Some really good stuff out there. A few high points I did not hit, most of which I'm drawing from others' comments, but not all.
1) Yes, there has been an awful lot of attention to this, crowding out other issues of importance. My having posted on it reflects my agreement that it's interesting and important, but having seen the explosion of coverage, I do agree with the call for perspective.
2) Yes, I also agree that the implicit internalized rejection of self in response to white standards of beauty figured in this; that to me does not shift the blame at all, but it does point out that developing an independence of thought and embracing what others seek to stigmatize can be an effective defense if you're lucky enough to be able to do it.
3) This is a good example of how free speech means being able to say what you want via the network you own; hence NBC and CBS got a chance to exercise their free speech by letting Don Imus find some other venue. Free speech purists might have demanded something other than Imus' termination, true, so as not to chill people in his position, but this speech struck me as weak in hallmarks for protectedness, Imus has been relatively privileged, and the demand for a penalty seems pretty inevitable. It would be better to enact a durable and viewpoint-neutral standard for on-air speech conduct than to get rid of a person.
4) I am generally accepting of a humor defense for what otherwise might be considred hate speech, provided the humor succeeds in achieving some redeeming value and particularly if the joke is intended to be on the bigots and not on the disenfranchised. It should be one of a series of factors considered in evaluating how bad a comment is.
5) Some have tried to shift the attention to rappers. Some very smart people rightly acknowledge that hip hop has its horrible side that should be addressed; on the other hand, the ploy of justifying us-on-them bigotry by pointing to them-on-them bigotry is tired and disingenuous coming from most of its advocates. Beyond that, a most of rap is pretty benign compared to the worst it has to offer. When Nelly sings, "won't you hos come out and play, now?" he's talking about...hos. When Will Smith affects a bad-ass persona, bragging about his sexual exploits, you know it's just silly : Jada's not gonna stand for it. When Slick Rick gives us "Women Lose Weight," it would be horribly misogynistic if it weren't so funny. The defense in the previous paragraph applies.
6) Several of these points can be summarized together in the series of factors suggested above which provide an estimate of how bad something is. There is precedent in the law for identifying lists of factors that distinguish, for example, threats, which are unprotected performative speech, from mere expression, which is protected. It's easy to think what some of the factors should be that should be considered, for example, in employment harassment policies. I would suggest:
(a) The comment targets a specific individual or small group, as opposed to an entire protected class. This is because the attack in the first instance is apt to be felt more personally.
(b) The target or targets are not merely members of a protected class which is attacked, such as women or AfricanAmericans, but represent, or are closely associated with the broader group. This would include a role model, advocate, or spokesperson for a group, or a person whose group membership is especially salient. Such association assists in assuring that the attack is felt by an entire group.
(c) The individual is a private rather than general-purpose public figure, who has not courted or invited the kind of attention represented by the remark.
(d) The individual is vulnerable, either because young, experiencing hard times, not rich or powerful, or is at a point in their venture where there is much at stake.
(e) The individual’s targeted classification is not shared with the attacker, especially if the comment is directed by a member of a dominant group toward a member of a less-dominant group. This is because comments from without are an expression of power and implicitly threatening, because they are more hurtful, and because criticism of a group's internal handling of its identity tends to blame the victim, interfere with the group's internal autonomy, and suffocates the defensive project of defanging hurtful antagonistic speech.
(f) The comment is clear in its meaning and in its hostility, or else exploits a well defined mechanism of ambiuguity or code which resists policing.
(g) The comment is made more forceful by its being explicit or graphic, protracted, repeated, detailed, or especially loud, course, or profane.
(h) The comment is made directly to the target, or to people with power over the target, or to others whose respect or support is important to the target.
(i) The comment exceeds the background degree of ignorance or hostility ordinarily transmitted within the environment it reflects, and tends to advocate or promote (or lessen resistance to) a degredation of standards.
(j) The comment lacks legitimate purpose, or redeeming value, which would includes humor, artistic merit, comment on matters of social concern, academic or educational discussion, deliberative processes, or, to a lesser extent, communication for any legitimate purpose, including expression of strong emotion.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Imus: Why the Why?
I've been, not astonished, but foreseeably disappointed, by the inability of so many mainstream media observers to get it. The local TV anchor refers to Don Imus's "blunder," a public radio report asks why the furor this time when he's said worse in the past. Another news report notes his being "insensitive."
Let's take the last first. Calling Barack Obama "articulate" is insensitive. One can sympathize with Joe Biden being so insensitive. Obama may be the most well-spoken American politician since Abraham Lincoln. He's the damned definition of articulate. But the word has baggage, and an articulate Democratic Presidential hopeful does not call an articulate black opponent articulate. It shows an awkward blindness to the consequences of language, one that can be attributed to innocent error. In contrast, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you would be offended at being called 'nappy headed hos'" does not seem very credible. [Aside: you shouldn't spell "hos" with an apostrophe, as many of these dumb media outlets have.]
Here's another test, based roughly on the burden-shifting mechanism recognized in Title VII discrimination cases: If you can make a prima facie case that a remark could reflect some kind of illicit prejudice, then ask whether the maker can come back with a credible explanation. In Biden's case: "Believe me: when I said articulate, all I meant was articulate" In Imus's case, the best I can come up with is, "I was saying that the Rutgers team fought on the court with the tenacity of young Ho Chi Minhs, but now must be so exhausted, they need to rest their sleepy heads." Pretty lame, I know, and I'm a lawyer.
Blunder implies the same thing: that it is what Imus did not intend that we dislike. What did he not intend? It's like a mean drunk who beats his pregnant wife every few days. If someone gets upset when it "goes too far" doesn't that mean that someone things a lesser degree of drunken pregnant wife-beating would have been acceptable?
I don't know everything that Imus has ever said, but the outrage in this instance does not seem hard to fathom. Not just that his -- wait --
Okay, as I am writing this, the local news I watch and always hate has just identified the issue as his "racially charged" comments. Again, this is a stupid hedge. Why is it only "charged"? My firm handled a case where a guy was fired for "racially charged" comments. We found a white comparator who told an African-American co-worker she looked like a hooker. That is what I'd call charged. It is not explicit, and in another context might have no racial aspect at all, but given the races of the parties, and the traditional Jezebel sterotype of African-American women, there was a racial tinge or inflection to the comment. "Nappy-headed" is pretty explicit. It's beyond charged. It's racial, period.
It also, of course, implicates sex, sexual mores, and class. In context, the phrase was equated with being rough, hard, savage. It hit on several points, and was graphic.
But that doesn't strike me as the big issue. Although I'm not a sports fan, I can appreciate the argument that for a bunch of underdog kids on the heels of a highlight achievement, this event partook of something sacred for its participants, like a funeral or a wedding. That's somewhere you don't want to take your dump, if you have any decency. Not if you want anyone to be willing to be seen with you.
Let's take the last first. Calling Barack Obama "articulate" is insensitive. One can sympathize with Joe Biden being so insensitive. Obama may be the most well-spoken American politician since Abraham Lincoln. He's the damned definition of articulate. But the word has baggage, and an articulate Democratic Presidential hopeful does not call an articulate black opponent articulate. It shows an awkward blindness to the consequences of language, one that can be attributed to innocent error. In contrast, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that you would be offended at being called 'nappy headed hos'" does not seem very credible. [Aside: you shouldn't spell "hos" with an apostrophe, as many of these dumb media outlets have.]
Here's another test, based roughly on the burden-shifting mechanism recognized in Title VII discrimination cases: If you can make a prima facie case that a remark could reflect some kind of illicit prejudice, then ask whether the maker can come back with a credible explanation. In Biden's case: "Believe me: when I said articulate, all I meant was articulate" In Imus's case, the best I can come up with is, "I was saying that the Rutgers team fought on the court with the tenacity of young Ho Chi Minhs, but now must be so exhausted, they need to rest their sleepy heads." Pretty lame, I know, and I'm a lawyer.
Blunder implies the same thing: that it is what Imus did not intend that we dislike. What did he not intend? It's like a mean drunk who beats his pregnant wife every few days. If someone gets upset when it "goes too far" doesn't that mean that someone things a lesser degree of drunken pregnant wife-beating would have been acceptable?
I don't know everything that Imus has ever said, but the outrage in this instance does not seem hard to fathom. Not just that his -- wait --
Okay, as I am writing this, the local news I watch and always hate has just identified the issue as his "racially charged" comments. Again, this is a stupid hedge. Why is it only "charged"? My firm handled a case where a guy was fired for "racially charged" comments. We found a white comparator who told an African-American co-worker she looked like a hooker. That is what I'd call charged. It is not explicit, and in another context might have no racial aspect at all, but given the races of the parties, and the traditional Jezebel sterotype of African-American women, there was a racial tinge or inflection to the comment. "Nappy-headed" is pretty explicit. It's beyond charged. It's racial, period.
It also, of course, implicates sex, sexual mores, and class. In context, the phrase was equated with being rough, hard, savage. It hit on several points, and was graphic.
But that doesn't strike me as the big issue. Although I'm not a sports fan, I can appreciate the argument that for a bunch of underdog kids on the heels of a highlight achievement, this event partook of something sacred for its participants, like a funeral or a wedding. That's somewhere you don't want to take your dump, if you have any decency. Not if you want anyone to be willing to be seen with you.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Dirty Dining
Quick hit only. The Dirty Dining segments on Journal Communications' TMJ4 I see a problem, big surpise.
They have had a few segments on successful, landmark restaurants, owned by white people, located in the suburbs or in nice downtown locations, where the restaurant's "executive chef" or owner has come on and said all the right things. This problem here was a short-term anomaly. That one we've fixed. This one was not as bad as it sounds. We're glad to find out about this problem so we can fix it. We strive for perfection, but it's hard to keep on top of everything. That's why we welcome the health department reports to let us know where to focus our continuing efforts so our diners can have confidence. All of these problems merit our attention and are being addressed, but none had progressed to the point of affecting our customers, and we're thankful for that.
The problem I see is that some of these responses would be applicable to most of the establishments who are covered in these segments. This diminishes the force of all of them, but that's not the problem. The problem is that when the target is some minority-owned small Indian or Mexican restaurant or fried chicken franchise, and the owners don't put up sophisticated damage control, the news media takes advantage of the bad response, lets them ignore their defenses, does not give any caviats, and sensationalizes the problems.
This is a direct cognate of the problem in the legal system where some criminally accused get ineffective counsel, the prosecution unethically pushes the advantage, and the judge allows it. There is a difference in that the media in cases like this plays the prosecutor while pretending to be a neutral investigator. The end result is racist, classist, and just plain unfair, and it misleads viewers and harms the community.
Thanks again, JCI.
They have had a few segments on successful, landmark restaurants, owned by white people, located in the suburbs or in nice downtown locations, where the restaurant's "executive chef" or owner has come on and said all the right things. This problem here was a short-term anomaly. That one we've fixed. This one was not as bad as it sounds. We're glad to find out about this problem so we can fix it. We strive for perfection, but it's hard to keep on top of everything. That's why we welcome the health department reports to let us know where to focus our continuing efforts so our diners can have confidence. All of these problems merit our attention and are being addressed, but none had progressed to the point of affecting our customers, and we're thankful for that.
The problem I see is that some of these responses would be applicable to most of the establishments who are covered in these segments. This diminishes the force of all of them, but that's not the problem. The problem is that when the target is some minority-owned small Indian or Mexican restaurant or fried chicken franchise, and the owners don't put up sophisticated damage control, the news media takes advantage of the bad response, lets them ignore their defenses, does not give any caviats, and sensationalizes the problems.
This is a direct cognate of the problem in the legal system where some criminally accused get ineffective counsel, the prosecution unethically pushes the advantage, and the judge allows it. There is a difference in that the media in cases like this plays the prosecutor while pretending to be a neutral investigator. The end result is racist, classist, and just plain unfair, and it misleads viewers and harms the community.
Thanks again, JCI.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
A parable
A corrupt cop whose life has fallen apart breaks into a house of a personal enemy, ransacks the house looking for guns, and destroys the library and family heirlooms, including the family Bible and some irreplacable art. In his rampage he destroys the electrical lines and causes the toilet to overflow, and makes a general disaster of the house. He kills the man of the house, lets the dogs out, and then rapes the man's wife. Then he whispers sweet nothings to her, tells her he husband was evil and he's saved her, and expects her gratitude. He is about to leave with the family's cash when a sniper shot through the window wounds him. He goes to the woman he raped, and says, "this is your house; it's your responsibility; here's a gun; we'll defend the house together." He hands her the gun and turns his back and he's shot again. He says, "who did that?" turns and sees the woman running away. He says, "don't be scared. We can do this. Take my knife too." He turns his back and she shoots him again, and cuts off his penis.
