Category: News

I wish our governor was as frugal as South Carolina’s Mark Sanford.

Our governor keeps wasting red stamp ink on the budget cuts he keeps vetoing.

As I was reading a nice hefty copy of the printed Chicago Tribune last Sunday (since I was in Chicago, donchaknow), I came across a story entitled “Critics: Is broadcast TV worth saving?” with “Some question its relevance” as the subhead (if you’re quick, you can see an online copy of the article here but be advised it goes to the pay archive on the 15th).

Here’s what those critics say:

Yet some critics say the system is irreparably broken and growing more irrelevant in the face of competition from cable and satellite services, even as the federal government has moved to prop up the broadcast industry.

Yessiree, free broadcast television is irrelevant because we middle class writers and critics can instead spend $50 or more a month of our extensive writin’ and criticizin’ salaries on the licensed luxury of paying some company to pipe entertainment into our homes. Of course, when projecting our own experience of life onto the whole wide country, perhaps we ought to take into consideration those people who cannot afford digital-quality audio and sound (except when technical difficulties interrupt service, sorry, no prorated refund). Don’t the Critics normally champion the underprivileged?

Let me see if I can sum up the reasons the Critics want broadcast television to die:

• Selling the rights to those portions of the electromagnetic spectrum would raise money that the government could then fritter away as it normally fritters away money, typically in ways the Critics like.
• Broadcast viewers are disenfranchised because broadcasters target programs to the audiences advertisers want. That is, the broadcasters have some greedy commerce considerations.
• Broadcasters don’t act in the public interest, or in a public way that can be measured, at least by the arbitrary standards assigned according to the Critics’ preferences. Acting in a public way is hard to measure, I would guess, unless of course by in a public way they mean like NPR and PBS, who properly use government money to promote a proper-thinking point of view.

  Because “accessible to anyone in the nation owning a rooftop antenna and a TV” and “Even today, most Americans get their news from broadcast TV” are not enough.

• The Fairness Doctrine, which allowed advocacy groups to provide a counterpoint to station management (FREE AIR TIME! GET YOUR FREE NUTBAR AIR TIME HERE!), was eliminated. This probably isolated the Critics and their fellows, relegating them (but not regulating them) to unwatched, public interest minded outlets (see also NPR, PBS).

  How did the article put it at the very end, the pièce de résistance?

  “Where there is no fighting or opposition in viewpoints,” said Herbert Chao Gunther, chief executive of the nonprofit Public Media Center, “there is no democracy.”

  Got that? The linchpin of democracy was the unlegislated mandate called the Fairness Doctrine.

I think that about sums up this article. The FCC, an appointed body, not an elected body (as George Carlin often points out), should replace the current system, which allows any yahoo with a receiver to pick up entertainment and news broadcast for free, with a license-fee-based system that the industry loves, where that yahoo has to buy or rent the receiver (a television set) and then pay a monthly license fee of some sort to the cable company or dish company to keep the signal coming to the receiver. Apparently everyone the Critics know has a subscription system, and the Critics cannot imagine differently.

This same middle-class myopia allows policy squawkers to banshee the very thought (blasphemy!) of taxing Internet sales, not realizing (or caring, perhaps) that the duty-free world of Internet commerce unfairly burdens those who do not have a secure Internet connection and/or a credit or debit card with an artificially inflated percentage of sales taxes. But that’s a rant for another day.

Caught this headline on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Web site. Of course the article clarifies that the Sisters of Mercy Health System St. Louis, a nonprofit health conglomerate (can nonprofits be conglomerates, or is that word reserved for the greedy corporations?).

Not the, you know, Sisters of Mercy. Although it would have made the article much more interesting indeed.

Fark provides a link to a story in the Washington Post about some artists who, metaphorically, paraded around looking like nutjobs in front of the U.S. Capitol.

Buried in the story is this nugget:

Although the objects under the duct tape turned out to be harmless, Olaniyi and Patel have been charged with interstate transportation of an explosive device, a charge that can be used in a hoax.

