 |
|
|
My Town Essays
I have had a weekly column on the Mytown website since early summer of 2005, where Norla Antinoro has put together a pretty good collection of essayists and humorists to comment on matters American, Canadian, and International.
Here are some of the essays that have appeared at MyTown.
| The Mouse that Roared | 4/5/08 | Putsch has kindly offered to send more
troops into Afghanistan – a “significant” number, above and beyond the
31,000 already there. Given that the only real differences between
Afghanistan and Iraq are those of scale, and the fact that America still
has a few allies in Afghanistan, this is discouraging news. Even more disturbing is the fact that Putsch made this commitment for 2009, when he will have left office. In short, he has made a commitment that is likely to blow up in the face of the next president by tying him to a losing cause. The Bushes are notorious for this kind of crap. George senior, in his final weeks in office, committed American troops to what was supposed to be a mercy mission in Somalia. You might wonder why George sent troops do do such a thing when he could have put it before the UN, or simply sent aid workers with tons of food. It left Clinton with a fairly large contingent of troops in a place where they weren’t particularly welcome (the Somalis wondered why all the firepower just to drop off some flour and corn) and after a while, “mission creep” set in. In August, the US raided a local warlord, provoking his ire and a formal declaration of war. |
| Who Put the Bomb in the Bomb-She-Bomb? | 3/29/08 |
An inventory. An inventory of nuclear arms. Now, ever since 1945, the government has said that they recognized that atomic bombs were the sort of thing you should keep close tabs on, what with their potential for destruction, and the propensity of certain parties to want to destroy things. Mostly they had in mind the Russians, because the Russians didn’t recognize the supremacy of the free market, but most people figured out, communist or not, that atomic bombs weren’t the sort of thing you wanted to leave lying about for the neighborhood kids to play with. There was a pretty big uproar when a plane with four bombs aboard crashed into water several miles deep. Both the USSR and the US put in years trying to figure out how to get at that plane. |
| Hanging Around at Easter | 3/23/08 | It’s Easter, and all around the world
people got up early to watch the sun rise. You can point out to them
that the sun rises like that every morning (except for certain times of
the year above the Arctic Circle and below the Antarctic circle, offer
void in Delaware and Vermont, your mileage may vary), and what’s more,
it can vary from an actinic burst of sharp light on an equatorial desert
to a sullen lightening of slate gray clouds over London, which is why
some people get up early all the time and watch the sun rise. You can
also point out that while it’s pretty close to due east, that’s only
because we’re near the equinox, and that at other times it tends to
wander around a bit, so don’t count on it for navigating out of that
desert, or even London. Unless you understand the basic motions of earth
and the solar system, there’s no way of telling where it will come up
next, really. Unless you do it the grunt way and notice it follows the
same pattern every year. But if you do point these things out to people, don’t expect an effusive response, especially from the depressingly high percentage for whom these particular revelations will be, well, revelations. They will tell you that you aren’t treating the occasion with the appropriate gravity. Since you may as well be hung for sheep as lambs, you can correct them, pointing out that while the earth’s gravity, combined with the distance between the earth and the moon, and the moon’s gravity, is a good way of telling where the moon will be twenty-five years, six months, four days, eighteen hours and 52 minutes from now, you really need the sun’s gravity, and the knowledge that the earth is roughly 93 million miles from the sun, to get a good feel for where sunrise is going to be on July the fifth. This won’t make you any friends, either, and if that troubles you, I’m sure your local bookstore has all sorts of self-help books that will make you popular and in the more decent bookstores, they’ll also make you some good coffee. |
| Sub Prime Time | 3/15/08 | Remember that huge rally the market had
Wednesday, after the Fed agreed to another massive bailout? The Fed
underwrote nearly a quarter trillion in subprime mortgage bonds – you
remember those little fellows, the bad debts repackaged as assets. The
same ones that caused the crisis to spread in the first place, that’s
right. OK, we’re subsidizing them to the tune of a quarter trillion. That’s in addition to the nearly half a trillion we’ve dumped in so far to try and stabilize the situation (ie, replace the money the brokers stole before the owners notice it’s gone and dozens of bank runs ensue). The market swooned with relief and shot up 400 points. Then it just sort of stalled out, waiting for the next hammer blow to strike. That came early Friday, when Bear Sterns announced they were basically broke. One of the biggest investment banking firms in the business. So the Fed underwrote them, to the tune of another $200 billion. By now, we’re starting to look at a pretty sizeable chunk of the economy, and even the dumb bastards who think if they are nice to millionaires then millionaires will be nice to them are beginning to wonder just where all that money is coming from, what it’s doing, and where it’s going. |
| "Teach Your Children Well..." | 3/9/08 | Bad law can result in bad decisions.
Californians found that out this week when an Appeals Court ruled that
parents wishing to homeschool their children must have a teaching
credential. I don’t blame the court for this. The facts of the case were clear enough: two of the children had filed for declaratory relief, citing emotional and physical abuse by the father. That it was the intent of the parents to keep the children at home from school in order to conceal abuse was made evident in the father’s statement that he kept his children home because “educating children outside the home exposes them to ‘snitches.’” The findings in the lower court trial were that all eight children in that family had been homeschooled, solely by the mother, and the lower court opined that the quality of the education they received was “lousy,” “meager,” and “bad.” Article IX, section 1 of California’s Constitution states: “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement.” The State Legislature, to this end, passed the education code, which required that parents either send their children to private or public school or have them taught at home by people credentialed to teach each grade. Most people think homeschooling is an unalloyed right in California. It isn’t. You need a license to teach. |
| "I Solemnly Swear..." | 3/2/08 | Marianne Kearney-Brown lost her job the
other day. It wasn’t much of a job; it was part-time, paid a lousy $700
a month, and consisted of teaching basic math to the moronic offspring
of well-heeled parents at the local California State University. She didn’t lose her job because she abused a student for not knowing that 4 x 3 = 3 x 4, or for not knowing that is the transitive property of multiplication. There’s no reason to believe she was anything other than an excellent teacher. She didn’t insert politics into her arithmetic lessons, teaching, for instance, that odd numbers were liberal and even numbers were conservative, and therefore that two odd numbers always added up to one even number. It’s unlikely that her syllabus gave her much opportunity to opine on the daemonic possession of Charles Darwin. No, she got fired for changing the loyalty oath that the University required of her so she wouldn’t do something unpatriotic like praise French cheese or claim hockey is better than baseball. Or whatever it is loyalty oaths are supposed to do. She didn’t have any problem with the oath itself, which is the standard “protect and defend the Constitution” boilerplate. Most people are willing to swear to support the constitution, and the less they know about the constitution, the happier they are to sign. (Case in point: the people who fired her had to sign the same oath, and neither they nor their lawyer know much about it.) But, a lifelong Quaker, she crossed out “swear,” leaving the constitutionally-mandated option of “affirm,” and inserted the words “non-violently” in front of the “protect and defend” language. |
| Campaign 2008 1 | 2/23/08 | It’s beginning to look like a campaign
now. That’s a pity. Serbia is exploding. The American embassy was torched, Serbs are in an uproar, and the US and the USSR, Incorporated, are glaring at one another over a newly independent Kosovo. The US wants Kosovo to be independent; the Russians don’t. Everyone’s wondering what the future of Cuba will be now that Fidel Castro is stepping down. (If the Cubans are smart, they’ll keep their distance from the US; they need only compare the standard of living, and yes, the freedom of a typical Cuban with his counterpart in any other Caribbean country in order to see that the US has little or no interest in their welfare). Kenya keeps threatening to turn into the next Rwanda. The US claims that Iran was toying with the notion of building nuclear weapons at one point, which begs the question, who was providing them with the technology to make that more than a pipe dream? Pakistan? Speaking of which, Musharraf acts every bit like a tinhorn dictator who is rallying the palace guard in order to maintain control despite a popular insurrection. Pakistan, of course, IS a nuclear power. I still haven’t figured out why America thinks it’s a good idea for Pakistan to have nukes. At home, the economy is still doing a thrilling reenactment of the second hour of David Cameron’s Titanic; the part where the captain and the ship’s designer and other crew members are standing around discussing whether there is a problem, and the ship is beginning to make odd little creaking noises while the ballroom dancing continues. Oh, and America still has nearly three million people in jail. In Britain, with a fifth of the population, they are beginning to think they’ve gone too far with the “throw away the key” mentality because there are – wait for it – a total of 86,000 people in jail. Or, if you prefer, “gaol.” |
| Star Light, Star Bright... | 2/17/08 | As has been noted elsewhere, there’s a
pretty big difference between a large unguided satellite tumbling
helplessly out of a known orbit and with a transponder that tells ground
control, “Here I am, Here I am, Here I am” and an enemy ICBM that, even
with a known target, can veer and toss out confusing and ambiguous
signals. It’s like comparing a safari in Africa a hundred years ago with the captive bird hunts that the vile Dick Cheney considers “sporting.” Shooting a helpless bird that can’t dodge your bullets just isn’t the same as tracking an animal that is simultaneously tracking you, and has a fair-to-middling chance of getting you first. Doesn’t matter how much Dick Cheney wags his little American flag at us and declares it noble. It isn’t. The US has been chasing after the “Star Wars” dream since the days of Carter, and while the computer and rocket technology has advanced greatly over that time, it has barely moved the notion, from the realm of “complete joke and utter waste of time and money” to the realm of “possible, but needs a lot more work.” |
| Springboard for Hitler | 2/9/08 | Ann Coulter, speaking before the Young
Americans for Freedom, greeted the nominee-presumptive of the GOP by
comparing him to Hitler. Now, there isn’t much doubt in the minds of most people that Coulter is a head case. I’ve often thought it was pretty disgraceful how the trash right pimps this poor sick woman out to howl her venom at the universe. The YAF aren’t people you would want for neighbors. Most are pampered and useless, vicious little preppies with brittle steel in them. Cheerleaders for the occupation and torture, you won’t find many vets among them. They have better things to do. Like pimp out Ann Coulter. Coulter, of course, likes to play the disingenuous and coy bit. She sneered that backing Hillary Clinton against John McCain would be much like Winston Churchill backing Stalin against Hitler. (Apparently she didn’t feel like mentioning that Stalin and the US were allies in that war, too, and that without the USSR, the west probably would have lost in Europe) She then simpered, “I'm not equating Hillary Clinton to Stalin, and if I did I apologize to Stalin's descendants... I'm not comparing McCain to Hitler. Hitler had a coherent tax policy.” |
| Superbowled! | 2/3/08 | The power is back on (we had a bit of
snow, about fourteen feet in the past month, and so the lights got a bit
iffy from time to time), but I still won’t be watching the Super Bowl.