U.S. in Iraq.
U.S. in Iraq.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Two entries on recurring themes -- part one.
1. Channel 4 again...
Right after my last post, they did another piece with the godawful John Mercure. This was an expose on a single businesswoman with a spotty record with the Better Business Bureau. It would have been nice to get the BBB's website or some excerpts of actual reports, but no. The report had the following elements: (1) the guy from the BBB gave his overall assessment that he would not use this service; (2) a disgruntled client was interviewed, said how upset she was, and claimed that she had waited months and gotten none of the product she was promised; (3) an undercover hidden camera visit to the businesswoman posing as a client caught her on film suggesting that she had lots of business, and it was opined, how can she take new business on when she hasn't finished the old business, and (4) a confrontation was arranged straight out of Jerry Springer or Cheaters where the dissatisfied client took over the usual John Mercure role of screaming at the subject of the expose. There was an apparent disagreement over whether the client had put in a specific order for what she said she had waited for, but the report did not include a look at the e-mail they were arguing over, so we could not see who was right. Now again, as usual, it may well be that the businesswoman was crummy, and deserved to be exposed. But that isn't the point. This dreadful report went to a lot of effort but did not convince me of its conclusions. I'm a lawyer. I see where the indictment had holes in it. I'm also a journalist and don't like the conclusion-driven reporting here. Instead of "We report, you decide" as Fox News promises but does not deliver, there is no pretense here of reporting. They have a conclusion which they present, and support with shaky, emotive, prejudicial evidence, and deny us the basic facts we would need to make a competent decision. This has led me to a lot more thought about the relationship between the news media and the legal system as alternative discursive fora where the truth is argued and opinions reached. The MSM, at its best, typically follows some of the guidelines of the legal system and disregards others, which results in systematic flaws, but the system is at least earnest. This Channel 4 crap follows an entirely different schematic. More later.
Right after my last post, they did another piece with the godawful John Mercure. This was an expose on a single businesswoman with a spotty record with the Better Business Bureau. It would have been nice to get the BBB's website or some excerpts of actual reports, but no. The report had the following elements: (1) the guy from the BBB gave his overall assessment that he would not use this service; (2) a disgruntled client was interviewed, said how upset she was, and claimed that she had waited months and gotten none of the product she was promised; (3) an undercover hidden camera visit to the businesswoman posing as a client caught her on film suggesting that she had lots of business, and it was opined, how can she take new business on when she hasn't finished the old business, and (4) a confrontation was arranged straight out of Jerry Springer or Cheaters where the dissatisfied client took over the usual John Mercure role of screaming at the subject of the expose. There was an apparent disagreement over whether the client had put in a specific order for what she said she had waited for, but the report did not include a look at the e-mail they were arguing over, so we could not see who was right. Now again, as usual, it may well be that the businesswoman was crummy, and deserved to be exposed. But that isn't the point. This dreadful report went to a lot of effort but did not convince me of its conclusions. I'm a lawyer. I see where the indictment had holes in it. I'm also a journalist and don't like the conclusion-driven reporting here. Instead of "We report, you decide" as Fox News promises but does not deliver, there is no pretense here of reporting. They have a conclusion which they present, and support with shaky, emotive, prejudicial evidence, and deny us the basic facts we would need to make a competent decision. This has led me to a lot more thought about the relationship between the news media and the legal system as alternative discursive fora where the truth is argued and opinions reached. The MSM, at its best, typically follows some of the guidelines of the legal system and disregards others, which results in systematic flaws, but the system is at least earnest. This Channel 4 crap follows an entirely different schematic. More later.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Iraq
Quickly.
The U.S. presence in Iraq is destabilizing.
There are numerous reasons for this. The first is the strategy of providing arms and training to people whose interests and loyalties are not primarily toward creating stability.
The second is that you don't promote stability by enraging people, crashing into their homes, humiliating them, insulting them, and killing off their family members seemingly at random. Terror can make a terrible stability, applied systematically. Where there is no system, it just feeds the engine of chaos.
But most fundamentally, everyone knows that change is coming. Eventually, people need to sit down and agree on an outcome of this conflict that will be seen as legitimate by enough people for it to stick. But if change is in the air, that generally means that at least one group will believe it could be the beneficiary of that change. And all you need is one bellicose group at any given time to sustain perpetual conflict. The US stayed in Iraq this long by constantly seeing each new anticipated development as the potential light at the end of the tunnel. Why go when victory is just up this way and a little to the left? Iraqis who are still in the fight are called forward by similar perceptions of promise. They will keep fighting so long as there is a short-run prospect that the US will leave or shift in its actions or allies.
Leave and this disappears. There will be an explosion and then a sit down. The longer the US waits, the bigger the explosion will be and the harder the sit down will be.
The U.S. presence in Iraq is destabilizing.
There are numerous reasons for this. The first is the strategy of providing arms and training to people whose interests and loyalties are not primarily toward creating stability.
The second is that you don't promote stability by enraging people, crashing into their homes, humiliating them, insulting them, and killing off their family members seemingly at random. Terror can make a terrible stability, applied systematically. Where there is no system, it just feeds the engine of chaos.
But most fundamentally, everyone knows that change is coming. Eventually, people need to sit down and agree on an outcome of this conflict that will be seen as legitimate by enough people for it to stick. But if change is in the air, that generally means that at least one group will believe it could be the beneficiary of that change. And all you need is one bellicose group at any given time to sustain perpetual conflict. The US stayed in Iraq this long by constantly seeing each new anticipated development as the potential light at the end of the tunnel. Why go when victory is just up this way and a little to the left? Iraqis who are still in the fight are called forward by similar perceptions of promise. They will keep fighting so long as there is a short-run prospect that the US will leave or shift in its actions or allies.
Leave and this disappears. There will be an explosion and then a sit down. The longer the US waits, the bigger the explosion will be and the harder the sit down will be.
One last time...
Ohmigod! I just realized that I have not posted anything for four months except these gripes against the local news. Just one more, and I'll go on to something else.
A while back, they had a story on how "criminals" (actually, the criminally accused, I think) were allowed one free substitution of a judge, which had lightened the caseload of one judge who was notorious for, variously, either being harsh, or giving mean lectures from the bench. There were some efforts at balance, but it was mainly an expose on this allgedly bad law.
I think this was another disservice. I don't know the original reasons for the rule, but one logical benefit I can see was never mentioned, and seems pretty important. If there are multiple judges hearing the same kind of case, and differences among them in terms of severity of their sentencing or use of discretion so that some are more pro-prosecution and others more pro-defense, then giving out a peremptory strike against a judge (for either side) will tend to promote uniformity. This is vital because the consequences of a crime should depend on the facts of the case and the considerations sanctione by law and not on the dumb luck of what judge you draw in the lottery.
A while back, they had a story on how "criminals" (actually, the criminally accused, I think) were allowed one free substitution of a judge, which had lightened the caseload of one judge who was notorious for, variously, either being harsh, or giving mean lectures from the bench. There were some efforts at balance, but it was mainly an expose on this allgedly bad law.
I think this was another disservice. I don't know the original reasons for the rule, but one logical benefit I can see was never mentioned, and seems pretty important. If there are multiple judges hearing the same kind of case, and differences among them in terms of severity of their sentencing or use of discretion so that some are more pro-prosecution and others more pro-defense, then giving out a peremptory strike against a judge (for either side) will tend to promote uniformity. This is vital because the consequences of a crime should depend on the facts of the case and the considerations sanctione by law and not on the dumb luck of what judge you draw in the lottery.
And more...
I have been away for a while, but I need to post before the month is up. I've fogotten most of my stored-up criticism but there's always something fresh.
They just finished a report in which they concealed the identity of a teacher who had a concern of retribution, not for speaking out against an apparently stupid policy (but who knows, because we never get both sides), but because she admits violating the policy. This gets a black mark from me.
I think it would be ethical for the news to protect its source by concealing the fact that she did something for which she could legitimately be sanctioned, because revealing that fact would chill the willingness of sources to come forward. Sure. But after that, there were choices made that probably weren't right.
Maybe, if the source's confession of rule-breaking were not presented, she could have been shown and identified. We don't know if there was any reason to fear retribution for simply voicing disagreement with the policy. This is a public school system, and in principle, one is legall protected from retribution for speaking out in a private capacity on a matter of public policy. There was no hint in the broadcast that any reasonable apprehension derived from speaking out -- just from admitting insubordination in violating the rule.
In actual journalism, it's considered a good thing to reveal sources. Secret sources are not subject to public truth-testing and hence unreliable unless corroborated. It's always better to get a specific, identified source for a fact as opposed to keeping the evidence in your back pocket.
But I doubt this was much of a concern for Channel 4 News. My guess is that they chose to hide the identity of the source because it adds drama to conceal faces, distort voices, and pretend the source is like some kind of spy who risks grave peril for disclosing the dirty secret.
But here the dirty secret was the source's own wrongdoing. Regardles of whether the rule violated was justified, this same station that flaunted that wrongdoing, and its complicity in abetting it, has frequently in the past run special reports where it exposes individual wrongdoers. The distinction here appears to be the reporter didn't like the rule. The station made a value judgment that the rules they collaborate in enforcing are good rules, and this rule was a bad rule. They decide. They would not have to decide whether they liked the rule if their goal was simply to report the facts. The point of the story was not the violation of the rule, but the fact that the rule exists and is questionable. They could still point out that they'd received reports of the rule's violation, but to do so was less important than to be neutral.
They just finished a report in which they concealed the identity of a teacher who had a concern of retribution, not for speaking out against an apparently stupid policy (but who knows, because we never get both sides), but because she admits violating the policy. This gets a black mark from me.
I think it would be ethical for the news to protect its source by concealing the fact that she did something for which she could legitimately be sanctioned, because revealing that fact would chill the willingness of sources to come forward. Sure. But after that, there were choices made that probably weren't right.
Maybe, if the source's confession of rule-breaking were not presented, she could have been shown and identified. We don't know if there was any reason to fear retribution for simply voicing disagreement with the policy. This is a public school system, and in principle, one is legall protected from retribution for speaking out in a private capacity on a matter of public policy. There was no hint in the broadcast that any reasonable apprehension derived from speaking out -- just from admitting insubordination in violating the rule.
In actual journalism, it's considered a good thing to reveal sources. Secret sources are not subject to public truth-testing and hence unreliable unless corroborated. It's always better to get a specific, identified source for a fact as opposed to keeping the evidence in your back pocket.
But I doubt this was much of a concern for Channel 4 News. My guess is that they chose to hide the identity of the source because it adds drama to conceal faces, distort voices, and pretend the source is like some kind of spy who risks grave peril for disclosing the dirty secret.
But here the dirty secret was the source's own wrongdoing. Regardles of whether the rule violated was justified, this same station that flaunted that wrongdoing, and its complicity in abetting it, has frequently in the past run special reports where it exposes individual wrongdoers. The distinction here appears to be the reporter didn't like the rule. The station made a value judgment that the rules they collaborate in enforcing are good rules, and this rule was a bad rule. They decide. They would not have to decide whether they liked the rule if their goal was simply to report the facts. The point of the story was not the violation of the rule, but the fact that the rule exists and is questionable. They could still point out that they'd received reports of the rule's violation, but to do so was less important than to be neutral.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
More gripes
Just wanted to add a couple more gripes to my growing list regarding the local news:
1) I hate it when they say "we all..." or "everybody" as in, "We all know how annoying it is when..." "We've all wondered..." or "Everybody loves to..." or (most of all) "Everybody's been waiting to hear..." or other phrases indicating particularly that the entire viewing area has had the same experiences or tastes or, especially, that we've all been following and care about some story that they've been covering excessively. I wonder, wouldn't people who call themselves journalists, who make it a business to report on the diversity of things that happen, have a broader perspective than that? Can these people really not be aware that there are others that think differently? How can their worlds possibly be so small?
2) If I haven't said it already, I hate the way stories are spun out into a daily series by adding a speck of information each day that is so small it should in no way qualify as a story. Day 1: Brett Favre's game tomorrow will be the last of the season, and we're going to wonder aloud for two and a half minutes whether it will be his last. Day 2: Yes, the game happened (see separate report); someone else has asked the question we were wondering about yesterday, and here's the non-answer response. Day 3: we asked again and here's a follow-up non-answer. Day 4: Guess what? We asked again, except this day, we got the views of some of his teammates, and they had no information. Day 5: See day 3. Day 6-7: weekend, we repeat the highlights of our previous reports. Day 8: Report fresh non-information. Day 9: see day 8. Et cetera.
