Le Sequoit

Seriously Amusing

2007-03-04T19:36:00.000-06:00

The verb muse means to ponder. It's from the French muser, which means snout. I guess it's something like standing there with your mouth open, oblivious to what is going on around you. Think of yourself going "huh?" while pulling back a bit, tilting your head to the side, and scrunching up your upper lip and nose. Go ahead, do it. You can see where the snout part comes in.

So it's not so much to ponder, but to act pretty silly doing it. Amusement, the bringing of one to such a state, is silly stuff, and not serious. A thing can't be serious and amusing. These are mutually exclusive terms (which are different from collectively exhaustive terms, though I don't have any idea how). George Carlin did, and does occasionally still, a bit about mutually exclusive terms, such as jumbo shrimp and semi-boneless ham and wrapping up with military intelligence, and that's some pretty funny stuff.

Is there a point to this? Not yet. I can't think of a good segueway, either. Word doesn't even recognize segueway, so I guess it can't be that important, anyway.

Joltingly:

Nothing spawns bad ideas like bad ideas. That's because people have such a fierce loyalty to their bad ideas that they'll shoehorn the most ungainly aspects of these ideas into a fit, while squinting just enough to make it all look right. Take the right wing's privatization mantra. Outsourcing the care of disabled veterans to private concerns does not improve care, nor does it reduce costs. Organizing the Social Security prescription drug program into dozens of programs being offered in many variations by hundreds of insurers does not make pricing more competitive, the only competition is in the effort to confuse the elderly, most of whom long since priced out of the almighty free market.

It just doesn't fit. It's pig-headedly stubborn to stretch the concept of free markets to the point of shopping life or death. Prevention and diagnosis don't pay, treatment does.

What's profitable isn't what is most needed. Somewhere there is a very stupid idea behind this.

In spite of the light bulb in the cartoons, most ideas come from other ideas. I will venture that if an idea has merit, it will generally propagate ideas that are good; since those thinking along the lines of the good idea have already demonstrated superior ability. Same goes for the bad, I reckon. Therefore, it is more likely than not that a bad idea, as in the above example, will have a bad idea as it's source.

This all started as I sat (laid me) down to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, a very disappointing and bizarre sequel to a fairly enjoyable movie, both with The Little Hun's beloved Johnny Depp in the lead. Among the descriptors for whatever the rating was, which I didn't notice, was something I did notice:

mild violence

Huh? I have to admit, I was amused. (see how this whole effort ties together now? Well, maybe ties isn't he right word, but here we are at the beginning)

What the hell is mild violence? Have you ever heard a weather bulletin for mildly violent thunderstorms? Are there victims of mild domestic violence out there, maybe whose husbands wear boxing gloves? Where do they draw that line? One stab and no twisting?

It's totally absurd. I don't know much about the movie ratings system, but I have good reason to suspect that this lunacy is the result of a lunatic notion to rate movies in the first place.

That's how it works with me.

An All Seriousness Aside

2007-02-08T16:34:00.000-06:00

In Atlantic City, Florida, a woman drove with her niece past the local theater. Noticing on the marquee a rather famous show about womanhood, the girl asked, "What is a Vagina?" The aunt reports that she was a bit uncomfortable with having to answer the question. She undoubtedly believed that this discomfort was caused by an affront to her propriety, though I suspect puritanical reaction is generally a false front, erected to hide inability and/or laziness to think things through, or to think in general.

The feministos on the blogs generally go like, "What's the problem? It's the canal between the vulva and the uterus. She should know about her body. Big deal." As if the niece, being old enough to read and curious enough to ask, wouldn't sit there and wonder, "Okay, why did someone write a play about that?"

So, the aunt did what all folk who are so viciously victimized into using their own brains do; she complained. To the theater owner.

And so now the marquee reads, "The Hoo-haa Monologues".

"Auntie, what's a Hoo-haa?"

"I have no idea."

A solution of blissful ignorance; perfect.

Now, that's funny. The whole story is flat out hilarious, not that my retelling of it helps any. If she'd go see the play, she might learn how to answer the question without getting, shall I say it, all squirmy. I can't take any of it seriously, from the author's goofy tantric celebration of the yoni as a symbol of women's superior spirituality, to the critics' decries of male bashing, to the liberals' indignation that the marquee was changed.

To me, it's just a funny story.

How do people survive without getting the joke? We look at a little baby and wonder what's going on in that precious little head. And then, an amazing thing happens. It laughs. It thrills us to no end to see this, and we make it happen over and over again.

Then what happens?

I'm still that little baby, I guess. This morning, realizing there was no milk for my Wheat Chex and, more seriously, no coffee, I headed out for the store. Actually, I headed for the local diner, and then the store. On the way in, I picked up a weird little local publication called The Beacon. This free paper is about two thirds county board news and such, and about one third humor and satire. Sort of a Mayberry Gazette meets The Onion. After reading all about the winter carnival's plans to proceed with or without winter, I turned to the back, and Dave Barry.

Since Dave retired more or less from thinking up funny stuff in his underwear, the column may been a rerun, but I don't remember having seen it. It was all about fat-free America and soy ranchers and veggie burgers and I chuckled right along as I ate my #1 with wry toast. He said we don't eat ants because they are considerably more fat free than cows and well, you had to be there. In fact here is there, if you like. (sorry if the link has grown old)

At the end he adds:

POSTSCRIPT - After I wrote this column, my editor, Tom Shroder, sent me a note saying he thinks he read somewhere that ants do contain fat. I think he's wrong, but since we're both professional journalists, neither of us will look it up.

Much to the astonishment of the local patrons, I laughed aloud at this, disturbing the dulcet tones of country muzak wafting over what was apparently to be a very serious Thursday morning. I think there may have been some perturbation in the waitress's voice when she came over to ask what was so funny.

"That Dave Barry, he always gets me laughing."

"Who?"

"You've never heard of Dave Barry?"

"Nope."

Honestly, I think she wished she had, 'cause I'm pretty sure that, as with all diner waitresses, she wants me. But she hadn't.

The greatest American humorist since Will Rogers. Wasted on her.

It's no wonder we're always at "war".

Seriously.

An Apple® a Day

2007-01-15T11:11:00.000-06:00

I've gone and done it. I've slipped over to the other side.

No, I haven't ordered a new Mac G5 quad core processing super computer with 30" Cinema display, (retail $4,500.00 at your friendly Apple website). I might like such a thing, should I ever have the time to want to compose symphonies by ear or make full length movies. (Actually, I'm hearing that many long time pros in graphics and such return to PCs, irritated by the Apple's smug, patronizing insistence of doing things their way)

Still, the minimalist art that is Apple product is almost worth it.

No I haven't given up on my PC, though it clearly has bus or memory issues. In a way, I have taken a bolder step.

I have laid the hint for and received for Christmas an iPod 4G nano. In authentic Apple brushed aluminum, no loud colors for this one.

This is radical departure for me into the world of compressed audio. Compressed audio, and we'll resist getting too technical here, is cramming digital music into smaller files. All those ups and downs on a sound wave require a lot of digital bits to reproduce. Stereo is recoded onto computers at a rate of 1.5 or so megabits a second. That's 11 megabytes a minute, times two tracks for stereo. For Take a Pebble, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, that's about 275 MG. That's a lot of storage and download time, even as capacity and bandwith explode.

But, you don't have to describe every pixel in a digital photograph (bitmap)--you can use language to describe what is happening to sections of information (JPEG). This can be done to music. Think of a football field marked off in a grid. To describe a diagonal move, you could say "He moved from (x,y) to (x+1,y+1) to (x+2,y+2)," and so forth, but you can see that this would entail a lot of writing. Or you could say (and I'm not much of a mathematician any more, so you won't get a trigonometric formula for this) "He started at (x,y) and moved one yard right and one yard up forty times. One of two of the moves were only a half a yard, but don't worry about it." This is kinda the idea, along with many other kinds of prediction and analysis.

Hey, I said I wasn't going to get too technical! The gist is, stuff like MP3 was invented to address transfer and storage issues, and became further popular because CD players don't work so well in a portable environment. Digital tape, without compression (any more than in CDs, anyway), suffers from the same mechanical limitations as any tape format. It has to be wound to the correct position. Before current capability, DAT tape was a stalwart for home studios, and many stand by their trusty old ADAT recorders, a great machine that terrified the music industry with it's CD quality reproduction. Affordable hard drive recorders (like your Tivo) and CD burners have made DAT obsolete. I actually have machines of a competitor format to DAT called DCC. These machines are extremely rare, and may be quite valuable one day. Until recently, I still used my portable DCC player and wired headphones to exercise. You can't carry it on a Nordic Trac, it will skip and it's too heavy. And you have to make those tapes, an entire new one for variety. I would have switched to the improved variety and portability of a good MP3 player except for one thing. MP3 sounds like crap, especially in the higher ranges. Cymbals hiss. Rock has lots and lots of symbols, and this quality is unacceptable to any serious listener, no matter how conveniently produced.

Then comes Apple's ACC format. Forget about it. Put all 600 CDs on 36 GB of your hard drive, back them up off site, and you have a permanent, instantly accessible and programmable music collection that is virtually indistinguishable in quality from CD. It's that good. Be sure, in preferences, to set error correction on to eliminate pops and clicks that imperfections on your CD might cause before embarking on this monumental task. (Apple not making a big huge point of this not being the default is as every bit as dense as Windows not having the firewall on by default)

And then iTunes exports whatever you like (more or less) to the credit card sized iPod nano. (such blatant disregard for things like capitalization is what causes bloggers to enter amorphous blobs of comments that glaze the eyes, as if they were the first e e cummings ever) I have no interest in the larger, video displaying unit, I have enough hobbies for now. From the main library, you drag and drop to new lists, as I have one for general exercise, and then subsets of that for tempos suitable to the Nordic Trac and the slightly slower stepper. iTunes automatically updates changes to the lists you would like to keep updated on the iPod. Perfect. It will shuffle the songs on demand--you don't know what's coming next, a fantastic feature, especially in an exercise mode, where one needs all the non-monotony one can get.

When one selects shuffle, however, the player shuffles all the songs in the iPod, and starts playing them all. You have to back out of that and select the playlist you want, which will be shuffled, though not visibly. It's a little confusing.

It keep photos, and iTunes will download my favorite Public Radio shows like a Tivo, and all and all it's pretty cool. Stuff is coming soon that does all this and takes pictures (good ones) and telephone and internet and god knows what else, but I think I'll be using this little sucker for a while.

Here's a look at my Nordic Trac list for now:

Sac à Merde

2007-01-04T10:58:00.000-06:00

I don't watch much opinion laden television these days, but, one aspect of my self-improvement meander is to get to bed at a decent time, and so I found myself having been awake for two hours at 6:00 am and resorting to some semblance of entertainment that doesn't involve the eye strain of another sudoku marathon. Hence the Imus show, and the unpleasantness of an interview with John McCain, heir apparent to the Imperial Throne. That's he, on his high horse. When he gets a little crazy, it's pretty hard to tell him from Bush the Lesser, isn't it?

His screed? Damn the torpedoes, and full speed ahead. Oh, he knows there is chaos in Iraq. And he's aware that Afghanistan is worse than when we found it. He knows better than you or I, he has better sources. Yet he shills the absurdity that 20% more troops might turn chaos into security―might tip the scale toward victory, as if the balance of human survival might swing on such a fractional effort.

You might be tempted to attribute McCain's escalatory attitude to a political manouvre―a ploy for consolidation of all those who would rather sacrifice a few thousand more lives than to accept that we might have made an error in Iraq, and there is no doubt that McCain is ready to parade his lightning steed right down the center of Main Street to invigorate those bastards. But to attribute such a position to mere pragmatism, despicable as such a possibility may be, falls dangerously short.

McCain's apparent blindness isn't Presidential fever. His infection is militarism. He started this morning's interview with a discussion of his favorite Herman Wouk and Hemingway novels. This is how it is with warriors, who tire quickly of peaceful scenarios. Even their recreation must be steeped in the gloriousness of soldiering. Though he dusted off the old saw, "We must learn from our history, or we are doomed...," he clearly is just reveling in the heroic, rather than absorbing the big picture.

The reality is that Napoleon met his Waterloo, Hitler his Stalingrad, Hannibal his Metaurus, and Harold K Johnson his Tet offensive. Invasions are expensive, messy and, if of any ambitious scope, generally (so to speak) unsustainable. How can McCain miss that point?

Yet he drones on about the preposterous goal of a Vichy Iraq, as if he'd never seen Casablanca. Is he dissembling? Yes. But the truly frightening aspect of all this is that he believes himself, in spite of the evidence. It's irrational. Delusional. He is a dog of war.

And this is what passes for sensibility in such a mindset:

When I was a young man, and all glory was self-glory, I responded aggressively and often irresponsibly to anyone who questioned my honor. I still remember how zealously a boy would attend the needs of his self-respect. But as I grew older, and the challenges to my self-respect became more varied and difficult, I was surprised to discover that while my sense of honor had matured, its defense mattered even more to me than it did when I believed that honor was such a frail thing that any empty challenge could threaten it.
The courage of the living and the dead taught me that. They taught me to dread dishonor above all other injuries. They taught me to be afraid of shame.

The Honor. After all the strategic analysis, punditry and positioning is through, the argument of the aggressor always comes down to this stalwart. The point is not the debilitating effect on a society that endures or wages war. It's not that the loss of young men and women is a tragedy. No, the point is that this loss might become a shame.

The Honor and the Glory. I don't intend to diminish the heroism of the defender. This is important illumination of those selfless deeds.

But let's not be unwary of those who might be staring into that sun a bit too intently.

The Rising Sun Never Sleeps, or Sets, or something

2007-01-01T22:24:00.000-06:00

In 1941, Japan, with rather insane delusions of grandeur, decided to attack the United States. As we had a gazillion times the industrial capacity of Japan, the numbers eventually caught up with them. They also found it a bit difficult to occupy every stinking island in the Pacific, like so many other forces that have found occupation impossible. (yet this lesson remains unlearned somehow, most recently in Iraq)

So they lost. But they never gave up.

Wave after wave continues to assault our shores to this day. Oh, sure, at first the devastating defeat took it's toll on their output, and the best they could muster was the export of millions of cheaply made tin toys, the sharp edges of which were responsible for merely thousands and thousands of sliced American youths' fingers. But they got better.

The 50s turned into the 60s and the siege took a more sinister turn with the export of the transistor radio, and we became slaves to our media. Great big chunks of our sanity began to fall off as there was no longer any escape. Not the woods, Not the beach, Certainly not the subway. Sonic frazzlement became the order to this day, the latest circuit board wizardry being responsible for the chirp chirp of walkie talkie telephony, not to mention the jolting launches of hideously mechanized ringtone versions of Für Elise whenever someone's "bud" wants to know "are you, like, busy or something"?

Having learned how to distract us, in the 70s they went for the throat, in the forms of Datsun (Nissan, for you younger folk) and Toyota. Entire industrial cities were laid waste, as the sluggish American auto industry struggled to respond to the Toyota Celica GT with such immortal lines as the Chevy Vega, Chevette, the AMC Gremlin, and the explosiveness that was the Ford Pinto.

The cat was out of the bag, then, as these altered relative perceptions of American and Japanese quality infiltrated the home electronics industry, and we bought up millions and millions of Sony VCRs and Hitachi TVs and Panasonic stereos. And while we were listening and watching and barbecuing on the Hibachi, the Japanese were working 15 hours a day coming up with their latest weapon.

Nintendo. Perhaps the greatest assault on American productivity ever invented. Its reach is so profound, its hold on Americans young and old so tenacious that it remains, with it's cousin, the Sony Playstation, a principal weapon for the 80s, 90s and 00s. Sleepless, half-blind, Vitamin D deprived and plagued with tendonitis, we are in poor array to withstand this perennial assault. Oh, sure, there were the productivity gains hatched from the American led PC revolution, a significant insurgency, but the mindlessness of "gaming" appears to have weathered that storm, as folks knock each other to the floor to get PSIIIs, not laptops.

Not that the Japanese are resting on their laurels. In the never-ending crusade to sap American productivity, there is always another front. For their latest trick, they have turned our weapon on ourselves. Dell, in the 70s, started to publish an old number game by the dopey name "Number Place". Nobody paid much attention to it here, but it gained some play in Japan. No doubt fully appreciating the addictiveness of this little game, they renamed it with a cute Japanese name and sent it back here in 2005, what the hell? Sudoku. More billions of American work hours down the tubes.

It never ends.

There Was an Explosion

2006-12-10T12:00:00.000-06:00

There was an explosion. The glass walls of buildings were blown into flesh tearing shards that raked across the industrial space first in one direction, and then, with compounding cruelty, swept in reverse by blasts of deadly debris-laden air inrushing to fill the vacuum created of what had been a day like any other day.

Riddled victims, those able to regain their footing, began to struggle in the dust and smoke for exit. Concussion racked, amnesiated minds struggled to make sense of the horror around them, some trapped under debris or immobilized by injury and increasingly terrified as a flaming hell gathered up around them.

Shocked relations of survivors gathered, unknowing of their loved one's fate. Some prayed, some sat stonily. Others expressed their incomprehension in anger at the sudden uncertainty of their fates, at the inability of anyone to make immediate sense of the bewildering chaos made of their lives with such instant totality.

A massive rescue and fire mission was launched. The press was notified. Helicopter reports interrupted The View and The Opening Bell and CNN Headline News. Local news vans rushed down the shoulders of expressways to set up remotes. Reporters tried to shake the cobwebs from shocked victims and get the coveted eyewitness report. Within days the news would spread as far as the Manchester Guardian and the ubiquitous Wikipedia.

Scores were injured, and three were dead. A big fire. A big story. The Sunday paper led with pages.

A big explosion. One big explosion.

Now add up all the heartbreak, loss, shock, uncertainty and grief spawned by this event, multiply by a thousand, and maybe one can begin to comprehend what Iraqis have gone through. In one month. How many thousands of pages would be necessary to tell the stories of the victims?. How many hundreds of hours of air time to relate the tales of heroism in the direst of circumstances?

I don't know better than anyone else what is to become of Iraq. I don't know what role, if any, we ought to play in Iraq's present or future. I don't know how many of Iraqis' horrors are directly or indirectly our responsibility.

But I know this.

In the enveloping shroud of such human suffering there is no place for pride. Along the cadaver strewn road that will lead humanity out of this hell there is no room for dignity.

And in the midst of this enormity of human suffering, if one's humanity is to remain at all intact, there is no prestige.

There are decisions to be made. Plans to unfold, be unraveled, and be planned anew. There are directives, reprisals and compromises to consider.

And if one is yet human, there is no suffering to waste on the bruised American ego. If one feels at all, there is no emotion to squander on the distasteful reality of American surrender.

At 8:06 one day there was an explosion. Days later, the shock waves continue to buffet a Midwestern city. Lives are destroyed. Now imagine that one had followed at 8:21, and at 8:36, and so on toward an unreadable future. This is the wicked pulse of Iraq.

To consider for one moment, while in the course of resolving the hostilities that bedevil these people, whether it is important or not that America shall be seen to surrender is unfeeling in the utmost.

To have the emotional capital to even suggest such consideration is to devalue life.

And in Local News

2006-11-30T22:46:00.000-06:00

The Elkhorn Independent reports in today's edition that a James Hartwick, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has won the 2006 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Religion and Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. That's a Lot of Engraving, right there.

The title of this remarkable dissertation is "An Investigation Into the Spiritual, Religious, and Prayer Lives of Wisconsin Public School Teachers: the Inner Life of a Teacher". His motivation? " ... I feel that prayer helped me to be more centered, patient, understanding and ultimately more receptive to my students."

Or to put it another way, I believe my belief helps. Now, I know you'd have to be some kind of secularist asshole, and I am, to suggest that piling belief on belief pretty much leaves one with a pile of, well, faith. And not much else, from a purely scientific, and therefore damned, point of view. How are you going to prove such a thing to the nons, who might be a little uncomfortable with your third recommendation of setting aside a "sacred space" in public schools for teachers to prepare themselves spiritually to face the little gremlins at their charge?

Need more research, and onward marched our faithful charge to all corners of the, well, Wisconsin, to accumulate this scholarly body of evidence. And so it turns out that 60% of the 91.5% of teachers sampled believe that praying does make them a better teacher. Hey, I believe him! The paper may shed some light on this, and I'll certainly never know, but I am assuming the other 31.5% don't pray professionally. Do any of these believers not believe that prayer makes a difference? I doubt it.

And so we come to the realization more or less that all the teachers who believe in prayer believe it works. Brilliant!

Hopefully there's just enough tax dollars left to provide someone who can explain to me what the hell 60% of the 91.5% of teachers sampled means.

Military Intelligence on Military Intelligence, or Fuzzy Navels

2006-11-19T23:46:00.000-06:00

Has there ever been a war where the battle for the hearts and minds of America has been so enthusiastically waged on the the New York Times bestsellers list? There's no shortage of Monday morning quarterbacking going on, that's for sure.

I've just finished FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks, another in a long series of the-senior-military-and-civilian-leaders-just-aren't-the-kind-of-intellectual-warrior-to-pull-this-kind-of-thing-off books. Ricks has been a military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post for about 25 years. He's a career war guy as much as any lifer, and I've heard him before on Wisconsin Public Radio, so I didn't go in thinking this was going to be about pacifism.

And it's not.

It is a very good chronology of the astonishing events of this war, and it would make an interesting project to produce a timeline of the war correlating internal statements about the condition of the battlefield with the preposterous public statements made by the administration.

Okay, we have time for one. On December 17th, 2004, a militarily intelligent Derek Harvey briefed the President about the "insurgency" thusly:

... It's robust, it's well-led, it's diverse. Absent some sort of reconciliation it's going to go on, and that risk's a civil war. they have the means to fight this for a long time, and they have a different sense of time than we die, and are willing to fight. They have better intelligence than we do.

The President, not wanting to believe this contrarian, sent a study group to check things out, this line apparently not squaring with that of all the sycophants in the hall. The report back in February 05 stated, according to Ricks:

... that the security situation was worse than was being depicted, the insurgency was gathering steam, the training of Iraqi security forces was slower than officials had said, and the U.S. intelligence operation continued to be deeply flawed.

Compare that to this Bush speech on March 8th, 2005:

Iraq's democracy, in the long run, must also be defended by Iraqis, themselves. Our goal is to help Iraqi security forces move toward self-reliance, and they are making daily progress. Iraqi forces were the main providers of security at about 5,000 polling places in the January elections. Our coalition is providing equipment and training to the new Iraqi military, yet they bring a spirit all of their own.

As I said, it would make an interesting project. Presidents lie to us for what they perceive to be our own good. I get that. But this one must have set a modern record.

That part's interesting and all, but the book began to wear on me. Inevitably we would get to the part where Ricks would make the point that the war was winnable, but botched. Still is winnable, actually. Somewhere in the library of the National Defense University is a book by some man's man whom Ricks and Cristopher Hitchens can sit around bullshitting about over fouled glasses of cheap scotch, a book that contains just the right strategy for Iraq. There is always a military solution. We have to live with the Iraqis, go out among them. Treat them with dignity. No mega bases and 45 mph convoys sideswiping cars through town. No smashing down doors, terrorizing kids, and humiliating Iraqi men in front of their peers. No big war, big guns, big bombs. Ricks thinks we are slowly adapting to that kind of fight, as Iraqis huddle in the cold glow of our air conditioned warehouses of soldiers in internet cafes wolfing down Pizza the Hut.

Slowly is the key word, here. In his afterword, Ricks's best case scenario is a considerable, but diminishing presence in Iraq for another six or seven years or so. And here is where the old hot dogs, apple pie, and exceptionalism rears its ugly head. Here is where the point is made that it's all about US. Here is the worst case scenario, or as he calls it, the nightmare scenario:

...the new Saladin would emerge first as a relief from the madness of chaos and terrorism. He would be a unifier, bringing together the disparate and weary parts of Iraq. He might even extend his influence beyond Iraq's borders, calling for the revival of the Arab world. Bolstered by Iraq's oil revenues, he might succeed in creating a new wave of pan-Arab feeling. Riding that wave, he might confront the West as it hasn't been―that is, as an Arab leader combining popular support with huge oil revenues. And he may also seek to harness that oil money to a new program to secure nuclear weapons. Such a program could threaten the existence of Israel, or, by secret means of delivery, New York or Washington. Before that happened, the West would have to consider a war of pre-emption―but this time its soldiers might really face nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.

Holy crap! 439 pages and we're right back at the beginning! How do you know this pan-Arabian good time feeling caliphate won't be more interested in buying Harley Davidsons than chemical weapons? And isn't attacking people just because we can (pre-emption) how we got here in the first place? And just in case we're going to target another 35 warheads on Syria, you threatening bastards!

All of Ricks's scenarios involve oil heavily. Americans will fight for oil eventually, I have no doubt. We're losing this war because that time hasn't come, yet. Junior has been a bit hasty here, burned through a trillion dollars or so in the process, and pissed off the whole freaking world for nothing. He had to burn a pre-emptive card to do it, as this ten year scenario would never have sold on its own merits. We're not that desperate, yet.

And that's the thing these professional killers and their hangers on have to accept sometimes, oh so unwillingly. Morals are fairly difficult to give up for most people, the people who eventually write their checks. Stripped of its Wolfowitzian veneer, this war just doesn't cut it, and never will.

What's a Matta Wid Use, Anyhow?

2006-11-15T21:03:00.000-06:00

Hold onto your ergonomic wireless mouse with the scroll button, cuz I'm here to tell ya that today... well, actually yesterday was World Usability Day. It's seems the Usability Professionals' Association wasn't all that good at getting the word out via the media.

It certainly might have been put to good use, though, as lord knows there are some seriously misguided concepts wrestled into the products we all love to hate out here. Remember the metal twist caps on pop bottles that spun and spun and never separated from the lower ring? That's what I'm talking about here.

If there's one thing people have a hard time using, a lot, it's remote controls. the Little Hun will just holler, "Why is it blue again?" and then I go patiently explain that the TV is supposed to be on 4 and if you push the TV button before the channel button, etc., but I wonder, "If the remote can talk to the TV, why the hell can't it tell it she's aiming at the cable box?" And then there's my mom's Direct TV remote. The smallest button on it? That's how you turn the damn TV on! You need a magnifying glass and a flashlight to find that little fucker.

And speaking of TV. In the good old days, you knew where things were. I like all these channels, but does the Bulls game have to be on channel 453? My digital cable box knows who I am. "This is me, Don, the guy who last night watched six straight reruns of Curb Your Enthusiasm on demand." It knows where I live, and my channel lineup. It knows 4 is NBC and 6 is Fox and 12 is ABC. Then why the hell is 6 on 3 and 4 on 6? And why oh why is 12 on 10 and nothing is on 12? 58 is on 9, and since this is our sorry-ass excuse for a CBS affiliate, I can live with that. But why not 8? No, channel 41, a low power loser, is on 8. Leave 41 on 41, put 58 on 8, and then WGN can be on 9, like in all it's logos, instead of 17. What the hell?

The other day I must have been a little bit nervous, cuz I bit off all my fingernails. All this nervousness can wear a guy out, so I stopped into the quick mart for a cup of Joe. Being off hours, the only cream available was those little tubs with the foil tops. Whoever thought this was a good idea? This must have been invented by the wife of the guy who invented the rear fastening bra! So I took it black, and went after my fingernails again.

Some things just get more complicated instead of better. How about the digital car clock? Go ahead and figure out how to set it back an hour when you drive your rental car into a new time zone. There was a time when you just grabbed a clock's hands and put them in the right place. That was easy. And digital alarm clocks? How come they never know it's Sunday? What century are we in anyway? I'd rather be late on Monday than early on Sunday, thank you. I'm sure there are 24/7 clocks that program schedules, but do I have to go to the Sharper Image for everything? That's a long drive, and I might need more coffee. I don't think my fingernails could take it.

Then there's all the filling out stuff. Good god almighty, how many times do we have to keep giving these people the same information? We gave up our privacy when they invented Social Security. In exchange, could we be at least be freed from writer's cramp from filling out forms every place we go? And quit asking me what state and town I live in. We have a number for that, and have for quite some time, now! "There is an error. City is a required field. State is a required field. Please be sure to fill out all required fields." No, they really aren't required.

Please fill out this form so that we may have your medical records transferred to us. And please fill out this form describing your medical history, which is the same as the form you filled out at the doctor's office we will be getting your records from.

Software? We don't even have time to go there. Questions arise, such as: In the supposed MS Office Suite, why does Excel save printing preferences with the workbook, but Word saves them only for the session? Don't they have email over there in Redmond? Or when you want to send a clever something to a bunch of people you click on the address book and you get a list with double entries for anyone that has more than one email address in their contact form and you can't tell which is which cuz they only list the name and you really shouldn't be sending this clever something to the person's work or maybe to a joint account with the person's wife or something cuz someone may end up in sensitivity training or court or something. Just in Office, I could write a book of huh?s.

Well, I gotta go now. I have to set up a wireless network so the littlest Hun can connect to fantasy football while he visits home. I used to have a game called All Star Baseball. The stats were represented around a disc for each player. A cardboard disc. You put together a team, you played the discs and spun the spinner. It was fun. And you could play any time of the day or night. It was, well, more usable.

The Mandate Ends With a Kiss

2006-11-08T08:46:00.000-06:00

It's The Morning After, The Aftermath, what have you, of Decision 2006, and it's potentially better than I had imagined. The Democrats have won a large majority in the House, with many long time Repugs out on their ears for lock stepping with the neo con world domination shtick. The Senate hangs by the slimmest of threads, tied 49/49 with Dems leading in Virginia by 6,000 votes and in Montana by 2,000 votes. Recounts are likely, the irony being that the Republicans are going to have to ask for them, contrary to their howling in 2000 about such recourse.

There is a glitch in this. The true Democratic count is 47, plus two independents. One independent is Bernie Sanders, of Vermont. He is actually a Democrat in practice, but for reasons I guess you'd have to live in the woods to understand, refuses to be identified as one. He will caucus with the Dems, and that's how all the critically important committee seats are decided. With the 47, plus the two in contention, plus ol' Green Mountain Boy, that's 50. Need one more.

That would be Joe Freaking Lieberman, from Connecticut. Joe lost his primary, possibly quite literally from too much kissing up to the President. Joe is very much in favor of Americas adventurism in the Middle East. As a very visible supporter of Israel, he's a natural ally of the neo con agenda. When Joe lost the primary, he ran as an Independent. The Republicans, preferring an ally on the war issue to the prospect of a liberal Dem, yanked all their support from the already piss-poor candidate they had intended to sacrifice to the expected Lieberman landslide. And voted in Gore's running mate, in the strange bedfellows segment of the day.

Lucky man, this Lieberman. Had Harold Ford won in Tennessee (against one of the most vile campaigns of the season), the Dems would be over the top, and might very well have backed off of their quiet assurances to Lieberman that they would maintain his valued seniority. "Go play with the minority Republicans, Judas, and see how that flies with Connecticut voters in 2012!" If the Dems fall short, even with him, he becomes a hanger on, and in opposition of the foreign policy directives and investigatory procedures that are sure to come.

