Senate holds final meeting
I was tipped to this one by the Best of the Web, because of the mural stuff at the end, but the whole thing is a hoot.The anger expressed by a number of students at the meeting stemmed from the allocation and subsequent de-allocation of funds for a safe house on campus for women of color and for non-UCR affiliated security guards.You didn't get the money. It never was your money. Walk it off, bitch!"Shame on you, whoever requested that they de-allocate this money," said an angry student addressing the senate. "I've never seen any of you do anything for the community. I'm really pissed off."
One student organization, Que onda Queers, requested $12,000 for safety devices, including cameras, camcorders, tapes, tape recorders and security to prevent physical retaliation.Okay, I'll admit it. I was certain this was a hoax when I read that there was an club called Que onda Queers. A quick google search dissuaded me. **sigh**
"On the real, I am very interested in funding this," said senator Ivory Parnell. "But considering there are only $10,000 in the fiscal budget, and the total request is over $27,000. What can we do?"(That second line isn't an actual sentence, but someone forgot to add [sic] when they typed it up. I hope.) You do what you just did. Deny the request. They want $27K worth of toys. Who cares? People in Hell want ice water.
In an attempt to find some way to allocate the money, senators suggested tapping other resources.Okay, I'm hoping that this is a hoax again. "Other pots to smoke?" Dunce."Aren't there other funds to be used?" asked senator Vianey Ramirez. "This is one pot, but there are other pots to smoke."
When President Sayegh informed the group that according to the constitution, only $100 could be allocated for equipment, students again expressed their discontent, saying that the senate was not willing enough to help them."Don't try to get all "follow the rules" on us! (See IV.9.(c)) We want money goddamnit! Gimme! And "Fiscal Duty" isn't even a real word. Quit trying to bullshit us and cut a check, dadd- I mean, chairperson."
"I definitely don't think that this is an unwillingness to help," Sayegh said. "For 28 days, every day, people have been working for you. Everybody on this board goes to class. For the past 28 days, because of this situation, I am not getting my degree."I'd vote for Ramirez.Students did not respond well to this, saying that is the senate's job to be dedicated to their needs.
"We're not going to discriminate," Ramirez said. "We treat you like shit. We're going to treat everybody like shit."
After some deliberation, and the decision to make it a closed ballot, the senate voted to allocate $3,025 to Que onda Queers.And in the end, they caved. Disgraceful.
Teens tutor FBI in cyber-slang
This is quite possibly the job that would drive me insane the quickest -- impersonating a 13 year old girl for 8 hours a day. I think that after a week I would be so numb it would be easier to offer myself up as the pedophile's victim.(If you are a pedophile, you can still email me though. Include your home address.)
Democratic Party -- racist?
Larry Elder takes on the DNC's outrageous stance on layoffs:Enter Donna Brazile, the black former campaign manager of Al Gore, and the lady who once called the Republican Party "the party of the white boys." Brazile goes ballistic. "I'm just outraged," said Brazile. "They started reading me the names and I said, 'Oh, oh -- they're all black.' I went through the roof."Oh, c'mon, Larry, we all know those honkey ofay suckas deserve it.So, the DNC, despite its declared financial problems, cannot lay off black workers. Question: Would Ms. Brazile, or, say, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, or anybody else, for that matter, complain if the DNC issued pink slips to white staffers?
I covered this one earlier, but Larry Elder does his tradional fine job on the matter. Read on to get to the connection between this and the Uncle Tom accusations lobbed at black Republicans. (And don't forget that Elder is neither Democrat nor Republican.)
