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Okay, now they're just plain making shit up...the TSA is now claiming that terrorists are staging "dry runs" of airplane terror events based on finding totally random crap in the luggage of completely unrelated people. In one cited example, blocks of cheese are claimed to be "similar in size and shape to plastic explosives."
Aw, c'mon, FOR FUCK'S SAKE! How much more of this total nonsense is going to go on?!?!?! They've stretched so far beyond the realm of credibility now that they might as well just disband the lot of them, cancel all air traffic, and send everybody home. For a moment last week, I thought maybe these guys were finally going to pull their heads out of their collective asses when the head of the TSA admitted that taking away cigarette lighters was "security theater", but apparently not.
I would also like to spew a little venom at the Bush Administration, who very obviously leaked this story as part of their recent campaign to cry "Wolf!" as much as possible to distract people from their latest poll numbers and their Mexican standoff with Congress. First it was Chertoff's "gut feeling", then some other vague warnings about terrorists, and now this. What really steams me, though, is the way the national news media report these stories with the doe-eyed ingenuousness of a five-year-old who has just learned that babies GROW UNDER CABBAGES and feels the need to pass this along to every person he meets. I'm beginning to think that this French tax official isn't the only one with a giant hole in his brain.
I never thought 'd say something like this, but I, for one, was actually glad that the Lindsay Lohan story got more attention than this, because that's about how much actual news value this shit has.
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Hey, local-area readers -- is it me or has Channel 7's 11:00 p.m. newscast turned into a live version of FARK?
I know that it was Channel 7 who dumbed down local news in general when Ed Ansin bought the station back in the early 1990s with their "if it bleeds, it leads" approach to news, but since he bought Channel 56 a few months ago and rolled the newscast into both stations (56 at 10:00, 7 at 11:00), it's like they just threw out any semblance of a "newsroom" and just cherry-pick stories off of goofy Internet news sites. Especially if there's video. Some nights the LEAD STORY will be some lame-ass piece of satellite video of something that happened in Ohio or Alabama or some other place thousands of miles away. For me, though, I think they crossed a line on Wednesday night when they ran JibJab's "Star Spangled Banner" video as news.
Lately, I also notice that they're trying to have the anchors and reporters shtick it up with dialog and little bits of stage business. Last night they tried it with their "story" about the study that showed that women don't really talk that much more than men by trying to get Randy Price, the male anchor, to say he's interested in talking about "sports and carburetors" with other guys. Unfortunately, a) Randy is totally unable to ad-lib and 2) he's gay, so the whole thing went over like a lead balloon (that's not to say that gay men can't be interested in sports and carburetors, but ol' Randy ain't fooling anybody).
I can't really explain why we watch Channel 7 except that I have some deep-seated thing about watching NBC News (even when I was very little I was a big fan of the Huntley-Brinkley Report), and it has carried over to usually watching the local NBC station newscast. Of course, years ago that meant watching WBZ, who still have the best news programming in this market (perhaps even one of the best in the country), and there's no reason we couldn't switch except that we're middle-aged and set in our ways about these sorts of things. But, sheesh! When I can predict the order of news stories on their program based on the most number of comments on FARK, it's getting a little out of hand.
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A brief explanation about the big angry banner that has appeared above the posts.
It's a sort of tradeoff. Lately, every time I look at the news I am wound up into steam-pouring-out-of-my-ears rant mode. It seems like not a single day goes by lately without some further revelation about the crimes and misdemeanors of George Bush and Dick Cheney, and the next-to-unbelievable enabling behavior (some of which itself seems to cross over into criminality) of Alberto Gonzales. Their near-total ransacking of our system of government is nothing short of treasonous and deserving not only of impeachment, but, in my opinion, of imprisonment.
But I can't operate in rant mode for the long-haul, so yesterday I decided I would put up that banner and leave it there for a while so that I could let go of feeling the need to rant about them when there are so many others already blogging about all of it.
These men do not deserve to remain one more day in the offices they presently hold. They are each of them guilty of enough trespasses on the Constitution that the question has to be seriously asked whether or not they've managed to usurp the government entirely and have managed to install themselves as tyrants. It must also be seriously asked whether or not the situation they have unleashed is salvageable -- can Congress do anything to counteract them at all? Clearly the Supreme Court has cast its lot with the Executive Branch (and whatever branch Dick Cheney says the OVP belongs to).
For a long time, I've dismissed other bloggers who have trumpeted this call for years. Now I can see no other useful thing to do with the soapbox I maintain here except to stake this position and stick to it. Quite honestly, I do not believe that there is the slightest chance of impeachment proceedings beginning against any of them -- the prevailing "wisdom" is that it's too late now to start in on them. Unfortunately, it is probably too late in a number of regards.
So, the banner stays for a while, and in return I will spare you (and me) the ranting...at least the ranting about these criminals.
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This is Massachusetts State Representative James R. Miceli. Yesterday, he was one of the 45 members of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (our fancy name for our state legislature) to vote in favor of a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
This man is my state representative. But let me state as publicly as possible that HE DOES NOT REPRESENT ME.
He represents prejudice and narrow-minded thinking. He represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the very notion of equal rights under the law. He represents hatred, bigotry and fear. He represents an appalling willingness to dehumanize others for the sake of moralistic pandering. He represents disrespect.
James R. Miceli has decided that he would like to take it to the next level: he has announced his candidacy for the Congressional seat vacated by Marty Meehan. Representative Meehan has supported gay rights in his role as Chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and in general during his tenure in the House.
Through the oddities of district alignments, while I presently live in Miceli's state house district, I do not live in Meehan's Congressional district (my Congressman is John Tierney, who supports gay rights issues). Consequently, I won't get the opportunity to vote against him, should he somehow manage to get the Democratic nomination, but I look forward to supporting a candidate to replace him in the state house and urge Democrats who live in the Fifth Congressional District to actively oppose this man.
Massachusetts has now made it abundantly clear that intolerance and bigotry have no place in our laws, and those who champion such should not be allowed to claim to represent us on Beacon Hill or on Capitol Hill.
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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame."Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"-- "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty
Lest you think that the current political brouhaha about immigration is a new-found issue with the right-wing, it's worth remembering that immigration policy has been an ongoing political issue since the mid-19th century. Whenever the United States has faced an onslaught of immgrants, whether they were the Potato Famine Irish, the Gold Rush Chinese, or the huge waves of Italian and Eastern European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there's always been a political backlash resulting in misguided and flat-out discriminatory immigration policy. When you approach the issue with a little context, it makes it clear that the current bunch of right-wing loonies are part of a very long tradition of conservative bigotry, hate-mongering, jingoism, and politics-of-fear.
The Statue of Liberty, erected in the 1890s at the height of anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, was intended as a direct challenge to those who would shut the door on immigration. Emma Lazarus' famous poem, inscribed on the pedestal of the monument, makes clear the difference between the notion of a country open to all comers, rather than closed to "outsiders".
Our sordid history with regard to immigration has other ways to haunt us as well. A new book that looks at Mexican immigration to the United States in the early 20th century unveils how the federal government processed immigrants in holding camps that Adolf Hitler would later use as models for designing his concentration camps (via Fogonazos, which has a wealth of photographs of these American camps). The U.S. would have another go at concentration camps when they interned the Japanese, but these particular camps were the ones Hitler liked. These camps even made use of the now-notorious "Zyklon B" chemical that the Nazis used to kill millions of Jews -- in the American camps the chemical was used as a fumigant.
Presently, the righties are very enamored of concentration camps and other brutalities. Mitt Romney says he would double the size of Guantanamo. 51% of Americans want to build a giant fence between the U.S. and Mexico. And we are all too well aware of the tolerance for torture.
The one thing you can say about conservatives, they've always got someone to get their hate on for. Maybe we need a new Statue of Liberty along the Rio Grande to remind a few people how we all got here in the first place.
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Today's "This Day In History" marks a couple of significant anniversaries in 20th Century American History: The Allied invasion at Normandy ("D-Day") began 63 years ago on this date, and Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles 39 years ago today.
There isn't any particular link between the two, but both are worth noting. Most Americans have an overly idealistic image of both. We don't learn much about World War II except that we were the good guys and "we won the war". We blithely overlook the widespread support for Hitler in the United States and the U.K. throughout the 1930s, our complicity in the extermination of the Jews, and the far-greater military effort and sacrifice of the Soviet Union in defeating Germany. Not to mention our own concentration camps, crimes against humanity, and so on. Nevertheless, the efforts of the American, British and Canadian forces on the beaches of Normandy were genuinely heroic, and there can be no doubting the significance of re-establishing a Western front in the military defeat of Germany. The invasion was a very hard-won fight, and there would be others as the Allies marched toward Germany, but our military victories eventually overwhelmed the cloudier pre-war political machinations to shape our overall perception of the war.