Now, this isn’t a big deal for me, since I wasn’t planning on watching
it anyway. Or rather, I might tune in at some point near the end of the
game and watch the last ten minutes or so if it’s a close game and I
don’t have something else to do. OK. I admit it. Football bores the hell out of me. But, of course, other people find it more interesting. I respect that. I like hockey and footie, which most of my neighbors find boring. Most of my neighbors are going to be a little upset this afternoon, and it won’t just be cause of the ten foot berm the snowplow left at the end of their driveway. Our local cable provider, Northland, and Fox have some sort of dispute going, and with talks broken down, Northland has been intermittently dropping Fox and inserting some other cable station, usually FX. Fox is carrying the Superbowl, and Northland will not be carrying Fox this weekend. So no Superbowl for the folks on cable, which is most of the people in town. I don’t know what the pissing match was about. I heard that Fox wanted to quadruple the rate they charged Northland for the right to carry the Fox stations (all the Fox stations were dropped on the 1st of the month). I don’t know if that’s true or not, and of course, both corporations are keeping mum, reasoning that it’s nobody’s fucking business what the issues are. |
| South Carolina Speaks | 1/26/08 | With results coming in on the first
really important primary of this election season, Barack Obama has won
by a startling margin, getting about double the vote of Hillary Clinton
and all but ending the viability of the Edwards campaign. Why is South Carolina important and Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan weren’t? Because SC has a more varied population, and it is also the first of the really deep red states to weigh in. First, SC isn’t as red as it used to be. In the GOP primary last week, 442,918 voted for Republican candidates. The state has 2,495,750 registered voters. Nearly 525,000 voted in the Democratic primary. The second thing we notice beyond the results themselves is that the exit polls show a huge discrepancy in voter gender. According to CNN, 61% of the voters were women, and only 39% were men. In the GOP primary, won by John McCain the week prior, the gender breakdown was 51-49 male. A difference of 51-49 for women in a state where males still dominate would have been enormous. Sixty-one percent is off the charts. Now, the common wisdom was that women would vote for Hillary, and blacks would support Obama. So the lopsided gender vote should have supported Hillary, giving her a big win. Obviously, that didn’t happen. In fact, both genders voted for Obama at exactly the same rate: 54%. The only loser in the discrepancy was Edwards, who only got 16% of the female vote |
| Jumpstarting Limos | 1/17/08 | Putsch’s economic stimulus plan – which
is mostly plan and no stimulus – works like this. He approaches the gleaming black limousine that is the American economy, which is sitting with its hood up. He has some jumper cables in his hands. He leans into the engine compartment, which prevents anyone from noticing that the engine is gone. He slaps the cable clasps together, producing some bright sparks. He makes some engine sounds with his lips, and steps back, hurriedly slapping the hood down. He then announces to the waiting media types that it’s purring like a kitten, and invites them all to hop in for a ride. They do so, and their added weight causes the limo, which is on a slight downhill, to begin inching forward. Putsch jumps in behind the wheel and invites the reporters to examine the gleaming and lavish appointments, the televisions and leather seats and above all, the well-stocked bar. They ooh and ahh in admiration, and a few glance out the windows and observe that they are, in fact, moving forward, albeit slowly. They all then pronounce Putsch to be an economic genius who has, once again, saved the American economy while giving them free booze, except for Paul Krugman, who cranes his head looking to see if the limousine might crunch harmlessly off a brick wall instead of going over the approaching cliff. I was overstating the case when I said the stimulus package was “mostly plan”. It’s not even that at this point. All we know about it is that Putsch wants it to be $145 billion. Apparently Bernie Bernanke thinks that a package that is 1% of the GDP is the precise amount needed to get the economy chugging forward again. Bernanke, a libertarian acoloyte of Alan Greenspan, is an expert on these things because he was an aide to Greenspan who, um, got us into this mess in the first place. That’s good enough for Putsch, who apparently has already realized he can’t fix the economy by bombing it. |
| The Putsch for War | 1/13/08 | The radio station was playing “Knee Deep
in the Big Muddy, and the Big Fool Said to ‘Push On’” the other day. You don’t hear it very often, this song that the Smothers Brothers turned into a hymn against the Vietnam war. When radio stations play it, the local bucketheads, those ignorant pseudo-patriots of the far right, yammer that it’s not “patriotic” and if the station is owned by Clear Channel, they cave to the toy nazis. Still, we’re at a point where even the bucketheads are having second thoughts about a third occupation of a distant land where we are not wanted. The first two haven’t exactly covered America in glory, what with torture and abuse of the civilian population and the disgraceful antics of the contemptible Halliburton. Millions of Americans flocked to the admin propaganda that the surge was working and peace was coming, and firmly ignored the inner, more truthful voice that told them the occupations were still a quagmire and the reduction in violence was only a passing thing. Not that the GOP benefitted from that; it just allowed people the luxury of noticing just how badly they had been screwed by the GOP economic policies over the past generation. They can’t use their usual wedge issues, because religion will send their base to Huckabee, race will be seen as an attack on Obama, sexism an attack on Hillary, and xenophobia will wipe out what’s left of their Hispanic base (which used to be very Republican until they realized that when Republicans said “illegal immigrants” they usually meant “anyone with brown skin”). So war it is! The GOP realizes that they lose if people focus on the war, and because they’ve fucked up nearly everything else, they will lose if people focus on anything else instead. |
| The Iowa Factor | 1/6/08 | Every analyist and spinmeister in the
country is examining the Iowa caucuses and making pronouncements on What
It All Means. The reality, of course, is that it doesn’t mean much. It’s a bit like Spring Training in that it gives you an idea of the relative strengths and weaknesses of all the major league baseball teams, but doesn’t tell you a thing about who the World Series champion will be seven months later. That Barack Obama won is a credit to Iowans, and proof that America is ready for a black president. No matter what happens between now and November, that is a step forward. The Democratic race is still up in the air, and about the only thing that got settled was that Dodd and Biden won’t be freezing their asses off in New Hampshire today. They’re out. It’s a bit like when the Seattle Pilots folded after one season; it was a bit of a shame, but it didn’t really have any impact on baseball. (Look, it’s snowing like hell here. Do you BLAME me if I’m longing for spring training?) Everyone’s talking about what a setback Iowa was for Hillary Clinton, but I’m guessing she’ll do well in New Hampshire on Tuesday, and that will be the end of that talk except among the Hillary haters, who will whine that “she didn’t deserve the Presidency because she came in third in Iowa” for the next 75 years. Fact is, most new presidents managed to lose in Iowa in their campaigns. It’s no big deal. Hillary got her nose tweaked, but she’s not dead. |
| 2008 | 12/30/07 | I came up with a great idea for a column
that was a retrospective of 2007. I wrote about 70 columns last year.
