Give Me a Break category archive

I can be equivocal* on the effort in Afghanistan, but I’m calling bullshit on this. This is PR damage-control bullshit:

The whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands, the Pentagon said on Thursday, warning its unprecedented leak of secret U.S. military files could cost lives and damage trust of allies.

As if any thinking person doesn’t realize that persons in Afghanistan or Pakistan already know what’s going on there on both, or on all three, or on however-the-hell-many sides there are in that mess.

There are few similiarities between the Wiki-Leaks leak and the Pentagon Papers, but there are two. Both include stuff that

• the Pentagon and the government and even the allied governments already knew, and
• the Pentagon and the government and even the allied governments did not want their citizenry (citizenries?) to know.

Until Wiki-Leaks is caught offing wedding parties with drones, I shall keep calling bullshit.

________________________

*I am equivocal.

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A Jacox Elementary teacher who anointed students with “holy oil” in the classroom has resigned.

School officials say she may have performed inappropriate religious practices during her three years with the division.

Clearly, this conduct was over the line. It is not the place of state employees–and public school teachers are state employees–to be performing religious rites while on the job.

It also sounds seriously creepy.

When I attended Catholic Church, which I did for 18 years of marriage to a Catholic, I felt a little odd getting anointed with oil on the one or two high holy days in which Catholics do that, but I was there through my choice, so it was quite okay. When in Rome and all that . . . .

It’s the second or third incident of teachers’ inflicting their religious practices on students to hit the news in the year or so since I started frequenting these part.

Long story at the link.

He takes on the meme that we, individual citizens of the United States (and individual citizens of any other country that uses oil and oil products) are to blame for BP’s wild well and reckless practices.

Most of the folks who have made such claims have, I think, good intentions. Their idea is that, by blaming individuals for the incompetence and recklessness of Buccaneer Petroleum (as if incompetence and recklessness are inevitable results of peak oil), they can shame the populace into demanding changes.

Shame is seldom a good motivator and holier-than-thou does not win friends and influence people. I commend Brendan’s post to your attention (warning: language). He points out that most of us did not create a petroleum culture; we were born into it.

Here’s a nugget:

1. Most of “us” don’t get to set energy policy: the most we can do is harass our politicians to do the right thing. We saw how well that worked out for a public option, for financial reform, and for the Iraq War. We may be a representative democracy, but it’s often not that representative. And when we try to replace bad representatives, we face the full weight and strength of the system: Blanche Lincoln, who helped carve out every good thing about health insurance reform out of the bill was supported by the White House and the entire Democratic establishment in the recent Arkansas primary. Other examples include the Democratic establishment’s support for Ed Case in Hawaii, their support for Arlen Specter in PA, their refusal to step in for Ned Lamont when he won the Connecticut primary in 2006, their opposition to Donna Edwards and support for corrupt Al Wynn in 2008, and their warm welcome to Joe Lieberman after he campaigned against Obama! Many of “us” are doing our damnedest to change the way we live, and many of “them” constitute massive roadblocks.

3: Pursuant to 2, if the government would really get behind energy alternatives perhaps the rest of “us” wouldn’t be so trapped by THEIR choices. Reagan’s the obvious goat for doing away with Carter’s tax credits for solar, and god knows the republicans practically ejaculate petroleum, but the cast of the energy farce includes Democrats like Kennedy (anti-wind power in Massachusetts), Rockefeller (big coal supporter), Dingell (has opposed raising fuel efficiency standards for YEARS), and Landrieu (still shilling for oil drilling despite what’s happened to her state).

Afterthought:

I find the rich folks on Martha’s Vineyard–and similar locales–who are fighting a wind farm in their part of the world because they fear it might ruin their view to be particularly obnoxious–and, as most of them likely consider themselves “progressive,” hypocritical. Pretty soon I’m likely to have oil in my aquatic backyard, though the odds are that it will not actually hit the beach ten miles east of where I sit.

They can look at a windmill way off in the distance just barely over the horizon standing there quietly generating electricity for Christ’s sake. Whatever danger a windmill may pose for wildlife, it cannot do in a decade what Buccaneer Petroleum has done every hour for the past two months and counting.

I shall shut up now, for the next sentence descends into language I prefer to keep elsewhere than in this place.

Personally, I find wind farm windmills to be rather majestic in an industrial reality sort of way.

More from the Allentown, Pa., case.

An AP story reports that one of the girls involved in the case is suing the the school district, claiming that the principal of the school “illegally confiscated” her phone, searched it, found nude pictures that she had taken of herself for her personal use, then sent the phone up the administrative ladder, allowing additional school personnel and, ultimately, members of the prosecutor’s office, to see the pictures of her.

She was 17 at the time. She’s 19 now. She is not identified by name in the complaint.

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What Brendan said on bigoted eyeballs (warning: language).

Steve M. has more about the mysterious conspiracy.

Petty blankety-blank gossip?

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Hubris:

Social networks will become a fundamental way we communicate with our governments, businesses and loved ones, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has told the BBC.

I can see it now:

@Heartburn: Hamburger for lunch.

@Notip: Lousy service at Joe’s bar and grill.

@Takeaction: Support HR2789.

@3rdFloorScottDorm: Who wanna part-tay! Hot chicks cold brewskis wanted!!!

