Be an Informed Voter

Anyone who goes to the polls and votes without knowing what the candidates believe in is doing a disservice to their country and their community. Sometimes it's hard - well, it's always remarkably difficult - to figure out where candidates actually stand on the issue just from listening to them speak or debate or from their ads on TV. Half of what they say is confusing or contradictory and half the issues you may care about are never even mentioned.

This means that responsible voters need to go out and seek the information they need to make a meaningful choice. One quick and effective way to do that is to look at issue questionaires and ratings from organizations which have queried the candidates on key issues and tabulated the answers. You don't have to agree with the group which asked the questions to benefit from the answers. In fact, sometimes looking at the questions and answers from groups you're opposed to is particularly enlightening.

One nice, easy to access set of issue ratings can be found on the Free Market Foundation's website. They may have questionable allegiances and dubious positions and be rather humorously misnamed, but they do ask the basic questions of all the candidates from local to national races and seem to have gotten a surprisingly high level of response. If you plan to vote - and you'd better - scanning through these ratings can help clarify things for you and rapidly get you basic information especially on those down-ballot races where you've never heard of the candidates. You might also find out some surprising things about what candidates you thought you agreed with actually believe.

The issue questionaire results are at: http://www.freemarket.org/

dave

Liberty Under Attack

If the Patriot Act scared you - and it should have - the same folks who brought you warrantless searches and monitoring all of your phone and data transmissions have another one up their sleeves.

Right now the Senate is considering H.R. 10 which includes provisions for a national ID card (section 2173) and a centralized database (section 3052) in which the government will keep track of all your health, financial and personal information, including such things as your HIV status and how many guns you own. Ultimately it would be a single, centralized repository for all of the information collected by every state and local government entity and many private organizations. So a bureaucrat could easily go through and know an awful lot of personal stuff about you, just in case they felt like putting everyone with HIV in quarantine camps or taking away every gun in every private home in America.

This bill is so bad that Eagle Forum and the ACLU which are on the opposite sides of almost every issue are both opposing it. Apparently both the far right wing and the far left wing agree that privacy is important, not to mention being guaranteed in the constitution.

I urge everyone to send a letter to their representatives, both in the house and the senate to urge them to vote against this dangerous legislation.

A group called The Liberty committee has provided a useful form to send a letter to the appropriate people. To access it just CLICK HERE

You can also phone your representative at their local offices or in Washington. You can get their numbers from their websites which are all linked to from http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml That same site also has an emailing page where you can email any member of congress. The Senate has a similar page at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm. You can even go direct to House Majority Leader Tom Delay and encourage him to step in and stop this bill. You can call him at 202-225-4000 or send a fax to 202-225-5117. He can also be emailed from http://www.majorityleader.gov/CONTACT.ASP?a=form

It's up to you to take action. They're likely to vote on this in the coming week if it gets out of joint committee, so you need to act now.

When fear and complacency make you surrender your freedoms to the government the enemies of liberty win their greatest victory.

Dave

For Your Amusement...

Most of you are probably coming to this site using the address www.wakeupzombies.com, but apparently I have a compulsive desire to register domain names while there are still some left. So if you like a slightly different look, try some of these:

www.torchofliberty.com
www.elitistpig.com
www.commonsenseaustin.com
www.freenation.us

I'm an inveterate fiddler and I'm not entirely satisfied with any of the domain names I've gotten for this blog so far. I'd like something short and appropriate, but everything catchy seems to have been taken. Eventually I may come up with something as catchy as Instapundit, but until then at least I have plenty of near-great choices to work with.

Dave

Selling Your Issue to the Highest Bidder

Just got news of a unique and amusing political/fundraising effort which I had to share.

Some of you may be aware of the outrageous plans here in Austin - as well other Texas cities - to take already existing, already paid for roads and turn them into toll roads. The plan for Austin is particularly rapacious. They plan to basically take all of our major highways running every direction and turn them into toll roads, making it impossible to go anywhere of any distance without paying a toll.

This plan serves two of our most powerful special interests which are normally on opposite sides of most issues. On the one hand it means 2.2 billion dollars for builders and developers and on the other it pleases the huge anti-growth lobby in Austin who have the pipe dream that it will get everyone out of their cars, onto bikes or into public transport, as well as providing money for their demented fantasy of commuter rail projects. This lets the local politicos take their fill of graft with one hand while stroking their hardcore constituents with the other.

