Cheap Linens Basically Shot Somebody
Posted on | January 11, 2011 | No Comments
Many wise commentators have noticed the way that Sarah Palin directly caused Rep. Gabrielle Gifford to be shot by using the graphic image of the crosshairs of a rifle scope to “target” her in an act of political speech. Indeed, Palin might as well have just pulled the trigger herself, and I propose we let this Loughner person go free — who can blame him? He saw a campaign graphic, and he obeyed. This is merely natural instinct.
But the poison, my friends, runs much deeper than we choose to acknowledge. Just this morning, as I drove down an apparently ordinary street in Worcester, Massachusetts, I was chilled to the bone to see a business that used the utterly terrifying symbol of a rifle’s crosshairs on the sign in front of their premises. Look at their website, friends: the symbol of murder is indeed there as well, chillingly imposed over the Mansonian imagery of a human skull. Once you notice that this business in Central Massachusetts calls itself “CrossFit Center Mass,” you can see precisely what they’re up to: “center mass” is where one aims a gun to shoot a human being, my friends. Yes, it is so.
Littering their website and physical premises with crosshairs, winking at their encouragement to take dead aim at the human heart, and (one presumes) encouraging their personal training clients to “hit” their weight loss “targets” or “nail” their “dead lifts,” this gymnasium is blowing the dog whistle…for MURDER! How long, my friends, until someone is gunned down in the street by some sick soul answering this vile inducement to hate? Will Congress not act to silence them?
Oh, but friends, it gets so much worse. Artists in Portland who sell handcrafted glassware under the starkly terror-inducing name of “Bullseye Glass?” Oh, friends, my very flesh quivers with a terrible chill to say it is so! Oh, whither civil discourse in glassware? Whither objets d’art that spoke not of VIOLENT DEATH?
One even hears rumors that a major retailer has named itself “Target.” Surely this is a false claim, as such a vile spewing of subliminal political vitriol would surely by now have led to far more legislative deaths than have been yet seen.
But let us speak no more of such dread things, my friends. Once one learns to see the world through eyes such as these, reader, one lives always with the frisson of he who sees. And then there is nothing left but tenure or a job at CNN.
Our Top Three Enemies Are Drugs, Terrorism, and Human Dignity
Posted on | October 30, 2010 | No Comments
In 1991, a police officer in Wareham, Massachusetts thought a 14 year-old girl might be hiding some marijuana. So he told her to unbutton her pants, standing out in the open next to a cranberry bog, and he conducted a long and very attentive search inside her underwear. Going through the places where a dude might find contraband on a young adolescent girl, he also had her lift her shirt and open her bra. So thorough – one of those cops who puts a lot into the job.
Other officers and a sergeant looked on, close enough to hear the girl screaming and crying as Officer Scott Flanagan carefully checked her genitals for a threat to the community. They didn’t stop him.
A year later, in what seems to have been turning into a habit, Flanagan thoroughly searched another teenaged girl’s genitals for more drugs. Alas, this was finally a bridge too far, and Officer Flanagan ended up in prison for indecent assault on a minor and civil rights violations.
We know about these long-finished events because the sergeant who supervised the officer at both searches is a state representative in Massachusetts, and currently a candidate for a seat in Congress. Otherwise it would all be old business, long forgotten.
Similarly, we wouldn’t know about Savana Redding if her family hadn’t persisted in a long legal battle against the Safford Unified School District in Arizona. When Redding was 13 years old, administrators at her middle school suspected — on the unexamined word of another child — that she possessed “ibuprofen, equivalent to two tablets of Advil.” So they did the reasonable and expected thing to protect children from such a dangerous and powerful narcotic: they had her take off her clothes and pull her underwear away from her body so they could take a careful look inside. No ibuprofen turned up. Another child saved from drugs, ladies and gentlemen.
At the end of the legal road, eight members of the United States Supreme Court concluded that the school district’s search had gone too far; the majority opinion pointed to “the degradation its subject may reasonably feel” as an argument against allowing such an intrusive act on so little cause. Just because some people in an office made a child show them her genitals — why’s everybody so sensitive these days? As Clarence Thomas helpfully explained in his dissenting opinion, “Judges are not qualified to second-guess the best manner for maintaining quiet and order in the school environment.”
Man, where the fuck was Clarence Thomas when Scott Flanagan needed him? Do we want marijuana out there unrestricted near our cranberry bogs? Why are we second-guessing a police officer who had the sense to be really diligent?
So then this week, someone sent bombs in UPS packages from Yemen, apparently destined for synagogues in Chicago. Following a tip, possibly from the Saudi government, the cargo planes containing the packages were isolated and searched. The packages were recovered.
