"vote" scrambled is "veto"

While it's sad that actual democratic input into society has been whittled down primarily to people's right to vote every few years, even that option is becoming less and less dependable. Here's an extremely disturbing story detailing the astonishing number of flaws inherent in paper-free touch-screen voting systems (and, in this case, in the people charged with running and overseeing those systems). And here is a concise summary of the situation, and an examination of its implications. (Via cursor.org.)

laptops out, plagiarists

As part of the ongoing effort to recycle spam into even more useless forms (here's another), I took a spam alt-text with a rather Mark E. Smith-like aura and cobbled together bits and pieces from various non-Fall records to make a sort of Frankenstein's monster version of a faux-Fall track. It's linked from this site that provides some further notes thereon. (Direct link to track.)

How to Succeed (in Annoying the Customer) in Business Without Really Trying

1. Three weeks after your customer has placed an order, do not reply to his e-mail asking where the product is, even if he politely allows that he'd understand if the CD is difficult to locate, since it's produced by a record "label" that is essentially the band's guitarist and a computer. (This is true even if your company's e-mail is signed by three people, and the customer has responded to the e-mail address of one of those three people.)

2. Two weeks after that, ignore a second, more pointed e-mail from the same customer, who now observes that Pay Pal probably would frown upon companies that take customers' money and fail to deliver product in exchange for that money - or even acknowledge that customer.

3. Two weeks later, when the customer gets on the telephone and requests that the order be cancelled and his money refunded, promise that his Pay Pal account will be credited - and then do nothing. Also, when the customer decides to be polite and not mention the lack of response to his e-mails - even though he's realized he's talking to the very person whose e-mail address he sent them to - do not acknowledge out loud that your company, or you personally, may have messed up, even though your tone of voice might indicate that you're somewhat chastened and in fact know that you're talking to the person whose order you've ignored for the past month and a half.

4. As a final fillip, when the customer calls a few days later to enquire about his refund, find the one person in the office who actually does what he says he'll do and refund the money...but credit it care of an e-mail address different from the one the customer used to send his Pay Pal payment in the first place, so the customer has to go through the hassle of verifying a second e-mail address with Pay Pal in order to have his account properly credited.

Rather lame, if you ask me.

we report, you decide

From a syndicated New York Times article on the 9/11 commission report:

"In an attack on the Clinton administration, the commission suggested that Washington's obsession with the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998 might have distracted senior government officials from the terrorism threat at a time when al-Qaida was becoming a gathering force."

Right...because it was the Clinton administration that was "obsessed" with the "Lewinsky scandal." Those Republicans in Congress, and Kenneth Starr, had nothing to do with it - or are they somehow part of the "the Clinton administration"?

spotted on a freeway overpass, somewhere in Wisconsin

Someone had used a stencil to spraypaint SUPPORT OUR TROOPS on a freeway overpass.

Some cleverer soul made a more original, pungent statement out of this graffito by the simple expedient of erasing the first two letters of the third word...

what I've been listening to lately

Among other things, I've been quite taken with the work of Nimbus Coleman. I first ran into his music courtesy of fluxblog, where the song "Who Is the Governess?" was posted about half a year back. That track is somewhat atypical for its opening haze of washed-out, distorted guitars, but its slightly tricky, chromatic chord sequence ends up being an indicator of one aspect of Coleman's music, his love of jazzy, bossa nova chords and sounds. It's not entirely clear, but from his website it seems he lived in Brazil for a time, so he comes by the bossa honestly. Combine that with a Pollard-esque love of short, tuneful, near-fragmentary songs, often with seemingly nonsensical lyrics, and a home-recordist's love of peculiar sounds, and you're most the way there: what that description leaves out is the ease and skill with which he playfully weaves these elements together. In terms of slightly more above-ground acts, I hear some similarities to the Caribbean, but that band's work is more songwriterly and tends a bit closer to electronic sounds (that their last full-length was released in Europe on Tomlab says something...). Coleman's music (at least in its sound: I haven't sat down and listened closely to lyrics yet) seems a bit more on the cheerful side, although the oddities of his song titles ("O, My Vitaphone, Excelsior"; "Terminally Soylent"; "Sinister and Dexter") are less Seuss than Residential in tone.

