Special Interests

Earlier today I watched Lou Dobbs rant about the "special interests" in a report worthy of Nancy Grace. Since Kung-Fu Monkey just posted on something similar, I figure I'd add to the ranting.

According to Dobbs, the special interests pushing the "amnesty agenda" include big business, organized labor, the Catholic church, and the media.

It sounds like both the capitalists and the proletariat are in favor, so who's left?

Isn't there some point when you've got enough people together that they stop being special interests and start being, I don't know, a large portion of America with a valid, albeit open to debate, point of view?

But, in the massive growth-industry realm of shoddy reporting we don't believe in things like intellectual honesty or taking a careful look at difficult issues.


One of the worries, and perhaps the group that's getting hit hardest, is the working poor -- those not in organized labor. The influx of immigrants willing to work for less can drive down wages.

I'm not sure about the real statistics on this. I have seen numbers indicating average wages are gonig down, but if those include the wages of the immigrants that doesn't necessarily mean that current worker's wages are going down since they could remain the same, but the overall average be pushed down by all these new, lower paying jobs.

Moreover, whenever people work they create secondary jobs as well, since they need to buy stuff -- and if there are more jobs available that can give workers the option to quit and go to a better work-place.

Regardless, the issue deserves a better discussion than it's getting from CNN.

Age is a Lens

Those who've eaten with me a couple times might remember that I don't like my different kinds of food touching each other on the plate. There are few things more repulsive than a fried chicken leg sodden with mashed potatoes (and yet, look at what I write).

Moreover, I eat food in order: vegetables first, to get them out of the way, then maybe the baked potato or steak, order doesn't matter but once one commits... For breakfast it's usually:

1. bacon
2. eggs
3. french toast

This quirk has evolved.

Tonight I had a craving for Kentucky Fried Chicken, and there was one right there across the street from the store I had gone to! However -

- it wasn't merely a KFC, it was one of those KFC/Taco Bell abominations. I looked at it and all I could think about was enchiritos with honey-barbecue wings stuffed in them and extra-crispy fried chicken slathered with refried beans.

I like KFC on its own and Taco Bell on its own, but I couldn't get those images out of my mind. So I kept driving, figuring there must be an unmolested KFC somewhere.

About 45 minutes later I pulled into the drive-thru of a Popeye's.

Even worse, I know it's horribly inconsistent of me. I have no problem going to Denny's for french toast at one time, spaghetti at some other time, and banana splits after midnight.

But there was this one true sin against God and nature in New Jersey that scarred itself into my brain forever. It combined a Togos, Dunkin Donuts, Baskin Robbins, and I think a Pizza Hut.

That's what age does to you -- transforms your quirks into neuroses, then full blown psychoses.

Praying Does Not Count as Planning

This will be a tad ranty...

See that image there off to the left -- that is, I believe, what counts as a two-lane road. It's actually a remarkably spacious one compared to others I've seen in Texas -- one side actually has more than 6 inches separating the lane from the concrete DEATH WALL.

I think this pic is from a car chase where the bad guy decided that driving the wrong way up an off ramp would be a clever escape technique -- probably learned that from the movies. Oddly enough, when freeways where everyone drives 75 MPH have concrete death walls locking them in on both sides, accidents like that in the picture happen. The freeway planners can feel morally comfortable too, because it's not the fault of their crappy planning, but the fault of a hardened and dastardly criminal.

San Antonio is growing so fast that all the freeways constantly have some major construction going on somewhere. In order to slow San Antonio's growth, during this construction they'll often put concrete death walls 4 to 6 inches from the left and right lanes on three lane freeways -- this means that the only lane where you don't need to drive in constant panic of a brief twitch sending you, your family, and the people in the cars behind you to a fiery, spark trailing doom, is the middle lane.

In the middle lane you just need to worry about the two tractor trailers walling you in on either side. Here's a nice example photo:

But picture it filled with SUVs, Hummers, and big rigs. The image is from the Texas Freeways page -- the above is route 410, but the I-10 is actually a bit worse right now.

It's so bad that Jaru and I essentially don't use the freeways in the northwest quadrant of San Antonio unless we're hit by devastating cases of suicidal depression.

And here's my thesis:

It's as if the Texas Highway Planning Commission thought that this will all work just perfectly -- as long as absolutely nothing ever goes wrong.

And this is endemic. About 25% of the drivers on the freeway figure one to two car lengths is a reasonable following distance when hammering along the interstate at 75+ MPH. This is known as the quarter-second rule.

And this on freeways you might see a Batman villain come up with, like those above, or out in the wilds where you'll see corpses of deer alongside the road about every ten miles. What do they think's going to happen if a deer jumps out in front of that car .25 seconds ahead of them?

A few months back Jaru and I drove up to Dallas on the one big road that leads from here to there, interstate 35. You can barrel along that road, it's awfully straight, and there's almost no major interchanges along it's path. Other than deer, there's almost no threats on that road -

- except other drivers.

On the way up and back we passed 3 (THREE!) blood-on-the-pavement car accidents. People pinned under cars kind of accidents. This is Texas -- there's no rain, no fog, bright daylight, no twists in the road, rare off-ramps and no one using them anyway, just a bunch of people driving the same direction.

You should be able to put your car on autopilot. But not if you like tailgating and/or weaving in and out of traffic. My suspicion is that the German heritage might have something to do with it. Everyone's quite polite, but get on the freeway and it's the autobahn.

Anyway, given the freeways' lack of emergency lanes, in case, you know, there's an emergency, and the prevalence of drivers whose strategy involves hoping really fervently that the driver ahead of them doesn't encounter:

• a deer jumping out of the brush
• a retread flying off a big rig's tire
• junk falling out of the back of a pickup truck
• a bee flying in the window
• spilling something on his lap
• a tire blow-out
• ...

I can't help but have a deeper understanding of President Bush's methodology.

In the Future Even the Commercials Will Have Commercials

And the future is now --

If you go to UGO to watch the Ultraviolet trailer you'll first have to sit through a commercial for the History channel.

The Future is Now

Control machines with the raw power of your brain!

-- another reason why New Scientist is the coolest science magazine.

Visited States

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Kung Fu Monkey posted one of these and Agents Are Evil followed up -- so it seemed cool since I have spent a fair bit of time getting lost driving around the country.

If I had stayed in philosophy my chance of visiting Arkansas would have drastically increased...