As always, click on the image to enlarge it
On top of all my other worries recently, it appears that the bozos who administer my health plan decided to cancel my coverage retrocative to 31 March 2005. They just got the following FAXed to them (I'll remove the X's if they prove unresponsive):
SUBJECT: URGENT ACTION DEMANDED REGARDING MY ACCOUNTOn 4 March 2005, I sent via US Mail Check No. 2361 to Xxxxx Xxxxx for payment of March and April premium fees. My bank records indicate this check cleared on the 10th of that month. Moreover, the bottom of my May 2005 statement (see addendum) clearly states "payment of April, 2005 premium has been received." This definitively establishes that Xxxxx has solicited, received and accepted payment for insurance services.
On Monday, 25 April 2005 I sent Xxxxx by US Mail Check No. 2378 in payment for my May, 2005 premium. As it is now past business hours, I have been unable to confirm with my bank if the check has cleared. However, as I have received no communication from Xxxxx about payment problems, at this time I have every reason to assume it has.
On Saturday, 31 April 2005 I received a telephone call from Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx at Xxxxx asking to confirm my request to terminate coverage. I clearly stated to her that I had sent in no such request and wanted coverage to continue.
This afternoon, I was informed by Kaiser Permanente's Interstate South Clinic here in Portland, OR that my membership in Kaiser Permanente has, at Xxxxx's request, been cancelled retroactive to the last day of March, 2005.
A little more background is in order. On the evening of Friday, 22 April 2005 I was involved in an injury bicycle accident. One of the wounds I received in this accident has the potential to cause permanent facial disfigurement. For this reason, it is absolutely imperative that I receive proper medical care in order to heal this wound with a minimum of permanent disfigurement.
Any delay in being able to receive further treatment makes permanent disfigurement more likely. I cannot stress strongly enough that such a possibility is totally intolerable on my part.
This message serves as notice that I intend to hold Xxxxx liable for the full costs physical and emotional damages incurred by this delay, as well as the costs of any litigation and/or legal consultation necessary to receive such compensation. Moreover, it also appears that in accepting payment for insurance services and failing to deliver same, Xxxxx has committed the crime of fraud across state lines.
I demand that my membership in Kaiser Permenente be reinstated immediately.
Absent any such definitive resolution of this matter by noon, Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, 4 May 2005, I intend to discuss this matter with my attorney and report Xxxxx's behavior to the appropriate Federal and State authorities for possible criminal prosecution.
I regret the necessity of taking a harsh stance on this, but to reiterate: any unnecessary permanent disfigurement is completely unacceptable to me and it is thus imperative that this matter be given the absolute highest possible priority on your part. I await a prompt resolution to this matter and sincerely hope that further steps such as those outlined above prove unnecessary.
They say they're working on fixing the problem. Which is probably the case, given how I lit the issue on fire and dumped it on them.
If you're thinking that I use the “nuclear option” regularly when dealing with people, think again. This is only the second time in my life I've used it. (The first was with a high-tech company unwilling to support an expensive software package my employer had paid tens of thousands of dollars for.) I'll be very happy if I never have occasion to use it again.
The thing is, organizations have their “procedures” and “priorities.” A single customer isn't normally anywhere near as important as these. In this case, the problem happened at a uniquely bad time for me. Waiting a few days for the standard procedures to work might be acceptable in a normal case, but this is anything but normal.
Ultimately, my health is more important to me than the future well-being of any organization. If I'm in a situation where organizational ineptitude creates an immediate threat to my well-being, I feel fully justified in creating a counter-threat to that organization's well-being to ensure a symmetry of urgency on both sides.
Better to frazzle their nerves than my body, I say.
Score another victory for the “nuclear option.” (Which, to reiterate, I hate using, but sometimes it beats the alternatives.)
Saw the Enron documentary by that name with a friend yesterday at Cinema 21. Just had some thoughts about the criminals responsible for this organization, in no particular order:
I get home from some errands at noon, half-expecting to see the dreaded UPS spoor on my door indicating that their sixth sense has, again, managed to correctly guess when I'm out. My cynicism was unrewarded.
