More on Diebold’s Electronic Voting Machines

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I’ve written before about the dust-up over the proposed use of electronic voting machines here in Forsyth County, NC.  That dust-up led to the resignation of the longtime director of elections because the Board of Elections wouldn’t support her proposal to use the Diebold machines, and over time the Board of Elections has been proven correct in their negative assessment of the machines.

Ed Cone has a piece about the trouble election officials are having with the Diebold systems being used in the Maryland primaries.  Things are so bad that Maryland’s governor is calling for a return to paper ballots for the November elections.  David Allen, whose been on top of this issue for a long time, has some interesting comments himself.

This is VERY important stuff and we need to get it sorted out by November since this mid-term election has the potential to have the greatest impact on our country’s future as any mid-term election in a generation.  And we definitely need to have all this figured out before ’08. Is there any doubt that ’08 will be the most important presidential election in decades?

I’ve Gotta Disagree with Ken, or, Where’s the Whitey Dance Club?

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Last week the Winston-Salem Journal ran a piece about travel clubs for black people and when I saw it the first thing that popped into my head was, "I wonder what would happen if they did an article about a white people travel club?"  Well, I’m not the only person who thought this.  The managing editor at the paper has a blog and on it he shared an email he received from a reader and his reply email.  Here’s what they wrote:

Please, Please help me understand the reasoning of the recent article (9-15-06) on vacation camaraderie. How outraged would the public,specifically the afro-american community be if your paper advertised and promoted a travel club or ski club or WET(White Entertainment Television) ,etc. designed only for white folks! It is so discouraging to read articles about the afro-americans complaining about racism in the workplace and communities and amazingly there are very proud to organize these clubs and organizations designed strictly for their own ethnic group. If we are ever to move past this sensitive subject of racism let’s drop the promotions of these afore mentioned clubs and organizations!
Thanks for listening,

Dear XXX: Your email was forwarded to me. Thanks for writing. I’ve discussed your comments with several editors here, both black and white. These travel clubs that we wrote about exist for several reasons, even when it comes to vacations. Sometimes, black people feel more comfortable doing things—particularly things that white people don’t often identify with black people, such as skiing—in groups. And clubs etc. that we as the majority may feel are open to everybody don’t feel the same way to minorities. 

You’re right that there is no WET, but the reason BET exists is that network TV did a poor job of producing shows that catered to the tastes of black Americans. Minority groups in America—whether racial, ethnic or religious—have always found strength in their own. That’s something that is sometimes hard for people in the majority to understand, particularly in how it relates to the larger goal of building a society where people are judged by what’s inside rather than outside.

Again, thanks for writing and for reading the Journal.
Best,
Ken Otterbourg
Managing Editor

Well, I can only say that if the justification for people creating and joining a club based on race is "Sometimes, black people feel more comfortable doing things—particularly things that white people don’t often identify with black people, such as skiing—in groups. And clubs etc. that we as the majority may feel are open to everybody don’t feel the same way to minorities" then why can’t a white person just as easily say "I’m not comfortable being around any non-whites so let’s create our own Whitey Ski Club so we all feel secure?" After all, those clubs that are open to all and aren’t often identified with white people could very well make a white person uncomfortable.  "Whitey Dance Club" anyone? 

Honestly I don’t have an issue with any group of people deciding to create their own exclusive club, but I do have a problem with one group being able to do it without catching heat and the other group getting absolutely raked over the coals for doing the same thing. The issue is not that people would decide to create a group based on race, but rather that there is a double standard in our society that says it is okay for one race to do it but not another.  So what if white’s are a majority?  Does it mean that they have fewer rights to consort with whomever they want just because there’s more of them?  That idea is actually contradictory to the concept of equal rights and I just don’t agree with Ken’s, or by extension, the paper’s reasoning.

To me the issue truly is that there’s a double standard in terms of race in this country and that we actually hurt the cause of racial equality by allowing the double standard to continue.  I personally don’t want to belong to a "white" club of any kind, or a "black" club, or a "tall people only club", because by default I think those clubs are less interesting.  I’m attracted to groups that engage me in different conversations on a regular basis so I’m drawn to groups, as Ken says, "where people are judged by what’s inside rather than outside." 

