Author: John

Cindy Sheehan's Question

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So now we’re five years into this goddamn war.

Cindy Sheehan, whose camping out in Crawford, Texas, during the August heat of 2005 did as much as anything to get Americans to see George W. Bush for the puny coward he is, had a very simple question for the man who caused her son Casey to die. Bush had said that Casey Sheehan, Cindy’s son– an Army soldier who was killed by a bullet in the head in Sadr City in April, 2004–had died for a “noble cause.”

Cindy Sheehan asked, “What is that noble cause?”

Rather than answer this question, Bush ran and hid. (Of course. That’s what cowards do.) And then he had some bumsucking speechwriter gin up a response about how the brave soldiers who had been killed in Iraq had died for this reason, or for that. An afterthought, really, but a bumsucking speechwriter can usually be found when George W. Bush needs one.

If you listen to Bush or to any of his apologists or whores or spokespeople, or to war apologists on the TeeVee; to wingnut bloggers, television “news” talking heads & radio oh-so-serious pontificators and teleprompter readers; to Christianist preachers, ingnorami in the street, flagwavers and dolts of every hue and persuasion, they’ll give you some bullshit definition of the so-called noble cause that cost Casey Sheehan his life and Cindy Sheehan her son. But the thing is, whatever bullshit answer they give you, it is guaranteed to be bullshit. It’s not going to be the answer they gave in 2003, or the different one they gave in 2004, or the still different one they gave in 2005, and on and on and on. If it comes from anybody in this administration or from any of its supporters (such as John McBush McCain), it’s going to be the latest bullshit. It’s not going to have anything to do with the earlier, inoperative versions of the bullshit. It’s going to be a hollow, empty lie.

If we ever get a truthful answer to Cindy Sheehan’s Question from a president, such as, “there was no noble cause”, then we’ll perhaps be ready to look at solutions to our current situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Until then, it’s nothing but lies, and sorrow, and waste.

Mungo Jerry and the Bear Stearns implosion

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Well this post-capitalism capitalism is a grand thing, isn’t it. Privatize the profit, socialize the loss, and no matter what, make sure the hyperwealthy aren’t unduly taxed (or asked to serve in Iraq), for after all, they’re responsible for keeping this great financial engine running. (Cough! Cough! Sputter!.. .Wheeeeeeee! Crash!) Where would we be without hedge funds and their managers! One shudders to think! I mean, somebody has to play bridge and golf, don’t they??? Free up the magic market fairies! Deregulate! That’s what our great national poet Walt Whitman meant when he said

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Thank God for the door-unscrewing Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan and the Reagan/Bush (hey, don’t forget Clinton!) revolutions, without which we might have had by now a decent health care system, peace, prosperity, a recovering (or never devastated) New Orleans, and some kind of plan to deal with the environmental and energy crises that threaten us all. Talk about bor-ring! How much more fun to do things the Greenspan/Cheney/Rove/Norquist/Dobson/Rumsfeld/Bush way! Imanentize the Eschaton, that’s what I say! Hasten the Coming! But whatever you do, don’t blame the rich (that’s “playing the class card”) or the Republicans (remember, whatever it is, it’s OK if you’re a Republican!) Just make sure that the Bear Stearns execs get a public-financed severance package in the reasonable seven figures (but not a dime more for the greedy limbless Iraq/Afghanistan vets who want to go to college–we’re not made out of money, you know!) Or in the words of Mungo Jerry,

If her daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal;
If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel.

Life’s for living, that’s our philosophy!

Kirkland College Requiem

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One night in the late spring of 1978, two young women broke into the registrar’s office at Hamilton College. Their mission was simple: to remove their academic records, along with all other evidence that they had ever had anything to do with Hamilton. They were members of the last class to receive diplomas from Kirkland College, which was about to be swallowed whole by Hamilton, the college across the street. The Kirkland College board of trustees, with a figurative fiscal gun to their head held by the Hamilton board, had reluctantly, in a split decision, agreed to the merger. But the students never agreed and as far as some of them were concerned Hamilton had no more rights to their records than did the man in the moon.

Below the fold, some commentary on Kirkland College president Samuel Fisher Babbitt’s Limited Engagement part of a my very occasional series of reviews of self-published books.