There's a lot of opposition to this from the sensible minority in Austin - it's hard to whirl a cat here and hit anyone with common sense - and the most amusing outlet of this which I've seen to date takes the form of an ebay auction. A unique way to publicize an issue and raise money at the same time. For a brief moment of amusement at local politics take a look at: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=4150&item=2280280577 and place a bid if you feel inspired.

Dave

Sign for the Times


As promised I did a redesign of the Michael Badnarik presidential campaign poster. Not all that exciting, but much more appealing than the version you may have seen on the streets. You can actually read it from more than a few feet away and it looks clearer and more attractive - in my opinion anyway. I especially think that the stylized torch on the 'I' in Badnarik is an improvement over the very crude and busy liberty statue graphic (see the article to the right titled "Badnarik for President..." for the official sign design and my original complaints about it).

If you want to support the campaign and like this sign better than the original, feel free to print it out and paste it up anywhere you like. For printing use the larger version located HERE . With modern printer technology or a trip to Kinkos you can make nice big versions from this graphic which is high enough resolution to be blown up quite a bit.

I'm not absolutely sure of the legal restrictions, but I believe that if you reproduce this sign as I've prepared it and fill in your name in the provided blank both you and the campaign are completely covered.

And vote for Badnarik. Even if he's stuck with the dogmatic Libertarian opposition to the Iraq War he's still better than Bush on almost every other issue and better than Kerry on every possible issue.

Dave

When in Doubt, Go to the Source

When I was in graduate school one thing they hammered into me that actually made sense was that if you want to build a viable thesis you should look to primary sources for your supporting data. That means don't go look it up in a book about the subject, but instead go and find the original documents relating to the subject you are studying and analyze them yourself.

The same principle applies in politics. When you're faced with a difficult issue, don't make your decisions based on what the media or your uncle or some website is telling you. Try to go straight to the source. This may mean filtering through the accessible information sources to find the nuggets of pure fact buried in their stories. Doing this requires a well developed ability to tell real fact from half-truths or selected facts or clever distortions. It may mean going beyond those common news sources and looking for where they get their information and looking at that information in its raw form.

Doing this allows you to form your own opinion, and when challenged you can point to factual sources rather than saying Bill O'Reilly told me this or I read it in the New York Times. It also means that by the time you're done you're likely to understand the issues which concern you a lot better than others around you. Think about it this way. If your house were broken into and you went to court over it, would you call an eyewitness to identify the burglar or call an expert on burglary to explain why burglary is bad?

For example, if you're concerned about the war in Iraq and what it's doing to our soldiers and to the people of Iraq, why rely on what the media or the president or anyone else is telling you? One of our accomplishments in Iraq is that we have the internet up and running there, both for Iraqi citizens and for US Soldiers. Rather than letting Peter Jennings or Sean Hannity tell you how the people of Iraq feel about America or how the soldiers feel about their role in the war, you can go direct to the source and find out for yourself. An excellent resource for this is the web network Blogs of War, which links together sites related to the war from miltary families to serving soldiers to Iraqi expatriats to Iraqis on the ground in Baghdad and elsewhere. It's a mixed bag, but a great way to gain insight into the war which is a lot fresher and more reliable than you'll get from the idiot box. I particularly recommend some of the Iraqi sites like The Messopotamian.


Dave

Voices from Fantasyland

As I do every week, I picked up a copy of the Austin Chronicle yesterday and sat down for a scary journey through the paranoid fantasies and hate-filled ravings of the ultra left. For those of you not from Austin and not familiar with the Chronicle, it's a very popular holdover from the 60s, an underground newspaper gone legit and become one of the cornerstones of the liberal mainstream in a city dominated by 60s relics and neoliberal cause monkeys. It has a huge circulation and probably does as much to legitimize leftwing lunacy as any publication in the US.

Anyone who cares about this country ought to read the Chronicle or a publication like it to get a handle on just how crazy and mired in utter fantasy the far left really is. Every week the Chronicle offers up at least a couple of articles that contain opinions which you wouldn't believe that an educated person could become deluded enough hold much less trumpet proudly in print.