1) I hate it when they say "we all..." or "everybody" as in, "We all know how annoying it is when..." "We've all wondered..." or "Everybody loves to..." or (most of all) "Everybody's been waiting to hear..." or other phrases indicating particularly that the entire viewing area has had the same experiences or tastes or, especially, that we've all been following and care about some story that they've been covering excessively. I wonder, wouldn't people who call themselves journalists, who make it a business to report on the diversity of things that happen, have a broader perspective than that? Can these people really not be aware that there are others that think differently? How can their worlds possibly be so small?
2) If I haven't said it already, I hate the way stories are spun out into a daily series by adding a speck of information each day that is so small it should in no way qualify as a story. Day 1: Brett Favre's game tomorrow will be the last of the season, and we're going to wonder aloud for two and a half minutes whether it will be his last. Day 2: Yes, the game happened (see separate report); someone else has asked the question we were wondering about yesterday, and here's the non-answer response. Day 3: we asked again and here's a follow-up non-answer. Day 4: Guess what? We asked again, except this day, we got the views of some of his teammates, and they had no information. Day 5: See day 3. Day 6-7: weekend, we repeat the highlights of our previous reports. Day 8: Report fresh non-information. Day 9: see day 8. Et cetera.
Friday, November 17, 2006
I just can't stop
Okay, tonight, it's an update on deadbeat dads, and a report on the roads where one is supposedly most likely to encounter a drunk driver. I just want to make a few notes about the latter. It did something that I noticed last night too. The reports are incredibly self-referential. "We tracked him down." "It took a lot of effort." "We searched for three weeks." Who cares? This stuff serves two apparent functions. First, it sensationalizes the story by creating a phony drama and suspense over whether the investigation will be successful. This is Geraldo outside Capone's vault. It's entertainment and it follows the strictures of entertainment. Nothing the I-Team does is newsworthy. They make the story about themselves to inject entertainment value into stories that would otherwise be simply news. Second, it's a big advertisement for the station -- look at us! Look see how hard we worked. This took a lot of effort. Be impressed. Now that I think about it, there's a third function: distract from the story so you won't see how deeply flawed it is.
Speaking of which, okay. The newsguys tallied reports of traffic arrests and noted the drunk driving arrest hotspots. Here's the big surprise -- the busiest major highways tended to be the source of the most arrests. One thing the report didn't ask anyone was, "Mr. Expert, is our methodology sound?" I'd have asked that before doing all that work. I suspect the answer would be, no.
Sections of the city that are more dense with roads are correspondingly likely to have more traffic and hence more arrests. Highways with higher speed limits and no stoplights simply see more traffic, even though the highways tend to be better lit, better maintained, and easier to drive (no intersections, constant speeds) than city streets. Some areas may have more arrests simply because they are better patrolled. Areas near police stations are likely to be more patrolled. One high arrest area is close to a part of the city that has late night traffic jams due to large public events -- unsafe, or just better patrolled?
A better methodology would be to compare number of accidents with city engineers' estimates of traffic flow. If a high ratio of cars on the road are involved in accidents, this is a sign of unsafety, rather than, "we counted more drunk driving arrests within a mile radius of the huge highway interchange near downtown than in any other circle with an area of pi miles." Duh!
Another thing which I neglected to mention last night is that within the report, they keep throwing in teasers: "you'll see" this, or "we'll show you" that, or "just wait until you see what we found." Just tell us, dammit. Don't make a 45-second report into a 3-minute report by telling us three times that you're going to show us something before you do. If you don't have a full report, then it isn't soup yet. Stick it back on the burner until it's ready.
Speaking of which, okay. The newsguys tallied reports of traffic arrests and noted the drunk driving arrest hotspots. Here's the big surprise -- the busiest major highways tended to be the source of the most arrests. One thing the report didn't ask anyone was, "Mr. Expert, is our methodology sound?" I'd have asked that before doing all that work. I suspect the answer would be, no.
Sections of the city that are more dense with roads are correspondingly likely to have more traffic and hence more arrests. Highways with higher speed limits and no stoplights simply see more traffic, even though the highways tend to be better lit, better maintained, and easier to drive (no intersections, constant speeds) than city streets. Some areas may have more arrests simply because they are better patrolled. Areas near police stations are likely to be more patrolled. One high arrest area is close to a part of the city that has late night traffic jams due to large public events -- unsafe, or just better patrolled?
A better methodology would be to compare number of accidents with city engineers' estimates of traffic flow. If a high ratio of cars on the road are involved in accidents, this is a sign of unsafety, rather than, "we counted more drunk driving arrests within a mile radius of the huge highway interchange near downtown than in any other circle with an area of pi miles." Duh!
Another thing which I neglected to mention last night is that within the report, they keep throwing in teasers: "you'll see" this, or "we'll show you" that, or "just wait until you see what we found." Just tell us, dammit. Don't make a 45-second report into a 3-minute report by telling us three times that you're going to show us something before you do. If you don't have a full report, then it isn't soup yet. Stick it back on the burner until it's ready.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
More Stupidity from WTMJ
It's one thing after another. Tonight, the worst of the worst, John Mercure, left, had an expose on two "deadbeat dads." This is a recycled theme that they run every once in a while, it seems, because it's dear to their hearts, and, after all, they don't have many original ideas. Again, please note, I don't mean to defend categorically real deadbeat dads, but so bad is the reporting from Channel 4, that when Mercure or one of his imitators accuse someone, I instantly begin to doubt. If they accused O.J. Simpson of being black, I'd start to wonder if he weren't really Chinese or something.
So this time, two guys. One -- and I admit this was clever -- they got to brag about all their successful enterprises in real estate, making tons of money. They confronted him and he denied everything. Later, they presented testimony that he was a big liar. So, if he's a liar, doesn't that undercut his claims of being such a bigshot, with all this money? It sounded all pretty vague to me. If there really was a big pot of money this guy had, couldn't Johnnie find it? Has he ever heard of research -- go down to the Register of Deeds, or just check on the City's website. If he had no evidence to support his claims other than the braggery of a known liar, it's premature to report. Adding his opinion that the guy is "deplorable" does nothing to change that. John's opinion is not news. In fact, it's utterly predictable.
Go to guy number two. This guy was depicted as a gambling addict who probably burns through every cent he earns and is left with nothing. This makes him a deadbeat? Yes, but the guy should have his wages garnished and get some treatment. It doesn't sound like he's concealing any big money from his kids. It doesn't sound like he's laughing his way to the bank. More to the point, John left in the segment a telling retort from this guy, something like, "shit, man, I just explained that to you!" This has happened before. We never seem to get this side of the story. If the guy's story is preposterous, let us hear it. If it's reasonable, let us hear it. If it's checkable, check it. Don't just hide it from us.
Beyond all this, the report is just disgustingly manipulative and one-sided. Once again, Johnny has confused law enforcement for journalism: "We're tracking them down, and authorities could soon be locking them up." Note to John: quit your job and enroll in the police academy. Our culture can withstand one more bad cop better than it can withstand one more hack reporter taking up our precious airwaves.
Last night, the expose was on Arturo Jimenez. Read and listen here. Here I have the usual complaints and some new ones. Among the usual, interview technique. Here are the questions News 4's "I-Team" cleverly asked Jimenez to gain his trust and elicit his version of the story: "You have taken people's money and not done the work," we said to him. All he could say was no. "No, no.""Talk to me about it," we tried again. "I'm going to give you a chance. You have taken people's money and not done the work.""I have nothing to talk about," he said.... "Why are you ripping people off in your own community?" we asked him. See how the interviewer slyly elicits the most informative comments from Jimenez by shouting accusations at him and simply rejecting anything he answers? It takes years of journalism school to master that. I smell another award!
Among the more special, I liked the I-Team's suggestion that because Jimenez was dishonest, he should not work at all but maybe just steal outright, or sponge off friends or the state:
"Courts have ruled against Jimenez. The Better Business Bureau has complaints on file. Yet, he keeps working..."
Mostly, though, I noticed how they focused not on the allegation that Jimenez was a crook, or that his victims were Hispanic, but that he was Hispanic, and this is what made him a louse. One talking head said he was someone who "takes advantage of their heritage." (Lazy minorities have all the breaks. How unfair that white people can never manage to prey on nonwhites.) Another guy said he made all Latinos look bad to Anglos. Some truth to this, but only because 1) Channel 4 is there to make sure all the white people know about this guy who previously had a bad name mainly among his own, and 2) people make racist generalizations, but Channel 4 never says they shouldn't -- it puts the entire blame for their racism on Jimenez. How ironic. Channel 4 is doing just what they accuse Jimenez of -- purveying a stereotype of Hispanics as lazy and corrupt.
Another report, this one not an I-Team report, but a "Special Investigation." The supposed problem, long lines at the DMV. It starts with an anecdote from some guy who waited two hours. I was at the DMV recently and waited about 20 minutes. Not great; I wish they'd hire more people. Still, it leads me to doubt that 2 hours is typical. The report had no average wait times, it just reported how long the lines were, and again just with anecdotes, not real data: 77 at one place. So what? Is that 77 waiting with one person on duty and each person has 15 minutes worth of business? (That would be a 19-hour wait for the last person in line, which is essentially like having an appointment for the next day.) Or maybe there are 12 checkout aisles, they take care of you in three minutes, which comes out to a 19-minute wait.
After inventing or exaggerating a big problem (which I say because they reported that customers at the DMV had an 80% satisfaction rate -- painting this as a horrible, horrible thing), they turn to the solution... privatization!
Privatization is not a solution. It does not magically make things better. Anything private businesses can do, governments can do just as well, except for screw over workers and rip people off, and they're getting pretty good at those things too. The only plus for privatization is that it can lead to a greater nimbleness and incentive to implement solutions. But once those solutions are identified, government can copy them. So, if Ohio went private and it was a huge success, I would want to know how that private company does things so much better. What did they do? Hire more people? Invest in technology?Allow people to make appointments? Allow more tasks to be done online? Cut corners on accuracy or security? Correct some unique Ohio problem that Wisconsin corrected 20 years ago? Take advantage of some unique Ohio characteristic we don't have? It would make a sound piece of reporting to find out these things and then ask whether they would work here.
That was not done. There was a reference to one possible solution to some problems -- allow customers to take care of some of their business online. Sounds like a great idea. A FAQ could answer your questions. You could download the forms and submit them, rather than waiting in line to hand them in. The computer could check for missing blanks. Even things that required you to be there, like having your picture taken, or take a vision test, could be shortened -- set up everything in advance and make an appointment. This would take most of the people out of the line, making it shorter for everyone else. Also mentioned, better technology. Stop walking back to the row of filing cabinets for a record, get it from the computer in a second. That should speed things up. In all likelihood, this is what Ohio did.
However, the reporter dismissed this with a wave of the hand: "Their solution is more online services and better technology. But that's little comfort for people losing hours of their lives at the DMV." No? Why not? Listen, Mike Trevey, if you don't understand it, ask a question. Don't seek to impose your own ignorance on viewers.
The best part of the report came after it was over. Carole Meekins asks, so, is there any downside? Oh, yeah, Mike neglected to mention that in Ohio privatization worked, but elsewhere it's been an abysmal failure. Thanks, Carole, for shooting that suggestion entirely to hell with one question the answer to which Mr. "Special Assignment" decided he shouldn't bother to tell us.
Before I go back to last week, let me also mention the repeated reports on "fainting goats" and where you can get them. Why are they running and re-running livestock advertisements disguised as news? Do they get a cut from every goat sold?
Now back to the I-Team. Their commercials talk about how when you investigate, you get to take on the powerful. Usually, it’s people who park illegally. They just did another one of those. Or you get divorced dads with gambling convictions, or Hispanic contractors who don't perform. So last week it’s…student loan deadbeats!
Now, don’t get me wrong. As usual, the story is half true. There are folks out there who have the money and should be doing a better job of servicing their student loans. Many were improvident in having borrowed. A very few may be scammers. But as usual, many of not most of the “powerful” whom the station seeks to afflict are themselves victims.
The station goes to great lengths to tell us over and over that when student borrowers default, the taxpayers wind up paying.
But who’s really responsible? Here are some things the broadcast doesn’t tell you:
1) Some schools are frauds, designed to suck up student loan money, without actually preparing their students with the marketable skills needed to pay back their loans. These schools can sometimes be spotted by the fact that most of their students default on their loans.
2) Even legitimate schools consciously overcharge because they know the government, by subsidizing loans and grants, will take up the slack. The formula is need-based, which means the higher the tuition, the more students need, and hence the more they get – which they immediately give to the schools. Hence tuition has overall grown at several times the rate of inflation.
3) The banks make money off making these loans, charging both interest and extra charges like administration and origination fees, despite the fact that they bear zero risk on the investment. (Remember, when students default, the government insures the loans, so the banks never pay, the taxpayers do.)
