This; that; a little of the other.
Ignatz on the administration’s MLK Jr. amicus. —Also, Atrios.
Messr. Capozzolla touchingly wakes the hairdresser.
This one, for no particular reason the rest of you should be hip to, is for Skook. (But y’all did know about National Geographic’s wallpaper-o’-the-day. Right?)
I really liked Chad Orzel’s point about rec.arts.nielsenhayden.com, so I thought I’d drop it casually in conversation over here, like I’d come up with it or something.
Via the ever-eloquent (by which, of course, I mean right-thinking) Dan Gillmor’s pithy, punches-unpulled take on the 7-2 Eldred decision: a new blog to follow, Copyfight.
In vaguely tangential if more important (although rather thumpingly obvious) news: television network executives are still every last one of them evil, ignorant scum who haven’t the sense God gave a flea and are all on a Machiavellian kick to suck everything good and pure and true and fun from our lives.
If you were wondering: yes. I am indeed Griffen’s hand model.
Oh, and Barry’s back. (Ask him about his electricity issues. It’s funny. In a glad-I-wasn’t-there sort of way.)
Bold.
I’ve figured out where all this bold rhetoric is coming from. Everything this administration is doing, from boldly negotiating with North Korea just like Clinton did, to boldly addressing our tax code’s horribly progressive nature (whereby people who don’t make enough money to live actually get money from people who have enough to worry about stock dividends), is bold. Bold bold bold.
You ever look at the etymology of bold? It comes from the Indo-European root bhel:
bhel-2: To blow, swell; with derivatives referring to various round objects and to the notion of tumescent masculinity.
Keep blowing, Bush; keep swelling, pundits. Just beware: there’s only one place to go when bold’s used up.
Billions of dollars in Big Content profits saved by courageous Supreme Court; Sonny Bono’s legacy is secure.
Well, shit.
Barry pretty much nailed it, last year.
Okay; so SCOTUS called it on the constitutional merits of which branch of government gets to decide what. Fine. Time for us to start lobbying our representatives to change the law to favor all of us, and not just corporate citizens with huge lobbying budgets—what? What’s so funny?
Of course, I should have included a link to the blog of Lawrence Lessig, who argued Eldred v. Ashcroft on behalf of the plaintiff. Also, his comments section, which is busy rallying the troops for round 2. And, the Creative Commons. Yay, team!
The terrorists have already—oh, never mind.
The next time you’re in the neighborhood with someone who proclaims themselves an anti-idiotarian or some such similar designation and they mouth off about Marxist traitorous ivory-towered Stalinist elitist class-war-fightin’ Maoist revolutionary workers’-paradisical anarchist idiotarian liberal Berkeley, try to temper your disgust with a healthy dollop of rue when you point out that Berkeley is censoring Emma Goldman, dead for 62 years now:
In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people “not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.” In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates “shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open.”
Berkeley officials said the quotations could be construed as a political statement by the university in opposition to United States policy toward Iraq.
If that be treason, count me a traitor. You don’t fuck with Emma Goldman.
Oh, and by the way,
Heather Corinna wants us all to have more sex. There’s T-shirts and everything. Now, if you’ll excuse me—
How many times do we have to say no?
The RAVE act is back. TalkLeft has the skinny:
The RAVE Act unfairly punishes businessmen and women for the crimes of their customers. The federal government can’t even keep drugs out of its own schools and prisons, yet it seeks to punish business owners for failing to keep people from carrying drugs onto their property. It is a danger to innocent businessmen and women, especially restaurant and nightclub owners, concert promoters, landlords, and real estate managers. Section 4 of the bill goes so far as to allow the federal government to charge property owners civilly, thus allowing prosecutors to fine property owners $250,000 (and put them out of business) without having to meet the higher standard of proof in criminal cases that is needed to protect innocent people.
It was shut down once before. It’s being snuck through as provisions to Senator Daschle’s omnibus security bill, S.22. Fax him right now and tell him hell no. Again.
Now lemme hear an amen from the choir!
I open with the words of Paul, from his letter to the Romans, chapter 16, verses 18 and 19: “For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple. For your obedience is come abroad unto all men. I am glad therefore on your behalf: but yet I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil.” And I turn to his first letter to the people of Corinth, chapter 2, verses 4 and 5: “And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”
And what I would have you do, friends and neighbors, brothers and sisters, is go out into the world of blogs and the mediamilieu and see for yourselves what enticing words, good and fair, have been deceiving the hearts of the simple these past few days; I would have you seek out this wisdom of men and women and judge it for yourselves. —Go, read the words of Jeanne D’Arc, as she muses on the differences between a politician with a spine, and a politician without. (A spine is a spine, friends and neighbors, for all that it’s not found till the last minute of a long, dark midnight.)
