…I must assert my absolute 1st, 4th and 5th Amendment rights over my radiator.
Regardless of my jest, this is one kickin’ argument. Stop at the second post, and scan down half-way, for my puny assertion.
I believe I blogged on this a few days back. But, little doubt, you have heard through one channel or another about the UMass student who got a visit from government agents, asking about his request for an original English language edition of Mao’s Little Red Book. Well, this from the American Library Association sheds doubt on that story’s veracity:
Student Claims Homeland Security Has Book Watch List
A senior at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth says he was visited at his parents’ home by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security who were investigating why he had requested a book by former Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong through interlibrary loan. The student, who has asked university officials to shield his identity, told two UMD history professors that the incident took place in late October or early November after he attempted to obtain a copy of the first English edition of the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, published in Beijing in 1966 and popularly known in China as the “Little Red Book,” for a class on communism.
The story broke in the December 17 New Bedford Standard-Times as the result of an interview with UMD faculty members Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, who mentioned the incident as an example of government monitoring of academic research. Williams told American Libraries, “The student told me that the book was on a watch list, and that the books on this list had changing status. Mao was on the list at the time, hence the visit, which was also related to his time abroad.”
UMD Library Dean Ann Montgomery Smith told AL that the student had requested the book by phone from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, not through the UMD interlibrary services as originally reported.
The UMD chancellor’s office released a statement December 19 that said, “At this point, it is difficult to ascertain how Homeland Security obtained the information about the student’s borrowing of the book. The UMass Dartmouth Library has not been visited by agents of any type seeking information about the borrowing patterns or habits of any of its patrons.” Chancellor Jean F. MacCormack stated, “It is important that our students and our faculty be unfettered in their pursuit of knowledge about other cultures and political systems if their education and research is to be meaningful.”
Kirk Whitworth, a spokesman for the DHS—the U.S. cabinet department that oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the Secret Service, and Citizenship and Immigration Services, among others—said in the December 21 Standard-Times that the story seemed unlikely. “We’re aware of the claims,” he said. “However, the scenario sounds unlikely because investigations are based on violation of law, not on the books and individual[s who] might check [them] out from the library.”
An earlier report that the incident occurred at the University of California at Santa Cruz has proven false.
Posted December 21, 2005.
Hat Tip: WSJ “BotWT“
When I was a teen, the rule of thumb was that being a civil servant meant taking a lower rate of pay than one might make in an equivalent position in the private sector, in exchange for greater job security. But, for at least two decades, that has hardly been the case:
According to the Manhattan Institute, the average bus or subway driver–the most-skilled job in the union by most standards–is already paid $63,000 a year. The person who sits behind the bullet-proof glass in what used to be called a token booth, and who now says for most purchases you have to use the metro-card machines, takes down an average of $51,000. And the least-skilled work, though certainly the dirtiest, is the subway cleaner who clocks in at an average of $40,000.
Compare that with the average New York worker. Take out Wall Street, where mega-bonuses skew the average unfairly, and the average private sector worker earns $49,000. Peel off the college-educated (which you don’t need for most transit jobs) and the average income drops to well below $35,000. That includes everyone from a skilled factory worker to the clerk in Bloomingdale’s.
Nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average unskilled worker (we’ll put the cleaners in that category) earns $23,753 a year in the private sector; in the public sector that jumps to $30,056, but is still ten grand less than a New York subway cleaner. The disparity jumps even further when you look at the nationwide “transportation workers” as a specialty. There the average annual wage is $30,846 in the private sector and $34,611 in the public sector. Clearly, it pays to work for the government. But it pays even better to work for the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority)–indeed 80% better. New York is expensive, but not that expensive.
The reason? compliant elected officials have failed to hold the line against public employee union demands
* In 1994, then-Gov. Mario Cuomo signed a law giving transit workers the right to retire at age 55, with a half-pay pension, after just 25 years on the job. At the time, employees opting for this 25/55 benefit were required to make an added pension contribution equal to 2.3 percent of their annual salaries.
* In 2000, as part of a series of pension sweeteners affecting every government employee in the state, Gov. George Pataki and the Legislature agreed to reduce transit workers’ regular pension contributions by one-third, and to eliminate the added contribution for the 25/55 benefit. This effectively amounted to a 3.3 percent increase in transit workers’ base pay, on top of pay hikes in that year’s contract.
* In 2003, fresh from another negotiation with the MTA, the union persuaded state legislators to introduce a bill allowing transit workers to retire with half-pay pensions at age 50, after just 20 years on the job.
Coming at a time when the state, city and MTA were awash in red ink, the 20/50 pension sweetener would have cost more than $100 million a year. Nonetheless, just before adjourning in 2003, the Legislature approved the bill. The vote tallies were as good as it gets — 148-0 in the Democrat-dominated Assembly, and 62-0 in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Pataki killed the measure with a “pocket veto” in early 2004. Even then, however, he didn’t object in principle to 20/50 pensions. Instead, in a tepid veto message, the governor cited technical problems with the bill, expressed qualms over its cost and said he was “constrained to disapprove the bill” based on the objection of the MTA and Mayor Bloomberg, “who contend that this type of enhanced benefit should be the subject of mutual agreement through collective bargaining.”
Indeed, this problem is nationwide:
The pension deficit now reported by state and local governments totals $278 billion. If these governments adopted the more conservative estimates used in the private sector, however, the total deficit would be $700 billion. This amount does not include retiree health benefits.
New York City put $2.46 billion into its pension fund in 2004 — eight percent of the total city budget. By 2007, the City expects pension contributions to hit $4.9 billion, or 12 percent of its total budget. Illinois’ pension plans are facing a $35 billion deficit in a state with a total operating budget of $43 billion.
Legislation to end defined benefit pensions in favor of defined contribution plans similar to 401(k)s for government employees has been proposed in Alaska and Maryland. Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Carolina and Virginia are all considering a shift to defined contribution plans.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed ending the California defined benefit plan and instituting a 401(k)-type plan instead. California contributed $3.5 billion for pension and health care benefits for its retirees this year, almost triple what it paid three years ago. Schwarzenegger has indicated that he will put the public employee pensions issue on the ballot in 2006.
