Ravings of a Feral Genius

Anything you say can and will be used against you

2012-01-26T14:52:00.000-08:00

Miranda rights don't apply online, so even though I don't commit crimes in the first place, if I did you wouldn't know about them from reading this blog because I know better than to write anything like "I'm living large off the proceeds of yesterday's tri-state crime spree."

Although it sounds like the FBI's plan to monitor social media sites will go beyond that. I wrote about it, briefly, for the Daily Dot.

Rand Paul and the TSA

2012-01-23T15:21:00.001-08:00

Over at the Guardian I discuss the brouhaha over Rand Paul's refusal to let TSA touch his junk. The White House, of course, has spoken in support of the TSA.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

2012-01-20T14:26:00.000-08:00

I could say my lack of recent posts was because of me showing principled support for the anti-SOPA protest blackout, but that would be a pious lie. For all that I loathe SOPA and cheered the blackout, the truth is I've been busy researching and writing about science-fiction-themed brothels, Arab-Israeli hacker wars, Japanese legends of Moses and similar matters for the Daily Dot.

But I haven't abandoned my fear or my fury over what's been happening in the US of late: TSA, NDAA, "the president of the US can kill anybody anywhere in the world, without a trial or declaration of war, so long as he's first willing to say 'dude's a terrorist'" ... reading the news these days feels like watching a documentary on a World War Two cable channel, a documentary about how things went dreadfully wrong in a certain country I dare not mention because anytime anybody makes the slightest comparison between anything here now and anything there then, somebody will scream Godwin! and at that point the conversation is over. So forget I even mentioned it.

Dammit, GOP, Get Your Act Together

2012-01-09T11:16:00.000-08:00

Every five minutes or so the status of the "current GOP presidential front-runner" changes, so right this second I don't know who looks most likely to get the 2012 Republican presidential nomination: Rick Santorum the Catholic Taliban? Newt Gingrich the megalomaniac sociopath? Mitt Romney the blank slate who changes his politics and principles almost as frequently as I change my socks?

If any Republican national strategists are reading this then pay attention, damn you: Obama is spectacularly unpopular these days, not just among right-wingers who never stood a chance of liking him anyway, but also among left-wingers and independents (like me) who voted for him in 2008, not because we're party-line Democrats who'll pull the lever for anybody with a -(D) after his name, but because we care about civil liberties and believed Obama's circa-2008 claims that he would undo the constitutional damage of the Bush/Cheney administration. But Obama has proven to be an absolute civil-liberties disaster, and the Republicans could easily mop up that disaster -- and reclaim the White House for themselves -- if only they'd support a sane, sensible centrist candidate promoting a return to the constitutional rights all Americans took for granted up through September 10, 2001.

Plenty of Republicans meet those criteria, so why is the GOP power structure consistently ignoring them? At this point, Obama could release a videotaped confession showing him raping and murdering photogenic orphan toddlers as part of a Satanic occult plot to raise Hitler from the dead after giving Kim Jong Eun the entire American nuclear arsenal as a "welcome to power" gift, and somehow, some way, the Republicans would STILL find a candidate who makes Obama look like the lesser of two evils.

Re-elect Obama in 2012: "He'll raise Hitler from the dead, turn North Korea into the world's number-one nuclear power and sign legislation making it legal for TSAgents (with valid hunting licenses) to shoot American airline travelers for sport."

No, vote for the Republican in 2012: "He'll build more nukes and use them to blow up the sun." (And then Obama would add "Blowing up the sun is bad, m'kay?" to his campaign platform until the second he wins re-election, at which point he too will try to blow up the sun, because damned if he'll let any Republicans out-Republican him.)

[/sulks]
[/kicks pebble]
[/watches pebble fall down storm drain into dark stinking underground sewer]
[/morosely imagines pebble symbolizes entire country]

Eek, It's A Living

2012-01-05T20:17:00.000-08:00

Time was when I'd introduce non-political stuff by saying "This is about as political as a cupcake." Of course, now that overzealous TSAgents have decreed that even cupcakes are a terrorist threat, I'll now say "Instead of unleashing my inner grammar Nazi, I unleashed my inner grammar TSAgent when I wrote this piece for the Daily Dot:"

The Internet can be a frustrating place, especially for former English/writing majors trying to eek out a living in a harsh trans-print journalism world where millions of our fellow netizens see nothing wrong with “trying to eek out a living.”
This gets tooth-grindingly annoying for those sensitive enough to recognize “No, you eke out a living. E. K. E. ‘Eek’ is what you yell when some gross thing makes you squirm, like a mouse in your breakfast cereal or an adult on the Internet writing ‘Drat this economy makes it hard to eek out a living’.”
-snip-

TSA's True Concern: Everything Except Security

2012-01-03T15:40:00.000-08:00

A few days ago Jeffrey Goldberg, in an article he wrote for Bloomberg (the news site, not the New York politico) spoke to TSA director John Pistole about various matters including the "backscatter X-ray" machines, which are potentially dangerous quite apart from their obvious privacy violations; other countries ban them even as the TSA rolls them out into evermore American airports. When Goldberg asked Pistole why the agency didn't at least replace them with safer options, Pistole discussed the benefits of competition among government contractors: "This is the best thing in terms of driving innovation and incentivizing manufacturers to produce the best possible products at the best possible prices."

So by Pistole's own admission, TSA values "a friendly business environment for government contractors" more than "the safety of Americans" or "the effectiveness of TSA's presumed job."

Meanwhile, "In These Times" yesterday published a nauseatingly sympathetic story about the TSA union complaining "Media's portrayal of TSA employees has hurt our bargaining power." Groping breast-cancer patients, confiscating cupcakes, shoving their hands down the underwear of a six-year-old girl -- these actions by TSA employees aren't the problem, see; the problem is that pesky ol' media reporting such actions, which makes Americans less sympathetic to the employees who molest them.

TSA agents made similar complaints back in November 2010, when the groping policy was still new and I mentioned "the agents of the Transportation Security Administration have been sobbing their little hearts out because they just can't understand why Americans have to be all rude and cranky rather than passively adopt submissive-criminal body poses while uniform-wearing thugs fondle their genitals. Union officials are especially outraged that people who are just following orders should actually be blamed for what they do."

And now they say the same, boo-hoo, pity the poor TSAgent who risks getting carpal tunnel after cupping women's breasts or men's balls all the livelong day.

It's times like this I wish I were back in college. Because if I were in college I'd probably be stoned right now, plus when I was in college you had to be stoned -- far more stoned than ever I personally got -- to actually believe these TSA gropings would be the law for more than a year now, and still things only keep getting worse. You'd have to be hallucinating to imagine the government would erase habeus corpus as it did in the NDAA bill, and you'd need to be in the final stage before permanent brain death to believe anyone in the American government could be psychotic enough to find a seven-day food stockpile cause for suspicion. I'm stone sober and still can't quite believe any of this.

2012: An Inauspicious Start

2012-01-02T23:22:00.000-08:00

Well, Dear Reader, I hope that at some point during the last couple weeks you and your loved ones celebrated a happy secular- or religious-themed December holiday of your choice. I spent New Year’s Eve taking down the Christmas decorations; President Obama marked the occasion by signing the NDAA into law, so it’s now legal for the American government to arrest American citizens anywhere in the world on “suspicion” of terrorism, no trial, no rights, no lawyer, nobody telling your family what happened to you.

Of course, in his signing statement he promised his administration will never-ever use this power unfairly. As for whoever comes after him, who cares? Oh, I know the excuses Obama’s supporters are making – the poor dear had no choice but to sign the bill. It didn’t just gut the constitution by allowing American citizens to be disappeared into military camps, it provides for the military to get paid. (Ordering The Troops to risk maiming or death on occupation duty in the name of defending the constitution in one thing, but delaying their paychecks to defend the constitution is wholly unacceptable.)

If Obama had anything remotely resembling balls, or a spine, or a conscience, he could have vetoed the bill anyway and told Americans exactly why: “My fellow Americans, I could not in good conscience sign this bill. When I was elected to this office I took an oath – as do all Congressmen and Senators– swearing to uphold the constitution of these United States. Those who voted for this bill – Democrats and Republicans both – violated that oath when they did so. I will not violate mine by signing it.”

Even If We Win, We Still Lose

2011-12-20T13:22:00.000-08:00

So focused have I been on bad news lately that not until today, while researching this Daily Dot story about Anonymous' alleged threat to hack the Iowa GOP caucus, did I realize Ron Paul is currently on track to win the caucus race. At first glance that looks like good news -- longtime readers of this-here blog might recall that in 2008, I stained my soul by spending six whole days as a registered Republican solely so I could vote for Paul in the GOP primary -- but then I thought: why should one man matter so much? Suppose everything works out just as I hope: Paul wins the caucus, wins the GOP nod, wins the election and restores all the constitutional rights we've lost these past ten years. Sounds great, but if the system's only as good as the guy in charge, how are we any different from an absolute monarchy? Whatever happened to checks and balances?

Only Terrorists Have Seven Day’s Worth Of Food

2011-12-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

Here’s what Senator Rand Paul said about the National Defense Authorization Act, which will enable the military to imprison any American citizen suspected of terrorism without a trial, without a lawyer, without anybody even knowing they’ve been imprisoned:

"There are laws on the books now that characterise who might be a terrorist: someone missing fingers on their hands is a suspect according to the department of justice. Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist," Paul said. "If you are suspected because of these activities, do you want the government to have the ability to send you to Guantánamo Bay for indefinite detention?"

Guns and ammo? It’s our constitutional right to have these, but no surprise why an oppressive government wouldn’t trust citizens who do. Missing fingers? Presumably on the assumption you lost them while making a bomb. These both make sense, in a twisted authoritarian sort of way.

But food stockpiles? More specifically, food stockpiles lasting barely more than a week? I could – maybe – understand why a paranoid government would distrust someone with food sufficient to last several years: if you really are planning to become a domestic terrorist, it would behoove you to have a stockpile handy so you can vanish into the wilderness rather than make regular supply runs into town. Of course, there are also perfectly innocent reasons to keep that much food on hand: maybe you’re a Mormon with the religious obligation to store a couple years’ worth of supplies. Maybe you watch enough disaster porn to fear starvation if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts or a dinosaur-killing asteroid strikes. Maybe you’re poor, or fear becoming so, and stockpile non-perishable food to ensure that even without money, you can still eat. Maybe you live in an isolated rural area and fear a blizzard or other storm could keep you housebound for a long time. Maybe you live in hurricane country and already know firsthand about being cut off from civilization for awhile.

Still, I can understand – sort of –why a paranoid government would look askance at anyone with several years’ worth of food on hand. But seven days?

I suppose I run the risk of disappearing into a military black hole by admitting this, but what the hell: ever since I left my parents’ house and set up housekeeping on my own, I’ve always had at least two week’s worth of food on hand. As a college student working for tips in stripper bars I had an erratic income, so whenever canned or dried food I liked went on sale, I’d stock up. (Indeed, there were lean weeks when those canned and dried goods were the only thing keeping me fed.)

Now I’m a freelancer with an even more erratic income, so I still stock up on sale days: a few weeks ago I bought ten cans of baked beans – the maximum allowed for a customer – when the store sold them for 40 percent off. I also face occasional power outages, so I make sure to have a Sterno kit and plenty of heat-n-serve food like canned spaghetti; that came in handy when I lost electricity for a week after the unseasonably early blizzard last October.

But even if none of this applied to me – even if I were the happy-go-lucky sort who never worried about bad luck and therefore never planned for it – I’d often have more than seven days’ worth of food on hand for the simple reason that I only go grocery shopping once a week. And if there’s only one or two people in your household it’s hard not to buy more than seven day’s worth of food, not unless you eat the same thing every day: rice and flour are most often found in five- or ten-pound bags. A box of just-add-water pancake mix could feed a person for nearly a week. Eggs are sold by the dozen. Oatmeal, coffee, farina, sugar … if you buy “ingredients” rather than “processed meals,” you pretty much have to buy more than seven days’ worth at a time.

So there are plenty of non-terrorist reasons a person would have more than seven days’ worth of food stores; why has the government set such a ridiculously low cut-off for the “potential terrorist” threshold? Why pretend a week’s worth of food is equivalent to plutonium? The only explanation that makes any sense, especially in light of the indefinite-detention bill, is the explanation offered by a commenter on my last blog post:

My bet is that they are preparing for the total collapse of the global economy in the next year or so and will use this to take out anyone who doesn't accept their fate as serfs.

Sounds paranoid, I know. Utterly ridiculous. But what other explanation makes sense? Until the indefinite-detention bill, I routinely pooh-poohed the concerns of people who blathered on about FEMA concentration camps set up in the western deserts, or feared mass round-ups of citizens in the streets. But now? Unless Obama vetoes the bill – and he’s already said he won’t – any American suspected of terrorism can be made to disappear. And any American with more than a week’s worth of food in their pantry can be suspected of terrorism. And oh, dear God in whom I wish I could believe, I am so very terrified.

***
NEXT-DAY EDIT: After an uneasy night's sleep, another possible motivation occurs to me: Alabama has made headlines these past couple months, after its anti-illegal immigration initiatives resulted in a statewide loss of their agricultural force, and crops rotting in the fields en masse. Alabama officials have suggested filling the gap by using prison labor to bring in the crops. Maybe the government's motivation here is to ensure a steady supply of slave laborers, for any politically connected businesses that want it.

TSA Paved The Way For The NDAA

2011-12-16T00:41:00.000-08:00

Behold a new meaning for the phrase "it's important to keep a balanced diet": FEMA says all Americans should keep a three-day supply of food on hand in case of emergency. But the department of justice says anyone with more than seven day's worth of food is a potential terrorist, and the new defense authorization bill says anyone suspected of being a terrorist can be locked in a secret military prison without a trial, without a lawyer, without anyone even knowing you're there. So to keep your family safe, you need at least three day's worth of food but no more than seven. Got that?

I remain convinced that the TSA groping policies -- or rather, the millions of Americans who continued to fly despite them -- paved the way for the indefinite-detention bill. The thing about indefinite detention is this: most Americans will console themselves by thinking, "This won't be used against me and mine; it's only those other people who need to worry about it." But that was never the case with TSA groping (which started in airports and is spreading to other forms of mass transit); it happens to any American citizen who wishes to travel within the borders of his own country. It's not even something where people can say "It'll never happen to me" ... yet still, the majority went along with it. "Yeah, I don't like the groping, but what am I supposed to do -- vacation someplace within driving distance? Screw that."

Groping people without cause is a gross constitutional violation. Waterboarding people is a gross constitutional violation. The department of defense classifying peaceful protests as "low-level terrorism" is a breathtaking expression of contempt for constitutional freedoms. So why be surprised to hear the government now wants to do away with the right to a trial, the right to a lawyer, any rights at all? Ever since 9/11, the government violated the constitution over and over and over again; who thought it would stop of its own volition? Who was naive enough to think they'd ever say "Okay, we've seized enough power now; we don't need any more?"

Everyone who submitted to a TSA grope-down, for starters. Do you feel safe now, cowards?

Game Over

2011-12-14T20:10:00.000-08:00

My fellow Americans, we're screwed. The National Defense Authorization Act allowing the military to detain American citizens captured on American soil indefinitely, sans trial, sans lawyer, sans evidence, sans anything, has passed the House. And Obama has backed away from his threat of a veto; looks like he'll sign it into law. So much for the oath to defend the constitution of the United States. So much for the "land of the free."

Every good thing I once believed about my country is dead. We invade other countries on false pretenses. We torture people. We molest innocent citizens whose only "crime" is wishing to travel within the borders of their own country. And soon we'll start disappearing our own people, on the word of an anonymous tipster with a grudge.

I should've listened to the guidance counselor who urged me to become a doctor. Not that I have any interest in medicine, but if I were a physician, I could emigrate the fuck out of here. Instead, I'm trapped in a country where anyone suspected of terrorism can be made to disappear, and where anyone who protests in considered to engage in "low-level terrorism."

I don't enjoy contemplating my own mortality, but I always figured I'd either die of natural causes or (if unlucky) in an accident. Now it looks like I might very well die in some filthy secret military prison, after a bureaucrat decides some op-ed I wrote for the Guardian or what have you qualifies me as a threat to the commonweal.

Constitutional Amendments Four Through Eight, R.I.P.

2011-12-07T00:07:00.000-08:00

In an inspirational display of bipartisanship, Republicans and Democrats alike in the Senate passed a bill that would designate the US a “battlefield” in the war on terrorism, and give the military the right to detain American citizens, in America, indefinitely, with no trial, no evidence, no lawyer, no rights at all.

American citizens suspected of terrorism, of course. But terrorism means whatever the government says it does; in 2009 came the entirely unsurprising news that the Department of Defense believes – and teaches – that protests are a form of “low-level terrorism.” In which case pepper-spraying elderly women at a peaceful protest almost makes sense.

If suspicion of “terrorism” is all it takes for the military to disappear you …. that’s enough to make me nostalgic for the days when I had “only” to worry about TSA molesting me if I ever want to fly again. How long before the next step inspires nostalgia for the days when I needed “only” fear eternal military detention, sans evidence or a trial?

Bin Laden is dead, Saddam and Gaddafi too, yet the less boogeymen we have, the more power the government grabs in the name of fighting them. What can I, personally, do about this? Nothing comes to mind. I’ve been ranting about the decay of civil rights ever since the PATRIOT Act was new – for the past half-decade, I’ve even ranted as a bona fide journalist whose rants sometimes make it into mainstream publications with infinitely more readers than my little blog here has. Singing the same song over and over, in a slightly different key each time – and always nothing changed, nothing changed, nothing changed no wait it just got worse!

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is madness. But accepting that same result I’ve been getting is capitulation. I haven’t capitulated yet – I still refuse to fly in American airspace, because I have no interest in being unfaithful to my partner and if I did it wouldn’t be with some blue-gloved TSA thugwaffle – but how much longer do we have until avoiding airplanes isn’t enough to stay out of the government’s crosshairs?

Earlier this year, when the PATRIOT Act was extended yet again, I noted in the Guardian:

A few months before Bin Laden died, Pew Research did a survey showing he and al-Qaida had already lost most of their support throughout the Muslim world. So, with Bin Laden dead and his organisation toothless and despised by its own former power base, why not repeal the Patriot Act and return to the constitutional standards of 10 September 2001?

Oh, right: won't happen because the Patriot Act was never about Bin Laden in the first place.

And the terrifying new powers the government keeps grabbing for itself were never about keeping the country safe. We didn’t have to give up amendments four through eight during the Cold War or World War Two, and Hitler and the Soviets were bigger threats to us than Bin Laden could ever have hoped to be.

But what can I do about this? What can any of us do about this? Hell, just asking those questions might be enough to get people disappeared, in the America of the imminent future.

Elsewhere

2011-11-29T18:35:00.000-08:00

I summarize a reddit brouhaha for the Daily Dot.

Extended Metaphor, TSA-Style

2011-11-27T20:20:00.001-08:00

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."
--O'Brien to Winston Smith, 1984

"If you want a picture of the TSA, imagine dogshit smeared all over the sole of the boot."
-- Jennifer to whoever reads her blog, 2011

UC Davis: Those Cattle Cars Won't Fill Themselves, You Know

2011-11-21T07:50:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago, when I first saw headlines about police at UC Davis pepper-spraying nonviolent protesters on the campus, I didn't read the accompanying stories because I didn't have time: I'm only one person, an American person at that, and in America, "Police use violence against nonviolent protesters" has become the new "Child born to area woman": headlines like that appear every day, so you pay little attention unless you personally know one of the people involved.

Police Taser an tiny elderly woman, police attack a tiny pregnant woman, police beat a tiny college woman in the face -- like "TSA mistreats person in airport," it hardly qualifies as news in America anymore. It's just life.

So I might never have seen that UC pepper-spray video, were it not for the intense cheesiness of my local TV news broadcast: last night, while watching Fox's Sunday primetime cartoon lineup, I kept seeing commercials for the ten o'clock news: "Coming up next: [legitimate local news story], [another legitimate local news story], and what does the height of your heels say about the state of your finances?"

For some reason, I found that juxtaposition extremely funny: "How tragic, a young woman died at a Yale tailgate party last night, now here's a puff piece giving us an excuse to run stock footage of women walking in very sexy high heels! But we'll pretend it's an important analytical piece about the economy."

So when cartoons ended I didn't change the channel, but stuck around to watch the news and the "news," and after the legitimate local news stories but before the high-heeled puff piece, my local Connecticut broadcasters showed a video snippet of a pepper-spraying police officer 3,000 miles away.

The truly horrifying thing about the UC Davis videos is that the police look so calm. So bored. In other cases of police malfeasance toward Occupy Wall Street and its regional branch protests -- shooting a nonviolent war veteran in the face, beating the snot out of a woman half his size ... well, there's no justification for what police did in any of these cases, but there might sometimes be an excuse -- maybe the cops (rightly or wrongly) felt threatened, on high alert, drunk on adrenaline, and it's not humanly possible for them to do their best and clearest thinking once their fight-or-flight responses have kicked in. The cops who escalated matters in Oakland, New York, DC, Richmond et al -- maybe they can claim they thought they were acting in self-defense.

Not the cops at UC Davis. What chilled me about the video was how nonchalant the cop was. How casually he pepper-sprayed the quiet bowed heads of the students sitting before him, methodically going down the row to ensure every student got a good solid faceful of orange chemical weaponry.

Yesterday afternoon I acted with the same remorseless boredom, while cleaning some spilled coffee grounds from off my kitchen counter: Well, they're in a more-or-less straight line along one edge of my cutting board, so I'll start at this end and sloooowly make my way down. Whoops! Missed a spot. Lemme double-back with the sponge ... that's better. Not one individual spot on this line shall escape my notice. I'm gonna get 'em all.

Not that my thoughts were anywhere near that explicit. Truth be told, when I cleaned the coffee grounds yesterday I didn't think or feel much at all: I wasn't angry, frightened, or feeling threatened; it's just that whenever coffee grounds, flour dust, syrup drippings or any other foodstuff hits my countertop, it becomes "dirt" the second that happens, and dirt must be swept away before it attracts vermin.

Normal people have that attitude toward kitchen spills. Sociopaths have it toward human beings. And those cops at UC Davis weren't spraying pain chemicals point-blank into student's faces because the cops were afraid or even angry; they were just doing their jobs. When you sweep up dirt you don't worry about the dirt's well-being. The cops weren't angry at the students anymore than I was angry at my spilled coffee grounds. But neither did the cops concern themselves with the students' well-being, anymore than I give a damn for the feelings of my coffee.

Of course, I can see the difference between ground coffee and live people, same way I can distinguish between peaceful demonstrations and dangerous threats. Why does the University of California give weapons and badges to people who can't tell the difference in either case?

Those who make peaceful protest impossible make violent protest inevitable. I wish I could believe my government -- anybody at any level of my government -- understood that.

Football Flabbergastment

2011-11-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

I'm almost done playing catch-up for the post-blizzard week I spent twiddling my thumbs in lieu of doing actual paid work that requires electricity (soon as those old-fashioned foot-pedal-powered computers come on the market, I'm buying one); however, I'm wondering if maybe smoke inhalation from the hundreds of candles I used as my primary heat source that week hasn't made me a little loopy, because I keep reading this news story about the Penn State child-rape scandal and it persists in making no sense to me:

Penn State trustees fire Paterno, students riot
Thousands protest dismissal of longtime coach embroiled in child sex-abuse scandal

The winningest coach in major college football history was fired Wednesday night, sending angry students into the streets where they shouted support for Paterno and tipped over a news van. ... As word of the firings spread, thousands of students flocked to the administration building, shouting, "We want Joe back!" and "One more game!"

When I disagree with someone on a certain matter (as I do the majority of the time, being an individual-rights proponent living in an evermore police-state country), I always try to at least understand why my detractors feel as they do, and usually I think I succeed -- I don't support the evisceration of the second amendment, but I understand why many of my fellow Americans do. I don't support anything the TSA has ever done, but understand why a self-centered coward would feel differently. I even -- kind of -- understand how I, born and raised in a different time and place, might have believed "all women, myself included, should stay home and raise kids all day," "God exists and slavery is His will" or even "of all available candidates, that Hitler guy looks like the best option."

