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September 28, 2006
the fucking torture bill
Today is another day where we who can do little at least make with the typey-typey. News reports are that the Congress is going to pass today legislation dealing with the desire of the administration to detain, torture and try foreign nationals in full-blown contravention of the Geneva Accords. News reports are referring to the bills in question as "anti-terror" or "detainee", which I would take issue with -- you can just as easy refer to the legislation as "pro-torture" or "war crime-y". I guess the news interests have to take care not to take sides, or at least only take one side, the war crime-y side.You'da thunk that when the sad, evil fuckers decided to actually cross the line in full daylight and legislate something not only anti-Constitutional but also anti-American, they would have chosen some issue more in line with their personal greed -- election-fixing, or environmental deregulation. Something that would actually continue the free flow of greenbacks into their corrupt little pockets. But no. Instead they cross the line with our right to strip inaliable rights from people.
Just like the founders intended!
The idea that an electorate is willing to allow this codified atrocity to be enacted makes me wish every bad thing on this electorate. You invite what you become. That is why the traditional story arc of a despot ends in the quick and painful end of said despot, and why the lifespan of an oppressive regime, and why a regime that deliberately steps on the rights of its people can end slowly and tumultuously with blood in the streets.
Not that this will happen anytime soon. But we used to have this organizing document that gave us the illusion of moral authority, even when our actions didn't exactly jibe with this document.
Now we don't even have that.
So fuck the architects of this abortion. Fuck them. I hope they experience the focused disdain of millions of good people in a very, very personal fashion.
And finally, realize what is at stake with this legislation (and maybe why the Administration is so willing to put it on the line) -- this is not so much about a ruling class of sadist fuckwits looking to rationalize their basest instincts (though it seems that way, doesn't it?). This is the act of a lawless and suddenly scared administration trying to endrun the Constitution and retroactively approve their impeachable offenses.
Some days not one fucking thing goes right.
Posted by mrbrent at 03:19 PM
attack of the monarchs
I don't remember this happening last year, or any year before it. But the past week I've noticed an unnatural amount of monarch butterfllies here in the greater NYC region. Mostly I see them outside my office in West Chelsea, and they just kind of waft in the wind eddies about three or four stories up.Ah, I see that these little dudes stopped in Connecticut first. That explains a lot. Or at least it explains that the reason that I didn't notice them in years past is probably only because I didn't notice them.
I know, butterflies, schmutterflies. But remember, Vladimir Nabokov had a little thing for butterflies, and that would be good company to keep. Also, two words: papillon and schmetterling.
Posted by mrbrent at 10:17 AM
September 27, 2006
silversun pickups
A pal gave me a CD of a new band, and I swear on a stack of Bibles I have not been able to stop playing it. It was in the glovebox of my car for a while, and I brought it to work on a whim last Monday. Once I slapped it in the Discman (how quaint!) I have not taken it out.The band is called Silversun Pickups, and the album is called Carnavas. I've spent all afternoon trying to think of some snazzy description of what they sound like, but I'm apparently not having a very Lester Bangs-y day. It jangles when it has to, and also it fuzzes out when it needs to. The lead singer reminds you of Billy Corgan minus the cage-metaphors and the studio magic. Are we up to post-post-punk now? Is there pop in that equation?
I like. And my recommendations come with no promise of profit, though I've never been known to turn down swag. Yes, I'm talking to you, SSPU, should you be googling yourselves.
[UPDATE: I see on the website of their label that they have been picked as a Band To Watch by Rolling Stone, so maybe I'm late to this party. Though I refuse to feel sorry for not reading Rolling Stone.]
Posted by mrbrent at 05:51 PM
it's so annoying when i harp on his broken language
There are other places for sober commentary on the recently related National Intelligence Estimate. You know, the one about the briar patch, and the president who insisted that throwing the rabbit into the briar patch was the only wise choice. You go to the places for the sober commentary already; no need for me to link, or to pile on.I would, however, would like to read back to you some of the Words of Petulance from our President, as he discussed the implications of the NIE (as reported by the New York Times):
“You know, to suggest that if we weren’t in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience,” Mr. Bush said. He added: “My judgment is: The only way to protect this country is to stay on the offense.”
I'm not sure where Mr. Bush acquired twenty years of experience -- he's not talking about experience as a failed capitalist, is he, or experience as beneficiary of his daddy's cronies' largess? Or maybe just being a drunk?
And also, I'd suggest that the President get the country off the offense. It's pretty hard to breathe with a country on top of you.
'Cause he meant, "stay on the offensive," see? So, if you imagine it literally...
Whatever. A bad day for this President is a good day for me.