4) Student loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. So there are graduates out there who can’t keep ahead of the interest, and can’t start over.
The story focused on doctors. Student loans for medical school can be enormous. If you don't finish, you'll just have this huge debt and no profession to show for it that can help you pay that off. The interest on that mountain of debt can by itself overwhelm any income that you can get from half a medical degree, which is to say minimum wage.
So what does TV-4 propose? Throw them in jail? That'll save the taxpayers a lot of money. (Actually, it may discourage people from going to medical school. But that would also hurt medical schools and cause a shortage of doctors, which is already a problem.)
Thanks, WTMJ. With you on the air, at least we'll never face a shortage in stupidity.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Reagan Stamp
I was having a conversation with friends about last year's Ronald Reagan stamp. One friend was sent the stamp on a SASE and, despising Reagan, was horrified at having to use it, but not so horrified as to spend 39 cents on another stamp. After all, it's just a stamp.Another friend said he liked the stamp. He also thought Reagan sucked, but liked the idea that a machine would be pounding into his face, smearing it with ink as the stamp as cancelled.
Another potential view, I remarked, although impolite, might be to recall that by federal law, no stamp or coin can bear the likeness of anyone still alive -- a law, by the way, which I think has been violated by the Ohio state quarter, since no one can honestly argue, I think, that the "astronaut" on the back is not simply John Glenn -- anyhow, one might recall that law and look upon the Reagan stamp and look at it as reassurance that "that f**ker's finally DEAD."
Photo Retouching 101
Well, I'm a little nonplussed by the way blogger lets you add photos. It took me a few tries to get the photo on the left to be on the left.In any event, what you see us the before and after pictures from a photo retouching job I did. I wanted to post this because it's not something I do a lot of and I'm proud of this result. On the left is the original photo of a friend of mine. On the right, the adjusted product. The changes include changing the saturation and color balance to make the complexion a bit less ashen, thinning the face, moving the right jowl inward and eliminating the bulge a the neck, lowering the forehead, evening out the hairline, making the stubble less obvious and less grey, eliminating the veins on the forehead, darkening the eyebrows, and, of course, covering my tracks so the retouching job isn't totally obvious. I left plenty of clues for FBI laboratory staff if they ever wanted to test the authenticity of this photo, but with limited time for the project, I think I made it look pretty convincing to the naked eye.
So, beyond that bragging, I did have a retouching thread that I've been wanting to post for a while. Remember that Reuters photographer who retouched some of his photos of Israeli strikes in Iraq, Adnan Hajj? He basically added some dark smoke to a photo depicting an Israeli airstrike.
He also did a crappy job. You can see that he basically copied a billow of smoke on photoshop and repasted it at intervals to add additional volume.But of course the issue is not that he's an unskilled manipulator. Nor is it that there was any material misrepresentation involved. While supporters of the Israeli attacks screamed bloody murder and got Hajj suspended, let's be clear. The attack was real. It did make smoke. The photo was not fabricated out of whole cloth. Nor was the amount of smoke an important issue for which the photo provided evidence. Opponents of the attacks objected on the grounds that they killed, injured, or displaced a million people, mostly innocent people, violated international law, inflicted huge damage on the economy of Lebanon, and were counterproductive to their own stated goals. I don't recall a lot of people saying, Israel should stop its war because it makes too much smoke and that's really affecting air quality in the region.
No, the issue was, or supposedly would be, that any manipulation threatens the credibility of the publisher, so there is a need to be circumspect with respect to the integrity of photos regardless of whether they are used as evidence of a material point, or merely seek to entertain the eye and illustrate an event. But if that is true, what about all the other manipulation that takes place?
Take for example, the famous occasion of Time magazine darkening the mug shot of O.J. Simpson, making him look more African and at the same time, more sinsiter and obscure. This was done reportedly for asthetic reasons rather than editorial ones. The cover was conceived as an illustration rather than a photo attesting to reality, and it was assembled with a symbolic black-and-white theme. You can see that an iris effect was added to the background, the colorsaturation was reduced, and even the color balance changed to be more reddish. The slate reading "BK4013970 061794 Los Angeles Police Jail Div" was also shrunk, and everything unrelated to the article is kept off the cover. So I get that the idea was conceived as being artistic rather than racist, but I think the manipulation was consequential and rightly criticized.
Other examples are, contempraneous to the Lebanon manipulation story, slimming down Katie Couric as she was slated to become CBS' new anchor, in CBS magazine, which was arguably an effort to sell the CBS Nightly News based on her looks. In this case, it's a matter of both false advertising, and debasing both the news and Couric by treating her as eye candy and the evening newscast as a form of entertainment whose essential quality is represented by the looks of its anchor.
More serious, though it involves a pretty standard photo trick requiring less sophisticated manipulation.
This was the April 9, 2003 toppling of the statute of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Although the initially released photos appeared to show a substantial crowd of cheering Iraqis spontaneously pulling down the statue and celebrating, photos available at the time and later released showed that the crowd was insubstantial, concentrated entirely within the visual field of the cropped photo that appeared in countless papers.Outside of that field, cropped off the bottom and sides of the picture, were two things:
1) the emptiness of a mostly deserted square, and
2) a U.S. military presence, which included the tank which actually pulled down the statue.
(Observers also noted that some of the members of the crowd were apparently plants, since the same individuals appeared in other crowd photos around the country and at least one was photographed as part of Ahmed Chalabi's entourage as they arrived in the country.)
Here the manipulation was not any sophisticated retouching, but merely cropping. Another common device is foreshortening. When a long lens is used, the viewer seems to be close to the action, because the image is large, but the sense of perspective is diminished, as when a scene is viewed from far away. The effect is that objects in the foreground and background appear to be separated by little distance along the axis of viewing, though they may in fact be a considerable distance apart.
Of course the point with Couric and OJ and Firdos Square is that, to my knowledge, none of these tricks prompted anyone to be suspended, or have their entire portfolio scanned for deceptions. A story on the Couric affair had a CBS exec laughing the whole thing off and treating it as trivial. It may be, simply given how common manipulation is in one form or another.
One could itemize other forms of manipulation, such as the mere decision to cover staged pseudo-events, which comprise perhaps a majority of all news, or helping to stage photos, or selecting subjects or angles or filters that make photographs dramatic and asthetic and thus fail to capure the boring reality that is their real subject.
Anyhow, the big deal over Hajj is overblown in relative terms, or perhaps all the other cases are simply underblown.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Potpourri, again
Once more I have a lot of ideas saved up. Here are some:
1. Blushing Bride. The local news had a story maybe 10 days ago, which again I'm in too much of a rush to link to, about a store that sold wedding dresses that suddenly shut its doors and declared bankrupcy. It featured, as might be expected, distraught brides to be, complaining about the awful situation they were in, because they trusted the company and then they suddenly closed, without notice.
I take the unpopular position that the news treated the bankrupt company unfairly. I don't hold them blameless, but from what little I know about business bankrupcy, the report failed to provide the context that would explain the company's actions. In doing this, it failed to point the way to possible solutions to keep this from happening in the future.
First of all, the company undoubtedly did not set out to go bankrupt. I haven't seen their business plan, but most companies want to make money, not lose it. As far as I know there have been no allegations of fraud, i.e. that the principals of the company overpaid themselves in order to rob the company as much as possible with bankrupcy on the horizon. It is pretty common for the owner of a small business to loan the business money to keep it afloat, hoping it will turn the corner and survive.
I don't know if the company's original plan was reasonable or whether it was reasonable for it to try to ride out the crisis as long as they did. It sounded like the company used a lot of shipping. When gas prices rise, shipping costs rise. That could help explain why things went awry. I do think it was piss poor to get into this situation. I think a company that undertakes an enterprise like this should make damn sure they're not undercapitalized, and there should be some insurance offered to customers to prevent the worst. But society has not set up a strict liability standard. The law and the culture encourage half-assed startups in the name of the market. So the entrepreneur cannot entirely be blamed.
The customers wish they had been informed in advance. My understanding is that there is no such thing. Once there is an announcement of an impending bankrupcy, any hopes of riding out the crisis pretty much go out the window. No one will put anything into the company anymore, because they're on notice they may not get it back. Fraudulent conveyance laws kick into place preventing the company from giving things out -- it's treated as creditor property even before the papers are filed. Basically, the company has no choice but to close its doors. Even to give out dresses kept on the premises would be considered stealing from the creditors.
I think it's shitty that the company did not leave their customers a longer note. It's not enough to say, sorry for the inconvenience, and let people presume the worst. They should have said, now that we're bankrupt, matters are mostly out of our control, but we will do our best working with the lawyers and creditors to get everyone their dresses if possible. That could have alleviated at least some of the stress.
Ultimately, everyone whose weddings were scheduled within two weeks of the bankrupcy were promised their dresses. As far as I know this promise was kept. It was reportedly kept for at lest the first bride with an upcoming wedding. I have no doubt this was the lawyers who worked this out, recognizing the potential for bad publicity against the creditors.
In sum, the company acted badly, but the news media's inept and misleading coverage made them the only culprit, and failed to explain how some of the complaints against them were really attributable to aspects of the law and culture that should have been questioned, but remained unquestioned after all the reporting was done, helping set this up to happen again.
2. McGruff. McGruff, the crime dog, is at it again, teaching the kiddies how to do crimes.
Cartoons are popular with three kinds of viewers: kiddies, the tragically ironic, and no-goods who bust into houses to rape, steal, and watch Tom and Jerry. Adults seeking serious information on how to prevent identity theft generally do not go to Blue’s Clues, Clifford the Big Red Dog or McGruff.
So here he is again on TV, showing us how you can take a picture of someone’s credit card discreetly with a cell phone, and use the numbers to make unauthorized purchases. Cool. Kids don’t have credit cards, though if the kid is over 12 he probably has his own cell number. So you know kids aren’t gonna run and tell their parents this new trick.
No-goods will be sitting in someone’s living room after a home invasion when McGruff comes on during Matlock, and reminds them how they can get a credit card out of the victim’s purse and order a pizza.
And of course, the tragically ironic just think it would be cool to commit a crime suggested to them by a misguided crime-prevention effort, so they order original artworks from the Banksy website and have them sent to the Whitney at Altria.
3. Yellow Ribbons. Yellow ribbons, it turns out, are a fascinating example of semantic drift. Part of the message of the ribbons has remained the same: I support you. But tracing their use backwards, it turns out that the rest of their meaning has reversed almost 180 degrees.
Today, the ribbons are an endemic outgrowth of the Iraq war, and they seem to signify something like, “I support you in your mission. You’re a hero.” Everyone is supposed to have one of the damn things. It’s considered patriotic to consider the mission heroic on the level of the individual soldier, even though most now see the war as a whole as stupid and counterproductive, if not simply wrong – one unnecessary atrocity spangled with smaller atrocities. It’s currently debated whether the ribbons also display support for the war.
I recall earlier uses of the ribbons. The previous Iraq war, or “Persian Gulf War,” then years before the current one, saw the ribbons. Their meaning was not support for the war so much, at least where I was. It was more, we love you and we want you back. Over the decade, the military aspect and even the location were unchanged, but there was a subtle change in tenor from expressing love and the pain of absence to support for the mission.
Ten years before that was the first use of the ribbons that I know of. We’re now back to the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-80, the “crisis” that became “America Held Hostage” and later NBC’s Nightline. The ribbons were for the hostages. Between the Hostage Crisis and Iraq I, the notion of “we want you safely home” remained intact, but shifted from diplomatic hostages to military personnel engaging in a hot war.
The first use was in 1974, when Dawn, featuring Tony Orlando, performed “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree.” From some of the lyrics, you might think there was a hint of soldiers returning from the Vietnam war: it begins and ends with simply, “I'm comin' home…” Everyone knows the chorus:
Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak treeIt's been three long years. Do you still want me?If I don't see a ribbon round the old oak treeI'll stay on the bus, forget about us, put the blame on me.If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree
But the context is clear that the singer is actually much more like the hostages in Iran than like our troops. He’s a prisoner. An inmate at one of America’s fine penal institutions:
I'm comin' home, I've done my time…
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free
So, the yellow ribbon used to say: Yes, it looks like you done wrong and landed in jail. But you’ve done your time, you’ve reformed yourself. You’re willing to accept responsibility and “put the blame on me.” That gives me faith in you to forgive you and take you back.
Appropriate for Lynddie England, perhaps. Certainly not the meaning the ribbons have today.
4. Other. Here is just a reminder to me of things I want to write for this space:
a) The Activism Amendment, b) Venezuela or Guatemala for the Security Council? c) Democrats criticize Chavez, d) Dogcross, e) Westphalia, f) The purported rights of nations to persist, g) 911 and immigarants, h) guns in schools and nukes for nations, i) Sex talk, j) God Talk, k) Cry Wolf, l) Eden.
