Followup: Yay for Chris Dodd

Senator Chris Dodd announced he will put a hold on the retroactive immunity bill in the Senate. So that will slow down authorizing Bush's illegal spying, and hopefully prevent the phone companies who broke the law from getting excused from breaking the law. Hooray for Seantor Dodd!

The Gold Standard

There's still people who claim we need "real money" based on gold, not just "fiat money", because gold's really worth something, regular money's only worth something because the government says so.

But gold's only worth anything because people say so also. (Yes, gold has applications in electronics and a lot of other things, but when people talk about the "value" of gold, that's usally not what they're talking about.

50 Books #4-6

#4 Bad Prince Charlie by John Moore

This was a nifty humorous fantasy novel. Somewhat in the vein of Terry Pratchett's, who he even mentioned by name, when he was using footnotes. Kinda like the stuff I wanted to write at one point. It's quite good though, and I'm probably gonna read the other books he's written too.

#5 Making Money by Terry Pratchett

I love pretty much everything Pratchett's ever written. I'm an unabashed fanboy. And Moist Von Lipwig is a nifty character, the or I just have a weakness for con men characters who mean good in the end, really. I was a little disappointed in this one, though. I don't regret reading it at all, but it wasn't the best Discworld book I've read. The plot and the main villain both seemed a little weak. Things felt a little too easy. And I'm nerd enough I wish he'd gone more into the economics of money part, with the "gold standard" and all of the rest. A novel about trying to fundamentally change the entire financial structure of Ankh-morpok could have been fascinating. It just wasn't quite there. Some of the characters were excellent though, including Mr. Bent, the accountant, and the golem with an identity crisis. And it gave us some of the best looks at lord Vetinari.

#6 How to Win Friends and Influence People

It took me a while to finish reading this. Not because it was bad or hard, but because it was chopped up into short chapters. So I'd read one or two, and then figure I was done for now. It's easy to see why the book's been in print continuously since 1930something though. There's a lot of good advice in it. And some things I definitely have to work on changing with how I communicate with people. I think this is going to join Getting Things Done on a stack of books to read every so often, to get new perspectives and to see how else I can improve.

Previous Books:
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#1: Grave Peril

Heh

Actual voicemail menu option I just got. "To disconnect, press 1. To press another number, press 2."

Government is Good

Actually, that's the name of the website. Government is good.

The currently most interesting part I found of it is this page: A Guide to Rebutting Right-Wing Criticisms of Government.