All I need to do is pick twenty words at random from each column, dump
them all into one Word Perfect file, and voilá! Instant column! Now, there IS the fact that the column wouldn’t make much sense, but columns that are annual retrospectives usually are pretty fragmented, so probably no one will notice. Right wingers will further argue that I don’t make any sense anyway, although if the word “Clinton” appears more than twice, I’ll still get hate mail. But opening 70 files and picking 20 words from each is a lot of work when you think about it, and it’s probably easier just to write a damn column fresh. It might even make sense. And the fact is you can sum up last year in two words: 2007 sucked. So let’s talk about 2008 instead. I’ll remove any and all dramatic tension by observing that the biggest issue we will face in 2008 was the one I said we would face in 2007. And 2006. And before that. |
| Smiling Faces . . . | 12/22/07 | There was a weird story in the paper
today. The NY Times reported that J. Edgar Hoover, the former director
of the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, had put forth a plan to
the President to suspend habeas corpus and arrest some 12,000 people,
nearly all of them American citizens, and hold them indefinitely without
trial. At first glance, the story didn’t seem surprising. Everyone knows the lurid stories about the director and his nearly sociopathic vendettas against any and all people whose politics he disliked, his bureaucratic machinations, and his utter contempt for the rights of suspects. Nearly every bad thing we believed about him in the late sixties turned out to be true, and what’s more, he used to dress up in women’s clothes and swan about his house. But this wasn’t the corrupt, vicious bloated bureaucrat of 1969 who managed to appall even Richard Nixon. This was the young, svelte, super-patriotic J. Edgar Hoover of 1950, before the McCarthy era and the use of red-baiting by the fascist right to get back into power in America. The Korean police action (it was never officially a war) had just started, and Hoover wanted to use that as an excuse. His goal was stated baldly enough: “In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus.” President Truman’s response, if any, was unknown, but the proposal went no further. In those days, Hoover was a hero. Kids wanted to grow up to be G-men, “The Untouchables,” and fight mobsters and gangsters and protect and preserve the American way. Hoover was considered America’s finest cop. He was a hero. He was a patriot. He was America. |
| Bali High | 12/14/07 | The big global warming conference in Bali
wrapped up last night, and in a last minute burst of activity, managed
to cobble together an accord. It’s not a very good accord; it lets
criminal regimes like the Putsch junta ignore the growing crisis of
climate change for decades and gives India and China enough rope to hang
us all, but it’s an accord, none the less. The agreement is to cut carbon emissions by half by 2050. The US (and Canadian) delegations went home, smiling, to tell their corporate masters that nothing need be done about climate change for 41 years or so and to please feel free to continue turning north America into a impoverished and polluted third-world zone. Their corporate masters, who had no intention of doing anything other than utterly derail the conference, will not be pleased. One wonders if Dick Cheney will snap their necks in mid air, like a displeased Darth Vader did in the first “Star Wars” movie. At the same time, however, the US, which was booed and hissed and treated with the sort of utter contempt reserved for delegates from Hitler’s Germany, got a hard and sobering lesson: the world is rapidly losing patience with the corporate swine who run roughshod over our lives, and sees them not as leaders who have to fix the messes they have created, but as enemies who must be vanquished if the human race is to continue to enjoy prosperity. Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, put it bluntly in debate: “We seek your (American) leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please, get out of the way.” Up until now it was considered unimaginable that any country would tell the US to “get out of the way.” After all, as THE superpower, America led in everything, from science to athletics to art. |
| Into the Darkness | 12/8/07 | There was so much going on this week that
it’s hard to know where to begin, really. First, there was the National Intelligence Evaluation, which, for the benefit of anyone living in a cave and Mike Huckabee, was the bald declaration by American intelligence forces that Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon, and hasn’t been since 2003. For a president who was invoking World War III and/or avoidance thereof as a reason to attack Iran now, this totally destroyed his case, leaving him looking foolish and worse. When Israel denounced the findings, Putsch had to go out in front of the world with the shifty look of a ten year old boy trying to explain just why he was caught trying to stuff the family cat into the microwave oven, and declare that the lack of hostile intent by Iran didn’t change his mind about attacking them for America’s security. Quite a few commentators, even in America’s equivalent of a “free press,” used phrases like “nuts” and “bald-faced liar” to describe his performance. Joe Biden, not the most courageous Senator ever, flat out promised to impeach Putsch if he continued his push for war with Iran. Iran, in the meantime, went ahead and finally dropped the dollar as an instrument in oil trades altogether, labeling it an “unreliable” currency. Lost in all the fooforaw about how big a bogeyman Iran President Ahmadinejad wasn’t were the little news stories that Russia, now a one-party dictatorship again, had resumed long range ocean patrols with nuclear-armed craft, and that the Russian Minister of Defence had declared that Russia would regain nuclear parity with America before the end of the decade. What makes the clownish Ahmadinejad scarier than the cold and vicious Vladimir Putin totally escapes me, as does the concept that Iran with a potential nuclear capability is a bigger threat to world peace than a dictatorship in Russia with 15,000 nuclear weapons. |
| The Strange Case of Gillian Gibbons | 12/1/07 | By now the world knows about the strange
case of Gillian Gibbons. Ms. Gibbons, 54, looks like everyone’s favorite
grandmother, and hails from Liverpool, which is a great place to be
from. She taught in the Sudan, an elementary school teacher, and got in hot water when her six and seven year old charges elected to name the class mascot, a medium-sized white teddy bear, “Mohammad.” This happens to be the most common name for male children in the Sudan, just as “Jesus” is popular in Latin American countries, or “Abraham” is in Europe and northern Africa. The school secretary, unfortunately, was a religious nut of the Moslem variety, and decided that this was an affront to the prophet. Bears are probably deemed unclean animals (and if you’ve ever watched bears, you know that personal hygiene doesn’t rank real high among them), but I’m pretty sure that teddy bears aren’t on the list. Even if they are named for a US president who was a liberal Republican. The secretary spread the word, and quickly a mob formed, demanding death for the teacher. Fortunately, this was in the Sudan, a country that has no serious social or financial problems. Indeed, it is a glittering example of the moral superiority of Islam. When life is that perfect, it makes sense that you won’t be able to come up with better ways to occupy your time other than to demand the decapitation of a Liverpudlian grandmother for standing nearby when a teddy bear was named “Mohammad.” |
| The Final Frontier | 11/25/07 | My wife pointed out a ad in the Sac Bee
that struck me as distinctly creepy today. “Launching on 10 NEW
Satellite Platforms! Supreme Master Television goes GLOBAL!” OK, I’m a little wary of self-styled “Supreme Masters” having unlimited broadcasting power. That always seems like a recipe for problems down the road. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast. I’m just saying that people should keep an eye on them, since these are the types to have a bad habit of trying to form their followers into armies for the lord and they go out and try to take over the world. Gawd knows we have enough problems like that with our garden-variety politicians without cult leaders chiming in. So I looked into this “Supreme Master.” She is called “Supreme Master Ching Hai”, and is affectionately known to her followers as “SuMa” (an affectionate abbreviation of “Supreme Master”, and no, I’m not making that up). Her real name is Hue Dang Trinh, and she was originally a Vietnamese Roman Catholic who became a Buddhist. On the surface, at least, the group practices Quan Yin worship, (Quan Yin is also known as Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, Guanyin, and Miao Shan, among others). In a nutshell, it is the feminine in Buddhism, and is normally a quite benign form of religion. I poked Wikipedia for more information on this group, and as is often the case, found a lot of text that had clearly been written by acolytes of the group, and more text written by skeptics. The worst I could find was that some people thought she was a bit flamboyant in manner and dress for a Buddhist Monk, and compared her to Madonna (the pop star, and not the other female religious icon.) |
| Propaganda | 11/17/07 | Back around 1995, I got to see an
animated short about abortion. This was in the days before Flash® and
DSL and all that, which means someone went to a lot of time and trouble
to reach a pretty limited audience. I got to see it on a VCR. The woman is lying on the table, her lower half fig leafed by thuggish-looking guys in scrubs. Apparently in 1995 six surgeons were required to perform an abortion on one woman. But then, foetuses were a lot tougher back then, too, as this movie demonstrates. Unseen, the foetus begins to scream. “Why are you doing this to me! Stop! Oh, please, stop, it hurts! It hurts! Mommy! Mommy!” Then a despairing wail. “Mommy! Don’t kill me! Don’t you LOVE me, mommy?” And then, finally, in a preternaturally calm voice: “Jesus loves me, Mommy. Why didn’t you?” By then, I’m falling out of my chair laughing. The sheer absurdity of the piece has overwhelmed me. I doubt this was the response the makers of the short had in mind. |
| The Tip -- Eserday's News | 11/09/07 | For years, my principal source of news has been the London Guardian. Recently, that has been augmented by the brilliant “BBC News America” show, on BBC America weeknights at 7pm. It’s a full hour of comprehensive, detailed, knowledgeable coverage. If there is a firefight between troops and insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan, BBC reporters are in the middle of it with their cameramen, talking to one side or the other as the bullets fly, instead of talking about the Pentagon news release about the incident hours later from a hotel room miles away and hours later, as American television reporters are wont to do. BBC sends reporters to trouble spots who speak the local language and understand the customs, instead of depending on a helpful government translator. In recent weeks, the BBC has had comprehensive and detailed stories about the effects of the Chinese “economic miracle” on a rural village in China, and a look at how families are changing, not just in the west but throughout the world. It’s not unusual for a reporter to confront an interviewee, as happened last night when Katty Kay (silly name, superb journalist) accosted the ambassador of Pakistan to the United States and asked him how, as a lawyer, he could rationalize his personal support for a regime that was rounding up all the lawyers. She asked him three times, unlike most American journalists, few of whom would even ask the question once. Matt Frei, chief presenter of the show, is no empty suit. Picture Ted Koppel, with just a small dash of Jon Stewart. He has notably incisive and probing interviews with people ranging from the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman to Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the pro-Democracy movement in Burma. I watched the Friedman interview prepared to dislike the man, and came away with a much-elevated opinion of him. BBC News America has the power to change your mind. |
| Profits of Gloom and Doom | 11/3/07 | The problem is surprising. Fire-fighting
outfits end up with an individual who – usually for job security – goes
about surreptitiously lighting fires. We had a case locally where a
firefighter’s MOTHER went out committing small acts of arson as a way of
ensuring her son kept a steady income. It isn’t extremely common, but it does happen, and it sometimes makes the papers. When people read about it, they tend to cluck indignantly and dismiss the perpetrator as a nut or a greedhead or both. It would be a lot more common if fire departments either didn’t offer civil service protection, or, in the case of small towns, weren’t run on an unpaid volunteer basis. If you’re a firefighter and you have a family and bills and Christmas coming up, you’re much less likely to WANT a big fire if you get paid the same either way. In fact, it’s in your best interest to help prevent fires. As for volunteers, well, these are people who put their lives on the line out of sheer altruism. I can’t say enough good things about them. Outfits like the Forest Service, in addition to their own fire crews, have outside help they can call on and pay to help fight fires. Quite often, the same undocumented aliens who plant seedlings in forests that have burned or been logged over are called for fire duty when the inevitable siege of summer and fall fires strike the west. Prison gangs are utilized in what amounts to slave labor. |
| Dreams of Empire | 10/28/07 | Dreams can be daft things. For instance, the other night, I dreamed that a friend of mine at the local community access channel had set up to do an interview with Dick Cheney. But when we got there, we looked at the chair where Cheney was supposed to be sitting, and he wasn’t there. Instead, there was just one of those goofy white helmets the Imperial storm troopers wore in the Star Wars movies. In the background a voiceover was going, “Yes, this is a dream. But it will make perfect sense, so remember it.” Well, after I woke up and got some coffee in me, I remembered the dream and realized that it didn’t really make a whole hell of a lot of sense. If it was an idea I was going to toy with in waking hours, I would have put Darth Vader’s black helmet on the chair instead. Cheney’s always reminded me of a cross between Darth Vader and Montgomery Burns, the evil nuclear plant owner in the Simpsons. Say what you will about Cheney, he’s not the spear carrier type. He’s the one who might say, “Will no one rid me of this accursed priest?” He might be at Agincourt (although if he was, the English would have lost). He might have a hunched back and prove himself a serviceable villain. |
| Perfecting Man | 10/20/07 | A few years ago I wrote about thermal
depolymerization (TDP), the process of converting carbon-based refuse
into light crude oil. The process works, and is useful if the source
material is incidental, that is, something already existing that might
otherwise have been tossed. If you set out to deliberately create the
items used as raw material for TDP, then it becomes a losing
proposition. The one commercial plant in the US is in Missouri, just
outside a huge turkey plant, and it gets most of its raw material from
the plant. The energy contained in the oil equates to about 85% of the
energy needed to create what is politely termed “turkey offal”, which,
obviously, is a losing proposition. But if you look at the supply of
turkey offal as a byproduct that otherwise would have gone to waste,
then it’s a pretty good deal, especially with OPEC oil at $90 a barrel.