Posted by mrbrent at 11:09 AM
September 25, 2006
i am having sex with marmaduke again, just now
This is your irregular dose of entertainments originally mined by Boing Boing.First, there is this post concerning a little infographic concerning Disney's role in the current IP wars. I link it mostly because Cory Doctorow makes a point that is infrequently made, and you all need to memorize it: the character of Mickey Mouse is under no threat of scampering off into the public domain -- Mickey Mouse is protected to a greater extent by trademark, which, if properly maintained, doesn't ever expire, as does copyright. (Long story.) So when you hear some loudmouth (like me) talk about how Disney is fighting to keep its characters from being publicly owned, remember that Disney is actually spending all this money and good will to ensure that the actual works (i.e., "Steamboat Willie") do not become publicly owned. It's a small but important distinction, and Cory nails it in half the words it took me to describe it. Figures.
And then, as an small token to my old friend Monk, there is this piece of excellence, which experiments with injecting real live humor into old strips, and the money line of which is the title of this little post.
It's nice to stumble across a few items not involving stuffing a doe's head into someone's mailbox.
[The next day:] More sweet Marmaduke love! Please let there be more websites deconstructing Marmaduke. Or Modok.
Posted by mrbrent at 03:30 PM
my favorite part was that he was rude
I don't need to post anything about Bill Clinton's Presidential moment, do I? You don't live in a cave, right?I will say that word of President Clinton's appearance on Fox News spread in a fashion that I would compare favorably to schoolyard news that someone finally bloodied the nose of the bully who's been giving you years of swirlies.
And I would also like to cast aspersions on the personal character of one Mr. Chris Wallace, word of which comes to me anecdotally, and therefore I keep it to myself and let aspersions cast themselves.
Unless, of course, you'd like to buy me a drink.
Posted by mrbrent at 10:26 AM
September 22, 2006
i'm not paranoid; i'm craven
I hate to admit it. But, boy, I sure do feel Bill O'Reilly's pain all right.In fact, the FBI has also contacted me, letting me know that I as well have been targeted for assasination for my courageous stand against terrorism, evil and mean people.
So start feeling sorry for my patriotic self! I, like O'Reilly, write these words under threat of death!
It is only through your adulation and purchasing of certain merchandising items that the valiant effort of O'Reilly, and myself, will be validated!
How can O'Reilly, and myself, save this great nation if you do not support us with your love and discretionary income?
It's true, the No Spin Zone, and Titivil, are the front lines of a clash of civilizations. So, please, look both ways before crossing.
Posted by mrbrent at 11:51 AM
adventures in annotation
Every time the President gives one of his barn-burners of a speech, I'm tempted to gin up a full annotation. This is not usually a morning thought; it is a falling asleep thought, as in, "Tomorrow I'll get up extra early so I can put a few hours in on an annotation of that address to the UN. It'll be crackerjack!"Inevitably, the next day does not bring this crackerjack annotation. I'm lucky if the day brings something shortish about fools stealing my butter at work.
But I finally found an annotation that I like very much -- this one here. It is brought to us by a think tank named "Foreign Policy In Focus", about whom I know very little. And it is a very in-depth annotation of the President's most recent speech to the General Assembly of the UN (which I'm a big fan of, as it includes the phrase "less likely to blow themselves up"), not at all like the snarky, glib one I would write. A representative example follows:
“Some have argued that the democratic changes we're seeing in the Middle East are destabilizing the region. This argument rests on a false assumption, that the Middle East was stable to begin with. The reality is that the stability we thought we saw in the Middle East was a mirage.”This is a terribly misleading characterization of the administration's critics:
First of all, the Middle East has not been seen as a stable part of the world since well before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For many decades, outside observers have widely recognized the serious ongoing conflicts in that region. There was no “mirage” here.
More importantly, virtually no one argues that the very limited democratic changes in recent years have destabilized the region. Instead, critics of U.S. policy note correctly that the region has been destabilized by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large-scale killings of civilians in U.S. military operations, and other U.S. violations of international law and national sovereignty.
See? Very very dry, but also very very correct. Please go educate yourselves, so that you may better convince the misguided.
Posted by mrbrent at 09:52 AM
September 20, 2006
it's the little things that get you through the day
I'm not as big on the comments function as some. I know, for example, that Monk takes the same perverse pleasure from reading a nice long comments thread that some would get from trolling Powerline. Me, I prefer to keep the trainwrecks behind me and the flamewars at a safe distance. (You will note that this site is not comments-enabled. That is on purpose, though I am sure that there is a certain fellowship I'm missing out on.)Having said that, I got sucked into a comments thread and I couldn't stop reading. It's a Gothamist post concerning our local public transportation agency, the MTA, and their continued and ongoing threats to raise fares, cut services, etc. Here in New York we are used to hearing this from the MTA. They are corrupt and ineffective. They refuse to open their accounting books to audit, so that we citizens can have some oversight and make sure that our subway fares are not buying someone a vacation home somewhere.