But I cannot understand how a modern American college student -- or any American born and raised after the mid-1960s or so -- could look at a rich and influential man who was complicit in covering up the rapes of dozens of children, and think HE is the victim for losing his job after his complicity was exposed. Can't wrap my mind around that at all. My best guess is that it goes something like this:

I of course do not approve of raping children or the coverup of same, no no no, but still think it's a goddamned shame the school has to lose all that sweet football money and important athletic prestige just because some tattletale couldn't keep his damned mouth shut. Not that I'm saying the rape of children is a good thing, mind you, unless a TSA agent does it for national security reasons which obviously was NOT a mitigating factor here, but there is a LOT of money at stake here, y'know, and alumni football fans to keep happy, and idealistic-purity arguments about not corrupting education or the law with the protection of athletic programs tend to be dreadfully ignorant of how the real world works, y'know?

Seven Days Of Darkness

2011-11-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

I finally got my electricity back today, after being without it since last Saturday night. It still might be awhile before I resume regular posting, though, because I have enormous amounts of work to do here. My living room looks like a refugee camp (which is pretty much what it was, this past week), I need to do some serious grocery shopping since my refrigerator and freezer are entirely empty (I tossed out their contents last Monday, once I realized there was no chance the power would come back in time to save the food), I'm outrageously behind on various freelance assignments and, while I'm not the type who responds to every unpleasantry in life with cries of "There oughtta be a law!", I do think there oughtta be a law saying that if you have trees on your property, you cannot let their branches grow over or through aboveground utility wires. (It's one thing if your tree outright falls over; I'd consider it unreasonable to expect trees to be far enough away from neighborhood wires to cause no damage if they topple. But branches that fall straight down after being overburdened by wet, heavy snow should NOT bring power lines down with them, and entire neighborhoods should not suffer a week of cold darkness just because some homeowner -- or city landscaping department -- is too damned irresponsible to keep their trees properly trimmed.)

Between spoiled food, lost freelance work, and the expense of using candle oil as a primary heat source, I personally lost over a thousand dollars from this storm (and Zod knows I was never too rich to begin with). Discarding leftovers, or half-empty condiment bottles and jelly jars, didn't bother me too much, but throwing away entire unopened packages of chicken, bacon and beef, the unopened half-gallon of milk, the almost-full cartons of expensive ice cream and so forth, outraged every frugal bone in my body (which is to say, every bone in my body except maybe a couple of the smaller ones in my inner ear). If I'd known (or even suspected) that I'd suffer such a power loss, I would NOT have bought any freezer or refrigerator food when I went grocery shopping last week.

On the other hand, once I could see the bottom of my fridge and freezer for the first time since we moved in here seven+ years ago, I discovered it was kind of gross, so maybe it's just as well I had the chance to clean it up; when the power came back on today, the first thing I did was turn on the heat, and the second thing I did was scrub down the inside of the fridge and freezer with hot soapy water.

Housekeeping advice: you really should clean out your fridge and freezer at least once every eight years.

The Year Without A Halloween

2011-11-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday: turned on the heat for the first time since last winter.
Last Friday: sunny, warm-ish and gorgeous.
Last Saturday: giant monster blizzard slams the Northeast and knocks out the power to my city.
Conclusion: Old Man Winter is a lazy selfish fuck who just rams it in without bothering to engage in foreplay.

I haven't had power or internet access since 11:55 Saturday night, and still don't; I'm writing this from the home of one of my partner's colleagues, who kindly offered to let me shower and work from here today while my partner is at work.

Our apartment, fortunately, is very well insulated. Even more fortunately, I always keep on hand a large supply of candles and lamp oil, which have been our only source of heat these past few days. I cleared off the coffee table and loaded it with enough lamps and candles to keep the room temperature at about 62 degrees (of course I extinguish all flames before going to bed, and indoor temps drop to the low fifties by the time we get up next morning). I've also been using two metal coffee cans as makeshift radiant heaters, by burning four or five tealight candles at the bottom of each one. Even at the rate we're burning through them, my candle and oil supplies should last at least another two weeks, and even the most pessimistic scenarios predict we'll have the power back by then.

The one problem I'm having is gasoline, since I stupidly neglected to fill my tank before the storm. I went out yesterday morning because I'd heard the business district one town over still had electricity. That was only half-true; when I drove I'd see one block with full power, including traffic lights, but then the next six block or so would have nothing. Intersections without traffic lights have been treated as four-way stop signs, so I needed about two hours to make a drive that would ordinarily have taken about twenty minutes, and burned a lot more gasoline as a result (I only had a quarter-tank -- about two and a half gallons -- to start with).

The few gas stations open for business had lines upwards of a mile long, with police there to prevent riots and line-cutting. I didn't bother trying to buy gas, not because I lack the patience to wait but because I seriously doubted I had enough gas to make it to the front of the line. Thus, my car is effectively undriveable until the gas stations near me are not merely open for business, but open for normal business, the kind where customers can pull right up to the pump rather than wait in a long line.

My partner sometimes complains that I'm difficult to buy Christmas presents for, but this year will be easy since I've been drawing up a survivalist wish list. I want one of those fancy battery packs that you charge in an ordinary electrical outlet, and then plug small appliances into it. (My partner still goes to work each day, since his job still has full power; he'd be able to recharge the battery pack at work if we had one.) I want a small, low-power TV which I can plug in to said battery pack (do such things even exist, now that TVs all have to pick up digital transmissions?). I want a battery-powered radio better than the one I have; it hasn't been able to pick up any of the all-news AM stations in my area, and what stations it does pick up are utterly useless to me: yeah, I already know Def Leppard gets hysterical when I'm near. I know Jim Morrison wants me to light his fire. (There's over twenty open flames on my coffee table every night; he can damned well light his own fire off one of them.) What I don't know is, what useful businesses are open near me? When is the power supposed to come back on? What is going on in the larger world outside my immediate line of sight? None of the high-power rock stations my cheap radio can pick up have deigned to tell me. But the radio has served one useful purpose: my partner finds it difficult to sleep without some sort of background white noise, so we keep the radio tuned to an all-static station. I rather like the idea that cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang now lulls us to sleep at night.

The mayor canceled trick-or-treating on our city last night; most cities in the area have done the same. The official excuse is that there are still live power lines down in many places, but if I had kids I wouldn't have let them trick-or-treat last night anyway, since our neighborhood is in pitch darkness: no streetlights, no porch lights, nothing but the occasional glow of a candle or battery lantern dimly shining out of the occasional window. Most of the other people who live in my building have either gone to stay with friends who have power, or moved into the shelter the city opened in a nearby middle school.

I'll end this now because I still have actual paid work to do; I'm supposed to turn in two stories for a certain magazine by this Thursday, but will only be able to do one, since the second required me to do phone interviews with certain people yesterday, and they have been incommunicado since Saturday. For the first time since I started my professional writing career, I will not be giving my editor a story expected of me, and this fact has me more pissed off than almost anything else about this storm.

TSA Outrage Roundup: One Week In America

2011-10-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

Behold, a partial listing of search terms that led people to my blog in the past couple of weeks:

TSA took my hair straightener

TSA inappropriately touched my scrotum

TSA hurt my breasts

TSA VIPR Tennessee

Can I carry shampoo on a plane

Andrea Abbott (the woman arrested for being "belligerent and verbally abusive" because she didn't want some TSA thug's meaty paws running over her daughter's crotch)

Sabrina Birge (the TSA ignoramus who told Abbott “No, it’s not an X-ray ... It is 10,000 times safer than your cell phone and uses the same type of radio waves as a sonogram,” because she's too stupid to know that sound waves and radio waves are vastly different things)

Thedala Magee (the gate-rapist who sexually assaulted Amy Alkon and then had the sociopathic chutzpah to sue her victim for $500,000, after Alkon identified the rapist by name)

And I'm sure I'd've had even more TSA-related blog visits, if I'd had the time to write about the TSA agent who found a vibrator in a woman's luggage and left her a perverted note. Or if I'd said anything about the driver's license checkpoints that Tennessee state troopers will hold on Halloween under the aegis of the DHS, TSA's Orwellian parent organization. Then, too, there's the huge clouds of chlorine gas TSA deliberately released into the Utah desert. The woman detained by TSA agents because she wore hand lotion which was mistaken for an explosive ("They had told me laughingly that this happens all the time," the woman later said). The woman approached by a BDO not because he had security concerns, but because he wanted to flirt with her.

And the links in that last paragraph only cover stories from the past week. How much longer will it be before we finally scrape the TSA dogshit off the sole of America's shoe?

Oakland PD: Those Who Make Peaceful Protest Impossible

2011-10-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't been following the various Occupy movements very closely, though a few weeks ago, when the movement was new, I wrote a post mentioning my complete agreement with the movement's basic complaint "the system is rigged to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor."

And I deplored the reports of police responding to the protests with violence, and also noted this:

John F. Kennedy famously said “Those who make peaceful protest impossible make violent protest inevitable.” Why don’t the police learn this in their academies? Do the fools – and the greater fools who speak approvingly of their misbehavior – not realize that if enough people decide the system cannot be reformed from within – if enough people decide outright revolt is the only answer – then all is lost? If violent revolution comes to this country, whether from the left wing or the right, then whatever phoenix rises from the ashes will almost certainly be something much, much worse than what they burn down.

And last night, the even greater fools in the Oakland police department responded in force against the non-violent protesters, going after them with tear gas and rubber bullets, and one of those bullets shot Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen in the face. According to the Huffington Post, Olsen's roommate Keith Shannon said Olsen "was simply one of the marchers. 'He was just hit by a projectile,' said Shannon, who did not attend the march but heard about the incident from eyewitnesses. 'He wasn't near a police officer when it happened'." After shooting Olsen, police lobbed a flashbang grenade at the people who went to help him. Olsen is now in the hospital, unconscious and with swelling of the brain.

Twenty years ago, I would have been shocked and surprised to hear American police chose to attack bystanders rather than protect them. Not in today's America.

In related news, British writer Jeff Berwick, fortunate enough to have an outsider's view of the country, published an essay titled "The US is fast becoming a third world police state." It's worth reading in full, but I'll quote only the small section discussing Occupy protesters in Phoenix:

The photos coming out of the US continue to look like something you'd see in a country like North Korea or in the old Soviet Bloc.

This photo, from a small gathering of Occupy Wall Street protesters in Phoenix, shows that not only the police outnumbered the protesters but showed the level of intimidation and force used against just a few people sitting in a park. Their crime? They were there after "curfew". I've been searching my copy of the US Constitution for any reference to curfew but have yet to find anything.

Yeah, well, I've been searching my copy of the constitution for any references to where it says you must submit to government agents fondling your genitalia if you want to travel within the borders of your own country, and I can't find anything either. Nor can I find where it says the president can order an American citizen executed without trial.

I want America to go back to the "free country" we used to be. And I don't want the country I have now to erupt into violent revolution. And I grow evermore terrified and evermore pessimistic, fearing I'll be disappointed in both.

Jumping The Shark: SPLC Edition

2011-10-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Southern Poverty Law Center has long been a solution desperately in search of a problem, but they absolutely jumped the shark last week when they claimed that a "Nullification Now" conference sponsored by the Tenth Amendment Center was actually a hotbed of dangerous far-right extremism.

Who are these terrifying nullifying right-wingers that so concern the SPLC? Conference attendees included "Roughly 100 people [who] attended the conference organized by the Los Angeles-based Tenth Amendment Center, a group focused on how to weaken the reach of the federal government through nullification. Their central idea—that each state has the constitutional right to invalidate and disregard virtually any federal law—relies on a spurious interpretation of the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states and the people any power not explicitly given to the federal government, and flies in the face of more than two centuries of jurisprudence. .... There were also representatives from groups advocating for the legalization of raw milk—to limit the government’s regulatory power to ensure food safety."

Seriously. The SPLC now slaps the "far-right extremist" label on anybody who thinks the federal government is overstepping its constitutional bounds, including left-wing crunchy-granola hippie types who want to drink raw milk.

Somebody should read them the fable of the boy who cried wolf. One of these days, the SPLC really is going to uncover a terrifying racist threat to the republic ... and not a soul will believe them. At the very least, the SPLC should learn to distinguish between “racist terrorists plotting armed insurrection” and “three lonely teenagers who meet in mom’s basement after school to tell racist jokes and bitch about people they don’t like, and call themselves the ‘Valiant Kickass +17 Spell of Awesomeness Totally Cool Saviors of the White Race Chicks Dig Us,’” and according to SPLC mailings I’m supposed to freak out because there’s a VK+17SATCSWRCDU chapter less than 250 miles from me, and they’ll be able to make that trip to my house in less than five hours if their leader passes his test and gets his drivers’ license next month.

A friend of mine who grew up in Birmingham reports that, as of the late 1990s, the highest-ranking black employee at the SPLC was the janitor. A photo of high-ranking SPLC executives looks little different from a photo of the high-ranking members of Stormfront. And if the SPLC wants to call me a bigot because I support the Bill of Rights in its entirety, tenth amendment included, the SPLC is cordially invited to kiss my left-wing libertarian ass.

Another Brick Out Of The Wall

2011-10-20T23:52:00.000-07:00

Noting that a building’s collapsing is fairly simple, but detailing the downfall of each individual brick impossibly complicated. So too it goes for anyone trying to note every little detail of the collapse of the America I knew, an America that could plausibly lay claim to being the freest country in the world. But here’s a few of the small bricks that tumbled, just in the last week or so:

The state of Tennessee isn’t usually described by such terms as “progressive” or “forward-looking,” but on Tuesday it won praise from Homeland Security for being the first state to deploy TSA agents on Interstate highways. Agents of the not-at-all-ominously named VIPR squad – you might remember them from such fiascoes as grope-searching Amtrak passengers (including a nine-year-old boy) in Savannah after they finished their journey and disembarked from the train – were deployed at weigh stations and bus stations throughout the state. Officials admitted the VIPR deployment wasn’t in response to any particular threat; Tennessee Highway Patrol spokescop Tracy Trott discussed the importance of paying attention to detail and reminded people (seriously) that a police officer caught Timothy McVeigh after pulling him over for driving a car without a license plate. Of course, police already had the power to pull over unlicensed cars; they don’t need mass searches and interrogations of truck drivers on the highways.

In New York City, a narcotics detective surprised exactly nobody when he testified that cops routinely plant drugs n innocent people to meet arrest quotas.

Alabama proposed ending the problem of illegal immigrants taking farm jobs away from unemployed Americans by having prison laborers take farm jobs away from unemployed Americans.

Some Occupy protesters were arrested for being disruptive in a Citibank, and it turned out the loudest and most disruptive of all was an undercover cop presumably goading people so he could arrest them. The arrested protesters were lucky, by modern American standards; at least the cop didn’t plant drugs on them too.

History Can Bite Me (First World Problem Rant)

2011-10-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

I actually miss the days when the History Channel was all Hitler all the time, because at least Hitler and the Nazis were actual history (if not necessarily the sum total of it), as were "Hitler's Bodyguards" and "Hitler's Inner Circle," "Hitler's Rise to Power" and "Hitler's Fall from Power" and even "Hitler's Dry Cleaner," if that's what they're reduced to. But I just went through what my cable-on-demand calls "history" offerings, and found nothing remotely historical about any of it. Screw ice road truckers, screw pawn shops, screw hairy bikers and double-screw anyone who takes Nostradamus or Mayan Apocalypse 2012 seriously ... just because such shows deserve to be history doesn't justify their presence on that channel.

Marketing suggestion: take this stuff off History, give it its own network, add a cooking show featuring easy recipes for meth and roadkill, and with History subsidized by ad revenue from the White Trash Channel you could afford lots of new documentaries about Hitler, and maybe even a show or two about something historical that doesn't require a swastika.

Devils In The Details

2011-10-12T10:29:00.000-07:00

I've paid little-to-no attention to details of the alleged Iranian terror plot our Fearless Leaders have uncovered, though I gather it involves wicked Iranians wishing to kill a Saudi Arabian diplomat on US soil. (Only a truly wicked country, like Iran, would want to attack an official from a freedom-loving nation like Saudi Arabia, America's chief ally and casus belli in this-here war on terror).

But I let my mind drift out of focus rather than pay attention to the specific details of the plot, for the same reason I drift off when homeless schizophrenics go into detail regarding just how the Illuminati and the Jews use poisonous jet contrails to control the populace: once I recognize a steaming pile of shit, why worry about details like "Just how many undigested corn-kernels of truth might be in here, anyway?"

Or maybe the Iranian terror plot is not bullshit, this time. It could happen; even the boy who cried wolf told the truth once. I was discussing the matter with my friend Thoreau (who blogs at Unqualified Offerings) and he asked a pertinent question: How is it that Khaled El-Masri (who was innocent) gets sent to Bagram after being captured in Europe, but Iranian spies trying to hire Mexican drug cartel assassination squads are sent to court?

I suspect El-Masri's innocence is exactly why he didn't go to court. That would make the US look pretty stupid, trying to convict a guy who's entirely innocent. Remember: where the "war on terror" is concerned, finding and stopping actual terrorists is not the government's primary concern; if it were, the FBI would not consider "goading unstable teenagers into attempting half-ass attacks so they can be arrested" a better use of resources than "finding people willing and able to commit terrorist attacks by themselves." If stopping terror (rather than inflicting it on innocent people) were the government's chief motivator, the TSA would pull a few people off molestation duty to check the contents of airplane cargo holds instead.

Seriously: where our Fearless Leaders are concerned, what the hell difference does it make if the Iranians are guilty or not? It's actually better and more convenient if they are innocent, because shipping them to foreign torture chambers and inventing stories about what they did is a hell of a lot easier than actually finding and producing evidence sufficient for a conviction in a court of law.

Even Drones Can Fly Away

2011-10-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

So: if the United States claims the right to use robotic attack drones to kill American citizens in foreign countries, does that mean we’ll say nothing when China inevitably uses drones to kill dissidents who have gone into exile?

As an American patriot, I suppose I should be outraged upon learning some unknown enemy infected the military’s robotic kill-drone fleet with a computer virus. Instead, I’m disappointed the virus wasn’t worse; if the drones won’t boomerang back to attack their operators, I’d at least like them to explode harmlessly over unpopulated areas. A mere keylogging virus isn't enough to make the government back down from using them.

Once upon a time, I would’ve opposed the use of war robots on the grounds that robots cannot tell the difference between (for example) an armed fighter and an unarmed civilian. But the human soldiers we have over there don’t bother telling the difference either, so it would be hypocrisy for me to oppose robots on such grounds. Instead, I oppose them because they’ll result in the US getting involved in even more foreign wars than the variety pack we’re fighting already.

In all my life there hasn’t been a day when the US wasn’t fighting some war or other, declared or undeclared, because the government thinks “Why not go to war? We can hurt the hell out of them, and they can’t even touch us,” and war stopped being the option of last resort and became the status quo.

On the other hand, if I take a long-run view of things, I should support the military’s use of drones because inevitably, once they perfect the technology, our rivals will copy it in short order. When I see the first drones flying over my neighborhood, will they belong to my government, or some other?

Foolish question; they’ll be our drones, of course, after local police departments across the country add them to their ever-expanding repertoire of military hardware for use against citizens. (No wonder they call us civilians now.)

Occupy Wall Street. Or Something.

2011-10-06T01:18:00.000-07:00

I haven’t seen what-if-any actual concrete policy solutions are being proposed by the Occupy Wall Street movement, nor even why its members figure occupying Wall Street makes more sense than Washington, but I completely agree with the assumption behind it: the system is rigged to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. What I don’t know is, what-if-any politically feasible chance there is of fixing it.

Nothing surprising in the reports of police violence; cops have had a hostile, us-versus-them mentality toward the public they presumably serve and protect ever since they started referring to us as “civilians.”

John F. Kennedy famously said “Those who make peaceful protest impossible make violent protest inevitable.” Why don’t the police learn this in their academies? Do the fools – and the greater fools who speak approvingly of their misbehavior – not realize that if enough people decide the system cannot be reformed from within – if enough people decide outright revolt is the only answer – then all is lost? If violent revolution comes to this country, whether from the left wing or the right, then whatever phoenix rises from the ashes will almost certainly be something much, much worse than what they burn down.

Or perhaps I’m just getting carried away. Experience tells me American complaint and protest movements tend to fizzle out into nothingness – but there’s always the potential to prove experience wrong.

Check out the individual anecdotes on the We Are The 99 Percent blog. A few of the case studies suffer from the same problem I mentioned in my last post: people whose financial difficulties stem chiefly from their own poor decision making, rather than the poor economy. (Advice: if you’re 20 years old, still in school and unmarried, having a baby now is a fantastically bad idea even if you’re not deep in debt.)

Even so, the system is rigged. Most of the 99-percenter posts complain of high rates of student loan debt, and I see something not merely corrupt but outright evil in a system that will spend limitless amounts of public money to spare billionaire financiers the humiliation of being demoted to mere millionaire status, but offers no forgiveness – not even the option of legal bankruptcy – to some poor twentysomething whose only “crime” was having been a teenager naïve enough to believe what every adult authority figure had ever told her: “Go to college and work hard, and you can make a better life for yourself. That student-loan debt is good debt. It’s a wise investment!”

That was definitely true in the Baby Boomers’ day. And still mostly true in mine – but even then, in the four years I went to Cheap State U., in-state tuition costs at CSU rose almost 70 percent, and have risen at similar rates ever since.

Now? Student loans are definitely a wise investment for the banks who make them – the government “guarantees” such loans via making it illegal to discharge the debts in bankruptcy. Rack up gambling debt in a casino, max out a credit card on whiskey and temporary tattoos – that debt can be forgiven if you prove you can’t afford repayment, but college debt cannot. The student loan debacle is almost entirely a government creation: the government backs the loans, the loans inflate the tuition costs, and government then denies students the “clean slate but bad credit score” bankruptcy option offered almost every other debtor in the United States.

When I was in college applying for federally subsidized student loans – the ones where the feds paid the interest until I graduated and started making payments – I calculated the maximum amount I could borrow, plus the amount of interest the feds were going to pay, and I really wished they would’ve offered the option “We’ll just give you the interest outright, in exchange for which we won’t subsidize any loans for you.”

But how would the banks make any money that way? Other than the bailout money they get as a reward for screwing up, I mean.

Look at much of what’s wrong with America today. The war on drugs: there’s no money to get medicine to sick people who need it, because we’re spending it all imprisoning sick people who take unapproved medicine. The Endless Wars in Asia and the Middle East: there’s no money to repair our own country’s crumbling infrastructure, because we’re spending it all bombing other countries’ infrastructures into rubble. The TSA’s war on American flyers… in each instance you can say “Behold, another situation wherein poor nobodies suffer while rich guys with political connections get richer.” There’s lots of money to be made imprisoning drug users and confiscating their property, making bankruptcy-proof loans to students, building drone bombers and nude scanners and ad infinitum.

So yeah, I’m a capitalist and a libertarian and still I empathize with the 99ers who say “The game is rigged.” I don’t agree with all their arguments or individual anecdotes, of course, but the basic recognition of an inherently unjust system? Hell, yes.

Lay Off The Poverty Porn

2011-09-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

Whenever a journalist writes about a current social or political trend, the story is supposed to include a couple of case studies. It's not enough to report "This problem exists"; you must find some people suffering from said problem and willing to discuss it on the record.

For some problems, that's easy: when I was a staff reporter for an alt-weekly, and wrote on a subject like "Medical marijuana users push for legalization," all I had to do was call various pro-legalization organizations and introduce myself as a sympathetic journalist, and the organizations were happy to put me in touch with medical MJ users willing to chat.

It's harder to write hard-times stories; many people affected by them are ashamed of their newly reduced circumstances. Suppose you need to write on the theme "The food bank says donations are down and requests for help are up, with the economy likely to blame"; ideally, you need someone who (because of the economy) recently cut back on former food-bank donations, and someone else who became a food-bank client for the first time. Except those first-timers don't want to talk to you, don't want their name or face in a news story about the Nouveau Pauvre, and when you finally do find someone willing to openly discuss their reliance on food banks, you often find yourself facing an unpleasant truth: this person has one of the least sympathetic sob stories ever.

Relevant anecdote: two winters ago, when I worked for a dying local daily, an unfortunate freelancer was hired to write a story about a local charity that bought coats and other cold-weather gear for poor kids who couldn't afford it. The point, of course, was to make readers want to donate time or money to said charity.

The day the story broke, I read it online and winced before I finished the second paragraph. The case study -- the individual client chosen to put a Human Face on those whom the charity helps -- was a never-married woman who quit her cashier job at McDonald's after catching pregnant with her ninth child.