And so, wonderfully, we get this, as a local news story put it: “Friday’s UPS scare is prompting increased security measures at the nation’s airports. That could include newly introduced pat-down procedures.” See how bombs in shipping packages on a cargo flight lead to intrusive searches of passengers on commuter flights? The neat thing about working for the government is that you can just make shit up, and no one can stop you.
Anyway, about those newly introduced pat-down procedures: a CNN employee went through one this week to get on a flight at the Orlando airport after her underwire bra set off the metal detector. She says the screener “ran her hands around her breasts, over her stomach, buttocks and her inner thighs, and briefly touched her crotch.” (Personal to Scott Flanagan: the TSA is hiring!)
Afterwards, the searched passenger expressed her appreciation for the government’s efforts to keep her safe. “I felt helpless, I felt violated, and I felt humiliated,” she said.
Of course, some airline passengers won’t have to worry about being groped by a TSA flunkie, since many airports now have body-imaging x-ray machines that essentially let screeners look at your naked body without taking off your clothes. But they’ll totally be careful with it, and never abuse it. Except for when they make fun of people’s genitals.
Drugs and terrorism are awesome. Dear power-mad sadistic perverts who enjoy the sound of helpless weeping: be sure to thank your god of choice for these wonderful gifts, and get a government job as soon as possible. You’ll get a good paycheck, a nice pension, and you’ll work to protect people every day.
pretty much
Posted on | October 29, 2010 | No Comments
freedom: it just put your ass in a biometric database
Posted on | August 25, 2010 | No Comments
I don’t know if I’ve ever loved a news story the way that I love this one from USA Today. See, the U.S. military needs to identify insurgents in Afghanistan, so it’s using retina scanners and fingerprint scanners to build a database encompassing “all Afghan males of fighting age.” Then they lift fingerprints from a bomb, see, or check the retinas of someone they’ve detained as a bad guy, and bam: positive identification of a terrorizer! Thousands of Afghans are scanned into the database every month.
So how many insurgents have been caught with this technology, so far? Click through to the story if you need to, but I bet you already know the answer. The U.S. military is scanning the fingerprints and retinas of every male of fighting age who comes to U.S. or ANA-staffed checkpoints and submits to fingerprint and retina scans. Just like the Taliban totally does all the time, is how that one is apparently supposed to work.
But it gets so much more wonderfully betterer, because of the freedomness:
Soldiers are encouraged to keep a friendly attitude while scanning subjects.
“We just try to be polite and tell them we are trying to separate the good guys from the bad guys,” Lt. Scott Browne says while scanning subjects at the Freedom Gate, a bustling border entry point in the town of Wesh.
Freedom Gate: It’s where you come to be scanned into the database as a subject.
“Soldiers are encouraged to keep a friendly attitude while scanning subjects.” I believe that kind of sentence is sometimes called an “epitaph.”
max boot, shameless lying asshole
Posted on | August 21, 2010 | No Comments
“Above all, the terrible fear of Saddam and his secret police, of the knock in the night, has been lifted. Numerous radio and TV shows, newspapers and magazines air a variety of viewpoints, and politicians from a multiplicity of parties compete in free and fair elections.” — Max Boot, Winning the Peace in Iraq, the Wall Street Journal, August 20.
“Negotiations between Iraq’s two most powerful political blocs broke down Monday, dashing hopes that a solution to a more than five-month impasse after national elections was on the horizon.” — Leila Fadel and Mary Beth Sheridan, Power-sharing talks between Iraqi politicians are called off, the Washington Post, August 17.
Getting a Clue
Posted on | August 20, 2010 | No Comments
Marc Grisham was hired in 2004 to be the city manager in Pittsburg, California, a working class city of 65,000 people. His contract is below. Grisham’s starting salary was $169,000 a year. His contract was amended five times in the years since. By 2008, he was making a base salary of $231,938 a year (see the Novermber 4, 2008 letter in the same file below). In just four years, Grisham added $63,000 to his annual base pay — cumulative increases worth more than a third of his starting salary.
But reality appears to be making its appearance in Pittsburg: last month, Grisham recommended that the city council forego his salary increase for the year. The council said yes. See how simple that is?
When tax revenues were strong, city government officials did well for themselves. In a weak economy, they can live on salaries that have grown very rapidly over the last few years. No bailouts or tax hikes are necessary. There’s another solution, and it’s easily implemented.
how to show the limits of your humanity in one easy step
Posted on | August 19, 2010 | No Comments
Over the last year, the Los Angeles Times has reported a long investigative series on abused children who died while under the protection of the LA County Department of Child Protective Services. On Wednesday, the county Board of Supervisors voted to open an investigation…
…to catch the county employees who are leaking documents to the Los Angeles Times.
I don’t believe in a fiery hell, but I sometimes wish I did.
the empire has a glitch
Posted on | August 18, 2010 | No Comments
I left one thing out of my post on Todd Purdum’s empire worship, yesterday: the main point. I got distracted by the glorious awfulness of Purdum’s ponderous paragraphs, and lost track of the indescribable blindness that he shares with the subjects of his worshipful journalism.
