The Scandalhunters Lament

Unlike many of my Republican friends - whom I regularly meet for coffee at Republican Headquarters (next to the big pile of gold inside the fortress of bones, you know) - I am not a big fan of special interest money. I don't think we have a constitutional right to purchase our elected officials either at campaign time or while they are in office.

Which is why I read with great interest the Washington Post article about the fall of D.C. powerhouse lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The bumper text hypes the story as K Street Enron in the making - one with the potential to take down a whole raft of congresspeople, staffers, and corrupt lobbyists. That sure sounds like some tasty scandal they got cooking at the Post! Maybe this one will 'take'.

But when you read the details ... it's sort of disappointing. Page after page of evidence chronicles Abramoff's political affiliations with key Republicans at different points from 1980 forward. He kept saying he knew Newt, and took peyote with Grover Norquist at Burning Man, whatever. Fine. But the meat of the accusations seem to be that his lobbying firm outrageously overcharged a group of Indian tribes to represent their interests in key legislation. Cruel perhaps, but alas, not against the law. And the most criminal-sounding offense - that he may have snookered a deal involving some expensive boats - doesn't even appear to involve politicians.

Maybe there's more to it. But I think papers like the Post work on stories like this for several months, chase all of the leads to the end, but after a while can't turn up anything conclusive. So the glitz up whatever they have, slap some lipstick on it, and publish in the hopes the story and surrounding hype will move sources to reveal more scintillating information. But they often end up like one of those hurricanes they track offshore that spin around menacingly at sea and never quite make land.

Technoserendipity

Thanks to an elaborate sequence of events - that began when a pickup truck we were borrowing burst into flame - my wife and I had to drive two cars back from our Christmas holiday back East with the family. And thanks to the generosity of a family member I was able to pass the long hours by playing songs from my iPod through the radio courtesy of the Griffin iTrip, which was given to me as a gift for the Baby Jesus Holiday.

Crass product placement? It's deliberate. I rant at length about the goods and services that disappoint or seem like a swindle. In 2006 I expect to do my little part to bolster the aggregate blogosphere buzz when a product delivers as promised. The burning, Sauron-like eye of capitalism is intently focused on blogs as a means to hump new technology uphill to the masses, and the phenomenon has spawned a corona industry of meme-trackers and market researchers. So until such time as the Marxist revolution takes hold I will hereby salute the free market.

The iTrip worked as advertised, and I was able to enjoy my tasteful iPod music selection on the stereo during my travel. The device broadcasts a strong localized FM signal on a channel of your choosing - and that's the only drawback. It seems like the expanse of rural Ohio and West Virginia used to be an FM wasteland punctuated only by the occasional preacher or country station. Now the kids are hip-hopping in Zanesville I guess, and there are stations on almost every tick of the dial. This meant I had to re-tune to an empty frequency every fifty or so miles.

But Rachel and I discovered a fringe benefit. The signal could be picked up a few car lengths behind. So as we traveled in tandem she could listen to the same FM station. And this provided a curious, ethereal moment. We hit a snowstorm in the mountains. So in our two cars cruising carefully through the gale - with headlights illuminating the snowflakes and no cell phone coverage - our wedding song came up in the random shuffle of music.

Live in fragments no longer...

Merry Christmas

Does telling everyone a 'Merry Christmas' constitute an act of evangelization, a dangerous nod to those delusional cultists who believe in hope, love, and some savior humbly born? I'm not sure. To me it seems overblown - this notion of protecting Christmas from wild-eyed secular professors, Jewish children, and down-at-the-mouth masses who can't explain what they believe. I'm just not convinced they pose a credible threat to the institution.

Certainly the United States has a strongly Christian heritage, but I see nothing wrong with - in the interests of harmony - putting it the way George and Laura did on the card this year (which I received, thank you): Happy Holidays. At least when it comes to public discourse I think a note of inclusion is fair.

