Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
What's Happening in Hartford?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 02/06/2013 - 21:05Today, Gov. Malloy announced his proposed Fiscal Year 2014/2015 Biennial Budget. There are plenty of news stories about Gov. Malloy and the budget. But what are legislators saying about all of this?
Well, I set up a Facebook list, CT State Legislators which anyone can subscribe to. You can read through the different posts to find a wide array of reactions. Two State Reps have videos on YouTube that you can find from the Facebook list, State Rep. Bryan Hurlburt and State Rep. Sean Williams. It is very interesting to watch both of these videos and contrast them.
It is also great to see various State Representatives praising the work of State Comptroller Kevin Lembo, with the site that his office has produced, Open Connecticut. Hopefully many people will look at this as they think about our state's budget.
I also set up a set of links using Pearltrees for 2013 Bills before the General Assembly. The inner most circle is for various committees whose bills have been added to the set of links. The second circle is a link to the bills themselves, and the outer circle is links to articles and commentary on the bills. So far, ten committees have had bills added, with nineteen bills and twelve articles added. I've added many of these links, but a thing that is great about Pearltrees is that it can be done as a team effort, so some of the links have been added by others. If there are bills of particular interest to you, please add them. Let me know if you need help getting started.
Finally, for those in the Woodbridge area, there will be another Citizen's Town Hall where people can come and discuss with one another the bills being considered and and what they think about these bills.
Understanding Social Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/30/2013 - 23:17It's been about half a century since Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media and a lot has changed since then. The need to understand media, and especially social media, has grown considerably since then.
As the Social Media Manager for a non-profit health care organization, I often speak at conferences about social media. Besides my role in non-profits, I also talk about social media from the perspective of a politician and a citizen journalist.
Recently, I spoke about how I like to use social media when I'm at conferences. Typically, I try to take notes at the conference using Twitter. I need to refine the thought down to less than 140 characters. Sometimes, this can be a challenge. Sometimes, people might not get what I'm tweeting, without the context of the surrounding tweets. People need to learn more about context, especially for tweets, where additional context can often be found in the hashtags used in the tweets.
When I mentioned this at one event I was at, people said they felt uncomfortable doing that because others might think they were busy doing things online and not paying attention. As a social media manager, I don't often run into that problem, but it is a common misconception.
Just because a person is writing something on their computer, perhaps via Facebook or Twitter, doesn't mean they aren't paying attention. If they are using social media as a means of taking and sharing notes, they may be paying much more attention than others who are just sitting casually at the meeting.
Another aspect of social media note taking is that it is conversational. It is like being able to take notes and see other people's notes at the same time. It can produce brief interchanges that further enhance the understanding of the topic being discussed. I recently ran into this as I was taking notes via social media of the hearings in Hartford about Newtown.
State Senator Beth Bye posted about a nuanced statement from DMHAS Commissioner Patricia Rehmer about outpatient commitment and forced medication. A few different people commented on different aspects of this and I believe everyone came out better informed as a result.
Yet this style of note taking and communications may be unfamiliar to some. Some people may have a mistaken impression that Facebook is just for games or talking about parties. What is worse, some people may try to capitalize on this misimpression to cast aspersions on others. This is perhaps most likely by those who do not want a serious discussion about the issues our country faces and simply want to force their opinions on others.
Such people may, in fact, use social media to distort, and to try to get traditional media sources to spread the distortion.
This appears to be the case of opponents of gun control legislation that Sen. Bye has introduced. Perhaps it backfired on them because the broadcast that NBC had showed a gun control opponent who was not at the hearing criticizing Sen. Bye for being at the hearing and using Facebook to communicate with constituents about the hearing. It helped paint the gun control opponents as uninformed. Fortunately for those opposing gun control, NBC ended their segment with a gun control opponent who was at the hearing and who lauded Sen. Bye for her efforts to keep people informed.
