:  you had to dial the number and wait for the dialer to spin back to it’s original position.  you could break a nail or get a sore finger if you made too many phone calls.

Spring Break Scholastic Chess Championships

Christopher, Susan, and I played in the Global Concepts Charter School  Chess Club  ”Spring Break Scholastic Chess Tournament” this Saturday.  I have been looking for some time for tournaments where they could play other kids, and this one worked out well.  The timing of the tournament was perfect, and the entry fee of $5.00 included pizza for lunch.  Also, parents played free.

I got to play in the parent’s section, which was a non-competitive section for adults.  I was the only “parent” who played regularly in tournaments, so I won easily.  It was relaxing after competing in the Erie City Chess Championship during March, and finishing in the middle of the pack.

I have never been in a tournament where there were about 40 elementary school kids.  The atmosphere sure is different from an “adult” tournament.  It just isn’t as quiet for some strange reason.

Also, the kids play really fast.   When the Tournament Director tells the players to start, the players move their pieces and punch their clocks so fast it sounds like popcorn popping.  I watched one of Christopher’s games, and it quickly became “blitz chess,”  with him and his opponent taking about 5 seconds for each move.  Imagine what he could do if he stopped to think. 

Here is a shot of the players at work.

The tournament had 3 sections for the kids.  Christopher and Susan were in the same section, but they managed to avoid playing each other until the penultimate round.  There is absolutely no sibling rivalry going on, ever.  Here they are, up front, battling it out:

Christopher won that round, and went 6-0 to win first prize in the Under 500 rated section.  Susan went 3-2, with one bye, and she won 3rd place in her section.   She also has the distinction of being the only player who actually thought and wrote down nearly all of her moves.  Christopher and Susan are at the lower right with their trophies.

The next time we play in a scholastic like this, Christopher and Susan won’t have to worry about playing each other, because Christopher will have to play in the next section up.

Some April Fool’s Links, and One that Isn’t

Believing what you read on the Internet is a problem, even when it’s not April 1.  Here are some interesting links from today:

A.  Google Solves Chess - Chess will never be the same again.  Until now, many mathematicians claimed it wasn’t possible to ‘solve’ chess due to the exponentially large number of possible games (10^120).  However, in a dramatic development today the search giant Google announced that it had developed an online application which could play the royal game ‘perfectly’.

Besides playing perfect chess, ‘GoogleChess’ as the application is known, will allow users to input any legal chess position either manually or by importing a standard FEN file.  The application engine then searches for the position on a vast Google database and retrieves the ‘answer’ – the best move in that position and the result of the game assuming perfect play by both sides.

B.

  Anoop Desai requests federal bailout - After less-than-stellar reviews of Tuesday night’s show, American Idol contestant Anoop Desai formerly requested a federal bailout, in the hopes of avoiding the close call Matt Giraud (a.k.a. “Timberlake lookalike”) had to suffer through on live TV last week.

Desai filed a TARP application with the Treasury Department Tuesday night, shortly after the show.

“Why would President Obama stop at cars? My fans have rights, too,” Desai, 21, told News Corp.’s Fox and Friends Wednesday morning. “Is Simon Cowell somehow above the ruler of the world? You saw how happy people were about Slumdog Millionaire. This will be a good thing for America. And you know this is the story political reporters want to write: ‘Previewing a Jindal rise, young Indian American wins.’”

C.  Obama Orders Chevrolet and Dodge Out of Nascar - Unfortunately, Car and Driver Magazine took down their original link, probably under pressure from the Obama administration, so this is a copy of the original article.

In a move sure to spark outrage, the White House announced today that GM and Chrysler must cease participation in NASCAR at the end of the 2009 season if they hope to receive any additional financial aid from the government…

“Automakers used to operate on the principle of ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday,’ but the Auto Task Force’s research just doesn’t validate that as true,” said the statement from President Obama.

 

 

On a more serious note, this looks like an April Fool’s link at first glance, but it isn’t.  Malcom Stewart, the deputy solicitor general, was arguing before the Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act allows the government to forbid distribution of films and books that advocate for or against a political candidate.

A Clear Danger to Free Speech: Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart Argues For Banning of Books -

Just last week, the Obama administration argued before the Supreme Court that it has no principled constitutional problem with banning books.

The case before the court, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, involves a documentary-style film, Hillary: The Movie, that ran afoul of campaign-finance laws designed to censor so-called stealth ads as well as electioneering paid for by corporations or unions.

