Personal Musings category archive

King George the Wurst speaks:

President Bush this month issued his first signing statement since the Democratic takeover of Congress, reserving the right to bypass 11 provisions in a military appropriations bill under his executive powers.

By God, it’s his country. He owns it. Why the hell should he obey the law? After all, isn’t his word the law?

Give me a break.

Via Susie.

The local rag carries a daily feature on the front page of the local section.

The feature is entitled “A City’s Deadly Toll.” It lists the number of homicides year to date in Philadelphia. There have been more homicides this year than there are days in the year 2007 so far.

And, no doubt, when I open the paper tomorrow, two or three more murders will have happened over night.

Actually, two is not a bad night. Sometimes, it’s three or four or five.

Yeah, I know I live in Delaware, but I worked in Center City Philadelphia for many years.

I used to be a member of a Center City church.

Philadelphia is a great town and I love it.

When I read David Aldridge’s column this morning, I thought it was a powerful piece of writing, but I wondered, just how could I share it with my two or three regular readers?

Then I realized.

It’s a powerful piece of writing. Who cares to whom he directed his column? He speaks to all of us.

For when one life is wasted, all of us are diminished.

From today’s local rag:

A doctor and his wife who face deportation because of a long-ago mistake on their immigration paperwork reported to federal authorities Monday but were allowed to return home while lawyers seek political support for them to remain in the U.S.

Dr. Pedro Servano and his wife, Salvacion, obeyed an order to meet with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Philadelphia and were told to report back in 60 days, attorney Gregg Cotler said. No deportation date was set, he said.

“I think that’s very hopeful,” Cotler said.

The Servanos, parents of four U.S. citizens and prominent members of their central Pennsylvania community, could be deported to their native Philippines because of a change in their marital status during their visa-application process more than 20 years ago.

The Servanos were single in 1978 when they applied for U.S. visas. They did not receive them until after they were married, but U.S. officials were not notified of the change in their marital status.

By all indications, they were not aware that they had to amend their applications.

They have served their community well and lived exemplary lives.

And the United States is preparing to throw them away.

This is not right.

Upyernoz sums it up well:

so now the administration is switching tactics entirely. it’s giving up on reconciliation, which means it’s not trying to fulfill any of the benchmarks anymore. which can only mean that the surge was a failure–the benchmarks are the measure set by the administration to measure the surge’s progress and now the administration itself admits that those benchmarks will not be met. the surge simply did not do what it was supposed to do.

Yeah, well, he’s right and you all know that. All the claims of “success” are rationalizations for failure. Some slim gains in calm on the streets of Baghdad and not much of nothing anywhere else. And no political gains at all–and, remember, the idea of the S(pl)urge ™ was to buy time for political consolidation, not to perfect the occupation.

Another Bushie failure.

The war in Iraq–conceived in lies, prosecuted with incompetence, propagated in duplicity.

And this surprises us how?

My brother is an umpire.

I’ve seen him in action. He’s actually pretty damned good, as much as it pains me to say that.

(Full disclosure: I got suckered into umpiring once, first base. Never again. Give me a training class in front of a bunch of hostile railroad conductors who have just come off 90-day disciplinary suspensions any day of the week and twice on Sundays.)

It’s not his day job. He’s one of the persons who umpire Little League and Babe Ruth and High School games, for no or for only token pay, so kids get to play the game. He’s been doing it for almost 30 years.

He doesn’t do it because he enjoys the abuse from coaches and parents and fans. He doesn’t do it because he likes ejecting the occasional obnoxious player or parent or coach from the park (something he doesn’t hesitate to do, with an autocratic streak he didn’t show when I, pulling three years’ rank, was Wild Bill to his Jingles).

He umpires because he loves baseball.

He sent me this link. Welcome to umpiring (oh, yeah, he’s got some great stories about the parents and the coaches and the players, but they are his to tell):

The most common cause of fatalities amongst recreational boaters is getting drunk and falling overboard.

That’s one reason I run an alcohol-free boat. The other is that the water is so much fun, who needs a drink?

The next greatest danger for recreation boaters is fire, not so much for outboards–because everything is pretty much out in the open–but for I/Os and inboards. If there’s a leak or a mistake, gas fumes can build up in the engine compartment and kabloeey!

I was out on the Chesapeake one day and saw a recreational boat burning. It’s a pretty gruesome sight–lots of smoke and the fire doesn’t go out until it reaches the waterline.

Fiberglass burns good.

As a couple found out yesterday.

I feel for the couple and their loss. I once met a couple at Georgetown Yacht Basin who, upon retirement, had purchased a sailboat and pretty much used it as their home as the sailed about North America, much as some persons purchase RVs and cruise KOA.