But on a personal basis I've enjoyed telling everyone I meet this year 'Merry Christmas'. I had the opportunity to help in a soup kitchen in Over-the-Rhine a few days ago, and in that setting the words seemed more comforting than the coffee and hot lunch being served. And on Wisconsin Ave. here in Washington DC where we are spending the holidays - 'Merry Christmas' to everyone in the more-international crowd that streams the sidewalks and chokes the upscale stores. Maybe it's just my subjective opinion - and maybe that's the point - but the words ring with a clear note of promise.

Big Apple Walkout

The New York City transit worker union decided to walk off the job this morning.

Such strikes are illegal, not to mention disruptive to the tune of $400 million a day. Mayor Mike Bloomberg has a serious problem on his hands. Some of us are old enough to remember, with amusement, Ronald Reagan's response to the striking air traffic controllers in the early 80s: "You're fired." But that may not be a practical solution in this case.

When you compare TWU salaries and compensation to similar public sector jobs their expectations seem a little outlandish, even considering the high cost of living in Nueva York. If labor has a role in today's economy (and on that score reasonable people can disagree) then I think these types of belligerent, bet-the-farm protest actions might actually hurt the future efforts of unions who might have a legitimate gripe in a dispute with unfair employers.

Because the people of NYC are royally pissed, in that unmistakable, five boroughs type of way. One of the white-hot spots in the blogosphere today is the comments section of this Transit Union blog, where people are expressing their opinion of the strike in no uncertain terms. It's very cold in the city today, and a lot of people need to go many different places.

Update: Revisionism just doesn't work. They edited the comments page at the Union blog, but somebody had the good sense to archive it.

Merry Unrestrained Avarice

Somewhere there is a flack in the commercial property management office who maintains the magic spreadsheet that cooks together rent per square foot and the load for various commercial mortgages. Other factors like parking and traffic flow and insurance are added to the equation, but it all tumbles through the waterfall of numbers towards ROI and profitability for the owners and investors.

Damn that wide expanse of floor on the concourse between stores. Cram it with stalls that sell hair extensions, cell phone plans, or crazy knick-knacks! Make the customers churn around en masee during the shopping season, and assault them with music, bright lights, and large displays of attractive people to stir their consumer hearts and loosen the path towards righteous, high-volume credit transactions. Make ready the way of the 1st Quarter earnings report.

Every holiday season I make a trip to the Towne Center, a local Cincinnati mall, to do a little shopping. And every year I end up ready to throw capitalism over the side and give Marxism a whirl - often by the time I manage to park the car. This year required an extra helping of patience, since the trip involved girls aged 6 and 10 who wanted to choose a present for Mommy. Every single scented variety of lotion needed to be sniffed and discussed at length relative to various childlike misinterpretations of adult female taste. The bickering was endless - China and Taiwan probably find it easier to agree - but finally a proper selection had been made, and a place was taken in the long line snaking past the bright, distracting baubles towards the register where an overworked, space-cadet teenager snapped her gum and struggled to replace the paper in the credit card machine while long-dead crooners on the surround-sound demanded merriness from our bedraggled hearts.

Maybe these New Zealanders might have the right idea.

Tehran. Tel Aviv, and Toledo

Imagine if the neo-Nazi inbreds who recently staged a "protest" in Toledo, Ohio were in control of a large nation with buckets of money from oil wealth. Imagine if they had cash-strapped neighbors who are willing to sell them assets from their former days of superpower glory - surface-to-air missles, for example. Imagine if the fat, pink race-haters were building a nuclear bomb.

If the neo-Nazis were on the verge of atomic capability I have faith that the streets of Ann Arbor and Madison would be filled with organic coffee shop owners and post-structuralist lit professors demanding that we forego diplomacy in favor of JDAMs and Marines. Blue and red states alike might be in agreement that such mixed-up, angry boys should not be in possession of nuclear toys, and the double-wide in which the white supremacists were processing uranium would quickly be reduced to smoldering rubble.