TDP-based oil costs about as much these days. Anyone who has forgotten to take their Bean-o® prior to sitting down to a large turkey dinner knows that turkey is a rich source of flammable gases. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it might be interesting to measure the methane levels in the United States the day after Thanksgiving. That’s assuming you can find any scientists who aren’t still in a tryptophan coma and are willing to stand out in the sleet and measure the fart rates of America. Of course, TDP can’t convert methane or CO2 to oil, but that’s not the point. I just needed an excuse to talk about turkey farts. There are machines that can capture and convert these turkey farts into fuel, but strapping them on to 300,000,000 people would be expensive, unsightly, and force most people to watch the football games standing up, which I suspect would not be popular. Obviously, a more linear approach is called for. |
| A Nobel Man in America | 10/14/07 | Al Gore is a man who will never have to
pad his résumé. It’s already one of the most remarkable in history. Four
terms as a Congressman, plus one as a Senator. Two terms as vice
president. Elected President of the United States, cheated by scummy
right wingers on the Supreme Court. Won an Academy Award. Then an Emmy. And now, the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, half the Nobel Peace Prize. He had to share it with the thousands of climate scientists who compiled the monumental International Panel on Climate Chance (IPCC) reports that pretty much convinced the world that global warming was real, and a rapidly-approaching danger. OK, so Gore hasn’t had a chart-busting “concept” LP, or been to the moon. But watching him, you kind of get the feeling that it’s only a matter of time. Even without “An Inconvenient Truth” he’s accomplished remarkable things. As vice-president, he was tasked to streamline federal government. At the time, this drew derisive laughs. Nobody had ever been able to streamline the federal government, and right-wing promoted “conventional wisdom” was that certainly no Democrat was ever going to do that. Gore did it, reducing the size of the government by 10% while keeping all essential services intact. That alone should get him his face on the money after he dies. And while he’s widely derided for his remark about taking the initiative in developing the Internet, the fact, acknowledged by the people who actually invented the Internet, is that it was his ground-breaking work in Congress that made the Internet as we know it possible. That should be good for his face on the overnight delivery postage stamp. |
| Good Evening, Officer Krupke | 10/6/07 | I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to the Marion Jones
case. I knew that she was one of a long line of well-known athletes whose name
and reputation had been caught up in the Balco steroid scandal, and I’ve been
ambivalent about that particular situation all along. I know that steroids can cause considerable damage to people, and that kids in sports were under pressure to use them in order to gain a competitive edge. Early heart attacks, psychosis, and neuromuscular degeneration are all sweet bye-and-byes to kids who are hoping to get a spot on the team, be it the JV football squad or the Olympic team. Clearly, it needed to be discouraged. But for adult athletes, the situation wasn’t so cut and dried. Nobody really knows if it affects performance that much. Would Barry Bonds hold the record for home runs and be guaranteed a spot in the hall of fame without steroid use, or would he be an extraordinary player with 680 home runs right now and still be headed for the hall of fame anyway? Either way, Bonds made his decisions as an adult, and since league rules didn’t cover his actions at the time, he wasn’t doing anything punishable. Was he cheating? Gaining an unfair advantage? You tell me. Steroids enhance power, but they don’t do anything for reflexes, and it was his ability to instantly tell where a pitch was going that made him the most feared hitter in baseball history in recent years. It was his bat speed that made Bonds an incredible hitter. I can hit a baseball out of a ball park, but I’m not going to do it against Randy Johnson. He’s going to uncork one of those fearsome fastballs and leave me curled in a fetal ball next to home plate, terrified by a 102 mile an hour zinger that didn’t come within three feet of my head. And steroids wouldn’t help me. |
| Soldiers of Misfortune | 10/3/07 | Mercenaries,
like genocide and child rape, have been around for a long time.
According
to Wikipedia , they date back to the days of Pharaoh Ramesses II,
some 3,400 years ago. Even back then, they were used to subjugate
occupied societies and to act as palace guards for the leaders and
aristocrats. Ramesses hired some 11,000 of them, so there was a whole
lot of subjugating and guarding going on. Feudal Japan had private armies and roving divisions of samurai, willing to fight for any warlord who could afford them and against any warlord who couldn’t. Despite all the bushido claptrap that is used to ennoble them 500 years after, the fact is they were a vicious and vile lot who didn’t mind getting paid in pillage and rape. England made heavy use of mercenaries, particularly in the colonies. A lot of the hated “redcoats”, justly accused of brutality and lack of respect for people or property, weren’t English at all, but were in fact Prussian mercenaries. Earlier, of course, England had privateers, sea-going mercenaries who amounted to pirates licensed by the Crown to ply their trade. After they stopped being cost-effective and Elizabeth stopped hiring them, many went free-lance and preyed on English shipping along with everyone else’s. |
| Marching as to World War | 10/1/07 | Iran. The Putsch junta wants to attack Iran. Oh, every so often one of them makes a /pro forma/ noise about a “peaceful resolution” and a negotiated solution to what they insist is an “impasse,” but the fact is, they want to attack Iran. Well, they wanted peace and negotiations with Iraq, too, remember? They were lying then. They are lying now. They want to attack Iran. There are several reasons behind this madness. First, they want to extend control over the Middle East. Iraq was meant to give America a strategically secure mounting right at the crossroads of the Middle East, but things haven’t worked out. Iraq, it turned out, didn’t appreciate being occupied. There has been some mention of that in the newspapers. The admin is still following a lunatic non-proliferation approach in which countries of which they approve, such as Israel, Pakistan and India, are allowed to develop nuclear weapons, whereas countries they don’t approve of , such as North Korea, Iran and Liberia, can’t have nuclear power of any kind. I leave it to the reader to try to figure out how a Pakistan with nuclear weapons is somehow better than Iran with centrifuges. In the case of Iran, nobody disputes that they are working on a nuclear program. Whether this program is being staged with the idea of power generation or a nuclear weapon is problematical. Outside of the administration war hawks, however, nobody thinks that Iran will have a nuclear weapon for at least five years, or a delivery system for at least ten. |
| For the Kids | 9/23/07 | There
was a
really scary story in the WaHoPo by Ellen Nakashima about how the
government has been compiling data on everyone traveling to and from the
United States. Not just foreign visitors, either. They are collecting
the data from airlines, cruise lines, border crossing sites, anywhere
anyone crosses the borders, a intrusive and paranoid packrat lust to
know what everyone is up to that would be worthy of the old Soviet
regime. Just what every democracy needs: a paranoid, secretive regime that needs to know what you are up to. But then, your employers already have cameras all over the place and monitor every keystroke you enter in your computer, and are demanding to know what your off-duty hobbies are so they can get a break on their health insurance premiums, so what the hell does the loss of one last tattered vestige of privacy mean to you? It’s not like you don’t trust the government and major corporations to look out for your own best interests, after all. |
| The Law of One-Thirds | 9/16/07 |
I didn’t bother to watch the Putsch speech on Iraq, and I’m willing to bet the large majority of my readers not only didn’t either, but don’t blame me a bit. I mean, let’s face it: the son of a bitch was just
going to lie to us. And they would be clumsy, self-serving, obvious lies
that insult the intelligence of any person of normal intelligence. |
| Coyote Moon | 9/3/07 | I
planned on getting a full night’s sleep
the other night, but the moon, and our somewhat more local coyotes, had
other ideas. Full moons disrupt sleep patterns out here in the sticks more than they do in the city. The city is bright at night. The night sky over Los Angeles might only have a couple of dozen stars, and there are probably quite a few people who are totally unaware of the existence of the Milky Way. Down there, the moon is just another night light, one that isn’t even powerful enough to wash out the yellow light of the sodium street lights. Stop a typical Angelino and ask him what phase the moon is in, and he’ll probably give you a puzzled stare and back away from you slowly, wishing he had remembered to pack his .45. At best, he’s got you figured for an astrologer or some other kind of religious nut. And of course, he won’t know squat about the moon. Why should he? Just another night light, and not a very impressive one. Doesn’t even drown out the billboards. Here, of course, it’s different. A moonless night is a night with a million stars in the sky, and the Milky Way a pearlescent band from horizon to horizon. People discover that yes, you can really see things by starlight, although not very well. You can see the snowy patches on the mountain, although not the mountain itself. On a moonless cloudy night, it is pitch dark. You can’t see your hand in front of your face, especially if your hand is not there to begin with. |
| ...And it's One, Two, Three | 8/25/07 | If there was any reason to believe the
occupation of Iraq was a viable military operation at this juncture,
there were several things this week that would pretty much have polished
it off. First, there was the news that Senator John Warner, Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on the admin to pull 5,000 troops out of Iraq by December, the first step of a general withdrawal. The White House, apparently taken by surprise, made the limp response that they hadn’t received word that Warner planned to change his vote on anything. Why Warner’s statement surprised the White House isn’t clear. Clear back last October, Warner went to Baghdad and came back and, in the words of the docile American media, “offered a stark assessment,” which is reporterese for “it’s a real clusterfuck and we’re getting our asses kicked.” Except Warner was more direct, stating flatly that America was losing. Nothing has improved in Iraq since last October, and there’s no credible reason to suppose that anything WILL improve. So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Warner moved from Step One to Step Two. |
| How to Get Out of Iraq | 8/19/07 | The New York Times, former cheerleader
for the invasion of Iraq and a failing newspaper still gamely committed
to supporting a failed occupation, ran a piece on its editorial page
today that was written by seven non-coms who just got back from a 15
month tour of duty in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division. The piece,
entitled “The War As We Saw It” is authored by Buddhika Jayamaha, Wesley
D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Omar Mora, Edward Sandmeier, Yance T. Gray and
