All religion is politics

Understand that I make a fundamental, line in the sand distinction between faith and religion. "Faith," which is personal, and I usually admire it when it does not trample either reason or reasonability.

Sigh. And then there is religion, wherein discourse inevitably boils down to "My god's dick can beat up your god's dick so neenerneenerneener." (The fact that folks are quite often arguing over the same god makes it just that much more puerile.)

Two cases in point:

1.) Arkansas barring unmarried couples from adopting children...even when they're their own friggin' relatives, and

2.) Israel, period, and most recently this.

When is making other people suffer for your dogma a testament to "faith"? Faith, last I checked, was about keeping one's convictions in the face of opposition. Not forcing the world to conform to your notions to, ultimately, eliminate the need for faith.

True, the God of the Old Testament doesn't have Problem One with killing children by the truckload to spite their parents/tribes. But we're not child-minded superstitious Bronze Age goat herders, are we? Thus we have every d--ned right expect better of these so-called leaders and the voters who enable them. When religion informs politics to the point of reductio ad absurdam, where innocents (particularly children) suffer, that's not faith. It's politics.

It's time for the so-called "values voters" to stop pretending that the blood is not on their hands. Or that it can be washed away by whatever they've deluded themselves into thinking were their pure intentions.

How much evidence is enough, Part II

The fact that the hothouse wankers on the right incite their posse to keep blaming the equal lending opportunity laws for the finance meltdown should have them up on charges of treason. There are people in Gitmo who are less of a threat to America. When selling more books or keeping your ratings gets in the way of fixing the problem, you have forfeited your right to free speech. Honestly, Streicher was hung for less vitriol than some of these beady-eyed cheeseburger-snorting gits have spewed.

The premeditated thievery of The Suits who pumped air into an obvious bubble is the cause of the meltdown. Homebuyers with shaky credit most emphatically did not spray Lysol on their loans before bundling them as "secure" investments. Homebuyers with still worse credit absolutely did not force anyone to cook the books and lie all the way up the so-called accountability chain. This was a culture of greed, pure and simple. I mean, come on, already: This is a industry that's thumbed its nose at that meddling government for years--one whose stooges trumpted the virtues of "self-correcting" capitalism. Does anyone with two brain cells to rub together honestly believe that any suit anywhere gave a flying @#$% at a rolling doughnut whether someone was being discriminated against?

So, for the dittoheads and willing bitches of the hot-air vents on AM and Faux News: Saying Yes, WaMu Built an Empire on Shaky Loans. Oh, and while you're at it: Bite the ankles of those who shoved their way above you on mobility ladder rather than kicking the heads of those climbing behind you. For a freakin' change, already. Guess who actually deserves it?

But I suppose that I might be deluding myself there, expecting mere fact to tempt anyone from the fun of playground bullying--which is what this is. Mom said that some people never grow up, and she's becoming more correct the longer I live and see things like bailout bonuses, Vice Presidents sneering "So?"s, and knowing that these criminals will not gasp their last in prison. Pathetically, it's much easier to turn your dissatisfaction at your own lot on those less powerful than even you than it is to risk something by holding the real perpertrators to account. Especially when they're obviously sociopaths. Just like the hate-peddlers who single out the powerless.

How much evidence is enough?

The usual sensational headline from Yahoo! News: "Many teens don't keep virginity pledges". In other news, night is dark, water is wet, and human stupidity still defies all measurement.

But, here's the most telling part:

Teens who take virginity pledges are just as likely to have sex as teens who don't make such promises -- and they're less likely to practice safe sex to prevent disease or pregnancy, a new study finds.

At the bottom, this isn't about raging adolescent hormones. Nor is it a question about "self control" or any degree of "morality." Not in the least. The problem here is magical thinking, which is why all the wholesale repression of information that goes on in the name of "education" will ultimately cause more misery than (gasp!) actually treating sex as a subject for mature, rational, scientifically- and statistically-informed discussion.

Bottom line: Pledges of this kind are a cop-out, most especially for the parents who don't want the responsibility of raising sexually healthy young adults. Then too, they put another layer of immaturity between the teen and her/his responsibility to her/himself and her/his partner. And that, peeps, is most emphatically NOT the point of growing up. Apart from the human and social impacts of too-early parenthood, what particularly pisses me off about this magical thinking is that it's promulgated by the self-same tribe that continually bangs on about accountability and personal responsibility.

Gaaagh. The older I become, the less desire I have to replace the irony and hypocrisy meters blown out by the last decade or so...

Merry Mayhem!

This won't come as a shock to anyone who knows me, but I mostly loathe Christmas. Or, more aptly, I loathe the hyper-politicized, spiritually bankrupt consumerist orgy that eats its way further backwards in the calendar every friggin' year. (Silver lining: I actually look forward to New Years' now, a holiday that I found pointless as a kid.)

That being said, here's one of the handful of indulgences I do look forward to this time of year: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/snowglobe Keep your eye on the snowman--that's all I'm sayin'.

The other stuff:

1.) The Ref
2.) John Denver and the Muppets
3.) Elf Bowling v.1
4.) George C. Scott as Ebeneezer Scrooge

A grateful shout-out to Les Jenkins at Stupid Evil Bastard for finding that needle in the internet's haystack--"the Google" and I came up skunked the other day when we went trolling for it.

A farewell (sort of) and thanks

One of the regular stops on my morning news-cruise is the blog "Managing Globalization," which is mostly the handiwork of Daniel Altman. Yesterday was its last day, as Mr. Altman will focus on other ventures, including another book, which I very much hope will hit the shelves no later than 2010.

In a world where economics is much less science than religion--with nearly as many schisms, jihads, and Kool-Aid-swilling cultishness than the real thing--Dr. Altman's clear-eyed, evenhanded approach combined with his humane outlook elevate him to statesman status in my opinion.

So I didn't want to let the week run out without a hat-tip and a thanks for his insights. I will be looking forward to Dr. Altman's future work, and wish him all success in those ventures.

Revolution behind schedule?

It's about friggin' time... "Chicago workers sit-in becomes rallying point"

I don't care if the Soviets and Chinese and various Third World thugocracies gave Marxism a bad name. Labor is NOT a commodity, and employees ARE stakeholders, d--it. Far more so than overpaid gits pushing imaginary money back and forth between spreadsheet columns at an investment banking firm. Or the significantly more overpaid gits who set up the giant Monopoly game.

So viva la revolución. Granted, the firing squad's gonna run short of bullets eventually, but it'll at least thin the ranks of the cheeseburger-binging b@$+@rds--I'm looking at you, Mr. "Contract with America"--who put us in this mess. It certainly won't do much tangible short-term good, but if a few pike-mounted heads convince today's business/finance majors to go into useful occupations, I think the world will be a better place for it.

Stupid Friday humor

From from The Onion archives to you: Zombie Nutritionist Recommends All-Brain Diet. Better stale than compost: Bon appetit, mes amis.

Guerilla capitalism

So if the Orwellian "conscience clause" almost certain to be enacted by our Baptist Taliban is disproportionally detrimental to women, shouldn't I be getting a discount on my next medical bill? After all, if I'm getting WalMart service, I shouldn't have to pay Tiffany's prices.

Crikey. At this rate, will anyone be surprised if Bush and Cheney set fire to the White House on their way out?

New lunchbox hero?

The web comic "Do You Work Here?" laces my Mondays and Thursdays with a lovely note of cynicism, and today there was a bonus: A link to this comic, in the wake of Friday's WalMart trampling death. (Disclaimer: I did do some shopping Friday, but it was purely a grocery run. Mama may have raised a fool, but not that kind of fool...)

Uh-oh

Malware specifically targeted at U.S. Military computers, reported by the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cyberattack28-2008nov28,0,6441140.story

[snark] Yep, let's keep off-shoring those "knowledge worker" jobs to the lowest bidder. I, for one, can soooo not wait for the spectacle of a U.S. soldier waiting (on hold) for a Filipino call center worker to read the troubleshooting scripts for Indian software on Chinese hardware while the red buttons flash and the blue screens stare back. [/snark]

Adobe: Fail. Again.

GAAAAAGGGHH!!! I am so ungodly sick of Flash freaking out on Ubuntu Firefox lately. Like I don't get enough grief at work from Adobe via that garbled, fragmented, Rube Goldberg, incomplete, woefully under-documented, discombobulated excuse for an API otherwise known as Flex.

Sorry. Just had to rant. I was nearly half-way through an hour-long video. when the video decided to crash, which has been par for the course lately. But, what can you expect from a company arrogant and pretentious enough to charges hundreds of dollars for an Eclipse fork?

Bonus karma?

I've been pretty buried through the last couple weeks, and have been lax about keeping up with the news of my to-be-adopted country. Stephane Dion's lack of charisma and innate leadership ability is, to me, the prime reason that the Harper government was returned to minority power. (Sort of an echo of the "WTF??!?!" anyone with two brain cells to rub together should have been thinking in Nov. 2004.) But maybe, just maybe, the "Bush Lite" league has overreached itself.

