chorus of idiots

It never ends, does it?

Entire networks devoted to waving the flag and parroting the administration's press releases. Man-whores planted in the press room to ask softball questions. Exactly zero discussion about what the "nuclear option" really means, besides that the Democrats want to filibuster and the Republicans want an "up-or-down vote."

Never mind that an up or down vote really means up, and that the nuclear option would mean a rubber stamp for the Prez'dint's upcoming Supreme Court nominee. The Democrats want to filibuster judicial nominees, and the Republicans want an "up-or-down vote."

Still, we read all about the liberal bias in the media. The Washington Times, hardly a paper of record, contains an article blasting the major networks (mostly just CBS and Newsweek) for sloppy, liberal-slanted reporting. Two mistakes in two years, both of which were retracted, neither of which had anything to do with the other (aside from unreliable sources... which doesn't bother the right-wing press, as the anchors themselves are vicious liars), and all of a sudden the reason Fox News is so popular is because people are sick of the bias and sick of the bush-bashing.

If I were Bill O'Reilly, I would tell these people to SHUT UP. Just SHUT UP.

And if this were the Old West, and I had a gun, I would shoot them between the head.

This whole discussion is ridiculous. Here I've wasted two posts in two days, wrecking my vacation story, spreading partisan distaste and anger for everyone to read and join me in fist-shaking. The number of articles dedicated to why liberals are wrong and need to re-evaluate every position they've ever held (read: become republicans), or why liberals are stuck in their ivory towers and need to reconnect with the people.... it's all crap.

Maybe it's just a slow news day, and so we need to rehash all the things we've been saying since 2000. Maybe the problems our country is facing are so scary and so impossible to deal with that nobody wants to say anything, because when people hear about the oil crash, they just want to cry. Crying doesn't sell newspapers (unless it's over somebody on life support). Maybe it's because our president is so focused on building a short-term agenda to the exclusion of the country's long-term needs and (heaven forbid!) goals, nobody has time to take the long view. My feeling is that there are a large number of real issues that the press needs to take up and shout from the hills.

What about our economic future? How will we respond to the massive influx of educated, connected people that are coming from China and India in the next 20 years? Will we suck even more money out of higher education, so that the few people who compete against the Asian workforce have enough (tax-free) family money to survive even if they lose their jobs? Will education again become synonymous with great wealth? Will the lower and middle classes be doomed to service in a "volunteer" military, just to pay the bills? How will our oil-drunk society adapt as oil supplies decrease slightly, but demand continues to increase? Will my mother, who has worked her whole life, carved out some savings, and contributed to Social Security, have to take a smaller payment every month because the government assumed responsibility for paying airline pensions? Will anyone but the Pioneer's Club ever see the benefits of massively unbalanced tax cuts that have plunged the federal budget into unrecoverable deficits?

You would think that a Stanford professor would have time and inclination to answer some of these questions, instead of writing just another article about why people like Fox News so much. I can tell you that right now: They wave the flag, and Bill O'Reilly is a bully. It's like watching kids at recess surround a fist-fight. It's not educational, and it's barely entertaining. Still, as our education systems, health-care systems, and revenue systems fall apart, we all eagerly await our turn to be told to SHUT UP!!!

Just shut up.

Maybe it's time to move on.

recoculous

I read this article, written by an author I enjoy, Orson Scott Card.

Although I liked "Ender's Game," I don't know quite how I feel about his politics. It turns out that Card hates liberals; or at least smart people. He blames terrorism on

"Hollywood to newspeople to the soft-subject professors in our universities, the culture that makes people like Osama bin Laden want to blow us up or crush us into dust is the culture of the R-rated movie, the anti-religion intellectual, the glorified abortionist, the babies-without-marriage crowd, and the what-me-worry media elite."

...neglecting to mention that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. government's policy of meddling around in middle eastern affairs for the last 30 years hasn't worked, isn't working, and has (with the exception of Afghanistan) resulted in theocratic minorities seizing hold of the government after our puppets fall from power. No, it's the college prof that taught me about Third Way feminism or that made me write a paper about the Crusades, or the girl I know that has a beautiful daughter but no husband to help raise her. They are the real reason that Muslims on the street are angry about what they perceive to be a physical, tangible attack on their way of life.

The thesis of this article is that Newsweek should not have run the story about U.S. interrogators flushing a Koran down a toilet. I think everybody, including Newsweek, knows that now (they did, in fact, retract the story). Card doesn't stop there, though.

