A few months ago I was engaged in a discussion with a supervisor concerning the utility and material viability of a company-mandated windbreaker (in their terminology a “rain” jacket). A lower-echelon supervisor butted-in and asserted that the jacket was just fine in his opinion, which disturbed me because I had a valid point and he was suggesting that my opinion meant nothing; I figure he must be a Republican. Today, my worthless opinion could not prevent this jacket from hanging by a shred, although I finally have a pocket for a writing instrument—the tear just below the left elbow. In that spirit, I continue where I left off last week.
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It is difficult to avoid the thought that Casey Anthony got away with murder when she was acquitted after only a few hours of deliberation. Yes, she looked small and vulnerable sitting there in the courtroom, just as she was coached to do, but that was at odds with the image of the fun-loving party girl. The fact of the matter is that between June 16 and July 15, 2008, during which Anthony had left the family home with her daughter, she made a mystery of the girl's whereabouts, claiming that she was in the care of a nanny. But in a diary entry dated June 21, Anthony wrote “I have no regrets, just a bit worried. I just want for everything to work out OK. I completely trust my own judgment and know that I made the right decision. I just hope that the end justifies the means. I just want to know what the future will hold for me. I guess I will soon see – This is the happiest that I have been in a very long time. I hope that my happiness will continue to grow– I've made new friends that I really like. I've surrounded myself with good people – I am finally happy. Let's just hope that it doesn't change.” What could she have possibly have been referring to? It couldn’t have been her “job”—she had been fired from the position she had at Universal Studies she told her parents (and police) she still worked at years before. If she was talking about the murder of her daughter as the "right decision" and that she hoped that the "happiness" of being freed of her was "justified by the means," it is shockingly pathological and callous. If we suspect the worst, Anthony had on the very day of her little trip killed her child, practically leaving her in family backyard.
It wasn’t until June 15 that Caylee was reported missing; Anthony at first claimed that the nanny had kidnapped her, but it was just one of many lies. The nanny, though a real person, had never met or Anthony or her child. In August, a meter reader claimed to have found what appeared to be human remains, but investigators were looking further afield based on Anthony’s story; they like could not fathom that the girl could have left so near the family home. They took a second report of what appeared to be human remains more seriously, and finding what was left of Caylee’s skeleton; had they found the remains in August, prosecutor’s might have had more stabstantial forensic evidence. In the meantime, Anthony was finding herself in and out of jail for petty criminal fraud before she was officially charged with murder. The only person who was claiming that Caylee drowned in a pool was Anthony’s lawyers; the only person who could know for certain was Anthony, and she never testified, and that probably more than anything else saved her. Someone so self-involved with her personal happiness didn’t need a “motive.”
Yes, with only circumstantial evidence at best, the prosecution made the mistake of reaching for too much; nevertheless, people are overlooking the fact that the jury also had the option of aggravated manslaughter, which they also saw fit to acquit Anthony of. If, as a few of the jurors claimed, they didn’t believe Anthony was innocent, they would at the very least have agreed to a mistrial to force the prosecution to come up with new evidence; but to let Anthony walk free forever when she is the only person who could possibly know the truth, never to answer for her crime if that is the fact of the matter, is unconscionable. One of the alternates also had the nerve to claim that Anthony was a “good mother.” How would he know that, especially when she had a dead child on her hands that she just threw out into the woods as if she was disposable garbage?
Anthony was convicted of the misdemeanors charge of lying to police; I suppose many of us can be forgiven for wondering what exactly she was trying to hide. As for what the jurors were thinking, I don’t know how they can look themselves in the face, frankly. Another alternate juror claimed that given the evidence—or lack thereof, in his opinion—he was “comfortable” with the verdict. But in this case what does “reasonable doubt” mean? Could these jurors honestly believe that anyone other than Anthony had something to do with the death of this child? Just looking at some of the post-trial photos of Anthony (I mean the ones right after she broke down in tears of relief). There wasn’t this quivering, scared little white girl huddling in her chair, but a gleeful tart. It wasn’t guilt that frighten her during the trial, or even injustice; it was the thought that she might never be able to be free to party like it was 2099. Anthony’s ex-fiancé Jesse Grund, after having described a pathologically dysfunctional Anthony household, observed that “Right now, she has everything she ever wanted. She is going to have money, she is going to have people at her doorstep asking for her, wanting her, and she’s going to have that partying lifestyle that she so craved.’’
Finally, I don’t know how the media can look at itself without shame; the morbid, sometimes hysterical, fascination with white female victims was bound to run into a speed bump when confronted with a defendant who looked like a “victim” of a frenzied press. We saw a version of this before, when the media all but dispensed with due process by “convicting” O.J. Simpson just days after the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. The jurors in that trial bent over backwards to provide the due process that the media denied him, and the same likely occurred in the Anthony case. But unlike O.J., there seems to be this expectation that Anthony will profit handsomely from her “story.” No doubt she will only talk about the experience of the past few years rather than about her deceptions, her petty criminal past or even what really happened to Casey.
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I think if you ask most people who are obese, they would say that they would prefer not to be. On the other hand, they’d probably prefer that you not bring-up the subject at all. It often can’t be helped. Some people’s metabolism decides it can’t process all the booze and the junk as efficiently; how many actors and actresses have we seen who looked svelte when they were young, but after forty starting inflating like a balloon?
Still, it is worth pointing out that the level of childhood obesity in this country is unusual, and has always been associated with poor or gluttonous eating habits. An important part of the problem is that many parents have to make tougher choices in their food spending, because of income that has not kept-up with the cost of living since the advent of Reagan’s “trickle down” economics policies—although one must confess that “trickle down” was a more apt description than originally envisioned. Fresh produce prices tend to be on the high side; what value is there when $5-a-pound buys you three oranges, especially when a large bag of chips can be had for half that price? Consumers are frequently given such bad choices, and many are forced to look at their available funds and make the bad choice. It really comes down to economics, and who knows what prices would be if we chased all those illegals away and paid the “natives” the $20-an-hour that I recall one unemployed white person tell a farmer was a “fair” price to get him off his sofa and spend ten hours a day in the hot sun picking vegetables.
The economics of the situation is the only reason to criticize Michelle Obama’s campaign on childhood obesity, since it doesn’t take into account the bad choices that many low-income parents are forced to make. But what is the response of the Right? Instead of recognizing that it is the largely their own Party’s policies that have produced vast income disparities that have effected life styles in even the lowest survival denominator, they make petty personal attacks on the First Lady; even Hillary wasn’t subjected to so much spite from members of her own gender. The fact is that Obama not being able to open her mouth without some sad-sack right-wing commentator and politician making a crude remarks says far more about those individuals than it does about her. Rush Limbaugh fulminated "The problem is, and dare I say this, it doesn't look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice. And then we hear that she's out eating ribs at 1,500 calories a serving with 141 grams of fat per serving." I wonder if Limbaugh takes a similar interest in his own calorie intake. At any rate, I dare say that Michelle Obama looks a lot better than he does, so she must have been doing something right. But oh no, “She is a hypocrite. Leaders are supposed to be leaders. If we are supposed to go out and eat nothing, if we are supposed to eat roots, berries, and tree bark, show us how." The problem here is that Michelle Obama is using her position to highlight what is to most people a generally-understood problem; at least it gives her something to do. But Limbaugh’s comments fall into the category of juvenile mean-spiritedness; his “logic” has no point beyond that. Perhaps Limbaugh is taking this all too personally, since he has always been on the “rotund” side.
Sean Hannity, meanwhile, claimed that he was loath to attack a president’s family—unless, of course, they “asked for it” by putting themselves in the “spotlight.” Hannity confined himself to cracks about how if people allowed Michelle Obama to run their kids’ lives, she’d probably send them to Rev. Wright, who’d introduce them to Bill Ayers. I’m in stitches over that one. Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, expressed some dismay over his colleagues’ acting like rabid dogs merely because a sound comes from her lips.
You would think, of course, that women are less apt to engage in unfair, demeaning behavior, especially between “sisters.” That’s just another myth perpetuated by feminists who think that all women have some kind of secret kinship, like perpetual victimhood. The Michelle Obama case proves that prejudice and inanity is not confined to one gender. Take, for example, the woman I referred to as the “First Lady of Hate” last year, Michelle Malkin. Malkin is Filipino, and dating back to the time she was allowed by the Seattle Times management to skip the reporting thing—that would have required her to find out how the world really works—right into the opinion thing, she has been a complete horse’s fundament. I figure the Times thought they needed a “right-wing” voice in the paper, and being a “minority” they thought it would be fascinating to allow someone like that without a jot of credibility to be an object of bemusement. Instead, the Times opened a slimy can of worms, giving Malkin a platform of undeserved “credibility,” unleashing her onto an unsuspecting world. My own personal belief—and I suspect it is the correct one—is that Malkin has self-esteem issues, believing that she is not fully “respected” because she has dark skin. The question is one of blame—bigoted whites or fellow minorities who she is “embarrassed” to be “associated” with. Malkin chose the latter course; in trying to “prove” she is not one of “them,” she out-bigots her new “friends” on the extreme right. Weighing in on Obama’s anti-obesity campaign, she snarls
“Over the past year, the first lady has marshaled a taxpayer-subsidized army of government lawyers, bureaucrats and consultants against the "national security threat" of childhood obesity. She has transformed the East Wing of the White House into Big Nanny's new Central Command headquarters. The biggest threats to Mrs. Obama's 70-point plan for national fitness: parental authority and sound science.” Frankly, I don’t know what can be any more sound than the simple empirical fact that there more and more people walking around with considerably more weight than they should, and contributing to more disease and higher health care costs; it also points out a much greater problem in this country: that low-income people have difficulty in affording the high prices of fresh food, thus defaulting lower-cost but fattier and unhealthier food. If here is a “threat” here, it is Malkin’s preference to keep people in ignorance.
Now, what would life be without Sarah Palin? Probably a lot more tolerable, but since she still thinks she is relevant, we might as well poke holes in her enormous ego. Charging that this was another example of “government control,” Palin also found fault with Obama’s suggestion that breast-feeding might delay or avert the onset of obesity in children:
"No wonder Michelle Obama is telling people to breast feed their babies, because the price of milk is rising so high.” Ha-ha, I’m in stitches over that one, although as I mentioned there is something to be said about the relationship between nutrition and food prices, except that in Palin’s case it was only worthy of a joke—which of course is typical of Republicans. "That better not be the takeaway here," Palin warned reporters—as if the rest of her comments strayed far from the original script. You have to hand it to the Republicans: They all sound alike, save the times they reveal their personalities, which always leave something to be desired.
Who else? I admit that I’ve never heard of Jenny Erikson, who is a right-wing blogger living in Southern California, and after this I probably will forget who she is. She claimed that Obama’s anti-obesity campaign was "incredibly insulting to parents." Yeah, parents, we know you care about the health and wellbeing of your “big and beautiful” kids. "News flash to the government: Changing menus is not going to slenderize America. People who eat 5,000 calories a day and feed their kids three scoops of ice cream nightly are going to keep doing that." This is apparently in reference to Obama’s wish for school districts to lunches that are healthy. Of course we know what the Republicans consider to be “healthy”; at least I remember the Reagan administration listing ketchup as a “vegetable.” Again, this what the Republicans mean when they say this a “great” country: you have the freedom to do any stupid you wish. No one has the right to even suggest you should might alter your behavior in a marginally life-affirming way. Even criminals can act as they wish, because it helps the prison industry-based economy stay viable, and operates as a kind of concentration camp system or gulag to keep the undesirables out of sight so “100 percent” Americans can enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness unfettered by such things a guilty consciences.
Media favorite Michelle Bachmann, of course, never bores with her “Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” impersonations. Now, I have to admit that whoever advised Michelle Obama on the breast pump issue probably should be fired, but it gave Bachmann the opportunity to say that tax breaks for breast pumps are "very consistent with where the hard left is coming from. For them, government is the answer to every problem." Well, no. What is being suggested is that the government is willing to provide incentives it believes are positive goods. I call that leading, not establishing a “nanny state.” That’s Seattle.
So what do feminists think about all of this? Are they defending Michelle Obama from the “sexist” attacks, or are they joining the racist and unjust chorus, if only because they still have hard feelings over Barack Obama fstealing Hillary’s “thunder?” There hasn’t been much talk here, but in France, where in many ways feminists are even more radicalized, such as so-called “philosopher” and author Elisabeth Badinter, who spouts the most far-fetched victimization theories imaginable. She claims that breast-feeding is a monstrous, soul-destroying invention of the Americans. In a New York Times interview in regard to her latest tome on female victimization, this sad case of egotism is considered entirely plausible: “Her most recent battle cry: to defend women from the impossibility of being ‘the perfect mother,’ and even from the pressure to be a mother at all.” What I find more interesting but more to her point is this line from the book not mentioned in the story: Women need to be defended from "despotic, gluttonous babies who devour their mothers.” This woman is in need of medication. The basic hypocrisy of feminists is that they can’t settle on any “philosophy.” First they say they are “superior” to men, and then they say they can’t handle the pressure of being “superior.” First they say that they are “natural” nurturers, and then they say it is unfair to them to put the “pressure” of motherhood on them. All these “pressures” of being superior to men victimize women. You know, life isn’t all that easy for men, either; it doesn’t advance truth one iota to engage in this phony one-sided “oppression.”
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I came across a curious story about how Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley claimed to have been put in a “chokehold” by Justice David Prosser after a bitter dispute concerning the imminent ruling on the validity of a lower court voiding Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial anti-union law got out of hand. Prosser apparently stormed into Bradley’s office, where he found Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson (the person he was presumably looking for) whose dissent on the majority right’s ruling included some statements that Prosser seems to have taken offense to:
“At first glance, the order appears to provide some support for broad conclusions reached on fundamental and complex issues of law. But on even casual reading, the explanations are clearly disingenuous, based on disinformation. Justice Prosser's concurrence is longer than the order. The concurrence consists mostly of a statement of happenings. It is long on rhetoric and long on story-telling that appears to have a partisan slant. Like the order, the concurrence reaches unsupported conclusions. In hastily reaching judgment, Justice Patience D. Roggensack, Justice Annette K. Ziegler, and Justice Michael J. Gableman author an order, joined by Justice David T. Prosser, lacking a reasoned, transparent analysis and incorporating numerous errors of law and fact.”
Although none of the justices chose to speak for the record, we may conjecture that an unpleasant argument ensued, during which Bradley “asked” Prosser to leave. Instead, Prosser allegedly applied a chokehold on Bradley, which tends to suggest (if true) that Bradley tried to get her point across from rather close proximity. At any rate, the bad blood between ideological sides are such that one local commentator referred to them as “gangs.” While Prosser—a former Republican speaker of the state Assembly, and thus with obvious partisan leanings—has been accused of being bad tempered and using foul or threatening language against his ideological opposition, Abrahamson has been accused of abusing her administrative authority; the local commentator suggested she does this deliberately to agitate opponents like Prosser.
Regardless of the truth of the matter, we haven’t seen this kind of “action” since the Kansas-Nebraska debates in Congress during the 1850s. Is this the kind of “healthy” debate this country needs to solve its problems? Not at all. I, of course, place the majority of the blame on those on the right for refusing to even countenance “compromising” their so-called “principles” regardless of all the evidence that it serves only destructive purposes for the vast majority of the people.