Over the coming years, I expect to see more and more legislators using social media to communicate with the constituents, especially during hearings. Sen. Bye and several other Connecticut legislators provide a good example of how this can be done to improve civil discourse. Of course, during this time, there are bound to be more issues like this one and we all need to spend more time understanding social media.
Gun Control Bingo
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/28/2013 - 20:17Today, I watched parts of the "Bipartisan Task Force on Gun Violence Prevention and Children’s Safety Public Hearing at the Legislative Office Building about Gun Control".
While I haven't seen any talking points sent out by people supporting or opposing gun control, but it sure sounded like a lot people were reading off of one script or another.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. The only thing that stops a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. Cars, alcohol, airplanes, etc., kill people, why don't we ban them? We need our guns to protect us from tyrants, terrorists, and home invasions.
However, a lot of what people say is contradictory, just plain false, or even nuts.
For example, people say that limiting high capacity magazines wouldn't have slowed down the shooter. However, banning high capacity magazines would make it difficult for law abiding citizens to defend their homes.
People opposed to gun control talk about 9/11 and how that didn't cause any new legislation to be quickly passed. However, the Patriot Act was passed 45 days after 9/11. Anyone who thinks that 9/11 didn't change things, hasn't flown in an airplane over the past decade. It is notable that other people opposed to gun control cite the Patriot Act as a reason they need to keep their guns.
Those who talk about cars, alcohol and airplanes would most likely be abhorred if guns were as regulated as cars, alcohol and airplanes, and we do require car owners to have insurance.
One of the great talking points is the issue of mental health, and I think that is an important point. When I listen to people saying things like "We're already close to civil war because of a certain man in the White House" and "I call about all gun owners to nullify any law" which limits gun ownership, "I don't trust the government anymore", and "the AMA has drugged our youth", I think mental health is a big issue, and I do hope that Secret Service is paying attention to some of the testimony.
I also have to wonder how many of the people who are calling for more spending on mental health are some of the same people who are calling for lower taxes and less government spending.
Then, there is the argument that no law will prevent criminals from getting guns. No law prevents criminals from doing many different things, but that doesn't mean we should have no laws. However, it seems like the common thread is that we should be making it more difficult for people who should not have guns to get guns.
This is not to say that the hearings have been without content. A spokesperson for the Police Chiefs' Association had what sounded like well thought out suggestions on how to combat gun violence. Likewise, the spokespeople for the Connecticut Council of Municipalities talked about about what efforts were most likely to have a real effect on gun violence in our state.
Perhaps the most interesting was the spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Foundation who exercised some sophistry to try and dance around comments from Sen. Williams. Sen. Williams called him out on it, but it struck me as if the NSSF has about as little credibility the NRA. On the other hand, the spokesperson for Sturm and Ruger actually spoke persuasively about trying to improve gun safety and wanting to work with the legislature.
I wish more people would speak like the Police Chiefs, the Connecticut Council of Municipalities and work together to find ways to make our country truly safer.
Town Halls
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/22/2013 - 22:40Earlier this month, I organized a Citizen's Town Hall where people from Woodbridge and the surrounding area could come and discuss the issues to be addressed in Hartford this year. It was a nice, informal little gathering with about a dozen people showing up, including people from the League of Women Voters and State Rep. Lezlye Zupkus and others. We talked about how there have been other gatherings like this, sponsored by the league and other groups and how we thought it would be good to continue meeting like this. We briefly introduced ourselves and talked a little bit about the issues we hoped to see addressed in Hartford. We agreed to meet again on Thursday, Feb 7th at 6:30 PM, again at Wheeler's Market-Cafe in Woodbridge.
Since then, Rep. Zupkus has announced that she will be holding a town hall in Bethany on Tuesday, January 29th at 6:30 PM. State Rep. Themis Klarides announced that she would be participating in that town hall.
I also received an email from Rep. Brandon McGee that he will be holding four town halls in his district between January 22nd and Feb 13th. It is great to see more opportunities for people to come together and address issues in Hartford.