Similarly, we've constructed Bobby Kennedy into a legendary figure with a mythos he doesn't completely deserve. His father, who, coincidentally, thought Hitler was a better bet than Churchill, was also a big fan and supporter of Joseph McCarthy and got Bobby hired to be one of McCarthy's gunslingers along with the genuinely evil Roy Cohn and David Schine. Then, when McCarthy hit the skids, young Bobby somehow managed to escape relatively politically unscathed. Later, as Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy used illegal wiretaps against a number of figures the Justice Department investigated, including Martin Luther King, Jr.
Always politically opportunistic, Bobby Kennedy used the goodwill going his way after John Kennedy's assassination to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the emerging liberal majority. He used Lyndon Johnson as a foil and was able to win a sympathy vote into the Senate. He managed to turn himself into the very symbol of Democratic liberalism itself in time for the 1968 election, and I think it's likely he would have trounced Nixon if he hadn't died, but there was probably more in common politically between RFK and RMN than most people would admit.
It's easy to boil down the complexities of history as time passes. There are fewer and fewer people alive who remember D-Day personally, and the prominent figures of American politics in 1968 are themselves in that dwindling category. We're left with iconic images like these, histories written for our eighth-grade education level, and our cultural tendency toward selective perception. We need to pay closer attention to what really happened then, and we especially need to pay closer attention to what is going on right in front of us now so that there is genuine accounting for our own actions, our own political figures and our own history when our grandchildren look back through their imperfect lenses half a century on.
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On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln appeared along with former Massachusetts Senator Edward Everett and a host of other dignitaries to dedicate the opening of a cemetery for the Union soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln was a last-minute invitee and second on the bill to Everett, who was considered to be the nation's greatest orator, but his brief remarks have lived on as one of the greatest speeches of all time.
For this Memorial Day, I share with you the text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
We Americans love to imagine ourselves as heroes. Our entire national mythology is presented as a steady stream of noble victories in the neverending battle for freedom and justice. Our telling and retelling of history endures no limit of twisting, rationalization, willing denial, and outright misrepresentation of events in order to preserve our almost child-like need to preserve our national self-image as warriors of liberty.
Once in a while, the truths of history even align in a way that we can reassure ourselves of this belief without having to cast a blind eye to reality. Nearly 8,000 men, Union and Confederate alike, died on the fields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania fighting a war that was not really about slavery or freedom, but about the very basic and oppositional concepts that framed the founding of the American nation. Two very different visions of America, but both stemming from the philosophies of those founding fathers Lincoln invoked. Heroes all were they who fell at Gettysburg, and Lincoln's blessing applies to them all equally.
Nearly a century and a half has passed since the American Civil War. Despite the superficial scars that seek to rejoin those disparate notions of American freedom, we are as deeply divided as we were on that autumn day in 1863. Blue and Gray have been succeeded by Red and Blue, but our idealistic visions of ourselves and our country still stand on far edges of a chasm, one that seems to widen with each passing day.
And in that chasm, once again, thousands of soldiers are pitched in battle. Though they do not fight against one another, the nature of their war and the struggle they represent is not about bringing freedom to the world or about the noble causes of enlightement, it is about us. The men and women who fight a war thousands of miles away from home are, in truth, fighting about our competing visions of ourselves. And, because we are so willing to bend reality to our liking, we have visited the devastation and death not upon the towns and villages of Pennsylvania or Georgia, but upon the innocent peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. They die by the tens of thousands in a struggle that means nothing to them.
Lincoln's assessment of his own remarks was wrong, to say the least. The entire world remembers those eighty-six words and the refrain of "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." That people should be able to freely choose and determine the course of their own governance is not just idealism, it has become recognized as a basic right of every living person on this Earth.
But as I write these words, we are marking a day to remember not just those killed in the Civil War, but all of our war dead, including 3,455 men and women who have died fighting a proxy civil war. Just as the blood shed by those boys in Gettysburg consecrated that field where Lincoln stood, so does the blood shed now in acts of individual heroism continue to consecrate the graveyards of America. But make no mistake, their sacrifices have made no "noble advance" of the "great task". Their deaths and the deaths of those thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan are, so sadly, entirely in vain.
Thus I would say to you on this Memorial Day that it is up to us to take even greater heed of the words of The Great Emancipator and re-dedicate ourselves to the standard of government of the people, by the people, for the people; to stand united against the ruthless men in power who try to take advantage of our divisions to profit from war waged under deceitful rationales; to live up to Lincoln's words for as long as history lets us hear them.
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Q: What is the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?
I've been C&D'd!
Gosh, now I feel like a REAL blogger!
C&D, for those of you who have never had the honor, stands for "Cease and Desist". There is a whole cottage industry of law firms who do nothing but spend their day scouring the Internet looking for things they (well, their clients, really) don't like and then sending bogus threatening letters to people demanding that they cease and desist from doing whatever it is that's gotten a hair across some corporate wanker's ass.
Because, after all, nothing threatens giant multinational corporations more than some geek with a website who uses a name that sounds vaguely like theirs, or makes their logo the same as their "patented" color scheme, or, as in my case, redistributes a font.
Eeeeeeeeeep! Oh NOES! You're distributing a FONT??!?!eleven11
I can hear you gasping in shocked disbelief even now.
Yes. When I brought my site back online last year, I decided I liked the look of one of the fonts Microsoft had come up with for Windows Vista. It's called "Candara", and it's a sophisticated sans-serif style that I think looks especially nice in the smaller sizes. So I specified Candara in my style sheet AND, since most people aren't using Vista, I found a site that had the fonts, downloaded them, re-upped them to my own site and put up a link for people to get the font so the site would look good.
I suppose I should count myself lucky for not ending up at Guantanamo.
Ah, you argue, you are costing Microsoft BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars in lost revenue by STEALING their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.
To which I reply...bullshit. Microsoft went out of their way to make sure those fonts got given away long before Vista hit the streets, and now that Vista is actually for sale, the fonts are included with the installer but are in absolutely NO way central to the function or operation of the software. They are an aesthetic enhancement with zero commercial value, and Microsoft essentially gives them away in every single copy of Vista and Microsoft Office they sell, which, poor sales figures notwithstanding, still numbers in the millions.
This is not to say that fonts in and of themselves don't have some commercial value. There are a number of companies that design fonts and sell them (at fairly steep prices, I might add) to people who would make professional use of them: graphic artists, publishers, and so on. There's some futility to this enterprise, to be sure, because from the earliest days of the use of typeface on computer displays, people have been freely distributing and sharing fonts. The industry likes to position this as "piracy", in the same vein as music sharing, but has had very little success in making it stick because fonts are basically unnecessary and frivolous to 99.999% of computer users.
Anyway, to argue that I am preventing Bill Gates from stacking more bags of money in his giant vault is ingenuous and less than compelling.
Still, they persist. Lawyers are always looking for a way to remove the money from their clients' pockets, and they've managed to convince enough companies that there's something to be gained by harassing people over insignificant details. And, sadly, the American court system, bought and paid for by big business has time and again supported this bullshit argument by giving decision after decision on so-called "infringement" suits to the big corporations. So they won't give up until they have squeezed every imaginable nickel out of this scam. Hooray for America!
Well, my first instinct was that it was just some silly e-mail spam. But then I got a couple more e-mails, all from the same poor beleaguered paralegal who has gotten stuck with the miserable task of scouring site after site for any manner of "infringement" and firing off some boilerplate saber-rattling C&D letter from her boss. I took a moment to look up the firm involved, and they do indeed seem to be the sort of scum-sucking bottom dwellers who flourish in this environment of unbridled greed and unmatched stupidity, so I decided that they were probably for real.
I e-mailed them back, and though I was originally going to tell them to piss off, I finally decided it would be sufficient to get rid of the link they don't like and then post this. Which I told them I was going to do. Except I told them I was going to do it on Monday. So they hit my site like 150 times looking for it. I am usually lucky to have 10-15 visitors a day, so the spike in my traffic was pretty impressive, but otherwise I don't know what they thought they were going to get by reloading my front page 150 times in the space of an hour. It's certainly not enough to clog the server. Maybe they just like hearing about themselves. Maybe the paralegal is just bored out of her tits sending letter after letter to countless thousands of bloggers who have somehow transgressed in the eyes of Microsoft.