So how do we handle Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who just annouced the Holocaust is a myth? He could have merely claimed that Europe's guilt in the aftermath of World War Two has caused trouble in the Middle East, notably for the Palestinians. But he had to go that extra mile and prove to everybody that the ruling cabal of Iranian mullahs are indeed exactly as advertised by American neocons - a bunch of dangerous and delusional extremists who consider world opinion irrelevant and may soon have nukes.

So everybody flipped out - inlcuding the Israelis, who noted that the distance between Tel Aviv and Tehran is 2000 kilometers - an observation which comes on the heels of their recent, highly publicized tests of the Arrow missle defense system. And the German Minister went so far as to claim - brace yourself - that Ahmadinejad's outrageous remarks "may weigh on our bilateral relations" - a rejoinder which, we hope, sounds a little bit more stern in the original German.

Bona fide jackasses like Ahmadinejad do exist in the world. Are we forced to choose between Donald Rumsfeld and Noam Chomsky when it comes to dealing with them? Because I can tell you which approach the public will ultimately endorse when it comes to practical conflict. Let's hope the question is made moot by the cosmopolitan and trade-friendly middle class Iranians who feel warmly towards the West. These people are hardly extremists, and reports claim they've had it with the mullahs.

The time might be ripe for another Iranian Revolution.

Capricorn Dumb

Three bloomin' idiots in Great Britain have been duped into believing they have been sent into space for several days. The TV production company built a bogus training facility from an old military base, bought up a bunch of actual unused Soviet space hardware and made a huge thundering racket at to simulate a launch. The show, Space Cadets, is being broadcast on the BBC's Channel 4.

If the show's contestants manage to formulate a cohesive thought long enough to to wonder why they are not floating they will be told that "gravity generators" have been used to stick them to the floor. (Hey, they've worked on science fiction shows for years.) But based on the jaw-dropping level of ignorance I think they'd be just as likely to accept "pixie magic" as an explanation.

From a TV writers standpoint this is pure gold. One expects aliens to make an appearance sooner or later - followed by an air leak or a visit from Captain Kirk. You can do a lot with that level of sheer stupid. The advertisers will certainly love it, since science (standing in line after drama and literature) has been made profitability's sweet whore.

But from the standpoint of basic literacy this is horrifying. We live in a world powered by information and engineering, where every meaningful piece of human activity stands on the shoulders devices and machinery understood by an increasingly smaller group of people. From the Internet to the brakes on your car to oil refineries, the average citizen knows zilcho about how stuff actually works. The rest of us could be told by Katie Couric that pretzels cause elbow cancer and we'd all freak out and demand that Mr. Salty testify before congress.

Original link Slashdot. Post title reference here.

State of Litigation

The people who adore climate change as a means to make capitalist countries accountable had a few giggles over the Michael Crichton novel State of Fear. The book was a techno-thriller baked together with a treatise on global warming - one which called into question the notion that human activity is causing major disruption to the environment. Crichton even added graphs and charts to the story.

Many people accept the environmental gospel unquestioningly. Of course geologically speaking the climate has been changing rapidly back and forth between cold and hot extremes every 20,000 years for the past millennium. But nevermind. Drawing attention to that simple fact is somehow kookypants Republican talk.

Now life imitates art in at least one way. In the book there is a lawsuit brought by indigenous people against Western countries for mucking up nature and making things all koyaanisqatsi. Checking the Google News today we see the Inuit Circumpolar Conference has decided that emissions from the United States is making things a wee bit too balmy in the Arctic netheregions, and that's a violation of their human rights for goodness sake, so they are pressing a lawsuit against the United States.

Fine. Somehow I don't think we'll go broke. But did you know the weather report in Beijing is now smoke? Not rainy, or partly cloudy. But smoke. I took a screensnap from the MSN weather site.

