:: blame the extended gestation.... ::

:: Friday, February 27, 2004 ::

BW Online | February 13, 2004 | The Biggest Bomb in Bush's Budget:

"It seems that no one outside the Bush Administration has anything good to say about the federal budget -- with good reason. The government's finances are a fiasco of mammoth proportions. Thanks to fiscal profligacy, more and more voices are heard arguing that America is rushing headlong into severe economic decline."

It may be a bad sign for the Bush administration if the business press gets them in their sites

:: Jim Nichols 2/27/2004 11:36:00 PM [+] ::
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Greater Sacramento added jobs in 2003 - 2004-02-27 - Sacramento Business Journal:

"It was the worst year since 1993 for job growth in the region, but Sacramento, Placer and El Dorado counties saw job growth of 1.2 percent for the year, according to revised figures issued Friday. "

:: Jim Nichols 2/27/2004 11:32:00 PM [+] ::
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Sacramentans spend 11 days a year getting to work - 2004-02-26 - Sacramento Business Journal:

"Sacramento commuters spend an average of 21.9 minutes getting to work each day, tying them with Portland, Ore., for the 40th longest commute among America's largest cities. "

I'm not sure why public transportation isn't higher on the priority list of more people. If you make it cheaper and faster for individuals to get to work, create tax incentives for using public trans. when going to and from work; you save people both time and money.

:: Jim Nichols 2/26/2004 05:32:00 PM [+] ::
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Study: California job loss could accelerate swiftly - 2004-02-26 - Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal:

"Nearly 40 percent of companies in California are planning to move jobs out of state according to a new study paid for by the California Business Roundtable, a pro-business lobby in Sacramento. "

:: Jim Nichols 2/26/2004 05:29:00 PM [+] ::
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Why we aren't really who we say we are...
The Kerry Cascade - How a '50s psychology experiment can explain the Democratic primaries. By Duncan Watts:

" We think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, each driven by own internal abilities and desires and therefore solely responsible for our own behavior, particularly when it comes to voting. No voter ever admits—even to herself—that she chose Kerry because he won New Hampshire. To acknowledge that our decisions might not, in fact, be ours at all, but instead might be a reflection of what we think everyone else thinks diminishes our sense of individuality. That's why we prefer to invoke other explanations for why we did whatever we did—Kerry supporters might talk about his 'electability,' but they believe the support for him has some other basis, such as foreign-policy experience, than just following the crowd. Even Asch's unwitting subjects—clear victims of manipulation—when interviewed afterwards gave other rationalizations for their decisions, some of them succumbing to what Asch called a 'distortion of perception' in which they perceived the majority as being correct. "

:: Jim Nichols 2/25/2004 08:11:00 PM [+] ::
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Study: Loss of manufacturing jobs worse than thought - 2004-02-25 - Sacramento Business Journal:

"More than 261,000 manufacturing jobs and $98 billion in gross sales of California-manufactured products disappeared in the three-year period between 1999 and 2002.
The loss in manufacturing jobs is particularly damaging because manufacturing jobs pay exceptionally well -- almost 50 percent more than the average of all California jobs.
For decades, manufacturing jobs in California have been the prized 'one-way ticket' to the middle class for those on lower rungs of the job ladder (in particular the Latino worker).
Manufacturing jobs have a pronounced 'multiplier effect' -- they create jobs in other sectors of the economy, at a rate at least twice that of the trickle-down from the retail industry.
California legislation in recent years has had a noticeable anti-manufacturing bias.
State and local land-use policies make the development of manufacturing facilities difficult.
'As a result of all these factors, doing business in California is more difficult and more expensive than in neighboring states. California is drifting down the path of becoming a region of smaller storefront companies. Many of the large or mature companies are taking all or a portion of their operation out of town,' Kosmont says. 'We are losing high-pay manufacturing jobs and replacing them with lower-paying or minimum-wage jobs.' "

:: Jim Nichols 2/25/2004 07:49:00 PM [+] ::
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Religion on the brain
I'm reading a book right now by Pascal Boyer called Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.


I came across something interesting; he's talking about the question of whether religion is innate in the genes. He says the question is meaningless; he uses the example of catching colds, and remembering melodies. Basically it runs like this--human beings can catch colds, we have respiratory organs that provide a site for tons of pathogens including those of the commons cold; we remember tunes cause part of our brain can store series of sounds and easily remember relative pitch and duration. But there are no common colds in our genes and no melodies in our genes either.

What is in the genes is a tremendously complex set of chemical recipes for the building of normal organisms with respiratory organs and a complex set of connections between brain areas. Normal genes in a normal milieu will give you a pair of lungs and an organized auditory cortex, and with these the dispositions to acquire both colds and tunes.

So having a normal brain means you have the ability to aquire religion.

:: Jim Nichols 2/24/2004 07:53:00 PM [+] ::
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Scratch the idea of Blogging on Hegel and Schopenhauer. I am not very confident in my interpretations of them, hell i'm not very confident of anything I do in philosophy. Poltics, sure; culture, great; but philsophy throws me for a loss. I have to read a whole lot more before I start to even make a dent in the quality of textual analysis I do.

