Today was Earth Day. In hindsight, I did a pretty poor job with it. Today I
Here’s to hoping we can collectively hold out for another year.
While chatting with an old friend, it just occurred to me that a fair number of the blogs I regularly participate in (and two of the three podcasts I listen to) are produced by people living in a part of the country for which I generally hold a fairly derisive, dismissive opinion: The flyover. Prairie Flounder is from the flat, geographically uninteresting part of Colorado, KC Meesha and Logtar are both from Kansas City, Missouri. Fear the Boot is produced in St. Louis. Fell Calls is produced in Colorado, too. Some of these I ran into in rather round-about ways (PF is a relative of Doctor X, Logtar is somebody that comments frequently on my friend Daniel’s blog, KC Meesha comments frequently on Logtar’s blog…)
I really wasn’t going anywhere with this other than to solicit some kind of information about why somebody would actually want to live in such notoriously-uninteresting areas. I know there are some pretty nice cities scattered around there, mostly built up through some kind of reflexive need to huddle together against the oppressive blandness of the surrounding landscape.
Most of my knowledge of the area comes from the massive influx of immigrants (refugees?) California gets from places with strange names like Nebraska or Kansas, where apparently they have this thing they call “real weather” and try to lord it over us native Californians. Real weather, of course, is pony-sized hail, tornadoes, black ice, and plagues of locusts. It’s also where a lot of subsidies go so our kids can get diabetes from high-fructose corn syrup.
I keep hearing people on the radio imply that Senator Barack Obama has no experience or accomplishments to recommend him for the job of President of the United States of America. Generally this comes up in the form of a pointed question thrown at a random Obama supporter: “Can you name one legislative accomplishment of Barack Obama?”
So if you’re an Obama supporter, here are two pat answers for you to keep handy:
Maybe you don’t want to read the actual bills, that’s OK. Just remember that he’s done more for anti-proliferation than his opponents have, and has done more for ensuring that the government is answerable for the money it spends than his opponents have.
A couple more things he’s done that you may want to be prepared to fling out when challenged:
More importantly, the true answer to a question of “What has Barack Hussein Obama accomplished in his life that recommends him to the role of Commander in Chief,” particularly in contrast to the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain:
Being able to hold notions like that in your head may come in handy in the near future. Oh, and screw you, Roger Hedgecock.
It is generally accepted around these parts (Northern California) that the Democratic Party is a circular firing-squad, lacking any internal discipline in the face of the lock-step unity of the Republicans. Internal party discipline is certainly something that the Republicans talk about more openly, and their long stretches as the minority party in the federal legislature has lead to a number of impressive filibusters and procedural maneuvers requiring few or no hold-outs. The relatively recent rise of the right-wing echo chamber on talk radio and other media lend additional credibility to this perception. Even their primary process for nominating a presidential candidate ensures an early knock-out by way of winner-take-all contests rather than the slow bleeding of proportional representation.
Social Action, a tool produced by the University of Maryland, was recently used to show that this may be all perception. Taking the voting records for all US senators during 2007 and feeding these data into a social-network visualizer, you get a bit of a different story. Last year the Democratic and Independent senators voted very similarly to each other. On the other side of the aisle, four Republican senators (Collins, Smith, Snowe, and Specter) broke ranks repeatedly, dragging them out into the center of an otherwise-sharply-divided network. McCain and Brownback, both Republicans, had too few votes on record during the sample period to be meaningfully represented.
Hat tip to Visual Complexity for posting this where I’d run into it.
The Olympic torch is going to pass through San Francisco this week, and all manner of protests have been planned. Some have already been implemented. The locus of these protests has been, largely, China’s relations with Sudan in light of the situation in Darfur and their actions in Tibet suppressing the local population.
As a resident of Sonoma County, I’ve long been subjected to bumper sticker rhetoric showing the iconic red, gold, and blue Tibetan suburst with the words “FREE TIBET” emblazoned below. People ranging from west-county hippies to Beastie Boy Adam Yount express great concern that the unique cultural heritage and traditions of the Tibetan people are being systematically eradicated by the totalitarian government in Beijing.
I’ve got news for you: The uniquie cultural heritage and traditions of all the Chinese people have been under the same process for the past 49 years. Millions died in Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. Nothing about the Tibetans makes them more important than hundreds of millions of their neighbors who are every bit as entitled to religious freedom, self-determination, and all the various civil liberties we consider basic human rights. Screw Tibet. Free China.
