Category: Other People

Oooh, my first hate-mail. Get some integrity?

Why am I in need of integrity? Because I note that the WSJ Editorial page, a noted haunt of the ultra-right ‘starve-the-beast’ economics gurus, has begun to note that Dubya is plundering this country for the benefit of his closest access-capitalist allies?

Look, bucko, he’s not even a good capitalist or a free-marketeer. The steel tarrifs should have showed you that. Or maybe the gay marriage issue, which is strangling our domestic wedding industry. Or was it earlier, with his Harken energy insider trading? Or maybe the way he used his baseball team to seize property using eminent domain, then sell it cheap to close friends, who developed it or flipped it to developers for tidy sums.

Dishonest. Dishonorable. Hypocritical. And worse, ineffective at helping this country, and others.

Six years my ass.

Ismael Olea: translator, writer, and amazing person.

That is all.

You may be a duppie but that doesn’t mean you have to go jump off a bridge.

Particularly fun bit about a man who jumped in protest of the Iraq war:

The Coast Guard crew, wearing their standard jumper-retrieval garb to protect against leaking body fluids—Tyvex biohazard suits, masks, gloves, and safety goggles—began C.P.R. Half an hour later, Alarab was pronounced dead. Gary Tindel, the assistant coroner of Marin County, who examined the body on the dock at Fort Baker, at the north end of the bridge, observed that “massive bleeding had occurred in both ears, along with apparent grayish brain matter in and around the right ear.”

and about a man who used to campaign for an anti-suicide net or fence:

He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. “People were very hostile,” Grimes told me. “They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, ‘Jump!’”

You can tell a programmer from a regular person by the way they ask and answer questions. Programmers give answers and ask questions like computers do: technically correct, but often totally irrelevant and beside the point.

For example, if you ask a regular person “do you know where Hynes Convention Center is?” they’ll try to give you directions. Programmers are likely to say “Yes.” They may occasionally elaborate, and describe the location. If they give you directions, they will have strange and often frightening details, such as longitude, cardinal direction, and the amount of time it will take, depending on whether you are travelling by African or European swallow. Or, in a meeting designed to tell new employees of a large corporation about insider trading laws, they will ask questions which do not apply to them (“If I were a foreign resident, what would the tax implications for…”) or will pick at inconsistencies in the ways that the rules are explained, despite the fact that the rules themselves are consistent.

It can be infuriating until you realize that these are the people whose thought process is what makes your world tick. They are able to see things in a way that you don’t, are able to imagine all the corner cases, the exceptions. Things that you take as common sense appear to them as arbitrary rules which have to be learned, because, frankly, that’s what they are. They’re just aware of it more than you are.

Well, the Plame thing is really getting picked up by a lot of people. Billmon has a great take on it: it looks a lot like a coup, honestly. The CIA is fighting the White House using the Justice Department.

Once, the Economist apologized for implying that Bush was actually elected, and noted that he was appointed, given that the election was too close to call. Today, an editorial there apologizes for defending any of the Bush team’s economic policies:

Underlying some of this column’s cheer these few weeks past has been an assumption that President George Bush and his administration were not as stupid, short-sighted, parochial and economically illiterate as they sometimes appear. Buttonwood now realises that this was a mistake and retracts this view as hopelessly optimistic and naive. Over the past couple of weeks, the risks to the world economy and financial markets everywhere have risen as the full force of their economic myopia has visited itself on the world stage.

Finally beginning to hammer on the lies and the lying liars who tell them. As the song goes, “Lies, lies lies lies lies lies lies.”

Maybe it was that I just had peanut M&M’s for lunch, but it makes me sick to my stomach when I see how we’re colluding in our own deception. A friend of mine had this to say:

I have always had trust in our country. I know that sounds retardedly patriotic. But I have always felt lucky to live here and now they have taken that away. And it pisses me off. This is my fucking country too you fucking assholes. QUIT FUCKING IT UP! What is going on with the people that we are letting this happen? Do people not realize? I had faith in the people at one point too.

Two motorcycle stories:
They’re resurfacing Memorial Drive in Cambridge, and at 35 miles an hour I hit the line between the resurfacing-in-progress and the old road. There was a bump up, maybe an inch or two, sharp corner. I felt the front wheel land a lot sooner than the back wheel. Absolutely terrifying.

But then someone on a Honda Interceptor nodded at me, so that was cool. I like Hondas. I like some of the Suzuki bikes, too– the sportbikes that don’t look all overdone– but I don’t know if I could ride anything that wasn’t a Honda. Their original slogan for US sales was “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”

And today on the way to work, thinking “oh man, the season has got to be over, it is cold cold cold” there was a whole group of kindergardeners, holding on to a rope and being led by a teacher, that saw me and started pointing and saying ‘motorcycle! motorcycle!’ and I waved, and they waved back. It was pretty cute.

Blah blah blah metrosexual blah blah blah. Shut up already about men having a sense of style as though it were a new thing. It’s not a new thing.

More self-injury in the news– parents freak out about this shit every couple years, it seems. It’ll be gas-huffing next year, then they’ll be back to kids chugging DXM to get high, and then maybe sex and STD’s. See also apotemnophilia, non-fatal suicidal gestures, trepanation, mass hysteria, recovered memories, ritual satanic abuse.