That said, if our society and our media can accept and extol the virtues of a black or other minority travel club then it should be able to do the same for whites, and if they can’t accept the same for whites then they should accept it for none.  I refuse to believe that it is an enlightened society (or publication) that allows for such double standards to exist and I’m saddened that in the forty years (two generations!) since the civil rights movement we still have to have these discussions.

So Ken, and the folks at the Winston-Salem Journal, I have to say that your article did not forward  "the larger goal of building a society where people are judged by what’s inside rather than outside" rather it added one more detour on the road towards attaining that goal.  It’s just a damn shame.

World’s Greatest News Spoof or Creepiest News of the Day

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According to this story in the BBC there’s a small town in Cambodia with people who have been infected by a new parasite carried by mosquitos native to the area.  The mortality rate for those infected so far has been 100%, but the strange part of the story is that the parasite restarts the victims’ hearts and other organs for a couple of hours and the victims proceed to walk around in a zombie-like state and behave violently before the effect wears off.

According to the story the Cambodian government is studying the parasite, an action which US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has objected to and claimed that the Cambodians hold a great potential biological weapon.  You think?  (I’m wondering if the same parasite is indigenous to DC…might explain a lot of the goings-on at the White House).

This has all the earmarks of a spoof, but if it’s true I can honestly say that it’s one of the creepiest stories I’ve seen.  Ugh.

Is 500 Feet Enough?

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Lewisville’s (NC) public-safety committee has proposed expanding the distance from a building within which you can fire a gun from 300 feet to 500 feet.  Earlier in the year the committee had recommended expanding the distance to 1,000 feet, but the town council changed the distance to 500 and then sent the proposal back to the committee after receiving complaints from some citizens.  The committee held two public meetings and then settled on 500 feet as a good compromise.

I don’t know much about guns but 500 feet doesn’t seem like enough to me, especially when you consider that people can actually shoot closer to buildings if they have the owner’s permission.  That means that if you want to shoot off some rounds on a farm or in an open field you can do so even within 100 feet of a building if you have the owner’s permission.  That also means farmers who want to keep shooting pests and varmints on their own land can do so at will.  On the other hand 500 feet doesn’t seem like much of a buffer if you’ve got someone with bad aim and a hunting rifle popping off shots down the street from the backyard where your kids are playing.

Part of me thinks I might be getting a little too touchy here, and I do understand where the long-time residents who are used to hunting and shooting on their family farms are coming from (they don’t like this proposal), but on the other hand the town is only going to get more populated and I think we need to anticipate that eventuality with some common-sense regulations. Still, whichever way the town council votes on this issue won’t change the fact that this is a great place to live.

Ode to Mike

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Img_0510That handsome devil to the left is my oldest son Mike.  Until very recently he was my oldest son Michael, but he’s requested that we start calling him Mike so I’m giving it my best shot.  (News flash to Mike: your Mother will never stop calling you Michael so get used to it). 

Last Saturday Mike turned 14 and I’ve been struggling with that reality for almost an entire week.  It seems like just yesterday he was a precocious four year old giving his sister a hair cut that left her with a kind of bangs-mohawk.  You’d have to see it to understand.

Now he’s in 8th grade and is a good student, a great friend, a kind person, a gentle soul, and an absolute class clown.  He also manages to be a relatively benevolent older brother to his sister Erin and brother Justin. I couldn’t be prouder of the young man he’s become, and I’m looking forward to seeing him blossom in high school.

MichaelbandwStill I can’t believe he’s not the little guy in the sleeper you see on the left.  Part of me misses little Michael, but the rest of me loves meeting the new big Mike that seems to blossom more every day.

Happy 14th son.