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Although the exact numbers are fluid, it is estimated that ten percent of Egypt’s population is Christian, mainly of the Coptic Orthodox sect. Some people old enough to remember him might be surprised to learn that actor Omar Sharif was born Michel Shalhoub of parents in the Greek Catholic religion. He later converted to Islam, partly because it was the religion of his second wife, an actress in Egypt, and perhaps because he also knew that there was prejudice against Christians in the country. It should not then be surprising that today with the relaxing of police authority in Egypt since the ouster of Mubarak, long-standing religious animosities have been unleashed, although you won’t hear much about it on CNN. Attacks on Christian churches and mob violence against individuals has become an almost daily occurrence. While justice officials in the caretaker government have promised to take a firm hand against those fomenting religious violence, in fact little is being done, with Muslim police mainly looking on as churches are being burned and people killed. This past New Year’s eve, a suicide bomber killed 20 Christian worshipers inside a church.
Many of the attacks seem to be “justified” by Muslims who claim that Christian women who allegedly converted to Islam were being held against their will inside the churches being attacked. The reality is that Islamic fundamentalist terrorist gangs of the Salafi sect—who recently held a prayer vigil in remembrance of Osama bin Laden—has as part of their agenda the desire to rid Egypt of Christians, and appears to be behind most of the violence. Although the military claims that they have made some arrests, many Christians accuse them of doing little to stop the fire-bombing of churches, merely watching Muslim mobs tossing the bombs over their heads onto churches.
I was listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now “debate” a member of the Israeli consulate concerning the 400-ship flotilla that is attempting to set sail for Gaza. I like peace just as much as the next person, but it has to be a two-way street, which is something that people on the extreme-left like Goodman simply do not seem to understand; the Israeli functionary repeatedly asked Goodman if she considered Hamas a terrorist organization or not, which she answered by asking a question that the Israeli had already answered before. She continuously refused to acknowledge the crimes of Hamas, which seriously undercut her credibility. The stated goal of Hamas is not a two-state solution, but a single-state solution devoid of Jews. This is the kind of fanaticism that Christians face in Egypt—and make no mistake, the Christian heritage in Egypt predates the Muslim by at least 5 centuries. The anti-Christian (and anti-Israeli) attitude of many on the extreme-left is based on a false notion that the Muslims they choose to support, like Hamas, are the solution, not the obstacle, to peace.
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Jared Loughner, the perpetrator of the Tucson massacre earlier this year, has been judged mentally incompetent for the time being to stand trial. The judge in the case based this on Loughner’s spitting on some people during a court hearing, and on the assertion by two psychiatrists that he did not seem to have an understanding of legal procedures, and distrusted his lawyers. Loughner may not be “competent,” but that is not the same as being insane; after all, that didn’t stop Charles Manson from being tried. Loughner was certainly sane enough to ask that he not be forced to take anti-psychotic drugs, and his attitude and behavior simply reflects his extreme anti-government, anti-authority and anti-whatever political stance. What I fear is that we will never be allowed to hear the extent of his twisted philosophy and who were his “mentors,” which would may embarrass many on the extreme right like Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh—sending them scurrying in search of ever more bizarre and hypocritical rationalizations.
One thing we do know is that Loughner did have an “interest” in the “literature” of the American Renaissance. Who are interested parties in that organization’s activities, besides a smorgasbord of anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-immigrant fanatics? Patrons of the neo-Nazi Stormfront website, for one; I checked-out a forum in which members gleefully relayed the latest racist and anti-government speechifying at its last conference. Regardless if one believes Loughner is “deranged” or not, it is worth hearing what he has to say, even if it does disrupt court proceedings, if only to prove the effect that right-wing rhetoric with more than a touch of violence has on its listeners. And let’s not forget that we were denied the whole truth in the Timothy McVeigh case, something which I discussed in detail in an early post, but suffice to say that he had more help—in fact much more—than we were led to believe.
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The genocide in Rwanda, which took the lives of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers in a mere 100 days in 1994 before Tutsi rebels gained control of the country, was one of those events which turn commonly-held myths upside down. One of those myths was upended recently when a crimes against humanity tribunal recently found Pauline Nyiramasuhuko guilty of genocide. It was a known fact that Hutu women took part in the genocide (mainly by hacking victims with machetes), but outsiders in the main chose to generalize the crime as male-only affair. The trial itself, like so many such trials, took extraordinarily long to advance to a conclusion (when often the defendant dies in prison before trial is over), in this case 10 years. The “surprising” thing about this case was the fact that Nyiramasuhuko was the family affairs and women's development minister; there is no accounting for the dark places that inhabit some people’s souls. The defendant apparently ordered and assisted in the killing-off of minority Tutsis “as fast as possible” in her home district where she acted with “depravity and sadism”; besides overseeing and participating in the transportation and extermination of victims, she ordered Tutsi women and girls raped.
After being sentenced to life imprisonment, a BBC reporter observed that Nyiramasuhuko showed no emotion, continuing to deny all charges. Although it is the only high profile case in which a woman was charged, Rwandan courts have convicted a number of women on genocide charges, and in 2001, two nuns were convicted of participating in genocide in a Belgium court. One nun was charged with turning away thousands of Tutsis looking for sanctuary, instead contacting Hutu soldiers for “assistance,” and who subsequently killed 5,000 of them. The second nun was charged with providing Hutu soldiers with gasoline, knowing that they were going to use it to burn 700 people to death who were hiding in a building on the grounds of her convent.
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I wonder how many people scratched their heads when they heard that one of the Kennedy clan, Maria Shriver—daughter of Eunice Kennedy—was marrying steroid-enhanced body-builder/bad actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I mean guy was a comedy routine every time he opened his mouth. He also was a supporter of Ronald Reagan, who even by the mid-1980s the damage his reactionary policies were causing was apparent. I could only think that this was a “celebrity” marriage; it was hard to imagine that anyone could take seriously any political aspirations Schwarzenegger might have the audacity to entertain; even Clint Eastwood limited himself to being mayor of Sarah Palin-sized town. How could someone who was part of the liberal establishment tolerate being around such a person for 25 years, let alone one day? When he actually did become governor of California—aided by no small degree by the presence of Shriver, who not only forgave him his groping sins, but gave voters the impression that some of that Kennedy mystique must have rubbed-off on him—it was clear that any idea that Schwarzenegger was a “different” kind of Republican was wishful thinking. Outside a few proclamations on emissions standards, he towed the anti-tax, deep-cut line the Grover Norquist lobby. The result was that California was worse-off than it was in 2003. In 2008, Shriver openly broke with her husband politically by endorsing Barack Obama in the California primary, and later for president.
Schwarzenegger and Shriver and now divorcing, ostensibly because of his cheating ways, at least in one instance leading to an illegitimate child. But perhaps it is surprising that this marriage lasted as long as did, given their presumed ideological differences. Maybe it made conversation at the dinner table more interesting, but it is easy to imagine angry rows at starkly different worldviews, especially with how illogically simplistic right-wing ideology can be. It will be interesting to see if Shriver chooses to reveal what it was like for her to be the spouse of someone who was presumably her political opposite.
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Recently the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the class action lawsuit against Wal-Mart, brought by those representing 1.6 million female employees for pay and advancement discrimination. Frankly, I think the court’s right-wing was unfortunately correct, and not just because of the absurdity that all those women should be a chief; it was incredibly pompous and stupid for the people representing the plaintiffs to claim that all of these women were being discriminated against. As Scalia stated quite correctly stated, an examination of employee records revealed no pattern that individual women were being discriminated merely because of the fact of their gender, thus it was wrong to make generalizations regarding the whole. Discrimination no doubt occurs, but since local managers must follow the company’s non-discrimination policy, and are allowed hiring and promotion at their discretion, discrimination suits must be limited to what can reasonably be proved. And it need not be limited to discrimination against women, but against minorities, or males generally if a woman is a local manager with such discretion (I’ve already talked about a job site I worked for a day at where non-white women were discriminated against).
The Walmart plaintiffs provided no evidence that there was a systematic policy of discrimination against women—as opposed to practices based on subjective criteria, such as the perception that an employee was spending more time talking than working. Unlike the Texaco racial discrimination case, there was no “smoking gun,” where executives were surreptitiously recorded disparaging blacks and discussing a plan in which to hide a long-time policy of discriminatory practices against black employees by destroying documents. Since only 1,400 black employees were plaintiffs, there was a greater likelihood of a settlement before the case went to what was then already a right-leaning Supreme Court. Because the Walmart plaintiffs claimed that all women were discriminated against, it worked against its credibility, and in fact weakened their case rather than strengthened it. What makes this case truly unfortunate is the fact that in selfishly reaching for far more than was justified, the plaintiffs hurt people who really are discriminated against in this country, mainly racial minorities of both genders. Although a black woman was one of the media-ready faces presented to the public, black women arguably face fewer challenges in the work place than black males (especially the white collar work place).
I have to admit that I found intriguing the testimony of a sociologist, William Bielby, who claimed to have collected “scientific evidence about gender bias, stereotypes and the structure and dynamics of gender inequality in organizations.” But only because the evidence wasn’t precisely “scientific” of sociological generalizations. In the past twenty years, I’ve worked at numerous places of employment, and I’ve never seen this “evidence,” myself. At many places, I observed women promoted to supervisory positions not because they were better qualified, but because the company had to find something for them to do because they couldn’t do the heavy work. In many lines of work, such as the service industries, women—and especially white women—are shown considerable partiality because they are deemed more “attractive” magnets for customers.
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When I was in the Army, I spent nine months in Fort Lewis, WA before being shipped out to Germany again; my re-enlistment contract said it was supposed to be one year at least, but when I complained, they just laughed at me. However, while I was here I did have time to appreciate the environment of Puget Sound, if not necessarily the locals. I wanted to return to live here someday, but it had to wait until my enlistment was up, college and a brief stay in Sacramento. I found a cheap apartment a few blocks from the California state capitol building, which I thought was pretty neat; I never fooled myself into thinking that I’d ever find a job in my field of study, especially without connections, and so in order to survive I signed up with a temp agency through I which I found regular work at a shop putting together plastic conveyor belts. One day I decided I also needed to go back to school because being a student was a more impressive occupation than doing such labor—except that I still needed an income, so I couldn’t quit my job. I eventually enrolled in what was then called California State University at Sacramento (now Sacramento State). For ninth months, this was how my day went: I’d wake-up at 6 AM in order to prepare for my first class at 8 AM. My last class ended a 1:30 PM. I would then catch a light rail train and a connecting bus near the location of my place of employment, and eventually arrive by 3:00 PM. I worked until 11:30, by which time buses had ceased running, and I had 45 minutes to catch the last light rail train out. Because there was no way I could make it time if I walked, I donned a sweat suit and jogged the distance, after which I had maybe five minutes to spare. When I got off the train it was 12:45 AM, it took me another 45 minutes to walk to my apartment; I eventually went to sleep at 2 AM. I suppose it would have been helpful to have a car, but I couldn’t squeeze the cost between an apartment and tuition without starving to death first. It didn’t take long for this routine to become completely exhausting. I had to take a GMAT test, but when I was scheduled for a Saturday morning session, and I begged the administrators to reschedule me the afternoon block so that I could get some rest first. My request was denied. I had only a few hours of sleep before I had to take the test, and I was additionally discomfited by stomach cramps, and I simply couldn’t concentrate. Right then I decided that there was no point to this, because the school didn’t even have a master’s program in journalism, and besides, I already knew how to write anyways. I certainly didn’t require an “advanced” education to form an opinion about the world I lived in. So I sold most of my CD and Laser Disk collection, and took a bus to Seattle, which had been my intention to begin with. Having only $600 when I arrived, I perused a newspaper to find the cheapest accommodations available; put on my one suit in my duffle bag, which I stashed in a locker at the Greyhound station, and marched to and fro until I stumbled upon the apartment building, which was obviously one of those subsidized low-income establishments. The manager, who was just a kid, was sufficiently impressed by my attire, and the “fact” that I was a UW student, that he gave me a room right there on the spot without credit check. After making the required payments, I had $20 left; I lived on raw hotdogs and water for two weeks before I found a job, and lived on hotdogs and water for another two weeks until I received my first paycheck, most of which I had to use to pay for the next month’s rent. I had enough money to buy a pot, so until my next check I lived on hotdogs that were cooked, and water.
But that is just the background of the little tale I want to tell. One day I was jogging to the train station when a large four-by-four pick-up truck stopped in front of me. As I passed along the sidewalk, a man inside called out to asking me if I needed a ride. I said sure, I can use a ride. I’m going to train station, thanks. This man, wearing glasses and a beard, looked like an academic or an accountant; I figured he was just being a good Samaritan. We had only traveled a block when the man asked me a question. I won’t tell you what the question was, but I kept my composure, said uh, no thanks, I have to go to class in the morning so I can’t miss this train, and I kind of let myself out at the next red light. I couldn’t believe it; life was already tough enough without some guy going to make me miss the last train by asking something crazy like that. Did he really think that because I was outside jogging in a sweat suit at near midnight didn’t mean he and I had the same “idea”? Looking back on it now, I can say that my calm, matter-of-fact attitude probably kept the encounter from degenerating into something quite unpleasant. One thing I never did afterward was accept offers of a ride from people, even from those I knew. My philosophy in life is actually quite simple: I don’t care what you do, just don’t bother me with it.
I was compelled to relate this story after listening to NPR last week concerning the New York legislature passing a gay marriage law. A reporter bemoaned Barack Obama’s waffling on the issue, only going so far that the passing of such laws should be a state issue. Considering the fact that the right would pummel him mercilessly if he did come out explicitly in favor of gay marriage, I think no one on the pro side should be particularly unhappy with him, especially when they’ve done nothing to support him even when he has come out in favor of progressive policies. The progressives like to talk, but when it comes to action, they just sit back and wait for something to happen. Or if they do something, it has nothing to do with what’s going on in this country, like the Americans in that flotilla to the Gaza strip. Another fact is that while a CBS poll claims that support for gay marriage has risen, at 42 percent it is still significantly under a majority. In New York, the latest polls show that the support of gay marriage is not as strong as previously claimed; when asked what their personal belief was, a majority still said they believed it should be between a man and woman. What this means is what people say and what they do—like vote—are often two different things. Obama has been constantly accused of being a “socialist”—something that when combined with his being a racial minority is a source of constant hysteria from the right that tends to spill over into then “independent” mind. The best thing for the activists to do is to get their lazy fundaments to the polls in 2012, unlike what they did in 2010, and get the Democrats back in control of both houses and re-elect Obama; he may be no socialist, but all things considered, he’d prefer to do the “left” thing when he has nothing to lose.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Garbage Dump, Part One
British director Ken Russell is one of those filmmakers whose reputation seems to be greater than his actual output, and although he gained some notoriety in the 1970s for several films (such as “The Music Lovers” and “The Devils”) which took too much license with “artistry” for many viewers to accept, to me his work doesn’t interest me as much as those of one his contemporaries, Nicolas Roeg. I have to admit, however, that it is one of his lesser-known films, “Savage Messiah”—currently available from Warner Home Video as an “on-demand” DVD-R—that I find worthy as an amusing diversion for a couple of hours. It allegedly portrays the brief career of radical French sculptor Henri Gaudier, focusing on his eccentricities and bizarre relationship with a Polish governess-turned-novelist Sophie Brzeska. There is a scene in the latter half of the film in which Gaudier encounters a women’s suffragette (played by a young Helen Mirren) who for some unexplained reason he manages to convince to take time out from spouting feminist rhetoric to pose for him wearing nothing but her shoes. She tells Gaudier that she wants to be an “artist.” Why? Because she wants to leave behind something “that was never there before.” Gaudier tells her “The outhouse is in the back.” In that spirit, here are some more leftover thoughts that I never seemed to quite get right in my mind:
The vote on the war powers act in regard to U.S. “involvement” in Libya is pure political grandstanding, with an unhealthy dose of unaldulterated hypocrisy. Consider: George Bush led us into a war in Iraq first based on wishful thinking and “plausible” falsehoods, and secondly upon a country that posed no threat to our “freedoms,” imminent or otherwise. Yet the Senate voted affirmatively on a war resolution, and continued to fund it the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe ultimately trillions of dollars. And yet now some in Congress are bellyaching about a token effort in Libya, particular when there was pressure on the U.S. to do something on behalf of “the people.” Now they stand on “principle” after thousands have already died. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Obama administration isn’t portraying this as some kind of NATO operation, especially when the brunt of the “war” is being conducted by the British and French, the two countries that agitated for intervention into Libya most forcefully to begin with. But as I recall, the Democrats were acting like jelly-spined weaklings before the Bush administration beefcake bull, and the Republicans—well, they’re just do what Republicans are expected to do. Diplomatically, the Libyan operation was the first opportunity, after decades of backing repressive right-wing regimes, to demonstrate that the U.S. supported the “people” substantially rather than rhetorically. But for certain Democrats, this is an opportunity to undermine their own president for no good reason when before they flailed about haplessly before a Republican president. As for Republicans on the Libyan issue, they’ll happily dispense with their “principles” for any cynical partisan reason. If we have been taught anything about this episode, government is only expected to be ”ethical” and “moral” when Democrats are in the White House; when occupied by Republicans, power is its own justification.