And, apparently, in situations where no explosive devices exist. Unless, of course, the explosive device in question is their van.

Luckily for the kids in Casinoport, they didn’t cross any lines with their chickens-in-a-box devices.

/. points to a story about how Minnesota parks are cracking down on the esoteric hobby of geocaching. Buried within the article, we get this nugget:

They worry that hundreds of people tramping through their woods will damage plants and habitat.

Dang! I thought parks were to give people the opportunity to tramp through plants and habitat. This quote would seem to assert that parks are really designed to keep park officials employed or to maintain habitats for flora and fauna.

Until such time as the flora, fauna, and park officials pay to preserve these parks, instead of gigging my paycheck for it, I say, “Honey, have you seen my tramping shoes?”

Here in Casinoport, four high school students are getting the pamphlet thrown at them for a senior prank. Ill-advised youngsters ran into their high school cafeteria while wearing masks and carrying boxes with chickens in them to release said chickens. They’re getting misdemeanor disturbing the peace (or maybe “Disturbing the 10-Piece Bucket”) charges. What an outrage!

You mean it’s not yet a felony to wear masks in public or carry chickens in boxes? Legislators, take note! We need to make an example of these young men, assuring that they’re stigmatized for life and that they forever have to tell this particular story when checking that little “Yes, I have been convicted” box on job applications. And if they’re convicted felons, they can’t vote against you! Win/win!

Remember, when have senses of humor are outlawed, only outlaws will have a sense of humor. And in case it’s a law exempt from ex post facto, allow me to assert “I am serious.”

It’s old news by now, but a UK firm has started making beer-flavored ice cream.

All of the calories, none of the buzz? Do they think I like the stationary bike, or what?

Fark (and other sources) are reporting about the New Zealand guy who’s building a cruise missile in his garage from parts he bought, essentially, in electronics catalogs from around the world, and get this, New Zealand Customs didn’t stop the legal parts trafficking!

Let the uproar begin. So this yahoo fancies himself Tom Swift or the modern equivalent, who instead of building a time machine or rocket to get to Saturn, builds a cruise missile or a Ptomekin-class nuclear submarine. It ain’t easy to do on one’s own, and if he can do it, more power to him. However, the Hysterics-That-Be will undoubtedly want to clamp down on mail order now and maybe even curiosity among the civilian populace.

Remember, Captain James T. Kirk once built a gun out of the surrounding environment (while nearly shirtless, no less). But in the end he didn’t kill the guy in the awkward lizard costume out of civilized behavior.

Perhaps society and its emissaries (of which government is but one, and a subserviant one at that) should work on promoting civilization and not worry so much about taking away our individual pointy objects. Civilized people don’t use them on one another without good reason. Or reason, anyway.

Didn’t get the point of the Rent-A-Negro.com Web site that I mentioned? In the Chicago Tribune, Clarence Page explains it (registration required).

He makes some points about blackness-as-phenomenon I am not sure I would agree with, though.

Of course, I am not <insert thing I am not here>, so I couldn’t understand.

Looks like Madonna has fallen from her bicycle.

Heather, it could happen to you!

Well, not exactly, since you don’t drink coffee while riding. I guess you’re safe.

(I saw it on Fark first.)

According to the Sunday edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, unemployment is undercounted because:

It does not count the substantial number of Americans who have gone back to school because they can’t find a job or those who have taken a part-time job for much less pay. It does not include people who, unable to find work, have set themselves up in businesses, many as home-based consultants.

That’s right, the official unemployment numbers do not include students or people who are employed.

Also not represented in the numbers, experts (in technical writing, and by “experts” I mean I) also point out that official unemployment does not include homemakers who know raising children is a full-time job, thousands of registered and active Chicago voters who happen to be deceased, dozens of fetuses, dogs and cats who have obtained credit cards, illegal migrant farm workers who have returned to their points of origin, and Canadians.

By the time you add it up, the number actually exceeds the population of the United States. That’s right, unemployment has skyrocketed to 135%. We need block grants, stat! Please send the government checks to Brian J. Noggle, care of this Web site.

