karmajunkie

Background: Texas has a law guaranteeing admission to any public university for any high school student who graduates in the top 10% of their class.  Among other things, this has the effect of requiring UT-Austin to admit an incoming class every year composed almost entirely of freshmen from Texas with a high GPA, leaving  little discretion for admissions counselors to admit those with more colorful transcripts that include interesting experiences or more well-rounded students who don’t fall in that bracket.  Another problem is that at some schools, the bottom of that bracket may be a 3.9, while at others it may be as low as 2.8, which means that many of the students, despite being in the top of their high school class, may still be ill-equipped to handle college life on their own, eventually flunking out.  UT-Austin has been trying to get a law passed for three sessions now to cap the percentage of the incoming class admitted under this rule to 50%; in the last session a law was blocked that would have capped it at 60% because the House version capped it at 66.67%, and the group of reps who have been blocking the change would not compromise on that percentage discrepency.  Below is my letter to Elliot Naishtat, my district’s Representative, on why I will be both campaigning and voting against him in the next election.

Dear Representative Naishtat:

The top 10% law was an ill-conceived plan with the best of intentions but the poorest of implementations. For two sessions of the Texas Legislature now you have voted against amending the law to cap the number of admissions under this rule, or finding another method to otherwise alleviate the strain on universities, particular UT-Austin.

I applied to UT several times over the course of a year and a half as a transfer student, with almost a 3.85 GPA from Austin Community College.  This would have been enough to get me into any other public university in the state and even the country.  Not so with UT, however; because of the burden of mandatory admission of thousands of high school graduates, many of whom go on to drop out of UT after failing to make a smooth transition to college, I was denied admission four times.  After finally meeting with an advisor who told me that while my transcript was excellent I would likely never be admitted because of coursework completed 7 years earlier that brought my cumulative GPA below a 3.5, I made the difficult decision to move away from Austin to San Antonio to complete my coursework and degree there.  I love Austin dearly.  In the last five years it has become the home I never had, and moving away from here was a painful experience, and one I would not have had to face but for the 10% law.

I write you now not to berate you further for supporting this wrong-headed law that makes little account for market forces or considers the disproportionate popularity of the UT-Austin campus.  I am not writing to berate you and other legislators for failing to ensure that EVERY UT school has the same academic and research prowess of UT-Austin.  I am writing to you to make sure that you know that when I vote against you in the next election, it is because of this reason and this reason alone: you failed to support a necessary and critical amendment to this law during this session. 

Every year that goes by without an amendment to the law, education at UT suffers.  When faced with the opportunity to fix the situation, you refused to do so.  In the last election, I maintained residency in your district because I was angry enough to vote against you for the immediate past session.  On election day, however, I could not stomach the thought of voting for a republican.  In the next election, however, I will not make that mistake again.  You have shown me that giving you the benefit of the doubt was a error in judgment.  In the next election I will do everything in my power to fix that error.  I am a lifelong Democrat, and have only on the rarest of occasions voted for a Republican.  In 2008 I will add one more time to that list, and will up the ante by campaigning for whatever candidate is in the race against you.

You have done your district and all of Texas a great disservice, and I urge you to cede your seat to a Democrat in the primary so that we are not forced to choose between you and a Republican in the next election.

Sincerely,
full name redacted

The unholy alliance between the ecofreaks, the health nuts, and the values voters is at it again: now they’re aiming to expand Austin’s ridiculous assault on the rights of property owners statewide with an indoor smoking ban encompassing all businesses throughout the state.

Below is the letter I sent to my Rep (Elliot Naishtat) who’s already on my shitlist for his support of the “Top 10%” law that guarantees any high school student graduating in the top 10% of his class admission to any public school in Texas–ignoring the fact that the only public schools anyone really wants to go to in the state are UT-Austin and TAMU. I voted for him against my better judgement last time because I couldn’t stomach the thought of voting for a Republican, but if he votes for HB 9 then I’ll just have to live with the bile in the back of my throat in the next election.

My letter:

Dear Representative Naishtat,
I am writing to you to ask you to pledge to vote no on HB 9, which is a bill to ban smoking indoors at businesses statewide. I do not represent any special interest, nor am I a smoker.