Jeremy A. Murphy. Most of them are sergeants or staff sergeants. Given that all seven are still on active duty, and presumably aren’t interested in being court-martialed for what they wrote, they had to step carefully, and not offend the administration. This made them a perfect match for the New York Times, which also likes to step carefully and not offend the administration. As a result, they limit themselves in the well-written piece to discussing the tactical and logistical problems they encounter, especially in dealing with a population that clearly does not want American troops to be there at all. While protesting that their morale was good and they felt duty-bound to see this “war” through to the end, they also acknowledged the utter impracticability of the notion that the US was ever going to win the support of even a measurable minority of the population. They describe the political debate in Washington, and by extension, through the US, as “surreal.” |
| Benchmarks | 8/7/07 | General David Petraeus will be giving his
report on the Iraqi situation on 9/11. Everyone be sure to waggle your
flags as the administration tries, yet again, to tie Iraq to that event
six years ago. Pretty cheeky for a President who not only has utterly
failed to secure justice for that event, but who has openly said that he
doesn’t care where Osama bin Laden is. Who would have guessed that when actually challenged in a Pearl Harbor type manner, Republicans would turn out to be cowards? Three thousand dead, the President doesn’t care where the perpetrator is, and they take it. Amazing. Petraeus’ speech will get as much attention as Colin Powell’s to the UN did in February of 2003. Both will be giving military assessments that will be used by the administration to guide American policy in regard to Iraq. This doesn’t bode well, since Powell was lying through his teeth. Remember the sophisticated chemical and biological weapons lab that turned out not to have any running water and only a Honda® generator to supply power? |
| DiFi the Dino | 8/5/07 | A friend of mine had hip surgery – a
replacement – back in March, at the age of 54. She was an excellent
candidate for rehab, of course. The surgery was a success, and she
looked to be making a rapid and uneventful recovery. Instead, she
fetched up in a convalescent place, and while she did receive care and
eventually was able to go home, it was nothing like the sort of care
that post-op patients usually got if they were lucky enough to be
covered. In her case, she had Medi-Cal. We couldn’t figure out why she had been turfed out to that dump in the first place. While her medical condition is intractable, she’s still young and capable of decent quality of life. There’s no reason she cannot continue living at home with her pets and a minimum of outside help. So it made sense to get her top level rehab, and thus improve her ability to live at home, both for her benefit and for the savings it would present to society. But then today my wife spotted something in the Sacramento Bee. Seems that California’s whorish senior Senator had helped arrange for an auditing firm – not a medical group – to look over cases of people having surgeries such as hip replacements and the like, or who had suffered strokes, and who were slated to go to rehab. The outfit, PRG-Schultz International, got 25% of the savings for every medicare claim for rehab that it denied. Yes, you read that right; they got paid – lavishly – but only for claims they denied. It probably comes as no surprise that PRG-Schultz International denied 97% of the claims they audited. Nice work if you can get it. And speaking of which, Feinstein’s hubby bought heavily into PRG-Schultz International stock shortly before Feinstein set this up. |
| Come the Revolution | 7/22/07 | The first time someone asked me why
people weren’t revolting against the Putsch junta was in 2005. Oh, people talked about revolution in the 60s, of course, but after that, it became the province of the paranoid nuts. No matter how hard you listen, a phrase like, “Aliens from Betelgeuse disguised as dogs have seized control of the President’s mind and so we must revolt immediately” doesn’t really qualify as political discourse. Not even when Reagan was president and such a theory might have had a certain intellectual appeal. No, this incident in 2005 when a sane, sober, well-respected member of the community looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t get it. Why aren’t people rioting in the streets over all this? “All this” is a sweeping phrase that covers the depredations of the Putsch junta: the illegal occupations and the vast cost those have inflicted, the hidden-yet-widely-noticed collapse of the economy, the ominous gulf between the super-rich and the rest of America (and one of the main reasons why, in “the richest country in the world,” most people are struggling to get by), and the increasing corporate control of our lives. Why aren’t people outraged? |
| Vitter Fruit | 7/19/07 | I don’t usually devote much time to sex
scandals when I write about politics, although I often think I should.
The main reason I don’t is that in almost all circumstances, I have
trouble taking them seriously. Any politician highly-placed enough for
anyone to care who he sleeps with has amassed a certain amount of wealth
and power, and men with such tend to get endless opportunities and more
than ample temptation. Nixon and Carter might be the only presidents in modern times who didn’t have mistresses, and neither turned out to be what you would call your stellar presidents. Even Rutherford B. Hayes, who was reputed to be gay, had at least one svelte young male secretary with no typing skills but who had the requisite fast hands. I’d be more worried about politicians who are not out getting some on the side. Those tend to be emotionally crippled, religious nuts, or both. They lead lives above reproach, but start wars or found police states. And yes, I wonder if Putsch is getting any and hope for the sake of the country that he is, even if it’s only Barney. If it turns out that Laura is his only outlet, then America might just be doomed. |
| Summer in the City | 7/15/07 | Everyone gets out of Paris in August. The
whole town shuts down, and everyone who can leave departs for the
countryside or chilly British beaches or just about anywhere that is Not
Paris. Mind you, there are a lot of cities that get a lot hotter and more miserable in high summer. Washington is hotter and even more humid, and prior to the widespread use of air-conditioning, it too would shut down completely during the hot months. In high summer, everyone stays inside air conditioned buildings, and if they must venture outside, it is to air-conditioned cars kept in air-conditioned parking floors. Thus, a well-connected and alert Washington bureaucrat may never personally experience a temperature above about 75 during the entire summer. Nonetheless, people complain about the heat and try to escape out into the country, where there is shade and running water and, of course, more air-conditioning. Then there’s Baghdad. Baghdad tends to be a bit warmish in the summer, with lows around 90. And highs around 115 on average. (In Celsius, that would equate to “Damn, that’s hot!” and “Christ, are you fricking KIDDING?!”). Highs of 125 are common, and unofficial highs of 150 aren’t unknown. Forget the old egg-on-the-sidewalk bit. Put a chicken out on the sidewalk at dawn, and you would have perfectly edible roast chicken by sunset. Assuming someone didn’t blow it up first, of course. |
| Impeach | 7/8/07 | Back during the Clinton Impeachment
fiasco, poll after poll showed that there was very little support for
impeachment, and virtually none at all outside of GOP voters. It wasn’t
just polls; the 1998 elections gave the Democrats extra seats in
Congress – something virtually unheard of for a President’s party in the
sixth year of his administration, an upset which led a furious GOP to
turn on Newt Gingrich and dump him unceremoniously as Speaker. Further,
after two terms of Bill Clinton, the voters were more than happy to stay
with a winner, and elected Al Gore by a three million vote margin, only
to see the election stolen by a crooked and corrupt Supreme Court. Impeachment for Bill Clinton was not a popular idea, and rarely got more than 30% support in the polls. Indeed, job approval ratings for Clinton PEAKED the day of the Impeachment vote, soaring to 72%. Clinton’s approval ratings never did drop below 55% at any point after that. This was despite the endless blare from the right wing echo chamber about how what Clinton did was horrible, and what about our poor children! The contemptible Kenneth Starr made sure there would be plenty of material for the kiddies, lovingly caressing in his report unfounded allegations of analingus and penetration with cigars. It may have been the only erection Kenneth Starr had in the 90s. The right wing discovered that they couldn’t blandly lie to the American people and expect automatic acceptance. They are still a little disconcerted about that, but characteristically, they came up with the wrong rationale for the lack of public support. |
| 7/1/07 | By now, we’ve all heard about how
terrorists, with horrible efficiency, caused all of Glasgow and its
environs to vanish in a vast explosion that killed nearly thirty million
Scots, or roughly 500% of the inhabitants of the country. That’s normal,
by the way. You usually have to kill a Scot several times before he’ll
lie down and be still. Britons were horrified, thunderstruck by a level
of terror that had never been seen on the Sculpted Isle, or even in the
Sculptured Aisles. (The Sculptured Aisles, like the Isle of Mann and
Wyoming, are a semi-autonomous part of Great Britain, and would normally
be considered a part of that Island were they not separated from it by
stretches of open water, and did they not have their own currency,
preferring Tesla coils to AC). The “attacks” in Britain, no matter how deadly the intent might have been, were nothing more than low farce. One car bomb, which, had it been a real bomb, would have been most murderously placed, at Haymarket by Piccadilly, and the other would also have had maximum effect, being situated in a heavily trafficked area. The first fizzled, the second didn’t go off at all, and being illegally parked in one of London’s busiest areas, quickly attracted official notice and in fact had been impounded and towed off before anyone noticed anything unusual about the contents. As for the incident at Glasgow, the SUV hit the building, caught fire, which in turn caused a small part of the terminal’s facing to catch fire. On the plus side, it was one less SUV cluttering up the M-1. The driver apparently climbed out, poured gas over himself, and set himself alight. Truly an exercise in pathos. If he dies, I can just imagine his next conversation. “Seventy two virgins? You think you earned seventy-two virgins with that embarrassing cockup!? You made the whole of Islam look clownish! No, my boy, I’m not giving you any virgins. Instead, I’m sending you to the worst place in all of the afterlife. That’s right! I sentence you to BAPTIST HEAVEN!!”. |
|
| What should good health care cost? | 6/23/07 | With the official release of Michael
Moore’s “SiCKO” still a week off, the insurance companies and
pharmaceuticals are gearing up to spend billions to try and discredit
