SuBBrilliant Blog

Lou Dobbs has immigration as his big issue. This disappoints me. Lou claims to be a vigorous independent who gives nobody a free pass. I believe he is an independent. And I love the idea of an aggressive independent who can give the lie to O’Reilly AND Keith Olberman. But immigration as the rallying issue is a disappointment for me. The issue I feel needs most attention from independents is election reform.

In the United States we don’t directly elect our President. And even if we did, the candidates for president are selected by a legally protected primary system that assures that only two parties have a candidate with a real chance of winning the presidency. Granted a Ross Perot or Ralph Nader can have an effect from time to time, but even those stalwarts have little real chance of winning.

We need to eliminate the electoral college and eliminate legal protections for the two-party system. We also need to eliminate the practive of gerrymandering and develop a fair process of redistricting. Granted prejudice will always exist in drawing these borders but we can do so much better than we do now.

Beyond that I believe proportional representation deserves exploration.

You can learn a lot more about real election reform at Fairvote.org.

I was discussing with bigepaz this morning how J. J. Abrams would incorporate Leonard Nimoy into the upcoming Star Trek movie. It occured to us that he could choose to pick up the story of Spock’s resistance fight on Romulus. Perhaps even dealing with Spock having the same ailment that affected his father.

So wouldn’t it be an obvious opportunity for a TNG crossover? Abrams is good at keeping secrets and springing surprises. It would be a very smart buzz-generating and just generally cool move to have a double-crossover. But who should/would/could it be?

I’m a little behind on this one, but at the end of 2007 President Bush signed into law the Open Government Act of 2007.

According to the EFF this law will make it easier to access government information in ways like:

* Ensuring that freelance and alternative journalists are considered representatives of the media, making it less expensive for them to get information from the government.
* Providing for attorney fees when a requester’s lawsuit prompts an agency to change its position on a request, even if a court doesn’t order it.

* Creating a tracking system to help make sure that FOIA requests don’t become hopelessly tangled in red tape.
* Establishing the Office of Government Information Services, which will be tasked with helping to resolve conflicts between agencies and requesters.
* Penalizing agencies that don’t process FOIA requests on time.
* Making it clear that requesters can get government records maintained by private contractors, not just the agencies themselves.
* Imposing greater reporting requirements to let Congress and the public know more about how agencies handle requests.

Read the full release from the EFF here and the text of the legislation is available here.

In honor of the idea that copyright should expire after 14 years, I’ve dedicated the 1993 articles of the SuBBrilliant News archive into the public domain.

The 1993 issues were printed and distributed on paper, originally in Champaign-Urbana and then after July in Austin, Texas. They were also sold as a collection in the late 1990s at the FringeWare Book Store in Austin. (Ahh FringeWare. How I miss you.)

Anyway, 14 years is what the old copyright law used to be and what one study says the optimal term of copyright should be. In support of that notion, I’m making the text of the original 1993 issues public domain. I’d make the images PD too, except they were all clip artIstole, so I probably don’t have the right to do so.

You can find the archive here.

I probably won’t make 1994 Public Domain, as I can’t freakin’ find any of those stories. They were written up in email and distributed from my CCSI email account. That account is long gone as are the stories sent through it.But if you do find any of them, (One was about Santa and Jerry Garcia as I recall) by all means consider them yours to do with what you will. Just drop me a line if you would. I’d love to see them again.