This bill tramples on the rights of property owners both large and small, replacing their judgements and desires about what is permissible on their property with that of the so-called nanny state. It ignores the fact that employees of establishments have a choice in their employment, just as patrons have a right to choose where they take their business. It also ignores the influence of market forces: if there is truly a sizeable subset of individuals who do not wish to be exposed to cigarette smoke, then businesses will cater to that population. As an example, I cite for you the Dog and Duck Pub in Austin, which has had an indoor smoking ban for several years preceding Austin’s own smoking ban (a ban which was itself a similarly egregious assault on the rights of property owners.) Its business thrived precisely because it served a segment of the market which was underserved by other bars in the area.

I urge you to vote against this bill.

Sincerely,
kbg
Austin, TX

A friend and I have been carrying on
an exchange the last few days regarding the recent passage of an
ordinance banning plastic grocery bags in San Francisco.  With her
permission I’m posting the discussion here for more open debate.

Her first post:

As you may or may not know, San Francisco has become the first U.S. city to BAN PLASTIC GROCERY BAGS!! Here’s the news story:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/27/environment.baggs.reut/index.html

Let’s make Austin the second! What do you think?

My Reply:

I think if they did that i’d be out of poop bags for my dog! the
solution isn’t for the government to tell everyone what they have to
do, its for people to tell companies what they’re willing to take. if
you want me to stop using plastic, you have to make an argument that
convinces me to do so. I’m not personally convinced that cutting down
trees to bag my groceries is any more ecologically friendly than
plastic, especially when I have a secondary use for plastic bags that I
don’t have for paper. i have the same bitch about the smoking ban–its
antithetical to a free state to tell private property owners what they
can and can’t do on their own property.

presuming that the argument that plastic is bad holds water (a
point yet to be proven) a better strategy would be to make it less
desirable for use, or alternatively and probably more attractive an
option, make it less deleterious. for example, requiring a five-cent
tax on plastic bags would be one way to make paper more attractive,
though I’m of the opinion that a tax is almost as bad as an outright
ban. perhaps a better solution would be to charge for them (maybe a
dime a bag) and offer a rebate for returning them the way glass bottles
used to be handled (say, 8 cents/bag). that way there’s both an
incentive to keep them out of the landfills and for companies to
participate voluntarily. a third path would be to convince companies to
make plastic bags out of biodegradable components that obviates the
ecological argument against them.

at the end of the day though, it should still be my choice as a
consumer, and my grocer’s choice as a private enterprise, whether to
use or offer plastic. plastic bags aren’t exactly toxic waste, and
they’re made chiefly of byproducts of petroleum refining that would
otherwise have to be disposed of, creating ecological problems
someplace else. So the argument that my choice affects everyone
regardless of their own choices doesn’t really hold water.

And her response:

Thanks for the thoughts. I am all for a ban on plastic bags but I
definitely see your point. I am not sure that paper would be the
solution either but the fact is that plastic bags are the cause of more
trash in Texas rivers, lakes, and shorelines than ANY other form of
waste, they use petroleum, a resource that is becoming more and more
valuable each day, and, contrary to popular belief, with the exception
of a very inefficient and expensive process, plastic bags CANNOT be
recycled and are not recycled, even in the places where the option is
available. I think that in a city of such progressive and creative
people such as Austin, we can think of better ways to take home our
groceries. I am not sure that the private sector would be able to carry
such an idea (excuse the pun) by charging for bags, etc. Most places
already give you a discount for bringing your own bags but it is such a
negligible amount and so unadvertised that it’s not worth it to the
average consumer. The government should represent the priorities of the
people and in my opinion the environment should be a top priority for
Austin.

I haven’t responded to this last yet.

Yes, its time for the return of everyone’s favorite (well, my favorite, anyway) blog series, Things that Chap My Ass.  This time its the stock managers at HEB who have managed to raise my hackles enough that I came straight to my trusty computer, fighting years of training in procrastination and laziness.