Obviously, not everyone in New York agrees with me, even though I am righter than they are. Some people like to point fingers at the transit employees union (which had a very novel strike nine months ago), some like to blame hipsters -- "diff'rent strokes", we call it.
And it is the beauty of these diff'rences that make for a compelling read in the comments section. About a third of the posts are serious, almost scholarly. They discuss the history of the MTA and its budget, and the various financial mechanisms of debt. The second third of comments are from the "poor conversationalists" -- the subject of the post on which they comment is public transit, so in come a flood of comments detailing the commenters' own personal commute. Sometimes funny; mostly about as funny as someone describing their commute. And the last third consists of the miscellania, the internecine disputes among commenters, with the veiled accusations and the half-apologies, along with the outwardly random: "money money everywhere- that is absurd," and, "GET A SCOOTER".
Basically, I started reading in hopes of stumbling across an organized resistance to the MTA, and then could not turn away as the thread devolved into whatever it is that every thread eventually devolves into.
Monk is right. These comment threads are fabulous. They're like a little Habitrail you can watch the netizens scurry around in.
Posted by mrbrent at 11:48 AM
September 19, 2006
not buzzkill -- principle
Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. It is on this day, each year, that I write something about not supporting institutionalized days in which once is encouraged to talk like a pirate. Sometimes I give my long litany of reasons. Not this year. I will be brief.Face it. If there were pirates, like the kind you want to talk like, and you said, "Yar," or, "Matey," to him, he would fucking kill you. And it would hurt, and you would be dead.
So celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, or Forced Spontanaeity Day, or whatever you call it. Institute the fun out of whatever you wish. I will talk like a pirate on any day I choose, thank you.
Someday we will look back and try to remember what it was like back when we actually had to go to work on Talk Like a Pirate Day. And I will write this post for the nth consecutive year.
Posted by mrbrent at 05:55 PM
killing the future by murdering the past
I guess I should be used to stories like this by now, but no. I've come across news that the powers-that-be are closing Atlantic City's Steel Pier. The reason? AC needs more luxury condos and the like.Message to stupid fucking AC developers: while your mercenary instinct to murder culture in order to make a buck may be admired by stupid people, I am not stupid people. In Europe, historic structures are generally only replaced after they fall down by themselves. That is why European real estate developers will not die rich but unmourned, like you.
Soon, the oldest public space/attraction in America will be a shopping mall from the 70s -- perhaps Monroeville Mall or something similar.
Posted by mrbrent at 11:14 AM
September 18, 2006
maybe you are not who you think you are
I think a link a day from Boing Boing is not excessive. Especially considering that, if you have the time to read this, you should probably be acquainting yourself with certain electronic consumer/identity security issues that have a reasonable chance of affecting your everyday everyday.For example, for today: sometimes, the information wanting to be free can be a pretty big problem. The more complex (and arbitary, in certain ways) the system is, the harder it is to repair the errors of inadvertancy and/or dumb-assery.
So now we panic, and go back to only watching TV.
Posted by mrbrent at 04:52 PM
saxby chambliss, come on down
Yes, I know, you're as sick of links from Raw Story as everyone else. Snarking on politics just grows more tiresome, and yet we soldier on. But this one is especially good, in light of my interest in exactly how the South intends to rise again.In a closed Armed Forces Committee meeting, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) picked up the "War on Terror is analogous to the [X] War" football and ran with it thusly:
Conflicting reports of what was said have emerged, one from a source to Roll Call's Heard on the Hill column, the other a spokesperson for Chambliss. “We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil War we’d be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln,” The source told ROLL CALL.Saying that the story wasn't true, a spokesperson for Chambliss said that what the Senator actually said was a different quote, "If Gen. Jeb Stuart had had better intelligence, we’d all be meeting in Richmond right now."
First of all, I actually did a little research (!?!) and, come to find out, no black Senators sit on the Armed Forces Committee. Which not only prevented Chambliss from saying something more colorful, like, "If Gen. Jeb Stuart had had better intelligence, the Honorable Senator from Illinois would be picking my cotton," but also took away the possibility of a particularly forceful exchange of ideas.
Further, if Chambliss intends to truly honor the War on Terror simile trope, it should go more along the lines of:
We need better intelligence. If we didn't have better intelligence in the Civil War we’d be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln.
Because, Senator Chambliss, the participant in that little conflict that stands best compared to al Qaida would be, what did you call yourselves? The Confederacy. The secessionists who could not repel invasion of their territories and ultimately surrendered.
Of course, if the Senator intended the comparison to be al Qaida equals the Union forces, I'm happy to let that stand on the record too.
For the record, if I had to choose what warring faction of history to compare al Qaida with, I would nominate Eurasia. Or maybe Eastasia.