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I found this link while I was doing some online research. There are quite a few such polls floating around the web, and most of them seem to be self-prophesizing carnival barking, rather than attempting to gather useful information:
Should Congress Repeal Obama's Health Plan and Other Policies?
Should Obama Be Re-elected?
Vote in This Urgent Poll
“Newsmax.com, one of America's leading online news services, is conducting an urgent national online poll about President Obama, the 2011 Congress and whether it should repeal President Obama's healthcare plan and other policies.”
“We are also asking if he should be re-elected in 2012”
“Newsmax will provide the results of this poll to major media outlets. Newsmax's results also will be shared with popular radio talk-show hosts across America.”
“Newsmax reports have been cited by major media outlets, including CNN, ABC News, Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, and other major networks.”
“Don't miss this opportunity to let your voice be heard! Many media outlets and national leaders are interested in your opinion. Hundreds of media outlets have reported on Newsmax's online polls.”
“Vote today!”
1) Do you support the full repeal of President Obama's healthcare plan Congress passed in 2010?
Yes, repeal it completely
No, don’t repeal it at all
No, repeal just parts of it
2) Should Congress restore $500 billion in Medicare benefits for seniors that the Obama plan cut?
Yes, restore the Medicare benefits
No, don't restore the Medicare benefits
3) Do you support President Obama's desire to give 12 million illegal aliens amnesty and a path to citizenship?
Yes, I support Obama's amnesty plan
No, I oppose it
4) What do you believe Congress' top priority should be in 2011?
Cutting spending
Cutting taxes
Paying down the national debt
Improving the nation's security
5) Do you plan on voting to re-elect President Obama in 2012?
Yes, re-elect
No, for another candidate
Not sure right now
6) Who did you vote for in 2008?
McCain - Palin
Obama - Biden
Other
As I’ve said, there a million polls like this, giving people an either/or choice, or essentially no choice at all. The first question on the health care bill seems innocuous enough; perhaps people do want parts of it repealed. The question is, what parts? If you ask these people what it is they don’t like, they’d probably have a hard time explaining what exactly it is. The second question tries to scare seniors into believing it is Obama who is seeking to gut Social Security, and not the Republicans; now at least we know that there is an underlying stincture of partisan politics meant to reach a pre-conceived conclusion. The third question asks if you support amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens; as an aside, it is interesting to note that almost a quarter of illegal immigrants in this country are from countries outside of Latin America (13 percent from Asia, according to the Pew Foundation), but because it costs so much more to ship them out of the country, the ICE and Border Patrol ignores them, focusing solely on Latinos. Anyways, no one wants a blanket amnesty, but because the question equates the hot-button term “amnesty” and “a path to citizenship” as essentially the same thing, it self-negates the latter term as an approach to address the immigration issue. The fourth, and probably most despicable, question again gives people false choices. Where is the choice for raising taxes on the wealthy (which means nothing more than allowing the Bush era tax cuts to sunset) or closing tax loopholes for corporations that pay little or no taxes on their massive profits? Why are we talking about national security? Where is job creation (which would mean additional spending)? What about maintaining Social Security and Medicare? Question five is essentially pointless, because we still don’t know how the economy will turn and what Republican emerges from the darkness.
Who would use a poll that essentially measures nothing but a guttural response that requires no reflection or thought? Probably Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and others like them who would use the “results” for next week’s right-wing talking point.
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Last Sunday the Seattle Times published a “special report” on the case of forensic psycho-analyst Stuart Greenberg, who had committed suicide following an arrest for surreptitiously installing a video camera in the patient/employee bathroom of his home-office, where he conducted his psychology practice, in order to satisfy some bizarre fetish he had. He also had an interesting record of providing apparently false or misleading testimony in mostly child-custody cases, although for some reason the Times chose cases in which women were the “victims,” when the record tells us that it is men who are the usual “prey” to accusations of abuse in custody cases.
While admittedly the Greenberg case was of prurient interest, I find it is odd that the Times chose to fixate on this guy when there are plenty of other activists masquerading as "experts" who do as bad or worse to advance their victim agenda. Not surprisingly, one party or another finds such testimony useful, regardless of its veracity, and sometimes with tragic results. There was a local case some years ago involving a middle-aged man who shot and killed his young, pregnant Filipino wife and her friend right in the middle of a divorce court proceeding. The media, of course, reported this story in the way it typically does, without quite getting the back story: One of the victims had a boyfriend living in the U.S., but his legal status was insufficient to help her immigrate in order to join him. What to do? She advertised herself as a “mail order bride” in order to attract some lonesome American with abysmal courtship abilities to marry her, after which she could legally remain in the country. She had a plan, of course; remain married to the man for a “respectable” amount of time (say, a year), and file for divorce. Once married, she abandoned the pretense of being a wife and rejoined her boyfriend, and subsequently became pregnant with his child. One may imagine the reaction of the husband when told that he had been deliberately cuckolded, and confronted with the demand for a divorce. Why was her friend in that fatal courtroom? She was there to offer testimony to “corroborate” a story of domestic violence, no doubt falsely. What could have been going through this man’s mind, given the totality of this monstrosity of injustice? Or are not men allowed to have feelings of being emotionally pummeled, like women are allowed to? There is no doubt if the roles had been reversed, the woman would have received all the empathy the world had to offer, and instead of being labeled a monster would have been acquitted for temporary insanity in a case of a crime of passion. I realize that this has little to do with the Times story, but I just needed an excuse to put in my two-bit in regard to that incident.
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Although the previous story doesn’t exactly substantiate the point of my next story, it is worth noting since its implications all too often are swept under the rug. Last week while in the University District, I observed a minor confrontation that failed to achieve full-blown status because of the intervention of a man between two combatants. Well, it was actually one combatant—a woman who was preparing to lay a scrawny guy horizontal to the ground. I bring this up because one of the myths of domestic abuse is that men are always portrayed as the aggressors both physically and emotionally. The reality is that some men are congenitally passive or physical cowards, like “Back to the Future’s” George McFly, avoiding conflict at any cost, even self-respect. Some of these men are in relationships with women who take advantage of these “weaknesses” in their character, especially if they are naturally aggressive and like “conversations” to be one-sided. It doesn’t matter if the man is physically stronger; if he lacks physical or emotional aggressiveness, then he seeks to avoid those people who are; it is hard for him to imagine a situation where he can work himself up to such a state that he is even willing to strike someone, for fear that that his opponent will subsequently beat him to pulp if he doesn’t get in that lucky punch first. If it is a spouse who likes to bully, and knows she can do it without fear of imminent reprisal, we enter into the world that domestic violence “researchers,” “experts” and even police loath to take into account, since interrupts myth-making. Domestic abuse does not turn on the presence of physical strength, but the psychological willingness to use physical means.
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I was watching CNN the other day when some reporter was talking about the Caylee Anthony murder case. The reporter suggested that the lawyers of the accused murderer—her mother, Casey Anthony—would use the argument that the girl had “accidentally” drowned, and in a fit of panic or indifference, Anthony took the body into the woods and left it. Why anyone would believe this story after the mountain of lies Anthony and her family had already told is a minor detail, according to this scenario. That Anthony had responded to the “rumor” of a drowning, suggested helpfully by her parents, by dismissing it as untrue is also apparently not a point worth rehashing. At any rate, the CNN reporter seemed to think that the story would “resonate” with Florida jurors because drowning is supposedly the number one killer of children under five in the state; something tells me that this reporter hopes that is the case, because the other scenario (that the girl was rendered unconscious with chloroform and then suffocated with duct tape) is an unfortunate reminder that “motherhood” in humans is not a natural instinct, but a learned one.
CNN, of course, has spent a lot of time on this case, mainly because of the media’s fixation on white female victims, and no more so than Nancy Grace, who is the media equivalent of finger nails scraping across a blackboard. Egotistical and self-righteous, Grace is easy to dislike and distrust because she behaves like an activist for whom concepts like impartial justice, innocent until proven guilty and factual evidence are obscure notions best left to those who prefer reporting the facts. After attempting to implicate one innocent person (an ex-boyfriend, Ricardo Morales), and another (ex-boyfriend Tony Rusciano) and then a nanny (Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, who did not know Anthony or her daughter) and then her parents, in a sudden fit of “impartiality” decided instead of focusing on the most logical suspect, suggested to viewers that they leave the investigation to the “experts” like law enforcement and “psychics”—this despite the fact that in a six-month period Anthony had been arrested and re-arrested four times for the following crimes: child neglect, obstruction, making false statements, forgery, fraud, theft, theft again, and finally murder. Just in case apologists thought Grace really meant to say “psychiatrists,” no such luck; she was referring to a “psychic” who allegedly “saw” Casey’s murder—with bug spray and chloroform.
Grace claims to have been motivated to become a prosecutor after the murder of her fiancé in 1980. However, she made false claims about the case—that the murderer was a stranger, had a prior criminal record, that the jury was “unclear” about guilt, and numberless delaying appeals of a guilty verdict that took hours to reach, not days—in which to justify the misconduct that she would engage in as a special prosecutor in the Atlanta-Fulton County District Attorney’s office. Although her fiancé was obviously a man, Grace chose for her cases victims of crime who were almost exclusively female, and not surprisingly her underlying misandry would cloud her sense of “justice” on numerous occasions. In her book “Objection,” Grace claims that high-priced lawyers, celebrity defendants, and 24/7 media has hijacked “justice.” No, it is fanatics like Grace who provide the illusion that all victims are white females (when they are they are in fact the least likely to be a victim of crime) who have hijacked “justice.”
Grace was pretty much allowed a free hand in prosecuting cases as she saw fit, until her boss decided not to run for re-election, and since her protector was gone, she left the office. And protection she needed, since the Georgia Supreme Court weighed-in on her conduct on at least two occasions. In a drug trafficking case, the court threw out a guilty verdict because in her closing argument, Grace had prejudiced the jury by referring to murder and rape cases that had nothing to do with the defendant. In another case, the court overturned a conviction a businessman on murder and arson charges stemming from the death of his wife, asserting that the "the conduct of the prosecuting attorney (Grace) in this case demonstrated her disregard of the notions of due process and fairness, and was inexcusable." The defendant was eventually released without further charge. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals also weighed-in on Grace, condemning her unethical behavior in prosecuting a defendant in another murder trial, charging that she knowingly used false testimony by a detective.
With this record of prosecutorial misconduct (no doubt not confined to these few instances—and no doubt “justified” by a zeal for “justice”) why did CNN (or Court TV, for that matter) hire her? Obviously because she fit the bill perfectly as an overbearing zealot uninterested in facts who thinks everyone who is merely charged is guilty; Americans are apparently so uninterested in due process that her version of justice is a natural ratings winner. So what has she done since joining CNN, besides being allowed to engage unfettered in her white female victim of the week activism? Besides being all over the map with the Anthony case, she showed her narrow-minded, activist-driven contempt for impartial justice by assuming that the woman in the Duke University rape case was telling the truth: "Why would you go to a cop in a gang rape case, and lie and give misleading information?” Wendy Murphy, her “expert” on the subject, declaimed that "My own statistics speak to this fact" that there is no such thing as a false rape accusation (unless, of course, you want to accuse an anonymous homeless man in order to shame your parents into giving you money to pay your rent, as in a recent local case). It turned out that the woman—a student who worked as a part-time stripper, felt “disrespected” while dancing in a state of undress in front of a bunch of drunken white frat boys, and wanted to get “even.” On the day the case was dismissed and the local prosecutor disbarred, Grace apparently decided she was too sick to show-up for work; it must have been equally tough for Jane “War against Women” Velez-Mitchell to report that story in her place.
Remember talk show personality Jenny Jones and the tragic events that unfolded after she told a young man that he had a “secret admirer,” and embarrassed him on national television when this admirer turned out to be a man? Well, Grace had her own such moment, after hounding a young woman into suicide after an interview about her missing child. CNN displayed about as much ethics as Grace when it actually aired the interview after the woman had killed herself. Grace defended herself by claiming that guilt, and not being portrayed as a cold-blooded killer on national TV, led to the suicide (the child has not been found at this date). Interestingly, Grace claims that guilty people always look for someone else to blame, and yet she repeatedly does the same when confronted with her own misdeeds. In the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case, Grace returned to her usual haunts, employing her “intuition” to determine guilt. She asserted far and wide her conviction that a suspect, Richard Ricci, was guilty of the crime even though there was no evidence to back the assertion; after the real criminals were arrested and charged, Grace refused to admit error, suggesting it was an “honest” mistake, and no one was going to lay a guilt-trip on her.
Despite all of this, one must confess that Grace is one with her times; the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly weighed-in against defendants’ rights, and every time an innocent person is shot dead by police, people just don’t seem to care; he must have done something wrong, right?
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Al Gore recently got himself back in the news (along with Bruce “Where is he now” Babbitt) by accusing Barack Obama of “failing to lead” on the problem of global warming, as if he doesn’t have enough to do with economy, the deficit and foreign conflicts. Obama has made noises on the subject, and forced government regulators to arouse from their slumbers, which was all Bush-era non-rules gave them to do, but with so many other problems and so little money to apply to controlling greenhouse gases, there seems little political benefit to pushing the issue; this shouldn’t be surprising, since most Americans prefer to be left alone, and react to events rather anticipate them (which naturally didn’t apply to the Bush administration, which “anticipated” that Saddam Hussein was insane enough to attack us with his non-existent WMDs). Obama did talk about grand visions, “green energy” and jobs related to it, but except for tax breaks there was no green dream Manhattan Project on the horizon—and there won’t be until industry that controls politicians start clamoring for “action” and a willingness to pay for it. There was also something called “Cap and Trade,” which supposedly gives companies an incentive to reduce pollutants and emissions by issuing “permits” that sets limits on emissions, and companies that remain under the limits can sell their permits to companies who exceed the limits. However, any kind of government intervention into the “freedom” of businesses to do whatever they want is anathema to Republicans, so naturally this went on the wayside.
You really can’t blame Obama so much, since despite all the hand-ringing by liberals, the media has done nothing to illuminate the issue of climate change for the masses, nor has a significant number hit the streets to do the protest thing; the few that have are usually regarded as cranks and fringe fanatics. In the halls of Congress, despite the dire straits the Republicans have left us in, Southerners and Westerners still see fit to vote foolish; when the country needed a change, they re-sent us their do-nothing reactionaries. In 1933, FDR had the benefit of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and an even greater majority in 1935; in the House, the Republican presence was such that they only bothered to show-up to pick-up their paychecks. For whatever grand schemes he may have had, Obama was saddled 41 Republican senators and a half-dozen faux-Democrats who ensured that nothing too dramatic would occur; now, of course, he has even less leverage. As bad as the economy is, it just isn’t bad enough. If it ever does, Americans will be left in a quagmire: should they learn from their mistake and insure that Democratic Party has the power to do what is needed, or should they continue to listen to the call of a rabid minority motivated only by cupidity, narrow-mindedness, paranoia, bigotry and fear.