She and her children aren't poor because the economy stinks or there's too many holes in the social safety net; they're poor because the woman is a cataclysmic idiot who refuses to learn from her mistakes, and because you can't raise a family of ten on a minimum-wage income insufficient for one. And sure enough, many people who commented on the story pointed this out and added, "Well, I WAS going to donate some of my hard-earned money to this cause, but after seeing what utter basket cases that money will be spent on...."

The next winter, when the paper ran another story about the cold-weather charity, the editor made the wise decision to simply run a press release, with no case studies. Kudos to the paper, and I mean that sincerely; winters can get pretty frigid around here, and it's bad enough being one of the nine offspring of a pathologically irresponsible parent without getting frostbite, too.

So I cringe when I read mainstream news stories about the Plight of the Poor, because all-too-often they turn out to be the Plight of the Makers of Consistently Bad Decisions. On New Year's Day 2007, just before the economy went sour, I wrote an irritated post about one such story; the poor-me woman in question kept her three pet dogs even though she couldn't afford to feed herself and the dogs repeatedly got her evicted from her rental housing.

And I cringed again when I tried reading today's LA Times story "Fear, Uncertainty are common themes as families face economic toll." The first case study:

Staring resolutely ahead, a heavily pregnant Veronica Long pushed a stroller along 5th Street in downtown Los Angeles, past the junkies, the psych patients and those with no place to go. She ignored the whispers from crack dealers outside San Julian Park and strangers who hollered at her: “Go home!”
Before the recession, home was a two-bedroom house with a pool in Reseda. For most of this year, it was a shelter on skid row.

Veronica's husband, Jonathan, had a busy studio where he recorded and produced up-and-coming rap, hip-hop and R&B artists. But when the economy tanked, his clients ran out of money and he had to pawn his equipment to pay the bills.

The family downsized to an apartment in Long Beach, then a friend's spare room in Corona. When the friend was evicted last year, Jonathan, 35, Veronica, 34, and their four children ages 3 to 8 were homeless.

In hindsight, perhaps having so many children while still heavily in debt was not the best decision. But what's done is done, and there's no point blaming the couple for it now (though the soda and large bag of Cheetos visible in the photograph leads me to suspect that whatever food money they do have, they're not spending too wisely).

The Longs squeezed into a room at the Union Rescue Mission, which has turned over two floors of its main shelter to families washing up on skid row. Soon after, Veronica found out she was pregnant. (She thought she couldn't have more children because of a medical condition.)

Sigh. I'm guessing she plans to keep Baby #5 when he or she arrives.

Jonathan was thrilled when he found a job doing event security, but the work was sporadic. Other employers turned him down. He thought it might have to do with the tattoos covering his arms, a relic of his music industry days. When a young boy admired them in the hallway, he snapped: “I regret every single one.”

In hindsight, perhaps spending a lot of money on elaborate tattoos while deeply in debt and trying to raise an ever-growing brood of children was even less of a good decision. But what's done is done, he already feels bad about it and there's no point criticizing the decision now, though if he thinks his heavily tattooed arms are keeping him from job opportunities, why doesn't he wear long sleeves?

On a June morning, the family piled their belongings into two minivans and moved into transitional housing in Koreatown operated by Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. They pulled up in front of a building on a quiet, residential street. ... Their ground-floor apartment had two roomy bedrooms with bunk beds. ... They didn't stay long. After a dispute with staff over house rules, the family moved to an L.A. Family Housing transitional facility in North Hollywood.

No mention of exactly what those disputed house rules were. If my broke self had four kids to support and a fifth on the way and Jewish Family Service offered us a free furnished two-bedroom in a nice neighborhood, I'd keep a kosher kitchen if that's what they demanded. No bacon and no cheeseburgers still beats no place to live.

On the other hand, if Jewish Family Services required the man and his sons to get circumcised, then I genuinely sympathize with the family here. But if that were the case, I'm pretty sure the story would have mentioned it.

I have no doubt many Americans today are in dire financial straits through no fault of their own: illness not covered by insurance, no-fault job loss followed by prolonged unemployment ... even someone with no debt and a decent financial cushion can land in deep trouble, if such calamities strike. I wish the LA Times had written about such a couple rather than Jonathan and Veronica.

Maybe the second couple has a bit more sense:

Three years after the collapse of his six-figure income, Eric Petersen ...[and his] family has managed to hang on to its dream home in Coto de Caza, a gated community with golf courses and polo grounds that at one time was the primary setting for the reality TV series “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” But inside their five-bedroom house, which they bought for $375,000 in 1997, there are signs of trouble. Laundry hangs in the garden because they can't afford to fix the dryer. The facing is coming off the kitchen cabinetry. The shelves are stocked with handouts from a food pantry. When the housing market peaked, Eric, 46, made up to $360,000 a year...But in the last three years, he has made just $70,000 on real estate transactions, most of it on a single deal. Many months he made nothing.
The Petersens burned through their savings, credit cards, home equity line and help from relatives. This year, they missed two mortgage payments....

But they're still "hanging onto their dream home." Though I don't know how much longer they can keep that up; the story says monthly expenses for themselves and their two sons "come to about $7,000 a month, including some $4,000 in mortgage payments." Seven grand a month equals $84,000 per year. If you're trying to live an $84,000 annual lifestyle (including $48,000 in mortgage payments) on a $23,000 annual income, you again fail to meet the criteria for "sympathetic story about Americans in dire straits despite living within their means."

The third case study should have been the first; no extravagant mortgage or other debt mentioned, but the couple both work for public schools and their hours and wages have been cut. (Granted, I've known for a while now that public-sector employment costs have grown too high to be sustainable in the long run, and thus would never bet my long-term future on a no-power public job, but I can't blame them for lacking the insights gleaned from reading snarky libertarian blogs).

I still have no doubt that in this dreadful economy, many millions of Americans are poor through no fault of their own, yet the media Case Studies all-too-often focus on "these people are idiots" scenarios, which in turn makes it easy for others to insist "ALL poor people are idiots" leading inevitably to "we need not help the poor at all." According to the LA Times, after all, two out of three poor families have entitlement issues and the third was dreadfully naive.

Troy Davis: Killing A Scapegoat Is Easier Than Finding The Actual Murderer

2011-09-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

Despite ample evidence suggesting Troy Davis did not commit the murder for which he sits on Georgia's death row, despite ample witnesses saying police and prosecutors badgered them into implicating Davis, the state of Georgia still plans to execute him tonight.

Prosecutors fabricating evidence to convict innocent people is nothing new in contemporary American justice; last year I protested the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court due to her stance on the matter. And I'll just repeat now what I said then:

I’d like to offer a modest proposal to cut government costs: let’s abolish the criminal court system altogether, and replace it with a big red-white-and-blue top hat of the sort Uncle Sam wears in patriotic posters. Next time a crime is committed, we’ll collect the names of all minority men in the area (and a few especially unpopular white people), dump their names in the hat and then pick a name or two out at random. Whichever name we pick will thus be dubbed “the guilty party” and locked in prison for however long the crime they never committed warrants.

Why not? If the American court system is fine with imprisoning innocent people, why force prosecutors to waste time and money creating a frame job first? Let’s just cut out the middlemen and put the innocent directly in jail. And Kagan can file an amicus brief explaining why this is just fine, and Obama can praise her for her integrity, excellence and passion for the law.

And so can the legislators in Georgia. When a crime is committed it's very very important that somebody be punished for it; whether the punished somebody is actually guilty doesn't matter so much.

The Technological Problems Of Retirement

2011-09-21T11:43:00.000-07:00

Still no solution in sight for the whole "Baby Boomers/Social Security/WTF can we do to pay for all this?" retirement conundrum. (I am confident that whatever quick-fix solution our government proposes, it definitely won't involve "cutting back on military expenditures almost as large as every other military on earth combined," though.)

But it's a definite problem either way: a pay-as-you go program like Social Security worked well enough back when we had a ratio of 16 workers to every retiree; now there's three workers for every retiree, and the ratio is predicted to drop to 2:1 in a couple of decades.

Much of the retirement-funding difficulty stems from a current technological glitch: "Caring for people too old and sick to care for themselves" is the only aspect of modern existence I can think of where machinery/technology/automation has ultimately brought us to a situation requiring more human labor than before, rather than less.

Consider the matter "People need clothing appropriate for the weather." Getting enough clothes for everyone -- even those too young, old or sick to work -- hasn't been a problem for decades, not when a modern machine can spit out more clothes in one hour than a human weaver and tailor working together can make in their entire lifetimes. "People need food" -- also not a problem for over a century; when famines hit today, it isn't because "there's simply not enough food to feed those people" but because "those people's evil government is keeping food away from them."

So for an elderly retiree (or any person of any age) today, if you ask the question "How much human labor and effort is needed to keep that person clothed and fed?" the answer is "very little, especially compared to the old days." (I've mentioned before how my current winter wardrobe, purchased in secondhand stores, cost me roughly one median day's wages in all, though in the medieval era a wardrobe that size would have been literally worth more than its weight in gold.) Feeding and clothing the elderly isn't the problem now; the problem is providing hands-on medical or everyday-living care they can no longer do for themselves.

And there, technology has (temporarily) made matters worse: we can keep people alive who would've died before, but now that they're still alive, we need to pay actual people to care for them, because our robot and mechanical technology isn't advanced enough to handle it. This wouldn't be a problem if we had Jetsons-level tech, where an ordinary middle-class family can easily afford a tireless robot maid that dedicates 24 hours a day to turning Grandma over so she doesn't get bedsores; changing Grandma's clothes, bedding and bedpans when necessary; helping Grandma if she falls down and can't get up ... but for right now, if Grandma needs someone to do all these things for her, it takes a lot of different people working together to achieve this.

A friend of mine pointed out that Japan has been developing robots for that exact reason -- their population demographic is aging even more rapidly than ours -- but so far, it's not going over very well. But Japanese robot technicians would do well to avoid uncanny valley situations by making "machines" rather than "robots." My dishwasher does not in any way look like a poorly paid immigrant servant scrubbing plates at the kitchen sink, and doesn't attempt to; it's a machine rather than a robot. And if I one day get so incapacitated that I can't even load the dishwasher myself, a machine that takes dirty dishes from the sink/my table and loads them into the dishwasher need not look anything like a person, either.

Indeed, in many ways robots would be preferable to actual human contact; if ever I get so dependent that I can't even wipe my own ass after visiting the bathroom, I'd much rather use a robotic asswipe machine* than need another person to do it. (*Though if it came to that, 'twould probably be easier to just install a bidet.)

Unfortunately, I have the gloomy suspicion it'll take us a couple of centuries before technology grants us affordable full-service robot servants, and that's not soon enough to give people today a good answer to the question "WTF can we do to pay for the whole Baby Boomer retirement thing?"

Linguistics And The TSA

2011-09-20T19:25:00.000-07:00

My nth anti-TSA column is up at the Guardian.

Today's lesson in vulgar Americanisms is "camel toe", a slang term meaning "the front half of a woman's genitalia, or the shape thereof". To properly use it in a sentence, you can say, "Those tight trousers give her such camel toe, when you talk to her, you hear echoes" or "the Transportation Security Administration demands to see or feel the camel toe of every female airline passenger in America, in case she's smuggling weapons there."

The one-year anniversary of the TSA's mandatory molestation policy is next month.

This Post Is Actually A Beer Commercial

2011-09-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

The news media is all abuzz upon learning that Obama (or rather his servants) brews his own beer in the White House. Maybe they can sell it and use the money to pay down the national debt? I don't know what they should call it -- my own partner has a fondness for precious little microbrews with names like "Pretentia-Brau" -- but if the White House does enter the beer-selling business, I have an AWESOME advertising slogan:

ObamaBrew. Nowhere near as intoxicating as the potent pot I used to smoke or kickass cocaine I used to snort, but if you drink it, at least I won't have my attorney general arrest you for ingesting the exact same intoxicants I enjoyed back in the day. I mean, unless you drink it before your 21st birthday, you filthy alcoholic criminal slime.

What, too long? Maybe I should try something shorter and punchier: "Combining the great taste of hops with the greater taste of hypocrisy."

Philosophical Question Regarding The Whole Solyndra Thing

2011-09-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the Solyndra high-tech green-energy save-the-Earth solar company shut down a year or so after getting 535 million federal dollars, and now there's allegations the firm was never trustworthy to begin with, and I still can't decide if this was better or worse than the bailouts: assuming you find it acceptable to hand hundreds of millions of public dollars over to certain select private companies (those with the right connections, natch), is it better to give companies this money before they fail, or afterwards?

The Evolution of Keith Albow

2011-09-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dr. Keith Albow in contemporary America, here in the Year of Someone Else's Lord 2011: "PANIC and don't let your kids watch that TV dance show with Chaz Bono on it, or they might grow up like him."

Alternate universe version of Dr. Keith Albow, writing op-eds forty years ago: "White parents, don't let your offspring watch Soul Train lest they grow up and catch Teh Blackness."

Me, intensely annoyed: "If nontraditional heterosexual procreative sexuality freaks you out, why the hell are you watching dance shows anyway? You wanna freak out about gays and trans, learn your stereotypes."

TSA Continues To Insult America's Intelligence

2011-09-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

For the third or fourth time since implementing its genital-fondling policy last October, the TSA has announced that henceforth, children under 12 shall be exempt from molestation; not until American citizens turn 13 will TSA claim the right to feel our goodies. (The logic is, if molesting children is a bad thing, the badness goes away once they hit puberty.) Janet Napolitano has also raised the possibility of ending the take-off-your-shoes policy:

"We are moving towards an intelligence and risk-based approach to how we screen," Napolitano is quoted as saying by Politico. "I think one of the first things you will see over time is the ability to keep your shoes on. One of the last things you will [see] is the reduction or limitation on liquids."

At least she was honest enough to say they're moving toward an intelligence- and risk-based approach, rather othan pretend we have an intelligent, risk-based approach now. But she said nothing about the hands-down-your-underpants or photograph-your-genitalia policies. The hope is, if you're allowed to keep your shoes on, the inability to keep your pants on too maybe won't bother you so much.

This Is Who I Actually Live With

2011-09-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

I have never seen an episode of Space: 1999 (though I have reels depicting an episode of it, somewhere in my View-Master collection). However, my partner spent a good part of his teenage years active in whatever fandom the show had, and via him I gather the story had something to do with the moon blowing out of Earth's orbit, and either yesterday or today was the anniversary of when that happened in the Space: 1999 universe, so here's my One True Love waxing nostalgic about it over at SF Signal .

I'm pretty sure we're already supposed to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland by now in the Star Trek timeline, too. Chances are we're only a few years behind schedule for that.

9/11: Never Forget (Because They'll Never Let You)

2011-09-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

I wrote and published my obligatory 9/11 ten-year anniversary post last week, so I could get it out of the way and then move on with the rest of my life (as far too many of my countrymen refuse to do).

The Feral Genius Offers Heartfelt Congratulations To International Celebrity Thedala Magee

2011-09-06T17:48:00.001-07:00

All hail the Streisand Effect! Only a few short hours ago, I read and blogged about Thedala Magee, the abusive TSA agent who is attempting to sue columnist Amy Alkon after the latter wrote a blog post complaining about Magee's treatment of her. Alkon wrote that post over four months ago, and since then, neither she nor Magee have exactly been household names.

But that's likely to change, thanks to Magee's gloriously clueless lawsuit. In the few hours since I wrote about it, here on my rather obscure blog (if you're reading this, you're statistically exceptional), I've had visitors searching for "Thedala Magee" coming not only from America, but from the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany .... congratulations, Ms. Magee! Instead of being known only to the relatively few people who either read Alkon's blog or frequent TSA opposition forums, your name is known to everyone on the internet. If my obscure little blog's getting that many hits, just imagine how many are going to TechDirt, Forbes, Popehat, and the ever-growing number of other sites covering your travesty of a lawsuit.

I do know that either Sabrina Birge or friends or relatives thereof commented here a couple months ago, after I criticized Birge's behavior on behalf of the TSA; I can only hope Thedala Magee is in the habit of Googling herself as thoroughly as she diddles innocent travelers. I also suspect TSA higher-ups wish Magee had simply let the issue drop; the last thing TSA wants is a jury contemplating its procedures to decide whether or not they constitute sexual assault.

TSA Gate-Rapist Thedala Magee Sues An Advice Columnist

2011-09-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

Last April, when I wrote for the Guardian about a TSA agent's pornographic search of six-year-old Anna Drexel's body and underwear, I also noted this:

A TSA spokesman said Anna's groping "followed proper current screening procedures". Not a bad apple, not an isolated incident; just standard TSA procedure – which Janet Napolitano has said she wants to expand beyond airlines to all forms of mass transit.
Two days after calling the Drexel incident "proper", the TSA told CNN that expressing "contempt against airport passenger procedures" is one of the "behavioural indicators" of a "high-risk passenger". It's not enough for them to fondle you; you have to pretend to like it.

Apparently, advice columnist Amy Alkon didn't want to play pretend. Five days after that Guardian column and eleven days after TSA deemed "contempt" a "high-risk activity," Alkon wrote a justifiably furious blog post:

Don't Give The TSA An Easy Time Of Violating Your Rights
It shouldn't be emotionally easy, earning a living by violating people's rights.

On March 31st, when I came through the metal detector and realized that everyone in the TSA line to my United flight was getting searched, I got teary. I was teary at the prospect of being touched by a government worker -- entirely without probable cause. I was very upset, both because of the physical violation and because I love our now too-often-crumpled-up Constitution and Bill of Rights.

I can hold back the tears...hang tough...but as I was made to "assume the position" on a rubber mat like a common criminal, I thought fast. I decided that these TSA lackeys who serve the government in violating our rights just don't deserve my quiet compliance. And no, I won't go through the scanner (do you trust the government that they're safe?) and allow a government employee to see me naked in the course of normal and totally ordinary business travel: flying from Los Angeles to Binghamton, New York, to attend an evolutionary psychology conference for my work.

Basically, I felt it important to make a spectacle of what they are doing to us, to make it uncomfortable for them to violate us and our rights, so I let the tears come. In fact, I sobbed my guts out. Loudly. Very loudly. The entire time the woman was searching me.

Nearing the end of this violation, I sobbed even louder as the woman, FOUR TIMES, stuck the side of her gloved hand INTO my vagina, through my pants. Between my labia. She really got up there. Four times. Back right and left, and front right and left. In my vagina. Between my labia. I was shocked -- utterly unprepared for how she got the side of her hand up there. It was government-sanctioned sexual assault.

Upon leaving, still sobbing, I yelled to the woman, "YOU RAPED ME." And I took her name to see if I could file sexual assault charges on my return.

Alkon identified the TSA agent as

Thedala Magee. Or Magee Thedala. I was really upset, and neither name sounds like a typical American first name or last name, so I can't remember if I wrote it down in the right order.

Alkon got it right the first time, and Thedala Magee the TSA agent is now suing Alkon, demanding $500,000 and removal of the blog post. Alkon responded through her lawyer Marc Randazza:

Your client aggressively pushed her fingers into my client’s vulva. I am certain that she did not expect to find a bomb there. She did this to humiliate my client, to punish her for exercising her rights, and to send a message to others who might do the same. It was absolutely a sexual assault, perpetrated in order to exercise power over the victim. We agree with Ms. Alkon’s characterization of this crime as “rape,” and so would any reasonable juror.

Furthermore, even if your client did not actually sexually assault my client, Ms. Alkon’s statements to and about Ms. Magee would still be protected by the First Amendment. The word “rape” itself has been the subject of defamation cases by far more sympathetic Plaintiffs than your client. In Gold v. Harrison, 962 P.2d 353 (Haw. 1998), cert denied, 526 U.S. 1018 (1999), the Hawai’i Supreme Court held that a defendant’s characterization of his neighbors’ seeking an easement in his backyard as “raping [the defendant]” was not defamatory. This speech was protected as rhetorical hyperbole. Of course, we need not seek out Hawai’i case law in order to debunk your unsupportable claims. Rhetorical hyperbole has a strong history of favorable treatment in defamation actions. See Greenbelt Cooperative Pub. Ass'n v. Bresler, 398 U.S. 6, 14 (1970). This doctrine acknowledges our First Amendment right to express ourselves, even when employing literary license. Accordingly, even if your client’s actions were not “rape,” Ms. Alkon had every right to characterize them as such.

No free woman should endure what your client did to Ms. Alkon. Fortunately, Ms. Alkon is capable of recognizing injustice, and for the good of us all, she had the courage to speak out on this matter of public concern of the highest order. After Magee’s assault on Ms. Alkon’s vagina and dignity, Ms. Alkon exercised her First Amendment right to recount this incident to others in person and through her blog. This was not only her right -- it was her responsibility.

It's no surprise Thedala Magee wants to remain anonymous. Last November, when certain media outlets started printing sympathetic stories about poor TSA agents sobbing their little hearts out because they just can't understand why Americans have to be all rude and cranky rather than passively adopt submissive-criminal body poses while uniform-wearing thugs fondle their genitals, I quoted a couple of anonymous complaints:

“Molester, pervert, disgusting, an embarrassment, creep. These are all words I have heard today at work describing me. ...These comments are painful and demoralizing,” one unnamed TSO posted on Frischling’s website.

Another said: “Being a TSO means often being verbally abused. You let the comments roll off and check the next person; however, when a woman refuses the scanner then comes to me and tells me that she feels like I am molesting her; that is beyond verbal abuse.”

At the time, I commented: "I don't blame you for remaining anonymous, you sociopathic piece of garbage. You grope innocent people all day, then claim you're the victim when they take umbrage?" But Amy Alkon's spiteful rapist Thedala Magee is even worse. I hope Alkon countersues and wins, and even more fervently, I hope Thedala Magee and her colleagues are tried, convicted and sentenced to prison for the sex criminals they are. If nothing else, the Streisand Effect should ensure the name "Thedala Magee" in association with the label "rapist" becomes far better known than it otherwise would have.

For Love Of Man And Country

2011-09-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

When the World Trade Center went down almost ten years ago, pundits were quick to make comparisons with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Nobody makes that comparison anymore, though, because now it's just embarrassing. Ten years after Pearl, the attack wasn't still being cited as justification for the mass suspension of American constitutional rights. Ten years after Pearl, the American government didn't claim the right to shove its collective hand down little girls' underpants, didn't demand that sick elderly ladies submit to inspection of the contents of their adult diapers before flying home to their families, didn't take pride in assaulting law-abiding travelers under the guise of protecting them.

Ten years after Pearl the nation didn't still wallow in masochistic obsession over it, the way we now do over 9/11. Of course, by the tenth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, we had long-since established a more important anniversary to celebrate -- the day we defeated those who attacked us. (Compare that to 9/11, where we mostly ignored those who attacked us; the State Department removed all references to Saudi Arabia from its report on the attack, and we went after Iraq instead.)

As for this 9/11 fetishism ... we have no victories to celebrate so we jealously cling to our defeats instead, and use them as justification for evermore harsh and punitive policies -- not only against the rest of the world, but against our own people. The anti-Muslim hysteria that didn't actually start growing until the economy collapsed, over six years after the initial attack; the complete and growing evisceration of the fourth amendment for travelers; the knowledge that in a presumably free country, the DHS and its TSA subsidiary cite 9/11 as justification to claim the right to strip-search any and all travelers at will ... if someone knocks you down, picking yourself up and cleaning yourself off is a much healthier option than staying down and wallowing in the mud.

But if you want to stay in the mud, or simply lack the heart to climb out of it, then goddammit, don't drag the rest of the country into the mud with you. Bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda defanged, and STILL they are cited as excuses to make this country a little meaner and a little less free every day.

Oh, but I shouldn't say such things. How dare I criticize my country? When asked about 9/11, the proper patriotic American response is "They hated our freedom, not our foreign policy, so let's make some changes to the former." (The Muslim race is a very emotional one, you see, and when you bomb their wedding parties or kill their infants they get extremely cranky, even if you explain how it's all for their own good, to free them from the forces of oppression.)

Yet the rot set in long before 9/11. Maybe it dates back to the Vietnam War. I can just barely remember, as a little girl, seeing cars festooned with faded old "America: love it or leave it" bumper stickers, obviously directed toward anyone who'd dare criticize their country. But what psychosis is necessary to believe honest criticism and love cannot co-exist?