Posted by mrbrent at 10:06 AM
September 17, 2006
wherein we bid 9-11 goodbye for a year
I saved this one for a couple of days, because I thought I could use a little distance. But this post is Josh Marshall's summation of the import of 9-11 (which already seems like weeks ago), and I like it for a few reasons.First of all, this passage contains a point I've long wanted to see in print:
The point is that al Qaida itself does not pose an existential threat to our civilization. It can kill hundreds or even thousands of us. There's the outside chance of a catastrophic attack perhaps with hundreds of thousands of death, though most of the people Fallows spoke to think that it's far, far harder for al Qaida to get, say, a nuclear device than people imagine, particularly with the reduced means of al Qaida today. But if al Qaida itself doesn't threaten our civilization itself, our possible reactions to al Qaida's threat do.
There are only two nation-states on Earth with true planet-killing capabilities -- that would be us, and however you want to classify the old Soviet aggregation. And if you think to yourself, "Why, both of these weapon systems are under close control -- they would not be used spuriously," then you are missing the point. Even if you take for granted (and I don't) the unlikeliness of these nations acting irresponsibly, you still have to take into account that these nations may be goaded into acting irresponsibly. So you then must include on the list of the planet-killing capables every actor (nation, state, organization) that has the potential to so goad. That makes the list very long indeed. And it illuminates why exactly terrorism is not the biggest problem facing us, and specifies how the greatest harm that terrorism can do is an indirect result of terrorism, a result of how terrorist events are responded to.
I also like this one, because I disagree with it:
Over the weekend I read one of the many 'why haven't we been hit again' articles. One I read, after disposing of many of the standard possible answers, proposed the following answer to the question: the reason we have not been hit again on our own soil after five long years is simply a sign of al Qaida's patience. They'll hit us at a time and place of their choosing.
Nope, the reason that they haven't hit us is, most basically, because they don't want to. And the reason that they don't want to is because the goal of the 9-11 attack has already been achieved, and doesn't need to be re-achieved. The intended effect of the attacks was to manipulate the US government into making very bad decisions in the Middle East. The US government did so, and has no intention of making a good decision anytime soon. They played us for suckers, and we bit. We hit the Taliban, but not hard enough to end them, and we sloppily invaded Iraq. We are worse than a recruiting poster for al Qaida, we are actually a multi-media advertising campaign of incalculable cost for al Qaida.
Al Qaida are a loose association of lawbreakers. And that is all they ever would be, no matter how many crimes they committed and no matter how inhuman the crimes were. All they wanted was to be treated as a state actor. They wanted to be waging war, and not just avoiding arrest. The only power they have is the power granted them by the terrorized.
Basically, we are suffering through a very bad little spot in history where the objectives of wackadoo zealot criminals with global desires and of our very own and very dumb-ass administration kind of fall into lockstep, and so we lose some civil liberties and a couple thousand soldiers, and Iraq experiences some hundred thousand "collateral damages", and we lose an American city and we get to watch Senators argue about how much torture is okay.
If you are not outraged on a moral level, you are not paying attention.
Tune in next year for more uplifting words.
Posted by mrbrent at 09:09 AM
this one goes out to god
This is a little nothing, but I just wanna be square with the world. To the individual that was referred to this site by the search keyphrase "gospel for september 09 2006", I would like to say that I am deeply, deeply sorry. There is not much gospel here, while there is a great volume of blasphemy, heretical thoughts, profanity and other by-products of my apostacy. I probably used the word "gospel" somewhere and boom, some poor soul is punished for their good intentions, by Titivil.I just hope things worked out better on september 10.
And also please remember us in your prayers, gospel-seeker -- someone's gonna have to feed your cat after the Rapture.
Posted by mrbrent at 08:55 AM
September 15, 2006
let's try real short
From the President's mouth today:It's flawed logic.
Let us all bask quietly in the hubris.
Posted by mrbrent at 05:11 PM
i thought we were friends, amazon?
I spend a measurable amount of time warning friends and family about technology. I'm not quite as sharp as Cardhouse on these issues, but I do know to never click on unknown attachments, that Evite is a scam that monetizes the contact info of your invitees, that Bill Gates will not give you money for e-mailing, etc. And a surprising number of friends and family are still in a state of alarming gullibility, as if bad intentions were only created with the advent of the Internets.So it's with interest that I follow technology/IP/privacy events as they unfold rather quickly. (In fact, as a brief sidebar, one of the biggest grudges I have against the Bush Administration is that their efforts to destroy the planet have taken up bandwidth that I would rather be applying to tech/IP/privacy wars.) Obviously there are far too many developments for me to do them -- the individual developments and the field in general -- any justice. But I did find this post from Cory Doctorow fascinating. Doctorow discusses the license agreement one would have to agree to if one were to "purchase" a movie from Amazon's new VOD store, "Amazon Unbox". Basically, the license is shitty, and only a fool would agree to it. But the great thing about the post is that it covers most of the basic digital rights issues confronting us today, as such issues are conveniently addressed by the draconic license agreement -- malicious DRMs, privacy, territory and usage restrictions. Yeah, it reads like boilerplate, but Doctorow does a great job putting it into English, making it snappy, etc.
