Yeah, because ideas like this have worked so well elsewhere in the world where there have been disputes between ethnic groups. I used to work in Caledonia and relations betweent the town and the reserve have never been great. Fletcher's Fusiliers are not going to help matters. I'm not sure what the solution to the problem in Caledonia is, but I know having a bunch of intolerant race-baiting running around playing vigilante and claiming to be a militia is not it. And if you doubt that is what this is really all about, just read what is being said by the knuckle-dragging mouthbreathers in the comments at the linked article.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Second thoughts on Iran
Having followed the Twitter frenzy over events in Iran and having read whatever else I could find (I would especially reccommend a few of the first hand accounts posted at Juan Cole's joint) I find I am leaning toward calling "Bullshit" on the widespread idea (which I initially bought into) that the Iranian Revolution is being driven by Twitter and social networking sites.
The case against the Twitter being a big deal for the Iranians is laid out in great detail and much more cogently over at Open Anthropology, but the main points are that very few Iranians actually use Twitter, the overwhelming majority of the the tweets being posted are repeats and copies of non-information and messages of support ( ie "support the Iranian Revolution by turning your profile picture green" "Change your location in Twitter to Tehran to make it harder for the Iranian censors to find Iranians twittering" "We are with you" "Freedom for Iran" etc etc etc) and warnings NOT to post info identifying Iranian dissidents and the same half dozen links to articles by journalists on the ground in Tehran. What little information there is to be found on Twitter is highly suspect, and much of it appears to be disinformation circulated to serve U.S. and Israeli interests -- claims that the government has imported thousands of Hezbollah and Hamas goons to violently suppress the demonstrations, for example, intended to drive a wedge between Iranians and the terrorist groups their government has supported (the Iranian government has no need to import goons, they have plenty on hand already). Much has been made of the U.S. State Department asking Twitter not to shut down for scheduled maintence as it had intended to do earlier in the week for a few hours, claiming that Twitter is an important communcations tools in Iran. It is an important communications tool, but for the Americans, not for the Iranians.
The exception might be YouTube, to which dissidents have been posting cell phone videos of clashes with the government forces. These serve as an important record and rallying point for the Iranian people. And ten minutes of video says a lot more than 140 characters of text can.
Clearly there is more going on here than is evident at first glance. Much of the public communication we are seeing is part of a propaganda effort intended to manipulate events and public perceptions, some of it is counter-insurgency work by the Iranian government, some of it is political posturing for domestic consumption by US political factions on both sides of the fence. Remember that a few months ago, many of the same conservatives now cheering for the Iranian Revolution were calling for bombing Tehran -- some were even hoping the previous administration would start a war with them before handing over the reins to Obama, who they now insist must "do something" or he will have "abandoned" the Iranians who wanted "freedom."
I had a slight disagreement, more of an exchange of snark really, with Laurence Simon aka Crap Mariner (of 100 Word Stories fame) about what Obama should do and he mentioned smuggling satellite phones and uplinks into the country to help dissidents get the word out to the rest of the world. Given statements like this, I'm not so sure he cares that deeply about helping the Iranians so much as complaining about Obama. A few things about the smuggling idea: 1)The Iranians don't really lack high tech gear, nor do they really care what the rest of the world thinks for the most part 2) Who's to say the United States isn't doing exactly that right now? If they were, they would hardly be advertising the fact since it would play into the government's efforts to portray the opposition as tools of the West and 3)anyone caught with such equipment would probably be executed as a spy.
I think all Obama can and should do openly is to condemn any and all violence and call for the two sides in Iran to work things out peacefully without outside interference. He could also denounce the violations of human rights going on in the country, but given that he wants to reestablish diplomatic ties or at least hold direct talks with whoever eventually becomes president, he may have to hold back and let others (like the Twitternauts) send that message.