Unrewarded in that I was being overly generous to the bastards. I leave at 2:30 PM on another set of errands, only to be greeted by the inside surface of a UPS spoor with my name on it staring at me through the glass of the front door. I had been in my condo the whole time! And the worst thing about it was I had a sign explaining how to use an entry system already posted!
That's right, the rat bastard of a UPS driver (can't call him a “delivery person” because the one thing he doesn't do is deliver) had ignored my sign, not even attempted to ring me, and left his “spoor” behind instead.
No, dipshit, contrary to the text on your message, you didn't in any way “attempt to deliver” my package. Fuck you very much, and rest assured that the next item I order I'm going to be explicitly specifying that they not use UPS for delivery.
This, that is.
And didn't “it” happen oh, about thirty-odd years ago? With the same effect on automakers and the economy?
Who was it that said history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce? Oh, yeah.
That sound you heard was the remaining conservative reader of this blog concluding that I'm a complete commie and leaving.
This, alas, should not come as a surprise, given the well-known reputation of the police in Colombia.
It is, in fact, one of the main human rights problems in Latin America that despite a great deal of progress in making governments nominally more democratic, the police in many nations there are still very much a law unto themselves.
This blows the mind.
Not because it's possible to squat undetected somewhere on LANL property (LANL occupies a lot of real estate, much of it not actively being used for any purpose and pretty remote from any lab facilities or any other human facilities for that matter), but because it was possible to squat fifty feet from DOE headquarters without being detected for four years.
Sure, DOE HQ in Los Alamos is on the edge of a pretty rugged canyon, so it's understandable they wouldn't see Moore's home from HQ itself, his home being out of sight over the canyon rim. But he had a fricking woodstove in there. You'd think someone working at or visiting the HQ building would have noticed the smoke before that. Especially since Los Alamos has a history of devastating forest fires; you'd think smoke coming from a wooded area right on the edge of town would set off literal alarm bells.
Not only that, DOE HQ is in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and one that's pretty densely populated for a town the size of Los Alamos (lots of apartment buildings). That means more pairs of eyes to notice smoke where smoke doesn't belong.
Finally, despite it being a restricted area, you'd have thought that the neighborhood kids would have come across Moore's place on their explorations of the canyon. (I know from experience that many, if not most, kids in Los Alamos ignore the fact that the canyons are LANL property closed to unauthorized entry; from a kid's point of view they make tremendously fun places to explore and play in.)
I see that the self-proclaimed Party of Smaller Government is now attempting to bully local school districts into violating the privacy of their students.
KBOO is airing a program by an alternative-health care “doctor” right now. Amongst the pearls of wisdom he's dispensed that stick in my mind:
Go here for some ugly details from a very credible source.
The trouble is, fixing the problems (for a real meaning of the word fix, i.e. ensuring the problems go away instead of simply being turned around and exacting pain on the other side) is not going to exactly be easy.
Certainly, a fix is not going to come about from electing Chavez' biggest foes to power. Their commitment to any principles of freedom and human rights were amply demonstrated in the failed April, 2002 coup d'etat. They're like capitalists and capitalism fans worldwide — the democratic state is just fine as long as it continues to generate properly bourgeois outcomes; as soon as it doesn't it's into the ash-can with democracy and on to fascism.
Given how horrid the human rights records of other Latin American right-wing regimes that gained power through coups against elected left-populist governments is, it's almost certainly a very good thing for human rights that the coup failed. Whatever evils are in Chavez' Venezuela pale in comparison to Pinochet's mass executions, El Salvador's death squads, Argentina's dirty war, and so on.
Which, of course, doesn't make those evils any less evil. I'd sure hate to be living in fear that an overly-broad Guardia Nacional dragnet might result in my torture or death for nothing more than walking around in a neighborhood that happens to be the location of an anti-government protest.
Funny thing about the real world. Simplistic good vs. evil battles seldom exist in it.
So, will the West attempt to cozy up to the emerging revolution there (it is, after all, a revolution being led by businessmen and not popular leaders; doing so would hardly endanger the interests of the corporate elite), or is it too politically inconvenient because the dictator there is already in the US government's pocket? Whatever the outcome, you can bet that (whatever the rhetoric) human rights will not be the key motivating factor.
