Buy Blue Buy Smart
I spent the afternoon going over the computational issues in exploratory geophysics. It was illuminating, and after a patient hour or so of my tutor's limited time, I got to an "ah ha" point. My "ah ha" is cluttered by prior work in the signal processing (radar) problem domain, and not for applications as defensible as solid earth imaging for oil companies.
However, the "ah ha" that motivates this post, the one (of several) that is relevant to Wampum as a blog of Progressive Politics, Indian Issues, and Autism Advocacy, is that Big Oil has shed its research centers, staff, hardware, and even data, just like ... just about every institution, from the NSF to Xerox to IBM to ... there just are no jobs for post-docs in networking, in operating systems, in ... exploratory geophysics, aka, looking for oil. And at $60/bbl, and believed to be finite, you'd think it has a higher ROI than price gouging during a relaxation of a regulatory regime.
Progressive Politics is humanism, learning. The stuff of Erasmus and Galileo. Indian Issues are outside of the hermetic struggles of European cults. Autism Advocacy is science, science, science.
Mimicry of the cultural Onanism of the Christoholic Right, who "Buy Red", with "Buy Blue", is insufficient. It fails to capture the hope, and desperate necessity, of who we are.
Rather than counting the corporate donations to the RNC, and to the DNC, and going with that indica of institutional citizenship, I'm going to look at investment in research. I think Democrats, the Party of Invention, is slightly more interesting than Democrats, the Other Grey Meat, and for as long as we are alive, and our children, and theirs, Invention is a better choice than simply Other.