In the past I've had some fun pointing out specific glaring untruths and delusional rants in the Chronicle, but while there were some real howlers in this issue the thing which struck me was one point which I encountered in two articles and in a cartoon of all places. The theme echoing through those grimy pages was astonishment and joy at the fact that some parts of the anti-Bush message were getting out despite the clear right-wing bias of the mainstream media. When I first saw this opinion in a cartoon I thought it might be some sort of clever irony. When I saw it expressed in two articles as well, I knew that the chronicle staff had taken a light-rail trainride through loony land.

Apparently this opinion is held by a lot of people on the far, far left. They seem to believe that the newspapers and television networks are dominated by conservatives who want to keep the "truth" away from the people and are part of some giant conspiratorial coverup and in league with the Bush administration to stop John Kerry from becoming president. The only way you could hold this opinion would be either by never reading a newspaper or watching television news, or by having your own belief set so far to the left that traditional democrats and moderate left wingers are almost indistinguishable from neocons in your eyes. In recent weeks the major news networks have become so outspokenly hostile to Bush and so openly left wing that anyone who could watch them and think they had a right wing bias could only be clinically insane.

That this attitude - really this insanity - exists in the far left is very significant, because these are people who support John Kerry because of who John Kerry is, not just mainstream liberals who have an unreasoning hatred of Bush and support Kerry because he's running against Bush. These people are the engine driving the most aggressive activism on the left, and they drag the unsuspecting moderate liberals along with them for the ride. These are the sowers of madness, the folks who think Michael Moore sold out to Hollywood and that people are crossing the border into Canada to take advantage of their socialized health care, not just their articicially low drug prices.

So, these are the people to fear, and they have a voice and that voice has an outlet in print. Everyone should read the Austin Chronicle, because it's an education in just how far wrong liberalism can go. If people this crazy and out of touch with reality honestly think of John Kerry as one of them, then anyone who retains a touch of sanity should think very hard about picking Kerry as their representative in the White House.

Dave

Even a Stopped Clock...

I know our raving liberal visitors will find this hard to believe, but after viewing the last two debates I've realized that John Kerry is dead right on at least one issue. Since his positions seem almost random and change every few days I guess it's not surprising that he should get something right, even if it's by accident, but it was still a pleasant surprise.

When the issue of religious faith and abortion came up my first reaction was "wow, he admits to being a catholic yet the ultra-reactionary walking corpse in Rome hasn't excommunicated him", but my second reaction was surprise, because after stating his completely insincere religious allegiance he said something remarkably sensible. Rather than saying that he supports abortion because women have the right to control their own bodies or one of the standard liberal takes on the issue, he took the very appealing position that regardless of his personal religious beliefs it's not the job of the government to legislate issues of personal morality or faith.

This is rather out of step with the general democrat effort to meddle as much as possible in peoples personal lives and I don't think it signals a general libertarian trend for Kerry, but it was a bit more sensible than I expected from him. It's the right stand to take on abortion, because science is anything but definite on where life begins and while sensible people may form a consensus on a particular point from conception on, any absolute determination is a matter of faith more than science.

Ultimately issues like abortion, birth control, sexual orientation and other aspects of individual morality and behavior are personal decisions, not the proper domain of government, and they should be left up to individuals, or at the very least to the individual states. This certainly should never be the realm of the federal government.

So Kerry proves the old maxim that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Too bad about the other 22 hours.

Dave

Are You a Neocon?

We've had some visitors recently who have expressed the amusing opinion that I'm a 'neocon', apparently based on the theory that anyone who doesn't think Bush is a complete disaster and who thinks that America ought to retain some level of sovereignty subscribes to the whole littany of loony Neoconservative dogma.

Neoconservatism is a belief in an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy, US sole-superpower domination of world trade and politics and a judeo-christian based policy on a variety of domestic issues. Putting me in that category is pretty laughable, given my opposition to almost everything Neoconservatives believe in, but Neocon has become a swear word among liberals and they love to try to pin it on anyone they don't understand or find threatening.

I'm going to write more on the nature of Neoconservatism eventually, but in the meantime I think you might be entertained by taking a test to see if you might be a dreaded Neocon yourself. The Christian Science Monitor often comes up with some very clever items, despite their religious lunacy, and although their Neocon Quiz is limited to just foreign policy, it's quite enlightening.

You can test your Neocon leanings by going to: CSM Neocon Quiz

Any guesses where your humble bloghost ranked?