Glass For Garofolo
Damn that internet! All the stupid things that you ever said keep bubbling back up! Just in case you have forgotten:On March 6, 2003, Bill O'Reilly interviewed actress, comedianne and anti-war activist Janeane Garofalo on the Fox Network show, "The Pulse." Garofalo made the following statement:Well, it's been a month or so since we saw our boys go in, liberate Iraq with people in the streets holding American flags, hugging our soldiers and pointing out the rape rooms, mass graves (including one especially for children and thier toys) and mobile biological weapon labs.O'Reilly: "If you are wrong, all right, and if the United States -- and they will, this is going to happen -- goes in, liberates Iraq, people in the street, American flags, hugging our soldiers, all right, we find all kinds of bad, bad stuff, all right, in Iraq, you gonna apologize to George W. Bush?"
Garofalo: "I would be so willing to say I'm sorry, I hope to God that I can be made a buffoon of, that people will say you were wrong, you were a fatalist, and I will go to the White House on my knees on cut glass and say, hey, you were right, I shouldn't have doubted you. But I think to think that is preposterous."
I know. She is just waiting for an invitation to the White House. It's all George's fault again. Bad George!
New York's Deadly Cigarette Tax
Prohibition created crime. It really is that simple. The history presented in the article:The tax hikes also spurred crime against legal businesses. The chairman of a New York State commission that investigated the illicit tobacco trade stated that the tax hikes caused distributors and retailers to be "confronted almost daily with the risk and dangers of personal violence which are now inherent in their industry." To the dismay of other states, the crime associated with New York's illegal cigarette trade spread beyond its borders. Across the country, trucks carrying cigarettes were hijacked and businesses selling cigarettes were robbed to supply New York's black market.Prohibition is the same, no matter what is being prohibited, and the results are the same. Prohibition of liquor created the Mafia in America as we know it. It was a failure. Recreational drug prohibition (other than, of course, alcohol, caffeine, Viagra, and Everquest) has resulted in the largest crime growth and the greatest infringement on freedom in our short history. Cigarette prohibition (since that is what this really is an attempt to do) is causing the exact same problems.State and city officials experimented with a variety of ways to control the crime, including mandatory prison sentences for cigarette bootleggers, expanded police powers of search and seizure, and more industry regulation. But none of those measures had much effect. Finally, by the mid-1970s, with tobacco-related crime rising and governments and business losing millions of dollars to bootlegging, a special state commission recommended that the city's cigarette tax be repealed. New York Governor Malcolm Wilson embraced that proposal and said, "One major incentive to organized crime is the high New York City cigarette taxes, piled on top of the state tax, which have made that city the promised land for cigarette bootleggers."
While the governor fought hard for cigarette tax repeal, parochial politics scuttled its passage. However, escalating violence, including a series of homicides resulting from turf battles and efforts to silence witnesses, discouraged policymakers from further tax hikes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That allowed the high inflation of the era to reduce real cigarette tax rates by more than 40 percent, which sapped the profitability of bootlegging and reduced smuggling and related crime.
The lessons learned from New York's tax-induced crime wave were short-lived. By the late 1980s, New York State's cigarette taxes were again on the rise, prompting one official in the state's tax enforcement office to note that "in New York it is literally more profitable to hijack a cigarette delivery truck than an armored truck." Today, at least half of the cigarettes consumed in New York City have somehow avoided state and city excises. ATF officials report that in addition to traditional organized crime, street gangs and terrorist groups are now also involved in the city's illicit cigarette trade.
The proof is that when ending the prohibition was tried it was a smashing success. When the prohibition was brought back, the crime came right with it. Those who do not study history are doomed to life of politics, I guess.
Male underarm odors soothe women
Ohhhh yeah. Come to Phelps.Lavender and vanilla aromatherapy may be all the rage. But new research suggests that male armpit sweat may be just as soothing for women. The effect, say scientists, may have helped get early women into the mood for love.And I'm hairy too. I wonder why more chicks don't dig me.Chemist George Preti of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Penn., and colleagues exposed female volunteers for six hours to a fragrance containing men's concentrated armpit sweat. The researchers then tracked levels of luteinizing hormone in the women's bloodstreams. Luteinizing hormone helps regulate the timing of the menstrual cycle.