Using fiscal conservatism as an excuse to eliminate equal pay guarantees for women?!?! That reeks of Shock Doctrine, Northern Style. Flaherty should be keelhauled and what remains of him should be sacked. If the Canadians don't wake up to the reactionary Tory agenda after this, then they deserve no less than what we've had for the last eight years.

Let's get it straight this time:

1. "Compassionate Conservatism" is an Orwellian lie--compassion requires empathy in its pantheon of values. Deregulation does not protect the Have-nots, only the Haves.
2. Zygotes are not babies.
3. Blowing the $#!+ out of a nation does not normalize its political system.
4. Freedom of religion is less than pointless without freedom from it.
5. Companies are never too big to fail--most especially when their bad behaviour is so handsomely rewarded.
6. If consenting adults are involved, there is no "moral" dimension to sex--let's just call the "social conservatives" out for the voyeuristic perverts they truly are. (Geeze people, just get creative with that shower massage and loosen the heck up!)
7. Neither Wal-Mart nor Wall Street would be considered "capitalism" by Adam Smith any more than Vietnam would be considered "communist" by Marx. & Engels.
8. Oh, and telling you to shut up and stop running me off the road is not an abridgment of your freedom of speech.

But anyway, I'm very much hoping that the rebellion succeeds, if nothing else, in rattling the minority government for the rest of its term. I don't think that Harper's run out of tactics just yet. I doubt that he's working from an abridged version of the Karl Rove playbook, after all. So I'm not holding my breath for a successful coup. Hopefully, though, it signals the beginning of the end for Canada's reactionary relapse. And, by the grace of His Noodliness, hopefully the Liberals will finally scrounge up something better than a relative figurehead like Dion.

An upside to the downturn

H/t to DailyKos for the news that God's Posse doesn't take care of its own any better than Mammon's: Focus on the Family is laying off staff.

Now, when I read that James Dobson is dumpster-diving for meals, I'll believe that there's not only a God, but that He is just. In the meantime, though, I'll just savor some non-denominational karma.

Cheers, all!

Really good Seth Godin blog post

Whether you're a consumer or a marketer, "Hungry" is definitely a meal for the brain--well worth the few minutes you'll spend nibbling it.

Black Monday at the office

We lost over a fifth of the staff at the office this morning, wiping out roughly a year's job growth. Ironically, the same day the pinheads at AIG got their bailout--presumably so that they can flush it down the same toilets that sucked up the private sector money. Sewers aren't known for for being picky that way.

But subsidize my (erstwhile) co-workers' rent/heat/groceries/health care/etc.? That would be a handout. You know: Socialism. And we dassn't have any of that in this country...

Thank you, America

Yes, I realize that the last vote has not yet been counted. But, hey, I'm in Stats this semester, so I have diplomatic immunity, okay? ;-)

But seriously. This moment is the American exceptionalism I was taught to love--and have found nothing in the thirty-odd years since to make me fall out of love. This is most emphatically not the "We have the monopoly on the right answers and the bright ideas" perversion that was made of this exceptionalism--even before we as a nation went into denial about having the stone age bomb us right back in Vietnam.

No, I'm talking about unbridled promise and the responsibility to embrace it with passion and brains and discipline. You know, the whole "Free to be You and Me" thing: "Every boy in this land/grows to be his own man. In this land every girl/grows to be her own woman." And if that woman or that man turns out to be the President of the United States of America...well, that's just the whole freakin' point, now ain't it?

That being said, I realize that these are baby steps. President-elect Barack Hussein Obama is not a knight in shining armor by any stretch. And it is a dangerous thing to hold people's dreams as well as shield them from their fears--far, far more weighty than Prince Hal's laments about the uneasy fit of the crown.

But as Archimedes said so long ago, "Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world." Today and tonight, the fulcrum has been moved in the direction where it can do more good for the most people of this earth. If I can wake to the news that Californians transcended yet another form of bigotry at the polls, it will be an even better world than I could have hoped for four years ago.

And so, again: Thank you, America. No matter how you voted. As a History graduate, it is humbling to see history unfold in its myriad dimensions.

Paging Spiderman

Prohibiting teachers (kindergarten through college) from displaying bumper stickers on their car is going overboard. And certainly the First Amendment isn't terribly specific about whether teachers wearing campaign buttons or other campaign swag falls within its penumbra (much less umbra).

But the one thing that's missing from the whole debate is the concept of responsibility. I could rail for reams against the all-noblesse-and-no-obilige (h/t Gary Trudeau) pack of boorish louts this nation has become. But that's somewhat orthogonal to the point. And the point is that teachers instill either strong emotions or none. You're rarely ambivalent about a teacher, whatever your grade. Heck, I had teachers--even student teachers--I all-but-worshiped. Some teachers--thankfully few--I despise to the marrow of my being. But everyone else, I do well enough to remember their names.

So. You have the polarizing influence of politics and the polarized attitude students have toward their instructors. Combining them can't be a good thing. I don't care how you slice it--there's just no good outcome. You might as well just start playing favorites at that point and have done with it. No teacher worth her/his dry-erase vapor should be doing that.

Moreover, it's flouting the responsibility that goes with the job. This isn't like teaching sex education or evolution where you actually have data and facts with which to brow-beat hysteria and superstition. Politics, like religion, is All About opinion. Adding to the herd mentality already stampeding rampant through society does no good whatsoever.

More to the point, teaching--like it or not--requires a certain amount of gravitas. On any given day, teaching more about mob control than it will ever, EVER be about the proverbial Three Rs. Introducing politics--particularly when it's not even age-appropriate--is counter-productive. And that only when it's not just flat-out stupid. Stupid to the point where I'm have to admit that I'm gob-smacked that morons--educated and non---are actually arguing over this.

Look: I don't have any sort of leadership position. If I had a real business card for work, I'd list my title as "Alpha-Peon." But for all that, I certainly wouldn't presume to politically proselytize on the job. It's just tacky. We already have one person on staff to cover tacky. Sadly, we haven't figured out how to outsource tacky. And it's merely one of the reasons that this person is the office pariah. Bottom line: Don't be that person.

Giving honor its due

I would disappoint my inner Hufflepuff if I neglected to give John McCain credit for trying to stuff the proverbial genie back into the bottle. Being booed by the people who came to cheer you has to be d--ned unnerving, even with a Secret Service posse at your back. I heartily commend the courage that it takes to incur that--make no mistake. There's a reason I slipped out of pep rallies and into the library, trust me.

Unfortunately, the sorcery that turns mobs 180 degrees from their initial course is all too rare. Worse, Miss Wingnut USA is just too goshdarned white trash dingdangitalready for any prayer of gravitas.

But I digress.

Again, my sincere kudos to the senior Senator from Arizona. Sadly, though, with such discombobulated campaign machinery running beneath him, I'd put McCain's chances of holding back the dark side of conservativism at slim to none. I just hope to Hades that the hatefulness is confined to the rallies.

Conservative party-crasher

On the surface, David Brooks' "The Class War Before Palin" op-ed makes me want to cheer. But barely scratch the highlighting powder of Mr. Brooks' self-conscious makeover--one eye to the mirror and the other to a photo of George F. Will--and he bleeds nervousness. Someone's little bubble has been burst, methinks, and mewonders also how long it will be before that someone presumes to outrage on the same grounds.

Tell me, Mr. Brooks: How does it feel to sit in the decidedly un-Enlightened salon of Madame Guillotine? Did you perchance think that the lady in the front was knitting you a sweater? You and your ilk for too long provided the pseudo-intellectual rationalizations for the political mob-mentality of the last decade and more. How can you claim surprise when the self-same mob howls for the missing "one" promised to them when the Red Team proclaimed that two plus two equals five (and FSM help anyone who insisted that the answer was actually four--why do they hate numbers?)? When housing prices climb as all other indicators plunge, it's not the American Dream--it's a real estate bubble. The Iraq War is not paying for itself in oil revenue. National Security measures at airports are pure voodoo--you can board a plane packing (inert) grenades, but not nipple jewlery. The NSA doesn't have time to eavesdrop on Osama's pizza-delivery calls because they're too busy jacking off to other peoples' phone sex.

In short, the Emperor is butt-naked, somebody's got some 'splainin' to do, and you're one of those somebodies, jack.

Why? Because we find ourselves three-quarters through 2008, beggared of several Constitutional birthrights, our children steadily dumbed down by NCLB and left to pipe-dreams of winning the lottery as rap artists or ball-players or supermodels rather than spending their adulthood usefully or meaningfully. It's lucky for you that math is so fatally uncool to U.S.-born students. Otherwise they might be able to count high enough to appreciate how bankrupted they've been made by your ideologies. For anyone who adds any value to the economy, however, two plus two does after all equal four.