Of course, Boing Boing is about the best site to visit regularly if you are interested in these issues. And Slashdot as well, though I'm still a few years of learnin' away from not feeling dumb and old when I visit.
And if you are uninterested in these issues, ask yourself this question: when you buy a book or a CD, do you then own that item, or are you merely licensing that book? See, me, I can ponder that one for days, and argue it for longer.
It just may happen that the riots all your friends have been predicting for years now will end up being digital.
Posted by mrbrent at 11:24 AM
i guess their god is vengeful after all
God was not going to let me get away with that. After a little skeptical smart-assery earlier this week, opening questioning Christian dogma in a little post on this here site, He has seen fit to Visit Upon me and Remind me of my Sinful Ways.I got to share a crowded subway car with a Gospel Lady of Craziness this morning. The length of the trip, she sat and loudly sung hymns to herself, and the people standing around her, and the people in the next car, and the people on the space station. And these were not groovy hymns; listeners did not feel the sway, and did not clap in time. These were hymns of admonition. These were weaponized hymns, intended to be applied to the unfaithful. And, no, she was not crazy the way I would call a crazy hobo crazy. She was apparently going to work, and she was sober. I take that back -- she was drunk on the Spirit. She reeked of the Spirit. Apparently, she had a long night of the Spirit, if you know what I mean.
It was one of those public transportation moments, with commuters united in their antipathy towards the harmless yet annoying.
And, yes, even in my ecclesiastical punishment I crack wise and heretical. I am bad person.
Posted by mrbrent at 10:42 AM
September 13, 2006
wiki warning
Someday, you will be tempted to muck around on Wikipedia. You know, see where the linkage takes you. You will then stumble across a page listing all the people listed on Wikipedia that were born in the year you were born. You will then click.You do not want to do this. As far as your self-esteem goes, it's like googling yourself, plus also piles of crank.
Yes. I'm vain. Cat: out of bag, you!
Posted by mrbrent at 05:22 PM
atrocity update
Sometimes all you can do is you sit back and watch the outrages float on down the stream. I have principally two (three?) in mind.First was this story, which broke over the weekend. To wit, journalist Greg Palast is threatened with arrest over his photography of an Exxon refinery, which incidentally is adjacent to a Katrina refugee camp. This could be construed to constitute two atrocities -- the first that the DHS is running around playing junior G-man on journalists, and the other that there are still Katrina refugees (72,000, reportedly, behind barbed wire somewhere). Either one should be enough to take to the streets with the torches and the pitchforks. Or at least type really angrily.
And if this is not disturbing enough, please enjoy this little nugget about how US military leadership believes that international criticism could be avoided if certain non-lethal weapons are first used on US citizens before they are deployed in foreign theaters. There are elements of this argument that could almost be considered heart-warming -- non-lethal weapons, avoiding foreign criticism -- but unfortunately when you mix it all in the batter you get a very foul pancake indeed. It makes the Navy look like a nest of nascent Dr Evils, positing any social strife as an excellent research opportunity. At least then, I guess, the dirty Hippies will have been good for something.
In a way, we are lucky that no one has decided that a trial run of very-lethal weapons would look good on the US populace. Yet.
Posted by mrbrent at 11:16 AM
September 12, 2006
another sad reminiscence of the bad old days
I just realized: there's another item you can add to the list of cultural phenomena lost to the ages. Though, maybe not so much cultural as anthropological, which has creepy implications w/r/t the slow mutation of our consciousness.No longer do we, or will we, consistently misspell a specific word. Maybe the phenomena is me-specific, but back in the school days, there was a small array of words that I could never remember the spelling of, and would usually guess wrong on the two or three options I could conjure. "Across" was one of those words, as was "manipulate". It was kind of pathological.
Now we have spellcheck, not only in our word processing apps and e-mail, but even in our phones now. In fact, spellcheck is almost becoming sentient, your little buddy who keeps all your linguistic foibles a secret from the world.
Not to mention grammarcheck, which I have never once used in my life on principle, so its ravaging of our linguistic capability is as yet unknown to me.
I'm warning you, we'll be telling our children, "Man, I wish you were around before the robots got to us -- good times." To which they will reply, "Don't say 'man'. You embarrass me, and my pet robot friend."