the movie and preserve the status quo. The flood of disinformation, which never really stops, is revving up as the people who are making a fortune in the medical field gear up to protect that gravy train. When you are pulling in hundreds of billions a year, a few billion here and there to protect it seems prudent. So we’re already hearing the vivid (and untrue) stories of Canadians waiting months for critical procedures, or of how thousands of Canadians are sneaking across the border for medical care they can’t get at home (the truth is that thousands of AMERICANS are sneaking across that same border for the same reason). We’ll hear about how the English hate their medical system. (They hate it so much that Margaret Thatcher openly acknowledged there would be a revolution if she tried to change it). And of course we’ll hear about how the French have universal health care, and so it MUST be bad. The leading Democratic candidates, frightened to death of the hatchet job the big medical industries will do on them, are already triangulating, trying to promise the people a working system while assuring Big Medicine that their profits won’t be harmed. It’s a promise that cannot be kept. Republican answers, of course, are even worse, ranging from removing all government regulations to Schwarzenegger’s goofy scheme in which everyone is forced to buy health insurance. |
| Confederacy of Dunces | 5/27/07 | The other day, Paul Krugman wrote a
column called “Don’t Blame Bush.” Drastically boiled down and rendered
into varnish, his point was that while Putsch may look and sound like a
demented moron, it wasn’t entirely his fault, because the whole
fershluggeneh GOP was demented. The eleven lawn jockeys at the Faux/GOP
debate promised nothing but More of the Same (with the exception of Ron
Paul, who the GOP wants to ban from future debates). Krugman pointed to
the candidates’ debate as an example, in which 10 of the 11 candidates
applauded the gulag at Guatanamo. (Guiliani even said he would “double”
it, leading an ecstatic Jon Stewart to shout, “He landed the double
Guantanamo! No one’s ever done that before!”). Stewart watched the
debate and saw the same thing that Krugman apparently did: that some or
all of the eleven clones standing there must have forgotten to pay their
brain bills or something, because they all sounded like drooling idiots.
This all came out on the same day that Al Gore’s new book, “The Assault on Reason” came out. It deals with the ignorance and stupidity – often willful – that has become so prevalent in US politics. Gore’s book reminds us all that the powers of viciousness and stupidity overcame the will of the American people in 2000, and installed a man who can’t even read a book, let alone write one. Gore also notes that far too many people are complacently happy to be led by people who think evolution is a secular hoax, or that scientists have a political agenda but that politicians don’t. |
| Death of a President | 5/25/07 | Michael Moore will be releasing his
latest movie, “Sicko” on June 29th in the United States. With Moore’s
work, the words “controversial,” “incendiary,” and “confrontational” get
over used, but it’s safe to say, nevertheless, that “Sicko” will be
controversial, incendiary, and confrontational. It will possibly also
galvanize US voters into throwing off the shackles of the insurance
consortium that has all but enslaved this country. Unlike with “Bowling for Columbine” or “Fahrenheit 9/11", support for his latest seems to be crossing party and ideological lines. A lot of red state voters got hit even harder by the great scam that the medical system has become than the blue states. People in Kansas are dying prematurely because their provider denied coverage, or they had to chose between expensive drugs heavily advertised on prime time TV or eating, or because they simply couldn’t afford to lose their house and leave their family out on the street because they wanted to live an extra year. I plan to go see it. Hopefully I won’t have to drive 80 miles as I did in order to see “Fahrenheit 9/11," because our local theater owner was afraid to show “F9/11". Even the Medford Theater had a disclaimer on the box office stating that the contents of any movie they showed did not necessarily reflect the political views of management. But this was a couple of years back, and a lot of right wingers still felt that any disagreement was disloyalty, and should be met with brownshirt tactics. We all remember the efforts the far right took to try to destroy people like the Dixie Chicks, or Bill Maher, or Martin Sheen, for questioning The Leader. |
| Get Out | 5/13/07 | The Iraqi Parliament had a clear and
simple message for the American forces the other day. Get out. Now. Of the 275 who are members of the chamber, 144 co-sponsored a bill demanding an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq. The vote will be pro forma. They have a large majority. In a country that has basically been in a state of civil war for three years – since the Golden Mosque was blown up – it is the one thing that can bring Sunni and Shi’ite together, and now even the Kurds are beginning to realize that the Americans are no real improvement over Saddam Hussein. The Americans, even if they had been civil and well-intentioned, would still have been occupiers, representatives of an alien culture, an alien language, and an alien god. The Americans, of course, were not civil and well-intentioned. They murdered indiscriminately, they raped, they urinated on the bodies of their victims. They laughed on camera at people they shot who were trying to crawl away, at their torture victims, and forced prisoners to pose for soft-porn shots for use on the internet. They sent men with dogs into devout Moslem households to search for weapons – yes, the same Americans who for so long preached to the world that people should have weapons in their homes to guard against invaders. |
| Darwin, Social Darwinism and Evolution | 5/5/07 | Patricia Cohen of the New York Times
wrote a piece this week about how social conservatives (NY Timese for
“falangists and fascists”) might despise “Darwinism” (the right wing’s
misnomer for the theory of evolution) but that they needed Darwin’s
theories to explain, in Cohen’s words, “traditional social roles for men
and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.” Cohen noted that when asked if they rejected the theory of evolution, three of the GOP candidates – Brownback, Huckabee and Tancredo – raised their hands. All three should drop out now: America has had six years of leadership by illiterate god-struck morons, and it hasn’t worked out. We don’t need more of the same. Cohen’s link is supposed to be a cute playoff between Darwinism and Social Darwinism, but the main problem is that neither tag has much of anything to do with the vast array of scientific knowledge that is collectively known as “the theory of evolution.” Nearly all of Darwin’s suppositions existed in an era when nobody knew what DNA or mitochondria were, or what dinosaurs might have been, or had ever heard the phrase “extinction level event.” Nothing remains of Darwin’s suppositions except for his two main observations: that species change in response to their environment, and that it seemed likely that over time, a species might change so much so as to become an entirely different species. |
| Strange New Vista | 4/28/07 | The first thing to know about Windows
Vista is that it’s very pretty. The colors and icons are the epitome of
corporate good taste, faultless in their artistic decorum. The OS
features an attractive suite of desktop wallpapers, one of which I’m
actually using (a 15 second night exposure of Aurora Borealis over a
Norwegian Fjord). It is eye candy. But that’s the best thing you can say for it. It has that bit where it takes all your programs that are on screen or minimized and turns them 45 degrees along an imaginary perpendicular axis – it provokes oohs and aahs, but the reality is that it’s perfectly useless. The screens, tilted away like that, are harder to read than the little two inch screens that appear when you put the mouse over the menu along the bottom bar of minimalized programs, and don’t do anything if you click them except return you to the front program or the desktop. Vista is also extraordinarily slow. I’ve got an antique 450 MHz at home, and it loads Corel Draw faster than my dual core screamer does. Same with Photoshop, Word, or any other program of any complexity. Mind you, the week before, when I detailed the problems I had just getting the new computer and getting it running, I noted that when I loaded Linux Ubuntu 64 in, it was “blindingly fast” and that when I had to format and install an XP OEM, the install only took nine minutes, instead of the usual 45. So it’s not the computer. |
| Blue Screen of Death | 4/22/07 | It all started when I suddenly got the
blue screen of death on my monitor. Windows XP is a relatively stable
OS, and I hadn’t seen one of those in quite a while. A quick
investigation showed that my data drive was dying. Well, these things happen. I made sure my backups were current, ordered a new drive, and pulled the dying drive out of the loop. I was mildly annoyed. While the computer was nearly six years old and due for trouble, the drive that failed was only two years old. But I had lost no data, and there was room on C for ongoing projects to reside. It was a reminder to order a new computer in a month or so, when things slowed down and I could take time to make the move. I ran a registry cleaner app, and was startled to see it register over 4,000 errors. There weren’t any apps on the dead drive; just data. But a quick check showed that nearly all the errors were addresses for data files that Windows expected to find on drive D. With my usual mumbled curses for Microsoft and a slight sense of foreboding, I told the app to clean all the dross out of the registry. Windows still whined and howled and left little messes on the floor. The whole OS was over-engineered until hell wouldn’t have it, just so it could annoy users with the aggressive obsequiousness of a butler who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Oh, and to confound pirates, although it was spectacularly unsuccessful in that regard. My OS, confused by the loss of the D drive, would hang for several minutes at a time, and picked up the quaint new habit of waiting four minutes to load any program I told it to run. |
| Taxing Times | 4/17/07 | As I was driving home and reflecting on
how proud and privileged I am to have the right to pay $3.40 a gallon
for gas, the local NPR station was talking about the effect of taxes on
income groups here in California. It seems that folks in the bottom 20% of wage earners average $11,000 per year, and of that, 12% goes to state and local taxes. That would be $1,320 dollars, which is a pretty hefty sum of money when you’re looking at bread for a $1.25 a loaf and milk at $1.50 a gallon, which is what Guilliani thinks those lucky ducky minimum wage earners have to pay. The top 1%, on the other hand, average $1.6 million income. They pay 7% of that in state and local taxes. Now, that’s a fair chunk of change, running about $102,000 a year. The folks at the Wall Street Journal will huff that this just goes to show how the system favors the lucky duckies in the bottom 20% over the top 1%. Why, one of those top wage earners is paying EIGHT TIMES as much in state and local taxes as the lucky guys in the bottom 20%. Sure, you can say that the bottom 20% pay more total taxes than the top 1%, but do the math: they outnumber the top 1% by 20-to-1! |
| 4/7/07 | People have been thrilled about the
Supreme Court decision last week, Massachusetts vs. EPA, which ruled
that CO2 was in fact a pollutant, and that the Environmental Protection
Agency therefore had a legal responsibility to regulate it. The far right people were utterly aghast, of course, but then, they are usually utterly aghast about something. This was just greenhouse aghast this time. They are convinced that it’s all a plot to destroy the American economy. Apparently the mighty American industrial engine, poor, timorous, shivering wee beastie that it is, will utterly collapse if asked to maintain the sorts of pollution standards that they have inflicted on such third-world hellholes as Canada, or California. I can’t find much about this decision to be thrilled about, though. It’s a bit like learning that the Supreme Court had ruled, 5-4, that the world actually is a globe, with two snarling dissents written by the minority declaring “round earthism” to be bogus, politically motivated “science” that is designed to destroy industry. That is the point we’re at with global warming. |