"Even if the allegations about Quran desecration were completely and absolutely verified, why in the world would you publish the information during wartime? It's not that the Media themselves regard the Quran as sacred. It's just paper to them. And surely they would have to agree that if such actions might somehow gain the cooperation of a potential source of useful information (though that seems extremely unlikely to me), it would be infinitely preferable to physical torture."

Now a perfectly good science-fiction author and generally smart guy starts showing some pretty freaky jingoistic leanings; maybe it's the soft-subject liberal college education talking, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if our guys are flushing/burning/peeing on holy books, it's a form of psychological torture, or at least an abuse of power, and it should stop. (Card makes the silent assumption that our prisoners must be tortured, and holds up psychological torture as superior to physical; maybe that's just because there are no scars on a broken mind)

The media is obligated to publish stories like that. If the news is truly the fourth branch of government, and if it is the only check on executive power, we need it, because they have shown us that our military has lied, cheated, and tortured its way out of situations in this very same war. To suggest that it would have been better for everyone if nobody published the Abu Ghraib story is ludicrous. This time, Newsweek made a mistake. They will no longer use anonymous sources for news items without the approval of a senior editor. They are being severely punished by their peers, discussed by their readers (I've been a subscriber for years)... and FOX News will forever hold this example up as another global incident caused by the "left-wing media."

Card wants the offenders fired; a cleaning up of Newsweek's front office. I suggest we do what President Bush did when his senior staff made serious, grievous mistakes that ended the lives of thousands of people: give 'em all promotions.

sweet freedom

After almost three weeks and enough head-scratching to cause major bleeding and trauma... I finally got the iMac to communicate with the great, wide Internet... and incidentally, that's where I'm typing from.

Major kudos go to Paul for answering pretty much all my questions and providing a number of brilliant solutions to what were previously unsolvable problems. His firm grip on the technical outreached my grasp of the concepts, and the whole adventure would never have even gotten off the ground without his technical support. thanks, bro.

So, back to the story.

Wednesday afternoon was cool and rainy. Our first stop was a pizza joint somewhere in SF (this was before I developed any familiarity with my surroundings). I have said to anyone who will listen, and will probably say for many weeks from now, that I had the best food ever while I was gone, and this was just the beginning of a wondrous culinary journey.

There is a whole industry that remains dedicated to manufacturing very expensive watches. Not digital watches with built-in PDAs or that tell you the weather or anything like that, but real mechanical watches that perform bizarre, unlikely tasks simply by way of interlocking gears. Each function that is not part of time-telling is called a "complication." A good example of a really complicated complication: Some watches, if you flip over the face, have a season-dependent astronomical chart on the underside. If you turn over your watch, it will provide a guide of the constellations to you, depending on the time of year. (I wish I had a link: anyone?) My favorite, though, is the perpetual calendar. A calendar that will be correct in perpetuity... inside a watch, manifested in little bits of metal teeth.

Norm has an affinity for watches with complications. Norm is the sales manager of the car dealership where Kevin works, and he would be our host for an evening on the town. Kevin was critiquing my appearance as though I were his wife and we were out trying to wine and dine a client that would close the deal of the century, if only my hair were perfect enough; I was a bit apprehensive that I would let it slip that I'm a total country bumpkin in the presence of this amazing salesman.

Norm turned out to be a very friendly, likable fellow. We sat down at a Chinese restaurant near downtown SF (the name of which I don't remember, sorry), shook hands all around, and made small talk about the nature of work, business, and keeping employees happy... all the while being served sake bombs (like a jager-bomb, but with sake instead of jagermeister and beer instead of red bull - you're right, it doesn't taste very good) and crab soup. I generally disapprove of seafood and soup, but I figured that this was my first and possibly only chance to enjoy some local delicacies that would be unlikely to appear in my local grocery store. Norm was happy to oblige, summoning a server and ordering dish after dish in Chinese, leaving me mystified as to what would arrive at our table to replace the growing stack of Heineken bottles.

touchdown

The first thing Kevin said to me when I saw him was "..You look thin." The next thing (of any importance) came when we were in his car, hurtling down the freeway at speeds that would kill us both if I were to attack, molest, or interfere with Kevin in any way.

"You know we're not going to e3, right?"