Posted by mrbrent at 10:12 AM
September 11, 2006
love is not like the pizza man
This can be filed in the "Careless Words" department. And, as you may or may not be aware, "Careless Words" is pretty much all that Titivils do.I listen to way too much AM radio. Much more than you do. And I don't even drive to work -- I have these old Sony headphones, each can the size of an onion, that I wear as I trudge back and forth across Gotham. They make me look like Princess Leia. And as I leave snickers in my wake, I'm grooving to the NPR, the news, or the talk radio, or even the occasional professional athletic event.
One of the the things you're missing with your reluctance to sumbit yourself to the Amplitude Modulation radio is this super radio ad for Match dot com. Apparently, Dr Phil's piles of money have shrinked, because he's partnered up with Match, both for some services program but best of all for radio ads, in some of which, he says things like the following (please imagine it being read in the accusing twang of Dr Phil.):
Love is not like the pizza man, goin' door-to-door -- "Hi, I'm looking for a life partner?"
Which is oddly the pick-up line I used on my then wife-to-be. You know, directly following me trying to remember the one about me holding something against her and failing.
I will just type it again because it is the truest thing ever: Love is not like the pizza man.
Posted by mrbrent at 02:46 PM
and that's all the people need to know
Last night the moon was in "waning gibbous" phase. It was full last week, so now it's three-quarters full and emptying slowly. I think I remember somewhere back in all the schooling that some old old human cultures, let's put them in the B.C., believed that the waning of the moon was caused by a god, angry or maybe just hungry, who was eating the moon.So, today is September 11, 2006. There will be remembrances and ceremonies, some pretty deep and heartfelt, some pretty tacky. There are a whole lotta people for whom this day must suck, considering the loved ones lost, and a whole lot more that saw some pretty scary shit five years ago. And there's even more people who are convinced that today is some kind of holiday, that we must commodify our grief, that there is some "lesson" of that terrible day. These lesson people are pretty much exclusive from the first two groups of people I described. They also are the kind of people who believe that Saddam Hussein raised the ghosts of Hitler, Lenin and Khomeini, who each possessed the body of President Clinton, who then personally flew the planes into towers/Pentagon/countryside.
Yeah, there was a lesson to be taken from 9-11, as follows: there actually never was an angry god eating the moon.
Yes, I understand that by even addressing this, I'm adding fuel to the fire, and it makes me little better than all the ghouls out there. Just wanted to get a little something off my chest. Now excuse me while I take my indomitable spirit and go looking for some novelty.
Posted by mrbrent at 10:24 AM
September 08, 2006
oh nothing
I received a few e-mails regarding my stumbling across Pete Townshend. It is very nice to hear from everyone. I will endeavour to stumble across Pete Townshend more often.Posted by mrbrent at 03:46 PM
September 07, 2006
yes, pete townshend
I ordinarily refrain from this kind of stalkery. The interface between celebrity and the rest of the world is only interesting to me in a pathological sense. Plus also I've lived in NY for years, have worked in fields that are peopled with celebrities, etc. So, yes, no starfucker, me.But on my way to lunch just now I walked past Pete Townshend getting out of a Town Car. Pete God-damn Townshend. And he looked good, too -- fit, bespoke, energetic.
(To you youngsters -- Pete Townshend: Who?)
I guess I still listen to CMF in my heart.
Posted by mrbrent at 03:03 PM
armchair torture experts, unite
The idea of an open, public debate about torture is making me laugh heartily, to myself. Oh, the debate about the morality is one thing -- well, it's not much of a debate really. Torture is immoral, regardless of the possible beneficial effects thereof. And don't gimme your "good of the many versus the good of the few" line, Trekkies, because that little situational ethics lesson is about sacrifice, and not pulling anyone's fingernails out. Torture is wrong. If you'd like to turn this into a valid debate, then wonder to yourself to what extent a nation is willing to commit immoral acts.No, what's making me heart-laugh (to myself) is when the open public debate edges up to discussion of the efficacy of torture and various torturous techniques. I laugh because everybody shut up now. There are only a very few people on the planet who know for sure what works and doesn't work as far as interrogations go. You are not one of them. It doesn't matter how many Tom Clancy novels you've read, and it doesn't matter how many times a day you click on StratFor. All the black ops shit is very much over your head. It's fun to say "waterboard", but you really have no functional understanding of how its effects differ from an Indian burn, or even a nice backrub.
And neither do I. Which is why I can only laugh.
In fact, based on my limited understanding of history, if it is publicly known that the military is using certain interrogation techniques, etc., then you can be very certain that there are other, blacker techniques out there, and you can be sure that they are not performed in the presence of any half-wit Guardsman with a phonecam. They got a corps of precogs, they got a doctor ready to read memory off the cortical folds, they got Chthullu on line one waiting to speak to the prisoner.