For years, state legislatures and local governments were able to justify higher overall benefits for public sector workers because wages in the private sector were generally higher. With the employer attack on private sector unions and the decline in wage growth in the private sector, however, public sector labor costs are now higher than private sector costs.
Total compensation costs for state and local government employees were $34.72 per hour worked in 2004, compared with $23.76 for private-sector workers, according to BLS and Census Bureau data. Public sector benefit costs are approaching 40 percent of total compensation, compared to 30% in the private sector, and pressure is building to cut these costs dramatically.
The disproportionate political power of public employee unions has not only been due to their massive financial power, but that they have always been able to muster legions among their membership, to man phone banks and walk precincts, in support of their favored candidates.
But, as the rush of angry comments – on the TWU’s own blog – demonstrate, the general public is feed-up:
The Transport Workers Union Local 100 has a blog. The Blog had comments. But no longer. Fortunately the comments were cached before the union tried to make all those angry New Yorkers go away. Bloggers wrote a lot about the strike, but the comments on the union site really seemed to catch the enmity of a lot of New Yorkers towards the union.
Sample Quote: “You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn’t hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong. You’re asking for way too much here. Back down and know your roll. You guys aren’t as high and as mighty as you think.”
Thanks to Bill for finding this cache!Hey, Local 100: you guys weighed the options, asked for support and chose to go on strike. So you ought to own and acknowledge citizen’s reaction. Censorship is so lame.
Think about this: Reagan replaced the air traffic controllers without much problem (largely due to highly trained, but unemployed vets). But what do you think it takes to train someone (even with military experience) to manage a crowded airspace, verses sitting in the front of a train, to put on the brakes, should the (virtually infallible) computerized controls go awry?
I have no issue with their right to strike – regardless of New York law. But we must recognize that these people are the Deltas of the world. And, while our private sector is blowing off these high pay/low skill workers in droves, they keep holding on in the public sector. This situation cannot endure.
My daughter and I leave tonight for a long Christmas-time road trip, yet another in a semi-long series— an addition and continuation of the times I drove from Northern California, and from Ogden, all the way south through several climate zones, to spend Christmas with Mom and Dad. But we did more often spend our Christmases together, just the two of us in whatever home we happened to find ourselves in that particular year, establishing our own Christmas traditions— Blondie could pick out and open just one of her Christmas presents from under the tree on Christmas Eve, as long as she left milk and cookies for Santa, we would have anything but turkey for dinner, and for a long run of Christmasses I would give her an enormous and lavish Lego assortment, a castle or a pirate ship, which we would build together on Christmas day
And so a pic from one of those Christmasses, as we prepare for a long road trip.
Blondie, checking out the ornaments, Christmas 1985, Zaragoza Spain
We’ll be back New Years’ Day— have a lovely holiday and the most wonderful and promising of New Years!
Sgt Hook does it again. Give yourself a treat, and check out his post Christmas Presence.
Peggy Noonan points me to a joint effort by Time Magazine and the Rocky Mountain News.
I’ve not had time to finish reading the articles, but wanted to point you to them. The RMN article (the bits I’ve read thus far) are written with profound respect, and bring tears to my eyes. It details the homecoming of 2LT James J. Cathey, in the cargo hold of a commercial jet, and tells about Major Steve Beck, a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer. I’ve only gotten to the 2nd page of the article, because I have to get ready for work, but I’ll be rushing to finish it as soon as I can. The Time piece is a photo essay of the same event.
In her column, Peggy says:
The Time version has been speeding all over the Web. The Rocky Mountain News version is more comprehensive in terms of text, and offers this comment from Maj. Steven Beck, the Marine who stood with Second Lt. Jim Cathey’s widow, Katherine, as his coffin was unloaded from the cargo hold of the commercial flight while everyone looked out the windows. He said, “See the people in the windows? They’re going to remember being on that plane for the rest of their lives. They’re going to remember bringing the Marine home. And they should.”
and the part of her column that I really wanted to share, because she says what most of us say, when we see a military member:
On this December these men and women are a self-given gift to the nation. Thank you men and women of the armed forces of the United States of America. Merry Christmas to you, happy holidays; stay safe, come home.
Thank you. It’s small and not enough but it is so meant, and by all of us.
THANK YOU to all who are currently serving, standing guard between us and the darkness. You are appreciated more than any of us have words to say.
and to all who have served, whether in hot wars or cold wars, thank you as well.
Ages ago, when my daughter says that dinosaurs roamed the earth, and I was taking post-graduate classes in public administration, one of the lecturing professors related an amusing anecdote about a project that he had been a part of. I don’t remember in exactly which class this anecdote featured as a lecture motif; one of the sociology courses, or maybe the city planning class, or the basic police-force management class. (I don’t think it was the terrorism class, taught by a U-OK prof whose main gig was to do seminars with law-enforcement professionals wherein he would dress up in a kaffiyah and stopped AK-47 and with a select coterie of his grad students, pretend to be terrorists, take half the class hostage and make the other half negotiate their release.) The lecturer had participated in a study in which a late-model, perfectly serviceable and ordinary automobile was parked on a street in a good part of town, and a similar vehicle parked on a street in a not quite so good part. Both automobiles were being constantly monitored with remote TV cameras and a team of grad students.
The results, said the lecturer, pretty well demonstrated where was a better place in which to leave an automobile unattended; the battery of the car in the bad neighborhood was stolen in 45 minutes flat, and it was stripped of everything detachable within three days. The car in the good neighborhood sat unmolested for two weeks. At that point, the creator of the experiment demonstrated the ‘broken window theory’ and broke one of the car’s windows, making the clear point in the good neighborhood that no one was likely to make a fuss about vandalizing or stealing from it. While such did proceed, it was at a much slower pace than the car in the bad neighborhood, and was terminated when the city stepped in and towed it away as an abandoned automobile, presumably to the amusement of the observing audience.