To repeat an analogy I've used before: one day, while giving my boyfriend a backrub, I saw a mole I'd never noticed before, and immediately brought it to his attention. Why? Because I love him too much to say nothing if I see he has a problem which, left untreated, could destroy him. But if I "loved" him the same way certain self-described patriots "love" America I would have said nothing, because "I love him too much to admit he could have anything as ugly and imperfect as a melanoma on his body!" And woe betide any doctor or colleague who brought it to his attention: "Don't you dare criticize my man! He's perfect!" I'd screech before throwing a few punches (or chairs), or adopting some of the other conflict-resolution techniques so beloved by fervent nationalists and Jerry Springer guests. Such patriots would literally love their country to death.

Irene’s Aftermath: Sympathy For The Devil

2011-09-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

Once afternoon when I was about seven, I thoughtlessly ran into traffic to retrieve a stray ball. Fortunately, nothing bad happened: the driver saw me and slammed his brakes in time, no other driver hit him, I didn’t even lose my ball.

That said, even as a seven-year-old dumb enough to run into traffic, I still knew enough (when considering the incident afterwards) to conclude “I was very lucky,” rather than “Obviously, that talk about the danger of running into traffic is overblown hype, used by authority figures to control me!”

Which brings me to Hurricane Irene, which (despite warnings to the contrary) turned out to be an extremely minor storm, here in my little corner of Connecticut. And by “my little corner,” I specifically mean “my small city block, and the one next to mine.” Beyond that, though, the river overflowed its banks, and less than a mile in every direction were homes and businesses without electricity; roads either coated in mud from temporary flooding, or completely washed away, leaving flooded ravines where the roadbed used to be; a building that collapsed directly into the river less than ten minutes’ walk from my front door.

No damage on my street, though. For the first time since I loved here, I can point to my address and say “I live in the good part of town!” I did lose electricity, but only for a second; none of my refrigerated or frozen food went bad though I did have to reset all my digital clocks.

In conclusion: despite the catastrophe unfolding in Vermont, the millions still without power on the East Coast, the dozens dead and all the other damage caused by Hurricane Irene, I personally suffered none of the ill effects the media warned me about. Thus, this was a minor fizzled-out nothing of a storm, and the warnings about it mere hype and bullshit. ’Cuz it's all about me. Only me.

When the sun came out on Sunday afternoon, I grabbed my camera and walked a few blocks to where the underground river re-emerges into the open. It’s usually less than a foot deep and a few feet across, but when the remnants of Irene came through it overflowed its banks into nearby streets. By the time I came by the water had mostly receded, but the roads were still closed to traffic and covered in a couple inches of mud.

There used to be an abandoned business building spanning the river itself – since at least the 1960s – and it always survived previous flooding, but this time the building slumped into the river below, and I saw two large black cracks in the yellow brick walls.

I saw them from a safe distance away, using the zoom function on my camera, but every few minutes somebody would walk around the yellow tape police attempted to tie around the slumping building (the still-brisk winds kept tearing the tape loose), and a few people actually stood on the front steps peering in, and I found myself actually feeling sorry for the exasperated policeman who kept repeating over and over into his loudspeaker “Get away from the building. Get away from the Stately Floors building. You there, in the white shorts and blue top, get away from the building!”

I’m not usually one to urge compliance with authority figures, but this was a rare instance when I wanted to shout “Listen to the cops, dumbass!” Of course I didn’t; I said nothing as I walked across a mudfield that used to be a sidewalk. A group of five teenage girls walked across from the other direction; four wore flip-flops and the other walked barefoot, and a few minutes later when I heard “Get away from the building” over the loudspeaker again, I wasn’t surprised to see the barefoot girl peering inside the store.

Various friends and colleagues who live closer to the coast or major rivers remain without power even now, five days later. Entire towns in Vermont were wiped out. But I’m completely fine, so I’ll be the latest media person to declare Hurricane Irene a complete non-event (unless you want to focus on the whole “me agreeing with government authorities” angle). But an actual disaster? Pfft. I’m fine and so’s New York, and really, who else matters?

Let The Hurricane Roar

2011-08-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

It's a quarter after noon as I start typing; I moved my ice reserves out of the freezers and into the coolers a couple hours ago, though now I highly doubt I'll need any of the water I bottled or bought. I still have electricity (obviously, else you wouldn't be reading this), but from what the TV says, that makes me a minority in Connecticut right now. The cities and towns on the coast and along the big rivers are getting slammed, but the little river under my street appears fine (by which I mean, I can still see my street rather than a river).

Most annoying thing so far has been the robo-calls from the city telling us where the shelters are in case we need to "self-evacuate" (which is what I was doing, in the bathroom, when one of the calls came). Second-most annoying was seeing that odious kiddie-diddler pimp Janet Napolitano on TV posing in front of the FEMA logo, and wondering what indignities she will inflict on East Coast Americans in the name of protecting us from this vast and scary threat. Perhaps people visiting the shelters need to have their genitalia fondled by TSA flunkies, just in case a terrorist is trying to smuggle a crotch bomb? America, being a mere 3,000 miles from coast to coast, is not big enough to simultaneously contain constitutional rights and Napolitano's fat ass (immune to TSA groping, by virtue of her position), and Napolitano clearly isn't leaving so it's the Constitution that has to go.

Apparently the worst of the winds have yet to hit us, so I might still lose power before this is over. Napolitano and FEMA will gain power, either way.

ADDENDUM: Looks like every church in the state has closed today, not just the staid, sensible Methodist and Episcopalian types, but even churches with names like the Jesus Christ Almighty Independent Freewill Baptist Rattlesnake Handlers. O ye of little faith.

SECOND ADDENDUM, 2:03 pm: Rain stopped, a little sun is visible, but the wind is blowing more furiously than ever. I still haven't ruled out a power loss.

THIRD ADDENDUM, 2:13: Lights just flickered twice, and went out long enough to reset the digital clocks. I'm going offline and unplugging my computer. Talk to y'all later.

Smashed Medicinal Boobs and Other Annoyances

2011-08-26T18:53:00.001-07:00

As if preparing for the first major northeast hurricane hit of a lifetime didn't keep me busy enough today, I also had to keep a doctor appointment I made four months ago and they sent me to a nearby radiological center for a mammogram, which is where they stick your boob into a machine that smashes it down to roughly one-tenth of its actual size, then the machine goes WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM against the smashed boob before repeating the process with the other boob, which somehow confers medical benefits. It also left interesting red marks on my skin, which is much better than the purple-and-blue bruising I expected. A non-medical version of the machine is found in Mexican restaurants, where it converts dough balls into nice flat tortillas.

Hurricane Irene is still threatening to pound my section of Connecticut almost as flat (don't attempt segues like that unless you're a Professional Writer, like me), so after my medical pounding today I went shopping again, bought more bottled water and some six-packs of small juice bottles at prices that made my frugal soul scream, because I'm used to giant economy sizes with much lower unit costs. But there's a difference between being thrifty and being cheap, and the whole point of living frugally and setting aside every dollar you can is so you can afford what you need at times like this.

The freezer's stuffed with about four gallons of water frozen in big plastic bottles or boxes, and several smaller Ziploc bags filled with ice cubes. Once the storm hits, while the power's still on, I'll move the ice into my two coolers, leaving the chemical freezer-packs in the freezer to maybe save the food there. I also have small Ziploc bags of ice cubes to keep in the smaller cooler along with pre-chilled juices, so without power I should still have cold or at least cool drinks for three days, and hopefully won't be without power any longer than that. (Hopefully, the storm turns or weakens enough to ultimately make this post much ado about nothing.)

I've got lanterns, radios, a camera and a fan, and batteries to power them all. I've got food that requires no cooking at all, and small aluminum baking dishes to serve as disposable cooking pots for foods requiring only a little heat over a Sterno setup. I'm too high up and too far inland for storm surge to be any concern, though I do live at the bottom of a valley surrounded by hills, so flash flooding is always a possibility. At least I'm on the second floor of a sturdy building with high ceilings. I've got enough plastic containers to store another eight gallons of tapwater on the countertop, in case any of my neighbors neglected to plan ahead. (Not that I'm turning into a softy; I just figure lacking power and water will be annoying enough, without having to hear kids whine "Mommy, I'm thirsty.")

I'd rather face the hurricane here than in my childhood stomping grounds in Virginia, which has been featured on the Weather Channel all day. At least here, I don't live two inches above and six blocks inland from the Chesapeake Bay.

I still have ridiculous amounts of work to do before the storm hits. Wish me luck, if you don't hear from me in awhile.

Go On, Irene

2011-08-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

Just a little reminder to those naive enough to think otherwise: Mother Nature is not your friend. Now, I am not going to make any of the Armageddon jokes that write themselves when the First Noticeable Earthquake In Over A Century rattles your unsafe-for-earthquakes brick building on the east coast, then as soon as the shaking stops the weathermen tell you to expect a hit from the First Category 3 Hurricane Strike Of Your Lifetime, too. (I don't need to make any of the Armageddon jokes such circumstances invite, because everyone else in Connecticut already has. I heard every one of them, while shopping for hurricane supplies yesterday.)

Yesterday morning I wasn't particularly concerned about Hurricane Irene but decided to buy bottled water and a few other supplies anyway, figuring, By the time you know for certain a storm'll hit, the stores have already sold out of everything. Indeed, almost half the shelves in my local supermarket's bottled-water aisle stood empty by one o'clock yesterday afternoon; there were still plenty of overpriced brands like Fiji water, but stocks of the store brand spring water ran low.

Still, "almost half the shelves empty" means "more than half the shelves full." I bought two small pallets of cheap store-brand water bottles, still doubting I'd actually have to drink them anytime soon, and by the time I got home and hauled the water, canned meats and assorted no-refrigeration snacks I'd bought into my kitchen, the weather reports had changed; instead of saying "chance Irene might hit" they all warned of a "SEVERE THREAT TO THE NORTHEAST." And the reports specifically cited Hartford and New York, and I live between those two cities in a valley that got slammed back during the infamous Flood of '55 (caused when the rains of a dying hurricane drenched already-soaked ground like the kind we have right now, here in Connecticut) and in fact -- although you'd never guess it, to look around my neighborhood -- I live only a few feet from the bank of a formerly aboveground river that had an entire residential neighborhood built over it sometime in the past century or so.

Vast is the difference between "an emergency kit you buy when you don't really expect anything to happen" and "the emergency kit you want when you think something actually will." So I went shopping again to negate the differential, and now I'm hustling to finish some writing assignments that aren't actually due until next week, but now I want them done and gone by Saturday, just in case I lose power the next day and don't regain it by deadline. I'm also turning sandwich bags into ice bags as fast as my three ice cube trays will let me.

Damned annoying hurricanes.

Earthquake!

2011-08-23T11:30:00.001-07:00

Yikes! An earthquake just shook Washington, DC hard enough that I felt it very strongly here in central Connecticut (though the kids playing outside in the backyard next door didn't seem to notice).

I was on the living room sofa working on my laptop when suddenly the sofa started shaking so hard I couldn't possibly think, I must be imagining this. I heard the sounds of small things falling over, and the shaking continued long enough for me to remember "My building is unreinforced brick, the absolute worst kind to be in during a quake." So I finally got up and walked toward the back door, thinking I'd be safer on the building's outer wooden porch/stair structure -- and as I walked across the floor, it didn't seem to shake so much as vibrate -- but by the time I got the door open, everything had stopped.

On one wall in my living room there's a hanging shelf displaying a collection of miniature porcelain items. It has several narrow horizontal wooden shelves that fit snugly into slots on the vertical wood frame, and one shelf had shaken itself out of its right slot (and a few of the miniatures fell down, but by amazing good luck, none of them fell off, or broke). I can't find any actual damages, either to the building or anything in it, and I obviously haven't lost electricity or internet.

So I was completely unharmed, as was all my property, and I have nothing to complain about, but: that was damned scary. I've sat through some wild storms, both here and in cheap Southern college apartments where the storms blew much stronger on buildings much flimsier. Those are often frightening in their own right, but having a calm sky and perfectly still, quiet air while the rest of the world vibrates has its own unique creepiness.

INTENSELY IRRITATING UPDATE: In an email timed 2:39 pm EDT, my boyfriend gave the following eyewitness report:

I just witnessed a My9 reporter actually say it was a "mild earthquake just weeks before the 9/11 anniversary."

Unsettling Reflections Off An Iron Heart

2011-08-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

(Warning: this post is chockful of spoilers for Harry Turtledove's novel The Man With The Iron Heart.)

For several years now I've been a fan of Harry Turtledove's alt-history books; not only do I find the stories entertaining, but they often inspire thoughtful reflection of my own views, how much they reflect my character versus merely reflecting the time and culture in which I live -- mental contamination by the zeitgeist, if you want to be pretentious about it. Back in 2006 I shared some ponderings inspired by Turtledove's Guns of the South; today it's The Man With The Iron Heart giving me food for thought and possible mental indigestion.

I read the book once when it first came out and I borrowed a library copy; I bought my own copy on vacation last week, and now I'm roughly halfway through my second reading. The point of divergence is, in our World War Two reality Czech partisans assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, their brutal Nazi/SS military governor; in Turtledove's version the attempt failed. So Heydrich was alive to see the German defeat at Stalingrad, realized Germany would lose the war, and started stockpiling men and weapons for a future partisan fight against the Allied occupation army.

Heydrich's "Werewolf" forces included many suicide bombers who gladly sacrificed their lives to bring down important targets. Basically, Turtledove took the real story of the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, gave the anti-occupation terrorists/partisans/fighters infinitely better resources plus almost two years' time for advance planning, and transposed it into the Allied occupation of postwar Germany. (Putting real history into other contexts is a common trick of Turtledove's; if you read his Confederate victory series, you can accurately predict many major plot developments if you're familiar with the real history of Germany's rise and militarization in World War Two and the decades before it.)

The book has a bad ending; American troops ultimately pull out of Germany and pretty much give up on Western Europe altogether, and at book's end the Nazis are rising again in Germany and Stalin's Red Army no longer content to stay behind their Iron Curtain confines of our history, and it's pretty likely World War Three (this time, with nukes!) will break out in a generation or less ... and the reason America gave up on Europe is because back home, opposition to the continued occupation grew too great.

Of course I, living in a world where both the Nazis and the Communists ultimately vanished from Europe, read the story thinking "No, fools! Stay the course! Don't pull out of the region" ... the exact opposite of my view on Iraq/Afghanistan.

If I were actually a character in the story, a 1940s-era version of my real self remaining stateside the whole time, which side would I take? Would I have attended the "US OUT OF GERMANY" and "BRING OUR TROOPS BACK HOME" rallies, or supported the continued anti-Nazi, anti-Communist "STAY THE COURSE" side?

I'm guessing/hoping I would prefer "Stay the course" on the grounds that I would have empathized more with the suffering concentration-camp and gulag victims than with the suffering US occupation soldiers, plus the more practical and obvious difference "The Nazis and Communists were actual proven threats invading and occupying multiple countries in addition to their own, and could easily conquer entire continents," which is not the case for the band of terrorist criminals in whose name Americans lose civil liberties and soldiers' lives in ever-increasing numbers today.

EDIT: Fixed an enormous typo which I blame not on myself, but on the freakin' earthquake which inspired me to hit "send" a bit sooner than I otherwise would have. Ahem. (Embarrassed throat-clearing.)

Vacation All I Ever Wanted

2011-08-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

For security reasons I only blog about vacations in the past tense, because otherwise I may as well put up a blog post saying "My house is devoid of people and chock-full of stuff worth stealing!" (assuming a circa 1998 television set and pile of size-one bluejeans meet your definition of "worth stealing." There's also lots of battered paperbacks, and two jelly jars containing about $70 in nickels).

So I went to South Carolina, in August, where you can go outdoors, or you can be clean and non-stinky, but you can't do both. I opted to go outdoors, and if any South Carolinians reading this had problems getting a signal on their cell phones I sincerely apologize for that; the stink rays I emitted are probably what kept you from getting bars. (Bad enough dealing with swamp ass; I also had swamp boob, swamp scalp, swamp foot, and swamp everything that had fabric covering it. Bleah.)

On the off-chance any clothing designers are reading this, let me say: if it's hot enough to wear a sundress, it's too damned hot to wear rayon, polyester, or any other artificial fabric that does not "breathe," so why the hell do you use such fabric to make your sundresses? My theory: you are motivated by sheer hatred of your customers, a hatred so intense that if your IQ were a mere 50 points lower, you'd probably work for TSA.

Speaking of which: what would have been a three-hour flight to the Carolinas turned instead into a two-day drive, because I refuse to let some child-molesting waste of DNA feel my genitalia before I travel; dealing with vacation traffic on the I-95 corridor is vastly preferable to dealing with the TSA. (Side note: there will come a time when people say "TSA agent" the same way we now say "concentration-camp guard." I hope that time comes soon enough for me to benefit by it.)

We're fast approaching the one-year anniversary of the TSA's "We molest your children so you don't have to" mandatory groping policy. I honestly never believed it would last this long.

Normal People vs. Characters In Bad Novels

2011-08-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

Advice for vanity-novel fiction writers who do NOT want to drive their editors-for-hire insane: go through your manuscript, search for every instance of dialogue where a character says "As you know" and delete the entire scene.

Here's how normal people talk: "I went to the store today. Christ, gas is expensive! Damn this economy."

Here's how characters in bad novels express the same concept: "I went to the store today and drove my car which, as you know, is a form of transport powered by an internal combustion engine fueled by a petroleum distillate called 'gasoline.' On this trip I went to a 'gas station,' a specialized fuel store where early twenty-first-century Americans like me are wont to fuel up our cars, and I was and am dismayed to report that gas is more expensive than usual, partially due to the effects of oil depletion but also due to the current economic crisis which, as you know, has its roots in the popping of the housing bubble of the last decade and the dot-com bubble before that...."

I don't believe in an afterlife but I still know Hell exists, as I'm posting this from Hell's own couch.

In Praise Of Civilized Behavior (Mine)

2011-08-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

"Shut the hell up or you'll never get Christmas presents again because I'll go to the North Pole and CUT OFF SANTA'S HEAD."

That's the sort of thing you will never ever ever hear me say to the eternally screeching kids next door, because I am a respectable well-behaved civilized sweet-tempered grown-up person who understands the importance of not inflicting psychological scars on the next generation, no matter how much the little hellions might deserve it this second. Kudos to me!

Bridal Bliss

2011-08-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

Over at the Guardian, Kirsten Hansen has a piece discussing the lavish excesses of the overpriced-wedding industry, where $50,000 for a one-day party isn't unheard-of. I have nothing bad to say about the wedding industry, however; I fully encourage the growth of a profession based on persuading middle-class people to spend upwards of a whole year's post-tax take-home pay -- three or four percent of their entire adult professional lifetime earnings -- on a single day's party, because I believe letting fools keep hold of their money is a sin.

I also believe buying $300 sneakers for your still-growing child's feet is a very intelligent and well-thought-out thing to do, especially if you're a low-income parent wondering why you can't seem to ever get ahead in life.

A Truly Isolated Incident

2011-08-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

For the past several years, I've associated the phrase "another isolated incident" with journalist Radley Balko -- formerly of Reason magazine, now writing for the Huffington Post -- because Balko's beat focuses on abusive police conduct, prosecutorial malfeasance, and other incidents where agents of the law use their authority to terrorize, rather than defend, innocent people. (I've said more than once: if America were truly the free country we claim to be, Radley Balko's career would not exist.) And whenever Radley (or his colleagues) writes about policemen abusing their authority -- SWAT teams raiding the wrong home, cops shaking down business owners (after carefully destroying said businesses' surveillance cameras), any such legalized horrors -- police spokesmen always say the outrage is an "isolated incident." It's getting so you can't even fart in this country anymore without stinking up another isolated incident of police misconduct.

But yesterday I found a news story about a police-related incident that truly is isolated: an unnamed 18-year-old taking summer classes at the University of Cincinnati died of cardiac arrest after an unnamed cop Tasered him.

Not that there's anything isolated about death by cop, or even death by Taser -- Taser fatalities being sadly commonplace despite (or perhaps because of) the widespread police belief that Tasers are non-lethal weapons -- but here's what does make the story a truly isolated incident:

The department has suspended the use of stun guns until his cause of death is determined.

Cops kill people all the time in America, but death-by-cop stories ending with the department actually changing some aspect of its behavior -- which at least implies the possibility that police handled some matter improperly -- are quite rare, thus making the Taser death of some teenage college kid in Ohio (or at least the police department's response to it) a truly isolated incident.

Of course this is a university police department, not a regular city force, which might explain the relative reasonableness of the police behavior here. Tuition-paying students are statistically likely to have family or friends rich enough, or at least middle-class enough, to notice and make a stink when police kill someone they love. It's one thing if cops kill a middle-aged homeless schizophrenic like Kelly Thomas, but young college students are people with the potential to actually matter.

Buy This Man Some Hair Dye, Stat

2011-08-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

Michelle Obama claims the gray strands in the hair of her 50-year-old husband prove he deserves a second presidential term.

In other news, my local Target sells black hair dye for less than $4 a dose. I figure less than $100 should keep Obama's hair maintained in all its ebony youthfulness long enough to get us through to the 2012 election, and if "gray hair" is the only thing keeping that corrupt SOB in the White House I'm willing to personally shell out the money it costs to keep it at bay.

Random Links (Nothing New Under The Sun Edition)

2011-08-03T16:04:00.001-07:00

Nothing new on the TSA outrage front, though there's an old story in new packaging: TSA's "new" BDO/behavior detection officer program has been making headlines, though I wrote about the then-new program four years ago, for the Hartford Advocate. Time flies when civil liberties decay; TSA tells the same story over and over again, a little worse each time.

At the Guardian, where I've frequently discussed my beef with the anti-sexy woman strain of feminism, I wrote a new piece discussing the poisons of academic feminism, inspired by a hilariously bad academic piece I discovered via Reason Hit and Run. But that too is the same nonsense that's made feminism a misogynist's parody of itself since even before Andrea Dworkin's day.

The Feral Genius Applies For A Government Job

2011-07-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

No joke, people, and no exaggeration: that staff writing gig with the Department of Homeland Security I told you about yesterday offers a vastly higher salary and considerably better benefits than any writing or journalism job I personally have ever held. Minimum starting salary $62,000 per year! Maximum salary just a hairsbreadth below 100K! And a pension, and long paid vacations, and all sorts of health and dental insurance, too!

Not that I expect to be hired, but I’ve decided to apply for it anyway – thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can send off application letters and even entire clipfiles without having to pay any postage costs. I already have a resume tailored for writing/editing jobs in general, and wrote a cover letter for this one in particular. Here’s mine, and if you have any suggestions for improvement, please tell me in the comments. I really need/want this job:

My name is Jennifer Abel and I’d like to be the writer and editor you’re looking for with job announcement number FS-505757-SW11. As my attached resume indicates, I have ample experience in writing and editing; more importantly, I have ample experience dealing with angry clients, irate parents and other people with ruffled feathers in need of smoothing, and thus know how to defuse tense situations, a very important skill in making DHS/TSA practices palatable to the American public.

As a high school teacher, I assured many sets of parents that “Your child is destined for a happy, competent adulthood characterized by wise, intelligent decision-making, all thanks to your excellent helicopter parenting.” As an editor for a vanity publisher, I repeatedly tell authors “Your writing suggests you are neither functionally illiterate nor insane, and burning all the hard copies of your book and deleting all the computer files of it would be a very bad idea.” I once briefly worked for an ad agency where I convinced consumers “My client’s product is not worthless overpriced junk, but a useful bargain you should absolutely spend your money on.”

Ridiculous as these examples sound, I still convinced people to believe them. In other words, I’m very good at taking crap and convincing people it’s chocolate, and can surely convince travelers that being groped by government agents is perfectly compatible with life in a free country. I am also looking to replace “low-paid journalist” with a more respectable and stable career serving my government and my country, in that order, by working for the Department of Homeland Security. The ad for this job said “[Y]our services touch every US citizen,” and I personally am willing to touch as many US citizens, resident aliens and foreign tourists as necessary to make Janet Napolitano feel she has the whole “terrorism” thing safely under control.

I currently live in Connecticut but am willing to relocate to the Washington, DC area, and I can pass a drug test with only 30 days’ advance notice.

Thank you, and I look forward to discussing this position with you in greater detail.