Purdum argues that Washington is “broken,” that procedural disfunction prevents the rational management of the nation’s affairs. The presidency, he writes, “has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the ‘news’ by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth — these forces have made today’s Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself.”
But there’s some good news, Purdum adds. Despite the crushing burden on the presidency, the guy who holds the job has gotten some big things done: he secured the passage of major legislation on health care, education, and financial reform, and the administration “managed the Afghan surge” with unnoticed skill and unmistakable political discipline.
So. The presidency is becoming untenable, as a single individual sits in a chair in an office and makes decisions about so many things:
The social and political future of whole swathes of the world — Afghanistan, Iraq, the many others where American drones fire missiles and Special Forces operators join CIA paramilitary warriors and federal contractors in shaping the competing place of Islam and pluralist democracy in foreign societies.
The future of American education, and the nature of the relationship between teachers and students, now sharply defined by federal legislation.
The future of the global economy, now closely regulated by an American government that travels the world to push other national leaders to follow the American path to economic recovery.
And on and on and on. The president manages the world, you see, and it’s becoming too much responsibility for any one person to carry. But despite all those burdens, the president has managed to centralize the management of American health care with the passage of legislation that imposes a federal mandate on everyone in the country. And he’s managed to expand the American wars overseas, going all in on the American bet that it can build a better society in Afghanistan. And he’s pulled the regulation of finance and industry and energy to the center, where it can be better managed.
Yes, despite the growing centralization of power and the spectacular insanity of its untenable burdens on that center, the president has successfully managed to centralize more power. Despite the debilitating effects of the disease, he’s managed to cause the disease to metastasize. Success!
The solution to the “gargantuan size, speed, and complexity” of the contemporary American presidency is for Afghans to run Afghanistan, local school boards to run schools, and state legislatures to give policy direction to state insurance commissioners regarding the regulation of health insurance. The solution is to spin power out and down. The difficulty of getting the rock farther up the hill isn’t a procedural error. It’s gravity. And the people pushing on the rock haven’t figured it out, yet.
Despite the paralyzing effects of the growth of the federal government, the president has managed to implement a universal federal health insurance mandate. Nothing strange about that argument, no sir.
This moment feels historically familiar, doesn’t it?
Tags: absence of skepticism > bombing the wogs into freedomness > bureaucratic values > eternal war > gubmint sux > lazy news media prostitutes
let’s just eat the whole thing (II)
Posted on | August 18, 2010 | No Comments
Between 2000 and 2010, the cost of living went up by about 30%.
In the same period in the city where I live — West Hollywood, California — government salaries went up by rates that, in many instances, come remarkably close to 100%. (The city manager’s salary growth actually topped 100%, as I’ve already noted.)
The proof is easy to come by. Salary control rates establish the top and bottom available pay for a particular position. Here are the salary control rates for the current fiscal year, posted on the City of West Hollywood website. The document below, received in response to a public records request this week, shows the city’s salary control rates for the 1999-2000 fiscal year.
Last week, a local news website, Weho Daily, posted a story saying that the city’s payroll costs had more than doubled in ten years, rising from $12.9 million ten years ago to $26.6 million over the last year. The story noted that city staffing had remained static over those years, parked around 200 in a contract city that gets its most significant local government services from county agencies. But what caused that payroll growth, then?
Simple answer: let’s compare salaries across the years.
Pay range for a department director, 1999-2000: $6,560 to $8,958 a month.
Pay range for a department director, today: $12,479.81 to $14,652.56 a month.
Pay range for the job title “human resources manager,” 1999-2000: $5,385 to $7,540 a month.
Pay range for the job title “human resources manager,” today: $9,690.11 to $12,753.43 a month.
Pay range for the job title “associate planner,” 1999-2000: $4,058 to $4,910 a month.
Pay range for the job title “associate planner,” today: $6,376.46 to $8,147.43 a month.
And so on — it’s a long pair of lists, with some job reclassification that makes comparisons tricky. But the general trend is clear enough: government salaries have grown well ahead of the cost of living over the last ten years. Note also that the upward movement of salary control rates is just one way that salaries grew; a department head starting at the bottom of his control rate ten years ago and rising to the top of his control rate now would have gone from making $6,560 a month in 2000 to making $14,653 a month now.
And this is why, as the economy receded and tax revenues declined, California government frantically worked to make up its losses: they have to sustain their untenable growth in payroll (and the related growth of their pension obligations).
In practical terms, this now means that I can walk out of a store where I just paid 9.75% sales tax on a box of diapers — just in time to see the meter maid put a $57 parking citation on my car (that would have been a $45 citation last year). The rest of us are being drowned to keep public sector salaries from softening into mere opulence.