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“Online Free Expresson Day” from Reporters Without Borders

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Reporters Without Borders has a nifty little consciousnes-raising “virtual demostration” going on today, sort of a SimCity Second-Life kind of deal.

“Today, the first time this day is being marked, we are giving all Internet users the opportunity to demonstrate in places were protests are not normally possible. We hope many will come and protest in virtual versions of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Cuba’s Revolution Square or on the streets of Rangoon, in Burma. At least 62 cyber-dissidents are currently imprisoned worldwide, while more than 2,600 websites, blogs or discussions forums were closed or made inaccessible in 2007.”

Today they’re also releasing a helpful, newly-revised Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.

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Where's the goddamn Magna Carta when you need it?

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Here’s a story about some shadowy (nominally USian) government agency that’s going around shutting down websites it doesn’t like & snapping up the domain names.

Rankin, the Treasury spokesman, said Marshall was free to ask for a review of his case. “If they want to be taken off the list,” Rankin said, “they should contact us to make their case.”

That is a problematic system, Fitzgerald said. “The way to get off the list,” he said, “is to go back to the same bureaucrat who put you on.”

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Manny Ramirez fails to make proper curtsy to King George; whiney-ass tittie babies of WEEI go into St. Vitus Dance of Rage. (Or was it St. Anthony's Fire?)

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Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez recently passed up an invitation to be a prop for a George W. Bush vanity photoshoot with the rest of the 2007 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox. Evidently Manny didn’t feel like going to Washington, so he didn’t go. Man, did that put the authoritarian fetishists of WEEI sports radio in Boston into a snit. Evidently most of them never got the news flash that the USA is a republic, not a monarchy, and there’s no such thing as a command performance here. Yet.

Yesterday even the more-or-less sane on-air guys were going on about how, at the least, Manny’s doing whatever he chose to be doing instead of putting on a dorky suit and being ritually humiliated by the narcissistic asshole currently in residence in the White House was a “missed opportunity.” Missed opportunity for what, one might ask. A chance to be photographed kissing George Bush’s ass? That’s an opportunity I myself will be happy to miss indefinitely, thank you very much, and it doesn’t surprise me that Manny also chose to take a pass. Manny’s eccentricities are legendary, but in this case I think he was the sanest one in the group.

By what the callers & hosts were saying, I got the impression that Dennis & Callahan, the most overtly fascistic of the WEEI crew, had been apoplectic about Manny’s “unpatriotic” decision to exercise freedom to not do something that he was under no contractual or moral obligation to do. “Freedom” is evidently a very difficult concept for these guys to grasp.

Bush noted Ramirez’s absence with a typically boorish frat-boy joke about the death of Ramirez’s grandmother, which was widely repeated in print and on the air as a telling example of his stellar bonhomie and wit.

I know that after my Superduperbowl(TM) screed I promised to cut loose the WEEI until spring training. But darn it, the Sox were playing yesterday, a Grapefruit League warmer-upper against Minnesota. I just paid the paid the price for tuning in a bit too early.

UPDATE: I rewrote this a little for clarity since posting it this morning.

The FCC holds a hearing on Net Neutrality, and YOU! ARE! THERE!

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So yesterday morning over coffee I was doing what most people do over their first daily cup o’ joe, which is bring up technorati and see if anybody’s talking about me. That process took me to Joho’s page, from which I learned that the FCC was to be holding an hearing on why Comcast sucks, I mean Net Neutrality broadband network management practices only hours thence. Now although to my surprise & delight, Wetmachine, thanks to the work of my fellow wetmechanics Harold Feld and Greg Rose has become quite the FCC policy site with a side-order of net neutrality, I had never been to an FCC hearing. A quick check of the boat and bus schedules showed that I could probably make it to Hahvahd in time for most of the festivities. I decided to go. So, after securing the blessings of Dear Wife and throwing a few things in a bag, off I set to lose my FCC-hearing virginity.

Below the fold, some totally subjective impressions of the day, told in that winsome wetmachine way that you’ve come to treasure, or if you haven’t yet, which you soon will. More sober-styled reports have surely appeared by now, and I’ll dig up some links & post them at the end for those of you who like a little conventional reportage to ballast what you get from me.

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