Read for yourselves what Dwight Meredith says, when he tells us that getting things done is the only reward we need to do more things, and read for yourselves the signs he’s selected to prove to himself (and you, brothers and sisters) that things are, indeed, getting done.
Read the words of those who ought to be simple concerning evil, and who yet have the temerity to ask troubling, complex questions, about the actions we take against those we have named our enemies, and the actions taken against those who exhort us to stop. Read the words of those few who even have the temerity to ask troubling, complex questions of those who speak and preach in demonstration of power.
Come, read the burden that Sisyphus has shrugged off before you, and ponder the meaning of these two little words, so simple when it comes to doing good: Never again.—And if I might be permitted a moment to shrug off my own conceit, Prof. Reynolds: perhaps the Canadians and Europeans are so “sanctimonious” because they aren’t haphazardly proposing the unthinkable crime of locking up people whose only crimes are the colors of their skin, the countries of their origin, the names of their religions. If the Europeans and the Canadians are feckless in this regard, sir, then feck is something I never want; it is something utterly antithetical to the ideals of the country I thought I was in. Never again means never again. Not nohow, noway, nobody.
Ahem.
Then, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, I would ask you to hearken to the words of William Rivers Pitt, when he says to us, “In my faith, I stand on the precepts of the religion, and not upon any innate worthiness within the hierarchy. I do not do so because I am some sort of rebel. I do so because the truth that first breathed life into the Church is still worthy, even as the mortals who pretended to carry its banner are not. I did not leave the Church. It left me.”
How breathtaking in its arrogance, this wisdom of women and men! Exhorting us to show mercy and compassion, even to the least among us, even to those the law has condemned to die; affirming that the struggle is its own reward; demanding that our other cheek always be ready, no matter how foolish or dangerous it might seem to turn it. Urging us to set aside the words of those who serve only their own bellies. (Concerning those who ask complex and troubling questions of evil, evil in the face of which we are told to be simple, I can only offer up a question of my own: how can we be wise unto that which is good if we are not also wise in what we name to be evil?)
We fight, or so we are told by some, to preserve our way of life, the fine Judeo-Christian values which built this nation and made it strong. Let’s for the moment allow it; let’s set aside the many (and valid) arguments against this simple assertion. But set aside with it those notions of Judeo-Christianity drawn from the strictures of Deuteronomy or the comforting fevre dreams of Revelations. (I do not trust Biblical exegesis from those who can’t even read Tolkien properly.) Instead, let’s turn to Paul—crabby, vicious, mean-spirited, priggish Paul, nèe Saul the Pharisee, the tax collector; let’s take up what are perhaps the finest words he ever wrote, in that first letter to those immoral, deplorable Corinthians:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
“Charity.” Some translate it as “love,” but I find this a pale echo of what he meant: agape, Paul wrote; an open love, a social love, a love for your fellow humans. A charitable love. The greatest of that which abides.
If this is the Judeo-Christian value that we’re fighting for: charity; if we keep that always in mind, if we understand that when we speak we speak only our parts and that when we see the world around us we see it imperfectly, unclearly, through a dark glass; that none of us can ever know the whole of any of it, and so we must all in all our dealings act with charity, with the benefit of our doubts (though they may be legion)—if charity is what we’re fighting for—
Well, hell. Sign me up.
(Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose—)
Better than bombs, yes, but—
We’re spamming key Iraqi leaders. Apparently, the subject lines read “Important Information”:
If you took part in the use of these ugly weapons you’ll be regarded as war criminals. If you can make these weapons ineffective then do it. If you can identify the position of weapons of mass destruction by light signals, then do it. If all this is not possible, then at least refuse to take part in any activity or follow orders to use weapons of mass destruction.
While the sentiment is laudable, you’ve got to admit—it lacks a certain credibility.
One down (again).
Matt’s right; this is a killer argument against Pickering. Now: let’s dig into Owens. Shouldn’t be too hard…
Further fall-out from miscellaneous internet research.