So, please, more discussion on the nuts and bolts of torture, and why it works so well. Maybe the citizenry should be given the opportunity to vote, on 1-900 phone lines. I will continue to laugh. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Posted by mrbrent at 10:54 AM
September 06, 2006
bye, cathy; don't be dipping into my butter
It's sad when things change. I noticed in the most recent print issue of The Onion (which has had the benefit of a recent redesign) that they had expanded the comic strips included. One of the new strips is Cathy, although, wait for it, it is in Spanish. (Or Portuguese, or something decidedly non-English -- don't have it in front of me.) The inclusion of this translated comic strip, I presume, is for the ironic self-regard of a nation of cynics. For example, even my own personal ironic self-regard felt a tug or two upon discovering the non-English Cathy.That's the good news. Our ironic self-regard marches on.
The bad news is that, in the past, when writing a post that included actual bitching about the job, I would usually try to deaden the banality of another white guy whining about his desk job by invoking both Cathy and Dilbert. (I would look for examples, but searching through your own archive can feel like editing your obituary, and the day is too young to risk it.)
So now, on a going-forward basis, when I get all writey with the anecdote about the co-worker who left two coffee mugs half-full of milk and cereal on top of the refrigerator for untold weeks, I will not refer to myself as "getting all Cathy on it". Also, when I threaten that I will indeed find out who it is who has been dipping into my butter, and I will passive-aggress them into a state not unlike uncontrollable sobbing, no Cathy at all. And no Dilbert either, because Dilbert without the leavening effect of Cathy is a bit too much to take.
I will think about a replacement of the Cathy/Dilbert signifier. (Because it I bitch about work without a signifier, then the terrorists will have won.) No clear winner yet, but the leading candidates are "Brenda Starr/Wizard of Id" and, simply, "Blackjack Mulligan".
I'll let you know.
Posted by mrbrent at 04:17 PM
number stations
Complacency is the pinata of the day. Or at least of the post. Why? As usual, because of the President of the United States of America. He is currently so concerned about our complacency that he found it the right time to reveal who it is we are fighting in Iraq - the ghost of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. And through our American resolve, there will be no ghost left standing, in Iraq or in any other place with ghosts.Because if we don't fight the ghosts over there, then we'll be fighting them in our own cities!
Personally, while we find America's complacency with ghosts shocking, we are more concerned with too much complacency in the public towards general weirdness. It's true, the world is much more weird than you think, and it's your own fault for not keeping up on the weirdness.
So here is a free taste of weird, because I am a kind and judicious pusherman.
Number stations. Yes, numbers stations. What are number stations and how could they be weird? (After all, "number" and "station" are two of the least weird words in the English language.) Number stations are low power short-wave or AM radio broadcasts consisting of nothing but random series of numbers (or, in some cases, letters). I've never heard them with my personal ears, but this is a place you can go to listen to examples.
Why do they exist? Well, everyone pretty much agrees -- spies. The theory is that the numbers are a ciphertext, broadcast generally so that the location of the spy, who will decrypt the message with a one-time pad, cannot be easily deduced. However, until a spy knocks on my door and admits to being behind number stations, the jury is out for me, except for the verdict of weirdness.
So, all the time, as you walk to work, or cook up those good chicken wings, or settle into an evening of your favorite professional athletics, there are numbers stations out there, whizzing signals through your own personal corpus. In fact, if you take into account all the man-made invisible waves whizzing out there, remember that a certain portion of them have a mysterious and foreboding origin, of which only few are aware!
Weird.
Posted by mrbrent at 12:47 PM
he's one busy retiree
I'm trying to stay away from the headline thing. It was starting to feel about as novel as making fun of a classmate because you can see their underpants. So, to demonstrate my reluctance, I will lay it straight and leave the nonsense out, for once:• Delay puts Iran closer to U.N. sanctions
Having a public figure whose surname is also a noun can create little syntactical car crashes in your head.
Posted by mrbrent at 09:45 AM
September 05, 2006
we've met the enemy, and he is, um, darth vader
I can never figure out who the "enemy" is in Iraq. For a while after the invasion, it seemed obvious -- Iraqis, in general. But that idea wasn't exactly moving a lotta merch, if you catch my drift, so the powers-that-be decided it was time for some semantic realignment, but fast.For a while there, the enemy became "those who hate freedom". Conveniently, they also wanted to "destroy our way of life". What this had to do with Iraqis, whose nation was invaded, and who suffered tens of thousands of civilian casualties, I could not figure out. But it sounded good. After all, how could you sympathize with freedom-haters? Or even them with a hard-on against our way of life? (Which is what, exactly? Irrational consumerism? Shit-headed representational democracy?)