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As some people may or may not be aware of, the Huffington Post is now an AOL property. You remember AOL. All those ubiquitous software CDs that if you were foolish enough to put in your computer’s optical drive, you’d be regretting it ever more. What was that? You thought this was only a “trial” subscription? You say you canceled your subscription three months ago and you are still being billed? Oh, you say you never subscribed in the first place? Of course, this was how AOL reached a subscriber peak of 27 million, but has since fallen to less than 4 million once those”free” CDs disappeared from magazine racks and mailboxes. If the Post acquisition will help raise its subscriber numbers or even its profile is unknown, but it certainly was a windfall for its founder, Arianna Huffington—whose maiden name is Stassinopoulos, but decided to keep her ex-husband’s; if she called the website The Stassinopoulous Post, it probably wouldn’t attract very much attention, since you can’t pronounce it. Huffington cashed-in for about a $100 million and a cushy job as a consultant, or something. Although she occasionally contributes a brief article, the Post is really nothing more than an inflated version of Google’s Blogspot, where swell-heads and superstars-in-their-own-mind can post for free and actually pretend to be credible purveyors of fact and fiction—and most of which is not even original, but simply re-posts from other publications or websites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Huffington has come into some heat from unpaid contributors (although they may have been paid at their site of origin) who find it offensive that she should be basically making a killing off the work of thousands. I mean, the Post is nothing without its contributors, and the only thing Huffington is providing is her name and notoriety.
Huffington is also nothing if not a brazen opportunist willing to make a buck by any means necessary; yes, she has opinions, but as they say, opinions are like pieholes—everyone has one. Today, Huffington pretends to be a “progressive,” but yesterday she was an unrepentant right-winger. In the 1990s, she campaigned for her Republican husband’s bid for Congress; Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote that “Anybody who expects her to continue as a reliable voice of the left is a poor student of Huffington’s history. I first came across Huffington in 1995, when she was working at (Newt) Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation, preaching social consciousness to fellow conservatives. She railed against "big government" and pronounced: ‘We do our part and God meets us halfway. That's why I'm a conservative.’ That version of Huffington called for strict immigration restrictions (and she also opposed abortion rights). She favored Bill Clinton's resignation and floated the rumor that a former ambassador had been buried in Arlington because Clinton had slept with his wife.”
After her divorce (her husband admitted to being bi-sexual), she decided she didn’t want to be a conservative anymore, because the fast lane to power and ego-enhancement via that route had been curtailed. Of course, all it required was a simple change in attitude, and attitudes can change, again (author/dandy Tom Wolfe claimed that he became a conservative merely because everyone at Yale was supposedly a “liberal”). The fact is that if the Huffington Post was a “bastion” of “progressive” politics, it is because of the large number of contributors who claim to be; today, most of its content about such things as cooking, spreading salacious rumors in the entertainment and divorce fields—anything to increase the “hit” rate. Huffington herself has in recent times declared that she is dismissive of labels like “left” and “right”—claiming that the label of “liberal” causes people not to take her seriously, which isn’t hard anyways given her sometimes incomprehensible manner of speaking.
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Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna plans on running for governor for the Republican Party. I suppose it helps that he looks like one of those harmless bespectacled nerds, so one is easily deceived. McKenna is probably best known outside the state for acting against the (we suppose?) wishes of the Democratic governor and added this supposedly blue state to the anti-healthcare reform law; Christine Gregoire has made only tiny bleats about this blatant act of (we suppose?) insubordination. His “priorities” also apparently include supporting efforts to defund education in the state. The state Supreme Court is ready to rule on McKenna flunky Bill Clark’s argument that the state has no obligation to fully-fund education for all students in the state, blatantly suggesting that the state "There cannot be a constitutional requirement that all children succeed. Otherwise, we jump to the default position that ample funding is not being provided. That's unworkable." What does this mean? It justifies the right’s position that additional funding for impoverished schools in poor neighborhoods (because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision brought by right-wing representatives of a white female parent in Seattle, only white kids are allowed to have school “choice”) will not improve education, so why bother? This justifies continuing to lower education funding to the point where most of the money goes to teacher salaries and building maintenance, if that.
McKenna has, however, jumped on the “human trafficking” bandwagon as a means of proving that he really does “care,” although it also fits in nicely with his law and order shtick. Last week he presented his “national initiative” to “combat” human trafficking, which he claimed was his personal mission to “protect the vulnerable” against “modern day slavery”—the “selling of another person’s body through the use of force, fear or coercion.” It is interesting to note that he isn’t the only Republican in the state to latch onto this issue in lieu of problems afflicting the impoverished, homeless and hungry in this country. Ex-congressperson and right-wing extremist Linda Smith has also been big on the human trafficking, although her angle is more along the lines of converting the lost to Christianity. According to the Hillary Clinton’s State Department, 12.3 million adults and children are in “forced labor, bonded labor and forced prostitution.” McKenna is quick to insert that this is “not just an international problem, but a local one.” Good thing it is, because McKenna doesn’t have time or tax-payer money to go globetrotting. According to a Seattle Weekly story a couple years ago written by Nina Shapiro, finding these local slaves is not always easy:
“Leigh Winchell, head of the regional office of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sits in his high-up downtown Seattle office overlooking Puget Sound. ICE, as it is known, is charged with conducting trafficking investigations domestically. Winchell recently popped up in newspaper coverage of a June prostitution bust in Bellevue. Two of the alleged prostitutes were illegal immigrants from China. Winchell told the Seattle Times reporter writing about the case: ‘Human trafficking in the sex trade is alive and vibrant, particularly in the Northwest.’ Yet the Bellevue police, who helped conduct the raid, say they do not believe the women were being held against their will. When I ask Winchell about that, he tells me that he did not intend to suggest that this was a trafficking case. ‘Any comments I made in regard to the Bellevue case were more global in nature.’"
I’m not certain what he means there. Maybe it is that since you can’t prove that women who engage in prostitution in this country do not have the freedom to make a different career choice, that is not the case in places like Thailand, where the sex trade is part of the tourist “attraction”—much like Las Vegas; proselytizers can mind their own business, and are told so by the supposed “victims.” So there is a problem of indeterminate numbers (estimates range from a few hundred thousand to 200 million); this really is not a question of how many “slaves” there are, but who should be counted. Feminists, not surprisingly, have made common cause with the hell-and-damnation element to simply count the number of people working in the sex trade:
“In some respects, the evangelical worldview is similar to that of certain strains of feminism, which also see the world as full of evil—perpetrated by men on women, with sex a primary means of exploitation and abuse. Hence, Equality Now, a New York organization that works on international women's rights and has Gloria Steinem on its advisory board, is enthusiastically working with religious groups on trafficking. The famous feminist University of Michigan law professor Catherine MacKinnon, also affiliated with Equality Now and whose fervent anti-pornography views have put her in alignment with the Christian right before, is deeply involved with the cause (I mentioned this before, but I once attended a guest lecture by McKinnon, which was suggested to me by a female professor who I hoped only found her views “thought-provoking”—she surely couldn’t have believed she was serious. Aside from me, the only male in the auditorium was a reporter from the local newspaper; McKinnon was clearly uncomfortable with his presence. Forced to tone down her rhetoric lest it make into the local paper before she left town, at this gathering she only made such “moderate” assertions as 15 percent of all college women are raped. This claim, made by a radical university women’s association, has long been discredited; however, within the safety of her radical network, McKinnon has expanded this claim to include all heterosexual sex is “rape,” and that lesbianism is an explicitly anti-male “choice”—which, of course, fits in right nicely with conservative religious views)."
If McKinnon and Steinem had their way, human trafficking would be seen in the narrow prism of the sex trade, but a Weekly story that followed Shapiro’s a few months later tried to redress the imbalance, only not very successfully. The story concerned an Algerian teenager who had immigrated illegally to the U.S., going to school in Seattle, living with her aunt and uncle who ran a coffee shop. The basis for calling this case one of “human trafficking” and slavery comes from the notion that she was not paid for working at the coffee shop, and that she was occasionally “grounded” for not obeying the rules for her upkeep, such as partying all night with people she hardly knew. Since the coffee shop was a family business, and that perhaps in Algeria family members are expected to “help-out” for their room and board, perhaps there was a “cultural” disconnect between mores in there and in this country. It also stands to reason that since the aunt and uncle were responsible for the girl’s safety, they felt they had to put a clamp on her; how does this amount to “slavery?” I actually wrote to the author of this story, and she couldn’t provide answers to my queries that made any sense whatever.
It may be true that prostitutes, “do not truly do so of their own free will but have been driven by economic desperation and abusive circumstances,” returning to the Shapiro story. “But does that make them, literally, slaves? What about sweatshop workers? Poorly paid janitors? They're not as demeaned as prostitutes, but surely they'd prefer to be doing something else, too. One gets the impression that we are dealing with a new, shocking crime. It seems an odd label for prostitution, the oldest (profession) in the book.” Concerning the assumed victims, one researcher is quoted "Nobody's bothered to ask them how they got there and if they're exploited.” Out of 1,000 people identified by “activists” as victims of human trafficking and slavery in Mali and Cambodia, "only four could be classified as having been deceived, exploited, or not paid at all for their labor." Although some women had turned to prostitution to receive and then pay back loans (“debt bondage”), only six of 100 Vietnamese prostitutes working in Cambodia "reported having been 'tricked' into sex work or betrayed by an intermediary."
Coincidentally, the Seattle Weekly published another cover story on the topic this week, concerning the campaign by actress Demi Moore and her under-age actor husband Ashton Kutcher to “illuminate” the issue of underage prostitution. Moore is basically a has-been in Hollywood, so in order for her to feel “relevant” and workout her angst against sexist and ageist male studio executives and producers at the same time, she’s latched onto this hot-button issue, with her husband dutifully tagging along. Moore had no idea of the extent of the problem, but somehow she dug-up a 2001 University of Pennsylvania “study” that claimed that 100,000 to 300,000 underage girls were picked-up by police every year for prostitution. The study has been criticized for poor and/or non-existent examination of actual facts, but there is no accounting for the public taste for ever more salacious fantasy; A former Hillary Clinton staffer and his wife are managing the “campaign,” and they admit that facts don’t matter—only making the issue at hand as big a problem as they can make it matters. After the Moore/Kutchner campaign began, various major news media suddenly “discovered” the study as well, making all sorts of inflammatory and attention-grabbing claims like the usually dour C-Span’s “Children in our country enslaved sexually” and typically fact-challenged CNN’s “There’s between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States.”
The reality is that any study with such a wide gap in its “estimate” simply can’t be trusted. The authors of the “study” these figures come from admit that they make some rather broad and wild assumptions, such as American girls in San Diego going on a weekend trip to Tijuana not to booze or do drugs, but to prostitute themselves and load themselves with cash. The authors of the study admitted that they included youths who might be “at risk” of child prostitution—meaning runaways. But the authors of the Weekly story pointed out that FBI statistics show that 77 percent of runaways are gone for no more than a week, and only 7 percent for longer than a month. An informal survey of police records in 37 major cities found barely over 8,000 arrests for underage prostitution in a ten year period—800 a year, not 100,000 let alone 300,000. One of the authors of the “study” eventually admitted that there probably was no more than a few hundred underage “sex slaves” operating in the U.S. That there shouldn’t be any is a given; that some people are using grossly-inflated numbers to frighten the public in order to inflate their egos and work-out personal “issues” is neither ethical or moral. It just makes people for whom facts do mean something more cynical about such claims.
Meanwhile, undaunted by facts or the possibility that human trafficking is not quite the scope he envisions, a Seattle Times story reports that McKenna nevertheless “wants to prosecute traffickers and buyers, and mobilizing communities to provide support to victims…Human trafficking is the only crime I can think of where the victim is more likely to be prosecuted than the perpetrator.” McKenna is obviously referring to prostitutes here, even if most of them operate independently; if (former UW basketball player) Venoy Overton isn’t available to “pimp,” then who is the “perpetrator?” A functionary from the Department of Homeland Security claims that “human trafficking was a fast-growing area of criminal endeavor, and victims may be hidden from public view and from those who might want to rescue them. They are typically afraid of police because they're involved in prostitution and have been told they are criminals themselves and will be punished if they are caught.” Huh? First, if they are hidden from view, that means that numbers can be inflated to suit a political objective; it doesn’t mean it is true. Secondly, is prostitution a crime or not? Is it only a crime if a “pimp” is involved? If prostitutes are not criminals, then why should they be afraid of being arrested? I told you that whenever gender activism takes hold, logic goes straight out the window.
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I was listening to a story on local radio station, probably the National Public Radio affiliate, last week concerning something called the “Homework Club.” This club was located in a school the Highline school district (if I heard rightly), with a large number of students from low-income homes. Initially I found it to be a positive story, about a half-dozen kids who needed extra assistance, and a couple of teachers who instead of sitting in an empty class room until their day was over assisted these kids if they wanted. There was talk about the lack of transportation for kids who would miss their bus and have to walk a long way through bad neighborhoods. Very sad. But sadness turned to gladness when it was discovered that the school was getting extra money: $21,000 of spare cash, $500 extra per English as a Second Language students. So what was this money used for? Screw the 42 students who were having a difficult time learning because of the language barrier—let’s buy a bus and some other goodies for these half-dozen “special” kids. My empathy went right down the toilet. Frankly, I think the school district should investigate this matter.
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I was watching Kevin Costner’s “The Postman” the other day, one of those “message” movies he made after the success of “Dances With Wolves.” I’m a sucker for message movies if they are politically to the left, and I didn’t think it was as bad as critics said it was when it first came out in 1997—although it likely would have better if its story line had more in common with the source novel beyond its title. The scene was set in 2013, and by then the civilization had virtually disappeared do to nuclear war and the collapse of society. Now, some people might say that in the year 2011, and despite what survivalists, neo-Nazi militia types and Tea Party people might suggest, we are far from that vision of the future. I suppose that 16 years sounds like a long time, but it really isn’t; sometimes it seems like only yesterday, especially when you dwell on those wasted years.
Writers and filmmakers obviously have great imaginations, and so do readers and viewers. They want to believe that the future holds many exciting marvels and vistas, kids especially. When I was growing up, books on space travel imagined floating cities entirely self-sustaining, colonies on the moon by the 1990s. I mean, how much farther was Mars from the Moon? A spinning giant donut with gardens to feed a population the size of a small town? Surely for Americans, the greatest people on Earth, who built the Saturn moon rocket, could go the next small step? Right?
Wrong. While I have to admit that electronic devices have come a long way since I was kid, and kids should consider themselves “fortunate” that they live in such an interactive world, that doesn’t mean that they have the tools to become smarter human beings, just that they have “smart” devices to do their work for them. But that’s it. Sure, there’s computer generated imaging that can send you to pretend places, but we are no closer to placing a floating city (or village, for that matter) in space, and no person has reached the Moon since 1972. Given the high cost of such missions, it is difficult to see them ever realized again, unless someone discovers a more efficient propulsion mechanism, which remains the most daunting obstacle to any manned space flight beyond the Moon.