But, ever so regretably, awakening to sober reality does not undo the damage of fantasy. When you disparage education and rational thinking, you damage far more than the educational system itself. You also undermine the social compact that we should be making with those who are raised in this country: Pay attention in class, work smart, live smart, and you won't have to sell your soul to be financially safe. Even if you don't want to work for The Man, you have to be well-rounded enough to be The Man.

The baiting of the educated "elite" didn't start in the past week, Mr. Brooks, and it is, at best, disingenuous to admit it on the cusp of a potential Palin Vice-Presidency. The time for that was 2000, if not before. Nor are the educated the sole targets of the GOP's putrid us-vs-them tactics. The definition of "them" (sometimes) excepted, the Republican brand of populism is indistinguishable from a Klan rally. The "them"s are the rainbow that intrudes on your tribe's black-and-white(-bread) weltanschauung: Gays. Liberals. Immigrants. Muslims. Atheists/Agnostics. Wiccans/Pagans. Judges whose rulings they dislike. People who tell them to stay the @#$% out of their reproductive choices. Wealthy, connected Jews (But in the latter case only sotto vocce, because they wouldn't want to sound, you know, racist.)

And, too, the "educated." For the statistics speak, and in full throated chorus: U.S. social mobility is ossifying into a caste system. Thus, a devil's-bargain (a.k.a. "debt for degree") must be made by middle- and lower-income undergraduates to an extent not seen during my undergraduate epoch a mere two decades ago. Then, after incurring thousands of dollars of debt and jumping through hoops for four more years--wondering all the while how offshore-proof their career will actually be--these folks step off the commencement stage to be vilified for their wager of effort and expense. That's just gotta make it all worthwhile, dunnit?

Feh. I'd say "Welcome to my world, Mr. Brooks," except you're emphatically not. Not without significantly more self-reflection and a penitent appreciation of your own complicity. You were in no way obliged to attach yourself to the preening cheerleaders and jocks to the exclusion of the dweebs who do their own homework. On test day, your team chose a Champagne Brigade flyboy over someone who was actually used for target practice by dudes in black 'jammies. And, in case it escaped your notice, your team is now backing the privileged son and grandson of Navy brass who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. Against a guy who beat the odds of being dark-skinned and raised in a single-parent family to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard.

Is it any wonder that the GOP acts as high-handedly as it has these past several years? To them, getting ahead is couched in terms of playground pecking-order, and not in any way a meritocracy. The last eight years have been the political equivalent of "Lord of the Flies." And now the whole island is ablaze, thank you very little. Puppeteering and power-grabbing only carry so far, even in politics. Reality has a nasty way of defying dogma of any kind. The next few years will take political smarts, but more still of the academic kind, if there is any hope for pulling this country back from the banana republic brink.

While that's underway, I would appreciate it if you would do us a big favor, Mr. Brooks, and take your own words to heart. Pretty-please stay the hell out from underfoot while the "educated" folks try to put America back together. And I'd be doubly obliged if you would actually help the effort by nudging your party--and hopefully the nation at large--back to some sort of intellectual respectability.

Elayne Boosler nails it in one

Brought to you via The Huffington Post: Elayne Boosler hands Harry Reid his head. Alas, not in person. But it does prove, yet again, that you never, ever want to piss off anyone who's funnier than you.

The truth is rarely so delicious and bitter at the same time. Enjoy.

The twelve o'clock flashers strike again

Quelle surprise: The line between science and wishful thinking is crossed yet again. And I'm not even talking about creationism, global-warming denial or abstinence-only "education" this time: Scientists question terrorist-hunting techniques.

Y'know, I consider myself a professional dilettante--it comes with the territory of working with multiple languages and technologies for a living. But for love of the FSM, I at least have the humility and wit to flout the wisdom of my alpha geeks only after triple-checking my facts.

Sigh...if our so-called "leaders"--in the private as well as public sector--could grok that they've merely been promoted to the level of their incompetence and act with the appropriate friggin' humility, it would easily halve the world's problems.

What color is the sky in W's world?

Daaaang. I didn't think that hypocrisy could come in this density without imploding into a black hole. Cheeseburgers alone can't mess up your thinking this badly, can they? I gotta think that Dubya's been brain damaged by all the white-out he's used on hundreds of signing statements--not to mention the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention, Salt II, and reality in general. (Fortunately, it flakes off reality sooner or later. The others? Don't hold your breath...)

But the amount of hypocrisy and/or self-deception required for Dubya to pontificate about "apply[ing] the laws as written" just knocks the wind out of you. I don't think you realize this, Mr. President, but Keith Olberman was being polite when he told you to "shut the Hell up." That's certainly not the four-letter word I would have used.

Channelling Robinson Jeffers

Not surprisingly, I've become a poll-junkie lately. Between the passionate hope of seeing an end to the hemorrhaging of everything I was taught to respect about the U.S., and a scholarly interest in statistics--4 credits this semester--that's pretty much inevitable.

In the milieu of bailouts ("Would you like some pork fries to go with that pork-burger?" "Super-size it!") and ballyhoo on the political circuit, an echo calls from the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, to remind us that we have been this way before:

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to Empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and
sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother, and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You, making haste, haste on decay; not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: Meteors are not needed less than
mountains: Shine, perishing Republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their
distance from the thickening center; corruption
Is never compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--
they say--God, when he walked on earth.

Corruption is never compulsory. But refusing to be corrupted--if only to a threshold percentage--carries a price tag. I'm not especially convinced that all recognize that. Maybe only the folks who have been corrupted, or those who spent childhood/adolescence on the proverbial outside looking in truly do. And that, ultimately, may be what's truly wrong with Joe and Jane Sixpack.

Again, the ghost speaks:

Ave Caesar

No bitterness; our ancestors did it,
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth, too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or, rather--for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists--
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive.
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.

The Danegeld that Washington just pledged to the Wall Street jarls is no different from shooting an adrenaline-morphine cocktail into the vein of a terminally ill person. Even without card-houses tumbling and the spike in unemployment, the fundamentals of our economy are most emphatically not strong. We're borrowing money to pay for the things we should be making ourselves. It's Company Store Capitalism--period, full stop. Anyone who claims that this is healthy has no business being President.

Maybe it's just my mood today, but Jeffers almost seems too optimistic. Are there actually mountain refuges in this day of illegal surveillance? And how can any tyrant--kindly or not--save us from our own excesses when they will not curb their own? FDR was considered a dictator by some, and there's no question that he crossed Constitutional boundaries by packing the Supreme Court. But he had brains and a sense of noblesse oblige and a tenacious, two-handed grip on capital-R reality. (And, of course, he had Eleanor to lean on.) Things that our latter-day Caesar lacks in superabundance. And, unlike the maverick-y reformer pretensions of a certain Republican candidate, FDR went toe-to-toe against Tammany Hall and won--Eleanor carrying the banner and helping to deliver the coup de grace a few decades later.

But such Caesars are far, far too rare to be relied upon. While the Boss Tweeds are not--and they are back in spades. (Funny how Karl Rove is fat, too.) Percentage-spreads and interactive maps on the internet are all well and good, but there are October Surprises and Diebold and good, old-fashioned voter suppression to reckon with. When the GOP's concern-trolling stoops to obsessing over tee-shirts and singing hats (I am NOT making this up), worry. Cornered people are dangerous. People at risk of facing their own guilt are far more so. Today' GOP is both.

Take a little time next week--over your lunch break or what-have-you--to call your registrar and make sure that you're on the rolls. If you're not, dot the 'i's and cross the 't's to get that way. This month. If possible, vote absentee (with your political tee-shirt on, just to stick it to the fascist fashionistas). Me, I'm packing my utility bill, my driver's license, and my friggin' passport for good measure on November 4th. The cheeseburger-poisoned b@@rds who run this show have already robbed you of your birthright of habeus corpus. Pilfering your vote is completely in character.

Update, 11:50 p.m.
By sheer coincidence, Dearest forwarded this Andrew Bacevich op-ed to me: He told us to go shopping. Now the bill is due.

Shine, perishing republic.

My lunchbox hero today

Seth Godin's blog--the sethgodin.typepad.com edition, anyway--is one that I don't miss, despite the fact that I don't (yet) own a company. Other than his concept of permission-based marketing, nothing in particular tends to stick with me day to day. It's the kind of writing that gently infiltrates the mind like a gentle rain. (Rather like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations)

This post from over the weekend, however, is an exception. Godin, in his writing, comes off as a truly gentle soul, but you sense the righteous anger of someone who sees his values violated every time he has to fly.

I have to second--"second" as in waving a cigarette lighter in the air and hollering "Woooo! Preach it, brother!"-- that, given that not only do I voluntarily subsidize lowest common denominator thinking whenever I purchase a ticket, but that I am involuntarily complicit by dint of having taxable income.