So, just let me say that this site STILL looks best when you have the Candara font installed. And while I won't be giving it away anymore, there are at least 24,000 other places on the Internet where you can get it for free. Unless that paralegal has been AWFULLY busy.
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Jeebus, that didn't take long. Deval Patrick hasn't even been governor for two months, and he's already a complete and utter joke. First it was the Cadillac SUV, then the drapes, then giving his wife a secretary on the state payroll and now he's in Dutch for making an ill-advised phone call trying to score a loan for a company he used to serve on the board of.
What a political embarrassment this guy is. Politicians are always a bit on the self-aggrandizing side, to be sure, and if you look around it's not hard to see plenty of pols who have secured themselves, their families, and their assorted followers all manner of personal perks and luxuries. It is part of the game we play with our elected officials -- we overlook some petty (and sometimes not-so-petty) self-enrichment as long as they give the appearance of working for some useful purpose and occasionally pass the spoils on down to us once in a while. In fact, people seem to prefer a degree of embellishing -- anyone old enough to remember when Mike Dukakis was governor will recall that he was ridiculed for riding the T to work and mowing his own lawn. But people cannot bear a politician who sets out to gild his own lily before he does anything to merit it.
What's all the more disappointing, though, is that this guy pulled off one of the most unlikely outsider campaigns in Massachusetts political history and carried the mantle of being "not like the rest of them" right through the election. That means quite a lot in a state like this, where the Democratic party is so thoroughly entrenched at every level of power in government that most of the regular politicians are simply content to wait for their "turn" for the top of the pyramid.
At least a machine pol would have learned a few lessons about public humility and discretion. Even non-stop self-promoters like Bill Galvin know when to shut up and keep quiet about certain things. And Galvin was smart enough to back out of the governor's race early in the face of the groundswell of support Patrick was able to muster, figuring that he would be better off not going up against such anti-incumbent sentiment.
What makes Patrick look especially greedy and stupid through all of this is that everybody has fairly fresh memories of Republican Jane Swift doing the exact same sort of bonehead things during her worthless occupation of "the corner office". Her desire to pluck the big shiny ring of executive privilege cost her entire political career in the end, left to be an asterisk in the history books. Luckily, as far as Jane Swift goes, she was only temporary. This guy is just starting a full term and has already turned himself into a complete laughingstock.
I really wanted this guy to be different. To be the one who gave the Democrats a new direction and the chance to reclaim some semblance of a legitimate platform from which they could restore the devastation that the Republicans have wreaked on American government and free society. Instead, he's managed to prove that the allure of the perks held greater appeal for him than any real agenda for governing, putting him squarely in the same league as generations of worthless political hacks.
Somebody give me a recall petition to sign.
Permalink | Comments (1)Via 3Quarks Daily, I read this opinion piece in Salon by Glenn Greenwald wherein he tries to offer some deeper analysis into why the Republicans pay even the slightest attention to Ann Coulter and the other poo-flinging monkeys of the right.
His thesis: conservatives are a bunch of pussies. Okay, he didn't actually call them "pussies" the way dear old Ann Coulter called John Edwards a "faggot", but that's pretty much what he's saying. Here's one of the better pullquotes:
That laughable absurdity really reveals the heart of this movement. It is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archtypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind -- or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is -- and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.
It all falls together, if you ask me. You've got a general populace which has been brainwashed into a near-constant state of fear at the slightest threat: LED signs mistaken for bombs, anybody even remotely swarthy getting on a plane causing panic, people taking pictures of public buildings being arrested as terror suspects, the whole lot. Then you've got the constant media message of machismo driving people into a false sense of appropriate role models and behaviors. Next you've got the perversion of the predominant religion, which consistently reinforces selfishness, self-righteousness, zealotry and bigotry. And stir that all up with a dose of near-constant stupidity on the part of public officials and media mouthpieces.
Another quote from Greenwald:
People who feel weak and vulnerable crave strong leaders to protect them and to enable them to feel powerful. And those same people crave being part of a political movement that gives them those sensations of power, strength, triumph and bravery -- and they need a strong, powerful, masculine Leader to enable those feelings. And they will devote absolute loyalty to any political movement which can provide them with that.
And, there, my friends, you have the "conservative movement" in a nutshell. Emphasis on the "nut".
Permalink |One of my favorite bloggers, BusyMom, is just back from a somewhat lackluster getaway weekend with her girlfriends and has some advice on what NOT to name your new business.
(I would hasten to add at least one more, particularly for those of you opening a shop somewhere here in New England: Enough already with the "Ye Olde Shoppe", please.)
I have linked to the blogger at Violent Acres previously, as well, even though I don't ordinarily read her site. This was her rant recently about giving your employer as good as they give you back.
I agree with her in principle -- on the whole, most employers expect something akin to blood-oath loyalty in return for a mere paycheck, meanwhile they have no problem imposing absurd and arbitrary rules and conditions on people and cutting people off at the knees when it suits their short-sighted purposes. Redefining the employer-employee relationship in a way that balances the power a bit more fairly is something I think both sides need to address in a positive way.
I do think she's trying to excuse herself from some bad behavior in the way that she actually quit that terrible job. I shouldn't be pointing any fingers, to be sure, but she didn't even tell them she actually quit, and then sent her husband to collect her final paycheck. Even if you just up and quit on the spot (which I have done more than once, by the way), you should at least tell them that. I don't think two week's notice is necessary at all -- I completely agree that if an employer wanted to fire someone or lay them off they wouldn't feel obliged to give notice, so turnabout is fair play -- but you have to at least acknowledge what you've done.
This post resonates with me because my last job was so dysfunctional in so many ways, and yet that employer is routinely classified as a "best place to work". It makes you wonder who makes those judgments and if they ever actually talk to people who work "in the trenches" or if they just get a bunch of smoke blown up their asses from PR flacks armed with bullshit HR propaganda.
My friends and regular visitors probably know that I've recently started working an IT job again, but as a contractor rather than as a permanent employee. The company where I am right now is immensely bureaucratic (in part out of necessity, but in part just as a function of their culture) and not terribly employee-friendly as far as I can see. Being a semi-autonomous contractor goes a long way to leveling out the inherent inequalities in the employer-employee relationship. I highly recommend it.
Permalink | Comments (1)While Turner Broadcasting may have gotten a cheap deal for only having to pay $2 million and sacrifice one guy in a suit over the Mooninite Invasion, the over-the-top response from the local authorities is a laughable reminder of a very un-laughable situation that affects a number of major American cities in a very sinister and threatening way: superficial and overblown public security measures that in practice offer almost no real security but transform public life into a series of intimidating encounters that violate the very nature of a free society.
First, just so we're all on the same page, a short lesson I found online the other day: this Flash animation very simply and elegantly explains the whole philosophy of liberty. It's several minutes long, and gets a bit preachy at the end, but for those of you who find philosophy a little thick, this lays out the central ideas plainly. Among them, the one most pertinent to this conversation is the idea that the threat of force or violence to coerce proscribed behavior is inimical to a free society.
Writing at 3QuarksDaily, Michael Blim takes on the intimidation used by the MBTA Police in the form of random bag searches. Though it took a couple of false starts for the MBTA Police to actually mplement the searches as regular policy, it has been in place now for a couple of years. The MBTA Police do not always pay much attention to the policy themselves, but every once in a while something (like bogus LED signs all over the city) jostles them back to attention and they make more of a show of doing some searches.
As Blim points out, in the last quarter of 2006, the MBTA Police detained 2500 people for random searches. Absolutely none of them turned out to have anything remotely dangerous or illegal, and only 27 of them even set off what would turn out to be false positives from their explosive sniffing dogs and machines. There are approximately 1.2 MILLION riders on the various MBTA trains and buses every single day. The MBTA cops stopped 2500 people out of a total possible number of 98.4 million riders in an 82-day period. That's 0.002% of the total ridership. As the Massachusetts ACLU notes, that is an "infinitesimally small" number of searches.
In other words, it's a joke. A complete waste of time and a complete waste of money. Barring the statistical "one-in-a-million" scenario (which they would have to score EVERY SINGLE DAY to be meaningful), there's no way these searches are the slightest bit effective.
So what's the real effect of the presence of the cops and the dogs and the bomb-sniffing machines? Intimidation. Whereas the presence of police obviously on patrol for routine criminal activity can indeed provide some deterrent, these police are not on routine patrol. Their job is to consider each and every person on the subways, buses, and commuter trains as suspect. And because their task is done overtly, the glare of suspicion introduces the element of intimidation into the public space.