And this smoke, for those of you who are unaware, is the natural result of the Chinese economy huffing and puffing it's way through the industrial age trying madly to catch up to the rest of the world. They don't give a panda bear's sphincter about emissions. And they nothing to fear from environmentalist attorneys either. Because the first rule of litigation is go after people with the big money.

Christmas Is Optional

Looks like some of the bigbox churches, like their retailing counterparts, have decided that it's better to close on Christmas than deal with all of the hassle of trying to get shift coverage for their sales associates - er ... I mean church staff. Cincinnati-based outfits like Crossroads (right around the corner from Sam's Club) are among those who have elected to forgo services.

Heck, I'm just some retrograde Catholic - a believer in all of those crazy spiritual antiques like sacraments, liturgy, and grace. I've never taken a shine to these arena-sized megachurches with their coffee stands and over-earnest Jesus rock with the dry ice and laser lights.

So maybe I'm old fashioned thinking that any Christians might be reasonably expected to darken the door of their worship-house on December 25th and spend a few moments with their fellow faithful in contemplation of the birth of their redeemer. It seems to me that this isn't an unreasonable request given the orgy of commercial activity that otherwise surrounds the holiday. Aren't these megachurches tacitly acknowledging the primacy of that culture? In the long term will people eventually recognize the shoddiness of this substitute for worship (not to mention the traffic problems and wholesale pummeling of mom-and-pop parishes) just like the people of this neighborhood did when SuperTarget tried to stick 'em with their two-toned flavor of retail religion?

The tide may have already turned. The small but growing trend of microchurches might signal a return to the form of religion first known by the earliest Christians: A few followers gathering in somebody's home. In this case they aren't hiding from Romans - but from the crass glare of consumerism in a secular society.

Holden Caulfield 2005

Many visitors to this website are high school students looking for an essay they can use for an assignment due the next day on "Harrison Bergeron". For whatever reason Google indexes very prominantly a post I made last year which references this old staple of secondary education by Kurt Vonnegut. (The post was actually about the movie 'The Incredibles' and the unfortunate societal trend towards prentending everyone is special.) Now every few days one of these boneheaded slackers arrives here (I see the hits occur at 10 or 11 at night) because searching the Internet is easier that reading one simple godamn short story. Incase you haven't guessed I have nothing but contempt for these kids, who

Apple's Larsonian Nostaglia

From ArsTechnica by way of Slashdot:

Just when you thought you'd never be able to get live action David Hasselhoff on your iPod video, Apple goes and does the amazing!

Finally we can watch old episodes of Knight Rider on our video iPod while toiling away on the gym treadmill. Maybe you, like me, thought the outer apex of brain-dead, techno-driven U.S. culture had been exceeded long ago. But along comes another boatload of attorneys specializing in licensing tired old media properties in perpetuity on every available new form of media. How far will this go? Will our great-great-grandchildren relax around the dormitories on Mars by watching holographic re-broadcasts of Blossom and Saved by the Bell?

Most normal people are too sensible to care. But Apple's strategy in the iPod market-space is always the subject of breathless tech-press speculation, right along with Google's next play, Ajax, and open source. Apple, after all, isn't only a computer company, but a genuine font of innovation that shapes and defines markets - like it or not. I still don't understand why people will be enamored by the prospect of watching video on tiny iPod screens - but obviously this can't the final goal. Ubiquitous distribution and on-demand content on a variety of tech platforms (PC, handheld players, entertainment centers) seems like a better long-term gameplan.

But the road towards that nirvana runs right through the ghetto of fear-driven copyright attorneys who are haunted by the notion that these silly TV shows might be released into the wild for free, without the profit hook. (Psst! Hey pal, wanna free copy of Super Train?)

Let's hope there's at least a residual for some of the actors - including old Dave. He seems to have a strange, enduring power. In fact the Hasselhoffian Recursion is a tenacious meme that has been covered on this weblog once before. A quick look at IMDB tells us he's been keeping busy lately; like other properties in the Glen Larson ouevre that have been recently reborn, this Knight may be riding again. How long before we're gazing nostalgically at BJ and the Bear on our cell phone screens while driving?