What do you get the billionaire who has everything, including a fighter jet and a special disposition to land planes at his rural airport at night? How about his own aircraft carrier?

He’ll probably drop the $4.5 million on this WWII-era (but in use until recently by the Brazillian Navy) carrier. He’ll expense it, of course, as part of his long term rearming so that Oracle can retake its rightful position as database market leader, by force if necessary, from IBM.

(Thanks to /. for the pointer.)

Now that I am well on the way to recovery from the bruises on my chin suffered when I was astonished by Harley Soandso’s column about Chris Hedges on SFGate.com (seven prepositional phrases in a clause! A new blog personal best!), I can reason out what bothered me about this assertion:

Yet the Rockford incident had a chilling aspect to it. As described in the press, it could well have been a scene out of the recent miniseries on the rise of Hitler to power in Nazi Germany.

The difference between the many incidents at Berkeley and the Rockford incident is that, at Berkeley, it’s usually the rabble against an Establishment spokesperson. At Rockford, it was just the opposite; the incident had the feel of a government protest against an outsider.

America has been called the Republic of Many Mansions (based on the biblical quote from John 14:2). The Carmody text (The Republic of Many Mansions) posits that America has a lot of (mostly Christian) strains in its religious thought. Different denominations and whatnot. The paragraph represents a long, albeit annotated, description of how I decided to frame my thesis for this posting, which is:

America is a republic of many establishments, and hence a lot of wide-eyed innocent strugglers against the oppressive established regime (or jackbooted hooligans, if you’re in the establishment being assailed at the immediate time of assailing).

For instance, from Sorensen’s perspective, Chris Hedges and his points of view, shared by his colleagues at many established dailies and chic alternative weeklies, represent the Wide-Eyed Innocent (or perhaps slightly jaundiced and worldly) Struggler Against the Oppressive Regime (WEISAOR for not-very-short). The Rockford College graduates and their families represent Tools of The Man (ToTM). Because, you see, Hedges was speaking against an Establishment, namely the 3-year-old presidential administration and the recent Republican-controlled Congress, a decisive foreign policy, and whatever handy straw men he could set up regarding these. (Certainly, he was not speaking against the republican form of government itself, where the hoi polloi pick the leaders whom the rabble think will best represent it.)

However, to some with a different point of view, Chris Hedges represents an Establishment of a different sort. The Established Coastal Media, which postures to represent the People and wants to dictate how The People thinks. Not by force, of course, but because ECM thinking is right and dissenters will be mocked and looked down upon. However, to some, ECM represents the Oppressive Established Regime (OER), or at least a bunch of out-of-touch twits. So sometimes, the local (or imported) WEISAOR makes a little noise.

America offers a good number of institutions against which anyone can play David. The Church (which cam be any of a handful of small Christian denominations or the Catholics), The Military Industrial Complex, the Gummint, Congress, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, Corporations, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the Automakers, the Unions, and so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee.

So dividing the country into Establishment/Rebel fails because Establishments and their Oppressive Regimes are too prevalent to be noteworthy, and so is rebellion. Rebellion has always been a part of growing up. The adolescent differentiates from the parents through rebellion. Pop culture latched onto this particular part of growing up and has idolized it, super-sized it, and apothesized it (probably because teething is such an individual agony, and not good cinema). Once the new rebels got the parents out of the way, they decided to take on The Man, and they keep finding another The Man to take on. Even I define myself in opposition to some things, rebelling against the oppressive regime who thinks I should mow my back lawn before it goes to seed. Join me this afternoon for a protest against it.

So Sorensen’s gone off into victimics when shrilling about his WEISAORs representing “the rabble against an Establishment spokesperson” while the opposing WEISORs represent “a government protest against an outsider.” We’re all outsiders in the establishment.

A ninety minute porn film has a six page script. Drop that nugget into conversation mysteriously-but-knowingly sometime.

It’s better if you don’t mention you learned it from Business 2.0.

Although its fifth paragraph acknowledges that workplace safety has improved significantly in the past, this article in the Washington Post laments how dangerous it is in workplaces these days, especially jobs where you don’t get to surf the Internet or talk on the phone all day.