I wonder whether they had the boat inspected by a marine surveyor when they bought it–buying a boat to sail down the Intracoastal Waterway is a lot bigger investment than buying a little runabout to trailer from here to there.

And, you know, the water is a dangerous place. And what you can see from the boat is only the top of it.

Little Ricky had his first column in the local rag yesterday.

I could not bring myself to read it. I didn’t want to ruin an otherwise okay Thanksgiving. Okay because my girlfriend’s convalescense from her recent hospitalization is pretty rough: she’s convalescing–that’s good; it’s not easy–that’s not good.

So I didn’t want to ruin it with Little Ricky Sanctimonious-orum.

Fortunately for me, Will Bunch saved me the trouble of backtracking and reading Little Ricky’s drivel.

Via Atrios.

. . . is a term referring to the day after Thanksgiving in the USA, a term I did not hear until I moved to the Greater Philadelphis Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Somehow, I have never been able to wrap my tiny brain around the idea of compulsively doing Christmas shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Actually, I rather like shopping on Christmas Eve. There’s a certain desperation about last-minute shopping that appeals to me.

Karen Heller dissects Black Friday here.

(Aside–I don’t get lots of hits, but I know I do get hits from all over the place. How common is the term, “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving in your part of the world?)

(Aside again–One of my neighbors has already decorated his yard for Christmas. He had his landscapers out to hang lights in his cedar tree. A little early, thinks I.)

About a week ago, I blogged about the futility and fatuousness of self-styled “diversity training,” which, frankly, I view as a fraud and deception foisted on the training consumer.

The local rag (the one to which I don’t subscribe because I want a paper that takes more than 5 minutes to read) had a good follow-up story today.

This quote illustrates what happens when bad training is implemented by incompetent trainers:

Freshman Ryan Schneer, who is majoring in chemical engineering, believes the diversity program is an attempt to force students to adopt university-approved ideologies on debatable matters. And he doesn’t like the aftermath he has seen.

Schneer, who is Jewish, said he is concerned for a friend on another floor of his Russell Complex dormitory who is a devout Christian. Schneer said his friend wound up standing alone on the “No” side of the room when students in the Residence Life program were asked if they approved of gay marriage.

“Everyone else was on the other side,” Schneer said. “He’s a great guy, a nice person, but I ran into some girls at a party and they talked trash about him. I asked them, ‘Is he a bad person?’ But they’ve already made their decision. People who are different or outspoken are looked down upon. Things like this are tearing up the ideological diversity this nation was founded on.”

Lanan, a geology major, said people who objected to the program have been wrongly accused of intolerance.

A program which is supposed to foster tolerance, but, which, instead, creates it, deserves any bad publicity that it gets.

(Full disclosure: I believe the evidence resoundingly shows that sexual orientation is born, not made, and, because it is born, not made, cannot be changed.)

In case of the student described in this piece: If, whatever his personal beliefs and attitudes, he treats all persons in the same way, who the hell cares what he believes? His beliefs are his own.

Only his behaviors are the concern of his family, his friends, and the larger society–and only to the extent they affect his family, his friends, and the larger society.

(In other words, if he wants to show one face to his family and friends and another face to the larger society, that is, so long as no one is harmed, his privilege. Where does common courtesy end and hypocrisy begin? When there is harm. If there is no harm, the duplicity, if such there is, is between him and God, but society doesn’t have a stake in it.)

The latest on the s(pl)urge:

The lack of political progress (in Iraq–ed.) calls into question the core rationale behind the troop buildup President Bush announced in January, which was premised on the notion that improved security would create space for Iraqis to arrive at new power-sharing arrangements. And what if there is no such breakthrough by next summer? “If that doesn’t happen,” Odierno said, “we’re going to have to review our strategy.”

Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, deputy commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division, complained last week that Iraqi politicians appear out of touch with everyday citizens. “The ministers, they don’t get out,” he said. “They don’t know what the hell is going on on the ground.”

Dan Froomkin has more.

I have been amusing myself today, in between cooling towers, by trying to think of anything that the Current Federal Administration has touched that hasn’t turned to shit.

The economy?

The Federal budget? (Oh, yeah, there used to be a surplus, before it was given away to the rich. Remember?)

The justice system?

The tax code?

Civil liberties?

The War in Afghanistan?

The War in Iraq? (See the opening citation.)

It’s the Midas touch.

As the treasurer for my church, I get to pay the bills and shoot my mouth off in meetings.

We got our first fuel oil delivery for the winter season.

Fuel oil is running $2.99 a gallon.

More than gasoline.

Oh, yeah, and the War in Iraq was going to pay for itself.

No, I didn’t leave my body and float above it.