The scientists report in the journal Biology of Reproduction that the brains of women exposed to the sweat pulsed out more luteinizing hormone faster than women who didn't get armpit whiffs. Women also reported feeling more relaxed while sniffing the sweat. Overall, the pheromones may help improve women's receptivity to sexual advances and to synchronize their fertile times with the presence of men.
A Fearful Symmetry
The first part was the most interesting to me; the same sort of mania that consumed the right during the Clinton administration is consuming the left during this administration. I think it comes from a bulletproof administration; Bush is almost guaranteed to be re-elected.These days, all you have to do is change a few words around and the hysterical right-wing radio commentary of yesteryear becomes today's cutting-edge left-wing blog posts . . .Bill Clinton = George W. Bush
biting the lower lip = the smirk
Hillary Clinton = Dick Cheney
the military = the children
raising taxes = despoiling the environment
Monica Bombings = Operation Iraqi Freedom
Chinese money = oil money
Halliburton = Whitewater
Clinton killed Vince Foster = Bush Knew!
Lessons of the War
This is a long but comprehensive look at the war, both from a micro "how did this war go" level to the macro "how does this fit into the general WW-IV west/arab conflict" level. One of the compelling parts was the spot on evaluation of the reasons the war went they way it did (and it has little to do with the US):There is, to begin with, very little status accorded to conscript soldiers, who are poorly paid, housed, and trained. Tribalism, not merit, is more likely to govern the promotion of officers. In an age of mechanized warfare and combined land-and-air operations, most commanders have little knowledge of flexible tactical doctrine. Instead, outdated Soviet ideas from the 1970's -- like stacking armor in successive rings for massive, set-piece assaults -- still infect the thinking of the few generals who have studied military theory. When such rote practices prove suicidal in the face of a sophisticated opponent with mastery of the air, there is no mechanism for ad-hoc adjustment.In other words, we didn't necessarily win because we are so damned good; we won because they are so damned bad. Being so damned good just ensured that we did it quickly. Also:There are other deficiencies as well. Weapons, almost exclusively imported rather than manufactured at home, are often poorly maintained and are thrust into the hands of soldiers lacking either education or much experience with high technology. As American soldiers would remark in the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraqi artillery was inaccurate and slow-firing, small-arms fire was poorly directed, and armored vehicles and tanks were in obviously inferior condition.
All this is symptomatic of larger problems: the absence within Arab militaries of free discussion about operational choices, and a system that rewards obsequiousness and punishes initiative. Only in this wider context can the Baathists' otherwise bewildering tactics in the most recent conflict be understood. Here was a military clique that went to war over the possession of chemical and biological weapons that were so hidden away they could not be readily used for the very purpose for which they had been acquired; that would send an armored column into the open under the cloak of a sandstorm that provided no cloak at all against satellite-guided bombs; that would order men to swarm out of fortifications and dwellings at the sight of approaching American troops ("quail hunters"), only to see them obliterated by waiting planes; that would hurl men clad in pajamas against soldiers arrayed in ceramic body armor; that would stockpile arms and munitions in public sanctuaries that proved indefensible points of resistance.
As Pollack documents, moreover, while defeat on the battlefield can exact a bitter price for a professional Arab soldier, excellence can be no less dangerous, earning him the envy and suspicion of his peers and his political bosses. Few of the prominent Iraqi generals who fought in the Iran-Iraq war survived to fight in Kuwait, and almost none was still around for the latest conflict.
WHAT IS it that permits this radically dysfunctional system to perpetuate itself? The question is really political rather than military, and ultimately the answer is a state-induced terror that has its roots in the absence of consensual government and of notions of personal freedom, thus ensuring little self-criticism or accountability in matters of war-making or anything else. Helping to keep this entire edifice afloat is an ingrained (but also state-supported) habit of denial: a disavowal of just how deep, and how self-inflicted, are the deficiencies of one's own society; a rejection of every alternative view of reality that would expose these inadequacies for what they are; an unwillingness to assume any responsibility for repairing them.Joe Bob says check it out.During Operation Iraqi Freedom, American viewers were exasperated or convulsed at the circus-like spectacle provided by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the so-called Baathist information minister -- a/k/a "Baghdad Bob" -- whose daily communiques detailed an endless string of catastrophes for coalition forces. Seeming at first odious, then deranged, at last almost entertaining, al-Sahaf confidently declaimed lines like "We have killed most of the infidels, and I think we will finish the rest soon" even as split-screen television images revealed Abrams tanks looming a few miles away, or Marines resting in Saddam's Baghdad palaces.