Not content to examine how some jobs are really hazardous, the WaPo brings it home to the white collar and near-white collar employees by telling them how some formerly safe jobs are now DANGEROUS! Suddenly, the world of terrorism, workplace violence, and new super-cool, super deadly diseases like AIDS and SARS are intruding on the workday world, and surprise, surprise, surprise, but employers are choosing not to emphasize the inherent dangers of modern life and how they apply to an above minimum wage but below “living wage” jobs.

Seems to me that the movie Article 99 covered that in 1992. The trailer depicted an angry disabled veteran chambering a round in a semiautomatic rifle as he and his comrades chained each other togethter to protest the cutting of their benefits by the ruthless Republican administration of the era. A hospital administrator tells the army of renta-cops, “Disarm that man!” The rent-a-cop replies, “Not for $5.50 an hour.” So you see, the WaPo scooped by an obscure Keifer Sutherland film.

Perhaps the WaPo forgets the days when people died on the job, or Heaven forbid, drank beer while operating industrial machinery on the job, or when children were used because they could crawl into or under the enormous, steam-belching, coal-fed machines. Instead, going to work is in many cases not much more dangerous than going to the mall, but since it’s not padded with comfortable, non-toxic foam padding, it’s still too dangerous, and someone should do something!

Fox News reports that the major parties, in particular the Republicans, are having tough times finding candidates for office.

If the Libertarians can field strong candidates, and by strong candidates I mean “not the usual crackpots,” perhaps they could win a statewide or national (legislative) election. If only they could field candidates who have a firm grasp not only of the Libertarian platform, but how to explain the platform and its benefits for common Americans without resorting to broadsides against prevailing authority and sounding like they’re one rock away from an anarchist, maybe the Libertarians could have a shot.

The blogomockracy is full of able-minded individuals with predilections toward libertarianism. Will any of us hear the call, or are we to wedded to our high-paying blog careers to make the leap into public service?

Writing about the recent “commencement” speech by the New York Times reporter Chris Hedges that was booed and eventually trumped by the attendees at Rockford (Illinois) College, Harley Sorensen uncovers another tentacle of the vast right wing conspiracy, that is to say, Midwestern values.

Hedges got to a-foaming at the mouth with the treatise:

I want to speak to you today about war and empire.

Killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will continue to spill — theirs and ours — be prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige.

Welcome to the working world, graduates. Your mark will damage our souls and prestige. No, wait, he was talking about the gummint, but with a different tone since his antigummint tone is condescension, whereas the antigummint tone coming from those who disagreed with the previous administration was the raving of madmen. Or something. But Rockford didn’t want to hear his antigummint diatribe. They probably wanted to hear about overcoming challenges and accruing enough wealth to retire and not run out of grubzits before the end of retirement.

Sorensen knows to indict the Right Wing because its 11 spices were all over the crispy skin. How does he know They were in on it, and that it was not a spontaneous outpouring of heartfelt disgust?

In all, it was a remarkable performance by the audience. And, judging from the presence of “foghorns,” it wasn’t spontaneous. It was planned.

Unlike the spontaneous protests where the audience produces whistles to drown out opposing speakers in cosmopolitan or enlightened towns like Berkeley, right? Foghorns at a graduation = conspiracy! Obviously, the worldly Mr. Sorensen has not spoken at many, make that any, graduations here in the Midwest where foghorns make their presences known at most, if not all, graduations from high school or college.

But Sorensen understands why the audience booed: ignorance! Armed with a transcript, he can at his leisure point out the errors that listeners made while transcribing the speech for a write up. I’ll leave it to you, ungentle readers, to read the column to see about what I am talking.

But let me hit, well, not really hit a couple more points. Sorensen saith:

But even ignorance doesn’t translate necessarily into violence. It’s rare for me to understand a church sermon, but I’ve never felt the urge to beat up on a minister because of that.

Interesting. He goes from shouting down to physical violence as though they’re merely different settings on the same potentiometer.