Competition in Education

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The U.S. public education system sucks.  It’s a virtual monopoly that as John Stossel writes in this piece, is run pretty much the same way North Korea or Cuba run their school systems.  Stossel quotes Albert Shanker, once the head of the American Federation of Teachers, as saying, "It’s time to admit that the public education system operates like a
planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is
spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and
productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve.
It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."

What kills me is that we seem to think that throwing more money at the problem is the solution.  Well, one need only look at the D.C. public schools to see that money is not the solution.  D.C. spends $12,801 per student while the counties that comprise its suburbs in Virginia and Maryland spend between $9,374 (Prince William County, VA) and $16,464 (Arlington County, VA) respectively and yet easily out-perform the D.C. system.  D.C. does have a very high percentage of poor families which is without a doubt a factor, but they also have chronic management problems and since the vast majority of families can’t afford private schools they’re stuck with what they’ve got.

The frustrating part of this to me is that all of us pay for schools with our taxes and if we don’t like how our schools are performing we pretty much get told, "tough."  Even if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford private schools you’re essentially paying for your child’s education twice over (taxes + private school tuition) which is a rip-off.  The only real option is to make sure you live in a neighborhood with good schools, but that in effect is a form of economic segregation.

When we lived in Virginia our kids were in the Prince William County school system (lowest per-pupil spending in the DC metro area) and we made sure we lived in a neighborhood that had good schools.  The interesting thing to note is that our kids’ school was racially diverse, but economically we were all so uniform it was kind of weird.  Everyone lived in the same kind of house, drove the same kind of car, participated in the same activities and most of all were highly involved in the schools.  Most parent-teacher events were packed because both parents of most of the kids were there, and the kids did very well academically.

Just one school zone over, though, things got a little dicey.  More poverty, gangs, lots of school fights and below-par academics.  Same school system, same spending, but much lower performance. Unfortunately the parents didn’t have many options.  If they wanted their children to go to a different school they had to apply for a spot, and if they were lucky enough to get one they had to find a way to get their kids to and from school on their own.  Not a great option, especially if both parents were working, which in the D.C. area is the norm.

When we moved here to Forsyth County, NC we did a lot of research on the schools and moved to Lewisville because the elementary, middle and high schools that served our neighborhood were among the best the county had to offer.  What we didn’t know at the time was that if we decided that we didn’t like our kids’ schools we could pick other schools for them to go to and the county would provide busing.  The consequence of this is that the first week of school is very hectic as the school transportation system gets all the kinks worked out, and some kids do spend a great deal of time on the bus (my son’s best friend spends 1 1/2 hours on the bus each way), but the parents have options. It isn’t easy, but the school system makes it work.

Still, many people don’t want their kids to have to travel far to go to school, and many kids don’t want to leave their local schools because that’s where their friends are.  That’s why I’d rather see a system where some creative, hard working educators could come in and start a new school that offers options for those kids.  Maybe it would have a science and technology emphasis, or an emphasis on trades.  Whatever.  It would provide a viable alternative for the parents and they could choose where their tax dollars are spent (vouchers).  If the schools are good, they survive.  If they suck, they die.

Some people don’t like the idea of school vouchers for a variety of reasons, including the idea that many parochial (i.e. religious) private schools would end up getting public money, but from what I can see most of them (teachers unions, school administrators) are more afraid of losing their monopoly status and actually having to provide a superior service/product in a competitive market.  As we’ve seen in other businesses they do have something to worry about; when competition is introduced to a closed market the big losers are the former monopolies and the big winners are the customers and the entrepreneurs.  As a lifelong customer and entrepreneur you can guess which way I lean.

Why I Still Have My Palm VIIx

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Like most everyone else I’ve been thinking about where I was 9/11/01.  Like Esbee’s husband, a fellow DC-to-Winston migrant, I was working in downtown DC and after a long day I too made it home.  We lived about 30 miles south of DC and I worked about three blocks from the White House and at the time I was commuting in to the city  on a commuter bus that stopped at the Pentagon for its first stop.  That meant I was in the Pentagon parking lot an hour or two before it was hit, and I had no car to get home in.