But the best scenario now for Dems must sadly empower this dufus, quite possibly to superstar status as "The Negotiator" in breathlessly heroic accounts of bipartisan nonsense.

You might note just a pinch of sarcasm in my voice, and that has to do with the meme of the day, centrism. This is all supposed to be a lurch back to the center, the pundits say. Conservatives couldn't be more proud to bleat that the new Dems are a center to conservative lot. Bill Bennett puffs his mighty gut up into his chest and smiles 'cause he knows the agenda remains conservative, only now he gets to make a killing going after the ins.

But out there beyond the pundits there are some very unhappy conservatives, and more unhappy corporate interests that are going to find themselves with a lot of explaining to do.

I'll talk a lot about the specter of more Clintonian centrism, to be sure. For now, however, I'll be content with the House, be thrilled with the Senate possibility, and worry about Joe. (maybe it's something in those reservoirs they drink out of in New England) For now my mode will be as obstructionist to the evil cabal in the White House and, in the run up to 2008, we will see if any of this carries a scent of progress.

There's No Vocal Hokum Like One's Local Yokum

2006-11-02T23:49:00.000-06:00

For today's inspiration we need turn only so far as the local Elkhorn Independent, to the lead story "Supervisors hear taxpayers' proposed budget complaints".

The county is proposing a budget increase of 9.55% in 2007. "This is insane!" wailed a Bob Barrow, of Lyons, "If there was ever a poster child for a TABOR Amendment, this is it." (TABOR is an acronym for we stingy bastards have grown children and can afford our own retirement and health care and the rest of you can eat cake)

True, the county has been spending a bit of money lately. We have a new courthouse, and a new nursing home. In addition, our county maintains it's own special education school, and is proposing rebuilding that. All this building means debt maintenance. And then there's health care. The cost of providing health care to county employees will increase 35% in 2007. Youza! A Jim Simons put forth a solution for that, toot de suite:

County employees don't have to make a contribution, there is no incentive not to go to the doctor for everything.

His company, the one he runs, requires a 50% premium co-pay and a $1,500 deductible.

When we went to that, doctor's visits went way down.

Eureka! Save on health costs by charging your employees half the cost of something they can't afford to use anyway. (and there's probably a golf outing or two in it for Jim Simons, too) "We offer health insurance," undoubtedly go the want ads. Good old American style health care, with none of that doctoring crap mucking up the works.

And toss in a raise or two into the budget. David DeHaan, small business owner, offered:

When I fund (sic) out what increases to wages and benefits county employees are getting, it fried my eggs.

Quaint. DeHann is probably crabby because sales of his RVs are down, what with the gas prices and all. Still, a decent Coachman Class C goes for about $65,000 over there, a pretty good jump from the $28,000 or so I remember similar models going for when I sold them in 1974. That's about 3% a year, I think, finance not being my strong suit. Sounds like a soft boil to me, and so I would expect these raises to be way, way beyond anything of that scope to turn DeHaan over hard, wouldn't you?

Actually, the figure given is 1% to 6% per cent. I'll bet the average is pretty close to 3%.

So, back to the increase. As a result of this 9.55% increase in the budget to pay for new buildings and health care and raises and stuff the tax rate will, get ready for it, decrease from $4.40 per $100,000 to $4.24! The value of a home in my town is up 11% in the last year. A $200,000 home paid $880 for the county share of taxes in 2006, and in 2007 the same $222,000 home will pay $941. Let's say you're retired or cash poor for some other reason. Take out an equity line of credit, borrow $200, pay the extra $61 to the county, take the old lady to The Auctioneer Inn for a first class steak and a couple of nice bottles of wine, get laid and too happy to go carp at a county board meeting, and you're still up $21,800.

Problem solved.

Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, When I'm Sixty Four

2006-10-28T11:49:00.000-05:00

The coolest part about this McCartney song, sandwiched between the lovely Harrison raga "Within you and Without You" and the more brilliant "Lovely Rita Meter Maid" (is it a bow to the new militant feminism of 60s?), is the bass clarinet on the bottom, an instrument I once played in junior high.

But well, The Cute One is 64 and, as life would have it, things didn't turn out quite the way any of us imagined. While composing this little fantasy of a song, I'm certain that Paul didn't consider that he would still be doing rock and roll concerts in American stadiums instead of:

Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight
If it's not too dear
We shall scrimp and save

And now, visions of:

I can be handy mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday morning go for a ride

have turned into reports of "excess" alcohol and drug use, and alleged mistreatment, including ketchup bottles flying and talk not of brandy glasses by the fire, but of brandishing broken wine glasses while on fire.

Bunches of people are making a deal out of this, and here I am too. All of Merry Old England is atwitter with nitwitted peckishness at the sad affair, and opinionees are being opinionated about "what it all means", with the inevitable decay in values lament being dredged up like so much bland apple butter on a stale biscuit.

Well, yeah yeah yeah, guess what? Love doesn't make the world go round (though it might make it flip its poles now and then). And love isn't forever.

And love is not a rose. Love is the sunshine brought to the rose. Love is the moisture provided for the rose, and the nutrients laid into the soil founding the rose. It takes time, perseverance, the right stuff, and a goodly amount of pure, dumb luck to end up with anything to show for it.

McCartney and bride didn't make it. Most don't. You would think that people would have had enough of silly love songs. But they haven't, and this doesn't change. It does, however, take a whole spectrum to make up the light of love, and love songs aren't always silly, as in this one by his old mate:

Woman I can hardly express
My mixed emotion at my thoughtlessness
After all I'm forever in your debt
And woman I will try express
My inner feelings and thankfulness
For showing me the meaning of success

This isn't about our times, or those times, or time at all. Matters of love are timeless, as are these words from elsewhere on the Sergeant Pepper wonder:

I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her
And kept her apart from the things that she loved
Man I was mean but I'm changing my scene
And I'm doing the best that I can

I have to admit it's getting better

I hope it gets better for Paul, Heather, and everyone else with the courage to try again, or try a little harder. Though love isn't all you need, it's a damn good thing for what ails ya.

Your Lungs Look a Little Redenbacher, Orville

2006-10-22T23:16:00.000-05:00

One of the so few things I complain about over the years has been the bizarre odor of microwave popcorn. There are few things in life that compare to this affront on the old olfactory organ. Formaldehyde comes to mind. And the time a raccoon curled up and died under the crawl space of a cabin we called a house on the Fox River.

There is no way in God's Green Earth I am ever going to eat that stuff, but I'm a little surprised that I've just now learned about Popcorn Lung Disease.

Actually called bronchiolitis obliterans, it's name is quite literal. It obliterates one's bronchial passages. Especially when one is in charge of cooking up microwave popcorn "butter" flavoring. In the year 2000 some twenty folks working at a plant in Jasper, MO were discovered to have severe respiratory problems, particularly those from the mixing areas. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) stepped in with a study. These recommendations were made:

Use closed processes to transfer flavorings and eliminate flavor spillage.
Reduce mixing and holding tank temperatures for butter flavorings and mixtures. To the extent possible, workwith nonheated flavorings.
Install local exhaust ventilation in the mixing room and on flavor holding/mixing tanks.
Physically isolate the mixing room (and all flavor holding tanks) from other plant operations and maintain this area on a separate ventilation system under negative pressure.
Provide general dilution ventilation to plant packaging areas. Minimize the time workers spend in the mixing room. Substitute flavorings that generate lower emissions of VOCs and diacetyl.
Use respiratory protection, especially for mixing operations, in accordance with a formal respiratory protection program. (Respirators should be equipped with NIOSH-approved P-100 type filters and cartridges for protection against organic vapors.)
Use skin and eye protection when handling volatile flavorings.
Educate workers regarding the hazards associated with exposure to plant operations involving exposure to flavorings.

I'm guessing number six is about all one needs to know about working around this stuff, and this stuff turns out to a synthetic version of diacetyl, a substance that occurs naturally in all kinds of things. Sold to the manufacturer by International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF). Gives it that buttery taste. The study was followed up two years later, with typical governmental patience to err on the side of corporate well being, by this warning:

WARNING!
Breathing certain flavoring chemicals in the workplace may lead to severe lung disease.

According to a St Louis Post-Dispatch article, at least 31 people from the Jasper plant had been diagnosed with severe lung disease by the time a round of lawsuits began in March of 2004, eight of them awaiting lung transplants. Where were the watchdogs in the meantime? NIOSH did the science, exposing rats to diacetyl, monitoring the health of the workers and drawing the obvious conclusions, though hedging slightly in attributing the damage to this chemical, indicating there were other, though not attributable, exposures in the plant. That was all OSHA needed to hear, who still maintains that there is no direct causation.

Notes: 1) No IDLH has been established. One of four rats died after a 6-hour exposure to vapors from heated (55°C) artificial butter flavoring containing 285 ppm diacetyl (~64% of total VOCs), but no deaths occurred among groups of six rats exposed to 203 ppm diacetyl (~68% of total VOCs) or 352 ppm diacetyl (~61% of total VOCs) (Hubbs et al., 2002). 2) A cause-effect relationship between diacetyl and bronchiolitis obliterans has not been established. Food-processing workers with this lung disease were also exposed to other volatile agents (Kanwal et al., 2006; Kreiss et al., 2002; Kullman et al., 2005; Lockey et al., 2002; NIOSH 2004, 2006). 3) Diacetyl is known to react with the amino acid arginine in proteins (Riordan, 1979) and inhibits enzymes that are important for protecting cells from oxidative damage, such as superoxide dismutase (Borders et al., 1985) and glutathione reductase (Boggaram and Mannervik, 1982).
Date Last Revised: 07/31/2006

Juries were not impressed with OSHA's stonewalling, awarding tens of millions of awards to victims at this point. Perhaps they were made aware of this little headline on the OSHA website:

AGREEMENT ESTABLISHING AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR REGION VII AND THE POPCORN BOARD

The Popcorn Board is a federation of ownership, and this is how the Bush OSHA works, forming partnerships with the people whose business entails cracking a few eggs to make the omelet known as free trade. Here's some of the agenda of this "partnership":

Using a mailing list provided by The Popcorn Board of member companies engaged in microwave popcorn packaging, OSHA will forward to them recent information on the potential adverse health effects of employees exposure to artificial butter flavoring compounds.
The mailing will also include information to assist employers in recognizing and evaluating the development of obstructive lung disease among exposed employees.
In addition, the mailing will provide jointly developed best practice approaches for the safe handling of artificial butter flavoring compounds in the manufacturing process through the use of engineering and administrative controls.
Representatives of The Popcorn Board will review and provide comment and input on a draft OSHA "Hazard Information Bulletin" to be developed by OSHA for internal distribution to it's compliance officers in the field.

The alliance lasted about five months, with no mailing and no explanation. I'm guessing that the first finding of the alliance was that any additional alarm from OSHA about diacetyl was going to end up costing the other member of the alliance a lot more money. OSHA retreated behind the stone wall and hasn't been heard from since.

It didn't help IFF's cause that in 1993 BASF in Germany did a study on synthetic diacetyl, with similiar results to the NIOSH study OSHA continues to ignore. Rats died a lot, and quickly. The study was included to the database of The Flavor and Extract Association, another trade group, in heart of lobbyist country in DC. They, of course, have a mission:

The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association furthers the business interests of its members through a sound scientific program designed to promote the safe use of flavors.

Another FEMA! Here's a statement from their handout to manufacturers after the cows were out of the barn in 2004:

Diacetyl, a natural constituent of butter and other dairy products, and a flavoring substance commonly used in butter-type flavors, is cited by NIOSH as a marker of exposure in microwave popcorn manufacturing and as a substance that can cause airway injury in animal studies (NIOSH, 2003). Prior to its identification by NIOSH as being associated with respiratory illness in workers in microwave popcorn manufacturing, diacetyl was not considered a significant respiratory hazard and it has no OSHA PEL. Discussions with companies that manufacture diacetyl revealed no information suggesting any health effects, respiratory or other, from years of experience in manufacturing and handling diacetyl. However, it is appropriate to consider diacetyl a “high priority” substance based on the available data, and the need to be cautious given the association with respiratory illness noted by NIOSH.

A bit of a hedge, especially in the use of quotation marks! No mention of the 1993 BASF study buried in their own database while workers spent years peeking into the vats of one of the worst lung destroyers ever found, and while one of it's flagship members issued safety sheets with it's deadly product that no respirator was required.

Eventually, somebody was going to wonder if the god awful stink coming out of those microwave popcorn bags might be causing a bit of a problem on the consumer side. The FDA says the stuff is fine, and it only concerns itself with ingested ingredients, inhalation not being their purview. One of their associate directors, and it really doesn't matter who, considering the quote, stated, "...home cooks are not being exposed to anything that they would not be exposed to if the food were prepared with real butter." I think those in line for the lungs would dispute that, could they gasp enough words.

The EPA did decide to check this out in 2003. Here's a bit from USA TODAY from those days:

In the first direct study of chemicals contained in one of the nation's most popular snack foods, the EPA's Indoor Environment Management Branch at Research Triangle Park, N.C., is examining the type and amount of chemicals emitted from microwave popcorn bags.
Further research would be needed to determine any health effects of those chemicals and whether consumers are at risk, said Jacky Rosati, an EPA scientist involved in the study. "Once we know what chemicals are and the amounts, somebody else can look at the health effects," Rosati said Wednesday.

The results? Not released to the public as of yet, though they have been shared with industry officials. Buried? Now that the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers are among those pushing for more action on this chemical, consumer groups are re-energized, wondering why the report is so long forthcoming and why it's been made available to the industry prior to its release. In the meantime, IFF has separated its fragrances business from its flavors business. Fascinating, in a sort of Johns-Manville-sorry-there's-no-money-left-light.

Which brings us full circle to, something stinks here, which comes as no surprise to me. And who is on the consumers' side? Who is on the worker's side? It's been twelve years since the BASF study, and, in a nation where the percentage of GDP for health care is approaching 20%, our best effort is only this murky trail of industry and governmental double talk, about this and undoubtedly so many other deadly substances.

Oh, and a big hurrah for the unions for putting their foot down in so timely a fashion. Great job.

God save us from the lions of industry.

Someone's Got Some Catching Up to Do

2006-10-16T23:06:00.000-05:00

I assure you that, despite my recent non-reportage, I've been paying attention to the politics of politics. Others' minds may fog over the creepy crawl of murder and mayhem that passes for the Holy Crusade of Judeo-Christian Democracy, but I know that "wartime" American deaths have surpassed those of 9/11. And I caught that a study by fringe denizen Johns Hopkins University and funded by ultra radical MIT has placed the Iraqi death toll at least 400,000 but likely over 600,000.

Our President has termed the study "not credible". I think even he may have actually learned this term at Yale, where the scholarly study of scholarship is as well served by it's own brand of faith based underpinning as is the pursuit of the politics of greed. "We can't believe it" is where faith and other realities part ways. We know you can't, which is quite the point.

And then there's corruption. I haven't forgotten Abramoff and the slave labor trade of the American Pacific, the strong-arming of Indian tribes to buy unfavorable rulings on competitor's efforts, the outing of CIA agents with politically challenged intelligence findings, the murder of former dupes in off-shore Miami gambling interests, the congressional junkets to five star golf resorts in Scotland, on and on and on. Today's primary Republican scandal news is of the searches and seizures at the houses of a daughter and a friend of one Curt Weldon (R, PA), concerning the $500,000 half payment on a contract between the daughter and some important natural gas tycoons (Itera) in Russia. This contract was inked six days after the congressman, presumably at taxpayers' expense, threw a testimonial dinner for these hot shots at the Library of Congress. Officials at Itera had emailed the daughter that details of the contract would be worked out at the dinner. Just a coincidence, he says, he's never helped his daughter get anything. You could spend years following these.

But the real grabber has turned out to be Senator Foley's somewhat inappropriate inquiries to house pages as to whether they might be horny like him and such. "This says so much of our society," go the folk living mysteriously somewhere else, "that all the murder and larceny fade away while a juicy sex scandal rockets the polls into blue heaven."

"It's not about sex, it's about the hypocrisy of family values touting perverts and their conservative coalition enablers;" others say.

No, it's about sex. That's one cum stained blue dress on one side, and one pulsating pederast pole on the other. One set apiece. Love/love. Few are particularly interested in whether House leadership is a bunch of lying bastards in covering the whole mess up. I can't blame folk for not smelling any suspense here.

But, speaking of liars, My favorite of the political season is this :

"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible ..."

"incomprehensible"? Here we go again! Everything is the defeatist, petulant childish "I can't" with these people, blissfully, yea, faithfully unaware of the universally adult translation "I won't". This one came from Condoleezza Rice, prior to the disclosure that the chief spook of the CIA himself had headlined an emergency meeting on July 10th, 2001, complete with PowerPoint presentation linking the dots pointing to an imminent Al Qaeda attack on US interests, Rice was a key invitee. And when September 11th happened, and someone had assumedly told her who the culprits were, did this brilliant scholar stop for a second and think, "Hey, weren't these the guys in Tenet's pretty slides in that meeting, oh, way back in July?" Guess not.

Lies, corruption, incompetence. Iraq and Afghanistan in freefall. North Korea accomplishing on one continent what we've spent a trillion dollars and three thousand soldiers' lives lying about preventing on another. The right is reeling. The House is probably turning, and maybe the Senate.

Republicans have had it all their way, while controlling all of the "oversight". In yielding that, the exposure will be astonishing.

Every cockroach for itself, when that switch is turned on.

Redemption

2006-10-03T00:03:00.000-05:00

I've been away.

It seems that I lost the energy to continue this little effort, which must make me the... oh... twenty five millionth blogger to run out of remotely interesting things to write about.

I could say that I've had too much on my plate. It certainly was a busy summer, beginning with my boy getting married and moving through about a hundred family graduations and weddings (well, maybe ten or twelve). Toss in a few friends' kids doing the same and right up to another wedding this Saturday and all the weekends have been pretty busy.

And then there may have been some golf.

Yeah, I could say I've been too busy. But then I think to myself that I certainly spend a lot of time reading others' blogs and such. And what about all those Scrabble games with the computer and the Sudoku? Seems there may have been a couple of hundred hours to spare there somewhere.

The honest truth is that I must have gotten a little discouraged. It's a lonely process, this sitting down with one's own mind. And the introspection involved can be a bit unsettling. I find myself wondering why I think the things I do, and whether it's good for me to do so. I find myself wondering why I'm not one of those people who seem to accept things as they are, who are happy falling asleep in front of Survivor reruns, instead of sitting here reading posts on The Daily Kos about Darfur and Iraq. And seeing the pictures American TV doesn't show.

Or more generally, why do I expect so much out of people that I have such a hard time being around them. On the job I have a routine of amicability, but I can't seem to muster that bit socially. Why do I insist that people know things?

Who's the smart one here? The knowledgeable or the complacent? Is it smart for people not to care what I think?

Who cares what some post middle aged crank is opining about, anyway? It's just delusional nonsense, right?

Well, I'm forgetting that this is about me. I care to know, and maybe this article from the Baltimore Sun has something to say as to why:

Grumpy Old Men (and Women) Stay Smart, Study Hints
..."These individuals have a higher vocabulary," she said. "They have a better use of words, a better knowledge of facts."
It also suggests that those dismissed as grumpy old men and feisty* old ladies are often smarter in some ways than the young. The study's findings fly in the face of notions that intellect and memory fade with age - and that has made it a hot topic in the psychology world...

Oh, speak to me, my darling! "She" is Morgan State psychology professor Jacqueline Bichsel, who goes on to say:

"These results suggest that superior, crystallized ability is relatively strongly associated with low agreeableness scores, meaning that older individuals who have a tendency toward being unfriendly and uncooperative maintain higher levels of breadth and depth of general knowledge."

Hah! In this woman's clinical search for a correlation between personality traits and intelligence she found that general intelligence, the type that would help you play Jeopardy (I'll take odds and ends for 40, Art), seems to be the area of intelligence most predictable by personality. Interestingly, the young did no better than the old in this area. That's right, the 19-60 group did no better than the over 60s. And "disagreeable" over 60s did best of all.

Of course, there is some disagreement:

"The unfortunate interpretation of Bichsel's study is that it's good for older people to be cranky, and I feel that it reinforces those ageist stereotypes," said Susan K. Whitbourne, a University of Massachusetts psychology professor.

Well, just who the hell is this Whitbourne, and where's her study, I'd like to know! Stereotyping by whom? We just explained to you that only we know that what these youngsters think about us is all wrong anyway. Are you not paying attention?

And don't think you whippersnappers can crash this party:

Yet that doesn't mean that if you're 60 or younger and prone to be pushed around, standing up for yourself more often now will ensure you'll hold on to your smarts.
"What research has shown is that personality doesn't change a lot during the lifespan," said Bichsel. "And no single experience is going to change a person's personality."

No, I was born with this, baby, and I'm getting better at it all the time.

"It sort of keeps your mind sharp to have some of those traits," she added. "If you think about it, if you engage in debate you have to use words to make your point. That's what a disagreeable person does. They like to make their point, so they're going to seek out words to help them do that."

I think I'm ready to get back on this horse, now.

* the web site (undoubtedly edited by a younger person than is the paper), spelled it fiesty.

He's Never Done That Before

2006-08-04T18:23:00.000-05:00

I don't know why, really, but this story put a big smile on my face today.

Depending on how much of this work of art you may have read to this point, you might know that I have a fairly unpopular opinion when it comes to pets. I wouldn't have one. This isn't to say that I don't like animals. We have a good mouser at the shop, and that's okay, but she gets really, really needy when I'm trying to work. She'll lie down on the paper on the desk if you ignore her, or stand in front of the monitor. Or stop in the middle of the room and start coughing up a hair ball while you're eating your lunch. Nice. Then there's the hair.

I could live with a cat if I had to, though I think a fish would be better. At any rate, nothing is as annoying as dogs. Oh sure. so many of them are as cute as all get out. Then they nuzzle up to your fresh, clean khakis and coat you in saliva. I don't want other creatures' spit on my skin and clothes, especially ones that can and do lick their private parts every time they get the itch.

And then there's all that barking. I'm an aural person. Noise pollution is worse to me than litter. To me, incessant dog barking is like a garbage truck that's been leaking papers for the last five miles down the road.

And I hate big, mean dogs. At times my job takes me into the working poor neighborhoods, and these people have Dobermans, pit bulls and Rottweillers up the wazoo. I hate it. I fear for myself, and I fear for the children who grow up in such an environment of terror. I fear for the whole damn human race, that the image of a child being mutilated by these hellish beings isn't enough to stop a potential owner from finding another security solution.

And so back to the story. On Wednesday, in London, a vandal did $900.000 damage to a teddy bear museum. Not your ordinary teddy bears, the collection included the boyhood companion of Elvis, and several extremely rare stuffed animals. They didn't have to look far for the perpetrator, a six year old Doberman named Barney, who, strangely, was left minding the store.

Now, the aptly named Barney, I would assume, is a pro. Isn't that what these owners will tell you, that the breed is not the problem with the proper training, nicht wahr? But apparently, one of these cuddle buckets looked at Barney the wrong way. Or maybe he had a toothache.

I guess the reason this story tickles me so is that I know that somewhere over in London there's a Doberman that's lost his job. Good.

The Luxury of a Good Education

2006-07-14T20:12:00.000-05:00

Now and again, in my travels seventy-five miles or so south of Madison, I run across a Ford Taurus or some such nondescript vehicle donning University of Wisconsin plates. Not booster stuff, but official tags for university business. I figure somebody must be out testing soil or whatever the hell else Wiscy might be up to slumming out here with the unwashed. No big deal.

So today I was heading to work and there's another one of these plates ahead of me. Slowly it dawned on my semi-conscious morning commute brain functon that there was something a little different here. These plates weren't attached to some dull blue four door sedan. These official plates had found a bright and shiny new home on the shanks of a brand new, silver Lexus R330 SUV. Typically equipped, $40,000.

Well, I'm not going to say that forty grand is in the luxury range of a Lexus LS 430 sedan, at about sixty large, but it's no Taurus either. Soon I began to think to myself, "Why?"

Or perhaps, "Who?"

Who at the University gets a Lexus as a company car? It could be a chancellor. the biggest cheese at UW gets a salary of about $350,000. Minor chancellors get in the high $100,000s or so. Barry Alvarez, the football coach turned AD, will get $500,000 from the U (more from alumni orgs), and the new football coach rates about $350,000 plus another $400,000 or so from "private" alumni funds.

There are many more coaches, and it's certainly not inconceivable that the Lexus in my mirror was just a little part of the picture in one of these deals.

I won't argue here whether it takes someone in the top percentile of incomes to run a university, though I doubt it. And I won't get into the absurdity of the importance given to interscholastic athletics, for now.

But the legislative reality of Wisconsin is gerrymandered Republicanism. Republicans are adverse to public education, or at least that which does not serve affluent suburbs directly. They continue to reach into the pockets of the University in order to fund their donors' road projects and what-have-you. From their bully pulpits they sermonize of the wasteful elite in Madison, while the pork sizzles out on our 350% over budget US 12.

And so maybe it's not such a good idea to have Lexuses tooling around the state with University tags on them. Whoever is driving them, give them the money and let them get their own cars and register them themselves.

Have a little sense.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

2006-06-23T23:25:00.000-05:00

Still awfully busy, though I can't blame my inactivity here solely on that. In truth, I've been going through a disenchanted period, uninspired by events as the "war" drags on and conservatives pound law after directive down in the effort to empty our pockets as much as possible during the remainder of their carte blanche days. I'm still reading though, currently on about chapter 55 (sheesh) of Clinton's My Life.

Remember when Clinton was being accused of wagging the dog because his attacks on Al Qaeda targets coincided with the Lewinski testimony etc.? Well now, looky what we have here. Those Molson's swilling, standing in line at the clinic Canadians/Canadiens have gone and arrested more real terrorists in one day than we have in the entire War That Will End When Hell Freezes Over. $41 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and Dudley Do-Right is getting all the bacon!

And so I imagine this phone call:

―Say, uh, Gonzo, those gol durn Canucks is gone and stole the whole mother lovin' show here. Jesus H., we gotta grab the reins PDQ. Who ya'll got we can kinda, heh heh heh, toss under the tracks pronto, like? We got anything?
―Let me see, here ... best I have right now is this loony bunch of Haitians down in Miami. Weird bunch, and not a lot on them right now. No weapons, money. Just a lot of talk.
―Big talk?
―Told our guy they want to blow up the Sears tower.
―Sears tower, eh? That a big un? Where it's at?
―(Sigh) Biggest we got. In Chicago, sir.
―Haitians, eh? Got no Al Qaeda? Nuttin?
―Well, they've been trying to shop themselves to Al Qaeda.
―Now, that's somethin'. How do we know this?
―Our guy is their Al Qaeda.
―Say, Gonzo, heh heh heh, ya'll gotcherself a one stop terrorist shop over there, dontcha? Ah remember somethin' from second year 'bout en-trap-ment, but I guess these guys ain't likely to be seein' their day in court, heh heh heh.
―Not likely, sir.
―Still, sumpin's got me a little queasy 'bout it. I mean, no weapons, no money, no backers, and the only talk we got is braggin' to our own Al Qaeda imposter. How many dumb fuckers out there gonna buy this?
―More than 29%, sir.
―Heh heh heh heh heh. At's a corker, Gonzo. Ya know what ya'll are? Ya'll one a them sleepers. 29%, heh heh heh. I gitcher point. Yep, ya'll got some brass ones, too. Yer lucky Rover's in good mood today, Gonzo. You go on ahead now and leggo the hounds on these guys. Lemme know the hour so's I can have the bases covered 'round here. And don't make it too late, ya hear? More than 29%, heh heh heh, It's a goddamn good thing I don't have ta run on that slogan, heh heh heh ...You're doin' a heck of a job, Gonzo.
―Uh ...thanks, sir.

Kick This Around

2006-06-09T19:52:00.000-05:00

The Little Hun was telling me a story over ribs, spuds and asparagus about how a supplier for her shop, call him Dieter, called in from Munich today with a rather sudsy report on the World Cup opener. To which the response around the shop was apparently, ... oh, that's nice.

We Americans take a beating, likely deserved, for our provinciality. But this time I think we have it right. The FIFA World Cup "soccer" tournament is the ultimate stupidity in a stupid sport.

All right, all you soccer moms. Think I'm wrong? Let's line you up along the "goal" line. I'll put my golf spikes on and go down the line kicking each one of you squarely in the shin. How's that feel?

Of course, that kind of pain goes away, not like the brain damage from heading a ball, or worse, another head.

Ah, but then there's the pageantry of some rich Costa Ricans flying to Munich to see the national team go up against Germany. 'Cause if there's one thing we just don't have enough of in this world, it's nationalism.

Was I inspired by some prima donnas from the Boston suburbs prevailing over an under-funded Russian Army team in the "Miracle on Ice"? Oh, yeah, that was wicked awesome. Now let's invade Grenada. USA ... USA ...

But these are filler, the crux is this:

We have hands. We can do the most amazing things with them. We can communicate with them. Create tools with them. Love with them. Hurt with them. Express our most complex artistic sense with them.

And so the world is going to tell me that they have the ultimate athletic contest in the World Cup. This is the premier showcase in all of team sport?

You just can't use your hands.

That's just plain stupid.

This Is Why I Do What I Do

2006-06-01T21:54:00.000-05:00

I sell stuff. To do this one has to be charming, for about a half an hour. Kilgore Trout was incapable of this, and so he installed aluminum windows. Kilgore Trout is a recurring character in Kurt Vonnegut's books, a sort of alter ego to the author. I like Vonnegut a lot. He has a way of making a point, as so:

Sparky could not wag his tail--because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters. He was lumpy with scars.

First I laugh, then I think, then I laugh a little harder. I like that.

It occurred to me about thirty years ago that I would have to be charming for a lot longer before I could, say, work for a corporation. Or be a teacher. Or a lawyer. Or a diplomat. Or a Defense Department Spokesperson. Half hour is about all I can do. Why? Because I know I'm a bit insane and so insanity scares me, to the point that I would have to to cry out when it all became too much. I wouldn't last a week.

I couldn't come up with this, couldn't come near it, from American Forces Press Service, a propaganda sheet of the DoD:

BAGHDAD, June 1, 2006 – The top coalition operational commander in Iraq has directed his subordinate commanders to conduct training in "core warrior values" for all coalition forces, highlighting the importance of adhering to legal, moral and ethical standards on the battlefield, military officials here announced today.

"Now let me explain this to you again. You really shouldn't be busting into people's homes and spot executing entire families. Got it?"

"Yes, SIR."

In addition, the troops will be shown a Power Point presentation to reinforce that it is counterproductive to Iraqi morale, this busting into homes and spot executing entire families.

The program will take about 30 days. Where have we heard that before?

I just couldn't, can't be a part of all this. It's my health.