When George Orwell wrote “1984,” he already had the example of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to provide him with inspiration, but in 2011, while some aspects of his vision of a totalitarian state that continually monitors the activities of its citizens, detain “thought criminals” and controls what passes for truth in order to maintain its authority still has some validity (such as in China), it has become fiction rather than fact. In 1997, World War III will be narrowly averted by some guy named Snake, who rescues the president from the crooks in Manhattan, which became one giant prison camp. Funny thing, I missed it. “2001: A Space Odyssey” would be better titled “Oddity” given the unlikelihood of its vision of future space travel. According to “Blade Runner,” in 2009 there were flying cars; 28 years into the future does seem like a long time, but technology has obviously moved at a relative snail’s pace, if it has moved at all. This year, according to “Aeon Flux,” the entire planet is wiped-out by virus; if that were true, Charlize Theron need not embarrass herself making another awful superhero movie. In “2012,” the world will end in an unexplained cataclysm; some people say that the Mayan calendar’s supposed “end time” actually refers to great celebration. In 2022, New York City will have a population of 40 million, and people were eating something called “soylent green.” With a population like that, somebody thought it was natural that a few thousand people wouldn’t be missed being sent into the sausage grinder. Some movies, knowing that how far-fetched their visions of the future were, took fewer liberties with their guesses of future events. “Logan’s Run,” a kind of biosphere where in order to maintain a certain population, the beautiful white people were killed-off when they reached the age of thirty. This future world was set sometime in the 23rd century, so by then the filmmakers would be dead long before they could be proved ridiculous. Humans in one form or another have inhabited the planet for several millions years; by the looks of Java Man, they probably reached the level of today’s great apes around 500,000 BC. But “Planet of the Apes” predicts the apes will reach human evolution that was current in 2,500 BC by the year 3978 AD; a lot of luck with that.
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The Rod Blagojevich re-trial, of which I was not the only person who regarded the whole thing as a farce, ended in conviction on most counts. The easiest decision, the jurors said, was on the issue of whether he ‘sold” Barack Obama’s vacated senate seat. The problem here is that politics is nothing if not horse-trading (although Republicans these days seem intent on stubborn stupidity which they call “principle”). We live in a very strange world; a congressman is forced to resign because he sent some snaps of his bare chest to a couple of women. Yet we had a president who secretly approved of selling weapons to a rogue regime that referred to the U.S. as the “Great Satan.” We had a president who committed adultery—in the White House offices—and he’s come out of it practically unscathed. We have congressmen and senators who support legislation that benefits certain donors (they call it “pro-business”), and then work for them as lobbyists or serve on their boards. We saw a man who served on the board of a company, went on hiatus went he became vice president, saw to it that his company received no-bid contracts eventually worth billions, pocketed tens of millions in “deferred” payments, and hardly anyone said anything; the guy should be in jail now, instead of occasionally growling and sneering on Fox and CNN (wasn’t he also the guy who “accidentally” shot a hunting companion?). And in the overall scheme of things, people are living in a dream world if they think that politics is in theory so pure of morality and ethics. You support this, I’ll vote for that. Politicians receive donations from interest groups if they support laws or do not enforce regulations. Of course, we are told that a governor is supposed to make appointments based on competence, but we know this isn’t true. So why didn’t Blago get away with what is common practice? Because he was unpopular in the media, and was untrusted by his own party, and gentility wasn’t in his vocabulary.
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There has been recent news reports that the police will start cracking down harder on hand held cell phone use. Most people will probably still try to get away with it if they can, but if they feel discomfited by it, they can always blame Sarah Potts, who smashed her brand-new Ford explorer into a stalled vehicle in 2002, unleashing a wall of flame that crossed two lanes; four people inside died a horrific death. Although police initially said that Potts—the wife of a Bothell police officer, was not driving recklessly because she was “going with the flow” of traffic at approximately 60 mph, a state patrol investigation found witnesses who said she was weaving in and out of traffic, suggesting that she was driving at least 80 mph. Worse, she was clearly distracted talking on her cell phone; although she disputed this, phone records showed that she was using her phone at the time of the accident. The state patrol recommended prosecution for vehicular homicide, which of course was ignored.
A former writer for the Seattle Weekly, Eric Scigliano, wrote sometime after the episode was “resolved” that despite Potts essentially getting away with murder, there was no favoritism being showed to law enforcement or their wives, because of the outcomes of two other cases involving a fireman and a police officer who were legally DUI and ended-up killing people. I had to beg to differ with his interpretation; in the case of Eric Thomas, a Bellevue police officer, was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, while George Moorehead, a firefighter also convicted of a similar crime, yet received only a year's community service. There was something amiss here; what could account for this clear favoritism and double standard? It seems that Moorehead, the firefighter, was white, and his victims were two Vietnamese girls who were walking on a Bellevue sidewalk. Thomas was black, and the person whose car he struck (who was also driving drunk) was white. Thomas manfully confessed his crime and stated he deserved punishment. At Moorehead’s sentencing the courtroom was packed with his family and supporters, and there was so much sobbing and regretfulness permeating the atmosphere that it was impossible for the relatives of the Vietnamese victims to get in a word edgewise. I'm certain that when it was all over that they felt their daughters were the guilty party for getting in the way of Moorehead’s car.
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Despite the Justice Department threats that doomed the relatively tepid state medical marijuana law—which essentially made state employees regulators of legal marijuana instead of the police—several local figures of note (the European tourist guy Rick Steves and former U.S. attorney John McKay among them) are backing a law in the state not just in providing protection for medical marijuana users, but to make it legal for everyone. There are currently two competing pro-legalize initiatives making the rounds, New Approach Washington and Sensible Washington, both of which say essentially the same thing—legalize, regulate and tax marijuana—although the latter (which seems aimed at decriminalizing pot completely) is running out of time to get the required signatures. The New Approach initiative, because of its pedigree, may have a better shot of at least getting on a ballot; it calls for 21 to be the legal age to smoke marijuana either for medicinal uses, or not. A major difference is that like hard liquor currently is, it would be sold through state-licensed marijuana-only outlets; the Liquor Control Board would oversee its production and distribution. Individuals would be limited on one ounce of dried bud, and only licensed producers can grow it, so it somewhat limited in scope and still gives police room to harass users. Nevertheless, it would seem to be the easier pill to follow for those in the federal government still operating under the illusion that the “war against drugs” has been anything but a failure that has cost tens of thousands of lives to no purpose.
As an aside, I wonder who this initiative is really supposed to benefit. We frequently hear of police hassling or arresting people in minority neighborhoods, while other users go suspiciously unnoticed. I was walking past an underpass that the Interurban Trail in Kent passes through; there were these white kids, who looked and talked like your typical privileged class, smoking weed. They even offered me a bud, which I scoffed at; the stuff never did anything for me, probably because I didn’t inhale properly.
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Because of my extremely modest means, I like to think of myself as a “smart” shopper, meaning purchasing the most bang for the buck. I might prefer the more expensive product, but if it is food, sweetener can always improve my outlook. Now, some businesses do their best to fool the customer into purchasing what they think is a good deal, but is not necessarily so. Fast food restaurants are particularly sneaky about this. Take for example McDonald’s. They currently advertise three options for Chicken McNuggets:
20 for $4.99
4 for $1.29
10 for $4.58
At first glance, it would seem obvious that the 20-piece is the better buy than the 10-piece. If it was a choice between one or the other as separate items, even a caveman could figure it out. However, the catch is that the 10-piece can come separately or as part of a Meal Deal. If you wanted a drink and fries with your 20-piece, you would pay more those additions than you would for the same drink and fries for the meal. As for the 4-piece option, would pay $3.87 for 12-pieces, making it technically a better deal than the 10-piece, although you would still encounter the same problem as just mentioned; on the other hand, you would be paying the equivalent of $6.45 for 20 pieces, so it is not the best value for the buck. We can assume that the 20-piece still reflects a bottom-line healthy profit for McDonald’s, so the other options expand on the concept. Overall you are left with options that require some thought if you are on a tight budget; two 4-pieces for $2.58 is better than 10 for $4.58, but only if you also order small fires and drink as well; ordering the larger sizes will exceed the 10-piece meal price, and you will actually be getting less bang for the buck. The 20-piece only makes sense from a budget standpoint if you don’t intend on making additions to your order, or you just want more McNuggets and cost isn’t an issue.
Alright, that’s our math class for the day.
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I watched a YouTube recently of a pigeon which laid her eggs on someone’s balcony. She hadn’t constructed what could be called a nest—just a half-dozen randomly placed twigs. Worse, the two eggs were placed not on the nest, but off to the side—and she was not sitting on them at all, just kind of looking at them as if it was the “natural” thing to do. When the individual approached with a camcorder, the bird simply got up and casually walked away. Since the eggs were not being incubated properly, they would soon rot. Although street pigeon’ nests are an eyesore, their general construction does resemble in a rudimentary way a typical bird’s nest. Some viewer comments were as follows:
“That is one bad nest... I think this bird is retarded...”
“Look at that nest. This pigeon fails as a mother.”
“This fool fell asleep during Nest Making 101”
“I've watched plenty of wild birds lay eggs and YES, keep them in the NEST! This pigeon obviously missed the memo. And if I ever walk up to a nest (birds around here make them rather low and usually on light fixtures even though they have plenty of trees to choose from) the mom stays in the nest unless I actually try touching her.”
“No male pigeon helps with nest to build for her and built it on her own before the eggs....she might be afraid of sitting and smash the eggs out of the nest!”
Apart from calling the bird retarded, it was hard what to make of this. Nest building, like flying, is an instinct in birds; research has shown that birds raised outside the influence of adult birds will act “normally” once they reach an internal and physical maturation date. “Smart” birds like crows and ravens may imitate certain behaviors if it is useful, or adapt to supernormal stimuli; it is not "learned." Blaming the male bird for failing to provide a suitable home may be usefully politically, but the fact is that in most species, the female constructs most or all of the nest; the female American Robin, for example, expends considerable effort to insure that the nest conforms with the contours of her body, in order to protect the eggs from the elements. Not all birds build nests, and a few species of penguin build “nests” of pebbles, so the observation that the pigeon was afraid of crushing the eggs does not answer the question. What we may be seeing is some behavioral cross-wiring, as in domestic chickens, where most hens do not go “broody” after laying their eggs; most street pigeons, though a strain of Rock Pigeon, are feral descendants of domestic birds.
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Guess who says he is changing his name to Metta World Peace? Why, Ron Artest, the guy who close-lined J.J. Barea in the NBA playoffs and got himself suspended for a game, and congratulated Andrew Bynum after he was ejected for launching himself like a missile beneath Barea as he was going up for a shot. Artest recently received the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award by the NBA award, supposedly given for "outstanding service and dedication to the community." It’s one thing to give some of your millions to worthy causes; it’s quite another to provide a bad example for kids in your personal dealings with others. Money, however, can buy a lot of goodwill and “forgiveness.” Back in the old days, they called it the selling of indulgences, where a wealthy person could purchase God’s forgiveness for his or her sins. Artest will, of course, go down in NBA lore as the man who was suspended for a record 86 games after a brawl with Detroit Pistons’ fans. Like the Barea suspension, the incident was instigated by Artest’s seeming inability to restrain his violent impulses when there was no call for it; with the game in the final minute and all but over when he applied a hard foul to the Piston’s Ben Wallace just any lessons on “peace,” maybe he should control his urges to take a “piece” out of people.
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Speaking of names, I came across a story from “The People’s News” concerning a young girl who was suing to get her name changed. It seems that her single mother, for want of anything more creative, named her little girl Clitoria. A judge in Detroit had recently ruled in favor of a class action suit on behalf of a number of girls whose mothers refused to abide by the girls’ wishes and change their names to something more sensible, observing that “such outlandish names seldom take into account the societal effects on the child.” Among the names the judge ruled against was one written in Incan hieroglyphics. “She said it would make me stand out,” said the girl who previously owned this appellation, which caused some confusion in court since it can only be reproduced by invention, since the Incans had no written language. “It’s really just stupid.” The ruling was also likely to allow “little Clitoria Jackson” to get a new name. The belief that black girls require increasingly incomprehensible names is not likely to end soon, however. “It’s so hard to keep coming up with something unique,” said Uneeqqi Jenkins, 22, a black mother of seven who survives on public assistance. Her children are named Daryl, Q’Antity, Uhlleejsha, Cray-Ig, Fellisittee, Tay’Sh’awn and Day’Shawndra.” Teachers lauded the ruling; "Oh my God, the first day of school you'd be standing there sweating, looking at the list of names wondering 'How do I pronounce Q'J'Q'Sha.'? " said one teacher who refused to be named for fear of parental retaliation. “Is this even English?"
This was obviously a satirical piece, though with a serious point. I added and subtracted some things from the original story, but I couldn’t have made-up those names if you paid me to.
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The company I work for has taken a lot of flack, mostly unfair, from employees from other airlines, including the one we service. We are constantly reminded that we are interlopers, scabs and somehow inferior. I recall someone who was training with one of these companies telling me that disdainful commentary in regard to us was common practice. I say that these people should mind their own store. Let’s take, for example, one of the larger airlines which I will identify as “Acme Airlines.” The results of the American Customer Satisfaction Index found Acme Airlines dead last in its consumer poll for the second year in a row. The unions representing Acme employees also consider the airline a poor employer, nursing grievances about wage, benefit and job cuts. But that begs the question: Is poor employee attitudes and poor service related?
A website call “Glassdoor” seems to suggest that this is the case, observing that “Mediocrity is the goal for (Acme).” This seems evident by the fact that customer complaint phone lines were so tied-up that in 2009, Acme discontinued its customer complaint line; complaints can still be sent by email, meaning that the company can more easily dismiss them.
For people who feel their complaints are ignored, there is a website called untied.com in order for them to let-off steam. Here is a sampling of the commentary:
“Acme has absolutely the worst call center/customer service in the industry! Total incompetence!!”
“Customer Service is the worst at Acme Airlines and we will never fly them again. We will recommend to everyone to stay away from the unfriendly skies at Acme…Of all the disturbing events I’ve witnessed at airports in recent years, I must admit that Acme’s abuse of its passengers, both on and off the ground, has put me over the edge. I was conned into flying Acme on two separate occasions - both overseas trips (to Germany in 2004 and to England in 2007). I insisted during the planning of the 2007 trip that I refused to fly United, and was overjoyed at the prospect of flying with Lufthansa only to discover after the fact that Lufthansa had partnered with Acme…Needless to say, I was royally ticked because I knew that the experience would be an exercise in terror.”
“I will NEVER fly with Acme Airlines again. It is a total joke. They are not interested in doing the right thing. Their so called "customer service" department is a fraud. People do not speak proficient English and hang up on you when you do not buy their ridiculous offers. "Customer Service Supervisor" is also a joke.”
“Never have I been treated more rudely at an airport. Ms. XYZ was brusque, unhelpful, and unprofessional.”
“I can honestly say that I will never fly Acme Airlines. I hope Jane Doe yelling at a customer was worth the company losing business.”
“I was better off driving in a car. My experience with Acme was a complete nightmare. I have never been so stressed out during travel, and I refuse to fly Acme so long as I can avoid it.”
“If we do not hear back from AA to resolve then my parents plans to seek counsel and file motions against AA employees for the disruption they caused on our family vacation.”
“That incompetent gate agent caused me a lot of un-necessary stress and despair. She also did nothing about the $60 luggage charge. If I performed like that at my job, I would be fired instantly.”
“The people that work and run our airline are dumber than a box of rocks. You treat all your customers like terrorist for your stupidity and lack of security. The top management of Acme Airlines have to be the dumbest people on Earth. As long as Acme Airlines has been in business Acme just gets better at making passengers luggage disappear. Most people get arrested for stealing. Acme Airlines thinks that is part of the experience of flying with them. I think every employee of your airline should (be) drug tested every time the airline screws up. You are doing a great job of being the worst airline. Keep up the great work your airline will be out of business before you know it.”
Moral to this story: If you want to criticize, just make certain that you are not the one setting the “standard.”