Boning up for Becca’s game (Anamnesis, it’s called, and there’ll be more to say later, in a variety of fora; in the meanwhile, go read what John and Chas, who’ll also be playing, have to say to each other [and Emily, and Vince] about gaming in general, and I’ve got something rattling around in the back of my head about the four stances and how any truly postmodern art needs to take them into account—is that sufficiently hubristic? But for the moment, I’m distracted—ooh, shiny!), in which I’ll be playing a rather (for me) odd character; then, it’ll be an odd situation in a number of respects: it’s been four years? five? since I’ve played in a role-playing game, and much longer since I’ve played in one I didn’t also have a vested interest in as a GM. (But since the terms probably don’t mean that much to most of you reading this, I’ll skip for now the whole discussion of how the way we went about it ended up making the distinction between GM—the “gamemaster,” running the scenario and presenting the world—and players—the ones playing individual agents reacting to that world—problematic at best.)
But! That isn’t why I fired up TexEdit to type up a new post. No, it’s this article I stumbled over from the rations Journal on urban lessons learned from the Russian experience in Chechnya. There’s 57 lessons, starting from the very general and strategic (Lesson 4: Overall Russian command lacked continuity and was plagued by too much senior leadership at the operational level) to the very specific and tactical (Lesson 52: Helicopters need stand-off weapons), but it’s the first one that makes you stop and go, huh:
Lesson 1: Military operations could not solve deep-seated political problems.
You don’t say.
Oh: and if you think I’m thinking there’s several more of these strategic and operational lessons that Yankee chickenhawks will have an opportunity to learn for themselves in Iraq, well, you’re every bit as smart as I thought you were.
•––• •••–• ••••–
That’s “134” in Morse code, if you read • as “dit” and – as “dah.”
“134” means “Who is at the key?”
This is what 134 wrote in the December, 1864 issue of Telegrapher:
now there is a prejudice against lady operators, and the very word he uses, “prejudice” (being a noun in that relation), which, according to Webster means premature opinion; injury; damage, admits that it is merely a myth. Who that wishes to do right, stops for a moment to listen to the voice of prejudice?
I’d known there were female telegraphers up and down the network that bloomed across the States in the latter half of the 19th century. I’ve read The Victorian Internet. (The comparison is not so half-baked as it might seem. —The first online romance kicked off in 1860-something. Honest.) Prejudice (and myths of women’s fingers having a lighter touch on the wire) aside, there was no qualitative difference between men’s and women’s tapping; women were cheaper than men; Western Union liked cheap. The telegraph hubs in most major urban centers employed dormitories full of women, taking in messages from one branch, retransmitting them down another. Women first began filling commercial telegrapher roles in great numbers with the advent of the Civil War, when male operators were drafted into military telegraphy; when the war ended, and those men came back to find women competing for their jobs, we saw some of the tensions of the late 1940s and 1950s play themselves out in microcosm, 80 years before. Here’s what TA had to say on the subject of the American Telegraph Company training women in Morse code for free in the hopes of employing them as operators—at, he feared, a lower rate than men (and thus more attractive to General Marshall Lefferts, American’s owner):
What operators should do to protect themselves from ‘hard times’ is to keep the ladies out of the National Telegraphic Union, and also as much as possible off the lines.
I’d known this, vaguely, sort of, in the back of the brain, having read that book a couple of years ago, and then jotted down some notes about a 19th century dot-com satire that didn’t end up going anywhere in time. (Think about it: San Francisco was hip back then, too.) —So it was nice tonight, on an unrelated search (looking for various types of radio operator slang and shorthand), to stumble over a paper that sums up the debate that raged in the letters column of Telegrapher on this subject. (Since turned into a book. Hmm.) Here, for instance, is Magnetta’s response to TA:
I asked myself, do I live in the nineteenth century…? or are the days of barbarism rolling back upon us, and are we to do homage to the god of selfishness?...All the spleen that may be vented will not assure us that General Lefferts, in opening a way for ladies to become operators, does it from such selfish motives as those stated. Henry Ward Beecher, and John B. Gough, strive in their lectures to convince people of woman’s proper sphere. General Lefferts does more; he gives us a helping hand, and places us where we can prove ourselves equal to the best of you, if only we persevere.
“Protect from hard times—keep ladies out of Union; also off the lines!” Sir! you weighed your soul in that remark! Please examine that weight closely. But how I shudder as I imagine your mother at home washing your linen, while your sister blacks your boots!
And that’s not even the kicker. Go on, click through, browse; keep your eyes peeled for Josie, and what she has to say. (Josie is my new hero.) —And also be sure to note that 134’s letter itself is preserved in all its glory.
God, I love the internet. Sometimes.
Kittenhawking.
I suppose it’s a better practice than Stephenhawking.
If you’re going to be a fucking pedant…
LanguageHat? Could I tell you something? Personal-like? —Dear sweet Jesus, but I fucking love you for this. (If the archive’s being persnickety, go here and scroll down to “David Foster Wallace Demolished.”) (And it matters not one whit to me that your face is as green as mine.)