The Politics of Driving

Driving around Austin - and I have to drive way too much every day - it seems like everyone has a bumper sticker making some statment from the back of their car. The city is remarkably polarized and full of outspoken folks involved in state government and the university. Everyone has an agenda to flog and they're willing to say it on their bumper.

This has created a great opportunity to observe the relationship between political convictions and driving style. When you see drivers exhibiting certain sorts of behavior you can bet on seeing the matching bumper sticker. Based on this, you can now protect yourself by knowing what to expect based on what you see on the bumpers of the cars around you.

In general politically conservative drivers tend to be lumbering and somewhat overbearing, while liberal drivers are usually timid and indecisive. In my experience the liberals are more annoying and more dangerous, while the conservatives are predictable and slow to react - which I generally prefer in the drivers around me.

When I'm out on the highway all that matters is that I get where I'm going as quickly as possible. Austin traffic is a nightmare, and living some miles from town in my fortified compound, I need every break I can get to speed up my all too frequent trips into town. In this pursuit, the quality of the drivers around me makes a big difference, as what they do can slow me down or even put me in danger, so I keep a close eye on their behavior patterns.

I'm not too worried about the republican sporting a 'W' sticker who's lumbering along in his SUV in the middle lane. It's easy to avoid them, zip around them and get where I want to go. What does scare me is the timid driver who drives at slow speed in the left lane of the highway flashing a random turn signal and sporting a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker. They're clearly out of their depth, somewhat terrified, and liable to make an unpredictable move in any direction.

In general it's the liberal drivers who seem to be the threat, and they break down into three groups.

The least dangerous are the ones who sport one or two bumper stickers with a clear message. The driver with a single 'No W' bumper sticker is generally a serious, decisive liberal whose only a threat if the hybrid engine on his riceburner gives out.

The most common group are those sporting somewhat less aggressive stickers or ones with more complex messages. They're the ones who are likely to be driving slow in the fast lane, fast in the slow lane, missing their turns and braking suddenly for no reason. They've got stuff on their minds, are a bit frightened by just being on a road dominated by republicans in SUVs, and likely to bolt. When I see someone on the highway with a Bush/Kerry sticker and a "Texas Democrat" sticker I'm not too worried but keep an eye on them. If they've added an issue sticker then they're more of a threat, proportional to the craziness of their sticker.

The ones that really scare me are driving a 1980 VW Golf with the back completely covered with issue stickers, many of them contradictory, incredibly obscure and hideously out of date. You don't usually see these on the highway. They're terrified of highway driving. They may even think that highways are evil since they enable the big polluters like 18-wheelers and SUVs. These drivers are actually at their most dangerous in parking lots and on small streets where they are most often found. They're the ones who start to come out of parking spots, stop when they see you approaching, wait half in and half out of their spots, and then wave you around them, at which point they surge uncontrollably out of the space and ram you in the side. They're so terrified by other vehicles, so sure that the world is out to get them that they can't make a decision or think ahead for more than a few seconds. They're unpredictable, desperate and irrational, and that makes them a hazard to everyone.

I'm still trying to figure out what Wiccan and rock band supporter stickers mean about the drivers of those cars, but for now, when you see the car with "Free Tibet", "Kucinich 2004" and "Visualize World Peace" on the back, take cover.

The Truth They Dare Not Speak

Bush and his minions are reluctantly admitting there were no WMDs in Iraq, and everyone is jumping on it and they're on the defensive and it's a big media issue. To those with some common sense it's just as meaningless now that they admit it as it was when they claimed it in the first place. WMDs were a nice selling point, but with a tyrant like Saddam we shouldn't really need an excuse to impose regime change and free the oppressed people of Iraq.

Given the reality of global politics and the reality of the Bush administration's foreign policy, they really did need a compelling reason to go into Iraq. If it wasn't WMDs - and even if the administration believed they were there, they were never really their primary interest - then what was the reason? The nattering nitwits on the left will rave on that it was all for oil, an argument which even a child who has read a few newspapers would laugh at. We don't need Iraq to get oil, and oil was already coming out of Iraq anyway under the disastrous and corrups oil for food program, plus we're not profitting as a nation from Iraqi oil now that the war is over, nor are our businesses, at least not any more than any one else is. That argument is just silly.