I can't say whether Coleman's earlier work (which was originally released only to friends and family, and which is now somewhat more available by e-mailing Coleman directly, according to his website) is as good as the most recent stuff, but I'm definitely inspired to look into it.

"We Will Never Forget!" (although we might be a bit hazy on a few minor details...)

Courtesy of cursor.org: The Smoking Gun reveals this rather appalling example of shoddy workmanship and/or lack of proofreading skill...

ghastly yellow saxophones...

A couple of years ago, I found myself wondering about the different sax solos Lisa "plays" in the opening credits to The Simpsons (yes, I do have better things to do, so shut up about it). Given the obsessive nature of certain Simpsons fans, I felt certain that somewhere on the web, there was a site devoted solely to the solos, with transcriptions and endless debates about which one was best, which best fit the tone of its respective episode, and which famous sax player should have played the solo. (In the same dream-universe in which Klaatu really did turn out to be the Beatles, and the Residents were moonlighting big-name pop-stars gone avant-garde, the Simpsons solos would have been played by famous saxophone players, for whom being chosen to do the solo would be a big kick, much as a Simpsons guest voice slot is for folks in this, the real world.) And I was really rather surprised to find that, as far as I could tell, at that time there was no such site.

Well, here ya go. Apparently there are even transcriptions elsewhere - can we expect Branford Marsalis to puckishly quote one of Lisa's solos on his next album?

attributing this quotation is like...

The source of the phrase I borrowed for the name of this site came up in conversation again, and so I thought I'd link to the best explanation of its origins I've found so far. Briefly, the odds favor Elvis Costello (appropriately - because it sounds more like him than like any of the other chief contenders) with an outside chance going Martin Mull's way.

lobster red, nothing said...

So, because the weather here has been so cool, cloudy, and gray this season, it completely slipped my mind today that, since I was going to spend the entire afternoon in a park at a party thrown by some friends of mine, and since the forecast called for a high near 80 and a perfectly cloudless sky, some sunscreen probably would have been a good idea.

I don't like being in a red state...

Fahrenheit 9/11

We finally got around to seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 this afternoon: with a houseful of friends visiting, other things always seemed to take priority in the last week, but finally the bunch of us got around to seeing the movie.

I think that, for me, curiously (at least in some people's perspectives), the movie reaffirmed something that, ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn't have been as likely to recognize: my patriotism. Patriotism, for an American, properly considered, is a bit more complex than it is for people in most nations. First, as a whole we cannot celebrate a common language, a common heritage, or a land common to generation after generation of ancestors. Instead, we are, perhaps, the first theoretical nation, a nation bound together not by the historically usual ties of language, culture, or soil but, ultimately, by ideas. The only thing we share in common, the only basis for our sense of national self, must be the ideas - and the ideals -we claim to uphold - even if those ideas are more often claimed than actually upheld, and even if, from the beginning, they were, for many, more notional than actual. Despite the truth that the language of our nation's founding documents appears to be nearly all-inclusive, in practice it never was. But again: despite that historical fact, the language of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence has been claimed by peoples who had previously been disenfranchised. And because the principles laid out by that language claim universality, it has been difficult to argue that they should not be applicable with equal universality, despite the more sordid reality of actual history, whose chief actors were often unambiguous in their intent toward exclusion.

The catch, as far as "patriotism" is concerned, is that in order to be true to those ideals, they cannot be limited to Americans, or to American citizens. Instead, they apply to all peoples. And so, exclusionary definitions of "patriotism" (more properly, "nationalism"), which favor the peoples of one nation over those of another, fall outside the only definitions of "patriotism" that Americans can truly own.