Spinach pizza.  That’s all I wanted.  Every time I go to the store, I’ve got one thing on my mind when I walk through those sliding glass doors wheeling my oversized buggy through the undersized aisles (there’s another article coming on the cart-chasers who must take special delight in leaving the tiny carts in the furthest reaches of the parking lot.)  California Pizza Kitchen’s Spinach & Feta frozen pizza.  My mouth waters just thinking of it.  Just the right balance of cheese and spinach, and with a touch of garlic salt it transforms from an object of sustenance to one of sheer delight.  Ahhh.  The memories…  And here I really must stress “memories” because I have once again come home empty handed from the pizza aisle.

There really is a special place in hell for these guys.  Were this something that I ran into once in a blue moon, I’d quite fairly assume that I had the misfortune of shopping the night before stocking.  Were it to happen reliably at a single store, I could again fairly assume that the stock manager at that store was incompentent, but the organization as a whole was free of this plague of ineptitude.  But now I am forced to recognize the ugly truth.  HEB actually trains their stock managers to piss me off.  That’s right.  H.E. Butts is part of the vast conspiracy of People Who Piss Me Off Daily.

In three different cities at literally dozens of stores, I have found HEB to be out of exactly one kind of pizza, and you don’t need three guesses to figure out hich.  A normal person might take notice of this.  Week after week, by the night after stocking, the four or five spinach pizzas they’ve ordered are completely sold out.  Meanwhile, the two dozen garlic barbeque chicken pizzas that are gathering frost in the freezer are gamely putting their best face forward in order to get someone–anyone!–to take them home, to let them fulfill their purpose in life.  Alas, poor garlic barbeque chicken pizza, you cannot escape the truth: nobody likes you.  Its really not your fault.  Chicken doesn’t really belong on pizza in the first place.  Much like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie before you, you are the product of a drunken night of experimentation in self-loathing.  But don’t feel badly–Amy’s Barbeque Vegan Pizza is right there keeping you company.  Maybe you’ll even grow to love each other one day, thus proving that there is indeed someone for everyone out there, giving millions of awkward twenty-something virgins hope.  But you’re going to have to do it in someone else’s kitchen.

Where, I ask you, is this invisible hand of the free market guiding stores to carry enough of the supply?  I submit to you that Adam Smith, while visionary at the time of his writing, was not quite prescient enough to see the effects of the spinach-feta pizza on the free market.  Or maybe he just couldn’t foresee the incompentent fucking assholes in charge of HEB’s pizza orders.

Update: Say what you will about the evils of Walmart, but those fuckers know how to keep my goddamned pizza on the shelf.

I was reading this article on a bill introduced by Jeff Wentworth (R-San Antonio, go figure) and which in turn linked to David Horowitz’s op-ed published last month in UT’s student newspaper, The Daily Texan. Aside from the usual neocon blather, this bit in particular jumped out at me from Horowitz’s editorial:

The stated mission of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies does
not propose a disinterested inquiry into the history and condition of
women or the nature of gender and its place in different societies.
Instead, its stated mission is “to advance knowledge and understanding
about … the role that gender plays in structuring society.”

The idea that gender structures society is an ideological claim, not a
program for scholarly investigation. This claim is the organizing
principle of gender feminism, a radical sect of the broader movement.
Not surprisingly, the reading lists for courses in the department are
almost exclusively drawn from radical feminist texts.

Pay careful attention to the highlighted line.  Not a program for scholarly investigation. 

I’ll grant you, I spent more time in school than most college students.  Chalk it up to a lack of direction in my youth.  But one thing I learned through attending classes at four different schools over a decade is that there’s no such thing as an idea not worthy of scholarly investigation.  Claiming otherwise betrays an agenda to squelch  academic freedom, which is  one of Horowitz’s self-professed  causes.  The punchline to his editorial:

What is the justification for deceiving students that they are getting
an education, when in reality what they are getting is a political
indoctrination?

And how can any self-respecting liberal countenance academic programs
in which there is only one side presented to the most controversial
issues of the day?

For a noted, if asinine, author to miss the irony here would be mildly humorous if not for the fact that its so completely disingenuous.   Horowitz is actually trying to claim that by silencing discussion of anything falling under his “ideology” banner that academic freedom is preserved, and that silencing other views that discussion will somehow become less “one-sided”.  Its honestly so absurd that I have trouble forming a response–I’m not really sure where to begin.  The answer to his (rhetorical, I’m sure) question is that no self-respecting institution does so, but making a case in academia isn’t like making one in the media: you have to have actual arguments and evidence, not merely the appearance of such.  This, I’m sure, is the true source of the neocon’s frustration with “liberal” academics.  You can’t get away with throwing out inflammatory rhetoric that’s short on logic and proof and expect the world to beat a path to your door.  That only holds water in the White House.

