The Current Situation – Page 6

Separated at Birth? Part IV

Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and actor Gig Young.

Whenever I see Roberts I half expect him to stand up in the middle of everything and start walking towards the Homewood bandstand (or at least take a shot at Warren Oates).

Edward R. Murrow’s 1958 keynote speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association convention frames the beginning and ending of Good Night, And Good Luck. The complete text is up on RTNDA’s web site and despite being 47 years old it’s just as spot-on now. Even more so.

Exactly what somebody wanted to have happen

One last parapolitical thought – this one lifted from David Brin. I’m by no stretch a Brin apologist and his particular brand of militancy gets irritating but the last couple of paragraphs in this blog entry struck home. He’s talking about Iraq, but it basically applies to Katrina too.

Finally… see a couple places where moderates have proposed alternatives to the current “stay the course” vs. “cut and run” dichotomy. Both seem reasonable and are probably compatible — both could be done simultaneously.They are:

“The Way Out of Iraq: Decentralizing the Iraqi Government” and “How to Win in Iraq”

These articles make sense… and they won’t be implemented because the goal of the involvement in Iraq has never been success at nation building. Yes, that is officially our purpose now that there are no WMD and no Saddam. But Cheney and Rumsfeld both famously expressed contempt for “nation building” long ago and their disbelief in it still shows.

No, there are only two possible classes of hypothesis to explain such a disaster. (* Kool-aid alert! Paranoia riff about to resume! * 😉

Hypothesis 1. Incompetence. These are moronic frat boys, using the United States and our military as personal toys. The calamity is not what was intended. It is just what happens when skilled professionals – first diplomats and then military officers – are relentlessly over-ruled by meddling politician imbecilles bent on playing war and stealing everything in sight.

Hypothesis 2. What you see is what was planned. This explanation looks utterly paranoid and I am the only one suggesting it. And that means I must disclaim that it is formally what I BELIEVE to be true. Yes, yes. Brin’s Fantasy. But it IS logically the other side of the coin. My excuse is that I am a completist and must include it.

Still, let me repeat my call for you to step aside and look from another angle. If you were enemies of the United States, and looked across our history for some weakness to exploit, what two disasters nearly ruined us? Dividing us, sapping our strength, wounding the economy, tearing down our alliances, frittering our military strength?

The Civil War and Vietnam.

Now look at last year’s electoral map. And look at Iraq. And wonder… which sworn enemies of our culture have access to every powerful person in this administration?

Paranoid? yes. But reasonable people do not automatically dismiss that which fits all facts and has not been disproved. Always leave a “what-if” possibility open that what you see is exactly what somebody wanted to have happen.

Dear Grand Isle, LA

Haven’t seen any news reports from you, but I hope you’re OK. I was there in January and liked it a lot.

Wrenwood vs. Snowflake

There’s much more under the hood of Todd Haynes’ Safe than the basic slow death by suburban life plot, but regardless of which ambiguous analysis you follow the endpoint is still the same: Julianne Moore’s character is compelled and/or logically decides that living in a germ-free igloo is the only way to recover some real or imagined medical/emotional/psychological control.

I never would have expected Safe to be in that small list of “future now” tales like Blade Runner where the social milieu/whathaveyou inside supersedes the story. Well maybe not so soon. Enter Snowflake, Arizona…

In this town 150 miles northeast of Phoenix, “for sale” signs have become as commonplace as sagebrush. “Real estate has gone crazy around here,” said Bruce Wachter, an agent with the local Century 21 franchise.
But one “for sale” sign has a group of residents worried. They suffer from multiple chemical sensitivities, an illness that led them to flee cities for this remote high desert town.

An electrical engineer from Mesa, a broker from Chicago, a software executive from Santa Cruz, Calif. — all settled in Snowflake to escape pesticides and paints that they say caused them devastating health effects.

Now they fear that a nearby house could be bought by a family that wants to use chemicals on its lawn, or install a blacktop driveway, rendering the fragile haven a haven no longer. “We might have to evacuate some people,” said Susan Molloy, who has lived in the area since 1994.

Nevada nukes nuke plate

Via the Memory Hole…

Department of Motor Vehicles Director Ginny Lewis, backed by Gov. Kenny Guinn, decided to cancel the plate because its design prominently features a mushroom cloud, a familiar sight to longtime Nevadans who once watched the atmospheric atomic tests set off 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The move immediately was criticized as a bow to politics, and Troy Wade, chairman of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, called on Guinn Thursday to reverse Lewis’ decision….

Damnit, I seriously would have moved to Nevada just to get one of these awesome license plates for my new car (which I’ll get to in a bit). The California plates are just so damn ugly with a horrid script font that belongs more to a twenty-year-past-it’s-prime beach nightclub than a license plate. Years ago there was a proposal for a California “desert protection” plate with a wonderful mosaic design, but not enough people were interested enough for the DMV to move ahead on it. Time again to try a Joshua Tree or Mono Lake plate folks?

Freelanced

I’ve been (un)steadily freelancing since the beginning of the year and since things have finally settled down into a routine it’s time to spew out some free advice…

First, if the job advertisement doesn’t list a salary range it means they expect job applicants to be desperate enough for work that they’ll undervalue themselves. If the position remains open for a long time that means other applicants have wised up. Corollary to that, if you apply for a job and don’t hear anything for over a month that means that they hired someone else who later wised up and split. You are now their second or third choice.

If the position announcement has incomplete sentences, poor grammar, or misspellings don’t even bother with them. This isn’t just a Craigslist issue – I’ve seen this on more “corporate” job sites.

If you do get work, make sure sure sure that you have some sort of employment agreement that covers the pay rate and period. The agreement doesn’t need to be complex, just something that will help prevent you from getting screwed.

Anil Dash is much more eloquent with the last piece of advice than I could be:

I talk to a lot of consultants, freelancers, and small businesses who do web work, and I used to be a freelancer myself, so sometimes I get asked for advice on how to price one’s goods and services.

I think I came up with my best suggestion today, and it involves only two simple steps:

Slap the client in face.

Tell the client your hourly rate.

If the person looked more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face, then you are still pricing yourself too low.

Your mileage my vary, this is not to be construed as legal advice, eye-poking may be substituted for slapping in some states.

Separated at birth? Part II

Separated at birth?

Cell tower camouflage

Boing Boing links to some photo galleries of radio and wireless phone transmission towers, but the most interesting gallery is this collection of camouflaged cell phone towers that look like trees, bell towers, flagpoles, or anything that isn’t an antenna collection.

The best is the “fake cell pine diseased tree” which could easily be called the “Charlie Brown cell phone tower.” Need to find a cell tower? Search online.

Dogs and cats living together… Mass hysteria!

Senator John Cornyn (R – TX) is afraid that gay marriage will lead to a slippery slope Sodom & Gomorrah of marrage absurdity

“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.”

So why stop there?.

John then listed the stuff he plans to marry. Not long afterwards, Victoria at Unspeakable Vitrine picked up the meme and came up with her own list.

Now that the bedrock of Western Civilization has been irrevocably shattered here in Portland, I realize that it’s time for me also to be lawfully wed to a selection of animals, objects and concepts. Here’s my list. I encourage you to post your own. Remember, an elected official has made it clear that if you can marry someone with the same bathroom parts, you can marry ANYTHING. Have fun, and happy marriage!

Therefore, I intend to marry:

The box turtle, because The Man is putting them down.