Let me quote Blim directly, because he says this well:
Further the court seems unaware of the fear such tactics create in ordinary persons feel when they find cops in their face unexpectedly, dressed in black and equipped with guns, a machine, and a dog, and demanding that they surrender their bags.
Let's be clear -- the fear or expectation of violence or punishment is absolutely equivalent to the violence or punishment itself. Don't agree with me? Ask Dick Cheney or Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the validity of torture. The threat of torture alone is considered a torturous act in international law. While random bag searches do not reach the same threat level on their own, consider that you can be arrested and detained indefinitely without benefit of counsel or contact with anyone on practically any grounds of suspicion deemed appropriate. And, as Blim points out, the federal courts have ruled that the state has complete and total discretion to determine any action as a threat to itself, trumping the rights of the individual.
Now let's consider that "philosophy of liberty" piece again, shall we? If you accept the premises of this short lesson as valid, then there's no way the current MBTA policies, or any of the other "for show" efforts established by public safety agencies in Boston, New York, London, or anywhere else are in any way tolerable in a free society.
And yet they persist, are given legitimacy by the courts, are aggressively pursued by all levels of government and receive a degree of public support from some quarters of society. In short, we have breached the free society as it was imagined and put into practice for more than 200 years and all we have to show for it is fear itself.
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Oh, I just don't even know where to begin. This whole debacle is beyond stupid, it's George W. Bush-stupid.
Somehow, nine other cities across the country managed to have these little LED signs all over the place and no one thought they were bombs, but Boston's Finest came out and publicly decreed that a circuit board, some wires and a battery "were consistent with improvised explosive devices". I guess the light-up monster giving the one-fingered salute must be some kind of Islamo-fascist code, eh? (That's what seven generations of police in-breeding will do to people, I guess)
Somehow, nobody at the "guerilla marketing company" or Turner Broadcasting managed to take a moment to consider just what sort of reptile-brain thinking goes on in your major metropolitan police department. Then, when the shit hit the fan, Turner's own people at CNN were among the first to start banging the panic gongs for a "terror alert" and balls-to-the-wall live coverage. The paranoid among us have already jumped on this to say that the whole thing was a cleverly-designed maneuver a la "War Of The Worlds", but to me it only goes to show that the so-called "television journalists" are completely unable to do anything but parrot back what they are told. Frankly, that explains pretty much everything that has happened in this country for the last seven years, but it sure is getting old.
Then, "da Mayah" and our sparkly-new governor jumped the gun a bit with their public statements, only to have egg on their faces an hour later when every blogger on the planet except me broke the real story about the cartoon characters. Instead of ponying up to being mike-grabbing attention-hounds, the pols have spent every moment since issuing various stern pronouncements about what they're going to do to Turner Broadcasting. What they're going to do is jack-shit, and we all know it, so they might as well just have said "Oh, sorry, never mind" and admitted they and the Boston Police overreacted. Apparently they've been watching tapes of George W. Bush in action.
But, the stupidity doesn't stop there. The "struggling artist" who put up all the signs for the marketing company managed to videotape himself and a friend hanging the signs all over the city late at night and POSTED IT ON THE INTERNET. They arrested him last night on some bogus charges that I'm sure will get dropped once the politicians have covered their asses, but he deserves to be arrested again for being so fundamentally stupid as to post his self-incriminating video (complete with rockin' techno music that features a robot chanting "BOOM-chaka-laka"). Americans don't have to spy on each other, I guess, because they're obviously willing to implicate themselves in the dumbest possible stunts.
Somewhere in a cave in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is cackling with glee. Who knew he was such an Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan?
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As regular visitors here know, my anger toward and hatred of George W. Bush has become so visceral that I can't even bear to watch him or listen to his voice except in the smallest of clips without elevating my blood pressure.
So I chose to watch Adam and Jamie blow up a scale model of the Hindenburg on MythBusters last night. I figure if I have to choose between two different flaming Nazi gasbags, I might as well choose the one with some entertainment value.
I also knew that there would be plenty of media coverage to make sure that I would know the content of the speech, even if I didn't watch it personally. And I was right, of course. In fact, the White House was even good enough to give the media a few excerpts of the speech beforehand so they could get their spin machines up to full speed before 9:00 p.m.
As usual, rising to the top of the commentary, is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. Here's the link to the video of Olbermann's piece at Crooks & Liars (I might change this link to some other source later). And, as I have made it a practice to do in the last few months, here is the complete transcript of the editorial:
President Bush makes no secret of his distaste for looking backward, for assessing past results. But in our third story on the Countdown tonight: too bad.Permalink |Any meaningful assessment of the president's next step in Iraq must consider his steps and missteps so far. So, let's look at the record: Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said he was no nation-builder; nation-building was wrong for America. Now, he says it is vital for America.
He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control. Today, U.S. troops observe Iraqi restrictions. He told us about WMDs. Mobile labs. Secret sources. Aluminum tubing. Yellow-cake.He has told us the war is necessary. Because Saddam was a threat; Because of 9/11; Osama bin Laden; al Qaeda; Because of terrorism in general; To liberate Iraq; To spread freedom; To spread democracy; To keep the oil out of the hands of terrorist-controlled states; Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.
In pushing for and prosecuting this war, he passed on chances to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, Osama bin Laden. He sent in fewer troops than recommended. He disbanded the Iraqi Army, and "de-Baathified" the government. He short-changed Iraqi training. He did not plan for widespread looting, nor the explosion of sectarian violence. He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. Gave jobs to foreign contractors, not the Iraqis. Staffed U-S positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.
We learned that "America had prevailed", "Mission Accomplished", the resistance was in its "last throes".
He has said more troops were not necessary, and more troops are necessary, and that it's up to the generals, and removed some of the generals who said more troops would be necessary.
He told us of turning points: The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam, a provisional government, the trial of Saddam, a charter, a constitution, an Iraqi government, ¤elections, purple fingers, a new government, the death of Saddam. We would be greeted as liberators, with flowers. As they stood up-we would stand down, we would stay the course, we were never 'stay the course'.
The enemy was al Qaeda, was foreigners, terrorists, Baathists. The war would pay for itself, it would cost 1-point-7 billion dollars, 100 billion, 400 billion, half a trillion dollars.
And after all of that, today it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Republicans, Democrats, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November, and the majority of the American people.
Via reddit.com, I read and completely agree with this blogger's rant about how so many people feel perfectly entitled to treat customer service workers badly and how it has boiled over into the general level of rudeness in just about every avenue of public discourse. (I am trying to use language a bit less rough than hers, but her basic point is "stop being such an asshole")
The blogger credits this sad state of affairs to two popular American aphorisms: "the customer is always right" and "you have to earn respect". I agree with her sentiment, although I think it goes much deeper than that. It's not just a sense of entitlement, it's our willingness to reduce everyone outside of our very small personal spheres into non-entities. Once you stop seeing other people as human beings, it becomes possible to do almost anything to them -- witness the sudden popularity of torture among the general public.
Her method of confronting this when she encounters it in others is to try to publicly humiliate the person delivering the beatdown to the hapless waiter or counter clerk. I am less sure about whether this is a good approach. On one hand, it seems to just extend the cycle of uncivil behavior, but on the other hand sometimes the only way to get people to stop behaving badly is to give them a taste of their own medicine. Just imagine how effective it would be to tie Dick Cheney down to a wooden plank and dunk his head in a bucket of water over and over again (okay, I'll stop drooling over that scenario now, but you see my point).
I always try to remember that telemarketers, retail clerks at the mall, and so on are just people doing a job. One that they probably don't like or want but have no choice about. If a customer service person of whatever stripe is doing their job badly, I think it's fine to call them on it, but not to berate them, blow an air horn into the phone, or have a temper tantrum in the middle of the mall. If the person is taking their bad day out on you, then I think there's some justification in giving it back, because respect is a two-way street. And everybody deserves a margin of respect without having to earn it. Even if you're being an asshole.
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Actual screen cap of an AP story about soon-to-be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in which whoever wrote the caption felt obliged to mention her outfit. (via Jack at TPRS)
Excuse the hell out of me, but when was the last time it was considered necessary to mention who made George Bush's suit or what color shirt he wore? Are we really not over the need in our society to define women by their clothing? What single bit of difference does it make if Nancy Pelosi wears an aqua Armani pantsuit or a red polyester dress from K-Mart? Does it matter if Bush wears Hermes neckties or suits off the rack from Men's Wearhouse? Of course not.