A Life of Entilement

2006-05-28T09:53:00.000-05:00

travel fairly light through this world, as least by American consumption frenzied standards. I have a small car, no boats, no skimobiles, no RVs, no ATVs, no airplanes, and not even the obligatory cheese head Harley. I'm no pack rat, either. Somewhere in a desk drawer are a couple things from Boy Scouts and high school, and a few, strange remnants from the 60/70s such as Exile on Main Street postcards and a photograph of myself with Sir George Martin. On my desk are a yoyo, a cheap plastic recorder (as in flute), a model hippie VW bug, a model Cooper Mini, a Rubik's Cube type of sphere (record time 1 min., 15 sec.), and a Tip a Day calendar for golf, currently set to April 17th, which was about the time my golf swing disappeared, apparently forever.

Downstairs I have built a storage shelf system about 24 feet long, floor to ceiling. Two boxes are my things. I'm not certain what's in there. Mostly useless electronic stuff, such instantly outmoded things such as a Marantz four track cassette recorder, bought for $600.00 about two years before one could get a tapeless hard disc recorder to do the same thing for about the same dough. There's an antique four track reel to reel down there, two. Not the cool TEAC stuff from the 60s, this one is from the 50s or even 40s, I don't know. I don't know why, either. To continue the digression, I own an Optimus DCC digital tape deck. DCC was an alternatative to Sony's DAT format. In a mini reversal of the VCR/Betamax outcome, DAT won and DCC, the technically superior format, lost. I still use this machine, bought for about $400.00, mainly to make exercise tapes. They sound so much better than an Ipod, trust me. Really. It's money, ... well ..., spent.

Where were we? Ah, yes, traveling light! I suppose my biggest toy is an Ovation guitar, followed up closely by a Fender Telecaster. Wait a minute, this was all supposed to segue into a discussion of memorabilia. I've completely lost the track.

Forget about all that electronics stuff. The sequence is: travel light through this world → no big toys → not much laying around → not much stored. There.

I don't have a lot of history in photos; I was never good at getting them to the developer, getting them back and putting them into albums, etc. That was true, at least, until computers came around. Now that so much of life can be organized with just a brain, a few fingers, and a good chair, I do much, much better with this and so many other such activities. Now there are folders and folders of pictures, cross referenced.

But these only go back to early digital camera days, with a few exceptions from the days of another bit of electronic trivia called a Snappy. This device The Little Hun was actually able to get rid of in a garage sale, and so does not reside in the aforementioned single bin graveyard downstairs. Probably would be worth some money on EBay someday. Oh Oh. Anyway, I hooked up this Snappy to my HIFI S-VHS camcorder and my Packard Bell Pentium I and captured stills from video. Very cool at getting the best of people, but lacking in resolution. The camcorder still sits on the closet shelf, patiently. The Pentium I still worked the last time I checked, and sits downstairs. Next to the Compaq Presario, which doesn't. Could be worth some money someday on EBay. Hmmm.

I'm a little amazed at this point there are no overpriced, underutilized scanners down there. Oh yeah, garage sale.

So you can see how precious little room there is for memorabilia on this tightly run ship. Where lies the history of my life? In the study closet, in a blue box, under the carousel DeLuxe Scrabble board, is a fully used set of official Scrabble score sheets. About 30 years worth. There are games between myself, my ex and her Maid of Honor. Games my with best man and his wife. Games with my son, The Little Hun, and her Littler Hun. Games with lovers, and their children. Games with my Dad, some of which I actually won somehow. Games from Brighton in Boston and Hollis, NH. Snipe Lake in Wisconsin. Antioch, IL. Miami, FL.

Scores kept in the hands of the people I've loved and always will. Better than photos, somehow.

Deeds, and not images.

She-demons

2006-05-18T21:16:00.000-05:00

It's often not the things people say that tell you most about their mindsets, but the way they say them. Previously I posted how it seems to be conservatives who are always telling you, "What you need to remember is", "What's important for Americans to know is", etc. Here's another one. I've noticed a trend that Democrats refer to Republicans as Republicans, while Republicans refer to Democrats as "the Democrats". Conservatives are called conservatives. Liberals are "the liberals". I ask you, does one seem less inclusive than the other? Whenever I hear Sean Hannity say "the Democrats", a little twinge of fear creeps in. I wonder just how ancillary these people consider us.

Today on WPR I listened to John Podhoretz, who has written a book warning conservatives of the real threat Hillary Clinton poses to Republicans in the next presidential election. He's pushing Guliani over McCain, and more power to him. I don't care much about that, as I don't think any Republican has a chance in 2008. I think Americans, deep down, will vote their pocketbooks this time around, and I think they're onto the shill game of the Republicans. In their hearts, the median class American knows who is getting the shaft. They'll sit around in the bar and tell each other how the Dems have it all wrong on the hot button issues, but in the booth they'll be sorely inclined to try something new.

But I digress. What I want to talk about here is the title of Podhoretz's book, Can She Be Stopped?. I'm sure there are a lot of insights in the book. In general, I'm sure the book takes a fairly dry approach in analyzing the subject, though I'm unlikely to read it.

But then comes the marketing. Then comes the targeting of an audience. She is the demon. Hillary Clinton became Hillary about the time she set up in the West Wing of the White House instead of taking charge of banquet planning. And now, when it comes to the hook, even Hillary gets dropped to the subtitle. The point is primarily she.

It's the hot button of all hot buttons. She. Get ready for a lot of this.

The Only Thing You Have to Fear Is Fear Itself

2006-05-11T23:07:00.000-05:00

Things are cooking up on the political side again. There is quite a buzz that Karl Rove is to be indicted tomorrow. And then there's the ongoing power struggle between the administration and almost everybody else as to the level of secrecy and invasion of citizen's lives that should be allowed in this nation that has been for some time two buttons from annihilation but is now forever changed by 19 Arabs with box cutters.

This week we've had a double whammy on this front. First, this:

WASHINGTON, May 10 — An investigation by the Justice Department ethics office into the conduct of department lawyers who approved the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program has been closed because investigators were denied security clearances, according to a letter sent to Congress on Wednesday.

Justice was thusly trumped in America yesterday. "With Liberty and Justice for all" goes the line. One down.

And then one to go:

"We're not mining or trolling though the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," Bush said before departing Washington to give a commencement address in Mississippi. Collection of data about communications inside the U.S. is a part of efforts to prevent another terrorist attack.
Bush's made the unscheduled remarks after USA Today reported that said AT&T Inc., BellSouth Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. secretly provided the phone records of millions of Americans to the National Security Agency. The agency, which collects and interprets electronic intelligence, has compiled a massive database with the information, the newspaper reported.

A massive database. It is sensible to many that we begin to take these steps. A small price to pay for our security, goes the mantra.

That eternal optimist, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, sums up the defense with, "... is not a warrantless wiretapping of the American people. I don't think this action is nearly as troublesome as being made out here, because they are not tapping our phones." So, what are they doing?

According to Fox News, it's just a little Social Network Analysis. Algorithms search for patterns of interactivity to pick up signs of a cell structure. Okay, but then the same Fox article goes on to say:

Then there are more creative ways of getting off the grid. The Madrid train bombings case has revealed that the plotters communicated by sharing one e-mail account and saving messages to each other as drafts that, since they were never sent, didn't traverse the Internet as regular e-mail messages would.

Hard to believe they would be caught up with by phone records, isn't it? Yet blowhards will go on about how this "revelation" by the USA Today has jeopardized national security.

This has little to do with terrorists. What the administration is up to, by executive order, is continuing the building of the infamous Total Information Awareness program, which Congress, led by my own Senator Russ Feingold, halted in 2003. This program would track your phone, internet, purchasing, toll booth activity, banking ... well, you get the picture. Congress said stop. Bush has said, "Make me."

There was a made-for-TV movie I saw a long time ago, I'm guessing in the late 70s. The plot is set in a not-to-distant future world where having a second child had been forbidden, but a couple had decided to keep theirs. The immediate problem was that the record of the pregnancy, along with all medical records, was already in the national security database. They decided to run. The problem was that this was a cashless society. The government/bank pulled their account.

Many will defend database gathering by the NSA with the assumption that since they have nothing to hide, they don't have to fear such activity. It's remarkable, this degree of trust in a government they otherwise scorn day in and day out. It's not a stretch to imagine the merger of Total Information Awareness with a cashless society, we rush headlong toward both. And if the NSA goofs? Someone's dead in the water. Your ATT/phone use/internet access/national ID/cash station/toll booth/passport/subway/air terminal/bus terminal/train station access card is going to get you nowhere

And if one sends a lawyer to straighten things out? Sorry, not without a security clearance.

Gas, and Gasbags

2006-04-30T11:33:00.000-05:00

This gas price thing is stirring up a whole lot of debate. Worst in my book is the free market nonsense that such crunches can be best addressed by giving free reign to the monopolists, in the assumption that the value of their product will naturally lead them to search out new sources of oil. "Calm down, everyone, it's not like we haven't had these prices before, adjusted for inflation."

Of course, adjusted for inflation, the median income isn't keeping up with the price of gas, or with the income of such columnists as Patrick McIlheran, who gives us this advice:

So adjust. It's unpleasant - I speak as a minivan owner - but fuel costs had been low for a long time. If politicians need to keep busy, they can rethink rules that reduce competition and supply. They can otherwise let the market work.

Ah, yes, all those pesky rules, written at a time when foolish folk decided that living in a choking brown haze was perhaps not the way to go. Well, it's a post $2.00-a-gallon world out there, the reality is that we have to unshackle those ... well ... that oil company to do it's best, spending a lot of it's own money to flood it's exclusive market with cheap gas.

But ask not what the corporation can do for you, ask what you can do for the corporation. There are important choices to be made by us one and all. Not cumbersome, evil communal decisions, but good old American free market embracing ruggedly individualistic personal decisions, as the op-ed guy wires this in from his den:

The tale is that we're hooked and paying the price.
Speak for yourself. You're hooked if you drive 26 miles to work in a pickup truck. You're less dependent if you take a bus. Some guy who runs his consultancy off a laptop once he walks from his loft to a coffee joint around the corner has you beat either way. Make a choice and pay the price.

"Make a choice and pay a price." And how might that ol' free market be effecting one's choice? Let's look at the county where I work; Lake County, Illinois. The median household income is around $80,000. Jobs in Lake County predominantly line up along the I94 corridor, mainly in the southeastern part of the county. Let's look at the map to see where one might make one's "choice" to locate environmentally responsibly. The numbers are the median home prices in each town.

Now, Highwood is rather a small WC town alongside a former army base, so don't think everyone can move there. In fact, the old base is being converted into half a million dollar townhouses, so the median is likely to rise.

Where do all those $80,000 families live? Well, Mr. McIlheran, they seem to have made the bad choice to locate off the map to the left there, where they are certainly to be the first to pay the price. Miles away. Millions of gallons away.

How very irresponsible of them.

Back At It

2006-04-16T13:50:00.000-05:00

That was a bit of a break. I'm sure my legions of fans have been wondering if I had joined the millions of ex-bloggers, moved on to sudoku, become infatuated with The American Idol, or taken two weeks to tour the South of France. No, a little, good god no, and I wish. Alas, this is the time of year when I have to work sixty or so hours a week, putting a damper on less ostensibly productive pursuits.

Plus, golf season approaches, and a certain amount of mental preparation is required to fine tune the talent of over thinking. A little practice is in order, as the muscles must again be properly estranged from any type of repetitive motion memory, lest they become uncooperative in the eventuality that no two swings will be alike.

It's not like there aren't things to go on about. April 15th has passed, and the median has contributed their 10% to the feds while the rich have coughed up their 5.9%. The war we are at but not really in drones on to more and more disinterest from the American public. Parade ran a front page story about how some lucky vets can get state of the art prosthetic devices. Vet funding continues to flounder under the crusaders of the Bush Administration.

In a side note, I remembered that the owners of Parade, tied for 25th of Forbes' 400 richest Americans and apparently thinking that 5.9% was too high a price to be rich in America, were once indicted on a billion dollars' worth of tax evasion. I've just wasted a half hour on the free side of the internet trying to discover the outcome of all that, but the only possible source I could find that didn't involve credit cards was The Nation's archives, currently down for rebuild. Assuming a deal was made, I'm thinking that a billion dollars would have bought a lot of prosthetics.

And then, of course, there is the ongoing investigation of the Valerie Plame outing, where it has become known that the President himself ordered the selective dissemination of classified information in order to more fully inform the American public in defense of WMD claims. Of course, he was more fully informing us with previously discredited information. His defense? He was not aware it was discredited information. How desperate must a supposed world leader be to continually rely on ignorance as a last defense? Astonishing, but again, largely ignored.

Gas prices rise steadily as big oil grabs all it can before the inevitable walk down before the congressional elections.

By far the most disturbing news in this corner of the woods is the sad case of the beating taken by a Frank Jude, Jr. The story is that a bunch of cops were at an all-white party, and Jude, no saint himself, walked in. He left soon, but the cops' story is that one of their wallets with badge was missing, as it's apparently a common practice for a cop to leave these things lying around at a big drunken party.

The story continues to where Jude was beaten savagely by a dozen or so of Milwaukee's finest, having been dragged from his truck. There were many more witnesses. The woman who'd brought Jude to the party was on the phone with 911 the whole time, until the phone was grabbed away from her while she reported that the responding on duty cops had joined in the beating.

Two officers eventually came forward with details, after having first lied on their reports. Many others testified that they had no idea who specifically was doing the beating. Three were indicted. All three were acquitted by an all white jury.

It's an old story, but the part that always gets to me is the inevitable comments about the overall integrity of the police force, as if they are not responsible for the few "bad eggs". Where is the pressure within the force to get to the bottom of this? It's obvious such pressure is no match for the collective resistance put forth within the force.

It's not about a few "bad eggs", is it?

Immigraciousness

2006-04-02T12:33:00.000-05:00

There are occasional dead spots in the course of my rounds when appointments cancel or run short, available tasks are too complex to spread across the front seat of a Subaru, and time is a bit too short to chase down a remote workplace. Sometimes, if the weather is calm and cool enough, I'll stop by a playground and shoot some hoops. Sometimes I'm able to hunt down some necessity or accessory on the list. Most times though, the ideal pastime for these interludes is a chapter or two from a good book (currently The Assassins' Gate, by George Packer).

But, luxuriously for one whose country can constantly be at war without actually being in one, the subject today is not war.

During one of these pauses I found myself a quiet spot in the overflow parking area for some townhouse units (It's important where one loiters these days, as rampant paranoia will have one reported as a possible child molester or serial rapist should he remain in a stationary vehicle for too long). Alongside ran a chain link fence, nondescript to most, but I'm a pro. A closer look revealed an untypical pattern of distortion and staining. Down the line a ways was an uncharacteristically large terminal post, oddly spaced. "Of course," I realized aloud, this is the cut-off remnant of the foul post for field three of Softball City, where our company team had won a championship a long time ago.

The reading never got started as I drifted into one of those nostalgic spells that afflict the (generously self-imaged) advanced middle aged. Was it really twenty years ago? Oh, to have a chance to relive those days, when we sons and daughters of the émigrés from Chicago were THE BIG NOISE here in exurbia. While more suburban teams would road trip to our neck of the woods with their perfectly machined muscles and painstakingly accessorized sportsmen's regalia, we strutted in our spandex under torn up blue jean cut-offs and we tore the sleeves off of our T's. We kept as much score of the pitchers of beer as we did the games.

But things change most quickly along the fringes of the insanity that is American urban sprawl. In the Fifties the more affordable housing at the limit of commutability brought less fortunate Chicagoans by the tens of thousands to this area, rather than to the more costly Northbrook, Arlington Heights, Highland Park and so forth. Many of these were first or second generation Americans of Polish, German, Swedish, Italian, Irish and so many other lines of descent. Many, many more came up from the South to work in the Great Lakes industrial belt.

We were their children. This was our place, the place where we grew. The place where we built new and better neighborhoods. But the affordable houses―the small bungalows in hastily built, crowded post war tracts―remain. Soon many Mexicans would arrive, wisely shunning urban blight to settle in places where employment, however miserable, was possible. We who were once reviled as dagos, micks, krauts and polocks called them beaners and spics and wetbacks, and generally made their lives miserable, but they labored on.

We did grow, and did a pretty good job of catching up. Our sons and daughters became educators and lawyers and engineers. Maybe some day my grandchildren will come across my old 28 oz. Estwing milled framing hammer and wonder what kind of a man used to swing such a thing. Maybe they'll see the team photo from those days, with our ponytails and do-rags and Miller beer, and wonder who such people were.

And on this spot where we used to play are town homes. Starter homes for the sons and daughters of the immigrants who still man the landscaping crews and work in the factories. They are managers, construction sub-contractors, insurance agents, realtors and all of those things we became to claw our way up. Among them are Indian, Pakistani, and Indonesian Americans whose parents worked double shifts at Seven Eleven that their children might become doctors and computer engineers and bio-chemical researchers at Abbott labs. Building the latest phase of these homes are plasterers and plumbers and electricians speaking Polish and so many tongues of the old USSR.

It's a strange process, this American building. It's cruel, and unfair, and unnecessarily difficult. In this land where there is so much, far too many needs go unmet. There is much to fight for, and there is much to be cherished as hard won.

I can remember vividly what it was like to one hop a liner to this fence―can hear the voices of long gone acquaintances shouting encouragement (sometimes a bit sardonically) as I chugged toward third base. This was my time, my place. Memories remain, but times change, as the old gang's pastimes have evolved variously to golf, fishing, and riding Harleys.

But some time ago my little field of dreams became an American dream for a few of those who have followed. This seems expedient to me.

This seems very American.

You Oughta Know by Now

2006-03-27T21:49:00.000-06:00

I've always had a hard time with people telling me what I have to do. Isn't this a core freedom, to decide for one's self just what it is one would like to spend time doing? Or creating? Or thinking about? This has no doubt affected my sociopolitical outlook. So I get a little edgy when I hear this kind of stuff, from the President's press conference of March 21st:

It's important for our citizens to understand that we have got to deal with this issue diplomatically now.

Never mind the irony in this statement about Iran if you can, because my point here is that I'm being told what is important and what is not. How many times have we seen The Lesser lean over the podium and get all folksy like and interject, "Ya see, whatcha gotta remember is ..." Who the hell do you think you are to tell me what I have to remember and what I don't?

And then I thought about that.

So I Googled "it's important for Americans to remember". I ignored non-political issues and non-quote hits and the first few pages began with these:

It's important for Americans to remember that as we debate an energy bill ... W.

and

It's important for Americans to remember that America imports more than 50 percent of its oil -- more than 10 million barrels a day ... W.

Okay, so this is an important guy and at the top of the list. What else am I supposed to be remembering? Veterans abound:

It's important for Americans to remember veterans because they've risked their lives so we can be free.

and

... veterans of Vietnam who say it's mportant for Americans to remember not just their own countrymen who died in the ten years of fighting, but the thousands and thousands of Vietnamese allies who also gave their lives.

and

Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn attended the event and says it's important for Americans to remember the sacrifice made by those who fought in World War II.

There is more of the same, and it becomes obvious that the most important thing that Americans are to remember is the glory that is war. But there are other subjects, as a conservative commenter pops up with:

People laugh when Bush says "You forgot Poland", but he's rather serious. In these times, it's important for Americans to remember who our true friends are, no matter how small.

Or how about this guy on Fox, an expert on profiling and security:

... it's important for Americans to remember that profiling is a fact of security but it's also a fact of life here in America.

Or this apologist for the drug czars:

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center associate dean says it's important for Americans to remember that all drugs have risks ... Rather than relying on regulators to perfectly identifying all risks accurately, doctors suggest Americans be more cautious with their pills.

Mind you, I am not cherry picking these. Do you sense a commonality here? If not, maybe these will help:

I was in Vilnius, Lithuania, for Bush's speech welcoming them into NATO a few weeks ago. It was about as big a pro-American outpouring that you'll see. It's important for Americans to remember that we have a lot of friends out here, but they're mostly the ones that were behind the Iron Curtain 15 years ago.

and this from a flag organization

I think it's important for Americans to remember how significant this tradition is.

And speaking of Fox, one can get so into such a rhetorical habit such that this astonishing bloviation is possible:

During this time of national crisis, it's important for Americans to remember that 24 debuts on the Fox Network November 6.

What?!!

Of course, it's not all one sided:

It's important for Americans to remember that two of our key framers - Thomas Jefferson and James Madison - opposed government issuing religious proclamations.

Those darn Americans United for Separation of Church and State and their paganistic floundering from the one true American Christian American power and the glory, praise God and pass the ammunition. Where do they get off telling us what is important?

But then, to remember what we, as Americans, should remember, we need to know what we, as Americans, should know in the first place. Whom do we find here to help us out? You betcha:

It's important for Americans to know, with that kind of strong, independent review process, most disagreements will not wind up in court. The law should allow the review process to work, not short-circuit it by inviting unnecessary lawsuits.

and

Yet, it's important for Americans to know this war will not be quick and this war will not be easy.

and

It's important for Americans to know that the trafficking of drugs finances the world of terror, sustaining terrorists.

and

But I also think it's important for Americans to know about either the private foundations or individuals or their churches, synagogues or mosques that are also working in Africa, to know the whole contribution of what the American people do.

Oh, wait. Mr. Bush wasn't the only source that popped up in the first few Google pages, that last one was Laura Bush. There must be others, right? Okay, let's try "What you have to remember". And the first political quote we find is ... Oh, my God!

MR. FLEISCHER: What you have to remember is President Bush, through his action in August 2001, created the guidelines for the first federal effort to fund stem cell research, to actually provide dollars for the purpose of stem cell research, where it was previously prohibited by the federal government.

Thus it becomes fairly obvious who is spending the most time telling me what I should know, and what I should be remembering. It's no wonder I can rarely take the conservative side, for they insult my intellect. I will make up my own mind in due course, thank you. I will decide what is important to me. Or should I say for me?

Because none of the above actually say what is important to me, do they? Such things are important for me to know, but that importance is to them.

Pure Spun Feingold

2006-03-15T20:53:00.000-06:00

He's done it again!

Out of the blue and into the light Russ Feingold has taken it upon himself to introduce a measure in the Senate to censure Bush the Lesser for alleged lawbreaking in running the domestic spying dohickey.

Oh man, watch a bunch of Foghorn Leghorn blowhards clam up while looking to get out of the way of this one! Hillary's sneaking out the back door of the cafeteria while Barack Obama is claiming he hasn't read the resolution some two days later. Blah, blah, blah.

Republicans are summoning up with apparently limitless bile their two universal talking points―A: the Democrats are a rudderless ship, and B: to do anything but goose step to the President in this post-9-11-world-and-the-most-scariest-moment-in-the-history-of-the-world is treasonous.

note: during my brief trip to the other side to get some rightie reaction, it was truly depressing to see the fervor with which they are all cooking up the war with Iran over there.

Lefties are blogging things like, "about time someone had some guts", and "let's hope the Dem Senators come around to support this" and so on.

I, myself wondered where Russ intended to go with this, as clearly it has no legs. I thought for a moment that this was it, that this was the eve of a Feingold led Progressive Party, as the cowering of his fellow Dems would provide a convenient, (and oh, so predictable) point of departure. But this is some very wishful thinking.

It's far more brilliant (though less intriguing) a ploy than that. Feingold has properly identified a weakness in his opponents for the Democratic nomination, putting them in an impossible position of being weak on Bush on one side and following Feingold's lead on the other. It's no wonder they're hiding. At the same time, he continues to work on Republican talking point A: He continues to be the one thing that Republicans fear most, a definitive leader. He also makes points as a moderate, suggesting a censure rather than an impeachment. Though the big "I" is the kind of historical tag we all would love to see on this here hangdog, a censure just seems more ... level headed. Of course, Feingold couldn't begin an impeachment anyway, but when it comes to the American electorate there's no need to split hairs here.

What does he have to lose? He soloed against God and Country on the Patriot Act and still was comfortably reelected in my strange little Joe McCarthy, William Proxmire, Fightin' Bob LaFolette, James Sensenbrenner corner of the world.

Is he twisting in the wind ... or the twist?

I Didn't Say It, This Time

2006-03-10T17:39:00.000-06:00

We should avoid the country falling into dictatorship at the end by avoiding these beginnings.

Who's words are these?

These words were part of a speech about the right wing's attack on the courts of America. What are we talking here? Let's start with that paragon of integrity, Tom DeLay. After the Terri Schiavo fiasco DeLay said federal judges "thumbed their nose at Congress and the president. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." And then the speaker mentioned (not by name, but clearly) Texas Sen. Joe Cornyn's remarks that violence against judges, such as the murder of a Georgia judge and the killing of an Illinois judge's family, may have been linked to "political decisions".

Consider this quote from James Sensenbrenner, Republican congressman from Wisconsin, and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee:

This does not mean that judges should not be punished in some capacity for behavior that does not rise to the level of impeachable conduct….The appropriate questions are how do we punish and who does the punishing.

"Punishing what?" you might ask, as there are already tools for unethical conduct and gross ineptitude. He doesn't say. Here's more from DeLay:

"We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse,"

How about these next two blood sucking vampires? Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, and James C. Dobson, of Focus on the Family, were caught on tape with these:

Perkins:

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to take a black robe off the bench

Dobson:

Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court. They don't have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone.

Well, it's no surprise to find these "fundamentalists" picking and choosing their way through the law―an example in itself of the necessity of an independent judiciary―and they seem to have lost sight of Amendment III, which states:

...the Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

So who is the lefty, pinko commie who dares to utter the dictator word in the face of such enthusiasm to smack down judges? Is it a media lefty like Jon Stewart or Keith Olberman. Some blogger on Kos or the Huffington Post? The NY Times? And as this quote is from a very highly placed individual, why aren't Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox and all the other defenders of the Reich up in arms about this? Where are the ad hominum smears?

No, this time they have to stop and think for a moment. Cuz this "paranoid alarmist" is none other than generally conservative and Reagan appointed Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

O Brave New World

2006-03-05T11:42:00.000-06:00

O, how merrily we skip down the road to damnation.

The Little Hun and I were off yesterday on a rather quixotic attempt to find a dress―one that is perfectly, simply elegant, yet properly understated so as not to distract from the soon-to-be daughter in law on her day of days. And cheap. In a size 2 petite.

This brought us to the Mayfair Mall in Milwaukee, a mid-upper scale mall in "transition". The strangeness of two utterly distinct American cultures going about their Saturday afternoon experience in total ignorance of each other was sadly disappointing, but that's another subject.

And the fact that there is such a thing as size 18 petite is truly puzzling.

Ah, but tucked away on the top level of this coliseum of commercialism there was (is) real evil lurking, salivating as hundreds of parents stood in line with their children. In a cross-generational frenzy of conformity, these sheep thought they were there to pay too much for the latest thing but, even as I was distracted by the male affliction of shopper's back, the suspicious eye attached to the mercurial mind of le sequoit was not fooled for one little moment. No, slithering behind those warm, fuzzy "it was all yellow" gates the devil himself is behind this latest Pied Piper of the futurist nightmare, the Build a Bear Workshop.

How we cringe with fear at signs of our approach to the children factories of Huxley's Brave New World! "Frankensteins," we call those genetic engineers who are making the availability of designer children a reality. Yet I witnessed moms and dads applauding with their Visa cards, as sweet talking instruments of the unholy sat their children down at a console to construct their pals. It's a well-disguised end run, I tell ya! Is it only a matter of time before our children, duly acclimated, will order their own children in the same "fashion", two kiosks down from the Sunglass Hut?

Where are the righteous in the face of this insidious, international plot?

And what of these made to order teddy bears and their keepers? What will be their fate? Will they ever know true love, the kind that at first sight lights up like a carousel with mystery and wonder and imagination? Or will this relationship be signed, sealed and delivered? Inspected?

When the skin is chosen, the heart placed, the stuffing stuffed and the story written, what's left for teddy to contribute?

Besides "fashion" sense?

The Rants Go Marking Dubai, Too

2006-02-28T22:55:00.000-06:00

Okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but "Dubai or not Dubai", exceedingly appealing in its double-entendreness, is already well-worn. We are, of course, talking about Dubai Ports World taking over the British owned and so quaintly titled Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company's rights to operate either six or twenty one American port operations, depending on how one defines operate.

What an interesting story this has turned out to be! In October DPW told the Treasury Department about the proposed deal, and then it took all of the agencies involved in the security of the US, who normally can't agree if a sign says walk or don't walk, about a month to declare, "No problem here." Seems like things might have been expedited a little, would you think? By whom?

Not the Preznit, no sir. After the AP "broke" the story of the deal on February 11th, and people began wondering why we were hiring the fox to watch the hen house, Bush was allegedly informed on Feb.16th that his administration had approved the deal. The approving body was the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Among it's members from eleven agencies is Donald Rumsfeld, head of the Department of Defense. Surely this one of eleven would have been involved in this vetting, right? Nope, in a press conference on Feb. 21 he said he had "minimal information" about the deal because he had "just heard about this over the weekend."

At this point all hell had broken loose, with some interesting role reversal going on in the mix. One of the first tacks was taken by the AP in its initial story, that DPW was somewhat state owned by the UAE that had been host and/or home to several al Qaeda terrorists. This unnecessarily fueled the immediate, more racist fires whose objection is purely that these are Arabs. This is a nonsensical argument―it's like saying Kansas's Sprint corporation can't build towers in Oklahoma because Terry Nichols lived in Marion, KS. At the liberal blogs there was plenty of this raw attack, but also a whole lot of, "Hold on there, lets not out-hate the haters. Let's not base our opinion solely on the race of DPW's ownership."

Astonishingly in this black/white political climate, the right was having the same argument. Here was the administration telling people that we need to consider the message we were sending to our "ally" in the war on terror. Clearly there was a lesson in sensitivity to be learned here, and from the Administration, no less!

There were lots of ways to go with this story, including the examination of big business. Big, big business. The inevitable political agony this would surely cause the administration, and their bull-headed intention to stay the course, led some people to become very suspicious on the money side. Could someone be trading political capital for real capital? Enter another of the eleven, Treasury's Jack Snow. CSX Corp. is a shipping giant that sold much of its worldwide operations to DPW in 2005. Snow was CEO of CSX (try to keep up, here) when they had sold another subsidiary in 2002 for 300 million to (here we go) the Carlyle Group. Enter Bush the Elder, James Baker, and a couple of Bin Ladens, among others. When the deal was announced, Snow had already been tapped as Treasury Secretary. One week earlier! A year later Carlyle sold the renamed company to a New York company for 650 million!

Questions that still burn here:

How did the Carlyle Group get such a bargain?
Are the CSX/DPW and CSX/Carlyle deals intertwined?
Who might owe whom what after Carlyle doubled their money in one year in a business that is apparently not profitable enough for US interests?
Bush and Rummy knew nothing about DPW's latest 7 billion dollar deal in a business that Snow, Baker and Bush Sr. made millions in?

I keep coming back to that, don't I? A UAE company is spending seven billion dollars on US port operations management, the deal is under a security review, and the unholy duo of our "war on terrorism" leadership knows nothing about it and/or is willing to put that up as their defense!

Well, a little time has passed, and Congress is in a major fit now. The deal is delayed, with Bush threatening to veto a ban. Liberals and conservatives are looking for consolidation, time marches on. Each accuses the other side of trying to be like them, which is, of course, each side's purported goal in life.