As I searched my feelings, I knew it to be true. On the plane, I had been thinking about drive time... SF to LA is about 7 hours one way, and we were not making that trip every day. We were also probably not staying in a hotel in LA. Plus, we'd be signing up a day late, and I still had't seen or heard anything about these "tickets." My only regret is that I did not end both of our lives in a flaming wreck right there on the freeway. It is the only sort of death we deserved.

Although I was excited to fly someplace for the first time in years, I discovered shortly after the first plane took off that I don't really like flying. The most frightening part of the journey came as we were landing in SF; the airstrip reaches out into the bay, and incoming flights arrive from the west... over the bay. Watching from my tiny window, I saw our plane fly closer and closer to the water until I almost cringed with the expectation of impact and chaos. At the last possible second, land appeared under us and I felt the plane touch down.

Another day older

It's cold and rainy today, and I think the weather is negatively affecting the people around me, myself included. The weather isn't the only thing, of course, but many people I have come into contact with today have been... out-of-sorts. I'm tired, too; I've been working a lot, and trying to squeeze in gym time, and it's taking its toll on my poor physical self. Which, in turn, leaves me mentally weak and prone to irrational thoughts and behavior... or, at its most benign, not knowing what to say and just being comfortable with uncomfortable silence.

My grandma flew into town today (and boy, are her wings tired). I went to dinner with her and my brother, and it struck me how much different we all are from when I was a kid, hangin' out with Grandma. (Except my brother; he's basically the same as he's always been.) Time, always in relentless pursuit, is beginning to catch up with her. I don't begrudge her that; we're all entitled to get old, and we did have a nice conversation, for the most part. Still, though, the depth has gone out of our relationship, mostly because when I tell a story of any substance, my natural windiness and rapid speech make me very difficult for her to hear and understand. It's too bad; Grandma is a pretty sharp lady, and is full of interesting tidbits and stories and things of that nature. Nowadays, it's more difficult to pry them out, especially when my only backup is my brother, who is more than content to sit silently for weeks, even months at a time. So, after a hard day's work and a brief imitation of a workout, it's almost easier for me to take a vested interest in my surroundings and let her share what she wants. Eventually, I will be old enough to miss softly spoken sentences such that two people can have a conversation at the table with me and I won't even know it. That is, to say the least, not a comforting thought.

I saw last year's roommate, Jerome, at the gym this afternoon for the first time since I moved out last summer. He's in the Guard, and will be going to Iraq this summer. I always thought he'd end up over there, troop deployments being what they are, but it's still rather unsettling. He doesn't have an easy job, and he's much too nice of a guy to be blown up by some Syrian fundie who's been brainwashed by ultra-conservative demagogues. He is, however, not too nice of a guy to be sent over to an excessively dangerous, fledgling democracy by ultra-conservative American demagogues, and I can only cross my fingers and hope that his unit finds the perfect balance between not enough armor to protect oneself and having so much homemade armor hanging from the Humvee that it collapses under its own weight.

I want to stay up late tonight, to revel in the freedom of not having to get up for work at 6:15 in the morning.

first post!

I got my re-admission letter to UND yesterday, and I registered for class today. 20 credits doesn't seem like that much on paper, but I bet it'll be a lot when all my homework is due and I'm slacking off. Mostly taking classes that I failed my first year, and a prerequisite for a stats class that i've been putting off. Thanks to my laziness/depression/whatever, my GPA is a rockin' 0.93. What a joke.

I leave for e3 in a week. It's just now settling in that soon I will be hopping a plane and going to California, on a real vacation, for five whole days!! Compared to the years of being too broke to do anything but drink a lot, this is like high society. I fully plan to blog heavily about the experience, hopefully not too long after it happens. That's the point of this whole endeavor, but as time goes by, maybe I'll find something else worthwhile to blog about.

For now, though, DrunkenBlog has a very interesting article about the the company that 'wrote' CherryOS 'from scratch' and the web of lies they have woven around themselves. Although this is a very interesting story, and basically exposes a couple of crooks, it is very heavy on details and difficult to digest for anyone without a semi-grasp of intellectual property law and computer programming. To say the least, it is not ready for prime time, but if you've got an hour to kill, I encourage you to read it, if for no other reason than to laugh at the ridiculous letters, emails, and chat logs acquired during drunkenbatman's investigation.

No frisbee golf scores; it's been way too windy today to even try.