To be fair, the film does amount to partisan advocacy. It’s a scorching indictment of the former Democratic presidential front-runner, produced by an unapologetically conservative outfit. It’s as one-sided as a MoveOn.org-produced documentary about George W. Bush would be. But, some might wonder, should partisan advocacy ever be illegal in a democracy?

Several justices asked the deputy solicitor general, Malcolm Stewart, if there would be any constitutional reason why the ban on documentaries and ads couldn’t be extended to books carrying similar messages. Stewart, speaking for a president who once taught constitutional law, said Congress can ban books “if the book contained the functional equivalent of express advocacy” for a candidate and was supported, even slightly, with corporate money. Such advocacy, Stewart conceded, could amount to negatively mentioning a politician just once in a 500-page book put out by a mainstream publisher.

Virtually every newspaper in America is owned by a corporation; does that mean they can’t endorse candidates anymore? To even ask such a question as if it were reasonable shows how close to the heart of our democracy the poison has reached.

 

This Little Light of Mine: An Earth Hour Post

The nut jobs who came up with “Earth Hour” got their symbolism perfect.  For Earth Hour, we are all supposed to turn our lights off and stop using electricity for one hour, starting at 8:30 p.m. tonight.  The UN is even turning its lights off, and they are expecting to save a whopping $102 in electricity costs.

Of course many people will switch to candles, which cause 10X to 100X the CO2 emissions that are caused by a similar amount of electric light.  (They are also romantic, and may contribute to “overpopulation,” but that is another story.)  So they won’t be in the dark at all, but they will feel good about themselves while they increase the air pollution in their homes.

But the symbolism is perfect.  The inventors of Earth Hour do not understand what humans are, and so their only solution to problems facing humanity is to plunge people into darkness.  Their only solutions to the world’s problems involve reducing what people consume, or even trying to reduce the number of people on the planet to consume resources.

What they don’t understand is that people, unlike animals, produce as well as consume.  So, I can use less than $1.00 of electricity to power my computer, and create something valuable, or analyze data to reduce thousands of dollars worth of waste in a manufacturing facility.

Or a person can use less than $1.00 of electricty to power woodworking tools that will turn a pile of wood into a dining room table. 

Electricity and other forms of energy are relatively cheap, and very useful, and people who choose to stay in the dark probably don’t understand how cheap and useful it is.

So, for earth hour and every hour, you should thank God that energy is so easy to get these days (for example, you don’t have to burn cow dung for fuel, or chop down a tree and wait months for the wood to dry), and use it freely for useful things.  Instead of living in the dark, like a mushroom, let these African children set you straight:

AFRICAN CHILDREN’S CHOIR – THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE

My Wild Neighborhood

A few years ago, we moved from a house on a city block, to a house in a cul-de-sac that borders a woods.  The difference in wildlife is amazing:  for example, my kids counted something like 46 species of birds that have landed in our yard.  That includes the flock of wild turkeys that sometimes walk through the neighbor’s yard.  They must know about the firearms ban in the city.

Unfortunately, some of the mammals are acting like they own the place.

At supper time, we often see a herd of deer moving through our neighbor’s yard.  One night, the deer were on the neighbor’s driveway, as he drove his SUV into his garage.  You would think they would be spooked and run away, but instead they walked off at the speed of a teenage jaywalker who wears his pants hanging halfway down.

I have also seen deer tracks in my FRONT yard, less than 10 feet from my mailbox.  Don’t they understand what it means to be a “wild” animal? 

I am used to seeing raccoons and the occasional skunk at night, but this morning, I saw the fattest raccoon in the world walking tward my garbage can in broad daylight.  I snuck out on my deck, hoping to catch him in the act of eating my garbage.  I threw something at my tipped-over garbage can, thinking that if he was inside, the noise would scare him off and keep him away for a day or two, until temptation was too strong again.

But no, he ambled off at about the speed of a PENNDOT worker in July.  He was probably going to visit his lawyer, to sue me for disturbing his digestion.

If these creatures get any less afraid of humans, they’ll come into my house, log on to my computer, and start reading my blog.

Since nothing else seems to work, here is a message for all of you large non-human warm-blooded creatures who trespass on my property:

For the deer:  We can eat you!  And the economy is bad enough that you are looking tastier all the time! 

For the raccoons:  If you eat my garbage and I decide you are too gross to eat, my son can play Davy Crockett with your hide!

For the turkeys:  We can stuff you, eat you, and use your tailfeathers as writing implements!