My take? Who knows what all these deals mean to the principals and hangers on, so the money angle is beyond me. On the matter of security, I don't consider caution in consideration of the anti-American aspect of the culture of the UAE and its employees to be racist. Chinese do not blow up our ships. Brits don't hijack our planes. Bush is still pushing the "Coast Guard handles the security" line. This is bullshit, pure and simple. This is the administration who asks every man jack in America to be ever vigilant against terrorism, yet in our most vulnerable locations vigilance by the few is enough.

Even by Bush standards, the policy is idiotic. Is he being set up? Is it convenient right now to push through what DPW wants on a limping administration, a killing of two birds with one stone? If Bush is on the outs, how dangerous is this India/Pakistan trip? I'd be thinking twice.

But to my mind the most likely scenario is the continuance of union busting, part of the war on everyone else that the corporate world has been conducting without pause for such things as terrorism and war. Check out this Wall Street Journal editorial about the criticism of the deal:

It is also not a good way to convince the world that we mean what we say about free trade and investment. The port-management business is dominated by non-American companies in part because high labor costs drove U.S. firms out of the business. That's also in part the handiwork of the International Longshoremen's Association, an affiliate of the protectionist AFL-CIO.

Let's see; the Administration and the UAE and the WSJ on one side. Workers on the other.

That's about right.

Oh Limp X Games

2006-02-22T00:47:00.000-06:00

Actually, I've been watching quite a bit of the Winter Olympics. I've watched the ice dancing and figure skating, which I find to have a compelling drama quite unlike a lot of athletic endeavor. The character that goes into these efforts, or lack thereof, is immediately, thoroughly displayed. There is great courage in these skaters, as well as uncommon grace, stamina and perseverance. Each of them begins the performance needing little short of perfection, and most times leaves nothing in reserve in the attempt.

And the ski, skate, sled and board racers that train for so long and so hard to achieve that .03 second edge that makes them the best in the world, well, the efforts are incredible, the losses heartbreaking, and the wins indescribably ecstatic.

Not everyone feels this way, to be sure, as ratings for these tape delayed games are down. People like Bill Maher think gravity sports are a big joke, dismissive of the perfection required to win a luge or bobsled event. Okay, it's a cheap joke for a guy running out of decaying flesh in the colon humor. Annoying, but not nearly in the same league as the comments of that graduate of the Jim-Brown-got-a-major-hair-across-his-ass school, Bryant Gumbel:

Finally, tonight, the Winter Games. Count me among those who don’t like them and won’t watch them ... Because they’re so trying, maybe over the next three weeks we should all try too. Like, try not to be incredulous when someone attempts to link these games to those of the ancient Greeks who never heard of skating or skiing. So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world’s greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention. Try not to point out that something’s not really a sport if a pseudo-athlete waits in what’s called a kiss-and-cry area, while some panel of subjective judges decides who won ... So if only to hasten the arrival of the day they’re done, when we can move on to March Madness — for God’s sake, let the games begin.

Bryant, Bryant, Bryant. Is this the same incredulity required when your phony-ass grinning no-talent self rode into Nagano? Are you and Greg actually related? Because that sense of humor gene seems to have taken the remissive role in your model. These are called the modern Olympics, Bry, and maybe one in a hundred professional American "athletes" would have anything near the athleticism required to get through a four minute pairs program.

You say you don't watch, and must then be subjectively judging the judging to be subjective. Or you do watch, and it only seems subjective to you because you watch with the same non-curiosity evident in your interviews. Which is it?

And then the black thing―the old twilight of the career, attention starved gambit of becoming a controversial spokesman for the oppressed in between rounds at Doral or Kapalua. I guess for real athletes we should have been tuning in the NBA All-Star Game. Then, instead of kiss and cry areas we could have been treated to piss and moan everywhere, and cushy padded folding chairs for the fat asses of real athletes who need to call time out if they have to actually run three lengths of an eighty foot court in succession.

Can't find this year's ratings, but last year this assemblage of the NBA fantastic drew a 3.5 rating ... live. The Olympics are averaging a 6.3 ... tape delayed, with an upswing expected toward the finale.

And then there's that March Madness you can't wait for. Last year the first two rounds, again live, pulled a 5.9 share (in the overnights, I haven't found the final ratings). Obviously more people are curious about this. If you have any curiosity about any of this, Bill Maher or Bryant Gumbel, look closer. Look a lot closer. Look at Marie-France Dubreuil, who early in her program crashed onto her hip and, not knowing if it was broken, returned to finish. Look at Irina Slutskaya, who trails by .03 points in the women's figure skating. While her mother awaits a kidney, and she fights a debilitating blood vessel disease, she maintains her humor, poise and dignity with her lifelong dream so nearly realized.

It's about something way, way beyond mere athleticism. It's about character.

And you gotta go diss it all playing the race card for hire. Shame on you. Oh, and by the way, as of this writing 16.67% of America's medals were won by blacks, who total 12.9% of the population. Oh, the paucity of it all!

Cheney's Got a Gun

2006-02-16T19:48:00.000-06:00

It may seem like an accident. The Vice President turns and fires too carelessly and his buddy goes down. Happens all the time.

Now, don't think I'm going to say here that Cheney intentionally fired on his hunting partner. I couldn't know that about the man, and it strikes me as a pretty messy way to go about things for a guy who, let's face it, has more than a few hit men at his command.

But the story is so incredibly, hilariously, perfectly apt! What better describes the policies of this administration, held by many to be dictated by Cheney, than "shoot first, and ask questions later"? And then the man goes out and, in the simplest form, does exactly that! This is an accident?

The loyal opposition has been screaming that they are being accused of being weak on defense by a bunch of armchair warriors, and then this clown is caught in an imbroglio while getting out of his car to blast cage grown flightless birds to kingdom come. The big, tough former Secretary of Defense does canned hunting, like the little kids fishing at a roadside trout pond.

And in the midst of all the shouting about the Administration's secrecy and it's controversial policy of executive power trumping the law, he holds back for nearly a day the fact that the second most or possibly most powerful man in the world has shot somebody. When the sheriff's deputy arrives to make a report, he's told to come back tomorrow.

Of course, right wingers wonder what all the fuss is about, these guys who spent 40 million dollars on Clinton's sex life. Lots of left wingers are wishing the emphasis were on more substantial issues as well, and yet the story continues to fascinate. It just writes itself, it's so natural!

The comedians are having a field day. My favorite is this, from The Daily Show:

Rob Corddry : "Jon, tonight the Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be the 78 year old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face.

And this man, who has been largely responsible for thousands of deaths of Americans, tens of thousands of dead Arabs, and untold thousands of post traumatic stress disorders, finally shows up four days later on kiss-his-ass Faux News to tell us that seeing his friend go down was the worst day of his life. Boo fucking hoo!

And so while this week we may have been discussing:

how Cheney outed Valerie Plame while she was working on Iran's hunger for enriched uranium;
that Bush by executive order extended his power to Cheney to classify and, presumably, de-classify intelligence info the very month Cheney was doing the outing;
the latest Patriot Act shenanigans; or
the so many ways the administration is changing the rules of American society via sub-paragraphs buried in voluminous legislation;

instead this is the story that resonates.

Relying on the witnesses who had 24 hours to corroborate their story the local authority has swiftly come to the conclusion that this incident was an accident, but the life in this story begs a qualifier.

Given the man, it was an accident waiting to happen.

Behind Every Candy Store is a Sugar Plantation

2006-02-12T15:21:00.000-06:00

There is a certain weakness I have where automobiles are concerned. I'm by no means an aficionado, but I know they're out there. I don't drive my life in a way that I might collect big boy toys like that Porsche Cayman S on the left, but if I won the lottery I would know where to find one. Out of all the cars I saw yesterday, I'd have to say that this was the most gorgeous. And I saw a lot of cars yesterday.

Some friends of mine, who are aficionados, took me to the Chicago Auto Show. Eleven hours worth. This show is big, the biggest in the world. It covers 23 acres of floor space, which is only about 55% of the available apace at Chicago's massive McCormick Place convention complex. McCormick Place is named after Col. Robert McCormick, editor and manager of the Chicago Tribune during the early and mid 20th century. During his tenure the Tribune was uncompromisingly right wing extremist, a tradition that remains, though now expressed in a more measured, and therefore a perhaps more insidious style.

In the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 the Chicago Police (da policeman is not dere to create disorder, da policeman is dere to perserve disorder ... another mayor Daley) murdered ten strikers and injured at least a hundred more. McCormick's Tribune dismissed the strikers as communists trying to take over the Republic steel plant, and that the police had only done their duty. In these more civilized days this paper, which once billed itself "The American Paper for Americans", is more likely to be using the editorial pages for exercises such as chiming in with da Mayor and Governor about the necessity for union concessions at McCormick Place, in order to avoid a loss of trade show revenue.

These cries continue, as McPier (who runs this and Navy Pier) has run into some losses. These losses are blamed on the competitiveness of other centers, and unions are expected to make the necessary adjustments. Going unstated in any such calls for reasonableness is the fact that this largest convention center in America and second largest in the world, run by an agency "concerned" about losing shows, is in the process of adding another half a million square feet of space and another 100,000 square foot ballroom. Financed with a 1.1 billion dollar bond. Being paid for out of operating revenues.

So how bad is it for McPier? They expect to show an operating loss of about one million for the three years ending in June, 2006, as opposed to a projected sixty two million. This while they are paying the interest on their new construction. This after they won major union concessions in 1998 and minor ones here and there. Thus union workers are transporting and building the shows, directing the traffic, serving the food, selling the tickets, building the expansion, and essentially financing the expansion with their concessions (and I don't mean the beer and such). And they are the bad guys. McCormick would be proud.

And the shows business (there's no business like shows business)? I was reserving a room in Denver for late May and, thinking the cost pretty darn reasonable, decided to check prices in Chicago for the same date, just for fun. Sold out.

McCormick moved on with typical modesty to call the Tribune the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (hence WGN Radio and television), but back to the cars.

I'm looking for a car, but not actually in the $75,000 large price range (surprised?). At 30,000 miles a year, I'm not looking to burn through more than about $17,000. It needs to be comfortable and have plenty head, shoulder and leg room. The show can't help me with driving characteristics, but I checked every car in this range for head, shoulder and leg room; the ergonomics of entry and exit and pedal and shifter positions; mileage (must be 30+ highway); included features such as cruise, power windows, remote entry and seat adjustment; quality of interior elements; and general styling (as much as you get in this range). I also want a hatchback, since we will have an existing Ford Focus sedan and this leaves very little flexibility for loading larger items.

The pickings get thin, and I come down to two existing models and one that won't be available until summer. The two existing are the Focus five door (after a rocky start this model has been very good, and I own a good one already), and a VW Golf. The intriguing possibility is a coming model from Nissan, the Versa. Nissan had some of these at the show, and they were better configured and showed some newer thinking about this class that the older Golf and Focus don't. On the other hand, it will be a totally new car, which means concerns about bugs and it will carry no incentive like the Focus does. In it's favor is a body style, typically Nissan, with some originality and eccentricity, things always appealing to me, a persons who actually once owned a (68?) SAAB 95.

Or the Porsche, tough choice.

A Four Bit Drama, Minus Change

2006-02-08T22:50:00.000-06:00

So I'm in a mega Mobil station in Kenosha, minding my own business (well, for a while anyway). While searching through the coffee, cappuccino and cocoa machines for the cream for my coffee, I hear the dulcet screech of the local dialect thusly:

The signs say two dollars and twenty four cents, but the pumps all say two dollars and twenty nine cents. Now, I just want to know, which one is it?

I'm thinking at this point, "Why don't you go try pumping some gas out of the sign, moron?" cause there's something about the tone that is pissing me off already. The clerk takes a more polite approach and tries to explain to this self righteous, indignant twit that they have been attempting to change the pump prices, but they are having trouble getting the computer to manage it. She is sorry, they did not realize that the signs had changed over. At this point the manager comes out and gets the gist from the clerk. She asks if the clerk knows how to run a credit for the price difference for the customer, she will be happy to show her how.

I wonder if this will actually be so easy, as it is obviously the same computer and operator we're dealing with here.

It doesn't matter, because before the the manager's words, or anyone else's words, can be finished to the point of being half understood our little squiglet is strangling the second verse:

Well, I haven't pumped the gas yet. I just need to know, which price is the right price?

The manager again:

I am supposed to reduce the price by five cents, but the change didn't take. I'm working on it, but in the meantime I will be happy to issue a credit for the five cents.

It's obvious to me that the manager is a bit green to be up on the workings of the minds of the indignant EVERYBODY IS TRYING TO SCREW ME class represented so gratingly here, and so she doesn't realize, like I do, that there is no way in hell the customer is going to figure out that she can just go out, pump the gas at the higher price, and come in and get the discount. Sure enough:

So, if you're saying that the price is really two dollars and twenty nine cents, I don't have to get gas now. You best believe I can stop on my way home if the price is going to be five cents cheaper, for sure.

That last part she squeals quite proudly, snout skyward with Miss Piggy pride at such a clever assertion.

An eerie silence falls over the room as the manager looks at the clerk, and the clerk looks at me, and I look at the clerk, and the clerk looks at the manager, and then we all look at the customer. Wow. The customer gets that little "hey, what am I missing" tilt and then walks out, gets into her Toyota whats-its and drives off.

At the end of the day, and if her Toyota is really empty, she will be proud to have saved ... about forty five cents. And all of this in a blustery lake effect snow squall!

Oh, the inanity!

But this says so much about the brainwashed masses of post-911, homophobic, xenophobic, agoraphobic, androphobic, coitophobic, phonemophobic, erotophobic, noctiphobic, scopophobic, verminophobic and generally phobophobic misfits that populate our landscape. The hot button issues blare away, sound bite by sound bite, headline by headline, and rationality is impossible. Oil and the Middle East and oh, my God how is one going to get through it all and there isn't enough time in the day and the next thing you know, that someone is spending fifteen minutes of her precious time making sure that only ten minutes more spent later in the day will save her forty five cents!

And they vote for Republicans cuz Republicans mean business in the WAR ON TERRORISM. That's really important to them because they are TERRIFIED of everything and at least someone will do something about it. Republicans yuk it up as they devise ten or twenty ways to suck the blood out of these zombies, giggling with themselves as they write speeches about the TERRORISTS AND THEIR EFFORTS TO OBTAIN WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION oh, my God, oh, my God!

As if terrorists are over there, right now, drawing maps of Kenosha in the sand. Lunacy! As if the world weren't always a dangerous place!

They don't think, they can't think. And when the mind is blown there is only one salvation, faith.

One shining path. One God.

... there is no God but one ...

One heavenly light.

The new gray.

Dissembled Still, But Plowing Ahead

2006-02-05T11:28:00.000-06:00

My brain is still sloshing along, much like the rum punch in my stomach while on a catamaran cruise Tuesday (some pics up here). In an attempt to recover whatever one might call the flow like thing that drives this opus, I'll go with scattergun.

In the toy box in the garage are my baseball mitt, football and basketball, in amongst all the nerfy stuff we Spockians invented to make our little darlings all safe-like. The mitt (that's what we called them) is a little worn from distantly remembered company softball team seasons, and the football is practically virginal. the basketball, however, is on it's way to that fuzzy, one pound light twilight of its career―a kind of faux suede advanced middle age of somewhat slippery elegance.

How did things get that way? Why does this simple spheroid object rate such attention over it's close cousin, the sleekly tapered football with it's ability to be launched in a perfect, forty yard long, four dimensional parabola to meet the outstretched fingertips of a leaping, sprinting playmate? What about that "having a catch" (I don't know anybody who didn't say "play catch") thing ? "Baseball, hot dogs and apple pie" and that kind of stuff?

You see, football and baseball are necessarily social. Basketball can be, but it doesn't have to be.

There's my self-revelation for the day.

Moving on:

A great American died this week. I'm sure thousands of great Americans died, so let's say an extremely influential and determined American, Betty Friedan. Author in 1963 of the book "The Feminine Mystique", Friedan examined the frustration of the fifties and sixties women, discovering that those who were involved in activities outside the home were far happier with themselves and their men than others. She founded NOW, but fell into disfavor with most radical feminists with her insistence that loving men was a defining process for woman, achievable with ultimate quality only by the elevation of women to an equal status with men inside and outside of the home. Her book was the non-fiction bestseller in 1964, an astounding year in so many regards.

And on:

Things have quieted considerably on the Republican scandal fronts. The media have failed or chosen not to emphasize the scale of the collusive governmental/corporate intrusion into our lives. The same public that believes Saddam was in league with OBL believes that this spying bit is all about a few "wiretaps" on messages to or from Al Qaeda agents. The same public that entrusts their sons and daughters to our Commander in Chief paid little attention this week to the revelation that he once was considering sacrificing twenty or so of them by putting them into planes with phony UN markings and instigating an attack from Hussein, thereby starting the war he was insistent on starting. Nice. At least Al Qaeda takes care of its suicide bombers' families. The shepherd of our "Support our Troops" flock dreams up these little scenarios to sacrifice American lives while he simultaneously cuts veteran's benefits, or works to make accessing those benefits so arcane and convoluted that so many give up altogether. Though at least 95% of the Abramoff scandal is Republican, that other 5% is enough for the ill-informed masses to dismiss the whole thing with a "they all do it".

And on:

Wisconsin companies supplied all the toilets at the Super Bowl. And the toilet paper. Kleenex, Kotex? You bet! Something for those Michiganers to think about, and a place to do it. Often the football championship is not a single elimination event, but we got it covered.

Quickly on:

I recommend watching the Senate Intelligence(?!) Committee tomorrow (Monday) interviewing US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose statements, maintaining the administration position that few Americans are affected by the NSA's and others' data mining operations, are being contradicted daily in numerous reports. Squirm city.

Enough:

I have things to do.

Oh, mon!

2006-02-03T07:24:00.000-06:00

I have to admit, it's a little hard for me to pick up here. In fact, it's a little hard for me to have a lot of motivation to do anything right now. Such is the state of mind after having spent a week at an all-inclusive Jamaican resort, where all activity consists of four things; eating, sleeping, drinking and picking a chaise.

Well, maybe five things.

Pictured is the Italian restaurant at Couples, Ocho Rios. Couples isn't the most modern of the popular resorts in Jamaica. It was previously called the Tower Isle Beach Club, host to such diverse luminaries as Walt Disney, Debbie Reynolds and Fidel Castro before turning all-inclusive in 1979. It's not the most elegant either, just down the road Couples has bought San Souci, a smaller, more intimate, cliff hugging beauty.

It's a classic beach resort, a little long in the tooth but stretched out along the waterside, with the great majority of its rooms ocean view and not more than fifty yards from the water. We're not talking marble baths and sunken Jacuzzis here, just comfortable rooms with private balconies where the French doors need not be closed and the curtains need not be drawn shut.

Food? Very good. Not over the top cuisine but very, very good from the ground up. What do I mean by that? Jamaica is a very mountainous island, and large enough to wring a lot of rain from the trade winds, hence an abundance of water. Ocho Rios means eight rivers. The greatest portion of the food served at the resorts is grown on the island. Vegetables are plentiful and varied, and they are extremely fresh. Lots of water means lots of ice, and the beer and punch are as refreshingly cold as the salads. The dishes and glassware are clean. An extensive Continental breakfast menu was available for the included room service, as was a breakfast buffet with to-order omelets, steamed fish, grilled vegetables, Danish, bagels, lox, English muffins, bacon, sausage, waffles, warm potato salad, they had it covered.

Though I seemed to overdo it at times, I only gained about four pounds, and this with no visits to the gym.

Ah, but all good things must end, else why would they be better than the rest? The beautiful sunset descent through three strata of wispy clouds over Lake Michigan brought us down to a heavy cover at three thousand feet, through which we made our turns to the vector and final, dropping out of the low ceiling to reveal the steely gray gloom of a snowless, sunless February day.

At customs there was shouting and a near fight between two of Wisconsin's finest over cutting in line, this from an all "adult" charter. Everyone had to stop while agents calmed them down. Wonderful. Home.

Aged to Perfection ... Irrelevance

2006-01-21T11:37:00.000-06:00

If one Googles "wisdom of elders" there are, of course, quite a few hits about Native Americans. There are numerous referrals about African culture, and Indian, Chinese, Japanese, South American, Hebraic, and many, many others. Noticeably few hits―especially considering that the search was done in our language―are links to our own culture.

In one of my current haunts, the Daily Kos, posters and commentators are reminded often when they are being disrespectful of others' lifestyles or other cultural identities. Sexism, gay-bashing or other such conscious or less so intolerances put forth in this huge community will bring, like inevitable white corpuscles descending on bacteria, gentle to not-so-gentle remonstrations, occasionally leading to banishment by the referees for flagrant abuse. The clever design of the comment ratings system keeps the site remarkably civil in tone, considering the generally invective laden blogosphere. The tone is decidedly left, to be sure, but makes no bones about it. Many would think this sensitivity a bit too "politically" correct. This is a nonsensical argument. Correct is correct, politically or otherwise. Anything short of correctness is incorrect, regardless of political focus.

However.

Such generosity of effort to consider the feelings of others seems to skip a beat when it comes to age. Oh, for sure there are excellent and heart rending posts about the trials of older family members and the difficulties with health care and social security and such. But there is little outrage when someone suggests that "wrinkly faced has-beens" like Ted Kennedy should step aside and turn over the leadership of the party to new blood. A November dust-up over Cindy Sheehan describing her ordeal as a "trail of tears" and the subsequent outrage of a Native American elicited thousands of comments in numerous posts, but constantly there are references to "those old farts" and "aging hippie pipedreams" and "doddering old fools" that raise few eyebrows.

Here's an Kossack example, from just last night. In a comment about Imus and his cohorts this champion of one of the most respectful and dignified politicians on the scene commented so:

... don't listen - never will - won't pollute my ears and eyes with either (sic) aging petrified impotent worms...

It's not that difficult to endure such short-sightedness. We've been parents for a long time. I applied for a management job at Best Buy a couple of years ago, more for practice than anything else. The interviewer actually asked something very close to this:

I like to come to the point, so let me ask you ... um, you're quite a bit older than other applicants we've had. Do you think you'll be able to maintain the pace?

That was pretty much the end of the interview, as I just kind of smiled, grabbed my jacket and walked out, vowing to always bring a dictaphone in the future. The sheer stupidity of the question was, on so many levels, enough to make it quite clear that I was barking up the wrong tree. I wanted to say:

I work out six days a week. I can shovel 6" of snow off the driveway and not feel my heart or have to stop for breath. I've been working on my feet in sales and construction for 30 years. I can kick your butt in chess, Scrabble, HORSE and long driving. I can grab your ass and toss you out that fucking window, you 30 something, Dew-sucking, chain smoking sack of yesterday's greasy french fries!

Incensed I was, but I didn't say anything like that. Why? Because wisdom prevents it. You either have the sense to realize that someone who has been in the world twice as long as you might have something to contribute or you don't. Most are surprised at thirty to realize how much they still feel like that fifteen year old kid, yet so many cannot make the connection that this phenomenon never goes away. Age is the frame; the setting. Life is the art; the dialogue. Though age is an element, it needs not to be, nor should it be a distraction to the appreciation of a person.

Some get it from the start. There are always one or two of your kid's teenage friends who stop in your kitchen on their way to the hangin' out place. Kid's who remember that your mom is under treatment and ask how things are going or actually offer information about how their life is going. Curious kids, not limited in view to the qualities of the stage of life they currently inhabit.

And when you see one of those endearing, eternally loving couples, or the retired guy who always shows up at the diner with a joke and a smile (and a tip) for the waitress, or the seventy year old woman at Wal Mart who hustles to help you get a cart while you corral two toddlers and load an infant, guess what?

Those are those same kids.

In the Bush League, Everyone Bats .000

2006-01-18T09:42:00.000-06:00

The Medicare drug plan is off to a fantastic start. Here's some news from The Record.net in California:

SACRAMENTO - As the fiasco surrounding the federal government's new Medicare Part D drug program widens, California stands ready to spend $150 million to make sure needy seniors and the disabled get the medicine they need.
A bill is expected to fly through the Legislature this week to ensure that people such as Stockton's Bobbie Cossey get their medicine.The trick will be to get the feds to repay the state.
Cossey, 87, needs medicine for her heart problems. She is one of 16,637 "dual eligibles" in San Joaquin County - people receiving benefits from both Medicare for the elderly and disabled, and Medi-Cal, California's version of the federal Medicaid program for the nation's poorest residents.
It is this group, 6 million nationwide and about 1 million in California, who were removed from Medi-Cal drug coverage and automatically enrolled into Medicare's new prescription drug plan as of Jan. 1.
But upwards of 200,000 Californians have been unable to get their medicine without lengthy delays or being forced to pay exorbitant rates, because the computer system and phone lines supporting the plan have crashed.
Every day, thousands of calls pour in to state and local agencies reporting problems with the system. Many of them involve poor people who need medicine to survive and who have been told they need to make a $250 co-payment to get medicine that was free two weeks ago.
It's truly a national disgrace," said Assembly Speaker Fabian Nûñez, D-Los Angeles. "There's no question the Bush administration has faltered and failed to deliver."

It's no surprise to so many of us that this administration is too hopelessly inept to pull off such a program. The professionals in government will have to pick up the shards of this fragile free market dreamwork and patch it together, sadly not until the rethuglicans have killed off a couple thousand old people first.

But listen to this response from a druggist in Tennessee.

It's been a nightmare only the government could have come up with," Cohen said. "Any pharmacy serving an older population is tearing their hair out.

This will be the response of the pliant majority. In their Fox News oblivion they will blame not the consortium of right wing pols and pharmaceutical barons who have shoved this down our elders' throats (16 Democrats voted for this albatross), but BIG Guvament and the "nanny" state for trying to accomplish what high flying, fast living drug czars can do better. And here's their hero on the subject:

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE:

I don't really understand. How is the new plan going to fix the problem?

PRESIDENT BUSH:

Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to that has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, supposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

How can you go wrong with leadership like that?

Bears that Don't Dance

2006-01-16T11:27:00.000-06:00

Today is Martin Luther King day, who may just have well been born five hundred years ago. Protest? Hell, we've got careers to attend to. Let's talk about the Bears, instead. Yesterday was their first playoff game in some time, which they lost to the Panthers, 29/21.

Report card:

offense	B	got rolling after a while
offensive line	B-	too many hurries, but the run was fairly effective against a very good defense
running backs	C	downgraded for lack of blitz help
receivers	C	not enough there, lack of aggressiveness to ball, no speed
quarterback	B-	steadied but only less erratic. accurate middle range, less so short range. inexperience showed in two minute
defense	D	keeping score down in first half and last two stops in second only salvation from F. defense was highly overrated, as Packers (twice) and Steelers piled up big yards before this debacle
defensive line	C-	so-so against good running team. no pressure on quarterback
linebackers	D-	if it wasn't an eight or nine yard gain over the middle, it was an eight or nine yard gain on that flanker/wide pass with no outside backer in sight (revised to D- for Uhrlacher's all time highlights quality interception
defensive backs	D-	only Vasher prevents F-, Tilmon's efforts were historically you feel sorry for the guy wherever he ends up bad. the field was no help here, but phew!
special teams	F	perhaps the most critical aspect of the game, as punter was uncharacteristically awful, putting us behind the eight ball. each time the offense responded kickoffs were short and coverage was poor, negating momentum.
offensive coaching	B-	downgraded for lack of timely adjustment to middle blitzes, which harried first half efforts well into the second quarter
defensive coaching	F	Vasher on Smith (200+ yards) anyone?
head coach	C	can't help thinking that Grossman and defense should have played final regular season game, that we were in no position to coast. wasted a challenge that might have been used on the last NC TD, I thought the receiver didn't have control when he hit the ground on a very tight replay. team seemed sluggish and ill-prepared at onset.
Fox	B	upgraded for helping Charter kiss and make up with the evil right wingers at Sinclair Broadcasting (who own my local Fox affiliate) in time to add Fox to my hi-def tier in time for playoffs. hate the buzz, zip, swoosh stuff, but I'm probably just old. beneath the flashy graphics, Fox is MBA bottom line not enough help cheap and it shows
Joe Buck	A	knowledgeable enough to have input, smart enough to stay out of the way
Troy Aikman	F	didn't think it possible, but he's worse than Collinsworth! calling for balanced attack down 16/7 to an excellent run defense team, whereupon Grossman immediately catches fire and ignites offense. whereupon he says it won't continue to work. whereupon it does. whereupon after it worked three times in a row but not the fourth he declared himself right all along. what "got us there" was not being behind by two scores, nimrod! Collinsworth did his part on Saturday, though, remarking after numerous three and outs that "we're not in Chicago, after all". He keeps snarking the second biggest football market in the country, how smart is that?
outlook	B	will defense maintain speed, because it isn't big. big backs (Steelers, Sam Con) steamrolled it. receiver situation is not good, no speed. Grossman has guts, but is clumsy, will he last? continue bubble under until top flight receiver core. looked like a bona-fide NFL team out there, which is a big improvement.

Long Train Coming, Long Train Gone

2006-01-15T14:19:00.000-06:00

In the locust wind comes a rattle and hum

"Bullet in the Sky" U2

The resolution of a thing is a quieter process. The cold fronts that sweep across our prairies trigger adrenaline charged awe at the titanic clash of cloud on cloud and the explosive release of gust lines and gale driven precipitation, but these riots are mere announcements of an effect that is to come, as more quietly, while our attention turns elsewhere, the chill gathers.

Or a hard charging freight train approaches a crossing as its horns crescendo a screaming certainty. While the basso growl of the diesels accompanies the cacophony of a thousand steel wheels bowing the tracks one stands by, waiting for the worst of the powerlessness to be over.

Later, with heart still pounding, breath recovers as the hundreds of cars roll by. Some clatter by more noisily than others, but one becomes less transfixed, the mind wandering off to the business of the day or perhaps to daydreams.

Some trains bring only the coal that cooks our troposphere and kills our lakes. Some bring the chemicals that transmute our tissues. Some carry the sticks and glue of our construction. Railroad trains carry the stuff of life and death, and of all the complication in between.

As do trains of thought. So, now that the conservative counter revolution's engine has passed with the fury and tumult of congressional and executive election, we wait dumbly as the cars go by. Along rattles an Alito nomination, somewhat above the din. We notice briefly, and maybe glance down the track for an end to the inconvenience.

Not all of us. There are spotters who gather and compare notes and take photographs. These enthusiasts see the contents, monitor the traffic, note the poisons. As we look down or straight ahead, we don't notice them. We are vaguely aware that there are poisons, we have heard of disasters.

But always they have occurred in someone else's town.