And then there was that whole period where the enemy was "the insurgents". That was a hot one. No one, not even the good guys, not even girl scouts career-tracked for divinity school, like the insurgents. Except for the insurgents in Vichy France, or 1980s Afghanistan, or those other insurgents, fighting, valiantly, against an occupying force. Except for them, "insurgents" was a very wise way to cast this nameless "enemy".
Fortunately, the past few weeks have brought exciting new enemies that we never knew we were fighting in the first place. I distinctly remember when the enemy became "Islamic Fascists", or, for short, "Islamofascists", which had all the awkward racist appeal of "Negroe Communists". Oddly, that was abandoned after a few days. On the heels of that, the President implied that the enemy, over there in Iraq, are Nazis, and nobody doesn't like kicking Nazi ass. Nobody. I was hoping they were going to stick with Nazis, because then we would know exactly who we were fighting -- eighty- to ninety-year old Germans.
But then yesterday we discovered that it was not Nazis we were fighting, oh no -- we are fighting the Confederacy. Yes, the South did rise again, and now we get to fight them in Basra, Fallujah, etc. Because, leaving Iraq now would be like accepting the truce of Gen. Robert E. Lee or something, which may have ended the Civil War, but deprived us of the opportunity to crush the Confederacy, to march through Georgia like Sherman did, um, or would have done much better, or something.
It's been so confusing, keep track of this enemy, who is so talented at morphing into increasingly threatening cartoon characters.
The beauty of this array of enemies is that they are very generic indeed. Interchangeable, even. While it's fun to compare, none of the comparisons implied are grounded in any kind of fact, and the purpose of all the negative associations is to argue against the ending of any old generic war, not this specific invasion and occupation of Iraq.
This whole thing is probably a lot more clear outside of the confines of the U. S. of A., but I hardly want to invite any accusations of heresy or traitorism or any of those others that are flung around like pancakes these days.
Posted by mrbrent at 07:54 PM
i got all my panicking done in the 90s
Looks like someone got their Orwell in their Leo Strauss again. I am referring to this morning's AP story headlined White House: U.S. safer but not yet safe. Which of course invites a whole species of "Everything is fine, so keep freaking out" comments.It is a unique position the administration is in, trying to simultaneously convince the electorate that the competence of the administration will protect them from a scary world -- a world so scary, in fact, that it is impossible to protect them. Of course, a weary, poor and not very bright electorate will stumble across the inherent contradiction contained in the headline, and then repeat it back to you as gospel. For there is no precept of logic strong enough to withstand the pernicious rhetoric of the Bush Administration.
I'm coming to the belief that any news story that reports the news of some shit somebody says is not much of a news story at all. Anything like, "[Party A]: [Propaganda]", or, "[Utter lie], [Party A] says". That's not news, and it's not even reporting. There are supposed to be those five one-word questions that all begin with "w" behind a news story, not just a functioning tape recorder. I think I've come to this belief before. Whatever. I was right then; now look at me go.
The story does contain legitimately scary news though, as follows:
Asked about [the latest al-Qaida videotape] Tuesday, Fran Townsend, a special assistant to President Bush for homeland security and counterterrorism, said she did not think the tape suggested another strike.
That would be the first time that the Administration has interpreted an al-Qaida tape to not suggest an attack since September, 2001. I do believe the megachurches and the shopping malls of the greater Midwest area should commence panicking.
Posted by mrbrent at 08:51 AM
September 04, 2006
steve irwin
I'm glad the news of Steve Irwin's untimely death broke on Labor Day. The sound of a million bloggers struggling between earnestness and ironic detachment would have been deafening.Enjoy your day off, million blogers.
Posted by mrbrent at 11:31 AM
September 01, 2006
try shaking it
Maybe this one should go to Deadspin, but I'll give it a try. This is the lead paragraph from an otherwise innocuous NYTimes sports story:The Jet's quarterback picture, which was developing as slowly as a Polaroid, became clear yesterday with the trade of Brooks Bollinger to the Minnesota Vikings.
Um, Polaroids develop in a minute or so. I dunno if the reporter/editor have tried pulling 35mm film out of a camera and developing it in their hands, but I'm pretty sure Polaroids have corned the market on the quick-developing.
Maybe I'm just not impatient enough.
Posted by mrbrent at 02:49 PM
nypd wants you horn-swaggled
The powers-that-be are persisting with their baffling West Chelsea campaign. And they're honing their message.The traffic sign of fate has returned to the corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, and its message to commuters is this:
USE OF FAKE ID/IS A CRIME
You might remember that a few weeks ago, the traffic sign was present, and read:
FAKE ID USE IS/UNLAWFUL
Apparently, there was some concern that the potential perpetrators were confusing "unlawful" with "suggested", or "fun".
I'll tell ya, the assorted new media minions and gallery assistants of the neighborhood are governing themselves accordingly, hoo boy.
Posted by mrbrent at 10:20 AM