Yet there is a real and compelling reason for going into Iraq and the beauty of it, the reason why Bush has had to defend the WMD claim to the death and walk with tiptoes around exactly what we're doing there and why it's absolutely worth going into Iraq, is a reason which no one who understands or is in a position of power can even dare to speak aloud. The true reason we're in Iraq is so important and so dangerous and such a high stakes play that it could inflame a world war if Bush came right out and stated it.

To see what they're not saying all you have to do is look at a map and remember the last 20 years of history in the Middle East. While you look at the map, consider which two countries we have invaded in the 3 years since the 9/11 attack. What do Iraq and Afghanistan have in common? Only one thing unites them. Afghanistan borders Iran to the east and Iraq borders Iran to the west. By invading those two countries and establishing a military presence in each of them, we have effectively surrounded Iran. Going back to 1980 and looking at the problems in the Middle East, what country comes up again and again as a source of terrorism, as the single most powerful nation antagonistic to the US and the most potentially dangerous nation to our interests in that part of the world? Which country has the largest and most modern army? Which country is an anti-American theocracy run by implacable ideologues? Which country has agents operating against secular governments from India to Egypt? Which country is developing its own Nuclear Bomb (a real WMD)? Which country is sending all the terrorists into Iraq to fight back against our army? The answer to all of those questions is Iran. It's probably the most dangerous nation in the world right now, including North Korea and it's absolutely set on the destruction of the US.

Iran is a tough nut to crack. We don't want to invade Iran. We want to neutralize it, place pressure on it and bring it to under control. How do we do that without invading? We take over the two screwed up but easy to conquer countries bordering it, move troops and cooperative governments in and surround Iran with enemies. That's the truth Bush dare not speak and the real reason we invaded Iraq. Iran is the heart of islamic extremism and Iraq is the key to neutralizing Iran. Don't expect to hear that in a debate, but when you listen to Bush remember that this is the truth which he can never speak and which we have to understand and know that he has in mind throughout his dangerous ventures in the Middle East.

Badnarik for President ... of Mexico?

As a long-time libertarian activist and a supporter (at least in principle) of Michael Badnarik's campaign for President, it pleased me to see that he has signs up all over Austin. But, like what I would guess are many others, I'm quite bewildered by his choice of signage.

The color choice is good - white on a dark blue background is always a winner. His name is clear right there at the top, so that's good too. But after that the signs become rather mystifying. There's a tiny word you can't see below Badnarik and then the next word which really stands out is the Spanish word 'Campagna', which I always thought referred to a rural region or a field, but now in context I'm having to guess means something else like 'is running for President of Mexico'. Since it's the only word besides Badnarik which is large enough to read and it has the central position on the sign, it's got to be important, right?

On seeing this sign, and for the next few dozen times I saw it, I assumed that this was a sign made up to appeal to the hispanic population and that the message "Badnarik Campagna" would have some special meaning to them. I felt somewhat slighted, as I would have liked to see a sign in English, but then I went on and did some more research.

After going to badnarik.org I figured out that the signs aren't actually in Spanish. It turns out that Richard Campagna is Badnarik's pick to run with him for Vice President, so I don't have to head off to Mexico to vote Libertarian. What the sign actually says is:

Michael (too small to read)
Badnarik (nice and big)
Richard (too small to read)
Campagna (almost as big as Badnarik and in the middle of the sign)
Libertarian for President (also too small to read)
plus it has a toll free number and a web address to make it even more crowded

At least my linguistic issues were cleared up by this, but now it becomes a design issue. Why is Campagna just as big on the sign as Badnarik and in the more prominent central position? Why is everything else on the sign so small you can't read it from more than a few feet away? I guess it got me thinking about the sign, but it didn't exactly create a favorable impression. From a distance all you see is the two last names and no indication of what they're doing on the sign. From close up there's further confusion because there's no differentiation between the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. If there's so much information to put on the sign that the first names and the 'Libertarian for President' line have to be made too small to read, then there's too much information on the sign. I wouldn't want to be rude, but Campagna needs to be cut from the sign, and they need to drop Badnarik's first name and maybe go with a bolder, sans-serif typeface. A simple, clear 'Badnarik, Libertarian for President' would do the job - maybe throw the web address on large enough to read too. Sadly, a website is far more relevant than a VP candidate. Clear and simple is always better in these things.

Give me a day or two and I'll follow up with my own design for the sign. Who knows, maybe someone is paying attention.