I'm Not One to Judge

2006-01-11T18:02:00.000-06:00

KENNEDY: The June '84 edition of Prospect magazine contains a short article on AIDS. I know that we've come a long way since then in our understanding of the disease, but even for that time the insensitivity of statements in this article are breathtaking. It announces that a team of doctors has found the AIDS virus in the rhesus monkeys was similar to the virus occurring in human beings. And the article then goes on with this terrible statement: "Now that the scientists must find humans, or rather homosexuals, to submit themselves to experimental treatment. Perhaps Princeton's Gay Alliance may want to hold an election." You didn't read that article?
ALITO: I feel confident that I didn't, Senator, because I would not have anything to do with statements of that nature.
KENNEDY: In 1973, a year after you graduated, and during your first year at Yale Law School, former Senator Bill Bradley very publicly disassociated himself with CAP because of its right-wing views and unsupported allegations about the university. His letter of resignation was published in The Prospect; garnered much attention on campus and among the alumni. Were you aware of that at the time that you listed the organization in your application?
ALITO: I don't think I was aware of that until recent weeks when I was informed of it.

This is Ted Kennedy grilling Supreme Court Justice nominee Alito. You might think a guy looking for the #1 prestige legal job in America, a guy who has made his way through one of the most difficult law schools in the land and presumably passed at least one bar exam would not have such a hard time remembering things. "I don't recall". Its sickening. "I don't remember these guys wanted to return Princeton to the good old days of no women, no minorities, and no gays."

Yeah, right. And le sequoit doesn't remember anything about the SDS or the Yippies or the Black Panthers from those days. You say these guys advocated actual revolution? I don't remember any of that. NORML advocated legalization of marijauna? You're kidding me! NOW was pushing for an Equal Rights Amendment for women? News to me.

If politics were truth, and if I were being interviewed by one Ted Kennedy, the conversation would be much shorter and to the point. I wouldn't have to pretend that, although I had been generally considered fairly brilliant my entire life, I couldn't remember the general tenor of the propaganda of any group I belonged to.

No, my response to Kennedy to all this questioning of school days stuff would be:

I would think that we all have matured in our individual perceptions of
responsibility to our fellow man and woman since those days, wouldn't you agree,
Senator Kennedy?

As much as I respect Ted Kennedy for being one of the hardest working and productive contributors to government for the last 35 years, and despite my believing fervently that he is far more the champion of my well being that Alito, I don't think I could have blamed Alito for going that way.

It would have been perfectly fair. And honest. That's why you didn't hear it.

Betwixt and Between

2006-01-11T08:14:00.000-06:00

Today was time to to take my mom to the doc. My father―and this would be another of excellently timed events in my life―graduated from lower middle to upper middle class at precisely the moment I left the nest. Thus my mom, like Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes, is older and has better insurance. Medicare backed up by Blue Cross.

So taking her to the doctor means firing up one of the Buicks and heading straight on through all the northern Chicago suburbs and past Rush Presbyterian and Northwestern University Medical Center and right on down South Lake Shore Drive to the Midway Plaisance and the University of Chicago hospitals. No messing around here. These are US News and World Report 2005 rankings for American cancer centers.

Memorial Sloan - Kettering Cancer Center, New York
University of Texas, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston
Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
Dana - Farber Cancer Institute, Boston
Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.
Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C.
University of Chicago Hospitals

I don't mind one bit taking the time to do this, and we took a little extra time coming back. The University is in an stately old neighborhood called Hyde Park. The Museum of Science and Industry anchors the lakeside end of this former midway of The Columbian Exposition (it was the fine arts hall), and then we headed out onto South Lake Shore Drive northbound. Coming north toward the Chicago skyline is always a treat, and I passed the cutoff to the expressways and continued north past the monstrous McCormack Place and its annexes toward the bizarrely remodeled Soldier Field, which looks rather like a giant colander plunked down into the middle of the Parthenon.

Along about here we turned onto Columbus Ave., which bisects Grant Park. Along this drive we passed one of Chicago's oldest landmarks, Buckingham Fountain and one of its newest, Millennium Park's Crown Fountain. Soon this drive pops out over the river, east of Michigan Avenue. It won't be too long until there is a major addition to this view, the new (oh, my god) Trump Tower, Chicago style. I thoroughly approve of this building, especially from the pictured view. All over Asia they are building science fiction or pagoda looking big buildings, but this is pure Chicago classic steel and glass curtain. It's unfortunate that it has to be named after a New Yorker, but I give the Don (well, Skidmore, Owens & Merrill) credit on this one.

We turned left onto Ontario and crossed Michigan Ave. on our way out to the expressways, just a quick ten minute tour this time. Tomorrow I get to take the little Hun up to Madison to follow up with her eye surgeon. Another great place for all of it's own reasons.

And I'll continue to wonder how it is that I live halfway in between these great places, rather than in one of them.

A Sure Sign of Cabin Fever

2006-01-08T11:21:00.000-06:00

The squirrels around here get a bit restless in winter. Per exemple:

-----Original Message-----
From: your_little_ Hun
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 8:45 AM
To: big_ass_ sequoit_ admin
Subject: RE: Pictures

To My Network Administrator:

I can't open the XMAS 2005 pics.
Access is denied.

-----Original Message-----
From: big_ass_sequoit_admin
Sent: Friday,January 06, 2006 9:45 PM
To: your_little_ Hun
Subject: RE:Pictures
I will decide who is worthy to view the XMAS 2005 pics.
Incidentally, using "xmas" is traitorous in view of the War on the War against Christmas. luser.

-----Original Message-----
From: your_little_ Hun
Sent: Saturday, January 07, 2006 10:30 AM
To: big_ass_ sequoit_ admin
subject: RE: Pictures

It was you that named the folder "XMAS 2005, luser.
And I'm not worthy??????

-----Original Message-----
From: big_ass_ sequoit_admin
Sent: Saturday, January 07, 2006 2:15 PM
To: your_little_ Hun
Subject: RE: Pictures
Hmmmmm. Was likely autonomic adherence to secular based enterprise naming policy.
Appropriate permissions applied. Have a smurfy day.

Perhaps it would be better if we could just go into cryogenic capsules for the duration. Unsurprisingly, this syndrome of winter ennui has its own acronym, SAD, which stands for
seasonal affective disorder. Symptoms?

regularly occurring symptoms of depression (excessive eating and sleeping,
weight gain) during the fall or winter months.
full remission from depression occur in the spring and summer months.
symptoms have occurred in the past two years, with no nonseasonal
depression episodes.
seasonal episodes substantially outnumber nonseasonal depression episodes.
a craving for sugary and/or starchy foods.
odd fits of attempts at levity, such as emailing each other snarky stuff
from the some console. (I added that one)

The thinking is that our bodies are confused as to why we are going to and coming home from work in the dark―we never listen, do we? It is thought that this condition might be exacerbated by long periods of darkness. AHA!

Yesterday was (in Milwaukee, anyway) our 15th consecutive officially overcast day. Virtually no sun in about a half a month. This is a new record, breaking one from 1991, I think (Grandma's got the paper now, and it already took two trips to remember seasonal affected disorder, I'm not going back again).

Eerily, this timing coincides with the previous losing season for the Packers, the year they traded for a backup quarterback Brett Favre. This will give you an idea of just how thorough the local media is at inserting something about the Packers into every single story ever written.

The article mentioned that today and tomorrow are going to be the same sad story.

There's nary a cloud in the sky.

Rebel Music

2006-01-04T22:22:00.000-06:00

This post begins a new phase of this effort, as I've gone and made a likely shaky resolution to be more about...well...me. Not like, "I cleaned the trunk of the car today and then I made stir-fry" about me, but an attempt to be a bit more observational of things more proximate than the President and stuff.

For instance, unless I've made a formatting foray by the time you read this, or if you are reading this at sequoit.blogspot.com, above you can see Wednesday, January 04, 2006 (assuming I finish by midnight). It occurred to me some time ago that if you're reading the Front Page version I compose these little ditties on you're probably at least months from now. Oh sure, for me it's the day before garbage day (though despite my knowing this, I will unfailingly be reminded of it by both my "roommates"), but what's that to you?

As I said, if you've stumbled upon this page in 2009 or so, it's not going to matter if today was my day to call unemployment or not. I've realized this for some time, and it's a kind of thing that bugs me. I've been meaning to take the day out of the dateline. For a while now. I've probably entered...oh...twenty or thirty or fifty or so days since I decided to remove them.

Well now, I lied on top there because I am going to report here that I did cook a stir-fry, but somehow I never got to the trunk thing. Nor have I cleaned my golf clubs and bag that in November I left in the way so I would be sure to do so. I took them out of the trunk in November because I had to haul two bags of stuff the little Hun yanked off some plants in October. I had to dump the two bags in a dumpster behind a travel agency (how much room could they need?) in January when I went to go to the Home Depot to get six bags of salt for the water softener (which didn't look too good down there). Always something, ain't it?

It's quite possible that I'm a procrastinator, but let's not rush to any conclusions!

Surprisingly enough, I have some bills that really have to get out, so I better get right to it. But first, let me tell you all about New Year's Eve. We spent it with some very old friends and, despite our being so very old, managed quite the time. We had dinner at Chautara restaurant in Madison, which serves food from the Himalayan region. Our compadres were friends with the owner Rajan, and we quickly became so as well. Rajan was born in Nepal, but grew up on State Street, as his father was a professor of linguistics at UW. The food was fantastic, mine a loin of lamb. At ten or so we walked up to the Capitol to watch fireworks, and then back to the restaurant for a little after hours celebrating with our new friends at Chautara, which kinda means "resting place".

Then off to a club I don't remember the name of for Supa Ranks & His Rock Stone High Power (mysteriously, that I remember). Dat be da reggae, mon. Me jamma til tree, mebbe four.

21 day to de Island. Irie.

It's a Wonderful World of Open Source Out There...Luser

2006-01-03T10:09:00.000-06:00

While checking in this AM at Daily Kos I saw this WARNING- Major new Windows virus post. This may or may not be a latest hoax, I've been Googling around to see other news of this (which is probably a good way to get malware) but haven't found much yet.

Inevitable with any story like this comes the geek rain pouring down cats and dogs, why would anyone use 'win-duhs', anyway? Don't they get sick of chasing down every emergency security patch for every hole these sadists in Redmond leave in there just to drive us all crazy! Blah, blah, blah. (or , excuse me, in Millennialese thats yadda, yadda, yadda)

Now, I browse a lot. I used to get spyware, etc., and had to learn how to get rid of it. But since I began using XP pro and browse in power user profile, I've had zero problems. Perhaps the network with Charter cable helps with this, as I'm sure that the way they're trying to maximize their bandwith running three meg internet on the same cable with Digital TV with high definition channels and whatnot must entail some effort at keeping the malware stuff at bay.

I've thought about checking out Linux. I could partition my hard drive and run a dual-boot machine so I could use MS Office for work stuff and Flight Sim, and boot back to Linux for heavy memory stuff and running a Firefox browser. If I needed another hobby, which I don't. Still, my "carelessless" doesn't seem as bad as all this, taken from the above post's comments and fairly typical:

When you all are tired of trying to enumerate every possible variation of evil that can ruin your Microsoft (Broken) Windows(tm) computer maybe you will switch to Linux if you don't want to buy new hardware. Not only won't these kind of things happen, but your computer will actually work better because it won't be wasting resources running band-aid software (anti-virus, spy-ware detectors,...).

This was entitled, "Yawn". (apparently not so bored he couldn't help keying it in)

When I see stuff like this, I think "Volkswagen people" (after selling you this crap for so long, they own BMW's now). You know, the our weird engineering is so non-mainstream and way better myth, ironically brought to you by the manufacturers of the "people's car". The car that in the sixties needed a new exhaust system and brakes every second trip to Kmart for arctic gloves to keep your hands from freezing while you continually scraped the frost from the inside of the windshield. We leased a Jetta once. After two months I realized that the chronic charley horse in my right leg was due to the way the accelerator pedal makes you hold the top of your foot back. At six months one of the passenger access handles pulled off. Other interior elements came loose. Going near a parking lot was enough to chip the paint. My Focus, at $4,000 less and 50,000 miles farther, is far superior, though I have little love for the Ford Motor Company's disregard for customer service.

Somewhere, though, I tried to keep a semblance of an open mind as I went to Google and keyed "Linux problems". The first hit that seemed to want to make a comparative stab was called Cool Tech Zone. I got an article taking the devil's advocate's side and arguing the shortfalls of Linux, an attempt at fairness following up some previous article extolling its virtues.

They address the concern that any foray into tech world beyond the Add New Programs wizard will bring you into the land of the it's plenty clear to me, you luser, and I've only been into electronics for fifteen years or so crowd:

6. Unfriendly Gurus: If there is one thing that people hate, it's being condescended to. Unfortunately, this was a common occurrence on many Linux message boards and help resources. People saying things like "READ THE MANUAL, YOU MORON" usually doesn't send the positive message to the learner. While the idea is correct, the form of expression is not well thought out. If, on the other hand, someone had politely pointed out that the solution could be found in such and such a place, the new users might actually have looked. A response like this will only lead the user right back to Windows.

Well, that seems downright friendly, don't it? (Of course the "idea" example isn't entirely correct, as many times the MANUEL has been loosely translated from Mandarin or Hindustani.) We don't have to go far for an example of condescension, though. In fact, only back to the second paragraph of the same article:

Why do this article? Well, in the interest of being fair. Yes, it is easy to dismiss Windows users as whiners, and people who can't be bothered to learn about their machines, but life is not that simple, is it?

Well, there's a fucking welcome wagon to the world of Linux, eh? And this is them trying to be gracious.

And then there's Mac, the Betamax of home computing. Pre XP―with it's adoption of N/T's hardware abstraction―Macs had a huge reliability advantage. Your Mac doesn't crash, and my PC doesn't either (any more). PC performance levels are catching Mac, too. In fact, dual processor Dells out of the box are blowing away dual Macs as we speak, though that's $3,000 and up stuff. Interface? I'll take the Windows start menu in classic mode any day, especially with some mastery of keyboard shortcuts.

I might have gone that way in 1998. Surely there is a big advantage to Macs in that they are far less targeted by malicious folk than the ubiquitous Windows. Applephiles say this isn't the sole explanation for the security edge, but I don't trust that anything that's written can't be written around. More Macs, more Mac messers, and that goes for Linux "flavors", too.

I'm going to check out Firefox today, though, as there's a lot about Outlook that mystifies me, starting with having to select email addressees by their first names. So much of Office is incredibly arcane. You select a box in Contacts called Display as and you set "Smith, Ann and Bob". Then you go to New→Message→To: and you get a list starting with "Ann and Bob Smith". WTF? What if you don't remember Bob's wife's name? Why don't you just give me the regular contacts folder so I can decide which email for "Bob Smith" I want to use, instead of listing two "Ann and Bob Smith"s in the To: list with no indication which email address is which? If one contact has to be "bob at work" for the To: list to make sense, then what's the point of giving email1, email2 and email 3 options in the Contact form? There are a gazillion things like this in Windows that make you go, "huh?" And then there's that little Alzheimer's moment when your Office Professional 2003 program is missing a button that you could swear was there yesterday, but that's because yesterday your were at home on your Office XP Professional version. Why, why, why?

Still, Microsoft suffers a lot of slings and arrows largely because they try to follow the correct philosophy that for most of us these things are supposed to be appliances...a turn key operation. It's a foreign concept to all these cranky old mechanics of techie world that if we wanted to know more about our machines we would be, like, mechanics. We just want it to work, and if it doesn't, that's your fault.

Luser.

I'm Shocked, Shocked that Illegal Activity is Going On at the NSA

2005-12-26T21:23:00.000-06:00

This, my friends, is what is has been euphamistically referred to recently as a wiretap. This is Menwith Hill, the busiest listening station in the world, located in Yorkshire, England. It's run by the NSA and the Army, and part of a worldwide listening project called ECHELON. The Yorkshire location is convenient to the UK terminus of transatlantic cables, and so what you see is only half the story. Virtually all of the UK's international and domestic wired communication passes through this base, where hundreds of mainframe computers utilize sophisticated software to "mine" intelligence, to automatically shift from monitor to targeter, and to transcribe voice to data and print.

There is much more to ECHELON, including similar sites in Sugar Grove, WV, and Yakima, Washington. these sites not only download information from spy satellites, but also are located very close to facilities that receive signals from major commercial communications satellites, the better to hear you with, my dears.

The goal is to monitor each and every domestic and overseas communication, and they're doing there damnest to get there.

Though there are others involved in ECHELON, it's primarily a US/UK deal, which is probably why the EU had enough concern to commission a study on ECHELON called REPORT on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI)). following is as excerpt:

Possible threats to privacy and to businesses posed by a system of the ECHELON type arise not only from the fact that is a particularly powerful monitoring system, but also that it operates in a largely legislation-free area. Systems for the interception of international communications are not usually targeted at residents of the home country. The person whose messages were intercepted would have no domestic legal protection, not being resident in the country concerned. Such a person would be completely at the mercy of the system. Parliamentary supervision would also be inadequate in this area, since the voters, who assume that interception only affects people abroad, would not be particularly interested in it, and elected representatives chiefly follow the interests of their voters. That being so, it is hardly surprising that the hearings held in the US Congress concerning the activities of the NSA were confined to the question of whether US citizens were affected by it, with no real concern expressed regarding the existence of such a system in itself. It thus seems all the more important to investigate this issue at European level.

The EU was understandably miffed when Airbus lost a big deal with the Saudis because it was the NSA who produced memos exposing how the Euros had used bribery to obtain the contract, and they came up with recommendations for EU businesses and citizens to use cryptography in their communications. Though public key encription (look it up) has raised the bar on governments' ability to decipher communications, no one can be certain that the hardware doesn't exist to do so.

On the private front though, let's focus on "...not usually targeted at residents of the home country." The way this works is that the US and UK have data on their own citizens collected on the other nation's soil, and then it's a simple matter to ship the data back and forth, essentially avoiding privacy law.

What does the NSA have to say about this. In "frequently asked questions" on their web site they respond:

We have been prohibited by executive order since 1978 from having any person or government agency, whether foreign or U.S., conduct any activity on our behalf that we are prohibited from conducting ourselves. Therefore, NSA/CSS does not ask its allies to conduct such activities on its behalf nor does NSA/CSS do so on behalf of its allies.

So, the NSA doesn't spy on US citizens, or British citizens, or Canadian citizens. The British don't spy on their own citizens. The Canadians don't spy on it's own citizens. Yet a highly automated ECHELON network has facilities in the US and Canada and Britain capable of intercepting billions of communications. The US installation in Yorkshire is connected to the trunk lines of the domestic BTA phone networks with fiber optic lines capable of transmitting 100,000 messages simultaneously and the largest American installations are positioned to intercept the earthbound beams of all telecom satellites handling American and Canadian phone calls. Are we to believe that all non-warranted domestic hits in this lot are simply ignored? Nobody is sharing anything within America, Canada, and Britain without a warrant?

The convenience of our modern communications has left us increasingly transparent, there is little privacy in it. We would be wise to examine this phenomenon as there may be little time left to affect a better compromise between security and privacy. Encryption, itself of unknown quality, will be useless in a legal environment that curtails it. Suspicious minds might suggest that the absence of legal aggression against public key encryption may hint of an existing ability to break it. Perhaps, if more people used public key encryption, the NSA would push for laws in the attempt to bluff us into thinking they can't crack it efficiently. All this spy versus spy stuff makes me dizzy.

This ECHELON stuff is old news already, yet we continue with this misled debate over orders issued by our President authorizing the NSA to do what it has obviously been doing all along.

There are two issues here, one partisan and one not. Bush did not invent Big Brother. He's been here a long time, and is maturing rapidly. We are being monitored, with increasing efficiency but with no more enthusiasm than under Clinton. The hits are there. What Bushco wants is to make hits legal without having to chase down a warrant.

And mind you, this also "legitimizes" non-security hits, mandating the NSA to turn them over to other enforcement agencies.

Lord knows, Bush is the last guy we want behind this wheel. But that's a different topic than whether the damn thing is just too big for the highway in the first place.

It's Our Christmas, Goddamn It!

2005-12-22T06:30:00.000-06:00

Well, the 80% has prevailed, it appears that the war to save Christmas has been won. It was nip and tuck there for a while, but the red and green army, in their mighty SUV's (I like that apostrophe, Arianna Huffington), armed with extension cords, lights, generators, air pumps, giant balloons and massive numbers of credit cards, have run the gauntlet of...well, I'm not sure what...and saved the day.

Let the negotiations begin then, as nuclear families begin blocking out schedules with six or seven or a dozen other nuclear families and come up with a plan where somebody might congregate with somebody. It's gotten a little complicated, hasn't it?

But we made our contracts early this year and the kids are on the way. Consultation on exact times and durations is still in process, but I am confident enough to have gone to the "good" store for the ingredients for my traditional tenderloin stuffed with goat cheese, spinach and roasted red peppers. (all red and green, O'Reilly, all red and green, and American beef!)

Egg nog's in the fridge, presents under the tree. Put new strings on the guitars for the occasion. Plenty of snow on the ground, with a 40% chance for Christmas eve and morning. Ready to rock Christmas, dude

Even picked up a cheap recorder yesterday, and I've been annoying everyone around the house learning Christmas songs on it. Turns out though that in spite of all the gentle-hearted threats in the media from better Christians than I, and despite the new plastic lawn signs on my street exhorting me to put Christ back in Christmas, and irregardless of all this upwelling of generousity and good will toward men, there may be little Hope for me.

Cuz try as I might to knuckle down to Silent Night and O, Little Town of Bethlehem, my fingers keep going for Frosty the Snowman, The Nutcracker Suite and Here Comes Santa Claus. I just have to keep reminding myself:

It's not about fun.

Flameout

2005-12-20T19:21:00.000-06:00

After finishing the above post I turned on CNN in time to see NY mayor Bloomberg blame the transit union for everything from destroying the local economy to endangering the lives of policeman with their illegal strike. Why is a strike illegal? What is the point of having a union if the government says you can't strike? "You can have collective bargaining, you just can't back it up with collective action."

This is Reagan all over again and this is where it all got started. This is where the road to stagnation in wages began, with the vilification of unions enhanced by governmental/business collusion. If a central progressive tenet is that the distribution of wealth is badly skewed, it would seem that progressives should be up in arms over this well publicized event.

So I checked in at the Daily Kos, to see what folks were up to. The innkeeper at this site states "The progressive movement of the future will be built, in large part, on this digital foundation." Between the front pagers (semi-pro contributors), the previous 25 diaries (member's entries), recommended diaries (entries promoted by readers), and open threads (chat string), there was no mention of any of this.

I got angry. What kind of progressives ignore hot labor issues? Then I fired off a "diary" calling them all hypocrites, that this was all just a game to them and they were not champions of the common man, certainly not in any economics sense, and that I was moving on.

That elicited various kinds of responses:

I was called an obnoxious New Yorker who thought the world revolves around him, a sentiment Kos himself echoed, though we both grew up in suburban Chicago and went to NIU. Though he claims to hold Caesar Chavez as a personal hero, apparently I was wasting my time boycotting grapes in De Kalb because migrant worker's conditions were a California issue.

I was accused of failing to do my research in discovering that "10 or so" diaries had been done on this subject previously. It is true I didn't look under the rocks, but I think my point was that the issue should have been way too hot to have to.

Some visited le sequoit and promptly pointed out that I had not posted on the strike on my own blog, and so I was being a hypocrite. Well, there's only one of me and a few thousand of them, I figured they might have a head start, especially in that so many were closer to the action.

Many said that I should have posted a report on the site rather than complain about the lack of them. In order for a post to survive, however, it must be recommended (promoted) by many. There is a whole system of cliques on the site, and I hadn't taken the time to worm my way into any of them. The terrain is rocky, think junior high.

Then there were the technicians, the experts who immediately classified the post as a GBCW (goodbye cruel world) post, and a less than average one, at that. Goodbye cruel world, that's pretty funny. I was being accused of self-aggrandizement, but my sign-off to this bunch was akin to suicide, right!

And there were the name-callers; hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

The truth is that these people are a lot more interested in being Democrats than being progressives. A little dustup in NYC about working people's rights is the least of their concerns. Impeachment is on their brains. Revenge. Not progress.

It's Still the Same Old Story

2005-12-20T11:16:00.000-06:00

I came across this photo on WisOpinion.com, and I had to copy it, even though the next is not central to the point of this post.

Was it necessary to know one single item of policy, one bit of biography, or one iota of political background concerning this man to decide not to vote for him? Take a good long look at that face and try to remember where you've seen it before.

I know a lot of high school deans have seen it, because it's the face of persistent adolescence, the face of insecure defiance of the reality that one is clearly in over one's head, or that one has been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. If it weren't on the face of the President it might be cute in a boys-will-be-boys kind of way. When one gets good at it, it can carry one a long way in life. But President?

It seems such a simple thing to look at that face and say to oneself, "Here's trouble." And simplicity will have to serve as the best segue way I've got, cuz the subject today is simplicity of message.

Today's raging debate is over the "revelation" in the New York Times that the NSA has been monitoring phone calls of US citizens without warrants. Lefties are screaming that the President has broken the law, while righties are calling them a bunch of Chicken Littles. It's not an event that's going to tip the scales either way, however. The lines of battle are familiar. The arguments are well-worn.

Though the American brand of social conservatism is certainly a very complex philosophy, the not so secret secret of its recent success has been the simplicity of message the right has been able to get across to Americans. "Ya gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet," goes the routine, and it hits home. Disregarding the true motivations of the neo-cons, this is the home-spun public rationale behind everything from pre-emptive war to the Patriot Act to this latest dust-up over the NSA.

"Liberty and Justice for just about all" is the creed, and it's the very pragmatism of this approach that appeals. Applying fundamental freedoms to each and every citizen of this country is just too exasperating to deal with. The correctness of it is politically based, and an obstacle in the desire to "git er done".

This is, of course, woefully short sided. Many of these folks who think a little internal spying is okay because, after all, they have nothing to hide, would certainly change their tunes in a hurry if they realized that their tax returns were one of the first places any self-respecting investigator would look. But the administration is counting on its supporters not to take that next logical step. When some of those eggs that need to be cracked are the "collateral" damage of war the hawks are counting on a lack of connection that our true enemy, hatred, grows in the hearts of those whose homes and families are shredded by poison shells.

And when Republicans cut health, education and welfare to pay for military-industrial adventurism, they rely heavily on the masses's non-realization that this priority is based on a future where they don't intend to need us.

It is on that last point that progressives may find their own simple message to counteract the conservative line. We need to get across to Americans that the reason conservative leaders spend so much on foreign wars is because their business is not with us.

We need the message to be, "America, we want to invest in you!"

Keep it simple.

Me Frist, or Charity Begins at Home

2005-12-18T14:57:00.000-06:00

In the fox guarding the hen house category, Bill Frist is a member of the US Senate Committee on Finance. In fact, as recently as last June this committee sat to review the state of charity and the law. Here's one highlight:

WRITTEN STATEMENT OF MARK W. EVERSON COMMMISSIONER OF INTERNAL REVENUE BEFORE
THE COMMITTEE ON FINANCE UNITED STATES SENATE HEARING ON CHARITABLE GIVING
PROBLEMS AND BEST PRACTICES JUNE 22, 2004
...We will be contacting hundreds of organizations. During the first stage, we will be looking at public charities of various sizes and private foundations. We will be asking these organizations for detailed information and supporting documents on their compensation practices and procedures, and specifically how they set and report compensation for specific executives. Organizations also will be asked for details concerning the independence of the governing body that approved the compensation and details of the duties and responsibilities of these managers with respect to the
organization. Other stages will follow, and will include looking at various kinds of insider transactions, such as loans or sales to executives and officers...

Do you suppose consultants' fees to two companies involved in raising funds for one's campaigns might fall under the category of "various kinds of insider transactions"? Do you suppose a payout of 10.36% of revenues in such fees might be a little excessive?

According to the AP article the net layout to charities stated on Frist's World of Hope (sigh) outfit's woefully late tax returns is about three million dollars, from a gross of about 4.5 million. The half a million's worth of consultation is only part of the 33% expense ratio of this exercise in Christian charity.

Hey, it takes a lot of man hours to program 18 numbers (the number of principal donors to this charity) on your cell phone! Or perhaps woman hours, as one of these firms is run by Linda Bond, wife of another Repuglican senator.

How extraordinary are these numbers in the charity biz? For this we go to Charity Navigator, who tracks such things:

Fundraising Organizations:
These charities serve as fundraising vehicles for other community-based charities, and appropriately demonstrate smaller overhead spending. The median administration expenses percentage among fundraising organizations is 6.3%, as
compared to 10.4% among all charities.

Frist's buddies' arm-twisting fees alone sucked up more than that! Someone, somewhere along the line apparently thought this was an aides charity, instead of AIDS.

Mark Everson of the IRS might have considered bringing a couple of agents with him up Capitol Hill last summer, because they could have gotten started with investigating corruption right there in the Senate Finance Committee room.

It's like fishin' in a stocked pond these days.

A (catered) Trek to the Frozen Tundra

2005-12-13T14:29:00.000-06:00

The Little Hun has seen her beloved Packers numerous times at County Stadium in Milwaukee. Back in the day before Roselle the Pack used to split their home schedule to foment interest in the Milwaukee area because Green Bay, whose population in 1960 was about 125,000, needed a little help supporting their oddly placed NFL franchise.

Those days are long gone, as the waiting list for tickets is so long that the succession of the right to the potential throne has to be outlined in people's wills.

It was with great joy then that my little cheesehead learned she had won tickets to Sunday night's game from Sentry Foods. Really good tickets. Sentry has a sky box on the fifteen yard line. Inside. This was important, because the temperature was about 15° F. at game time and dropping.

You want to know, at least for a couple of hours, what it feels like to be among the chosen? Stroll the Club level concourse in your slacks, sweater and loafers alongside a few thousand thawing, runny nosed imbibers in snowmobile suits. I had to joke to the usher whether we should be letting in all these cold people, as they were creating a draft.

But truly, these may be the best fans in the country. I'm a Bear fan, and I've been to some pretty inclement games. Bears fans are as rabid as any, except these. Were the Bears 2-10, and a game played on a frigid Sunday night in December, and the game site so remote for so many of them, and the game available to them on cable hi-def ESPN, and the opponent the lowly Lions, I would estimate a minimum of 15,000 no shows. In many cities the number would be twice that.

I saw no empty seats, except for my own while I made my numerous fifteen foot treks to the buffet. I tried the brats, of course, as well as the quesadillas, chili, ham, potato salad, salad, cashews and assorted nuts, chips and salsa, guacamole, and washing it down with Leinenkugel Honey Weiss. Not being Chicago there was no pizza, and no whiskey.

But of course, there was cheese. Ironically, this native Flatlander was the only really interested party in that, a delicious assortment of cheddar, brie, brick, Roquefort, and others. Three cups of coffee was a nice touch for the ride home, all in all very hospitable.

There was a game. The effort by the two teams and coaching staffs seemed more lacking amidst all this pageantry than on TV. Considering all the resources put into this extravaganza, the actual product seemed a little careless. People being paid millions to catch balls dropping them. College "educated" linemen failing to snap count to three. Coaches makng incredibly bone-headed decisions. Referees taking eons to review the rules with each other.

