jenk

Kevin Federline has a search site.
Pew Research Center reports that GOP base is decreasing (PDF).
Apartment Therapy has a lotus-like bean bag and Comics B&B.

from meathelmet:

If flooding is a concern: King County officials remind people that they can cast a provisional ballot at any polling place if they can't reach their designated voting spot. Call 206-296-VOTE (8383) if you have questions and for the latest information about problems.

Monday, the polling place at Snoqualmie Elementary School, 39801 S.E. Park St., Snoqualmie, was closed. Voters will be routed to the Snoqualmie Fire Station, 37600 S.E. Snoqualmie Parkway, Snoqualmie.

Part of me thinks "It takes law professors to come up with this". But I recall CS Lewis suggesting something remarkably similar in Mere Christianity:

There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, and the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members.

Paul Campos' column in the Rocky Mountain News takes this a bit further:

Here's the plan: Civil marriage licenses would continue to be issued by the government [...] Religious marriages, however, would be a different matter.

Let us imagine that John and Jane decide to get married in the Roman Catholic Church. [...] As long as the Catholic Church said John and Jane were still married, they would be considered married by the government.

[...I]f John decided he would prefer to enter into a civil marriage with Jackie (or Jack) rather than remaining married to Jane, he would be allowed to do this only if the Catholic Church agreed to release him from his wedding vows. Until then, he would remain married to Jane, and would continue to bear all the legal obligations created by that marriage.

This might sound like a radical idea, but legally speaking, it is merely the standard way in which we treat most business contracts. ( [...When] )

a business contract lays out a process for arbitrating disputes that arise about the contract's meaning or enforcement, that process must be honored by the courts. Why shouldn't marriage contracts be treated with as much respect?

This is also similar to the idea of "Covenant Marriage" - but with the twist of permitting institutions other than the state to write the initial marriage contract. In Campos' example, the contract is written by the Catholic Church. But why not by a Wiccan coven, for a year and a day? Or (gasp) by the individuals involved? (Well, granted, I'm sure starry-eyed idiots would put in all sorts of stupid stuff, but ...)

And, as Campos points out, this would give the opportunity for those who believe that marriage is a sacred, lifelong bond to act on it. Might be interesting to see if they would. It also would make it clearer that the church and state are separate, which I also think is a good thing. To quote CS Lewis again:

[The question is] how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammendans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.

(Andrew Sullivan discusses CS Lewis' take on church, state, and marriage here).

This explains why it was a WTF. And some of the comments are interesting too...

Oh, and a last reminder to

Register to vote!!

The King County elections office is at 500 Fourth Ave in Seattle. Room 553. Doors close at 4:30 p.m.

If you're in another county, you can look up your county elections offices on the state's elections site.

Luke Esser sent jw1776 a letter which states

• Rodney Tom is soft on drug crime. Electing him could lead to decriminalization. Esser knows better.
• Rodney Tom missed 80some votes this year and accepted money when he wasn't at work (see also this post).

I'm surprised it didn't mention the supposed "ethics investigation" too.

I am considering a thank-you note to Esser for pointing out that Tom supports decriminalization. Personally I think GlaxoSmithKline could do a much better job of putting drug dealers out of business than the cops.

From The NY Times Magazine:

Food poisoning has always been with us, but not until we started processing all our food in such a small number of “kitchens” did the potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.

[...] Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy — and at the moment they are thriving — is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef — is, of all things, the government’s own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants — the ones that local meat producers depend on — are closing because they can’t afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour. ( ... )

From the U.S.D.A.’s perspective, it is much more efficient to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.

So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers’ market when the F.D.A. starts demanding a Haccp plan — daily testing of the irrigation water, say, or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology? When we start requiring that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in the first place.

I also found the assertion that "[t]he lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, ( ... can’t survive long in cattle living on grass. )" rather interesting.

I knew I preferred the taste of grass-fed beef and felt it was vaguely healthier, but it's rather interesting to note that no, beef grown in feedlots are not "the same" as those grown on a traditional farm - "where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops". The article goes into more detail on how moving animals to feedlots creates a pollution problem, but I'm not going into that here.

The Redmond Farmer's Market is shutting down for winter. At least there's fewer tourists at the Market this time of year...

From the Washington State Elections site:

• The last day to register to vote by mail or change a registration address is Saturday, October 7.
  
• Ballots will be mailed to voters no later than Friday, October 20.
  
• The last day to register to vote in-person at the county elections department is Friday, October 23.
  
• The date of the Primary Election is Tuesday, November 7.

Washington residents can register to vote on the state's web site.

Want to know where your county elections office is? You can look it up here.

From Leonard Pitts, Jr:

We are often told that terrorists threaten our "way of life." We hear this so often that it's jolting to realize it's not true.

Oh, they threaten our lives, certainly. Your life, mine. But our "way" of life? No.

Granted, that's a broad and vaguely defined term but still, no. Whether you take it to mean things frivolous (baseball, MTV, fireworks on the Fourth) or things fundamental (freedom of speech, equality under the law, the native idealism of our national character), there is no way suicide bombers and fanatics with box cutters can destroy our way of life.

[...] Unless we, in fear, knuckle under and destroy it ourselves.

I think the guy's got a point.

I know the Republicans have been acting as if they have no limits - even when the military prefers them. But this just crossed some line somewhere in my head. ( excerpt )
What is with these people? Why are they so afraid of judicial review?

That's the title of this article by Ben Stein on the Nazi's former euthanasia center in Hadamar, Germany, which killed persons "with mental diseases, with retardation, with vaguely defined 'antisocial tendencies,' which could include being divorced too often, changing jobs too often, drinking too much, or, of course, being Jewish or 'Negro' or Gypsy".

Why?

[The Nazis] believed there would inevitably be shortages of food, and it should not be wasted on so-called undesirables, including mentally retarded people (who supposedly tended to reproduce much faster than careful, prudent Aryans of good mental health) and unemployed vagabonds, who were portrayed as weighing heavily on the shoulders of the German working man. [...]

The logic was simple: Fewer “useless eaters,” more food for the Reich. Exhausted forced laborers from Russia and the Balkan states were killed there for the same reasons.

Contrasting this corruption of Malthusian economics with American thinking, Stein states:

[T]he great glory of America is that our economics has always been based on the idea that abundance is the natural order of things, interrupted only by the Great Depression.... If there is always plenty, there is plenty to go around. No one need be killed for others to thrive. [...]

We have not had to face genuine scarcity in North America since at least 1940. We have certainly never had a generational crisis comparable to the one that is coming in Medicare. What will happen down the road?

Frankly, I don’t know. But the economics of Hadamar stands grimly as a reminder of what not to do. In the cemetery at Hadamar there is a stark obelisk on which is written, in German, “Man, respect mankind.”

Stein also calls for Americans to "make some economic policy plans" so that abundance continues. I don't disagree. The main thing I see is to raise the retirement age to reflect longer lives (Life expectancy is 50 percent higher just since the 1930s, when Social Security was created.)