The more I learn and the more I think about it, I don't think there is a revolution going on in Iran. There is political and civil unrest to be sure, but at the end of the day, even if the protestors get what they want, the country will still be a conservative, authoritarian fundementalist Muslim theocracy. If the opposition wins out, the people in power might be slightly less unreasonable and the control of the mullahs may slacken ever so slightly - both good things - but I the pro- and anti-government demonstrators both chant "God is Great" at their rallies and will be back to chanting "Death to the Jews, Death to America" in six months. The current struggle might in fact be serving to help the government purge the real revolutionaries who want true change by drawing them out into the open while at the same time allowing the population to blow off some of the social pressure built up by 30 years of repression without any real changes being made.
It may be that sometime in the future Iranians will look back at all the green profile pictures on Twitter and and find a softer spot in their hearts for America, but I think it is more likely that most will see it as another attempt by "the Great Satan" to interfere in their nation's politics. Internet users are a small minority in Iran and those using Twitter an even smaller minority among them. Those people are more likely already interested in Western ideas and culture and in favor of real change in their country. Twitter activists in the West appears to be preaching to the converted and possibly even endangering those whose cause they claim to champion.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Happy Bloomsday
105 years ago today.....
"STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned..."
Wiki has a decent capsule study of the whole thing.
Tune into Radio Woodshed starting a noon EDT to hear the whole novel read aloud, unabridged, all 27+ hours of it.
And if you think Ulysses was hard to read or listen to, imagine writing a 265,000-word novel with a vocabulary of about 30,000 words that all takes place in a single day - it only took
Joyce seven years to write it, but has taken most people much more time to read and develop an understanding of it.
Culture, beeyoches, come get some!
The revolution may not be televised
but it sure as hell is being tweeted. I am ashamed to admit that my initial kneejerk reaction to seeing the first messages on Twitter about the rioting following the election results announcements in Iran was that it would be really easy for the CIA to put a half a dozen people in a room full of computer gear and convince people that a revolution was starting halfway around the world, simply by having them work the social media sites and blocking media transmissions from the country in question and blaming the local government. Clearly, I have see "Wag the Dog" far too many times.
I am most emphatically not saying this is what happened in Iran. I think these pictures pretty much prove that this is no CIA smoke and mirrors show. I'm not sure what anyone outside Iran can do, in fact I think any outside interference at this point is going to allow the government to frame the whole thing as the work of Western-funded agitators, so I guess we are stuck cheering from the sidelines for the time being.
I don't think the challenger, former President Mir Hossain Mousavi, is any kind of combination of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, Elvis and Abe Lincoln - in fact I suspect he's probably a fundamentalist bastard. However, I think he is a bit less of a fundamentalist bastard and definitely less of an authoritarian whackjob than the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Even small change is better than no change, so viva la revolution!
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Bloody Unions
There are certain individuals who used to be with the union who have since chosen to go it alone. This despite the fact that without the union some of them would very likely have been let go after six months and replaced with another temp. There are others who quit who felt that certain work habits of their fellow union members reflected poorly on them, while forgetting why they joined the union in the first place. All of them ask the same question: "What have the unions ever done for us?"
More right-wing murder
I can't wait to hear Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs explain how these three murderous Minutemen were actually secret left-wing socialist Islamohomofacists.
According to the news report, the police say the three broke into the home of the Flores family in the hopes of robbing Mr. Flores, who was rumored to be a drug dealer. Bush is said to have been the triggerman, shooting the father, mother and daughter at the instructions of Forde.
Seriously, whatever happened to those camps the wingnuts were so worried about? If only Barack Obama was doing as they feared and taking their guns away, because this shit is getting way out of hand.
You can't come home again
I don't think Thomas Wolfe meant that phrase to be taken as literally as it seems to be interpreted by Stephen Harper's minions in the foreign affairs ministry. Check out Canada's scofflaw government in action. Apparently obeying court orders is just for the little people, not for the proto-facists of the Stephen Harper regime. Keep digging that legal hole boys, because the more bullshit like this that you pull, the bigger the award is going to be in the lawsuit you will inevitably lose. Sadly, it will be the Canadian taxpayer that will be picking up the tab when you do get sued.