Lord help us.

For some persons, too much is never enough. Take, for example, this.

This story seems to be rapidly going from page five worthiness to the comics pages.

The latest is that the gentleman in question, though born abroad, may have been born to an mother who is an American citizen and is therefore is a citizen by definition.

But neither of them realized it.

Now his mother is trying to find something to prove that she is an American citizen.

Flight school operator in Norfolk charged as illegal immigrant

(The link to the individual story isn’t working right now. Link is now working.)

EIght column inches in, on the runover page, you learn that he illegally entered the country twenty years ago

when he was eight years old.

No mention of whether he entered with his parents or smuggled himself in.

Afterthought: No, I’m not saying there’s no issue here. It was a screw-up in background checking to let him set up a business at the airport–not because he’s illegal, but because the background checkers didn’t do their jobs very well.

But it’s not a preferred position (top right) front page screw-up. It’s a page five screw-up at best.

I got an honest-to-God typed chain letter in an envelop postmarked Texas in the mail yesterday.

I’ll be mailing it in to the Postal Inspectors today.

The fuss over Trijicon’s encoding references to New Testament Bible verses in the serial numbers of its telescopic rifle sights seemed a little over the top to me.

• No one looks at serial numbers.
• You had to know already to what they were to recognize the references. Proselytizing didn’t seem to be an issue here.

But I wonder . . .

These are the two verses in question:

When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

(referred to as JN8:12)

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,”[a]made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

referred to as 2COR4:6

One wonders whether the authors of these words would consider them appropriate for gunsights.

And about the thinking of those who concluded that they were a fitting accompaniment to instruments of killing.

Like it’s something new:

The state (Delaware–ed.) Department of Transportation is adding a simple feature to Delaware roads to try to prevent fatal accidents.

Workers have begun stringing metal cable barriers down the median of Del. 1 that will not only stop vehicles from crossing over into oncoming traffic, but also ease the impact when a car hits them.

The modern take on roadside barriers offers a safer alternative to concrete or metal versions that are more expensive and can do more damage to vehicles, DelDOT spokesman Jim Westhoff said. The new addition to Del. 1 beginning south of the Roth Bridge will be the first use of cable barriers in Delaware.

Bringing Delaware’s highways into the 1920s.

More agony from the New York Times:

“It’s enough to get rejected in real life,” said Ms. Hill, 28, who blogs about legal issues and lives in New York. “But does it have to happen so often in my online world too? It makes me want to keep my digital life separate in future relationships, whomever they are with.”

A new dating order has emerged in the era of social media. Couples who used to see each other’s friends only at parties now enjoy 24-hour access to their beloved’s confidants thanks to Facebook. Sharing passwords to e-mail accounts, bank accounts and photo-sharing sites is the new currency of intimacy. And courtship — however brief or intense — is wantonly scrutinized by the whole world on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook.

Words fail me.

Your treacle is safe:

News Corp.’s Fox network and Time Warner Cable Inc. resolved a fee dispute that threatened to keep football bowl games and dramas such as “24” off the air in the cable operator’s two largest markets.

She was alone.

They were abstinence tapes, folks. Abstinence tapes.

(Concept shamelessly stolen from Michael Feldman.)

Carlymasterplan:

1. Try to destroy Hewlett-Packard.

2. If that fails, on to California to destroy Arnold’s leavings.

We no longer eat food.

According to my grocery store, we now consume “meal solutions.”

I thought “meal solutions” was what astronauts ate drank.

And I thought it was a big deal when my parents raised my allowance from five to eight dollars and got a riding mower so that my brother and I could cut the grass at the farm in less than two hours.

By all estimates, the current crop of tweens, 20 million of them, are the it generation. They can’t drive to the mall, but they are mighty consumers (even in the recession), believed to control or influence as much as $200 billion in purchasing power. And those numbers are expected only to grow. By 2015, the census estimates that tweens will number nearly 24 million.

Afterthought:

Speaking of cutting the grass, the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years at college, I had a job cutting grass for the state highway department. They assigned me a nice little tractor with a sickle bar.

On Mondays, we’d drive out to our assigned stretch of road. At the end of the day, we’d park the tractors and the foreman would pick us up, then drive us back in the morning. On Fridays, we’d drive back to the garage to do weekly maintenance. I only rolled it over once. We wrapped a chain around it and one of my coworkers pulled it back up with his tractor.

Then there was the time I ditched it and they had to bring out the motor grader to pull it out of the ditch (one of fellow summer hires ditched his tractor about once a week, but they usually could get Mickey free with a dump truck; I remember the boss saying, “Damn, Frank, when you ditch it, you ditch it good.”)

It was the funnest summer job I had (except for the two weeks of raging poison ivy I got cutting a ditchbank down by Custis tomb).

My brother got all the grass-cutting duties at the farm that summer. I remember his asking my father, “Why doesn’t Frank ever have to cut the grass?”

My father looked at him and said, “He’s cut more grass this summer than you’ve seen.”

I just got a come-on in the mail from some outfit trying to bamboozle me into getting a mortgage I don’t need at a rate I’m not interested in for reasons that have nothing to do with me.

It was breath-taking in its nerve and detachment from reality.

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