The subtle point made about the difference in the two neighborhoods, however, is about how we share the public spaces— our streets, parks, civic buildings, highways and beaches. Every time we walk out our front door, we are in a public space, and our behavior in that space is constrained by a number of impulses. The first is a mutual sense of courtesy, and what is appropriate, which is sometimes discovered by offense and rebuke. Several months ago, a householder in my neighborhood put an old washing machine out by the curb for trash pickup, although the bulk trash collection (where the city sends a huge trailer and a truck with a mobile arm to remove heavy items like this) wasn’t due for months yet. Within days, I noticed a stern and neatly printed note taped to the side of the washing machine: “This is our neighborhood,” said the note “Not a Dump.” The errant washing machine promptly vanished, from the sidewalk, at least. The message had been sent, received, and the transgression amended; that this is a neighborhood were residents do not place clapped-out appliances on the curb for weeks or months on end.
We have standards, was the unwritten text to the note, and as a householder, you are not meeting them; which leads naturally into the second constraint, the fear of disapproval by others — a powerful constraint, especially of that approval is valued by the individual. And the third constraint is the impartial but comparatively blunt and unsubtle club of civil law, in the form of the city code compliance authorities, always ready to respond with the force of official law to complaints of this kind of thing. One may poke fun, justifiably or not, at the conformity and insularity neighborhoods and communities like this, but at a very minimum, they are fairly open and accommodating places. The streets and parks are attractive, and most people feel safe, unthreatened, and secure in the knowledge that soft power and civil authority will be respected across the board.
One has only to look at a place like urban San Francisco, where the soft power of community disapproval of certain behaviors has been disarmed, and civil authority made powerless, to see what happens in their absence. There has long been bitter complaining by residents, business owners and tourists about homeless people— often deranged, usually unkempt and aggressively pan-handling, living, sleeping, eating and defecating in the streets and sidewalks—- not exactly what wants to contemplate in an urban vista, even though one might very well feel quite compassionate about the homeless, and generous in rendering assistance. Any sort of organized call to do something about the homeless is met with aggrieved accusations of being anti-homeless, and being selfish and heartless about those poor homeless who have no where else to go, et cetera, et cetera. And that public space continues to be noisome and uninviting; since the problem cannot or will not be fixed to anyone’s satisfaction and those residents or travelers who do not want to deal with aggressive and deranged panhandlers will quietly go elsewhere. Just so do responsible residents of a neighborhood under threat of being overtaken over by drug traffickers and gang-bangers, if neighborly disapproval of such goings on is not backed up by civil law, impartially applied.
I began to write this as a meditation on the Australian beach riots, and then was sidetracked on how the pattern was repeating itself one more time; that of a public space freely enjoyed by a varied constituency gradually turned somewhat less free and un-enjoyable— practically no bathing-suit clad woman really enjoys being threatened with rape or told she is a whore and ordered to put more clothes on by officious and bullying young thugs. After all, there are really only two things that happen when a public space is taken over, and civil law proves to be indifferent or incompetent. Either the residents or the regular users of that space withdraw and give it up to whoever is aggressively taking it over— be they homeless, or gangsters, or whatever— or they attempt to take it back, however clumsily and ham-fistedly. Our public spaces are either ours and everyones�, to be shared freely and equally … or they are not.
Oh, yeah somewhere, someplace, someone is forgiving me for cadging Jack Aubrey’s joke in the movie version of “Master & Commander”, about choosing the lesser of two weevils, in reference to my darling daughter presenting me with the choice of either a gun or a dog as a personal home protection device. I chose, of course, a dog as the lesser of two weevils, over my own misgivings, and the even deeper misgivings of the cats, especially Bubba and Parfait, the visitors who now find their gentleman’s paradise closed to them, for now my backyard is home to… a dog. I put their dishes on the front porch, but they have not been back since yesterday morning, when I returned from my morning run, dragging Lesser-Weevil back with both hands on the leash from chasing them. A couple of miles, and she still has energy and enthusiasm. The discipline will come, and fairly easily, I think, for she appears to be an intelligent and personable dog.
Her qualities are as murky as the circumstances under which she was acquired, from friends of my daughter who were either vague, or unknowing, but this much we have been able to deduce either from personal observation, or from the judgment of an attending veterinarian: She is an un-neutered female (and partial to females, small children, and non-threatening males), is somewhere between six and nineteen months of age. Her adult teeth are grown in, but relatively unworn, her paws and leg bones are in proportion to the rest of her, and the expert veterinarian concludes that she has grown to her adult size and weight (about 45 pounds), and is in excellent health. She appears to be mostly boxer, and lashings of something else, at which can only be guessed; whatever what may be in the genetic mix she is openly friendly with other, non-hostile dogs, and genuinely civil and affectionate to the average non-hostile person. She was actually pretty territorial about Blondie’s car, during the drive from Cherry Point, which bodes well for her assigned profession as a guard or alarm dog.
Lesser-Weevil also— which is good for me and the small yards in the neighborhood I live in— not one of those nervy or terribly bored dogs who barks interminably at any provocation as a hobby. (Her bark is more of a deep, sonorous bay, the sort of thing you can imagine from a bloodhound on the trail) I may have to get a couple of the distant neighbors to walk up to the front door as a test, to see how she handles strangers coming to the door; she is quite calm about Blondie or Judy or I coming up the walk. She sleeps on the back porch, curling up very small, and is ecstatically happy to go out with me for my early-morning run, cavorting and bouncing up and down on her hind legs for about the first half block, until I shorten the leash and then she settles down into a steady mile-eating jog. Three mornings, and she seems to have already grasped that I need a dog that will pace a short distance from my right hand, not tugging or jerking at the leash. Blondie is already working on “sit/stay”, with promising results; the Lesser-Weevil sits and waits, even while you have her full food-dish in hand.
