This I Believe

I was reading another of NPR's "This I Believe" series, this time of a charity worker's opinions regarding the naming conventions for her baby that you can read here.

The naming process she and her husband decided upon was a listing of the traits they found most important. Through this, they would

In deciding on the first two traits, strangely enough, she and I were completely in tune. For those of you who don't want to bother reading the article, those traits, in that order, were "honesty" and "charity".

For my third, I decided to settle on "industrious/innovative". Something that I am certainly not, but I value because those traits can lead one to want to better things, that end up not being just for oneself, but for everyone around.

For their third trait, however, they had decided upon the ability to laugh at oneself. I heartily recommend you read the last paragraph in that article to see why.

And I completely agreed.

A Petroleum Conundrum

As some of you were previously aware, BP has decided to raise the amount of toxins it directly dumps into Lake Michigan in order to increase the amount of Canadian heavy oil that it can process at its Indiana facility. I previously blogged about this dire problem of increasing industrial rampages against the environment, and the destruction of the public commons at my old Livejournal blog, emphasizing the fact that the public good means little for BP's drive towards greater profits of a failing industry whose time has come.

Already, efforts are under way to encourage BP to not continue this drive towards an increased, mercury-based, poisoning of one of the world's largest fresh water supplies. These have come from groups like the EPA proposing alternative methods to clean the region by BP, Mayor Daley of Chicago threatening a state lawsuit, Indiana Governor Daniels reviewing pollution laws, and even local action by Environment Illinois to increase public education about the matter.

Regarding the last link, however, it seems that there is still extreme resistance by the comfortable upper class to ignore problems going on around them, as evidenced by the quote: "One said in disgust, "We don't know what you're talking about.""

Thankfully, it seems that the overall purpose of this local demonstration, to educate and inform the public regarding the hazards that corporations and negligent state officials have in store for their lives, is an overall success:

"People in Naperville are eager to know more," she said. "Sometimes they're just stunted by fear."

First time I've actually had some element of faith in my suburban hometown.

The Fall of the Independent Candidate

South Carolina today has decided to move forward its primary voting day from February 2nd to January 19th, as this New York Times poliblog states. This is a direct competition to the "importance" of the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primaries, two voting days that display some of the wide variety of opinions towards the current frontrunners.

The problem with this is that it gives far too little time for those without the political clout or monetary resources to spread their message to the mainstream. If we, as a political party, are choosing who will represent us without letting the smaller candidates (I'm looking at you, Joe Biden and Ron Paul) campaign as long as their larger brethren in order to actually be a known choice for primary voters, it only further cements control by the oligarchy of the rich and powerful.

The primary season has effectively been running since this January/February, and virtually earlier for the Democratic candidates whose names have been getting hyped over and over again, but really, few, if any of the voters hitting the polls at the beginning of 2008 have even started to pay attention, let alone get any news on the candidates outside of those favored by the MSM (Obama, Clinton, McCain, Guiliani, and perhaps Edwards). The debates have been few and far between among the candidates, taking us by surprise at best (YouTube debates) and flying completely under the radar at worst.

The change for South Carolina means that voters have a scant 5 months to dig up all the information they possibly can on these candidates, as well as for these candidates to publish the points they want these potential voters to discover.

Is this the type of schedule we want to give these small candidates; that they must be prepared to start running a full 21 months before the election even happens to even be heard of? Is this how we want our brightest and best candidates selected?

I'll be over with Biden and Paul's supporters, with the rest of the political blogging community that's been paying attention.

Reading List

I'm going to set myself up a book list of things I plan on reading, both for enjoyment and for educational interest.

I'd like to sort these by various topic:

Politics:

The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama

• From one who would like to support Obama, this book is about the difficulties of modern politics and the lack of cooperation between the polarized sides.
  

Social Issues

Medicare Meets Mistopheles, by David Hyman

• Satirical take on how Medicare has failed (as this book is published by the Cato Institute).
  
• I saw this book hyped on a cable show, can't forget which one now, but I found out he's actually one of the law professors here at U of I, and mentioned I'd been wanting to read the book for a while. Lo and behold, he loans me a copy as I'm finishing up some IT work for his computer!

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

• This book details the process of our food and where our food innately comes from.
  
• First found out about this book through the library webcomic, Unshelved, and due to my recent environmental tendencies, became intrigued. It's on my to-do.

Literature

The Poems of Sappho

• Sappho, an ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, wrote highly emotional poetry, dealing with her relationships and sexuality.
  
• I first encountered Sappho during my Classical Civilization course that emphasized Greek culture. One of her poems, fragment 52, enraptured me through her use of language to so effortlessly and succinctly capture the feelings of loneliness:

• The moon is set. And the Pleiades.

  It’s the middle of the night.

  Time passes.

  I sleep alone.

General Fiction

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

• Cyberpunk
  

Transition

So it seems only fitting that upon my changeover from the life of an undergraduate to that of a working "professional", that I have a similar change in my blog, moving away from the strangely and easily networked nature of Livejournal towards that of Blogger, especially given the events that have been occurring that have totally shown Six Apart's focus as a commercial venture.

Sponsored communities, invasion of freedom of literature and artistic creation, all of these are really treading on my nerves.

So in the interest of having a more mature and responsible blog, especially given the more discussion-worthy topics I had been doing recently in my Livejournal blog, I now reopen The Elevated City, and hope to make a blog worthy of its name.