So, go read Random Travel Thoughts. Well worth your time in the coin of thought-fodder.

Hats off to Margaret Cho

As Sarah Palin's shenanigans have been trickling into the public press, I've been unable to shake the notion that she's basically every office alpha-hen you've ever had to suffer with/under. Only on steroids.

But Margaret Cho, quoted by FireDogLake, absolutely nails it, IMO:

...she is the ultimate misogynist. She is a woman hater in the extreme. To force women to have children against their will, to deny abortion rights EVEN in cases of incest and rape is abominable. She is an insult to feminism, a sickening example what a woman will do to other women in order to please men and further her own career. Women do s**t like that to other women to keep them down – to make their achievement seem more extraordinary – to keep women out of their way, so they can enjoy all the power and the men themselves, and that stuff makes them worse than sexist men. It is worse to be a traitor than a perpetrator.

Just like Palin's Uncle Tom comrades (e.g. Phyllis Schlafly and Ann Coulter). Even Mareshal Petain would be embarassed by such disgusting pandering to a thugocracy.

Same $#!+, different country, Part II

As if 40+ of those polled supporting McCain in the U.S. isn't enough cognitive dissonance to make your head explode, it's the fact that Harper and his goons are within striking distance of a majority government in Canada.

After eight textbook case years of the scapegoating done by one of the most corrupt and morally, intellectually bankrupt political philosophies since modern Communism, you'd think that a few people would be able to spot another "us vs. them" demonizing attempt at distraction. Like this one: PM vows to name youth criminals. Just like the neocons/theocons in our country have demonized immigrants (illegal and non-), homosexuals, Muslims, and liberals.

The thing is, I consider Canada's penal system far too soft, and shamefully lax on consideration for the victims. But I could agree 100% with Harpers proposal's, but oppose them nonetheless. Why? Because the Tories are still the spiritual descendents of the "White Man's Burden" colonials. Playing the tribes off against each other, spreading guns and fire-water and smallpox-infected blankets around indiscriminately. More to the point, Harper waited until the middle of an election to trot out a divisive proposal, a proposal that has squat to do with actually curbing crime. In short, every once in a while, the messenger does matter. The Tories have proved--with forcing a re-vote on same-sex marriage, with immigration so-called "reform"--that they have photocopied whole chapters from the Karl Rove playbook.

And so, I just shake my head, wondering how so many Canadians can be as blind as their counterparts to the the damning verdict on the reactionary dogma that has made undermined the military, foreign policy, political discourse, and economic standing of the most powerful nation on earth. I realize that Stephane Dion is about as exciting as cold, canned cream of mushroom soup, but still... Is that any justification for letting a grasping thug like Harper drag a country down a road that has already been scorched and devastated by the neocons south of the border?

Another spin on the kowtow to the Religious Right?

From I Kings, 1:14:

King David was old and advanced in years; and although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm. So his servants said to him, "Let a young virgin be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king, and be his attendant; let her lie in your bosom, so that the lord my king may be warm." So they searched for a beautiful girl throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. The girl was very beautiful. She became the king's attendant and served him, but the king did not know her sexually.

Sarah Palin in a political nutshell? As long as the GOP is so shamelessly sacrificing several centuries of progress to re-animate a Bronze Age world-view, I figure the metaphors might as well cut both ways. Pity that one won't perk up the ears of those who listen for Palin's Dominionist dog-whistles.

Then again, these are the same marks who actually believe that David and Abishag's relationship was actually platonic. Just like they believe that two gang-raped (erstwhile) virgins would think to seduce the father who handed them over to the gang in the first place. Or that the polygamy-rife Bible defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Or that handing your female servant over to your husband to bear the children you cannot isn't adultery or immoral.

On second thought, never mind. Lost cause. @#$%&*-up sexual mores are @#$%*&-up sexual mores. Forget I mentioned it.

A thought on the McCain/Palin (Palin/McCain?) campaign

From IMDB's (http://www.imdb.com) quotes section of "A Fish Called Wanda":

Otto: Don't call me stupid.
Wanda: Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?
Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.

This, peeps, is precisely how I feel when I have to deal with McCain--or, more aptly, (Sarah) Palin--groupies.

I am just so effin' sick of the blatant lies. And sicker yet of a populace that enables them. And from sheer intellectual couch-potato flabbiness, allows itself to be numbed and dumbed-down even further.

So here's a little channeling of Wanda Gershwitz:

• "Reformers" do NOT support a "Bridge to Nowhere" before turning against it (much less spend the earmarked funds elsewhere).
  
• Campaign finance reformers, in particular, do NOT appoint lobbyists to the top positions of their campaigns.
  
• "Beltway outsiders" do NOT pay lobbyists for $27 million in earmarks for a town of 9000 people. Nor do they appoint (ahem!) "uncredentialed" friends (whose qualifications for Ag. Administration include a childhood "love of cows") to lucrative government positions.
• "Historic women" do NOT appoint police chiefs who charge rape victims for the medical exams used as evidence against the perps. They also do NOT attempt to roll back a century's worth of progress by being blatantly anti-choice and opposing sex education that includes information on contraception. Why? Because a woman is more than a uterus with legs, regardless of demographic.
  
• Talking smack about other governments--particularly those which have The Bomb--is NOT an acceptable substitute for foreign policy. It is a demonstrable evidence of a lack of foreign policy (or understanding thereof). Particularly at a time when most of our fighting forces are pinned down in a sandy quagmire of our own misguided making.
  
• Conversely: Talking smack about governments who don't have The Bomb is NOT an incentive to make them stop wanting one. Especially when you talk about bombing them first.
  
• Linking the late Saddam Hussein with 9/11 does NOT enhance your qualifications for leading the War! On!! Terror!!! Why? Because connecting Dot 1 and Dot 427 does not make a good picture. Twit.
  
• Gas prices are high as the result of speculation, NOT a lack of offshore--much less ANWAR--drilling. If drilling were the the silver bullet, maybe oil companies would already being doing that on 40 million godd--n acres. Got that? 40 million acres of public land they can already drill. But don't.
  
• A flyboy who sat out 5 1/2 years of Vietnam does NOT "know how to win wars." In case you missed it, Senator, the North Vietnamese and the VC won. Despite our superior technology and firepower. And 58K+ dead. And if you can't recognize that that simple fact of history, you have absolutely no @#$%ing business being CoC for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where the Humvee vs. IED battle isn't doing so well. Why? Because we're making the mistakes of your generation over and over again. Dumb@$$.
• God is NOT running for President of the United States. Stop acting like He is. If He were running, he would have filed with the FEC, like a good Deity. If God wanted George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq, mightn't He at least have pointed out the location of the WMDs? Except that there weren't any. Similarly, if God wanted an Alaskan pipeline, He would be more than capable of putting one wherever He d--ned well felt like putting it.
• People who have been in Congress for over 30 years are NOT agents of "change." Stop it. Just stop. You're getting moron cooties all over the rest of us.
  

Grrrrrr. I could go on (and on). Except that I hear the callings of this "elitist" thing called education. Namely a stats class, plus studying toward a work-related certification. But even in this anti-science, anti-intellectual age--wherein anyone who can spell their name without referring to their belt buckle is an effete "elitist"--that's just how I roll.

---

Addendum. Let's add this to my "To Do" list once I'm El Supremo Presidente Dictator for Life: International curriculum for any school child will include a minimum of three years of logic, two of rhetoric, the equivalent of three semesters of statistics, four years of another language, and lots and lots of math and science. No driver's license nor diploma will granted until those requirements are met. Period. The criterion of "who you'd rather have a beer with" is will no longer be a valid qualification for public office, from the county dog-catcher on up. Enough is enough. We're not electing the Homecoming Queen, for @#$%^'s sake. This is the real world, with real people whose real lives are affected in real dollar terms. If your thinking is still in terms of the high school pecking-order, you don't deserve to vote. End of discussion.

And if, ultimately, my (benevolent) dictatorship is overthrown, I at least want the comfort that the coup will be executed by people who are adequately educated (and hopefully rational human beings). Seriously, I'll face a firing squad with a smile with that knowledge.

How much money is enough?

This is the second online mention of Texas energy billionaire T. Boone Pickens--seriously, I am soooo not making that name up--I've encountered in roughly two months. The first was his wind farm scheme. And now he's meddling in California politics.

On the philosophical level, you have to ask a few questions, such as:

• "How much money does one person need to have?"
• "At what point does simple human acquisitiveness become a 'control issues' kind of mental disease?"
• "And when are we going to stop lionizing the diseased?"

On the political level, however, the question becomes "How many welfare billionaires do our state and federal governments have to make before people stop buying the notion that we're a 'capitalist' society?"

Societally, we look on comic-book mavens as somehow immature. But as farcical as spandex-clad heroes battling luridly-looking villains seems--particularly given that most of these characters don't have any visible means of support--perhaps the mavens have better instincts after all. A simple skimming of the tabloid headlines reveals a set of priorities that are pretty messed up.