A joke, but too bitter to be mere jest. Such state-sponsored whoppers, spread from Ramallah to Cairo and beyond, are hardly a new phenomenon. In June 1967, as Michael Oren reminds us in Six Days of War, there were triumphant broadcasts about heroic Arab armies approaching the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Egyptian jets pounding Israel even as Israeli soldiers were sweeping to victory on three fronts and Egyptian air fields were littered with the remains of that country's air force, destroyed in the first minutes of war. Such fabrications are among the intellectual legacies of the Arab regimes of the Middle East, whose homegrown proclivities toward mythmaking and braggadocio were only enhanced by decades of immersion in a Soviet-style disinformation apparatus.
Nor have international news organizations, who supposedly know better, been so immune to these ruinous exercises in falsification as the skeptical treatment of "Baghdad Bob" might suggest. Quite the contrary. Especially when baseless bragging takes the form of protestations about unprecedented Arab suffering and victimization -- and even if presented without quite the dramatic flair of the Iraqi information minister -- the press has proved all too ready to lend its credibility-enhancing energies to the Arab cause.
"ASK FOR DEATH!": The Indoctrination of Palestinian Children to Seek Death for Allah -- Shahada
This is an interesting documentary. The streaming quality seemed to good, so it isn't a pain to watch -- at least not from the quality. The subject matter is another issue.If this was my first exposure to PLO propaganda, then I would probably be disbelieving. I have seen nothing to persuade me to the opposite, however. I have seen no one -- not even the PA -- attempt to counter this with the assertion that it is an extreme, selective view of the PA media. It is part of a pattern and practice that the PLO/PA has been building for years.
If you want to know where this came from, look to Nazi Germany. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a Nazi ally, a student of Nazism and the Hitler Youth, and a rabid Jew-hater. Yassir Arafat was his student, and he is now the leader of the PLO/PA. That is why you see Nazi propaganda techniques in the PA -- he learned them from the horse's mouth.
More Dowdism
Maureen Dowd seems to have started a fad; David Hogberg details more of the same from Paul Krugman.Rappin' with your rep
A morality play by Neal Boortz:(As the curtain rises, we find Congressman Dewey Cheatem sitting behind his desk in his home district office. Ima Whiner, one of his constituents, has wormed her way into an appointment with Congressman Cheatem to voice some concerns.)Check it out.
A Blast From the Past
(Hat tip to Sgt. Stryker's Blog)Posted September 2002:
CAIRO, Egypt (CNN) -- A U.S. war against Iraq would "open the gates of hell" in the Middle East, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said on Thursday.Heh.Speaking at the end of an Arab League foreign ministers' meeting in Cairo, Moussa urged Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspections to resume in a bid to head off a U.S. attack.
But he warned, "No Arab country will accept any strike on any other Arab country."
Country music in battle over patriotism, free speech
Oh, the gnashing of teeth! (Okay, this is the Tennessean. Tooth.) The rending of sackcloth! Oh, the humanity!Some fans and observers say country music, in responding to Sept. 11 and subsequent global events, has gone beyond its traditional support of America and the armed forces and begun to cultivate an atmosphere that's intolerant of dissent from the Bush administration's strategies in the war on terror.Country music fans being intolerant? That's unconcievable!