And it's hardly a surprise that it's come to this there, given the long-documented brutality of the regime in power. It's hardly an inexplicable outpouring of rage by Islamic extremists who are motivated by nothing but a hatred of the West. Though it may well turn into just that if the West continues to turn a blind eye to the abuses of the government simply because it's a military ally.
More on Uzbekistan here.
It appears that the situation in Uzbekistan is too politically inconvenient because it threatens a friendly dictator. The domestic media is wasting no time in characterizing the opposition as “Islamic militants” and/or accepting the Uzbek government's description of them as “Islamic extremists” at face value.
There's no doubt that they're Islamic, as Islam is the dominant religion in Uzbekistan. There's also no doubt that Islam itself is a major motive in their dislike of the government, as the Karimov dictatorship tightly controls religion (and brands any expressions of religion outside its control as “extremist”).
And therein lies the rub. There's a huge spectrum of Islamic belief that's outside the realm of what any sane person would consider “extremist” but which the dictatorship suppresses as such.
And in dismissing the demands of the Uzbeks as such and turning their backs on them, the ruling elite in the US is paving the way for the Uzbeks to forge alliances with real Islamic extremists. Who have every motivation to support that opposition as it means the destabilization and overthrow of a US ally.
Because, of course, a key concept of revolutions is that revolutionaries are desperate. They'll gladly accept help from anyone who offers. Always have, always will, at least since the days when some British colonies in North America enthusiastically accepted the assistance of one of the most unjust monarchies in Europe.
Which, therefore, makes dismissing the Uzbek opposition as nothing more than Islamic radicals a textbook case of self-justifying prophecy.
…More politicians as frank as this.
Luis Posada Carriles, the terrorist I alluded to last month, has finally been arrested.
Or maybe I should say “reluctantly been arrested,” since apparently he had been living quite openly in a Miami condo for about a month before making things too blatantly brazen for even the Bushies by inviting a Miami Herald reporter over to his pad for an interview. Note that he's been arrested by immigration officials simply to justify the legality of his being in the USA, not on any criminal charges, so it'll be easy to quietly release him in a day or two.
But it's fun to watch the ruling elite squirm as a result of their own hypocrisy as they decide what to do with him.
That's what I think of when I look at this site. Somehow, they think that local folks ought to be able to control Forest Service land management decisions, apparently because of property rights.
Property rights is a very strange star to hitch that wagon onto. The national forests are the property of the Federal government. So property rights in this case means they should butt the hell out and let the Forest Service make decisions on how its property is to be managed. Sure, it's a public agency and they can give their input. But if they're serious about property rights, they should also be deferential to the wishes of the agency that owns the land, and respect whatever decision that agency eventually makes.
The claim that it's been a county road for 100 years or more smells fishy to me. Oh, I won't doubt that there's probably been an easement for passage through that canyon for 100 years. Probably for 1000 years, even. But it's been in the form of a trail, not a maintained road for motor vehicles. There were very few roads suitable for motor vehicles in Nevada in 1900, after all. 100 years ago, Jarbidge Canyon was probably served by foot and pack-animal path, used by prospectors and their mules, and maybe the odd cowboy riding in to look for stray cattle.
This skepticism is backed up by the behavior of the county that claims ownership of the road. It was washed out in 1995 or so. If it was a county road, one would think the county would get busy fixing it in short order. Especially if it's as important a road as those in high dudgeon over it being closed claim it is. Instead, everyone sat around waiting, waiting for the Forest Service to fix the road, and getting more and more upset as the Forest Service dawdled in this respect. That would appear to be an implicit acknowledgment that it was the Forest Service's road and not the county's road. So they lose on property rights with respect to the road, too.
To add a another bizarre touch, that web site, full of rants against the Federal government, is full of the nationalistic symbols of that same government.
And while the claim that less than 10% of Nevada was taken into Federal ownership by constitutionally allowed means may well be correct, something tells me they probably wouldn't be happy if that situation was rectified according to the principles of property rights by returning it to the heirs of its rightful owners. Who, by the way, have skin several shades darker than the (presumably white) folks who created that web site.