My disgust for the government in this case knows no bounds. I'd like to see them all trade places with Abdelrazik. I wonder if they will even let me back in when I decide to return home.
Way to defuse the situation
Sure the OPP could have waited a few hours, but then no one would have gotten arrested or injured, and how much fun would that have been?
The prostesters are being portrayed as a minority among Tyendinaga Mohawk Reserve residents and that may well be the case as the Tyendinaga has never been as politically active as the Mohawks at Cornwall, whom the protesters were acting in support of as they protest the arming of border services personnel on their land. Gee, I wonder why they wouldn't want the border services people armed?
Friday, June 12, 2009
There's always room for Jello
Possibly the strangest use of bandwidth I've seen in a while, but oddly comforting and smile inducing, at least until Bill Cosby comes and chases us out of the tree.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Greatest music video evah!
I'm not sure what music these young ladies are dancing too, and frankly, I don't really care. At least they don't look like some plastic surgeon's frankenstien monster. And Brook Benton is a God.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
people helping people are the luckiest people
How did I not know about this? This is the very idea that won the Nobel Peace Prize a couple of years ago and now its gone viral on the intertubes. Apparently the payback rate on these loans is over 95% - maybe Citibank and Bank of America need to take some lessons.
The website lets you loan as little as $25, bundling it into a larger loan. Kiva lets you form or join groups and tracks which groups contribute the most. It should surprise no one that the second largest contributing group are the "Kiva Christians" -- the largest being "Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious."
I'll be looking for a suitable borrower on the site and posting info here for anyone else who wants to help out.
Just Friends, really
Wow! The girl I was so in love with all through high school and university and even a large chunk of my 20s -- you know, all those years when I was considerably thinner, kinder and less bitter than I turned out -- the girl who I helped through all the bad boyfriends and insecurities, the one with the killer bod who thought of me like her brother --it turns out she's writing for the Onion now!
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy"
Apologies to Greg Palast for borrowing the title of his excellent book, but how else to describe the New York State Senate shenanigans of billionaire Tom Golisano. Just because he can't get people to vote for him as governor doesn't mean he can't run the state government and make them do what he wants.
It wasn't acceptable when he bought the Senate for the Democrats and it isn't acceptable that he is now essentially bribing state sentators to cross the floor to hand control to the Republicans. As Bob Dylan said "Money doesn't talk, it swears"Golisano, who moved from Rochester to Florida this year after Democrats temporarily raised the state income tax on high earners, has promised campaign money for those who carry out his reform agenda. That includes the two Democratic senators who broke ranks to join the Republicans, Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx - elected temporary president of the Senate Monday - and Hiram Monserrate of Queens.
Given the primary challenge the two Democrats can expect, that counts for a lot. But Golisano stressed that his political action committee, Responsible New York, "will be watching very carefully" to see if the new coalition keeps its promises.
30 years before the masthead
This is from a few weeks back, but listen to Stuart McLean talks about why newspapers are important. I couldn't agree more.
I've been writing paying copy or editing the words of others since I was 14 years old and sold my first piece to the Sault Star for 25 cents a column inch. I even had a neighborhood newspaper I published with a couple of friends when I was about six years old - as I recall my first bylined piece read something like "Jamie Smith just got a minibike this week for his birthday. What a lucky kid!" - I was editorializing even then.
I wrote for the Sault Star for a few months in high school and then covered Rotary Club meetings for the Ancaster Journal for a year or two while still in high school ( I didn't get paid, but all my friend's fathers bought me gin and tonics to keep me coming back - "follow the free booze" being a lesson I learned early in my career").
From there I went to the University of Waterloo's Imprint, Sheridan College's student paper and the Guelph Daily Mercury for a short co-op spell, where they gave me a front page byline above the fold my first day (may as well have been China white).