:: Jim Nichols 2/24/2004 07:35:00 PM [+] ::
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I'm sorry he lost his job overseas but...

"Its not easy to be retrained at 54"

What and its easy to be trained at 23?
What about the person who needs that job in India?
The only problem with outsourcing jobs is that we do not have a strong social safety net to retrain and upgrade skills of workers while they are waiting to find a new job.

:: Jim Nichols 2/24/2004 03:50:00 PM [+] ::
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The Economic and Social Case for Homosexual Marriage:

"A review of the research published in the American Sociological Review indicates clearly that gay parents raise children who are every bit as capable on a wide range of measures as children brought up by straight parents. Indeed, because for most gay parents having a child requires overcoming numerous obstacles, there is evidence to suggest that gay parents are better caregivers.

On the other hand, it is certainly the case that, on average, children with two parents do better in life than children that grow up in single-parent households. Children of single parents, for instance, are 1.7 times more likely to drop out of high school. But the reason has nothing to do with whether those children are adequately prepared to live in a society made of men and women. The ?empirically verified common wisdom,? to borrow a phrase from Kolasinski, is that it has everything to do with growing up in loving and financially stable homes regardless of whether those homes are headed by straight or gay parents. "

:: Jim Nichols 2/24/2004 03:28:00 PM [+] ::
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California Insider - Lockyer recall planned:

"Ted Costa and Howard Kaloogian, two men who helped get the Davis Recall off the ground before the professionals took over, are threatening this morning to recall Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer if he doesn't move quickly to stop the gay marriages ongoing in San Francisco."

:: Jim Nichols 2/24/2004 02:49:00 PM [+] ::
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Chomsky on NYT's op-ed page
Op-Ed Contributor: A Wall as a Weapon:

"It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else. Careful scrutiny is always in order. Israel's so-called security fence, which is the subject of hearings starting today at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, is a case in point."

:: Jim Nichols 2/23/2004 05:56:00 PM [+] ::
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"Reason is the law of the world and...therefore, in world history, things have come about rationally" --Hegel

Hegel looks outward towards Man as a social being--the outer life of man, he uses world history to illustrate Reason. Schopenhauer looks within man and forms his thesis by "following facts connected with the inner life of man":

"The will, as the thing in itself, constitues the inner, true, and indestrucible nature of man..."

At least in Hegel's Reason in History and Schopenhauer's The World as will and Idea we have two different starting points... Hegel is looking at the rationality of the world and Schopenhauer is looking at the rationalilty of man's nature.

:: Jim Nichols 2/23/2004 03:42:00 PM [+] ::
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19th cent. Philosophy

I have a 1500 word essay due, on the following topic, in my class:

Hegel declared that “Reason is the law of the world” (p. 62), while Schopenhauer maintained that “the intellect is a mere accident of our being” (p. 100). Explain what was meant by each of these philosophers, and whether and to what extent their views are in conflict. Show what arguments (if any) the two used to arrive at these two apparently opposite conclusions.

I'm having a whole lot of trouble getting started because I see a lot of similarities in Hegel's Reason and Shcopenhauer's Will. Even though I believe they would each argue the other is nuts...

I think i'm going to try something new and blog on it for a while to see if it leads me any where. If anyone has any thoughts (other than the fact that i'm off my gord) please email me... its up at the top but here it is again just for show: JimN4@yahoo.com

:: Jim Nichols 2/23/2004 03:38:00 PM [+] ::
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Nader 2004

Here's my take on a Nader 2004 campaign. I'll call it the Kucinich factor. I assume most people who voted for Nader tend to be idealistic AND intelligent. (Thats my key assumption... if untrue all bets are off) I think that having one more person attacking Bush from the left is a good thing. I think sticking Kerry next to Nader makes Kerry seem centrist; you can't argue Kerry's a Mass. Liberal when Naders railing on and on about Universal Health Care. I don't think Nader will draw a large vote, I truly believe most his former voters and allies want Bush out more than they dislike Kerry. I'm glad Nader's in, I want to hear him rail against all the hobgoblins he rails against--someone needs to be talking about it; but I'm certainly not going to vote for him.

:: Jim Nichols 2/22/2004 05:08:00 PM [+] ::
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'Breathalyzer in every car' bill passes house:

"Some state lawmakers are convinced they have the answer to solve the D.W.I. epidemic and want to require everyone on the road to take a breathalyzer test before they can start the engine of any vehicle."

I wouldn't have a real problem with this...

:: Jim Nichols 2/22/2004 04:32:00 PM [+] ::
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CBC.ca - Hot Type - Season 2003-2004: "Episode Overview

Author: Noam Chomsky
Book Title: 'Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance'
Original Broadcast Date: December 9, 2003

Hot Type with Evan Solomon in conversation with Noam Chomsky."

:: Jim Nichols 2/22/2004 03:37:00 PM [+] ::
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