This comes straight from a book report lifted off another one of those right-wing sites that's extremely confused about nationalism and property rights:
On July 24, 1911, the men of Jarbidge, Nevada left their mines and shops and set out to finish a road. The gold rush which had brought thousands of adventurers to their region during the previous two years had been hampered by, among other things, inadequate access to the town. And when Elko County abandoned the road it was building into Jarbidge from the south, citizens undertook the do-it-yourself government services the region was (and still is) known for. Women provided meals, men brought their tools, and by sundown the job was almost complete. These people didn't have time to wait for a reauthorization of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act.So, the county wasn't very interested in the road. Which didn't exist at all during the time in the 1860's and 1870's that the dusty old law they cited gave them ownership of it was in effect. And the road certainly hadn't been there for 100 years around the turn of the millennium, when all the clueless right-wingers were claiming it has.
In fact, by the time 1911 had rolled around, TR had already made that area part of the then brand-new national forest reserve system. That's right: there was no road when it became a forest reserve. The road came later.
As a result, so it seems, of unauthorized vigilante roadbuilding. It seems that disrespect for property rights has been a long tradition in that part of the world.
The question I have is: were the old-timers honest and did they say they thought some forms of property rights were a questionable concept as they disregarded them on a matter of principle, or were they like today's lying weasels who disregard property rights all the while whining about how property rights are inviolate?
That's my take on this.
The problems for the ruling elite started when we Portlanders elected a progressive mayor. It's continued when he actually stuck to campaign promises like pulling out of a joint task force with the FBI that was probably spying on people in violation of state law. And now his approval ratings are higher than on the day he was elected.
Even though it's hardly caused a sea change in the basic parameters of society, apparently any lessening of absolute iron control is totally unacceptable. Clearly its time to attempt to re-frame the parameters of debate, and pronto.
Not that it has to make sense or anything. Consider this reference to Mayor Potter's plan to take the local electric utility into public ownership:
"Among other things," said Boyle, "it would say: Our financial obligations exceed our revenue, and we have trouble maintaining our existing line of business. Management's attention in the last year has been focused on acquiring a new line of business, and if we acquire it, we will spend much of our time learning how to run it."First, the running of PGE will be the responsibility of everyone who's currently there, with the exception of the uppermost echelons of management tainted by their long associations with Enron, lying to state regulators, and cheating on PGE's taxes. Pretty much everyone else there is a loyal employee who's skilled in doing his or her part in running an electric utility. The job of keeping the lights on is pretty much the same whether it's under public or private ownership. There's no reason PGE's current workers can't continue on once the utility is municipalized.
Second, once the dishonest profiteering (and honest profiteering, for that matter: it all comes out of ratepayers pockets) is cut out of the picture, electricity rates will fall. That's important, as Portland currently has some the highest rates in the region. Rates that are paid by businesses as well as residential customers. In fact, PGE's business rates are even more out of whack with regional norms than its residential rates are. Far from being a distraction, taking PGE into public ownership will address one of the big reasons why Portland is an uncompetitive place to do business.
So, basically, here we have a corporation run by a CEO who's so desperate to (with his rich buddies) be calling all the shots that he's willing to act against the financial best interests of the firm he manages in the name of doing so. If I were a Columbia Sportswear stockholder, I'd be mighty pissed that a CEO who's purportedly hired for the purposes of maximizing my returns is instead arguing for higher business expenses to be imposed on me.
This doesn't make sense. At least the Oregon and Washington data doesn't make sense.
Look. There's basically three contenders for the most liberal city in Oregon. From north to south: Portland, Corvallis, and Eugene. And no, I'm not pissed that Portland wasn't chosen. Voting patterns in recent elections would point to Corvallis winning the title.
But Lincoln City? Give me a break! Sure, the county it's in voted for Kerry over Bush. Narrowly. Nothing comparable to the margins Multnomah, Benton, or Lane counties. It's definitely not Bush territory, but it doesn't compare to the three cities mentioned in the last paragraph, either. Trust me, I've been to them all.
And if this is representative of the quality control these folks exercise with their demographic data, it throws doubt on every claim in their site. King County has been a Democratic stronghold for decades. Even if they didn't know that, how much horse sense would it take think there might be something just a teensy bit fishy about data that indicate a sea change in public opinion like that? And that just perhaps a more logical explanation is that some numbers got swapped around by mistake. It's not like election returns are a big secret and it's hard to follow up on such a hunch or anything.