Then it was into the professional ranks in Ingersol, Ontario where in a regular week I covered events and wrote stories, took photos, rewrote press releases for publication, developed film and printed photos, laid out pages with a razor knife, hot wax and graphics tape with copy off a linotype machine and one week even sold and laid out an ad and delivered the paper -- all for $230 a week before taxes and all the newsprint I could eat (and no, I am not speaking of the 1950s here -- this was in the late 80's).
From there it was onward and upward to the Caledonia's Grand River Sachem, the good old Port Dover Maple Leaf, the Listowel Independent, The Napanee Beaver and finally the editorship of the oldest community newspaper in Canada, The Picton Gazatte. I don't think in the entire seven or so years I worked in the community news trade I ever put in fewer than 55 hours a week and most of the time with meeting to cover and the like, it was more like 70 hours. And I never made more than about $500 a week until I came to Japan a dozen years ago, where I work for a very, very different kind of newspaper for considerably better wages and, sadly in recent years, considerably less job satisfaction.
The printed newspaper may be a on its way out, but opinion-riddled blogs will never replace good honest local journalism, and woe betide the community that doesn't have some poor, starving, scoop-hungry kid or two with ink in their veins and visions of Woodward and Bernstein and Hersh and I. F. Stone in their heads, keeping an eye on the town council and the police service and the school board on your behalf. He may not know everyone's grandmother, he may not be from around here and he may have spelled your niece Kathie's name "Cathy" last week, but he's the only one going to all those meetings and putting two and two together to let you know that someone is about to build a quarry on the old swimming hole or tear down the old Johnson house to put in a landfill or that the planning committee is being run by the local real estate bund.
The New York Times and the Toronto Star can evolve to on-line versions that are half TV and half news and lifestyle magazine, but you lose that local rag at your peril, especially in a small town. Newspapers may be a dying industry, but the world still needs trained, professional journalists to balance out the pretty show-biz people on television and the national celebrity media villagers in the major magazines. Where will you be without those uncredited, underpaid, underappreciated rock-solid beat reporters who are there to bear witness at every council meeting, who are there at the police station every day, who are covering the endless, dull school board meetings, sifting through the committee minutes for a little gold or checking into the claims of the PR people, the spin-doctors, the press agents and marketing flacks? Up to your neck in bullshit and hype, that's where.
You think Can-West or the Toronto Star or Edmonton Sun or CFRB give a rat's ass about following up on rumors that the water in some little town might not be up to the proper health standards? Oh, sure they'll pick up the story if somebody dies, but it going to be a little late for the locals then. You think the Vancouver Province or the New York Times or the Montreal Gazette care if half the municipal budget of your little township is being handed to the brother of the Reeve? Not unless he get runs for federal office and get photographed without his pants at kids' summer camp. The local paper is your first line of defense against rumor, official skulduggery and the only place you can find out how the local Jr. B hockey team is doing or who the new high school principal is going to be, or whether a teacher at the local school is going to jail for molesting kids or some 14-year-old just had it in for him and made the whole thing up.
Read your paper while you still can.
Go read it now Part II - Die Harder
"Hey, what's that little grease stain at the bottom of that smoking crater?"
"Oh that? That used to be some douche bag that wrote for the Wall Street Journal - he called Hank Paulson a national hero the other day, turns out he used to work for Paulson on Wall Street."
"So what happened? Tactical nuke? Self-Immolation? Did God smite him or something?
"Nah, he pissed off Matt Taibbi"
If one looks around for a worthy successor to Hunter S. Thompson in the journalistic world today, one must seriously consider Matt Taibbi. While he probably doesn't party like Hunter - who does anymore? - he certainly has studied in the same temple of literary kung-fu as the master. Witness if you will how one slaughters the metaphorical troops, burns the conceptual villages and salts the rhetorical earth of the enemy by lacing up the steel-toed, hob-nailed +eleventy Boots of Ass-Kicking.
Monday, June 08, 2009
Newspaper industry deathwatch, part 37
The plunge continues. Veteran newspaper guy suggests a new pay-for-content model that others see as an online ritual suicide pact.