I nearly died.

I’m driving down Delaware 1 past Dover Air Force Base, admiring the flight line of C-5s. It was raining heavily off and on all morning.

I’m in the left lane. There’s a van in the right lane two car lengths ahead of me.

And suddenly the world disappeared.

Muddy water covered my windshield for at least two seconds.

I could not see anything through the windshield.

Fortunately, the road is straight at that point. I backed off the exhilerater and just hung on.

I was still shaking when I got to the cooling tower place 20 minutes later.

All I can guess is that the van hit a patch of standing water and splashed me out.

The local rag had two columns on the death penalty yesterday.

One was by Jonathan Last, a conservative with whom I seldom agree, but whose thoughtfulness and reasoning I respect. Last’s central conclusion (full disclosure–my opinions on the death penalty are stated here):

And here is the one case where the prudential unhappily intrudes on the moral: If the existence of a criminal poses an ongoing threat, then the death penalty can be a necessary evil. Such cases are incredibly rare, limited mostly to heads of criminal states or organizations. For instance, an imprisoned Osama bin Laden would pose a continuing threat to the citizenry by inspiring violence in ways a mere murderer, or even a serial killer, would not.

Yet the list of such hypotheticals can be counted on one hand. The overarching case is there to be made that the death penalty should be put aside in America – not because it’s unconstitutional, or because it doesn’t work well, but because it’s wrong. And this should be accomplished not by courts torturing the law, but by citizens and legislators changing the laws.

Waste of Newsprint, on the other hand, cited a study which showed a decline in murders in years following an increase in executions, trumpeting it as proof of a deterrent effect for capital punishment:

They have documented a relationship between capital punishment and the future rate of homicide. When executions leveled off, the professors found, murders increased. And when executions increased, the number of people murdered dropped off. In a year-by-year analysis, Adler and Summers found that each execution was associated with 74 fewer murders the following year.

Of course, he failed to note the study’s authors’ own caution:

74 fewer murders a year.

From 1998 to 2000, there were 12,658 murders in the United States.

74. Triple that to 232 to cover three years. That’s a 1.8% per cent reduction.

How do you say, “statistically insignificant”?

But, yeah, this is fairly typical of Waste of Newsprint’s reasoning.

Waste of Time.

Now, it has been a long time since I studied sociology, but I do recall reading a study that documented that severity of punishment is not a deterrent. Certainty of capture is.

As long as criminals pretty much reckon they won’t get caught, they don’t really think about severity of punishment. And, of course, those who commit crimes on impulse aren’t thinking of the consequences at all.

This link leads to some readings on the subject.

And, as usual on the Hypocrisy Watch, there was no mention of whether Senator Thompson should retire from politics and spend his remaining years with his family.

Now, I do have to say, Waste has a certain “Everyman” appeal.

He’s sort of like Fred Flintstone with a typewriter.

One day this might turn out to be my son.

I certainly hope not.

And it was all for a lie.

Via Will Bunch.

I do not claim to be a Biblical scholar.

My conversations with God tend to rather one-way–my trying to figure out what would be the right thing for me to do, and, frankly, too often making the wrong choice.

I have read the Bible through a few times–not the King James Version (but, then again, God did not spake in Elizabethan English), but, rather, the Jerusalem Bible, which, as far as I am concerned, is the only modern translation to combine facility of language with poetry worthy of the KJV).

Thanks to my Baptist upbringing, I do know the scriptures pretty well. That doesn’t mean I understand them.

There’s the old joke about the pastor who was asked what he thought of his wife. “Well,” he said, “she’s sort of like the King James Bible.” He paused. “She’s beautiful, but I don’t always understand her.”

As I recall, the Bible recognizes that God spoke directly to three persons: Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.

It is noteworthy that the number of white right-wing Christianist clerics who claim that God spoke directly to them within the past five years rivals the number of persons that the Bible reports God spoke directly with in two thousand years of biblical Old Testament history.

Such as Pat Robertson. Or was that Oral Roberts? Or Ted Haggard?

It must be good to be a white right-wing Republican “Christian” and to know that God is on your side.

That way, you do not have to worry about trying to be on God’s side.

I was thinking today about why I haven’t been posting all that much.

Part of it, of course, had to do with visits to the E. R.

Part of it had to do with racking up billable hours.

And part of it is just fatigue.

Fatigue with corruption.

And with lies.

And with flip-floppers.

And with buffoons.

And with organized hypocrisy.

And with distortion.

Depravity fatigue.

It’s a NeoCon thing.

was a Jefferson Airplane song.

It’s also the policy of the Current Federal Admnistration.

As regards you and me, that is, not as regards their own conduct.

Learn more at Senator Dodd’s site.