This is interesting.
Not because I'm a huge Emacs-fan. I prefer vi, because it's small, fast, and free from feature-creep. Well, at least the traditional legacy vi and nvi are. Vim seems hell-bent on becoming as much of a booger-eating fat pig as Emacs is.
Which just about removes the main reason for using vi in the first place. It sure as hell isn't the vi user interface (which I've always thought is pretty awful). It would make me unlikely to use vim even if that editor wasn't written by folks incapable of coding screen updating properly. And that's a pity because the nvi project appears to have been abandoned, leaving vim as the only vi-like editor out there under active development.
Anyhow, back to Mac Emacs. The interesting thing about it is that apparently it has working UTF-8 support. Which is more than one can say for nvi, vim, or the stock version of Emacs Apple distributes with OSX. All of which, while 8-bit-clean, can't seem to display anything but US-ASCII in the terminal window. I know, I've tried to make them do so. So whatever Emacs' faults, it's nice to have a non-toy editor that can handle something other than 7-bit ASCII.
Spoke too soon. Neither the carbonized Emacs nor the stock one work for inputting non-ASCII characters the standard Mac way. Thanks to a decision decades ago to use the eighth bit as a “meta prefix,” attempts to use the standard Mac keystrokes end up being interpreted as Emacs commands.
Normally, by this time of the year, I'd be about a fortnight into about six weeks of the abject misery that is grass pollen season in the Willamette Valley, home to the world's biggest concentration of grass seed farms. But ever since late March, the drought pattern has been replaced by a persistently rainy and cool one. Result is that onset of the grass pollen season has been delayed compared to past years. Grass pollen counts have been low to zero so far.
So I'm still in suspense as to whether the multiple measures (air filtration, air conditioning, nasal steroids, and new antihistamines) I'm throwing at the problem will bring significant relief or not. I won't get into the ugly details on how awful my symptoms are, but suffice to say it's more than just a few minor sniffles. So I sure hope everything I've done makes for a significant degree of improvement.
If the forecast of warm and dry weather for next week holds true, I'll know soon enough.
So I decide to give this editor a whirl. Java was written with Unicode support from the get-go, so any editor written in Java should work just fine with UTF-8.
Or so I thought. Turns out that one of the most persistent and nagging bugs in the Java virtual machine is its inability to handle dead keys correctly. And dead keys are precisely how accented characters are entered. End result is yet another very nice US-ASCII text editor.
One would really think that, a decade or more after Unicode became a standard character set, one would be able to easily find some degree of support for it. Especially under an OS that supports the character set. Guess my expectations are unrealistic.
So I give up. I'll check back in a year or two.
So, after decades of an idiotic traffic signal design whose key salient features are that it (a) costs more money and (b) creates more traffic congestion and air pollution, we're now getting around to spending yet more money reversing the brain damage and crowing about it like it's some sort of brand-new improvement.
It's not. I learned to drive in a state that was too poor to afford to dedicate a separate set of lights for each left turn lane. Instead the light held above the traffic lanes had sometimes one and usually two extra elements: a green arrow and often a yellow arrow (to indicate that the green arrow was about to turn out). The turn lane was covered by a green arrow or a green light; either your turn had the right-of-way or you could make it if you yielded to oncoming traffic. There was no way to have the turn lane covered by a silly red light while the rest of the traffic had a green, so it wasn't done.
And traffic flowed remarkably well. It took me ages to get used to how much more I sat at red lights in the Pacific Northwest thanks to our more “modern” traffic lights.
Turns out I had a Unicode-capable editor installed all along: the venerable old nvi. Getting it to act as such was a simple matter of setting the LANG environment variable to en_US.UTF-8 .
Well, almost. It's not that hard to make it glitch when deleting and undeleting multi-byte characters. Or even moving the cursor over them in some cases. Interestingly, once the source for the even more venerable traditional vi was made publicly-available, it's been picked up and put under active development. So the “old” vi is actually now newer than the “new” one! And it works with multibyte characters as well, though like its cousin it has a few glitches.