The sad fact that Fahrenheit 9/11 lays out, of course, is the extent to which an exclusionary notion of patriotism - so exclusionary as to exile huge numbers of actual American citizens - has become the primary definition of "patriotism" in the minds of the people who actually run things. Since it seems many critics addressing the movie seem to think, oddly, that it is scattered and disorganized, I will lay out what I see as a clear and simple throughline of the movie. Bush, and his cohorts in class and privilege, have pledged allegiance to the furtherance of corporate profit and power above all else. What follows from this is, among other things, a laxity toward the warnings regarding terrorism that Richard Clarke and others had made prior to September 11, particularly insofar as they involved the rulers of Saudi Arabia, since those rulers were also very powerful players in the international market in oil. Christopher Hitchens, in his scathingly negative review of the film published in Slate, goes astray in his analysis at the point where he claims that Moore states that "the Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape." What Hitchens misses is what, for Moore, this claim means: it means that the Bush administration's efforts in Afghanistan were never truly intended to strike a blow against terrorism - at least insofar as such a blow needed to be struck against Saudis and the bin Laden family. Instead, they were essentially window-dressing, the means by which Bush appeared to be taking action while propagating the fear and paranoia that would allow the administration to further its longstanding plans against Iraq. Of course, it's also true that the military efforts in Afghanistan did allow the hoped-for oil pipeline to proceed without inconvenient interference from the Taliban - and that those plans against Iraq were predicated on the need to control that nation's oil and install a US-friendly government to replace the inconveniently anti-American Saddam Hussein.

Essentially, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda's actions forced the Bush team's hand: they could no longer negotiate with the Taliban; they were forced to get rid of them. That diplomatic efforts to coddle the Taliban were in place at least as late as May 2001 is well-known. At any rate, it is appallingly clear that Iraq was a standing target of the Bushites from before the beginning.

I probably don't need to rehearse here the well-known litany of "justifications" offered for the invasion of Iraq, but again, Moore's take is that they were always, at some level, duplicitous and manipulated, with corporate control and access to oil the primary goal.

The other main thread of Moore's movie, which follows from the first, is the appalling deception whereby the patriotism of everyday Americans - particularly the most vulnerable, poorest Americans, for whom military service presented the last, best chance at opportunity - has been cynically taken advantage of, again with only lip service paid to the terrifyingly real sacrifices these men and women have made. Moore says near the end of his film that all these Americans ask is that they not be asked to make such sacrifices except when absolutely necessary, in clear defense of the nation they have, in fact, sworn to defend. (Hitchens' bloviations again miss the point about the insufficient military forces in Afghanistan: they were insufficient if they were necessary to our defense, and the fact that they weren't implicates Bush's lack of seriousness. You can argue that a job should or should not be done, but you aren't going to argue that it should be done shoddily or with insufficient resources.

The movie is not, of course, "objective" - and no one with any sense would expect it to be, even one minute into it, even if they'd never heard of Michael Moore. But it clearly illustrates that, even if one subtracts Moore's political perspective and views the Bush administration's reactions to terrorism and its actions in Iraq, those actions have been appallingly incompetent, ill-considered, and counterproductive to any goal real patriotic Americans should support. I suppose it should go without saying that such a goal cannot include the "right" of gigantic oil corporations to ensure massive profiteering by running roughshod over every international standard of sovereignty.

And the way in which Moore's film made me realize the extent of my patriotism - in the terms I define it above - is how much it affected and moved me, how angry, how sad, and how frustrated it made me feel in response to the chicanery of the administration it exposes. Sadly, little in the film was news to me - but actually seeing the wounded terror of war victims' families, seeing the abstracted complacency with which the Bush administration prosecuted this war, and seeing the death by attrition of the idealism that motivated the young men and women who volunteered to serve their nation, that brought home to me, in a way that merely reading about such things could not, the extent of Bush's betrayal of everything about this country that I've loved - and, equally contemptible, his embrace of everything in this country's history I've despised.

I hope all the people who've made Fahrenheit 9/11 the nation's number-one movie the last few weeks remember Lila Lipscomb - the woman whose trajectory from Bush supporter to grief-stricken mother of a fallen soldier son gives the movie its moral center - and ask whether anything this nation could achieve in Iraq, given the reality on the ground in that nation, could make her, and the thousands of other mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, and children of those killed and wounded in Iraq (on both sides), feel that such sacrifice is worth its cost. Bush's war has made our soldiers and our nation the enemy in the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis, even more so than a decade of bombing sorties and crippling embargoes, and our ongoing presence is the equivalent of spraying gasoline at a raging fire.