DC Made Me Liberal?

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McCain Van Reading up on media feedback to the current crop of US presidentiables, I note that the outraged response to McCain’s primary frontrunner status from the Coulter/Malkin/Limbaugh/O’Reilly set isn’t a reflection of McCain’s relative liberalness so much as it is a sign of the increasing marginalization of that particular brand of fiery right-wing, pro-war, anti-immigration, security-radical politics. McCain’s rise among Republican voters seems to reflect a shift back to something resembling moderate conservatism — and the fact that someone as right-wing as McCain represents “moderate” to conservatives is evidence of just how far towards the fringe the Republican mainstream has shifted through the course of the Bush administration.

MLK Day 2003 But my saying this also signifies to me my own personal political shift. In 2002 I would have described myself as a socially conservative, fence-sitting moderate. Five years of being surrounded by a disenfranchised urban population which went 90% for John Kerry in 2004 and has never voted Republican, and working with smokefree nonprofits actively opposed by free market think tanks in DC — combined with reading Breathed and Tomorrow and Trudeau while watching Iraq and the economy go the way they have — have had an effect. More and more over the last few years I find myself swinging left on issues like war, health care, environment, taxation, welfare, net neutrality, civil unions, and other political wedge issues.

Devil Bush Guy Brandishing his Pitchfork But have I swung left, really? Or was I already a liberal convincing myself I was still moderate? That I once favorably linked this Lileks entry on Michael Moore and President Bush back in 2004 says that my sympathies were friendlier to Bush, while my thoughts on “my antiwar environment,” in retrospect, held conceptions of “liberal” which were more in line with the caricaturish sloganeering of a much-farther-left. The conservative “higher-ground” principles which I appealed to for defense have since shown themselves to be not quite as high-minded as I had thought, especially in light of such issues as faulty intelligence, torture, wiretapping and telecom immunity, the massive slave-built fire-hazard embassy-city, unscrupulous defense contractors, and the price of oil.

IMG_6887.JPG War issues aside, I’ve decided that being liberal is consistent with my values as a Christian and a Baptist: peacemaking, compassion to the poor and oppressed, sharing for the common good, liberty of conscience in the Lord, defense of human freedoms and rights, and a loving testimony of Christ’s love to the world. I find that in this day I am far more equipped spiritually to uphold these values by more fully committing myself to a liberal position, especially when I contrast my perception of the USA as one raised overseas to that of one living and working among the people of DC.

IMG_6411.JPG “What about abortion,” comes the angered cry. Well, I didn’t say I agreed with the Democrats on everything. (That’s one reason I’ve kept my Facebook “political views” set to “moderate” for as long as I have.) And yet, I think a woman should be able to choose and talk to a doctor about it when life and health are at stake, or in the case of a rape pregnancy — and I can hope and pray that such situations never happen where a woman has to make that choice. I think that by standing for a peaceful and just society we can help to eliminate some of the social and economic pressures which can drive women to want to terminate unborn children.

(Oh, and I am also in some disagreement with certain Democrats on the topic of video games.)

Further reading/viewing:

Clouds, Anonymous, Nader

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Back in my old apartment I would often leave my webcam on the window ledge, pointed up at the sky to record passing clouds as timelapse sequences, the best of which I compiled into a single video:

I uploaded the video to Google, left it open to saving and embedding for anyone who might want the clouds for something, and pretty much forgot about it, neglecting to even post it to my videolog. More than a year later, reading about Project Chanology, (though I’m not much of a suppressive myself beyond the occasional link and snarky comment) I found a video by Anonymous* which, I’m flattered to say, used my cloud time lapses as a dark, sinister backdrop:

The icing on the cake is that Andy Cobbon (of Democrats For Romney fame) combined Chanology parody with biting political commentary to produce this just-as-sinister message to Ralph Nader (caveat: some adult language):

It would appear that the clouds over my apartment have catalyzed a new class of online video meme: the sinister computer-voiced message to [INSERT CULTIC ENTITY OR POLITICAL NUISANCE HERE]. You’re welcome, internet. I’m glad to be of service.