When Katie Couric debuted on the CBS Evening News a couple of months ago, there was a lot of scrutiny given to her choice of wardrobe, too. On one hand, I can understand this to some degree because she's more celebrity than authority figure, even though she finds herself in a role we've traditionally granted "gravitas" to. What celebrities wear is part of the whole cult of celebrity in the first place. But even in Katie Couric's case, dishing about her outfit seems woefully out of place in the context of her role vis-a-vis Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson, and certainly in relation to the way we talked about news anchors like Cronkite or Jennings.
Part of the problem, I suppose, is that we've reduced politicians to celebrities (indeed, the line is so blurred that we're entirely willing to accept celebrities as politicians, so why not the other way around?), but the double standard is unnecessary.
Permalink | Comments (1)I don't usually watch Bill Maher's show on HBO -- I'm an old fart and am usually in bed by 11:00 on a Friday night -- but thanks to the magic of The Internets it's easy to keep up with his regular "New Rules" segment, which is generally the best part of the show anyway. I like Maher better than the "fake news" premise of "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" (even though I do find those both very funny); I think it's a bit more honest to go head-to-head with newsfigures rather than hide behind the safe disguise of a staged bit. Maher also points his monologue at a broader range of subjects than just the usual Washington idiotocracy. It's good to remember that there is a world outside of politics, even if someone is making fun of it.
I especially liked this recent "New Rules" segment wherein he pulls no punches about the "We're Number One!" chest-thumping that permeates American society. We ain't Number One in much any more, and he's got the statistics to prove it.
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Please don't.
Yeah, this was clever 'n shit back in 1999 or something when the Internet was still shiny and clean and everybody thought it was cool when you could convince a whole bunch of people to do random stuff just because they could. But after several years of spending each November reading bloggers alternately whining about not writing enough and crowing about their hopeless logorrhea, I think it's done. Seriously. Think of the children.
Not everyone has the Great American Novel hiding deep inside their soul, waiting to be set free. Though these days I am cursed with terminal writer's block, I have done a fair amount of writing in my life, and long ago I came to terms with the honest assessment that I was not cut out to write novels. So I am not saying this out of some secretly-harbored desire to be a novelist or some bitter resentment that you're a lemming with a word processor and I'm not. I am saying this in hopes of sparing you, me, and everyone else a month's worth of pointless effort when you could be doing something so much more worth your while like polishing your shoes or raking leaves.
Maybe you could use November to READ novels. Good ones. Or at least entertaining ones. Skip Dickens, though. He got paid by the word and it shows. Plus, he probably did write a couple of those in a month, and I wouldn't want you to get any ideas. Try "War And Peace". That wasn't dashed off in between watching YouTube clips and IM-ing with your cow-orkers, you can bet. Or "Gone With The Wind". Hell, the MOVIE took three years to make, so imagine how long it took Margaret Mitchell to write.
When you do finally sit down to write your novel, promise me you'll take longer than a month to do it. And promise me you won't post some running commentary about it on your blog every single day, especially when all you have to say is "I didn't write anything today". Be like President Bush and use The Internets and The Google for something useful, like downloading porn. At least that way you can masturbate in private and not in front of everybody.
(Here's the blog I swiped that image from. Very funny stuff and oh so true.)
Permalink |I had the usual selection of assorted links all ready to post today, but when I went online this morning, I caught Keith Olbermann's latest monologue speaking out against Bush's signing of the "Terror Act" that wipes away nearly 1000 years of the rule of law, 230 years of American democracy, rejects the Geneva Convention and turns every person in this nation into a political prisoner whether they realize it yet or not.
And so again, I feel that it is important to post this for you today; there will be plenty of time for frivolities another day. For now these words need to be seen and heard. "The Beginning of the End Of America", indeed. If you are not willing or able to watch the embedded streaming video above, here is the complete transcript:
And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.Permalink |We have lived as if in a trance. We have lived as people in fear. And now, our rights and our freedoms in peril, we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before, and we have been led here by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America.
We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said, about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans, while his man-in-charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese."
American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did -- but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced, survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his Presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States, to the citizens of the United States, whose lives it ruined.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been, only human. We have let Roosevelt's "fear of fear itself" overtake us. We have listened to the little voice inside that has said "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass." We have accepted, that the only way to stop the terrorists, is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets, was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets. Or substitute the Japanese. Or the Germans. Or the Socialists. Or the Anarchists. Or the Immigrants. Or the British. Or the aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always wrong.
"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"
Wise words. And ironic ones, Mr. Bush. Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act. You spoke so much more than you know, sir. Sadly, of course, the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And -- again, Mr. Bush -- all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghreib Prison and the stories of waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere -- anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" -- exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check. He lied to get it. He lied as he received it. Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?
"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. "In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them."
'Presumed innocent,' Mr. Bush? The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
'Access to an attorney,' Mr. Bush? Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
'Hearing all the evidence,' Mr. Bush? The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.
Your words are lies, sir. They are lies, that imperil us all.
"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us yesterday, "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America." That terrorist, sir, could only hope. Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.
Habeas Corpus? Gone. The Geneva Conventions? Optional. The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be "the beginning of the end of America."
And did it even occur to you once, sir, somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11, that with only a little further shift in this world we now know, just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died, did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" for, and convene a Military Commission to try, not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, sir, all of them -- as always -- wrong.
For those of us who spend a significant portion of our days online, we've become quite familiar with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and his series of penetrating, truth-baring editorials calling the Bush Adminstration and its allies on the carpet for their incessant lies, cavils, misdemeanors and incompetence. It seems like every time he opens his mouth, the video clips appear on YouTube, Crooks & Liars, Digg and just about everywhere else almost immediately.
A few weeks ago, though, when I posted about what I think was his best monologue, wherein he excoriated Donald Rumsfeld for likening opposition to the war in Iraq to the behavior of the Nazis, my friend Tony replied with this comment:
This is an incredibly penetrating and compelling essay. The question is, is anyone listening?
His point is valid: Olbermann's show is buried in the middle of the night on a poorly-rated cable network. Even though every word the man is speaking hits like the hammer of justice, his viewing audience is negligible, particularly compared to that of his arch-nemesis, Fox News gasbag Bill O'Reilly.
In the days before the Internet, that would have been the end of it. A voice literally crying out in the darkness, unheard and unnoticed as the wave of right-wing extremism overwhelms this nation. But, as I said, Olbermann is getting plenty of notice from an online culture able to spread not just his message but his actual words more or less instantaneously and to people everywhere on the planet. Six or seven years ago, though, that would still be a small number of people, and the larger culture of people who do not live online still might have missed it.
But the power of his words and the power of the Internet are beginning to have an effect. Olbermann's television ratings are up 69%, and his editorials are discussed, disseminated, and (in the case of the right-wing media) disresepcted in a number of "MSM" outlets as well as major online news sites.
The broader implication of "is anyone listening?" is, of course, whether or not such outspoken sentiments carry any weight with the Bush Administration itself. In that case, all you can really say is that they have encased themselves so completely in a cocoon of denial, deceit and spin that nothing anyone says gets through to them. Ultimately, it's probably not all that important to reach the ears of Chimpy McAWOL and his band of thugs -- they have already cast their fate to the wind. But more and more ordinary people need to hear these things if there is any chance to stem the tide, and it appears like that is beginning to happen.
Permalink | Comments (2)In the week and a half or so since the Republicans "compromised" with the White House on the legislation that permits torture, abrogates the Geneva Convention and eviscerates the 800-year-old legal tradition of habeas corpus I have been trying to think of a way to write about it here.
In the process, I have encountered a lot of well-written editorials, articles, and blog posts:
A blogger who calls himself "Wisco" wrote this post entitled "Remember When Everyone Thought Torture Was Evil?" He pays particular attention to the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen originally from Syria who was detained, imprisoned and tortured by the United States government covertly for almost a year with no access to any legal resources. A confession was beaten out of him despite the fact that he was completely innocent of any charges. Wisco writes about the apologists and advocates among the American Right who continue to try to smear this man and promote torture as a "necessary weapon".
The Russian author Vladimir Bukovsky wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post in the spring of 2005 entitled "Torture's Long Shadow", in which he offers his own first-hand account of being held prisoner and tortured by the KGB in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison. The graphic details will make you shudder when you consider that his only "crime" was speaking out against the Soviet regime -- we used to think of ourselves better than the Soviets, but, as Bukovsky writes, we have consigned ourselves to this same path where any justification can and will be found to imprison and torture anyone who comes under the displeasure of the administration.