The perfect murder.
Indeed, under federal law, causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules—a misdemeanor with a six-month maximum prison term—is a less serious crime than harassing a wild burro on federal lands, which is punishable by a year in prison.
If you aren’t reading the New York Times’ series on McWane, Inc. [1] [2] [3], you should be.
Boom and Bust.
Via TalkLeft (who got it from the Horse): most Americans believe that between 1 and 5 million people live in poverty in the US. It’s actually more like 33 million, at or below the poverty level.
What’s truly astonishing about this astonishing number is that most Americans are also far more generous (and far more realistic) in setting the poverty level than the federal government: 47 percent of the respondents believe that it takes almost $35,000 a year to just adequately feed, clothe, and house a family of four.
The Census Bureau classifies a family of four as poor if its cash income is below $18,104 a year.
(A family of three: $14,128. A couple: $11,569. On your own: $9,039.)
So a lot more people are making a lot less money than most Americans realize.
When you couple that with the fact that 19% of Americans believe their income puts them in the top 1% of income earners, and another 20% hope to be 1%ers when all their hard work finally pays off—
Suddenly, it becomes a bit more clear how Rush can get away with this garbage when the reality of American taxation looks a lot more like this.
A lot’s been bandied about regarding Bush’s unguarded assertion that the dwindling of the long-since-squandered surplus will create “a fiscal straitjacket for Congress”; that the administration’s “real” goal in running up unsupportable deficits while slashing and burning taxes is to force reductions in “unnecessary” government services. The result is a sort of Machiavellian vision of wasteful tax-cut-and-spend Republicans who depend on being voted out of office every now and then (because long term, everyone’s voted in and out of office now and then) so that the hard choices and the unpopular service cuts and meager tax hikes are actually made on the Democrats’ watch. (Since the Bush administration still shows absolutely no sign of curbing spending themselves.) —I think we need to take an even longer view. I think Professor DeLong is quite right to note:
Deep in the core of American ideology and culture is a constellation of beliefs and attitudes: belief that the future will be brighter than the present; that what you accomplish you make with your own hands; that individuals should rely on themselves, not the state; that people can cross oceans and mountains to make for themselves a better life; and that those who succeed do so not through luck and corruption but through preparation and industry. These are not beliefs conducive to social democracy.
We think we’re richer than we are. We think we all have more of a shot at striking it rich than we do. We don’t want to think about how much of our lives is dependent on contingency and luck; we don’t want to think about the one bad day that could be between us and the street. We willfully do not want to see how many people live in poverty, and we don’t want to think about how crushing that poverty really is. We don’t want to admit it could ever happen to us, and even if it has, we want to plan to secure what will happen to us, someday. When all our deserving hard work finally pays off. Any day now.
DeLong is right: this ignorance and moonshine is not conducive to notions of sharing the wealth and leveling the playing field.
So it’s not that Republicans depend on deficit-hawk Rubinomics Democrats to come along and clean up after them. We all depend on Republicans to run the whole shebang into the ground and on the rocks from time to time so that things get so bad our better instincts reluctantly kick in, and we get New Deals and Great Societies and some small measure of economic sanity. A different sort of Boom and Bust.
It’s just—how far off are those rocks? How much further till the bottom? 33 million are there already. How much larger does that number need to get before we see it?
Maybe we all need to get out more.
Tomorrow belongs to—
Friday, 10 January 2003—the special registration deadline for Group 2: male citizens or nationals of Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, born on or before 2 December 1986.
Remember what happened to Group 1?
Via Boing Boing, here’s Lisa Rein’s invaluable page of resources for those who want to keep the pressure on. “Our security is not enhanced by the targeting of innocent people who report voluntarily to the authorities,” she writes. “This is has resulted in a chilling effect on the cooperation of law-abiding, concerned citizens and immigrants with federal agencies as these agencies are increasingly being seen as over-zealous and, in many cases, all too willing to violate the civil and human rights of the people they come in contact with.”
“I’m totally scared,” says Chedli Fathi, a Tunisian whose student visa expired in 2001. “Because after Jan. 10 there is no exception or excuse for not showing up. But if I go, I can get arrested, and if I don’t go, I can get arrested. In both cases, it is bad for me.”
Those quick to leap on Fathi for staying on an expired visa—and thus being in violation of a law—need to keep in mind what an incompetent bureaucracy the INS is.