Thank you, Youtube, for opening up the Internet to its true potential, and thank you Meesha for pointing out this video. Along with Christopher Walken reading the Three Little Pigs and old Devo videos, this is what governments and corporations spent billions of dollars and millions of manhours interconnecting the computers of the world. Oh, and porn. Mustn’t forget the porn.
Yesterday was L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday, so Anonymous threw a party in his honor at Scientology centers around the world. T52 posted some great photos of the gathering in London along with some insightful commentary. Looks like they had a great time. The birthday revelry near Atlanta, Georgia turned out a bit differently, with some police officers deciding to arrest demonstrators and ticket passers-by out of what I can only assume was sheer boredom; nobody puts on the badge so they can stand across the street from an unimpressive handful of unenthusiastic protesters.
Supposedly more people showed up for events at the larger cities (per Partyvan), but a bunch of Internet pranksters are hardly to be trusted when it comes to proper numbers. Some say that Anonymous is looking to take the Scientologists down. Some say it’s just for the lulz. I’d say they lack the capacity to have a motivation at all.
While studiously researching the proper capitalization of Taekwondo (a matter fraught with peril, as it’s a romanization of a Korean term as transmogrified by the Japanese and can rightly be regarded as three separate words), I ran across something that made me smile: the World Taekwondo Federation, aka WTF.
Another amusing pair of acronyms I ran into recently include Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (BATMAN) and its closely-related protocol Routing BATMAN Inside (RO.B.IN). This pair goes from doubly funny for the individual super-hero references to triple funny for the dynamic-duo pairing to quadruple-funny for having Batman inside Robin. Hoo, boy. Gary and Ace would be proud.
If a police officer finds you pinning your little brother down in a van, with a knife in your hand, and you fail to relinquish that knife, proceed to struggle physically with that police officers, kicking and otherwise striking him, you will be shot. There are no exceptions to this. If you are white, black, brown, yellow, red, purple, or polka-dot. If you are straight, gay, young, old, rich, poor, smart, or dumb, you will be shot. With bullets. From a gun. There are no exceptions for mental health. Indeed, brandishing a knife at a police officer is an excellent indication that you are unstable and an immediate danger to the people around you. And you will be shot.
This week the District Attorney of Sonoma County wrapped up an investigation into just such an incident last year. A young man, only 16 years old, had a mental health crisis that resulted in a 911 call, his family trying to lock themselves in a van to keep away from him, a brief hostage situation and struggle, a bloodied police officer being kicked to the ground, and another police officer opening fire once the other officer was out of the way. The DA found that the police officers had acted legally, and that there was no crime in the shooting.
Since this finding, there has been a renewed rash of accusations that the local police do not understand mental health issues and aren’t handling these situations correctly. I certainly agree that the death of Jeremiah Chass is unfortunate. Had things not gotten to the point they did, with an irrational, violent outburst, he likely would have gone on to be a productive member of society. Once it went that far, once he decided to violently resist being taken by his family to the hospital, once he broke into that van and took hold of his sibling, it was already too late. The police officers did what they had to do to protect the younger boy, each other, and the community. You are not allowed to brandish a knife at police officers. You are not allowed to attack police officers. Society requires that they put themselves between irrational, violent people and ordinary civilians, and when they do this, they have the right to defend themselves.
This year I’ve decided to end Black History Month with a link to the highly-debatable Top 10 Rap Songs White People Love.
I personally feel that the NWA derivatives (Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, etc.) should have been somewhere here, probably with NWA’s “Express yourself” or Snoop Dogg’s “Gin & Juice.” I think the pinnacle of this variety of rap music was Eazy E’s “Boyz-N-The-Hood” (known to a very few as “the Ballad of Kilo-G”).
The lack of Run-DMC is also disturbing (Sucka MCs should call me “sire“). Maybe it’s just because I live so close to Mendocino and Humboldt counties (you can arguably find better pot in British Columbia, but I’m no expert on that subject), but the stoner white-people demographic was sorely underrepresented. Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Membrane” and Afro Man’s “Because I Got High” could easily replace some of the marginal cases here.
As we slide back into your regularly-scheduled White History Months (Asians get May, Hispanics get September, Native Americans get November; the rest is for whitey), I leave you with a link to Stuff White People Like.