More recently in the Washington Post, the editorial board of that newspaper offered a harsh criticism of not just Bush but Senator John McCain, himself the victim of torture as a prisoner of war, but when political points needed to be scored was willing to betray his own past. It is disturbing in the extreme that a "compromise" which consists of little more than a political face-saving gesture for both Bush and McCain which, in the end, astonishingly turns a blind eye to this despicable behavior.
The historian Niall Ferguson, who had been at one point a darling among the Right because of his historical assessment of the United States' unclaimed status as an "empire", now reminds us that another hero of the Right, Winston Churchill, opposed torture for pragmatic reasons: abuse of prisoners will inevitably result in torture and abuse on the part of the other side and turn into a downward spiral of atrocities. This was the very point of the Geneva Conventions in the first place, and technicalities will hold little water with aggrieved enemies.
Speaking of water -- waterboarding has been much discussed through all of this, held up by the Right as a "lite" version of torture (if any such thing can be imagined), but this post by "The Nation" editor David Corn should dissuade anyone except the most willfully blind apologist that it is anything but. Bush, he says, has cast his lot in with the worst dictators and murderers of the 20th Century.
I could go on with the links, as there have been many people of conscience who have spoken out publicly in the last couple of weeks about this.
One time, several years ago, on this blog I stated one thing very clearly:
I continue to hold fast to that sentiment. It is heart-breaking to even begin to think that millions of people in this country continue to support the actions of a group of people who have demonstrated themselves to have nothing but contempt for the groundwork of civilization itself, who are willing to broach any separation between decency and brutality, who are ready to cast aside every principle upon which law and government have made manifest for nearly a millennium, who have determined to exert and extend their power with only the foulest of intentions.
Liberalism in theory and form promotes tolerance and provides a great deal of room for the co-existence of a multiplicity of opinions and world-views, but for me the threshhold of tolerance has been reached as a consequence of these recent actions. I can no longer find any room for accommodation for anyone who supports these actions or the people who have undertaken them. I am compelled to judge any and all supporters as being profoundly evil themselves and from this time forward will show not the slightest consideration for them. They are deserving of nothing but my uttermost contempt and will receive no more.
I cannot say what the best practical course is to begin the fight against this evil. It is clear that the mechanisms traditionally available to the American people have been undermined and devalued to the point of meaninglessness. It is less clear where other traditional forms of opposition might take us. Unfortunately, there may not be many alternatives as we are marched down this path.
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The BBC reports that yet another person in Indonesia has succumbed to the H5N1 "bird flu". Fifty people have died in Indonesia, and the global worldwide total of human deaths from bird flu has reached 140.
I notice that the catastrophiles who worked themselves up into a frenzy all last winter about the coming pandemic that was going to destroy humanity have managed to be a bit more restrained so far this year. Not that they probably won't try, but I think that the utter lack of a pandemic finally got a lot of people to realize that there was more than a little bit of crying wolf involved.
That's not to say that flu pandemics can't happen or that H5N1 doesn't have the potential to morph into a virus more readily communicable between humans. It is to say that the people who seem so deeply invested in imagining the worst-case scenarios really need to screw their tin-foil helmets on a bit more tightly and try looking at the world with a working reality.
People are imaginative creatures, and the point of these three posts today is that most people will believe what they want to believe even if there is no evidence to back them up or even when the existing evidence contradicts them completely. They will, in fact, go out of their way to seek out anything that has the most tenuous connection to their belief and overstate it as necessary to shore up their clearly erroneous and sometimes outright delusional beliefs.
This is called "faith", and it's an incredibly destructive human tendency. Faith and its various manifestations does more to harm our ability to cope with the world as it really is than almost any other human emotion.
As a culture, we have taken this to an extreme perversion by transforming fears into a form of "faith" -- we want to believe that the worst possible things are going to happen to us, despite all indications to the contrary: tusnamis, terror attacks, pandemics, even the "Second Coming" is a fearful faith. It's not just Americans, either; a Guardian article I saw the other day noted that most Britons think the world is a more dangerous place now than it was 50 years ago, despite plenty of evidence otherwise. Historically, Western culture goes through these cycles, most usually described as "Millenialism" due to the prevalence of the belief that "End Times" were upon them (as surely the belief curses our culture now). Ultimately even the most fervent doomsdayers are compelled to give in to the brutal daily reality of our dogged continuation, and the mania wanes to wait its turn for another century or so. And, oddly enough, the deluded people actually do eventually get their wish in some fashion through the inescapability of death, even if they don't get to go out in the blaze of glory they wished for or get that all-important resurrection they spent so much time praying for.
Our imaginations and our propensity to believe in them to the exclusion of our ability to comprehend the world around us are a far greater threat to our ultimate survival than dead chickens in Asia.
Permalink |The fetishization of September 11 is overwhelming and needs to end.
This morning we are confronted with news anchors dressed in funereal clothing, a day-long replay of the live coverage of that morning five years ago, dozens upon dozens of commemorative services, a president who could not be found during the actual event gadabouting around from place to place to bask in the afterglow of his most shining moment, and, what is possibly the longest-lasting legacy, a day that promises more worthless partisan bickering and personal division over "what this day means".
Even my five-year-old, who was not yet four months old on September 11, 2001, is being forced to "remember" an event that she will never have a personal memory of, as her school indulges in this particular and unseemly obsession. She and her classmates will always live with the consequences of that day and the shameful choices we the people have made since then, but at the very least they should be allowed to face that life afresh and not with the constant perverse infatuation their parents insist on clinging to.
We are cursed with the ability to conjure up not just our imperfect human memories but our intricately detailed recordings of daily events; personal memories fade and reshape themselves over time, but we can be re-assaulted with the exact moments through our technology, and the people responsible for using that technology have no compunction about doing so again and again as long as it seems to suit their less-than-altruistic purposes. And so the memorable becomes unforgettable, and the process of recovering from the emotional trauma is subverted repeatedly until no one is allowed the chance to move on. The families and friends of those who were killed have their own cycle of grief to bear, but now every person in this country is forced to re-tread that cycle for themselves, seemingly ad infinitum.
Thus has the magnitude of the day been rendered out of proportion for most people. We are treated to the news of disaster and tragedy every single day -- a quarter of a million people killed in the South Asia tsunami, tens of thousands dead in earthquakes in India and Pakistan, nearly as many people dead from Hurricane Katrina as from 9/11, and the ongoing and escalating death toll of Iraqis and Americans alike in the sham war perpetrated in the memory of those killed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Somehow we are able to soldier on in the wake of all of these tragedies, and in fairly short order. That is the natural progression of life -- we stop for a bit to reflect on what was lost, and then we move on. But we are not allowed that basic provision with regard to this anniversary.
Before the smoke could even clear from the skies of New York, it was crystal clear that there were those who saw in the tragedy an opportunity to make bold initiatives impossible to achieve when calmer heads prevailed, and it has been to their advantage to keep these wounds and divisions as fresh as possible. And though the news media have proven irrefutably that they are shameless hucksters and opportunistic parasites of the worst kind, in their parasitism they are not essentially guilty for exacerbating the situation that the politicians foster. We, the people of this country, need to acknowledge our unseemly obsession, to recover our sensibility with regard to the progression of human life, to reassert our natural ability to overcome obstacles and setbacks. Wallowing in self-indulgent and self-absorbed maudlin sentiment, fueled by the the hypocritical machinations of politics and media is disgraceful and ultimately the poorest possible way to honor the innocents victimized five years ago and the innocents just beginning their lives now.
Permalink | Comments (1)On Tuesday, Donald Rumsfeld delivered an address to the American Legion in Salt Lake City that accused anyone who opposed the Bush Administration's efforts in Iraq of appeasement and likened them to the Nazis.
News anchor Keith Olbermann, who has been vocal and outspoken about his disagreement with the administration and its apologists and supporters, took the time on his overnight broadcast early Wednesday morning to rebut the words of Donald Rumsfeld, in the process delivering an essay of immense conviction and fortitude. Olbermann invoked the spirit and the very words of Edward R. Murrow in doing so, and while he demurred at any positive comparison between Murrow and himself, I believe that he may have achieved something very similar.
I give you now without other further comment from me the full transcript and video of Keith Olbermann's closing essay:
The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.Permalink | Comments (1)Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.
We end the countdown where we began, our #1 story, with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld's remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It demands the deep analysis - and the sober contemplation - of every American.
For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence - indeed, the loyalty - of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land; Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants - our employees - with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration's track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.
Dissent and disagreement with government is the life's blood of human freedom; And not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as "his" troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq. It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right, and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.
In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld's speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For, in their time, there was another government faced with true peril with a growing evil, powerful and remorseless. That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld's, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the secret information. It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld's - questioning their intellect and their morality.