Sincerely,
Jennifer Abel

"Our Services Touch Every US Citizen"

2011-07-26T13:24:00.001-07:00

Nobody in the government -- not the president, not Congress, neither Republicans nor Democrats -- is serious about solving the deficit, the debt ceiling or any of the other economic-flavored doom-causing problems out there; for all the meat and bone anyone cuts out of the budget, they'll leave the fat and gristle untouched. No money to fund the FAA, but plenty to expand TSA workforces to root around in travelers' underwear. No money to fix our country's crumbling infrastructure, but plenty to demolish the infrastructures of the other countries where we wage our Endless Wars.

Meanwhile, I remain poor by modern American socioeconomic income standards. Might I alleviate this and be personally enriched by some of the money government wastes on bullshit? It's possible! I'm still looking for a full-time staff writer position, and the Department of Homeland Security is hiring some and offering to pay them pretty well:

Job Title: Writer/Editor
Department: Department Of Homeland Security
Agency: National Protection and Programs Directorate
Job Announcement Number: FS-505757-SW11

SALARY RANGE: $62,467.00 - $97,333.00 /year

OPEN PERIOD:Monday, July 25, 2011 to Friday, August 05, 2011

SERIES & GRADE: GS-1082-11/12
POSITION INFORMATION: Full Time Career/Career Conditional
PROMOTION POTENTIAL:12
DUTY LOCATIONS: Few vacancies - Arlington, VA
WHO MAY BE CONSIDERED: US Citizens and Status Candidates

JOB SUMMARY:
Secure the Homeland
Proud to Protect

Are you interested in a job where your primary purpose will be to write and edit materials, such as reports, inquiries from the White House, Congress, and the Government Accountability Office, news releases, and speeches.? Then consider joining the Office of Identity Services Branch, US-VISIT, National Protection and Programs Directorate, Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Come work with the best to prevent and deter terrorist attacks, protect against and respond to potential threats, ensure safe and secure borders, welcome immigrants and visitors, and promote the free-flow [sic] of commerce. This mission of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is carried out every day by the dedicated men and women who answer the noble calling of public service with courage and enthusiasm. With a diverse and critical mission, we lead the unified national effort to secure America. In today's interconnected world, our country's security challenges are constantly evolving. To meet these challenges, DHS fosters a culture that values and promotes diversity, teamwork, flexibility, and innovation.

In Headquarters, we coordinate, plan, and guide the Department's work across all DHS components. You could enjoy a career that includes research, administration and management, legal work, budget and finance, cyber security, infrastructure protection and intelligence analysis. Our services touch every U.S. citizen, and our goal is to secure our country across land and sea. Come join the team who is "Proud to Protect". APPLICATIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED FROM: All U.S. Citizens and Status Candidates.More than one selection may be made from this announcement should the need arise.

For new Federal employees, the starting salary will be at the Step 1 Grade selected (GS-11-$62,467; GS-12 - $74,872).

I wonder if that's the same pay Blogger Bob enjoys for his role as TSA's head of propaganda? More importantly, I wonder if I could do it?

Come work with the best to prevent and deter terrorist attacks, protect against and respond to potential threats, ensure safe and secure borders, welcome immigrants and visitors, and promote the free-flow of commerce.

Prevent and deter terrorist attacks? Then-President George W. Bush said the terrorists attacked us because they hate freedom; DHS is certainly removing that motivation, and if I worked for them, I'd be helping.

Protect against and respond to potential threats? If that means "mistreat everyone who travels anywhere in America," DHS continues doing a bang-up job and as their staff writer, I would repeatedly say so.

Ensure safe and secure borders? I personally would not tote a gun and play target practice on the border; I'd write justifications for those who did. If the TSA blog is any indication, I wouldn't even be required to tell the truth; I could tell outright lies, so long as it makes my masters look good. "There are no children on the No-Fly List." "Our immigration policy is totally humane." "The problems in Mexico are in no way the fault of US drug policy and DEA meddling."

As a journalist, I know "making shit up" is much easier than "finding and telling the truth"; an article that could take all week to write if I had to read documents and talk to witnesses could be done in less than an hour if I only had to consult the reference library stored between the cheeks of my ass. Finding proof of government wrongdoing might sometimes take awhile, but telling fairy tales where such wrongdoing doesn't exist is a snap.

Welcome immigrants and visitors? If by "welcome" you mean "confiscate their electronics and subject their bodies to intimate genital searches considered human-rights violations in other countries," DHS again does a bang-up job, which I'd have to justify.

Promote the free flow of commerce? For all the indignities TSA inflicts on passengers they still don't check cargo, so I suppose there's that.

Our services touch every U.S. citizen. Yeah. That's pretty much the problem.

But I really need a job. Or a benefactor willing to give me regular sums of money for doing basically nothing. If I work for the government I could have both at once. All I need to do is find a friendly and not entirely ethical brain surgeon to lobotomize my conscience and empathy circuits first. Except I don't have enough health insurance for that, so rather than apply for this respectable middle-class writing position, I'll continue editing vanity novels and envying Japanese fetish artists. At least that way I keep my self-respect.

“Jennifer’s Law” and the Terrors of Terrorism

2011-07-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

I look at the Norwegian government with a twinge of envy, wishing my own showed the same sensible restraint. The terrorist attack in Norway yesterday was monstrous – 92 confirmed dead as I type this, and the number might rise higher – but today, Norway’s prime minister said the country will not raise its terrorist “threat level” over this.

Norway understands what the United States refuses to admit: isolated freak incidents happen, and perfect safety from them is impossible, but you don’t throw out every ideal your country once stood for the first time you suffer an anomaly. Of course, Norway’s government has not embarked on a ten-year-long spree of seeking out excuses to take away the legal rights of its citizens, either.

I’m typing this in my apartment, near a window. That window, like almost every window in every private home in America, is made of ordinary rather than bulletproof glass. And as I look through the window onto the street, I know it’s perfectly possible for someone standing in that street to look back at me, and even aim a rifle through my window, and shoot and kill me.

This hypothetical psychopath wishing to harm me wouldn’t even need a gun; a guy with a big enough rock could lob it through my window and cause major damage. If the rock itself didn’t hurt me, the broken window’s various sharp shards of glass might.

Should I live with this threat, or eradicate it by any means necessary? It’s unlikely but not impossible; it’s surely happened already, somewhere in the United States. With a population of over 320 million, even a one-in-a-million event will happen somewhere in this country 320 times this year. And I’d bet money that somewhere in the US, people have been killed in their own homes after a bullet or other projectile flew through their closed window.

Suppose it happened here. Now. To me. Some freak walks down my street shooting through windows, kills me, maims the guy next door, blinds a child in the next house over, and kills three more people on my street before finally turning the gun on himself.

In Norway, the prime minister would view this as the freak crime it is. In the United States, the government would raise the terrorist threat level, and Janet Napolitano would have TSA guards in residential neighborhoods giving genital patdowns to passing pedestrians to ensure they had nothing capable of breaking windows hidden in their underwear, and pandering congressmen with support from the glaziers’ lobby would argue for the passage of “Jennifer’s Law” mandating all residential windows be made of bulletproof safety glass. (The law would be named after me rather than any of the other three people who died in the shooting spree because I am – was – a cute white female, whereas the other three victims were males. Or minorities. Or ugly, or something. They weren't cute white females, so who cares?)

My fellow Americans, we must remember what Norway forgot: the purpose of terrorist acts, by definition, is to make people feel “terrified,” and it is our patriotic duty to help the terrorists win by allowing pants-soiling terror to shape our legal and our thought processes. Why is Norway’s prime minister letting this opportunity slip through his fingers? It’s almost like the Norwegian government thinks “a free country” is too worthwhile an ideal to toss out their non-bulletproof window.

Catatonia

2011-07-22T13:29:00.000-07:00

So what happens in the short run (August 2, to be specific) if the debt limit is not raised? What happens in the long run if the debt limit is? How long can a nation continue spending more than it earns? Here’s my answer:

Idano.

Imagine we’re discussing this in person, in the same room. I’m huddled in a dim corner (dim despite the full daylight outside, as I have all curtains drawn and blinds closed against the record-breaking heat and humidity smothering my corner of New England today). Imagine my eyes gone wide and vacant with a thousand-yard stare, fixed on some unseen distant thing far beyond the opaque walls of my apartment. Imagine my voice barely audible over the hum of multiple fans and window-unit air conditioners.

I can’t make any predictions about the economy, nor even discuss it. I’ve gone catatonic.

Listen: I’m a Generation Xer who’s now spent more than half my life hearing “your generation is the first in American history to be worse off than your parents.” I’ve heard for years that I might not get back the money Social Security regularly extorts from my meager paychecks, which made glum sense to me but I never actually sat down to work out the specifics: At what point between today and my sixty- or seventy-somethingth birthday do I expect the SS checks to stop?

Trick question, because I never seriously expected Social Security to vanish; I just figured inflation would render its payments worthless. So I’m not particularly worried that the feds will quit paying pension obligations and other bills next month.

But that’s not a position I could defend in an intellectual debate; it’s more a matter of “I can’t bring myself to believe it.” Of course, I have a hard time believing anything that’s happened this past year or two. Seriously: I finally, finally have time and money enough where I could actually visit Europe, but my own government in the guise of “protecting” me says I can’t fly there unless I let some anonymous TSA drone in latex gloves feel the contours of my labia through my underwear? When I worked strip clubs in college, I’d have been arrested for prostitution if I let anyone touch me like that. How did my government come to make mandatory the same behavior that’s otherwise illegal between consenting adults?

Everything feels so surreal already, with the debate over the debt just one more clock melting in an improbably detailed landscape. I can’t see how the level of debt we have is remotely close to sustainable. We can’t spend money we don’t have every year; there seems to be this fiction that US debt is the kind of debt that never, ever needs to be repaid, let alone repaid with interest. We can’t keep doing this and yet we can’t stop.

I recently read some 1980s-era books about the USSR (books with titles like Time/Life Books Library of Nations: The Soviet Union) and of course, when I read them I had an advantage the writers lacked: sure knowledge the country would collapse five years later.

One book dedicated a chapter or two to the then-new premier, Gorbachev, who wanted to promote reforms and make the Soviet Union, in his words, “more moral.” In other words, less cruel, less likely to kill you and your whole family should you complain about getting rancid meat after waiting in line three hours; similar, perhaps, to what the first President George Bush a few years later called “a kinder, gentler nation.”

A few years after Gorbachev said this, the USSR collapsed overnight. Why? Well, the most obvious reason is that they plain ran out of money—literally, no cash reserves of hard currency.

And yet, despite being flat broke, I think the Communists could’ve held power had they really wanted to – say, with someone amoral and ruthless like Stalin at the helm. The USSR did not die merely because it ran out of money; it died because Gorbachev wasn’t willing to kill however many people it took to maintain the fiction that the country worked. One article I read about the fall of the Soviet Union specifically mentioned food; the country’s crops that year weren’t enough to feed its people, and the government did not have enough money to import grain from overseas.

Gorbachev wasn’t willing to see millions die in a famine. Stalin engineered a famine to wipe out people he didn’t like.

What has any of this to do with the United States today? I don’t think Obama – or any of the leading Republicans or Democrats in Congress – takes the Gorbachevian view “Our government should be kinder to its citizens than it used to be.” No, quite the opposite: Obama, far more than Bush/Cheney before him, actively works to make this country harsher, meaner, more punitive towards its own people, and neither Republicans nor Democrats do a damn thing to stop him. Indeed, if you do hear the word “moral” coming from a Republican, it’s only as an excuse to punish someone with a sex life he doesn’t like, and from a Democrat to criticize someone who smokes or eats too much. Our country grows meaner and less moral by the day: yes to torture, to hell with the fourth amendment, sexual assault is a precondition of modern travel, bombing civilians is perfectly fine, et cetera. And I can’t predict how things will turn out, anymore than I can predict how a hallucinating schizophrenic will react to any stimuli.

Psychopathic Quote Of The Day

2011-07-21T14:28:00.000-07:00

As if there aren't enough reasons to fear for the future of our country, universities like Stanford are actively warping the Leaders of Tomorrow with some disturbing views of sex today.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason Hit and Run has a good run-down of the basic travesty:

A Stanford University student accused of sexual assault in an incident that the Palo Alto police and prosecutor investigated and declined to pursue nevertheless was convicted by a student court under relaxed evidence standards introduced by U.S. Department of Education.
In the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, Princeton alumna Samantha Harris reports that the student court – which I guess is what you would get if you replaced kangaroos with students in a kangaroo court – changed its standard mid-trial, in response to a letter from Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR):

At the time the student was charged, Stanford was using the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard -- the highest standard of proof, used by courts in criminal cases. But after OCR's letter, Stanford shifted to the "preponderance" standard in the middle of his case.

Plus, the campus panel that heard the case had been "trained" using documents boldly proclaiming that "everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man's claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence" and that one indication of an abuser is that he will "act persuasive and logical."

Perhaps the Stanford student acted too logically: He was promptly found guilty and suspended for two years. But because the OCR's letter forces colleges to permit the accuser to appeal the decision if the accused may do so, she has appealed and is seeking permanent expulsion of her alleged attacker.

Being logical and persuasive indicates somebody is an abuser? Bullshit! (I say that rather than a logical, persuasive argument lest anyone accuse me of being abusive.)

If I were a male enrolled at Stanford I'd transfer out as fast as possible. But Stanford student blogger Uncle Ruckus -- I mean, Peter "Shotgun" McDonald (that's how his name appears on his author archive page) -- argues on The Unofficial Stanford Blog that since rape victims were often disbelieved in the bad old days, "innocent until proven guilty" should not apply to men accused of rape today:

In most sexual assault cases, there’s pretty much only one piece of evidence that proves guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt: bruises. Often times, rapists aren’t so courteous. So it’s her word against his, in a society that is none too afraid to call women lying bitches when they act in ways that are displeasing to powerful men, and in a society where stories about attempted rape are auto-tuned and gleefully offered up as the latest Internet meme. For sexual assault victims that aren’t blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and still had their hymen in tact, the system’s kind of set up against them. But none of that matters because “INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY.” I’m pretty sure the people who developed that concept never had to worry about being the victim of sexual assault. [italics added]

Is Peter "Shotgun" McDonald seriously suggesting the veracity of a given statement varies depending on the shape of the genitalia of whoever uttered it? Pete also agrees with Reagan appointee Ed Meese that people accused of crimes don't need too many rights because (to quote Meese) "If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect":

The old Standard of Proof was not working, it needed to be changed. If the new Standard of Proof bothers you, there’s an easy solution: don’t sexually assault people.

So if you're accused, does that automatically mean you're guilty? Not necessarily; turns out Peter "Shotgun" McDonald does concede that men can be falsely accused of sexual assault. But Peter says the victims were all asking for it:

If you carry the world view that false sexual assault allegations are commonplace, then don’t do anything that would make a woman want to file one against you. They don’t just come out of the blue. Think about cutting down on sex with blackout strangers. Maybe reduce the number of sexist insults you use whenever you get in an argument with a romantic attachment. Call your friends out when they do the same.

Try applying McDonald's logic to women worried about being sexually assaulted: "Don't do anything that would make a man want to assault you. Attacks don't just come out of the blue."

As a woman -- a member of that half of humanity whose interests McDonald thinks he's championing -- I can only hope Pete's just trolling. Because, surely, he can't sincerely believe "Women sometimes behave like sociopaths, but men just have to expect that, and know not to trigger it," right? Nobody can actually be stupid enough to believe "That guy falsely imprisoned and charged with rape? Serves him right for being insulting."

A Fat And Happy Mob

2011-07-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

Though I refuse to link to any of them, there's a slew of online petitions signed by constitutionally illiterate Americans who wish to "retry Casey Anthony" because they dislike the verdict from her first trial. Of course, the constitution's fifth amendment bans re-trying a defendant because you didn't like the first verdict; among other things, it says "nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb." That clause was done primarily to prevent an out-of-control government (or judicial lynch mob) from jury-shopping, trying the same defendant over and over and over again until somebody, somewhere, agrees to find said defendant guilty.

Conventional wisdom says "Civilization is only three missed meals away from mob rule." Nancy Grace fans and the signers of those anti-Anthony petitions say "Why wait to skip three meals first? Lynching's no fun on an empty stomach."

Americans and TSA: A Call For Sacrifice

2011-07-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

As usual, there's plenty of new TSA outrage stories I could link to if I wished, but I won't bother today. Let me get right to the point: I know that simply saying "Do not fly" is turning into a cliche, but dammit, people, if you don't like seeing yourselves and your loved ones mistreated by the TSA, do not fly! It really is that simple.

Sometimes liberty requires sacrifice, though it's easy for contemporary Americans to forget that, especially middle-class-or-better Americans, given how cushy we've had it compared to the overwhelming majority of humans who are or ever have been alive.

And we are still lucky, because liberty today requires such a small sacrifice, compared to sacrifices made by Americans past! Seriously, my fellow Americans: if you want yourselves and your descendants to live in freedom, you need not risk maiming or death, by taking up arms against an oppressive army. You don't have to abandon your family, friends, credentials and all worldly possessions to escape from behind the Iron or Bamboo curtains. You don't have to face an angry southern lynch mob armed with dogs and fire hoses to deny you "free and fully human" status. All you have to do is not fly.

Yet so many refuse to even consider this! "I don't like the idea of my kids being groped by the TSA, but how else can I get them to Disney World? It's too far to drive."

OLD AMERICANS: Give me liberty or give me death!

NEW AMERICANS: I'll put up with anything, if my kid can shake hands with Mickey Mouse.

Andrea Abbott's Arrest: Sanity's Illegal In An Insane Country

2011-07-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

"I don't want someone to see my naked body." That is now considered a "belligerent statement" in the United States of America, belligerent enough to get you arrested.

Andrea Abbott was arrested in Nashville for being "belligerent and verbally abusive" because she didn't want a TSA agent to feel her daughter's genitalia through her clothing. Here's what the story has to say:

A 41-year-old Clarksville woman was arrested after Nashville airport authorities say she was belligerent and verbally abusive to security officers, refusing for her daughter to be patted down at a security checkpoint.
Andrea Fornella Abbott yelled and swore at Transportation Security Administration agents Saturday afternoon at Nashville International Airport, saying she did not want her daughter to be “touched inappropriately or have her “crotch grabbed,” a police report states.
After the woman refused to calm down, airport police said, she was charged with disorderly conduct and taken to jail. She has been released on bond.
Attempts to reach Abbott on Tuesday were unsuccessful. The report does not list her daughter’s age. The mother and daughter were traveling from Nashville to Baltimore on Southwest Airlines.
“(She) told me in a very stern voice with quite a bit of attitude that they were not going through that X-ray,” Sabrina Birge, an airport security officer, told police.
“No, it’s not an X-ray,” she told Abbott. “It is 10,000 times safer than your cell phone and uses the same type of radio waves as a sonogram.”

Airport security officer Sabrina Birge is clearly an ignoramus; sonograms use sound waves, not radio. And what has happened to my formerly free country, when not wanting your crotch grabbed is now worthy of a police report? When not wanting strangers to see you naked means you have an "attitude?" When having an "attitude" is grounds for arrest?

This is why I refuse to fly in America, so long as flying requires I submit to being fondled by thugs in blue latex gloves (or any other color, for that matter). Being impolite to crotch-grabbing kiddie diddlers in an airport is now grounds for arrest; indeed, I'd guess merely calling them "crotch-grabbing kiddie diddlers" is grounds for that.

That's one sign of a non-free country: when lese majeste becomes a felony. Remember, America: it's not enough to let TSA agents grab your crotch; you have to pretend you don't mind.

Childhood flashback -- Airport security officer Sabrina Birge, aged nine or so, playing pranks on her friends: "Hey, your epidermis is showing!" {Laughs at embarrassed classmate, as latter frantically checks pants and other areas in search of embarrassing rips} "Ha ha! The stupid dork doesn't realize epidermis means your eyeballs."

Americans and TSA: A Call For Sacrifice

Regarding The Whole Casey Anthony Thing

2011-07-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

I do not condone the killing of toddlers, especially not cute ones, but anything that makes Nancy Grace so pissed off must have something going for it. And if Grace and a certain few I know in real life work themselves into a fatal stroke or aneurysm over this -- hope springs eternal -- I'm getting a sex-change operation and converting to Catholicism solely so I can work my way up to Pope and nominate Casey Anthony for sainthood.

TSA And the Silicone Threat: I Told You So

2011-07-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

Your Humble Blogress' blog post from September 9, 2006:

Why hasn’t some enterprising terrorist outfitted a flat-chested female suicide bomber with plastic-explosive breast implants yet? The beauty of a plan like that (from a villainous mastermind perspective) is, even if the plot fails in the sense that the bombs are discovered before they can be set off, it will be a success in terms of terrorizing the population. Consider: the infidel government has already banned certain foods and all beverages, toothpastes, hair-styling products, and anything else that might theoretically be an explosive in disguise. If the government discovered an implant plot, its overreaction would do more to disrupt American air travel than detonating a nuke at O'Hare.

Today, the TSA has decided that's a threat worth fearing:

The government has warned airlines that terrorists are considering surgically implanting explosives into people in an attempt to circumvent screening procedures, according to U.S. officials.

There is no indication of an immediate plot, but the new information could lead to additional screening procedures at the nation’s airports. Existing scanners would not necessarily detect bombs implanted under a person’s skin, experts said.

I can no longer make jokes about TSA cavity searches and the like, for the same reason I can't make jokes about how, come December, I'll probably have the heat rather than the air-conditioning on in my apartment: because there's nothing funny about a straightforward prediction/observation.

My country has gone absolutely, spectacularly, stark-raving mad, assaulting law-abiding travelers under the guise of protecting them.

July 4 Anniversaries

2011-07-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, I’m in danger of turning into a one-trick pony; my blog, which started over five years ago as a catchall discussion of any social, sexual or political topic which caught my interest, now seems to be all TSA all the time.

Still, better a one-trick pony than a horse’s ass, and the latter is what I’d be if I celebrated such illusory concepts as “freedom” while simultaneously knowing “I finally have enough money to take a really good vacation, I can even afford to see Europe for the first time firsthand, but I’m not allowed to fly unless some government agent first looks at or touches my genitalia.” Yet few of my fellow Americans are outraged by this; if anything, I’m considered rude, or possibly hyperbolic, for pointing this out.

Fine. If I can’t celebrate “freedom” this July 4, I will instead celebrate the anniversary of the first time Your Humble Blogress Here ever got published. As a child, YHBH spent every summer enrolled in a "Young Writers" summer day camp sponsored by the city school district. I have many fond memories of those programs, though I don’t specifically recall pooping out any patriotic poetry as July 4 approached, when I was nine years old. Still, I know I produced at least one pro-America poem that summer – doubtless written in my absolute-best Magic Markered handwriting, on colored construction paper decorated with red, white and blue glitter – and the first of the poem’s three stanzas read:

The Fourth of July is a symbol
of the red, white and blue
the three dear colors
of the land of the true.

Some two years after I composed that little masterpiece, on Fourth of July when I was eleven, my mother suddenly started yelling, “Jennifer, you're in the paper!” Sure enough, the newspaper my family subscribed to in those primitive pre-internet days had a special holiday insert section, an insert filled with patriotic prose, poetry and pictures by local schoolchildren, including a three-stanza ode to the Fourth of July printed over the words “JENNIFER ABEL, age 9.”

One line of the poem, obviously alluding to our national flag, mentioned “Fifty stars and thirteen strips.” Even though my 11-year-old self had no memory of writing the poem two years earlier, she indignantly insisted someone at the newspaper must have made a mistake, because even at age nine I’d known the difference between “strips” and “stripes” (though had no idea I’d do the former, nine years hence).

I read the poem with the maturity and sophistication I had at aged eleven-going-on-twelve and, even overlooking the strip-stripe typo, was utterly horrified by this reminder of how childish and simplistic my writing and thoughts had been back during my single-digit years, twenty-four months previous. And it didn’t help that my mother called all our relatives to tell them “Jennifer’s in the paper!”, then called all the neighbors and asked them to save their Fourth of July inserts for her because “Jennifer’s in the paper!”

Fourth of July, personal milestone, childhood trauma ... all the same to me. So maybe it’s fitting that YHBH started out writing shiny pro-America poems on July 4 and now spends the holiday planning ways to enrich foreign airline companies in lieu of my own countrymen, since the easiest way for me to simultaneously visit Europe and avoid being molested by the TSA involves my first traveling to an airport in French Canada.