* Contrary to the breathless panic of clueless sensationalists, Anonymous is not a hacker group but rather is everyone. You, me, him, her, we are all Anonymous. That is why we are legion.

USA 193 Intercept

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Popular in the sensational space news spotlight last week was the Navy’s shootdown of satellite USA 193, internally known as NROL-21, an experimental reconnaissance satellite which suffered post-launch computer failure so it was trapped in a rapidly decaying low earth orbit, and could have crashed with many large parts intact. Carrying a full tank of highly toxic hydrazine, USA 193 may have posed the greatest reentry threat since Skylab and Cosmos 954 — not to mention the [officially denied] possibility of classified reconaissance hardware surviving reentry and falling into the wrong hands. Without a working guidance system on the satellite, DoD decided to disrupt it with a missile, fragmenting it into smaller pieces which would burn up in the atmosphere, and hopefully rupture the fuel tank to disperse the hydrazine before reaching the ground.

DoD announced the mission on February 14th, and launched an SM-3 missile with a non-explosive kinetic warhead on February 21st from the USS Lake Erie in the Pacific — during the lunar eclipse, interestingly enough. The missile hit the satellite, and an explosion was recorded, with several small fragments reentering the atmosphere shortly after, and a small number of other pieces in orbit being tracked. It was a surprisingly efficient one-shot operation: going from notification of the threat to announcement of the mission in less than a month, and from there to a successful strike on an orbital target in just a week. That’s impressive turnaround time for a process of transforming a catastrophic billion-dollar satellite failure into a public relations semi-triumph of James-Bondian technological scope.

More info on the USA 193 operation:

Bye, Jay

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I just learned that Jay Tan, an old friend from college who’s been having kidney trouble and got a transplant just two months ago, passed away yesterday. He was 32. Jay was in my carpool and we had a close set of mutual friends, but I’ve only seen him once or twice since college, and I didn’t know that he was in broadcasting. It’s a sharp loss of a jovial man with whom we had some good times back in the 90s.

At the same time, another old friend — of mine and Jay’s — from college, Ganns, lost his half-brother in a disturbing murder in Cebu. This is especially hard for Ganns, who suffers these losses right around his birthday. I’ll let him say the rest.

More memories of Jay from Vic, Charo and Gen. We’ll miss you, man.

Your New Bicycle

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Thanks to Mat Honan for starting it all, but I say that’s it for that. Any new ones will signify a jumping of the shark. So it ends here. Thus saith I. Brownpau has spoken.

More on sites like this one from Kottke and Wikipedia. (Oh by the way, one of the above “bicycle” sites was made by me, and I threw it together in like twenty minutes, but I’m not telling which one it is.)

Travel Roundup, Dec 2007 to Jan 2008

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Thank you all for putting up with my much-procrastinated-on, retroactively dated, self indulgent travel logging. Here is a quick roundup of everything from the trip before I go back to the regular grind:

Travel Log Entries

Photos

Video

Assorted “in-transit” video clips from my phone and camera, including a trip down EDSA, the Airport Express and Star Ferry in Hong Kong, and takeoffs and landings aboard various 747-400s:


Assorted Travel Clips: Manila, HKG, LAX (Jan 2008) from brownpau on Vimeo.

Rear Window

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A quick tip for couples flying coach class on long-haul flights: if you’re riding a 747-400 and you like windows, reserve a pair of seats at the very rear of the plane. The last three rows of seating go from 3-4-3 to 2-4-2 because of the tapering of the fuselage, so you can reserve two seats by the window without anyone being in the middle of two people, no awkward clambering over strangers to get out, and a bit of extra arm space between chair and window. One more cool thing I found out about the rearmost seat — if you look back, you can see the tail wing:

IMG_1897.JPG

Major disadvantages to the rear twosome seats: while it’s far enough from the lavs not to stink, people do tend to congregate in the emergency exit space behind the seats for loud conversation and leaning on chair backs. Plus, you’re pretty much the last off the plane. But I think it’s worth it for sixteen hours of relative comfort and guiltless reclining. See the SeatGuru chart.