1. Blushing Bride. The local news had a story maybe 10 days ago, which again I'm in too much of a rush to link to, about a store that sold wedding dresses that suddenly shut its doors and declared bankrupcy. It featured, as might be expected, distraught brides to be, complaining about the awful situation they were in, because they trusted the company and then they suddenly closed, without notice.
I take the unpopular position that the news treated the bankrupt company unfairly. I don't hold them blameless, but from what little I know about business bankrupcy, the report failed to provide the context that would explain the company's actions. In doing this, it failed to point the way to possible solutions to keep this from happening in the future.
First of all, the company undoubtedly did not set out to go bankrupt. I haven't seen their business plan, but most companies want to make money, not lose it. As far as I know there have been no allegations of fraud, i.e. that the principals of the company overpaid themselves in order to rob the company as much as possible with bankrupcy on the horizon. It is pretty common for the owner of a small business to loan the business money to keep it afloat, hoping it will turn the corner and survive.
I don't know if the company's original plan was reasonable or whether it was reasonable for it to try to ride out the crisis as long as they did. It sounded like the company used a lot of shipping. When gas prices rise, shipping costs rise. That could help explain why things went awry. I do think it was piss poor to get into this situation. I think a company that undertakes an enterprise like this should make damn sure they're not undercapitalized, and there should be some insurance offered to customers to prevent the worst. But society has not set up a strict liability standard. The law and the culture encourage half-assed startups in the name of the market. So the entrepreneur cannot entirely be blamed.
The customers wish they had been informed in advance. My understanding is that there is no such thing. Once there is an announcement of an impending bankrupcy, any hopes of riding out the crisis pretty much go out the window. No one will put anything into the company anymore, because they're on notice they may not get it back. Fraudulent conveyance laws kick into place preventing the company from giving things out -- it's treated as creditor property even before the papers are filed. Basically, the company has no choice but to close its doors. Even to give out dresses kept on the premises would be considered stealing from the creditors.
I think it's shitty that the company did not leave their customers a longer note. It's not enough to say, sorry for the inconvenience, and let people presume the worst. They should have said, now that we're bankrupt, matters are mostly out of our control, but we will do our best working with the lawyers and creditors to get everyone their dresses if possible. That could have alleviated at least some of the stress.
Ultimately, everyone whose weddings were scheduled within two weeks of the bankrupcy were promised their dresses. As far as I know this promise was kept. It was reportedly kept for at lest the first bride with an upcoming wedding. I have no doubt this was the lawyers who worked this out, recognizing the potential for bad publicity against the creditors.
In sum, the company acted badly, but the news media's inept and misleading coverage made them the only culprit, and failed to explain how some of the complaints against them were really attributable to aspects of the law and culture that should have been questioned, but remained unquestioned after all the reporting was done, helping set this up to happen again.
2. McGruff. McGruff, the crime dog, is at it again, teaching the kiddies how to do crimes.
Cartoons are popular with three kinds of viewers: kiddies, the tragically ironic, and no-goods who bust into houses to rape, steal, and watch Tom and Jerry. Adults seeking serious information on how to prevent identity theft generally do not go to Blue’s Clues, Clifford the Big Red Dog or McGruff.
So here he is again on TV, showing us how you can take a picture of someone’s credit card discreetly with a cell phone, and use the numbers to make unauthorized purchases. Cool. Kids don’t have credit cards, though if the kid is over 12 he probably has his own cell number. So you know kids aren’t gonna run and tell their parents this new trick.
No-goods will be sitting in someone’s living room after a home invasion when McGruff comes on during Matlock, and reminds them how they can get a credit card out of the victim’s purse and order a pizza.
And of course, the tragically ironic just think it would be cool to commit a crime suggested to them by a misguided crime-prevention effort, so they order original artworks from the Banksy website and have them sent to the Whitney at Altria.
3. Yellow Ribbons. Yellow ribbons, it turns out, are a fascinating example of semantic drift. Part of the message of the ribbons has remained the same: I support you. But tracing their use backwards, it turns out that the rest of their meaning has reversed almost 180 degrees.
Today, the ribbons are an endemic outgrowth of the Iraq war, and they seem to signify something like, “I support you in your mission. You’re a hero.” Everyone is supposed to have one of the damn things. It’s considered patriotic to consider the mission heroic on the level of the individual soldier, even though most now see the war as a whole as stupid and counterproductive, if not simply wrong – one unnecessary atrocity spangled with smaller atrocities. It’s currently debated whether the ribbons also display support for the war.
I recall earlier uses of the ribbons. The previous Iraq war, or “Persian Gulf War,” then years before the current one, saw the ribbons. Their meaning was not support for the war so much, at least where I was. It was more, we love you and we want you back. Over the decade, the military aspect and even the location were unchanged, but there was a subtle change in tenor from expressing love and the pain of absence to support for the mission.
Ten years before that was the first use of the ribbons that I know of. We’re now back to the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-80, the “crisis” that became “America Held Hostage” and later NBC’s Nightline. The ribbons were for the hostages. Between the Hostage Crisis and Iraq I, the notion of “we want you safely home” remained intact, but shifted from diplomatic hostages to military personnel engaging in a hot war.
The first use was in 1974, when Dawn, featuring Tony Orlando, performed “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree.” From some of the lyrics, you might think there was a hint of soldiers returning from the Vietnam war: it begins and ends with simply, “I'm comin' home…” Everyone knows the chorus:
Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak treeIt's been three long years. Do you still want me?If I don't see a ribbon round the old oak treeI'll stay on the bus, forget about us, put the blame on me.If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree
But the context is clear that the singer is actually much more like the hostages in Iran than like our troops. He’s a prisoner. An inmate at one of America’s fine penal institutions:
I'm comin' home, I've done my time…
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free
So, the yellow ribbon used to say: Yes, it looks like you done wrong and landed in jail. But you’ve done your time, you’ve reformed yourself. You’re willing to accept responsibility and “put the blame on me.” That gives me faith in you to forgive you and take you back.
Appropriate for Lynddie England, perhaps. Certainly not the meaning the ribbons have today.
4. Other. Here is just a reminder to me of things I want to write for this space:
a) The Activism Amendment, b) Venezuela or Guatemala for the Security Council? c) Democrats criticize Chavez, d) Dogcross, e) Westphalia, f) The purported rights of nations to persist, g) 911 and immigarants, h) guns in schools and nukes for nations, i) Sex talk, j) God Talk, k) Cry Wolf, l) Eden.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Republican Scandals
Well, it's been a month and I have a pile of items that I had planned to post that are all backed up in the pipeline. I'm going to continue that bout of laziness by being a lazy linker and not giving the hotlinks to a few references here, which is like filing a legal paper without the exhibits, but oh hell, maybe I'll find them later.
Crooks and liars has a video of some talking heads talking about the Foley scandal. It's a hoot because the Democrat guy spreads like a 1N debater, rattling off more than a dozen high-profile Republican scandals. I remember a great video they posted months ago with Howard Dean saying again and again how the Abramoff scandal had touched not one Democrat.
Counterpunch has an article with an analysis if why so many times Republicans get caught literally with pants down (With links to an about.com list of scandals that is redacted from Wikipedia).
My own thought is that this is at once a hard and an easy issue for the Democrats. It's hard because attention span is so short that any smart Republican can run out the clock listing Democratic scandals and make it look like a bipartisan failing. (Note however that the Crooks and Liars video shows that Republicans often aren't smart.) On the other hand, there must be some way to make the point that Republicans dominate in the area of scandal, because they do.
Beyond the lists you could make from this administration, one could compare the relatively clean Clinton, Carter, and Johnson white houses with the corrupt administrations of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes. (Ford was apparently not so bad.) For Johnson you had, what, a petty scandal regarding a Supreme Court appointee? Compare to Nixon: president resigned and pardoned, top advisors sent to jail. Ford restored and Carter restored some of the reputation the government had lost. Then recall when Time magazine presented its "Wall of Shame" showing a hundred-odd Reagan officials who'd been indicted or left under a cloud. Bush I had his own set of pardons of a half dozen of his top people right before leaving office. Clinton, in spite of being impeached and ultimately surrendering his law license for a misleadingly captious denial about sex with Monica Lewinsky, had a relatively clean house. Now Bush II and you have numerous investigations reaching into the White House, with various spy scandals, Plamegate, Abramoff, etc...
You read about the slimy environment in which young Republicans are trained to fight dirty, and I've seen these shenanigans in student politics. Anything goes, because the issues are always black and white to the authoritarian personality. John Dean has recently discovered this and written a book about it. It's no accident that the new breed of Republicans includes a disproportionate share of grifters, liars, and pedophiles.
Foleygate has been amusing and disturbing in part because of the lack of unified Republican spin. Of course, many want to shoot the messenger. Wonkette caught Fox News letting the Republicans off the hook by labeling Foley a Democrat. The FRC Christians have blamed the scandal on the Republican's coddling of gays. Drudge blames the kid victims for going along. Boehner blames Hastert. Foley blames alcohol. Hannity invented the fact that the twentysomething Lewinsky was actually still a tender child while servicing the Presidential staff, a comparison that O'Reilly had said only an extremist lunatic would make (but in Hannity's defense, you would only be a lunatic to compare the real facts of the cases, and as a Fox News pseudojournalust, he was dealing in made-up facts). How many different stories and scapegoats are we up to? Oh yeah, Stephen Colbert blames himself. Thanks for owning up.
Locally, we have a governor's race that is all about scandals. The Democratic governor, running for reelection, received a lot of campaign money from people who benefited from his policies, making him exactly like 100% of other politicians. He has not been the target of any investigation and exactly one person in state government, a minor functionary, has left under a cloud. This is the substance of all the negative Republican adds. Plus, they've added a new charge -- he tried to rig the election.
Now, I'm no great fan of this guy but I defend people who are attacked with stupid arguments. How did he attempt to rig the election? His lawyer lobbied the elections board to make a ruling favorable to him concerning his opponent's illegal activities. Scandalous -- a lawyer presenting an argument to a legal body. The Journal-Sentinel, only mass daily paper of the state's largest city, ran this "scandal" on page 1; it reported later on page 6B that the lawyer for the Republicans did the same thing, apparently not a scandal. The elections board voted along party lines, but a judge affirmed its ruling.
The substance of that ruling, as I understand, was that the Republican candidate, who is currently in Congress, transferred his entire Congressional campaign warchest into his budget for election to the statehouse. A bit over 1/3 of that money was raised from national donors who had never complied with the restrictions for giving to a state campaign. Its transfer violated federal law. The television station owned by the Journal's parent company covered the story last night in a condescendingly simple manner, apparently because it presumes its viewers are idiots who would not otherwise understand. They treated the whole warchest as suspect, and said that a Democratic congressman had done something similar in the last election -- but no word on whether his actions were significantly different in legal terms. It's like saying that a cop is partisan because he pulls over the Republican for driving drunk, but not the Democrat, even though the Democrat is also driving (and not mentioning that maybe he's sober). I believe about 10% of what this station airs as news.
Crooks and liars has a video of some talking heads talking about the Foley scandal. It's a hoot because the Democrat guy spreads like a 1N debater, rattling off more than a dozen high-profile Republican scandals. I remember a great video they posted months ago with Howard Dean saying again and again how the Abramoff scandal had touched not one Democrat.
Counterpunch has an article with an analysis if why so many times Republicans get caught literally with pants down (With links to an about.com list of scandals that is redacted from Wikipedia).
My own thought is that this is at once a hard and an easy issue for the Democrats. It's hard because attention span is so short that any smart Republican can run out the clock listing Democratic scandals and make it look like a bipartisan failing. (Note however that the Crooks and Liars video shows that Republicans often aren't smart.) On the other hand, there must be some way to make the point that Republicans dominate in the area of scandal, because they do.
Beyond the lists you could make from this administration, one could compare the relatively clean Clinton, Carter, and Johnson white houses with the corrupt administrations of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes. (Ford was apparently not so bad.) For Johnson you had, what, a petty scandal regarding a Supreme Court appointee? Compare to Nixon: president resigned and pardoned, top advisors sent to jail. Ford restored and Carter restored some of the reputation the government had lost. Then recall when Time magazine presented its "Wall of Shame" showing a hundred-odd Reagan officials who'd been indicted or left under a cloud. Bush I had his own set of pardons of a half dozen of his top people right before leaving office. Clinton, in spite of being impeached and ultimately surrendering his law license for a misleadingly captious denial about sex with Monica Lewinsky, had a relatively clean house. Now Bush II and you have numerous investigations reaching into the White House, with various spy scandals, Plamegate, Abramoff, etc...