So be it. Any given TSA agent can certainly kiss my ass, but otherwise may not touch it.

Another Tenuous "Security" Connection

2011-07-03T16:39:00.000-07:00

So: a tractor-trailer truck hit an Amtrak train at a crossing, and Homeland Security is using that as an excuse to argue that passengers on trains should be required to list their names with a government registry first. Actual story headline on the Reno news site: Amtrak train wreck reveals security weakness. And the "weakness" in the story is not "Oh, dear, trains cross roadways and might be hit by trucks"; it's "Oh, no, we don't know the name of every single passenger on the train at all times."

Actual quote from the story: "In the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, airline security became increasingly tight, but Amtrak remains unable to even identify who is on its trains at any given moment."

Because heaven forbid the government not know exactly who's in transit at any given moment.

TSA Grows New Fangs

2011-06-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

I took a break from blogging because I feared falling into an insanity rut -- remember, one definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" -- and it was starting to feel like I wrote the same anti-TSA rant over and over again. I snapped out of it long enough to write another column for the Guardian, this one sharing the unsurprising news that TSA searches are spreading out of airports into other forms of American mass transit via the agency's not-at-all-ominous-sounding VIPR program.

The TSA doesn't protect us from terrorism; now it's TSA terrorizing us. It's not "fear of al-Qaeda" that prevents me flying to visit friends or scenic attractions on the other side of the country; it's fear of being molested by a thug in blue latex gloves. And now, the apoligists' mantra "If you don't like it, don't fly," is replaced by "If you don't like it, don't fly, don't take a train or trolley, don't ride a bus, don't board a boat or ferry, and don't drive your own car. In fact, don't go anywhere; just stay home and be thankful you live in a free country."

X-Ray Vision, Tee Hee Hee

2011-06-22T18:10:00.000-07:00

Actual job posting from the Transportation Security Administration, which is looking to hire agents to fondle airline travelers at Boston's Logan International Airport:

TRANSPORTATION SECURITY OFFICERS

About the Job

A CAREER WHERE X-RAY VISION AND FEDERAL BENEFITS COME STANDARD

Logan International Airport Is Now Hiring

Transportation Security Officers

See yourself in a vital role for Homeland Security. Be part of a dynamic security team protecting airports and skies as you proudly secure your future.

[Dates, addresses and phone numbers for various hiring fairs listed]

Part-Time

Federal Benefits * Paid, ongoing training

X-ray vision, ha ha ha! Since fondling travelers at Logan is only part-time work that can't possibly pay enough to live on in a hyper-expensive city like Boston, maybe TSA hoped calling attention to the X-rated X-ray fringe benefits would offset that among the sort of people craven enough to consider working for TSA.

In other news, last Sunday the Texas-based site The Statesman ran a puff piece about a government surplus store, discussing the nifty profit the state makes (and the nifty bargains ordinary people can find!) at surplus stores selling items TSA confiscates from travelers. The article specifically talks about all the beautiful snow globes for sale, all confiscated because they contain too much potentially dangerous liquid.

A beaming girl's picture is encased in the snow globe, which is about the size of a grapefruit and rests atop an expensive-looking wooden base proclaiming, "Congratulations, graduate!"

Alas, the graduate never received this gift. It rests amid a sea of San Antonio snow globes — and a few globes from Denver, Chicago and Disney World — on the shelves of the Texas State Surplus Store at 6506 Bolm Road, off U.S. 183.

Because it's filled with liquid, you can't carry a snow globe onto an airplane. But some travelers haven't gotten the message, or maybe it slips their minds during their harried packing for summer vacation. Thus, rows and rows of snow globes sit at the surplus store, which gets its inventory not only from state surplus but also from items that were left behind or confiscated — "We say willfully surrendered," said cashier Roberta Siller — at airport security checkpoints in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, El Paso and other small airports.
In the five years this store has been open, its plane-related inventory has soared because of heightened security, according to director James Barrington. The airport stuff takes up most of one small room at the store. In 2010, the state's general fund was enriched $300,000 by the storefront's sales.

It's never a good sign when the government actively profits from violating people's rights. And I would gladly bet my life's savings that the snow globes, confiscated on the grounds "They might be explosive or poisonous or something" are sold without first being tested to ensure their contents aren't explosive or poisonous or anything.

And there's similar tales, too: back when toiletry confiscations were first introduced, there were feel-good stories about TSA donating confiscated shampoo and soap and the like to homeless shelters. Then, as now, there's only two possible conclusion to draw from TSA's behavior:

Option one: they know damned well the stuff they confiscate on safety grounds is perfectly harmless, yet confiscate it anyway; or,

Option two: they honestly believe the stuff they confiscate might be dangerous, yet have no qualms about foisting potential poisons onto the homeless or bargain-shopping public.

I still haven't decided which option on TSA's part demonstrates the most contempt for the American public it allegedly serves.

(Dubious thanks to Lisa Simeone for letting me know about the job listing. I don't know why I even try affecting a good mood anymore.)

Bite Me, Spammers

2011-06-22T01:15:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't updated this blog in awhile -- busy taking care of certain non-writing jobs -- but I still get email alerts whenever someone posts a comment on any thread and today I got several dozen visitors all with names like "Buydesignercraponline."

So, yes, I'll update this soon, I promise, but first I have to delete 150 spambot comments. Even that annoying type-in-this-code security system I've set up on the comment threads isn't working.

The "Daughter Test": Massive Fail

2011-06-10T20:15:00.000-07:00

I'm in danger of developing a permanent forehead callus inspired by from near-constant facepalming ever since reading about Steven Levitt's ridiculously paternalistic "daughter test," which I discuss at the Guardian this week.

Historicalicity

2011-06-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

Remember high school, sitting through Civil War history lessons and learning how Abraham Lincoln led the Confederated Army in glorious battle against Adolf Hitler to free the Jewish slaves out of Egypt? Sarah Palin does.

Anthony Weiner: The Stupidest Politician In America This Week

2011-06-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

I have not been paying much attention to the WeinerTwit scandal -- the allegations that Anthony Weiner used Twitter to send a photo of his weiner to a disinterested college student -- until today, when he finally admitted that yes, he did indeed send it; it wasn't some nefarious right-wing hacker. And the only thing I have to say is: what a freaking idiot. When the likes of Newt Gingrich and John Edwards got caught up in sex scandals, at least they got to, y'know, actually have sex, and presumably enjoy an orgasm or two. What the hell did WeinerTwit hope to get out of this? Did he actually think the sight of his droopy middle-aged schlong would inspire an attractive young woman to drop out of college and move to the other side of the continent so she could enjoy proximity to it? Hell, did he actually think at all?

An American’s Knowledge Of Freedom, And A Child’s Knowledge Of Lust

2011-05-31T10:42:00.000-07:00

Imagine a child – very precocious and bright for her age, but still young enough to think kissing is “icky” and romance is “gross” and she will never, ever involve herself in such yuckiness when she grows up, because everybody knows boys are nothing more than perpetual-motion machines generating cooties in lieu of energy. Eeew.

Now imagine a political sex scandal – or look at any random news site, there’s always one in the headlines – some dude had a good chance of being elected to high office, or already made it there, but then his career and reputation came crashing down around his ankles, right along with his pants.

And the child asks about the politician’s motivation: what made him risk his fortune, career and reputation like that? So you look for age-appropriate ways to explain “Grown-ups feel this thing called ‘lust,’ which makes some of them behave in very stupid ways,” and perhaps the child might understand this intellectually, but until she is old enough to have such feelings herself, she won’t truly understand it in her gut.

Something similar happened to me last weekend, when I took a short vacation to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. For a long time now, I’ve known intellectually that America is no longer the “free country” it used to be, but only when stepping outside it for awhile do I truly feel it in my gut.

I mentioned yesterday some differences between the Canadian and American border guards. But there were other little things, too: in Canada and America, both governments will buy TV ads or billboards encouraging their citizens to behave in certain ways. The Canadian ads I saw contained messages like “donate blood” or “volunteer your time for a worthy charity.” The American ads urged people to feel paranoia and fear, via the infamous “See Something, Say Something” messages sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. (I had no idea sleepy little farm towns in the Massachusetts Berkshires were such hotbeds of potential terrorist activity, but the billboards assured the farmers they should feel very, very afraid.)

To get to Niagara Falls from my place in Connecticut, the best route involves taking the New York Thruway, which is well-peppered with electronic signboards flashing messages to drivers. I first saw such signboards in the mid-1980s, on a family trip to Washington, DC, and remember being impressed by how high-tech and science-fictiony they were. Back then, the signboards flashed information drivers would find useful: time, temperature, traffic and weather conditions.

The signboards on the New York Thruway last weekend wasted no electrons on such drivel; instead, they flashed constant reminders of state authority and the penalties for getting on the wrong side of it, with “Click it or ticket” being the most common phrase.

A couple years ago, while writing for a now-defunct group blog, I took a trip to Halifax and shared an anecdote: my boyfriend and I visited a fort built to defend the city back when cannon were the most powerful weapon available. Inside the fort, you were surrounded by green grassy walls topped with regular niches where cannon once stood guard. Today, if you climbed the walls and sat in those cannon-spots you’d get breathtaking views of the harbor and city, but you’d also be at high risk of a fatal fall, so there were regular signs posted warning people to stay off the wall.

As I wandered through the fort, I suddenly heard a man yelling “Get off the wall!” I looked in one direction and saw an elderly man who had climbed into one of the forbidden cannon spots, then in another direction and saw an annoyed Canadian police officer whose job, apparently, was to stand in the center of the fort, keep an eye on the walls and yell at people who climbed too high.

As an American woman accustomed to American authority figures, I watched and waited to see what the police officer would do next – kick the old man out of the park? Ticket him? Arrest him? Taser him for non-compliance? The answer turned out to be “none of the above”; the cop merely watched to ensure the old man climbed down. A few minutes later, I heard the cop shout “Get off the wall!” at another tourist, but again, that was all he did.

I had long known, intellectually, that America was no longer the truly free country I’d learned about in school, just as small bright cootie-fearing children might know intellectually “Adults feel this thing they call lust,” but that moment in Halifax, considering the difference between how I expected the police officer to behave versus how he actually did, was the first moment I truly felt it in my gut. But I’d managed to forget that feeling, just a little bit, until I left my country again.

There’s an old saying “Nobody fears being cheated more than a con man; nobody fears being robbed more than a thief.” Apply that standard to modern America, and it says something very disconcerting about our government.

My Country, 'Tis Not Of Me

2011-05-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

I'm still tired and footsore after a mini-vacation on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Though still too exhausted to write very much, I will say this: the Canadian border guard was polite, though obviously bored. The American guard was a bigger dick than the one which launched John Holmes' career. I'm honestly amazed that in America, in the Year Of Someone Else's Lord 2011, the fact that I am unmarried -- or rather, the fact that I crossed the border with a man whose last name differs from my own -- is enough to warrant Extra Questions. Good thing my boyfriend is not the stereotypical "forgetful male"; I shudder to think what would have happened had he not been able to answer the question "When is her birthday?"

The Unpatriotic Patriot Act

2011-05-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

Over at the Guardian, I explain why I don't expect the Patriot Act to be repealed anytime soon: despite claims to the contrary, the Patriot Act has nothing to do with the War on Terror and everything to do with the War on Drugs.

Arizona Cops Murder Iraq War Veteran

2011-05-22T16:02:00.001-07:00

Last week a SWAT team in Pima County, Arizona, violently invaded Jose Guerena's home, fired 71 bullets at him (only 60 hit their target), and refused for an hour and 15 minutes to let paramedics work on the injured man. Now the cops are assiduously doing their best to slander the dead by saying he had it coming, what with his being involved with a drug gang and everything. Except there's no actual evidence Guerena was; no drugs or paraphernalia found in his home, and Arizona authorities are now reduced to saying Guerena might have been involved in drug gangs because he owned a picture of Jesus Malverde, a sort of Mexican Robin Hood apparently revered by millions of Mexicans today. However, some of those Mexicans are narco-traffickers, ergo anyone with a Mexican name and a picture of Malverde is assumed to belong to a drug gang (especially when cops need after-the-fact justification for staging a home invasion and murdering the home's inhabitants).

I look forward to the day police use similar logic to bring down the Mafia: he had an Italian last name and owned a rosary! You know how Catholic those Mafiosi tend to be. We had no choice but to pump 60 bullets into his body, then keep the paramedics at bay. How else are we supposed to protect innocent people from murderous thugs?

I have officially lost what few remaining shreds of respect I had for "police work" as a profession. The noble stories I heard as a child all turned out to have parentheticals attached: Police work hard to get murderers off the streets (assuming those murderers don't have police badges. When they do, police do all they can to cover up for the murderer and slander his victim). Police protect us from thieves (except the thieves in the police department who use civil asset forfeiture to confiscate money and property from people never convicted of a crime).

I'll concede the possibility "a numerical majority of police have never personally used their badge as a license to rob, rape or murder." But even those who never directly inflicted suffering on innocents are still complicit, by allowing themselves to become bricks in the blue wall of silence. There are thousands of corrupt-cop stories out there -- journalist Radley Balko has made an entire career out of documenting American police abuse, and for all that I admire Balko's work I firmly believe his career has no damned business existing in an ostensibly free country -- yet how many policemen became known for blowing the whistle on their corrupt colleagues? Off the top of my head, I recall Frank Serpico. That's all.

Jose Guerena, dead at 26 and leaving behind a widow and a toddler child, would've been better off killed by an IED in Iraq. At least then, the government would pay his widow a pension rather than posthumously slander him. (Granted, you might say I should not blame "the" government for the localized actions of the Pima County Sheriff's Department. But unless and until the Department of Justice spends at least as much time and effort taking down murderous SWAT teams as it does arresting cancer patients who smoke pot, I consider the federal government complicit in every SWAT-team atrocity Radley Balko ever reported.)

Were Jose Guerena a blue-eyed blond named Joe Whitebread, he'd probably still be alive today. Here in the year 2011, the belief "Mexicans aren't fully human, so it's no big deal if they die" is de rigueur for any effective drug warrior. Just ask Michele Leonhart, the oddly moralistic sociopath currently heading the Drug Enforcement Administration: last month the Washington Post reported that Mexican drug cartels are now targeting and killing children, in order to terrorize the populace. Leonhart considers that cause for celebration:

“It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” said Michele Leonhart, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The cartels “are like caged animals, attacking one another,” she added.

See? No innocent children are being slaughtered in Mexico; they're just caged animals dying south of the Rio Grande, and our world presumably a better place now that they've stopped breathing. And Jose Guerena wasn't just a Marine veteran, hard-working husband and devoted father; he was one of those people. You know, the ones who engage in suspicious activities like having a Hispanic name and owning pictures of the wrong Robin Hood.

Our Lady Of Perpetual Misery

2011-05-19T16:57:00.000-07:00

WHAT UNITED AIRLINES DID: scheduled its usual load of flights to and from various places in the country, assigning each flight a number for billing and recordkeeping. As usual, United assigned its flights ordinary integers like 93 or 175, nothing insane or irrational like π or √2 or anything like that.

WHAT UNITED AIRLINES SAID AFTERWARDS: “Mea culpa! Forgive us! We forgot the numbers 93 and 175 can never be used on flights anymore, because those were some of the flight numbers from 9/11!”

WHAT UNITED AIRLINES SHOULD HAVE SAID: “Get over yourselves, you masochistic misery fetishists. They’re just numbers.”

(Note to non-American readers: “9/11” is American shorthand for what the rest of the English-speaking world calls “the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC on 11 September 2001.” It’s pronounced “nine-eleven,” in the same hallowed tones devout teetotalling Baptists use to say “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”)

Back when 9/11 was still contemporary news, it would indeed have been insensitive for an American airline company to assign a flight such numbers; no ticketholder wants to hear “Now boarding flight 93” when he’s already heard “everyone on flight 93 died” on the news on his way to the airport.

But ten years later, why are we still behaving as though the initial fear and adrenalin rush is still intoxicating our systems? What really creeps me out about this is, it seems like America’s on track to becoming another dysfunctional LEG country, a Land of Endless Grudges. Like the rationales for the idiotic wars that periodically erupt in places like the Balkans: “We must raze the town of Grzywycz and kill everybody in it, to avenge the evil things its townspeople did to my great-great-grancestor in 1397!” Or perhaps a better analogy would be the lifelong mourning misogynistic Victorians demanded from respectable widows: “Your husband is dead, you’re a widow at age 20, and the sorrow you now feel is expected to define the rest of your existence. You must never smile, wear colors or pursue normal enjoyment, ever again. You know the old saying ‘Life goes on?’ Not for you, it doesn’t.”

It’s wicked enough when done to widows, worse when done to a whole nation. Especially when that nation is mine.

An American Healthcare Survey

2011-05-19T01:44:00.000-07:00

My landline phone rang today, a rare event in my household since we mostly communicate with friends and family via the internet, and are on the Do Not Call registry besides. But politicians and pollsters aren’t bound by anti-telemarketing restrictions, so I picked up the phone to hear a very young and meek-sounding woman who said she was with Blah Blah Polling Company conducting a survey about healthcare, and wondered if she could ask my opinion on a few matters and absolutely positively not try to sell me anything.

I don’t usually go along with such requests but did this time, thinking it would be interesting to hear what sort of healthcare questions pollsters currently focus on. Except the pollster asked me nothing about health care; she only asked about health insurance. Specifically, she asked me to name all the health insurance companies I knew about. I could only name two off the top of my head, though when she started reading company names off a list I recognized them all: yeah, I’ve heard of that one. Yes, that one too. Yes. Yes. Yep. Yup. Uh-huh.

Then my household health insurance status: yes, we have coverage in our household; yes, it’s through mine or my spouse and/or partner’s employer. No, without looking at my card I can’t tell you which health insurance company covers me now. (That’s because my doctor’s receptionist never asks for the name of my health insurance company, only the name of the employer who provides it. But I didn’t tell the pollster this, since she didn’t ask.)

Now she repeated her previous list of “Have you heard of this company” questions, only this time she pronounced the full, complete multi-word names of national corporations’ various Connecticut-based subsidiaries: instead of simply asking if I’d heard of Blue Cross, she asked about “Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Connecticut.”

Corporate names more than six words long all sound alike to me, so I told her the only full-name company I knew was Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts, which once covered me. I didn’t tell her my opinion of said company – that it sucks like a vacuum cleaner on steroids – but she still made a discouraged sound halfway between “oh” and “eew.” (Note to non-American readers: in this country, health insurance companies in one state aren’t allowed to offer coverage in another. Thus, when I taught high school in Massachusetts my employer-provided health insurance would only pay for doctor visits in that state, though I lived in Connecticut.)

Nonetheless, she repeated the full Connecticut-specific subsidiary names of various insurance companies and asked if I’d heard of them: How familiar am I with This Company Healthcare and Insurance of Connecticut? What about That Company Connecticut Insurance and Healthcare? Other Company Connecticut Healthcare Insurance?

Then another list of questions: the last time I had to choose between different coverage providers in an employer-based plan, did I have the opportunity to buy a policy with Some Company?

“I don’t remember what the choices were,” I said. “I remember I went with Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts, but don’t remember who offered the other options.” That didn’t stop her from asking if I’d had the opportunity to buy coverage from every insurance company on her list. “Are we almost finished here?” I asked. “I was in the middle of something.”

“There’s only a few more questions,” she assured me. “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being ‘very interested’ and 1 being ‘not interested at all,’ how interested would you be in buying coverage with This Company Healthcare and Insurance of Connecticut?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d have to see what they charge, what they cover, what the deductibles are, and how all that compares to my other options. Without knowing that, I can’t say.”

“There’s no right or wrong answer,” she assured me. “This is an opinion poll.”

“I know, but I have no opinion right now and don’t have the information I need to form one.”

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how interested would you be in buying coverage with That Company Connecticut Insurance and Healthcare?”

“I don’t know. How much would it cost me?”

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how interested would you be in buying coverage with Other Company Connecticut Healthcare Insurance?”

I told her I still didn’t know, and suggested she use that answer for the rest of the 1-to-10 interest questions and skip to the next batch. Of course, she couldn’t deviate from her script. So I told her I was sorry, but I wouldn’t be finishing the survey since I obviously couldn’t give her any useful answers, and I hung up before she could say anything.

You know what’s scary? Whichever twit of a lobbyist wrote that useless, monotonous cookie-cutter survey has more political influence and outright power than you or I ever will.

More On The Loss Of J sub D

2011-05-12T00:49:00.000-07:00

His official name was John D. Hannah—I think the D stood for David—but most of the friends he had at the end of his life knew him as J sub D. That was the name he used to post online, at Reason’s Hit and Run, Radley Balko’s Agitator and a variety of other blogs; if I recall correctly, he originally planned to go by his initials JD when he started at Hit and Run years ago, but modified it upon discovering a regular poster by that moniker already there. That’s good, though, because it’s easy to find his old thoughts online when searching for “J sub D,” while JD commenters are a dime a dozen on the web.

Over a thousand people who don’t normally check this blog visited in just over 24 hours to read about J-sub. Ironically, as DA Ridgely points out, none of us, J-sub's online friends, would have known the details of his death if not for the Detroit Free Press column mourning how he died forgotten, but “Far from forgotten, John had simply become temporarily disconnected from his family and his many online friends.” Many indeed; over a thousand at my last count.

I think I made a mistake in my last post, though; I said he’d been homeless the last few months of his life, but after reading Mitch Albom’s article again I think he was actually homeless for the better part of a decade:

Hannah, as near as I can piece together, grew up somewhere in Wayne County. He served years in the Navy, reached the relatively high level of E8 (in the Navy, that would be a senior chief petty officer). At some point, perhaps a decade ago, his wife died, and he took it hard. He didn't want to live anymore.

He just dropped out of sight," said JimHoffner, who oversees the kitchen at Pilgrim Church/I Am My Brother's Keeper Ministries in Detroit, where, for the last five or six months, Hannah had been sleeping among other homeless men, on vinyl mats beneath wool blankets. "He was a helluva nice guy. Intelligent. He helped with the chores here. At some point every day, he would walk up to the library at Wayne State. I think he used the computers there."

Yeah. He did. That’s when we’d talk.

I guess he just lost interest in life after Donna died. I knew he still mourned her, but never realized how hard. With a military pension and health insurance, I don’t think “lack of money” put him on the street … but I can definitely imagine his depression over Donna draining so much of his mental energy that even minor matters like “taking pension money and paying bills with it” became impossibly Herculean tasks. At least with us, his friends at the forum and the regular commenters from other blogs, it seems he did find something interesting again, at an energy level he did not find draining.

He was Caucasian, thin, 5 feet 5 or so. He smoked and had lung cancer, which he accepted.

"He said he came here to die," AnnetteCovington related. She is the wife of the church's late pastor, Henry Covington. She knew Hannah as a quiet, decent man, who, after the kindness shown him at the shelter, said he changed his mind and wanted to live.

It was too late.

Maybe we, his online friends, helped him change his mind too. I like to think so. He obviously didn’t want us to know how what was going on with him, though. Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted Mitch Albom to write that Free Press column, or for me to find it and connect John Hannah with J sub D. But he should not be forgotten.

John/J-sub’s memorial service will be today at 1 p.m. (Detroit time). Representatives from the military are supposed to be there, as well as some people from the shelter and a family member or two. I doubt any of his online friends will make it on such short notice.

From the “reads differently in retrospect” archives, here’s the transcript of a little chat J-sub and I had at the forum on March 27, four days before he stopped posting for good:

JENNIFER: Regarding Earth Hour, I'm sympathetic to the whole "Let's reduce waste and save the earth" kind of thing, but hate all symbolic gestures because people think making the gesture equals actually doing something. On the other hand, given that these are many of the same people who banned lightbulbs and dish detergent that actually works without your having to add trisodium phosphate to it, it's good for them to be distracted by meaningless symbolic gestures rather than continue pushing through their horrible legislation.

J SUB D: My favorite, by far, meaningless gesture ever attempted was Hands Across America. I found it im-fucking-possible to avoid mocking it from conception to failed attempt.

JENNIFER: I'd managed to forget all about that! Wasn't it supposed to be some symbolic "homelessness is bad" thing?

J SUB D: I think it was about peace on earth or kill the A-Rabs or something.

please hold, googling, googling ...