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I just got back from one of the more exciting events I’ve been to in awhile–Barack Obama’s campaign rally here in austin.  Can’t really blog much about it at the moment, but I did take a ton of pictures, and some of them are up on flickr now.

Or at least, “the first (and probably only) snow days of 2007″.   I’d love to be a fly on the wall up in yankee territory right now.  Nothing makes us down South look like a bunch of pansies more than a quarter inch of snow on the ground.  So now, Texas not only gets to be the state that gave the world “The Decider” and Master of Strategery George Bush, but we’ve managed to demonstrate to the Terrorists that all you need to do to cripple America is bring a giant snowball machine with you.  Nuclear and biological threats–come on,  its so 2002.  Imagine though, if every man, woman, and child in America knew the Terrorists could, at any time and in any city in America, make it snow.  My Mississippi accent quavers just thinking about it.

So, determined not to let the Terrorists win, I went and took some pictures, so as to better study their nefarious tactics.  You should do the same, immediately.  We’ve absolutely GOT to win the Global War On Terror™.

Now this is one sexy bitch:

Perhaps GM is on the verge of redeeming themselves after all.  After a couple of decades of emphasizing size and power over environmental responsibility and fuel efficiency, they seem to be doing an about-face.  The Volt concept car pictured above is a plugin hybrid with a pure electric drivetrain and a lithium-ion battery pack which is kept charged by a 3-cylinder engine.  The ability to plug in this car to the electrical grid allows it to approach a fuel efficiency of 200mpg when used for commutes of 40 miles or less total, at a cost of about a penny per mile–though whether that figure takes into account the electrical cost is something the article didn’t bring up.

Where do I sign up?

On another note, does anyone else remember when I actually used to write instead of post inane links to other people’s shit? blegh.

I want to paint a picture for you.  Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

There’s an incident in which tens of thousands of lives are lost.  There’s a secular, multinational coalition force tasked with keeping the peace in the aftermath.  There’s a religious extremist insurgency movement intent on conversion or destruction of all non-believers in their faith.  The insurgency stresses the power of prayer, of course, but when that fails, a bullet will do just as well.  The battle is waged on the streets in and around a major urban center, and any and all tactics are fair game for the insurgents.

Sound familiar?  Probably not as familiar as you think.

I’ve written about this before, but abc is running another article about a “faith-based” videogame in which Christians are given the divine imperative of converting or killing non-believers and Satanic forces after the Rapture has taken away believers.  The “Satanic forces” in the game are not, as one might expect, legions of demons and fallen angels intent on wreaking havoc, but a UN-style peacekeeping force called the Global Community Peacekeepers.  The “good guys” are the Tribulation Forces, a Christian militia that evangelizes New Yorkers (because we all know if Satan’s to be found in America, its going to be in THAT melting pot of cultural diversity and moral relativism that he will bathe in the blood of aborted babies, dontcha know?) and gathers (steals?) resources to fight the GCP forces.  Do I need to draw the lines of this picture any more clearly for you?

This game is disgusting.  This is intolerance and bigotry, family-style.  From the article:

“It’s essentially faith-based killing,” [Rev. Tim] Simpson
says, arguing that the game twists the Gospel. “The religious right
envisions sitting down by the fireside — Mom and Dad, Johnny and Susie
— killing all their non-Christian opponents inside the game and
imagining this is what, in fact, God wants.”

If there’s a difference there between the action of this game (using the term loosely–I would call it “interactive propaganda”, or perhaps “interactive indoctrination” has a better ring to it) and the war being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t see it.  Somehow one is evil and the other is good, but the distinguishing characteristic seems merely to be which book you pray with.

Bottom line: anyone who endorses this game gives credence to al’Qaeda.  Endorse this game, and you’re no better than al’Qaeda with a cross.

This site lets you post pictures of those rebels at heart who never seemed to be able to color within the lines–or park there, or park there for that matter. 

Check out YouParkLikeAnAsshole.com