On top of this, several people have been sharing various bills that have been introduced in Hartford via Facebook, creating a sort of virtual town hall. One person posted a link to AN ACT PROVIDING FREE ADMISSION TO AND PARKING AT STATE PARKS FOR CONNECTICUT VETERANS and another posted a link to AN ACT CONCERNING A SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, introduced by State Senator Joe Crisco from Woodbridge.
I've also set up a Facebook Interest Group of state legislators that I am friends of or who have publicly accessible Facebook Pages that I've found. You can see what some of the State Legislators are up to on the list.
It seems like this could be a good year for discussing what goes on in the Connecticut General Assembly, and I hope many people participate.
#visionforum - Finding My Religion - Picasso's Theory of Relativity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/03/2012 - 07:32Saturday evening, Kim and I went to the Connecticut Forum discussion, Vision and Brilliance which featured Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neri Oxman and Neil Gaiman. The event was sold out; packed with geeks that most likely rarely make it to the Bushnell. I must admit that the only other time I've been to the Bushnell as to see Blue Man Group a couple years ago.
Others have written about what a great event it was, so I'm going to share a few of my thoughts about specific parts of the content. In the slides before the event started, it mentioned that the hashtag for the event was #visionforum. Yet then they played the standard announcement at the beginning of the events at the Bushnell about turning off all electrical devices and not taking photos. A lot of people had their cellphones out as the event started, but the tweeting subsided pretty quickly. Unfortunately, but my phone and Kim's were low on battery power and I didn't get to tweet as much as I would have liked.
John Dankowsky started off with a standard introductory question and the panelists answered the way I had already heard them speak in YouTube videos. Then he moved on to a question about what is vision and brilliance? Where does it come from. The three panelists all seemed to agree and give the same answer in slightly different ways. Vision and brilliance comes from doing what you love. From having a job you don't want to take a vacation from. Tie to that was an important aspect of keeping at your passion, even though others might not understand what you are talking about.
This played out particularly notably between Neri Oxman and Neil Gaiman. Oxman went off on topics about 3D and 4D printing; printing cartilage, printing DNA, and time after time, Gaiman seemed to say, that gives me a great idea for another story. Picasso's theory of relativity, a house seed, and several other ideas.
Oxman had talked about Cubism and the Theory of Relativity emerging at about the same time and how closely related they were in her mind. They were both about taking observations and trying to make sense of them. They both built upon the what was known at the time. It led to some interesting talks about intelligence. Intelligence, at least as it is measured by humans is about learning from others, from not having to rediscover tools or fire in each new generation. I could almost hear President Obama paraphrased into, "You didn't discover that by yourself." I could imagine some conservatives writhing at the idea about how connected and dependent we really are on one another.
After the break, there was a discussion about science and religion. It seemed to fall back on what I believe is a misguided false dichotomy between religion and science. The discussion drifted into the idea of "God of the Gaps", God, described in terms of what science can't explain. I got tired of that discussion over three decades ago in a science and religion philosophy class in college. Tyson spoke favorably about Jefferson's Bible, where Jefferson left out the miraculous and supernatural stuff.
Yet this struck me as anti-science, a sort of science of the gaps. Science is about observing, forming hypotheses and testing them. It is not about discarding observations that contradict current scientific theories. It seemed that Oxman managed to capture the spiritual aspect much more wisely, with an ability to appreciate the beauty of both arts and sciences.
Recently, there was an interview on NPR about a new book about prayer, which broke prayer down to three key forms: Help, Thanks, and Wow. I thought the author was brilliant. We all pray those three prayers in different ways, and Wow is a special place where science, arts, and religion can all meet. It also sums up, fairly nicely, the response to many great ideas that were shared at CT Forum's panel discussion Vision and Brilliance.
The tweeting continued until Sunday, with people talking about another CT Forum nerdfest; perhaps making it an annual event. I know that I have plenty more to write about the event, but I wanted to get these initial thoughts down before the new week started.
