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	November 20, 2003

CORPORATISM -- THE NEW 'ENEMY WITHIN' Yesterday, Salon carried an interview by David Tabot with Robert Kennedy Jr., a long-time environmental campaigner. It's worth a complete read, but here are some key excerpts, emphasis mine: The NRDC Web site lists over 200 environmental rollbacks by the White House in the last two years. If even a fraction of those are actually implemented, we will effectively have no significant federal environmental law left in our country by this time next year. That's not exaggeration, it's not hyperbole, it is a fact. [Bush attaches] stealthy, anti-environmental riders to must-pass budget bills. In that way they can alter statutes without debate or public scrutiny. Furthermore, a lot of the environmental regulations are arcane and highly technical and require strict enforcement by the various agencies. The Bush administration is suspending enforcement or changing agency policies without altering the regulations. A lot of the changes are illegal, and groups like the NRDC will sue them and we will win the lawsuits -- but that litigation process takes 10 or 12 years, and by that time the damage will be done. The National Academy of Sciences predicts that 30,000 Americans a year will die because of the Bush decision [two weeks ago to abandon the 'source performance standards' that regulate air pollution]. [My father's] book on organized crime was titled "The Enemy Within" -- and I think the enemy within is still the greatest threat to our country, but it's no longer the Mafia, it's corporate control of our country and our communities, it's the erosion of democracy. As Teddy Roosevelt said, American democracy will never be destroyed by outside enemies -- but it can be destroyed by the malefactors of great wealth who subtly rob and undermine it from within. And I see that process happening today. And just as there were a lot of people who denied that the Mafia existed at that time, today there's a huge lobby that is denying the fact that our democracy is really threatened by corporate control. I helped Arnold [Schwarzenegger] put together an environmental policy, which Arnold read and then adopted. And it's probably stronger than [Al] Gore's policy. 1:18:34 PM  trackback []  comment []

NON-TECHIE RANT AND APOLOGY Yesterday I got a new PC with a larger screen, and the first thing I did was check out how this blog looks on it using various browsers. What a shock. It looks awful. At the risk of scaring off other non-techie bloggers from doing anything fancy with their blogs, here's what I learned: You need to check how your theme, layout, graphics, tables and sidebars look with different browsers, and also different versions of each browser and different screen sizes of each version. If it looks fine with IE 5, it may still look dreadful with IE 6, and if it looks fine on a 1200 x 1600 pixel screen, it may look dreadful on a 600 x 800 screen. Many of my JPGs and GIFs are charts with words on them, and when I create them with PowerPoint and export them to Microsoft Image Composer to save them as JPG or GIF files, never wider than 450 pixels to that those with small screens won't have trouble with them, they look perfect. And with Netscape 7 and IE 5.5 on a medium sized screen the text was crystal clear. But now I discover that on IE 6 much of the text in these JPG and GIF files looks ragged and blurry, and some of the colours of boxes look mottled, making the text hard to read. Every one of my posts is embedded in a table, set so that people who want to print them out (older readers who find reading on-screen hard, for example) can do so without having to tinker with print settings, and except for the right sidebar it will fit on an 8.5x11 page legibly. Within those tables I use text-wrap to conserve space and make the graphics look a bit more professional. But now I find that on a screen larger or smaller than my usual mid-size, the graphics frequently look wonky (the wrap-around doesn't work properly because of different paragraph lengths on different sized screens), and information shown in table format sometimes gets truncated. And many readers also use text magnification settings on their browsers, which can produce the same unintended effects. The bottom line is that I now understand why some readers thought my post on 'good weblog design and layout' was ironic: to many, perhaps most readers, my blog must look more like a kidnapper's ransom note (with words glued every which way) than the snappy, semi-professionally laid out journal I had always imagined it to be. To these readers I apologize -- I'm embarrassed to admit I had no idea, other than the occasional e-mail from a reader whose problem with my layout I was unable to reproduce. But I'm also annoyed. Most of us are not techies, and when we get a tool that allows us to use indents, graphics, lists and tables, we expect that those tools will produce layouts that will work regardless of browser, version, screen size or text magnification. I'm not a big fan of MS Office but when I use these features in a Word document, they look fine on all screens and print fine on all printers. It is absurd and unreasonable that before we can safely use these basic functions in a blog post, we need to test out their appearance on different versions of different browsers with different screen sizes. Damn it, we're here to write, not fiddle with HTML. Looking at my lovely blog on a large screen on IE 6, I'm almost in tears. You can't even read the right sidebar -- beyond 1400 pixels width, a vertical navy blue bar suddenly appears at the right end of my blog (a heretofore invisible part of my Radio theme) rendering the black text atop it illegible. It's almost enough to make you give up blogging. But I'm hooked, and chagrined but unrepentant. So if you find the look of How to Save the World amateurish and difficult to read, please persevere and understand that I'm just a crazy non-techie doing my best to write something interesting and perhaps informative. I'm just trying to save the world. Someone else will have to save the blogosphere. 2:28:03 AM  trackback []  comment []

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