You read about the slimy environment in which young Republicans are trained to fight dirty, and I've seen these shenanigans in student politics. Anything goes, because the issues are always black and white to the authoritarian personality. John Dean has recently discovered this and written a book about it. It's no accident that the new breed of Republicans includes a disproportionate share of grifters, liars, and pedophiles.
Foleygate has been amusing and disturbing in part because of the lack of unified Republican spin. Of course, many want to shoot the messenger. Wonkette caught Fox News letting the Republicans off the hook by labeling Foley a Democrat. The FRC Christians have blamed the scandal on the Republican's coddling of gays. Drudge blames the kid victims for going along. Boehner blames Hastert. Foley blames alcohol. Hannity invented the fact that the twentysomething Lewinsky was actually still a tender child while servicing the Presidential staff, a comparison that O'Reilly had said only an extremist lunatic would make (but in Hannity's defense, you would only be a lunatic to compare the real facts of the cases, and as a Fox News pseudojournalust, he was dealing in made-up facts). How many different stories and scapegoats are we up to? Oh yeah, Stephen Colbert blames himself. Thanks for owning up.
Locally, we have a governor's race that is all about scandals. The Democratic governor, running for reelection, received a lot of campaign money from people who benefited from his policies, making him exactly like 100% of other politicians. He has not been the target of any investigation and exactly one person in state government, a minor functionary, has left under a cloud. This is the substance of all the negative Republican adds. Plus, they've added a new charge -- he tried to rig the election.
Now, I'm no great fan of this guy but I defend people who are attacked with stupid arguments. How did he attempt to rig the election? His lawyer lobbied the elections board to make a ruling favorable to him concerning his opponent's illegal activities. Scandalous -- a lawyer presenting an argument to a legal body. The Journal-Sentinel, only mass daily paper of the state's largest city, ran this "scandal" on page 1; it reported later on page 6B that the lawyer for the Republicans did the same thing, apparently not a scandal. The elections board voted along party lines, but a judge affirmed its ruling.
The substance of that ruling, as I understand, was that the Republican candidate, who is currently in Congress, transferred his entire Congressional campaign warchest into his budget for election to the statehouse. A bit over 1/3 of that money was raised from national donors who had never complied with the restrictions for giving to a state campaign. Its transfer violated federal law. The television station owned by the Journal's parent company covered the story last night in a condescendingly simple manner, apparently because it presumes its viewers are idiots who would not otherwise understand. They treated the whole warchest as suspect, and said that a Democratic congressman had done something similar in the last election -- but no word on whether his actions were significantly different in legal terms. It's like saying that a cop is partisan because he pulls over the Republican for driving drunk, but not the Democrat, even though the Democrat is also driving (and not mentioning that maybe he's sober). I believe about 10% of what this station airs as news.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Potpourri
Here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking of. Most is from the last couple of days. One or two are of longer gestation.
Pluto
I like the IAU’s decision to reclassify Pluto. Since the issue of designation is essentially arbitrary, I would have been satisfied with any number of outcomes. The one thing that really annoys me is the repeated assertion, and I mean repeated, over and over, in AP service reporting, that Pluto fails to meet the definition of a planet because its orbit overlaps that of Neptune. (I also was annoyed by the recent protest over Pluto’s demotion where signs read, “size doesn’t matter,” the implication being that Pluto was rejected for being too small.)
The new definition of a planet has three criteria. A body is a plant if it 1) orbits a star; 2) is sufficiently massive that gravitational forces have rendered it approximately spherical in shape; and 3) it is sufficiently massive and stable in its orbit that debris in its orbital path has been cleared or captured. Each criterion has some fuzziness. Satellites of planets do orbit stars, and planets orbit the centers of gravity of their planet-moon systems, so that some moons might be regarded as more star-orbiting than planet-orbiting. How spherical is spherical? How clear of debris is clear enough?
Pluto orbits the sun, though it has a big moon, Charon, and their mutual center of gravity is between the two planets. This is not considered a disqualification. The Pluto-Charon-Nix-Hydra system still orbits the sun, and since Charon has been locked into that system, it does not constitute unswept debris in Pluto’s path. Pluto is small, but it’s small planet-sized and basically round. The fact that the orbit is extremely tilted relative to the ecliptic, and highly eccentric, and that its motion is retrograde, are all oddities that do not effect its definition as a planet. Pluto’s orbital is not cleared, however.
But the idea that Neptune is in Pluto’s path is bullshit. If it were, Neptune could not be considered a planet either. Because Pluto’s orbit is tilted, it only intersects the orbital plane of Neptune at two points. If Pluto and Neptune were to cross that plane at the same time, they would be about 1.8 billion miles apart. When you see Pluto’s and Neptune’s orbits drawn in 2-D as they are projected onto the ecliptic, they appear to cross, but at the crossing point, Pluto is maybe 700 million miles above the ecliptic. Moreover, Pluto and Neptune’s orbits are synchronized: they “resonate” at a 2:3 ratio – a pattern that is stable over time. They never get closer than 1.8 billion miles apart, and that’s not at the ecliptic.
By comparison, Pluto will at some point come closer than 1.8 billion miles from both Uranus and Saturn, also considered to still be planets.
Poppy Crop
Well, another measure of US success in Afghanistan – they’ve reported a record harvest of poppies this year. I look forward to a few cents off those yummy poppyseed muffins.
Reading Quiz
Bush has been reading Macbeth and L’Etranger, which I dare say are a step up from The Pet Goat and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But does he comprehend anything he reads? Here’s a quiz he should take.
Both Macbeth and the Very Hungry Caterpillar have ambitions or appetites. Where do these ambitions or appetites come from? Do they stem from deep within the nature of the individual, or from somewhere else? Do Macbeth and the Very Hungry Caterpillar each have a clear vision of what it is they want?
Mersault and the Pet Goat both face the judgment of society. Would you say that Mersault goes from approval to disapproval, while the Pet Goat undergoes the opposite transformation? Are the motives for their actions clear? Does society judge them on their motives or on the outcomes? Who or what in these stories is existentially “absurd?”
The Pet Goat and the Very Hungry Caterpillar both eat a lot of things. How do their diets differ? How are they the same? Is different food wholesome for different eaters? Should the Pet Goat and Very Hungry Caterpillar have eaten differently? What do these stories tell you about the consequences of bad choices?
Mersault and Macbeth both engage in socially disapproved acts of violence, but for different reasons. Is there anything redeeming for either of these characters in the motives for their acts? How would we think of these characters if they had continued in their tracks and not committed the transformatory acts in their stories?
Castro's Death Date
Just learned that Ho Chi Minh died on the anniversary of the declaration of Vietnamese independence, much like Jefferson and Adams died on July 4. I predict Castro will die on January 1, 2067 (at age 140).
Missing Flag
The flag first erected on the 9/11 WTC rubble is lost. The story would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Well, it is funny. The firefighters came to a commemorative event and when the flag was brought out, which has been toured and worshipped like a religious icon, it turned out to be the wrong flag. Three times too big. Comment: what an incompetent country we’ve become. File under Katrina.
Can the First Responders Talk to Each Other Yet?
When Katrina came, one of the problems that was highlighted at the time was that emergency first responders could not talk to each other. Incompatible communications equipment. That was a problem on 9/11. It was going to be fixed. Katrina hits, it’s still not fixed, so everyone said again, now we’ll fix it.
I haven’t been able to find any news: on the anniversary of Katrina, when nothing else seems to have been fixed, have the communications problems at least been resolved? No one seems to say.
Survivor
Survivor is having the battle of the races. Ordinarily I might agree that this was a stupid, sensationalist, racially inflammatory tactic. But, as one local civil libertarian and fan of the show has pointed out, the normal course of the show when teams are integrated by force and left without any race-sensitive rules for the remainder of play is that the black people get kicked off the teams right way, and by mid-season it’s an all-white game. That was a telling social experiment. The battle of the races at least offers all races the opportunity to succeed, and it may be an interesting social experiment now that the lessons of the old formula have been absorbed.
Birth Pangs
It should be widely agreed that there was something callous in U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s stating that she viewed the systematic destruction in Lebanon, with its accompanying loss of life, as hopefully representing "the birth pangs of a new Middle East."
Of course, what was so appalling about Rice’s statement was not the mere notion in itself that some good can arise out of bad things. One can find millions of examples of the "silver lining" motif – whole cosmologies are built upon the analogy of slash and burn agriculture – the fire that destroys the last generation fertilizes the ground for the new.
What really makes the comment crass is the seeming failure to recognize that in this case, the metaphor suffers from Pollyanna optimism and a gross disproportionality. On one side, the hell of war, the wailing of men, women and children over the loss of loved ones to Israeli bombs, a society shattered, and jackboots approaching. On the other, what? Another showpiece of U.S.-certified Middle East Democracy a la Iraq?
For precedents, compare the following quotes, one from World War I, the other from World War II:
"The old world order died with the setting of that day’s sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow."
That was Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University President and leading figure in the Republican Party, looking back in 1915 to the start of World War I. It’s the same metaphor, but Butler at least does not sound cheerful. The pain of loss begins and ends the quote. Butler later received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to "outlaw war."
Now here’s another quote, much closer in tone to Condi:
"There are rare moments in the middle of the pressures of daily life when we suddenly are struck by the feeling that everything before us is history, and that a new world is now being born. We experience the birth pangs of all that is young and new, and realize that this new world is replacing the old and sinking one, with all its peculiarities, tenseness and prejudice."
Here we have the model for Condoleeza’s optimism. Peculiarities and prejudice will be abolished in the glorious new age to be ushered in by worthy bloodshed. How fortunate we are to be witness to it!
The speaker is Josef Goebbels, giving his annual speech praising Hitler on the event of his birthday. When "Our Hitler" was delivered, it was 1941, and German casualties alone stood at perhaps a quarter million, with 40 times that yet to come. That Rice would come speaking the same words as Hitler’s propagandist, as a defender of Israel, strikes an additional, though not unfamiliar, chord of distaste.
For Goebbels, the war was a good thing, and Hitler deserved the credit: "We are experiencing the greatest miracle that history offers: a genius is building a new world." The Nazis absorbed and believed this lesson. Even after the war, Rudolf Hess wrote from Spandau prison that the rise and fall of Hitler were the "birth pangs of a new age" of Naziism. That theme is not alien to this administration. Bush’s defenders, confounded by the horrible disasters of Iraq and the Bush Presidency itself, have turned like Hess for comfort in a redemptive future: If Bush succeeds in remaking the Middle East, he will be remembered as a great president.
One final source for Rice’s statement can’t be overlooked. In the King James Bible, Matthew 24: 7-8 reads like this:
"For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows."
Jesus’ disciples have asked for the signs of the end times, and he describes the lead up to Armageddon. The word with which he concludes, "sorrows," is translated in some versions of the Bible as "birth pangs." The posters at end-time-obsessed websites like Rapture Ready all understand that "the birth pangs" are the signs of the last days of the elect on Earth and debate each new event in the Middle East as to its position in the run-up to the rapture. The Armageddon theme is echoed by the right’s hopeful-sounding inclusion of the Israel-Lebanon war as part of World War III.
We know that Bush’s speeches are peppered with Christian Right inside references, whether these are secret messages or comfort words. It hardly seems coincidental that John Bolton insists he is "not the Alpha and Omega" just as Condoleeza is quoted saying that indeed, these are (the?) "birth pangs."
If this is the inspiration for Condoleeza’s quote, then she has much in common with Goebbels, only it is Bush rather than Hitler, who occupies the position of a Messianic figure, so certain in his inspired path to a new order that he wants the credit for war and for everyone to think positively about what it may bring.
Or rather, Rice has much in common with Hess, who clung to the vision, cherry ripe in 1941, long after its rotten core lay exposed.
Suicide March
The Republican phrases of the year are “cut and run” and “overall war on terror.” There is a subtle contradiction in they way they are used. If one wants to withdraw from Iraq, this could only constitute a “surrender” in the war if the Iraq war were a stand-alone adventure. If it is not a mindless filibuster but really just one of myriad fronts in a larger war, then abandoning it would be something akin to, say, retreating from the Phillipines five months into World War II. History has sustained the judgment that tossing forces fruitlessly into the Japanese meat grinder was less important than husbanding resources for the next phase of war, reinforcing lines of resistance further south and east, and allowing forces to be allocated to the European theater, where it was vital to keep Russia from being lost. Lose the Phillipines for a while, keep Europe and Russia and win the war. Good trade.
If Iraq is not the war but a mere front in the war, then “cut and run” does not mean “surrender.” It just means “redeploy.” The idea that you never retreat or never redeploy implies some kind of last stand or suicide march – by an army that only knows how to move forward or die. Is that the policy?