Now, if she would only restrain herself from chewing up everything in sight; she’s already done a number on the bamboo table on the back porch, my gardening hat (well, that was nearly shot already), the plastic lighter I use for the oil lamps, and Blondie’s pleather purse…. Ah, well, things to work towards.
Michael J. Totten has this must-read interview with Big Pharaoh. Here’s some of the meat:
“I’ve had this theory for a while now,” I said. “It looks like some, if not most, Middle East countries are going to have to live under an Islamic state for a while and get it out of their system.”
Big Pharaoh laughed grimly.
“Sorry,” I said. “That’s just how it looks.”
He buried his head on his arms.
“Take Iranians,” I said. “They used to think Islamism was a fantastic idea. Now they hate it. Same goes in Afghanistan. Algerians don’t think too much of Islamism either after 150,000 people were killed in the civil war. I hate to say this, but it looks like Egypt will have to learn this the hard way.”
“You are right,” he said. “You are right. I went to an Egyptian chat room on the Internet and asked 15 people if they fasted during Ramadan. All of them said they fasted during at least most of it. I went to an Iranian chat room and asked the same question. 14 out of 15 said they did not fast for even one single day.”
“Egypt didn’t used to be like this,” I said.
“Nasser’s biggest crime was not establishing democracy when he took over,” he said. “Back then, Egyptian people were liberal. It would have worked then. But not now.”
Progress is a funny thing. We Westerners like to think it moves in a straight line. In America that’s pretty much how it is. No serious person would argue that American culture was more liberal and tolerant in the 1950s than it is now. But Egypt, amazingly, moved in exactly the other direction.
“When Nasser took over,” Big Pharaoh said, “people were angry at Britain and Israel. He nationalized all the industry. He banned political parties. He stifled everything. Banned the Muslim Brotherhood. Banned the Communists. Banned all. When Sadat took over in 1970, he had two enemies: the Communists and the Nasser remnants. So to counter these threats, he did what the United States did in Afghanistan during the Cold War – he made an alliance with the Islamists. He brought back the Muslim Brotherhood which had fled to Saudi Arabia when Nasser was around. He used them to destroy the left.”
“That was part of it,” he continued. “During the oil boom of 1973 a lot of Egyptians went to Saudi Arabia to work. Then in the 1990s, two important things happened. After the first Gulf War, Saudi Arabia began to Saudize its economy and said they no longer needed Egyptian workers. When the Egyptians came home they were contaminated with Wahhabism. Egypt’s economy kept getting worse. Unemployed members of the middle class either sat around and smoked shisha or got more religious. That was when Islamism moved from the lower class to the middle class. Now it is moving even to the upper class.”
As our long-term readers know, I’ve been following the case of Terry Bressi, and his fight against a seemingly illegal joint federal/state/indian roadblock conducted in Arizona.
Well, included with my last email update was this from Denver:
A similar incident to mine recently took place in Denver, Colorado. A 50 year old mother of four was forcibly removed from a public bus by federal agents while she was on her way to work one morning. As part of its normal route, the bus was traveling through the Denver Federal Center and was stopped at a federal checkpoint. Armed agents boarded the bus and demanded that everyone show their ID. Given that nobody is even required to have ID on their person if they aren’t driving, Deborah Davis refused and was arrested and charged with two federal misdemeanors for daring to stand up for her rights. Her case was quickly highlighted at:
http://www.papersplease.org/davis
and the resulting public outcry resulted in the federal prosecutor dropping all charges the day before she was to go to court. To find out about what’s increasingly becoming a common occurrence in this country, please check out the website highlighting Deborah Davis’s case above.
This story has gotten some MSM attention. But for those who would like to use this as something with which to demonize the Patriot Act, sorry:
Carl Rusnok, spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the Federal Protective Service, said the practice of checking IDs at the bus stop was instituted after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
The cursory bus check is part of a “multilayered security system,” he said. “There are 9,000 federal facilities in the country, and virtually every one of them requires an ID check.”
I’ll have to do some follow-up on this. At the moment, I’m confident nobody checks the ID of passengers on the several buses that pass the Ronald Reagan Federal Bldg. in Santa Ana, which is immediately adjacent to the Transit Terminal.
Update: Jacob Sullum is following this. So is Adam Shostack. And Alicia Caldwell at the Denver Post has a good article, including a graphic, showing that this particular bus actually goes through the Federal Center campus. Im still wwondering if they check passengers in private vehicles.
And here’s a discussion post, with one comment, at Josh Marshall’s TPMCafe. I honestly don’t know why this hasn’t gotten more exposure in the blogosphere. I would think this would have my old friend Jeralyn Merritt blowing steam out her ears, as this is just the sort of abuse she rails against, and it’s also in her neck of the woods.
Update II: Jeralyn informs me that she blogged on this at a local Denver site, 5280.com. She also notes that charges weren’t filed on Ms. Davis. I, for one, hope it doesn’t end here. Criminal charges were also dropped in Terry Bressi’s case; but he’s following-up on it civilly. And the fact that she’s not being charged with a crime does not effect the matter of Ms. Davis’ rights being violated. If the facts are as she states, she was man-handled, and detained for over three hours, which caused her to lose her job.
But there are larger issues at hand than just the fate of a single individual. It seems the Denver RTD has adjusted it’s “route 100” around the campus, with a spur going in, for those with business there – to apease Ms. Davis and her supporters. However, as Carl Rusnok stated, this is going on at other federal facilities. And, as reader Chaz points out (see comments), federal contractors as well.
(The following was sent to me last month by frequent reader Roy M. Read it, wince and snicker.)
1. I am in the military , I have a problem. This is the first step to
recovery…
2. Speech:
* Time should never begin with a zero or end in a hundred, it is not 0530 or 1400 it is 5:30 in the morning (AKA God-awful early).
* Words like deck, rack, and “PT” will get you weird looks; floor, bed,
workout, get used to it.
* “F *ck” cannot be used to -replace whatever word you can’t think of right
now, try “um”.