The wild and wonderful wiki wrote:
“Hands Across America was a benefit event and publicity campaign staged on Sunday May 25, 1986 in which approximately 6.5 million people held hands in a human chain for fifteen minutes along a path across the continental United States. Many participants donated ten dollars to reserve their place in line; the proceeds were donated to local charities to fight hunger and homelessness and help those in poverty.”

Since homelessness and poverty are no longer the major problems they were back in the '80s, I guess we have to call it a success.

“Life’s A Joy That Has To End”: John Hannah, Rest In Peace

2011-05-10T16:43:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine died a couple weeks ago: alone, in pain, homeless in Detroit. I think a friend of mine died, anyway. I’m 99 percent sure it’s him, but lack firm knowledge to banish that one percent uncertainty.

Damn the internet, sometimes. Hard enough to keep abreast of everything important that happens to folks you care about in real life—but what of those you only know online, if they can’t go near a computer?

I belong to a small, semiprivate forum with roughly 70 active members, over half of whom have met each other in meatspace at various times. We all feel we know each other, to an extent … but how well can one person truly know another? Even those you see every day hold secrets in their private lives, and it’s even easier to keep secrets from those who only know you online.

One such person I’ve known for years through various fora (though never met in real life) went by the online moniker “J sub D.” His real name was John Hannah: a retired Navy chief; a widower still mourning Donna, his second wife and the love of his life until she died; a Detroit native who settled back there after he retired.

We got along smashingly well in our online chats, since we had similarly sarcastic tastes in humor. He always encouraged the give-em-hell articles I wrote for various papers and magazines, and would often quote (and link to) them in comment threads where he chatted online, though he never told me about his attempts to help my career; I only learned of them one day when I checked my personal blog stats and saw visitors from unfamiliar websites.

Last September, he told the forum he’d been diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, but forbade us all from “making a fuss.” It was easy to pretend he was okay since we only read his online words; his typing always looked the same so we never noticed him wasting away. He also told us, “Someone once said 'Life’s a bitch and then you die,' which is only half-true. 'Life’s a joy that has to end' might be a better way to put it.” His attitude did, and does, make me ashamed of myself sometimes.

On March 25 he posted this:

Woot! Woot! I have now entered the uncharted (by me) waters of Stage 4. Just finished a week of R&R at the hospital for testing, testing and more testing. The docs discovered (via MRI due to numbness in face) three small lesions on my brain and tumors in my sinuses. I turned down "relatively minor" brain surgery (WTF is "minor" brain surgery?) and start getting by head blasted with radiation on Tuesday. I'll let you know if I turn green and grow monstrous muscles.

“Tuesday” would have been March 29. March 31 was the last day he ever posted at the forum. His word-of-the-day subscription had emailed him the definition of “dauphin,” which he posted. That started a rambling little discussion thread about word history and dolphins and old French nobility, and J sub D’s final post in that forum — his final post online anywhere, so far as I can determine — was a picture of the last Dauphin’s family crest, and his observation “ETA I really enjoy the etymologies.”

We never heard from him again.

Two weeks later I emailed him. He never responded. What I didn’t know — what none of us knew — is that somehow, despite his military pension, John lived in a homeless shelter the last few months of his life. To go online, he’d walk to Wayne State University and use the library computers.

I could’ve given him the old laptop I don’t use anymore, with a prepaid wireless subscription or something on it, if I’d known he had to walk outside through a Detroit winter for internet access. I could’ve given him more than that, if he’d only let me know he needed it.

I learned about the homeless shelter—and John’s death—today, when I found this two-day-old story by Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press:

John D. Hannah died once.

Now he is dying again.

The second death is the death of being forgotten. And Hannah, who served his country for years, has been forgotten.

His body lies alone in a cooled room in the Gates of Heaven Funeral Home in Detroit, thanks to the grace of its 66-year-old owner, Joseph Norris, who said, "My heart told me I had to do this."

Norris is keeping Hannah unburied, in a donated coffin, until someone from his family, some brother, sister, child, uncle, cousin -- even a friend -- comes forward to say they knew him.

Does “we often exchanged jokes and debated political matters online, and I miss him terribly now that he’s gone, but I have no idea what he looked like” equal “I knew him”? What about “I already knew every single personal detail mentioned in the story, except the minor piddling little detail about his living in a homeless shelter?”

For two weeks, no one has, despite Hannah's years of service in the Navy, despite an honorable discharge, despite calls and a letter to the U.S. Military Retirement Pay Division. Bureaucracy and privacy concerns (ironic for a man whom no one has claimed) bog down the process.

Meanwhile, Hannah's corpse remains unvisited. Surely, there is someone reading this who knew him? A man can't simply die in the state where he was raised, in the city where he lived and have no one to stand by his coffin, can he?

Sadly, he can. In the world of homelessness, one can die as quietly as a falling leaf.

That’s the first mention of homelessness in the story. Also the first mention of homelessness I ever heard in relation to my online friend J sub D, the retired Navy chief with whom I’d chat online. I knew he had his pension; he mentioned it to us and its existence is strongly implied in the story. The Navy career, the beloved dead wife, the lung cancer, the birthday on August 11, 1955 … I knew that. I knew all that. I just didn’t know he was sleeping in a homeless shelter.

He died alone. Some of us talked about making a road trip to Detroit, but by the time we reached out to ask him, he was already out of internet access and thus out of reach forever.

So I didn’t know him as well as I thought, but I know he was smart and funny and responded to tales of injustice with an outraged sarcasm I effortlessly empathized with. I know—from reading Albom’s story and the comments on it—that he died homeless, and apparently estranged from his family; I only speak to one or two relatives anymore myself, so it looks like we could empathize in ways I never knew.

At least not when he was still alive and it could do him any good. None of us at the forum, his friends from the internet, knew anything in time to do him any good. Perhaps the relationship was merely “virtual,” yet the loss I feel now is entirely real.

***

ADDENDUM: Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings suggests making donations to I Am My Brother's Keeper, the homeless shelter where John spent his last months before going into the hospital.

ADDITIONAL ADDENDUM: It's also worth considering a small donation to Joseph Norris, the funeral home operator who donated the coffin, took care of J-sub's body and notified the reporter; without him, none of us might ever have known for certain what happened to our friend. Norris is a small business owner, and I doubt he's rich enough for such to be mere pocket-change expenses for him.

Joseph Norris
Gates of Heaven Funeral Home
4412 Livernois Avenue
Detroit, MI 48210
(313) 894-2427

THIRD ADDENDUM: The funeral service was today (Thursday, May 12), at 1 pm Detroit time. Members of the forum called the funeral home yesterday, and heard that military representatives, shelter workers and a couple of family members were planning to attend on Chief John Hannah's behalf. Meanwhile, this post has started getting hits from people who knew or were looking for John Hannah, but maybe never heard of J sub D. If that's you, here are some sites you might want to check out where J sub D's friends remember him, in the posts themselves and especially in the comment threads:

J sub D, RIP (Jesse Walker at Reason Hit and Run)
J sub D, Rest in Peace (Radley Balko at The Agitator)
Sad News (Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings)
John Hannah (J sub D), RIP (DA Ridgely)

Crazy Trains

2011-05-06T01:11:00.000-07:00

I have no violent or vandalistic intentions whatsoever -- I feel compelled to start with a disclaimer, in contemporary America -- but if I wanted to derail a train I could do so in less than three hours, starting right now: ten minutes to steal steel from a construction site, five minutes to get to the active train tracks nearby, and another couple of hours to walk along the tracks until I'm deep in relatively isolated woods along various steep embankments, lay the steel along the track just so and wait for the passing train to derail itself.

I'm oversimplifying a tad -- in reality, a piece of steel heavy enough to derail a train would probably be too heavy for me to move without a hand truck -- but if I really were of a murderous mindset, I doubt I'd need long to think of something. I doubt anybody would, which is why I'm unimpressed by reports that Bin Laden's computer held word of a possible train-derailment plot on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

There's over 140,000 miles of standard-gauge train track in the USA (according to a quick Wiki search) and no way in hell anybody can watch it all. But we don't need to; for as long as railroads have existed, anyone with access to a big stone or metal bar, and the will to cause harm, could derail a train anytime they wished. And al-Qaeda's been reduced to train-derailment plots; i.e., the sort of stunts I personally could pull right now if I wanted to derail a train in lieu of finishing this post and going to bed. It is good that they finally got Bin Laden, but in the same way it's good when Germany still arrests the occasional incontinent ninety-something-year-old ex-concentration camp guard: yes, he's responsible for great evil and deserves to face consequences; yes, it's a travesty of justice that he remained free as long as he did; but no, we didn't make the world safer by taking him out of it.

The terror threat is the same as it's been since the aftermath of 9/11: negligible. The 9/11 attacks happened because terrorists exploited a loophole that will never be opened again, at least not while anyone who personally remembers that day is still alive. Ever since then, the only thing we've had to fear is fear itself -- and the nasty things fear is leading America into.

Bin Laden’s Dead And Chocolate Rations Are Up

2011-05-02T01:10:00.000-07:00

Hooray! Now that the big bad scary threat to America is dead, we Americans can have our civil liberties back, right? No more TSA fingerbang patdowns in the name of preserving freedom, right?

Wrong, of course; Eternal War doesn’t end just because Goldstein is dead. Indeed, the government wants us to be more afraid of terrorists than ever:

U.S. diplomatic facilities around the world were placed on high alert following the announcement of bin Laden's death, a senior U.S. official said, and the U.S. State Department should be sending out a new "worldwide caution" for Americans shortly. Some fear al Qaeda supporters may try to retaliate against U.S. citizens or U.S. institutions.

A few days before they caught Bin Laden, self-described “advice goddess” Amy Alkon had her own TSA encounter. Perhaps that explains why US forces finally caught Bin Laden. It definitely explains why she wrote a blog post advising her readers, “Don't Give The TSA An Easy Time Of Violating Your Rights,” and added “It shouldn't be emotionally easy, earning a living by violating people's rights.”

TSA hasn’t commented on Alkon’s case, so far as I know, though if it did, I’m sure they’d insist Alkon’s groping followed proper procedure, just like the groping of six-year-old Anna Drexel, Miss USA Susie Castillo, and every other person molested by TSA agents (except the cancer survivor who wound up drenched in his own urine after a TSA agent broke his colostomy bag; a TSA spokesman admitted that agent screwed up, just not severely enough to be punished or even identified for it).

The TSA isn't going away just because they caught Bin Laden. The Patriot Act isn't going away either. The “terrorist threat” hasn’t been about Bin Laden for a long time now, if indeed it ever was; America’s Eternal War is fought against its own citizens. And many of those Americans who cheered in the street after hearing Bin Laden is dead doubtless believe TSA is a noble organization doing a necessary job, and I’m convinced the majority of my fellow Americans these days will eat any crap the government shovels their way, so long as there’s an authority figure to assure them “That’s not shit you’re eating; that’s Freedom Chocolate.”

I Heart Royalty

2011-04-29T13:09:00.000-07:00

No, this post isn't about the inbred rich dude who got hitched in England today, and shame on you for even thinking I'd care enough to write about that. Though in retrospect, maybe it's my fault for writing the wrong title; this post should be called "I heart royalty payments." Yesterday I learned that the German publisher of an English-as-a-second-language textbook got licensed to print one of my Guardian immigration columns. [Boyfriend's response: "Germans pick your least scathing piece. That must hurt."]

Not really, but what does hurt, as I remember back to my own student attempts to read whatever foreign-language essays my teachers and textbook publishers deemed acceptable, is knowing karmic law demands certain high school students in Germany will one day hate me. I always try to write so the result is easy to read and understand, and I daresay my immigration column met that standard . . . assuming you-the-reader are not only fluent in English, but also familiar with American history, laws, mainstream politics and everyday culture.

But I tried reading the column again, imagining myself someone for whom the English language is something I must seek out rather than my everyday means of communication, and without footnotes I might not understand that "suckitude" is no real word but a slightly vulgar portmanteau, and the word "illegals" considered rude and incorrect as a plural noun but neutral and grammatically sound in singular adjectival form. There's also mention of "totalitarian regimes," and regime-vs-government is a standard example used in American denotation/connotation lessons; when I taught high school English I did that lesson every year.

What laws regarding the status of people who to the United States emigrate does the woman who this column wrote prefer? Cite three examples to your answer support.

Anna Drexel, Revisited

2011-04-21T15:25:00.000-07:00

Over at the Guardian I discuss the revolting kiddie-porn video starring the unwilling Anna Drexel, and its implications for American freedom.

Fiddle About With Uncle Ernie Sam

2011-04-14T20:26:00.000-07:00

I miss the days when the Transportation Security Administration was merely a bad joke rather than a public employment program for NAMBLA. Spokesmen for the TSA have already admitted that the agent who molested six-year-old Anna Drexel in the now-infamous video followed “proper procedure”; in other words, TSA sees nothing improper about forcing little girls and boys to submit to big scary strangers who want to squeeze their buttocks and run their hands between their legs, stroke their hair and pull it back from the nape of their neck, run their fingers all around the insides of their underwear and shirt necklines — nothing extraordinary about that, just the ordinary everyday submission TSA expects all travelers to endure.

Now that Drexel’s parents have come forward and made national headlines, other parents have come forth with their children’s stories too: last week eight-year-old Spencer Sheahan was fondled on his way to Disneyland. Spencer said “I didn’t know what they were going to do to me”; Anna Drexel’s parents said their daughter started to cry after her groping, and asked if she’d done something wrong.

No, dear, you did nothing wrong: the TSA did, and to a lesser extent your parents did too, taking you on an airplane a full six months after TSA implemented its molestation policy. TSA agents in Washington DC might have gone too far when they pulled a 15-year-old girl away from her mother before groping the teen; the girl turned out to be the daughter of Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who has introduced legislation that would ban TSA agents from groping a minor “unless a parent gives consent and is present for the screening. If a minor is traveling alone, a representative of an air carrier must supervise the pat down.”

Chaffetz means well but misses the point: the problem isn’t “minors are being groped without their parents’ consent” but “every flier in America is being groped (or at least at risk of it) without their consent.” And having your mom or an airline executive watch while you’re being degraded won’t make it any easier. Just ask little Anna Drexel.

The TSA has been a pointless, useless, unconstitutional organization from its very inception. Preventing another 9/11 required two things, and we’ve already done them both: strengthen cockpit doors so hijackers can’t force their way in, and let passengers know the old conventional wisdom “During a hijacking, the best course of action is to be quiet and do what the hijackers tell you” is wrong.

Everything else since then has been pointless: the bans on tweezers and similar grooming items, the restrictions on toiletries, all these and more have done nothing but erode the fourth amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Back in September 2006 I said of the TSA: “these stupid rules aren’t meant to make us safer, but only train us in habits of evermore mindless obedience.”

And that was back in the good old days, when TSA was merely a sad unconstitutional joke of a make-work program, not the out-of-control mass molestation squad it is now.

It’s Not Kiddie Porn; It’s The TSA!

2011-04-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

I never thought I’d wax nostalgic for the Good Old Days when Bush and Cheney were running this country into the ground, yet here’s one way Bush’s America was indisputably better than Obama’s: under the Bush administration, child molesters were given long prison sentences, whereas today they’re given tax-funded salaries and turned loose to diddle children and adults alike in American airports for the TSA.

Here’s a video I’d never have shown you during the Bush administration, because back then it would’ve been classified “softcore child pornography” rather than mere “documentation of American government agents at work.” If you’re not a pedophile, prepare to be outraged; if you are a pedophile, prepare your Vaseline and tissue box. You’ll need them both.

Background: apparently, just before this video was shot, the little girl did go through the nude scanner, but that didn’t satisfy the TSA so the child had to be groped instead. At the very beginning, you can just hear the girl’s mother plead, “Can’t you just re-scan her?”

Of course they can’t just “re-scan” her. Where’s the fun in that? Scanning would merely give agents another look-see at the six-year-old girl’s smooth hairless nude body, but if they wanted to see that again, they could call up the saved image with only one hand (leaving the other free to pursue more pleasurable activities). Re-scanning the girl wouldn’t let some fat slob so lacking in morality and marketable job skills she has to work as a TSA agent act out the pedophiliac fantasy in the video: first running her gloved hands down the soft, silky hair on the girl’s head before slo-o-o-owly pulling it back from the nape of her neck, letting the hair drop softly back down onto the neckline of the girl’s shirt just before the agent sticks her finger down said neckline to trace out the full circumference of the child’s naked shoulders before pulling out, and running her palms over by where her victim’s breasts ought to appear in a few years [i.e. when she’s too old to be sexually appealing anymore], across the child’s still-nonexistent waistline and hip curvatures, finally sticking a gloved finger down into the child’s underwear and feeling aaaaallllll the way around the girl’s slender cylindrical little form. Next it’s the girl’s buttocks — gentle squeeze, gentle squeeze, just enough to make sure she’s not smuggling a nuke down there — now between the legs — yes, yes, right there, that’s the sweet spot all the pedophiles wish they could touch — mmm, yeah — now run both hands down the child’s inner thighs … all done while you’re behind the child, of course, so she can’t make eye contact with you but you can, if you want, pretend/fantasize she’s somebody else — maybe that hot little piece JonBenet Ramsey circa 1990-something — now dash around to the front for another quick grab-through — yes, pull the girl’s shirt back down and smooth it out, you did rumple it pretty badly — now walk away and leave the child standing there with her legs apart while she waits for the results of the drug test you’re running on her.

I’m sure someone out there will read this and be very offended by what I wrote. Not offended by the pedophiliac behavior of the TSA, mind you, but offended at me for identifying such behavior as the pedophile wet dream it is. I am not swayed by the argument “TSA does not hire child molesters!” Anyone who molests a child is by definition a child molester, and what that video shows and what I just described is indisputably a bully in authority molesting a child.

UPDATED EDIT: A spokesman for TSA says the agent in the video followed proper procedure. Not a bad apple, not an isolated incident -- this is simply what the TSA does.

Americans and TSA: A Call For Sacrifice

The Day My Heart Stood Still

2011-04-08T01:40:00.000-07:00

I haven’t blogged for awhile because I’ve been suffering through withdrawal symptoms after quitting a drug addiction cold turkey. Specifically, I haven’t had a cup of coffee in several days, because I want to go back to where caffeine brings an occasional extra welcome jolt, rather than being a daily baseline requirement.

But today I had a jolt stronger than any I ever got from caffeine. Get this: a few days ago I started “penny mining” — when I go to the bank, in addition to my regular transactions I also take out some rolls of pennies to sort through while watching TV at home. Pre-1982 copper pennies go in one jar, the very occasional wheat penny in another, and I re-roll the rest to deposit in my account.

So I went to the bank today and came home with $10 in penny rolls, which I sorted while watching a DVD. When I opened one roll and scattered its contents across my work tray, there among the brown and red coins I saw a silver-colored one. “Cool,” I thought, “a steel wheat penny in good condition.” But the back of the coin showed the Lincoln Memorial, and when I turned it over I saw the date was 1974.

The old cliché about time standing still describes the moment too well for me to seek out something better. One of the rarest recent American coins is the 1974 aluminum penny; that year, in light of high copper prices, there was talk of minting pennies from aluminum. (The proposal failed, of course, and copper pennies minted until 1982.) Over a million aluminum pennies were struck; one was donated to the Smithsonian, and a few more passed out to congresspersons and cabinet members and similar people. The US Mint recalled the coins when it abandoned the plan, but about a dozen of the aluminum pennies were never returned.

Nowadays the missing coins are officially considered US government property, and the Secret Service is tasked with confiscating any that are found and returning them to the Mint. Or so it’s believed; nobody knows for sure what would happen if a 1974 aluminum penny turned up, because nobody — not one of the relatives, mistresses or favored lobbyists of the Congressmen who initially refused to return the coins — has ever publicly come forth, admitted holding one and offered it for sale.

I stared down at the silver 1974 next to Lincoln’s silver head and felt hot and cold and dizzy all at once, thinking: “Here I sit with a literally priceless coin in my lap, and there’s collectors who’d pay millions for it except I have no idea how to find any of these people, plus the Secret Service will confiscate the penny if they know I have it.”

All this and more flashed through my head in a fraction of a second, but eventually realization sank in that an aluminum penny would be noticeably lighter than the one I actually held. I have a few aluminum coins on hand; a French franc from World War Two is about the size of a quarter, yet weighs noticeably less than my penny. Then I remembered how, before safety regulations went insane, “turning pennies into silver” was a common high school chemistry experiment.

So I didn’t have a priceless artifact fall into my lap today. If I had, I wouldn’t have updated my blog today either, and would probably continue neglecting it awhile longer until I logged on to report “Hi, everybody, I now live in one of those non-Middle Eastern countries that refuses to extradite rich people to the US. No TSA here, either.”

(Confession: once I realized I had an ordinary copper penny after all, I felt an overwhelming urge to call the Secret Service in the guise of a patriotic citizen who thought she’d found an aluminum penny and was doing her civic duty by reporting it. But I decided not to, figuring I’m probably on some watch list already.)

Earth Hour Regrets

2011-03-26T21:08:00.000-07:00

So a couple of hours ago was "Earth Hour," where people were supposed to turn off their lights to symbolize something about saving energy or Earth or the environment, all of which are probably good causes but I hate symbolic gestures because too many people think "making the gesture" equals "actually doing something." So I paid no attention to Earth Hour this year, as I did the year before.

On the other hand, in the past year I've had to sacrifice precious closet space to make room for my stockpile of incandescent light bulbs. The US is banning their retail sale in a couple of years, so I need enough incandescents to last the rest of my life since their presumptive equivalents, CFLs and LEDs, both emit bleak, headache-inducing illumination no matter what kind of lampshade or stained glass I shine them through. And many of the people who support the incandescent-bulb ban are the same ones making a big show of complying with Earth Hour so they can Make A Difference, so I suppose it's good when they're distracted by meaningless gestures rather than run around banning something else they don't like.

So in retrospect I wish I'd supported Earth Hour, or written blog posts a couple days in advance saying "This Earth Hour thing planned for Saturday -- it's useful and productive and if you go along with it you get bonus points toward Good Person status."

I'll try to remember next year.

Gallivanting Around The Web

2011-03-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

Over at Mainstreet.com, I use an extremely simple mathematical formula to figure out that in most American markets, housing prices still have a long way to fall.

TSA: Damning American Catholics To Hellfire Eternal Since Its Inception

2011-03-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

Among the myriad reasons I’m glad I’m not Catholic, there’s this: Catholics say despair is a sin, and after all the cool, exciting, makes-for-a-great-story sins I’ve committed it would really suck if I wound up condemned to Hell for what boiled down to never outgrowing my Goth phase. “Are you freaking kidding me?” I’d say when St. Peter turned me away from the Pearly Gates and summoned a demon to torture me forever (though if the demon were a US government operative, respectable mainstream American media outlets would say I was not tortured, but merely subjected to “enhanced interrogation”). “I was an atheist stripper who wrote blasphemous poetry in her spare time, and you’re condemning me for being depressed?”

Of course, you need not subscribe to any religious principles to figure despair worth avoiding; it may not be a sin but it still corrodes your soul. Yet the more news I read about the TSA, the harder it is to maintain any genuine optimism (as opposed to optimistic self-delusion). Even finding news about the TSA is a struggle these days; the media downplayed the issue long before events in Japan and Libya justifiably dominated the front pages.

But I belong to various anti-TSA online groups, which every day find and post obscure local stories that would’ve been national front-page news back when the media still cared about things like “civil liberties” and “the right to travel freely within the borders of my own country without being felt up by government agents so lacking in morality and intelligence, they actually think diddling innocent travelers all day is a noble and worthwhile act, and Americans have no right to be angry.”

Just look at the past week and change: the Department of Homeland Security argued in court that it has the right to strip-search every airline passenger, if it wants to. A congressional committee held a hearing on the nude scanners, and TSA initially skipped out on it, proving yet again that the rogue agency doesn’t even pay lip service to notions like “accountability to the public” or “consent of the governed.”

An alleged “calculation error” (or possible “deliberate lie”) resulted in TSA misreporting scanner radiation levels by a factor of ten; that is, the scanners emit ten times the radiation TSA previously claimed. Still, John Pistole wants to deploy another 275 of the scanners in airports throughout the country, and there’s talk of moving them out of the realm of transportation altogether, and installing them in schools, federal buildings, shopping malls and other public places.