Not that we’ve been told. We train our armies to go forward and to retreat. We send along enough fuel and supplies for a round trip. The troops expect to come back someday. Our generals are taught orderly retreat as a valid military option. Taking away that option limits choices and generally limits the means available to be effective.
Historically, units have sometimes been ordered to never retreat. Some of these armies fought through to victory, motivated by the knowledge that this was their only hope of survival. Most were annihilated.
I think if a poll were taken and people were asked, “Should generals who can no longer obtain their military objectives have the discretion to order tactical retreats when necessary to save their forces from annihilation?” the answer would be yes close to 100% of the time.
Sheriff Bozo
Why David Clarke is even running for re-election for Milwaukee County Sheriff baffles me. He has shown a stunning disregard for the rule of law. He has demonstrated arrogance and incompetence while unethically abusing his apartment to aggrandize himself and his own political ambitions.
I received a campaign flier which: 1) featured a glaring typo in a headline featuring Clarke’s ironic slogan about being above politics (or “politices”); 2) featured laudatory quotes without any attribution; 3) bragged about all the remedial on-the-job training Clarke has received; 4) listed 150 citizen endorsers, all no-names because no one with any reputation is willing to endorse him; and 5) cites his record as a beat cop, a job from which he was fired for incompetence and insubordination. I wonder how many of the listed endorsers have criminal records?
Actually, I’ve run a few of these names. Michael Lutz was the cop who shot Timothy Nabors, a black man, in a controversial episode a couple of years ago. Michel Jurkovich has some jail time on his record. Paul Kopornik is under an injunction in what looks like a domestic violence case.
My brother is a deputy, and boy does he have some tales. Clarke is a laughingstock among his men. He must go.
More Potpourri to come later if I have time:
Cows with Accents
Katie Couric Retouched
Patriot Missles
Mouse Fur
Activism Amendment
Crying Wolf
The Rapture
Pluto
I like the IAU’s decision to reclassify Pluto. Since the issue of designation is essentially arbitrary, I would have been satisfied with any number of outcomes. The one thing that really annoys me is the repeated assertion, and I mean repeated, over and over, in AP service reporting, that Pluto fails to meet the definition of a planet because its orbit overlaps that of Neptune. (I also was annoyed by the recent protest over Pluto’s demotion where signs read, “size doesn’t matter,” the implication being that Pluto was rejected for being too small.)
The new definition of a planet has three criteria. A body is a plant if it 1) orbits a star; 2) is sufficiently massive that gravitational forces have rendered it approximately spherical in shape; and 3) it is sufficiently massive and stable in its orbit that debris in its orbital path has been cleared or captured. Each criterion has some fuzziness. Satellites of planets do orbit stars, and planets orbit the centers of gravity of their planet-moon systems, so that some moons might be regarded as more star-orbiting than planet-orbiting. How spherical is spherical? How clear of debris is clear enough?
Pluto orbits the sun, though it has a big moon, Charon, and their mutual center of gravity is between the two planets. This is not considered a disqualification. The Pluto-Charon-Nix-Hydra system still orbits the sun, and since Charon has been locked into that system, it does not constitute unswept debris in Pluto’s path. Pluto is small, but it’s small planet-sized and basically round. The fact that the orbit is extremely tilted relative to the ecliptic, and highly eccentric, and that its motion is retrograde, are all oddities that do not effect its definition as a planet. Pluto’s orbital is not cleared, however.
But the idea that Neptune is in Pluto’s path is bullshit. If it were, Neptune could not be considered a planet either. Because Pluto’s orbit is tilted, it only intersects the orbital plane of Neptune at two points. If Pluto and Neptune were to cross that plane at the same time, they would be about 1.8 billion miles apart. When you see Pluto’s and Neptune’s orbits drawn in 2-D as they are projected onto the ecliptic, they appear to cross, but at the crossing point, Pluto is maybe 700 million miles above the ecliptic. Moreover, Pluto and Neptune’s orbits are synchronized: they “resonate” at a 2:3 ratio – a pattern that is stable over time. They never get closer than 1.8 billion miles apart, and that’s not at the ecliptic.
By comparison, Pluto will at some point come closer than 1.8 billion miles from both Uranus and Saturn, also considered to still be planets.
Poppy Crop
Well, another measure of US success in Afghanistan – they’ve reported a record harvest of poppies this year. I look forward to a few cents off those yummy poppyseed muffins.
Reading Quiz
Bush has been reading Macbeth and L’Etranger, which I dare say are a step up from The Pet Goat and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But does he comprehend anything he reads? Here’s a quiz he should take.
Both Macbeth and the Very Hungry Caterpillar have ambitions or appetites. Where do these ambitions or appetites come from? Do they stem from deep within the nature of the individual, or from somewhere else? Do Macbeth and the Very Hungry Caterpillar each have a clear vision of what it is they want?
Mersault and the Pet Goat both face the judgment of society. Would you say that Mersault goes from approval to disapproval, while the Pet Goat undergoes the opposite transformation? Are the motives for their actions clear? Does society judge them on their motives or on the outcomes? Who or what in these stories is existentially “absurd?”
The Pet Goat and the Very Hungry Caterpillar both eat a lot of things. How do their diets differ? How are they the same? Is different food wholesome for different eaters? Should the Pet Goat and Very Hungry Caterpillar have eaten differently? What do these stories tell you about the consequences of bad choices?
Mersault and Macbeth both engage in socially disapproved acts of violence, but for different reasons. Is there anything redeeming for either of these characters in the motives for their acts? How would we think of these characters if they had continued in their tracks and not committed the transformatory acts in their stories?
Castro's Death Date
Just learned that Ho Chi Minh died on the anniversary of the declaration of Vietnamese independence, much like Jefferson and Adams died on July 4. I predict Castro will die on January 1, 2067 (at age 140).
Missing Flag
The flag first erected on the 9/11 WTC rubble is lost. The story would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Well, it is funny. The firefighters came to a commemorative event and when the flag was brought out, which has been toured and worshipped like a religious icon, it turned out to be the wrong flag. Three times too big. Comment: what an incompetent country we’ve become. File under Katrina.
Can the First Responders Talk to Each Other Yet?
When Katrina came, one of the problems that was highlighted at the time was that emergency first responders could not talk to each other. Incompatible communications equipment. That was a problem on 9/11. It was going to be fixed. Katrina hits, it’s still not fixed, so everyone said again, now we’ll fix it.
I haven’t been able to find any news: on the anniversary of Katrina, when nothing else seems to have been fixed, have the communications problems at least been resolved? No one seems to say.
Survivor
Survivor is having the battle of the races. Ordinarily I might agree that this was a stupid, sensationalist, racially inflammatory tactic. But, as one local civil libertarian and fan of the show has pointed out, the normal course of the show when teams are integrated by force and left without any race-sensitive rules for the remainder of play is that the black people get kicked off the teams right way, and by mid-season it’s an all-white game. That was a telling social experiment. The battle of the races at least offers all races the opportunity to succeed, and it may be an interesting social experiment now that the lessons of the old formula have been absorbed.
Birth Pangs
It should be widely agreed that there was something callous in U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s stating that she viewed the systematic destruction in Lebanon, with its accompanying loss of life, as hopefully representing "the birth pangs of a new Middle East."
Of course, what was so appalling about Rice’s statement was not the mere notion in itself that some good can arise out of bad things. One can find millions of examples of the "silver lining" motif – whole cosmologies are built upon the analogy of slash and burn agriculture – the fire that destroys the last generation fertilizes the ground for the new.
What really makes the comment crass is the seeming failure to recognize that in this case, the metaphor suffers from Pollyanna optimism and a gross disproportionality. On one side, the hell of war, the wailing of men, women and children over the loss of loved ones to Israeli bombs, a society shattered, and jackboots approaching. On the other, what? Another showpiece of U.S.-certified Middle East Democracy a la Iraq?
For precedents, compare the following quotes, one from World War I, the other from World War II:
"The old world order died with the setting of that day’s sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow."
That was Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University President and leading figure in the Republican Party, looking back in 1915 to the start of World War I. It’s the same metaphor, but Butler at least does not sound cheerful. The pain of loss begins and ends the quote. Butler later received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to "outlaw war."
Now here’s another quote, much closer in tone to Condi:
"There are rare moments in the middle of the pressures of daily life when we suddenly are struck by the feeling that everything before us is history, and that a new world is now being born. We experience the birth pangs of all that is young and new, and realize that this new world is replacing the old and sinking one, with all its peculiarities, tenseness and prejudice."
Here we have the model for Condoleeza’s optimism. Peculiarities and prejudice will be abolished in the glorious new age to be ushered in by worthy bloodshed. How fortunate we are to be witness to it!
The speaker is Josef Goebbels, giving his annual speech praising Hitler on the event of his birthday. When "Our Hitler" was delivered, it was 1941, and German casualties alone stood at perhaps a quarter million, with 40 times that yet to come. That Rice would come speaking the same words as Hitler’s propagandist, as a defender of Israel, strikes an additional, though not unfamiliar, chord of distaste.
For Goebbels, the war was a good thing, and Hitler deserved the credit: "We are experiencing the greatest miracle that history offers: a genius is building a new world." The Nazis absorbed and believed this lesson. Even after the war, Rudolf Hess wrote from Spandau prison that the rise and fall of Hitler were the "birth pangs of a new age" of Naziism. That theme is not alien to this administration. Bush’s defenders, confounded by the horrible disasters of Iraq and the Bush Presidency itself, have turned like Hess for comfort in a redemptive future: If Bush succeeds in remaking the Middle East, he will be remembered as a great president.
One final source for Rice’s statement can’t be overlooked. In the King James Bible, Matthew 24: 7-8 reads like this:
"For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows."
Jesus’ disciples have asked for the signs of the end times, and he describes the lead up to Armageddon. The word with which he concludes, "sorrows," is translated in some versions of the Bible as "birth pangs." The posters at end-time-obsessed websites like Rapture Ready all understand that "the birth pangs" are the signs of the last days of the elect on Earth and debate each new event in the Middle East as to its position in the run-up to the rapture. The Armageddon theme is echoed by the right’s hopeful-sounding inclusion of the Israel-Lebanon war as part of World War III.
We know that Bush’s speeches are peppered with Christian Right inside references, whether these are secret messages or comfort words. It hardly seems coincidental that John Bolton insists he is "not the Alpha and Omega" just as Condoleeza is quoted saying that indeed, these are (the?) "birth pangs."
If this is the inspiration for Condoleeza’s quote, then she has much in common with Goebbels, only it is Bush rather than Hitler, who occupies the position of a Messianic figure, so certain in his inspired path to a new order that he wants the credit for war and for everyone to think positively about what it may bring.
Or rather, Rice has much in common with Hess, who clung to the vision, cherry ripe in 1941, long after its rotten core lay exposed.
Suicide March
The Republican phrases of the year are “cut and run” and “overall war on terror.” There is a subtle contradiction in they way they are used. If one wants to withdraw from Iraq, this could only constitute a “surrender” in the war if the Iraq war were a stand-alone adventure. If it is not a mindless filibuster but really just one of myriad fronts in a larger war, then abandoning it would be something akin to, say, retreating from the Phillipines five months into World War II. History has sustained the judgment that tossing forces fruitlessly into the Japanese meat grinder was less important than husbanding resources for the next phase of war, reinforcing lines of resistance further south and east, and allowing forces to be allocated to the European theater, where it was vital to keep Russia from being lost. Lose the Phillipines for a while, keep Europe and Russia and win the war. Good trade.
If Iraq is not the war but a mere front in the war, then “cut and run” does not mean “surrender.” It just means “redeploy.” The idea that you never retreat or never redeploy implies some kind of last stand or suicide march – by an army that only knows how to move forward or die. Is that the policy?
Not that we’ve been told. We train our armies to go forward and to retreat. We send along enough fuel and supplies for a round trip. The troops expect to come back someday. Our generals are taught orderly retreat as a valid military option. Taking away that option limits choices and generally limits the means available to be effective.
Historically, units have sometimes been ordered to never retreat. Some of these armies fought through to victory, motivated by the knowledge that this was their only hope of survival. Most were annihilated.
I think if a poll were taken and people were asked, “Should generals who can no longer obtain their military objectives have the discretion to order tactical retreats when necessary to save their forces from annihilation?” the answer would be yes close to 100% of the time.
Sheriff Bozo
Why David Clarke is even running for re-election for Milwaukee County Sheriff baffles me. He has shown a stunning disregard for the rule of law. He has demonstrated arrogance and incompetence while unethically abusing his apartment to aggrandize himself and his own political ambitions.