That government was England's, in the 1930s. It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone to England. It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords. It knew that the hard evidence it had received, which contradicted it's own policies, it's own conclusions - it's own omniscience - needed to be dismissed. The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.
Most relevant of all - it "knew" that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile - at best morally or intellectually confused. That critic's name… was Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.
History - and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England - had taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty - and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.
Thus did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy excepting the fact that he has the battery plugged in backwards. His government, absolute and exclusive in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis. It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.
But back to today's Omniscient Ones.
That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count - not just his. Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience - about Osama Bin Laden's plans five years ago - about Saddam Hussein's weapons four years ago - about Hurricane Katrina's impact one year ago - we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego. But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelope this nation - he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have - inadvertently or intentionally - profited and benefited, both personally, and politically. And yet he can stand up in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor's New Clothes.
In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?
The confusion we - as its citizens - must now address, is stark and forbidding. But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note - with hope in your heart - that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light and we can too. The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this Administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.
And about Mr. Rumsfeld's other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism." As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that, though probably not in the way he thought he meant it. This country faces a new type of fascism, indeed.
Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute… I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow. But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed, "confused" or "immoral."
Thus forgive me for reading Murrow in full:
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954.
"We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear - one, of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of un-reason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men; Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were - for the moment - unpopular."
And so, good night, and good luck.
(One of the many Hezbollah fighters incapacitated by Israeli strikes in Lebanon. Except, of course, that he's five years old.)
It should be patently obvious by now that this war-by-proxy between the United States and Iran is a deliberate and calculated action by both sides to further their aims against one another by building a framework that can be used for justifying military escalation.
In particular, the useless jetting about by Condoleezza Rice spouting off an unsupportable cease-fire plan to other governments who will hear none of it would be laughable were it not for the serious consequences of such blatant stalling. It's been established that the Israelis sought and received American political support for this action a year ago, waiting for the right pretext to make their move. Foolishly (or perhaps cunningly) Hezbollah gave them the opening they were waiting for, not unlike the way Al Quaeda gave Bush carte blanche on 9/11.
But the gambit has not worked out quite the way Israel and the American neocons expected it would (about par for the course for the PNAC crowd), despite Israel's quick military success, and the Bush Administration's ploy of delaying a diplomatic solution to give Israel time to finish up threatens now plays into the hands of the Iranians, as have almost all of their efforts.
On the positive side, as long as Bush plays a stalling game, I think it's unlikely that the military conflict will widen. New Gingrich has been running around in public with the drool pouring down from his slavering mouth while he declares this World War III, and the neocons have been sickeningly fast to embrace that idea. Even that poor old sot Christopher Hitchens has been granted a little more time to babble on about how Allied war crimes in WWII are really the fault of the "appeasers" and if we'd learn from their example, the innocents of Lebanon would not have to die at the hands of the Israelis. Anything to rationalize an American foreign policy that has failed utterly, eh Chris?
Tell that to the little boy in the picture. Or this family. Or this woman in Beirut. Given that the Israelis decided a year ago that they were prepared to accept their own civilian casulties to further their aim and have shown absolutely no reluctance to kill Lebanese civilians and U.N. observers, there is little point in asserting any equivalence between Israeli and Hezbollah airstrikes. This is cold-blooded and calculated murder. Meanwhile, the mullahs in Iran get to shore up their international support without having to take on direct military action.
If this game plan continues in the way most of the neocon agenda has gone, the stalling game won't last forever. Bush will eventually commit American troops, and will almost certainly get a justification for attacking Iran directly -- a Hezbollah rocket hitting an American armored vehicle, a suicide bomber, something -- a rationalization that will score with American public opinion where months of saber-rattling and threatening words have failed to sway people. It's beyond repulsive to watch these machinations play themselves out knowing the consequences they hold.
Permalink |Three brief examples of the absurdity of religion delivering needless suffering to people all over the world:
Example #1
Today, July 12, marks the beginning of "marching season" in Northern Ireland. People in Northern Ireland know today simply as "The Twelfth", much as we know Independence Day as "The Fourth". The anniversary marks the victory of the English King William's victory at the Battle of the Boyne, a key turning point in the English conquest of Ireland, but over the years has devolved into yet another opportunity for Protestant groups to incite conflict with the Catholics, who are the minority in Ulster. In recent years, the marches have grown increasingly violent, even as sectarian strife in Northern Ierland has found an outlet through political dialogue.
Now, some moron (an American businessman, of course) has decided to profit from this conflict by turning it into a tourist opportunity. Inviting Americans to go to Northern Ireland to see the marches (and, by extension, inviting them to witness whatever conflicts might arise). It's the moral equivalent of selling tickets to a lynching, another popular American pasttime of yesteryear. But, then again, the most popular sport in America is NASCAR, so I guess things really haven't changed at all. (via New Humanist)
Example #2
The death toll from yesterday's train bombings in Mumbai (Bombay), India is now at 185, with nearly 700 other people injured. Though there were some yesterday trying to pin the incident on Al Quaeda, the culprits appear to be one of two groups of Kashmir separatist movements with ties to Pakistan, a long-standing sponsor of a number of Islamic terrorist groups (including Al Quaeda).
The struggle over Kashmir, which is sectarian in origin, has fueled political tension between India and Pakistan for decades. Both nations now have nuclear weapons and both have indicated complete willingness to use them against one another -- at the end of 2001, the two countries stood toe-to-toe ready to unleash nuclear holocaust on one another after another terrorist bombing. Since then, the two countries have done much to open political dialogue, but, as this Washington Post editorial wonders, how much more provocation will be tolerated before an event sets off those nuclear triggers? The author of that piece opines that India needs to step up to the table on Kashmir, but that Pakistan needs to demonstrate that they have the willingness to throttle their wayward clients. (via 3quarksdaily)
Example #3
Is there really anything left to say about the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine? Israeli forces have already begun shelling Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon following the seizure of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, and the government of Israel has deemed the kidnapping an "act of war". They will undoubtedly conduct additional military incursions, as they have been doing with regard to a similar situation in Gaza.
To me the only thing that's clear about this situation any more is that both sides are wrong on just about everything. There is probably no real political solution to be had, given that each side is willing to simply start killing the other regardless of the imposition of dialogue, "roadmaps", shuttle diplomacy, Camp David meetings, or anything else.
All of this grief, all of this suffering, all of this peril because religious people can't agree on their various flavors of imaginary beings. You'll pardon my disgust.
Permalink |Twenty years ago, when my wife and I first started seeing each other, I had occasion to buy a small 14-inch color television from Sears. It was even a Sears brand, not a major nameplate (although I realize Sears uses them to manufacture their electronics). That television has moved with us from Maine to Illinois to Indiana, back to Maine, and here to Massachusetts and it still works just as well as it did twenty years ago, when I paid something like $150.00 for it. These days it lives in the basement in the playroom/sewing space that Bridget and Charlotte share, relegated to third wheel behind our more recent television purchases, which get the premiere spots of the living room and the master bedroom. No other television I've bought in the last twenty years has come anywhere near lasting that long.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, the TV in our bedroom finally stopped working. It was just about nine years old, which is not bad for electronics, but not even close to that little Sears set. We knew it was just a matter of time when it began shutting itself off randomly. It would respond to the tried-and-true home repair method of whacking it a few times on the side, but when it would no longer respond to brute force, we knew it was toast. So I toddled over to Circuit City to scope out a new model.
In the last few years since we bought that television, digital TV and HDTV have become standardized at long last, and the foot-dragging over the long-awaited switchover to full-time HDTV broadcasting was finally mandated for next year. So what you'll find when you visit an electronics store these days is that the few traditional analog televisions being sold have been relegated to junk status and are available for birdseed, even the larger-screen models which used to command a pretty lofty price. The Luddites and bargain-hunters among you will be glad to know this, I'm sure. For the same price as that little 14-inch guy I bought in 1986, I could have bought a 27-inch conventional television set.
But, knowing what's to come, I looked at the various HD models and opted to buy one of those, which are now at last selling in the price range that traditional TV sets used to go for. It's quite easy to find an HDTV in the $500-800 range, and even some of the extra-large sets have finally gone under the magic $1500 price tag. Because I had the added constraint of needing to fit the set in the armoire-style entertainment center in our bedroom, there was only one model I could really buy: the Samsung TX-S2782H 27" "Slim-Fit". Sorry, no cinema-sized television for us this year, although when the TV in the living room buys the farm (it is 10 years old but still working fine, for now), we'll ditch the armoire downstairs and go for a wall-mounted big screen.
