Earlier this month, in the last few days of his term, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour pardoned five men, including four convicted murderers, who worked in his mansion. The AP FOIAed the records about their pardons and—darnedest thing—there aren’t any. The attorney general says that they’re nowhere to be found. This is headed to court in a couple of weeks. →
Chicago recently announced that they’d be sharing the GPS-tracked positions of snowplows online, for people wondering when their neighborhood would be plowed, and what roads are cleared. Now VDOT is doing the same in Virginia, although only upstate. →
The 71-year-old paper isn’t convinced that endorsements mean much anymore, and are worried that the practice gives the appearance of bias in their coverage of politics. So they’re giving it up. I wonder if this is the beginning of a trend, or of the Sun-Times will stand alone? →
Discussion hosting service Disqus has crunched the numbers on their enormous database of comments and found that people writing under pseudonyms (as opposed to anonymously or under their real name) contribute substantially more comments than others, and those comments are rated more highly than others. People writing under a real name are a close second, and people writing anonymously are a distant third. Fascinating! →
Remember that blog entry I wrote last month about trying to make a cheeseburger from scratch? Scientific American has a short article based on it in their February issue. Page 24. I haven’t picked up a copy yet, but I’m sure going to. →
I publicly launched Richmond Sunlight five years ago this week. Upon its launch I gave it to the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy because, as I wrote, “they’re non-partisan, they have an attention span longer than a housefly, and they have access to resources that I don’t.” I concluded: “I’ll run it for them for the next six months, while we train an editor and a webmaster to take it over. Then I can move on to my next project.” Richmond Sunlight is something that I want to exist, but not something that I actually want to be my problem. But nothing ever changed: the website was Virginia Interfaith’s in a legal sense (on a handshake deal), but in all other practical senses, it was mine. Every bit of the website was mine to run, from stem to stern…which was the opposite of my goal. It occupied enough of my time I couldn’t move onto that next project. In March, I informed the Virginia Interfaith Center that I had just worked my last session—they’d need to finally hire that webmaster. And I walked away from Richmond Sunlight, which is what enabled me to get started on Virginia Decoded. (Which is on hold briefly while I’m working for the White House.)
A few weeks ago, the Virginia Interfaith Center decided that they couldn’t operate Richmond Sunlight. The cost of paying somebody with the appropriate skill set would be too high and, besides, they’re between executive directors, and have more important things going on. So I asked for them to give it back, which they did cheerfully.
So I seem to have this website. Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with it. Giving it away hasn’t worked out, so now I need to chart a course that will allow it to grow and thrive, and also be financially sustainable.
Perhaps I could start a 501(c)3 to house Richmond Sunlight, Virginia Decoded, Open Virginia, and my other nascent efforts towards open government in Virginia? But then what—where does the money come from? I worry that advertising could make Richmond Sunlight appear disreputable. I think I could get some grants, but that’s ultimately not a business model. Maybe a few site sponsors (advertising lite), though I don’t know that anybody would be willing to pay enough to hire somebody to run the site during session. I do have a mostly completed “pro” version of Richmond Sunlight, but I’ve hesitated to launch it because I can’t provide the support that customers would deserve. (“Sorry it’s broken for you, but I’m at work now. And I’m busy tonight. How’s Saturday for you?”) While there’s a bit of a horse-and-cart problem there, the revenue from that could well make it possible to hire somebody to provide that support and also run the website. Perhaps there’s a partnership waiting to happen—some organization with whom the site could have a mutually beneficial relationship?
I’m soliciting ideas. What should I do with Richmond Sunlight? How do I ensure that it continues to exist, fulfills its potential, but doesn’t keep me from moving onto other projects?
