ARTS & FARCES internet

Politics are a lot like trains. The Democrat and Republican trains are pulled by sleek and powerful engines fueled by political action committee (PAC) money. In the dark of night about 20 years ago the Democrat train hitched to the rear of the Republican train. Now there’s just the Republicrat train with the Republican engine pulling and the Democrat engine pushing the cars down the track.

Just behind the Republicrat engine at the head of the train is the club car. It’s hard to miss with all of its polished stainless steel, chrome, and glass. There’s a lot of smoke, but not much fire in this car, as it’s the domicile of the old white men of both former parties, the domain of the corporate aristocracy—the wealthiest 10% that own 90% of the country’s wealth.

Behind the club car are a lot of coach-class sleeper cars. This is the middle 60% that believe that if they work harder or catch a break they can take their rightful place in the club car. Of course, the dirty secret is that this never happens; those already in the club car have no intention of letting any of the riff-raff—that is to say, anyone not already among them—though the door. About half of these sleeper cars are comfortably well appointed and about half are tattered and worn around the edges but comfortable nonetheless.

Behind the sleeper cars are the boxcars holding the bottom 25% of the populace. Spartan and bare, these cars are crowded. Because the side doors of these cars are wide open, quite a few passengers are lost as the train pitches from side to side. Smarter boxcar passengers have learned to lean to the left as the train usually lurches to the right.

At the end of the train is the caboose containing a 5% amalgamation of what remains of the free-thinking left. While the rest of the formerly Democratic train was listing hard to the right, the caboose was seeking to balance the whole with a concerted push to the left. This against-the-grain behavior was not appreciated by those in the club car. It didn’t really have enough of an impact to affect the smoothness of their ride, but it did manage to slosh a little of the fine wine in the club-car’s hand-cut crystal goblets that were filled to overflowing.

Alwin Hawkins is a critical care nurse and therefore is on the front lines of the health care battles. He offered some interesting pushback on the article I published recently on the proposed Medicare bill that would increase the level of payment to dialysis centers at the expense of home dialysis.

I didn’t suggest that the reimbursement rates should be cut, just that they shouldn’t be increased, and not at the expense of home dialysis. The corporation that owns the dialysis center I use is looking at an annualized profit (based on Q1 financials) on the order of US$160 million this year.

Here’s how I would support an increased reimbursement rate (subject to change after the Philadelphia subpoena of DaVita records runs its course):

“ This is War” by Devin Leonard in next week’s Fortune has got to be the most ill-informed and clueless piece yet about the ensuing professional wrestling match between the entertainment and technology industries. Here’s a clue for you dumbass capital “J” journalists: the war is against us, the customers. It’s not against Ted Waitt’s talking cow, Apple’s iPod, or the larger technology industry. The technology industry wants to lock up digital bits just as badly as the entertainment industry. The wrestling match is completely staged, scripted, and just for show.

Remember the first law of video production: it doesn’t have to be real, it just has to look real.

You gotta know that the technology giants are grinning from ear to ear when Chief Mousekateer Michael Eisner tells the U.S. Senate that the entertainment industry is “dealing with an industry where an unspoken strategy is that the killer app is piracy.”

The administration of Bush the Lesser appears to be ceding the regulatory process to the industries regulated. So says Elizabeth Kolbert in a New Yorker piece entitled “Bad Environments.” And she offers substantial evidence.

In early May, the trade association representing the mining industry convinced Junior to allow the waste produced during the removal of mountaintops to mine coal to be dumped anywhere, including surrounding bodies of water. The change, according to Kolbert, is “the most significant rollback of the Clean Water Act since it was passed in 1972, and, according to a federal court decision issued in West Virginia last week, is of dubious legality.”

And then there’s the case of Junior’s adult supervision, Vice President Dick Cheney, doing a fast two-step sashay to avoid disclosing records of his energy task force. The records were finally turned over a week before the mining rules were finalized after the Natural Resources Defense Council and Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the administration. Kolbert illustrates why Cheney mightily resisted the disclosure: “‘If you were King, or Il Duce, what would you include in a national energy policy, especially with respect to natural gas issues?’ one email sent by a staff member to a natural-gas-industry lobbyist asked.”

The laundry list of environmental plunder certainly doesn’t stop there and Kolbert does an excellent job of deconstructing the Bush administration’s policies with regard to the environment.

Highly recommended.

As noted back in February 2002, the Creative Commons aims to tag digitized intellectual property with a machine-readable license.

At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference today, the Creative Commons principals announced the non-profit’s implementation plans and the availability of its website.

While the software necessary for authors to tag their work and users to search for specific license tags won’t be available until this fall at the earliest, Creative Commons has released technology overviews for both systems:

• Creative Commons contributor application
• Creative Commons search application

This is a major step in the right direction of increasing the availability of works both in the public domain and with limited license restrictions.