Oh, and:

Yet the Rockford incident had a chilling aspect to it. As described in the press, it could well have been a scene out of the recent miniseries on the rise of Hitler to power in Nazi Germany.

The difference between the many incidents at Berkeley and the Rockford incident is that, at Berkeley, it’s usually the rabble against an Establishment spokesperson. At Rockford, it was just the opposite; the incident had the feel of a government protest against an outsider.

Speechless. Wordless. Perhaps when I can once again work my mandibular musculature and can close my mouth, I can tell you what I think of this comparison and straw army.

On the other hand, John Leo says, in his column, deal with it.

Think of it as “dialoging with the text.”

In his latest Fox News.com column “Junk Science,” Steven Milloy recounts the “science” (snicker) of Mad Cow Disease and its entertaining media hysteria, such that:

Front-page coverage in the New York Times, for example, reported that eating meat from diseased cattle has allegedly caused more than 100 human deaths in Europe since 1994 and “raised questions about the health benefits of eating beef for many consumers around the world.”

More than 100? A number of “More than 100” in a hysterifluff piece means like 103. Mad Cow disease has killed that many people in ten years? Is that all? Well, at least we’re asserting our species dominance and slaughtering hundreds of cattle for each dead human to teach those cattle about going mad. One of your brains swell, all of your friends get it.

However, according to an old United Kingdom government study (see table B.5), in 1995 alone choking caused 153 deaths in just the UK, which would lead one to postulate merely eating (or putting things in one’s mouth) kills 1500% more people each year than Mad Cow Disease. Time for some appropriate hysterifluff.

Outlaw oral ingestion! Mandate intravenous feeding! Shoot the herds of people who chew gum with their mouths open! Although, since that would include me, I am less in favor of the latterest (most latterly?) suggestion.

However, in defense of our media and our own perception of statistics, people think they can win the lottery, too, so of course they imagine that Mad Cow Disease could get them if they bought a hamburger or McDonald’s stock. So at least we’re consistent in our ignorance of statistics and risk analysis.

Spinsanity discusses how some commentators have mischaracterized President Bush’s description of certain elements of Al Qaeda’s terrorist network. To be brief, the meme has spread that Bush said Al Qaeda was no longer a threat. He didn’t actually say that, but once attackers got a hold of that piece of straw, they thought it was meat. (Both Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan mentioned this Spinsanity piece yesterday.)

The problem, and the potential for the straw man, lies within the “slops” contemporary writers and speakers play with collective-noun-subject/pronoun/verb agreement. In many cases, writers and speakers mangle it, and those who read or listen come to expect it. The full Bush quote to which the commentators refer:

Al Qaeda [singular] is [singular] on the run. That group [singular] of terrorists who attacked our country is [singular] slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half [collective singular or plural, plural in this case] of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are [plural, refers to “half”] either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re [plural/plural] not a problem anymore.

So the text indicates that the pronoun “they” does indeed refer to the half of the top operatives who are jailed or dead, which is the nearest antecedent. Al Qaeda, an individual entity, should be referred to with the pronoun “it.” That group, another singular antecedent that refers to Al Qaeda, is also singular.

Of course, “half” as a noun falls into the collective noun category where it can refer to either a plural (for a number of entities, like Maureen Dowd has lost half her marbles and cannot find them) or a singular (for a quantity not enumerated, like Maureen Dowd has lost half of her mind and cannot find it). Although Strunk and White advise you to play colloquially with such collective nouns, no where would they tell Bush to mix agreement (Al Qaeda is…they’re) in the same paragraph.

So Bush’s text means what he (or his writers) meant for it to say. Anyone who argues differently is deconstructing. Which will help you graduate from some of the country’s finest higher education institutions with a frameable piece of paper that says English upon it, but it won’t necessarily help you communicate more effectively.

(P.S. I’ll save the extended rant of each word and grammar rule having an individual purpose in oral or written communication and how violating these rules can lead to listen-time or read-time exceptions like the one demonstrated, and exploited by grammatical commentatorial H4X0Rz, above.)