* Grunting is not talking.
* It’s a phone, not a radio, conversations on a phone do not end in “out”
* People will not know what you are talking about if you tell them you are
coming from Camp Lejeune with the MWSS platoon or that you spent a deployment in the OCAC
Michelle Malkin wants everyone to tell Time what they think of their “People Who Mattered” choices. Well, I’ve been telling Time that for at least two decades – by not buying their magazine.
Honestly, I can’t understand the consternation in the blogosphere over this annual Time “Person of the Year” edition. Some saying that Time was trying to be People or US. Well folks, here’s a newsflash: Time has a long history of “Person of the Year” choices which had emphasized celebrity over substance, and has been punctuated by some real boners, including Hitler and Stalin (twice).
I do agree though, that Time should have followed in their footsteps of 1956 (Hungarian Patriot), and chosen the brave people of Iraq, Lebanon, and Ukraine.
So, my dearly beloved and somewhat over-protective daughter has put it to me… given that in the row of about twelve or fourteen houses in which I live contains only three houses (one on either end, and one in the middle) which actually contain able-bodied males (and one of them appearing to fall in the weedy and academically ineffectual division of the male spectrum anyway), and that all the rest contain single women— widows, working single women, divorcees, single parents, most of us of a certain age— and given also that the neighborhood was plagued a couple of years ago by an intrusive peeping-tom (who managed to scare the living ***** out of some of my neighbors), given that someone once tried to jimmy the door of my house with a 16-in screwdriver, and a couple of someone elses’ tried to steal William’s Accura Integra right out of my driveway— and even though this is a really pretty safe neighborhood, with an active neighborhood patrolling scheme… she has laid down the law. I must have either a dog… or a gun. Judy, my neighbor, who lives vicariously through me has been insisting the same thing also (I Know Judy and Blondie have been collaborating on this, I just know it!)
I don’t want a gun, I know there are all sorts of reasons why I should, but I really don’t.
Dad had a couple of revolvers in the house when we were children, but they were kept locked away. I didn’t ever handle anything other than a BB-gun until I had been five or six years in the Air Force, and I never took small-arms training until another ten years after than and threatened with a TDY to the Magic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. (It was with the standard Beretta. I have small hands, and to me the Beretta was so heavy I had to hold it with both hands to keep it steady enough to even squeeze off an accurate shot.)
But I don’t want to have to think that civil authority has been so degraded, that the soft power of the commune and neighborhood has been so destroyed that having a gun in the house is essential. I don’t want to acknowledge that things have become so horrible that we need to take this precaution. Call me a pacifist wuss, call me a freeloader on all my neighbors who do have guns, call me a starry-eyed optimist… but to have a gun in my house would mean to me that we have descended to the law of the jungle, that the SAPD is useless and ineffectual, that things have gone to the point where we cannot depend on civil compacts at all. I am just not at the point— just yet— where I can do that.
So, I will have the dog. She is very sweet, my daughter says, very well mannered and protective. I can’t begin to imagine how she will get along with the cats. I think I will call her “Lesser-Weevil”… because (to steal a line from “Master and Commander”… she will be the lesser of two evils. Although the cats might have a different opinion, of course.
Glenn Reynolds posts this from Popular Mechanics:
Biloxi ought to be Exhibit A in any discussion of whether current coastal development regulations make sense. The beachfront properties were devastated, but only a few hundred yards inland, damage was moderate. Maybe there’s a lesson there for developers? Apparently not. Compared to New Orleans, where whole neighborhoods remain deserted, Biloxi is crawling with construction teams. Most of them are busy rebuilding hotels right at the water’s edge.
The wisdom of building on the gulf coast waterfront aside, Mississippi is getting back on its feet. Meanwhile, New Orleanians continue to go homeless, because of NIMBY concerns over FEMA-supplied trailers:
Half the state’s 64 parishes Louisiana’s equivalent of counties have barred such trailer parks, and most of the rest have various restrictions, FEMA said.
The agency’s acting director, R. David Paulison, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that some of the restrictions are unreasonable, such as a requirement that only evacuated parish residents be allowed to live in the parks.
Since almost every other state has taken in Hurricane Katrina evacuees, Paulison said, “I don’t know why the parishes won’t let their own Louisiana neighbors come in until they get their lives back together.”
This from James Niccolai of IDG News Service, via PC World:
Google has revamped its Web search engine to make it easier for users to find music-related content such as lyrics and track listings. The action pushes the search site into an area that has been raising eyebrows among record labels.
[…]
The lyrics feature could potentially land Google in hot water with the record labels, which have been turning their attention to Web sites that offer unlicensed music scores and lyrics. Lauren Keiser, president of the Music Publisher’s Association told the BBC earlier this week that his group plans to launch its first campaign against such sites early next year. Some labels have already begun.
Record label Warner/Chappel Music sent a cease and desist letter recently to pearLyrics, a service that lets users track down lyrics for songs currently playing in their iTunes software. The developer of the service, Walter Ritter, shut down the site December 6 rather than face an expensive court battle. “As a freeware developer I can not afford to risk a law suit against such a big company,” he wrote on his Web site.
There was no indication Thursday that the music industry has Google in its sights, and the MPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Google’s service is perhaps less controversial than that of pearLyrics, which also loaded the lyrics it found into the lyrics field of the iTunes software.
Well, picking off small-fry may be one thing, but going after cash-rich Google is a whole ‘nother matter. But, either way, they are biting the hand that feeds.
In other Googlie-news, you might note the new Firefox feature, on the same article, and the AOL buy-in. It seems to me as though Google is looking to become a more broad-based portal/content provider, similar to Yahoo!.
This from Max Borders at TCS Daily:
Whether you’re a 220 lb. guzzler with an iron liver or a 120 anorexic who’s just had her first drink, you will be evaluated by the same standard in determining whether you’re capable of driving. The standard in most states is a .08 blood-alcohol content or BAC. But other states have policies in which an even lower BAC can send you to jail. Recently, for example, the Washington D.C. city council voted in favor of raising its legal BAC from .01 to .05 — where between .05 and .079 police may use their discretion about whether to make an arrest.