The Writer’s Guild of America is on strike.

Frankly, I think they have cause. Their employers are denying them revenues from electronic versions of the shows that they have written.

But let us look at the larger picture.

While my girlfriend was in the hospital, we looked at the hospital television (full cable). That reminded us why our television life consists of Law and Order, CSI, and M*A*S*H reruns and Forensics Files.

Gosh! There might be no new television shows.

Aww, shucks!

Or any other day, for that matter.

But at 6:00 on a Sunday morning, you do get quick service. All the knifings and shootings are taken care of, and the lawn mower and leaf blower accidents haven’t started yet.

My girlfriend developed a nosebleed early this morning. To stop it, the doctor had to inflate a balloon in her nose (think: abscessed tooth pain levels).

She will remain in the hospital until the device can be removed, at least one night, possibly two.

The Diversity Monster surfaced at the University of Delaware.

When University of Delaware freshmen showed up at their dorms this semester, their orientation included an exercise aimed at bridging cultural divides.

But the program backfired after they were told to write down stereotypes of different ethnic and religious groups and publicly give their views on issues such as gay marriage and affirmative action.

(snip)

Delaware’s diversity training program is under scrutiny after students complained that they were pressed to adopt university-approved views on race and other sensitive topics, participate in squirm-inducing exercises, and rated on their responses to questions about their sexual and cultural beliefs.

Parents and professors also complained that the program is politically slanted, citing training material that claims all white people living in the United States are racist.

What is the Diversity Monster?

Well, it has nothing to do with the social, religious, ethnic, cultural, and racial make-up of the population of the United States of America.

Yes, America has a population of truly diverse backgrounds, perhaps the most diverse in the world. And, for a number of valid reasons (I won’t go into the history here–it’s readily available), one of the side effects of this diversity is the creation of the Diversity Monster.

So what exactly is this monster?

It’s the thriving little industry of consultants (many of them well-intentioned) and charlatans (many of them trying to become well-heeled, others just jumping on the bandwagon of the day) who think that by, structuring experiences designed to expose persons’ opinions and prejudices in small (and sometimes large) groups and then humiliating persons for those opinions, they can somehow change “attitudes” and eliminate bigotry.

It is a fitting offspring of EST.

Just for grins and giggles, take a break and google “diversity consultants.” I just did, and I got “approximately 1,870,000” hits, to cite the results page.

These projects are doomed to failure.

Why? Because there is no such thing as an “attitude.” There is therefore nothing to change.

If I say, for example, that “Opie has such-and-such an attitude,” I’m not talking about Opie.

His “attitude” doesn’t exist in his head.

It exists in mine. It is a judgement that I make of Opie based on the behaviors I have observed. I can’t change it in him because it doesn’t exist in him.

There is no such thing as “attitude.”

There is only behavior.

Now, I’m not arguing that racist, sexist, cultural, and other types of bigotry don’t exist.

Just go here to see numerous examples of them. (And leave a donation when you do. Morris Dees is the Real Deal.)

And what are those examples? Examples of . . .

(Wait for it.)

. . . Behavior.

The way to grapple with misconduct, whether it’s based on race, color, religion, creed, sex, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, and (in some jurisdictions) sexual orientation, is to grapple with . . .

(Wait for it.)

. . . Behavior.

In one of my previous incarnations, I taught a class that was colloquially referred to as “EEO training.” It really wasn’t “equal employment opportunity” training. It was training in how not to get the company in trouble with the EEOC (not something to worry about these days).

We would open the class by telling the attendees (who usually weren’t to happy to be there, but it was mandatory for all supervisors at all levels) that we were not there to change–or even to talk about–what they believed or felt, that the company did not have the right to dictate beliefs to them.

But, we would go on, the company sure as shootin’ had the right to tell them what they could and could not do on company property or on duty and how they must respond if a problem was brought to their attention.

By the end of the day, the attendees were generally glad they had been there, because they had not realized how behaviors they exhibited or witnessed might come across to others.

And, you know what, that class changed behaviors.

After a decade of this training, my employer, who had had a pretty bad record in this area (including signing a consent decree, which, as I’ve pointed out before, companies don’t do without reason), not through malice, but through inadvertence and ignorance, ended up being ranked as one of the best places for members of societal minorities to work.

And if someone’s behavior is acceptable, frankly, what the hell does it matter in day-to-day conduct what feelings or opinions may lurk inside the dark recesses of someone’s soul?

As one of my ex-colleagues used to say, “If you get ’em by the behaviors, the hearts and minds will follow.”

And if you try to change attitudes, you are doomed to failure and, and, as in the case of U.Del., richly deserved derision.

Hat tip to Linda for the first hint of this story.