|
| Pride Goeth... | 3/25/07 | “I am fully committed, as the
administration's fully committed, to ensure that, with respect to every
United States attorney position in this country, we will have a
presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed United States attorney.” With those words, Alberto Gonzales on January 18th stepped firmly over the line between shadiness and outright criminality. He said them in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and yes, he was under oath when he said them. Of course, by then they had already appointed eight “interim” attorneys who, under the provisions of the Patriot Act, could serve indefinitely at the pleasure of the President without the little nicety of getting confirmation from the Senate. Just one of hundreds of little land mines in the Patriot Act, such as stripping habeas corpus from all aliens, registered or not, or any citizen whom the President deems to be “an enemy combatant.” Kyle Sampson understood that someone would get wise to the obscure provision giving the President utter political control over the US attorneys, and wrote in a memo, “There is some risk that we’ll lose the authority, but if we don’t ever exercise it then what’s the point of having it?” So: Gonzales was lying under oath, and there is prima facie evidence of it. Even Republican Senators are beginning to talk about impeachment, and not just of Gonzales. For example, an exchange of emails between Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ assistant, and chief West Wing political advisor Karl Rove makes Rove’s immediate involvement crystal clear. |
| Four Years On | 3/18/07 | The London Times, a Murdoch rag that was once regarded as the world’s finest
newspaper, took a frantic effort at salvaging the Iraq occupation. Murdoch spent
years lying Britain and America into that mess, and heedless of the thousands of
lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted, he continues to push for the
occupation. Kangarupe’s rag breathlessly reported, “ Iraqis: life is getting better!” They cited (but did not specify the source of) a poll which claimed, among other things, that 61% of Iraqis didn’t believe there was a civil war raging, and that by a two-to-one margin, Iraqis believe Operation Surge will “disarm all militias.” The poll results were so laughably far removed from reality that, as with “Jeff Gannon” asking the president if Democrats had lost their minds, people got around to wondering just what strange beast this was. My sources have found that the poll was done by Opinion Research Business, a British private pollster specializing in polling for right wing groups, including the Conservative Party. This particular poll was commissioned by the Public Relations firm of Hill & Knowlton, the same people who brought us lurid stories of Iraqis dumping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators back in the first Gulf War. |
|
3/11/07 |
Last week, I wrote about the fooforaw the
right wing set up about Al Gore’s electric bill. I showed how this
organized and corporate-financed group of thugs and liars launched a
smear to try and counter the positive publicity “An Inconvenient Truth”
garnered from winning two Academy Awards. The piece drew a fair bit of response, mostly positive. But several made one point that I couldn’t refute: why doesn’t Gore live in a smaller place? With most who asked the question, it was politically motivated, and they would quickly dry up and blow away if I simply asked them if they favored laws mandating an upper limit to the size of a home a family might live in. As happens far too often with right wingers, they wanted to limit good behavior – which they see as a sign of personal weakness – to those on the other side. But one significant exception to this came from a local resident, Todd Cory. Todd, who has been featured in several magazines for his energy-saving lifestyle, doesn’t ask that particular question for political purposes (in fact, he likes Gore), and would strongly approve of people living in more reasonably-sized homes. Todd wrote, “Al Gore does not walk his talk and it is correct to chastise him for this... not make excuses. I see this all the time. There are so many "green" people that are all about talk yet do not behave in a way that reflects that... it is called cognizant dissonance.” Up here in the northern mountains, we were discovered as an enclave of peace and serenity by frightened wealthy urbanites from the Bay Area in the wake of 9/11, and they’ve been busily striving to tear up the woods and build McMansions all around the Mount Shasta area. Many of them assuage their feelings about their houses by showing up for pro-environment events in their SUVs. It isn’t an encouraging development. |
|
| Chilling Out Gore |
3/5/07 |
Hours after Gore received his Academy
Award for the documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the ambush attack
was launched. Kristin Hall, uncritical newshen for the AP, breathlessly
reported that “A conservative group” calling itself the “Tennessee
Center for Policy Research” reported that Gore’s home energy use was ten
times that of a “typical Nashville household.” The story goes on to
claim that Gore used 221,000 kilowatt hours in 2006, and that the group
knew this because they obtained his energy use documents from the
utility, Nashville Electric Service. You have to go near the bottom to
find it, but the story states, “But company spokeswoman Laurie Parker
said the utility never got a request from the policy center and never
gave it any information.” AP claimed to have reviewed the bills and came
up with an energy use figure some 15% lower, but it’s evident that
unlike the “Center,” AP remembered to factor in the surcharge that the
utility charges for energy use above about a thousand kilowatts a month.
It’s pretty unlikely that the “Tennessee Center for Policy Research” was interested in any niceties like finding out how much energy Gore actually used, or where the energy came from, or–and this was the main thing they were clucking indignantly about–if he had a large carbon footprint or not. |
| Spin Cycle |
2/25/07 |
For the past six weeks, I’ve been tuning
into the Canadian Broadcasting Radio One Sundays at 11 AM local time to
catch an excellent series called “Spin Cycle.”
The
entire audio of the series is available. The series is described by
CBC as “a series about spin, the spinners and the spun by Ira Basen for
CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition.” It starts with the history of what is now called “spin,” the innocuous efforts to deal with reporters not by avoiding them, but by making certain that your side of the story gets out there. The series follows the developing nature of spin into both a science and a pervasive factor in western society, to the point where nearly all politicians utter nothing but prefabricated platitudes – spin – when they deal with the media at all, and even try to supplant the media with their own information machines. The Basen series revolves around the question, “How did we get from there to here?” Spin started out as encouraging public disclosure, in order to ensure that one’s own side of a major story, such as a train wreck or a mine disaster, got told. Prior to that, corporations simply tried to conceal such stories from the media, and the public. Now companies would seek out the press, and say, “Yes, this happened, this is how we think it happened, and here’s what we’re doing about it.” It was good public relations, and served the public interest. |
| "It Does Not Move" | 2/17/07 | A friend of mine in Texas emailed me a
link to
Daily Kos, which breathlessly reported, “Wow. Just when you think
Republicans can't get any crazier, we find out that the powerful
chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, Warren Chisum,
doesn't even believe that the earth revolves around the sun. “Still, it's enough to set the world a-spinning that the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the most powerful committee in the House, distributed to legislators a memo pitching crazed wingers who believe the earth stands still – doesn't spin on its axis or revolve around the Sun – that Copernicus was part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Old Testament.” A copy of the memo can be found here. Daily Kos then added, “Head on over to FixedEarth.com, and you'd swear this was a parody site.” So I did. I read the seven page article debunking “geosynchronous orbit.” Seems that our Kabbalic masters hid from us the fact that electromagnetic forces are far stronger than gravity. He demonstrates thusly: ““Electromagnetic forces are infinitely more powerful than gravity… As we know, a child can test this statement with a plain magnet or an electromagnet and a coin on the ground. Gravity holds the coin on the ground, but pass the magnet over it at some appropriate height and….” And, well, nothing much. Coins aren’t magnetic. If he’s outside on a sunny day, he might see the magnet’s shadow move in relation to the coin after a while. But Truth can always overcome a little inaccuracy, and, undeterred, the author (the “scientific paper” is unsigned) gets to the point after only a few minutes of Jew-bashing. “From Newton till today the standard mathematics which attempt to explain all space phenomena centers on the concept of ‘gravity’. The apple and all else falls to the ground and this observed fact needs a name. Call it ‘gravity’. No problem.” A favorite rejoinder of brights to people who insist that evolution is “only a theory” (usually Communist, Satanic, or Jewish) is that “Gravity is only a theory, too.” This is often followed by a friendly invitation to step off a tall object and show how inconclusive a theory can be. |
| Why Newspapers are Dying | 2/11/07 | McClatchy Newspapers, second largest
chain of papers in the US and owners of California’s Bee newspapers, was
bemoaning the fact that their stock had slipped nearly 40%. They
mentioned lack of advertising revenue, dropping circulation, and
increasing costs of production as the problem, but the basic situation
goes beyond that. Newspapers love to cite cable news stations for all that has gone wrong in journalism over the past 35 years since the glory days of the Watergate scandal. But “Spin,” the brilliant CBC series, mentioned today the “dirty little secret” about cable news: they aren’t that popular, and their influence, such as it is, exists only because they insist they are influential. America’s most popular news cable station is Faux News, and on a good day, it gets one out of every two hundred Americans to watch. And while that viewership includes the administration and movers and shakers in the GOP, the typical Faux viewer is near or past retirement, annoyed that minorities are moving into the neighborhood, and thinks the world’s been going to hell since 1960. Grandpa Simpson with a whiskey bottle. The New York Times has substantially more reach, even just inside New York City. And their influence extends far beyond that. Even in these days, more people read the New York Times – or many other major metropolitan papers – than watch Faux News. In other words, were it not for the fact that the GOP had been co-opted by its lunatic wing, Faux News would have all the influence of the Weekly World News, or National Enquirer, and for much the same reasons. |
| Pluck-A-Doodle-Doo! | 2/3/07 | There are chicken feathers floating down
all over the Northeastern corridor this week from New York to Boston.
