The dawn of Mini 2

... translates to a much more feasible schedule (4 classes as opposed to 7), time for reading and blogging, time for exploration, time for being a graduate student in the full sense of the word - as opposed to putting out 150% just to stay afloat. Which I intend to do; I'm one of those crazy folks who actually records his life goals and similar desires, and I can assure that "studying for tests 90% of the time" was not on the list of things I want to get out of my experience as a grad student.

As I return to blogging, primarily about the election up till November 4th, here are just a few random thoughts on a variety of topics:
______________________________________________________________________

• There are some things that should never be up to a vote, and civil liberties and freedoms are on the top of that list. Most of the states of the South rejected legislation to outlaw slavery hundreds of years ago, and had states such as Alabama and Mississippi been asked to simply vote on whether or not to dismantle Jim Crow segregation in 1950, they would still be rigidly segregated to this very day. Hell, every state in the South still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books up until 1967 - 1967!! The Advocate did a very touching piece on the personal stories of same-sex couples in California who have recently gotten married - many of them have been together for decades - and it struck me how, come early next year, the votes of a few bigots could usurp their love and commitment. I tend to be a rather abstract thinker when it comes to these things - positive/negative liberties, the social contract, Constitutional rights, etc. - but that piece really resonated with me on a humane, personal level - and it made me damn angry. The thought that a couple's loving union could be rendered null and void by a few hundred voters is infuriating - and I decided to do even more, giving an extra donation to HRC's Million for Marriage PAC. I would encourage you to do the same, here.
• I've lost (on paper) like $2,000 over the last few months, but that doesn't bother me; I invest conservatively, and barring some catastrophic illness or family emergency I have no intention of touching my investments until I retire (hopefully) in my mid-50's. I eschew the type of short-term thinking that drives so much of modern American business, and this places me in a decided minority as compared to other folks with business degrees or who work in business. Do any people in business care about long-term, sustainable growth? Are all businesspeople truly out for nothing more than making a quick buck? If so, this country has a rather horrible future indeed.
• Pittsburgh has 315,000 residents, Allegheny County around 1.2 million, and yet I have seen maybe a dozen Hispanics since moving here. I have lived in Kentucky - Kentucky (!!) - and yet I have never seen a large city with less diversity than Pittsburgh. The same extends to African Americans and Asians as well, to a lesser extent. That's not necessarily an outright criticism - there is certainly nothing racist about this city or county - but it's something that I find rather hard to swallow. And it's another factor, one of many, that makes me realize how much I miss Florida.
  
• Minus grades really aren't all that bad - with the notable exception of the A-. In some classes, an A- refers to a grade in the range of 88-89.9% - clearly higher than a typical B, even a B+, but not quite a full "A". This usage is fine. But some anal-retentive professors use the A- for grades in the range of 90-92 or even 93%, and that is rather infuriating.
• We have a chance of snow intermixed with rain on Tuesday. Snow in October. The Northeastern and Midwestern diaspora is hardly difficult to explain; even without the industrial decline, it would have happened when people realized just how superior the weather in the Southwest and Southeast is when compared to this crap. Before living in the Northeast, I was sort of confused as to what attracts so many educated people to this region. I still am; I would choose San Francisco or Los Angeles over New York City or Boston any day of the week.
  
• Municipal taxes take a bit of getting used to when you're coming from a state without even a state income tax. But as long as that revenue is being used for the right things, I cannot object to them (I do feel that Pittsburgh's taxes are so high largely due to sheer necessity, though, and not because there exists some commendable slew of progressive programs; this city has lost over half of its population since 1950, and it will likely slip below the 300,000 mark sometime in the next 10 years.)
  
• I'm slowly starting to think that I'm renting from a borderline slumlord; there is always trash in the stairs of this building, the basement which contains the washer/dryer is a truly pathetic mess, and it has been freezing - literally, 32 degrees freezing - for the last two nights, barely reaching the mid-50's in the hottest part of the day, and the son of a bitch has yet to turn on the boiler in the building. I'll have more on that later in the year, depending on how things develop. On a broader note, I just generally don't like the landlord-tenant system in general; far, far too much power is given to the landlord in virtually 99% of all cases, with only a few states like New York seeming to insist that the tenant has more than a bare minimum set of "rights." Why should a landlord be able to mercilessly boot someone out into the street in the dead cold of winter if they have lost their job due to no fault of their own? Why should a person be able to rent out dilapidated buildings for exorbitant rent and only make repairs after the tenant has exhausted a long line of complicated bureaucratic processes involving a legion of different agencies? I certainly don't see land and property as a public good, but I do strongly believe that when land is rented, there should be an equitable (or much more equitable than the status quo) distribution of power between landlord and tenant; the current system encourages landlords to be, quite frankly, almost "evil" in their pursuit of profit at the detriment of the well-being of their tenants. Easy to see why home ownership has long been a major part of the American Dream, and it is certainly something I cannot wait to attain.
  
• Ronald Reagan may have died in person a few years ago, but I have a strong feeling that his legacy of destructive neoliberal economics and cultural conservatism will die on November 4, 2008. Good grief, and good riddance. What Reagan gave this country can be summarized as 3 D's: debt, deficits, and discrimination.