Everybody had a great time, though, and that's because little of it has any longer to do with the game. Sure, winning is very important, but not so much the actual doing of it. "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," Vince Lombardi is said to have coined, but to many, many of these fans everything is about the green and gold, the tailgating, the camaraderie, and the new digs, including―more James Bond than James Lofton―the Vodka Martini bar.

If winning were everything or the only thing, many of the fans of this 2-10 team wouldn't be have been at this particular game. Lombardi saw himself as a warrior, but times have changed. It not a war any more, it's a party.

Big party. The Packers won in overtime, and a good time was had by all. Though not as exciting as being in the bowl, I have to say that I liked the luxury box. It's similar to being at a movie, you can see the game extremely well and you don't have to keep standing up all the time. You get replays on the TV's and you can listen to the radio broadcast. If you're really into the football itself, it's hard to beat.

If the football were a little better, that would help.

There Oughtta be...an Amendment?

2005-12-09T10:59:00.000-06:00

Wisconsin is marginally a progressive state, but it may surprise outsiders to know that the legislature is Republican, they being obviously better at the gerrymandering game. My little neck of the "woods" is Walworth County. This combination of rich farms, lake houses and exurban commuters is very red indeed.

Our Governor Doyle is a Democrat, but my state senator, Neal Kedzie, is among the rightest of the rightists in Mad City. And it was while on my way to Mad City yesterday―that blue area where they keep the real surgeons―when I heard our local hero at the guest mike on WPR. Kedzie is so appalled at the violation of trust inherent in the Governor's appropriation of fuel tax dollars to fund education that he has introduced an amendment to the constitution prohibiting such shenanigans.

The impermanence of a law won't do, and as the storm clouds gather for the GOP I concede that point. The argument for this latest foray is that citizens have a contract with the state, that as we fork out that tax on gasoline it will be spent on better, safer roads. Right. There we are standing at the pump thinking about funding quarantines. There we are thinking about gasoline tax at all. Who besides politicians and special interest groups have a clue where the money goes and what it's specifically spent on?

This is not to say that we don't know how how the money is spent―that we don't notice the quality of services provided. We just don't care nearly as much about the nuts and bolts of State finance as Senator Kedzie would purport to believe of us. No, the purpose of this amendment is a Republican stab at a remedy for a wrong they feel has been perpetrated on them by Governor Doyle. Doyle raided the road funds to make a point. He will not stand for conservatives short-sightedly going after our great state universities while they send their own kids to Notre Dame, Marquette and Princeton.

Why is Kedzie leading the counter attack? Well, he's a big, big believer in roads, and this amendment would serve the road building industry to no end, which is precisely the course they believe road building should follow. He bragged yesterday about the wonderful new bypass around the mighty metropolis of Whitewater, right here in Kedzieland. I took it on the way home yesterday, very nice. And it ought to be, as it takes the grand prize for the biggest percentage cost overrun in the state over the last 15 years, a cool 359%. And for that they couldn't even afford a stop light at the eastern end of it. Kedzie glowed at the enhanced safety such projects bring us. Within four weeks there were two fatalities, one at the aforementioned intersection. I knew it was dangerous, and I would have been happy to take the original, non-inflated consultant fee.

I yield to our senator's judgment, as from the chart below one can clearly see that he knows a lot about roadbuilding:

This chart is what guidance counselors should be showing high school seniors when it comes time to consider their future, but that's another point.

Dare we get more specific...why not?

Who are the top contributors to Senator Kedzie?
1/1/96 - 12/31/02

Mann, oh Mann, here we go again. Of course, now that the Manns are personae non gratae, these donations have ceased. This will allow Robert Mann, who will apparently have his day in court with our Republican DA some time after we are all to old to remember any of this, to keep more of the billings coming in from the newly completed, you guessed it, Whitewater bypass.

Now, I'm not suggesting quid pro quo here.(poltalk for you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours) That would be libelous or something. Jobs are good, especially union jobs. I'm sure Kedzie will point to them, and it's very comforting to know that union operators are making $40.00 an hour or whatever on the other side of town. Teaching jobs are good, too, yet Republican education "reformers" persistently hold education unions as the enemy of the people. That would be them at the bottom of the above chart.

I'm just saying, Senator Kedzie, that some of us in your well-paved fiefdom know darn well which side your bread is buttered on, so don't came on my radio and tell me what I'm thinking at the gas pump. I don't care which fund does whatever. I want good roads and I want people in this state smart enough to know that required stop lights are not the place to keep overruns down from 375% to 350%.

That is, if you think you can diversify your interests.

What's Funnier than Shit?

2005-12-04T22:56:00.000-06:00

I like funny. Life is too short to take very seriously―or too long, I can't seem to put a finger on it. Now and then in the course of this exercise I get the notion that the tone is too serious. It's tough, what with all the torture and killing and destruction of the planet and such, but every now and then I need to get myself back some of that good old joy of being alive.

Of course, I could use some some help with this. I wasn't expecting much this morning as, mindful of the wind, I ventured in my slippers and robe onto the snowy drive on the first wintry morn of the season for the latest Sunday version of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. (having spent most of my life in other burgs, I'm not sure why they haven't decided what the name of their newspaper really is)

Having stripped the reverse double wrap our greatest paper route person in the world applied before she pulled far enough up our short 30' drive to deposit this treasured media within 4' of my garage door I knew that indeed this day had funny potential, for there on the upper right corner was a leader for an article by Dave Barry, whose retirement earlier this year was a rude shock from which my Sunday mornings haven't fully recovered.

Apparently in confusion after the long Thanksgiving weekend Mr. Barry accidentally sat down to work, ending up chiming in with a special list of gifts for the Holiday Season.

People often ask me what I'd like to be when I grow up. Or maybe they just ask me to grow up, I really don't listen all that well. Regardless, I respond that my second most favorite job would be professional golfer. Take a nice aerobic walk through the park, then eat and sleep in the most fabulous resorts in the world, not too shabby. But numero uno, my favorite thing to be, would be the next Dave Barry. Get up, scratch your balls, then sit down at the keyboard and crank out 1/5th of a column that you know is going to make men across America laugh out loud in the can.

Email the sucker out on Thursday in time to hit the senior special on the links. Tits.

Well, I did laugh out loud, twice. Once when he was making the point that we never, ever, when getting an urge while sitting in front of our favorite Sunday game, call Celery Hut for a big delivery bunch of celery (an inside joke around here).

The other was this about the new Titanic toy:

...Tragically, it does not come with a tiny non-floating replica of Leonardo DiCaprio.

If you've made it all the way through The Aviator, as I have just last night, you would understand.

I'm not a big fan of scatological humor, but any port in a storm, I say. Dave had some funny stuff about the dancing contents with eyeballs inside the musical toy toilet, though I thought the spray that freezes real dog poop to make it easier to clean up was a pretty good idea.

As it turns out, however, this was all just the dessert. Sure, Dave Barry is funny business, but is anything funnier really than the source? Dave is the confectioner who gathers (gathered) the sweet ingredients of humor and whips them up into pieces de resistance for us to greedily consume on the run. Long before I got to Lifestyle came the really funny stuff.

The tittering begin as I scanned this headline near the bottom of the second section:

Big farm, big feud: Giant dairy's manure angers neighbors

I started chuckling when I realized that in Milwaukee this was a lead story in Metro. "Hopefully this problem can be confined to a few of Milwaukee's more effluent suburbs," I thought immediately. You might think the reporter, Lee Berquist, would be less than thrilled at the assignment, but there is no sign of our guy slopping through it as he writes:

...It also has provoked confrontations, lawsuits, and a regulatory record that stands three feet high...

Is this a more subtle version of something like "paperwork so deep you need a shovel"? Is Berquist coyly suggesting a comparison of lawyers' byproducts (their principal products being billings) and cows'? Seriously (right), we're talking a lot of manure. The farm in question has 3,500 dairy cows on 5,000 acres. As I turned to the continuation of the story―running alongside the immensely informative Snow makes roads slick for drivers―I tried to keep a straight face at:

...Manure―with all its odor and potential to pollute―is frequently a source of tension in rural Wisconsin...

I always thought that crinkly look was just because they were too cheap to buy sunglasses! The owner of this cow pile, Tod Lieteritz, is getting a little steamed at the enviros and their lawyers. He states for the article:

"We're just like anyone else―we're trying to make a living"

Well, yeah, except for the stinking up 25 square miles part. Besides these problems, some of Lieteritz's neighbors are raising a stink of their own. There's been vandalism. His lawyer has contacted the FBI as, in the reporter's words:

...he says some of it smacks of "eco-terrorism"...(emphasis mine)

"Doesn't that leave a bad taste in your mouth?" I'm thinking, giggling all the way to pouring a second cup of coffee!

I'm sure that if they all pitch in they can dig their way out this mess. Lieteritz is pooh poohing his neighbor's stance that further expansion in this business is a slippery slope. There is some doubt of the outcome, and liquidation is a distinct possibility. There is a lot of pasturing going on right now, but for all parties, the most important matter is the end result.

I'm just about dung, now.

The War Against Christmas, regarding the hideous oppression of the Christian majority in America

2005-11-29T22:43:00.000-06:00

Fanning the flames of "holiday" jeer, conversation builds about John Gibson's book The War on Christmas. It's not a new theme, as all of your dime store variety hate-mongers get around to this. Anne Coulter likes to go around scaring the crap out of people with her demon-screech of "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" O'Reilly has carped on it. Rush too, and all the usual suspects. It's just Gibson's turn to cash in this year, pandering to the put-upon, downtrodden Christian masses who just might happen to have $20.00 or so of disposable income to toss after this trash.

Okay, let's zero in on one bone of contention, the National Christmas Tree, a tradition for 82 years.

By several accounts, America is about 77% to 82% Christian. The next largest group is secular or non-religious, though this doesn't include avowed atheists and agnostics. I couldn't guess how many of these non-religious believers might like or dislike a governmental Christmas display, so with enigmatic charity we'll lump them all in with the Christians and call it something like 90%. We don't need to be all that specific here, despite those who insist on serials smothered in sweet, sweet facts.

90% of 82 is―let me call up the calc―74 or so. Now, let's skip around the abyss full of conversations about jurisprudence from the days of the Magna Carta and focus on a couple of fundamentals. The United States is a democracy, majority rule for the most part. But the fathers realized that the majority could in fact be quite unfair, which was a major impetus for the establishment of the Bill of Rights―that basic rights need eternal protection from the democratic, majority driven process. Yes, my beleaguered baptized, this includes the Entitlement Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits federal (and generally by the 14th amendment the states') repression of religious expression.

It would seem that at this point John Gibson and the Godocrats, should they correctly regard the opportunity to celebrate one's religion as an American right, owe the rest of Americans eight holiday seasons to display with historically consistent prominence.

Considering the depths of despair over the expression "Seasons Greetings", imagine the horror when President Feingold lights an eighty foot high menorah on the White House lawn? Guess what, Johnny, you already owe them one. And what about atheists and agnostics? You're a little short on that account too. According to the Pew Research Council, so far you owe the 3% of us two years of no display at all!

Sometime in the next two hundred years you are obligated by your own principles to skip Christmas and in May set a big old Buddha down on the lawn, though I'm not sure how you would go about lighting it. Maybe the Wiccans could negotiate with the Buddhists and block out a few Mays jointly. Other partnerships might surface, but I'm guessing that the Hindu and Islamic interests will each wait for their alternate centuries.

And so, John Gibson and the similarly set upon, here you are stomping your little Italian shod feet at the unfairness of it all. You want to talk fair, then you think about whose turn it is next year. Unless you're ready to hear a month of chanting across the Oval from a minaret on the White House lawn maybe, just maybe, fair isn't a place you want to go.

Big Whopper, Small Fries

2005-11-23T19:28:00.000-06:00

Came across this bit from Michael Barone, he of the US News and World Report:

"At the same time, we must remember that the United States and our allies did not go to war solely because of weapons of mass destruction. There were other reasons, which Bush articulated at the time and which have been vindicated by events."

While this may be true for Neo-Con tank-thinkers, most American people accepted the call to war solely on the premise of WMD's. To suggest that we would have spent a half a trillion dollars to depose an internationally impotent dictator on the other side of the world or that we would have sacrificed thousands of American lives in an experimental program to plant the seeds of democratic process in Iraq is at least distracting, if not outright lying.

I again looked up President Bush's October 7th, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, a major presentation of the case for war coming just days before the Senate vote to authorize use of force on Iraq. Forty of forty-eight paragraphs of Bush's speech (I think, don't make me count again) reference the existence of weapons of mass destruction in some way. This was the sizzle, there can be no doubt. This was the double beef whopper, with a small order of fries. With gloriously consistent incompetence it apparently hasn't occurred to anyone to change the banner over the speech on the White House web site. Here it is.

It is unfortunate that Dems are barking up the wrong tree with their emphasis on who lied to whom, however. It's not a critical point whether we were lied to, and certainly we might have expected it. We should resist the temptation of investigating how these great leaders of the free world were duped by amateurish forgeries and focus on the surreality that their defense is that they were. We need to disregard the specter of dishonesty in the maintenance of the aluminum-tubes-as-centrifuge-component theory and concentrate on the absurdity that the administration's defense is their mishandling of known information, such as DOE's conclusion that these tubes were ill-suited for the purpose; that Iraq lacked the technology to reformulate them; State's opinion that these were likely for rockets; and that the PO for these "burning guns" was posted on the internet.

Eventually we will know whether dishonesty, incompetence, or a combination of both was at work here. Any or all are indefensible and, far worse, direct causation of national and international tragedy.

Dems who voted for the war are equally flawed, and some will get their knocks early on along the next presidential campaign trail from more courageous examples.. Russ Feingold has consistently fought such adventurism, joining conservatives in opposing the continuation of operations in Kosovo as well as leap-frogging liberals in the call for an exit strategy in Iraq.

There are many, many of us on the left who view with great skepticism johnny-come-lately Democrats like Kerry and Edwards and their elephant tears over being "duped" into taking a position popular with the misinformed majorities of their constituents.

We were the exceptions―the distinct minority for whom the WMD discussion was moot. We needed only words like these, from Washington's Senator Jim McDermott:

"There is no question that Saddam Hussein is not a nice person or that he's broken the resolutions of the United Nations, but that does not give us the power to pre-emptively strike a country. Once you start down that road, where do you stop?"

To the righteous this is self-evident. It is not mere coincidence that this truth is one of many lying along the road not taken.

Imagine

2005-11-22T06:56:00.000-06:00

My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now. John F.Kennedy

When leaders had courage.

If Looks Could Kill, It Would Have Been Us Instead of Him, Parte Deux

2005-11-18T20:23:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow is the day when manly men around here dismiss the primal urge to pull fish out of the water by their lips, put on their finest Elmer Fudd's, grab a case or two of Leinenkugels and some extra ammo (the gun is always ready), and head out for The Great Outdoors to stand in a tree and hope a deer comes close enough for them to blast it to kingdom come, whereupon they gather the sportsmanlike courage to grab the beast by the horns, take a snapshot and then try to figure out what the hell to do with the damn thing, cuz if they eat it they may suffer a horrible death from a brain-wasting disease..

Okay, I admit I come from a place where "nice rack" puts in mind an altogether different form of hunting (and a pretty funny Michael Keaton role), but I listened in for a while today to descriptions of a bittersweet season in these parts. You see, last year some guys came across a Vietnamese Hmong guy hunting on the wrong private property and decided to put a little scare into him. This they accomplished very well, as he proceeded to kill six of them.

Which gets to the point of, well, it's getting a little crowded out there for the 650.000 deer licensed hunters in Wisconsin. "Conservation" groups are voicing their disgust over the growing restrictive nature of private lands. To their horror, hunters have looked up to find that Wisconsin has become civilized to the point where landowners are a little leery to allow a half a milliion high-powered rifle armed people unlimited access to their lands. Someone could get sued.

Huge corporations with nothing else to do with their wealth are buying up lot of land and don't want the hassle. Private owners are seeing the advantage of leasing hunting rights. The deer get chased off the public lands but nobody's chasing them back.

Now, I don't want to excessively over-generalize (sure I don't), but I'm thinking that this particular interest group is fairly heavily populated by your "Don't Tread on Me" libertarian, "you'll have to pry my gun from my cold dead hands" NRA kind of guys. I'm guessing when the talk around the old fire finds its way to politics, the "guvament" takes a pretty big beating from this bunch.

Are you sensing a dilemma? Where can they turn to?

Just like the "law and order" conservative who goes after the school administration when his kid is suspended for a beer party;
Just like the "free market" championing supermarket owner who goes after village hall for stricter license laws for roadside produce vendors;
Just like the "strict constitutionalist" who wanted a "one-time" Terri Schaivo law;

...our guys went straight for the nanny, in this case the US Congress, for a 50 million dollar (for starters) handout for the states to use to grease landowners to let them come play.

It's not the money, that's a pittance to this regime.

It's the unmitigated gall.

It's in the Hole, or Life at Wyndfall CC

2005-11-17T07:37:00.000-06:00

There's been lots of talk recently about BIG OIL and price gouging. Sooner or later you know the Senate had to stick it's two cents in and round up a whole bunch of CEO's out of golf carts in Palm Springs to come and sort of testify as to whether they might have twisted the knife a bit.

Well, the whole experience was apparently unsatisfactory to our Governor Doyle, who has decided to subpoena the same guys to visit Milwaukee in a couple of weeks. Good luck with that. Today's 7 AM guest on WPR was Erin Roth, executive director, Wisconsin Petroleum Council, who had a few things to say on the subject.

And a fine defense of windfall profits it was, that given by Mr. Roth. Those big shot CEO's had nothing on our guy. No, he had every club in the bag, his game hot to go. Even at this early hour he stepped right up to the first tee with the big dog and tthhwackkk!!!, "supply and demand", right on down the middle.

Is it then?

	retail price	supplied gasoline by the gazillions
Aug 01, 2005	2.20	9,483
Aug 08, 2005	2.31	9,408
Aug 15, 2005	2.51	9,471
Aug 22, 2005	2.59	9,406
Aug 29, 2005	2.59	9,027
Sep 05, 2005	3.03	8,636
Sep 12, 2005	2.88	8,819
Sep 19, 2005	2.66	8,836
Sep 26, 2005	2.71	8,840
Oct 03, 2005	2.89	8,783
Oct 10, 2005	2.75	8,961
Oct 17, 2005	2.57	8,981
Oct 24, 2005	2.43	9,045
Oct 31, 2005	2.30	9,246
Nov 07, 2005	2.21	9,151

These are figures from the DOE. It's true that it's not hard to figure out where the hurricane stuff began. Clearly there is a supply (as in produced that week) drop; 8% by the second week and then easing to something more like 6%. Prices in the first week were up 36% (these are midwestern average prices). Oh, our boy will tell you all about this as he glides down the fairway.

But then you might have to point out to him that his ball has found the rough, as inspection of last year's supply runs for this same period―it is the end of summer, after all―reveals a drop in supply during the first two weeks of September of 5%.

In fact, nearly every year reveals a supply drop somewhere near this time frame as companies tighten inventories in anticipation of the autumn lull.

So the supply situation doesn't seem all that unusual, certainly not to the tune of 36% retail price increases. Demand? Inventories of gasoline increased during the last three months of September while prices continued to hover around $2.75. This is not about supply and demand, my friend, at least on a retail front.

No problem; our boy takes out his new hybrid escape club and, crack!!!, "free markets", high and long for the green. but he doesn't seem to mean the market where you actually buy your gas. So what gives?

Well, you know the whole idea of free markets is that eventually everything comes out in the wash. If I may mix metaphors―and who's going to stop me?―all this kind of works at the speed of a lava lamp in real life, which is simply not fast enough for financial types to achieve financial nirvana. The solution is markets within markets within markets. These futures markets tend to drive spot gasoline markets, and spot gasoline markets drive gasoline pricing. The DOE says this isn't a big part of the pricing picture, but short-term it can have a big effect, especially when driven by an emotional event. That's when we can get hung out to dry. (Okay, metaphorically speaking I've gone full circle: new paragraph)

Ostensibly, the big guys are just along for the ride on this one, to the tune of about 23 billion profit last quarter. The refiners reap the windfalls from prices driven by a bubble on a futures market; that's nothing they control, or so they say. With all this newspeak about fragile supply one naturally questions our golfer if some of these profits will go back into increasing production capability. He pulls out his Cleveland Wedge and fffluff!!, "EPA and NIMBY's messin' every thing up," while nestling the ball right up under the hole for a gimme.

Okay, fine, you got your windfall this time. But while senators and governors are grandstanding we're going to start looking into this futures market. We want to know who these traders are and just how intertwined they might be with BIG OIL. We want to know if BIG OIL has been conspiring to rig the futures market. We want to know just how "free" this little market setup is. We want to know if BIG OIL, the futures market, and the administration are going to turn out to be one and the same.

Mr. Roth gets all huffing and dismissive and says its not like BIG OIL can get up one morning and turn on a switch for higher prices, and that may or may not be fundamentally true.What we want to know is just how easy it is for them, given the opportunity of a Sept. 11 or Katrina, to pour gasoline on the fires of misfortune and hardship.

Wild in the Streets

2005-11-13T11:34:00.000-06:00

Could there be a more welcome event for writer's blocked, inferiority complexed panderers to culturally naive mainstream America than riots in France? Oh, man the words just fly onto laptop screens across the country as cheese fattened France bashers like Rush Limbaugh and Cal Thomas offer their "I told you so, na na na na"s.

Here's O'Reilly:

But now the tide has turned, hasn't it? France is under bitter siege by Muslims. And the weak Chirac government has been exposed in front of the world. For nearly two weeks, Chirac has allowed the insurrection to build in ferocity, refusing to use his military, allowing anarchy in the streets. This makes hurricane Katrina look like a comic book.

For the O'Reilly's of the world there is always one answer, escalation. Call in the Army, shoot the bastards. Ramp it up. Wouldn't it make more sense to let the fire burn out? Wouldn't it make more sense for the community to come to its senses, see for itself that violence is no solution, and learn that to police itself is the only way out of this mess? These riots are not about religion, despite the Great Crusaders' glee in taking the bait while characterizing all Moslem/Christian relations as Holy War. These riots are about, as are most aspects of this "Holy War", and all wars, money.

These rioters are the second and third generations of immigrants to urban France who find themselves left out of the loop economically in a France that is still far more capitalist than socialist. The ultimate destination for these youths is gang-style street life. These riots are far more rooted in economic frustration, like those in 60's Watts and Detroit and Chicago, than in Jihad.

Today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel contained three pieces, back to back to back. "Fire in the Streets", "A Warning for our Future", an "What the French Have Failed to Learn". There is so much crap in these, it's hard to know where to start.

From the first I read:

The United States needs to safeguard its tradition of effective economic and cultural integration.

Wow! This coming in a city that is one of America's most segregated. A recent New York State University study said the disparity between white and black family income in the Milwaukee-Waukesha region was the fifth worst among major U.S. population centers.

And how about that second op-ed, syndicated and from late-night Faux-News guy Cal Thomas?

Again hopelessly blind to the economic reality of racism, like most fascists he sees a cultural solution:

Why shouldn't we fight back by reaching out to them with our religious and political doctrines?

I know Muslims who have been converted and now live peaceful and productive lives among us. We shouldn't passively allow them to proceed with their conversion agenda with no response.

Let's peacefully and lovingly share our far better religious and cultural message with them.

Shall we look for an example of this lovingly shared and better religious and cultural message our not so silent Cal has in store for potential converts? We don't have to look far; let's try the first paragraph of this worthless screed:

Observing the riots in the suburbs of Paris, an American is tempted to rejoice.

I guess that would be you with Bill O'Reilly, over there giggling by the coffee machine when San Fran gets anthraxed.

And then there's what's behind column number three, by the Washington Post's Annie Applebaum:

Although there isn't yet evidence that this bout of rioting is Islamist in origin, it's pretty clear that large un-integrated, ungovernable and unemployed Islamic communities in Western Europe will continue to incubate radical Islam.

For proof of this Annie-get-Your-Gun cites that the twentieth hijacker was French-Moroccan. I guess it's also pretty clear to her that evidence of the rampant radical Christianity of unemployed rednecks that helped put Bush in the White House might have been sniffed out in the actions of one Timothy McVie.

Of course, the straw that broke Frenchy's back was non-belief in the free market, she explains:

...the refusal of French politicians to lift restrictions on employers, to promote entrepreneurship or to deregulate make it impossible for young people to integrate through the economy, as immigrants do in this country, despite discrimination.

This is ownerspeak for bust labor, give away working class jobs to immigrants, cut social programs and cut your own taxes and pay your maid and every other immigrant contractor that works on your suburban cul-de-castle in cash. The American Example.

I'm sure the French upper class, speaking the universal language of money, are fully aware of the benefits for them in such a system, however short-sided they will likely turn out to be. The difference in France is that the labor class, not being ignorant dupes munching Doritos in front of Fox News, realize that in a democracy they have the power, and they will not give up their livelihoods to the sons and daughters of the upper class's maids and landscapers.

No, the French will have to come up with their own solution. Our assimilation of Mexicans is no example for them, as their workers will not simply stand aside and let North Africans take their jobs, and we have little evidence of our own assimilation of blacks to point to. The "Free Market" scenario will only enrich a few while staving off the inevitable surplus of working class.

Servants have children, somebody should have thought of that.

And I Helped

2005-11-09T22:19:00.000-06:00

This post is about the dogs of war. I was going to post a photo here, but I find I can't. Instead I will provide a description of the effects of white phosphorus munitions. This from those friendly, family owned and operated folks at GlobalSecurity.org

White phosphorus burns spontaneously in air. Contact with these particles can cause local burns. These weapons are particularly nasty because white phosphorus continues to burn until it disappears. If service members are hit by pieces of white phosphorus, it could burn right down to the bone. Remove quickly all clothing affected by phosphorus to prevent phosphorus burning through to skin. If this is impossible, plunge skin or clothing affected by phosphorus in cold water or moisten strongly to extinguish or prevent fire. Then immediately remove affected clothing and rinse affected skin areas with cold sodium bicarbonate solution or with cold water. Moisten skin and remove visible phosphorus(preferably under water) with squared object (knife-back etc.) or tweezers. Do not touch phosphorus with fingers!

In other words, if you see victims whose flesh has burned off to the bone underneath their clothing, as you would have in the photo from Fallujah I did not post, you may well suspect considerable exposure to white phosphorus. Though the phrase "These weapons are particularly nasty" seems to the point, in the same article these humankind-as-pit bull terrier thinkers offer this:

The use of white phosphorus or fuel air explosives are not prohibited or restricted by Protocol II of the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention (CCWC), the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects.

So, they are particularly nasty, but not excessively injurious. This may explain there being some difference of opinion, as well as the confusion of reportage related to use or uses of these weapons in the assault on Fallujah. It seems that "Willy Pete" is close enough to a chemical weapon to have stirred up a bit of controversy early on in the events of last November. The ghastly effects of WP led to cries of chemical warfare from Arab and peace fronts alike, to the point where our government had to respond beyond scraping up and burying topsoil and accompanying families to burials in order to limit photography of victims.

And so we did what we do best, we lied. This is our State Department, ironically appearing in a statement containing a little morality lesson in how untruths gain momentum as they are repeated:

Finally, some news accounts have claimed that U.S. forces have used "outlawed" phosphorus shells in Fallujah. Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters. There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using "outlawed" weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.

Which is what leads us to the reality that the time has come when such disinformation is simply not going to fly. The blogoshere consists of hundreds of thousands of little enthusiasts searching every little nook and cranny of the WWW for the truth. We aren't pros. We don't get the facts all the time. We spread our own misconceptions and untruths. But by the time an issue has percolated down, truth is outed with unprecedented regularity. Thus we have this account from none other than the US Army's Field Artillery March/April edition, a rundown on the Fallujah operation from the mouths of those good old boys at Ft. Sill, OK, whose enthusiasm for blowing people up apparently can get in the way of supporting the company line:

b. White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired “shake and bake” missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.

Well, at least we wouldn't use such a weapon indiscriminantly, would we? From the same article:

We learned to use indirect fires early and often in large volumes. During the course of the battle, more than 2,000 artillery and mortar rounds were fired and more than 10 tons of precision Air Force munitions were dropped.

And then there's "napalm". The civilized world banned napalm after the Vietnam War, from which nobody living in those days will ever forget the picture of the young Kim Phuk running from her napalmed village with her clothes burned off. This civilized world excludes us. We have improved our napalm-like weapon to something called the Mark-77. I say "napalm like" because after numerous outsider and insider contrary reports the DOD/DOS brain trust amended this:

Your story ('Dead bodies everywhere', by Lindsay Murdoch, March 22, 2003) claiming US forces are using napalm in Iraq, is patently false. The US took napalm out of service in the early 1970s. We completed destruction of our last batch of napalm on April 4, 2001, and no longer maintain any stocks of napalm. —Jeff A. Davis, Lieutenant Commander, US Navy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense ― Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald

to this:

Although all napalm in the U.S. arsenal had been destroyed by 2001, Mark-77 firebombs, which have a similar effect to napalm, were used against enemy positions in 2003. ―usinfo disinfo from the State Dept.

Explanation for this "misunderstanding" was offered in that the brand name Napalm (DOW made billions on it) had been dropped. Well, we all stand corrected, you miserable, petulant little10 year old miscreants! Maybe our confusion stems from things like the DOD's own publication Defend AMERICA, which offered this in its Feb.12th, 2003 edition (there seems to be no end to the slick publications our tax dollars pay for):

Everything from hand grenades to 2,000-pound bombs and napalm are shipped, ready for use whenever 3rd MAW needs them.

The State Department says we didn't use nap―er...um...cannisters of fuel and oxidizers that turn to burning jelly that sticks to everything―in Fallujah. This time we really, really mean it, cross our fingers and hope to die. And anyway, as far as we're concerned it ain't illegal, as we still have our unsigned copy of protocol whatever it was that you all stupidly agreed to.

Shake and bake, man. Onward, Christian soldiers.

Drip, Drip, Drip

2005-11-06T15:01:00.000-06:00

It is becoming clear now that the ouster of George Bush is a real possibility. This is no story of white lies and sexual confessions ala Clinton, or of the political shenanigans of the Plumbers squad of the Nixon White House. This is the sad tale of the systematic misrepresentation of intelligence undertaken in the intention of selling an ill-advised, immoral, and ill-planned war on Iraq to the world, America and to our Congress.

We've already witnessed the massacre of the truth these dolts proliferated in the Niger yellow cake uranium/Plame/Wilson fiasco. Now the New York Times runs a story of a documented report from February, 2002, the gist being that the "revelation" of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, long since debunked, was immediately considered most likely untrue.

What revelation was this? That Iraq was training Al Qaeda terrorists in the use of explosives and chemical/biological warfare. This nay-saying report was done by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and would certainly have crossed the desk of one Donald Rumsfield and one Dick Cheney, yet this report was not offered up during phase one of the Senate investigation of intelligence quality, an interesting fact of itself. Now lets look at the speeches of our armchair warriors that offered this highly doubted intelligence as evidence of the necessity of war. This is from Colin Powell's infamous speech to the UN one year later, making the Administration's case for military action:

This senior al Qaeda terrorist was responsible for one of al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan.
His information comes firsthand from his personal involvement at senior levels of al Qaeda. He says bin Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan, deceased al Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef, did not believe that al Qaeda labs in Afghanistan were capable enough to manufacture these chemical or biological agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq.
The support that (inaudible) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.