That morning I originally intended to stay in my office until things calmed down, especially after looking out my window and seeing the gridlock on L Street, but our building management made us leave and I ended up on the street trying to figure out how to get home.  Unfortunately the last time I’d talked to my wife that morning I’d told her I was staying put and I couldn’t get another call out to her to let her know my plans had changed.

PalmVIIxI took the Metro to Union Station to see if the commuter train (VRE) was running since I was pretty sure the buses were out of commission, and it occured to me that I’d made a dumb move when I realized I was the only person on that particular Metro train.  Seems that everyone else had the sense to head away from targets like Capitol Hill.  They closed Union Station right as I arrived so I ended up on the lawn in front with a couple hundred other people trying to get calls through on our cell phones.  That’s when I remembered that I’d gotten a Palm VIIx as an early birthday gift and just a couple of days earlier I’d signed up for Palm’s email service ($9.99 a month).  So I fired it up and started emailing everyone I could think of to let them know I was okay, where I was and what I was planning to do.

After I got off the last email I started walking west, towards the bridges that crossed the Potomac to Rosslyn, VA, which is where my brother worked.  On the way I dropped down into the Metro stations to see if the trains were running and I was able to get on the Orange Line to Rosslyn.  On the Metro platform I ran into a friend and she told me that the towers had collapsed, which I hadn’t known.  Once in Rosslyn I found my brother’s building locked down, so I decided I’d try and walk to his house a few miles up the road.  Right then a car pulled up directly in front of me, standing in the middle of thousands of people, and the driver jumped out and offered a ride to anyone who needed to get to Woodbridge.  That was just a couple of miles from my house, so I jumped in along with an Army Major who’d walked over from the Pentagon (His office was hit, though he’d been in a meeting on the other side of the building.  He smelled very strongly of smoke and he was pretty much in shock).  While we were driving south I kept emailing from my Palm and eventually I did get one reply from my Mom who was just a little relieved to hear from me.

It took a couple of hours to get to Woodbridge and once there the driver dropped us off at the commuter lot at Potomac Mills mall.  The mall was shut down, but the Silver Diner across the street was open so I grabbed a table (I was one of maybe three customers) and the waiter sat down to talk while I was eating.

After my meal I checked my email and I had a reply from my buddy Ted. I emailed him back to see if I could get a lift home and he sent me a message back saying that his employee, Robert, would drop by and give me a ride on his way home.  Robert, who is now a good friend, also took the time to call my wife and let her know I was okay.  So at about 6 o’clock I was welcomed home with a big hug by my wife.

Now I keep that old Palm VIIx in my desk drawer as a reminder of that day and as an example of how fast technology is changing.  Heck, now my cell phone is a Pocket PC that can do email, take pictures and video, and I’m not sure what else and it’s smaller than my Palm was.  I’m not sure, however, if my email would get through in a scenario similar to 9/11 since my carrier (Verizon) is the same for both voice and data.  I hope I never find out.

One last thing I think is cool about my Palm.  It runs on two AAA batteries which means that even all these years later I can still use it if I want to.  I guarantee you that if I still have my Pocket PC in 2011 I will have lost the charger, and I won’t be able to find a replacement battery (or charger) and its only use will be as a paper weight.  I also don’t remember ever having to re-boot my Palm.  Of course if I’d had my Pocket PC in 2001 I’d have pictures uploaded to Flickr that I could point you to.  Life really is all about tradeoffs.

Hey, the Winston-Salem Journal made bookofjoe!

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I think this might be a sign of the times:  to me it’s a pretty big deal that a Winston-Salem Journal article about a K-9 mold investigating company in Winston-Salem was picked up by Charlottesville, VA blogger bookofjoe.  Why?  Because I can almost guarantee you that bookofjoe has a wider global audience than the Journal, if not more daily readers.

Who’d have thunk just two years ago that a guy working out of his house, by himself, could have a broader reach than a mainstream newspaper that’s part of a larger media company and has the requisite staff of reporters, editors, ad reps, etc.?  Kind of cool.