I don't know if I've said it here before, but I'll say it now: punk rock is simultaneously the best and the worst thing to happen to the anarchist movement in decades. The best because it's brought in lots of new people. The worst because it's directed so much of their energy into creating an inward-looking subculture that — absent some major changes — is unlikely to affect the broader world.
As much as these comrades claim to be “fed up with symbolism,” reality check time: actions such as this are symbolic.
Yes, dressing up in all black, wearing masks, knocking stuff over, and painting graffiti all have more an edge to them than politely staying within the bounds of the law as the liberal peaceniks were doing. But they're still just protest techniques. After they were done, everyone at the protest — anarchists and liberals alike — went home. Nothing lasting came as a direct result of the protest itself. It was all just a statement.
And it's a statement that's as open to the charge of being tired and clichéd as the quieter actions of the liberals. Seattle, 1999 is now six years in the past. Could I please see a coherent argument as to why those more aggressive tactics are more appropriate in this particular situation?
It's amazing how often real direct action has much less of an edgy and confrontational nature to it (and seems much less clichéd). Starting an alternative currency and/or bartering network, operating an infoshop, going to high-schools and doing counter-recruitment counseling, refusing to pay taxes to war-mongering governments, or even just talking to your neighbors and respectfully discussing your ideals with them. All those actions have much more to do with directly creating a better world and much less to do with symbolism than that protest.
Which is not to say that protests are useless. Far from it — symbolism has its place as well. But let's be honest as to what they are. Engaging in symbolism as a way to denounce symbolism looks just plain silly.
How does one know the politics of everyone at the so-called “liberal peace rally?” I happen to know that several of the organizers of such “liberal” rallies in Seattle are actually anarchists. We don't all dress up in black and smash things at protests, you know.
And while I'm not close enough to them to know their politics, I will say that the so-called “liberal” Portland Peaceful Response Coalition: (a) was one of the first anti-war organizations to appear on the scene, (b) has had anarchists participate in their rallies (see last sentence in previous paragraph), and (c) has always turned out to make a statement through thick and thin, even when nobody else (including the self-proclaimed holier-than-thou set) was bothering to do so.
That's about the only conclusion that can be reached upon reading this.
I mean, really now. Concede, concede, concede and give Monkey Boy less trouble on judicial appointments than Slick Willie ever got. And then concede some more.
With an “opposition” that consists of pathetic losers like this, is it any wonder that the GOP's support continues to grow? Say what you want about their policies: at least they believe in them, aren't afraid to stand squarely behind them, and aren't afraid to fight for them.
Oh, yeah, “the filibuster has been preserved.” Preserved only because you guys refused to use it. Rights that are granted under the condition that they never be used are rights that don't exist in reality. They're just a bunch of meaningless words and hot air.
Second day of dry, warm, windy weather and still no horrible hay fever. I'm not quite ready to proclaim victory yet, because the local pollen counting station hasn't reported since Sunday.
Eugene's grass pollen count was sky-high today, but (a) that's in the Allergy Heart of Darkness, the epicenter of grass-seed-farming territory, and (b) there was a strong breeze blowing up the Columbia from the ocean today.
So I'm going to wait until tomorrow at least before announcing success.
Mind you, it's not unfathomable that some bureaucrats in California could really be silly enough to require warning labels on baked potatoes. They might cause cancer, you know. It all brings the lyrics to this song to mind.
On the other hand, the bureaucracy is part of the executive branch of most state governments. And we know that the executive in California is a fan of deregulation and probably wouldn't mind seeing warning labels that actually make sense (but get in the way of some of his rich buddies profits) go away.
Which just makes me wonder if there isn't a hidden motive to the whole thing.
As always, click on the image to enlarge it
That's what comes to mind upon seeing the above ad. Capitalists lobby for ridiculous concepts of intellectual property, then when it exposes people to artificially-created liabilities, they sell security back to those from whom they stole it. And crow about it as if they've done the world a favor.
Because if idiocy like software patents didn't exist, there would be no need for Micro$oft's “indemnification” thank you very much.
