@!

I don’t know how long this has been around unbeknownst to me, but I just saw the @ sign, whose name I only know in French oddly, used in the word Latin@s to show the masculine o or the feminine a. I love it! It was at RaceWire. Funny, since I just commented on Female Impersonator (still in moderation) about the annoying-ness of grammatical gender. Perhaps I’ll try to explain my feelings on that topic soon.

finger-pointing over energy

So this is annoying: people who haven’t worried about energy since the seventies are all the sudden remembering the seventies and going, hey, how come nobody has done anything to improve our energy situation since the seventies?

Um, that would be because you, the majority of voters in the US, didn’t make anyone do anything about it since the seventies.

Someone just wrote into my paper saying in one paragraph that senators wrongly worry about being re-elected instead of getting things done, and in the next paragraph that voters should hold them accountable.  Apparently never realized that voters were holding them accountable the whole time, and that was the problem.  Maybe this will lead some US voters to think about things besides their own immediate gain in their future voting and polling and so on?  Probably not though.

Now Obama is throwing the separation of church and state out the window; I was worried about McCain pandering to the evangelicals too much and then winning, but I didn’t realize I should worry about that with Obama.  I now see that given the current political climate and the current alliance between evangelical Christians and the deepest part of social conservatism, any politician who wins poll points by talking about religion is not to be trusted.  Not that any politicians are to be trusted, of course.  I listened to a physics class podcast by RIchard A. Muller in which, veering from physics a bit at one point, he likened a two-party political system to a long beach with two ice cream stands, and each one kept moving towards the center of the beach, knowing the people on the ends wouldn’t cross over and that the people in the middle could be better reached by moving inward.  Thus he concluded that two-party systems breed centrist politicians.  He seems pretty accurate.