Look folks—imagine you’re dealing with your DMV. Imagine Flunky #1 messes up your driver’s license application and tells you to come down to the office. Then, when you do go down to the office as requested Flunky #2 notices you drove there AND you don’t have your driver’s license (because, well, they screwed up your application). Flunky #2’s boss recently decided they now had a no-tolerance policy on such things and he has you arrested and thrown in jail.
Then, of course it doesn’t stop there. The special DMV judge operates his own special DMV court which has its own rules. Speedy trial? Nah. You could be there awhile. Who will support your family? Who knows. Chances for appeal? Not really.
The DMV judge deports you back to a country you haven’t lived in for 10-15 years. Your American children wave goodbye, as does your wife.
But, enough of that, I’ve got to go work on my next Tech Central Station column about the inconveniences of airline security for business travelers and my Fox News column about startling new evidence that Michael Bellesiles is a pedophile.
—Atrios
For what it’s worth: the INS’s own page on Special Registration requirements for Groups 1 – 3.
The handle, and flying off thereof:
Post in haste, repent in leisure; an unexamined screed is not worth uploading; never shoot back when you’re all het up. I’m looking over the past few long stories tossed off the short pier and wincing; watching myself dance out onto any number of limbs past the point where I know a damn thing about what I’m saying simply because I was set off and wanted to do something, anything—and speaking up is all too often confused with doing something. —It is; it frequently is. When you’re saying something substantive; when you’re bringing something to the table; when you’re telling a story you know yourself.
When you don’t know anything about Charles Pickering, Sr., beyond other people’s stories found with a couple of quick Google searches, you should maybe not rush to the Movable Type; when you can only link up to what other people are saying about the Bush stimulus package, you should maybe not bother bringing that to the table (especially if you miss one of the more in-depth kickings around it’s gotten); when all you say on the subject of the coming Iraqi war is “Here, look at these pictures of folks there on the ground,” you should maybe cast about for a little more substance before yelling something inconsidered. (For “you,” of course, read me.)
Sigh.
Everyone’s got to find their niche; everyone’s got to find the thing they give a damn about. I’ve whinged about blogging and tipping points and echo chambers, and this is, indeed, a thing blogs can do, and some of them do it very, very well. Their success is inspiring and even intoxicating. Which does not mean this is all blogs can do, or should do. No.
You’ve got to find something you give a damn about, or you won’t do good work. I give a damn about judicial reactivism, fiscal insanity, and grotesquely stupid wars; what I haven’t given a damn about is stopping to think for a moment, marshalling my arguments, finding something of substance and bringing it carefully, deliberately, and as irrevocably as possible to the table. —That’s how I am, sometimes, with politics, with the state of the world as it is; I want to leap up on something and point and shout at the top of my lungs, “Jesus Christ, can you believe this shit?” Or words to that effect. To do something. You know? And when done well, it’s preaching to the choir, and that’s a fine thing to do from time to time; it’s just that preaching to the choir is, in the end, about as effective as pissing in a pool. You get that nice, warm feeling—and then what?
The thing is that the thing I give a damn about is rooting around in pop culture. Digging through the so-called dross for the joy of finding unexpected gems. Watching how people use the stuff and re-use it, poach from it and recombine it; lining up the pieces of it in pretty, signifying patterns; kicking it apart to see what makes it tick. Criticism, I suppose. (A lengthy and whimsical for instance.) —This is what I give a damn about; this is where (I’d like to think, anyway) I can bring something to the table. A table, anyway.
It’s just that it’s so damn frivolous. Isn’t it?
This narrowing of the American mind is exacerbated by the withdrawal of the left from active politics. Virtually ignored by the media, the left has further marginalized itself by a retreat into introspective cultural criticism. It seems content to do yoga and gender studies, leaving the fundamentalist Christian right and the multinationals to do the politics.
That’s Brian Eno, being a wee bit uncharitable and even unfair in Counterpunch. Still. Stings a little. (A lot, actually.)
But what he’s glossing over and I’m being disingenuous about is that the best criticism is at once deeply and transcendantly political (especially gender studies; yoga, too, has that potential), and that in even the most irrelevant of out-of-touch ivory towers, clear, vital, engaged criticism can end up changing the stories we all tell each other and the ways in which we tell them. Which is cool and even in its own (modest-seeming) way, earth-shaking. The potential, at least, is there; the possibility. Sometimes. Now and again. But it takes so goddamned long. It’s almost utterly and frustratingly dependent on contingency and the laws of unintended consequences. And there’s so many pressing needs right here right now and I want to do something—
Eh. Maybe I should go volunteer somewhere already. —Next month. After the taxes are done and the downstairs is ready to rent out again.
Yeah. That’s the ticket.