What did the DIA report, done one year prior, have to say about this "senior al Qaeda terrorist"?

It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers.

The Times article goes on to report that around the time of Powell's speech a declassified statement from the CIA called al-Libi's story credible, while at the same time a classified assessment stated "the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place."

But Powell wasn't the first to refer to this "credible source". Turn the page back to Bush's October 7th, 2002 Cincinnati speech done just three days before Congressional vote on the Iraq war resolution. This speech should live in infamy―should be looped forever in the W Presidential Library as an example of the extremity of corruption that is possible in the political arena. The level of distortion throughout this speech―the White House, with typical bone-headedness, still heads it up on their site as "Iraq, Denial and Deception"―is only surpassed in repugnancy by the President's sledge hammering appeals to the public's fear of WMD's throughout.

Back to the subject of the day, though. Here are Bush's words given a full eight months after the recently declassified report had been distributed:

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America. (emphasis mine)

But we now know you knew you didn't know any such thing.

Increasingly the focus becomes not that information was wrong, but that the Administration knew it was wrong and used it to scare the begeezus out of us anyway.

This is beyond impeachable, this is seditious in it's recklessness. It's time to head the vans over to the White House and start loading documents. It's time to impeach the President and the Vice President, and for finding out who in the hell the senate pro-tem is because the Speaker is likely to be disqualified as well.

Judgment day is coming, it's clear that the flow of revelations is widening. Will we progressives be happy to see such a day? Hell, no. But it won't be the saddest day in America lately.

No, that would be the day so many of you voted for what was clearly to us a pack of self-serving liars.

The Day (or two) After Fitzmas

2005-10-30T16:34:00.001-06:00

...At all relevant times from January 1, 2002 through July 2003, Valerie Wilson was employed by the CIA, and her employment status was classified. Prior to July 14, 2003, Valerie Wilson’s affiliation with the CIA was not common knowledge outside the intelligence community... From the Libby indictments

There is much debate going on whether or not this scandal has the gravity of that of Watergate (no), Iran-Contragate (similiar), or BJgate (give me a break). Since it became clear that some of the principals at the White House had been talking out of school enough to have exposed a cover-up, Bush administration apologists have been gearing up a defense of, "Oh, come on boys and girls. What's the big deal here?" To hear them tell it, Valerie Plame spent most of her time running around from one Washington cocktail party to another bragging about her top-secret job.

Fitzgerald, who wowed nearly everyone on both sides, appears to have shot this notion in the foot.

Few are better at this "aw, shucks" dismissal game than Bill Kristol. In this Weekly Standard article he co-writes:

...In today's Washington, as has been true for decades, classified information is leaked by many different players in any given policy fight in the government. The Bush administration has been replete with leaks of presumably classified information. Is the identity of Valerie Plame the most consequential leak of the last four years?...

Is such relativism what the neos and their gun boat diplomacy are looking to export to the "emerging" Iraq democracy?

Then there's ol' hot lips herself, Ann Coulter, as she stated the following on Hannity and Colmes on Oct. 26th:

...everyone in Washington knew she [Plame] was a CIA agent...

In view of the above, and by Ann Coulter's own standards, propagating this lie is treason. For such a treasonous act, by Ann Coulter's own words Ann Coulter should be gone after with a baseball bat.

What does Rush Limbaugh say?

...Everybody in her neighborhood knew who she was...

It goes on and on. This is old news already and you can Google to your heart's content if you want to learn more of the ineptitude of the Washington Post and the New York Times and how quickly the spin machine propels such careless reportage into public perception. The point of this post is more to the hypocrisy of this "common sense" defense that curmudgeonly wingnuts drag out whenever the specifics of a situation are indefensible―the old Reaganly "There you go again..."

Coincidently it was two Reaganites, Victoria Toensing and Bruce W. Sanford, contributors to the "outing" law behind this caper, writing this in a piece from the Washington Post on January 10, 2005:

...At the threshold, the agent must truly be covert. Her status as undercover must be classified, and she must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years. This requirement does not mean jetting to Berlin or Taipei for a week's work. It means permanent assignment in a foreign country. Since Plame had been living in Washington for some time when the July 2003 column was published, and was working at a desk job in Langley (a no-no for a person with a need for cover), there is a serious legal question as to whether she qualifies as "covert."...

My question is, who is going around making these determinations? What kind of governing is it that political cronies are running around the White House deciding which career personnel in the CIA are really spooks and which aren't, and then running off their mouths to a pipsqueak like Robert Novak about it? What kind of War on Terror are we running over there that this "is it or ain't it a crime?" litmus test needs to be considered at all in the case of a classified CIA employee working on WMD issues being exposed, not in a casual conversation, but to a national publication? According to Toensing and Sanford:

...But Congress also did not intend for government employees to be vulnerable to prosecution for an unintentional or careless spilling of the beans about an undercover identity. A dauntingly high standard was therefore required for the prosecutor to charge the leaker...

This care appears to have fortunate consequences for certain named and unnamed (but possibly labeled) officials, yet the statement hardly seems to describe the situation we have here. This "spill" was neither unintentional nor careless (in the sense of offhandedness). Although these officials will undoubtedly slip through this crack, the intention was to protect innocent morons, not the variety we are dealing with here.

And so back to "common sense". Regardless of how many knew of Plame's position, for one more to learn is worse, and for millions more is like, way worse. This is absolute logic. This is an absolute value. While it is the neo-con think tanks like those Bill Kristol's mommy and daddy run churning policy docs bemoaning lack of absolute values, it seems their appointed torch bearers have a bit of trouble operating according to their own.

Even POTUS, who is not nearly the ringleader of this cadre, knew better. In characteristic confusion he mistakenly made a statement of virtue, that anyone in his administration known to have leaked Plame's identity would be fired. Very soon this was changed to anyone having been convicted. One trip down the hall was enough for W to be reminded of the difference between the rhetoric and the reality of the mission.

We expect more. That was the big deal in '74 and it's the big deal now. We expect White House officials to know better, or at least would like to think that they do. We expect people with security clearance to value national security over political gain. We expect a level of competence in our administration far beyond that which this thuggish hack job demonstrates. It was indefensible, as the current "boys will be boys" spin makes obvious. They did it anyway. We expect better minds.

That's the big deal.

Ouisconsin, From One Extreme to the Other

2005-10-27T09:45:00.000-05:00

Those pesky sustainablists were at it again on WPR, mucking up my morning commute with their tales from the northwoods. I gave it a chance, listened on for ten minutes or so before opting out for the smooth-as-silk, homogenized Morning Edition on Chicago Public Radio. In those ten minutes however, I learned of Ashland, Wisconsin's bold move to become an eco-community or municipality or whatever. Pronouncing this radical departure had come these headlines in their local, The Daily Press:

Ashland on way to becoming eco-municipality
Officials say it won't threaten city

Phew! And in case this might not assuage the fears of those locals who like their pollution just the way it is, thank you, the story goes on to add:

Councilor Mary Rehwald said the new distinction would not obligate the city to anything. "There's absolutely nothing in this that says the city has to do something another way," she said.

Ah, but there's foulness afoot! Unbeknownst to these lovely lambs of the Lake Superior shore those wicked "socialists" of the sustainability movement are going around making making all kinds of changes, like installing bio-degradable soap in bed and breakfasts and scouting out windmill sites. They've discovered, and I'm aghast, eco-terrorism at a local birding installation and have switched the coffee to that which is grown "bird friendly".

They're so cute.

Some facts are in order, and for these I've taken the extraordinary step of actually finding some from the US Census Bureau. The population estimate of Ashland County for 2004 is 16,719, down from 16,866 in 2000. The average commute, about 15 minutes. It doesn't say if that includes the time it takes to put the snow chains on.

I don't think Ashland is the problem. Let's move southeast, all the way southeast to Kenosha County.

The 2004 population estimate of Kenosha County is 158,435; up 5.9% from 2000, which was up 16.7% from 1990. These aren't Las Vegas numbers, but there is some real growth here. Just south of Kenosha county and toward Chicago is Lake County, IL, which is up a whopping 30% for the same 15 years. The average commute for these counties for 2000 is 27 and 30 minutes and that is going up fast. The median home in Lake County was $200,000 in 2000, compared to $120,000 in Kenosha County, and as the fortunate zone out the less so the direction of this sprawl is increasingly away from work. So much for facts, now for some observations.

Ten times as many people are spending twice as much time going to work at one end of the state as on the other. For every new produce stand selling sustainable farmed produce on one extreme are 25 new Subways on the other loading up thousands of cookie cutter sandwiches with South American veggies. For every windmill established on the lovely Superior shore are a hundred new four bedroom pine and gypsum barns heating their volume ceiling great rooms with coal and natural gas produced energy.

I don't want to hear about Ashland, where the principal industry is catering to rich yuppie kayakers plying the Apostle Islands shoreline. I want to hear some people with ideas that are "sustainable" for the suburban landscape, where many, many more people actually live and go to work. I want someone to tell me how we are going to create a lifestyle for the masses that reduces transportation needs. I want to know how we are going to rebuild our infrastructure to reduce the environmental and human cost that the astoundingly inefficient suburban non-plan is exacting, increasingly every day while environmental minds desert this nightmare and go hide in Spring Green and Ashland.

I checked in later, and a "eco-friendly" development engineer was calling in his kudos for Ashland's gesture, he in fact has relocated his operation to Ashland from Green Bay.

Where apparantly his efforts weren't so sustainable.

Have Yourselves a Merry Little Fitzmas

2005-10-24T21:29:00.000-05:00

There's a place in the blogosphere I like to go to to be among friends, a site so well populated with like-minded souls that these sheer numbers seem to discourage all those ill-thinking right wingers and we are more or less left alone to hash out our own differences. This site is The Daily Kos. Sure it's a bit of a mutual admiration society, but don't we all need that from time to time?

Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor for the case of the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative by administration officials, is said to be set to hand down indictments this week. The rumor mill that is Washington is buzzing and so are the Kossacks. WE/they have taken to calling it waiting for Fitzmas. It is tossed around that as many as 24 indictments could be handed down, which would put my best guess at eight or so. Those bemoaning this "witch hunt" next week are likely to include Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, the latter being Cheney's chief of staff. It could go higher, nobody knows as Fitzgerald has been very close to the vest with this investigation, not at all like the oafish Kenneth Starr.

And so the phrase "Fitzmas" is being used to describe the morning that all this will go down. Despite all that you've heard about liberals from Fox TV, there is precious little lock-step agreement at Kos, and not everyone agrees that the gleeful nature of this anticipation is a good thing, as so:

Whatever the charges or eventual results of this turn out to be, it's not a happy day in our country if people at the highest level of government are committing crimes. We shouldn't celebrate it. SnoodGuy

Well, if you consider a secular view of Christmas (and don't even tell me you haven't) it is rooted in Saturnalia, a ritual of the winter solstice that celebrates the cyclical nature of the sun, the beginning of the return to light. How dark has it been, this reign of the Christian Soldiers?

For me the clouds begin early in the morning, as I stop at 6:30 am to haul my bag around nine holes at the local layout. Right across the street is the home of a construction company that built the new clubhouse. Some of the management has changed however, as several have been indicted or await indictment for the embezzlement of three million or so, some of it used to run a Republican Party bound slush fund. Read more about this in Grass Root Politics, Republican Style, or Boss Mann, Another Biskupic, Their Aides and the Deficiencies of Immunity. The Bush appointed DA, Steven Biskupic, has given the alleged ringleader of this circus "limited" immunity in exchange for his cooperation in the investigation.

If that seems a little backwards, well, when you're on a mission from God you get to make your own rules. All across the country Republicans have been bending, twisting and breaking the laws of the land in order to seize the mantle of world domination, and any good domination begins at home. To the world they have said in our name, "We will punch you first before you are big enough to punch us. This is our God given right."

These things darken my day, this is not who I thought we were.

GHW Bush's thousand points of light have become W's thousand little dark clouds. Eventuality is nigh, riding an ancient chariot drawn by Greed and Powerlust.

When Nixon gave that last goofy pelvic-thrusted victory sign as he left the White House grounds for good, sure, it was a little sad to see such a spectacle. But it was a far happier day than the one before it.

Party on, into the light.

Chi Gets its Day, Unfortunately on Fox

2005-10-23T11:26:00.000-05:00

“The World Series will begin today in Chicago…”

I have to admit, that takes a little getting used to. I get irritated quickly by the incessant harping on the futility of Chicago’s two baseball teams, but I confess (it must be Sunday morning, what with all this testifying going on right off the bat) that the sensation is all the more discomforting in that I know damn well the record is so horribly shabby it can’t be ignored. Two teams, no championships in nearly 100 years, it is hardly possible. But in this town which for the fifty-some years of my lifetime has had a football team without a quarterback for about forty-nine of them, the hardly possible is everyday.

But these White Sox are something. So far, they are not only in the dance, they appear to own the hall. They play the small ball and hit for power. Their outfield chases down the ball and the infield is as loose and efficient as if this were spring training and not the first game of the first World Series in Chicago since the year of the big fin. Their starting pitching is dominant and the relief pitching, when it appears, is wicked.

They get ahead early and never look back. They dispatched the darlings of the Eastern Seaboard Programming Network, the Red Sox, in three straight, and then flicked away the Somewhere-North-of-Oceanside Angels, who had defeated the Evil Empire (you know who I mean).

They not only act the part, they look it. They are confident without being haughty, serious with being sullen, handsome without glamour. The Houston Astros look like a bunch of minor leaguers from the swamps of Mississippi with their scraggly beards―like a bunch of clowns, with Bobblehead Biggio and his goofy oversize batting helmet and Bagwell up there looking like he taking a dump. And what’s with that Ensberg and that do-you-object-if-we-search-your-car inducing stare thing he’s got going?

The park looks good, too. Because it is. I am a Cub fan first, and there’s nothing like the historic ambiance of Wrigley field (Fenway doesn’t come close), but the “Cell”, (call it that in your paper and several corporations will request a meeting with your editor), is a better place to watch a baseball game. Better seats, better aisles, better concessions and better parking. Recently highlighted in blue, it is now classic black and white, and a truly videogenic backdrop in the crispness of the near winter weather into which the money men have stretched the baseball playoffs.

Not that Fox has a clue how to capture that. Fox exemplifies the way quality becomes a parody of itself. Fox is great with the graphics and all those whooshy sound effects, they just don’t know how to take a picture or capture the sound of the event. Just beyond the left field line of the Cell lies one of the most photographed cities in the world. Last night the weather was in a clearing window, a brilliantly black sky partly criss-crossed with low, scudding clouds that reflected brightly the orange glow of the city. It was pure Halloween out there, reflected in shimmering wetness; a Batman director would have been out shooting all over the place. Cheap-ass Fox sent a guy with a hand-held to the edge of the stands to take a couple of zooms of the back of the skyline. Such imagination! Way to capture such a long-awaited Chicago moment!

And who else was there to help diminish the experience for me? Who aids and abets all flashy-pants Fox in their stingy little effort to look like the real thing? Who chimes in with their typically Christian non-generosity to muck up all the works? Lurking behind another curtain is that parsonage of parsimoniousness, Sinclair Broadcasting, who owns the local Fox Affiliate. They, and only they, want fifty cents from every cable subscriber a month before they will allow Charter to carry Fox hi-def. That’s right. In the heart of Packer, Bears and Vikings country I pay $105.00 for cable and internet and can’t watch the NFC in Hi-def over 50 cents of it.

As always, there is more.

And who is it that won’t negotiate these 50 cents? Who owns Charter? The author of the following:

What should exist?

To me, that's the most exciting question imaginable.
What do we need that we don't have? How can we realize our potential? What will
it take to solve important problems and improve people's lives? What should
exist, and how might we create it—right now?

This is from Paul Allen, multi-gazzillionaire and also owner of the Portland Trailblazers, Seattle Seahawks and the Sporting News. Big sports guy.

Well, you overblown wind-bag, I’ll tell you what should exist, post 1950’s signals carrying the freaking World Series over your cables. May you could quit gallivanting around on your sea and sky polluting private ship long enough to sit down with the creeps from Sinclair and get this 50 cents deal done.

The Poor Had Their Fifteen Minutes of Fame

2005-10-18T22:23:00.000-05:00

There seems to be a breather in the news cycle. It's been days since a senior administrative official has been subpoenaed or indicted, and it will be days more before the next big hurricane. This one's called Wwwwwilmmma! Don't be thinking global warming now, we're just in one of those cycles, ya know, it happens. Yeah, I remember Carla and Camille. I don't remember no Wilma!

On Point had an attempt at a discussion going today about poverty, introduced to be about whether the supposed increased awareness to poverty issues brought about by Hurricane Katrina is in fact ironic considering that social programs are to suffer the deepest cuts in the attempt to offset the costs of rebuilding. Quickly this mess turned into five or six talking heads talking trash, rambling on as one might expect those of such a carefully culled cross section to do.

"Quit cutting the programs and knock off the tax cuts for the rich," goes A.

"Tell them to quit having babies out of wedlock and get a job," goes B.

Very informative.

Everybody was right of course, but oh, so cold on the key reason why America is backsliding on the poverty front. It all does have to do with entitlement, and nannies, and coddling, as it turns out.

Never, nowhere in the history of the world have so many haves felt so entitled. I will make it as simple as it can be. Divide all the wealth in America into three parts. One third belongs to the top 1%. One-third belongs to the rest of the top10%, and the rest is ours.

The 1% is in charge, and has given itself a 10% tax break, purportedly so they can give us all better jobs and raises by someday investing their little windfalls in something other than factories in Brazil and China. The next 9% is very, very busy maintaining the favor of the 1%, not in the least by convincing the majority of us morons that we may be just like them some day if we just vote for them and do their dirty work.

2.5 million Uncle Scrooges feel absolutely entitled to one-third of everything while their mouthpieces woe the unaffordability of Medicare and Social Security. 25 million more suck up the next third and complain about the taxes on their 3,500 square foot barns that push up the heating bills of the poor, and the luxury tax on their BMW 745's that push up the transportation costs of the poor.

They want it all. They deserve it all. If you don't play along, they'll take their ball and go home.

Fine. Give them a one-way ticket outta here, and let them raise their next generation of spoiled brats in Buenos Aires.

Shouldn't There Be Flashers?

2005-10-15T16:18:00.000-05:00

In On the Beach, Nevil Shutes's bleak portrayal of the end of the world (for humans), one of the principals is a sports car racer. As he and his fellow Australians wait for the radioactive clouds to precipitate over their last bit of inhabited Earth the races take on a bit of recklessness, to say the least.

That was my first thought when I came across this display.

I do admit, however, that I know what this is really all about. Once last year I was foolin' around by the secretary's computer―which is tuned to ALL COUNTRY, ALL THE TIME―and I heard the song this quote comes from. It's Tim McGraw's, and it was a monster hit.

I'll save you the time. Dad got sick, hadn't much time, and decided to be a human being and also to enjoy himself. Loved his family deeper and demonstrated this by spending the little time they might have had left with him riding a bull, climbing a mountain, jumping out of airplanes, going fishin' with the buddies, etc.

Double-checked the connection on the Jesus hotline too, best believe it!

Okay, fine, whatever, it's a good-natured thought.

It just goes to show ya, in spite of the onslaught of vitriolic anti-intellectualism spitting out of the mouthpieces of "red" America, how hungry these people are for a little philosophy. Today, Tim McGraw. Tomorrow, Socrates?

Maybe not.

Anyhow, I was inspired. Now if he could just scootch his fat-ass pickup truck up about three or four feet I could access the right turn lane and get on with my own life!

Knowing I'm On the Street Where You Live

2005-10-10T22:51:00.000-05:00

Made a return trip to Liberty Trails today. We had a little joke or two about these environs last year. After some careful investigating―sales types have to be a little careful about politics these days―I gleaned that my potential customer was a liberal.

So we had a few jokes but I left out the one about floating one's housing bubble on Hoover Trail. Upon leaving I headed down Hoover for Reagan Blvd., the mainstream drag. I noticed that a second phase was going in and out of curiosity and I turned right to check out the new street signs.

Well, you write this stuff for a while and there's little audience and less feedback and there's nobody to tell you you might not know it all. I headed down Reagan and there was a new street, Eisenhower (a loop). "Aha!" says I, "There's another over there."

As I approached I began to make out the "C" and thought, "Of course, Calvin Coolidge. Old Silent Cal. Robert Novak's second most favorite conservative President."

But, what's this? Do my eyes deceive? Holy crap, stuck right here between Eisenhower and Reagan it's Clinton Court!

Lincoln, Reagan, Hoover, Tyler, Eisenhower, Bush and then cloistered in middle of this sanctuary of Whiggishness is Satan hisself. I gotta think this through.

Either our builder did or did not intend a statement with this neighborhood. If he did then why the exception, especially with republic enemy one? Did he have a favorite aunt make him promise? Does the fact that this is the smallest street in the neighborhood mean anything? Did he need some Dem cash bad enough to tuck away five or six lots for them way in the back somewhere? Was he shamed into it? Why not Kennedy? It just doesn't seem possible that Bubba could find his way into a plan like this for any reason!

And so I'm thinking that maybe I should look outside and check the color of the moon because it just may be that I am...that I could be...well, wrong.

Pardon me while I get some oxygen back in my lungs.

If there was no conscious plan, then perhaps it was subconscious? Then why Tyler? Tyler was a real Whig but then he wasn't. In fact, the Whigs kicked him out while he was President. If he hadn't died he would have been in the Confederate States House of Representatives. This may well link him nicely with some of these others, but that is a way, way too abstractly drawn connection I'm thinking.

I have to admit, the most sensible explanation would be that it's all a big accident, perhaps somewhat corrected in phase two amidst what must be a great deal of comment.

And as I contemplate that photo above, I wonder with how much prejudice I might jump to conclusions.

But not who might have been responsible for that.

Bisoxual No More

2005-10-07T20:44:00.000-05:00

The White Sox have just swept the Red Sox from this year's playoffs. I don't like the Red Sox.

I used to like the Red Sox. I pulled for them in the '67 Series with the Cardinals (being a Cubs fan, I really don't like the Cardinals). I was living in Boston when two rookies, Jim Rice and Fred Lynn, led them to game seven in the '75 World Series against the ever despicable Pete Rose and the Big Red Machine. That was a fun team, with Cecil Cooper, Yaz, Dewey Evans and Bernie Cahhhhhbo. Toss in The Spaceman (Bill Lee) and El Tiante and this was definitely a team you could learn to like.

And I almost left out Pudge Fisk and the dance on the first base line.

But now I'm so happy to see them gone―not so much because they are a bunch of overweight and overpaid slugs―but because the Eastern Seaboard Programming Network is officially half way to having to get off their fat Bristol, Ct. asses and look for a story from out West. True, they still have the Yankees, and so for a little while the lead story is a sure thing around there.

ESPN used to give the appearance of being national, they don't even try any more. The color announcer's comment at the end of the clincher was something like, "We know now what we didn't know before, the White Sox have the deepest bullpen in the playoffs." No kidding, you ignorant twit! The White Sox led the American League in ERA nearly the entire year. The White Sox went 35-19 in one run games. They tied the league lead in saves with another playoff team you undoubtedly know nothing about, the Somewhere South of Malibu Angels.

Go to the ESPN site right now and what do you see? Konerko, who hit the winning home run? How 'bout El Duque (Orlando Hernandez), who came on and shut the Red Sox down with the bases loaded to protect a one run lead? How 'bout the kid from AA ball who came in and smoked the famous Red Sox bats in the ninth for his second save in two games?

No, what you get is Johnny freakin' Damon, all sad like, with the caption, "Johnny Damon and the Red Sox didn't have that '04 magic"

I suppose when the Yankees go down, The Boys of Bristol can skip baseball altogether, dust the cobwebs off of Dick Vitale and start where they left off last year hyping the ACC and the Big East and all those sucky hoops teams from Philadelphia. There was exactly one team in the Elite Eight from east of the Appalachians last Spring, but to hear ESPN tell it you'd think the hoops world was flat and and the edge was somewhere just west of Winston-Salem, NC.

Now, I must admit that I do appreciate the hi-def games brought my way by this organization, even though it means putting up with Chris Berman, who obviously hasn't cracked a media guide in a long time. But I never, ever watch Sports Center any more―not since the internet is there to give me scores. Often I wait thru the start to confirm my suspicions, and then off it goes.

Get ready for a piss poor network effort for the ALCS. Without all the Yankee-Red Sox cliches, and without getting their knowledge of the participants from the half Red Sox-half Yankees crowd of fans at the corner Starbucks on the way into their little Connecticut fantasy world over there, these guys have nothing.

It almost makes me yearn for Joe Garagiola. Maybe not.

le sequoit: The First Year

2005-10-04T22:18:00.000-05:00

It seems that I've let the first anniversary of this effort slip right on past, long about during West Wing or so. I've decided to provide a few highlights, or so I'd like to think.

On Republicans:

I would guess that somewhere in the middle of a business related deductible $200.00 dinner or $180.00 round of golf Mr. Mann and Mr. Brownwell discovered that they were both Republicans.

On social "conservatives":

Some children will be forced by the government to reveal their sins to their parents in the name of Family Values while, against their parents wishes, others must choose between castigation by their peers or prayer to the Christian God.

On class:

Being in the "middle" class means questioning whether you can afford matching ATV's to tow behind your SUV. Being in the median class means wondering how you will replace your Honda Civic when it croaks.

How much more can we be set against each other in the workplace, squeezed of every last bit of productivity while our economic realities are finely engineered to maintain us at the breaking point?

Many capitalists have admitted the inequality of the system as practiced is a barrier to its ultimate success, but the difficulty of institutionalizing a more egalitarian system while maintaining the freedom of the individual to aspire within it―and the daunting task of wresting power from those who have hijacked the system―leave this barrier to refortify itself, as witnessed in a continuing, deepening rift between the upper and upper middle classes and the true middle class.

On the "vitality" of candidates:

…in the absence of someone who might be intelligently decisive I like the survivability of the intelligent non-decision over that of the unintelligent decision.

On the Bush administration:

To be Secretary of State for this regime all you really need is a copy/fax machine and an intact middle finger!

On censorship:

It's a fool's game, played by whiny hypocrites on one side and adolescent schoolboys on the other.

On Gertrude Himmelfarb's reference that the welfare society has "emasculated" the culture of "traditional republican and Puritan virtue":

If masculinity is equivalent to vitality, then am I not wasting my time reading this woman’s book?

On gun control:

Most gun owners are law abiding. Most gun owners are non-urban. Most gun victims are urban. Most gun owners can live with that.

On cheap labor:

This is about those who put patriotic stickers on their Hummers while they've not hired an American in ten years.

On computers:

Clearly the renaissance of my life (not to mention my spelling proficiency) is owed to Microsoft’s abstraction of it into one great, big video game.

On the birth of religion:

The man had come to notice that the chief would bestow upon him certain favors in response for his good answers and thus spoke boldly words that any might have, “The sun goes to a distant hunting ground.”

On labor:

…but to speak the language of labor is at this point like giving the Latin Mass.

On a previous fascist regime:

It was only on the rise that appeals to the godly to oppose the godless were deemed necessary.

On jurisprudence:

Free speech ends at the corporate boundary.

On conservation:

how do you renew energy, anyway? With a perpetual motion driven generator?

On the left/right monster:

We land on each issue according to the side we have chosen, rather than the other way around.

On the money machine of American universities' research efforts:

How will an Alexander Fleming have the flexibility to consider the accident in his Petri dish made by some Penicillium notatum that happened to blow in from downstairs?

On politicians:

Son of George Allen
It’s high time the children of America learned
that there are no short cuts to
success.

Son of Sununu

Here! Here!

On parents and children:

Alas, our children did not benefit from such untelevisionary thinking and, as one goes off to law school and two Big Ten Universities are bidding for the other’s graduate study, it is with great shame that I admit that we let them watch Dangermouse and You Can’t Do That on Television.

...now the interviewee's child plays "on his own" and so develops ability to construct socially "on his own" in free play portions of practice, but for safety's sake within eyesight and earshot of five or six adults. Right.

On hunger:

People should quit feeding 80 pound dogs and start feeding 60 pound Africans.

On suburban dysfunction:

If it’s not safe beyond your door, then why have a lawn to mow?

On the socialism of neighborhood covenents:

We may talk a fine game about too much government but when it comes down to your money and my money—even on the corner of Reagan Boulevard and Hoover Trail—a little socialism can be just the ticket.

On generational nonsense:

The Sixties is when we stood up to “The Greatest Generation” and told them to shove their military industrial complex up their asses. There was nothing “relativistic” about that, you can be sure.

As to we being the “me first” generation and they out to “make a better world”, it is they who stand idly by while the less fortunate of their peers are enticed into service and dispatched to be picked off one by one in a foreign war of domestic political design.

On church and state:

Anyone who thinks religious education in public schools would be any less about cross bearing than history education is about flag waving has been dipping a bit too heavily into the sacramental wine.

On military adventurism and the latest Iraq war:

It is immoral to punch someone in the face because you fear that some day they will be big enough to punch back.

Let the Chinese keep the peace; that oughta take us off the effigy pole.

On infernal combustion and the American male:

All week long they await the wild splendor of the pine forest, only to streak through it so fast that it blurs.

On golf:

Seeing a fivesome ahead of you is a lot like coming over a rise on the expressway and seeing a couple hundred brake lights lit up ahead. It ain't even legal. It ain't even a Microsoft® Word!

On religion:

Religion has always led humanity off on some strange tangents, the happiest result of which is that such behavior remains harmless and the flock is well enough off the beaten path so as not to impede progress for the rest of us.

At any rate, I'm not all that impressed with the design effort, which is, I guess, why they don't call it Supremely Intelligent Design.

On Hurricane Katrina:

It's not called the National Guard for nothing.

Fear not, though, for in Norfolk the freaking Navy is almost on the way.

On Wisconsin seceding from the Union, except for Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha:

Of course, we would have to import a few million Harley Davidsons a year, but at least we could make them put real mufflers on them.

On American Exceptonalism:

It's a puzzlement that we are the world's most enthusiastic consumers of air fresheners, as clearly our shit doesn't stink.

Canadians don't have "I support the troops but what I really mean is that I support the war" stickers and they don't proclaim themselves saved or in a really tight relationship with Jesus, either. They seem to require less self-convincing.

On the free market system:

This supply cycle is just another loop the average joe increasingly has no place within.

It's all about supply and demand. Their supply, and their demand.

On whatever:

"Timing is everything", they say, though this was certainly truer in the days before electronic ignition.

This Little Piggy Went to Market

2005-10-03T21:24:00.000-05:00

Ah, supply and demand. That's the mantra. What fairer helmsperson could have ever stood to navigate us along the ebb and flow of economic reality? The market is the one integrous decideur of distributive method when it comes to the needs and wants of our society. Purity, it is.