The head of the fish stinks first, part II

Interesting that the WaPo would come this close to calling attention to a scandal that doesn't involve sex: Internal Justice Dept. Report Cites Illegal Hiring Practices. (Props to writer Carrie Johnson for calling a spade a spade with the phrase "Christian lifestyle choices," btw. It's well past time that phrase came into cant use.)

From the limited testimony I saw, Monica Goodling came off like a twit in the congressional hearings. But the fact of the matter is, she couldn't have that much power without the tacit approval of someone important. Plausible deniability doesn't stretch to such endemic malfeasance by a single person. Nuh-uh. I've worked with too many conniving office hens to know that. When politics trumps experience even in counter-terrorism--the so-called strong suit of this sad-sack Administration--it's criminal behavior. Regardless of whether it was gross negligence or actually an evil hand guided by an evil mind.

If you want a good sample of the Bush Junta's legacy, this is an excellent choice. You have people who are willing to kill thousands upon thousands in an illegal war, torture, roll back the definition of American citizenship to the days of the Union Jack, etc., etc. All in the sacred name of the War! On!! Terror!!!. Yet, ask them to make the "sacrifice" of (horrors!) sharing office space with a liberal who happens to be competent in counter-terrorism? Too much for their hothouse flower sensibilities: Break out the smelling salts!

I'm not the gambling sort, so I won't wager with myself over whether Mukasey will have the cajones to investigate, much less with any alacrity. He's bench-warming for a lame-duck President, after all. So I will not be at all surprised if the next Administration will be handed yet another mess to sort out. For all that, it won't do to let the interest flag in such things. Not just for the obvious reasons of giving a d--n that our so-called "leaders" live up to all that stuff we had to memorize in the 8th Grade. No, I think that the behavior of these high-ranking flunkies in the next few months will serve as a reliable bellwether for the GOP insider view on John McCain's prospects in November.

Update, 29 July 2008, 15:58 GMT:
Seems that the NYT's coverage went further up the political food chain. Quelle surprise, the White House's commissars had their sticky little fingers in the pot.

According to the report, officials at the White House first developed a method of searching the Internet to glean the political leanings of a candidate and introduced it at a White House seminar called The Thorough Process of Investigation. Justice Department officials then began using the technique to search for key phrases or words in an applicant’s background, like “abortion,” “homosexual,” “Florida recount,” or “guns.”

That, folks, is the set of priorities these jack-booted thought-police worked with. Abortion. Homosexuality. Florida recount. Guns. All of which have sweet F.A. to do with law enforcement or counter-terrorism. Even the "guns" emphasis was meant to screen out people who believe that there should be fewer guns out there, instead of more.

Makes you feel sooooo much safer, dun'nit? Personally, all I can think of the Spanish Armada. As in the micro-managing King Philip tapping poor old Medina-Sidonia and loading down the ships with hundreds of priests. And we all know how well that worked out...

Because you're never too old for silliness

Or the Muppets. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpcUxwpOQ_A

Anecdotal good news

Dearest and I have returned from our last round of "babysitting bees" at the county fair for the year. This year's crowd of visitors to the local beekeeper's booth seemed head-and-shoulders more informed about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) than, say, that of two years ago. Naturally, a couple kids mentioned "The Bee Movie," which didn't surprise me. What did surprise me, however, was the young man who credit the movie with giving him the answers to three of our posted trivia questions.

So it seems as though word is getting out--huzzahs and handsprings. If there's any silver lining to the spike in food prices, it's probably the fact that people are paying more attention to their next meal.

Nature's Bijoux, Part I

The window at the kitchen sink overlooks the backyard, and Dearest's karma-reward for doing dishes tonight was noticing the fireflies in and around the garden. Such delicate fireworks in the thick summer dusk. The only way to bottle such an experience (for the colder, bleaker months ahead) is to banish all else from the moment and just be. And I rejoice that there is no other way to do so.

Theocracy showing a few cracks?

What the Bush Regime failed (albeit not for lack of trying) to do, drunk wankers with fireworks managed to accomplish. I now officially hate this holiday. Never mind that I'm supposedly a descendant of the guy who penned the document with this famous date. I have to think that his slumber is not easy of late.

But anyhoo...

Crooks and Liars had an entry about the Religious Right (finally) warming to McCain. My head says that many, many of the pew-warmers will swallow the sophistry and obediently vote Republican as prescribed. But my gut says that you're going to see a greater percentage than expected sit 2008 out.

Why? It's not so much a matter of holding their noses as it that their heads would just plain explode from sheer cognitive dissonance.

Could it be the divorce (after much philandering) from his first wife who was severely injured in an automobile accident?

Why, no.

Could it be that his second wife was a drug addict who committed prescription fraud, stole painkillers from her own medical charity, and got off with a mere fine and community service (confirmed by Snopes)?

Why, no.

Could it be the Keating Five baggage or the never-ending latter-day lobbyist associations?

Why, no.

Could it be the public financing shenanigans from the erstwhile co-champion of campaign finance reform?

Why, no.

Could it be the fact that his lifestyle is decidely un-Christ-like, with eight homes, bankrolled by his heiress second wife?

Why, no.

Forget actual questions of character and values. (And Heaven forfend that we actually expect anyone to walk the talk if it means that--gasp!--a black guy could actually park his @$ in an office formerly occupied by slave-owners.) Nope. It all boils down to asking pew-warmers to part with a wee bit of self-identity.

Y'see, these are people who loooooove their tin foil hats. They never outgrew the persecution complex (with all the narcissism it entails) that we maladjusted adolescents shed at about--what?--sixteen or seventeen years of age. They're not happy unless they're forwarding emails or writing Letters to the Editor warning that the world is about to be taken over by A.) Muslims, B.) Homosexuals (who are always, ALWAYS pedophiles, donchaknow), C.) The United Nations, D.) Atheists (who are indistinguishable from Communists and Nazis, donchaknow), E.) Non-white people, period.

Seriously, these folk were born fifty years too late. If it weren't for the fact that they know they'd be laughed out of town for lining their basement with tar paper and tinfoil, eating Dinty Moore from the can, and counting their shotgun slugs, they'd be doing it right now. (Never mind they'd do well to keep an eye on Russia at the moment, but, apparently, one bogeyman at a time is all that can fit on the radar screen...)

So you take a mentality like that, this paranoia that's been carefully--yea, even lovingly--cultivated from inside and out, and you ask it to vote for McCain? Senator "Agents of Intolerance"? Wellllll...that could be just a little...problematic.

This is most emphatically not a question of forgiveness, you understand. McCain's (pre-courtship) sound byte was no dime-store trinket to the self-anointed "real Christians." It was nothing less than a validation of their "persecuted" status. (Doubtless, any number could even hear the lions roaring in the Roman arena.) And thus they will not part lightly with it. But, at the same time, McCain won't part with enough of his dignity for a revival-meeting "conversion." (For tasters, his beer-baroness (second) wife would have to divest her holdings to appease the Baptist mullahs. And we all know that ain't gonna happen.)

So, even knowing that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will vote according to their pastors' orders, I will not be surprised at a low turnout among the soi-dissant "values voters" who rubber-stamped the Bush Gang's Great Giveaway of Iraqi oil and American birthrights.

Of course, if McCain's fool enough to tap Huckabee as Veep, then my head will be more correct than my gut. Then again, that scenario raises the question of whether the (long-overdue) exodus (i.e. stampede) of moderate Republicans will more than cancel out the "born again" McCain voters. Part of me wants to see that scenario, just for the relief of coup-de-grace. I suppose that I daren't hope for a viable third party in this decade. Sigh...

On second thought, seeing the legal thuggery to which Prime Minister Harper is willing to resort, a third party isn't all the panacea it's cracked up to be. Gaaagh. The sooner the Canadian voters come to their senses and put that catamite of the Bush Junta out on the curb, the better off that country will be.

An unflattering contrast

A pair of ominous anecdotes are ammo. for my boss' conviction that America has lost its position as the "thought leader" of the world.

In Waterloo, Ontario, a seventeen year old boy wins a science competition by finding a way to compost plastic bags in a matter of months (rather than decades). Catch that, folks? Seventeen years old.

Meanwhile, here in America, the findings of twenty years of evolutionary research are cavalierly dismissed by that intellectual vanguard (not), Conservapedia. Without Andy Schlafly bothering to read the precis, mind you. I think that we can officially consider the phrase "conservative values" an oxymoron, thank you very much.

I truly marvel at the H1-B "shortage". For the life of me, I cannot understand why someone who could make it through college--intellectually and financially--in another country would want to come to America to be a white-collar coolie in a nation of xenophobic, anti-intellectual nutbags. As long as politicians on both sides of the aisle--I'm glaring at you, Senator Obama--give these flat-earthers the time of day, they'll immolate still more resources than we can afford in their auto-da-fes.