The vote on the war powers act in regard to U.S. “involvement” in Libya is pure political grandstanding, with an unhealthy dose of unaldulterated hypocrisy. Consider: George Bush led us into a war in Iraq first based on wishful thinking and “plausible” falsehoods, and secondly upon a country that posed no threat to our “freedoms,” imminent or otherwise. Yet the Senate voted affirmatively on a war resolution, and continued to fund it the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe ultimately trillions of dollars. And yet now some in Congress are bellyaching about a token effort in Libya, particular when there was pressure on the U.S. to do something on behalf of “the people.” Now they stand on “principle” after thousands have already died. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Obama administration isn’t portraying this as some kind of NATO operation, especially when the brunt of the “war” is being conducted by the British and French, the two countries that agitated for intervention into Libya most forcefully to begin with. But as I recall, the Democrats were acting like jelly-spined weaklings before the Bush administration beefcake bull, and the Republicans—well, they’re just do what Republicans are expected to do. Diplomatically, the Libyan operation was the first opportunity, after decades of backing repressive right-wing regimes, to demonstrate that the U.S. supported the “people” substantially rather than rhetorically. But for certain Democrats, this is an opportunity to undermine their own president for no good reason when before they flailed about haplessly before a Republican president. As for Republicans on the Libyan issue, they’ll happily dispense with their “principles” for any cynical partisan reason. If we have been taught anything about this episode, government is only expected to be ”ethical” and “moral” when Democrats are in the White House; when occupied by Republicans, power is its own justification.
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I found this link while I was doing some online research. There are quite a few such polls floating around the web, and most of them seem to be self-prophesizing carnival barking, rather than attempting to gather useful information:
Should Congress Repeal Obama's Health Plan and Other Policies?
Should Obama Be Re-elected?
Vote in This Urgent Poll
“Newsmax.com, one of America's leading online news services, is conducting an urgent national online poll about President Obama, the 2011 Congress and whether it should repeal President Obama's healthcare plan and other policies.”
“We are also asking if he should be re-elected in 2012”
“Newsmax will provide the results of this poll to major media outlets. Newsmax's results also will be shared with popular radio talk-show hosts across America.”
“Newsmax reports have been cited by major media outlets, including CNN, ABC News, Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, and other major networks.”
“Don't miss this opportunity to let your voice be heard! Many media outlets and national leaders are interested in your opinion. Hundreds of media outlets have reported on Newsmax's online polls.”
“Vote today!”
1) Do you support the full repeal of President Obama's healthcare plan Congress passed in 2010?
Yes, repeal it completely
No, don’t repeal it at all
No, repeal just parts of it
2) Should Congress restore $500 billion in Medicare benefits for seniors that the Obama plan cut?
Yes, restore the Medicare benefits
No, don't restore the Medicare benefits
3) Do you support President Obama's desire to give 12 million illegal aliens amnesty and a path to citizenship?
Yes, I support Obama's amnesty plan
No, I oppose it
4) What do you believe Congress' top priority should be in 2011?
Cutting spending
Cutting taxes
Paying down the national debt
Improving the nation's security
5) Do you plan on voting to re-elect President Obama in 2012?
Yes, re-elect
No, for another candidate
Not sure right now
6) Who did you vote for in 2008?
McCain - Palin
Obama - Biden
Other
As I’ve said, there a million polls like this, giving people an either/or choice, or essentially no choice at all. The first question on the health care bill seems innocuous enough; perhaps people do want parts of it repealed. The question is, what parts? If you ask these people what it is they don’t like, they’d probably have a hard time explaining what exactly it is. The second question tries to scare seniors into believing it is Obama who is seeking to gut Social Security, and not the Republicans; now at least we know that there is an underlying stincture of partisan politics meant to reach a pre-conceived conclusion. The third question asks if you support amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens; as an aside, it is interesting to note that almost a quarter of illegal immigrants in this country are from countries outside of Latin America (13 percent from Asia, according to the Pew Foundation), but because it costs so much more to ship them out of the country, the ICE and Border Patrol ignores them, focusing solely on Latinos. Anyways, no one wants a blanket amnesty, but because the question equates the hot-button term “amnesty” and “a path to citizenship” as essentially the same thing, it self-negates the latter term as an approach to address the immigration issue. The fourth, and probably most despicable, question again gives people false choices. Where is the choice for raising taxes on the wealthy (which means nothing more than allowing the Bush era tax cuts to sunset) or closing tax loopholes for corporations that pay little or no taxes on their massive profits? Why are we talking about national security? Where is job creation (which would mean additional spending)? What about maintaining Social Security and Medicare? Question five is essentially pointless, because we still don’t know how the economy will turn and what Republican emerges from the darkness.
Who would use a poll that essentially measures nothing but a guttural response that requires no reflection or thought? Probably Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and others like them who would use the “results” for next week’s right-wing talking point.
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Last Sunday the Seattle Times published a “special report” on the case of forensic psycho-analyst Stuart Greenberg, who had committed suicide following an arrest for surreptitiously installing a video camera in the patient/employee bathroom of his home-office, where he conducted his psychology practice, in order to satisfy some bizarre fetish he had. He also had an interesting record of providing apparently false or misleading testimony in mostly child-custody cases, although for some reason the Times chose cases in which women were the “victims,” when the record tells us that it is men who are the usual “prey” to accusations of abuse in custody cases.
While admittedly the Greenberg case was of prurient interest, I find it is odd that the Times chose to fixate on this guy when there are plenty of other activists masquerading as "experts" who do as bad or worse to advance their victim agenda. Not surprisingly, one party or another finds such testimony useful, regardless of its veracity, and sometimes with tragic results. There was a local case some years ago involving a middle-aged man who shot and killed his young, pregnant Filipino wife and her friend right in the middle of a divorce court proceeding. The media, of course, reported this story in the way it typically does, without quite getting the back story: One of the victims had a boyfriend living in the U.S., but his legal status was insufficient to help her immigrate in order to join him. What to do? She advertised herself as a “mail order bride” in order to attract some lonesome American with abysmal courtship abilities to marry her, after which she could legally remain in the country. She had a plan, of course; remain married to the man for a “respectable” amount of time (say, a year), and file for divorce. Once married, she abandoned the pretense of being a wife and rejoined her boyfriend, and subsequently became pregnant with his child. One may imagine the reaction of the husband when told that he had been deliberately cuckolded, and confronted with the demand for a divorce. Why was her friend in that fatal courtroom? She was there to offer testimony to “corroborate” a story of domestic violence, no doubt falsely. What could have been going through this man’s mind, given the totality of this monstrosity of injustice? Or are not men allowed to have feelings of being emotionally pummeled, like women are allowed to? There is no doubt if the roles had been reversed, the woman would have received all the empathy the world had to offer, and instead of being labeled a monster would have been acquitted for temporary insanity in a case of a crime of passion. I realize that this has little to do with the Times story, but I just needed an excuse to put in my two-bit in regard to that incident.
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Although the previous story doesn’t exactly substantiate the point of my next story, it is worth noting since its implications all too often are swept under the rug. Last week while in the University District, I observed a minor confrontation that failed to achieve full-blown status because of the intervention of a man between two combatants. Well, it was actually one combatant—a woman who was preparing to lay a scrawny guy horizontal to the ground. I bring this up because one of the myths of domestic abuse is that men are always portrayed as the aggressors both physically and emotionally. The reality is that some men are congenitally passive or physical cowards, like “Back to the Future’s” George McFly, avoiding conflict at any cost, even self-respect. Some of these men are in relationships with women who take advantage of these “weaknesses” in their character, especially if they are naturally aggressive and like “conversations” to be one-sided. It doesn’t matter if the man is physically stronger; if he lacks physical or emotional aggressiveness, then he seeks to avoid those people who are; it is hard for him to imagine a situation where he can work himself up to such a state that he is even willing to strike someone, for fear that that his opponent will subsequently beat him to pulp if he doesn’t get in that lucky punch first. If it is a spouse who likes to bully, and knows she can do it without fear of imminent reprisal, we enter into the world that domestic violence “researchers,” “experts” and even police loath to take into account, since interrupts myth-making. Domestic abuse does not turn on the presence of physical strength, but the psychological willingness to use physical means.
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I was watching CNN the other day when some reporter was talking about the Caylee Anthony murder case. The reporter suggested that the lawyers of the accused murderer—her mother, Casey Anthony—would use the argument that the girl had “accidentally” drowned, and in a fit of panic or indifference, Anthony took the body into the woods and left it. Why anyone would believe this story after the mountain of lies Anthony and her family had already told is a minor detail, according to this scenario. That Anthony had responded to the “rumor” of a drowning, suggested helpfully by her parents, by dismissing it as untrue is also apparently not a point worth rehashing. At any rate, the CNN reporter seemed to think that the story would “resonate” with Florida jurors because drowning is supposedly the number one killer of children under five in the state; something tells me that this reporter hopes that is the case, because the other scenario (that the girl was rendered unconscious with chloroform and then suffocated with duct tape) is an unfortunate reminder that “motherhood” in humans is not a natural instinct, but a learned one.
CNN, of course, has spent a lot of time on this case, mainly because of the media’s fixation on white female victims, and no more so than Nancy Grace, who is the media equivalent of finger nails scraping across a blackboard. Egotistical and self-righteous, Grace is easy to dislike and distrust because she behaves like an activist for whom concepts like impartial justice, innocent until proven guilty and factual evidence are obscure notions best left to those who prefer reporting the facts. After attempting to implicate one innocent person (an ex-boyfriend, Ricardo Morales), and another (ex-boyfriend Tony Rusciano) and then a nanny (Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, who did not know Anthony or her daughter) and then her parents, in a sudden fit of “impartiality” decided instead of focusing on the most logical suspect, suggested to viewers that they leave the investigation to the “experts” like law enforcement and “psychics”—this despite the fact that in a six-month period Anthony had been arrested and re-arrested four times for the following crimes: child neglect, obstruction, making false statements, forgery, fraud, theft, theft again, and finally murder. Just in case apologists thought Grace really meant to say “psychiatrists,” no such luck; she was referring to a “psychic” who allegedly “saw” Casey’s murder—with bug spray and chloroform.
Grace claims to have been motivated to become a prosecutor after the murder of her fiancé in 1980. However, she made false claims about the case—that the murderer was a stranger, had a prior criminal record, that the jury was “unclear” about guilt, and numberless delaying appeals of a guilty verdict that took hours to reach, not days—in which to justify the misconduct that she would engage in as a special prosecutor in the Atlanta-Fulton County District Attorney’s office. Although her fiancé was obviously a man, Grace chose for her cases victims of crime who were almost exclusively female, and not surprisingly her underlying misandry would cloud her sense of “justice” on numerous occasions. In her book “Objection,” Grace claims that high-priced lawyers, celebrity defendants, and 24/7 media has hijacked “justice.” No, it is fanatics like Grace who provide the illusion that all victims are white females (when they are they are in fact the least likely to be a victim of crime) who have hijacked “justice.”
Grace was pretty much allowed a free hand in prosecuting cases as she saw fit, until her boss decided not to run for re-election, and since her protector was gone, she left the office. And protection she needed, since the Georgia Supreme Court weighed-in on her conduct on at least two occasions. In a drug trafficking case, the court threw out a guilty verdict because in her closing argument, Grace had prejudiced the jury by referring to murder and rape cases that had nothing to do with the defendant. In another case, the court overturned a conviction a businessman on murder and arson charges stemming from the death of his wife, asserting that the "the conduct of the prosecuting attorney (Grace) in this case demonstrated her disregard of the notions of due process and fairness, and was inexcusable." The defendant was eventually released without further charge. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals also weighed-in on Grace, condemning her unethical behavior in prosecuting a defendant in another murder trial, charging that she knowingly used false testimony by a detective.
With this record of prosecutorial misconduct (no doubt not confined to these few instances—and no doubt “justified” by a zeal for “justice”) why did CNN (or Court TV, for that matter) hire her? Obviously because she fit the bill perfectly as an overbearing zealot uninterested in facts who thinks everyone who is merely charged is guilty; Americans are apparently so uninterested in due process that her version of justice is a natural ratings winner. So what has she done since joining CNN, besides being allowed to engage unfettered in her white female victim of the week activism? Besides being all over the map with the Anthony case, she showed her narrow-minded, activist-driven contempt for impartial justice by assuming that the woman in the Duke University rape case was telling the truth: "Why would you go to a cop in a gang rape case, and lie and give misleading information?” Wendy Murphy, her “expert” on the subject, declaimed that "My own statistics speak to this fact" that there is no such thing as a false rape accusation (unless, of course, you want to accuse an anonymous homeless man in order to shame your parents into giving you money to pay your rent, as in a recent local case). It turned out that the woman—a student who worked as a part-time stripper, felt “disrespected” while dancing in a state of undress in front of a bunch of drunken white frat boys, and wanted to get “even.” On the day the case was dismissed and the local prosecutor disbarred, Grace apparently decided she was too sick to show-up for work; it must have been equally tough for Jane “War against Women” Velez-Mitchell to report that story in her place.
Remember talk show personality Jenny Jones and the tragic events that unfolded after she told a young man that he had a “secret admirer,” and embarrassed him on national television when this admirer turned out to be a man? Well, Grace had her own such moment, after hounding a young woman into suicide after an interview about her missing child. CNN displayed about as much ethics as Grace when it actually aired the interview after the woman had killed herself. Grace defended herself by claiming that guilt, and not being portrayed as a cold-blooded killer on national TV, led to the suicide (the child has not been found at this date). Interestingly, Grace claims that guilty people always look for someone else to blame, and yet she repeatedly does the same when confronted with her own misdeeds. In the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case, Grace returned to her usual haunts, employing her “intuition” to determine guilt. She asserted far and wide her conviction that a suspect, Richard Ricci, was guilty of the crime even though there was no evidence to back the assertion; after the real criminals were arrested and charged, Grace refused to admit error, suggesting it was an “honest” mistake, and no one was going to lay a guilt-trip on her.
Despite all of this, one must confess that Grace is one with her times; the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly weighed-in against defendants’ rights, and every time an innocent person is shot dead by police, people just don’t seem to care; he must have done something wrong, right?
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Al Gore recently got himself back in the news (along with Bruce “Where is he now” Babbitt) by accusing Barack Obama of “failing to lead” on the problem of global warming, as if he doesn’t have enough to do with economy, the deficit and foreign conflicts. Obama has made noises on the subject, and forced government regulators to arouse from their slumbers, which was all Bush-era non-rules gave them to do, but with so many other problems and so little money to apply to controlling greenhouse gases, there seems little political benefit to pushing the issue; this shouldn’t be surprising, since most Americans prefer to be left alone, and react to events rather anticipate them (which naturally didn’t apply to the Bush administration, which “anticipated” that Saddam Hussein was insane enough to attack us with his non-existent WMDs). Obama did talk about grand visions, “green energy” and jobs related to it, but except for tax breaks there was no green dream Manhattan Project on the horizon—and there won’t be until industry that controls politicians start clamoring for “action” and a willingness to pay for it. There was also something called “Cap and Trade,” which supposedly gives companies an incentive to reduce pollutants and emissions by issuing “permits” that sets limits on emissions, and companies that remain under the limits can sell their permits to companies who exceed the limits. However, any kind of government intervention into the “freedom” of businesses to do whatever they want is anathema to Republicans, so naturally this went on the wayside.
You really can’t blame Obama so much, since despite all the hand-ringing by liberals, the media has done nothing to illuminate the issue of climate change for the masses, nor has a significant number hit the streets to do the protest thing; the few that have are usually regarded as cranks and fringe fanatics. In the halls of Congress, despite the dire straits the Republicans have left us in, Southerners and Westerners still see fit to vote foolish; when the country needed a change, they re-sent us their do-nothing reactionaries. In 1933, FDR had the benefit of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and an even greater majority in 1935; in the House, the Republican presence was such that they only bothered to show-up to pick-up their paychecks. For whatever grand schemes he may have had, Obama was saddled 41 Republican senators and a half-dozen faux-Democrats who ensured that nothing too dramatic would occur; now, of course, he has even less leverage. As bad as the economy is, it just isn’t bad enough. If it ever does, Americans will be left in a quagmire: should they learn from their mistake and insure that Democratic Party has the power to do what is needed, or should they continue to listen to the call of a rabid minority motivated only by cupidity, narrow-mindedness, paranoia, bigotry and fear.