Dumbing Down the Electorate

With this election, fired up by the perceived injustice of Gore's loss in 2000, the happy minions of elite special intertests are making an unprecedented effort to 'get out the vote'. This is manifested in the media and even on your local streetcorners and at your front door by college students carrying clip boards with voter registration cards, by celebrities all over the talk circuit, by PSAs every few minutes and by special 'rock the vote' functions on the music networks. This is all presented as a great, altruistic, non-partisan effort to get more people to vote so that they'll become part of the political process. This is a good thing, right?

Consider why people don't vote for a second. Most people who don't vote aren't terribly politically oriented and are therefore not likely to have made themselves particularly politically knowlegable. If they can't bring themselves to make even the minimal effort to register, how much time are they likely to spend researching and informing themselves on the candidates or the issues? Most likely the only opinion they have is some vague alliegiance formed by something they heard on TV or some friend's comment, an irrational inclination towards a particular candidate, or the fact that their grandfather voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

People who really care about politics and who know about political issues are already registered and are self-motivated to vote. They may hold to all sorts of different positions, but they have usually given at least a little more than a casual thought to the issues and the process of voting. They have a sense of responsibility to the republic which people who aren't even registered to vote clearly lack.

In general, it is certainly desirable to get more people involved in the political process, but getting people to come out and vote is not the same thing as preparing them to make informed decisions in the voting booth. Just putting a ballot in the hands of an apathetic fool who has no real commitment to the process and no understanding of issues or what the candidates stand for is essentially a means of diluting the voter base and flooding the polls with tractable, ignorant sheep who will vote with the prevailing wind from the media or other even more questionable sources.

Of course, the biggest group of unregistered voters are those who have recently turned 18, a group who by and large are abyssmally uninformed, not yet free of the indoctrination of government schools, and completely unaware of the importance of the electoral process. MTV makes voting sound fun! Ashton Kutcher and the members of Yellowcard think we should vote! Ooh boy, let's go elect someone! No one is more tractable, more gullible or more easily swayed than an 18 year old with a voter registration card. If they see their celebrity idol telling them to register and vote, they do it. If they later see them on a talkshow or in an entertainment magazine telling them who to vote for then they do that too.

Desptie the non-partisan trappings of these 'get out the vote' efforts their real objective is transparent - get uninformed people who are easily swayed and wouldn't normally vote into the polls and direct them to vote for left wing candidates and causes. You don't see voter registration efforts targeting overworked executives and small business owners who may not have the time to get down to the polls and vote. You don't see them going after upwardly mobile, highly-educated immgrant groups. And you certainly don't see them yearning to recruit members of the military for whom voting can be awfully inconvenient. Their targets are young, ignorant and generally inexperienced with the real world - the kind of people who are heavily influenced by the media and are naive enough to swallow the sweet-tasting lies of liberalism and lack the experience or inclination to question the philosophy they are being spoon-fed.

So, when you see a 'get out the vote' PSA remember whose vote they're trying to get out and do what you can to counteract the dumbing down of the electorate. Explain the issues to a handy teenager. Encourage local entrepreneurs to take time off work to go and vote. Remind people that in a democracy majority rule can be disastrous if the country is ruled by a majority of fools and dupes - the majority liberal special interests are desperate to bring to the polls this November.

Surfing Wirelessly in the Boonies!


As I type this I'm sitting in the Cafe 290 in Manor Texas of all places, having had a fine chopped steak and a milkshake, wondering at the miracle of technology. Manor, which can't seem to get itself a grovery store or a public playground and which is still reeling from a fire which burnt the town down in 1954 has free wireless internet in its best known
feeding establishment.

As a Manorite myself I have had to deal with the nightmare of trying to get internet in rural Texas. The cable company wasn't interested, the phone company can barely provide a line I can talk on, and satellite is a joke. I had to get together with a neighbor and put in a T1 to get internet to our neighborhood because cheaper, more consumer-oriented options just weren't available.

We distribute our T1 wirelessly, and apparently we're not the only people to have that idea. A WISP out of Austin called waveforward.com has brought free internet to downtown Manor, and apparently it's already a hit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since Austin is the most wired city in America and it's only 20 miles away, but what kind of twisted genius thought that Manor was the next place to debut the power of wireless internet?

It's a good development, but leaves me a bit bemused. There are so many more mundane things which Manor seems to be unable to acquire, yet in this one, esoteric technological area we're ahead of the curve. Go figure.