But, bringing the discussion back around to the clever Mr. Burd, it's good to see the brighter minds turned to working with the resources we've already ripped from this planet, rather than continuing to exploit them as if their supply were limitless. Now, if only someone could find a way to convert human stupidity into electricity, we'd be set... You could plug a fleet of electric cars into Conservapedia every night. Then, at least, these morons would stop being a drain on society.

Update, 07.03.2008, 16:14 GMT:

From CNet's U.N. report: Clean energy booming globally:

Public investment in wind topped $11 billion globally last year, but none of that came from the United States, the report said. [emphasis added]

Considering how the Plains States are leaking --sometimes hemorrhaging--people as rural communities go under, there's no excuse for not replacing the ag. farms with wind farms. And that without the NIMBY namby-pambiness that so often accompanies their installation. (e.g., the landscape can bristle with cellphone towers and billboards, but for crissakes, spare us the wind towers!)

Keeping things in perspective, there's no lack of stupidity or cupidity everywhere you go. But the example that's being set by our soi-dissant leaders, in both the public and private sectors, is considerably less than edifying. Civilizations can decay in any number of ways, not all of them calamitously. There's a difference between a compost pile and a cesspool, and the stench of the latter is becoming more palpable each year.

Seven words, two versions

From 1977 and 1974. (Other stuff there's fun, too.) The War on Fatuousness has lost its foremost soldier.

[Update]

A deeply grateful hat tip to the Crooks and Liars commenter "knuckledragger" who supplied this eerily current blast from the past. I repost it in the spirit of honoring Carlin's prescience, rather than plagiarizing his work:

I really haven’t seen this many people in one place since they took the group photographs of all the criminals and law-breakers in the Ronald Reagan administration. [laughter] Yeah! Yeah! 225 of ‘em so far! 225 different people in the Ronald Reagan administration have either quit, been fired, been arrested, indicted, or convicted of either breaking the law or violating the Ethics Code! 225 of ‘em! And Edwin Meese alone… [laughter] Edwin Meese alone has been investigated by three separate Special Prosecutors and there’s a fourth one waiting for him in Washington right now. Three separate Special Prosecutors have had to look into the activities of the Attorney General, and the Attorney General is the nation’s leading law enforcement officer! [laughter]

See that’s what you’ve got to remember, this is the Ronald Reagan administration we’re talking about. These are the Law and Order people! These are the people who are against street crime! They want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals! [laughter, cheers] Yeah! They’re against street crime, provided that street isn’t Wall Street. [laughter]

And the Supreme Court decided about a year ago that it’s all right to put people in jail now if we just think they’re going to commit a crime. It’s called preventive detention. All you’ve got to do now is just think they’re going to commit a crime. Well if we’d known this seven or eight years ago we could have put a bunch of these Republican motherfuckers directly into prison [laughter, cheers] Yeah! put ‘em in the joint where they belong and we could have saved the expense of putting these pin-headed assholes on trial. [laughter] Another thing you gotta remember is these are the people elected with the help of the Moral Majority. Elected with the help of the Moral Majority and — the Teamster’s Union. That’s a good combination. Organized Religion and Organized Crime working together to help build a better America. [laughter, cheers]

They were going to get government off our backs. Yeah, but when it comes to abortion they don’t mind government being in a woman’s uterus, do they? [laughter] Yeah, backs are no good, but uterus is ok by them. These people call themselves Right to Lifers. Don’t you love that phrase, and don’t you love the way these kind of people pervert the English language? Right to Lifers? Don’t you realize that most of the Right to Lifers are in favor of the death penalty, and they support the South American death squads, and they’re against gun control, and they’re against nuclear weapons control. When they say Right to Life they’re talking about their right to decide which people should live or die. [cheers]

So these right-wingers, you know, so these Reagan people, these right-wingers in general, these crypto-Fascists, they’re against homosexuality, they’re against pornography, they’re against sex education, they’re against abortion, yeah they’re going to get government off your back but they’re going to tell you how to live your sex life. And let me ask you this, how would they know anything about it? [laughter] Have you ever taken a look at those people? [laughter] No wonder they’re afraid of their bodies, take a look at ‘em! [laughter] Doesn’t it strike as mildly ironic that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place? [laughter, cheers]

Hey, I’m the first one to say it’s a great country, but it’s a stra-a-ange culture. We got a strange culture. … This is a country where tobacco kills 400,000 people a year — so they ban artifical sweeteners! [laughter] Because a rat died! [laughter, cheers] Know what I mean? This is a place where gun store owners are given a list of stolen credit cards, but not a list of criminals and maniacs! [laughter] And now they’re thinking about banning toys guns, and they’re going to keep the fucking real ones!! [laughter, cheers] This is a place where alcohol ruins more lives than cancer, and everybody gets upset when some athlete gets hooked on cocaine. You know Time Magazine and Newsweek put cocaine on the cover, but they put the liquor advertisements inside the magazine.

It’s the old American double standard, you know say one thing and do something different. And of course the country is founded on the double standard, that’s our history, we were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. [laughter, applause] Am I right? A group of slave owners who wanted to be free. So they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people, and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. [laughter] You know what the motto of this country ought to be? You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out! [laughter]

Thanks to several others in the crew who posted shorter blurbs. I had to stifle so much laughter from the pod-mates that I still have tears in my eyes. Thanks, guyzos!

Domestic vignette 1

It takes three squirts of conditioner to bring my hair under nominal control, squirts that come out as squiggles. So I've been working on my technique: Swiping my hand quickly under the nozzle for a short, straight stripe, then wrapping it with squiggly strokes left and right. Pinch the pointy ends together and...voila! A trilobite!

Today's effort was passable enough that I called Dearest in from the next room to show off my new skill. Dearest laughed: "You're weird," and returned to the adjacent office.

Hmph. I'm not the one who finds trilobites funny...

Court-martials, impeachments NOW

Report: Exam prove abuse, torture in Iraq, Gitmo.

And, while we're at it, would John McCain and the reich-wingers just STFU about the SCOTUS ruling? It's one of the few bright spots in the whole cluster-@#$%&* we've made of our heritage.

But the accountability needs to go all the way to the CinC. You can damsho' bet that Gitmo's personnel were hand-picked, not the usual deployment crap-shoot. I can only hope that this is the tinder for the prairie fire that clears the field. The overstretched military can ill-afford the head-rolling that should, by all rights, start now. But it absolutely cannot afford leaving these thugs and toadies in its ranks.

Same $#!+, different country

Well, doesn't this little kerfuffle just ring a bell???

But, hey, at least there weren't any dark hints about assassinating the justices involved. Funny, the Turks of the history books weren't exactly renowned for their subtlety. But apparently, even their fundamentalist politicians are rank amateurs in iron-fisted theocracy when stacked against our home-grown Dominionist thugs.

Gaaaagggh. Why can't Eric Hofer's "The True Believer" be required reading in secondary school? Along with three years of Logic being mandatory for graduation. Remind me to add that to my "To Do" list as El Supremo Presidente for Life...

What is the boiling point of blood?

Fifteen billion dollars seems like a nice round number...

Blaspheming heresy

Although I have no real interest in their products, I like the 37Signals "Signal vs. Noise" blog for its offbeat topics. (Case in point, I'm trying out the standing desk concept at home.) But once in awhile, I do think that I know better. This despite the fact that they've been running a business for years and I have yet to do more than one freelance gig.

Today's "Ask 37Signals: How do you say 'No'?" post is one of those times. One of the post comments linked to their book "Getting Real"--which I've skimmed on the insistence of my boss, but wasn't all that impressed with--and the fact that they throw away customer feature requests after reading them. The text in question, for context:

Forget Feature Requests

Let your customers remind you what's important

Customers want everything under the sun. They'll avalanche you with feature requests. Just check out our product forums; The feature request category always trumps the others by a wide margin.

We'll hear about "this little extra feature" or "this can't be hard" or "wouldn't it be easy to add this" or "it should take just a few seconds to put it in" or "if you added this I'd pay twice as much" and so on.

Of course we don't fault people for making requests. We encourage it and we want to hear what they have to say. Most everything we add to our products starts out as a customer request. But, as we mentioned before, your first response should be a no. So what do you do with all these requests that pour in? Where do you store them? How do you manage them? You don't. Just read them and then throw them away.

Yup, read them, throw them away, and forget them. It sounds blasphemous but the ones that are important will keep bubbling up anyway. Those are the only ones you need to remember. Those are the truly essential ones. Don't worry about tracking and saving each request that comes in. Let your customers be your memory. If it's really worth remembering, they'll remind you until you can't forget.

How did we come to this conclusion? When we first launched Basecamp we tracked every major feature request on a Basecamp to-do list. When a request was repeated by someone else we'd update the list with an extra hash mark (II or III or IIII, etc). We figured that one day we'd review this list and start working from the most requested features on down.