LAX Transfer

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We flew home from Hong Kong, crossing the Pacific through a miserable haze of cough meds and throat lozenges, but the real fun began on landing at Los Angeles Airport (LAX). As is standard U.S. port-of-entry policy, all transferring passengers had to disembark and go through immigration and customs, picking up bags at a baggage claim and depositing them at a dropoff after customs before continuing on to their connecting flights.

The way to immigration from our arrival gate was through a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, ending in a long, snaking immigration queue in a crowded, dimly lit, sterile basement — where there were too few immigration representatives, too many arriving residents, and, to my bladder’s dismay, no restrooms. (On the up side, we were waved through customs with nothing to declare because dried mango balls are not technically fruit.) Worse still was the fact that we had less than two hours to make our transfer, and the wait for our bags plus the wait in the immigration queue had left us no hope of catching our connection. Fortunately our airline had a service counter right at the bag dropoff, so we were able to rebook a later flight — the main drawback being that we would have to spend three extra hours at LAX. Not so bad, right?

We emerged from the International Arrivals exit and looked around — and could not find anything indicating where passengers transferring to domestic flights are supposed to go. There were no signs or arrows pointing to domestic departures, the single escalator coming from above was going down, and the travel information desk was unmanned. Finally we were approached by a cheery, official looking woman equipped with a map of the airport and instructions for transfers — who turned out to be a volunteer for a local homeless shelter who was soliciting donations from hapless lost travelers like us. So after learning that we were supposed to go up a small unmarked escalator out by the arrivals driveway, we had to stand through a rather lengthy spiel and give a ten. Thanks, Los Angeles!

Upstairs, the line for security guaranteed that we would have missed our flight had we not rebooked. Worse, there were no signs or guides as to whether to remove shoes, laptops, and jackets, or what went in separate bins, causing a scene of general chaos at the head of the line, exacerbated by yelling TSA guards and beeping metal detectors.

Once inside the concourse, we couldn’t find our gate because the arrows had fallen off the signs, or had loosened so that they hung haphazardly over the heads of passengers. I dropped by the money changer to get rid of my Hong Kong dollars, but got stuck in line behind a trio of confused women trying to buy Hong Kong dollars for their trip.

The only decent food we could find was La Salsa (which looks a lot like Baja Fresh), and the floor was dirty, but there was a nice view of planes on the tarmac.

Then we left and flew to a new transfer. At Chicago O’Hare. I don’t remember much of that other than us walking through a crowded terminal looking for food and finding nothing better than McDonalds before flying out to National Airport and taking a taxi home, where Pandora was happy to see us.

I still like travel, and I still like flying, but wow, we went through some pretty trashy airports on this trip, especially compared to HKG.

Ibis North Point

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For our two night stay in Hong Kong, we reserved a Harbour View room at the Hotel Ibis North Point, a small budget hotel in a mostly residential area on Hong Kong Island. The hotel sits right across a bus terminal from the waterfront, just a few steps from stairs down to the North Point MTR, making it quite convenient to the rest of Hong Kong. The neighborhood is very local and residential, with nearby tenements, small stores and noodle houses, a wet market and “cooked food center” down the road, and not much English spoken, so the easy access to the more touristy spots of Hong Kong was appreciated — six quick MTR stops to Central.

IMG_1647.JPG The guest rooms at Ibis North Point are very, very cheap because they are very, very small. Our full-size bed took up most of the room, with barely enough space between bed and wall for our bags, which we had to hop over to get to the tiny desk and window. The carpet had coffee stains, the bathroom was tiny and lacked an exhaust fan, the mattress was a bit too firm, the walls a bit thin, the elevators rather slow and cramped, the lobby a floor up from the hotel entrance, and internet only avaiable in prepaid cards at 3 hour increments, but hey, we were paying under $60/night, and it was still better than tolerable, even with two in a room. An added plus: harbour-facing rooms commanded a lovely view of Kowloon and the old peninsula which used to be Kai Tak Airport.

So yeah, for the low price, Ibis North Point is a great hotel if you need a small room with just the bare necessities, close to the MTR. We paid a total of about US$240 for two nights with a couple of internet cards, just a bit lower than what we paid for a single night at Novotel Citygate. That’s pretty good.

More info: Official Ibis North Point Hotel page, and TripAdvisor reviews.