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As some people may or may not be aware of, the Huffington Post is now an AOL property. You remember AOL. All those ubiquitous software CDs that if you were foolish enough to put in your computer’s optical drive, you’d be regretting it ever more. What was that? You thought this was only a “trial” subscription? You say you canceled your subscription three months ago and you are still being billed? Oh, you say you never subscribed in the first place? Of course, this was how AOL reached a subscriber peak of 27 million, but has since fallen to less than 4 million once those”free” CDs disappeared from magazine racks and mailboxes. If the Post acquisition will help raise its subscriber numbers or even its profile is unknown, but it certainly was a windfall for its founder, Arianna Huffington—whose maiden name is Stassinopoulos, but decided to keep her ex-husband’s; if she called the website The Stassinopoulous Post, it probably wouldn’t attract very much attention, since you can’t pronounce it. Huffington cashed-in for about a $100 million and a cushy job as a consultant, or something. Although she occasionally contributes a brief article, the Post is really nothing more than an inflated version of Google’s Blogspot, where swell-heads and superstars-in-their-own-mind can post for free and actually pretend to be credible purveyors of fact and fiction—and most of which is not even original, but simply re-posts from other publications or websites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Huffington has come into some heat from unpaid contributors (although they may have been paid at their site of origin) who find it offensive that she should be basically making a killing off the work of thousands. I mean, the Post is nothing without its contributors, and the only thing Huffington is providing is her name and notoriety.
Huffington is also nothing if not a brazen opportunist willing to make a buck by any means necessary; yes, she has opinions, but as they say, opinions are like pieholes—everyone has one. Today, Huffington pretends to be a “progressive,” but yesterday she was an unrepentant right-winger. In the 1990s, she campaigned for her Republican husband’s bid for Congress; Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote that “Anybody who expects her to continue as a reliable voice of the left is a poor student of Huffington’s history. I first came across Huffington in 1995, when she was working at (Newt) Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation, preaching social consciousness to fellow conservatives. She railed against "big government" and pronounced: ‘We do our part and God meets us halfway. That's why I'm a conservative.’ That version of Huffington called for strict immigration restrictions (and she also opposed abortion rights). She favored Bill Clinton's resignation and floated the rumor that a former ambassador had been buried in Arlington because Clinton had slept with his wife.”
After her divorce (her husband admitted to being bi-sexual), she decided she didn’t want to be a conservative anymore, because the fast lane to power and ego-enhancement via that route had been curtailed. Of course, all it required was a simple change in attitude, and attitudes can change, again (author/dandy Tom Wolfe claimed that he became a conservative merely because everyone at Yale was supposedly a “liberal”). The fact is that if the Huffington Post was a “bastion” of “progressive” politics, it is because of the large number of contributors who claim to be; today, most of its content about such things as cooking, spreading salacious rumors in the entertainment and divorce fields—anything to increase the “hit” rate. Huffington herself has in recent times declared that she is dismissive of labels like “left” and “right”—claiming that the label of “liberal” causes people not to take her seriously, which isn’t hard anyways given her sometimes incomprehensible manner of speaking.
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Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna plans on running for governor for the Republican Party. I suppose it helps that he looks like one of those harmless bespectacled nerds, so one is easily deceived. McKenna is probably best known outside the state for acting against the (we suppose?) wishes of the Democratic governor and added this supposedly blue state to the anti-healthcare reform law; Christine Gregoire has made only tiny bleats about this blatant act of (we suppose?) insubordination. His “priorities” also apparently include supporting efforts to defund education in the state. The state Supreme Court is ready to rule on McKenna flunky Bill Clark’s argument that the state has no obligation to fully-fund education for all students in the state, blatantly suggesting that the state "There cannot be a constitutional requirement that all children succeed. Otherwise, we jump to the default position that ample funding is not being provided. That's unworkable." What does this mean? It justifies the right’s position that additional funding for impoverished schools in poor neighborhoods (because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision brought by right-wing representatives of a white female parent in Seattle, only white kids are allowed to have school “choice”) will not improve education, so why bother? This justifies continuing to lower education funding to the point where most of the money goes to teacher salaries and building maintenance, if that.
McKenna has, however, jumped on the “human trafficking” bandwagon as a means of proving that he really does “care,” although it also fits in nicely with his law and order shtick. Last week he presented his “national initiative” to “combat” human trafficking, which he claimed was his personal mission to “protect the vulnerable” against “modern day slavery”—the “selling of another person’s body through the use of force, fear or coercion.” It is interesting to note that he isn’t the only Republican in the state to latch onto this issue in lieu of problems afflicting the impoverished, homeless and hungry in this country. Ex-congressperson and right-wing extremist Linda Smith has also been big on the human trafficking, although her angle is more along the lines of converting the lost to Christianity. According to the Hillary Clinton’s State Department, 12.3 million adults and children are in “forced labor, bonded labor and forced prostitution.” McKenna is quick to insert that this is “not just an international problem, but a local one.” Good thing it is, because McKenna doesn’t have time or tax-payer money to go globetrotting. According to a Seattle Weekly story a couple years ago written by Nina Shapiro, finding these local slaves is not always easy:
“Leigh Winchell, head of the regional office of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sits in his high-up downtown Seattle office overlooking Puget Sound. ICE, as it is known, is charged with conducting trafficking investigations domestically. Winchell recently popped up in newspaper coverage of a June prostitution bust in Bellevue. Two of the alleged prostitutes were illegal immigrants from China. Winchell told the Seattle Times reporter writing about the case: ‘Human trafficking in the sex trade is alive and vibrant, particularly in the Northwest.’ Yet the Bellevue police, who helped conduct the raid, say they do not believe the women were being held against their will. When I ask Winchell about that, he tells me that he did not intend to suggest that this was a trafficking case. ‘Any comments I made in regard to the Bellevue case were more global in nature.’"
I’m not certain what he means there. Maybe it is that since you can’t prove that women who engage in prostitution in this country do not have the freedom to make a different career choice, that is not the case in places like Thailand, where the sex trade is part of the tourist “attraction”—much like Las Vegas; proselytizers can mind their own business, and are told so by the supposed “victims.” So there is a problem of indeterminate numbers (estimates range from a few hundred thousand to 200 million); this really is not a question of how many “slaves” there are, but who should be counted. Feminists, not surprisingly, have made common cause with the hell-and-damnation element to simply count the number of people working in the sex trade:
“In some respects, the evangelical worldview is similar to that of certain strains of feminism, which also see the world as full of evil—perpetrated by men on women, with sex a primary means of exploitation and abuse. Hence, Equality Now, a New York organization that works on international women's rights and has Gloria Steinem on its advisory board, is enthusiastically working with religious groups on trafficking. The famous feminist University of Michigan law professor Catherine MacKinnon, also affiliated with Equality Now and whose fervent anti-pornography views have put her in alignment with the Christian right before, is deeply involved with the cause (I mentioned this before, but I once attended a guest lecture by McKinnon, which was suggested to me by a female professor who I hoped only found her views “thought-provoking”—she surely couldn’t have believed she was serious. Aside from me, the only male in the auditorium was a reporter from the local newspaper; McKinnon was clearly uncomfortable with his presence. Forced to tone down her rhetoric lest it make into the local paper before she left town, at this gathering she only made such “moderate” assertions as 15 percent of all college women are raped. This claim, made by a radical university women’s association, has long been discredited; however, within the safety of her radical network, McKinnon has expanded this claim to include all heterosexual sex is “rape,” and that lesbianism is an explicitly anti-male “choice”—which, of course, fits in right nicely with conservative religious views)."
If McKinnon and Steinem had their way, human trafficking would be seen in the narrow prism of the sex trade, but a Weekly story that followed Shapiro’s a few months later tried to redress the imbalance, only not very successfully. The story concerned an Algerian teenager who had immigrated illegally to the U.S., going to school in Seattle, living with her aunt and uncle who ran a coffee shop. The basis for calling this case one of “human trafficking” and slavery comes from the notion that she was not paid for working at the coffee shop, and that she was occasionally “grounded” for not obeying the rules for her upkeep, such as partying all night with people she hardly knew. Since the coffee shop was a family business, and that perhaps in Algeria family members are expected to “help-out” for their room and board, perhaps there was a “cultural” disconnect between mores in there and in this country. It also stands to reason that since the aunt and uncle were responsible for the girl’s safety, they felt they had to put a clamp on her; how does this amount to “slavery?” I actually wrote to the author of this story, and she couldn’t provide answers to my queries that made any sense whatever.
It may be true that prostitutes, “do not truly do so of their own free will but have been driven by economic desperation and abusive circumstances,” returning to the Shapiro story. “But does that make them, literally, slaves? What about sweatshop workers? Poorly paid janitors? They're not as demeaned as prostitutes, but surely they'd prefer to be doing something else, too. One gets the impression that we are dealing with a new, shocking crime. It seems an odd label for prostitution, the oldest (profession) in the book.” Concerning the assumed victims, one researcher is quoted "Nobody's bothered to ask them how they got there and if they're exploited.” Out of 1,000 people identified by “activists” as victims of human trafficking and slavery in Mali and Cambodia, "only four could be classified as having been deceived, exploited, or not paid at all for their labor." Although some women had turned to prostitution to receive and then pay back loans (“debt bondage”), only six of 100 Vietnamese prostitutes working in Cambodia "reported having been 'tricked' into sex work or betrayed by an intermediary."
Coincidentally, the Seattle Weekly published another cover story on the topic this week, concerning the campaign by actress Demi Moore and her under-age actor husband Ashton Kutcher to “illuminate” the issue of underage prostitution. Moore is basically a has-been in Hollywood, so in order for her to feel “relevant” and workout her angst against sexist and ageist male studio executives and producers at the same time, she’s latched onto this hot-button issue, with her husband dutifully tagging along. Moore had no idea of the extent of the problem, but somehow she dug-up a 2001 University of Pennsylvania “study” that claimed that 100,000 to 300,000 underage girls were picked-up by police every year for prostitution. The study has been criticized for poor and/or non-existent examination of actual facts, but there is no accounting for the public taste for ever more salacious fantasy; A former Hillary Clinton staffer and his wife are managing the “campaign,” and they admit that facts don’t matter—only making the issue at hand as big a problem as they can make it matters. After the Moore/Kutchner campaign began, various major news media suddenly “discovered” the study as well, making all sorts of inflammatory and attention-grabbing claims like the usually dour C-Span’s “Children in our country enslaved sexually” and typically fact-challenged CNN’s “There’s between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States.”
The reality is that any study with such a wide gap in its “estimate” simply can’t be trusted. The authors of the “study” these figures come from admit that they make some rather broad and wild assumptions, such as American girls in San Diego going on a weekend trip to Tijuana not to booze or do drugs, but to prostitute themselves and load themselves with cash. The authors of the study admitted that they included youths who might be “at risk” of child prostitution—meaning runaways. But the authors of the Weekly story pointed out that FBI statistics show that 77 percent of runaways are gone for no more than a week, and only 7 percent for longer than a month. An informal survey of police records in 37 major cities found barely over 8,000 arrests for underage prostitution in a ten year period—800 a year, not 100,000 let alone 300,000. One of the authors of the “study” eventually admitted that there probably was no more than a few hundred underage “sex slaves” operating in the U.S. That there shouldn’t be any is a given; that some people are using grossly-inflated numbers to frighten the public in order to inflate their egos and work-out personal “issues” is neither ethical or moral. It just makes people for whom facts do mean something more cynical about such claims.
Meanwhile, undaunted by facts or the possibility that human trafficking is not quite the scope he envisions, a Seattle Times story reports that McKenna nevertheless “wants to prosecute traffickers and buyers, and mobilizing communities to provide support to victims…Human trafficking is the only crime I can think of where the victim is more likely to be prosecuted than the perpetrator.” McKenna is obviously referring to prostitutes here, even if most of them operate independently; if (former UW basketball player) Venoy Overton isn’t available to “pimp,” then who is the “perpetrator?” A functionary from the Department of Homeland Security claims that “human trafficking was a fast-growing area of criminal endeavor, and victims may be hidden from public view and from those who might want to rescue them. They are typically afraid of police because they're involved in prostitution and have been told they are criminals themselves and will be punished if they are caught.” Huh? First, if they are hidden from view, that means that numbers can be inflated to suit a political objective; it doesn’t mean it is true. Secondly, is prostitution a crime or not? Is it only a crime if a “pimp” is involved? If prostitutes are not criminals, then why should they be afraid of being arrested? I told you that whenever gender activism takes hold, logic goes straight out the window.
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I was listening to a story on local radio station, probably the National Public Radio affiliate, last week concerning something called the “Homework Club.” This club was located in a school the Highline school district (if I heard rightly), with a large number of students from low-income homes. Initially I found it to be a positive story, about a half-dozen kids who needed extra assistance, and a couple of teachers who instead of sitting in an empty class room until their day was over assisted these kids if they wanted. There was talk about the lack of transportation for kids who would miss their bus and have to walk a long way through bad neighborhoods. Very sad. But sadness turned to gladness when it was discovered that the school was getting extra money: $21,000 of spare cash, $500 extra per English as a Second Language students. So what was this money used for? Screw the 42 students who were having a difficult time learning because of the language barrier—let’s buy a bus and some other goodies for these half-dozen “special” kids. My empathy went right down the toilet. Frankly, I think the school district should investigate this matter.
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I was watching Kevin Costner’s “The Postman” the other day, one of those “message” movies he made after the success of “Dances With Wolves.” I’m a sucker for message movies if they are politically to the left, and I didn’t think it was as bad as critics said it was when it first came out in 1997—although it likely would have better if its story line had more in common with the source novel beyond its title. The scene was set in 2013, and by then the civilization had virtually disappeared do to nuclear war and the collapse of society. Now, some people might say that in the year 2011, and despite what survivalists, neo-Nazi militia types and Tea Party people might suggest, we are far from that vision of the future. I suppose that 16 years sounds like a long time, but it really isn’t; sometimes it seems like only yesterday, especially when you dwell on those wasted years.
Writers and filmmakers obviously have great imaginations, and so do readers and viewers. They want to believe that the future holds many exciting marvels and vistas, kids especially. When I was growing up, books on space travel imagined floating cities entirely self-sustaining, colonies on the moon by the 1990s. I mean, how much farther was Mars from the Moon? A spinning giant donut with gardens to feed a population the size of a small town? Surely for Americans, the greatest people on Earth, who built the Saturn moon rocket, could go the next small step? Right?
Wrong. While I have to admit that electronic devices have come a long way since I was kid, and kids should consider themselves “fortunate” that they live in such an interactive world, that doesn’t mean that they have the tools to become smarter human beings, just that they have “smart” devices to do their work for them. But that’s it. Sure, there’s computer generated imaging that can send you to pretend places, but we are no closer to placing a floating city (or village, for that matter) in space, and no person has reached the Moon since 1972. Given the high cost of such missions, it is difficult to see them ever realized again, unless someone discovers a more efficient propulsion mechanism, which remains the most daunting obstacle to any manned space flight beyond the Moon.