Perhaps. It may seem, however, that the market can fail us miserably in times of crisis. Katrina is a crisis. Katrina has ripped us a new... er, window... in our national psyche in many ways. These ways will continue to multiply, as we are only beginning to come to grips with the enormous reality of a major American city for all intents and purposes needing―or perhaps not―rebuilding from scratch. This is a long, complexly unfolding story, but the subject today is natural gas prices.

47%. That's the latest number I am told that the average home heating bill will increase this year for natural gas customers. "Prices were already on the rise before Katrina," they say. "We want our cake and to eat it, too, limiting exploration while increasing our usage." the drillers lobby. "NIMBY's holler up and down every time we start talkin' 'bout importation facilities," cry the shipping giants about LNG tankers that would ignite buildings a third of a mile away and give second degree burns to exposed flesh up to a mile away, should they ignite.

"It's simple market forces, this 47% increase," harmonize the industry spokespeople.

In another of my uncanny timings, I was a gas station assistant manager during the oil embargo and "crisis" of the 70's. On salary, it was pretty cool to only be open three hours a day. Prices went from about 35 cents a gallon to over a dollar. People ran out of gas, mainly because we were only allowed to pump 3 dollars at a time. But the station never ran out of gas. The station averaged more gallons pumped daily than they had before. Deliveries went on, basically as before. Same supply, panic-driven demand. Arab oil up 66%. Gas up 300%. Hey, it's a free country, it's a free market.

Back to the natural gas. How exactly does demand increase dramatically―47%-jump dramatically―when supplies never actually run out? How does the demand of the end customer affect the supply and drive up the cost when everyone seems to be getting all the gas we need anyway? Are we not going to get gas this winter? Because, if that's the case, I would hope someone would be letting us in on that fairly soon, what with locally our first frost advisory coming up this week.

No, we're all going to get gas this year, and whether we can afford it or not. But while the upper middle class luxuriates in the celstory windowed, volume ceilinged splendor of the millions of 3,000 to 4,000 sq. ft. suburban barns they've "built" in the last 15 years, median class existence will again become just a little more difficult.

The "free market" at work here is of speculation, and in this or other crises increasingly fueled by emotion and hop-scotched along by pinch-me-I-can't-believe-my-own-good-fortune greed. This supply cycle is just another loop the average joe increasingly has no place within. It's a double whammy.

It's all about supply and demand. Their supply, and their demand.

The Worm Has Turned

2005-09-29T23:16:00.000-05:00

The eighteen wheeler that is the Republican machine is throwin' some big ol' chunks of rubber all over the highway these days, to the point where there are only 3 degrees of separation from the President to the Gambino crime family. That's right, three gangsters, one of whom once convicted along with Gene Gotti for heroin trafficking, were indicted today for conspiracy to murder the guy from whom top Bush/Cheney moneyman Jack Abramoff and his partner, Adam Kidan are accused of fraudulently buying a casino business in 2000.

Shortly before the murder Kidan wrote a check to one for $145,000 for "catering" and "consulting", though there never any food, and shortly after the murder he wrote another one for $95,000 for "surveillance services", of which I'm guessing there was at least a little.

About the alleged fraud. Well, it's seems that lenders involved in the deal were a little upset at learning that Abramoff and Kidan (allegedly) faked a 23 million dollar wire transfer that was supposed to represent their cash down payment. I hope our local Republican crooks are paying attention, here is truly someone to look up to.

There's much more with this guy, and there will be much to hear of him in the days to come. And then there's the Martha Stewart-like antics of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, and the indictment yesterday of Tom DeLay, the house majority leader. The hits keeps on coming, there's no rest for the weary as Washington reporters must be pulling their hair out.

More? How about this David Safavian character? After telling his GSA bosses that he had no dealings with the lobbyist, although he had been helping Abramoff to procure government land for a private high school he was involved in, Safavian got the OK to go on the now famous $100,000 St. Andrews, Scotland golf junket in 2002. Since then he has moved up to become the Government's top purchasing agent, at least until he got canned last Friday, right in the middle of handing out no-bid contracts like candy in the Katrina aftermath. Nice!

Oh, and today Judith Miller got tired of sitting in jail and agreed to testify in the investigation of just who in the administration decided to expose Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. It is widely believed that Cheney's secretary Scooter Libby is the source Miller has been protecting.

Like so many rats, conservatives are jumping off the USS Neo-Con. They claim the Administration's fiscal irresponsibility is no longer tenable, but the smoke these ultimate pragmatists sniff out is that the neo-con's insatiable greed has put their stronghold on the political majority in jeopardy. It's every man for himself and pols and money men will be seen to scramble as far as they can from what is rapidly becoming an historic disaster of a regime―illegitimate from beginning to awful end.

You can see it happening on Fox News, plaything of one of the biggest of these rats. Suddenly Colmes, for years the intentionally anemic foil of Sean Hannity, is getting more time, more guests, more last words.

It's coming.

We All Do Our Part

2005-09-26T20:09:00.000-05:00

The President:

Two other points I want to make is, one, we can all pitch in by using -- by being better conservers of energy. I mean, people just need to recognize that the storms have caused disruption and that if they're able to maybe not drive when they -- on a trip that's not essential, that would helpful. The federal government can help, and I've directed the federal agencies nationwide -- and here's some ways we can help. We can curtail nonessential travel. If it makes sense for the citizen out there to curtail nonessential travel, it darn sure makes sense for federal employees. We can encourage employees to carpool or use mass transit. And we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation.

This gem is copied directly off the whitehouse.gov site, where such attention to detail is only matched by the boss's command of English. But that are not the point of -- well, it just makes sense that folks out there be -- oughta listen up to their President...

From ABC News:

Despite the ban on unnecessary trips, Bush announced he was flying back to the hurricane-affected region on Tuesday, traveling to Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, two of the harder-hit areas. He just concluded on Sunday a three-day hurricane trip, his sixth since Katrina hit a month ago, that took him to Colorado and two cities in Texas and Louisiana. During that trip, the president had no direct contact with areas or people affected by the storm, instead spending the entire weekend getting briefings on the storm from military and other federal officials.

That we may better "pitch in", the official White House web page directs us to a link called "energysavers.org", which is really a redirect to something that's called Partnerships for Home Energy, which has absolutely nothing to do with gasoline or travel. This is the best these people can do.

"Whatta we got on energy for the folks? We got anything on fuel conservation on the old www, boys? No? Anything like that?"

"We got sumpin' on new windows and energy efficient refrigerators. 'Bout it."

"Well, make it sound a little more, uh, to the point, and stick it in."

"You got it!"

Nowhere in that site are there hints about how to save fuel if one happens to command a 747, a couple of transports, several armored limos, and a few miscellaneous choppers. I guess he's off the hook.

Unruliness Among the Unruled, or When Cribs Collide

2005-09-23T19:58:00.000-05:00

So this guy we know, a major (sports figure)-type, comes into a few million in signing bonus.

Time to pack up the bling bling, the collection of big-ass rides and the Rottweilers from the gates of Hell, plunk down a mil or two and drop it all into a couple of acres right in the middle of WASP utopia in a suburb called something like Freedomville, USA.

This is primo real estate. Not quite on the shore or in horsy country with the old money, but 10 minutes from the team facility and two minutes from the Tollway, while in a rare for these parts deep oak forest of a minor river valley. The kind of place where people like more than anything else to be left alone, or at least as close to such a place anyone can be and still take the train to the office in the Loop in 45 minutes.

This is the kind of place where people can afford good enough lawyers to keep their enclave out of the greedy little clutches of developers and the grubby little fingers of the neighboring tax-hungry municipalities, and so the authority in these parts remains the county. It's a little piece of libertarian heaven where you can park your travel bus or your cigarette boat, have a horse, whatever.

And build all the fences you want, and that's where we literally come in with hundreds of feet of cedar stockade and a front line of ornamental aluminum wrought iron looking kind of stuff. Right here through the arboreal ambience of Gentrified Oaks, somewhere in between the staged mulch bins and the herbal garden.

No one else had dared to do such a thing, though at least our guy didn't pull a Mr T and cut down every last oak tree on the property. The patrician etiquette heretofore practiced in these parts would certainly preclude such a garish display of, well, pretty much anything. Upon those awkward moments when their paths might collide whilst walking or running their spaniels and sheepdogs and Irish Wolfthings, a violator of the unspoken code might come to bear the awful Disdainful Eye, whereupon the shame of it all would force a relocation.

Ah, but the beady little evil eye shone over the impeccably shaven high-cheekboned rosiness framing the pursed, nearly non-existent lips of the impossibly perfectly silver haired gent in the lightly starched Polo shirt, cords and slightly worn but never dirty Topsiders ain't gonna shame our dude. Neighbors? Close the gates and release the hounds!

In the process of scouting the outer realms of this little sultanate, I'd noticed that in one spot the boundary ran fairly close to one of the neighbor's houses, within about 50' or so. "Trouble," I thought.

In the second day of the job I began to think, "So far, so good." As with those early results in New Orleans, I thought we'd dodged a bullet. Not so. Along 3 pm or so came the call, announced by the secretary, "Line two, (X's) neighbor."

Oh, boy! Now, the boss handles the VIP stuff, especially the (sports figure)-types, and so it was his call. I only listened to one end of the ensuing conversation, but I've done enough of these to gather the gist.

First comes the fishing. "I understand there's an ordinance that fences have to be built off the easements, or two feet (or some such) off the property line." Not true, except in certain cases, most of them having to do with exposures along streets and sidewalks. In one such conversation with a neighbor he told me that he was certain of such a rule, and that he ought to know, because he is a LAWYER. The unsaid part of that was that I, being a hippie-looking and somewhat begrimed by midday working class joe, was probably clueless and someone who might be intimidated by such an identification. Having dealt with these issues for twenty years or so by that time I was quite confident that I knew more about them than nearly any lawyer, and so my response was, "Ahhh, but are you a FENCE lawyer?"

He got the point and off he went, hopefully to reflect upon the ease with which his self-realized mystique had led him to judge a book by its cover.

Back to the crank de jour.

Having exhausted the only contrived argument he could come up with on the spot, our neighbor has nothing left to assert but emotion. "We've never had the need for fences before. I hate fences! I can't believe I have to look out of my kitchen window at this hideous fence every day!"

I recognize that these moments of uncharacteristic emotion represent breakthroughs for these folk, and at such times I might feel a twinge of sympathy. I don't like fences either. I think a far greater portion of the land should be common. I think we should live in clustered population centers of a more vertical design with centralized transportation and employment zones, and that the the greater portion of the land should be parklands, rather than the sprawling suburban nightmare of parceled isolation. But then I remember that these are the guys who zone the most attractive and accessible land for themselves, while stiffs like me have to move to the exurbs and buy more gas and waste away more of our lives driving past their pristine little hideaways on our way to work. Sympathy quickly wanes.

With no courage to confront the second party and having spent his enthusiasm for browbeating the third party, the first party gives up, no doubt feeling incredibly foolish in the utter spectacle of it all. The inevitable despoiling of his Hobbit hole continues.

Looks the same either way from my house.

Love Won Out Conference on Homosexuality Comes to Birmingham

2005-09-19T19:02:00.000-05:00

Focus on the Family will bring its international Love Won Out conference to Birmingham on September 17. Metropolitan Church of God will host the one-day event, designed to educate and equip attendees on the issues surrounding homosexuality and provide help for those struggling – and those whose loved ones struggle – with unwanted same-sex attractions.

At what point do wants become unwanted? Anyway, this is an example of what Family.org can do for you, assuming that you keep sending those dollars in so that they can go to feed the five young brats of a Glenn T. Stanton while he continues to ignore them while gallivanting around the country hawking his latest book on Christian family ideals. Instead of helping his no doubt besieged young wife get the little cherubs off to school, here he is on my radio at 7:00 am to tell us that kids are in trouble without the solid influence of a man in the house.

Study after study after study shows, he says, that children from a house with one man and one woman will become happier, more productive members of society. And who exactly is the control group for these studies? Who are the one man and one woman married households that do not have the enormous economic and legal advantages that accompany marriage that we can compare same sex couples to? Who are the hetero couples whose relationship cannot be celebrated in the church that can be rightly compared to homosexual couples? Could it be that the biggest problem facing same sex or single parents is that people like Glenn T. Stanton can't seem to stay out of their faces?

But lets put that aside for now, and argue the point in terms the Christian right can understand, or at least find familiar.

Stanton says the democratic thing would be for society to validate (and codify) the majority opinion that because children are better off living with Ozzie and Harriet―according to whatever―it shouldn't be that same sex people marry and/or raise children.

But wait a minute. Aren't these people the same who insist that the democratic element of American capitalism is not that all share equally, but that all have an opportunity to excel in the American Dream? It does not follow from this that the democratic outcome would be for same-sex or single parents to be denied the opportunity to raise children simply because certain of them are starting behind the eight ball. Is Family.org saying we should be in the practice of legislating out opportunity?

The awful truth is...that's exactly it, and only the beginning.

Over and over and over again, these people have democracy coming out both sides of their mouths.

A Kinder, Gentler Thought

2005-09-16T22:16:00.000-05:00

Bear with me, this will take a little setting up.

Remember the infamous seven minutes the President sat in the Florida schoolhouse while an unknown number of planes were out there continuing the attack of 9/11? I was mesmerized watching the president in Moore's film, wondering exactly what it was I was seeing.

And this is what I thought I saw. Anger. Not a stunned, then demanding of details and procedural options reaction one might expect. A knowing kind of anger. Why didn't he immediately head for the consul of his backers, of the nearby Rove et al? I saw a man who had been hoodwinked, a man who knew exactly who was responsible for the act and exactly who was responsible for telling him that a miscellaneous terrorist act or two would serve to further the Christian and neo-con agenda, as it certainly has. I saw a man who might explode if he were to confront the advisors who did not count on the murderous efficiency of the terrorists.

And so he sat and counted ten, and who could blame him? I think the reaction was something like, "This isn't the way I was told it would be, this is bullshit."

The other night Jon Stewart, on the Daily Show, made a big, goofy spectacle out of Bush apologizing and accepting the blame for his administration regarding the Katrina mess. Stewart was right, it was a big deal, and a strategy I don't think the party hacks liked it one bit.

And now the President comes on like the next FDR, for cryin' out loud, even with a program called the WRA. Conservatives are screaming and Bush just don't seem to give a golly. Listen to this:

I also want to know all the facts about the government response to Hurricane Katrina. The storm involved a massive flood, a major supply and security operation, and an evacuation order affecting more than a million people. It was not a normal hurricane -- and the normal disaster relief system was not equal to it. Many of the men and women of the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the United States military, the National Guard, Homeland Security, and state and local governments performed skillfully under the worst conditions. Yet the system, at every level of government, was not well-coordinated, and was overwhelmed in the first few days. It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice.

"Greater federal authority"? Holy crap!

Now, Rush Limbaugh and all those he inspires or marches with dismiss all criticism of the President as being hate driven. We hate the man, it's that simple they say. I don't hate him. I don't like the job he's doing, and I especially don't like the kind of philosophy that's behind him, but I see him sort of like the frat guy who gives you a hard time while he always seems to have a football player or two on his wing. I think he's running with a bad crowd, and I wonder if he may have more compassion that a lot of people give him credit for. It has been hard to tell.

I wonder if he's beginning to realize time is running short. I wonder if he's realizing that he has the power to put his compassion ahead of his conservatism. I wonder―and this is way out there―if he could be the anti-Reagan. And I wonder how long he could get away with it.

Stuff happens.

The Zero Sum of all Wisdom

2005-09-14T20:33:00.000-05:00

Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and
carried out in demagogues. Mark Twain

The "love it or leave it" crowd may not look too kindly on several of my last posts and others in that I criticize the notion of American Exceptionalism, the notion that America and Americans are on the one true path, and as such not to be subjected to limitations on our foreign policy we would expect to impose on other less morally "enlightened" societies.

When I was twelve years old, this made sense.

And so we come to that monumental waste of governmental, media and citizens' time, the Senate confirmation hearings for "X". The ins stroke so sweetly and the outs twist the candidate's words from about eighty years ago and about two weeks from now the vote everybody stashed away about 6 weeks ago will get dusted off and sent down to the podium. We learn nothing new about the candidate, because he is of the extreme inner beltway that all pols ascribe to some day, and as such the convention is that he will not be required to answer to anything if he chooses not to. You or I would get an entirely different treatment from such a committee. You or I would face jail time should we want to avoid embarrassing ourselves or to protect our employment, family or friends from the prying party line invoked queries of the chosen.

Getting back to the point, A Senator "R" started his bit of this circus with a long winded description of how the Court has in recent times made reference to laws in other countries in the formulation of opinion. This seems to have disturbed the Senator greatly, in that such foreign thinking has no place in an American institution intended to interpret American law according to the American founding fathers' American constitution.

And just where does Senator "R" think all them high-falutin' ideas in our constitution came from? Thin air? No, he knows damn well that America doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that our laws have always been somewhat influenced by international thinking. He would be a fool to actually think that we should ignore the wisdom of the greater part of humanity in the formulation of our legal concepts.

But if you're fool enough to believe it―if you'll be impressed by gratuitous American Exceptionalism―Senator "R" isn't above hitchin' up his britches, puffin' up the chest and givin' it his best Foghorn Leghorn crowin' for American law (in Latin) for American folk.

Don't think for a minute that I am anti-American. I love Americans and America, but it would be absurd to think we have all the answers for anything, including the law. Senator "R" knows this, as he didn't become Senator by playing the fool...

He became Senator by playing others for the fool.

The Plot Against America, a mini-review

2005-09-13T18:05:00.000-05:00

I finished The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. It's been a long time since I read Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint, books I highly recommend to anyone who wants to know exactly what us old farts are referring to when we speak of the sexual revolution of the late sixties.

Times, alas, have changed and this more "mature" Roth has written in this latest book of the struggles of several families in 1940's Jewish Newark, New Jersey. Roth starts out from a more or less historical locale and then travels a timeline of a parallel world in which rightists oust Roosevelt and sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler in order to stay out of the war.

The villain of the book is none other than Charles Lindbergh, and Roth draws from quotes of this and other historical figures in imagining a deeply anti-Semitic culture taking hold in America, complete with an Office of American Absorption being led by a tragically ambitious social climbing rabbi.

The protagonist of this work is an adolescent boy, who sees his family and his life crashing down all around him as the government begins to create programs designed to decentralize and disenfranchise the Jewish community.

Roth maintains that this tale is not intended to be an allegory of the currently rising conservatism, but this book certainly has all the elements of a classic roman à clef, or thinly veiled "fiction" intended to depict historical events. Well, we all have our crosses to bear―so to speak―but the man has a way of getting into the head of the child, and that is when I remember the very real characters with very real demons that peopled Roth's earlier works.

One passage that touched me was young Philip's description of his father's breaking down upon learning that his foster child had lost a leg fighting for Canada in the war:

It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another's
tears are more unbearable than one's own.

Such description is why we write, and why we read. To remember when such a thing happened, and to see these words and know that we do not travel alone in this world, is why people so often refer to a book as their old friend.

It was nice catching up with Mr. Roth.

Stickers and Stones

2005-09-11T10:02:00.000-05:00

If you travel on US Rte.6 from Cleveland west along the Lake Erie shore you will come across a very patriotic place called, appropriately ignorant of things French, Lorain County. For miles along this road there are at least a thousand full-size American flags, one strapped to each and every utility pole. By the end of this extravaganza, I was numb with pride.

Canadians don't do bumper stickers. They don't feel compelled to push the three word phrase that encapsulates their political bent into your face at every chance they get. They don't strap two Maple Leafs to their pickup truck unless the national hockey team is in a big match. They don't have stickers in their windows proclaiming themselves to be heavily armed.

Canadians don't have "I support the troops but what I really mean is that I support the war" stickers and they don't proclaim themselves saved or in a really tight relationship with Jesus, either.

They seem to require less self-convincing.

Disclaimer

2005-09-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

The previous post was sarcasm, as opposed to the act of advocating secession, which many might find treasonous. The humorless are advised to ignore le sequoit altogether.

The next post or two may contain observations made while on a trip to Toronto, Niagara and Cleveland, etc. I love my country. America is the greatest civilization since the Creation of the (is it okay if we call it the?) universe. Americans are the most greatest people to have ever walked the planet. Americans are the bearers of the beacons of morality, truth and justice.

It's a puzzlement that we are the world's most enthusiastic consumers of air fresheners, as clearly our shit doesn't stink.

Big, Boxy America

2005-09-04T22:51:00.000-05:00

Was planning a little car trip and yet I procrastinated enough to be looking for an oil change on Saturday afternoon in preparation for a post Labor Day four-in-the-morning departure, necessary in order to get around the Chi-town horn by rush hour and on our way to Toronto. Well, it turns out my usual spot was closed at 3:15 in the afternoon, so today I woke up and headed for the spaciously splendid, superbly centered Wal Mart as a last resort.

On approach to the auto center of this grand edifice were numerous lanes, two of them distinctly marked for the "express lube" category of unsuspecting patrons. We parked ourselves at the end of a perfectly marked ramp and waited. Nothing. Were we supposed to leave the car and enter the building? The Quick Lube place would be all over us now. Nothing.

So I went inside. One guy was trying to sell tires to someone and the other one was on the phone. After twenty minutes of watching these two go in and out of this little office without so much as an acknowledgement of my existence, eventually one of them took my order. I'd have liked to have gone outside to tell my little Hun what was going on, but I couldn't get out without a button press by one of those pretending that I don't exist. Interestingly, they couldn't get out either without fumbling for the right key when there are about eight thousand scanning devices throughout this building.

The main dude handed me a ticket with a UPC code and proudly informed me that I could check on the status of my "express" oil change utilizing any scanner from a check out or price check clerk in the store. Wonderful.

We went in and got a bouquet of flowers for my mom, a certain unmentionable and an extra book for the trip (The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold), and then we headed on back to claim the Focus. The hood was still up and they were apparently getting around to scrounging up the correct oil for this exotic model. No less than one hour from the time we pulled up to these "express" lanes we finally headed out, but not before the dopey part-timer doing our 15 point "expert" lube job had to call over his supervisor to make sure we had enough oil in our car.

The Waltons. You see, just as with the case of The Orleans catastrophe, you have these Reaganite, BMA laden, neo-con skin flints thinking they can apply their economic model to any old thing, with often disastrous results. Everyone manages but no one leads. Everyone makes do with less, and less is the result.

Ok, so a Texan is rough-ridin' the country, and an Oklahoman is running FEMA, and an Arkansan(?) is running the company store. When did all this happen? What happened to good old Yankee know-how!

Wisconsin is pretty self-sufficient. We have lots of fresh water, fertile land, Angus steer and dairy cows. We are the world's leading producer of if not cheese, cranberries. We also have a nice big pipeline to Alberta's oil fields. For what do we possibly need the South and all this hair-brained "leadership" they keep foisting on us?

I say we secede, maybe take Minnesota and the UP of Michigan with us and become the Canadian Province of New Scandinavia. If the German Americans don't like it they can keep Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha and go join the flatlanders in Illinois. Half of Kenosha and Racine are commuters to Illinois anyway, and since they no longer make beer in Milwaukee I haven't figured out what the hell else they do there.

Of course, we would have to import a few million Harley Davidsons a year, but at least we could make them put mufflers on them.

Me and the missus, we're gonna head up to Toronto and feel it out. If you don't hear from me, I've gone illegal.

The Festering

2005-09-01T22:22:00.000-05:00

Sometimes David Brooks, for all his ignorance of life among the ordinary, can get things very right:

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

As the police barricade themselves in for another night in New Orleans we see video after video of desperate people, and many of those who not only have no respect for the law, but suddenly find themselves in a position not to fear it either.

How many people in this crowd, to whatever degree justifiably, are wondering if they being left to rot in New Orleans because they are black? This anger will grow, and at the same time their plight will forever worsen for the violent images.

As anger grows, pols, and understandably, predominately the ins, plead this is not the time for politics. It is hard, though―so hard―to keep quiet when you hear something like this:

I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.
George Bush

Apparently this was true of just about anybody he knows well enough to have landed a job in departments like Homeland Security and agencies like FEMA.

The Daily Koz ran this quote:

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however--the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level--more than eight feet below in places--so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't--yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City.
National Geographic, October, 2004

2,800 Guardsman are on the ground today in New Orleans. 30,000 are said to be "On the way".

This is the forecast of the track of Katrina from last Friday:

Here is some text from a NOAA advisory from the same hour:

THE OFFICIAL FORECAST BRINGS THE CORE OF THE INTENSE HURRICANE OVER THE NORTH CENTRAL GULF OF MEXICO IN 48 HOURS OR SO. IT IS WORTH NOTING THAT THE GUIDANCE SPREAD HAS DECREASED AND MOST OF THE RELIABLE NUMERICAL MODEL TRACKS ARE NOW CLUSTERED BETWEEN THE EASTERN COAST OF LOUISIANA AND THE COAST OF MISSISSIPPI. THIS CLUSTERING INCREASES THE CONFIDENCE IN THE FORECAST

Six days later, help is still "on the way".

Glubya, Glubya

2005-08-31T08:04:00.000-05:00

Sunday it was apparent that there were not even enough resources or planning to load people into the Superdome, and I wondered how in the world we would be able to respond to the type of emergency that was possible―that had been in fact predicted fairly correctly―in New Orleans.

I heard the Governor of Louisiana state that 4000 National Guard were mobilized in Natchez. At this point the possibility of this outcome had been steadily increasing for at least four or five days. I looked up the response to Andrew, a disaster of much less scope than this. 22,000 troops and 7,000 National Guard.

And now the worst case scenario is reality. As the waters rush in through levees the engineers have no resources to address, people who chose to stay, had no place to go or had no means to escape huddle at the cesspool that is the Superdome, cling to roofs or drown in petrochemical waste in the streets or in their attics.

Thousands more bake on the concrete pavement of Interstate 10, on a highway that has remained accessible from the west throughout. The Governor, Homeland Security and the Mayor have no idea where they would evacuate the people to even if they had the means to do it. Before long it will occur to the mobs that the only provisions left are located at the hotels in which reporters, valiant employees and stranded tourists sit and wonder if evacuation will come on time.

And there are no images of trucks rolling into town, no swarms of helicopters dropping supplies and addressing the dikes, no details of plans to deal with any of this. How can this be? How can people in America die of the elements on an interstate highway?

There is news as I write that overnight, on this 7th day since this hurricane was predicted to intensify before landing on the gulf coast, on this fifth day since the greatest likelihood was that Katrina would strike New Orleans as at least a Cat 4 or 5, there is word that some military response is being organized. We are sending the Navy, by slow boat.

As the survivors baked yesterday in high 90° temps and hung their asses over the rail of the Superdome to take a dump, where was our leader? In California, giving a war speech and pluckin' strings with some country singer. His words?

Our teams and equipment are in place and we're beginning to move in the help
that people need.

Really! Where is that place? It's not on Interstate 10. Fear not, though, for in Norfolk the freaking Navy is almost on the way.

My Mistake

2005-08-29T20:43:00.000-05:00

Righties are pooh-poohing the notion that the guard may be too depleted to secure several major metropolitan areas.

3,000 are already "activated" with at least that many in reserve. Homeland security seems satisfied with that number, and therefore libbies like me just don't get it again.

For Hurricane Andrew, a much smaller storm, there were 22,000 troops and 7,000 national guard.

It amazes me how little we know about the scope of the damage, and how difficult it is to find a source of such knowledge. It looks not to be the catastrophe many feared, but certainly very, very bad and quite extensive.

I hope I'm wrong, but I have little faith in the current administration's ability to coordinate recovery from this disaster.

The Vacation is Over

2005-08-28T18:33:00.000-05:00

As I watch coverage of Katrina, the scenarios become more and more dire. This is what folks are saying:

Up to 50,000 dead. (perhaps eventually)
Most of the city of New Orleans inhabitable for perhaps months, as this saucer of a city fills with petro-chemical waste and sewage along with the 25' of flood water.
Up to a million homeless, five times that following Andrew.
Massive power outages over Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama of unknown duration.
Production responsible for 20 to 25 per cent of our oil consumption dead in the water―long term disruption of production, refining and distribution.
The Mississippi River closed to traffic.

But look at the waves and check out the wind bands.

And at the Superdome, a place that fills for a football game in two hours, poor black people who own no cars and have nowhere to go wait with their elderly relatives in the 40 MPH winds and increasing rain bands to be thoroughly screened before entering.

Because there are not enough National Guard left to do even this.

No one yet has pointed that out but, unless there is a miracle of miracles, this shortage is going to become very apparent as Katrina, shaping up to be the worst disaster of our history, continues her way.

It's not called the National Guard for nothing.

Intelligent Design, My Eye

2005-08-28T12:43:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, I do have qualms accepting carte blanche evolution as it is described to me. Without my having given much deep thought to the algorithmic reality of such a process, intuition suggests that an awful lot seems to have gotten done in the way of species' development in a difficultly comprehended amount of time. If I, deeply agnostic, have a hard time with this, is it easy to see how readily believers can be turned from Darwin's "satanic" notion to alternative "theory", significantly to that of Intelligent Design.

It still a decently big leap, but if the self-appointed angels of the Lord call "jump!" it doesn't matter how far, the flock will do it. Religion has always led humanity off on some strange tangents, the happiest result of which is that such behavior remains harmless and the flock is well enough off the beaten path so as not to impede progress for the rest of us.

That's all fine and good, until a time when conservatism takes such a deep hold on society that fundamental religion becomes viable as a means of control.

And so your local angel on up to George II, the Crusader, clamor for the resurrection of the theory, "Adam beget Cain, who beget Gandhi, who beget Iggy Pop." Let us teach creationism and evolution side by side.

The evidence for creationism? A strangely convoluted text. And faith.

So knowledge is to be this strange synthesis of wisdom and faith, and if this seems loony to you just remember:

God created man in his own image. In God's image he created
him; male and female he created them.

Maybe God couldn't see so well, cuz these eyes he gave us are for crap. Eagles' eyes can zoom in and out with far greater field of vision. Octopuses' eyes have photoreceptors facing the light source while ours face backwards on a precariously placed retina, an arrangement that cost my little Hun's insurance company about $45,000 before the doctors basically gave up and welded the retina on with lasers.

I hit the golf ball farther than I can see it, but also need prismatic readers to focus at two feet, because at 45 the muscles that bend my eyes were already tiring. If I stand for too long my back gets sore, leading me to understand why this imaged God seems to be such a crabass.

Why hasn't God stepped in and done something about the fact that we have managed to figure out how to live much longer than our design seems to have been maximized for?

Maybe God got cancer and died.

Maybe he had Alzheimer's already when he created us.

At any rate, I'm not all that impressed with the design effort, which is, I guess, why they don't call it Supremely Intelligent Design. It doesn't seem like we're aiming all that high here, but hey, It's good enough for the masses.

Knock off all that science stuff, just gives people ideas. Keep it simple, stupid. Now off you go, proles.

Arbeit Macht Frei