Five or ten years ago, when I first came across an argument that open source was going to win over proprietary software because it was superior, I remember being struck at the naïveté of its author. Capitalism is not about freedom and markets are not about rewarding technological superiority. Capitalism is about maximizing profits and markets are about rewarding the maximization of profits.
Just because there can be a correlation between maximizing profits and maximizing technological superiority doesn't necessarily mean there will be. And if there's money to be made by using the coercive arm of the state to sabotage the free software movement, you can bet they'll try to do so.
And yes, the arguments that the Internet is going to spell the end of the big one-to-many media empires are similarly naïve. If it shows signs of doing so, expect some form of government action intended to cripple same.
Technological progress is no substitute for social progress.
And Tom Tomorrow's statement “[t]hey are Charlie Brown to the Pentagon's Lucy, but without the anguish” is one of the better metaphors I've seen in recent months.
As far as the Pentagon's claim that “These kind of, sort of, fantastic charges about our guys doing something willfully heinous to a Koran for the purposes of rattling detainees are not credible on their face,” why not? Remember, instances of torture are well-documented, and not only at Abu Ghraib. Instances of rendering people to be tortured in other nations with CIA agents at hand ready to transcribe extracted confessions are well-documented. Both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo had the same commander, fer chrissakes.
Given that the abuse of human beings is so well-documented, it would seem completely credible on its face that inanimate objects which prisoners have strong emotional attachments to would also be abused.
A letter to the editor in today's Oregonian:
CEO's comments not constructiveIn your May 22 editorial, “Diplomatic dispatches,” about Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle's attack on city government in his speech last week, you ask, “(W)as anybody listening?”
Yes, I was listening. And this is what I heard:
I heard a wealthy, white, middle-aged male express no empathy for people who are not of his social strata, race and religious beliefs being unfairly targeted by the feds under the guise of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
I heard criticisms of Portland's business climate with no acknowledgement of the dramatic improvements in Portland's permitting system for new and growing businesses.
I heard no acknowledgement of the drop from 7 percent to 5 percent in the amount the city levies on sewer and water bills that homeowners and businesses pay.
I heard no understanding by Boyle that Enron/Portland General Electric is the poster child for corporate wrongdoing and that the city's efforts to stop the exploitation of ratepayers is embraced by some of the largest industrial customers of PGE.
Yes, the business income tax needs to be reduced. [But] how are we going to make up for the lost revenue; or which community centers or pools is the Council proposing to close to pay for the business income tax reduction?
Yes, I heard Tim Boyle. I heard him focus on what he doesn't like and did not hear him say anything constructive or propose any solutions.
RANDY LEONARD City commissioner Southeast Portland
And that last line explains why Boyle said it and was so desperate to get regain sort of upper hand in dictating the parameters of a debate that's escaped the control of the business elite. (And, as Leonard alludes to, it's only the rightmost subset of the elite at that. Many business owners like the idea that they'll be writing a smaller check to a municipal electric utility every month.)
Maybe if more Democrats on the national level would be willing to argue forcefully for their beliefs they wouldn't have so much difficulty attracting sufficient support at the polls.
Personally, I don't have much use for organized religion, but I can understand being sentimental about something you've been taught to revere from the day you were born. Plus, there's the plain old desire for respect at play as well. So the outrage over flushing the Koran down the toilet is understandable.
What I can't understand is how the widespread demonstrations against the physical abuse of an inanimate object are apparently outpacing any demonstrations against the physical abuse of human beings. Especially since many of those abused humans belong to the same religious and ethnic groups as those demonstrating against inanimate object abuse.
Which, I think, gets around to some of the why behind my personal lack of much use for organized religion.
I'm somewhat reluctant to conclude so because I'm still somewhat afraid of the other shoe dropping but we're now into Day No. 3 of windy, hot, pollen-laden air and still no major allergy symptoms.
So I guess I've “won” in the sense that I'm not going to go through absolute hell for the next four to six weeks. I'm still not completely thrilled at having to spend so much time indoors avoiding pollen in air-conditioned spaces. But I'm worried about provoking my system beyond the ability of the drugs to suppress the allergic reactions if I don't, and it's a price worth paying to avoid what's happened in to me Portland during years past in grass pollen season.
Go here now.
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