When George Orwell wrote “1984,” he already had the example of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to provide him with inspiration, but in 2011, while some aspects of his vision of a totalitarian state that continually monitors the activities of its citizens, detain “thought criminals” and controls what passes for truth in order to maintain its authority still has some validity (such as in China), it has become fiction rather than fact. In 1997, World War III will be narrowly averted by some guy named Snake, who rescues the president from the crooks in Manhattan, which became one giant prison camp. Funny thing, I missed it. “2001: A Space Odyssey” would be better titled “Oddity” given the unlikelihood of its vision of future space travel. According to “Blade Runner,” in 2009 there were flying cars; 28 years into the future does seem like a long time, but technology has obviously moved at a relative snail’s pace, if it has moved at all. This year, according to “Aeon Flux,” the entire planet is wiped-out by virus; if that were true, Charlize Theron need not embarrass herself making another awful superhero movie. In “2012,” the world will end in an unexplained cataclysm; some people say that the Mayan calendar’s supposed “end time” actually refers to great celebration. In 2022, New York City will have a population of 40 million, and people were eating something called “soylent green.” With a population like that, somebody thought it was natural that a few thousand people wouldn’t be missed being sent into the sausage grinder. Some movies, knowing that how far-fetched their visions of the future were, took fewer liberties with their guesses of future events. “Logan’s Run,” a kind of biosphere where in order to maintain a certain population, the beautiful white people were killed-off when they reached the age of thirty. This future world was set sometime in the 23rd century, so by then the filmmakers would be dead long before they could be proved ridiculous. Humans in one form or another have inhabited the planet for several millions years; by the looks of Java Man, they probably reached the level of today’s great apes around 500,000 BC. But “Planet of the Apes” predicts the apes will reach human evolution that was current in 2,500 BC by the year 3978 AD; a lot of luck with that.
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The Rod Blagojevich re-trial, of which I was not the only person who regarded the whole thing as a farce, ended in conviction on most counts. The easiest decision, the jurors said, was on the issue of whether he ‘sold” Barack Obama’s vacated senate seat. The problem here is that politics is nothing if not horse-trading (although Republicans these days seem intent on stubborn stupidity which they call “principle”). We live in a very strange world; a congressman is forced to resign because he sent some snaps of his bare chest to a couple of women. Yet we had a president who secretly approved of selling weapons to a rogue regime that referred to the U.S. as the “Great Satan.” We had a president who committed adultery—in the White House offices—and he’s come out of it practically unscathed. We have congressmen and senators who support legislation that benefits certain donors (they call it “pro-business”), and then work for them as lobbyists or serve on their boards. We saw a man who served on the board of a company, went on hiatus went he became vice president, saw to it that his company received no-bid contracts eventually worth billions, pocketed tens of millions in “deferred” payments, and hardly anyone said anything; the guy should be in jail now, instead of occasionally growling and sneering on Fox and CNN (wasn’t he also the guy who “accidentally” shot a hunting companion?). And in the overall scheme of things, people are living in a dream world if they think that politics is in theory so pure of morality and ethics. You support this, I’ll vote for that. Politicians receive donations from interest groups if they support laws or do not enforce regulations. Of course, we are told that a governor is supposed to make appointments based on competence, but we know this isn’t true. So why didn’t Blago get away with what is common practice? Because he was unpopular in the media, and was untrusted by his own party, and gentility wasn’t in his vocabulary.
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There has been recent news reports that the police will start cracking down harder on hand held cell phone use. Most people will probably still try to get away with it if they can, but if they feel discomfited by it, they can always blame Sarah Potts, who smashed her brand-new Ford explorer into a stalled vehicle in 2002, unleashing a wall of flame that crossed two lanes; four people inside died a horrific death. Although police initially said that Potts—the wife of a Bothell police officer, was not driving recklessly because she was “going with the flow” of traffic at approximately 60 mph, a state patrol investigation found witnesses who said she was weaving in and out of traffic, suggesting that she was driving at least 80 mph. Worse, she was clearly distracted talking on her cell phone; although she disputed this, phone records showed that she was using her phone at the time of the accident. The state patrol recommended prosecution for vehicular homicide, which of course was ignored.
A former writer for the Seattle Weekly, Eric Scigliano, wrote sometime after the episode was “resolved” that despite Potts essentially getting away with murder, there was no favoritism being showed to law enforcement or their wives, because of the outcomes of two other cases involving a fireman and a police officer who were legally DUI and ended-up killing people. I had to beg to differ with his interpretation; in the case of Eric Thomas, a Bellevue police officer, was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, while George Moorehead, a firefighter also convicted of a similar crime, yet received only a year's community service. There was something amiss here; what could account for this clear favoritism and double standard? It seems that Moorehead, the firefighter, was white, and his victims were two Vietnamese girls who were walking on a Bellevue sidewalk. Thomas was black, and the person whose car he struck (who was also driving drunk) was white. Thomas manfully confessed his crime and stated he deserved punishment. At Moorehead’s sentencing the courtroom was packed with his family and supporters, and there was so much sobbing and regretfulness permeating the atmosphere that it was impossible for the relatives of the Vietnamese victims to get in a word edgewise. I'm certain that when it was all over that they felt their daughters were the guilty party for getting in the way of Moorehead’s car.
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Despite the Justice Department threats that doomed the relatively tepid state medical marijuana law—which essentially made state employees regulators of legal marijuana instead of the police—several local figures of note (the European tourist guy Rick Steves and former U.S. attorney John McKay among them) are backing a law in the state not just in providing protection for medical marijuana users, but to make it legal for everyone. There are currently two competing pro-legalize initiatives making the rounds, New Approach Washington and Sensible Washington, both of which say essentially the same thing—legalize, regulate and tax marijuana—although the latter (which seems aimed at decriminalizing pot completely) is running out of time to get the required signatures. The New Approach initiative, because of its pedigree, may have a better shot of at least getting on a ballot; it calls for 21 to be the legal age to smoke marijuana either for medicinal uses, or not. A major difference is that like hard liquor currently is, it would be sold through state-licensed marijuana-only outlets; the Liquor Control Board would oversee its production and distribution. Individuals would be limited on one ounce of dried bud, and only licensed producers can grow it, so it somewhat limited in scope and still gives police room to harass users. Nevertheless, it would seem to be the easier pill to follow for those in the federal government still operating under the illusion that the “war against drugs” has been anything but a failure that has cost tens of thousands of lives to no purpose.
As an aside, I wonder who this initiative is really supposed to benefit. We frequently hear of police hassling or arresting people in minority neighborhoods, while other users go suspiciously unnoticed. I was walking past an underpass that the Interurban Trail in Kent passes through; there were these white kids, who looked and talked like your typical privileged class, smoking weed. They even offered me a bud, which I scoffed at; the stuff never did anything for me, probably because I didn’t inhale properly.
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Because of my extremely modest means, I like to think of myself as a “smart” shopper, meaning purchasing the most bang for the buck. I might prefer the more expensive product, but if it is food, sweetener can always improve my outlook. Now, some businesses do their best to fool the customer into purchasing what they think is a good deal, but is not necessarily so. Fast food restaurants are particularly sneaky about this. Take for example McDonald’s. They currently advertise three options for Chicken McNuggets:
20 for $4.99
4 for $1.29
10 for $4.58
At first glance, it would seem obvious that the 20-piece is the better buy than the 10-piece. If it was a choice between one or the other as separate items, even a caveman could figure it out. However, the catch is that the 10-piece can come separately or as part of a Meal Deal. If you wanted a drink and fries with your 20-piece, you would pay more those additions than you would for the same drink and fries for the meal. As for the 4-piece option, would pay $3.87 for 12-pieces, making it technically a better deal than the 10-piece, although you would still encounter the same problem as just mentioned; on the other hand, you would be paying the equivalent of $6.45 for 20 pieces, so it is not the best value for the buck. We can assume that the 20-piece still reflects a bottom-line healthy profit for McDonald’s, so the other options expand on the concept. Overall you are left with options that require some thought if you are on a tight budget; two 4-pieces for $2.58 is better than 10 for $4.58, but only if you also order small fires and drink as well; ordering the larger sizes will exceed the 10-piece meal price, and you will actually be getting less bang for the buck. The 20-piece only makes sense from a budget standpoint if you don’t intend on making additions to your order, or you just want more McNuggets and cost isn’t an issue.
Alright, that’s our math class for the day.
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I watched a YouTube recently of a pigeon which laid her eggs on someone’s balcony. She hadn’t constructed what could be called a nest—just a half-dozen randomly placed twigs. Worse, the two eggs were placed not on the nest, but off to the side—and she was not sitting on them at all, just kind of looking at them as if it was the “natural” thing to do. When the individual approached with a camcorder, the bird simply got up and casually walked away. Since the eggs were not being incubated properly, they would soon rot. Although street pigeon’ nests are an eyesore, their general construction does resemble in a rudimentary way a typical bird’s nest. Some viewer comments were as follows:
“That is one bad nest... I think this bird is retarded...”
“Look at that nest. This pigeon fails as a mother.”
“This fool fell asleep during Nest Making 101”
“I've watched plenty of wild birds lay eggs and YES, keep them in the NEST! This pigeon obviously missed the memo. And if I ever walk up to a nest (birds around here make them rather low and usually on light fixtures even though they have plenty of trees to choose from) the mom stays in the nest unless I actually try touching her.”
“No male pigeon helps with nest to build for her and built it on her own before the eggs....she might be afraid of sitting and smash the eggs out of the nest!”
Apart from calling the bird retarded, it was hard what to make of this. Nest building, like flying, is an instinct in birds; research has shown that birds raised outside the influence of adult birds will act “normally” once they reach an internal and physical maturation date. “Smart” birds like crows and ravens may imitate certain behaviors if it is useful, or adapt to supernormal stimuli; it is not "learned." Blaming the male bird for failing to provide a suitable home may be usefully politically, but the fact is that in most species, the female constructs most or all of the nest; the female American Robin, for example, expends considerable effort to insure that the nest conforms with the contours of her body, in order to protect the eggs from the elements. Not all birds build nests, and a few species of penguin build “nests” of pebbles, so the observation that the pigeon was afraid of crushing the eggs does not answer the question. What we may be seeing is some behavioral cross-wiring, as in domestic chickens, where most hens do not go “broody” after laying their eggs; most street pigeons, though a strain of Rock Pigeon, are feral descendants of domestic birds.
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Guess who says he is changing his name to Metta World Peace? Why, Ron Artest, the guy who close-lined J.J. Barea in the NBA playoffs and got himself suspended for a game, and congratulated Andrew Bynum after he was ejected for launching himself like a missile beneath Barea as he was going up for a shot. Artest recently received the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award by the NBA award, supposedly given for "outstanding service and dedication to the community." It’s one thing to give some of your millions to worthy causes; it’s quite another to provide a bad example for kids in your personal dealings with others. Money, however, can buy a lot of goodwill and “forgiveness.” Back in the old days, they called it the selling of indulgences, where a wealthy person could purchase God’s forgiveness for his or her sins. Artest will, of course, go down in NBA lore as the man who was suspended for a record 86 games after a brawl with Detroit Pistons’ fans. Like the Barea suspension, the incident was instigated by Artest’s seeming inability to restrain his violent impulses when there was no call for it; with the game in the final minute and all but over when he applied a hard foul to the Piston’s Ben Wallace just any lessons on “peace,” maybe he should control his urges to take a “piece” out of people.
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Speaking of names, I came across a story from “The People’s News” concerning a young girl who was suing to get her name changed. It seems that her single mother, for want of anything more creative, named her little girl Clitoria. A judge in Detroit had recently ruled in favor of a class action suit on behalf of a number of girls whose mothers refused to abide by the girls’ wishes and change their names to something more sensible, observing that “such outlandish names seldom take into account the societal effects on the child.” Among the names the judge ruled against was one written in Incan hieroglyphics. “She said it would make me stand out,” said the girl who previously owned this appellation, which caused some confusion in court since it can only be reproduced by invention, since the Incans had no written language. “It’s really just stupid.” The ruling was also likely to allow “little Clitoria Jackson” to get a new name. The belief that black girls require increasingly incomprehensible names is not likely to end soon, however. “It’s so hard to keep coming up with something unique,” said Uneeqqi Jenkins, 22, a black mother of seven who survives on public assistance. Her children are named Daryl, Q’Antity, Uhlleejsha, Cray-Ig, Fellisittee, Tay’Sh’awn and Day’Shawndra.” Teachers lauded the ruling; "Oh my God, the first day of school you'd be standing there sweating, looking at the list of names wondering 'How do I pronounce Q'J'Q'Sha.'? " said one teacher who refused to be named for fear of parental retaliation. “Is this even English?"
This was obviously a satirical piece, though with a serious point. I added and subtracted some things from the original story, but I couldn’t have made-up those names if you paid me to.
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The company I work for has taken a lot of flack, mostly unfair, from employees from other airlines, including the one we service. We are constantly reminded that we are interlopers, scabs and somehow inferior. I recall someone who was training with one of these companies telling me that disdainful commentary in regard to us was common practice. I say that these people should mind their own store. Let’s take, for example, one of the larger airlines which I will identify as “Acme Airlines.” The results of the American Customer Satisfaction Index found Acme Airlines dead last in its consumer poll for the second year in a row. The unions representing Acme employees also consider the airline a poor employer, nursing grievances about wage, benefit and job cuts. But that begs the question: Is poor employee attitudes and poor service related?
A website call “Glassdoor” seems to suggest that this is the case, observing that “Mediocrity is the goal for (Acme).” This seems evident by the fact that customer complaint phone lines were so tied-up that in 2009, Acme discontinued its customer complaint line; complaints can still be sent by email, meaning that the company can more easily dismiss them.
For people who feel their complaints are ignored, there is a website called untied.com in order for them to let-off steam. Here is a sampling of the commentary:
“Acme has absolutely the worst call center/customer service in the industry! Total incompetence!!”
“Customer Service is the worst at Acme Airlines and we will never fly them again. We will recommend to everyone to stay away from the unfriendly skies at Acme…Of all the disturbing events I’ve witnessed at airports in recent years, I must admit that Acme’s abuse of its passengers, both on and off the ground, has put me over the edge. I was conned into flying Acme on two separate occasions - both overseas trips (to Germany in 2004 and to England in 2007). I insisted during the planning of the 2007 trip that I refused to fly United, and was overjoyed at the prospect of flying with Lufthansa only to discover after the fact that Lufthansa had partnered with Acme…Needless to say, I was royally ticked because I knew that the experience would be an exercise in terror.”
“I will NEVER fly with Acme Airlines again. It is a total joke. They are not interested in doing the right thing. Their so called "customer service" department is a fraud. People do not speak proficient English and hang up on you when you do not buy their ridiculous offers. "Customer Service Supervisor" is also a joke.”
“Never have I been treated more rudely at an airport. Ms. XYZ was brusque, unhelpful, and unprofessional.”
“I can honestly say that I will never fly Acme Airlines. I hope Jane Doe yelling at a customer was worth the company losing business.”
“I was better off driving in a car. My experience with Acme was a complete nightmare. I have never been so stressed out during travel, and I refuse to fly Acme so long as I can avoid it.”
“If we do not hear back from AA to resolve then my parents plans to seek counsel and file motions against AA employees for the disruption they caused on our family vacation.”
“That incompetent gate agent caused me a lot of un-necessary stress and despair. She also did nothing about the $60 luggage charge. If I performed like that at my job, I would be fired instantly.”
“The people that work and run our airline are dumber than a box of rocks. You treat all your customers like terrorist for your stupidity and lack of security. The top management of Acme Airlines have to be the dumbest people on Earth. As long as Acme Airlines has been in business Acme just gets better at making passengers luggage disappear. Most people get arrested for stealing. Acme Airlines thinks that is part of the experience of flying with them. I think every employee of your airline should (be) drug tested every time the airline screws up. You are doing a great job of being the worst airline. Keep up the great work your airline will be out of business before you know it.”
Moral to this story: If you want to criticize, just make certain that you are not the one setting the “standard.”
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