[…]
It turns out that while the BAC standard is an objective standard for measuring the percentage of alcohol in the blood. It isn’t an objective standard of someone’s ability to drive safely. The very term DUI stands for “driving under the influence.” But the breathalyzer and other BAC measures can’t determine the influence of alcohol on one’s reaction times, faculties, and motor skills. If we were trying to determine whether someone is actually impaired, aren’t reaction times, faculties and motor skills what we ought to be looking at?
To be fair, there was a time in which the BAC standard made sense. In the absence of a better standard, a proxy standard would have had to suffice — just as age 65 might be a reasonable proxy standard for testing elderly drivers for the degenerative effects of aging.
I might also add that, while alcohol also generally lowers a person’s inhibitions, that effect varies greatly from one individual to another. I have in my life known several people who tend to throw caution to the wind after they’ve had a few drinks. I’ve also known others who recognize that they are below their peak performance level, and compensate with additional caution, just as a responsible senior citizen should.
These are the reasons the checkpoints advocated so vigorously by MADD, and similar organizations, are such a waste of valuable resources. Dangerous drunks make themselves known readily, by virtue of their actual driving, to even the casual lay observer – much more so to the trained and experienced patrol officer – so long as he/she is actually on patrol, not manning stationary checkpoints.
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
Get your best ad hominem attacks ready for another open thread on Friday.
Update: Ok, here’s the twist: The last time I told you all to keep the attack lines general. Well, now you can get personal – so long as the target of your attack is a public personality. George Bush, Howard Dean, Tom Cruise – all fair game. So put on your best Triumph, Kathy Griffin, or Don Rickles suit, and have at it. You can even go after yours truly, or other popular bloggers (Oh gawd – I’m likely to hear about this on Monday. Well, joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck.).
And no, as much as some of you might want to rip, say, Robin a new asshole, being a regular commenter on this blog does not make one a “public personality.” 🙂
Comments are now open!
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Mum mum mum mum mum mum
Got a job Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Yes indeedy, sportsfans, full and regular employment awaits the lovely and multi-talented Sgt. Mom, as of Friday, 8:00AM…. after three months as a temp mostly at the Enormous Corporate Giant, and pretty well resigning myself to the fact that very few enterprises would be looking to hire new staff until after the holidays… which would mean another couple of weeks after Christmas laboring in the vinyards of the E-C-G.
This whole thing happened as fast as a drive-by shooting, a message from one of the temp services about a possible job on my home phone last night. I called them first thing this morning, from the E-C-G:
“Oh, we really want to put your resume in front of this client…is it still current?”
“Well, pretty much, just tell him I’ve been temping since August for “Insert Major Temp Service Here”.”
“When can you do an interview?”
“Well, I can work with the manager here, and be free on Friday, last thing.”
“Ummm… well, he really wants to have someone start first thing… he’s coming in this morning to interview a possible… could you be here at 11:15?”
This agency is about ten minutes drive away from the palatial premises of the E-C-G, I can kiss off a lunch hour, or a little more, in the service of my eventual economic salvation. The backlong of work I was assigned to expedite for the E-C-G has been accomplished since mid-morning on Monday, and the area manager (a darling and accomplished woman) is very pleased with this, and otherwise inclined to be sympathetic to my quest for gainful long-term employment that does not involve two hours of travel out of my day. (I have better things to be doing with those hours, life being too short to spend them trudging the endless corridors of the E-C-G, or coping with San Antonio’s interminable traffic lights and jammed expressways.)
So, clock out, with the area manager’s best wishes, and allowing ten minutes to get to the VEV and off the E-C-G’s single zip-code encompassing premises, and ten to get down to the agency….
Foiled. The traffic light at a fairly major intersection is not functioning, and I spend the whole twenty minutes I have allotted to travel sitting in gridlocked traffic and fuming. This is the classic nightmare, horribly and embarrassingly late for an important appointment, second only to running in, trailing a length of toilet paper from your foot. I rush into the agency at half past the hour, apologizing and saying to the interviewer,
“I am so sorry… can you please imagine me in a suit, and not panting for breath?”
Fortunately, everyone got caught in the same traffic… and the interview goes very well. Of course, just about every interview I have done over the last five months I think I have done very well… well, maybe not the one where I told the CEO (in answer to the question “What would you do for me?”) “Get you properly organized… and bring in a vacuum cleaner and vacuum this office”. The place was a grubby pit in a warehouse an impossible drive away, and I didn’t really want that job anyway— it would have killed my soul, walking into it every day, with fluff on the turd-colored carpet and waterstains on the suspended cieling tiles.
Well, the agency called this afternoon–I have got the job. Well, that was a welcome surprise…. I shall think of it as my very welcome and most unexpected Christmas Present.
I routinely either applaud or deride reality TV shows on this blog. But I have been silent about the various casino shows. Well, one that has captured my interest is the Discovery Travel Channel’s “American Casino” .
Well, part of that may have to do with the fact that I am impressed with that Green Valley Ranch, and its sister Station Casinos are so classy, while still being down-to-Earth and anathematic – a rare thing in Vegas these days. But I must admit that it has largely to do with the fact that I find the Hotel Manager, Ninya Perna, so damn hot!
Well, on tonight’s episode: “The New Spa”, we find her computer dating – oh yeah! Well, on the broader measure, she may have the depth of a wading pool – we don’t really know. But she’s totally professional at what she does – and that scores big points with me.
But alas, we find out, at the end of the episode, that she is already seeing someone, and was just doing the compu-date thing to appease her friend. *Kevin mopes away – heartbroken* 🙂
…That the subject of tonight’s season two Project Runway episode, titled “All Dolled Up” involves designing a fashion for BarbieTM? And why not: Barbie puts all other supermodels (especially those her age) to shame. As “Barbie” is, by far, the most licensed trade name of all time (yes, even eclipsing Star WarsTM).