But the truth is we never looked at it again. We already knew what needed to be done next because our customers constantly reminded us by making the same requests over and over again. There was no need for a list or lots of analysis because it was all happening in real time. You can't forget what's important when you are reminded of it every day.

And one more thing: Just because x number of people request something, doesn't mean you have to include it. Sometimes it's better to just say no and maintain your vision for the product.

Don't misunderstand me here: Saying "No" properly is an important skill--one that too few develop. The Roman historian Tacitus contrasted brother-Caesars Titus and Domitian by relating that the former could make a friend with the way he said "No" whereas the latter could make an enemy by the way he said "Yes." Perhaps author of the essay above doesn't have a taste for Roman history or assumes that it's not applicable because it's soooo 2000 years ago an' all. But I don't consider it a wise attitude. Because 37Signals has basically told the people who have paid or would pay their bills that their feedback will be ignored unless the request (or the reader's perception of it--a distinction not to be taken lightly) is validated by some unquantified amount of apparently similar feedback. And to think that these people put down their stakes in the Midwest. That certainly wasn't the politeness ethic that I was raised with...

Apart from the flagrant violation of regional etiquette, I consider this a short-sighted and downright wasteful attitude for a few of logical reasons.

Reason #1: You're treating a customer interaction as if it's disposable. Someone took time from their day to inquire about your product. The employee who reads that feedback will likely be busy, and more likely to pigeonhole the request for an add-on to Bell #21 or Whistle #369. It may be a later customer interaction that could call that "pigeonholing" into question. But by that time, the original email is black-holed, and there's no way to double check. Unless you can guarantee that the same person (with an eidetic memory) reads every feature request throughout the entire life-cycle of your product, this seems like it's just asking for trouble.

Reason #2: It's not All About your bells and whistles, stupid. Obviously, it's 37Signals' business to run. My approach, on the other hand, would be to make view each request not through the lens of "To what feature does this request belong?" but "What does the customer (or potential customer) intend to do with that enhancement? A simple, courteous follow-up email to the customer asking how s/he would use the add-on accomplishes three things:

1. It shows that you actually (gasp!) read the email.
2. It engages the serious customers, b/c the time-wasters probably won't put themselves through the agony of translating self-reflection into words.
3. It could be a shortcut to the front of the Next Big Thing's curve.

The last point is the one I want to elaborate on. Understand that I'm a huuuuuge believer in "eating your own dog food." (In other words, if you're trying to peddle an email and calendaring program, you'd darned well better not be using Thunderbird or Outlook or what-have-you for your day-to-day use.) That being said, it only goes so far. Opening yourself up to the serendipity of another perspective is important. And that's not just an exercise in "personal growth". There's more money to be made from scratching other people's itches than there is from scratching your own. But you can't assume that the itches are in the same place on everyone's respective back. Why? Because Capital-P progress is quite often derived from unintended consequences. Teflon was born of an accident in working with coolants. Zippers were originally devised to fasten shoes, not blue jeans. That sort of thing.

Now, I won't pretend to consider myself an "inventor," not by any stretch. But the hallmark of the inventor is the openness of her/his perception to what isn't being done, or at least not done very efficiently. And 37Signals' approach strikes me as high-handed, and their success as an increasing liability. That goes double if they choose to remain a relatively small ISV. Because sooner or later your own itches will run out. The line between "Don't need to do" and "Don't feel like doing" blurs. At that point, it's far, far too easy to filter all input through the sieve of a "vision" which becomes more hide-bound and self-serving by the day.

Me, I prefer to leave the "visions" to the blessed lunatics of this world. That the world is generally a harsh place for such blessedness is not a recommendation to emulate them. As I mentioned, I have no real need of what 37Signals is peddling. But I do have some discretionary spending power at work as well as at home, and my itches are peripatetic. Their attitude has made it less likely that I will throw money--mine or, better yet, someone else's--at them.

Becoming the enemy

We're repeatedly told that the folks gunning (or IEDing) for Western soldiers or blowing up innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq do so because their leaders have muddled religion and killing people. Good thing our Armed Forces don't have that problem. Riiiight???

So...we'll take people with criminal records, put guns in their hands and not fuss overmuch about what they do to someone else's country--as long as nobody takes pictures. But for crissakes, kick out the homosexuals and atheists before they get their cooties on someone!

Feh. I suppose it makes perfect sense if you're a theocon. But, then, if you can believe that the kangaroos swam to Australia after Noah beached the Ark on Mount Ararat, I s'pose you can manage any amount of self-serving twaddle. Depressing, isn't it, how the moral compass never seems to survive the auto-lobotomy required by fundamentalism?

Reading

I've been under the weather with a mostly annoying bug since Thursday, in which time I've polished off Muhammed Yunus' "Banker to the Poor", the first third of John Norwich's "History of Byzantium" and over 1,000 pages of its second installment.

A weird juxtaposition, that: Microloans in Bangladesh (and elsewhere) vs. the undulations of Imperial fortunes in the Mediterranean. But for the gulf in time and culture, both certainly put the lie to the political coprolite known as supply-side economics. The most fatal mistake the Byzantine Empire made was to switch from freeholders to mercenaries in its armies (thereby dooming the small freeholders to the depredations of the aristocracy). Similarly, the economies of scale (with their feudal bureaucracies) create the economic gated communities that deprive hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people of their basic needs.

The consequences of Byzantium's economic apartheid are of course well-documented. The consequences of our own will, sooner or later, be at our doorstep. If not in outright revolution, then in the form of a super-virus incubated in the squalor which our addiction to cheap gew-gaws has created.

But reading of the rise and fall of ancient empires brings to mind something my boss said several weeks ago after returning from one of those "executive retreat" junkets. Most of my firm's branches are in the U.S., but that fact apparently didn't dampen the opinion--the consensus, to hear by boss talk--that America has lost its place as the "thought leader" of the world.

In that light, it's hard not to consider this morning's headline-skim a harbinger, rather than anecdotal. For instance, there's Ireland--backed by the EU--trying to prevent further devastation from ghost nets. Then there's the--again--European efforts to offset deforestation. And to what pressing issues pray tell, are our far-thinking leaders turning their attention? Legalizing concealed carry in national parks. I soooo wish that I could say that I'm making that up.

Maybe it's just that I've spent two days immersed in the tragi-comedy that is history. But if that's any sampling of our relative priorities, the American "empire" is doomed--with neither the Huns or Seljuks to blame.

Of memes, metaphors and moral pocket-lint

In politics, there's a tactic called the trial balloon. It basically amounts to having someone at the periphery or epicenter of influence toss a meme out into the press as sort of a marketing test. If it's rejected, whatever was motivating the meme is either unceremoniously shot, or a different, possibly just more sugar-coated meme is tested.

But something's cropped up in the last week or so has been bothering me: The day-late-dollar-short head-scratching and soul-searching being done by the GOP (national and nearer to home) that involves the meme of refurbishing the GOP's "brand."

As a voter, taxpayer and recovered Reagan Youth, I'm genuinely offended by the term "brand." "Brand" is a marketing concept. "Brand" is Coke vs. Pepsi, Ford vs. Chevy, McDonalds vs. Burger King. It is not about the ideologies that affect millions--if not billions--of lives, and trillions of dollars. And if the chest-thumping over being the soi-dissant party of "moral values" a few years ago was really only about maintaining a brand, then I think that a lot of the folks deserve an explanation, not to mention an apology. Bottom line: "Brand" is the talk of marketers, not leaders. And for that reason, the person who concocted that cynical meme, as well as those who parrot it, should be deeply ashamed of their former pretensions to holding a monopoly on right-thinking.

But as angry as I am at the insult to the principles of leadership inherent in substituting "brand" for "beliefs," part of me is glad that the term is in cant use on the right. On a subliminal level, it will drive home the shallow, time-serving moral bankruptcy of the neocon agenda. Namely the idea that the public is something to be manipulated with a splashy new logo, a catchy jingle, a celebrity endorsement. But the "brand" metaphor ominously indicates--for Republicans, anyway--that the lessons of 2006 and subsequent special elections have yet to be learned. Which in turn hopefully means that the party is fated for still more karmic payback.

The C-word

Well before The Coultergeist started preening into the cameras at Fox Noise, the only person whom I referred to using "The C-word" was right wing groupie Phillis Schlafley. I once-upon-a-time actually make her snap at me. It's true. With simple logic, even--that anathema to neo/theocons everywhere. She was comparing St. Ronnie's "Star Wars" pipe-dreams to JFK's aspirations for the space program. And I asked the simple--some would say, "D'uh!"--question of how billions of dollars in vaporware were going to save us from chemical or biological attacks. She screwed up her already-prissy mug and snapped, "Well, it won't!"