An honorably discharged Marine Corps veteran – a Muslim man married to a Christian woman – was put on the No-Fly List and visited by the FBI after exchanging e-mails with a local imam on “how to raise children in an interfaith household.”

(Think of the outrage that story alone would have generated back when the American media still took the constitution seriously enough to care about threats to it: the FBI reading an American citizen’s private correspondence; the FBI assuming “discussing childrearing matters with your clergyman makes you a potential terrorist"; the FBI not even having sense enough to suspect “people devout enough to consider ‘religious terrorism’ as a career generally aren’t the ones in interfaith marriages.” It’s also worth recalling Bruce Schneier’s excellent description of the No-Fly List: “a list of suspected terrorists so dangerous that we can't ever let them fly, yet so innocent that we can't arrest them - even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act.”)

And all the while, TSA agents were too busy groping travelers’ genitalia or stealing money from travelers’ luggage to notice any knives or guns being smuggled through checkpoints.

Yesterday, the group We Won’t Fly put out a press release demanding a “No-Fry Zone” in airports. I’ve already written about legislators in a handful of states promoting bills protecting passengers from TSA assault. Will any of this matter? I don’t know. It’s almost half a year now since TSA officially decided “the ritualized humiliation of travelers” made an acceptable substitute for actual “transportation security.” But TSA was unconstitutional and pointlessly invasive from its very beginning; a quasi-law enforcement agency with the motivational motto “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.” is exactly what you want if you’re the generalissimo of a third-world banana republic, but can’t co-exist with a healthy republican democracy claiming to respect human rights and individual freedoms.

Is TSA merely an aberration, or an ominous harbinger of my nation’s future? The question’s gloomy enough to contemplate, without the added worry that knowing the answer might result in a mortal sin. Lead us not into temptation; lead us not into despair.

Everybody Knows That The World Is Full Of Stupid People

2011-03-21T02:00:00.000-07:00

Just when I found myself staggering beneath the weight of a few remaining shreds of faith in humanity, reactions to the catastrophes that struck Japan soon relieved me of that burden.

First, I almost abandoned my firm “commitment to personal freedom” principles just long enough to advocate mandatory sterilization for those bigots who responded to news of the Japanese earthquake, tsunamis and nuclear disaster with cracks about karma and Pearl Harbor. (By their logic, my American self shudders to contemplate proper karmic payback for “genociding the natives so you could take their land” or “buying millions of people kidnapped off another continent and turning them into slaves.”)

But at least the karma pundits don’t—I’m guessing—subscribe to the latest insane conspiracy theory, which is: the US military caused the earthquake with its HAARP weather-control device. (I don’t want to link to anything, but Google “US military caused Japan earthquake” if you don’t believe me. Over four million hits without the quote marks. Bye-bye, faith in humanity! Don’t let the door hit your non-existent self in your non-existent ass on your way out.)

I asked one adherent how charging electricity into the atmosphere is supposed to make tectonic plates shift position relative to each other and Earth’s mantle, and apparently it’s because sometimes, before volcanoes erupt or earthquakes rumble, there are electrical discharges into the atmosphere, so maybe it works in reverse. The guy also suspects Obama ordered the tsunami because he’s afraid the Japanese might get too cozy with China, to the detriment of the US. (The notion “China and Japan get too lovey-dovey” is a common theme in many alt-history timelines, though not so much in ours.) I guess Obama thinks if we hit the Japanese with a tsunami they'll … not want to develop better relationships with their immediate neighbors.

The person who explained this to me, incidentally, lives in the United States even though he’s absolutely convinced that on September 11, 2001, the US government killed 3,000 of its own citizens, destroyed valuable real estate and framed the Saudis for it. If I seriously thought the government did that I’d talk about it all the time, as the conspiracy’s adherents are wont to do. But first, I’d get the hell out of the United States because I’d figure a government evil enough to kill 3,000 of its own people – including lots of rich white people – wouldn’t have the slightest qualms about ensuring a poor mouthy blogger who Exposed Their Secrets had a sudden fatal accident. And if the military has a deadly weather- and earthquake-generating machine, it'll have no qualms about going after anybody who exposes it. Bradley Manning could tell you a thing or two about that.

TSA: Is This The Backlash We Need?

2011-03-10T09:05:00.000-08:00

Behold history in the making: in anno Domini 2011, a mere 796 years after England's Magna Carta established that even kings must follow the law, American state legislators are starting to think mandates like "sexual assault is verboten" should apply to agents of the government, too.

Of course, that was always the case until the TSA (actual motivational motto: "Dominate. Intimidate. Control.") decided "ritualised humiliation of travelers" made an acceptable substitute for "transportation security."

That's the opening of my latest column in today's Guardian. But I confess to a bit of dishonesty in writing it: the column's tone sounds far more optimistic than my mood actually is.

Serious question, my fellow Americans: what the hell happened to our country? I have online news alerts set up to inform me whenever the media reports on the TSA anywhere in the land, and literally every single day my inbox fills with new atrocity stories, each of which would've been national front-page news before the US lost its collective mind. Now it's merely background noise, ignored and unnoticed by most. Maybe TSA is relying on an updated version of Josef Stalin's callous calculation: "One traveler sexually assaulted by a TSA agent is a tragedy. One million travelers sexually assaulted by TSA agents is a statistic."

Right now, in America, we have "actual elected lawmakers" -- Republican and Democrat both -- going up against "unelected political appointees" a la Janet Napolitano and John Pistole. The lawmakers have the Constitution and public opinion on their side; the appointed bureaucrats have neither.

Time was when I'd've confidently predicted, "A bipartisan coalition enjoying broad popular support and strong constitutional backing will surely triumph against a handful of bureaucrats gone wild." But where the abusiveness of a runaway TSA is concerned ... I don't know. I just don't know anymore.

Nurse Ratched Handles National Security

2011-03-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

My country is dying. Maybe my country is dead. The political entity known as "the United States of America" is still alive and kicking, and will likely remain so for centuries to come, but the ideals it once claimed to stand for are gone. Freedom, justice, liberty ... no. But there's this: "If American soldiers gun down unarmed journalists from a helicopter, or American contractors pimp out prepubescent little boys to serve as sex toys at Pashtun warlord parties, the government should ignore those criminals and instead go after Bradley Manning and Julian Assange for exposing them."

And now that Manning is in custody, the military forces him to sleep naked every night and report for attention naked the next day, but they claim they're doing this for Manning's own good, because they're afraid he'll commit suicide and when people feel suicidal you should treat them in the most degrading and dehumanizing fashion possible, to help them find life worth living again.

I've heard the arguments in support of the military here, the arguments Manning deserves all this and more, because national security blah blah terrorism and poor agents in the field who might die because Wikileaks exposed them. But the Department of Defense (note to non-Americans: that's the Orwellian name of the US government agency responsible for waging our country's wars) had the chance to vet the Wikileaks documents before their release, and refused. Any secret agent who suffered or might one day suffer from the Wikileaks revelations could have been saved, except the American war department let them be exposed in order to score points against Bradley Manning.

But if the potential for dead field agents truly does justify the military's treatment of Manning, then Karl Rove should sleep naked in his own cell at Quantico, after exposing Valerie Plame. Unlike Wikileaks, Rove didn't even offer the Department of Defense the courtesy of a chance to vet the information before he leaked it to the media.

Incidentally, here's what article 13 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice says regarding Punishment prohibited before trial:

No person while being held for trial, may be subjected to punishment or penalty other than arrest or confinement upon the charges pending against him, nor shall the arrest or confinement imposed upon him be any more rigorous than the circumstances required to insure his presence, but he may be subjected to minor punishment during that period for infractions of discipline.

The authoritarian apologists bleating about "the rule of law" as though it somehow justifies Manning's shameful treatment should maybe -- just maybe -- stop kissing totalitarian ass long enough to contemplate the consequences of what they're endorsing: if the government itself has no respect for the rule of law, why the hell should anyone else?

Smells Like Team Spirit

2011-02-22T15:47:00.000-08:00

I know a few sports fans —impossible not to, in mainstream America — and notice their loyalties usually lean more towards a team uniform than any individual athlete. So, living in Connecticut as I do, you can’t help hearing about Joe Blow, who wears the Patriots’ uniform when he plays and is also a magnanimous philanthropist, stellar role model and all-around helluva guy … until he’s traded to some team out in California which defeats New England in a crucial game, and you won’t hear anybody outright say “Joe Blow is worse than Hitler” but you will hear a few neutral, straightforward observations: “Hitler was a bad man, yes, but he never scored any touchdown against the Patriots to disqualify them from the Super Bowl. Just pointing out.”

That’s team loyalty. It’s harmless and even fun for millions of fans of the Patriots or any other professional sports franchise. But what’s cute when applied to the Patriots is a poor substitute for patriotism, so here’s why America is doomed: too many people on both ends of the political spectrum bury loyalty to individual principles beneath loyalty to Team Republican or Team Democrat.

The left wing’s wallowed in it ever since Obama came to power, the ones who firmly opposed the TSA on civil-liberty grounds back when it was a Bush baby, then became TSA boosters once “criticizing TSA” entailed “criticizing Obama and his political appointees.” That’s how the prison camp at Guantanamo could be a civil liberties travesty when George Bush refused to close it, and a vital plank in our anti-terror platform once Obama wouldn’t.

And the right wing’s no improvement. Too many Tea Partiers whose concern for “unsustainable national debt” or “out-of-control government power” didn’t materialize until the exact nanosecond a black Democrat started wielding that power. Where the hell were they during the Bush/Cheney years? I remember: crying “traitor” when people like me suggested, “Government’s gone out of control since 9/11” or “Congress and the president are spending too damn much money.” No, the right wing brooked no such talk when Team Republican held the White House and the legislative branch too.

Which is why I halfheartedly favored Team Democrat up until it won Congress in the midterm elections, then the White House in 2008, and everyone did the exact opposite of what they promised: not curtailing military spending and expanding civil liberties, but vice-versa.

The country’s falling apart. We can’t upgrade our crumbling infrastructure because our money supports a military more costly than every other military on earth combined. The poor and middle-class see their taxes raised and their benefits cut to fund bailouts, pork and ridiculous corporate welfare.

My state bribes rich movie producers to come film here. My taxes are going up, but at least I have the following state-subsidized bragging right: “Hey, you know the ‘corpses float downriver’ scene in the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds remake? They filmed it right near my house! Impressive, no? You can touch the hem of my garment, if you wish.”

Maybe they’ll cut the movie budget, but they’re still putting nude scanners in the airport and I’ll have to pay for that too. And there’s no way to fix anything, not when the majority of Americans put team spirit and partisan loyalty over love of country and every noble principle ours once claimed to stand for. Best thing that could happen to America would be if the party-line Democrats and party-line Republicans all got together in a big bipartisan love feast and choked on each other in flagrante soixante-neuf.

The Final Chapter Of Dennis Lorenzetti's Story

2011-02-19T11:21:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I mentioned my dismay at learning of the death of Dennis Lorenzetti, a homeless man I chanced to speak with and write about one afternoon in the summer of 2009. Lorenzetti froze to death behind a low-rent supermarket last December; when a local journalist (and former colleague) named Rick Guinness learned of it, he searched online for any mention of Lorenzetti and contacted me after finding my story from July 2009.

This week Rick's story about Lorenzetti ran in the Hartford Advocate, the alt-weekly I wrote for until the Great Tribune Company Meltdown Of Aught-Eight.

Yo, Bleephead, Bleep My Bleeping Bleep

2011-02-16T09:31:00.000-08:00

Like all American adults, I am a fragile and delicate flower who will surely wilt if ever exposed to the harsh scary world beyond the hothouse in which I reside. At least that's what the FCC believes, which is why, even when my night-owl self watches television during the wee small hours of the night when all the wee small impressionable young people are in bed, I still hear BLEEEEEEP whenever an actor says anything capable of wilting the petals off his hothouse flower audience. (There's nothing wrong with watching mobsters murder their business rivals in cold blood, but hearing mobsters say bad words while they do it will psychologically scar you.)

Relevant childhood anecdote: as a kid in Virginia I'd often watch after-school cartoons on local indie channel 27, which was owned by Pat Robertson and eventually went on to become the Christian Broadcasting Network. That channel aired The 700 Club, but the majority of its programming was identical to that of every other indie channel: cartoons older than my parents, ancient movies, syndicated sitcom reruns ... anything for which the broadcasting rights could be had cheap.

Channel 27 also aired old episodes of The Jeffersons, while new episodes still aired in primetime on the Whatever network. I liked the show, so I'd watch it in primetime and on 27 too. And one trait the George Jefferson character had was this: sometimes, when he was very mad or annoyed, he'd sort of scrunch himself up, and then explosively say "Damn!" This was considered funny, and the audience or laugh track always went wild.

But channel 27 didn't like the word "damn." They lacked the cutting-edge bleeping technology available to modern broadcasters, though, so what they'd do instead was turn the sound off for the fraction of a second George needed to pronounce the word. ALL of the sound. So you're watching the show and hearing all sorts of background noise -- laughter in the audience, Florence saying one thing, Weezy saying another -- and then, suddenly, a moment of dead silence before all the noise started up again. I always found it very jarring, same way it jarred me when I'd be reading in a quiet room, and didn't realize the refrigerator or heat pump was running until it shut off. The resulting silence always seemed a lot louder than the previous sound-I-hadn't-noticed.

Even as a kid I figured out: "When I watch The Jeffersons at night, I hardly notice when George says 'damn,' but after an episode on channel 27 in the afternoon I can tell you exactly how many times he said it and exactly what he was doing each time." In trying to hide George Jefferson's presumably scandalous language, all channel 27's sound engineers did was call more attention to it.

America would be a marginally less stupid place if only the middle-aged bleephead bureaucrats at the FCC were capable of the same insight into human nature I had as an eight-year-old.

Camden And Clinton: Two Flavors Of Drug War Stupidity

2011-02-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

If you dig post-industrial dystopian decay, the United States offers ample opportunity for you to live your dream, and the opportunities keep growing. They're easy to find via a simple two-step process: 1) look for an American city that had a strong and prosperous manufacturing base 50 years ago; and 2) not anymore, it doesn't.

The manufacturing decline provides the post-industrial decay, while the dystopia stems largely from our draconian drug laws. Over at the Guardian I discuss the sad state of Camden, New Jersey -- and the intellectual bankruptcy of Hillary Clinton -- in light of recent developments in America's eternal War On Drugs.

You'll notice a bit of a typo in the headline; some luckless intern must've been off his game this morning. Of course, my spellcheck program for this blog keeps insisting I've misspelled "dystopia" and "dystopian," so this could simply be the latest example of computers rebelling against their human masters, which (according to my fave sci-fi authors) is something that happens a lot in nightmarish dystopian hellscapes like the one Camden is transforming into.

Simple Pleasures: Harsh Winter Edition

2011-02-08T12:57:00.000-08:00

My DVD collection includes thousands of hours' worth of movies, TV shows and cartoon shorts covering all genres and dating back over a century, yet in the past three days, my chief viewing pleasure has been standing outside and watching water -- actual non-frozen liquid water -- drip off snowbanks and vanish down the storm drains.

The Evolution Of Desperation

2011-02-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

My third anti-TSA column in as many months is online at the Guardian -- well, a somewhat bowdlerized version of the column is online. Originally, the last two paragraphs said this:

When gropings make small children scream in terror, TSA director James Marchand (cribbing a page from the paedophiles' playbook) advised agents “If you can come up with some kind of a game to play with a child, it makes it a lot easier.”

Indeed, and makes it easier for pervs on a playground hissing “Let’s play Stop the Terrorist” too. Still, if TSA glosses over Ventura’s lawsuit as it has all the others, if American parents intend teaching their children that TSA’s treatment is an acceptable precondition for travelling within the borders of their own country, I have a better idea: Parents, abandon all pretence and outright raise your kids to be strippers or prostitutes. If they’ll spend their lives ogled nude or physically fondled by strangers they don’t know and don’t even find attractive, at least let them make a little money at it.

What truly frightens me are the lawsuit precedents I mention in my latest column: TSA has generally been losing or settling the various lawsuits brought against them -- yet still, they keep pushing forward rather than backing down. The American people don't want this, the American courts won't approve it, and still TSA does not care. The agency and the unelected poliitcal appointees who head it have abandoned all pretense of accountability, all pretense they are "public servants" rather than "the public's masters."

When the "scan or be groped" policy first came into effect, I wrote a Guardian column titled "Get Your Hands Off Me, TSA!" which ran on November 17, eight days before Thanksgiving. True fact: when I first pitched it to my editor, the original idea was to focus on the National Opt-Out Day Protest scheduled for Thanksgiving Eve. My editor initially planned to run the piece the day of the actual protest, then changed his mind and ran it a full week before that.

And I was relieved. Why? Because back then, as late as last November, I was still optimistic enough to think "In light of the outrage this policy is generating, TSA is sure to back down. The policy will likely be repealed before the Opt-Out protest even starts! If he waits until Opt-Out Day to run my Opt-Out column, it'll be as obsolete as an op-ed urging Nixon to resign."

In other words, I figured the groping policy would go the way of the short-lived "bathroom ban" after the Christmas bombing attempt of 2009. It hasn't. It most spectacularly hasn't. It's even spreading; as my most recent column mentions, the House of Representatives voted 417 to 3 in favor of a bill that would expand TSA to cover all forms of mass transit.

Yet the whole issue has largely fallen off the mainstream media radar, assuming it ever registered to begin with. I've written before about what I call the media gaslighting of America -- respected pundits sneering that only the most selfish and sexually uptight prudes would take umbrage with the TSA, rather than grovel before the altar of the false god Safety.

Sinclair Lewis got it wrong. He said, "When fascism comes to America, it'll be wrapped in the American flag and carrying a cross." But no -- it's wearing latex gloves and hissing "Let's play Stop the Terrorist."

Best Wishes To Egypt’s Lovers Of Liberty

2011-01-28T00:58:00.000-08:00

Here in New England it’s close to four in the morning; in Egypt it’s Friday afternoon, and there’s no way of knowing how the anti-government protests are doing since Mubarak’s government took the unprecedented act of shutting down the Internet and all other communications out of the country.

I’ll go to bed soon. Don’t know what will happen while I sleep. A very good friend of mine emigrated from Egypt, and his family’s there still. I want to be hopeful but dare not; for the past ten years and more, anytime I thought to feel hope on the liberty front, in my country or any other, it only led to disappointment.

Yesterday I shared a note an Egyptian man posted on Facebook before his government shut down the Internet. That’s what I do: post things on blogs. It’s not much – it may not be anything – but it’s still more than anyone in Egypt can do right now. Of course, as an American living in a Free Democratic Republic, I can also inform my duly elected representatives that I want them to stop giving support to the repressive Mubarak regime that ha ha ha ha ha.

I knew I couldn’t finish that with a straight face. The American government no longer listens to the American people – if it did, Janet Napolitano would be out of a job and so would everyone else in the TSA.

Maybe someday they’ll start listening again, before things get as bad here as they are in Egypt this afternoon. Maybe the protests in Egypt and Tunisia will spark a freedom renaissance in the Arab world. Or maybe I shouldn’t tempt fate with my hopes.

But I can’t help myself. I’m a misanthrope to be sure, yet somehow can’t entirely give up on humanity. We’ve come this far, and for all the recent stumbling I still can’t bring myself to believe we can’t go any further.

"We Don't Ask For Much, Just Broadcast What Is Happening"

2011-01-27T17:06:00.000-08:00

I didn't write any of this; it's a cut-and-paste of a note that an Egyptian friend-of-a-friend posted on Facebook about what's happening in Egypt right now. Also, here is raw video from the AP showing the protests. Warning: it includes a scene of an unarmed man being shot.

To all the people of world

The people in Egypt are under governmental siege. Mubarak regime is banning Facebook, Twitter, and all other popular internet sites Now, the internet are completely blocked in Egypt. Tomorrow the government will block the 3 mobile phone network will be completely blocked. And there is news that even the phone landlines will be cut tomorrow, to prevent any news agency from following what will happen.

Suez city is already under siege now. The government cut the water supply and electricity, people, including, children and elderly are suffering there now. The patients in hospitals cannot get urgent medical care. The injured protesters are lying in the streets and the riot police are preventing people from helping them. The families of the killed protesters cannot get the bodies of their sons to bury them. This picture is the same in north Saini (El-Sheikh zoyad city) and in western Egypt (Al-salom). The riot police is cracking down on protesters in Ismailia, Alexandria, Fayoum, Shbin Elkoum, and Cairo, the capital, in many neighborhoods across the city.

The government is preparing to crackdown on the protesters in all Egyptian cities. They are using tear gas bombs, rubber and plastic pullets, chemicals like dilutes mustard gas against protesters. Several protesters today have been killed when the armored vehicles of the riot police hit them. Officials in plain clothes carrying blades and knives used to intimidate protesters. Thugs deployed by the Egyptian Ministry of Interior are roaming the streets of Cairo, setting fire on car-wheels as means of black propaganda to demonize protesters and justify police beatings and state torture.

All this has been taken place over the past three days during the peaceful demonstrations in Cairo and other cities. Now, with the suspicious silence of the local media and the lack of coverage from the international media, Mubarak and his gang are blocking all the channels that can tell the world about what is happening.

People who call for their freedom need your support and help. Will you give them a hand?

The activists are flooding the net (youtube and other sites) with thousands of pictures and videos showing the riot police firing on armless people. The police started to use ammunition against protesters. 15-year old girl has been injured and another 25 year old man has been shot in the mouth. While nothing of these has appeared in the media, there is more to happen tomorrow. Will you keep silent? Will you keep your mouth shut while seeing all these cruelty and inhumane actions?

We don’t ask for much, just broadcast what is happening.

Death Of A Homeless Man

2011-01-26T11:36:00.001-08:00

In the summer of 2009 I was the fluff-piece writer for a local daily paper. Hardly anything I wrote there was worth adding to my professional clipfile or mentioning on this blog, with one exception: on a hot July afternoon, the staff photographer and I were trudging through downtown on our way back from covering another forgettable feelgood story when we chanced to speak with one of the homeless guys congregated near a bus stop, a man named Dennis Lorenzetti. I shared the story here because -- well, I don't know. Maybe for selfish reasons, professional pride in a rare story that actually mattered. Maybe for noble reasons, because I did and do firmly believe the purpose of the Fourth Estate is not to make the other three look good, but to give a voice to the voiceless. Maybe both, or something else entirely.

But it's a good thing I did, because that old blog post is apparently the only online mention of the man (save this one, of course). Now, fast forward to a couple weeks ago. I check my blog stats fairly regularly to see what sort of search terms bring new readers here; every day, dozens of no-doubt-disappointed people visit looking for Japanese tentacle porn or phone sex or similar topics. That's to be expected, but I was surprised to suddenly find several daily visitors searching for "Dennis Lorenzetti," and "Bristol" or "New Britain."

Then I got an e-mail last week from a journalist and former colleague bearing bitter news: Lorenzetti died last month. His body was found behind a low-rent supermarket where the homeless often huddle. Apparently there's disagreement regarding exactly what happened: his homeless friends say it was murder. The cops call it an accident, where he slipped and fell and that's why his head was smashed in. I can't claim to know all the details, and what little I do know is all second- or thirdhand information; I personally have verified nothing. But it seems the cops never bothered telling Lorenzetti's family, and his death never made the local papers because there was nobody to write and send an obituary.

In the past couple of days I have also received e-mails from people claiming to be relatives of Lorenzetti's; only now are they discovering what happened to him. Since I did not ask their permission, I lack the moral right to tell you who wrote me or what they said, but I can and will tell you this: I've been serving as an unofficial contact person this past week, putting friends and relatives of Lorenzetti in touch with the sole investigative journalist in the region with the time, resources and inclination to look into what happened. (I know a couple more gainfully employed journalists who, I suspect, would love to dig into and report what happened, but I doubt their employers will allow it. Can't run the risk of embarrassing well-paid, respectable public servants now, can we? Remember: government cock will not suck itself. That's what a free and independent media is for.) Lorenzetti clearly had some mental issues, and drank more alcohol than any person really should, but that doesn't mean he deserved to die unlamented and forgotten like a damned dog in the street.

If you are one of the people who found this blog after searching for Dennis Lorenzetti, feel free to e-mail me if you want to get in touch with the journalist pursuing this story. Or say something in the comment thread, if you'd prefer. I will give you his name and contact information, and send yours to him.

I wish I could do more.