Sigh.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Palm, meet forehead
In a week when one of the main stories in the news was about a man walking into a church in Kansas, pulling out a handgun and shooting another man dead at the behest of his coreligionists, to say nothing of other similar incidents of murder in houses of worship over the past while, we find that satire has been wholly overwhelmed by the assault of reality.
Pastor Organizes Gun Celebration at Church
Gun Control
Advocates Oppose Pastor Ken Pagano's 'Open Carry Celebration'
By EMILY FRIEDMANJune 5, 2009
A pastor in Kentucky is redefining the tradition of wearing your Sunday best to services by encouraging his congregation to strap on holsters and bring their weapons to church.
Pastor Ken Pagano has organized an "Open Carry Celebration" in late June where he encourages members of his Christian church to bring their handguns to services. Pastor Ken Pagano of New Bethel Church in Louisville, Ky., says that he organized an "Open Carry Celebration" to promote responsible gun ownership.
"As a Christian pastor I believe that without a deep-seeded belief in God and firearms that this country would not be here," Pagano told ABCNews.com. "I'm not ashamed of that fact. I'm proud of it."
The celebration scheduled for Sunday, June 27, will feature YouTube videos promoting gun safety and will ask congregants to join in singing patriotic songs, according to Pagano.
A $1 raffle to win a free handgun will also be part of the festivities.
If anyone is looking for me, I'll be in the bar drinking heavily with Satire and Parody - Irony has promised to buy the first few rounds..
Three hots and a cot --Not!
Apparently feeding prisoners is become too expensive for some prison systems in the U.S., so they've decided to cut back a bit, by dropping lunch from the program.
Georgia now only feeds inmates lunch on the four days a week that they work. The state prison system switched to ten hour work days four days a week as a money saving move. Here is the menu for no-lunch Fridays Since this is the menu released by the prison system I think its safe to assume that this is as good as the menu gets for inmates. (parenthetical comments are mine)
Breakfast:
Dinner:
Portions are supposedly larger on days when only two meals are served.- Scrambled eggs (probably safe to assume these would be powdered eggs)
- Grits
- Corn Muffins
- Bran cereal
- Pineapple beverage ( the linked article notes that many states are cutting back on fresh fruit to save money. In Alabama inmates get an apple or an orange once a week.)
- Margarine (this is a menu item? Is ketchup a vegetable again?)
- Coffee
- Milk (as noted in the linked article, may states are cutting back on milk to save money. In Alabama inmates get three servings a week, in Tennessee they have gone from twice a day to once a day)
Dinner:
- Chicken and biscuits (I'm betting on a drumstick and a thigh and no more than two bicuits - and I notice there is no margarine for the biscuits on the menu. Update - via email I learn that chicken and biscuits is more likely a chicken stew with dumplings and chunks of processed "chicken-like" meat product - a h/t to the best book page editor I know)
- Turnip greens
- Tossed salad (I'd have thought this came later in the privacy of one's cell, not right there in the dining hall)
- Vinegar and oil dressing
- Mashed potatoes (again, I have no doubt these are the powdered type)
- Spice cake
- Iced tea
Now, I'm not saying that inmates should eat like kings or anything, but there should be some sort of minimum standard. In the Georgia State Prison system male inmates get 2,800 calories a day and female inmates get 2,300, but I suspect most of those calories come from powdered mashed potatoes and the like.
Still, it sounds better than some of the country lock-ups:
From the CNN version of the story:
Both stories make mention of the Sheriff bragging about how he tried to offer the inmates some variety in their diet. He split the $1,000 cost of a truck load of corn dogs with another country sheriff and the inmates were apparently fed corn dogs morning, noon and night until they had eaten their way through the tractor-trailer load. If a parent fed a child like this to save money to spend on themselves, it would be considered neglect.
And lets not even get started on privately run prisons.
I bet Conrad Black is eating a lot better than this.
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