I was so proud of myself at the time. Still am, 's'matter of fact. (And to think that I was barely through the process of shedding the Reagan Youth cocoon that had wrapped me in Manichean simplicities and Mayberry platitudes through most of my adolescence...)

But it makes me wonder if, despite the toll fake tans and bottle-blonding and plastic surgery will take on that poisonous little bimbo (meaning the Coultergeist), history will repeat itself in another generation. I personally don't plan to grace this country with my citizenship (or, more importantly, my tax dollars) by that time, mind you. But it still makes me sad that rational, educated folk can give that dried-up Uncle Tom any attention whatsoever. Particularly when she deserves to spend her final days in obscurity and stripped of any dignity she was not willing to accord her fellow citizens and human beings. Bluntly and brutally put, if she spent the next decade drooling her pureed meals down her fuzzy chin and waiting overlong between Depends-changes, I would be the last to call call Fate unjust.

Now, I like to think that my adopted liberalism gives me a more humane outlook on others--failings, foibles and all. But for someone who has done as much damage (from the cowardly vantage of the sidelines, no less!) as this self-advancing trollop--I will always think of her as the model for Margaret Atwood's "Serena Joy"--the "grace" that should flow from a civilized nation should be cut off. Let her rot in obscurity. Let her die alone and afraid. Let her grave grow rank with weeds and let accident befall the tombstone so that no one will know where her corpse festers. And if she and her ilk are immortalized at all, let it be in the spirit of comedia della arte caricature.

Such fate would be more befitting of a civilized democracy, which should ultimately be a meritocracy of ideas. Rewarding a persona who makes the Mom in "The Manchurian Candidate" look like Aunt Bea is most emphatically NOT open-mindedness. I could trust my cat to handle noxiousness better than this. Her Ladyship's not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but her sense of context and propriety are infinitely superior. And considering that she has to use her own tongue as toilet paper, that's saying something, peeps.

Finally!

After black-hat hackers and spammers and the mouth-breathers who keep the tasteless banner ad folks in business, my least favorite people on the internet are cybersquatters. For the uninitiated, these folks like to register promising domain names with the intention of "flipping" them to someone who might have a legitimate use for the name. Until recently, I had assumed that this kind of bottom-feeding was more or less a cottage industry. I was quite wrong.

Fortunately, it looks like ICANN is doing something about it. Normally, calling for more regulation of the internet is something you will not find me doing. But the fact is that sleazoids are making billions by creating artificial barriers to entry for others. Which should in no way be mistaken for capitalism. It's pure squattocracy. And as such, I have no qualms whatsoever about brandishing my pitchfork and baying for blood. Get a real business model, losers: Add value or bugger off. Just like the rest of us have do to pay the bills.

Another software rant

I've said elsewhere--and often--that I wouldn't make a good farmer. Whenever I accidentally get underfoot and stepped on by an indifferent Universe, I don't pick myself up and dust off without a good round of shaking my fist and yelling at the sky.

Today at work is no different, and for the usual reasons. Namely Microsoft's presumptuousness with JavaScript implementation. In this case, using JavaScript to inject actual HTML into the .innerHTML value of a tag-set blows big sticky chunks. Whoodathunk that someone might be optimistic enough to take that .innerHTML property literally? Silly me.

Looking ahead to IE 8 (whose designers are allegedly flipping off the rest of the world in their implementation) is not pretty. For any client-intensive web app, it might just make sense to go to a Flash-based interface.

But there's a catch with that, too: Adobe's support for Flash on Linux--there is no delicate way to put this--sucks sewer sludge. And there's a whole 'nuther rant. The suits at Adobe are practically killing themselves making sloppy kissy-noises at the open source community just now. I'd be embarrassed for them if it weren't so patently self-serving. (It's like being hit on by some wanker who thinks his charms will make you overlook his wedding-ring: Eeew, Eeeeww, Eeeeewww.) C'mon boys, did we not use the right coversheet on your memo or something? Open source is a potluck. Inviting the peasants to dumpster-dive behind your McMansion is not the same thing.

Wanktards. All of 'em. Despite its datedness, I can't help going back to Bruce Sterling's "A Contrarian View of Open Source" lecture from 2002 for comfort -- and not just because it's hilarious in spots. The supermodel vs. hippie-chick metaphor will probably stick with me for the rest of my career, actually.

Fortunately, the pro-bono programming I need to get off my plate is (slowly) shrinking. All the sooner to get out of a Microsoft-addicted shop--hopefully easing into a micro ISV. Particularly when my own suits are making loud noises about offshoring programming. It's not that I'm overly worried about being unemployed. It's just that a career in babysitting flunkies is most emphatically NOT aligned with my career-goals. In fact, I'm not quite 100% positive I know which is actually the worst option.

A new guilty pleasure

Well, "guilty" if I'm tuning into the Falcon Cam on the company time and bandwidth, anyway. Hat-tip to Dearest for finding this. With so much of the real reality on hand, why do people waste their CPU cycles on anything less?

A correction

In the recent Bravissimo! post, I included a little snippet of code that looked like this:

if(navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer")
{
   httpReq.onreadystatechange = handleAjaxResponse;
}
else
{
   httpReq.onreadystatechange = handleAjaxResponse();
}

Today I discovered (by dint of my usual error-and-trial thrashings) that not only is the browser-check a waste of CPU cycles, but that the httpReq.onreadystatechange = handleAjaxResponse(); code causes Firefox to skip everything after the first onreadystatechange event. Which makes no flippin' sense whatsoever and lowers my opinion of JavaScript even further.

To get around that, I'd included a cheesy workaround in the handleAjaxResponse() function that had it calling itself every second or so to check for the onreadystate's value, plus the value of a global variable or two that prevented it from being locked in an endless loop if the page wasn't found or something else went kerflooey.

But my earlier rant about calling a function (and thus expecting parentheses) stands. It's a function call, not a variable reference, d---it. You can argue GB Shaw's "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" all you like, but computers expect predictability. And so should the programmers who try to make them do their bidding.

w00t!

A message on the answering machine told us that the friend who's been tussling with cancer since last year is in officially in remission: Friend: 1, Cancer: 0. I try to keep it in perspective, knowing that it's Round 1, and she'll be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life. No actual organs or other bits removed, but the price--in the coin of scarring and hospitalization and outright misery--was dear enough.

All the same, it's victory enough for me here on the sidelines. I can't begin to imagine what it's like for the survivor in question. And I hope I never have to.

In other life-accomplishments, Mom has achieved her 63rd birthday--all the more remarkable for what her brat-children put her through. And that's just the stuff she found out about... ;-)

Battery rechargers

I'm rebuilding a Windows XP workstation, triaging the hard drive content before wiping it. In the process, I found something I wrote going on three years ago. A friend had used the phrase "recharge my spiritual batteries," which prompted me to consider what things do that for me. At the time, the list--in no particular order--consisted of:

• To learn something new and worth knowing
• To fall asleep and/or wake up in Dearest's arms
• To create something from scratch, or even completely ex nihilo
  
• To earn the trust of someone or something gentle
• To touch history
• To fight a worthwhile battle, win or lose
• To experience art created with both skill and passion.
• To have a wide space of quiet time in which to think, dream and reflect
• To do something good for someone and slip away before they realize that it's been done or who did it
• To behold Nature's "bijoux": Spiderwebs, seashells, sheets of wild honeycomb, baby finches, etc.
  

None of that's much changed, two-years-and-change since. Although now I find myself more appreciative of friendship--and working a little more diligently to cultivate the perennials rather than indiscriminately sow flashy annuals. (Hokey metaphor, that, but you get the idea.)

Things that make you go "Urrrghff???"

A friend I've known since I was 17 has been part-sized at work: Downgraded from full-blown engineer to lab flunkie. (It was either that or unemployment--it subsidizes the search for the new job, if nothing else...) He's taken it well enough, for a museum-quality Type A raised with a 1950s American Dream work ethic. Better than I would have thought, truth be told.

But I'm starting to feel like an informal therapist--a cross between a counselor and the local bartender. Which is really wierding me out, because I've never had the impression that he's looked to me for anything practical, ever. In our twenties, he mistook me for a representative sample of females our age--thereby to peek into the collective head of my gender. But for many years I've had the impression of being somewhat looked down upon by him. Had it not been for the fact that he's been one of Dearest's friends--for even longer than I've known him--I would have discouraged the relationship years and years ago. In all fairness, the sense of deprecation has more or less evaporated in recent times: These days I'm usually not interrupted when I talk, for instance.

But on an almost subliminal level, I'm feeling ever-so-slightly used by this counselor/cheerleader role. As far as I know, Dearest doesn't get the blow-by-blow accounts of the job search and the sharper edges that corporate life holds for non-management. Not that I'll stop commiserating or encouraging or anything--I do actually like the guy. But I can't help but wonder how things will change after he's back where he thinks he deserves to be in the corporate world.