Rabble-rousing songs by Toby Keith and Darryl Worley have become smash hits. Widespread radio station boycotts of Dixie Chicks music after lead singer Natalie Maines' critical remark about President Bush in London left many thinking that country music was drawing ideological lines.Okay, I call spin-alert. "Rabble-rousing" is an inherently prejudicial term. "Critical remark" is about the softest way to refer to the direct insult tossed out at the concert.
''If you were just casually listening to country radio in the last year, you would think it was the music of Republicans,'' says Beverly Keel, country music journalist and Middle Tennessee State University associate professor. ''That's (been) reinforced with the way the Dixie Chicks have been treated.''It is the music of Republicans. So what? Rap is the music of Democrats by this reasoning. Who cares?
The environment, she says, may be leading to self-censorship on Music Row.Here is where it gets juicy. Apparently, Bev gets her boxers in a bunch if commercial artists actually have to give their fans what they want to hear. Imagine that -- artists actually crafting their work to accommodate the wants of their buyer rather than just saying, "There it is, now buy it and shut up."
''Unfortunately, there's a climate right now that probably strikes fear in the heart of singers and songwriters who don't agree with the prevailing winds,'' she says.'Oh, how will society survive it? The idea that if you piss off your customers they might not buy your products? Thinking like that could crush our socialist utopia!
The vast majority of songs on country radio today deal with love, nostalgia and homefront concerns, but the outsized impact of the stars-and-stripes songs and the strong divisions over the Dixie Chicks' right to be on the radio is setting a new tone, according to CMT editorial director and longtime country music chronicler Chet Flippo.Look. No one is challenging the Dixie Chick's right to be on the radio. What is being challenged is whether it is a good business choice for a Country station to play a Dixie Chicks song. The Dixie Chicks have -- right now and in the future -- the right to be on the radio. That is a first Amendment right and I have not heard a single person say that they should lose that. By the same token, a radio station owner has the right to refuse to play any music that he chooses to exclude. It's his station, he decides what to play. If your livelihood depends on that station, don't piss that station off.
The consolidation of the radio industry, with its concentrated power and targeted demographic programming, has contributed to the new environment, Flippo says.The public has a voice. Their voice is the almighty dollar. Cumulus did that because it got them listeners. When it wasn't something that was profitable anymore, the ban was lifted. This isn't a debate about free speech. It is about capitalism vs. fascism.''When the head of Cumulus (Media) can decide single-handedly to ban the Chicks, the public is given no voice in that at all, and that's something that wouldn't have happened a dozen years ago,'' he says.
That could be remedied to a large degree, he notes, by getting past the Dixie Chicks controversy and getting them back on the air.In other news, Michael Jackson is planning to get past that child molestation controversy and get back on the air, while Ike Turner is planning to get past the wife-beating controversy and get back on the air. OJ is planning to get past the double-murder controversy and get back into making Naked Gun movies.
Airports Favor Private-Sector Screeners
This one is an easy one to figure out. Airlines are in the business of making money. That means moving passengers and making them happy. Government bureaucracies are in the business of getting bigger budgets. Getting a bigger budget means not meeting your stated goals and blaming it on a lack of funds. These goals are diametrically opposed. You can't get rid of the airlines, so you get rid of the government screeners.You don't think that government has a chilling effect on free speech? You don't think that you can reach a police state through massive regulation (the M.O. of fascism, by the way:)
Many airports would not say publicly that they want to switch to private contract screeners. But an official of the nation's largest group representing airport owners said several dozen airports, including major hubs, have expressed an interest.
This is the part that really got my goat:
Peter Winch, national organizer for the American Federation of Government Employees, said privatizing airport security "sends the signal of retreat."Gee, isn't that special. The guy who's goal is to make a government worker union says that if we get rid of some government jobs, the sky is falling. Well, whoop de freaking do! I think that the fact that this is the best source they can get for that view speaks volumes."It's the wrong message in the war on terror," said Winch, whose group is trying to organize TSA screeners. "For TSA, just supervising a bunch of contract operations would lead to different standards at different airports. It would get away from one national security system."