Newspaper editors are urged not to attempt to have sexual congress with
the chicken feathers. Who would have guessed it would be so easy to bring a major American city to her knees? Or a major American newspaper? In Boston, a marketing ploy resulted in a bomb scare that shut the entire downtown area down for several hours. The “bomb” consisted of a breadboard circuit sheet like the type you can buy in Radio Shack to make your own radio, with about 60 LEDs arranged to create the outline of a simple cartoon figure which is making a rude gesture with its middle finger. It’s about as threatening as a kitten, even with the small battery and the two wires leading from the battery to the board to make the lights glow. Because of the rude gesture (the bird), our brave and noble media refused, in large measure, to show the “device,” leaving people to imagine a sophisticated electronic device with wires and times and big, ominous, greasy packages into which the bare wires feed. But really – it was a small circuit board, LEDS, two small wires and a battery. Boston plotzed when one of them was found (hidden in plain sight on a brick wall) by someone who promptly panicked and imagined himself in hour 24 of the Jack Bauer series. Boston arrested two people, who will probably be threatened with terrorism charges, and Boston is threatening to sue Time Warner. Time Warner owns the Cartoon Network, and it sounds a hell of a lot more dignified to say you are suing a big multinational corporation than threatening to start a scrap with Ed, Edd and Eddy, or Billy & Mandy. |
| Smoke and Mirrors | 1/27/07 | There was an article in the Guardian
that, had it appeared on April 1st, I would have passed along with a
wide grin. The Guardian has been infamous in past years for slipping in
news stories on that particular date that aren’t exactly reality-based.
The trouble is that usually it’s a sly wink to a British audience and
neither my readers, nor, often as not, I will get the joke. It might be
something like “Footballer’s wife Chelsea Wurst announced that she was
getting her husband, striker Pete Wurst, a kitten for his birthday”, and
99.9% of Brits and .01% of Americans would know that Wurst is violently
allergic to cats, and that he would be playing in the FA cup on his
birthday. On the same day that ABC news here in the US leaked advance information on the vast Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change study will be coming out that pretty much nails down human complicity in global warming, and on the same day that a major US study revealed that there is a strong correlation between living near freeways and diminished lung capacity in children, the admin announced that it would plan to combat global warming with ... drumroll, please. Smoke and mirrors. Here was a joke even people who don’t know how many sides a triangle has will get, I thought. Except it wasn’t April 1st, and the Guardian wasn’t joking. |
| Things are Heating Up | 1/20/07 | This isn’t shaping up to be a quiet year. But then, nobody really thought it was
going to be a quiet year. But in just the past 24 hours, we’ve seen THREE new candidates announce in a Presidential race with a crowded field that won’t even see its first primary for a full year. A big offensive in Iraq is already returning new and greater levels of meaningless carnage. And the Chinese, thanks to corrupt American contractors, can now blow American satellites out of the sky, robbing America of its greatest tactical advantage. I didn’t even look to see what the WEATHER was doing. Something awful, no doubt. These days it usually is. First, the trivial pursuit. Hilary Clinton, Bill Richardson and Sam Brownback all announced they were running for president. They join the following who are already running: Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut; Former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina; Former Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska; Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio; Former Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa; John H. Cox of Illinois; and Michael Charles Smith of Oregon. Mind you, that’s just people from the two major political parties. If you don’t know who any of them are or what party they are with, relax. It probably doesn’t matter. Every once in a while a “who dat?” candidate breaks from the ranks and gives the front runners a challenge, like happened with George McGovern, Bill Clinton and Howard Dean, but for each one who breaks through there’s usually five or six others who just sort of fade, often gone before the New Hampshire primary. |
| Rotterdammerüng | 1/15/07 | Everyone has been watching the
catastrophe that is the Putsch junta implode in upon itself, and as big
and as spectacular as that is, there’s been another development over the
past month or so that could have as big an effect on the American
political landscape. For years, the extreme reactionary right, led by crackpot billionaires such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Sun Myung Moon, and fostered by large, power-seeking corporations who were contemptuous of workers and individual rights, such as Disney, Time/Warner and Westinghouse, have spent billions and billions of dollars and devoted millions of manhours to diverting and controlling the public discourse by any means necessary. In an extreme example, Sun Myung Moon has spent three billion dollars out of his own pocket to keep his propaganda vanity project, the Washington Times, afloat. It, in turn, is the “newspaper” most frequently cited by Faux News, and all the various right wing radio and television show hosts whose commercial success floats magically above any actual public demand. Oh, did you think Rush Limbaugh’s audience really went out and bought enough foot odor pads to cover his $18 million/year salary? Or that Faux News was somehow more influential with its 0.5% share than NBC is with a 7% share? They’ve been involved in a vicious battle to utterly control the public discourse since the early 1980s, and in the late 90's and early Naughties, they largely succeeded. They came very close to bringing down the Clinton presidency, despite Clinton’s enormous success and popularity as president, and they managed to get George W. close enough in the 2000 vote that his daddy’s lawyers and judges could steal the rest. |
| Warm Air Aloft | 1/7/07 | It was chilly this morning. Thirteen above, call it minus ten Celsius. But then, it’s BEEN cooler than is usual in these parts pretty much steadily since mid November. As a result, the wood pile is going faster than normal, and we’ve been getting winter conditions we don’t often see: whiteouts, white ice, snow tornadoes traipsing down the boulevard. For all of that, it’s a dry winter. We only have about 60% of the snowpack we would normally have. A “normal” winter features lots of big fat snowflakes falling straight down at thirty degree temperatures. The Sacramento Bee is warning residents to prepare for possible snow Wednesday night. It’s snowed exactly once in Sacramento since 1942. If Sac gets snow, what’ll happen up here? We’re prepared for wet heavy snow, the type that turns to cement the next day. Powder snow has entirely different properties. It’s been an usually cold winter. I looked at the weather for central Alaska – another place that has been colder than normal this winter – and it looks like another big blast of cold air is forming, preparing to move south. This will probably astonish the folks back east and up north, who have been facing an entirely different set of circumstances this year. It was 72 in New York City the other day, and there was a striking picture of the Polar Bear club, looking unimpressive in their bathing suits under the warm sun, staging a protest against the un-winter-like weather. When I looked at the weather for NYC last night at midnight their time, it was 62 degrees. On January 6th. In Ottawa, which normally resembles Ice Station Zebra about now, it is raining, there is no snow on the ground, and the Rideau Canal – billed as the world’s longest ice rink – remains unfrozen. City authorities are contemplating alternatives for the city’s annual Winterlude and Ice Sculpture if things don’t get more seasonable. Cherry trees are blossoming in Washington, and even in Iqaluit, far up in Baffin Island, it rained the other day. It rains in Baffin Island in January somewhat less frequently than it snows in Sacramento. |
| The Death of Saddam | 12/31/06 | It would be easy to dismiss the execution
of Saddam Hussein as just another fallen tyrant getting his just
rewards. Nobody was surprised or even disturbed at the bloody death (by
impromptu firing squad) of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator.
Most people would have liked to see a similar fate befall Pinochet, or
Idi Amin, or any of the thousands of other despots who have contributed
to the savagery and disgrace that is so often the human condition.
Certainly there was no lack of blood on Saddam’s hands. But there isn’t anything the Putsch junta can’t screw up, and even the trial and killing of this loathsome man shifted rapidly from justice to low farce. Remember how, in the ramp-up to war, one of the biggest memes of Putsch’s far-right supporters was “Saddam gassed his own people”? Republican moral outrage, such as it is, focused on the attacks by Saddam on Kurdish villages. The Kurds were fighting for their freedom, and Saddam massacred them with mustard gas and other horrors. So, once captured, one might think that the Americans would be pressing for a trial of Saddam |