“The transcripts of the 2006 [Federal Reserve] meetings, released after a standard five-year delay, clearly show some of the nation’s pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding.” It’s a significant understatement to say that they didn’t “full understand” the economy. Their discussions make it look like a dozen econ 101 students were gathered in a room and put in charge of the economy. “Ender’s Game” made real. →
The Times’ public editor is asking, in the form of a blog entry, whether the media should be in the habit of pointing out when a subject is lying. That is, a politician says that black is white, should the reporter covering it point out that, in fact, black is black? It’s shameful that this question even needs to be asked. Websites like Richmond Sunlight are in the business of reporting straight-up facts. That has value, no doubt. But the job of media outlets is to take that information, review it, interpret it, package it up, and provide that to readers, to help them to understand the world around them. And the Times is wondering if it’s necessary to point out when their facts are wrong? Yes, yes it is necessary. Get on it, Times. →
“Shotgun Golf will soon take America by storm,” said Hunter S. Thompson in this 2004 article. I would definitely play this, though I’d be even more likely to play it with Bill Murray. →
The fence between Mexico and the U.S. isn’t always on the border. Sometimes it’s over a mile away, leaving Texans’ homes on the wrong side of the fence, sandwiched against the Mexican border. They’ve had their property split in two by the fence, and some homeowners have found that the Border Patrol guards not the actual border, but the fence, leaving these folks as the first line of defense, and the fence second. →
There has been increasing concern over the past year that hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) can cause earthquakes. I don’t understand the seismology well enough to understand the specifics, but the premise is simple enough: pumping millions of gallons of water, diesel, brine, and other liquids into the ground is liable to have an effect on the weight, shape, and distribution of land masses relative to fault lines, and could be the tipping point that causes a quake. Now a Columbia University seismologist investigating the unusual string of earthquakes in east Ohio over the past year has come to the conclusion that they were almost certainly caused by fracking. →
Remember how Blackwater changed their name to “Xe Services,” to outrun their reputation? Well, it caught up with them, so now they’ve changed their name again—they’re “Academi.” Nowhere on academi.com does the word “Blackwater” even appear. →
Henry Capron Jaquith, born last week. Six pounds, eleven ounces, and just under twenty inches long.
A few years ago, I decided that it would be interesting to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Not just regular “from scratch,” but really from scratch. Like, I’d make the buns, I’d make the mustard, I’d grow the tomatoes, I’d grow the lettuce, I’d grow the onion, I’d grind the beef, make the cheese, etc.
It didn’t happen that summer, by the following summer, my wife and I had built a new house, started raising chickens, and established a pretty good-sized garden. I realized that my prior plan hadn’t been ambitious enough—that wasn’t really from scratch. In fact, to make the buns, I’d need to grind my own wheat, collect my own eggs, and make my own butter. And I’d really need to raise the cow myself (or sheep, and make lamb burgers), mine or extract from seawater my own salt, grow my own mustard plant, etc. This past summer, revisiting the idea, I realized yet again that I was insufficiently ambitious. I’d really need to plant and harvest the wheat, raise a cow to produce the milk for the butter, raise another cow to slaughter for its rennet to make the cheese, and personally slaughter and process the cow or sheep. At this point I was thinking that this might all add up to an interesting book, and started to consider seriously the undertaking.
Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.
* * *
The weekend before Thanksgiving, my wife and I had some friends and family members over to the house to slaughter turkeys. We’d raised eight of them from poults, letting them free range around our land for most of their lives, and their time had come. It took the bulk of the day to slit their throats, bleed them out, pluck them, gut them, and put them on ice. Everybody got to take home a turkey that, by all accounts, was delicious. (Nearly everybody has already asked us to do this again next year.) Accompanied by cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and apple pie, it was a meal that could have been produced almost entirely at our home (and very nearly was). There was no mining of salt, of course, but it proved to be a meal that made sense for the place and the time. It’s really the only such ritual meal in the U.S. for which that’s true.
The Pilgrims established this standard, although in their case they probably had their meal in early October. The Thanksgiving menu at Plymouth Plantation was described by William Bradford:
They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.
There’s some fundamental good in eating honestly, I think. Of knowing where your food comes from—raising it yourself, when you can—and trying to eat foods that could theoretically have existed a century ago. But you can’t take that but so far, or else the whole thing breaks down. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
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Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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