I received a campaign flier which: 1) featured a glaring typo in a headline featuring Clarke’s ironic slogan about being above politics (or “politices”); 2) featured laudatory quotes without any attribution; 3) bragged about all the remedial on-the-job training Clarke has received; 4) listed 150 citizen endorsers, all no-names because no one with any reputation is willing to endorse him; and 5) cites his record as a beat cop, a job from which he was fired for incompetence and insubordination. I wonder how many of the listed endorsers have criminal records?
Actually, I’ve run a few of these names. Michael Lutz was the cop who shot Timothy Nabors, a black man, in a controversial episode a couple of years ago. Michel Jurkovich has some jail time on his record. Paul Kopornik is under an injunction in what looks like a domestic violence case.
My brother is a deputy, and boy does he have some tales. Clarke is a laughingstock among his men. He must go.
More Potpourri to come later if I have time:
Cows with Accents
Katie Couric Retouched
Patriot Missles
Mouse Fur
Activism Amendment
Crying Wolf
The Rapture
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Update on Lebanon
On Meet the Press, Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman asked what the US would do if it frequently suffered rocket attacks from Cuba:
"What would the United States do if Miami was bombed from Cuba, or if Chicago, which is your third largest city, would be bombed the way Haifa, our third largest city is, from Canada?" (source)
Great argument, Dan, only you got it backwards, as always.
"What would the United States do if Miami was bombed from Cuba, or if Chicago, which is your third largest city, would be bombed the way Haifa, our third largest city is, from Canada?" (source)
Great argument, Dan, only you got it backwards, as always.
Plan B
Gee, I haven't posted in over a month. Well, I did have a run of busy-ness at my job. Anyhow, just one brief comment. I saw this report on how the right is complaining about Plan B. What I found most interesting was the repeated claim that Plan B should be banned because it helps rapists and pedophiles get rid of evidence. Apparently, in the perfect world, nine year old rape victims would all become pregnant.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
War in the middle east
Here is a useful device for anyone seeking to clear-headedly assess foreign policy matters: switch around the identities of the players so that one is not biased by the identities of the parties. On many occasions, one does not even need to look to hypotheticals, because history will provide minimal pair cases for you. But for this technique to work you don't need real facts, just a set of facts, true or not, that someone believes and wants to argue from.
Today we look at a situation with the following elements:
1. Country A and Country B are neighbors with a history. They are not peacefully inclined toward one another, but we start the scenario at a juncture of relative peace.
2. Country A is the home to a group of people who are utterly and violently opposed to the regime of Country B. Among these people are some who claim land within Country B for themselves, and others who are in solidarity with those aspirations.
3. These people in Country A do not run Country A but they hold seats in its highest legislative body and are a potent political force. Many people in Country A think they're crazy, but when you consider what it would take to neutralize them as a political force, few in government have the will to stand up to them, and it's not uncommon that the executive overtly favors them.
4. These people launch small attacks on Country B. Nothing huge, because they're not really a significant military force, but people in Country B can sometimes expect their territory to be violated, particularly from the air, and people in Country B have been killed as a result of these attacks. (The number of actual attackers is small, but their base of support is broad.)
5. Country A does almost nothing to stop it. It continues to provide safe haven, while people move through its streets with signs lauding the attackers, hold parades for their most violent leaders, even as they are denounced around the world as terrorists. (But in defense of Country A, it's frankly a disaster and its government has shown almost complete inability to help its own people in the event of a serious crisis.)
6. Country B practices restraint, lodges formal protests. It has taken defensive military action in the past over these violations, but it seems they will continue until the terrorists and their supporters that want to completely eliminate B's government are dealt with decisively. Country B has a legitimate right to defend itself, of course. How far may it legitimately go to eliminate the threat of the people sheltered by Country A?
Given what's in the news these days, one might guess that country A is Lebanon, Country B is Israel, and the people operating unmolested from Lebanese territory are Hizbollah. The mainstream press accounts the facts above, and generally asserts that Israel may pulverize South Lebanon until Hizbollah either surrenders or is obliterated.
An alternative scenario has A as the United States, B as Cuba, and violent anti-Castro groups operating mainly out of Miami, but also out of New Jersey and some other places, in the Hizbollah role. One should not forget that some of these exile groups were identified by the U.S. government as domestic terrorists (when they bombed and assassinated political opponents in Miami), that they are blamed for thousands of Cuban deaths, and that their bloodiest representatives, like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carilles are given pardons or asylum by the federal govermnment and openly feted in Miami.
There are differences, but they do not generally favor the U.S. Unlike Lebanon, which was invaded, the U.S. has never been attacked by Cuba but itself launched an abortive invasion of Cuba, using its exile army. And the support for the Cuban exiles, including massive amounts of money, plus training, weapons, and intelligence, is tracable to the U.S. government, not some outside meddling state like Syria or Iran. These differences make average Americans more culpible in the deaths of innocent Cubans than average Lebanese are in the deaths of Israelis.
So by the logic of the media majority, Israel supporters and most of Congress, it should be legitimate for Cuba to seek to wipe out the terrorist exile groups and their supporters by mercilessly bombing Miami and Trenton. If Israel is right in all that it's doing, then Cuba should be free to destroy American bridges and hospitals first, target U.N. and Red Cross facilities, and, having rendered the civilian population incapable of medical aid or escape, rain down illegal phosphorous munitions. Once a few major U.S. cities have been turned into massive graveyards by the aerial assault, the ground troops would be expected to come in and round up the remaining anti-Castro terrorists and sympathizers.
There are two logical positions. Either:
(1) one determines that Cuba would be justified in committing massive violence to eliminate the bed of opposition it faces from its exiles in the U.S., or
(2) one determines that Israel has, at very least, gone to far in its effort to curb Hizbollah.
I choose the second.
Today we look at a situation with the following elements:
1. Country A and Country B are neighbors with a history. They are not peacefully inclined toward one another, but we start the scenario at a juncture of relative peace.
2. Country A is the home to a group of people who are utterly and violently opposed to the regime of Country B. Among these people are some who claim land within Country B for themselves, and others who are in solidarity with those aspirations.
3. These people in Country A do not run Country A but they hold seats in its highest legislative body and are a potent political force. Many people in Country A think they're crazy, but when you consider what it would take to neutralize them as a political force, few in government have the will to stand up to them, and it's not uncommon that the executive overtly favors them.
4. These people launch small attacks on Country B. Nothing huge, because they're not really a significant military force, but people in Country B can sometimes expect their territory to be violated, particularly from the air, and people in Country B have been killed as a result of these attacks. (The number of actual attackers is small, but their base of support is broad.)
5. Country A does almost nothing to stop it. It continues to provide safe haven, while people move through its streets with signs lauding the attackers, hold parades for their most violent leaders, even as they are denounced around the world as terrorists. (But in defense of Country A, it's frankly a disaster and its government has shown almost complete inability to help its own people in the event of a serious crisis.)
6. Country B practices restraint, lodges formal protests. It has taken defensive military action in the past over these violations, but it seems they will continue until the terrorists and their supporters that want to completely eliminate B's government are dealt with decisively. Country B has a legitimate right to defend itself, of course. How far may it legitimately go to eliminate the threat of the people sheltered by Country A?
Given what's in the news these days, one might guess that country A is Lebanon, Country B is Israel, and the people operating unmolested from Lebanese territory are Hizbollah. The mainstream press accounts the facts above, and generally asserts that Israel may pulverize South Lebanon until Hizbollah either surrenders or is obliterated.
An alternative scenario has A as the United States, B as Cuba, and violent anti-Castro groups operating mainly out of Miami, but also out of New Jersey and some other places, in the Hizbollah role. One should not forget that some of these exile groups were identified by the U.S. government as domestic terrorists (when they bombed and assassinated political opponents in Miami), that they are blamed for thousands of Cuban deaths, and that their bloodiest representatives, like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carilles are given pardons or asylum by the federal govermnment and openly feted in Miami.
There are differences, but they do not generally favor the U.S. Unlike Lebanon, which was invaded, the U.S. has never been attacked by Cuba but itself launched an abortive invasion of Cuba, using its exile army. And the support for the Cuban exiles, including massive amounts of money, plus training, weapons, and intelligence, is tracable to the U.S. government, not some outside meddling state like Syria or Iran. These differences make average Americans more culpible in the deaths of innocent Cubans than average Lebanese are in the deaths of Israelis.
So by the logic of the media majority, Israel supporters and most of Congress, it should be legitimate for Cuba to seek to wipe out the terrorist exile groups and their supporters by mercilessly bombing Miami and Trenton. If Israel is right in all that it's doing, then Cuba should be free to destroy American bridges and hospitals first, target U.N. and Red Cross facilities, and, having rendered the civilian population incapable of medical aid or escape, rain down illegal phosphorous munitions. Once a few major U.S. cities have been turned into massive graveyards by the aerial assault, the ground troops would be expected to come in and round up the remaining anti-Castro terrorists and sympathizers.
There are two logical positions. Either:
(1) one determines that Cuba would be justified in committing massive violence to eliminate the bed of opposition it faces from its exiles in the U.S., or
(2) one determines that Israel has, at very least, gone to far in its effort to curb Hizbollah.
I choose the second.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
The Beesting of Terrorism
Whereas terrorist attacks on the US get a lot of attention and a lot of rhetoric about changing the world forever, they have killed an average of something like 50 Americans per annum over the last 40-50 years, roughly comparable to the number of people killed by bee stings. Yet the attention paid to the bee sting epidemic is minimal. It has not promoted any secret wiretap programs, any massive government restructuring, or any $1.3 trillion foreign military adventures. The government is basically sitting on its hands as, insidiously, person by person, we are fallen by bees at the rate of 1 a week.
Where is our sense of perspective?
For that matter, bee stings are not even the leading cause of death in the U.S., which I know is surprising considering that they've killed more people here than international and domestic terrorism combined. Here are some other causes of death, given in BSEs (bee-sting equivalents):
Mauled by bears: 1/50
Poisoned by snakes: 1/10
Killed in deep sea diving accidents: 1/9
Electrocuted at work: 6
Plane crashes: 24
Gun accidents: 30
Killed while riding a bicycle: 48
Accidentally fall down and die: 100
Fatal asthma attack: 100
Atrial fibulation: 800
Murdered by a non-terrorist: 800 -- no, wait -- 799 (the other 1 is by a terrorist)
AIDS finally gets you: 800
Second-hand smoke: 1060 (conservative estimate)
Killing yourself intentionally (other than by smoking): 1100
Auto accidents: 1400 (not including the 48 hit while riding bikes)
Killed by doctors trying to help you: 2400
Killed by some kind of violent accident: 3000
Killed by your own dumb smoking: 7000
Got the "Big C": 12000 (overlaps the last one)
It's nice to see the government actually spening money on some of these things, even if it's chicken feed compared to the anti-terrorism investment. I mean, a trillion dollars would buy a lot of airbags and bicycle helmets, keep a few of those planes up in the air, even stop a few murders, doctors, or smokers from killing you.
Don't get me started on international comparisons, you know, all those kids that could get a cup of edible gruel and a malaria shot for 20 cents. You could really buy a lot of BSEs for a cool trillion if you could spend it anywhere in the world.
There's only one possible conclusion. It's not about lives to save. It's something else...
Where is our sense of perspective?
For that matter, bee stings are not even the leading cause of death in the U.S., which I know is surprising considering that they've killed more people here than international and domestic terrorism combined. Here are some other causes of death, given in BSEs (bee-sting equivalents):
Mauled by bears: 1/50
Poisoned by snakes: 1/10
Killed in deep sea diving accidents: 1/9
Electrocuted at work: 6
Plane crashes: 24
Gun accidents: 30
Killed while riding a bicycle: 48
Accidentally fall down and die: 100
Fatal asthma attack: 100
Atrial fibulation: 800
Murdered by a non-terrorist: 800 -- no, wait -- 799 (the other 1 is by a terrorist)
AIDS finally gets you: 800
Second-hand smoke: 1060 (conservative estimate)
Killing yourself intentionally (other than by smoking): 1100
Auto accidents: 1400 (not including the 48 hit while riding bikes)
Killed by doctors trying to help you: 2400
Killed by some kind of violent accident: 3000
Killed by your own dumb smoking: 7000
Got the "Big C": 12000 (overlaps the last one)
It's nice to see the government actually spening money on some of these things, even if it's chicken feed compared to the anti-terrorism investment. I mean, a trillion dollars would buy a lot of airbags and bicycle helmets, keep a few of those planes up in the air, even stop a few murders, doctors, or smokers from killing you.
Don't get me started on international comparisons, you know, all those kids that could get a cup of edible gruel and a malaria shot for 20 cents. You could really buy a lot of BSEs for a cool trillion if you could spend it anywhere in the world.
There's only one possible conclusion. It's not about lives to save. It's something else...
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