I’ll invite the City of West Hollywood to respond to this post, and will post whatever message they send. In the meantime, you have both sets of salary ranges — hunt around on your own, and post a comment if you see anything particularly interesting.
i’m empty without something to obey
Posted on | August 17, 2010 | 1 Comment
Ron Burgundy, royal retainer. Todd Purdum has just written the most perfect self-parody of late-imperial ruling class thought in, like, forever. Teasing Purdum’s 10,000-word Vanity Fair slopfest on its website, the magazine’s editors introduce the effort with these terrifying words: “Using history as his backdrop, Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing…”
Oh dear.
“It used to be” — here we go — “that news outlets had space to report or comment on only a fraction of any day’s events. The pace of events has picked up, sure, but the capacity to assert, allege, and comment is now infinite, and subject to little responsible control.”
The capacity to comment is no longer contained by responsible control. This lament takes up roughly 9,999 of Purdum’s 10,000 words. No one is in charge of communication, now. People can just…say things, and look closely at what this asshole just actually said in print:
Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people would believe the media,” she says. Today, no single media figure or outlet has that power to end debate, and in pursuit of “objectivity,” most honest news outlets draw the line at saying flatly that something or other is untrue, even when it plainly is.
I can’t think of many statements more revealing than the lament that no single figure has the power to end debate, anymore. I laughed so hard at this paragraph that it sounded like shouting, and my wife rolled over in bed to shoot me a nasty look. The world where Walter Cronkite silenced America with his Holy Word — it never existed. But how telling to invent it, and then to mourn its loss. I only agree with parts of this article, but I agree with the most important part: the American ruling class is locked in a cultural crisis of its own making.
On the same page, Purdum purses his mouth into a pucker to note that reporters at White House press briefings now casually ask questions about things they saw on the Drudge Report, an act that once “was enough to make Mike McCurry ask if the offending reporter was sure — really sure — that he or she wanted to sully the august precincts of the West Wing with a question based on such a source.”
Try as I might, I can’t imagine what would have to happen in my head to make it possible for me to type the phrase “sully the august precincts” — about a building full of politicians, for crying out loud — without bursting into an uncontrollable fit of nervous giggling. It happened just now, as I typed Purdum’s phrase here. I think Vanity Fair should pay for trumpeters in velvet robes to come to my house and play a flourish every time I see references to the West Wing, the White House, or the Sacred Body of the Emperor (whose Name I dare not speak) on the page. (“You’re gonna read the Purdum thing now? Hold on, give us a second to clear our spit valves.”) The august precincts, citizens! Sully them not!
Purdum’s sense of American political history is just as strong as his sense of American cultural history. Did you know that, once upon a time, everyone in Congress liked each other? “Fifty years ago, Congress met for only about nine months a year. During those months, though, the spouses and children of most members lived full-time in Washington. Members formed not just a legislature but something very like a club, with bipartisan twilight softball games on the Capitol grounds, weekend cocktail parties in one another’s houses, and long end-of-session car-pool trips back to their home states.”
Also, my friends, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Bipartisan twilight softball games on the Capitol grounds, and oh, friends, everyone was PLU and had the most rollicking stories about the antics of their supper clubs at Princeton, such sporting fine lads they were. You may now vomit. Oh, for the days when Congress was “very like a club,” and the members all liked each other. No.
Finally, I absolutely cannot help but throw down another block quote, because this may just be the funniest thing ever written in the English language:
In 1993, at the start of the Clinton administration, The New York Times’s White House team consisted of Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Gwen Ifill, Richard Berke, and the late Michael Kelly, each of whom had covered politics or foreign policy at high levels for years, and each of whom went on to be either an op-ed columnist or top editor at one outlet or another. Today the briefing room is filled with correspondents for whom the White House is their first big assignment. The life experiences — and thus the sense of perspective, history, and balance — of today’s Washington reporters are qualitatively different from those of their predecessors. An entire generation of Beltway journalists has come of age being taught that the way to succeed is to be a smart — if not smart-alecky — young thing.
Ohhhhhh, for the days when White House reporters were giants, my friends, giants! Worldly and wise, they had traveled the world, and they knew it well, with depth and care. Men and women of extraordinary intellectual gifts, they were not the sort to rely on mere cleverness, this smart-alecky show-off stuff. The White House press room may never again see the kind of exceptional sense of perspective and history brought to the job by sober journalists like…Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman.
Today, with the coarseness of Washington news media culture, you could easily imagine the nation’s media elites descending into a mad pile-on over some insane presidential sex scandal or something. Thank god something like that could never have happened during the Clinton era, when Maureen Dowd brought her extensive life experience to the table.
I only wish I had a Walter Cronkite to tell me what to think of all this.
Tags: crazy peasants > disintermediation > lazy news media prostitutes > really stupid journalism