Hmmm...TiVo? Oh, yes, I'm getting to that part.
The new TV is awesome. While the majority of programming is not yet in high-def, the stuff that is high-def truly redefines television as a visual medium, and we're often surprised at the more complex and theatrical-quality sound that goes along with a lot of TV shows now (and even some commercials!). But just buying a new TV set didn't automatically bring all of these improvements to us. Oh, no. In order to get any of the HD channels that are available, we had to genuflect at the feet of the all-powerful god Comcast and sacrifice our plain old digital cable converter box for a shiny new HD converter box.
All things considered, it could have been much worse. I actually talked to a knowledgeable and helpful Comcast customer service rep on the phone to find out what I needed to do, and only had to wait on hold about 45 seconds, not even long enough for the Muzak to start repeating. Because I am handy with this sort of stuff, I was able to short-circuit a scheduled visit from a guy in a truck and went right to the local Comcast office and made the swap in person (didn't even have to scatter chicken entrails in the process), then took the box home and hooked it up.
The catch is this: our TiVo box is not HD-compatible, and so if we wanted to record or even watch HD, we would have to disconnect the TiVo and use the built-in DVR that Comcast cleverly pre-bundles into their HD converters. With a bit of uncertainty, that's just what I did, casting our beloved TiVo out and setting it alongside the corpse of our demised TV to await its fate. All did not seem lost, though, because we would still have a DVR to use, and the Motorola DVR that Comcast bundles is even a two-tuner jobbie so you can watch one thing and record another (a feature not available on single-tuner DVRs).
We're about four weeks in on using the Comcast DVR now, and I'll tell you that we have already decided that the very minute TiVo brings out its HD box (scheduled for sometime in the fall), we'll be buying it no matter how expensive it might be at first. The Comcast DVR works, but Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ does it suck to use. The remote can really only be called a clusterfuck. While the TiVo remote (designed by my former co-workers at IDEO) is a thing of elegance and intuitive simplicity, the Comcast remote suffers from the all-too-common problem of too many fucking buttons, and nothing put together in terms of usability.
We still have another TiVo unit in the living room, and it is so easy to use that Charlotte has completely mastered how to handle all of the major functions and is well-practiced at zapping commercials, finding her favorite shows in the "Now Playing" list, and even recording something on the fly. Meanwhile, neither Bridget nor I can seem to completely master how to navigate through the confusingly-named menu picks to distinguish between things we've already recorded and things we'd like to schedule, and when we try to watch something we've recorded, we invariably hit the wrong buttons for assorted basic functions because they are either too close together, or arranged in absolutely no logical way. Moreover, the Comcast DVR simply lacks a number of ease-of-use features. For example, the fast-forward seems to only have two speeds: not-fast-enough, and too-damn-fast. And it also lacks the feature that auto-rewinds about ten seconds from the point where you stopped fast-forwarding, which seems to correspond to just about how far beyond the commercial break you can stop the sucker while you're zapping commercials. With a TiVo, you can almost always land right at the point where the program begins again, but with the Comcast DVR, you invariably jump a good 15-20 seconds beyond the end of the commercial.
We also notice that Comcast's online programming guide is nowhere near as accurate in terms of knowing what will be on in the near future. Even right up to the day a show is scheduled to be broadcast, the Comcast guide is likely to be displaying something completely different, making it impossible to properly schedule recordings.
You know, when we bought the first TiVo a couple of years ago, I didn't really think I would like it all that much, but now that we have to use somebody's knock-off I have come to realize not just the benefit of the DVR in general but the absolute superiority of the TiVo product. I have to say that I think it's a huge mistake on their part to be waiting so long to bring out their HD-compatible box; the latest Series 2 box they introduced has more capacity and double tuners, but is obviously a transitional device that will only last until the HD box rolls out. I didn't feel like waiting four or five months to get to enjoy the features of my shiny new TV, so I bit the bullet with Comcast, but if you are sitting on the fence about this at all, I have to recommend waiting until TiVo ships their new box and praying that they're not delayed in doing so.
Meanwhile, if you're interested, I have a perfectly good second-edition Series 2 TiVo that I'm willing to sell to the highest bidder. E-mail me if you're interested.
Permalink | Comments (2)These days I get paid money to cook for other people. Not a lot of money yet, but that's sort of beside the point because I'm having a great time doing it. Because I cook, I also spend a lot more time than the average person hanging about supermarkets, farm stands, wine shops (well, okay, liquor stores, but "wine shop" doesn't make me sound like a boozehound), and other places to buy all the many and varied ingredients that I use in preparing dishes. So, as you might expect, I've come to have some opinions about them.
By and large, I know where I can get exactly what I want and I also know what to expect from different vendors in terms of quality, but once in a while I make a point of stopping at some of the places I normally don't patronize, just to make sure I am not missing some incredible bargain, undiscovered treasure, or convenient pick-up spot (for food that is; don't get any naughty ideas).
And so yesterday, on my way to go cook for a client, I chose to stop at a Stop & Shop supermarket to pick up a few last-minute items to bring along. I realize "Stop & Shop" is a common name for supermarkets, so I will get a little more specific. I mean this New England supermarket chain and, even more specifically, this particular Stop & Shop (Store #0096). I do not regularly shop at Stop & Shop for anything, but this is the one closest to my house and is right at an onramp to Rt. 95, so it is a convenient place to stop on the way to my client's home. My thinking was that if it turned out to be acceptable in terms of food quality, I could make it a regular stop for some items.
Now, even before I walked in the door, I was not hopeful. There was a time when we were regular Stop & Shop customers, when we lived in our first house (The Little Blue House), because it was convenient and offered better customer service than the other big-player supermarket in town (then Star Market, now Shaw's). But even then we regularly refused to buy some items in that store, most notably produce, because the quality was so poor. We were more willing to drive far out of our way to go to a first-quality farm stand store than to buy the atrocious fruits and vegetables at Stop & Shop. So my expectations for the quality of the produce department were quite low. Unfortunately, everything on my pick-up list was a produce item. Still, for convenience's sake, I was willing to give it a try.
Calling the quality of their produce "atrocious" would be an understatement if you could have seen what I did. Containers of strawberries with visible mold. Rotten and rapidly decaying tomatoes and onions. Withered and spoiled green beans. This store is literally selling garbage and calling it "fresh produce". Fortunately for my client (and for me), the one item I really needed I was able to get directly from a packing crate in good condition, and I was able to make do with what I already had instead of having to purchase this slop.
I'm aware of the realities of our commoditized food industry -- namely that we here in the Northeast are lucky to have fresh produce at all for 10-11 months of the year, because our growing season is painfully attenuated and our climate not suited to growing anything less than "hardy". And I realize that all the grocery chains must, by necessity, buy in vast bulk quantities from growers to supply their stores. But I also know that the pool of produce vendors available to these grocery chains is not terribly large and that they buy from the exact same vendors for many of the items. Even farm stand places like Wilson's and Russo's and Arena Farms buy from these vendors in their off-seasons. And yet there is an undeniable hierarchy of quality of goods, which places those farm markets at the top, more selective grocers like Whole Foods in the middle, and the Stop & Shops and Shaws markets at the very bottom.
I can't tell you how utterly appalled I was, and I am vowing here in this quasi-public forum that Stop & Shop has lost me as a customer for good, not just for their produce, but for anything. Because if that's the way they run their stores, it makes me shudder to think about what you might be buying at the deli, in the fish case, or in any of the other "fresh" items they offer. My professional reputation has to rely in not a small degree on the quality of the ingredients I use, and I can't jeopardize the trust of my clients, not to mention their health and safety, for the sake of a convenient location or a bargain price.
Permalink | Comments (1)Yesterday's rant put me in a mood I guess.
At The Huffington Post, Martin Lewis (back together again after all these years, I see) issues the call for someone, ANYONE to finally shake the American body politic from its self-induced coma and speak for America against the idiot and his cabal.
Meanwhile, at Wired (of all places), Tony Long wonders why we are not marching in the streets at the malfeasance that has passed for governance these last six years, and opines that we are more than overdue for revolution (provided we can tear ourselves from our electronic distractions long enough to notice).
Permalink |That's very true if you live in France. Or Britain. Or the Phillippines.
The men, women and children of those nations and many more have given their lives again and again through history to purchase the freedoms their descendants enjoy to greater or lesser degrees today.
But do not try to sell me the bill of goods that a single drop of American blood has been shed in defense of this country since the last man fell in 1783. This country has gone to war around the world and even within i