Education and Masculinity

Men now make up only 43% of college students. This is not an isolated fact, but the product of a societal trend towards undervaluing innate male characteristics and steering boys through an educational environment that isn't geared towards their mode of learning. In changing our education system to accommodate girls we have created problems for the boys. Michael Gurian writes in the Washington Post:

Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms.

My experience is with daughters, but I have been witness firsthand to teachers at various levels who cannot distinguish between the generally raucous nature of boys and anti-social traits that lead to disruption. They think any kind of rowdy behavior is detrimental to learning, and they lack the skills to steer boyish behavior into productive education. Many of these teachers naturally prefer girls or girl-like behavior in a classroom setting, for no other reason than peace-of-mind.

Girls, of course, come with an inscrutable and complicated set of personal problems that can cause heartache and turmoil with one sideways glance; while boys, in comparison, can often have a fistfight at recess and be buddies again by the end of the day. But one high school teacher I know (the oldest of five sisters) will tell you that boys in the classroom are easier to manage - provided you can dish it right back immediately when they try and test their boundaries. Put up with a high overall level of boyish clowning, but at the right point the line should be firmly and smartly drawn with the inevitable classroom Alpha Jerk. It's like a whacking a newspaper on a dog's snout.

Gurian rightly suggests that society needs to stop blaming men and boys for their characteristically male approach to learning and the world at large. And that much is true. But the solution really isn't more complicated than role models. Boys can develop compassion, thoughtfulness, confidence, and all of the positive masculine attributes when they are shown these traits in action in the lives of the men in their families and communities.

How much public policy and debate will divert our attention before we come to the realize the simple power of example? Society is incomplete without fully-fledged men and women, and we need to raise and educate them both in a way that highlights their separate strengths.

Pass the Mic

Imagine for a moment that any citizen of the Untied States was allowed the opportunity to express their concerns directly by speaking in front of the collected group of senators on Capitol Hill. This would be a triumph of democracy and Listening to the Voices of the People, right?

Wrong. It would be unrestrained disaster. For every Joe or Sally citizen lined up behind the microphone with legitimate concerns there would be several cranks and loudmouths from the tinfoil-hat brigade eager to rant about the IRS, alien abductions, or every conceivable petty civic squabble. Instead of legislating on behalf of the voters our representative body would be constantly flogged and brutalized by vox populi.

Thank goodness most Republicans and Democrats can fathom the true nature of representative democracy, and no such cockamamie forum has been put in place. As citizens our wishes are expressed in two year increments at the ballot box, and not by direct participation. We do have the option of expressing opinions to our representatives by mail or phone, maintaining weblogs, or engaged in the archaic act writing letters to newspaper editors. Or, if we feel worked up about something, we can storm the Mall in D.C. to have a fun protest march with all of our likeminded pals.

Now I see the news about potential rules which might limit direct public input to discussion at the Cincinnati city council. On the local blogs there are the same predictable charges of fascism leveled against anyone who thinks there should be anything less than unlimited, undisciplined public comment. Even the notion of respect for the seriousness of public proceedings is derided as a tyrannical, oppressive limitation. If Colonel R.J. Puffinsby wants to read a poem that expresses his feelings about the trash disposal service - so goes the argument - who are we to deny him that right?

We can be reassured that those who adore the culture of complaint will speak up on his behalf. Meanwhile the rest of us have some reason to think positively: New Mayor Mark Mallory has asked the people of the city to ask themselves "What are you going to do to make our city better?" And maybe I'm just an old conservative bastard, but see that as a directive on personal responsibility. Instead of pointing fingers at city council, instead of focusing with dreary intensity on what others are doing wrong we should instead be at work improving our neighborhoods, supporting the local economy, and doing our part to make the city flourish.

If we do all of that and our elected officials manage to screw it up - then we throw them out on their arses and put a better crop of politicians in office.