Further, while I have no personal experience here, I understand collector Barbie fashions draw prices befitting those commonly worn by her life-size (and, in fact, living – although sometimes it may not seem so) contemporaries.
Update: I was right!
Update 2: I’m happy to see that our designers are being judged on the full-scale versions of their work, as – from my tangental involvement with this – I know to-scale fabrics are hard to come by.
It seems like Viacom’s buyout of Dreamworks SKG is a done deal. I love these sort of stories.
Right here….
And a tempting taste, courtesy of Rantburg:
Intellectually this same liberal, pampered, and self-indulgent upper class understands that, abstractly, little nuclear Elvis Kim Jong II of North Korea could sling a couple of hundred megatons of radioactive death their way – but on a gut level, where it counts, they can no longer visualize a world where their morning power walks in the dog park could ever actually be interrupted. They have lived for so long under the cool shadow of peace and prosperity that they can’t grasp in a meaningful way the hard reality which is war and poverty, a truth which Tolkien’s work desperately attempts to acquaint us with. They also cannot truly understand the reality of what Saddam Hussein’s now mercifully defunct Iraq was like because they live in a word where acid baths, state rapists, children’s prisons, daily torture, and constant executions are possible only as unwelcome, abstract ideas which only exist when the likes of Colin Powell or Donald Rumsfeld point them out. As soon as that accusing finger moves away, however, POOF! the entire unpleasant matter no longer exists…. and it’s time to go wine tasting in Napa.
Yeah, you probably have to really appreciate the Marin Co. mindset to appreciate.
I don’t know if I’d go to the trouble. But I have to give Jeff Harris his props for getting one over on an eBay scammer:
It’s an extended article. But well worth the read. What really chaps my hide, though, is this form letter he gets from eBay, after reporting the phony escrow company scam:
Hello,
Thank you for writing to eBay’s Customer Support with your concerns. My name is John and I appreciate the chance to answer your question. I’m happy to assist you further.
An Escrow service allows the buyer to send their money to the Escrow Company, and the Seller then ships the item to the Buyer. Once the Buyer approves the item the Escrow service then pays the Seller. eBay recommends escrow for transactions over $500.00.
The Escrow service affiliated with eBay is called Escrow.com. eBay encourages members to take advantage of the assurance that escrow services can provide. For more information on escrow, please see the following eBay page:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/escrow.html
I wish you the best with your future transactions.
Regards,
John W. S.
eBay Customer Support
This from Dr. Helen:
Remember when kids could play with toy guns and they were not a symbol of all that was evil in the world? My daughter doesn’t. She warned me that she could never bring the potato gun to school without the risk of expulsion. The sheer joy of running around being a kid is denied to our children today. It is a shame–it is no wonder our kids are so fat today. The slightest hint of rambunctiousness is medicated out of them and diagnosed as ADHD. A pointed finger becomes a symbol of a weapon that requires therapy or suspension. The whole world is now a place where mean adults (especially males) will kidnap you if you dare venture out into the world. It is best to just stay home, watch tv and eat junk food to squelch whatever desire you have to be autonomous in the world. Do we ever realize what joy we have taken from our kids in exchange for safety?
Hear hear, Dr. Helen! You are reading from what is a recurrent theme, here at The Daily Brief. In today’s society, we even have those busy-bodies who condemn children playing out aggressive tendencies vicariously through video games. They deny the basic nature of human beings. And, in turn, serve to foster dysfunction, not arrest it.
We got back OK from our trip at 0430 last Tuesday. The wedding was spectacular, as was the Fri-Sat snowstorm. Brr, Colorado was Cold!, but we enjoyed being “home” for a few days. I will post more and pix later, just wanted to let our friends know we’re OK…..
As a place likely to feature in the national news as the site of a horrible civic disaster, San Antonio is pretty far down on the list, rather a comfort for those who live here. It is not on a coast, and therefore subject to hurricanes, tsunamis or landslides. It wasn’t built on a major earthquake fault line, or on a major river: we are too far south for tornados, and too far north to collect anything but the remnants of hurricanes, there are no dormant volcanoes anywhere near. Mother Nature, a temperamental and moody bitch, tends to slam us with nothing more drastic than high winds, hail and torrential rains which, however, lead to sudden and astonishingly fast-moving floods within the metropolitan area. Local residents know where those places are— most of them are clearly marked anyway— but it is a civic embarrassment, knowing that there are places within city limits where it is possible to be innocently driving along a city street and be carried away and drowned.
The very predictability of flooding, though, has the fortunate sidelight of keeping local emergency planners on their toes. A more-than-usually heavy rain will swell Salado Creek out of it’s banks; the Olmos Basin will fill up, the downtown underpass part of I-35 will be impassible, North New Braunfels will run with about a foot of water, and there will be a couple of motorists caught by surprise and having to be rescued by the emergency services— it’s all expected, all predictable. But local disaster preparedness officials and planners have other motivations for staying on top of disaster response planning; as Lawson Magruder of University of Texas San Antonio’s Institute for the Protection of American Communities points out— San Antonio is well situated to serve as a refuge and support area for disasters occurring along the Gulf Coast and the border areas; recently 15,000 refugees from Hurricane Katrina were sheltered in San Antonio alone.
Granny Jessie, tiny and brutally practical, was not particularly given to fancy and fantasies. When she talked of old days and old ways, she talked of her girlhood on her fathers’ ancestral acres, a farm near Lionville, Chester County, Pennsylvania; of horse-drawn wagons, and cows and cats, and how pigs were cleverer than dogs. Of how she and her sister and brother would have to stop going down to the pig-pen early in the fall, lest they become too fond of an animal whose fate it was to be butchered for ham, and bacon, roasts and sausage and scrapple to last the winter through. Of how she played on the Lionville boys’ baseball team, since there were not enough boys, and she was a tomboy and skillful enough to play first-base, and how her grandfathers’ house was once a fall-back way-station on the Underground Railway. (It was the inn in Lionville itself was the main way-station, with a secret room and a concealed access to the woods, or so said Granny Jessie.) It was all very prosaic, very American, a breath away from the Little House books and so very familiar.
Granny Dodie’s stories, even if she did not have a spell-binding repertoire, were touched with fire and enchantment because of the very unfamiliarity of the venue… a row-house in Liverpools’ Merseyside, a few streets away from there the Beatles had come from, where Granny Dodie had grown up the youngest of a family of nine, sleeping three in a bed with her older sisters. “The one on the side is a golden bride, the one by the wall gets a golden ball, the one in the middle gets a golden fiddle, “she recited to me once. “Although all I ever got of it was the hot spot!” All her brothers were sailors or dockworkers, and her ancestors too, as far as memory went. Even her mothers’ family, surnamed Jago, and from Cornwall— even they were supposed to have grafted onto their family tree a shipwrecked Armada sailor. Granny Dodie insisted breathlessly there was proof of this in the darkly exotic good looks of one of her brothers. “He looked quite foreign, very Spanish!” she would say. We forbore to ruin the story by pointing out that according to all serious historic records, all the shipwrecked Spaniards cast up on English shores after the Armada disaster were quickly dispatched… and that there had been plenty of scope in Cornwall— with a long history of trans-channel adventure and commerce—to have acquired any number of foreign sons-in-law. She remembered Liverpool as it was in that long-ago Edwardian heyday, the time of the great trans-Atlantic steamers, and great white birds (liver-birds, which according to her gave the port it’s name) and cargo ships serving the commercial needs of a great empire, the docks all crowded and the shipways busy and prosperous.
One Christmas, she and my great-Aunt Nan discovered a pictue book— John S. Goodalls’ “An Edwardian Summer”, among my daughters’ presents, and the two of them immediately began waxing nostalgic about long-ago seaside holidays; that time when ladies wore swimsuits that were more like dresses, with stockings and hats. They recollected donkey-rides along the strand, the boardwalks and pleasure-piers full of carnival rides, those simpler pleasures for a slightly less over-stimulated age. But the one old tale that Granny Dodie told, the one that stayed my memory, especially when Pip and JP and I spent the summer of 1976 discovering (or re-discovering) our roots was this one:
“There are places,” she said, ” Out in the country, they are, where there are stone stairways in the hillsides, going down to doorways… but they are just the half the size they should be. They are all perfectly set and carved… but for the size of people half the size we are. And no one knows where they lead.”
Into the land of the Little People, the Fair Folk, living in the hollow hills, of course, and the half-sized stairways lead down into their world, a world fair and terrible, filled with faerie, the old gods, giants and monsters and the old ways, a world half-hidden, but always tantalizingly, just around the corner, or down the half-sized stairway into the hidden hills, and sometimes we mundane mortals could come close enough to brush against that unseen world of possibilities.
From my journal, an entry writ during the summer of 1976, when Pip and JP and I spent three months staying in youth hostels and riding busses and BritRail… and other means of transportation:
July 9- Inglesham
Today we started off to see the Uffington White Horse, that one cut into the hillside in what— the Bronze or Iron Age, I forget which. We started off thinking we could catch a bus and get off somewhere near it, but after trying quite a few bus stops (unmarked they are at least on one side of the road) we took to hitch-hiking and the first person took us all the way there. He was an employee of an auctioneering firm, I guess & I guess he wasn’t in a hurry because he asked where we were going (Swindon & then to the White Horse) & said he would take us all the way there. It was a lovely ride, out beyond Ashbury, and the best view of the horse is from the bottom, or perhaps an aero plane. It’s very windy up here, very strong and constantly- I think it must drive the grass right back into the ground, because it was very short & curly grass. We could see for miles, across the Vale, I guess they call it. After that we walked up to Uffington Castle, an Iron Age ring-embankment, & some people were trying to fly a kite-it’s a wonder it wasn’t torn to pieces.
We sat for a while, watching fields of wheat rippling like the ocean & cloud-shadows moving very slowly and deliberately across the multicolored patchwork.
The man who brought us out advised us to walk along the Ridgeway, an ancient track along the crest of the hill, and so we did. It was lovely and oh, so lonely. Nothing but the wheat fields on either side and looking as if they went on forever.
We looked at Wayland’s Smithy, a long stone barrow in a grove of trees & when we got to Ashford, we found the Rose & Crown pub and had lunch. It was practically empty, no one but an elderly couple and their dog, a lovely black & white sheepdog, very friendly. Then we set off to walk and hitch-hike back to Highworth, but we picked the two almost deserted roads in Oxfordshire to do it, because it took nearly forever to get two rides. One got us from Ashbury to (indecipherable) and the second directly into Highworth. Both were women, very kind and chatty; I wish I knew what impulse people have which make them pick up hitch-hikers. What I do know is that the loveliest sight is that of a car slowing down and the driver saying “Where are y’heading for?”
Thirty years later I remember how charmed we were by the people who gave us rides— the auctioneers assistant who was so taken in by my reasons for seeing the White Horse that he decided he had to see it himself, and the two women— both with cars full of children— who were either totally innocent of the ways of this soon-to-become-wicked-world, or had unerring snap-judgment in deciding to slow down and pick up three apparently innocent and apparent teenagers. (I was 22 but was frequently and embarrassingly informed that I looked younger than the 16 year-old Pip, and JP was 20, but also must have looked innocent, younger and harmless.)
With their assistance, we spent a lovely day, in the sun and wind, in the uplands along the Ridgeway, examining the form of a running horse, cut into the turf on a chalk hillside, an ancient fortress, a legendary dolman tomb, and an ancient highway along the backbone of Britain… always thinking that just around the next bend would be the stairway into the hollow hills, and the giants and fair folk of old… Adventure and peril just as Grannie Dodie said it would be in the lands of our ancestors… always just around the corner.